Roam Book club
host: Jason Kleinberg
career transitions, finding passion and purpose, learning opportunities, writing process, stoicism
listen: (download)
watch: (download)
Transcript:
Jason
You’ve done a lot of things. You’ve been a musician, circus performer, ring leader, writer, a programmer and entrepreneur. Who knows what else. My question that kind of relates to the book is how did you know if this particular vocation you did at the time was a good match? Did you have to think like, I’m going to do this next? Or did you sort of intuitively find your way as you went?
Derek Sivers
I was always obsessed. I couldn’t not do this thing. When I was doing music, I was just obsessed with music and thinking of nothing but music. Every waking minute for ten years. So I never questioned whether that was the right thing to do. From the age of 14 to 29, all I did was my music. When I was 29, I built this little thing to help people sell their CDs. It just quickly took over my life. That was a moment where I had to see that doing this new thing was actually the bigger learning growing opportunity. I could keep doing the same old gigs I had been doing. I could keep doing music, but at that point I’d been doing it for 15 years. It felt a little bit like been there, done that. Whereas doing this new thing felt like the bigger growing opportunity. I don’t even mean financially, I mean learning. It was a bigger learning opportunity. I think I’ve continued using that.
Derek Sivers
Whenever there’s that choice I could keep doing the old thing but this new thing is really fascinating me. To be clear, as soon as I started doing CD Baby I became monomaniacally focused on that new thing. It was just all I could think about every waking minute. I never questioned it. In that brief transition time, it felt like the question to ask yourself is what is the biggest learning opportunity? Where can I grow more? If you’re really not sure at all. Another good thing to ask yourself is who are your heroes? A few years ago, like four years ago, I still considered myself an entrepreneur and a programmer. I noticed that I was feeling a little bit ambivalent about that sometimes. Then I noticed that all of my heroes were authors. That helped me realize that I’m more of an author than an entrepreneur. No entrepreneurs are my heroes but many authors are my heroes. That helped me clarify it too. The two things you’re asking yourself, who are your heroes and what’s the bigger learning/growing opportunity?
Jason
Was there a point when you’re making that transition where you felt sad to be letting go of music and just feeling any pull back from that.
Derek Sivers
I think there will always be mixed feelings about anything you let go of, especially if you used to tie your identity to it. It might be hard to admit to yourself that that’s not your thing anymore. That keeps happening. A few of my friends have made big career changes and it’s always really weird for them to admit that “I just like this new thing more”. I know that I am this person, but I really I want to do this. Then you have to question whether you are that person anymore because your tastes have changed. It’s a little traumatic, but it’s alright.
Jason
Why do some people not move into new things like you have? What do you think is holding them back?
Derek Sivers
Oh, God. Everything’s holding you back. Having to explain to your friends and family why you’re changing. Feeling like an idiot. Doing the new thing. An old circle of friends, people that want you to be who you used to be. My God, my old college roommate still gets mad at me. He’s like, “I can’t believe you’re not playing guitar anymore”. You have everything that’s holding you back, so you have to push extra hard. There’s this great metaphor that rockets use most of their fuel just to get out of the pull of gravity. Like 90% of the fuel or something is just used just to get out of the atmosphere. Once it’s beyond that, it’s easier. There’s a huge effort you’re going to have to make to pull away from the gravity of whatever you’ve been doing.
Jason
Somehow you are able to do it and you are able to overcome like the being, the fear and the social pressure.
Derek Sivers
In my particular case, I was going from making my own music. That not a lot of people wanted, I was medium successful but with great effort. As soon as I started CD Baby every locked door just opened wide and everybody wanted it because I was serving people. As soon as I started this little hobby, everybody came my way asking me “please, could you sell my CD too?”. The social stuff was actually pulling me in the direction of the new thing. Let’s talk about the next transition after ten years when it was time to quit CD baby. That was also really hard, maybe most of you have felt at some point in your life. I just felt like, I can’t do this thing anymore. I’m completely done. It was diminishing returns. I felt like at an artist who’s painting a giant mural, at some point they feel like that’s the last brushstroke. That’s all I got, I think it’s done. I kind of felt that way about CD Baby I had set out everything I wanted to do and I just felt done. It’s also sad too, it’s a bit like a break up. There’s this sad moment where you just have to admit that it’s done, even though you wish it could go on forever. You just have to realize you’re done.
Jason
Maybe we could tie this into the book a little bit. Cal Newport talks about the law of financial viability. What you’re saying when you went into CD Baby, you had been working really hard in music and all of a sudden you were kind of validated for this new thing. Could you talk a little bit about that and then how that happened. Did you get any kind of validation when you left CD Baby moving forward into new things?
