David Perell
host: David Perell
wisdom preservation, posthumous autobiography, craft of writing and simplification, book publishing and distribution, mastery and practice in writing
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Transcript:
David Perell
Derek, welcome to the podcast. I’ve been a fan of your work for the better half of a decade now. I recently learned that you were writing a posthumous biography. What are you learning about that? Talk about that.
Derek Sivers
Okay, well, it’s inspired initially by one of my best friends, Milt Olin, who was just one of the wisest, smartest people I’ve ever met. Every time you’d have a conversation with this guy, you’d come away just with your perception of life changed. I’d always, like, go home and take notes after we talked. We’d have these great conversations over restaurants for hours. And then he died. He was hit and killed on his bicycle by a police car, weirdly enough, steered into the bicycle lane and he was killed.
Derek Sivers
But the problem is that Milt never wrote down anything. And I was so sad after he died that, like, I mean devastated to lose my friend, but also, like, double devastated that all of that wisdom he had was only ever going to be shared with the people that he had conversations with, not written down. And so I already liked writing what I’d learned to share with others, but that really emphasized it, right. Like that really brought out this idea of writing lasting after death.
David Perell
My grandfather was not someone who got to know super well. And now that I’ve become more interested in ideas, I was just working out, thinking about this. Being like, “Oh my goodness, my grandfather understood the human condition. And yet, because there isn’t that much writing that he did those thoughts, those ideas, those memories are lost to time.”
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I’ve been thinking about this idea of like the personality. So imagine this, that everything you’ve ever learned, the culmination of everything you’ve ever realized or learned or taken in or experienced, it gets filtered so that you adopt the traits that meant the most to you or stuck in your persona for some reason. And then when you share your personality with somebody, even like put writing aside for a second.
Derek Sivers
Let’s say my friend Milton, his personality, lives inside me now, like I can often imagine, “What would Milt say?” In fact, I wrote this little article sive.rs/ment the first four letters of mentor. So sive.rs/ment, I wrote this article about how I communicate with my mentors. So I say I do this and I do that, and I ask myself what my mentor would say, and I do all this before I contact them. And in the end, I often never contact them because I just needed this thought process of what would this person say? So Milton was definitely one of my mentors and he still is, that often when I’m in a situation, I wonder or ask myself, “What would Milt say?” And his personality lives on inside of me, right. So this is a wonderful motivation to write down everything you’ve learned, or even just share your point of view on something, because just sharing your point of view, even if it doesn’t seem that impressive or breathtaking, you’re sharing yourself. And who you are, is the culmination of everything you’ve ever learned, filtered through the things that you’ve chosen to adopt. And that’s what we call our personality, is the traits that we’ve adopted. So just sharing that with the world is filtering the past for the future.
David Perell
You know, one of the things that. I’ve always so admired about you. And you see it in “How to Live”, your new book. Is your ability to distill, to compress. And you did an experiment where you said, “I’m going to write every day for a month.” And then you said, “I don’t like that.” How do you think about the balance between those two?
Derek Sivers
Thanks for calling me out on that. I am not sharing enough lately. The past couple of years I’ve just had my head down too much in other things. I also admire Seth Godin like you do too, and I know that your interview with him was called “Writing Every Day”, because that’s like the main takeaway I got from him too. He says it over and over again. It’s the most important thing he’s ever done is choosing to write every day, no matter what. And so, yeah, I was trying to channel my other hero, Seth Godin, when I tried writing an article every day. But I think the difference for me was I wanted to raise the bar a bit so that when I tell my subscribers, my fans, my listeners, whatever you want to call them, when I tell them, “Hey, I’ve posted something new.” I want it to be something worthy of their time. Whereas I think that a lot of the things that when I was posting every single day, I didn’t find it quite worthy. What’s funny is that somebody else from the outside once looked, who knows my writing very well and knows all of my posts, actually felt that the stuff I posted during those 30 days was of no lesser quality than anything else I’ve ever posted, so maybe I’m just completely wrong.
Derek Sivers
I’m an idiot and I should just post it all and not try to prejudge pre-filter for the world. But I feel better if I raise the bar a bit, and I think probably the sweet spot for me would be like posting once a week or twice a week or something like that, where I’m writing every single day, having ideas every day, but just the ones that feel like, “Damn, that is so worth sharing.” Then you put those out once or twice a week.
David Perell
You know, what I struggle with is a lot of times on my more polished pieces, I lose that fire that you can only get right after an epiphany. There’s a childish excitement right after you have an epiphany and you run to the page, you write it down. And now I’m not saying that the things that I instantly come up with are the best, but I do think that as a writer, one of the things that I can improve on is keeping that excitement on pieces that I have worked on for a long time. It’s almost like there’s a level of writing that’s actually too polished, and I wonder if I run into that sometimes.
Derek Sivers
Hey, you just finished reading my “How to Live” book, or at least some of it. Did you think that was too polished?
David Perell
It’s careful. It’s intentionally careful. The frame of “How to Live” is a very careful text, and I think that you set that out at the very beginning. I think that you say something like, read slowly one line at a time or something. And so you tell the reader from the very beginning, this is a polished piece of work. For example, take the piece about Santa Monica beach running, where you basically say you’re going as fast as you can, took 34 minutes or something, and then you slowed down and took you 38. That story is an epiphany that you had, that you likely then went to the page, and there’s a freshness about that piece that isn’t in “How to Live”. But at the same time, I think that there are different contexts.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I like that the the exciting moment, the childlike excitement you have of a new idea you’re bursting to share. I think we always fear that we don’t want to be like the stoner that like gets really high and says, “Do you ever look at your hand?” And the problem with this idea of people connecting drugs with creativity is that the drugs make things seem more interesting to you, but then the ideas that you put out on drugs are often then less interesting to others because you found them too interesting at the time.
Derek Sivers
And so others don’t think it’s so interesting to look at your hand. That’s not a big idea, but it was fascinating to you at the time. It’s funny. So I sometimes wonder if like the moment I have a big epiphany, am I temporarily high you know, with this idea.
David Perell
Well, one of the things that you’ve said is that when listening to a piece of music, that you’re usually too analytical. So we can almost transport this same conversation into music. So does the same thing happen when you read or what are you feeling?
