Mortgage Architects
host: Dustan Woodhouse
personalized email outreach, power of open-ended questions, charitable trust for company sale, self-publishing vs traditional publishing
listen: (download)
Transcript:
Dustan
Derek, you sent me an email in April. How many people get an email from an author? That’s just a weird thing. Like, “I got an email from Derek Sivers.” How did that even happen? I’d signed up to your mailing list, of course. But the email was very personalized. It was like, “Hey, Dustin. Just checking in. Given everything that’s happening, how are you doing?” It really resonated with me because a lot of these folks have been hearing me for months saying to people, “Reach out to every one of your clients in your database and just ask them that one question; how are you? And let it go from there.” I actually didn’t reply to you for probably a month because it sat there and I’m like, “I don’t know if I have anything of substance to say to this guy. He’s way more important than I am. I’m not going to bug him.”
Dustan
Then as this idea germinated in my mind I reached out to you and said, “What do you think of this concept of what we’re doing here?” You were so gracious to say you’d come on and have a little bit of a conversation and a little bit of a Q&A. Joining us from Wellington, New Zealand in the mid day of winter, Mr Derek Sivers.
Derek Sivers
Thanks. The first time I did something like that ’how are you?’ email was actually my last year of running CD Baby when things were going really well. I felt like CD Baby was a smooth running machine, and I was just curious, what else do my clients need help with? Instead of doing some kind of MBA style market analysis, I just emailed all 190,000 of my musicians an open ended one sentence email like that saying, “Things are going really well here and I’ve got time to help you with something else. What do you need help with?”
Derek Sivers
That was it. One line email and something like 90,000 people replied with details of what they needed help with in their own words, which was really important. Because in marketing, you want to speak to people in their own language. I ended up hiring four people to help me go through the 90,000 emails, and took them in, categorized them, and listened to what they were saying. I ended up selling the company a year later instead of developing the new things.
Derek Sivers
I really appreciated the power of an open ended question. Not asking people to fill out a form, SurveyMonkey. “Tick from these multiple checkboxes. How are you? A, fine. B, not.” You don’t treat your friends that way. You don’t give your friends a SurveyMonkey so why should you do that to your clients?
Derek Sivers
Then when the COVID stuff hit and it was March, and I think just even of my own personal processing of what was going on, I just was wondering how everybody else was doing. So I thought, “I’m going to ask.” And that was that.
Dustan
How many people did that email go out to this time around?
Derek Sivers
That went out to everybody on my mailing list, so 110,000.
Dustan
You know about how many replies?
Derek Sivers
About half. About 50,000 replies. It was a lot to go through. For the next few weeks I spent seriously about 16 hours a day just answering emails for the next few weeks. It was all I did. But it was good. It helped me feel reconnected. I needed that.
Derek Sivers
By the way, I actually just like having the phone in my ear instead of arm’s length. So I’m going to turn off the camera and hold it up to my face.
Dustan
It’s all good. It gives us all permission to turn our cameras off and we don’t have to stare at each other. We can all just listen, so I’ll join the process.
Derek Sivers
Yes. Better to look out the window instead of look at our screens.
Dustan
I’m going to look at my notes and I don’t have to pretend I’m trying to make eye contact with you, which is really just contact with a camera.
Derek Sivers
Yes, exactly.
Dustan
Much, much better. “Anything You Want” is my most gifted book and it’s absolutely to do with the message. But it’s also to do with, of course, the fact that I’m not handing someone a burden. I’m not giving them an 8 hour, 10 hour assignment. It’s an hour of your life. Read it. Absorb it. I always get great feedback from it.
