Infinite Loops - part 2
host: Jim O’Shaughnessy
learning and growth, dissatisfaction as a motivator, art and creativity, perspectives and reframing, tech independence and self-reliance
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Transcript:
Jim
Hello everyone, and welcome to Another Infinite Loopa. I am so excited for today because I have part two of my wonderful conversation with the inimitable Derek Sivers, author, I mean if I had to go through everything that you are and do Derek, it would probably eat up the first 15 minutes of the podcast. But welcome back.
Derek Sivers
Thank you. And I love that for the listener. These conversations can be two days apart or even minutes apart, depending on when you’re listening. But here we’ve had a month apart and been around the world since then. So good to be back.
Jim
That’s right. It’s good to be back as well. I was going over our last conversation and we left off when we were talking about, you had made an excellent point about people needing to value the very idea of learning and of growing. And you referenced, again, as you had earlier in that conversation, Michelangelo versus Picasso. And we’re not saying that Michelangelo had this idea, but he’s a good example of his work. It kind of stayed the same over his career. And then, of course, Picasso, who was continually iterating and moving on. And I always think of his painting of bulls. Steve Jobs used that at Apple as the way, here’s how you make the progress, and I find it really interesting. And so my first question is, is there a way, Derek, for us to instill in people who might just be like, “Yeah, no, I’m good.” Is there a way to instill, “No no, no, no, you’re not good. You really want to learn more and you really want to change.”
Derek Sivers
I guess it has to start with a dissatisfaction, doesn’t it? If you’re not dissatisfied with the way things are then you see no reason to change. I was thinking about that with my next book called “Useful Not True”, which I’ve been stewing on for a year. I’ve been dabbling with the idea for a year and intentionally letting it sit and constantly learning more about it. And going down the rabbit hole, as we say. But along the way, I realized I had forgotten point number zero. When I think of like, okay, here’s the six main points of the book, I realized I had forgotten about point number zero, which is, if you’re not dissatisfied with the way things are, well, then everything else is moot. You don’t need any of this. It starts with this idea that you want to be somewhere else from where you are right now. You are here. You want to be there, whatever that might be mentally, physically, financially, whatever it may be. If you’re completely satisfied with where you are, then you just don’t have any incentive to change do you?
Jim
No but I don’t know many people like that. I’m aware that there are a lot of people like that. They’re content. I often say that many people are sometimes just quite happy to come out and use the shrink wrap human OS that they get instilled at birth, and they’re just like, “Yeah, no, I’m good, I’m happy. Yep. I buy into this creed and I support this party.” And to me, this sounds uncharitable. Maybe it is a little uncharitable. I kind of think of that type of person as an NPC. What do you mean you’re happy with that? Don’t you want to know at least how that came about? But no. You think that there are a lot of folks who are just like, “Yeah, no, I’m good.”
Derek Sivers
Maybe it’s not a characteristic of the person, but a stage that people can be in. And maybe it can even be applied to different things, that there might be times where relationship wise, that’s a good example. There are times in your life when you’re very not satisfied with your relationship status. And then there are other times when you are just satisfied. So if somebody were to present a book to you on a whether it’s how to improve your marriage or how to get laid, there are times when you would be very interested in that book. And then there are other times in your life when you wouldn’t. Okay, so let’s say it might also be like that with other aspects of your life. There are times when you’re looking to make a change and times when you’re not. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t want to make a change in any aspect of your life. But maybe not this aspect that somebody is trying to sell you.
Jim
That’s a really good point. It kind of depends on where you find yourself in space time. And I love the relationship example, because your reticular activating system gets fired up and like all you see is dating books or improve your marriage books. But I wonder, is there a difference between that kind of episodic curiosity or event specific or domain specific type of curiosity as you give the example of relationships and just a person more like you who is just so voraciously curious about everything. What about that? That’s the part that I’m more interested in. Is there a way that you see-- I personally would recommend, what I would do is send people to your books and say, read these and let me know what you think. I like.
