Ready For Launch
host: Ian Black
importance of location, parenting in nature, writing, entrepreneurship, culture
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Transcript:
Ian
Hello and welcome to “Ready for Launch”, the show, where I talk to inspiring people about the process of launching their businesses and ideas into the world. I’m super stoked today to have someone who has inspired me so many times in the last few years through their writing. Derek Sivers, welcome to “Ready for Launch”. How are you doing today?
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Ian. Good. We are talking from absolutely opposite sides of the world. It is nighttime in France. It’s first thing in the morning here in New Zealand and we’re ready to go.
Ian
Yeah you’re going to have a lot more energy than I have today. Cool. Well, it’s an absolute pleasure to be speaking to you. Most people don’t know this. Probably you don’t know it either. But when I started this podcast a couple of years ago, my mom actually asked me who my dream guest would be to have on the show, and the only person I could think of was you.
Derek Sivers
No way.
Ian
Here we are. So proof that you can do anything if you put your mind to it and send the right email to the right person.
Derek Sivers
That’s so cool. Thanks for telling me that. Actually thanks for saving that surprise till now. That’s sweet.
Ian
Yeah, but this is not a show about me. It’s a show about you and your writing journey. I usually get my guests to introduce themselves and their history, but I promised you I would do that piece for you, as there’s about 100 other podcasts that you have done that job. So here we go. Here’s my version of your life. Derek was born in California, 1969. Decided you wanted to become a musician. And for about a decade through most of your 20s, you did just that while also performing as the ringleader in a circus. You then kind of accidentally started a company called CD Baby that sold the music of independent artists. And about ten years later, you sold that company and donated the proceeds to a charitable trust. You then decided to become a speaker, performed at TEDx, and then went on to publish four books during all of that, you’ve moved from Oregon to California to New Zealand to England, and I believe back to New Zealand. And you’re now writing your fifth book, and today you’re here to talk about that on the show. Is there anything you’d like to add to that?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, actually, I’m here to talk more about the listener. I get uncomfortable when I think it’s about me, because I think anybody listening to this show is not really here to learn about me. They’re here to learn about things that they could apply to their own life. So I think a few times if you start asking about me directly, I might kind of deflect it into lessons I’ve learned that I think your listeners could use.
Ian
That is absolutely fine. So you are back in New Zealand again, where it is winter. What is it about New Zealand that brought you back there? Of all the places you’ve lived.
Derek Sivers
It helps to have a rational checklist of where you’d like to be based on what you know about yourself. I think the decision of where to live is almost as important as the decision of who to marry. I think that your location affects so many things in your life. It affects the people you’re around, the amount of ambition you’re around, it affects the values that you’re surrounded by, especially if you decide to have kids then. Your location is going to choose your kids values. Yeah, I know a Muslim family from India that moved to New York City when their kids were tiny, when they were babies, and assumed that they would be raising good Muslim children. But of course, they’re living in New York City, so their kids just adopted the local values, and the parents are so frustrated and well, you know, the place you live chooses your values. So I think we should put a lot of deliberate thought and intentional action into choosing where we live. So New Zealand is the right place for me for now, mostly because of my kid. I think it’s about the best place in the whole world to raise a kid, especially young kids. The nature, the freedom here is just a very free lifestyle. Not a lot of crime outside of Auckland, just a lot of trust and freedom and good values. So yeah, my kid is just grown up running around safely in this nature paradise, I think has been the best for that. So that’s really the main reason I’m here.
Ian
Did you have to try a lot of different places before you realized that, like where you felt right for you?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. So for me personally, if it weren’t for having a kid, I was living in Singapore and loving it. I was loving being in this hub in the middle of Asia, this amazing travel hub. I loved the people of Singapore. I love the government. Actually, the government of Singapore is amazing. So interesting to get to know. But then my kid was born and after a few months, I realized, okay, if he grows up in Singapore, he’s going to grow up completely indoors. There’s not a lot of outdoors in Singapore. There are some parks in between highways, you know. But I just realized that I thought it was important for kids to have that connection with the real physical world. You know, of water flowing around their ankles and mud squishing between their fingers. And I think that connection to the real physical world is important. And so, yeah, chose to move down here from Singapore after realizing that Singapore wasn’t the best place, in my opinion, to raise a kid. I think it would be a great place to be a teenager. I think it would be a great place to be 20s, 30s. Hell, I think it’s a great place to be in your 60s or 70s. The elderly are very incorporated into society, not hidden away. I think it would be a great place to be old. Yeah I love Singapore a lot, but just not for this. So I guess the other lesson learned from this is that there’s not necessarily one right place forever. At different phases of your life, there might be times where the right place for you to be is New York City, and then the right place for you to be is France.
Ian
Yes, I certainly understand that mentality of the importance of nature. I grew up in London, one of one of the best cities in the world, I still believe. But I moved to Canada. Yeah, six or so years ago. And just being on the west coast in the mountains really changed my values on like how important being in nature was. And since then, I’ve just been moving to smaller and smaller mountain communities where everyone around you is like an adventurer and spending every waking minute that they’re not working exploring the wilderness.
Derek Sivers
Ian, how old are you now?
Ian
I’m 35.
Derek Sivers
All right. So I’m 53 and same as you. I kind of in my 30s, I kept moving to small places, nature places and suddenly now, just this year, at the age of 53, I stopped through Dubai because my plane was transferring there. So instead of just two hours in the airport, I turned it into a two and a half day layover. And I’m so glad I did because oh my God, that place is amazing. I am so fascinated with the culture. It is so interesting. There’s so much going on, there’s so much development, so much ambition that I’m actually filled with this sense of like, “Oh man, I want to be there.” So if it weren’t for a feeling like, I need to be here with my kid right now, I think I would be in Dubai or Bangalore, India. That’s the other place that filled me with this excitement. So point is the where you are right now might just be a long phase, right? Like it might be suddenly at the age of 45 you want to be back in London or want to go to Shanghai or something. It’s not a fixed thing.
Ian
Absolutely. Yeah, I’m sure that it’s that contrast, right. Like doing something new. And once you’ve been in a city for 29 years, then the mountains are wonderful. Maybe if the mountains for another ten years, then I’ll want that buzz again.
Derek Sivers
Exactly. Yeah.
Ian
We’ll see. So you have lived a lot around the world. During lockdown. I remember your view of travel actually changed and you kind of realized that you could learn so much, if not more, about a culture without visiting because there’s this wealth of knowledge or like maybe this idea that people believe they’re learning by traveling. But actually you could learn a lot more from a book than a lot of people do traveling. It is now easier to travel again. Has your perspective changed or are you still feeling that same idea?
Derek Sivers
Haha. It’s funny, I never wrote about that, so I think you must have heard some of my podcasts I did in 2020. Huh?
Ian
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I had a moment of thinking, “Wait, how does Ian know that?” And I thought, “Oh, right. Yeah, I did some podcasts in 2020.” Where I think that the lesson learned from that is that we can adapt out of necessity to whatever situation we’re put in, right. So imagine right now your top values are skiing and hiking. And imagine next month you get in an accident and you’re paralyzed and you can’t ski and hike anymore. You would have to change your values to adapt to your situation, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing. It’s amazing that interviews with people that have been paralyzed, they often say it’s the best thing that ever happened to them because it made them reassess their values, and now they’re living more deliberately. So we are so resilient and able to adapt and change. Well, hopefully most of us are. Some resist it, but I think anybody that seeks out this kind of podcast is probably somebody that is resilient and open to change. And yeah, travel was my top priority. That’s actually why I moved to England is because I had been here in New Zealand for eight years and I felt like, okay, I want to travel a lot. I want to expose my kid to the cultures of the world. Let’s pick England as a home base for that. Oxford was pretty close to Heathrow and I chose it very strategically for that. And then just eight months after we arrived, Covid hit, suddenly we couldn’t travel and the schools were closed. And so we just had to adjust my values and say, okay, you know, kind of like being in a skiing accident. I had to say, “All right, I’m going to deliberately shift my values. I can learn about these places through books.” So that was a philosophy, a philosophy built out of necessity.
