Built Not Born
host: Joe Ciccarone
importance of focus, decision-making, life after success, finding purpose, influence of books
listen: (download)
Transcript:
Joe
Derek Sivers. Welcome to the show. It’s an honour to have you for our listeners who may not be familiar with you and your work. Who are you and what do you do?
Derek Sivers
You know, it’s funny. It depends who’s asking. I love this social situation where you’re on a train and somebody asks what you do and you don’t want to talk to them, so you just make up something that shuts down the conversation. So it’s funny, I have a few different answers to that. I can say what I have done in the past is I was a full time musician for 15 years until I started a little music store to sell my music, and that turned into CD Baby, which became the largest seller of independent music on the Web for ten years. Sold that in 2008 for far too much money, which put me into the situation of wondering what to do next. Since then, I have been thinking in public as an author and just published my fourth book. That’s my answer.
Joe
Wow. I want to get into your career as a musician, CD Baby, the lessons learned, which I believe you turned in the book Anything You Want, or at least it based on your experience there. Which is which was my introduction to your work, it really grabbed my attention. Also, I want to get into your TED talks, which I really like that have millions and millions of views, some great life lessons there. Your two books, Hell yeah or No and How to Live. Those two books just really hit home with me. There’s just knowledge in those books. Love to touch base there. But before we get started. Where did you grow up?
Derek Sivers
Even that’s a bit of a trick answer. Was born in California. Moved to England when I was five. Moved to Chicago when I was six. Moved to Boston when I was 16. Moved to New York City when I was 20. I’ve been moving every two years or so since then. So actually this not being from any one place is a big part of my identity.
Joe
What caused that? Those particular moves on purpose by accident.
Derek Sivers
My dad is a particle physicist that was just taking jobs at laboratories around the world, you know, job in California, a job in Chicago, a job in England. Since then, I think because I moved a lot as a little kid, it just kind of shaped my impression of how life is supposed to be, right? Like it felt like this is what you do. You move every year. Every year you move somewhere far away. That’s what life is. I was actually really sad when we moved to Chicago when I was six, and my mom said that we were just going to stay there for five or ten years. I went, “oh, like five or ten years? That’s awful. It’s like death”. Death means, you’re not moving anymore, right? So I think that’s part of why I’ve moved a lot since then. Just equated moving with life.
Joe
Because life is movement. You look at me, you stop moving, you die. There’s days if I sit down for a long period of time, my mind maybe not dead, but it’s so slow. I have to move to be my best self. Like, thinking wise and, like, feeling, like, physically. And it’s almost like the death of at least the day you’re in. If I don’t move that much.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, Yeah, exactly.
Joe
Looking back with all those multiple moves, when you look back, what’s the most powerful memory of your childhood?
Derek Sivers
Maybe the one I actually said already, which was after moving every year for five or six years, moving to Chicago, I remember where I was standing when I asked my mom, like, “how long are we going to stay here?”. And she said, “oh, maybe five, maybe ten years”. I started sobbing. To me, it sounded like the most awful situation to stay in one place for five or ten years. I still think that was pretty formative in my early years.
Joe
How long did you wind up staying in Chicago?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, ten years. That’s when I was legally allowed to leave, right? So we moved there at six. At 16, I graduated high school a year early and I was like, bye bye, getting as far away as I can.
Joe
And where’d you go from?
Derek Sivers
When I went off to Boston, to Berklee School of Music in Boston.
Joe
When did you figure out you wanted to be a musician. How early did that come about?
Derek Sivers
14. I always played music until then, just like piano lessons. Viola, violin and clarinet as a kid. But at 14 I started playing guitar and I was like, “this is it. This is what I want”. I am so thankful that I had this single mission from the age of 14 till 29. For 15 years of my life I wanted nothing but to be a great musician. I feel bad for people that are just kind of adrift and they don’t know what they want because I think it almost doesn’t matter what you put your focus into as long as you’re focused on something. To become good at anything teaches you how to be good at anything. It’s the act of focusing instead of just being adrift. I could have wanted to be a great mountain climber or ostrich racer or whatever it may be. But just the act of focusing on something and learning to be great at one thing I think teaches you amazing life skills that then later you can apply to anything else you’re doing. So I’m so thankful that from 14 to 29, I wanted nothing, nothing, nothing else than to be a great musician.
Joe
Yeah, because you look at the tactics or the idiosyncratic things you would do as a musician are applied to just a musician. The principles you can apply to anywhere in your life, like maybe you have to get up early. You have to go through like maybe with Seth Godin calls the dip where it’s fun in the beginning. Then it gets hard and you have to go through the dip. Bite enough to do the dip and then, do you bring other people with you? Are you part of a community of like minded people? Like everything that makes something like that work. The principles all remain the same, right? That’s the same stuff. You can take that to any part of your life.
Derek Sivers
Even learning how to practice, learning how to improve all that stuff you just said. That’s so crucial, such great life lessons in there that I would recommend that for anybody. Just pick anything, especially for a teenager, just like pick anything and just focus on that and be great at it instead of being adrift.