Derek Sivers
I like that plan. We’ll just keep doing that. We’ll just send everybody my books. Yes, that’s what the entire world should do.
Jim
Fair enough.
Derek Sivers
That is the answer, my books. Brainstorming. I don’t hear that term used much anymore, but this idea of coming up with another idea saying, okay, you’ve had that one idea, now let’s come up with another. And so you come up with another idea and they say, okay, now you have to let’s keep going, even if you really like idea number three, let’s keep going past idea number four and five. Like that’s what we’re doing here. Keep coming up with more. Again I was thinking of this for my next book called Useful Not True. The key idea in the book is like first disproving that very few things in life are absolutely necessarily true. But then the reason to do that is to force yourself to look at other perspectives, to say this idea that I think of as just true, this is right, this is true is actually just one of many perspectives. So let me force myself to consider some other perspectives. And that’s where all the good stuff happens. So clearly this is my belief. Or my approach to life is to force myself to consider other perspectives. But maybe the Picasso bull example that Steve Jobs celebrated Picasso’s drawing of a bull. Maybe people just need to be shown examples like that to be shown that Picasso didn’t just have the perfect bull drawing in mind, and then draw that bull to be shown that he screwed around and tried different approaches until he found one that he liked. There is actually a movie, I think it’s called Le Mystere, the French word for the mystery de Picasso. Le mystere de Picasso.
Jim
Oh yeah. Yeah, I’ve seen that. I know that movie.
Derek Sivers
It was a documentary. So a French filmmaker friend of his was allowed to set up a time lapse camera in Picasso’s studio and let it run all day, or for 2 or 3 days as he drew or painted. And so you got to see the progression of initial lines, then crossed out, then drawn here, then scribbled out, replaced with this, replaced with that, and then you see the final drawing, but you get to see the whole process along the way. Maybe people just need to see more often that that’s the case with not just paintings, but businesses and music and careers. Maybe people just need to see that process more often. They need to see the kitchen.
Jim
I had a guest, George. He had a theory that was you can increase what he calls your surface area for luck by taking when you have like option A and option B, he always picks the option where he feels he’s going to have the highest surface area for luck happening. And one of the things before we started recording, you were telling me about speaking at a conference and then ultimately having this fantastic conversation with the same group of people over the time in the conference. And that’s a great example. You kind of do it naturally. You went and then that presented itself. I like that idea, but I wonder, I wanted to talk a lot about Useful Not True. I just finished a book on William Blake. It was called “William Blake Versus the World” and he is such an interesting cat because he was a mystic. And like many people, if you read contemporary people who were writing about him when he was still alive, like when they would meet him, one guy wrote in his journal, “I don’t know whether I just met a genius or a madman, or maybe both.” Because Blake had this idea that you had to understand things kind of through their opposition, and he had what he called first vision, second vision, third vision. To him, that was just normal. And as I was paging through it, I thought in his The Marriage of Heaven and hell, he includes the Proverbs of hell and one is, “The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.” Okay. That’s interesting. And then the next one is, “Prisons are built with bricks of law, brothels with bricks of religion.”
Derek Sivers
First one is palaces are built with bricks of law?
Jim
No, no, no. The first one is, “The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.” The second one, which I think is kind of funny, is “Prisons are built with bricks of law. Brothels are built with bricks of religion.” But this idea that what Blake seemed to understand. I’ve always been fascinated by Blake. But this book, William Blake Versus the World, really calls out Blake Daoism, quantum philosophy. He understood that what everyone thought of as reality out there was, in fact, not reality out there. It was created in here, in our minds. Timothy Leary called them reality tunnels. Other guys have called them reality goggles. And it’s your idea writ large when you say you’ve got to look at the world from as many perspectives as you can to get kind of a real sense of what the real world, so to speak, is all about, and that most people are just kind of happy hanging in consensus reality.
Derek Sivers
Wow, thanks for that. I really like that.
Jim
I was gleeful, honestly, as I was preparing for this, I just thought, “Oh, he’s going to love this.”