Ian
And now you’re excited to travel again.
Derek Sivers
I am. I think the difference is the people. I think, yes, I can learn about a culture through a book. And then you can go and you can see buildings and smell smells and taste food, which is nice. But I think my favorite thing is all the face to face friendship building with people. That’s the reason I went to Bangalore, India was solely to make friends. I just felt like, “All right, I know a lot of people in this city, but I’ve never really been there.” So I went deliberately just to sit down and talk with potential new friends and I love it so much that it feels like a second home to me. It’s a place that I’m just going to keep going every six months and keep seeing my friends there. So yeah, that’s the difference to me is that you can’t get from a book is the friends you can make from spending physical, in-person time with people.
Ian
I know you often use your mailing list as a way to find people to connect to in advance. Do you also have more spontaneous friendship making approaches you take when traveling?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, both. These days because my boy, who’s 11 now, doesn’t travel with me because he’s in school usually you know, a third of the time when he’s on a school holiday will do a trip together. But two thirds of the time he’s here in school. And so I do these short trips because I don’t want to be away from him for too long. So I will go across the world somewhere for like six days. And just because of that, I tend to contact the people that I already know through email and just like have lots of back to back, meet as many people as I can. So that’s what I did in Bangalore and Chennai, India, is I sat down and met with 50 people in seven days, which meant every day I was having about seven 1 to 2 hour long meetings. And there isn’t a lot of time for spontaneity in that kind of schedule. But that’s okay. It was totally worth it. I got to have 50 long, wonderful sit down conversations in one week, and that was amazing. And yeah, I think one of the best things I’ve ever done with my life.
Ian
Fantastic. I’d love to shift gears a little bit and let’s start talking about your speaking and writing. I believe when you kind of left the business world and took a break, you decided you wanted to be a TEDx speaker. And I think you’d always been writing before that. But what’s the connection between writing and speaking for you? Was one an important part, like was writing an important part of becoming a TEDx speaker, or are these very separate journeys for you?
Derek Sivers
It’s part of the same. To be a good speaker almost entirely starts with having something good to say. A brilliantly written speech that is delivered imperfectly will be better than a poorly written speech delivered beautifully. So I realized it all still really comes down to the original creation of the idea that you’re sharing. And then you just get up on stage and you share the idea. And as long as you’re not a complete drone about it, I think it will be well received. So yeah, to me, I had been just an entrepreneur that people only knew me as the guy that started CD Baby, and I wanted to branch out of that and become more of a writer, speaker, thinker kind of guy. So the essence of that is coming up with interesting ideas. And then presenting those ideas to the world, whether that’s in an article or a book or a podcast or a standing on stage, didn’t really matter as much as the initial creation of the idea.
Ian
Do you think there is a difference with when an idea has to be portrayed through a blog post or a book, versus speaking on stage? Do you save certain things for stage versus like the written word?
Derek Sivers
No, I think that’s more about the audience. I think some people listening to this, for example, prefer audio. Some people prefer video. They only watch YouTube and TikTok. They will not read a book. They will not listen to a podcast that doesn’t have video. Other people like me will only read a book. I really don’t read articles anymore. I don’t read blog posts. I don’t read articles. I don’t even really listen to podcasts. I just read books and I never watch video. So I think it’s more about the audience. Oh, and some people just love attending events in person and they won’t read books, but they’ll go listen to the author. Some of them will spend thousands of dollars to go to a workshop that an author puts on. They won’t buy the $25 book, but they will spend $5,000 and fly across the country to a three day workshop presenting the exact same information that’s in the $20 book. That blows my mind, but that’s just how some people need to receive the information. So no, I think that’s more up to the audience. So as somebody who creates ideas, I think it’s our job to try to share those ideas in every format as best we can.
Ian
Did you ever take classes, workshops, guidance on how to become a good speaker when you set this goal of being a TEDx speaker?
Derek Sivers
No. But remember, I had been a professional musician and entertainer on stage for 15 years, so I’ve done over a thousand shows on stage as a performer before I ever stood up on stage to give a talk. So guess I was kind of an old hat at standing on stage by then.
Ian
Did anything stand out as different? When you know you’re not hiding behind the music, the instruments, or the performers of the circus?
Derek Sivers
Good question. I think the difference is whether you’re getting up there to do something you already know well, or if you’re getting up to do something for the first time. So still, if get up on stage right now and you tell me to just tell my story of how I started my company, or tell the story of how I moved to New Zealand or anything that I just know off the top of my head that’s completely comfortable. And there I have the opposite of stage fright. I have stage comfort. I get on stage and I go, “Oh yeah, this is my domain.” But when I write a new talk specifically for a conference, and then I stand up on stage to deliver something that I’ve never said out loud before, that is still terrifying, even if I’ve practiced it 20 times at home. The fact that I’m delivering something that I’ve just created for the first time, that’s always hard. So if you go to TED.com and you find my talks on TED, I’m actually terrified in all of those. I don’t know if anybody will be able to tell if you’ll know me well enough to hear that my voice is actually shaking, but all of those TED talks delivered on the TED stage. I wrote those talks just for the TED conference, and I was terrified at every single one, and I can hear it in my voice, but I don’t know if anybody else can.
Ian
Yeah, I wonder. I remember I performed at my very first open mic night last year, and I remember that I was listening to myself trembling as I tried to sing, but I have no idea what the how much that comes across to the audience. Yeah, I certainly hadn’t noticed it in your talks. But yeah, it’s interesting the things we pick up ourselves versus what other people hear. Do you have any techniques that you use to manage that fear?
Derek Sivers
No. Just practice.
Ian
Just keep getting on stage.
Derek Sivers
Well, I mean just practicing the talk before delivering it on stage. So if I’ve just written something for a conference, I’ll call ten different friends and do it ten different times as, like a performance over the phone. Or I’ll hit record on the camera and deliver it to the camera, even if it’s just for myself. Just practicing it over and over again before I get on stage. So then it’s not the worst thing. It’s still nervous and my heart is pounding out of my chest. But that’s the best practice I think is just do it over and over again before you get on stage.
Ian
Do your friends give you critiques? They like giving you feedback on what you’ve done or are they just listening?
Derek Sivers
Oh dude. This one time I wrote a talk that I worked for like two solid months on this talk that I was planning to knock out of the park at this big conference called the World Domination Summit, put on by Chris Cubillo in Portland, Oregon. The year was 2006 and a huge conference. He’d been asking me to come for years, and I finally said yes, and I knew it was going to be a big audience. So I spent two months writing this talk, and then like five, six days before the conference, I said, “Okay, I’m done. I’ve written this talk, this is going to be amazing.” And I called a few friends and I delivered the talk over the phone to them. And like the first friend said, “Derek, that sucked. That was awful.” She said that was terrible. She said, “I just tuned out after two minutes. It was so bad.” And I was like, “Hey, fuck you.” But then I called the next friend to somebody totally unrelated. I said, “Hey, I’ve got this new talk. Do you want to hear a preview of it?” She said, “Yes. Oh my God, yes, yes, yes. Hold on. Okay. Got my cup of tea ready. Okay go.” And I delivered my 20 minute talk to her. And afterwards she went, “That was really bad.” And yeah, every friend that heard it told me that, “No, that’s just a really bad talk. That’s not great. That’s terrible.” So I tried improving it over the next few days. And I got to the conference and it was literally the night before the conference. I could just tell, okay, this is not going to go well. So I got up on stage and I told my comfortable story of how I started CD Baby, the lessons I learned growing my company da da da.