Derek Sivers
Okay, I’m curious if you have this too when you studied the craft of something so deeply. Then you see details that most people don’t see or hear in the case of music. So yeah, when I’m listening to music, sometimes I nerd out on like the recording engineering of how they did the hi hat, or they put a certain effect on the echo and I’m like, “Oooh, listen to that.” And anybody else listening just says, “What it’s just a cheesy song. Stupid lyrics.” I’m like, “Shut up, listen to that echo, listen to that reverb.” I’ll do another musical comparison that there are a lot of songs that I like, even though it actually might be a bad song, but damn, it’s got one really interesting chord.
Derek Sivers
Like, it goes to this one really unexpected place here. I’m like, “Ooh.” So I love it for that. I even found this with films. Sometimes I would nerd out on cinematography, and I’ll give you an example of a bad movie that had interesting editing. For example, was Oliver Stone’s movie Natural Born Killers. So many people hate this movie. My friends hated the movie, but I just watched it again and again and again because I found the editing fascinating that they would often take a scene and break it into a different point of view and suddenly throw an effect on it and like, show it again. And I just thought the editing was fascinating. So I watched the movie again and again, but I was really watching the editing. I didn’t really care about the message or the meta point, you know, who cares?
David Perell
Actually, this is a great analogy. So here’s how I’ve done some film stuff and I’ve made YouTube vlogs and stuff. And when I was in college, I’d do college television. And what I found was after I would edit for a while. I couldn’t actually see it anymore. I don’t know if you’ve worked on design projects. I don’t know if you’ve worked on film projects. You can’t see what you’ve made. And what happens is because you’ve spent so much time with it. You become impatient. And what you think is the right speed is too fast for what the listener needs
Derek Sivers
Oooh.
David Perell
Brian Eno, the father of ambient music, had a heuristic. He would finish an ambient song and automatically take every part of it and double the length. And then he’d say, that is now what I’m going to ship.
Derek Sivers
Interesting. You know, you and I have studied the craft of writing so deeply and the problem is when I read almost anything by almost anyone, I almost always feel it could be done better. Like, almost every sentence could be improved. I can’t help but look at things like an editor. And I have to try to turn that off and get to the real point of what someone’s saying, because we have to separate the details and the point. Right. Like the example I used earlier of the certain effect on the echo of the music, that’s the details. I shouldn’t miss the point of the song, or I shouldn’t think that if I put a cool effect on the echo, that I’ve made a great song if it’s a bad song. So it’s the same thing with writing that sometimes say in poetry for example, we appreciate a certain combination of words like, we really love these three words together and we go, “Ooh, that’s so beautiful.” But the idea underlying it might be, you know, banal, but we just love those words.
Derek Sivers
So it can be the same with our writing that if we nerd out on the craft too much, we could end up saying something not impressive. Because we’re showing our craft or we’re too fascinated with our craft. So yeah, it’s distracting.
David Perell
Yeah. For sure. I think David Foster Wallace fell prey to this. He was so obsessed with the craft of writing that I think it often hurt his own writing. And so for me, what I find is I talk to other people. But I would love to hear this for you. Like, you don’t really hang out with people. So how does this decision fuel your writing? Does it help? Does it hurt?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, my situation is not ideal. I live in New Zealand and I moved here because it’s a great place to raise a kid, so I moved. I was living in Singapore when my kid was born and moved to New Zealand so that he could grow up in paradise. After flying from Singapore to New Zealand. I looked back at my calendar of people I’d met. I met up with 490 people, one on one. In the two years I lived there. I had 490 like coffees, basically 490 conversations and was so social and I overdid it. So moving to New Zealand was mostly for my kid, but also it was a time for me to just like, put my head down, do my work instead of just being so hyper social.
Derek Sivers
But yeah, I’ve noticed that I miss out on the ideas, got a caveat coming to that in a minute. Because yeah, most of my favorite ideas have come from this two way banter in a conversation with somebody where first something they bring up sparks a reaction in you and you say, “Huh? I wonder if this.” An then either they can show just disinterest like, “Yeah, that’s not interesting.” Or luckily they can push back. They can say like, “No, I think that’s not true because such or such.” And you go, “Ah, you’re right, that isn’t true. I was thinking of it wrong.” Or the best is when in a conversation you say, “Hmm, do you think it might be this?” And they go, “Oh my God, that’s so true. I’ve never thought about that.” And you go, “Oooh, mental note.” Like a comedian testing out new material. You think, “Okay, cool. That one worked. That resonated.” And so those are the things that I would turn into future articles, is often things that my friends found amazing in conversation or I should say, not just friends, but like people found interesting in conversation. The caveat I was gonna say though, is the phone works just as well for me. I have wonderful conversations with friends around the world. So when you heard somewhere, I guess I must have said somewhere that I don’t hang out with people.
Derek Sivers
That’s just a side effect of my remote location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean here. But I do have great conversations on the phone with friends, and that’s still where some of my favorite ideas come from.
David Perell
There was one thing-- to get super meta about this. There was one thing that I think you missed and it’s this line from John O’Donohue. He’s an Irish poet. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him, but I think you’d really like his work. And he asks, “When was the last time you had a great conversation, a conversation that wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, but when you overheard yourself saying things you never knew, you knew that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that found places within you that you thought you had lost?” And he goes on to basically talk about how most conversations are a game of ping pong, hit receive, hit, receive, but that a good conversation actually elevates both people onto a new plane of thought, and both of them are experiencing something that they could not get to on their own. And he says that conversations like that are food and drink for the soul. And I say this because I think that this is the other thing that a conversation can do, is it’s two people dancing in tandem. Ending up somewhere that they wouldn’t have come up with on their own. And it’s in that partnership. I think that we often come up with new ideas when you get, “Oh, yes. Oh, didn’t think about that. Hey, have you thought of this?” And there’s a support that is inside of that.
Derek Sivers
There’s a famous little itty bitty blog post I had called “Hell Yeah or No”. And the thing is, I try to tell anybody who will listen that idea, the core of it actually came from my musician friend Amber Rubarth, who’s a brilliant musician. And it was when I was on the phone with her and talking about like, “Oh, I’m supposed to go to this conference in Australia but really don’t want to.” And I was like talking about I was like, “You know, I just feel that we just need to raise the bar all the way up so that we just say no to almost everything and only say yes to the things that we’re really just like super excited about.” And then she’s the one that said, “So what you’re trying to say is it’s like not a decision between yes and no. It’s a decision between fuck yeah or no.” And I laughed. I was like, “Yeah, that’s it. It’s like a decision between fuck yeah or no.” And then I wrote the article that night and at first the original version was longer and I gave her credit and I changed the word to hell.