Dustan
First and foremost, again, thank you so much for writing that book. I can’t wait for the new book to be in my hands, which sounds like it’ll be very soon. We talked about a few things yesterday that I really want to make sure that we cover. You clearly started CD Baby out as almost a charitable start-up. It was doing friends favors, what it seemed like, and the success side of it seems almost like an afterthought, like an unintentional consequence of doing people favors.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. We all have our own definition of what success means to us or what rich means to us. To some people, rich is $1,000. To other people, 200 million is still not rich. There’s a funny little email that I sent when CD Baby was about a year old. I had one guy in my town. I was in the little forest town of Woodstock, New York when I started CD Baby. There was a guy that I had hired to paint my house and he said, “Hey, man. I’m always looking for work. If you got any work, let me know.” So I hired him to help me pack CDs and he ended up becoming the Vice President of CD Baby eventually.
Derek Sivers
There was an email I sent him when CD Baby was one year old. It was just me and him, me full-time, him part-time. One night I had this moment where I thought, “This thing could get really big.” I said, “We might have 1,000 musicians using this service someday.” I said, “We might get so big that we might need to hire a third person and this thing might get so big that the CDs won’t fit in my living room anymore. We might need to have some kind of building outside my house. That’s how huge it could get. We’re going to have to get a network switch to actually network three PCs together in the house. That’s how big this thing could get.”
Derek Sivers
That was me thinking big. But I didn’t know that it became that big just months later and much bigger a year later. It’s funny that to me, that was thinking big, so everything else that happened after that just felt like dessert. People would ask about, what are your future plans for the company? And I’d say, “My future plan’s already happened years ago. This is everything else. This is just a surprise.”
Dustan
The one thing that you said to me that was really interesting yesterday, I think I asked if you, but were you building this thing with a price tag on it one day? I wrote it down. You said, “Selling seemed like failing.”
Derek Sivers
National Public Radio in the US interviewed me just a year or two before I sold CD Baby and they asked my future plans for it. “Are you going to IPO or are you going to sell the company out?” Sincerely, I said, “Absolutely not. I plan to just do this until I die. Even 50 years from now when almost nobody’s buying a CD, I’m happy to be running the warehouse that packs that one order a day for that one person on earth that wants a CD.” And I meant it.
Derek Sivers
But then things went really pear-shaped between me and the employees. Basically, just a couple rotten apples spoiled the barrel, and shame on me for being away too much and just assuming that everything was fine without ensuring that it was. I really mismanaged things at the end and had some bad luck. When I sold the company it was really because of my personal failure to manage it well. I felt that my options were either to just shut down the whole company, and I almost did that. Actually, I did do that one night.
Derek Sivers
One night when all of the employees were practically staging a mutiny, trying to get me removed from the company, even though I was the sole owner of the company- there were no investors, there were no shareholders. This is just my personal thing. But they were trying to get me to leave the company. I just felt like, “This isn’t fun anymore and I hate this now.” So in the middle of the night that night I actually went into the web server. I always did all the programming and tech stuff myself, so I was the only person that had root access to the server. I went into the root axis of the server and I typed, “Apache control halt,” which shut down the web server, and I shut down the site.
Derek Sivers
I started writing a letter that was going to replace the entire website that said something like, “Dear customers and clients, I’m sorry that CD Baby has shut down. We thank you for your business. We will be returning all the CDs and filling the final orders and shutting down.” While I was trying to write that letter in a well written way and the web server was still off, I thought, “It’s 1:30 in the morning. Maybe I should sleep on this,” and I turned the web server back on and I went to sleep.
Derek Sivers
Then the next day, the more attractive idea was the Willy Wonka model. I was going to hide five golden tickets inside five CDs in our big warehouse that had over a million CDs at that point, and loudly announce that Willy Wonka style, there were five golden tickets that could be found by whoever bought the CD and got it in their order. When the five golden tickets would be found I would invite those five people to the CD Baby warehouse and they would get a tour of the warehouse, and then they would each make their pitch to the musicians on which of the five should be the new owner of CD Baby.
Derek Sivers
Then not Willy Wonka, but the musicians would decide who should be the new owner of CD Baby. That’s how I was going to pick the new owner so that I could step down. I really liked that idea and I planned it for about a week. Then a well-meaning friend of mine talked to me out of it and said, “You can also just sell.” It was really only after thinking of all these other ways to quit that I decided I could sell the company. But as we talked about, I didn’t need the money, I didn’t want the money. I just wanted to be done with it.