Derek Sivers
It’s like a Paul McCartney singing yesterday or something. Yeah, this is my thing I’ve done a thousand times. I can tell this tale and I’m so glad I did. It actually went great. Yes, I’m bored of telling that story, but the audience had never heard it before, and because I’m so comfortable telling it, I think I was funnier. Yeah, I’m glad they actually had really nice cameras set up, and they made a really good recording. So if you go to my website, it’s at sive.rs/wds, as in World Domination Summit. That’s the URL where I put that talk, I got the video of it, and I got to say it’s like the best recording of me speaking on stage, so I’m glad I didn’t wing it with the new talk. The funny thing is, you know, this terrible talk, I can’t find it. I have looked, I usually never delete files, but I looked everywhere in my hard drive. I can’t find the talk I wrote. But I can tell you that my book called “How to Live” is the same format as that talk. So my book, “How to Live” works well in writing because every sentence is meant to be pondered. It’s very dense. There’s not a single wasted word. So my friends critique was that you just can’t deliver that amount of density live on stage. You can’t hit people with 250 ideas in ten minutes. That’s just too much. And they were right. So yeah, if you want to see what the talk was, it’s basically my book called “How to Live”, which I think is a great book, but a bad talk.
Ian
Would it have been actually some of the same content or just a similar style in terms of alternating viewpoints?
Derek Sivers
Oh, similar style, not with the alternating viewpoints, but with the directives there, like the truisms, the one sentence of, “Do this, do that. Independence is this. Live this way. Do that.” And that’s why both my friends had heard it, said it was entertaining for the first minute or two, and then it was just too much. It was just like you were stuffing food in my face and wouldn’t stop.
Ian
Fascinating. That’s so cool. What about--
Derek Sivers
If anybody gets up on stage to tell a story just remember-- actually, I believe the same thing with writing an article. It’s better to just have one single idea per article don’t try to make an article with ten ideas in it. If you have ten ideas, make that ten separate articles. And if you do get invited to get up on stage to give a talk. Get up there with just 1 or 2 ideas and present the 1 or 2 ideas succinctly and make it a good short talk. But don’t overload people with too many ideas.
Ian
What is the one idea of your comfortable talk that you did present at WDS? Make your story. What is the summary of that?
Derek Sivers
That’s basically my first book called “Anything You Want”. That’s the other reason it was so comfortable. It was four years after I wrote that book, and I was just telling the stories from that. So it was really just the story of how I built and grew CD Baby. But the one core idea out of it is that the tao of business is not to focus on your profits, but to focus on generosity and by giving generously to your clients, to your customers. They will reward you happily, open their wallets to you, and happily tell their friends that everybody should go to you if you’re generous to them.
Ian
All right. Love it. When in your life did writing become so important to you?
Derek Sivers
Just a few years ago, actually, until a few years ago, I called myself an entrepreneur and a programmer. But yet all of my heroes were authors. These books I was reading were just my favorite things in life. And the authors of these books were the people that I most wanted to be like. And when I realized that one day I realized that I think I am an author. Because this is the way I’m facing. This is what I care about the most. I haven’t started a new business in a while, so I’m not really an entrepreneur. I’m an ex-entrepreneur, former entrepreneur. I have been an entrepreneur. But am I currently entrepreneuring? No. So why do I keep calling myself that? And programming is my favorite hobby. I love it, but I don’t think that’s my one and only thing. And realized that if you look at who your heroes are, it gives you a good indication of which way you’re facing and therefore which way you’re going.
Ian
Do you not think being a published writer is a type of entrepreneurship. Like what’s the difference?
Derek Sivers
No, that’s the difference between making art and having an art opening. The artist in the studio, let’s just do the classic oil painter or sculptor. Is thinking only of the art, is trying to make the best painting or sculpture they can and hopefully is focused entirely on that and making it the best art they can. And then when they’re done, they’re their agent, their dealer, whatever it may be. I don’t know, that world says, “Okay, well, you’ve got 20 works here. Let’s have an opening.” And then that’s the party to celebrate your art and to sell some. But that’s such a different thing than the making of the art itself. So no, when I’m writing, I’m just trying to make the best damn writing I can. I don’t care one bit if it sells or not. And then when the book is done and I’ve decided to release it, which I think is a wonderful verb, we release an album, we release a book, you let it go out into the world, then you can focus on the business and you can click into a different mindset, and you can look at this thing that you made over the last year or two, and that’s now done, and you can help sell it. But that’s a very different mindset. I wouldn’t call it the same thing.
Ian
How important do you think that act of publishing or releasing, whether that’s digital or physically, how important is that to the actually seeing yourself as a writer?
Derek Sivers
Oh it’s crucial. I mean, if you’re not releasing, then you’re just journaling. If you’re not posting it publicly, if you’re just keeping things to yourself, then you need to admit that’s just a journal. You’re not really being a writer, you’re just journaling for yourself. I think to be a writer, the unspoken necessity of that definition is that you have to release it to the world. Otherwise it’s just your diary.
Ian
Is there a range of like what counts as releasing? And I ask this because you know, I’ve started a writing about my experience in France because I’ve just moved to a new country and it is published on the internet. But like only a handful of people know that it exists. And I’m curious, do you believe that it’s out there to be found? Or do you have to put in the work to make it be found by more people? Is there a spectrum along there that like writer is over here and journaler is over here? And some people are sat in the middle.
Derek Sivers
Off the top of my head. I’ve never really thought about this, but think of it as kind of a binary. It’s either completely private or it’s public. Even if you just put it on a-- I don’t know what’s an old live journal blogspot I’m thinking of, like those old blogging tools that nobody goes to anymore. Even if you were to just put it on something like that with an audience of two, as you say, that counts. It’s out in the public now. It is released to the world because one of those two people might go post something about it and turn into 20. So just the fact that it’s out there that the public can see it, that you’re writing, whether you’re writing for the public or not. Yeah, there is something about just having it be out of your hands. That means you are officially writing now, which, by the way, I think the best way to do a book by far. Is to do individual essays, articles that become chapters. So that every idea is given its own article, therefore its own chapter, and then later.-- So sorry, forget the word later. I’ll come to that later. So you put out your ideas one at a time, and you give each idea its own spotlight in its own post, its own article, its own essay, one idea each, give that idea its spotlight.
Derek Sivers
And then later, when you’ve got enough of these, say you’ve got 40 or 80 of them. You can wrap them up and say, “Okay, this is a book now.” And then it becomes a fascinating book because every little chapter stands on its own, every chapter is worthy, and every chapter has already seen the light of day, has already had eyes on it, ideally has already had feedback from people along the way. So then it makes for a much stronger book than if you just try to write a book in hiding and think of it as a whole book. I think it’s so much better to release individual chapters. I guess this doesn’t apply if you’re creating a long fictional work. It can, I think some of the great books, the David Copperfield books, or whatever were serialised as individual chapters released once a month in a monthly magazine or a biweekly newsletter or whatever, and then later put together as a book. But think of this mostly for non-fiction that it’s like what you’re doing, journaling your move to France. I think that’d be a great format for you to put out. Keep putting out these posts. Then maybe after five years you take the best and put it into a book.
Ian
Yeah. Maybe I will. You said you loved that format of writing a book. Is that how you’re going to approach all of your future books, or do you think you’ll flip and say no. Like, actually, the best way to write a book is to do one whole story and release it at once. And then just--.