Derek Sivers
And then when Penguin published it in this book by Seth Godin, they edited it down to just like ten sentences, which was okay with. But yeah it was fully a conversation, like both of us bouncing off each other and it’s great. Amber Rubarth and I still have these great conversations, every week or two. She’s amazing.
David Perell
I don’t know why I’m Mr Quote today I’m not usually like this, but I’m feeling it right now Derek. And there’s a line from Tom Stoppard who says, “Laughter is the sound of comprehension.” And I think that’s what happened in your conversation with Amber, is she says that you laugh and actually if you deconstruct what’s going on is laughter is your body telling you that you have a very compressed unit of knowledge that has deconstructed your worldview and reconstructed it in a way that’s better in an instant.
Derek Sivers
Have you interviewed a stand up comedian?
David Perell
No, but got to do it.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Stand up comedians are-- I think they’re still underrated. And I think that comedy is like philosophy. I think like Louis C.K, I think is a philosopher. I love the insights of a great standup comic. The good ones, you know.
David Perell
Well, it’s funny, one of my best friends is a philosopher and was talking to him on the phone last night, and he said that most of the philosophers that he’s learned with take the enchanted and make it mundane. And then what a comedian does is they take the mundane and make it enchanted. And I thought that was a beautiful way to put it. What Louis C.K. will do so well is he’ll take him getting the kids ready for school. And it’ll be this super mundane thing that he’s just doing, and he’ll spin it into a story. He will sort of rile it up. And by enchanted, I don’t mean the magical sense of enchanted, but it’s adding a scaffolding to it that makes it hilarious, that makes it ring in your mind afterwards. And what a comedian would-- what so often they do I think Larry David is the absolute master of this is like, Larry David has this great skit about the chat and cut where like, there’s a bunch of people in line, and rather than waiting in the back of the line, you go up to person number eight in line and you say, “Derek, haven’t seen you in a while.” And it’s totally bogus, like you’ve met this person once and Larry David in the back and he goes, “Oh, you’re doing the chat and cut. I’m not gonna allow you to do this.” There have been no fewer than ten times in my life now where I’ve been in a line and I’ve had this thing where I’ve seen a long line. I’ve started thinking about the chat and cut.
David Perell
And I do think maybe enchanteds the wrong word. But what he was going for in the conversation is, it’s the most mundane thing ever, that you’ve now brought and turn into a whole story. And that’s what he was trying to get at.
Derek Sivers
You know what I like the comparison of is drawing with what you were just talking about, that my kid is ten years old now, and I think it would be wonderful for-- I was thinking about this for him. But for any of us, to learn to draw because of the way it makes you look at details so well. Like there’s this idea that anybody can take apart a car, but can you assemble a car? So think of drawing as kind of like assembling, like it’s one thing to look at a tree. Sorry I’m kind of doing this, I’m looking off camera at this imaginary tree. It’s one thing to look at a tree, but it’s like, can you recreate a tree? It makes you pay attention to the details so much more. So I wonder if comedians, whether stand up comedians or the other kind, I don’t know, have to pay super close attention to these nuances in life like that. Like Larry David’s specialty is social norms, right? Like all that stuff. Going back to Seinfeld was all social norms. And call out social norms by paying close attention to them. That’s kind of fun.
Derek Sivers
This idea of like, you have to pay attention to details to be good at what you do. You have to pay attention to details to be good at drawing. You have to pay attention to details to be a great comedian.
David Perell
Have you heard the David McCullough story on Look at Your Fish?
Derek Sivers
No.
David Perell
Okay, so David McCullough just died, which I’m really bummed about, but he was a big painter. He spent as much time painting as he did writing. And he said, it forces you to look. And I don’t know if it’s apocryphal, but he says he had a college teacher and on day one, it’s a writing class and the teacher plops a fish on the table and goes, “Write about the fish.” 20 minutes later, teacher comes back and goes, “What’d you write?” As students go, “We didn’t write anything. You put a fish on the table. There’s nothing to write about.” And the teacher goes, “No, keep looking.” And by the end of the semester, they’re expected to write like 3000 words about the fish. And the whole point is that you just weren’t looking closely enough. The fish was there. You could write about the scales, you can write about the color. You can write about the history of the fish, all these sorts of things. And the whole point is just what you’re saying to be more focused on the details. Why did you choose not to read when you were writing How to Live?
Derek Sivers
Oh, because I was trying to put everything I had ever learned into that one little book. The rough draft was 1300 pages. I was really doing like a life dump. I’ve heard a few other parents have this idea, like when your first kid is born and you think, “Oh my God, what if I don’t live until they’re old enough? I want to tell them what I’ve learned. I want to share my wisdom. I want you to put everything I’ve learned into a book.” I’ve heard a few different parents say this to me, and I’ll admit, “How to Live” was a little bit of this same idea I was trying to put like everything important I had ever learned in my life into this one book, and that’s why I didn’t want to read anything new, because it’s like I was already at a rough draft. And what if I were to read an amazing book and suddenly learn something new about life? I’d want to put it in there. So I was like, “No, please don’t give me any new wisdom. I’m on my rough draft. I can’t take it.” So yeah, that’s why.
David Perell
And you don’t feel like reading could have helped you access things that you had known but had forgotten about?
Derek Sivers
No, because I do my notes. I started doing this in 2007. I read hundreds of books before 2007, but it was in 2007 I realized I looked at this one book that I had read like only five years before, and I went, “Huh, I know I read this, but I don’t remember a damn thing from it.” I was like, “This is sad, it’s getting lost. All this stuff I’ve read is getting lost in my brain.” So I started at that time, just keeping a pencil in my hand when reading books and underlining every cool idea, or just circling a cool paragraph. And then when I was done with the book, I would open up a text file and type out my favorite ideas from this book. Often paraphrasing the ideas or it was just to capture the idea so that later I could just go back to the text file and review it in a few minutes and I could just give away the book, lose the book. I wouldn’t have to read the 300 page book again. I could just read the two pages of the ideas that I found the most interesting in this book. So I just kept up the habit ever since. And after doing it for a few years, I started posting them on my site. I was worried that would violate copyright somehow, but nobody’s complained yet. So if you go to sive.rs/book, you will see. I think it’s up to 330 books now. Every time I read a nonfiction book not fiction, fiction I just enjoy like a movie.