Joe
If you look at anyone that’s done anything of note, like Tiger Woods didn’t play the saxophone and was a kickboxer, he did golf. Lance Armstrong he rode his bike. Venus Williams, she played tennis like it wasn’t tennis and jujitsu, there’s one thing and you go, focus. It’s kind of like that microscope. You put the sunlight, it warms the yard.
Derek Sivers
The magnifying glass.
Joe
Magnifying glass burns everything. It burns it up then. Catching the fire. Cool. Let’s go. You’re in Berklee, right? So you’re in Berklee College of Music. Great music school. What are your life lessons you teased out like your time at Berkeley? What would be your life lesson there?
Derek Sivers
I actually wrote a whole story about this. I can give you the easy URL if you go to sive.rs/kimo. Kimo Williams was the name of my music teacher right before I went to Berklee and he gave me this amazing life lesson, which is the standard pace is for chumps. You don’t have to go with the normal pace. He taught me four semesters of Berkeley’s harmony classes in two lessons, and he taught me two semesters of Berkeley’s arranging classes in one lesson. He just kind of had this super intense pace and showed me like, you don’t have to go at the normal pace. I’ll bet you that you can graduate Berklee School of Music in two and a half years. I did. So that was my formative lesson.
Joe
That’s in the book, Anything You Want. You speak to that, don’t you?
Derek Sivers
Oh, yeah, that’s in there. Iff somebody just wants to see it on the web, sive.rs/kimo.
Joe
Yeah and the standard pace is for chumps. I think that’s like the quote from the book. I think that’s where the community comes in, where if you go with a bunch of people that are like doing it as a hobby, you’re going one pace. If you’re doing it for someone who’s doing it competitively, completely different pace, and you just speed up the process, like with the recreational people, they’re doing a month later that maybe the competitive people are doing in a week, you know?
Derek Sivers
Right. Yeah.
Joe
You extrapolate that over five years there are over here in the rec, people are still like worlds away. Let’s get to the book real quick. Let’s get to Anything You Want. Here are my three takeaways maybe we could discuss. One is, always take action, but when you take action, start small. If you’re starting a business, start with one client. And the third one is the power of focus. It’s the power of saying no and just focusing on exactly what you want. Don’t be all over the place. Be in one spot.
Derek Sivers
Great takeaways. I thank you.
Joe
The one thing I know I struggle with, I think everyone does that. The power of focus. It’s so easy to be everywhere. You look at your schedule and there’s 14 things. There’s three conference calls, your kids practice at night. There’s so much going on. How can the average person get more focus in their life? What do you think? How can you take that lesson from that book? How can the average person say, you know what, I got two, three kids, We have all these practices, I got work, I want to get to the gym. How can I focus more?
Derek Sivers
I think it’s the somewhat sad realization that although you can do anything, you can’t do everything. You have to decide. The Latin root of the word decide means to cut off. So to decide is to cut off other options. It really means saying I can’t do everything. If I want to be good at X, that means I cannot do a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p. You know, you decide that all these things literally will not be able to happen if you want to be good at X. You just realize that and hopefully, you have that drive intrinsically, you say, I’ll just keep using this letter X thing, right? You keep you want X so badly that you actually don’t care about a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p. So either you want it so badly that you are happy to just shut off everything else, say “no, I’m not going to be water skiing, I’m not going to be a good soccer coach. I’m not going to read the news. I’m not going to know what’s going on in the world. I’m not going to post my life on social media”, etc.. You just like say all these things that people act like you maybe have to do. You just say, I’m not going to do it. In fact, I’m not even going to answer my phone. I’ll check my messages once a night because I’m really focused on this one thing and you just have to be happy to make that tradeoff.
Joe
Now, how important do you think it is to I guess you have not just like something that you fully commit to, you have to love it. I think that’s important. Well, it’s not just a curiosity in it. It’s like, you know what I love it? This is me. This is what I love. Does that come after you commit to it, or is that in the front end? What do you think? I struggle with that.
Derek Sivers
There’s a good argument either way. I don’t think there’s one right answer. There’s a good argument either way. But I think you have to be whole hearted about it. It may not be necessarily love like a passion. Some people say that you have to have the passion, but I think it could also just be like a realization to say this is the right thing. This is what I’m going to do. I’m committed to this. Through highs and lows, kind of like the way that you really commit to a marriage and you say, we’re going to do this no matter what, it’s going to be hard, but we’re committing to this. You can do that with a career path. Somebody can just say like, you know what, I come from a family of lawyers. My dad wants me to take over the law firm. I don’t love doing legal work, but I’m good at it. I’ve got an unfair advantage here. This is the right thing. I’m going to do this and you just commit to it. You don’t have to go look for this Romeo and Juliet style passion in everything. It can just be this feeling that it’s the right thing to do.