Derek Sivers
You’re right. Just this morning, before I got out of bed, it’s 9 a.m. here. I’m talking about like an hour or two ago. I was thinking about how things are defined by their opposition. That you wouldn’t ever say Catholic until there was a Protestant. Those two things are defined by being not the other. And Sunni and Shiite Muslim. You wouldn’t say Sunni Muslim until Shiite Muslim came along. And then Sunni is defined by being not the Shiite one or vice versa. Yeah. Ooh, I really like the prisons built of law and brothels built of religion. Is that what it said?
Jim
Prisons are built with bricks of law, brothels with bricks of religion. And I love that too, by the way.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, things are defined by their upset. And even when you say, “I believe... Something.” You’re generally saying that it’s in opposition to. You’re choosing to not believe something else. That’s why you say, I believe this. It’s defined by what it’s not. I had a fun conversation in Dubai with a hardcore Christian. That has lived in the Middle East for ten years, speaks fluent Arabic and is very well versed in Islam. And he introduced me to one of his best friends that is a Muslim Emirati guy. So the three of us are sitting there and they were telling me about the difference between their two religions. And so the Christian guy said, “Basically, our two religions are almost the same.” He said, “Mohammed here.” Sorry, meaning his friend, not Prophet Mohammed. He said, “Mohammed speaks to God directly, whereas I speak to Jesus who speaks to God.” And I really liked that he boiled it down to the one difference. I mean, of course there are other differences, but we can all choose where to focus. If you have a fixed lens camera you can focus near, you can focus far, you can focus on any point in the middle. So he chose to focus on that as from his point of view, the primary difference between their two religions and coming from him who is so well versed, the guy really knows his stuff with Arab culture and Islam and still just holds on to his Christian values. Okay, well, that’s what you believe. This is my belief and not trying to convince anybody otherwise. But anyway, as they’re talking I thought, “Well I believe in all that stuff. The only difference for me then is I think it is not external. The powers that you’re talking about, I believe, are not external.” It’s like there. That’s my one difference.
Jim
We share that belief, by the way. I am basically an agnostic because I think, “What do I know?” I mean, honestly, how arrogant would I have to be to assert with absolute certainty that there was no God. It’s just like somebody who asserts with absolute certainty that there is one, and man, he’s got his eye on you. So I always try on those kinds of things to just keep the aperture as wide open as possible. The other thing that we touched on earlier in our first conversation, but I’d like to continue talking about you, made the point that many people will say I believe and then statement A or B, whatever. And in their minds I believe and then the one true Catholic and Apostolic faith. Okay, let’s stay with religion for a minute. And you made the point most people think of that, that they’re stating a fact, even though they preface it with the word I believe. They believe that they’re stating a fact. And it’s always been my viewpoint that, listen, if you and I found a time machine and we went back 600 years and we found the most intelligent people on the planet, we would find that almost all of their beliefs were absolutely wrong. As we look at it now. But then I extend the argument, why are we any different? What if 600 years from now, with all of the innovation and all the hopefully new things that we as a species will learn, they did the same. Guess what? They came back and they talked to you and me. Well, certainly not me, but they talked to you and some more of the other smart, intelligent people on the planet. They’re going to find the same thing.
Derek Sivers
I like that. It really helps to first point out how wrong other people are. It’s easier to say, “Look at all these fools spouting nonsense. You look at what these idiots said in the 1800s. They actually thought such and such. What fools! Look. Look at what somebody thought even 30 years ago. Look at what this idiot said about the stock market eight years ago. What fools.” And then after somebody going, “Oh, yeah, really? The world’s a bunch of idiots.” Then it’s like, so are you.
Jim
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
That’s you too.
Jim
Tony Demello has a great quote, which is, “If you’re wondering what your own faults are, simply look at what irritates you in other people.”