Derek Sivers
But when I’m reading a nonfiction book, I jot down the most interesting ideas, and I post them, and I review them often. I’d say every week I go back through my notes from old books I’ve read and just scan the notes. Or sometimes if I’m wrestling with a particular problem, I go back to the books that were written about that topic that I’m having a problem with, and review those carefully and think about how I can apply what I read eight years ago to my current situation today. It’s so useful. Talk about one of the best things I’ve ever done. Taking book notes like this has been one of the best habits I ever did. That’s why when you said like, help me remember something or kind of solidify something I knew, I had already done that. So I really just wanted to stop taking in new information and just output what I had learned up till this point just so I could get it done.
David Perell
I’m choosing these words carefully. I really admire there is a pairing of simplicity and discipline that I sense that you have or do identify with those words. Are you saying yes, or do either of those words feel like the wrong words?
Derek Sivers
Oh, no. Both dead on. Yeah.
David Perell
You’re so methodical. You know, you’ve been doing this for 15 years with book notes and but then also there’s a simplicity, like even your URLs are so simple that you can just save them on a podcast.
Derek Sivers
I’m not hyper disciplined, but I am hyper simplified. Everything I do, I’m constantly trying to get to the like how can this be simplified. Whether it’s an idea, whether it’s my life, whether it’s the essence of everything we do on a daily basis.
David Perell
And how does that help you write? Like where does it show up in your writing process? What’s going on?
Derek Sivers
Well, yeah. If you go to sive.rs/7 you will see my bullet list of my writing process, which is to dump out everything I’m thinking on a subject. I do the full unfiltered brainstorm into a text document. I just dump and dump in every single point. I argue against myself, I question it, and then I answer my questions, and I question my answers. And I do all this back and forth until it’s exhaustive and I just feel like that’s all I have to say about that, but then I go back to it. And I go, “Okay, this is a mess. What’s the gist of what I’ve said here, or what’s the gist of my conclusion?” And then I literally make a good old fashioned outline with a little bullet points and just a few words on each point. Not even complete sentences. And so like, “Well, out of all this hairball of a mess of thoughts I have here, I think the gist is this.”
Derek Sivers
Then I look at those few sentences and think, “Okay, so really all I need to say is this and I’ll maybe add in a couple sentences just for context. Maybe I’ll take point three, add a couple sentences that need to be said. Because it wouldn’t make sense without those couple sentences.” Then I Look at that it’s like 22 sentences. I think, “There you go. That’s done.” And that’s what I end up posting. So I think the average length of an article on my website is 22 sentences. And it’s because of this process. But it’s everything in life, I mean where do I live and the computer. God, even if you were to see the way I use a computer, speaking of my friend Amber Rubarth, who I mentioned earlier, let’s just mention her again. She just was at my house and like looking over my shoulder once as I was on the computer and she goes like, “I have never seen somebody use a computer like that. This is so weird.” And it’s because I spend most of my time in a black Unix terminal like full screen. There’s not even a menu bar at the bottom. There’s not a clock at right. I don’t want a single pixel on my screen that doesn’t have to be there. And so because of that, I use an obscure operating system called OpenBSD because it was like the most minimalist I could find.
Derek Sivers
And even on OpenBSD, I use this obscure window manager called Rat Poison, because it’s the only one I’ve ever found that removes every single pixel from the screen except what you’re working on. No menu bar, no icons in the top right corner. I hate all that clutter. So then I do everything, often without any graphics at all. No mouse, just like this raw Unix 70 terminal plain text. And it’s like there simplicity, I like this. It just gives me this deep sense of contentment. Like there, this is how things should be. Even when it came to the cover of my books, I worked with like 12 different graphic designers that came up with like 36 different cover designs for my books. And with everything I was like, “No, I want it simpler, I want it simpler.” And eventually I thought, “Wait a minute, why do I need images on my book cover?” I love it when you find a hard cover book and you take off that glossy, shiny outer wrapping and what you have underneath looks like a library book, you know, just the title, the author, that’s it. I thought, “Damn, that’s so badass.” See, those books look wise, you see those old books with just the title and the author, and that’s it. And so, yeah, that’s what my books look like. And it’s because of this.
Derek Sivers
I’m just so many things in life. My wife gets a little annoyed with it because I try to do that in our house, too. And she says, “But don’t like that. That’s too minimalist. It’s sad.” I’m like, “All right, all right, all right. I’ll draw the line there. I’ll do it in other things in my life.” Including my office and my writing and my computer. I’m just constantly pushing for the simplification. Oh, my code. I spent a lot of time programming. Yeah, you mentioned my URLs. All of this I’m just constantly asking like, how can it be simpler?
David Perell
What’s the point of trying so hard to make it right?
Derek Sivers
It’s not trying to make it right. It’s just trying to get to the essence of things because the rest feels like clutter. It feels like waste. It feels like excess baggage. It feels like pollution, like it’s noise signal versus noise. I’m trying to just get the signal and get rid of all the noise. Even, you know, in a sentence these words that don’t need to be there, they’re just clutter. They’re distractions. Those little comma phrases when people say things like, well, going forward, da da da da da. Or on the other hand, you know, come to think of it, all these kinds of phrases just aren’t necessary. We could just say the thing, and yeah, I’m trying to get to the essence of things to get rid of the pollution.
Derek Sivers
Like when I say the pixels on my screen and using Rat Poison. It’s because that’s visual pollution and I don’t want pollution in my eyes. I don’t want to put out pollution into the world. I don’t want to put out sentences that don’t need to be there. Yeah, that’s the real point.
David Perell
How much of this is a Derek thing versus what it means to have something of quality. For example, take something like the Sistine Chapel. Magnificent not distilled to its essence.
Derek Sivers
You know, if you’ve been to Paris, it’s one of the most ornate cities you’ve ever seen. Just everywhere. Every little balcony, the eaves on every building just have all those little squirrelly, squirrelly. It’s just so ornate. Yeah. It goes against my sense of none of that’s necessary, but I’m like, all right. It’s just a different approach. Which, when it comes down to it, that’s what my book, How to Live was about, is that life is not a problem to be solved, but it’s a paradox to be experienced, that you can believe one thing and you can also believe its opposite, and you could even live one thing and also live its opposite. Both can be true.