Derek Sivers
I expect that I will keep changing. I think I did that with music too, that I think if you’ve done one thing for too long, it’s healthy to change it up, change your approach. To me, I think of the contrast between AC/DC and say, David Bowie. So. AC/DC did the exact same kind of music. From 1973 until, I don’t know, five years ago, they did the exact same thing over and over and over again. They changed nothing. It takes a certain personality type to do that, to do something new 50 years ago and changed nothing. And I think there’s those of us with more curious minds, more intellectual ambition. God, that sounds snobby, can keep challenging ourselves to try new things. This is what I love about Brian Eno and his approach to producing records. And so no surprise that he worked with David Bowie. David Bowie went through many different phases and took on different personas, different musical styles, different approaches to writing and recording. Paul Simon did this too, even changing the whole way that he wrote songs. He experimented for a few years with stream of consciousness writing that he would go record the tracks first, like 3 to 4 minute long pieces of music start to finish, recorded with instrumentation and everything, and then just start bouncing a tennis ball off the wall. While stream of consciousness singing over the tracks, and recorded a few albums that way. After years of sitting down, pen in hand, to write songs the other way. So I think it’s healthy to change your creative habits. Whatever your creative habits are or your work habits, to go try the opposite. If you say “No, I’m just a co-working kind of guy.” Well then go try solitude for a while, or if you’ve been doing solitude for a while, go put yourself into a busy, collaborative space just to try the other approach I think just keep shaking up your creative habits to pull out different sides of yourself.
Ian
Yeah, it’s certainly something I think is important to do. I think as a listener, you know, as the audience of a music or, you know, any type of artist, you often want the opposite though, because you fall in love with someone for their style. And then when they go and change it, they like alienate a lot of their existing audience.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, but that’s beautiful because the role models of Miles Davis and Bob Dylan. These guys both had a core audience that wanted them to stay the way they were. Everybody wanted Bob Dylan to just stay that guy with the acoustic guitar and the harmonica. And then he went to the Newport Folk Festival everybody expecting that. And he got up on stage with a rock band and the audience was pissed off. They were furious. And somebody in the audience yelled, “Judas! You know, you betrayed us like we are the we are the folkies, we are anti electric. And you get up there with this electric rock band. Screw you.” And that was so creatively liberating for him. Can you imagine if he would have just stayed like a tribute act to his former self. You know, just kept doing the same thing because that’s what the audience wanted. And same thing with Miles Davis. God, he innovated so many different styles and then tried playing with other people’s styles too. And he kept changing and people kept wanting him to be the the bebop guy. And then he went to cool jazz, and everybody wanted him to keep doing cool jazz. And he went on to Bitches Brew and and his fusion electric style. And then he ended up doing cover versions of Cyndi Lauper pop songs. And again, the audience was furious. But that’s the artist’s way. You got to keep pushing yourself creatively. It’s the goose and the golden eggs, right. Like if you just keep giving the audience what they want, you’re not taking care of the creator that’s creating these things. So I think that’s where burnout happens. If you make yourself miserable in service of the audience, then you’ll dry up.
Ian
Have you seen any shifts in your writing style since you started that you feel like you know you’ve changed genres?
Derek Sivers
Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you see my first book called Anything You Want, it’s just storytelling. It’s telling lots of stories. And each little story ends with a little lesson I learned from this story. And then I get a little more abstract in my next two books. And then “How to Live” which as of now is still my newest and I think my best book, is so different. There is not a single story in there. It’s just a directives. It’s like the densest possible communication of big ideas, skipping the explanation for each. Just saying do this, do that, and just leaving it up to the reader to sit and ponder the implications of it or the thoughts behind it. Such a different style. I’m so proud of that one. That was a lot of work. It’s so much easier to just tell stories. But now, having done that, my next book, I’m having to deliberately make sure I tell some stories and don’t get stuck into a style like I did with “How to Live”. I don’t want to just keep being that guy that does that style. I want to keep changing it
Ian
You said it’s just much easier to tell stories. I think a lot of people would disagree. You know, not everyone is a natural storyteller.
Derek Sivers
And I agree it depends if you have the story already. I meant if you’re just telling your own stories, like, yeah, here’s something that happened, you know, yes, there’s a little craft to it, but if you already have the story, it’s easy to just tell the story. Yeah, it’s easier to just tell a story of something that happened instead of getting all philosophical.
Ian
Obviously, your past lives as entrepreneur and musician have had a big influence on the content of your writing. Do you think they have also influenced your approach to being a writer beyond the content?
Derek Sivers
The hard lesson I learned getting on stage at the age of 18 with the circus. Sorry. audience, for ten years I was ringleader of a circus from the age of 18 to 28. Basically, my full time job was the front man of a circus in the northeast of the US. We toured around and did 1000 shows, and I was the ringleader on stage and got the gig when I was 18 and I was not ready for it yet. I got up on stage and I was self-conscious and thought it was about me, and I sucked for the first month or two. And finally, after much prodding, I did what my boss kept telling me to do, which is now go out there and give them a show. This isn’t about you. They’re here to be entertained. It’s kids and families they want entertainment. Go be dramatic. And so, almost in a rebellious, defiant way, I got up on stage and played a caricature of the carnival barker and was like, “Ladies and gentlemen, what you’re about to see right now on stage is one of the most amazing things. We are going to have elephants jumping up here. We’re going to have snakes falling out of the sky with parachutes. You’re about to see one of the most amazing shows you’ve ever seen in your entire life. So sit down. It’s only three minutes to showtime. Get ready.”
Derek Sivers
And I came back stage like there. They went, “Yes, finally. Thank you. That’s what you need to do.” And I went, “Wait, really? You you want me to do that?” And they said, “Yes. That was fascinating. Did you see the kids faces now they’re excited. And I went, “Oh, okay.” I realized like that was my epiphany moment. It’s like, oh, this isn’t about me. Nobody cares about me. I am just a provider of entertainment. And so I still feel the same. When I got on stage at the TED conference a bunch of times in 2010, none of those talks were about me. It’s actually weird to me when I see people get up on a TED stage and tell the story of their life. It’s like, this isn’t about you. We’re here to learn something. And that’s why I pushed back a bit at the beginning of this call when you said, we’re here to talk about you. I was like, no, no, no. I’m just here to provide the intellectual entertainment for the audience. This isn’t really meant to be about me. I’ll share the things that I’ve learned, but really it’s about the audience. So yeah, I think that’s the thing. That’s where my past has influenced my present work.
Ian
You have published four books to date, and you are now in the progress of your fifth, which we’re all very excited about. Where would you say you are in that process right now?
Derek Sivers
I would have said a week ago. I’m still discovering what it is. But no, actually, just as of this week, I think I’ve solidified what the new book is. I’ve decided what it’s going to say. I’ve got rough drafts of a third of it. And so now I think it’s time for me to stop deciding what it’s going to be and just kind of make it concrete. So yeah, sorry that was very abstract. So audience the book is called “Useful Not True”. And in short, let’s see if I can sum it up in the the four main points it’s going to make is that, number one, pointing out that almost nothing is absolutely, positively, objectively necessarily true. Almost everything is subjective. All these things you hear people say as truths, unless it’s a physical, observable reality not filtered through the human mind, then define that as not true, which doesn’t mean false. It just means not necessarily absolutely true. And I think this is really useful because a lot of the obstacles, the things that hold us back in life, the disempowering beliefs, are not true. And it’s good to point that out to liberate your progress. Then number two, since almost nothing’s true, you get to make up your own beliefs or choose your own beliefs that serve you right now. You get to use beliefs as placebos because motivation is delicate, motivation matters, and you need to hack your own motivation to do what you want to do, to be who you want to be in life.
Derek Sivers
So it’s about choosing your beliefs intentionally, living intentionally by choosing what to leave. Then three is about avoiding ideology. I think the problem with ideology is it takes a whole bundle of beliefs and calls the entire collection true and good. But then if one thing in that bundle is disproven, people call the entire bundle false and bad and I think that’s the problem with cancel culture, is that one person who has done lots of wonderful things, if they say one wrong thing, we just declare everything they’ve ever done to be worthless. And same thing with say, I don’t know, I’m not Catholic, but let’s say. Yes some Catholic priests have done horrible things. But that doesn’t mean you should throw out every good thing that ever came in that religion. You could see the same things even with a book like “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. Brilliant book. So many useful ideas that could change your life. And yet, like two of the little studies he did in there have found to be not repeatable. And so a lot of people then in the ideology mindset say, “Well, then screw that book. Take it off the shelves. Like, I’m not going to read that book. It’s been disproven.” But no, it’s like that’s a 500 page book of which two pages were disproven and I think that’s harmful, that people want to throw things out and I think that comes from this mentality of defining something as either true or not true.