Dustan
I would definitely want to talk about the proceeds of sale because that is interesting. What you’re talking about is all laid out on page 76, 77. I highlighted the question your accountant asked, “Did you know they were giving all of the profits of the company back to themselves?” Then I wrote my own question in there for you. “What’s the problem, man? Why are you so greedy?”
Dustan
And that sets up the fact that, of course, you’re the furthest thing from that because I put an email out saying, “Hey, tune in. Here’s a gentleman who sold his company for $22 Million. Let’s listen to this.” But of course, we’ve now learned it wasn’t ever your plan to sell for $22 million. I read the book two or three times and I didn’t really drill down into that final page 81 of exactly what you did and the story of the trust is so interesting to me. So that 22 million didn’t flow into your bank account.
Derek Sivers
I never intended that to be public. It was just my secret. I sold the company in 2008 and it was in 2010 I think that somebody interviewed me on his podcast, and because I don’t listen to podcasts I didn’t realize that a lot of people do. It was 45 minutes into his podcast when he asked how much I sold the company for and my first thought was, “That’s nobody’s business. That’s a secret. I’m not going to announce that.”
Derek Sivers
Then my second thought was, “We’re 45 minutes into a podcast. Nobody’s going to listen to this.” So I was like, “Answer the question.” So I answered the question. I told him it was 22 million and he ended up publishing the podcast with the headline, “Derek Sivers Sells CD Baby for 22 Million.” “Damn it, I’ve been outed.” I don’t know what I was thinking.
Derek Sivers
Then the next person with a podcast said, “Wow, 22 million. You must be rolling in the bucks. What are you doing? You buying a yacht? You moving to the Bahamas?” I said, “No. I gave it all away.” And he said, “What?” I said, “I put it into a trust. It actually never came to me. I just gave it all away.” And he said, “We need to talk about this.” I said, “No, we don’t. It’s just a thing I did.” He really wanted to talk about it. He found it fascinating. So once again, in a podcast I talked about it and once again, he loudly announced it.
Derek Sivers
I was not virtue signaling. I was not trying to say, “Look at me, I’m altruistic,” because I don’t think it was altruistic because the company had been making a few million dollars a year for a few years so I had plenty of money in the bank. I think I had already felt the concept of having enough.
Dustan
Because you already had the Ferrari, and the mansion, and you’d already bid on the grilled cheese sandwich on eBay. You had all those necessities of life covered.
Derek Sivers
Right, especially the sandwich. When you see that person in a car park whose car is filled to the brim with stuff, we say, “That person has a mental illness. They’re hoarders and that person needs to seek professional help. They’ve got a mental disorder.” To me, once you’ve got a few million dollars and you’ve bought everything you want, the pursuit of more money to me feels a bit like a mental illness. If you think you need more money, I think you need help.
Derek Sivers
He said, “How serious about this are you?” I said, “Very serious.” He said, “Are you irreversibly serious? Would you irreversibly commit to that now and never be able to change your mind ever again?” I said, “Yeah, that’d be great.” Because I had read books like “The Paradox of Choice” and “Stumbling on Happiness” that says that when we make irreversible decisions we actually feel better about them. I said, “Yeah, I would actually love to make an irreversible decision now to give it away so that I don’t ever have to think about it ever again.”
Derek Sivers
I just didn’t see the reason to have more money. That’s how this idea came about, about giving it away. When I was in the process of selling the company and we already had this agreed upon price of 22 million, my lawyer, who is also a friend and also had a background in tax law, it was him just asking me personally, “What are you going to do with the money?” I said, “I’m just going to give it away.” He said, “Ha ha. No, really?” I said, “No, I’m serious. I’ve got enough money. I really don’t want this 22 million. I’m just going to give it to charity.”