Derek Sivers
Nice. When I read that 94% of doctors said that they are better than average doctors, and 95% of drivers say that they’re better than average drivers, and so on. There were a bunch of these statistics from polls. Internally my first thought was, “People are stupid.” And I was like, “Oh, right, wait, that’s me too.’ So all of these things that I think I’m better than average in right now. I think it’s just safe to assume that I’m not. In fact, I’m going to choose to counterbalance our human nature. And so I will deliberately choose to assume that I’m below average, since if I assume that deliberately, I will probably counterbalance and end up somewhere more in the middle. So it’s kind of like I think of the metaphor of if you’re bowling and every time you roll the bowling ball, it goes too far to the right. Well, then you compensate. Aiming towards the middle wasn’t working. It kept going to the right. So now it’s like I’m going to aim to the left. It feels wrong. But then that curves it back to the middle. Same thing with a Frisbee. If you’re throwing a frisbee and it keeps going too far left, you have to override your instincts and throw it to what feels too far to the right, and it’ll get back to the right place. I try to do that with my thinking when I hear that we have a cognitive bias that’s common that I’m probably susceptible to, I’ll try to counteract it.
Jim
I think that’s brilliant. And by the way, that idea is endemic everywhere. The one I love is guys well into their 50s or 60s still putting themselves in the top 10% by athletic ability.
Derek Sivers
Right?
Jim
I call it the Lake Wobegon effect. If you’re familiar with Garrison Keillor. He always had Lake Wobegon, where all the kids were above average and all the women were better looking than average. And of course, that doesn’t exist. And so willing yourself to say, “You know what? I’m probably not very good at that.” Is useful because the other effect it has, if you have a certain disposition like yours is, guess what? You’re going to probably try to get a little bit better at that, and you’re going to maybe try to upskill yourself a bit there. No?
Derek Sivers
Hopefully some people take that hard. Some people do the opposite. They say, “Well, maybe I’m just not suited for that then.” When I went to Berklee College of Music, I was 17 years old. It was, you know, just regular four year college. And there were a lot of musicians that in their high school in Kansas or South Dakota, they were the best drummer in their high school in the middle of nowhere. And then they got to Berklee College of Music, and suddenly they were not the best. And they were not good at all compared to the people around them. And a lot of people found that too depressing and they dropped out because they liked the feeling of being good at something and they got there and they went, “Oh, I’m actually not good at saxophone.” So never mind. I think I’m just going to go get a job in plumbing, you know, or whatever. I saw that happen a lot. A lot of people dropped out after the first year because they weren’t as good as they thought. Then some of us and yeah me, took that as inspiration to like double down and work harder. So yeah, it’s funny how some people react to that.
Jim
That’s tragic in a way to me, because I joked when I invested in an AI company that I just wanted to ensure that I was always the stupidest person in the room. I always look at those as opportunities rather than something to be bummed out about, and it gets back to something that you’re really good at, and that’s ability to reframe the way you look at things. And I wonder if that isn’t also part of the deal. Bucky Fuller had this thing where he was very charitable. He was talking about when other people that many others would say, “Oh, you’re an idiot if you don’t understand X, Y, or Z.” And Bucky Fuller used a microscopes as his example when they had the first microscope, nobody was aware there was a microscopic world in there, and the guy who looked through it was like, “Holy shit, there’s a whole different world there.” And so what Bucky Fuller said was, “Well, what it really is, is some people are tuned in and others are not yet tuned in.” It’s very charitable. It’s like they’re just not yet tuned in. But as I thought about that a lot, I’m reading another or rereading another book called “The God Problem” by Howard Bloom, and he’s talking about how does all of this creativity happen. And it’s so in line with the way you look at the world through constant iteration, through first off, what he says is basically you’ve got to be able to iterate, iterate, iterate with what you’re working with.