Derek Sivers
Sorry went on too long about that point. And then number four realizing that the norms and rules of society are just a game. That’s really no different from the games we made up as kids. When you play a game with a friend and you make up rules as you go. You say, “Okay, well, I’m starting at the couch now, so the ground is hot lava unless I’ve crossed my fingers. But then if I touch you twice, then you’re it.” And you know, “No, it’s all a bit. You have to have the five second rule, okay? You can’t. No immediate tagbacks.” You make up rules all the time. But then we get to be grownups and we go out into the world and make up these rules. But we act as if they’re true. And that’s the problem, is people make up rules and then insist that they are true and we believe them, unfortunately. And so the fourth part of the book points out that all of these rules and norms for society are not true. They are negotiable. And you should not play a game that is rigged against you, and you should quit the game, make your own game because it’s all just play anyway. So that’s it. The common thread of this is that almost nothing is true, so you should choose the beliefs that are useful to you. And that’s why the book is called Useful Not True.
Ian
What is your process for deciding what that next book is going to be? How did you come to the decision that having written a book on how to live, you’re now going to write a book about the non truths of living?
Derek Sivers
I found it was a common thread between things I had been thinking about and talking about and writing about for years. I kept having to explain to people that I’m choosing this belief not because it’s true, but because it’s useful for me. So a common one is correcting biases. So think about if you are playing frisbee or going bowling. And you notice that every time you roll the ball down the bowling alley, it keeps going off to the right. And so what you do is you have to deliberately steer it towards the left. You have to feel that you’re aiming too far to the left in order to correct for the bias that’s going to bring it back to the right. Or vice versa. So I do that with my thinking, where if I notice that I’ve got a bias, that, for example, is making me think that everything is someone else’s fault, then I will correct that bias by assuming that everything is my fault. And the problem is, when I would share that idea, people would say,”But that’s not true. Everything is not your fault.” And I’d say, “I don’t care if it’s not true. I’m choosing this belief to correct my bias. I’m choosing this belief because it’s useful, not because it’s true.” And this idea kept coming up so much, I felt like, you know, I think this is my next book. I have a lot to say on this subject.
Ian
How do you identify where your biases are in the first place?
Derek Sivers
The hard way. By finding out that you’re wrong. Yeah. By by feeling the pain of misjudgment you know like if you keep blaming everybody else for for problems in your life. And eventually enough feedback comes back to you that you know, “Hey dude, I think you keep blaming other people, but I think this is your fault.” Or if you just realize that mindset is making you miserable. For example, we choose our own perspective on everything. That’s what I mean about almost nothing is objectively true. There’s the cold, hard facts. That’s like, you know, a visiting alien you could see in a telescope. That’s an observable fact. Almost everything else is just our projected meanings onto things that are just not real. It’s just a perspective. And so you just notice that some perspectives make you miserable. Some perspectives make you happy. Some perspectives make you jump off your sofa and take action. Whereas some perspectives just make you want to go to bed every day in the middle of the day. Your perspective on life just changes all of your actions. And ultimately your actions are what matter. Besides, of course, you’re just mental tranquillity. So, I guess you just learn the hard way which mindsets are useful and work for you or not.
Ian
You definitely have this habit of going all in on any one aspect of your life, whether it was music, business, now writing, and you seem quite happy to discard these other portions of your life in order to commit to that. That is quite a rare trait, as far as I can tell in people. And I wondered has that just always been your natural way of being, you know, for as long as you can remember? Or is this something you have chosen to deliberately work on? And, you know, is this a one of those truths you’ve defined for yourself as that I’m just going to do something 100%?
Derek Sivers
It is my nature. I’ve been this way since I was a kid. I get really into one thing, but the way it feels inside my head is it feels like unfinished business. It feels like when my focus was songwriting, I was trying to crack the code of songwriting. I was trying to be a great songwriter. And being a great songwriter was unfinished business. And so when somebody said, “Hey, do you want to come travel with us to Paris?” I was like, “No, I’m trying to be the best songwriter.” They’re like, “Dude, come out, hang out and have drinks with us.” I’d say, “No, I’m trying to be the best songwriter.” They’d say, “Hey, do you want to start a business?” “No. Trying to be the best songwriter.” And that’s what was kind of funny about the birth of CD Baby by the way, is that I was quite focused on being the best musician and just being a successful musician, and what became CD Baby was just me building something to sell my own CD. But then my musician friends kind of begged me like, “Hey, could you sell my CD through that thing? So I don’t have to recreate your entire engine from scratch.”
Derek Sivers
I’m like, “Okay, well, as a favor to friends, yes.” And then friends told friends and it took off, and I had to let go of my defiant refusal to do anything but music. But then once I had started CD Baby, yeah, then I was all in on trying to make the best little company for musicians that I could. I wanted to be the best distributor for my musician friends. And then that became my obsession for ten years. That was my unfinished business. Like, no, there are too many things I need to do to make this the best distributor it can be. And my girlfriend said, “Hey, let’s go travel.” And I’d say, “No, I’m trying to do this thing.” Somebody said, “Hey, man, you should do you want to be an investor? You could get involved in Silicon Valley startups.” I’d say “No, I’m trying to be the best distributor I can be.” So it just feels like unfinished business.
Ian
It doesn’t seem like there’s ever a point that, you know that you’ve got to that finished business. It just seems that something comes along and takes over.
Derek Sivers
Ian, that’s what was funny about why I sold CD Baby after ten years is for the first time in my life, I think maybe the only time in my life it felt like my work was done. I had been doing CD Baby for ten years and I had really made all of my ideas happen and it felt done. I felt like somebody that’s been painting a mural for years and puts on the last brushstroke after years of work and stands back and looks at it and says, “Yeah, I think that’s it.” So that’s how I felt with CD Baby. After ten years, I had made it do everything I wanted it to do. I had succeeded, and yeah, it felt like the-- what do you call it, the reward. The payoff. No hold on. Damn. There’s a term I’m forgetting here with, like the amount of effort versus the amount of return you were getting. It felt like after ten years, I had done almost everything I wanted. And yes, I could have put in a ton more effort to make incremental improvements. But it felt like for the most part, my work was done here. And so that’s why I sold. It was a relieving feeling. Sorry. Go ahead.
Ian
I was going to say that seems quite different to the music. The end of the music era.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, yeah definitely. The music one. I had to rationalize myself into letting go, I had wanted to be much more successful than I was. I was just successful enough that I could rationalize it and say, “Okay, well, I did that right.” Like I had been a professional musician full time for, I think, six years at that point. I’d been paying my cost of living just by doing music. I bought a house in Woodstock with the money I made touring. I had released and promoted an album pretty successfully so I could say like, “Okay, I did that.” But that was more of a rationalization to help me feel the mental tranquility, to move on and turn my attention to the next thing.
Ian
Interesting. Do you think your writing process has changed as you become a more prolific publisher?
Derek Sivers
No, I mean, except for what we talked about earlier, where I hope to keep changing my writing style. In short, no, I still try to present one idea at a time.
Ian
And how do you decide which ideas you’re going to pursue and which ones kind of never make it out into the world?
Derek Sivers
Usually it comes from talking to friends. If I’m talking to friends and somebody says, “Ooh, that’s an interesting idea.” I go, “Really? Oh.” And then if I go tell that to another friend and they go, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” Then I think, okay, I should share this with the world. If two friends find it interesting, I try sharing it with the whole world.
Ian
Does that mean a lot of your ideas start just through conversation? Or are you writing things and then sharing them with people to see how they react?