Derek Sivers
He said, “If you’re serious about this in the US we have a structure called the US Charitable Remainder Trust, and you could actually transfer the company into the trust to set up a trust, transfer the ownership of the company into the trust so that when the purchasing company buys it, they’ll be buying it from the trust, not from you. Therefore, the entire 22 million goes to charity versus if you keep it in your own name, then the 22 million goes to you but then you have to pay 7 million to the IRS, leaving you with only 15 million to give to charity. If you want to make this irreversible, then the entire 22 million can go to charity. I said, “Great. Let’s do it.” So that’s what we did.
Dustan
It was a “Hell yes,” to use your own words.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, it was a no-brainer. Some things in life you have to sit for a long time and think about and weigh the pros and cons, and some things instantly you can just tell it’s right. This was one of those.
Dustan
You’d already hit that point where there wasn’t a solitary million in the bank or 2 million in the bank. You had a few million dollars in the bank, let’s say. The comment I know that you made to me again that I wrote down because it sticks with me as well is, “Even at my own levels in life, more money equals more choices and that becomes a real mentally taxing thing. All those different choices are not helpful to have in your life.”
Derek Sivers
Again, the book called “The Paradox of Choice” is a fascinating academic study into this, saying that they’ve done a bunch of tests to show that having choice is better than having no choice, but having yet more and more choices does not continue to improve after a certain point. But then the interesting thing is he said we might actually make better choices if we have more choice, but we feel worse about it because now we’re more aware than ever of all the other things we didn’t choose. I had read that book just about a year or so before this situation to sell the company came up, so I think it was still fresh in my mind that I didn’t want more and more choice.
Dustan
I think anyone who’s shopped for a new car, or even a new to them car at this point can see that. When you think about in 1990, there were fewer than 120 models. And in 1990, if you think of Honda, they had the Civic, the Prelude and the Accord in a CX, DX, LX or the SI model in a couple of them. They had three vehicles with three trim levels. There were 9, 10, 11 choices tops at a Honda dealership. It was really easy. You fast forward and now each manufacturer has more than 120 variants of their own. There’s probably more than 1,000 new cars that you could purchase and it’s overwhelming. That’s why I think some people, I have had them say to me, “I just keep driving the same thing. It’s just too tough to pick something new.” That is exactly what you’re talking about, too much choice. It’s everywhere. Grocery store, clothing, you name it.
Dustan
But I think one of the other interesting things too that hit my inbox from you not long ago was in relation to the new book, which I should have the title written in front of me and I can’t believe I’m failing. What a horrible host I am.
Derek Sivers
“Hell Yeah Or No.” Or do you mean the new, new one that I’m writing now called “How To Live”?
Dustan
I’m going to go with that. But are you kidding me? The new book that is coming out right now, that I’ve got 10 copies on the way to me, is titled “Hell Yeah Or No.”
Derek Sivers
Yes.
Dustan
How I forgot that when I’ve literally said to 11 people here in the breakout rooms, “That’s my favorite chapter, Hell Yeah Or No.” I’m glad that’s the title of the new book because it was my favorite chapter. I love it. You launched that and of course, I pre-ordered a bunch because I know what I’m going to get and I know I’m going to be giving it away. You had this amazing presale activity. Again, I’d love for you to share that story of what happened when you looked at your numbers in the presale...
Derek Sivers
Oh, that. Okay. That was a surprise. I’m going to take a little tangent and you’ll see how this has come full circle. In 1997, when I started CD Baby, there was a really cool thing happening in the music industry where up until that point a musician who wanted to sell his music to the world was beholden to the major labels, and the major distribution system, and the major retail outlets like Tower Records or whatever. Thanks to the Internet and MP3s and e-commerce, suddenly 1996, 1997, a musician didn’t need the record labels anymore.