David Perell
So I’m a Paris guy. That’s my favorite city in the world. The aesthetic of Paris. Like that’s what I try to invite in my life. And I struggle so much with simplicity. Every time I share an image of a space with someone whose taste I admire, the response is always that it’s cluttered. But the spaces have life. They have energy. They look like they’ve been used, they look like things are happening in the space and. What I love about talking to you and reading your work is you’re always making me question. Why am I like that? Why do I believe that? And I think that’s something that’s really cool about the way that you do things is you’re so aligned as a human and so clear on what it is that you do and don’t value. That alignment, that resonance with who you want to be and who you are and how earnestly you work to try to bring those two together. I think it really shows up in your writing because that’s what it is, is trying that refinement. It’s just cool to see the synthesis of how you live, how you write.
Derek Sivers
Thank you. It’s funny how we must have different mental associations with certain traits. It reminds me of when I moved to Singapore. It was hard to find any silence. Singapore is all dense. There’s almost none of it that’s not dense. It’s just one little island. And so shortly after I got there, I thought, “God, you know, it would be wonderful is to make a co-working office space, but call it solitude, like solitude.sg and it would be working spaces for people who want silence.
Derek Sivers
And so I batted this idea around all my Singaporean friends shortly after I arrived, and everybody was against it. In their gentle ways kind of like, “Yeah, maybe we’ll see.” But then some were more confrontational and said like, “No, that’s just not going to work here. That doesn’t work with the culture.” And they said, “You have to understand, Singapore is like two thirds Chinese heritage, like Chinese ethnicity. And in Chinese culture, noise is life, silence is death. And we like noise, that’s vibrancy. It’s life, it’s alive. So people like to work in busy, noisy spaces and it’s just where you get your energy.” So that’s like culture, you know, the same way that you’re these things like, you know, in China people wear white for funerals, so don’t wear white because it means death or something like that. Or people have different cultural associations with different things. So I think about that when you say that you see a cluttered space and to you it means life. And there’s things going on here and Paris suits me and all that. So it’s cool. You’ve just got different mental associations with these values. Traveling is a fun way to go to a place not that’s pleasant and similar to where you grew up, but ideally to go to somewhere that’s so different from where you grew up. So you can see a different working philosophy.
Derek Sivers
Like think that the cultures of countries are philosophies in action, they’re applied philosophies, and you can see a working culture that values very different things than you, that does not value individualism or does not value ambition, or does not value pleasure or does not value know things that you think of as just unquestionably true or unquestionably valuable. Another culture might not value those things, and it’s cool then, to not just visit and take some pictures, but to to get into it and try to adopt that mindset and try to see the world that way.
David Perell
You wanted how to live to be very persuasive. How did you go about achieving that?
Derek Sivers
You and I have a mutual friend, Ellen Fishbein. I worked with her writing coach service. William. I forget his last name right now. I worked with him on How to Live. I worked with a bunch of editors constantly trying to give me feedback like, is this persuasive? How? How can I be more persuasive? In the end I got some advice. I did the best I could. The only test I had-- because by the time it was like getting down to those final revisions, I had been working on it almost full time for four years. I just wanted to get it out. So all I know is that I was persuaded, as I was writing it, that each time I was writing a chapter, I felt like, “You know what forget those other chapters. This is it. This one has the answer. This is how to live.
Derek Sivers
And I was completely convinced myself that this was it. And then I’d work on the next chapter, which had the opposite point of view. And I’d say, “You know what actually, what was I thinking yesterday? That one is right. This is it. This is really the way to live.” And so I persuaded myself very well, I don’t know if it was persuasive to others, but I had to just draw the line somewhere and say, “I think it’s good enough.”
David Perell
People ask, how do you know when you’re done? And you never really feel done? And it’s frustrating. And I’ve published pieces too early. Where I needed to work on them more and didn’t have the courage to look in the mirror and say I needed to make a change. And for whatever reason I was afraid to do that. Maybe I co-wrote a piece with somebody, and I was afraid to tell somebody else that something that they wrote wasn’t good enough, or vice versa. And then I’ve also written pieces going back to the beginning of our conversation. That I spent too much time on, in a way. And now I’ve been working through this. And I think that when you were talking about the seven ways that you write.
David Perell
One of the things that I think I miss saying is that you can have an epiphany after you’ve been working on something for a while, and once you have that epiphany, you can just run with it. You can roar, you can sprint, take off like a cheetah. And what I mean is that it’s okay to be working on something for a while. Put that on the other side and just write from memory. I think it’s Jordan Peterson who says that one of the best reasons why you should write for memory is that when you do that is this compression algorithm in your head where your brain is automatically separating, what is the signal from, what is the noise. And I think that’s super helpful. And so I’ve sort of worked my way out of this with something I’m going to try, which is it’s okay if I work on something for a while, but often and the question is, how do you know when? I probably need to start all over and write it, and I’ll run through that compression algorithm and still maintain that giddiness that I think is part of good writing.
Derek Sivers
Nice, I like that, yeah. Jordan Peterson says the same thing about things like the Bible and fables, where he said, like, you gotta understand, these oral traditions have let everything fall aside that wasn’t important in these stories. Everything in these stories is important. I like that.
David Perell
Buying this book was really fun. And I don’t think I’ve ever said that about a book. I bought it on your website. You had good follow up emails and then I got all your books in the mail at the same time. Why do you sell books in the way that you do?
Derek Sivers
Few reasons. I mean, for one, it’s just you think things could be done better. You don’t just want to be a book on Amazon with that whole mess, and maybe you don’t fully support Amazon and don’t think that the world should be giving them more money. But sometimes you just feel like things could be done better. And so with selling books, I just felt that I could do it better than Amazon. There was a time when I doubted that, I thought, “What am I saying?” But I thought, “Wait a second, I’m the guy that started CD Baby. I’ve done this before. I’ve built a store before I can build a little store for my own books. I can do this.” And it’s part of that simplification. By building my own store, I got to simplify things even more. Instead of throwing people into a big Grand Bazaar full of noise and clutter. It’s just a nice, simple site that says, here’s the four books. But then there are also pricing things, right? Like, I never liked the fact that if you bought a paper book and now you want the audiobook, you have to pay for it again to get the audiobook.
