Radio New Zealand
host: Jesse Mulligan
New Zealand, philosophy of exploration, skepticism, parenting
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Transcript:
Jesse
Interesting people from around the world can be hiding in plain sight here in New Zealand. Derek Sivers is one of them. A musician turned dotcom millionaire, he’s the founder of CD Baby, one of the largest sellers of independent music on the web. He sold it, gave most of the money to charity. Travelled the world, had a son and landed in Wellington 12 years ago. He’s given TEDx talks with millions of views and dedicates himself to learning, gathering ideas like seeds, letting them germinate until they grow into books and posts for his website. He writes about everything from creativity to entrepreneurship to usefulness. And Derek Sivers joins me now from Wellington. Hello there.
Derek Sivers
Hi, Jesse. Thanks for having me.
Jesse
Why Wellington, you could have been in Silicon Valley, but instead you chose Stokes Valley.
Derek Sivers
Exactly. I actually really like the weather here, but the real answer is that I had too much freedom at the time that my son was born. We were traveling the world, and we just happen to be living in Singapore when our son was born. And at first I thought he’d grow up in Singapore, but then I thought, “Oh, kids need more nature. They need outside. They need a connection with the real world, not just shopping malls.” And I thought, “Well, if he could grow up anywhere on Earth, what would be the best place in the world to grow up?” And of course, New Zealand. So I did about nine months of paperwork and became a legal resident and moved here really for the sole purpose of raising my son. And just so glad I did. I’ve just, you know, felt a much deeper connection to it since then.
Jesse
Some New Zealanders don’t feel like we retain enough of that. I guess that free spirit, that outdoorsy New Zealand vibe. But you find that it’s not as noticeably apparent here, different to other countries.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I mean, it’s all relative, right. So I’m sure if somebody today is comparing today to their life in the 1970s or something, then it might be a disappointing comparison. But if you compare it to life in, I don’t know, Chicago or Singapore or Berlin, then you can realize how well we have it here.
Jesse
And I mean, you don’t just have a bolthole here. You actually gave up your US citizenship. Why go all in?
Derek Sivers
That was for quirky, esoteric reasons. There’s a fable, apparently true of a military leader that went to foreign enemy shores, and he had about 100 soldiers on three boats, and he got to the enemy shores, and there were a thousand enemies waiting to kill them. And so as soon as he got his men off the ships, he turned to his men and said, “Now burn the ships.” He said, “We cannot retreat. We must not retreat. Burn the ships.” And so burning the ships became a metaphor for forcing yourself to push ahead when you know you might be tempted to retreat. So I left America 13 years ago, and it was my comfort zone. You know, I’m 53 now. I had spent my whole life until the age of 40 in America, and I just could tell that anytime things got tough, I just wanted to retreat to my comfort zone. So I thought, I need to burn the ships.
Jesse
That’s brilliant. One of your Ted talks is a real favorite of ours. Well, actually, 10 million people have watched it, so I’m guessing it’s a few people’s favorite. It’s about the importance of the first follower, the person who stands up and joins the crazy person dancing alone at a festival. Someone who has the courage to join. I love that idea. Do you find that your life is a balance of being a leader and being a follower? I wonder if a follower is as big a skill as recognizing someone else’s good idea.
Derek Sivers
Honestly, neither. I’ve recently learned the difference between a leader and an explorer. Right. So a leader by definition has to be someone who is easy to follow or enticing to follow. But an explorer is annoying to follow. You know, if you think of the classic explorer in the pith helmet going into the jungles of darkest Peru, that person would be really annoying to follow because it’s like, “Oh, let’s try this. Oh no, that didn’t work out. Oh, what’s in this cave? Oh, never mind it’s not a cave. What’s at the top of this hill? Let’s get to the top. Nothing’s here. Let’s try this. Nope, that doesn’t work.” So an explorer just goes and tries lots of things. But then when the explorer finds a nice harbor and says, “This looks like a good place to settle.” Well, then the explorer sends the message back to the queen or whoever who says, “Okay, now I need to get a leader to to get all of our people to go to this new place.” And that’s a leader who puts the blinders on and says, “Okay, everybody, this way. We’re going here. I will not be told otherwise. We will not let anything get in our way. We’re going to this one place. Everyone follow me.” You know, the leader sells the dream on how life will be better in this new place. So follow me. This is our destination. That’s a leader who’s easy to follow. I’ve never been a leader or a follower. I’m just an explorer.