Derek Sivers
You could go direct to your fans. In fact, you could set up your own record label in an afternoon for $100 and just bypass the man and just go directly to your fans. It was this great renaissance, recharged feeling, just empowering a lot of musicians. That’s the spirit that made me start CD Baby. It was just as a musician selling my own music and then helping my friends. I just loved the decentralization of it. I loved not being beholden to the man, having to kiss corporate ass or whatever you want to call it. I loved that spirit.
Derek Sivers
Here we are in 2020 and everybody selling anything is just kissing Amazon’s ass or Facebook’s ass or whatever and I don’t like it. I don’t like the way that feels. It’s funny that any time you talk about self publishing, people just assume that what we’re going to talk about in the world of self publishing is how to rank high in Amazon’s SEO ratings. And no, I just disagree with this corporate centralization to the core. So I...
Dustan
I don’t want to interrupt you but I have to because anything you want, the irony is just “Capital Block Letters” here was not self published. It’s through Penguin, which you would have experienced the hard way because I’m like, “Your book just sold out on Amazon. What’s going on? Isn’t it print on demand or have you got a box you can ship me?” You were like, “No, I don’t really have control over that one. It’s through Penguin.” I have the same thing happen to me, of course, all the time. But it’s fascinating to me that, like I say, somebody who developed what you developed in the music industry, then when you wrote a book you didn’t self-publish it. You went to the man.
Derek Sivers
Well, actually to be fair, I never wanted to write a book. People have been asking me for years to write a book. I said, “No. No interest.” But then Seth Godin started a new publishing company called Domino, and he called me on the phone. My phone rings and I pick up and it’s, “Hey, Derek. It’s Seth Godin.” I went, “Oh my God. Hi.” He said, “I’m starting a new publishing company and I want you to be my first author.” I said, “Okay.”
Derek Sivers
That book that you guys read, “Anything You Want,” I wrote that in 11 days for Seth, and it was just because Seth asked me to. It was just for Seth for his little experiment, and then he ran Domino for a few years and then he sold it to Penguin. Then the book was rereleased in 2015 on Penguin. That’s what happened there. Penguin’s been wonderful. In fact, the woman at Penguin who’s my contact, she’s wonderful and she’s a big fan and she’s great. But I just don’t like the system. I don’t like that I don’t own that book.
Derek Sivers
A conference once asked me if they could buy 500 copies to give to every attendee of their conference. I emailed the woman at Penguin and said, “How can I say yes to this? How can we make this happen?” She said, “You just have to tell them to go to Amazon and buy 500 copies. Sorry, there’s no other way.” I was like, “Man, this sucks. That really sucks.” I was like, “Okay, I’m self publishing from now on.”
Derek Sivers
Not only are all of my future books self published, but I might try to buy back the rights for “Anything You Want” and self-publish that. But more importantly, I wanted to bypass Amazon completely. So I just built my own bookstore on my website, sive.rs, which meant that for every book sold... I’m charging 15 bucks, which is the all included play for the audiobook, the e-book, all formats for all future time. Everything’s combined at 15 bucks and then that 15 bucks goes to me. Otherwise, if you sell on Amazon, you get four or five bucks or something.
Dustan
Tell me about it.
Derek Sivers
I just emailed people on my mailing list with the advance announcement saying, “The book is done. I’ve sent it off to the printer. It’s going to be a couple months before it comes back from the printers. But if you want to pre-order now, you can.” I thought I was going to get maybe $30,000 or $40,000 of sales. Right away, in the first month I got over a quarter million dollars in sales. Suddenly there was over a quarter million dollars sitting in my bank account and I went, “Oh, wow. Huh.”
Dustan
To the Ferrari dealer, here we go.
Derek Sivers
I’ll admit, I was super happy about that for about a week. I was just dancing on air. I was like, “That’s amazing.” Because I hadn’t charged money for anything since 2007. I’d just been doing everything for free for 12 years. All the public speaking you’ve seen me do and the TED talks and all that, that’s all free. I haven’t charged a dime for anything in 12 years. This was my first time in 12 years charging money and that felt amazing. I was really happy about it for about a week and then, huh, what do I do with that money? Originally, I thought I would reinvest it into future projects but I don’t have any future projects in mind yet. I guess I should open an investment account at Vanguard and stick it in there, I guess. I was like, “Eh, for what? To turn it into 330,000? What’s the point of that?” I was like, “There must be something better I can do.”