Jim
And then the winner is the one who can abstract it through a story that creates a metaphor that in fact creates a symbol in our minds so that we can grasp what’s being talked about and then translation across one medium to another. You think Dawkins with his The Selfish Gene, and that’s where he introduced the word meme. That’s really what memes do, in a way. I used to joke that Saint Paul, who used to be Saul, and then he fell off his horse and hit his head and became Saint Paul. But he was the original meme. He memed Christianity into existence because, like, literally, he came up with killer, killer mindworms one of them that was just brilliant from my point of view. Back then, the gods you worshipped were the gods where you were born. So you had a village god. You had whatever a city god and everything. And Paul is up there going, “I have good news. It doesn’t matter what gods you were born into. It doesn’t matter what color you are, what sex you are, what country you come from, you can all worship the one true God who sits above them all.” And like hello, what is this? But I’m fascinated by this idea of memeing things into existence in the Dawkins sense of a meme. A meme is not just a visual on Twitter. It can be a song, a pop lyric, Saint Paul’s various exhortations to convert people. What do you think?
Derek Sivers
That’s funny. I always call them a troll. I thought that Saul was trolling.
Jim
That’s almost as good.
Derek Sivers
It’s funny that you went there with the meme because yeah, you’re right, I got so caught up on that fun image, I forgot the context of what we were talking about.
Jim
The context of what we’re talking about is how things get created and reframing, and you’re really good at it.
Derek Sivers
Thank you.
Jim
And in our last conversation, my head of Infinite Media was so excited because he kept the letter you sent him and I read it to you, so I won’t do it again here. But from your very, very successful accidentally started according to you online record company and your letter was so reframed from the way “corporate communications” came and it was lovely. And people will be listening to this in a 1,2, so they’ll hear it in our first time. But you’re really good at reframing. Can you give us the secret sauce?
Derek Sivers
I mean, I would just do the aw shucks, but I agree with you that I think that is my-- I’m not even going to say special skill. I think it is something I’m very good at.
Jim
Let me just interrupt and say it’s a superpower of yours. So I know you’re not going to say that but.
Derek Sivers
The reason I was avoiding saying that is the danger to think that some people just have that knack and some people don’t. This isn’t like I’m not tall. We mistake physical characteristics with intellectual things, and we think that some people just have it and some people don’t. So no, I was not born with a nature to reframe, but Tony Robbins book “Awaken the Giant Within” helped me a lot. I read that when I was 19, and he did a lot of reframing in there and encouraged you to do it and taught you how to do it, and suggested that so much of success or happiness is asking the right questions or asking different questions. And if you want different results, ask different questions. And focused a lot on these questions. But the questions were things like whenever something goes wrong, asking yourself, what’s great about this? And I really like that, he said, “Usually your first response will be nothing. This is just bad. It sucks.” He said, “All right, well, keep pushing through. Push past that first answer and whether you have to change the question to say, okay, well, ’What could be great about this? What might somebody else say could be great about this?’ Push through to find a perspective that empowers you instead of disempowers you.” So I think that’s all I’m really doing, is what I learned from Tony Robbins at 19, which is to ask different questions. That helped me take something that feels disempowering, like, “Oh, I lost. This thing failed. Where I’m at sucks. This is a drag. This bad thing happened.”
Derek Sivers
And to say, “Okay, hold on. What’s another way I could look at this? What’s a better way I could look at this. What could be great about this? Nothing. Okay. Keep going. No, nothing. It’s just bad. Keep going. Okay, well, maybe. Maybe I could say I won’t make that mistake again. Okay, that’s one thing. Keep going.” Like, I have these dialogues with myself, usually in my diary, where I just open up a blank page and ask myself these questions, like, “All right, I’m really upset right now. I’m really mad. I’m really disappointed. What could be good about this? What’s another way of doing this or this isn’t getting the results I want. Maybe it’s not even really bad. Maybe something is stagnated or I’m just not thriving. I’m not flourishing and I expect more from life than that. So how could I thrive and flourish in this situation? All right, these are my limitations here. How can I use these limitations instead of denying them or just feeling bad about them?” I think I do a lot of this brainstorming and I think I’ve also just learned through experience. Somebody who maybe starts scuba diving and loves scuba diving or can love skydiving. There’s some things in life that you just go like, “I love this. I love this feeling.” So to me, one of my favorite thrills in life is to change my mind when I feel my perspective on something completely change, and I just see something in a completely different way than I did five minutes ago. It’s such a rush. I go, “Whoa!” It’s like those moments that we love in those movies with a twist at the end.