Joe
Yeah, that’s great. One of the other notes I took from the book, and it goes right into what you just said you wrote, Go to the 1%, let go of the 99%. So figure out what your 1% is and just you got to have the courage and motivation and just let go of that FOMO, that fear of missing out, let go that 99% when you find your thing.
Derek Sivers
Well, that to me, that 99%/1% thing in the book, I meant that more in terms of like marketing, when you’re reaching out to your audience, you’re not trying to please 100% of the people. You just need to find that 1% out there that’s into what you’re doing and proudly exclude the other 99% and just not try to be everything to everyone.
Joe
Go to the true believers and let go of the people that it’s not for you. Understood. Cool. Let’s move on. So here we are. You just left the Berklee College of Music Tulsa, the quick version of CD Baby. I found the how you started basically CD Baby almost by accident and how it just took off.
Derek Sivers
Sure started it by accident. Let me just do the one minute version of this, because this is an old hat at this point. You got to understand, this is we’re talking like 1997. That I was just selling my CD. This is back before PayPal didn’t exist. Amazon was just a bookstore. If you were an independent musician, there was like literally nowhere on the Internet that would sell your music. Nowhere. So I was just trying to sell my music online. Nobody would do it. I thought, “oh, fuck it, how hard could it be? I’ll just set up my own little store”. But in 1997 it was hard. It was like three months of work and you had to pay $1,000 in setup fees to get a credit card merchant account. Then you had to make these like CGI bin Perl scripts to put on your server in order to process a credit card and it was hard. After three months of work, I had a “Buy Now” button on my website and my musician friends in New York City at the time said, “dude, how did you do that? Can you do that for me?”. Even though I had never intended it to be anything but a Buy Now button on my band’s website, I just kind of reluctantly agreed to do it for some friends as a favor.
Derek Sivers
But then they told their friends and soon the situation in 1998 was if you were an independent musician anywhere in the world and you wanted to sell your music online, the only way to do it was through some guy named Derek in New York. Just right away, CD Baby became the largest seller of independent music online. Yeah, there were there were imitators about six months later after I started CD Baby. For quite a while it was like that was it? I was the only guy doing this thing because everybody else felt it wasn’t worth doing. It was like, think of right now how you’d feel about doing a poetry market for octopuses or something. I don’t think there’s a market for that. That’s how independent music felt in 1998. It felt like what? Like bar bands that have no fans. Why would I bother setting up a business for them? But yeah, I did it. For ten years, and it just grew and grew and grew. That’s what the book Anything You Want is my lessons learned in hindsight from starting growing and then eventually selling CD Baby.
Joe
How did you know it was time? How did you know it was time to sell CD Baby? So you had it for how many years?
Derek Sivers
Ten years. And to put it in technical terms, I was fucking done.
Joe
Right? Right.
Derek Sivers
So fucking done. I was so sick of it. I just felt like, you know, those people that paint a giant mural on the side of a building and it takes them like a year to do it.
Joe
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
At some point, they put that last brushstroke on and they look at it and they go like, I think that’s it. I see. I think I’m done. There’s nothing else I want to change. That’s how I felt about CD Baby. I’d been doing it for ten years and it just felt like I have nothing more to add. I have no vision for the future of this. Like, I’m feeling like I did it. I just want to move on now. It was actually Seth Godin that helped nudge me. I asked his advice at the time, and he kind of helped nudge me to realize that actually the considerate thing to do, if you’re the owner of a company and you don’t have any vision for the future, it’s actually the considerate thing for your clients to sell the company. Because your clients probably want to keep growing, but if you don’t, you should probably sell and move on. So I’m really glad that I did.
Joe
That’s awesome.
Derek Sivers
Hey, Joe, do you want to ask me what’s the biggest challenge I ever faced?
Joe
Yes, I do. What is?
Derek Sivers
So I thought you might. So this is right where it comes in.
Joe
The story that is absolutely perfect. So you sell CD baby after what’s Derek? What would be the biggest challenge you ever faced? What would you say?
Derek Sivers
Oh, it’s funny that you ask.
Joe
You start a huge company. You had it for ten years, so you didn’t have any vision. Talk to Seth. Seth says it’s time to go. So right now. So from looking back, what’s that big? What’s the biggest challenge ever faced?
Derek Sivers
It was actually after that. It’s funny, I thought you kind of expect people to talk about the challenge being in the early years. I have an idea for your listeners here. This, I think might apply to a lot of people listening to this is, what to do after a big success. Everybody talks about how to get successful. Almost nobody talks about what to do after your successful. For me it was selling CD baby. I had millions in the bank and no responsibilities and total freedom. But now what? So you’ve got to ask yourself this, all of us here, everybody listening to this show, you’re working towards something you want more money, more success, more talent, a better romantic relationship, more fitness, whatever it may be. So ask yourself what would happen if you had all of that come true tomorrow? What if tomorrow you had $100 million? The romantic partner of your dreams, all the fitness you could ever want. Then what? You might celebrate for a bit. But then what? When you’ve been working towards something your whole life and you’re used to this pursuit, and the pursuit is now done, what do you do? If you’re playing a board game or a video game and you win the game. What do you do? You quit playing. You say, okay, game over. I finished. I’m done.