Derek Sivers
No, no, it’s just talking with just conversation. I don’t spend most of my life in conversation, but I do spend a lot of my life in conversation. So it’s in those conversations that ideas often come up or let me take it back. Maybe that’s half of them. Maybe the other half are just things that I’ve personally found very useful for me. That if I’ve had an idea and I’ve applied it to my life and it’s made a big difference for me. Then I’ll share that idea in writing. I don’t even need to test it on friends first or get feedback from friends. If something was profound for me, I’ll share it with the world directly.
Ian
You mentioned you spend a lot of time in conversation, and on the one hand, I’m not surprised because of the story you told of going to India and scheduling an entire week of conversations. But I also know you’ve said, like, your favorite way to spend a day is just shut up in a whole 12 hours of work, not talking to anyone. So those two conflicting sides of you.
Derek Sivers
You know, I never thought about that applied to this, but the author Nicholas Nassim Taleb wrote “The Black Swan”, and I think my favorite book of his is called “Antifragile”. One of the many, many ideas in that book is what he calls the barbell strategy, which is to take two extreme approaches to something. And balance the two extremes instead of living in the middle. So he has a picture of a barbell, you know, with a heavy weight on each end and a thin pole connecting two ends far apart from each other. And he gives gives his example of investing where he said, “I take 90% of my funds and I just leave them in safe cash, completely safe.” And then he said, “I take 10% and I take the riskiest, craziest bets with it. Which most don’t work out, but some pay off hugely.” He said, “But even if the worst fails, I’ve still got the 90% in cash.” So he said, “Instead of me taking a middle of the road investment strategy, I find it better to combine the ultra safe with the ultra risky.” So I guess you could say I’m doing that socially. I do spend a lot of my life in total solitude. Either just me or just me and my kid. Seeing nobody here in remote New Zealand. But then in bursts, I will go to Dubai, to India, to a conference, to London or something like that, and then go meet with a ton of people in a short amount of time, get my social fix, and then come back to my productive solitude.
Ian
Do you apply that to other areas of your life as well?
Derek Sivers
I don’t know, I mean, I didn’t even realize that until you asked the question just now. I don’t know. I think that in some ways I’m very progressive. I mean, you heard the whole like Useful Not True pitch of just making your own values. But I’ve noticed that my approach to technology, surprisingly, is quite conservative, that I got sick of the churn of the new thing announced and everybody jumping on the new thing and then discarding the new thing months later or two years later, choosing a new thing and I think, “Oh well, why not just skip all that churn? And only adopt things that have been around for decades and look like they’re going to be around for many more decades.” So that’s why I use the OpenBSD operating system, and I do all my work in the terminal using a 50 year old editing program called VI in the terminal. And tech wise, I guess you could say I’m very conservative, but it’s because of that I am trying to avoid the silly fashion feeling churn of technology.
Ian
Yeah, I’ve seen on your blog posts, your podcast, you’re very into tech independence. I don’t know if that would strike me as conservative or not, but really, you’re about owning your own servers, building your own website.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Ian
Do you self-publish for similar reasons to that?
Derek Sivers
It feels smart long term to own your own copyrights. Musicians dealt with this in the late 90s. There was a big talk in the musician community saying, “Look, now, thanks to the internet, we don’t need to sign away our rights to the record labels. You can hold on to your rights for your own music and get it directly to the fans yourself. You don’t need to sign away your life to to Warner Brothers or EMI.” And a lot of musicians, including me, really took that to heart and said, “Yeah, you know, fuck the man. I can get my work directly to my fans. I don’t need the middleman to own my copyrights.” And so then it blows my mind where 20 years later, I’m publishing books and people are just signing away their rights to Penguin and just handing all the distribution to Amazon. And I’m thinking, “God, did you learn nothing? Like, have you forgotten all the lessons of the indie music revolution? Like, come on, you don’t need the man. You could just do this yourself and just go directly to your fans.” And they say, “Yeah, but Amazon gives me broader exposure.” I’m like, “Yeah, well, that was the same argument that had musicians sign away all their rights to capital back in the day because it gave them more exposure, whereas the few that held onto their rights really we’re thankful for it.” And so yeah, I just hold on to my own copyrights. The first one was an exception. The only reason my first book happened is because Seth Godin, who was one of my heroes asked if he could publish my first book. And so because it’s my hero, I said yes. So my first book was on his company. Then he sold it to Penguin. So my first book was on Penguin and they were really nice people. I like them, but still just underneath I felt like, “Oh, this doesn’t align with my values.” I think it’s more important to keep your own copyrights. And just do the distribution yourself.
Ian
Does that sale to Penguin limit what you can do with that content now?
Derek Sivers
Oh no. Actually I spent a ton of money and bought back the rights to that first book.
Ian
Okay.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I forget what I spent, but it was an irrational amount because I just wanted the rights back. So sales had started to fall off a little bit, and I had to buy out my contract in both the UK and US. I mean, it wasn’t like $1 million. It was like, I don’t know, $10,000 or $20,000. I had to buy back every printed paper copy. And then I ended up giving those away. Yeah, but it made me happy. I then added eight new chapters that I wished could have been in the original, and I rereleased it myself. So now the copy of “Anything You Want”, my first book that you buy from me at sivers.com is the third edition, the newest and best with eight chapters that should have been there from the beginning. So it’s 48 chapters instead of 40.
Ian
Were they not there because you went through a publisher and they had--?
Derek Sivers
No, no. Nothing like that. I wrote the book in 11 days, and then after it was released, I felt there was a little more I should have said, you know, like, I really missed some context to that. There was a little more to add to that story. So that’s all.
Ian
How long is your new book going to take in comparison, do you think from 11 days for your first book?
Derek Sivers
Well, see you know what I said earlier about it’s easy to just tell stories that have already happened. The book “Anything You Want” was comprised of stories that I had just been telling for years, anecdotally. And so, I wrote it in 11 days. I could have written it in 11 hours. It was just telling my story in a very practiced way that I had tested those stories on audiences for years, and so all I had to do was just put them in writing. So the new book with “Useful Not True”. I’m really still or I was up until just a few days ago discovering what the book is even about. So those four bullet points I gave you a few minutes ago of what my next book is about? I only decided on those a few days ago. Up until a few days ago, I wasn’t even sure what this book was about. I knew that I wanted to write about this subject, but I had a lot more exploring to do so I think I decided ten months ago that I was going to write this book, and I spent a lot of the last ten months reading a lot of other people’s books on similar subjects, seeing what other minds have thought about this subject, and I contacted a philosophy teacher, and she told me about the school of pragmatism, and I read God, I don’t know, 5 or 6 or 7 books about pragmatism and then learned about nihilism. And I read a few books about nihilism, and then I learned about skepticism and existentialism and kind of read all of this and thought about how it applies to what I wanted to say. And yeah, so there was a lot more discovery. I wasn’t just blurting out something I know already.
Ian
Is this the first book you’ve done that kind of large amount of external research for?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, yeah. First ever. Because it was very different kind of book. It was more of a curiosity for me.
Ian
And how was that process gone for you?
Derek Sivers
Much harder. We’ll see if it makes it much better.
Ian
How will you judge that?
Derek Sivers
Good question. There’s two halves of this. There’s the pleasing yourself no matter what the audience thinks. But then there’s also the audience reaction. So sometimes you can have either way. My last book, How to Live, I was so happy with it. I didn’t care if nobody liked it, if everybody on earth said, “I don’t get it, it’s not for me.” I would have said, “I don’t care. I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s my favourite book I’ve ever read.” But there have been other times that I put something out into the world, like my little article called Hell Yeah or No. It was just like I sneezed that thing out in three minutes. And a lot of people, damn, 14 years later, are telling me how much it changed their life and that just surprises me because I didn’t think it was that interesting of an idea. But then I’m happy to know that a lot of people found it really useful. So, I mean, ideally you have both. Ideally, you’re really proud of something you make and people really like it, but it can be either one is fine.