Derek Sivers
Like The Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis was the ghost the whole time, or The Usual Suspects where oh my God, it was Keyser Soze is Verbal. Spoiler alert. Too late. And we love those moments because you go, “Whoa! Oh my God, hold on. Wait. Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. Hold on. Let me think about this. That’s right. Okay. I guess we never really--. You know, he just started following the boy, and the boy looked at him and he was avoiding him at first, and we just assumed this. Oh my God.” And you start replaying the whole movie in your head. Well, that’s what I do with my life when somebody says this morning’s thought, “Every belief is an opposition to another belief.” And I go, “Whoa, hold on, let me think about it. Whoa. Okay. This makes more sense then why people were acting like that. People that I thought were just kind of insane or stupid. Now that makes more sense. Oh, wow.” So this is one of my favorite things in life. Is to see another perspective that gives me some insights into life, and then I get to replay my whole life story, replay all those frustrating interpersonal experiences I’ve had in life and replay them. And now maybe they make a little more sense. Yeah, I guess I really pursue those moments, but I don’t want people to. Look at me and think, “Oh, well, Derek’s just weird like that.” Like, no, this is just a learned skill that anybody can do. I’m 54 now. I’ve been practicing this for 33 years. You know.
Jim
I do and it reminds me very much of what my grandfather taught me when I was just a youngster. I had the great good fortune of living in the town he lived in. He was quite successful. And my grandmother died, and he would come to dinner for two nights a week. I was 13 when he died, so I was really paying attention when I was about 11 and 12. And he taught me this thing he called premeditate. And what he meant by it was, think of something you might want and or a goal or whatever. And he goes then premeditated. I’m like, “What do you mean, granddad?” And he goes, “Well, you start a list and you say, here’s what I want. And then you go, here’s what happens if I get what I want, all the good things.” But then he goes, “But then I also want you to do a list of here are all the bad things that might happen if I get what I want.” And then he had you do, “Here’s what happened if I don’t get what I want, here’s all the good things that might happen because of that. And here’s all the bad things that might happen because they don’t get what I want.” But the way he framed it to me, reframing again, the first part was the one that made me kind of go, “Whoa!” Because what do you mean? If I get what I want bad things can happen.
Jim
And so the unlock for me was that because the minute you start doing it, Derek, it’s like you realize very quickly, maybe I don’t want this. And or conversely, I really want this. And then you kind of start articulating all the things, but you also see the other side, the contrary to be back to that part of the conversation, and it just gels so beautifully with the old Daoist story about the farmer who lives in a little farming village, and his horse ran away, and everyone in the village comes and says, “Oh, we’re so sorry. We’re just so sorry you lost your only means of farming. And oh, this is awful. It’s the worst.” And he said, “We’ll see.” And then the next day the horse returned and with it brought a wild horse that was beautiful. And everyone in the town rushes to congratulate him on his good fortune. And he says, “We’ll see.” And then the next day, his son is trying to break the wild horse and falls off, breaks his leg. Oh my God, they all rushed. Say how bad it is. We’ll see. Next day the army comes through and takes every able bodied young man into the service, into a battle they’re probably going to all die in. And it just keeps going and going and going. So the attitude we’ll see is also very much kind of part and parcel to this.
Derek Sivers
I love that story so much that not only did I retell it on my blog, but I actually wrote a song about it years ago.
Jim
Oh really? How cool.
Derek Sivers
It’s called “Still too soon to tell” and it tells that same story.
Jim
Oh, I love it.