Jesse
Mind you, people do get a lot out of your ideas. And people will have worked out already from this interview that you are an ideas man, and one of the ideas you have right now, I think, is that you can hold many philosophies in your head at the same time. This idea that no beliefs are true, they are just useful. Would you mind fleshing that out a bit for us?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I actually just wrote a book on this subject called “How to Live”, and the title is ironic because its subtitle is “27 Answers and One Conflicting Resolution”. So the idea is that there’s 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion. Sorry, that’s the subtitle. The there are different valid ways to live that you could say, “You know what the way to live is to commit long term, get the benefits of staying in one place, committing to one career path, commit to one person, commit to a community.” And that’s true. There are amazing benefits to living that way. But then somebody else can make an equally valid argument to say, “Here’s how to live. Just go fill your senses. Be opportunistic at any moment or every moment. Just be hedonistic. Live life. Say yes to everything. Go everywhere. Do everything.” And that is also a valid way to live. And then a German philosopher may tell you, “Here’s how to live. Steer towards the pain, whatever hurts, that’s what you should be doing.” That’s also a valid way to live. And there are good arguments behind it. And eventually I realized, like, none of these are wrong and none of these are right. They’re all possible. And then my favorite idea is that we can mix and match them like an orchestra. You know, like a conductor or a composer of an orchestra doesn’t have to decide what’s the best instrument. Clarinet or viola. He says, “Well, no, I’m going to use them all at different times.” So yeah, I think we could use these different approaches to life the way a composer combines instruments or lets the violins take a solo at this time and then stops and lets the brass section take over, you know. So yeah, that’s how I think about life.
Jesse
Is it possible to do that and still have a kind of a true north, a compass? You know, if you’re sampling from all the different, I guess, you shorthand all the different isms, can you get a bit lost on the way?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I mean, don’t we all? Isn’t that you don’t always know where north is, and that’s okay. I think there are times in your life when you say, “Okay, I need to re--”. What do you call that? Resituate myself. I need that compass. I need to know where I’m going.
Jesse
Recalibrate.
Derek Sivers
Thank you. That’s the word I was looking for. But there are other times in life where you kind of want to get a little lost and a little dizzy and have a little adventure and not know where you are. So I think we can do that philosophically, too. There are times in your life where you might take everything you’ve said yes to and say no to that, and take the things you used to say no to and say yes to that for a while. You know the classic OE experience, right? You just shake things up, you go somewhere strange, you go overseas, you have an adventure. Maybe it lasts one year, maybe it lasts 20 years, and then you come back to something. When you feel that you need to come back to something.
Jesse
You’re talking about a certain open mindedness there. But I know that there is a time when you value skepticism as well. What is the right amount of skepticism and how do you stop it turning into cynicism?
Derek Sivers
Oh, skepticism. This actually goes back to your question about the “Useful Not True” approach. I think skepticism is so useful. To realize that the stories we’ve been told and the stories we tell ourselves are not absolutely true. They are a fiction. They are a story. There’s a physical reality, you know, like I’m standing on two feet right now while we’re talking. That’s a physical reality. But the things we tell ourselves, like Wellington’s a great place to live or Wellington’s a terrible place to live, or my friend rejected me last month, or whatever it may be. We tell ourselves these stories, and you have to catch yourself with a healthy dose of skepticism to go, “Actually, wait, that’s not really true, is it? You know, my friend did not reject me. My friend just said, sorry, I can’t right now, and I don’t know the actual reasons, you know, and Wellington is not objectively a great or terrible place to be. It’s a place I can make of it what I want.” So I think skepticism can be so healthy. To dissolve those stories we tell ourselves. Because then you realize you’re free to make up your own story that serves you better. So that’s why I call it Useful Not True. It doesn’t really matter since most things are not objectively absolutely true anyway, you can make up the story that’s useful for you in this moment.