Ian
Given that you didn’t think that the Hell Yeah or No idea was that important, do you think there are maybe other things that you never released to the world because you thought it doesn’t matter actually?
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Ian
Could have been transformational.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. And in fact, I wrote something kind of meta about that, called “Obvious to you, useful to others” or something like that. Just because something is obvious to you doesn’t mean it’s not helpful to other people. Oh, yeah I called it “Obvious to you, amazing to others”. Because sometimes something that to you just feels like, “Well, yeah, duh.” People will find, “Oh my God, that’s amazing.” I mean, honestly, I think we should all probably put out way more than we do. Just share all of your thoughts and ideas. I’m really glad, even when you told me that you’re writing about France, even if it has an audience of two, which maybe it’ll be four after this podcast, then I think that’s really cool that you’re doing that, just sharing your observations, even if it’s not that helpful. There’s a guy who wrote a book. What’s his name? Francis Tapon, I think that’s his name. Wrote a book called Eastern Europe, Hidden Europe. I’m really glad he wrote it. It was a great travelogue of his, very unique, quirky personal experience, traveling through Eastern Europe for a long time and really immersing himself in every one of the countries in Eastern Europe.
Derek Sivers
He’s a wonderfully extreme character that in order to save on travel costs, he just brings a sleeping bag with him. And he’s found that, for example, graveyards are a great place to sleep because people don’t go in there at night. Nobody will bother you. So he wrote his book, which it’s a wonderfully flawed book, including his romantic crushes and going on far too long about this and that and. But I’m really glad he wrote it, because when I wanted to learn a little bit more about Eastern Europe, I went looking for books and there were a bunch of very official looking ones, and I chose his and read it and loved it. And I’m so glad I did, and contacted him afterwards to tell him how much I loved it. And he’s finally writing his book about Africa now, because he ended up going to Africa for years after that, going to every single country in Africa for a total of three years or something, and is currently writing his book about that. But I actually tried to help him get a publishing deal for it, but nobody would buy it because he doesn’t have a big audience. But I’m really glad he’s writing it.
Ian
Yeah, say you are pushing publishing on other people, but not for yourself.
Derek Sivers
No, no, no, he wanted. He asked me, “Can you help me get a publishing deal?” He needed money. He needed an upfront advance to cover his expenses while writing it. That’s why he wanted a publishing deal. Maybe that’s why most people do, I don’t know.
Ian
Yeah, I certainly would be. My assumption is that, like, I wouldn’t feel I had a big audience. So if I was going to release a book I would assume I would need someone to do that. But I think that’s just everyone is just trying to push the pressure onto an external party.
Derek Sivers
Because if you take it on yourself, well then the marketing of it, the promotion of it is solely up to you. Whereas the catch is that even if you sign with a major publishing company. The marketing and promoting of it is still up to you. It’s just that they give you a little nudge.
Ian
Yeah, I’ve certainly found with my writing, you know, even the idea of like, I can’t remember how you phrased it. Obvious to you, amazing to others. Like, I shared one of these recent articles with a friend back in Canada, and I was just like, oh, they might be interested because it’s about a topic that they care about. And then their response was like, “That’s fantastic. Can I share it with like all of these other people?” Okay.
Derek Sivers
By the way, Ian. You have to read Au contraire. Do you know this book?
Ian
I have never heard of it. No.
Derek Sivers
Oh, dude, it is one of my favorite books of all time “Au contraire: Figuring out the French”. It’s explaining French culture to outsiders. And it was written by two people, an American that’s been living in France for decades, and a French woman that’s been living in America for decades. And the two of them have an LLC company called I forget what, but they they help companies do business in France. So for 20 years or something, they’ve been professionally helping outsiders work in France. And so it’s not like they just kind of made this one book out of the blue. This book is the result of many, many years of explaining to many, many people how to understand the culture of France. And it is the most insightful book I’ve ever read on a country’s culture. “Watching the English” was also very good, which that might be interesting for you to read after “Au contraire” to then read a book about England because I forget her name, something fox. “Watching the English” is, to me, the second best book I’ve ever read about a country’s culture. So for you, I’d highly recommend go read “Au Contraire: Figuring out the French” and then afterwards try reading “Watching the English”.
Ian
Perfect. Yeah, I’ll definitely look those up. It’s been interesting having the people I meet here comment on like, “Oh, that’s such an English thing to do.” And like I wonder if the things in the books are the things that people notice, but I’ve been told that we like to have a very roundabout ways of telling an idea rather than just getting to the point. I don’t know if that’s an English thing or just an Ian thing. Once I read the book, I’ll know, perhaps. What about when you are in the middle of the writing a book, and you obviously know you have this idea that you want to produce. But do you ever struggle during the process of realizing that idea itself? And if you do, how do you get past that?
Derek Sivers
Sorry, I don’t have any good wisdom on this. This is the first book that’s been difficult for me. “How to Live” took me four years to write, but that was crafting. I knew exactly what I wanted it to be, and it just took four years of hacking at the words to make it what I wanted. This next book “Useful Not True”, it took me a while, as I described, to figure out what I want it to be, so that’s what’s been difficult about it. So sorry, that’s not very applicable to anybody else’s life or work.
Ian
That’s okay. Do you think that I guess we’ve talked about this a little bit, but in terms of helping others. But do you think people should write and publish for their own benefit, like more of doing this?
Derek Sivers
I love that when I learned that the word essay comes from the French word essayé, which is to try to attempt that. It was Michel de Montaigne. I don’t know how to say his name, that coined the term of writing his little articles. He called them essays because he was attempting to figure out what he thinks about something. He was trying his ideas by writing about them. There’s a metaphor of saying, “You aim the gun and shoot it to see if it shoots straight.” You know, like if you find a pistol on the ground, you pick a tree and you aim it at that tree to see if it shoots straight. So you write an essay to see if your ideas shoot straight. It’s to figure out your thoughts. So for that, yeah, I think writing, especially in public, even privately, I mean both are really useful. Let’s actually start with the private writing. Privately it could be done in conversation. It could be done by sitting in a chair and talking to yourself or walking down the road talking to yourself. But to say out loud or to write what your thoughts are something, and then to challenge those thoughts to push back against yourself and catch yourself saying something and say, “Is that true? Can I disprove that? What’s another perspective? That’s my default perspective. What’s another way I could look at this? Okay, now I’ve got two ways. What’s a third way? I could look at this that is unlike either of those previous two.” To challenge your own thoughts I think is so useful. And then to share your ideas in public even sharing your questions in public is useful if you have any kind of audience at all to ask the audience their thoughts on something. Actually, you know, even if you have no audience, if you just walk into a local shop, talk with whoever’s not busy on the street to ask random people a question I think is a wonderful way to think through a subject and get random thoughts on any given subject is so useful to add more perspectives to your thinking.
Ian
I certainly helped it for myself, helped me work through ideas. But I remember you were talking about that word essay, the kind of origin to try and I remember thinker Paul Graham wrote a piece about this. How like where this idea of writing to discover is like, so antithetical to how we’re taught about essays in school, right? Like trying to just lay down this fixed decision that you’ve made about a point, instead of using the writing to discover what you should be thinking?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. And you can do both. You can in a private journal or a rough draft explorer. 12 different ideas. And strike out 11 of them and come to one conclusion, and then you publish your conclusion for the world. I’ve done that quite a few times.
Ian
Yeah. Do you ever think about what your next project is going to be when you’re in the middle of another? You know, are you someone who has this list of ideas that are coming next, or is it--?
Derek Sivers
Oh yes, I have a list. Okay, so keep a folder called “Possible Futures” of every time I get some new thing I’m excited about instead of ceasing to work on the one I’m on, I just jot down all of my ideas into a text file, and I put it in a folder called possible futures, so I know I can come back to it. I know the ideas are captured. And they will stay there in storage until needed. But then I get back to work on the one I’m doing now. I think I learned over the years the importance of completing something that if I keep letting myself get distracted, then the thing I’m doing will never be complete. And that can feel like being 11 months pregnant. You know, it’s like, just get it out. Get this thing out of me. I need to move on. I need to get this out and be done with it. So I think it’s important to complete what you’re doing first and then turn your attention to the other things.