Derek Sivers
When Cal Newport was writing the book, just called me and asked me a bunch of questions. I didn’t really know where he was going with it. I think he was still figuring out what the book was about. The advice I was giving about the financial viability was a little bit directed at musicians. There are some musicians that want to be doing stage shows, for example. But every time they try to book a gig on stage, nobody wants them. On the other hand, they’re getting a lot of film scoring work. Well, just follow the money. Money being a neutral indicator of value to pass between us since we can’t all trade bicycles and chocolate and whatever we actually want. We use money as a neutral thing in the middle. If the world is saying that this thing pays more, the world is telling you that you are more valuable to us by doing this thing. I think that following the money can be a very wise and considerate thing to do because that’s listening. When people are telling you where you are more valuable to them.
Jason
It’s interesting to think of following the money versus chasing the money. Just thinking of listening. What is the world telling me here? What should I do based on what’s being told to me.
Derek Sivers
There’s the things that we do for ourselves. I like a hot bath, I like eating chocolate, whatever. The world doesn’t pay you to do those things. If you’re thinking of what to do in the world, you have to pay attention to what other people want. It’s not just about you and what you want. If you’re out there to serve the world. It’s all about what they want. That’s usually not always, but usually indicated by money. People are happy to open up their wallets and pay you to do one thing, but not another. It’s good path to follow.
Jason
It’s interesting to think about a lot of times we have this idea of artists just following their vision and not listening to anybody else. It seems like if you do want to share, if you’re not just doing it for purely for yourself, there’s a conversation in the end.
Derek Sivers
That’s a whole ’nother subject. On my website: sive.rs. If you go to the URL, that’s: sive.rs/balance. There’s my whole mini manifesto about why I think the best thing is to balance the thing you do for love and the thing you do for money and not try to mix the two. Keep the two separate. Do something for money that pays well and then do something you love and don’t try to monetize it. Like just let it be something you love. I know so many professional musicians that loved music until they got into it as a career. Suddenly when you have to write a piece of music for a business that’s paying you to do it. You can lose all the love for what you do. They would have been better off getting a job as a nurse and doing music for fun and not having to compromise what they love.
Jason
That’s a great piece of advice. That’s from Hell Yeah or No. I know all the chapters and all your books except the new one. I feel like I’ve hogged enough of the attention. So question time. Let me see. Kate do you want to ask a question now?
Kate
I’d love to. Thank you. Hey welcome, Derek.
Derek Sivers
Thank you.
Kate
It’s good to have you here. I’ve just finished reading How to Live, and I loved it very much. In fact, I’m going to give my grown up son a copy for Christmas because I think there’s some stuff in there he’d like too. You said before that a lot of writers are your heroes. A lot of people here read books, but we also write about them. Just coming off your book, I’m interested in knowing a bit more about your writing process, your workflow. Would you care to talk a little bit about that?
Derek Sivers
I don’t have a set process yet. It was a few years ago that I decided that I wanted to be a real author. At the time I had this backlog of some things and that how to Live book was something that I had a flash of inspiration for. Then it took four years to make it happen. The first version of my How to Live book was 1300 pages. It took a couple of years to write and it was 1300 pages, and then it took a couple of years to edit it down to 115 pages. Most of my writing process is editing. The initial gush is pretty easy. You can even just turn on voice dictation if you want and just blab and just spew all your thoughts. That would be easy but inconsiderate to the audience to leave it like that. The most considerate, thoughtful thing you can do is to edit, edit, edit and I try to not waste anybody’s time with a single sentence or a single word that wasn’t absolutely necessary, I love it when people do that with my time. My biggest process is editing. As far as the daily rituals and all that kind of stuff. Unfortunately not. I am mostly full time dad and my time is mostly at the mercy of an awesome little boy. I write when I can.
Kate
That’s great thank you. It occurred to me that book, How to Live, was in some of our parlance like propositions, a whole lot of propositions about living. Many of which were arguing against each other. I love the playfulness of the way that you you structured the book. You’d say, “let’s commit to everything and then let’s commit to nothing”. What that does is get the reader thinking. I really appreciate that, a writer who is speaking to the reader. Do you use any electronic processes to write?
Derek Sivers
No, I use plain text files. I use none of that special writer software. I write in a Unix terminal using an editor from 1975 called VI, I edit into plain text files. That works for me because I can just do it on any device. I love it
Kate
Thanks, Derek. I’ve really enjoyed that. Thank you.
Derek Sivers
Since you asked about writing the book that I found most surprising and helpful recently, look for an obscure book called Several Short Sentences. It is one of the most surprising and profound books I’ve ever found about the writing process. Several Short Sentences highly recommended.