Derek Sivers
But in life, we don’t tend to do that. So that’s obviously been my biggest challenge, is asking myself what’s worth doing after all of your dreams come true. That’s really the underlying question behind all of my writing, including my last two books especially. Hell Yeah or No. The subtitle is called What’s Worth Doing? Then my newest book called How to Live, is kind of looking at the collage of the different ways that you could live and take it to further extremes. That’s been my biggest challenge.
Joe
Thank you for sharing that. What to do after big success? It reminded me when you’re explaining that, it reminded me if you ever read about the NASA’s astronauts that reach the moon, like Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, rather than become the go to the moon, there’s a whole their whole world is Space moon astronaut. They get there and come back. So many of them are alcoholics. Their life falls apart because they already walked and they did it. They’re 35 years old and they’re like, what do we do now? I can’t do anything else. Yeah, it reminds me that.
Derek Sivers
Olympic gold medalists like Reggie, you broke the world record in something. You win the gold medal. Now what? Yeah. You know, if you go try to shave another millisecond off your time, or you do something else. I’ve been thinking about, I don’t know if I’m up for undertaking this endeavor, but maybe somebody will beat me to it, is to write a book about, what do you do after you’re rich or what do you do after you’re successful? Nobody talks about this because it’s so rare. If you were to have any hint of a complaint in there, it would sound like, oh, yeah. First world problems, good problem to have. What do you do with all your millions? But it’s worth looking at. I think it’s a lot of what makes people philosophical. When you’re just hyper focused on necessity and achieving something. You don’t usually have time to get fairly, very philosophical. You’ve got your head down on a task, but it’s after you’ve got all the freedom in the world and suddenly, more money brings more choices. Yeah, a lot more decisions are needed. Suddenly you have to get philosophical to ask yourself, what am I doing and what’s worth doing?
Joe
Yeah, no, absolutely. Say the average person listening to like, well, I would just chill on the beach.That’s great for a week to three.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. For a week, a month.
Joe
You spend the summer and go crazy. Spend the summer in Italy or summer in Hawaii. Awesome. Then what. Or New Zealand. Right. There’s that great quote. “Tranquility creates fragility” because you’re sitting there in the tranquil world. At some point, that tranquility makes you fragile because you don’t have any challenge. There’s nothing pressure testing you. There’s nothing keeping your sharp edges, after a while, don’t you think? I mean, at some point you’ve got to go out there and try something else. So you start Hell Yeah or No. Real quick couple just takeaways we could discuss. I love this one. One of my main takeaways was opportunities. Okay. Hell yeah. Basically the book is based on if it’s not a hell yeah, it’s a no, right? That’s the kind of overall view. One of my main takeaways is opportunities soon become obligations. You get all excited and all of a sudden I’m going to do it. Like I’m going to go join a spin class and they meet four times a morning. It’s 6:00 AM and the first one you’re excited, second one, you’re. Then all of a sudden like it’s, “oh, I got to get up again”. It’s a grind, the dip comes in and the newness. I’ll kick it over to you. Yeah, that’s what you’re saying there, right?
Derek Sivers
Well, you just have to be really careful of what you commit to, you should be really reluctant to commit to anything. The book Getting Things Done by David Allen is a very famous work and the lesson in there. He says, whenever I first start working with a client, Fortune 500 CEO hires me for a ton of money to come straighten out their life. He said, the first thing we do is we go to their garage on a Sunday and empty out their garage and they say, What? You know, I don’t have time for this. And I say, yes, we need to, because this is an indication of how you’ve been treating your life. To clean up your life, is to clean up your garage and vice versa, because you’ve said yes to too many things. He said, I want you to feel the pain of having to complete everything you’ve agreed to. Every item you’ve taken on needs to be look after now, like every item you’ve purchased, you need to look after it and put it somewhere and categorize it and take care of it. Every thing you’ve said yes to you, every time, obligation you’ve said yes to you need to do all those things that you’ve said yes to. Okay, now that we’ve done all that. How often are you going to say yes to things in the future now that you see how much pain it really creates? Kind of the underlying message of getting things done is to say yes to less. My Hell Yeah or No book kind of takes that,it just gives a little rule of thumb to say, here’s here’s where you should draw the line. Let’s let’s raise the bar all the way up so that if I’m not saying like, “oh my God, fuck, yeah, that would be amazing”. If I’m saying anything less than that, just say no to almost everything.