Ian
Once you have wrapped up an idea, do you you actually, like go to that folder, open it up, see what’s in there and pick something from it? Or by that point, you already figured out?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, my Useful Not True book, I’d had a folder for a year or two of ideas that I thought like, so thinking I need to write a book called Useful Not True. That started like three years ago when I was doing other things. I was like, “Yeah, I keep coming back to this idea, don’t I? I keep having to explain over and over again that I choose ideas because they’re useful, not true.” And so I just had a little folder called Useful Not True, where I kept adding little thoughts to it. And then after I was done writing “How to Live”, after I was done building the stuff to sell it and working on that. Then after a little exhale, I went, “Huh, I wonder what my next book is going to be?” And I went to my possible futures folder. And yeah, there were four other book ideas in there. I don’t remember what the other three are, but one of them was Useful Not True. And I went, “Ooh, yeah, I’ve been keeping little ideas on this for a couple of years. I think it’s time to write this.” So yeah, very, very literally, I go to that folder when I’m ready to start a new project and see what jumps out at me.
Ian
Do you think it’s influenced by the history of when an idea went into that? Or like, are you sometimes pulling out ideas that were way down the list from long ago, or is it more like the more recent the idea is, the more likely you are to pull it out?
Derek Sivers
Oh no. I think the age of an idea is unrelated to how good of an idea it is. In fact, you could argue that if after many, many years, something still feels like a good idea, I think that would prove a bit of a test of time. That if you had an idea five years ago in a different phase of your life, and still five years later, it seems like a good idea, that’s a good indication that the persistence has proven a resilience, a strength.
Ian
Yeah. Your career has kind of seen three phases so far. Music. Business. Writing. Do you think phase four is sitting in that list of possible futures somewhere already?
Derek Sivers
Probably. Yeah, that’s a really fun question. Yeah, probably. I have no idea what it would be. Knowing myself, I probably have another phase in me. It’s probably not like I’m not just going to only write books for the rest of my life. I’m super interested in anthropology in general. I just find somebody laughed at me two days ago for how over-the-top excited I was when describing Dubai to them, and what I loved about the culture of the United Arab Emirates. And she just laughed and said, “Oh my God, I haven’t heard anybody this excited about anything in months.” I went, “Really?” Oh, to me, it’s just fascinating. And hearing that kind of feedback from somebody who’s not quite a stranger, but almost made me think, “Huh, I wonder if I’m actually more interested in anthropology than I realized.” I thought it was just objectively fascinating, even, you know, like I told you, the Au Contraire book and Watching the English, I’ve read probably eight books in that genre of explaining a country, Germany and Enigma, Swiss watching, Figuring out the French. What are some other good ones? Oh, God. I’ve read a few books about India, but I’m fascinated with these books that explain a country’s mindset, because to me each one of these cultures is a living philosophy. It’s like we hear about philosophies that have isms on the end, right? Stoicism. Pragmatism. But the culture of Brazil is a living philosophy. The culture of India-- actually, even there, it’s like there are different cultures within India. India is as varied as Europe. But the different cultures of places are working mindsets. Some of them work better than others. There’s some some real outliers, like Japan, that have their own very unique culture that works very well in some ways and not well in others. And it’s fascinating to learn about these. So who knows, maybe anthropology is my next thing.
Ian
Anthropology of current civilizations though, rather than historic. Or is there?
Derek Sivers
You’re right. I’m saying anthropology. Like I know what it means. I don’t even know what it means. It’s just this thing. I think that’s what we call this thing. I’m interested in the study of people. You’re right. There’s probably a better term for it. In fact, I think I put down in my notes somewhere I learned a better term for what I’m talking about the study of mindsets.
Ian
I look forward to seeing your progress in that area.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, thanks. Maybe it’ll be interesting to you. Maybe not as usual. Probably lose my past audience. It was funny when I made the switch talking only to musicians for all those years with CD Baby. And then I started getting interested in business entrepreneurial things. I lost a lot of my musician audience, had no interest in that. And then I started talking about philosophical things, and I lost my audience that was interested in business and music. But it’s cute. Some people have persisted there. Some people that I’m in touch with that have been reading my stuff since 2002 for a while, 21 years, and have followed me through all the different phases. It’s very touching.
Ian
I’m sure I’ll be following you still. Don’t worry. You’ll still have at least one member. What is something useful but not true about being a writer, in your opinion?
Derek Sivers
That people want to hear what you have to say, that people will value your thoughts and insights and perspective. You have to believe that. I noticed that as a musician, as a teenage musician, I was really convinced with every song I wrote that this one was going to change the world. This was going to be a huge hit someday. And in a weird way, you have to believe that when you’re writing a song, because if you just believe, it’s just like nobody’s going to hear this and it doesn’t matter. Well, then you stop writing songs. You have to have this useful, not true belief that this is going to make a big difference, that people are going to care about this, that people want this. Yeah. That’s useful, not true.
Ian
That’s good advice.
Derek Sivers
Which by the way, sorry to clarify. I say this at the very beginning of the book, but every time I say not true, it doesn’t mean false. It just means not objectively, repeatedly, observably, verifiably, indisputably true. If it’s not all those adverbs, then just describe it as not true. But again, it doesn’t mean false. It doesn’t mean that it’s false. Nobody cares about your writing. Nobody cares about your thoughts. It’s just that it might not necessarily be true. But you have to believe it’s true to put the appropriate amount of energy and care into your writing.
Ian
Yeah, I see that in some of the things I write, in that you don’t necessarily notice it’s resonating with people because a lot of people don’t share that opinion with you until at some point later, whether, you happen to reach out to someone and they’re like, “Oh, by the way, I’ve been following what you’re doing, and I love it.” And yes, but until they said that, you’re just like, there’s no one, no one cares. But actually people just don’t share their opinions very often.
Derek Sivers
You said that sweet thing at the very beginning of the call today that that you told your mum that I was the the ideal guest. That was so sweet. That was amazing. Because of course, there were moments where a-- audience listening Ian had to reschedule our interview because of fireworks, and because he found out that they were going to be fireworks during the recording of when we were originally scheduled to do this. So there was a passing thought for only a second or two where I thought like, “Uh, is this even worth doing? Maybe he just doesn’t care. Maybe this just is a lame excuse to get out of it.” I was like, “Oh, no. Okay, I’ll reschedule.” And then you tell me something like that at the beginning of the call. So, see, I had no idea. I didn’t know you cared, Ian.
Ian
Yeah, well, when I booked this podcast, I wasn’t living in France. And then I moved to France. And August 15th is a national day off, and they’re all celebrating. At the exact time that we were recording, I almost didn’t email you because I was concerned you might cancel because I was changing it at the last minute. But here we go. We did it.
Derek Sivers
We did it.
Ian
And that’s a good place to end it. Yeah. Is there anything else you’d like to share based on what we’ve talked about?
Derek Sivers
Oh, I always like to say at the end that, look, if you’re somebody that went all the way through this, how long have we been talking? Almost two hours. If you’re somebody that’s gone all the way to two hours of Ian and Derek talking, you should definitely introduce yourself. You’re probably my kind of person. And really, some of my favorite people that I’ve ever met are people that just emailed me out of the blue to say hello and introduce themselves. So go to my website, go to sive.rs and email me. There’s a link there that says contact and it goes right to me, my eyes and reply to every single email. So please introduce yourself.
Ian
And I can verify that you do reply to every single email because you’ve always replied to mine.
Derek Sivers
I enjoy it. Yeah.
Ian
Derek, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate you being here.
Derek Sivers
You too. Thanks, Ian.