Kate
You’re a minimalist too, aren’t you? So you would say that.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Maggie
That’s awesome. Thank you. Johno, are you ready?
Johno
Hello, Derek. Glad to get to ask you these questions. My first question would be, what is it like collaborating with Ryuichi Sakamoto, are still on tour with him?
Derek Sivers
Oh, no, not still. I was 22, so I’m 52 now. I was 22 then. That was 30 years ago. I was a 22 year old kid. I had never been to Japan and suddenly I was being flown first class to Japan, playing to audiences of 15,000 people in Tokyo. It was amazing. It was just one of those big wow experiences. Like, I can’t believe this is my life. Oh, my God I’m 22, I’m so lucky. What’s funny is that I toured with him for about three months in Japan, and as soon as that tour was over, I was right back to the little gigs I was doing. Performing for 20 people at a county fair in upstate New York. It’s not like it changed my life permanently, but it was an amazing experience. If you go to YouTube and you search Ryuichi Sakamoto/Derek Sivers, you’ll find me on stage with him in 1992. I had very long blond hair then you wouldn’t recognize me from now. The guy with the long blond hair on stage is me.
Johno
Oh, awesome. When you were there, did you learn anything from him, the way he makes music? Especially because I read your blog about how you got the gig to be on tour. I’m curious, what is like your process to push yourself and how you strive to be better with your craft?
Derek Sivers
I didn’t learn anything from him musically because he was touring to promote his newest album and then he told me to do my thing. I just played guitar. He didn’t have any guitar on the album, so he told me “just do your thing, do whatever you want”. I played guitar however I thought was fit. He liked it. The more shareable lesson from that was when my roommate told me that the gig was available because he was the assistant engineer for Ryuichi Sakamoto in the studio at that time. He said “Ryuichi said he’s looking for a guitarist”. I was like, “I want this gig. I want this so badly”. I love it when you know what you want, sometimes it’s really clear you just go for it like 1,000%. You just go above and beyond even what you think you should do. You just completely overwhelm the opportunity to do whatever it takes to make it happen. I did everything I could to get that gig. I started calling his agent, I went above and beyond and made it happen, which is just such a satisfying feeling. I’ve done that a few other times in life when there was something I really, really knew I wanted. You just go for it all the way and you just overwhelm them so they can’t say no.
Johno
That’s amazing because I was thinking, how would you push yourself? Cause there’s no guitar in his album, how would you integrate your sense of play, your sense of style into his music. Then again because of your tenacity and just ways of trying to get the gig. It does apply later sooner or later you’ll get it.
Derek Sivers
It’s been a while since I’ve read the Cal Newport book. You guys are reading So good they can’t ignore you, right?
Maggie
Yep.
Derek Sivers
That was on this subject. We kind of accidentally brought it back to the book topic. He uses that line from Steve Martin where it’s like, “if there’s something you really want, you just go for it so bad that you become so great at what you’re doing and just do it so well and so persistently that you can’t fail”. It works.
Johno
I don’t want to hug. My last question then, Derek, how would you elevate your sense of play then? That’s what it’s all about, right? How you play the game and how you elevate yourself to improve. How would you do that?
Derek Sivers
Do you mean play being great at what you do game.
Johno
Yeah. Being good at what you do game.
Derek Sivers
I don’t have anything unique to offer here. It’s all the same advice that’s out there. Practice as hard as you can, pursue every opportunity. It’s a lot of persistence when I think about it. When I was applying for that Ryuichi gig, I didn’t hear back from them at first. I kept contacting them like three times a day and I didn’t take no for an answer. I kept pushing and I kept adding my guitar to his recordings and sending them new copies of this recording. Then I transcribed his music and I said “here’s this and I really want this gig”. I called other people I knew in the music industry that might know those people and said “hey, I think you know these people can you tell them that I really want this gig, I really need this favor”. As far as how to play that game it’s going on the verge of being rude. Maybe it is being rude, it’s doing it for good intentions for a short time. Not ongoing rude but sometimes you say sorry this is something I really, really, really want. I might even be a bit annoying to you right now.
Johno
Yeah it shows like your glow. It shows you want to add something different into it.
Derek Sivers
Exactly and it’s life energy. This is not a time to be cool, not a time to be casual and chill. When you really want something, you have to go for it completely. This maybe doesn’t apply to romantic things, but that’s a different subject.
Johno
Thank you. Thank you so much, Derek.
Maggie
We have one last formal question. Let’s go to Tom.
