London Writers’ Salon
host: Matthew Trinetti
journaling, minimalism, financial philosophy, long-term thinking, productivity, disconnecting from technology, book recommendations
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Transcript:
Matt
Welcome to the London Writers Salon, Derek Sivers.
Parul
So Derek, you’re in Wellington at the moment.
Derek Sivers
Your hometown.
Parul
My hometown, right. You wouldn’t know it from my accent. And you describe yourself as a world citizen. You have lived in Singapore, India, Belgium, England. You talked about Oxford to us just now. Portugal and Wellington at the moment. And you’ve said, “No place has got as deeply into my soul as New Zealand has.” That’s your real home, you say. And what is it about New Zealand that you connect with so deeply?
Derek Sivers
You can’t just put that into words. Ha! Okay. Sorry. I think it’s just the practicality and resourcefulness of the people. You know, there’s some places where you just feel like your values align with the people in this place. Some place you will always feel foreign. Some places you just go, “Oh, yeah, these are my people.” So for the most part, it’s like, these are my people. I love the values. I love that the country is very well run, very no nonsense. Very practical. And of course, just the connection to the land itself, you know, the physique.
Parul
I appreciate that.
Matt
And I joked earlier that-- so Parul born in New Zealand that as we go on with this interview her Kiwi accent is going to get thicker and thicker even the way you said Wellington it was funny. Derek, we’ve been following your writing for quite a while now, but when did writing first enter your life?
Derek Sivers
Journaling really forever. I mean, there are two different kinds of writing. There’s the writing you do for yourself, and there’s the writing that you do for the world, right? So the writing for myself, I’ve always been very reflective and introspective. I think ever since I was as young as I can remember in my diary, trying to figure out, trying to understand life and trying to understand myself. But public writing came from working with musicians. So I was a full time musician for 15 years from the age of basically 15 to 30. I was a professional musician, like making my living making music. And the music business can be a weird thing to figure out. It’s very counterintuitive. There are a lot of weird things about it, and I learned them the hard way. So after I would learn something about the music industry and how it worked, I would write to my fellow musicians telling them something I had learned, telling them how I got into radio airplay or how I finally met this publicist that doesn’t take any new clients or whatever. I would tell that story to help my fellow musicians. So my public writing started with that, and that’s what my first book called “Your Music and People”. Sorry, technically not my first book, but my book called “Your Music and People”. I actually wrote that first for musicians. And then later I started a company called CD Baby distributing music. Then in ten years of doing that, I learned a bunch of stuff that was counterintuitive that I learned the hard way about starting and growing a company. So after I sold the company, then I was writing publicly to other entrepreneurs, sharing my hard lessons learned from that. And now I guess I’m doing the same with life philosophy, “How to Live”.
Matt
And we’re so grateful for the words that you share. And in particular you’ve written about candidly, about difficult times, mistakes you’ve made professionally and personal mishaps. And you talk about there’s the private journaling and then the public writing. How do you discern when something is ready to be public versus something that’s meant to just live for you?
Derek Sivers
I think it’s just a matter of whether it’s useful to others or not, right. So like, my private musings are just about me. It’s just meant for me. It’s just a different way of thinking. I’m trying to think of what’s good for everyone. I’m just thinking about what’s good for me and my unique situation in a relationship with this person and in this place that I live and this son that I have. But in doing so, if I come across something that feels like an epiphany that could apply to others, then I take the time to extract that and try to describe it in a way that others would find useful.
Matt
I’m actually curious about your journaling practice, so I don’t know if you’re familiar with Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages. Where is it kind of like that just stream of conscious journaling where you just plop down, whatever comes up, or do you give yourself prompts or if you can give us a glimpse into what your journaling practice looks like?
Derek Sivers
Okay, sure. Actually you know what’s funny? I started at the age of 42. I started doing something I wish I would have done earlier. And I recommend to everybody that’s here is to every single day write down the mundane like what you did today stuff. Because looking back later, that stuff can really help. It only takes a few minutes to say woke up, did this. You don’t have to include every little-- you know took out the garbage but just kind of like describing your day to your future self and you save those forever in some format. And it can be amazing to look back at times in your life too. There might be times like you might be living in this place now with this person now, and there might be a future time where you’ll be wondering like, “Was I happy then or was I productive then? Or what was I doing then?” And it’s amazing to look back into your journal and into a glimpse at that time in your life. Not through the haze of time, but with the direct report from the moment that is more accurate and trustable or just a glimpse into your mindset. So I started keeping a daily what I did today journal only when I was 42. So I do that as well. But then I also-- and this is what I’ve been doing since I was a teenager is whenever I just had something on my mind that I was trying to work out.
Derek Sivers
You know what? I’ve got a fork in the road. What should I do here? Or I’m really feeling frustrated and upset. Why? Why is that? And I’ll ask myself first. I’ll just share it. I’ll just dump it out on the page. I’ll just blah. This is what I’m feeling. But then, yeah, I start questioning it like, why am I feeling this okay? Because I hate this place. Why do I hate this place? Why do I think I hate this place? Do I think I’d be happier in another place? Was I happier in another place? You start asking yourself questions and then you answer those questions. But then, best of all, you start questioning your answers. It’s really useful to doubt yourself, to question yourself, to like not believe the first thing you say. So later I found out that this is similar to something called cognitive behavioral therapy CBT, which I’m just starting to learn a bit more about. But as soon as I learned about it, I went, “Oh, that’s what I’ve been doing for 30 years. Cbt Huh? All right.” Which, yeah it’s questioning your beliefs and doubting your emotions.
Matt
And it’s something when you can tangibly see your belief in pen in paper, it then becomes an object that you can investigate. Or at least that’s how it feels for me, which is really interesting hearing you talk about that.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I think there’s two stages of learning anything. There’s the moment that the information comes into you, whether through watching a podcast like this or reading a book or just something that happened to you today out in the world, there’s the moment that it happens and that’s the first step. But to me, the deeper step is when you take time to later reflect on that and think about it and what did I learn from that and what could I learn from that and how can I use this? That to me is like where you truly ingest it and make it part of your soul, being, whatever.
Matt
I appreciate you giving us a peek into that practice for you. So many of us are avid journaling.
Derek Sivers
It also comes with reading books. Like reading a book is just only the first step. And to me it’s like I don’t really learn from the book until I do that second step, until I really take what I’ve learned in like put time in my journal to stop and reflect on what I’ve just learned from this book. Like that’s when I’ve truly learned. Until then, it’s just more information. I think a lot of us take in so much information through the net, through our screens, through books. But until you put aside that time to reflect on it, it’s not truly in you yet.
Matt
It’s a great reminder. Thanks, Derek. I’d love to kind of turn back to your-- rewind a bit just briefly. Because you’ve spoken a lot about this and written about it, but your experience with CD Baby, which you built and then eventually sold, it was a popular website for musicians to sell their music directly to fans. And you sold it, for which Parul said in the intro, for 22 million, you gave most of that away to an education charitable trust that you set up. And you’ve written about this before, that you’re clearly not money motivated and you didn’t start the business to make money. But that is life changing money, I mean for for anyone. And what we’re curious about is that decision to give most of that away. There was some calculation of enough like this is enough for me. Can you tell us how you calculated that enough for you, how you came to that decision? And yeah, it’s a phenomenal experience and journey you’ve been on.