Derek Sivers
But now you want the e-book and you have to pay for it again to get the e-book. And I just thought, “You know, it should just be that the means of delivery to get the words from my head to yours, the means of delivery shouldn’t matter.” Like you should just be able to buy the book, meaning the contents and whether you want it on paper or e-book or audiobook or I’m actually just releasing a video ebook today, that shouldn’t matter. It should all just be the same price and it should all be included. So you buy my book now. And maybe you have the paper book shipped to you, and maybe two years from now you’ve given away the paper book, but you just log in to my site and you get the book. And then four years from now, you feel like listening to it on a hike. You get the the audio book and it’s all included. So that was one thing. The other thing is I give all the money to charity 100%. I keep nothing for myself. So if I sell it on Amazon, much less goes to charity. You buy it directly from me the entire $15 goes to charity. That was another reason. Another reason was the long term relationship with the person who buys it. So if you buy a book from me, I like that I know you, and I know that you’ve bought this book and you get an email that’s actually from me, and you hit reply and it actually goes to me and it’s like a direct conversation.
Derek Sivers
And that I learned from experience running CD Baby, where I started to get some former rock stars that used to be famous in the 80s or 90s. Would put out an independent release directly through me, through CD Baby, and more than twice, at least twice, I can think of two concrete and I think heard it a few more times. These former rock stars would say, “You know, I sold a million albums through Warner Brothers or EMI or something. But selling a thousand directly through you means more like it feels better, because I’m actually seeing the thousand people that bought it.” Because the way I ran CD Baby is, I would let you know every time you sold something, “Here’s who bought it. Here’s the name and address and email address of the person that bought it.” And even often the comment on how they heard of it, “You know, heard you on Kexp, went and searched your name, found it.” And these former rockstars would tell me that it meant more to them to have a direct connection with a thousand fans instead of just hearing from their label, “You’ve sold a million copies.” So yeah, having sold my first book on Penguin, I knew that that would feel better to sell directly.
Derek Sivers
So stack up all those reasons and that’s why it was a no brainer for me.
David Perell
How do you think it changes your writing? For one thing, you don’t have to go through a publisher.
Derek Sivers
But I’ve actually never had to please a publisher. The only publisher I worked with, Penguin, just kind of bought my finished thing from Seth Godin. So I never had to please the publisher. But there’s one thing, you know, we haven’t talked about, and I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this publicly is when I made the decision to print hardcover books. You talk a lot about online writing, and I used to think of all of my writing as being online only. But once I made the decision to print hardcover books and it was like, “All right, I’m going to be killing trees.” And if I wasn’t succinct before, that made me even more succinct. I was like, “I want these books to have the least number of pages possible.” It made me go back and look at every sentence like, is this really worth killing a tree over? And every sentence had to pass that test. Like, all right, this is murder worthy.
David Perell
Yeah, I hear the same thing with people who used to handwrite, and then they’d have to put in a typewriter. They say the same thing. I was reading Shelby Foote. He was one of the great Civil War historians, and he was a novelist, and he was one of those Paris Review interviews that are just incredible.
David Perell
All of them like interview quality bar, Paris Review, top notch. And he said that one of the big problems with writing on a computer is that there’s a lastingness to things that you write on a computer, because you can copy and paste it. That there isn’t with handwriting and putting it into a typewriter.
Derek Sivers
I like that. Again, it’s like what we were saying with the oral tradition, the things that get worn down through writing from memory or retelling. Just the stuff that needs to be there. It’s a cool common thread.
David Perell
So then what is the role of online writing in your portfolio?
Derek Sivers
My number one bit of advice when people ask my advice about writing a book is I say, don’t think of it as a book. Put one idea at a time out into the world. Like shine a spotlight on each idea, because it would always make me sad that there would be these books that I would read all the way to the end. And sometimes there would be a brilliant idea on page 280, and I’ve read the statistics of first, how few people buy a book, and how few of those that buy a book actually read the book and I thought, “Man, there’s so few people reading this idea on page 280. I wish this idea would have had its own spotlight.”
Derek Sivers
And I think that’s a reason to post individual ideas online as individual articles. Get them out into the world. Let them breathe. Let them get some feedback. Don’t just keep them in your own private locked secret area. Release them to the world. Then the world can can give you some feedback on them. You can test them out. You can see where you might have been thinking about it wrong, or you can get people applauding and saying, “Oh my God, I love this idea.” And then you take all of these individual ideas you’ve posted online then you can turn them into a book with a greater sense of confidence that these ideas are ready as a collection of ideas in a book. That’s how I see it.
David Perell
How do you think that the share ability works differently? In the sense that when somebody shares a book with me the chance that I read it is much lower. But the weight of the recommendation is much higher, both in the added friction of sharing a book. And if somebody shares an article with you, they say, “Hey, check this out. This is pretty cool.” Someone shares a book with you. They say, “This changed my life.”
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I have nothing to add. I agree.
David Perell
You wrote “Anything You Want” in what, ten days?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I didn’t ever mean to write a book. And then Seth Godin, like, literally called me out of the blue. My phone rang from an unknown number and I answered and he said, “Derek, it’s Seth Godin.” I went, “Oh my God, hi.” And he said, “I’m starting a new publishing company and I want you to be one of my first authors. Will you do it?” I said, “Of course.” So he said, “Okay, I’m imagining this.” He’s actually the one maybe to blame for my short books. He said, “These aren’t going to be like usual books. They’re going to be more like manifestos. I want like 11,000 words. They’re going to be a manifesto.” And I said, “All right.” He said, “So, yeah, go.” I said, “Okay.” And so I just kind of looked at some of the things I’d written already-- it’s about half of it just telling my stories of how I started and grew and left CD Baby and realized there was a lot to be told, but it was just because I was just telling stories from my life. Speaking of going back in our conversation, these are things that I had all talked about with friends before. I’d talked about them even to crowds before. I had spoken at conferences to rooms of hundreds of people where I had told these stories and had heard the audience laugh at this point and knew that was a point that should be kept. I told these stories to friends. And I wasn’t having to conjure new insights.
Derek Sivers
I was just telling my tale. So, yeah I did it in-- I mean not just ten days, it was probably a total of like 20 hours. And then I sent it to Seth going, “What do you think?” And he said, “Yeah, it’s great. We like it.” And it came out like a week later and that was it.
David Perell
How do you think about mastering this craft? I mean, you talk about-- I just love this idea of mastery because what happens is when you first learn to write, we know school. This isn’t a criticism. It’s honestly it’s learning every single craft. You got to learn the basics. When I went to basketball camp through the legs, spin, move behind the mat, behind the back, the crossover, the four dribbles that every point guard needs to know. And I still have my basketball coach, Elliott Smith, telling me that hundreds of times. And when you write, it’s the same sort of thing. So you got to know what is the role of a comma? What is the role of a period? What’s the role of a semicolon? Delete it. When do you have a paragraph break, all these sorts of things. But then what I think is beautiful about mastery is mastery is divergent. The road to mastery begins when you say that I need to start asking my own questions and asking questions that haven’t been asked so I can find answers that nobody else has found. And how do you think about doing that?