Tom
Thanks, I’m enjoying your perspective. In your book Anything You Want, you talk about really focusing on things that are useful, that tap your creative energy. Right now you’re just finishing up on going for things with your passion. I also have a sense that when you have an idea you’re open about it, in the sense of letting other people know what you’re up to. To try to get a sense of how they respond to that. You’re using that as your gauge. Can you say more about that?
Derek Sivers
How to Live is the first book that I’ve written privately. My other three books were all done as writing individual articles and posting them publicly like a blog post. I highly recommend that. It is the way to go. In fact, it’s my top advice when people email me and ask me about writing a book. I say “don’t think of it as writing a book, write a really good article and post it, share it, spread it around”. There’s something about airing them out, it’s like getting them out into the open air, getting real eyes on them that are not your own. Most people do that with a book editor. But getting real people’s eyes on it sooner helps so much. Thinking of it not as a one big long book, but as a collection of chapters that make individual points. That makes it more shareable and people can read it in 3 minutes or 5 minutes and give you feedback. There’s something so useful about that, it’s by far the best way to go for writing a book. Do it publicly share the individual articles and chapters as you go. I think people’s fear is “I’ve given away the subject of my book or I’ve given away the contents in the individual articles”. I think the book still has great value to people when bundled together as a book. Maybe at that point you do one more round of editing and improving before you call it a book. It truly is unique and people like laying down on the couch and reading one book instead of clicking 98 times through your site. I swear by it, the fact that I kept How to Live private I was just curious to see how that would go. I never tried it that way before, I thought it was worth a try. Doing it in the public one chapter at a time, like blog posts is the way to go. Does that help?
Tom
Yes, aside from writing, if you have an idea from a business point of view that you want to explore. Are you talking about it and sharing it openly to get feedback? Are you holding things more close to the vest?
Derek Sivers
Absolutely share it because so many times the world doesn’t want what you think they want. If you have a business idea of course you should go spread it everywhere. You should tell everybody. In fact, a great thing to do is if you have four different business ideas that you’ve been sitting on for a while. I found this so useful years ago, I said that I’m going to do all four of them. I had these four different ideas for what I wanted to do after CD Baby posted them on my site, said, here are the four things I’m doing. Emailed it to everybody on my email list, and one of those four everybody just said, Oh my God, we need that, I want that. That’s the one I pursued and I just let the other three quietly drop away. It really surprised me that it’s not the one I thought they would have picked. Business ultimately is something you’re doing to be of service to others. Of course you should ask people what it is they want. Ideally, you could do that with a blank slate. You could just email everybody, you know and ask: How can I help? What do you need? What would make your life better? They can tell you what would help. If you have a business idea, definitely do not keep it secret. That’s the worst thing you could do.
Tom
Great. Thanks, Derek. Maggie.
Maggie
Awesome. Thank you so much. Those were all the questions that we sent to you. I just wanted to check in on time. Do you have maybe, like, ten more minutes. How are you doing time?
Derek Sivers
As long as you guys want. I’m good.
Maggie
Good. Okay, great.
Derek Sivers
By the way, this is my recording booth where I recorded my audiobook and I’ve got this nice microphone right here. I’ve never done this for a Zoom call before, I think this works really well, so I hope it sounds okay.
Maggie
Yeah, no, it sounds great. We have a couple of people with their hands up and someone else also messaged me privately with a question. At least four more questions. We’ll see how we go there. I think Lee had a hand up first, so go ahead.
Lee
You mentioned the book Several short sentences. The author is Klinkenborg. Is that the one you’re speaking about?
Derek Sivers
That’s the one, Yes.
Lee
When you communicate your ideas to people. Is it through your website and a mailing list or is it a Facebook group, Twitter or all of the above?
Derek Sivers
I’m a weird nerd and I like keeping everything on my own website. I don’t even have a Facebook account. I generally just use Twitter to kind of let people know when something is on my website. I prefer to keep everything on my website and I’ve been slowly building my email list since 1994.
Lee
Wow.
Derek Sivers
I’ve got a quarter million people on my database and email list. Not just that, but a lot of them are long relationships. I used to attend a lot of conferences, like 30 a year. I would keep in touch with everybody I met. Now my database is really just a history of everybody I’ve ever known. I do most of my communicating in my email list, and if possible, I recommend that. Twitter has a wide spread and so does Facebook and that’s good. There’s always this fear, 20 years ago there was something called MySpace that was popular at the time. A lot of musicians I knew depended on it entirely to reach their fans. They would reach their fans through MySpace. The only way they could reach them was through MySpace, and then MySpace shut down and suddenly they had no way to reach those people because they didn’t have the direct connections. They had only done it through MySpace. I highly recommend trying to make the direct connection to people that’s not dependent on any company that could possibly close your account.