Derek Sivers
I think my minimalism runs deep, you know that in so many aspects of life. I mean, you could even see it, you know, on the covers of my books, no graphics. Or if you go to my website, it’s just plain I just have this certain way of being that makes me deeply happy. It’s like it aligns with my values. And so I really don’t like having more than I need. So I don’t want a big house. I don’t want five houses. I don’t want a Ferrari when a Nissan Leaf is enough. You know, so that just makes me happy. Like you actually couldn’t pay me to drive a Ferrari. I just don’t want that. So I think I just realized early on that the things that rich people kind of waste money on, I think it feels a bit like insanity. It just feels wrong. And so CD Baby was profitable already and I was the sole owner, so I had a few million dollars in the bank, which is fucking enough for anybody. I just don’t understand this thing where somebody would have that and think that they really need more. So yeah, when I had this agreement to sell the company and they said, “Okay, it looks like it’s going to be $22 million.” I was like, “What the hell am I going to do with that?” And my only congruent answer was, give it to people who really need it. It just seemed stupid to do anything else.
Matt
I mean, just the way you live your life Derek, it causes one. It causes us to examine why we do what we do and why we believe what we believe. And just hearing you talk about that. Parul and I have conversations about like, what would you do in that situation? Do you think you would give it away? I’m like, “I don’t know if I would.” And what does that say about me?
Derek Sivers
But okay. Well, no, what’s important is to be honest with what works for you. So when I lived in Oxford, one of my best friends was this Iranian guy who lived in a huge mansion and literally had a tank in the front yard that he bought and had spent millions on artwork in his house and like literally lived in the giant mansion. And he was just very congruent about this is what he wants. And he’s like, these things bring me joy and I can spread joy through my buying and appreciation of these things. He’s like, “You know, the people that I bought these artworks from get to receive the flow of money that has come to me through luck and circumstance and investment banking.” And he was very congruent with his love of that. So that worked for him. For me, that would be horrible. I don’t want six bedrooms or whatever. So you just have to be honest about what you really want. Be honest with yourself first and then get the confidence to be honest with the world about it and just state it and know it about yourself and rock it. So this is what works for me. I wouldn’t prescribe it for anybody else. I would prescribe that you look into yourself and be honest about what makes you deeply happy. Not shallow, happy, but deeply happy.
Parul
And I wonder our attitudes towards money and having and security might come from our parents or other influences that we’ve had in our childhood or maybe even later on in life. I wonder if you have any sense of where your philosophy towards having and money and security comes from.
Derek Sivers
I think we often make decisions in life based on what we feel we’re lacking. You know, we often go towards what we feel is lacking in our life. So yeah, I grew up in just a regular, comfortable, middle class family. I thought that we were rich growing up. My family has a real estate business that later my sister started running the family real estate business and she asked me just a few years ago, she said, “Hey, growing up did you think we were rich?” I said, “Yeah, I did.” And she goes, “Yeah, it’s interesting. So did I.” But she goes, “Now that I’m running the company, we’re not. And we never were. Everything was so mortgaged that, yes, our company owned these properties, but if we sell them all, it just pays off the mortgage.” She said. “We were never rich, but we thought we were.” So I was thinking about the metaphor of like, imagine that you were--. There’s a tightrope, the high tightrope, high above the ground. And you’re told like, “Don’t worry, there’s a safety net down there, you’re fine.” And so you get on the tightrope and you’re very confident and you leap around and do somersaults because, hey, there’s a safety net down there. I’m fine. And only later, after you finish, you find out, oh, there actually wasn’t a safety net. But hey, that was useful for me to believe. So I think that a lot of the decisions I’ve made in life are because I believed that there was a safety net there and later found out there wasn’t. See, that’s an example of something. I don’t know if that’s useful to anybody else. That’s personal to me. But, you know.
Matt
No, it’s really useful. Some of these things, it’s like I want to spend a lot of time thinking about what you just said, but also I’m like, there’s a lot of things we want to talk about. So I think this is going to be something that we revisit. It’s really amazing.
Parul
It says, you said to us earlier, there’s the time where you hear the information and then we’ll all go and journal on what you’re saying later on and have a think.
Derek Sivers
Hey you know what, I should say one thing about--. By the way, I’m glad you’re recording this. Thank you. What the CD Baby thing did for me that if my public behavior seems a bit strange, if the choices that I’m making in self-publishing and whatnot seem a bit strange, it helps to remember that thing that after doing CD Baby for a number of years. As I was very like heralded in the music industry as like, you know, “Derek Sivers is revolutionizing the music business.” I got tons of attention, I think way more attention than I needed or deserved, and you know that I made a ton of money. So now I’m just coming from this place of like, I don’t want any more money and I don’t want any more attention. So a lot of the things I do seem strange because of that.
Matt
Love it. Derek, let’s turn back to your writing and your first book, “Anything You Want” or the first published book, at least that you you wrote for Seth Godin. So you say that you never intended to write a book, but Seth asked you to be the first author in a publishing company that he was starting. He wrote the book in ten days, which is amazing, and he published it a week later. Why did you say yes to that? And what do you think Seth saw in you? That he took a punt on someone who had never written a book to say, “Yes, you’re the one that can be my first author.”
Derek Sivers
Okay. And first, how could you not say yes to that? Like Seth Godin is my hero. And like literally, my phone rings from an unknown number. It’s Seth Godin on the phone and he says, “I’m starting a publishing company. I want you to be my first author.” I mean, how could anybody say anything but okay. So I said okay. And it helped that he said, “I want to make this different. This isn’t a typical publishing company. In fact, I’m not even going to think of these books so much as manifestos.” He said, “I want it to be like a short word manifesto on a subject.” And I said, okay. So I had already been telling my tale of how I built and grew and sold CD Baby. I’d already been blogging about it and I’d already spoken on the main stage, big TED conference stage three times. So I’d known Seth for a few years, adored him and his work, and I think he also sees a bit of himself in me. Because he’s been such a big influence on me. So I guess to him it was a no brainer. I never even really questioned why he asked me, but I guess it was a no brainer for him and--
Matt
It changed many lives, including ours and I think Parul and I both read that book when it came out. And reading it back, actually, I realized the way we’re looking at London Writers Salon in the community we’re trying to build here actually your ideas, whether it was deliberately or subconsciously, I think they’ve been injected into how we think about what we’re doing. So thank you. Thank you for that.
Derek Sivers
Cool. I love that I went back to read a book that made a big difference to me called “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber. And I read it when I was running CD Baby, and then I thought that I remembered most of it, but I went back to reread it and I was blown away by what an influence that book had on me. Like sometimes like you, you ingest it, you internalize it, and then it just becomes your approach. And later you look back at the book that taught you that mindset, and it’s really cool to revisit that later. So yeah, that was the book that did it for me, is E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. And I think the guy that started Clif Bars, I forget what his book is called, but I remember that one made a big difference to me. And also actually, sorry, I wish I would be able to give a shout out to the book title, but “Growing a Business” by Paul Hawken. He had like a gardening business or something that he wrote a book about long, long ago. And I remember reading that early on, maybe even before I started CD Baby, but I remember that one also made a huge difference. Both of those books were very like holistic, constantly reminding yourself why you’re doing this. You know, you’re running this business to help people. It’s not just about the money. And I think that those two books helped validate or get that kind of mindset into me. So that helped, right?