Jesse
I’m talking to Derek Sivers, musician turned dotcom millionaire turned deep thinker, a US citizen who’s renounced it and joined us here in New Zealand, and dotcom millionaire. It’s used for shorthand, you know, I’m sure there’s a longer story.
Derek Sivers
I got to just say one thing quickly. It’s funny that I go down to the Sunday market, and I see the people that are just selling muffins or cookies, and you could just tell it’s like one person that just said, “You know what, I’m good at making these cookies. My friends like these cookies. I’m going to sell these cookies at the Sunday market.” And my thing that I started years ago was just like that. It was like me selling cookies at the Sunday market. But the weirdly lucky timing of it, it’s just so weird that it just snowballed and turned big. And so now you say dotcom millionaire? And I look over my shoulder like, who are you talking about? Oh, me. Oh yeah.
Jesse
And you are the sort of person that I can imagine having quite a good conversation with that cookie seller and walking away from the conversation, having learned something. I mean, you’ve referenced German philosophers in this conversation, but I know well, I think that you feel we’re sometimes a little pretentious about where our wisdom comes from, where it should come from.
Derek Sivers
Oh, yeah. I mean. It’s nice to separate good ideas from the source. Meaning a drunk face down in a gutter could give you a useful bit of wisdom, like it doesn’t matter the source. And I think that’s important to remember, because sometimes, especially when politics gets very us versus them, or people get into these little tribes, not even political, but just you say I’m a fan of this writer and that writer is a bad person or because that person did something bad. But you know what? Even people that do something bad or make a bad life choice can still have good wisdom, you know? So somebody can write a great book that’s really useful to you and have a lot of useful ideas. And if you find out later that author or thinker or movie star or whatever didn’t pay their taxes, does that mean everything they did up to that point is invalid? No. It’s still useful to you no matter what other mistakes they might have made. So I used to do this thing whenever I would buy a book that had a picture of the author on the cover, you know, those kind of books that are like, “Look at me. I will tell you the way.” I would literally rip the front cover off that book because I’m like, I don’t want to see your stupid face. This book is about me, not you. I’m reading this for my sake. I don’t care who you are. And I think it’s important to separate the lessons from the messenger.
Jesse
You are, I think, trying to live your best life. It seems to guide a lot of what you do and think about and write about, and some people might view that as quite a frustrating or intimidating quest to live the best possible life, given all the options. But you recently said good enough is a superpower. How does that help?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I learned that lesson from a brilliant book called “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz, psychology professor who had been studying choice theory. Came to the conclusion that people who try to make the best possible decision at all times, they might technically make a slightly better decision, but they’re going to feel worse about it because they looked into all the different options too much. So now they’re too aware of all the other options they could have chosen, and they feel worse about whatever choice they do make. And he said, on the other hand, people who we call satisficers, who are people who say good enough end up making almost as good of a decision as the maximizers, the people trying to get the best possible position. But most importantly, they feel better about the choices that they’ve made. Because they didn’t maximize and didn’t sweat it too much. They made a simple choice, decided to stick with it, said good enough and psychology matters. How we feel matters more than objectively making the best possible choice. So I read that book long ago, 2007, and I really took that message to heart. And I’ve been living that way ever since.
Jesse
And do you think at some point good enough will be a country that is in New Zealand? Do you foresee a time where you might feel like it’s time to move on?
Derek Sivers
Sorry, I misunderstood the question. I thought you meant. Do you think New Zealand will someday be good enough? Wait. What? Jesse. Oh, okay. I see what you’re saying.
Jesse
You’re good enough right now. But, you know, you’re always looking around the world at what makes the next best move for you. So what do you think? How long will we have you for?