Lee
Well, you’re emailing this, you own that. I learned the hard way. I had a much smaller scale .I had 50,000 members of a Facebook group. They disabled it and no reason. Now it’s building back up to 12, but I’m trying to build it. That’s not my property. But your website and mailing list is your property. That’s the only thing.
Derek Sivers
You’ve experienced that pain right. A lot of people haven’t yet and they still depend on Instagram or on TikTok or whatever for their fans.
Lee
What do you use for your mailing list?
Derek Sivers
I’m a nerd. I programmed my own.
Lee
Oh, my God. All right.
Maggie
Thanks. How about Carl next?
Carl
Hey Derek. I joined pretty late, but I want to thank you for coming on. Speaking of your massive mailing list, I found the first sort of long form contact we had, which was like ten emails we sent back and forth in like 2015 because you were nice. You were sort of the first person I thought of as like an internet celebrity that had really helped me out a lot personally, you responded to a bunch of my inquiries. I’ve always appreciated that. It’s really cool seeing you here. Sundays are my total day off. I don’t need to jump into the book club too much. Yesterday I took Saturday as my day off. I checked the email and I was like, what! Derek’s coming on to the Roam. So cool.
Derek Sivers
You guys have Jason to thank. Jason was so wonderfully persistent. I actually said no many times. This is actually the first interview I’ve done in well over a year. I kept saying no, and Jason kept nicely asking. Thanks Jason, this is fun.
Carl
Yeah. Awesome.
Maggie
Oh, yeah. Thanks, Jason. Thank you for taking the time. We really appreciate it. I guess we’ll just do two more questions. We’ll do Steven and then Layla.
Steven
Thanks Maggie. Thanks for sticking around for these questions, Derek. One of the things I’ve noticed since joining Roam Book Club is, there seems to be a bit of a thread of people who are interested in Stoicism. Then I noticed that you had referenced Stoicism on your website I didn’t have enough time to dig in. I just maybe was hoping you could tell us a little bit about your connection to Stoicism. Certainly your book, How to Live, has a very kind of stoic vibe going for it and maybe suggest some entry points for people who are interested in learning more about that.
Derek Sivers
You have my How to Live book already?
Carl
No, no. Someone just mentioned it here in the chat. It immediately struck me as a very stoic title.
Derek Sivers
One of my favorite mini challenges inside the How to Live book is, there’s a chapter it’s: called prepare for a more difficult future. I had been wanting to for the longest time write about Stoicism without using the S-word. I always thought that the word Stoicism is such a turnoff when Tim Ferriss or other friends would talk about Stoicism, I’m like “ancient Greeks with beards. No interest”. I really avoided it for years because of the name. It sounded too serious and too dreary. There is a great book called The Guide to the Good Life. The subtitle is Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. Look for that book. You can see there’s the book notes on my website. If you guys haven’t seen it you go to: sive.rs/book, you can see almost 300 books I’ve read with all of my notes on them. I rank them with my top recommendations at the top. The Guide to the Good Life, The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, is right near the top because I read it somewhat reluctantly. I was just looking for something to read and I was like, “alright, I’ll read a book on Stoicism”. It had good reviews and I read it. I was like, “Oh my God this is all the reasons my friends have called me weird since I was a teenager”. They were my own, haphazardly tossed together weird approach to life.
Derek Sivers
It turns out that people thought through this stuff 2000 years ago, and it’s called Stoicism. For me it was the way I had already been living my life, even though I had never read anything about it. It came from this idea of wanting so badly to be a successful musician and feeling the way I was going to do it, was by toughening myself up to prepare for whatever may happen. I might lose my voice, I might lose my hair, I might lose everything. Still, I want to succeed at this thing. To me, it was a path to career success. That’s why I was living that way since I was a teenager, I wanted so badly to be successful and to be happy no matter what happens. To me, Stoicism is about being cool with whatever happens. That’s how I’d been living since a teenager. If you want to read something about it, I hope you like my little chapter where I talked about it without mentioning the S word. The best book about it I’ve read is The Guide to the Good Life, The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.
Carl
Awesome. Thank you.
Maggie
Thank you. Changing gears a little bit, Layla wanted to ask you a question about editing/writing.
Layla
Hi, Derek, I can’t believe I’m actually talking to you. I’ve followed you for a while now, and I can’t believe you’re in New Zealand, because that’s where I am too.
Derek Sivers
Oh, where are you?
Layla
I’m in Wellington.
Derek Sivers
Where? In Wellington?
Layla
Kelburn.
Derek Sivers
Alright, Kerri.
Layla
Oh, my gosh!