Parul
Yeah, those are some great recommendations. Some of those I’ve read, some I haven’t or definitely make a note of those and share these with everyone later. I’d love to get back to Anything You Want and believe you bought your rights back from Penguin. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Derek Sivers
Okay. Well, first, I think that’s maybe why I said that thing about like, you got to understand my situation of I don’t want more money or attention. So yes, Seth Godin published my first book, and then after a few years of doing his Domino project, it was called-- he sold that to Penguin. So suddenly my book was on Penguin four years later, rereleased on Penguin. And so for some people that would be an ego boost. Like I’m a published author and I’m on Penguin, but I didn’t need that ego boost. That meant nothing to me. And I think that all of us should not assign our rights away lightly. You should only assign your rights away if you’re getting a lot in return and you really want what they have to offer in return. So I loved the people at Penguin. My main contact there, Nikki Papadopoulos, she was awesome. She was wonderful. But their infrastructure just didn’t do much for me. I could reach my fans directly, I think unless unless you really need the upfront advance and unless you really don’t want to do the distribution yourself at all. There’s not that much a publisher can offer you unless you really think that the book that you’re writing is going to be like the next Harry Potter or Atomic Habits or Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck or something like that. Those ones you can see translated into 30 languages at a little Marriott Hotel bookstore in Fiji. But if you’re going for anything less than that, to me it seems to make more sense to just go directly.
Parul
That makes sense. And as you say, if you are happy to do the distribution yourself and take on some of the work that comes with publishing directly seems like a good path.
Derek Sivers
Right. So it depends, to know yourself, to know whether you would enjoy that, right? Like some people clean their own bathrooms and will scrub their toilets and some people say, “No way, I’m going to hire somebody else to do that.” Some people like to build their own furniture. They know that they could just go to IKEA and buy a chair for $80, but they find it fun to spend a weekend building their own chair or table. So to me, I’m kind of like that. I like building my own software. I learned just enough about programming. I’m not an expert, but I learned just enough in my years running CD Baby that I really enjoy it. It’s so creative to me to start from scratch. It’s kind of philosophical. As you’re building the software, you’re asking yourself at every step, like what’s really needed here? What’s the real purpose? You know I have a strange pricing model for my books because I went back to scratch and kind of very reflectively asked myself, “What’s the real point here? What’s the point of pricing? What’s the real point of writing a book?” The real point is to get words and thoughts from my head into your head. You know, whether that’s paper or audio or Kindle or PDF or who knows what holograms will be beamed into our senses in the future. The method doesn’t matter to me.
Derek Sivers
What really matters is just getting the ideas from here to here. And if in the future there’s some way that I can blink and send you a dump of my brain, well then that would be the real point, not the physical mediums or electronic mediums in between. So that’s what I find really fun in programming. It’s like making my own furniture. It makes me philosophical along the way and feels very creative and deeply satisfying. But some people might not enjoy that, and if you don’t enjoy that, then you’d say, “No, I’m happy to let Penguin distribute. I’m happy to let Amazon sell it.” And again, you just need to be honest with yourself about those things and not just emulate what others do. You know, you can hear an interview like this and say, “Yeah, I should build my own furniture.” But instead it’s more important to just be honest with yourself about what works for you. Maybe your emotional associations with being on Amazon are like happy, warm and fuzzy. You think, “Oh, yes, joy, I’m on Amazon. This is great.” And maybe for you, your mental associations of being on Amazon are like a fucking Jeff Bezos. Yeah, no, that makes me feel icky and dirty. I don’t want to be on Amazon. That’s a little gross. So you just have to be honest with yourself. And what I think deeply resonates and works for you.
Parul
And I know a good book that helps you think about what might work for you. It’s called “How to Live” by Derek Service. I would recommend that.
Derek Sivers
Oh, was that a segue?
Parul
I actually would love to just dig a little bit into this idea of how we sell directly to readers and fans. And obviously we interviewed Jonah Penn maybe a few months ago and some might consider her to sell directly to fans, depending on how you interpret the idea of selling directly. And I listened to a podcast interview with the two of you, and she had apparently advised you not to sell directly, meaning from your website where you distribute it-- take full control of that distribution. But you know, on the podcast you explain that actually you’re happy to do that, but I’d love to still know selling directly on your website and having owning all that interaction with your fan base or the readers. What has been difficult or easy about doing that?
Derek Sivers
Well, kind of like the kind of person who would love building their own furniture, you would ask, difficult or easy doesn’t really play into it. It’s like, okay, well, yes, some people enjoy gardening. Sorry, I sound like I’m repeating the same point, but I can’t answer the difficult or easy because, if you enjoy it then something that someone else would call difficult is fun for you. So yes, it was maybe hundreds of hours of work that I could have just done in one hour by punting it. But here’s my big thought behind it and for everyone listening, is that art doesn’t end at the edge of the canvas, that your creativity does not end at the last page of your book. Like that isn’t the end of your creativity. You go, “There you go. That’s the contents of the book. Now just do it.” The way that you present your work to the world is part of your art. And for those people that have never heard of you, it’s actually the start of your art. Like how you present yourself to the world is the beginning of the art that is you.
Derek Sivers
And only later will they make their way into the words on the pages that you’ve written. But first, it starts with how you present yourself to the world. That’s the start of your art. So I’d like to control that and use it and have my presentation reflect my values and be a part of my art. Instead of just saying, “Well, I wrote the last page, I gave it a title it’s done.” And handed off to be slotted in generically next to the rest. I understand the value in that too. There are the best books of the world right now, or in a turnstile airport bookstores saying, you know, WUthering Heights or in peace. Just, you know, plain, plain, plain and a turnstile with everything else. And that’s fine. We know that there’s genius inside. But I think that while you’re still alive, while it’s still under your control, it can be pretty cool to control the presentation of your work if that interests you. And maybe it doesn’t.
Parul
And that makes sense now because I’m thinking of my experience of you so far. This is the first time I’ve ever spoken to you. I’ve read your work, I’ve been on your website, I’ve looked at your covers, and now it’s making sense. There’s a continuity there. Your personality shines through, like you were saying, actually in the beginning. But your personality really does shine through in how you communicate with us asynchronously as well. And so there’s a unique thing there.
Derek Sivers
Thanks. There’s a-- okay, I’m going to hold these up. Not in some kind of ridiculous like self-promotional kind of thing, but like these book covers took so much thought. I think it took me a year to come to this like, plain book cover. I commissioned so many different designs. I went to 99 Designs. I worked with like five different graphic designers, including the one from Penguin that had done my previous book. I looked at so many designs. I went to the best bookstore in the world, I think it’s called Blackstone’s in Oxford. I was living in Oxford in England, and there’s this amazing multi-level bookstore, and I spent so many hours there looking at all these different book covers, thinking about what works for me. But every time I would come back to like a library book, you know, where it used to have the glossy hardcover on and then you take it off and what you’re left with is this. It was like this visceral, like something just inside of me was like, “Yeah, now that’s a fucking book.” You know, like no glossy, no marketing, no hype, no silly graphics.
Derek Sivers
That usually tend to diminish the importance of what’s inside. So I loved it when I’d see these library books with no glossy marketing. And I loved it. The example I gave earlier, when you see in a turnstile are these Penguin books that just say “War and Peace”, Leo Tolstoy, “Hound of Baskervilles” or whatever, and it’s just the title and the author, and you go like, “Yeah, now that makes me curious about what’s inside.” And then you look over at the business aisle and you see all these kind of like blah blah, blah, you know, shout, shout, shout, look at me down, down, down. And you think, “I don’t want to be a part of that? I don’t want to try to up that game.” So it was like a year of reflection and getting philosophical about presenting myself to the world before I finally came back to making these plain books. I was like, “Yeah, it seems like a bold move, but that’s congruent with my values.”