Derek Sivers
Then I had the idea to give it away. I thought for a minute about giving it to a musician’s charity, but that’s what I did with the previous sale. The CD Baby 22 million is all going to music education. I thought, “I know of this organization called GiveWell.org that is a bunch of data nerds that are looking at altruism from a data point of view to say which organizations are saving the most lives per dollar, and of those, which ones are only restrained by having more funding? Meaning if they were to have more money, they would instantly be saving more lives.
Derek Sivers
They’ve narrowed it down to really just three or four charities that fit these qualifications. They’ve listed them on their website, on GiveWell.org, and they take nothing for what they do. I picked the top recommended one, called “The Against Malaria Foundation,” and donated the entire $250,000 to them.
Dustan
Again, you’re just a remarkable human being.
Derek Sivers
I’m not. To me, it’s just this idea of enough. I already have a few million dollars in the bank that I’m not even using. I don’t even own a house right now. It would just be hoarding to...
Dustan
But that’s a remarkable perspective. I love that you’re already working on the next book and you realize that those books are going to generate that revenue. Really, what it is, is it’s a way for you to channel your creative energy into an outlet. It puts your message out there to the world and then in exchange, you get this monetary sum, which you then get to redirect and ultimately, save lives. You could probably get the data nerds at GiveWell to do the math and it would be like, for every additional word that Derek Sivers writes for the rest of his life, here’s how many lives are saved. There’s a formula there.
Derek Sivers
I don’t know if I want that weighing on me. Even with the 22 million that’s going to go to music education, that felt good because that felt like the circle of life. The money came from musicians and to musicians in the first place. To have it go, when I die, to the next generation of musicians after I’m dead... And it’s not named the Sivers anything. It’s just going to go to existing music charities as a cash donation. That felt like the circle of life.
Derek Sivers
You can type a number into the “Against Malaria Foundation,” or maybe it’s on GiveWell’s site, to say how much you’re giving. When I typed in $250,000 it said 139 lives will be saved. I was like, “Whoa, that’s fucking heavy.” Because if I was ever on the fence for a minute about whether I should, like you said, get a Ferrari or this, it’s like, wow, 139 lives. When I told this to a friend that night she said, “Now I guess the deal is if you do buy a Ferrari you’ve chosen that 139 people are going to die so you can have that Ferrari.” I was like, “Yeah. Exactly.”
Dustan
Thank you for ruining all of the Ferrari dreams for anyone on this call.
Derek Sivers
Exactly. Which kind of messes with you. If you think of anything that you were thinking of spending $100,000 on, it’s like you’re saying 60 people should die so you can have that thing, that addition to your house.
Dustan
We’re going down a dark, dark rabbit hole here. One day if I ever have a Ferrari, I’m going to get a personalized plate with 139 and a skull on it. That’s awful to calculate in those terms.
Derek Sivers
But it’s true.
Dustan
You’re right. Yes. We make choices and those choices have consequences. As I say, I love the details of the story and your journey from the 22 million into the music education side, and then the quarter million dollars of found money off to GiveWell and 139 lives through the malaria angle. As I say, it’s so great to be able to share this conversation with you. It’s just fascinating insight into your mind.
Derek Sivers
I like sharing the thought process because I do want to clear up the stereotype of somebody being altruistic. I don’t know the actual dictionary definition of altruistic, but I think to me, altruistic means that I would be giving up something, like, “No, no, no, I’ll do without a blanket tonight here. I’ll just sleep on this rock. You take the blanket.”
Derek Sivers
But I’m not. I’m giving up nothing because I already have enough. To try to spend more than I need to be happy just feels wasteful. It’s coming from that. I’m really not giving up a damn thing. I don’t think I’m even that nice of a person. It’s just rational.