Derek Sivers
We’re next to each other where I go through Kelburn to get to Karori.
Layla
This is amazing. First time I met somebody in New Zealand. It’s a beautiful place.
Derek Sivers
Hey, neighbor.
Layla
You mentioned for your book that you wrote 1300 pages and cut that down to 115. Do you have a process of doing that? Did you go through just cut it out? Did you give it to somebody else to cut it out?
Derek Sivers
No, I did it all myself. At one point I did hire 27 different editors for the 27 different chapters, which most would advise not to do, because that would give the book a different voice. That was the whole point, I wanted each chapter to have a very different voice. Unfortunately, I basically ended up not using their suggestions. I was already my own harshest critic, it turns out. It was just over and over and over again looking at something going, is this necessary? There were some little stories I told in the book. I thought there are different books that are storytelling books, but this is not a storytelling book. I actually chopped out all the stories because I felt like they are reiterating something I’ve already said. Why say something in six paragraphs if you can say it in one sentence? At least for this book, I put a lot on the reader to extract meaning from each sentence instead of me needing to hit them over the head with a story. In general, I look at every single sentence going, does that need to be said? Is that just echoing something I’ve already said? If so, I chop the sentence. Then sometimes I chop entire paragraphs or pages if I feel like it’s just not as strong as the rest. I’ve been doing this with public speaking for years, I did three or four or more TED talks that were 3 minutes long. I didn’t even do the 18 minute format. They usually do. I did the 3 minute format short.
Derek Sivers
Same process with that. What you have to do to give a TED talk is to cut out everything that is not surprising. You can’t get up there and tell people what they already know. You can’t get up there and say, “well, it’s good to be good and it’s bad to be bad, well some things are the way they are, and you never really know”. As soon as you say that people’s minds turn off, the only way you can keep people engaged is if you’re telling them surprising things. What I would always do in my public speaking is just remove everything that wasn’t surprising. Which is really hard to do, that eliminates 90% right there. You can go through again and eliminate everything that’s not as strong as something else in it. If you’ve got six pages and one of those six pages is really strong and the other five are not as strong, I’ll just delete all five pages and just leave that one good page. What’s so fun about that book, Several Short Sentences that I recommended, he said, “you usually don’t need the word but, instead of saying, it’s morning, but I’m sleepy. You can just say it’s morning, I’m sleepy”. People will figure out the connection. Then I went through and I removed every word but, I removed every so, I removed every and. Oh, it was so fun and bold to remove all of these softening conjunctions. What’s left, it’s just like bedrock. What’s left is just so solid. It’s such a good feeling. I’m kind of passionate on this subject.
Layla
No, no, I love it, too. It’s amazing. Thank you so much for your time. Maybe we could have a coffee.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, yes email me. We’ll see you around.
Maggie
Thank you. Do you have time for maybe two more questions? I’m glad to chat. Okay, great. I want to ask the one that shot first, because it’s kind of a follow up to to this conversation. Bruno was asking about your process for writing book reviews or book summaries and how that might be similar or different from this editing process that you do.
Derek Sivers
It’s almost identical. I mentioned my site: sive.rs/book, they are not book reviews. I’m not sharing my thoughts and feelings about the book. They’re not book summaries. I’m not trying to summarize what the author put into this book. All those are me reading the book. Every time I’m reading a book and something is interesting. I underline just those bits. That’s me underlining only the surprising. Really just the surprising sentences. When I’m done, I save those. If it was surprising, I want to reflect more on it myself later. First I want to read the book. Then it’s like, “oh, that was a really interesting idea”. I’m going to jot down that idea. I’m going to go through this later on. I’m going to reflect and think about that more. While I’m reading, I underlined the surprising sentence, the surprising idea, and I save that. I was just doing this for myself privately for years, then around 2010 I thought, “well, why not share them? Let’s see what happens. If the publisher tells me to take it down? I will”. Those notes you see on my side are just my private notes that I found surprising. Sometimes I keep it in exactly the author’s words. I often rephrase it into my own words. It’s a mix. Does that help?
Maggie
That’s also really interesting because it really is in line with a lot of what we’ve been doing in the book club and these different how to read a book talks about doing this and how to take smart notes. It seems like another example of you converging on something similar to other people.