Joe
Absolutely. So basically so you can create space for what really matters. So you’re basically saying no to everything, so you can say yes to things that matter. I like the one thing you mentioned where you say no to things so you can say yes to the three things I took from the book activities you can’t imagine not doing. Alright, so there’s something else I thought that was really cool. Something that you think scary is an intriguing. Selfishly to me, this was this podcast where we’re over COVID. I’m like, You know what? That scared me for five years, and I had an opportunity to learn how to do it. So I jumped into this because it scared me. The last one is what would you do if you had enough money and attention? If you were already rich and you had all the attention you needed, what would you do on the side? That’s a great filter to run that stuff through, so I appreciate that. here you are now, what are you saying no to now? Now you’re in New Zealand. What do you find yourself saying no to? A lot Like people come up to you with a lot of probably, “hey, how about we do this? Do you want this project?”. What do you say no to? A lot? What’s like some of the things you say no to right away?
Derek Sivers
These days I say no to everything. Somebody asked me recently, What’s your big yes these days? And I went, Huh? I had to think for a while and I thought.
Joe
That’s a great question. That’s fantastic.
Derek Sivers
I don’t have one and that’s okay. I don’t have one. I felt like I was supposed to say, “oh my God, what is my big yes?”. I had to just think for a few seconds. I went, ha! Like, no, there is there is nothing right now. This is the state that the Hell Yeah or No book is all about. It’s like you leave room in your life. You don’t worry when you don’t have some big yes. Because it’s like, now I’ve got room. So when that thing does come up, I can dive into it entirely because I’ve got the space of my life. Right now I just say no to literally everything. Luckily I have this, I have this thing on my website, I have an FAQ that says up front, I’m not an investor. I’m not looking for any new projects, here’s my email address. Please introduce yourself, say hello. Please understand in advance that I’m not even going to read a book you send me because I’ve already got a queue of 100 books that I’ve bought and want to read and I’m looking forward to reading. I’m not going to add another book to that right now. I just say no to literally everything.
Joe
How many books get sent to you on a monthly basis? The blurb or can you read my book? How many books you usually get?
Derek Sivers
Well, none, because I just tell them not to.
Joe
That’s all right, sir.
Derek Sivers
My mailing address is not public, so things don’t show up at my door, luckily. But even my email address. I actually have a shortcut, I set up these little macros for answering emails. I’m kind of known for having this public inbox and anybody listening to this send me an email and I’ll reply. Part of the reason I’m able to do that is that there is some sentences that you have to say often, such as I have a key and I hit the letter N and it says, “no, I’m sorry, I’m not going to be able to do that. I’m completely focused on some other work. I wrote an article about this here at, you know, sive.rs/noto, where I’m saying no to everything but this one thing I’m doing so sorry I won’t be able to do it”. It’s a polite general no, that I use many times a day because people say that like, “oh God, I’m just so bad at saying no”. Well just say it once in a form letter and just use it many times.
Joe
How about looking back? We’ve talked about your biggest challenges. How about if you look back, what’s the most successful failure you’ve ever had? Like, do you have a favorite failure that set you up for future success?
Derek Sivers
Okay. This is a funny question. I enjoy overthinking this question because I’m going to take a tangent and you’ll see why. I don’t know if anybody has ever called you needy or if you have ever called someone else needy in a romantic relationship kind of situation. But a friend of mine. Had that recently. And I thought about it and I said, You know what? You are not needy. It’s just that you got yourself into a social situation where. You wanted something from somebody who didn’t want to give you what you wanted. So that person called you needy. But needy is not a trait. It’s not like a person is a needy person. It’s describing a social situation. It passed. So in that social situation, this person was needing more from that person. So this person got labeled needy. So if B wants something from A but A doesn’t want to give to B, then A calls B needy. The problem is, if B takes that to heart and thinks I’m a bad person, I am needy. Nobody’s going to love me because I am needy. But no, needy was a social situation that has passed now. I think it’s similar with failure that I know this is a bit of a cliche, but I think that failure is a situation where something didn’t work out the way you want then you unhappily quit.
Derek Sivers
It has to be unhappily right. I was married for six years. Then we just started going our separate ways. She just really wanted a different lifestyle and I really wanted this different lifestyle. After six and a half years, we just like one day after dinner we said, like, “do you want to break up?”. “Yeah, do you want to break up?”. “Yeah, alright. Did we just break up?”. “I think we did. Cool. Let’s get a lemonade”. We decided and had this happy breakup. I remember years later somebody said, “how does it feel to have a failed marriage?”. I went “oh, no, that wasn’t a failed marriage. That was a great marriage. We had a great relationship for six and a half years, and then we happily quit and went our separate ways”. So failure is when you unhappily quit, right? You start a business, you put a creation out into the world. The world doesn’t respond the way you want. Things don’t turn out the way you hoped. And then you unhappily quit. That means failure is not a trait. It’s a situation. It’s a situation of unhappily quitting. I’ve only ever pursued a few things in life. We said that I wanted to be a successful musician.