Derek Sivers
You can find it on my music page on my website. It’s sive.rs/music is a list of all my mp3’s from my music making days from-- God what would that be like? Mid 80s through the end of the 90s when I started CD Baby and stopped making music. But yeah, “Still too soon to tell” is that story of the man with the horse. It’s funny. I love that story so much. Hearing you tell it almost felt like you were telling a story I wrote. Like I had to remember that, “Oh, that’s right, I didn’t write this.” I love that so much. But damn, what a cool experience you had at 11 with your granddad framing the world like this for you. That is so cool to have that so early on, to see the world through that lens, and even decide that there are some things that you decide to pursue and you’re willing to pay the price. You might pursue this in life and this will be the downside. You think, “Okay, I’m willing to take that downside.” And I wanted to tell the audience a little story. My sister, who’s two years younger than me. Just a few weeks ago, said that she really feels a little, I don’t know, resentful or bad that I had a lot of business success and she didn’t.
Derek Sivers
But she’s got three happy kids and a very long, successful marriage. She’s been super happily married for 30 years. They met young in college, and they’ve had this wonderful marriage for 30 years. Whereas I had business success but didn’t have a kid until after I sold my company at the age of 42 and never had a marriage or a good relationship. And so we talked about that. I said, you know, you chose this. I don’t think I could have had a business success and a kid at the same time. If I had a kid, I would have just chosen to be with a kid and ignored my business. And I think the only reason my business did well is because I was doing nothing but that 7 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week. And that’s what it took for that to thrive. I paid my price. You got the happy family life, I didn’t. And that made her feel better to realize like, oh yeah, that’s right. It’s a trade off.
Jim
I don’t even know how to refer to him. I love this author, Jed McKenna. He’s kind of the anti spiritual spiritualist in a weird way. He doesn’t buy into most of the happy talk of enlightenment. He’s very witty, he’s very funny. But one of the things that he says is, “Be very careful what you wish for, because if you’re sincere, the universe will turn you into the tool to achieve that.” And the example that he gives at length is Francis Ford Coppola and his making of Apocalypse Now. It nearly broke him, and Coppola was suicidal during the time because everything went wrong. His financers pulled out and he was so determined to do this. It was his own journey down into the heart of darkness. And I love the idea that being aware, as you said, with the example of your sister, when you’re aware of the things that it might cost you to get what you want and yet you still go for it. I personally believe I could be wrong, but I personally believe that you’re at least better informed than the people who don’t think. Because like, everything has a cost. And again, opposites. We’re back to that. If you’re aware of them, that seems like you’re going to end up in a better place than if you’re not.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, and guess what? A seemingly unrelated but now that I’m telling them together, it’s related. Two weeks ago, a friend of mine said, “If you had a time machine and you could go back like 40 years in the past and change something in your life, what would you do differently?” And my first answer off the top of my head, talking with my friend, was I never had a good marriage/romantic relationship, like a really long lasting one. So I think if I could do it all over again, I would do that. And I love that she knows me well enough that she said, “Are you sure? Because such and such, I don’t get that impression.” And I thought about it a little more and I went, “Actually, no, you’re right.” I act like that’s something that I’m missing out on. I think I’ve actually enjoyed not having that. I think I’ve actually really enjoyed having tons of short romances instead of one long one. So I was like, “Well, okay, thanks for pushing back. I was thinking that that was a regret. Now that you mention it, that is not a regret. Cool. Thank you.”
Jim
I am looking through. I used to do this. This is an old journal of mine from when I was 24, and I’m showing it so anyone who watches will be able to see this. Listeners aren’t going to be able to see it. But you see this little diagram here.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. What is that?
Jim
That is all of the various futures that could potentially happen from these decisions.
Derek Sivers
Whoa.
Jim
And one of the things just like your friend, you realize when you start thinking like that, you start figuring out, I kind of really did like having all those short term relationships. And so, you know, what I thought you were going to say would have been my answer, which is a more fatty. I would not change anything. The reason for that, I think, is pretty straightforward. And that is I mean, how unusual would it have been. We always see the path we took as like inevitable or retrospectively of course we would have done that. But that’s not true at all. So, for example, I transferred from the University of California to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, and I met my wife of now 41 years. So I’m one of those guys at a party over summer vacation. And I love Georgetown, by the way, but I loved her more. So everyone was telling me, “You’re a fool. You only got a couple of years left. Finish. Get your degree from Georgetown. Your relationship with her will be fine.” I’m like, “I don’t think so.” And so I literally transferred to the University of Minnesota because I loved her. And then now looking back, I wouldn’t have five grandchildren or not the same five, and I wouldn’t have the three beautiful children that I have. And so all of these things ended up because of that single decision. Yeah. No, it’s okay with me. I’m just going to finish the University of Minnesota. Chaos theory and metal brought fractals and everything basically suggests that one tiny change can lead to vastly different outcomes. And I think if you kind of think of it that way, then you’re kind of like, again, love your fate.