Derek Sivers
Speaking of Roam and books in the intersection. Here’s something I found super interesting. The book called How to Read a Book. It glorifies the book. To me, I see a book itself not as important as the interesting ideas inside of it. A lot of what’s in the book to me is just the setup for the occasional ideas that blow your mind, then the rest of it is kind of forgettable. What’s really fun for me is to separate out these ideas that you extract from the books. You don’t need to keep them attached to the book anymore. They can just be standalone ideas. What I started doing four years ago when I was preparing for How To Live, is taking all these ideas I’d gleaned from books, separating from the book and categorizing them into my 27 chapters. I wrote a little script that takes my text files and I separated them by double spaces, I ended up having something like 4000 ideas that I wanted to include in my book that I had gleaned from other people’s books. Now they were no longer attached to the original book. I was just treating them as individual ideas untethered from the original source. I found that so much more interesting. Let’s stop quoting book names and book titles, unless you’re trying to tell somebody like I’ve done today. Once you’ve read it and you’ve extracted your notes into Roam, you don’t need to keep that association with the original book. It can now be an idea about commitment or an idea about spending or an idea about health. You can just put them into separate new categories about health how it applies to your life. Forget the book, forget the author, you’re done with that. Keep the ideas that meant the most to you.
Maggie
Yeah, that makes total sense. Lot of people in the chat are talking about that. This is what people in the room nerd out about. How to try to think of things as ideas and detach them just from being tied purely to the text.
Carl
I want to jump in. It’s your your whole quote on make it your own. It’s funny because I was looking for a quote from you for a talk that I was giving because I wanted to use your particular quote. I stumbled upon this idea of just say it yourself once you’ve extracted the idea. It was just hilarious, while looking for a quote from you to use in a talk I found your whole thing there. I found myself arguing with it in an interesting way because I both completely agree with it. For me, the reason that I like having the link to the primary source, even if I’ve transformed the idea, even if I’ve separated out the idea is because often there’s nuance in the fuller context of the piece that I have forgotten about. If I still have a connection that I can sort of follow this trail if I’m interested in and then go see that the original source is usually going to have a lot more richness. One of my favorite papers is Fuck Nuance and talking about to do good theories, you have to sort of pull enough. You have to abstract away detail in order to say anything interesting about the world. There’s always richness in the world that is not going to be encapsulated by some model, it’s a tangent, but I thought it was hilarious.
Derek Sivers
I just pulled up my block ref from my response to your quoting thing. I agree and disagree. The thing you’re saying is kind of what Adler’s saying too. He’s like most books you should just be skim reading. The whole point of How to Read a Book is, don’t treat every book the same. It’s maybe ten books where the book itself is worthwhile. The best thing I got from How to Read a Book was realizing that you don’t need to start at the beginning and move to the end. You should read the conclusion first and the introduction and if you read those two for 99% of books that you’re going to read. Reading maybe the first and last paragraph of every chapter is actually going to get you the core idea and only dig into the index page. Some key term that looks interesting that you don’t know, maybe read the pages about that key term, but don’t read the book. How to Read a Book is about not reading books the way we think of reading books. That’s my defense of Adler’s, what you’re saying is the same thing he’s saying. Remixing all the ideas including your own and bringing authors into conversation by having these ideas separated from their original source.
Derek Sivers
The thing you heard me go on about earlier about editing, the main reason why I say don’t quote is because if you’re saying so and so said this, then you say the thing. To me, those were unnecessary words around the thing. I could chop, chop, chop, just say the thing. The original words that the speaker used to say it, can be reduced down even further to say the idea. Did you guys see the movie The Royal Tenenbaums? Wes Anderson.
Carl
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
Do you remember how he’s saying, “this is my adopted daughter Margot? Everybody, this is my adopted daughter. She’s adopted as my daughter Margot. She’s adopted. She’s my adopted daughter”. That’s rude because he’s refusing to take her in and just say, “this is my daughter”. To me, it’s like that when people keep saying, well, Plato said this quote or this. If you keep saying every time you say something who said it. It’s like you’re refusing to take it in as your own. If you believe this thing, take it in. Change a couple of words. Make it your own and say it in your own words. Now it’s really yours.
Carl
I’ve got to find the meme, but there’s a hilarious sort of galaxy brain meme that was showing all these authors giving justification of like, well, it was said by Plato and it’s in a footnote to this. The highest level of it is “this occurred to me in a dream”. In terms of the evidence that various philosophers were giving for their rationale, the peak one is the thing just stands so thoroughly on its own. You can say you got it from your dreams.
Derek Sivers
I was just thinking about that this morning, if you felt that the quote needed you to say this Nobel Prize winner said this. If you felt that you need to reference it in order to give it some weight. Maybe the idea doesn’t stand up enough on its own, if it needs to have somebody important saying it to be important. Maybe the idea itself isn’t good enough, it’s a good idea if it’s a great idea even without referencing somebody famous and important.
Maggie
I think we’re going to try to wrap up soon because we usually try to keep our sessions to 2 hours, so why don’t we take Julian Lee and then then we’ll wrap up there.