Parul
Thank you for sharing that.
Matt
Yeah. You’re a true craftsman. Through and through.
Parul
That’s it. Craftsman. That’s it. Exactly.
Derek Sivers
Oh, by the way, hey, I got to give a shout out to those of you. Interesting, saeah.com. Saeah Wood is my friend. She was my friend first, but she’s also a paper book nerd. She’s the one that actually produced these paper books I worked with her but she’s the one that like went to a bunch of different factories and tested different paper weights and got these different inlays, you know, things like this she nerds out about like the inside is black or is this white. And even in How to Live, I’ll show you a subtle thing. This front cover is a little bit different than the back cover because I always wanted to get something that some people would think was blue, some green because it matches the philosophy of the book. And so she helped get these two different tones that somebody might not notice that it had suddenly turned from blue to green. So if you go to saeah.com you’ll see Saeah’s website. She’s an expert paper book producer.
Matt
All right. I was thinking it would be great to talk to her. Maybe we could talk about this after. It’s awesome. Encourage everyone to check out her work.
Parul
I have a quick question on pricing. You talked about how you thought about the pricing and what the point of the book was or how you were trying to get that information to your reader. And I just want to get a bit specific here. So you charge $15 for the content and an additional $4 for the physical book. What is the thinking behind that division?
Derek Sivers
Okay. I wrote a long article about this at not that long, long for me, more than 20 sentences. If you go to sive.rs/bp, as in book pricing. That’s where I finally shared my thoughts on the book pricing so you can get the long version there. But in short, when I buy a book, what I’m really buying, are getting the thoughts from the author’s brain into mine. I don’t really care if it’s audio paper, e-book or some future format. I need different formats at different times. If I’ve got a really long drive, I wish I could listen to that book I bought on paper and it seems a shame to have to buy the whole book again just to get the same words I’ve already paid for in a different format. So what I decided early on is I really want people to only pay for the contents of the book and never pay for the format. So when you buy the book from me for $15, you get all formats audiobook, e-book, you know, all the formats of e-book epub, HTML, PDF. But the only place that this idea broke down is for paper books. I can’t give away paper for free because it actually costs me money to print the paper. So I thought, “Okay, well if I just charge the break even cost of the paper, then I feel pretty congruent about this.” So what it means is it’s a little weird to explain, but when you buy a book from me, you pay $15 once, and now the contents of the book are yours forever. All future digital formats you ever want forever. Any new formats that are invented, you already paid for it long ago. But the only thing is if you want paper, then you just pay me the break even cost of the paper and ship it to you.
Matt
That’s it. So cool. Share. Grab the link to that Derek so people can read more on your philosophy. I’m curious before we turn to How to Live, we want to talk about some of the ideas in that book. But if you were starting out today and I have a hunch I know the answer to this, but if you were starting out as a writer today, hoping to put interesting, maybe useful ideas into the world, but without the audience you have, where do you think you start? Would it be on your own blog again? Or given the state of the world in 2022, would you start somewhere else? A different approach.
Derek Sivers
I have the best short answer for you because it’s somebody else’s answer. Go read the book called “Write Useful Books” by Rob Fitzpatrick. Have you had him on yet?
Matt
No, but I think I know Rob. We worked together in London. If it’s the same Rob Fitzpatrick.
Derek Sivers
His book called Write Useful Books is the best answer to your question. It assumes that you have no built in audience, yet it assumes nonfiction though, if you’re writing fiction, it won’t apply to you much. Though maybe you could extract some metaphorical lessons from it, So Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick tells that answer so well. It’s mainly about solving a specific problem for others and writing the best book ever to solve that specific problem for people and working with the target market as you’re writing it to make sure it is solving their problem the best. And if you do that, you don’t have to worry about yourself. It’s not about you. It’s about them. It’s not about like, “How do I build a following? How do I call attention to myself? How do I make an audience?” It’s just about no, no, no, just solve their problem. If you solve their problem, everything else is taken care of.
Matt
Great. We’ll grab a link to that. Great shout out to Rob. You’ve said before, and this might be on a blog or in a book that the best investment of time is on timeless aspects of your craft. What have you found helpful in improving your writing in storytelling craft? You’ve mentioned some of the business books that have influenced you, but have you learned from anyone, any resources, books, people about the craft of storytelling?
Derek Sivers
Okay. The best book I’ve read about writing is called On Writing Well by William Zinsser, highly recommend that, especially again, for nonfiction. There’s a similar book just called On Writing by Stephen King. That’s half autobiography, but half some damn good writing advice for fiction writers. So between the two of those, I think those are my favorite books on the craft of writing. But honestly, I had an interesting experience in my past that I think shaped my succinct style more than anything. Which is when I was running CD Baby, I had 2 million customers and I had an email list where it wasn’t one of those like no reply at like when I sent out 2 million emails. Anybody who replied to that, it came back to me and my team. So I learned the hard way that if you are at all unclear in an email newsletter like that, you are going to get thousands of replies from people not understanding what you just said, and those thousands of replies take hundreds of hours to manage to answer again. So I found that if I was at all unclear, if I used a passive verb instead of an active verb, I would get an extra 1000 replies, which would take so many hours to handle. So it’s like I was feeling the ultimate pain, you know? It’s like unfortunately most writers, if you’re writing in a passive instead of active style, you might just get a little less engagement.
Derek Sivers
You might just get some people going, “Yeah, I read your book, it was all right.” Instead of like, “Oh my God!” You know? But I was feeling the pain hard from any sentence I wrote that was unclear. Even if I try to be as clear as I could, but I put the call to action in the 10th sentence instead of the second sentence, I would get like literally 500 replies from people going, “Great, how do I do it?” And I go, “Ugh!” And I’d have to answer 500 emails saying, “Just look at the email I just sent you. It’s right there in the 10th sentence.” But I couldn’t be mad at them. It was my fault. There must be a way I can be more clear. So that’s what shaped my writing. It seems that my personal speaking style and my books have a different style. It’s because it’s two different mediums. When people are reading, especially on the web, they don’t read carefully, their eyes just kind of dart and scan. So I think I got my writing craft writing for those people that are darting and scanning, and I need to make sure that every word is understood. Like the more you write, the less they understand. If you write in very short, direct, clear sentences, they might get your point.
Parul
Great and difficult way to learn by getting so much immediate feedback. I’d love to turn to your latest book now-- pain, what a painful way to learn. Your latest book is “How to Live”, and you say it’s some of your best writing. Can you tell us about why you decided to write this book and how this concept came to you?
Derek Sivers
Sure. Okay. First, it’s an homage to the book called Sum by David Eagleman, which is probably my favorite fiction book.
Parul
She’s one of my favorite books. I love it.
Derek Sivers
Oh, yeah. Oh, cool. You totally get it then. And you knew that book before “How to Live”, right? When you were reading How to Live, did you get the comparison?
Parul
You know, I just remembered now I actually had forgotten. But yes, you’re right. Of course. Yes. I used to give them as Christmas presents years ago to everyone I knew.