Derek Sivers
Well, first I should say I’m not just saying this because I’m talking to you now. If anybody were to ask me, who do you think like, who do you know is on the path of mastery to being a great writer to like mastering writing, I would say David Perel. Like, I think you are the embodiment of the mastery path to writing I so admire.
David Perell
That means a lot.
Derek Sivers
Not just what you’re doing now, but like the whole approach that you’ve taken, I think is the way to go. Like, you are mastering the craft, and I so admire it and think that’s what’s amazing. Like you’ve dove in to this one thing 100%. I think I’ve always forever if I thought about writing at all, it was always secondary. You know, like, I was mostly helping musicians. And then sometimes I would write a little story that I thought was worth sharing that I thought would help musicians, but mostly I was like hands on helping musicians, then I was mostly running a business, and every now and then I’d write a little story about something I had learned from running a business. But I always thought of my writing as just telling some tales on the side, as a side effect of what I was doing. I was never focused on the craft of writing, the mastery of writing itself.
David Perell
The story that I tell myself is I have way below average writing skills, and therefore I need to work harder than everybody else to learn this craft. What is your process for becoming a master writer?
Derek Sivers
Okay. You’ve made some quotes here. I’m going to quote somebody I don’t know who said it, but some musician at some point said, “If you can learn music, you can learn anything.” And I loved that because if you think of the typical path of learning an instrument, lots of playing your scales, not just scales but arpeggios, and this different chord patterns spread out tight. It’s digging into these little details. When you hear a musician practicing, it should sound bad. Musicians practice what they can’t play. Musicians don’t just sit there and play what they know all the time. Or if they do, they would suck. They would just not ever get any better. When a musician is practicing, what they’re playing is the awful sounding things because they can’t play it yet. It’s like, “Marinero. Damn it! Doh doh doh doh doh doh doh doh doh doh. Okay. Wait. Wait. Closer. Doh doh doh doh doh doh doh doh.” And they go, “Ah! Okay. There we go. I did it once. Let me try it again.” And they’ll take this thing that they don’t know how to do. And they’ll just do it again and again and again until they finally feel like all right I think I can do this now.
Derek Sivers
Now let me go back 10 seconds into the piece and make sure I can play this difficult bit in context, you know. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. Like I did it, you know? But even once you’ve done it, once you practice it again and again. You focus on things you can’t do. Oh and you dive into other people’s work that you admire. And you try to distill what is it that I admired about that. So we would analyze songs and try to figure out what made that melody work so well. Like exactly what? What note made that phrase intriguing? What chord kept me listening instead of feeling like switching it off? Or what word pulled me into this lyric. And then you’d extract the technique. I took songwriting classes at Berklee School of Music. They would say, “Okay, I’ve showed you this technique today. Go write me three songs using this technique by Thursday.” And so people would have to just come up with three songs that use this technique, let’s say, of when you’ve got an eight bar phrase, the usual thing is to do a four bar phrase, a four bar phrase. Instead, they’d say, try breaking it into three and three and two or other unusual combinations. Give me a five bar phrase, and a three bar phrase to use the eight bars.
Derek Sivers
And that would be your challenge for Thursday. Go. And it was so fun to write in this. Let’s say left brained way we think of songwriting and writing is just pure creativity, and so to take certain rules and apply it to me is creatively liberating because it’s just saying, “All right, I’m just going to do this technique.” And actually, some great songs of mine came out from these little challenges. Look at what musicians do to master their craft, and think of how you could apply that to whatever you’re trying to master. Not mean we’re speaking mostly to writers today, but say if you’re trying to be a great programmer or what would it look like to try to master entrepreneurship the way that musicians practice their instrument. Like, could you actually start a business every day? Could you start 100 businesses just to practice the craft of starting a business? The answer is probably no, but there’s an idea in there somewhere. So yeah, that to me is the path.
David Perell
Yeah. My little phrase that I like to use for this is practice analytically, perform intuitively. And it came out of a really cool experience that I had when I was 13 years old. I wanted to compete as a college golfer and during my freshman year of high school, I started playing in these tournaments. This tournament was in Fresno, and I remember being on the driving range with this guy, Bryson DeChambeau, who was like one of the big 15 year olds at the time or something like that, and he won the tournament by eight shots.
Derek Sivers
I remember watching him practice. He had his coach out there. He was so focused, so regimented, and I remember driving home with my three best buddies from high school back to San Francisco, and we were like, we don’t know who this guy is, but he was so much better than us. Last time I checked, he was the number five ranked golfer in the entire world. And what I learned from Bryson was this sense that you can practice like that. But he won the US open two years ago. Saturday, had a tough day. Saturday night goes to the driving range. And the last words to his coach before he left the range on Saturday and won the next day was “All right. I found my feel. Now I’m just going to go play like fun on Sunday.” And. I love this idea that you would deconstruct everything when you’re in that practice mode, but then once you find the feel, you let that analysis, that learning, that left brain move through you. The right brain kicks in, the intuition flows.
Derek Sivers
There’s a whole book about this called The Inner Game of Tennis. Great book. You know it. Oh, cool. Yeah, cool.
David Perell
Have you seen the YouTube video on it?
Derek Sivers
No.
David Perell
There’s a YouTube video where Tim Gallwey he shows basically takes these women and is working with them to hit and he just says, ball hit or bounce, hit, bounce, hit. And they go from being in this analytical mindset to this intuitive one and they start rocking it. It’s impressive. Do you feel intuitive when you’re writing, even though you’re doing some of that analysis?
Derek Sivers
I try to focus on the-- you know we’ve talked a lot about the craft today. But going back you know, I think that again the craft is pointless without a good idea underneath it. So I try to mostly just focus on the core idea. And then when you’re talking about just sharing an idea you’ve had. To me, the whole like intuitive versus craft. For the most part, it’s like talking. I tried it mostly I like to write like I talk, you know? My last book, “How to Live”, was an exercise in like, how can I take 1300 pages and instead say it in 112? So that’s why you got this kind of hyper compression where what was a page is now just a sentence. But for the most part, I think my writing is just a simplified version of how I talk, and so I don’t really put conscious craft into it so much. You’re right. Yeah. I guess if you call that intuitive. That almost feels like a over glorifying it. Because it’s not even like sports. It is just like talking but editing out the unnecessary words. Did you see the movie was it Midnight in Paris? The Woody Allen movie. So Owen Wilson goes back to 1920s Paris. My favorite thing about this movie are two characters.