Derek Sivers
And for 15 years I did nothing but pursue that. I think after 15 years, I got to a point that wasn’t the worldwide success that I wanted, but I got pretty successful. I made enough money as a musician that I bought a house in Woodstock with the money I made touring, and I was a full time professional musician for eight years, something like that. To me, that was a success. Then I did CD Baby. I wanted to be a great service to musicians. I did that. I feel like I only pursue things that I’m willing to do indefinitely. If something doesn’t turn out quite the way you want, you just take it as feedback. You make some adjustments, you try again. If you attempt something five times and you get it on the sixth. It doesn’t mean the first four or five attempts were failures. They were just attempts. It took you a few tries to make it right, so we don’t label it as a failure until you unhappily quit. So, yeah, it’s a funny question. You know, like a failure that leads to success then by definition wasn’t a failure. Yeah, I guess the question would really be when did you unhappily quit something, learn a lesson from it, and use that lesson to be successful in something else?
Joe
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Sorry. I don’t have a good answer to it, but I thought it was really interesting to think about what that question really means.
Joe
I am never going to look at that question the same way again. I ask another guest that is the deepest dive in that question I’ve heard in 54 episodes. So I appreciate that. Thank you very much. I appreciate your answer. With everything you have going on, projects you’re working on, like when you need to clear your mind and recharge your body, what do you do?
Derek Sivers
For once, I have a short answer for you. Two things. If I’m just feeling overwhelmed, I very, very often like a couple of times a day, we’ll just go lay down intending to take a nap. Maybe if I’ve answered a hundred emails or I’ve just been programming or I’ve been something and I’m like writing and I’m not sure what’s next.
Joe
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
I’m like, ugh. I’m going to take a nap. I go lay down on the couch. Fully intending to take a nap, but it almost never works out that way because once you kind of lay horizontal and intend to clear your mind. Suddenly you go like, “oh, I just had an idea”. I just let myself then jump up with enthusiasm back into what I’m doing. I don’t think I hardly ever actually fall asleep. But the other thing that it really helps that I do most days I live in New Zealand and I live in a city called Wellington, which is very, very hilly. There’s no flat space in Wellington. It’s all steep hills and I live at the bottom of a steep hill and it’s all forest. So I go on this two hour walk through the very hilly forest, and it’s exhilarating, it’s exhausting. I’m drenched in sweat after 2 hours. But I do this two hour walk through the silent forest, and that helps.
Joe
It’s like that Nietzsche quote or any great idea was come through walking or something like that. I guess when you lay down, you’re clearing your mind. When you go for a walk, that movement kind of clears your mind. It’s almost like we just have to quiet the mind for a second. That’s where the creativity comes from. Ideas come from, right? Because then there’s noise. There’s no space for the creativity. There’s a lot of busyness, busyness, busyness. The open space gives you that, right? Sometimes you get in the shower like you’re taking a shower and a great idea will pop in your head. Or I get it. If I wake up early, my kids swim and there’s time that I have to get up at 5:00 am here in Philly to take them to swim practice. There’s times now I get up at 4:30, I think I’m late for swim practice and I’m in bed for like a half hour just staring at the ceiling. I’ll get some of my best, or at least my ideas for some of my best ideas will come in like a quart or five in the morning. I actually put a notepad by my bed, like I’ll scribble something just so I don’t forget it because your mind’s clear it’s quiet and that’s when it comes out, right? That makes sense.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Same here. I agree.
Joe
So you’re an author with a couple of really cool books, and most authors are huge readers. Do you have a book that influenced your life or changed your mind more than any other? Do you have a favorite book?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. This might be a surprise. Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins.
Joe
How great is that?
Derek Sivers
Oh, you’ve read it.
Joe
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, You know it.
Joe
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
Okay, so, dude, I read that book when I was 19 and again when I was 21 and again when I was 23. Again when I was 25. In between I kind of did some of his audio programs. I tried attending one of his events, but it was full of these like fist pumping, you know, stand up and dance. And I was like, no, I don’t want to do that. I want the information. So I internalized that stuff so much that I only recently, like just a few weeks ago, went back and read the book for the first time in 25 years. It was like a Christian reading the Bible. It was realizing like, wow, this is the source. Of so much of how I see the world came from this book. Things that to me just seem like just true. This is the way the world works. I think it came from this book. So for example, this idea like you choose the way you feel. A lot of people say like, “oh, I can’t help the way I feel. I can’t help that I get angry”. It’s like, well, yeah, you can. You’re choosing that. You’re choosing to get angry. You don’t get angry because somebody did something. Nobody can make you angry. You just have some rules inside of you that you’re letting yourself get upset that some neutral event happened, this idea.
Derek Sivers
Your emotions come from you, not from events or others. You really have absolute control over your internal world. So that’s a big one. I also found that this whole way of seeing the world where it doesn’t matter what’s true, what matters is whether this is useful to you or not, Like if it’s useful for you to believe that you could die next week. We don’t need to look at an actuary’s statistics about how likely you are to die next week. If this belief serves you in some way and improves your actions in the present and serves you to make you more of who you want to be, well then you can believe this thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. That applies for everything. I have many beliefs that when I’ve said them to somebody, they say, “but that’s not true”. I don’t care if it’s true or not. I’m not a scientist or a journalist trying to get at the core of the truth. I’m looking for beliefs that support. Support and encourage the actions I needed to take to be who I want to be. That’s what I care about, what’s useful, not what’s true. Lastly, let’s say that there’s also a study that you can rewire your beliefs intentionally, that the beliefs that you have right now mostly just come from circumstance of where you grew up and who your parents were and your life situation and random things that have happened.