Derek Sivers
Oh, I love that book so much. So Sum by David Eagleman is 40 Tales of the Afterlife. So he basically asks one question with the book, which is “What happens when you die?” And then he answers it 40 different ways. It almost feels like a compilation of 40 different authors answering the question of what happens when you die? Or tell me a little fictional tale of what you think happens when you die. And yeah, it feels like 40 different authors because every single chapter says, “Here’s what happens when you die.” And then he’ll say, This happens. But then the very next chapter says,” Here’s what happens when you die.” Da da da da da, this other thing. And it completely disagrees with all the other chapters. And I love the format so much. And then one day I was literally just driving down the road, South Island, New Zealand, when I just kind of gasped. I was like, “I want to write a book called How to Live that will use the format of Sum, but with philosophies on how you should live.” Because like many of us, I’ve read more than one book that thinks it has the answer on how we should live. And so we’re very used to books disagreeing with each other. You know, this book will tell you to be hedonistic and live for the moment. The power of now, it’s all about the now. And this book will be--, you know, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. You must do everything in a very serious manner focused on the future. This is how you should live. And the next book will say, it’s just the power of love. Everything is love, you know, And all of these books disagree with each other, but we’re used to that.
Derek Sivers
How fun would it be to have all of that in one book, like Sum where every chapter disagrees with the rest and then like, boom, it like hit me on this very meaningful level that that matches with the pluralistic way that I see the world, that I don’t think there’s one answer. And I could never wholeheartedly go out to the world and say, “This is the answer. This is how to live.” Because I think pluralistically I think the answer is always a mix like an orchestra. You don’t go to a composer saying, “Well, which is the right instrument in life? Is it viola or is it bassoon?” Any composer would say, “That’s a ridiculous question. There is no right instrument. You use instruments at different times for different purposes.” And I think the same about life philosophies that we you use hedonism when needed and you use a very future thinking ten year plan kind of mindset when needed, and you use a kind of drop everything and give one thing your full attention when needed. And it’s the way that a composer would use an orchestra to kind of let the bassoon stop, let the viola play for a bit. Okay, “Now we’re going to bring in this combination of woodwinds. Now this is going to stop at the violins. Now let’s bring in the percussion behind the violins.” Like you do this with the philosophies of your life. And that solves or makes ridiculous all of the arguments about which one is correct. You know, the philosophers arguing like, no, no, no, this is reality. No, it’s not. This is reality. All of that seems ridiculous when you think of this pluralistic view.
Matt
It’s so funny.
Parul
Thank you for the insight.
Matt
Yeah. I just want to say, because Parul and I were talking about the book and I imagine part of the goal is to-- it was almost like it was a mirror to ourselves, like the things that we thought you were saying or the things that resonated with us. And we’re kind of it became a talking point to say, “Oh, no, it’s about this or no, it’s about that.” And yeah, just wanted to share. It’s a really cool concept. I totally encourage everyone to pick it up.
Parul
Now, you started writing this book in 2017 and published it last year. What did the time of writing look like for you? Are we writing daily, weekly? Are we writing to a specific deadline? How did you?
Derek Sivers
Daily and obsessively. I have a monomaniacal tendency. I don’t like to spread myself thin or think maybe once I felt the pain of spreading myself too thin, I made a decision to do the opposite. Where I will focus on one thing at a time to completion and do only that until it’s done. And that works wonderfully well when these are short things that can be done in a day or a week, maybe a month. But man, that was a hard thing when writing How to Live. Because now that I’ve told you the format and the story behind it, now imagine I decided to use this format to basically share every important thing I’ve ever learned in my life, every insight, every epiphany. I wanted to fit it into one book. And so the rough draft of this book was 1300 pages. So it took two years for me to dump everything I have to say about life, everything I’ve ever learned, almost like as if I was going to die tomorrow, what would I want my future descendants to know that I had learned in my life? This was it. That was putting everything into it. But of course, that would be a horrible, unreadable book. So then it took two years to take these 1300 pages and go back through it again. It’s just like, you know, compress, compress, compress. So what you see now is like every sentence in this little book used to be a page. That’s me like taking six paragraphs and thinking like just, making every word fight for its survival until it’s like there. I think this sentence captures the wisdom that I was trying to say in a page before. So that took another two years. But yeah, how I just every single hour I could I would wake up at 6 a.m. and just write or edit all day until midnight and do it again.
Parul
Wow. I really admire your focus and dedication to actually making it the best book you possibly could. And I suppose a lot of writers do fall down or struggle with the amount of time it might take to create the book they’re aspiring to write. Did you ever think about taking shortcuts, making it faster?
Derek Sivers
No, not for this one. There’s other kinds of writing. Okay? I mean, you guys said at the beginning, this book Anything You Want, I did this in 11 days or ten days because Seth said, “Just share what you’ve learned. Tell me your tale about growing CD baby and selling it. What did you learn along the way?” I went, “Oh, all right. Yeah, I’ve got some stories about that.” So I already had these things in mind. I was just telling my tale and even sharing lessons that I had already extracted for myself and had been sharing with friends in conversation. So all I had to do was write it down. So that was effortless. Just 11 days. There we go. Done. Good enough. It’s a different thing. How to Live was almost more like it’s a little bit like poetry. You know, in poetry you sweat every word. Whereas when you’re in a conversation with a friend, you don’t. So different styles of writing for different outcomes, right?
Parul
And there’s so many wonderful golden nuggets. We use the word nuggets a lot but don’t know what another term to describe it. There are so many truths within this book that Matt and I have scribbled away for the future, and I’d love to touch upon some of the topics you talk about. You talk about creating and you hit a really painful truth that many of us perhaps suffer from or encounter. When you talk about the importance of creating, you say, “The most valuable real estate in the world is the graveyard. There lie millions of half written books, ideas never launched, and the talents never developed. The way to live is to create. Calling yourself creative doesn’t make it true. Make finishing your top priority.” What do you think stops us from creating from what you’ve experienced, what trips us up?
Derek Sivers
I think we find our own ideas obvious because they’re already in our head. They are already how we think. So to us it’s obvious, but what’s obvious to you might be amazing to others. So it takes a reframing to really think, to share something useful, even if it seems obvious to you. A lot of the stuff that I said in my book called “Your Music and People”, so many musicians gave me such big thanks for the stuff that’s in that book. Like for those ten years while I was running CD Baby, I was sharing these kinds of things by email and by writing and people would say,” Oh my God, this changed my life. Oh, my God, thank you so much. That’s so useful. That’s so helpful. Wow. This really helps me think about, what I’m doing differently.” But to me, it was all just so obvious. It was almost like if somebody came to you and said,” All right, look, I’ve got this chicken coop, but I can’t find any eggs, where do you think the eggs might be?” And you’re just going, “Well, the obvious answer is under the chickens.” I won’t even need to say that.
Derek Sivers
Obviously, if he can’t find the eggs, they must be mysterious. So you launch some detective work to try to think of where else could these eggs be. “Have you looked on their roof? Maybe they’re falling in the cracks. Do you perhaps have wide gaps in the floor? Have you looked?” And then he said, “No, I’ve tried all those things. I couldn’t find the eggs.” And so you say, “Have you looked under the chickens?” Well, what do you know? There’s the eggs.” You know, it seems so obvious to you that you think, “Why would I even say this?” It’s obvious, but to somebody else it might be amazing. So, yeah, that’s how it feels to me sometimes to make yourself share these things that you already know and think but would be amazing to somebody else. I think that holds a lot of us back from sharing our perspective on the world. Your perspective is already yours. It’s already obvious to you, but to somebody else it might change their life.