Derek Sivers
For one, the guy that plays Salvador Dali just does this great like, “I’m Dali, Dali.” But the guy that plays Ernest Hemingway, he talks like Ernest Hemingway writes, and it’s powerful. I love the way that he says these direct sentences. He says them, he concludes them and he stops talking. And I love that. Watching that movie, I was like, “Damn it.” See, that’s a way to kind of like to walk your talk. Talk the way you write, is the way that that actor plays Ernest Hemingway in Midnight Before Paris. I recommend it just for those scenes alone.
David Perell
A lot of people struggle with that. Like if you read the writer of somebody who’s just left six, seventh grade, and they’re trying to write based off the novels that they’re reading and stuff. It’s so over the top. It’s just trying too hard. And write like you talk is the most obvious advice that no writing teacher ever told me. I don’t know what’s going on with that.
Derek Sivers
To me, I think the biggest problem to unlearn from school is page count is feeling like something has to be ten pages on a subject and if you think you get a book deal that it has to be 300 pages. I’m constantly trying to like, how can I make this shorter? How can I say less? Whereas I think we spend so many years because of needing to turn in assignments, like you said, about the fish, where we feel we have nothing to say about this. And so you use all of these padding words because they fill up more space, and it makes it sound like you’re saying something when you’re actually saying nothing. And that’s, to me, the hardest lesson from school to unlearn.
David Perell
Jason Freed at Base Camp has a little post called The Writing Class I’d Like to Teach. And he says, “Take an idea. Write two pages about it. Write one page about it. Write one paragraph about it. Write one sentence about it. There you go. Communicate the same amount of information.”
Derek Sivers
Yeah. We’re kindreds. I love his style. How did you meet Tyler Cowan? Did you just reach out to him out of the blue, I think.
David Perell
Yeah, I reached out to him and I said, “Hey, I’m 22 years old. I am living in New York City. I would like to interview you. I’ll go down to D.C.” I had no money at the time. So I took a $5 Megabus and it was packed. I’m sitting. It was the last ticket. So I’m sitting in one of those. You have the middle table and it’s like seats of four and traffic the whole way down, and our legs are just like rubbing against each other. Terrible experience. But I go down, have an hour with Tyler. And remember at the end he said, “You’re a kindred spirit.” I didn’t know what a kindred spirit was at the time. I didn’t know what that was. So I get out of the room. I look up, what does kindred spirit mean? I’m like, oh, well, that’s a really nice compliment. And a year later I get a $20,000 grant from Tyler Cowen, which allows me to start Rite of Passage. Otherwise, without that money I wouldn’t have been able to do it.
Derek Sivers
And you cold called him, I love that I think there was even a story. I listened to the interview you guys did together where you said that you emailed him some long piece you had written, and he replied back almost instantly. You were like, “How the hell did you read that in time?” And he actually had critique on your piece and had read it and just think, yeah, people underestimate how effective it can be to just cold email somebody and make that introduction. Because ideally, if you have enough self esteem, you think of yourself as worthy to speak with too. And the people that are putting themselves out there publicly are the ones that like this two way connection. There are plenty of people doing what we do that just stay head down and silent and don’t talk to anybody but the ones that lift their heads up to the world and put themselves out there like this are the ones that like the two way interaction with people. So like Tyler obviously does,
David Perell
It’s really nice to just get somebody who reaches out with something earnest. And that isn’t just some kind of templated email because it just reminds you that what you’re doing is moving people in some way. And there’s always some insecurity that you have when you’re a writer. Like, am I actually reaching people? Are these just like words that are being lost to time? Are they just evaporating or are they actually reaching somebody? You can look at page view numbers. But like one email does so much more for you than seven figures on a page for your number. It’s just a number.
Derek Sivers
Do you know that actually-- again, I know a lot of famous musicians from my years in the music industry, and all of them sincerely love it when somebody would come up and do that thing that we think of as like, “oh, I’m just fangirling. I’m just fanboying, I’m just gushing.” When you go up to a musician that you love you’re like, “Oh my God, like this song you wrote made such a big difference to me. And oh, I love this work.”
Derek Sivers
And I think it’s actually their favorite part of the job. It’s like that’s what they live for is getting that kind of sincere, personal, gushing feedback. When somebody says that it means everything to them. Right. And so, yeah, when people ask why answer my email every day, it’s because every day I check my email, there’s something really nice in there. And somebody’s just telling me nice ways how something I’ve written has helped them. And in fact, I’d say that’s probably the single biggest motivation for my writing at all is because of how much it’s meant to me when I’ve read a book that introduced a new way of thinking of something that blew my mind, made me think of everything differently, and how powerful that was, and how it, like, permanently changed the way I see the world. So when I have some kind of epiphany or insight, I try to put it out in the world in the hopes that somebody, somewhere from Nepal to Nebraska will read this idea and go, “Oh my God, yes, this helps me live my life. This helps me see the world in a way that works better for me.” Like, that’s what I’m trying to do. And so when somebody emails to tell me like, “Oh my God, this idea of yours made a big difference.” It’s like, there we go. Like, that’s the ultimate reward.
David Perell
And one thing I’ll add to that is actually do it. When people hear something like that, what goes through their head is I’m not going to do that because a lot of people don’t do it, and this person isn’t actually going to read it. I promise you, not nearly as many people reach out as you’d think. And I know from emailing you that you’re actually going to read it.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. You should always cold call. Cold email to people you like. In fact, I do this with every book that I love. All those books that you see on my book list, like the ones you see at the top on my website of the book notes that I’ve read. Every time I love a book, I stop and just find the author. Even if I have to dig hard to find her email address, I will find it and email them and say, “Thank you. I loved this book and here’s why.” And they almost always reply, it’s so rewarding. The reason I do a lot of these podcasts, main thing is because of the people that I meet afterwards, you know, the kind of person who listens all the way to the end of an interview like, this is my kind of person. So if you listen to the end, go to my website and email and introduce yourself.
David Perell
Derek, this was a blast. I feel like this was years in the making, and it just was one of the most fun conversations I’ve ever had about writing. So thank you.
Derek Sivers
Me too. Thanks, David.