Derek Sivers
You can deliberately change your beliefs to suit your needs to to be who you want to be. All of this to me is like how I see the whole world. Looking back, I think I got it a lot from this formative book, Awaken The Giant Within by Tony Robbins when I was 19. I have to give a warning, though, to anybody listening to this If you’re to actually go read the book now, I don’t think it’s a great book. It’s too verbose. Also it was written in 1991 with a lot of pop culture references to that current time, like it holds up O.J. Simpson’s as a role model because it was before, you know, the other O.J. Simpson stuff. So it has all these really outdated pop culture references. I wouldn’t say it’s a great book. Yeah, it’s too verbose. Things go on and on and on with too much unnecessary stories and detail. But inside it are some great, amazing life lessons. Just forewarning to anybody who’s listening to this that might go get the book, just brace yourself and expect it to be too verbose and dated, but glean the wisdom from inside of it. It’s amazing.
Joe
There’s wisdom in there to be mined. There’s another book that he has that the Unlimited Power book that he wrote, and I found that daily. I love the page of day books where I could just read it for a minute or two. There is a page a day book out there called Unlimited Power. He he did it and it’s really 365 ideas from his book Unlimited Power. I read one a day and it takes a minute and a half. Some are just so spot on and some are like, It’s crazy. But if you do, you mine the gold from it. When he’s on, I mean he’s on like no one else. Robbins. He’s a force of nature. Thanks for sharing that. Here’s a fun question. If you could spend the day with any historical figure alive or dead. Who would it be?
Derek Sivers
Alright. I have fun overthinking this question.
Joe
Let’s go. Bring it.
Derek Sivers
So take some typical answers, right? So somebody says, Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, Einstein, Mozart, something like that. But would that really be a good conversation. Like, imagine you were to spend a day with Jesus and imagine, you speak the same language. I don’t know if that would be a really good conversation. There would be so many references that he would say that you wouldn’t get because it was the context of the time, like lacking the context of their time, their lives, like the social situation. You wouldn’t get any of the references. They might not be able to understand anything about your life. I think a lot of their thoughts might go over your head like any of these people. I picked one, but you could have said Beethoven or Max Planck or whoever you admire. I don’t know if you’d get all the references unless you’re thoroughly so seeped in that person’s work. Like you are a scholar of this person. You’ve read everything they’ve ever done, you’ve read every critique and every reflection that people since then have published on this person. You’ve really thought it through thoroughly and then you spend a day with him. You might have a good conversation. So I think that which then you might take this as a challenge to say I thought that I’d want to spend the day with, you know, pick it.
Derek Sivers
Michael Jordan but come to think of it, I haven’t really read everything on the subject. There’s probably a lot more I could learn that’s out there right now. I don’t need to go spend a fictional day with this person. Then I also sometimes think that anybody ancient wasn’t necessarily the wisest. It’s just we know how fame works that sometimes fame amplifies one person. Like Albert Einstein versus Max Planck, like Max Planck might have been more brilliant, but Einstein just somehow pop culture latched on to the guy with the big white hair and the mustache and said, “that’s the smartest person that ever lived”. Name a composer, Mozart. Mozart might not have been the best or the most interesting, but we just kind of latched on to that one. So then fame amplifies the reputation of somebody, but they might not be the most interesting person then. I would have to lower my expectations of anybody who’s legendary. When I think about this question literally and I think about like what would be the most rewarding person ever in history for me to spend the day with. So I figured it out. You ready?
Joe
Yeah. Hit me.
Derek Sivers
It’s a little sappy.
Joe
Okay.
Derek Sivers
My kid. The most rewarding person for me to spend a day with is my kid who’s ten years old. And we have so much fun, we just can’t stop talking. He’s just so wonderful and that is like the most rewarding person I ever spent any time with. That’s actually my answer.
Joe
That is awesome. It’s the first guest in like 55 episodes.
Derek Sivers
But to be clear, my kid is alive and I will spend the day with him all day. That is my real answer. I actually thought it through really deeply.
Joe
Yeah, I appreciate that. That’s a deep thinking answer. I appreciate that. That’s a that’s a really, really good one. I thinking that if you asked me to think about that for a while, I don’t know if I’d come up with my kids, but I love spending the day with my kids and it’s so cool. Just backing up a little bit. We spoke about books that influenced you. One of your books that I recently read and reread, excuse me. And it just it hit me from all different sides is How To Live.
Derek Sivers
I have one here. I love this little book.