Matt
I think a lot of people needed to hear that Derek. So thank you for sharing that. You also talk about making choices and many writers and artists and people in our community in particular struggle with the many choices it could just be, “Which project do I work on next?” It could be something else. And you’ve mentioned Burdens Donkey, the Fable about choice. And we’re curious how do you decide what to work on next? I know you have your popular phrase and the title of your book, “Hell Yeah or No”. You can tell us a bit about that. But also generally when you’re advising someone on how do they choose what project to go to next, how might you advise them?
Derek Sivers
I think it’s a combination of happy, smart and useful. I later learned this is maybe something like Ikigai, but happy, smart and useful is how I think about it. It’s the intersection of like it has to be something that makes you happy. Beacause happiness is like the oil in the machine, right? You could do something without happiness, but then it’s going to be a rusty machine grinding away. And that’s not sustainable. Useful means useful to others. So you could do something that only makes you happy. You could focus entirely on your lifestyle, you know, lifestyle design. I’m going to make a passive business that’s just going to make me money. And you hear from these people that think this way and what’s missing in their thought process is, is something actually being useful to other people. They’re so focused on themselves and what would make them happy. But if they’re not taking into consideration what’s useful to others, well, then it’s always going to be hard because it’s just going to be this kind of self fulfilling-- I’m missing a term there. But you know what I mean? If you’re not being useful to others, it’s ultimately not going to work out. And then smart. There are ways of doing things that will not be very effective. You know, you want to be a musician, but say you just keep playing at the same local venue in the middle of nowhere thinking that’s going to benefit your music career.
Derek Sivers
It might make you happy to play that venue and it might be useful to the nine people that attend. But it’s not a smart strategy for what you really want of being a full time musician. So I try to think constantly about the intersection, the Venn diagram of what makes me happy, what’s a smart strategy, and what’s useful to others. Yeah. And then the rest has to be that you can sit there and list all of the pros and cons, but ultimately it comes down to a gut level kind of feeling like this is the right thing to do. Not in a reactionary way, but like at a deeper level. There’s actually a really interesting new book about this called Wild Problems by Russ Roberts, I think is his name. He’s the host of the EconTalk podcast, which is also wonderful and Wild Problems was his book. Looking at these problems that are so big, it’s hard to quantify, like who to marry, what to do with your life. These are things that you can’t just write a simple pro-con list. And so he actually wrote a book inspecting that subject, which is pretty fascinating.
Parul
That’s smart, happy, useful. This is really interesting. And thanks for the book recommendation. On this same topic of making choices. You talk about-- you have the phrase “hell yeah or no”, something that we know. Man, I know through you. You’ve popularised that sort of term. And in that book, actually, you go a bit further and you say the answer to all future distractions is to say no until you finish what you started. So not only are we, you know, you’re pushing people to make a choice, but actually to stick with it to take away all potential distractions. I was going to say, it sounds hard.
Derek Sivers
But it was learned the hard way. I mean, I felt the pain from doing things 80% and not finishing that last 20% and then feeling the pain a year or two later going, “Damn it, like I did most of the work. I took that almost to completion and then I didn’t finish. What the hell all that time was so wasted. You know, that pain of regret, of wasted time. And so I think I just felt that pain more than once and strongly enough that I said, “All right, from now on, I need to finish things, because that’s where the deeper reward and joy comes from the finishing it.” So I push myself through that pain even if I don’t want to. It’s kind of like I do a weightlifting and there’s that thing where it’s like, okay, I know this is good for me. Sometimes it can feel good, but sometimes you’re lifting that bar and of course it doesn’t feel good, but you push yourself through that last one, even though it’s not fun, You know, you’re going on a long run and that last mile is miserable. You push yourself through it because you know that you’ll get the deeper satisfaction of finishing. So yeah, I think I just learned that the hard way. Now I just make myself finish.
Parul
And saying no to a lot of things or saying no to pretty much everything, apart from the one thing you’re trying to do means that you probably end up disappointing a lot of people. How do you deal with that? Or what have been your mechanisms?
Derek Sivers
Form letter. My short hack, take 20 minutes and write a really nice precomposed form letter saying no, it doesn’t have to be long. But I mean when I say 20 minutes, just be thoughtful and consider it and think about what it would be like to be in the position of the person asking you for something that you aren’t able to give right now. And you just write a really considerate form letter. And so then when it comes up even many times a day, copy paste, send, you know, it’s out of your head. So yeah, in fact, I have it assigned to a shortcut. I hit a backslash n and that sends my no form letter which is very considerately and nicely written. Somebody actually two people wrote me back once and saying that is the nicest rejection I’ve ever received. I said, “Oh thank you.” So I send that without stress. And that’s my favorite hack.
Parul
That’s great. I feel like asking you for something really big just so I can see that rejection letter.
Derek Sivers
No. Send.
Parul
What about when it’s personal? What about when it’s family? More sort of close relationships asking.
Parul
Is it a form letter?
Derek Sivers
Same.
Derek Sivers
I think I even have somewhat of a like a verbal version of that. I’m just like, no, sorry. Psychology studies have shown that if you give any reason for anything, something in us feels a little validated. So there was like a long queue for people waiting for a cup of coffee or something like that. And they had some students do experiments to like go to the front of the queue and do like four different things. One was just like, “Excuse me, can I cut in front of you?” And that got mostly no, the next one was like, “Excuse me, I’m so sorry, could I cut in front of you? I’m giving a presentation in one minute. I really just need to grab this.” That got mostly yes, but then they did the variations, and it turns out that the last one was the most surprising, that you could cut the queue and say, “I’m so sorry, I need to cut the queue because I need a cup of coffee.” And even the fact that you’re because was almost meaningless, it worked something like almost as well as the big desperate reason that just giving a because works so that because I’ve chosen which is usually true is just say, “I’m really focused on my work right now. I just need to finish this. I’m sure you understand.” And you know, most people say yes, because most people kind of want that for themselves, too. I mean, part of the reason you’re asking me about this is we all wish that we could say no better. So I think when you say no to somebody in a kind, thoughtful way and just say, no, I’m sorry, I’ve just really focused on my work right now. I can’t. A lot of people go, “Cool. I appreciate that.”
Matt
I’m fantasizing about using the cup of coffee excuse over email. No, I’m sorry. I have to get a cup of coffee. That’s great. We are going to turn to some of your writing process and your practice for our questions next.
Parul
So yeah, I’d love to start talking about your writing process. You talked about how you spent two years for “How to Live” just writing everything out, everything that was in your head, all the ideas and concepts, philosophies when it came to editing, is that when you started to think about plot and narrative, or was that something that came earlier?
Derek Sivers
Oh. No, “How to Live” is kind of a weird example. So let me actually use my next book called “Useful Not True”, which I’m just at the very beginning of right now. So this is slightly different where I have a rough idea of what I want to say, but I know it’s not complete yet. There’s still more discovery to do. Like part of the reason I’m writing this book is because I find the subject fascinating and I want to learn more about it. I want to share my existing thoughts about it, but also learn more about this until kind of sharing my conclusions, right? So I think that’s for example, what James Clear did with “Atomic Habits” is like long ago, he said, “I think habits are fascinating. I think I’m going to write a book about this.” So he took a few years to write “Atomic Habits”, and he was learning about habits along the way as he was writing that book until it became the definitive book on habits. So my next book, Useful Not True.