Derek Sivers
Oh, no. New Zealand is way under my skin. No, I’m a citizen now. I’m very, very proud of that. I look at my black passport with a deep sense of happiness and identity. Like I’ve really internalized it. And I’m very thankful that you let me in, Jesse. But no, the other places. Yeah. I think that I’m probably overdue for another OE and get to know somewhere else. Actually, I just two months ago went to Bangalore, India, and I was surprised how nice it is. We think of places like that as, you know, so foreign. But I sat down and talked with 50 people. I lined up 50 meetings with 50 random people that just people who had emailed me over the years because they know me from my books, and I had 51 hour conversations with 50 people. And I feel really connected to that place, too. Wow. So that’s a place that I’d like to get to know more. But yeah, I think we all occasionally need a little OE to shake things up and also to remind us how nice we have it here.
Jesse
You mentioned your son, and that being a big part of the reason for choosing New Zealand, I have to ask as someone who’s passionate about learning. Is there one thing that you have learned from being a parent that sticks out for you?
Derek Sivers
Every kid is different. I think the trust thing is hard. You know, we play on the craggy rocks a lot, you know, by the Wellington airport. My favorite neighborhood in all of Wellington is called Breaker Bay. It’s those craggy rocks just past the runway. And we’ve spent a lot of his childhood there. He’s 11 now, but ever since he was one year old, we spent hours on those craggy rocks. And so many times he’ll get up to the brink of one, and I’ll be so worried that he’s going to fall. And I just have to pause and let him explore. Because here’s the lesson I learned. Bit broken bones may take a few months to heal. But fear can take a lifetime and never heal. So I’d much rather he break a bone than live with fear.
Jesse
I love that. You had a philosophy of not getting too comfortable doing stuff that scares you. Actually, when you become a parent, a lot of that stuff comes as part of the package, right? You don’t have much chance to get too comfortable in those early years.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I think comfort doesn’t always just have to mean racing off to, you know, sleep in a jail in Istanbul for the night. It can even just mean subtle things, like the fear of starting a new business or starting a group, or joining a group or going paddle boarding for the first time. Things that are completely compatible with being a parent and having a domestic life, that’s your primary life. But I think we can still find these little things that scare us. I think it’s a wonderful compass. A rule of thumb I’ve had since I was a teenager is whatever scares you, go do it, because I think it’s a really good compass to follow. Because if you keep doing those things that scare you, it shows you like this is the growing opportunity in your life. Got that from Abraham Maslow. He was a contemporary of Freud’s but studied the healthiest individuals instead of the most deranged. And and that was one of his maxims is he said, “If you really want to be self-actualized and live your fullest self, 100 times a day, when you are presented with a choice between safety and growth, make the growth choice a hundred times a day.” So I try to follow his advice.
Jesse
That’s a nice place to end the conversation. I just wanted to mention, too, that you do invite people who have an opinion to share with you, who are moved to comment on something you’ve done, whether it’s a book or a post or an interview, to get in touch. I mean, some authors prefer just for it to go one way and to have a bit of a wall up. But why do you why do you keep that open, that flow of dialogue?
Derek Sivers
Believe it or not, Jesse, one of the greatest joys in my life is my email inbox. I hear from strangers around the world and honestly, I was super excited to talk with you today because I have never, in my 12 years of living here, done anything on RNZ or the local radio here. I’ve never done it. Like you said at the beginning, I’ve been hiding in plain sight. I’ve been hiding here, speaking to a worldwide audience, but never really spoken to my local audience. So. Hi neighbors. Yes, send me an email. Go search the web for my name, go to my website, Derek Sivers and send me an email and introduce yourself. I would love to meet more of my neighbors here.
Jesse
What a pleasure it’s been to chat to you today. Thank you so much. Great to have you in New Zealand. Thanks for all the intelligence that you’re putting out into the world. And Derek Sivers, thanks for your time.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Jesse.