Joe
I did the audio. I read it and I did the audio. It is like, so contradictory where I’m like, “oh, this is what I think I should go left”. You talk about why to go left for 20 minutes. I’m like, “cool. I think that’s the way I’m going to go”. And then you go, “This is why you got to go right”. I’m like damn. Then all of a sudden, I don’t have a good answer. Like, some situations I may do this, but other situations or if the circumstances changed, I would probably go that way. One, where did you get the idea to write a contradictory book and how easy was it? Was it the easiest book to write or the hardest book to write of all yours?
Derek Sivers
Oh, hardest by far. We’ll start with reverse. Yeah, the hardest, most laborious thing I’ve ever written is How To Live. So anybody listening, if you haven’t read my book called How To Live yet, it’s it’s my masterpiece. It’s the best thing I’ve ever created by far. It’s pretty recent. I just finished it 11 months ago, a year ago. So the story of it is ,first you have to understand that it’s kind of an homage to a book called Sum spelled s-u-m by David Eagleman, where the subtitle of the book Sum, is 40 Tales from the Afterlives. He does this fun format. It’s fiction or, you know, semi fiction. It’s a think piece about, answer the question what happens when you die but answer it 40 times in 40 different ways. So each chapter says, Here’s what happens when you die. You’re in an empty mansion surrounded by something, something, and then you find out that you know God exists. But God is a creator, not a micromanager. So he kind of knocked over the first domino billions of years ago and left and doesn’t know we exist. The next story will say, Here’s what happens when you die. You’re in a waiting room etc. So every chapter disagrees with all the other chapters. I just loved that format, we’re used to a book having a single point of view. How fun to deliberately make every chapter disagree with the rest by answering the question anew, by asking one question in the title of the book and then answering it anew in each chapter.
Derek Sivers
So I loved the book Sum by David Eagleman. Already it was like my favorite book. Then one day I was just driving down the road and went, “oh oh, my God I want to write a book called How to Live in the Format of Sum”. I was like, “oh yeah, this is what I need to do”. From that moment, it took almost four years of full time work. It was two years to write down everything I had ever learned, everything I wanted to say. My first draft of the book was like 1300 pages and I think had about 30 categories. Then I did two years of full time editing. Reducing almost every page down to a single sentence. Now the final book, I think, is 115 pages. It’s as tight as can be. It’s meant to be read slowly, almost like poetry now, where it’s like every sentence represents what was a whole page of ideas. So there’s not a single word in that book that doesn’t need to be there. I spent two years reducing it down as short as I could and even chopped some chapters. So now it’s 27 conflicting answers. Then I was stuck on what to do about the conclusion. Do I just give 27 answers and then end? About halfway through writing I had this great idea for a conclusion, but I have to leave that as a secret to the people that read the book, because.
Joe
I won’t spoil it
Derek Sivers
If I just tell the conclusion without you seeing the book. You have to work your way there for it to make any sense. It comes to a very fun conclusion to me.
Joe
I won’t ruin it but you did a good job on the audio book explaining it without a visual in front of you, and I thought that was pretty great. I thought that was pretty good.
Derek Sivers
Right? Because the conclusion is two pictures.
Joe
It’s pictures.
Derek Sivers
And when I was recording the audio book.
Joe
Yeah, that’s cool.
Derek Sivers
Thank you. Yeah, that was a funny challenge.
Joe
One of my favorite books, I’m a big fan of the writing of Ryan Holiday like Holiday with the Stoicism. He introduced me to Marcus Aurelius and his meditations book. This is kind of your version of meditations like Marcus is telling himself in meditations on how he should live. He’s like, “ignore them, don’t worry about what they say. Get out of bed”. If you read it, you think he’s condescending to somebody else but he’s writing to himself.
Derek Sivers
Exactly.
Joe
That’s what I took out of this. Here’s just a couple of random things I took out I really, really liked. We talked about how tranquility creates fragility earlier in the podcast. You mentioned the chair, the softer the chair, the harder it is to come out of it. You put that in the book where like a soft chair is hard to get out. To me, like being really, really comfortable is hard to get going again.
Derek Sivers
It’s a nice line.
Joe
I mean, you put that on. I stole from you, man. Then how about you said passion comes after you get good. I think I asked you that earlier. You know, you need the passion. Sometimes I have kids in sports and they’re not into it until they start kicking butt or not kicking butt they start having some level of success. I have a daughter who swims and she was okay with swimming. Then she jumped in a few of the meets and she got her best time and she started competing with some of the really good swimmers and she was getting comparable times and she got really into swimming. The passion came after the success. I’m sure that’s not 100%, but does that make sense?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, there’s a whole book about that called So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. He makes that point really well to say, a lot of people say, “I’m just out of college. I don’t know what to do. What’s my passion?”. His argument is that passion is a feeling you feel from the rewards after you get good at something. He said, Steve Jobs, his passion was in computers. His passion was yoga and meditation. Then he just stumbled on this opportunity where his friend Steve Wozniak said, “hey, I think we could make some computers”. Steve Job said “yeah I think we could sell them”. They did this thing and like after a while this became his passion because it was rewarding, but that wasn’t his passion in the beginning.