Derek Sivers
I’m at that super early stage where, yeah, I am having to shape you said the plot and narrative, so maybe plot doesn’t apply. But like the structure, how am I going to present this argument of that we should use beliefs for their utility to us, not because they’re true or not. How am I going to build up that argument? And so sometimes I see other books that I like their structure. There was a book called “Code” just called Code. I forget the author’s name. That’s about understanding how all the code in our life works, from electronic switches to Morse code to Braille to computer CPUs to, you know, Python. And he builds it up in such a beautiful stack of building blocks from the very beginning. So I think the shape comes very early on because then that changes everything else for me. I’m no expert at this. I mean, those fiction writers in the audience, you have way more experience than I do about plot and narrative from mostly my books have just been sharing a compilation of essays.
Parul
And do you get outside help? Do you have editorial help? Do you have anyone mentors, beta readers?
Derek Sivers
For the first time? Literally last night I sent my very very rough draft of “Useful Not True” to a few different developmental editors. Is that what they’re called?
Parul
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
I’ve never worked with developmental editors before. This is my first time ever, so I’m trying this.
Matt
And why did you decide to try this with this book? What about this book is different or what’s changed in your head?
Derek Sivers
Personally, just for new experience? You know, the same way that somebody tells me about acupuncture. I’m like, “I’ve never tried that. I’ll try that.” You know, it’s like developmental editing. I’ve never tried that, but partially because I didn’t already know exactly what I wanted to say with this book. But I did want to make it a really strong structure. Like I wanted the reader to be very convinced and persuaded bit by bit while reading this book that this is how to think about beliefs. So I thought it would help to have some outside help I can get.
Parul
Basically I wanted to say that your titles are very catchy. “Hell yeah or No”, “How to Live”. Can you tell us anything about the thought process? Are these just phrases that you’ve already had or have you edited them, worked on them, honed them?
Derek Sivers
Oh, there’s one interesting story about that. In short, no. Like as soon as I had the idea for the How to Live book, the title came first. Hell Yeah or No was just one little essay that I wrote in 2009 that I wrote in 20 minutes. But people seem to love it. And people have even made like tea cups that say “Hell yeah or No” and t-shirts. And so I was like, “Well, I think my next book is going to be called Hell Yeah or No.” People seem to like that. But this one, “Your Music and People”, this is a funny story. So I’m not an expert computer programmer, but I know a bit and I wasn’t sure what to call this book. I had so many different working titles that were all completely different. It used to be called like marketing your music, how to call attention to your music. It had many different working titles. Finally, I did a word count. I had finished the contents of the book, but I didn’t know what to call the title, so I did the word count where I said, “Show me the most popular word.” Of course, like the next four most popular words in order were your music and people or sorry not and and was up above but your music people. I was like that’s it, “The book is going to be called ’Your Music and People’ word count.” So yeah, if you’re ever not sure what to call your book, do a word count of the most popular words in it. And once you get rid of the most common pronouns and conjunctions, you might have your title.
Parul
I’d love to talk about criticism and artists. We struggle to put our work out and potentially have someone tell us that it didn’t resonate with them or worse. And we had a previous guest, Laura K, a fiction writer, who says that she just simply doesn’t read her reviews online at all. And I’ve seen that you’ve said publicly. “Comments are just feedback on something you’ve made and that you should therefore distance yourself from that.” So do you read feedback? Do you take it constructively?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I think there are two different stages. There’s the stage where you’re still working on something, you’re still very open to changing it. And then, yeah, the more feedback, the better. Even if you disagree with 99%, every now and then somebody will point out a comment and you’ll go, “Oh, that’s a really good point.” And that’s so useful when you’re still changing it. But then to me, like once it’s done, you just need to feel good about it in yourself. You have to please yourself first. I’m sorry. This is to me, this is one of those, like, obvious look under the chicken things. Like you have to please yourself so much first that you are so damn proud of your writing. It’s like that you are happy no matter what. So when I put any of these books out into the world and then they get some bad feedback when somebody leaves a bad review, I just smile like, “All right, you didn’t like it. Cool. I really don’t care because I love this book.” I think it really helps to have that separation between whether this is done or not. And that was always the problem to me. When musicians for years when I was running CD Baby would finish recording an album and it was done. It was pressed like on a CD, it was done. And then they would hand it to me and say, “Let me know what you think.” And I would just like, “I’m not going to let you know what I think because I’m also a musician.” I’m going to say like, “All right, that bridge could have been longer. You should cut that verse. You should-- the hi hats too loud here.” But it’s too late for that kind of feedback. Anyway, that’s not your question. Yeah. To me, you have to feel so proud of your work when you’re calling it done that you honestly won’t care. Even if everybody hates it, it’ll just be like, “All right, so what? I love it.”
Parul
I mean, it’s a wonderful attitude to have. Have you always had that level of confidence? I think about some of the writers in our community who might be have a lot of self-doubt about their work.
Derek Sivers
Sorry, I’m no use then. Yeah, I’ve always had that. Even with my music. Long ago I would write these songs. I mean, I wrote over, you can go on my website. If you go to sive.rs/music, you can hear teenage Derek had over a hundred songs that I wrote and recorded and put out into the world, and I loved them. And if somebody didn’t like them, I was like, “Well, sucks to be you. It’s a good song.”
Parul
And I mean, maybe I’m thinking back to when I asked you about your attitude towards money and having acquiring things and how that seemed to just be a part of--. You had a philosophy there, you know about that you had enough, perhaps when you were younger. I’m not sure if it was philosophy, but there was something underlying and I’m wondering maybe there’s no simple answer here, but I’m just thinking, what is it about people who, including you, who just believe in what they do and don’t need that outside validation? Do you have any sense of where that might come from for you just being happy with what you think?
Derek Sivers
You know, I’ve never thought about it like that before, but an old girlfriend of mine that I hadn’t talked to in like 15 years called me up. So we hadn’t talked in 15 years. And within the first minute she said, “Let me ask you a question. Do you remember what you told me when I asked you if you would make music if you were the last person on earth?” And I went, “What? No.” And she goes, “Oh my God, you don’t even remember this.” I said, “No.” She said, “This to me has been like the legend of Derek Sivers. For the last 15 years I’ve told this story about 100 times and you have been the subject of conversation or like this question has been a starter because you blew my mind when I asked you would you make music if you were the last person on earth?’ And I said, ’Why?’ And she said, “Well, what is your answer?” I said, :Well, yes, of course.” And she went, “Oh, I don’t understand that. How the hell would you be interested in making music if you were the last person on earth?” And I said, “Well, how the hell would you not like there’s nothing else to do. Like you have no obligations. You don’t owe anyone anything because there’s nobody to owe. So you could just sit and make music until the end of time.” And she goes,” I don’t get that at all. That makes no sense to me.”
Derek Sivers
I said, “Why?” And she said, “Because ultimately everything I do is for other people.” And I went, “Oh, that’s weird. Like, to me, ultimately everything I do is for myself.” Like any time I’m writing, yes, I’m trying to be useful to others with my public writing, but I can mostly tell when I’ve made something that’s useful to others by my own standards. So it’s like there I think I put these words in such a way that these are useful to others. I have pleased myself. I have done that well. And it’s the same thing with writing a song. It’s like I had an idea of how this line could go with that melody and how these words could go there and how I could arrange it like this and do that. And it’s like I work hard and I make that song happen. And then if I’m not happy with it yet, then it’s not done yet. I keep working with it until I’m happy with it or throw it out, but once I’m happy with it, it’s like, “There I did it, I did it. I made that bass line, go with that melody, go with this idea.” I’m happy with it. And I put it out in the world and it’s like, even if everybody hates it, I’m like, “I don’t care. Ultimately, I’m doing it for me.” So maybe I’d never thought about that before, but maybe that’s a difference.