Dustan
I know what you mean. I don’t think I’m that nice of a guy either. But then we do nice things and they have an impact on somebody. There’s 139 people out there that have no idea how nice you are. I think it really boils down to one of the other notes I made a point of highlighting in pink felt here from page 59. Again, it’s your words. “What do you want to be? This matters. What do you want to have? This does not.” I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but that’s one of the key messages I took away and I think about that myself often. What do I want to be? It’s not about what I want to have. Who cares what I have? No one is going to talk about what I have at my funeral. What do I want to be?
Derek Sivers
Although, I’ve got to say, some people are motivated by different things. Some people really are motivated by money and if that’s your thing, you shouldn’t feel bad about it. If the idea of making 100,000 bucks is what gets you out of bed early in the morning, and helps you brush your teeth, and go to the gym, and be the best person you can be, and be kind to others because you think it’s going to earn you money, then cool. You can own that and rock it and not feel bad about it if that’s your motivation.
Derek Sivers
Other people are actually really, really driven by this idea of, say, leaving a legacy and putting their name on something to give a legend to the family name. Some people are really driven by putting their name on things and other people are really driven by charitable giving. Whatever your thing is, you just need to know it about yourself. Know yourself well enough to know what drives you and not feel bad about it. Because no matter what it is, somebody’s going to tell you you’re wrong.
Derek Sivers
If you’re driven by making money, somebody’s going to tell you you’re greedy and evil, and if you’re driven by charitable giving, somebody’s going to tell you that you’re stupid for giving it all away. No matter what it is, somebody’s going to tell you you’re wrong. So you have to know your motivations well enough and not feel bad about them.
Derek Sivers
I’m saying this because I have a lot of respect for Tony Robbins. I started reading his stuff and listening to his stuff when I was a teenager and it absolutely changed the way I think for the rest of my life. A thing that he did often to try to motivate his listeners or readers was to lay out these physical daydreams like, don’t you want to have your own helicopter? Wouldn’t you love to live in a mansion overlooking the ocean? Don’t you want to have a swimming pool?
Derek Sivers
I remember just even as a teenager reading that, I would just read these lists of things going, “No. I don’t want a swimming pool and people have to clean it. I don’t want a mansion. Can you imagine having to heat that and furnish it?” I just was never driven by that. But I remember even an interview with Paul McCartney from The Beatles. He said, “People thought The Beatles were all peace and love.” He said, “No, John and I, we would sit down and say, ’Let’s write a song that’s going to sell so much that we can buy a house with a swimming pool.’”
Derek Sivers
He said, “We were totally materialistic. That’s what drove us. We wanted to be rich. We wanted to be famous,” and they made great art because of it. I think whatever your motivation is doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to defend it or apologize for it. You just have to know what it is and then use it to hopefully, do good things.
Dustan
I think one of the greatest things any of us can do is let go of judgment. The judging of others I should say first and foremost, let go of that. That frees up a lot of thinking time in your own head when you’re not busy judging other people on why they did what they did. It allows you to look a little deeper at your own actions, but also to let go of the judgment of others and not really worry about it.
Dustan
A lot of us say, “I don’t care what other people think of me.” In fact, there’s a gentleman I’ve known for 15 years on this call right now. Willie was one of the first people to say to me, “I don’t really care what other people think of me,” and I believed him. He’s one of the few people that I believed when he said that. You’re certainly one as well because you do what you need to do.
Dustan
The Tony Robbins thing is interesting because he changed a lot of the way I think too. One of my takeaways was, you need to do whatever you’re capable of doing to the absolute maximum you can do it and earn whatever the maximum is you can earn doing that thing. Because if you’re somebody who’s capable of earning, say a million dollars a year and you only need 150,000... And I’m using the word ’need’ loosely. That leaves, even after taxes, $350,000, $400,000 let’s say that you don’t need.