Lee
I know so many books, the book will be 250 or 300 pages. Here is full of footnotes quoting all these things. If you just take the ideas out, it’s going to be a 100 page book. Isn’t it in a way what you’re driving at?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, exactly.
Lee
First of all, it was plagiarism. I guess if you extract the idea and put it in your own words, it’s not plagiarism, right?
Derek Sivers
That’s why I think it’s just better all around. You’re putting it in your own words. You’re not plagiarizing.
Lee
The essence of it. What it really means. Not who said it, not name dropping about Socrates, Kierkegaard and Plato.
Derek Sivers
There’s a writer right now that he’s also a friend of mine, but I disagree with the way he writes. Ryan Holiday. If you look at a page of any Ryan holiday book, it’s this Greek name said this, this famous person said this. I would just look at a page of this book. I thought it’s like a fifth of this page is just names. These names are not important to get into my head. I want the ideas, not the names. I actually emailed Ryan. I said, “Ryan, I really wish you’d just come on. You’ve built up enough trust with your audience. Say it in your own words”. He said, “I totally disagree. That’s the opposite of what I’m doing. I’m trying to share the wisdom of the elders”. It’s a lot of noise to me.
Lee
I guess you’d call it principles over personalities in a way.
Derek Sivers
I like that. That’s a good one.
Lee
The way I read three bucks and two sows here. A lot of words are good.
Maggie
All right, Julie, you want to close this out?
Julie
Thanks, Derek. There is such a vividness in your being with us. Thanks for that. And my question is what you shared about that parenting is your main thing you’re doing with yourself right now. I would be curious to hear if you would share any of your insights or learnings or what the frontier of parenting is for you.
Derek Sivers
I only have one kid, age nine. I’m no expert, but I should just say that anything I could say right now in one minute wouldn’t be worthy. There’s a great book called Playful Parenting. I’ve read a lot of parenting books, and this to me was the only masterpiece. Playful Parenting, the author’s name is Lawrence Cohen. It is so, so, so good because it’s saying that kids communicate through play, this is their language. If you try to sit a kid down and say, “okay now sit still, I need to tell you something important. Look me in the eyes, telling you something important”. He said “that won’t stick because that’s not their language. If you turn it into a game, now you’re speaking their language”. Everything kids do is through play. The way to speak their language is by engaging in that play. Even if your back hurts, even if you’re tired, engage in play with your kids, then you’ll connect with them. That was so right on. I highly recommend playful parenting. I think it’s applicable for ages 2 through 16 or so. That’s where I’m at, for people with brand new babies the best book I found was Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina. I read a lot of baby books when we first had a baby, and that was the best one by far for a baby age. Then Playful Parenting for everything after. Sorry. That’s all I know so far.
Kate
That’s great. I would guess as an improvisational dancer, that playfulness is good for adults too, and is just as a way to live and be with each other and expand our options and not just go to movies or have dinner together. There are so many other ways to interact with people. So thanks for joining us today.
Derek Sivers
Thank you.
Maggie
Yes. Thank you so much for joining us, Jason go ahead.
Jason
I had one follow up question about parenting. I’m not a parent, but a common complaint I hear among parents I know is that their kids are on the screen all the time. They’re always on an iPad or they’re obsessed with screens. And I was wondering if you had any advice to parents and people in general about about getting their kids less engaged with that or finding a balance, what do you think about that? Does your son not obsess over that? How do you navigate that?
Derek Sivers
You’re doing the first step right now. It’s getting them outside. We’ve got an unfair advantage living in New Zealand. It’s so gorgeous that ever since he was born, I spent most of his waking hours with him outdoors in gorgeous places. He just grew up playing with sticks, feet in the river, making things out of leaves and hands in the mud and sand. That’s just how he grew up. When he sees friends staring at a screen he says that’s not play. My friend hands me a PlayStation controller and says, “here you take this one”. He said “that’s not play, that’s buttons”. He’s actually losing friends because his friends are addicted to screens. In his case, he doesn’t like sitting still and clicking a screen. He wants to get outside and play. Part of it is just his nature. Maybe it’s how I raised him. I think it’s making the outdoor, playful stuff more interesting than the screen.
Jason
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Maggie
Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. I definitely learned a lot and I’m going to be combing through the chat for all the recommendations and everything. There was a lot of great discussion going on in there as well. Thank you very much. This is the end of the official session.
Derek Sivers
As you can tell, just send me an email and if you haven’t already, I’m good with that. If you go to my website: sive.rs, there’s a big link at the top that says, email me and say hello. Thanks.
Maggie
Thanks Derek. Appreciate it. Take care.