Parul
That’s really interesting because it makes me reflect and something I’ll definitely have to think about later. Do I do what I do for the purposes of expressing myself, or do I do it for validation? Maybe I should look again at those tasks and those actions because you have more control.
Derek Sivers
Sorry to repeat a point, but unless that works for you, you know, like some amazing human achievements have come from people seeking validation. Like don’t think that that’s wrong. Just because some dude on an interview said he doesn’t do it that way. You know, if that works for you, stick with it. Just, you know, we all have our different things that drive us. We have different fuel, so that may be yours. Yeah.
Parul
And maybe that actually makes me challenge this idea of, yeah, it’s a question, is it okay to do something validation? For me, I think the answer is probably not. I would like to hope that I don’t do things for validation and this questioning is helping me. So thank you.
Matt
So, Derek, you’ve written about you said this, that you have a relationship with your phone that many of us strive for. You didn’t say that part. That’s what I said. You have no apps or email on your phone, at least at the time of writing. Airplane mode. Most of the time you power off an hour before bed, turn it back on after you’ve done your writing in the morning. I just want to share that because I think maybe that would be inspiring for some people. Maybe that’s a rule you can take into your writing. But I’m curious, do you have any other rules or rituals that you create for yourself to put yourself in a state of writing aside from the phone?
Derek Sivers
Most of them are related to disconnecting. I’m thankful that I grew up at a time in an age where the internet used to be something that you would like physically dial into. You had to actually like take the phone and do a thing and put in the cable, and then you would use your home phone to connect to the internet. So that meant like while you were using the internet, nobody could use the phone at home. So it was this very limited thing. Like you would plug it in and turn it on and connect to the internet in order to get something you needed, which might meant downloading our email or, you know, why you were going online. It wasn’t the default. And I think that was really useful. I think it’s not Luddite or nostalgic to say that some things are better than others and that sometimes the thing that’s better is the thing that’s in the future. You want to make things differently for the future. But sometimes we can look and say, actually that was a better way of doing it. And so I think that connecting to the internet with a purpose and for a limited time is very useful because I think a lot of us can say that our always on state is a big part of the problem. It’s like living in a house full of junk food all the time, whereas getting rid of the junk food would be very smart. So yeah, most of my productivity tips or hacks or whatever, I forget exactly how you phrased the question, but it would come down to usually disconnecting, right?
Matt
What is a good day of writing look like for you? Do you have a measurement stick that you say this was a good day?
Derek Sivers
Insights. I mean, to me that’s a part of writing is where you you have the stuff it’s already here and it’s just a little bit of like slog work to like to get it out of here and into there where you already know what you want to say. It’s just the craft of getting it out. But then sometimes you’re exploring and that to me is kind of a bit like journal writing. You asked at the very, very beginning where I say a certain thing and then I immediately question it. I’m like, “Is that really true? Is that like, wait, hold on, what’s okay? That’s one way of looking at it. “What’s another way of looking at it?” And I ask myself these questions and sometimes I’m like, “Ooh, ooh.” I get these epiphanies while I’m writing. And that is the best day of writing is when you have those epiphanies that you discover while you’re writing.
Matt
Something we all long for.
Parul
So in “How to Live”, you say we talk about short term thinking and you say short term thinking is the root of most of our problems from pollution to debt, personal and global. And so you talk about the importance and the relevance of applying long term thinking. So I’m curious about how you apply long term thinking to your creative goals. What long term goals are you pursuing at the moment?
Derek Sivers
I think it’s funny. A dear friend of mine is very hedonistic and has a very congruent philosophy of how this moment is everything and everything you should do should just be for this moment. And when the next moment comes, you decide what’s the next thing to do for that moment? But there are things that will only happen if you have a plan, right? Like a building, a big building like the size of a museum. That will not happen if you just approach each day on its own. It takes foresight and planning to make a big building happen. And I think it can be the same thing with a book. It could take a lot of planning and you have to know where it’s going and why you’re doing this and what the purpose is. So yeah, like right now, to answer your question, my next book, “Useful Not True”, is taking a lot of planning. I enjoy programming and so a lot of the things I’m programming will take a lot of planning. But then there are things like I don’t really have a ten year plan that I’m following now, but I think that you can have an idea of your life. All right, I’m going to experiment, tell you a very personal one that might be of no use to anyone, but I had a ten year plan when I left America in 2010. I sold CD Baby in 2008, and I had spent my whole life in America until that point. And I had been like a fly inside the jar, not realizing that the lid was off the jar. And I kind of forgot that I could leave.
Derek Sivers
And so once I realized that, I said, “Okay, well, I’ve spent the first 40 years of my life in the US. I want to spend the next 40 out.” But that wasn’t just done in a hedonistic, I feel like leaving way. It was like, “I’m going to really do this thing. I want to live in many different countries for six months each. I want to get to know their culture. I want legal ties to this countries so I can be a legal resident or a legal citizen or have some other rights there. So I’m not just adrift and floating through. I want to feel ties to this place, each place.” So I set out on this very intentional journey with this long plan to make those things happen. And I did. And sorry, you know, you’re from New Zealand, but like, I love this country so much. It is a huge, huge, deep joy that I have New Zealand citizenship like I coveted that black New Zealand passport way more than most people would covet a mansion or $1 million or a Ferrari or whatever. Like I really wanted the legal bond to this country so badly that, you know, you have to do nine months of paperwork and then be here nine months per year for six years and then do this and that. And after six years of work, I had it. I have my New Zealand citizenship for life now, and so does my kid, and his kids will automatically have it and all that. Like that is such a deep joy that required some long term planning. So that’s one example, is it doesn’t have to rule your life.
Parul
Right? So you’ve reached the end. Yeah, I like that.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I’m done. Yeah.
Parul
Well, you’ve that sort of, you know, this general idea of wanting to leave the US and travel and have citizenship elsewhere. You’ve achieved it. And now when you think of your mountain top in the years to come, that goal you might be pursuing, what might that look like for you? Some might say you’ve already achieved so much. Oh, but there may be other things on your horizon. Dreams you have. What do they look like?
Derek Sivers
Oh, it’s funny. That’s like a belief. That’s kind of the subject of my next book that I’m excited about is that we get that--. Anytime you say I believe, whatever comes next is not true, it’s something that you’re choosing to believe. You wouldn’t have to say I believe if it was true, we don’t say I believe in rocks because there they are, there rocks. It’s those things that we’re choosing a certain perspective because it works for us and that’s why we’re adopting it. And that’s why we say I believe. So some people would say, “I believe I’m just at the very beginning of my journey.” And that perspective would help them think of the further mountains they want to climb. But somebody else might say, “I believe that I am whole and complete, that there is nothing else I need in my life that I have already arrived at the top of the mountain. There is nothing more I need to be or do.” And that belief might give them the tranquility that they want if they’ve spent years suffering with ambition or something like that. So it’s neither one of those is true. It’s just a perspective you’re choosing to adopt. So yeah, of course, the way that I see life is I choose to believe that I’m still at the beginning of the journey and have so far to go and so much I want to do. Yeah, so that’s the one I choose to believe.
Matt
Thank you, Derek. Well, this has been amazing to spend this time with you. So appreciate your time and the work that you do. We hope you keep doing it and we can’t wait for the next book, please. We’ll be watching closely as it comes out.