Dustan
What can you do with that money to help other people who are incapable of ever hitting that kind of earning level? I’ve always looked at it like I have an obligation to do my very best to earn the most that I can possibly earn so that I can give a good chunk of it away. Of course, being Canadian, we don’t ever talk about how much we give at all. It’s top secret. Canadians are weird about that. We don’t like to talk about how much money we make. We don’t like to talk about how much money we give away. It’s unfortunate that giving isn’t a competitive sport.
Derek Sivers
My instinct would be to never mention it either, as I said earlier. I wasn’t ever going to tell anybody that I did this and then I was outed. But since then I found that it is actually useful. That’s why I did end up writing it on an article on my site and then I included it in the book because I thought this is actually useful for other people to know. Quite a few people have come to me over the years since I published it, first to say that they ended up doing the same with their company because it was me writing about it that let them know that that was an option and put a seed into their head. Years later they were selling their own company and did the charitable trust thing. That’s cool, to spread the awareness of this idea and just put it into somebody’s head as a possibility.
Dustan
Again, an exponential impact that you have on the world. I think it’s fantastic and I hope that you never stop writing. You told me that’s your focus now, just deeper thinking and greater writing.
Dustan
If there’s anything else you’d like to add, feel free. I don’t want to take up much more of your time. I think it’s fantastic that you’re able to share the amount of time you have with us. Like I say, you’re one of my all time favorite human beings and I think you probably another 57 waving fans here as well at this point.
Derek Sivers
Thank you. The reason I do these things, obviously, is not to sell another 55 books. I don’t really care. But I like to meet people. It’s one of my favorite things. Anybody here listening, please go to my website, which is sive.rs, and you will see the link that says, ’Introduce yourself.’ It’s one of my favorite things.
Derek Sivers
Actually, just before our call I was going through my email inbox and replying to all my emails, but I really like it when people reach out to introduce themselves and tell me something about themselves. It’s actually one of my greatest joys. I would like it if everybody listening to this call went to my website and sent me an email and just said hello. It doesn’t have to be a big story of your life, but just say hello and tell me who you are. I like that.
Dustan
I’ve typed the web domain in the notes here as well. Yes, that’s the assignment, everybody. Thank you. By all means, please do drop Derek a line directly. As I’ve said, absolutely my all time most gifted book. The new book, the title alone... Which of course, I feel like a total fool for blanking on, “Hell Yeah.” I already know that I need to order another 50 copies because I’m going to be gifting the heck...
Derek Sivers
The new book is not just about that one idea. I hate it when authors... Usually I think a publisher eggs them on to do this, where they take something that should be an article and they try to turn it into a book. Nobody likes that. My book called “Hell Yeah Or No” is not just 200 pages on that one little idea. It’s more of a common thread behind a lot of my thoughts on what’s worth doing, and fixing faulty thinking, and getting things done. I think it’s 68 little chapters around those themes. “Hell Yeah Or No” was a catchy title. It’s one of the chapters, and so it became the title. But don’t worry, it’s not a book about that. If you liked “Anything You Want,” I think you’ll like the “Hell Yeah Or No” book.
Dustan
I look forward to the journey that that’s going to take us all on.
Derek Sivers
Thanks.
Dustan
Again, thank you so much for doing this for us. I think everybody got a ton of value out of the last 3 hours. Collectively, all of us to read a book together, to mastermind together on it, and then I’ll spend some time with the actual author of the book that we just read and then talked about. Maybe I’m just a book geek, what can I say? But this was awesome. This is the high point of my year. It is definitely a unique year where it’s maybe not that hard to have a high point. High point of the decade. How about that? Wait, did we just start a new decade? Okay. It doesn’t work either. Sincerely, thank you.
Derek Sivers
Thanks for having me.
Dustan
I will be looking for a way to pay it forward as well, Derek. Anything any of us can ever do for you, we would love to help you out, whatever way that might transpire.
Derek Sivers
Cool. Thank you very much. Take care.
Dustan
Awesome. Thank you, and thank you to everybody for tuning in.