Derek Sivers
I love that I actually think about that with politics sometimes when people talk about India. I’ve been going to India a lot the last year. To call India one country and to call Europe 20 countries or whatever it is. Both of those to me are just the sneeze of a butterfly.
Jim
Right?
Derek Sivers
A butterfly could have sneezed in Napoleon’s ear, and all of Europe could have been one country and all of India. What we call India could have actually been 27 countries. It’s just these silly, like when people get nationalistic about, you know, “My country is the best.” It’s like your country is just an accident of history. And also these things are ever changing. As people in Czechoslovakia know, a few of my friends are from countries that don’t exist anymore, and it’s hard to be nationalistic when the country you were born in doesn’t exist anymore.
Jim
Yeah, I would think so. But that’s a great example.
Derek Sivers
And there’s probably a metaphor with that for life. The path that you could have chosen in life. I mean, we’ll never know. Those other dandelion seeds on your--. Sorry if anybody listening. Jim’s drawing looked like to me like a dandelion shooting off in every possible direction, with a little poofs at the end and coming up from one central place. And you’ll never know those other paths, what they could have been. Some of them just don’t exist anymore. And that’s that.
Jim
As I listen to you, I think that is one of the things that I learned from that premeditating that my granddad taught me. I learned to see, listen, there’s always almost infinite alternative paths that you could have taken. And Tim Urban does a great graph that shows this. His Wait, but why? He’s very creative guy. Think you’d like him a lot. Anyway, he’s got the line and it’s in green with the actual path that your life took. So initial conditions and then everything that happened. But then he shows in a different color all of the branches that could have happened. And then he shows the future as much like the drawing I showed you. All of these various different paths. And so it’s one of the reasons why I’m a fan of alternate histories, because, like you bring up with politics, you’re absolutely right. So much of my country well was a lot of people’s countries until finally it ended up with you. And in the future, who knows? The Romans thought that their empire would never die, and the Vandals and the Huns had different ideas. And then we had the offshoot of the Holy Roman Empire, which was-- I’ll always love that, because it was neither Holy, Roman nor an empire.
Derek Sivers
Nice. My last book called “How to Live”. I came across a really interesting idea while writing it. Probably my single favorite new idea that came from writing that book was in the second chapter about commitment. This idea that if you’re ever wondering what is the right decision, should I do this or should I do that? Should I live here or should I live there? Should I take this job or that job, that just the act of choosing one and wholeheartedly committing to it makes your choice the best choice. It is your commitment itself that can make any choice the right choice for you. Because they’re all parallel worlds. You pick one, and by committing to it and making the best of it, it makes it the best choice. And that’s a fascinating idea to me, because I’ve spent so much of my life wondering, where should I live? What should I do? It felt like such a huge epiphany to realize that just committing to a place and making the best of it, makes it the best place to live. Committing to a job and making the best of it makes it the best job for you.
Jim
Yeah, that’s a great notion. And decide comes from the Latin, which is desari, which means to cut off. Exactly. And so when you decide and cut off, give it your commitment. That is your best choice. And I’m always baffled a little bit by the shoulda, woulda, coulda. You remember Marlon Brando on A Streetcar Named Desire, I could have been a contender. And the idea that instantly draws me to you and the way you think and write is, I think we share that. I think that this idea that spending all your time filling it with regrets, that’s not a useful use of your time. And if you think like you’ve just expressed, I love the way you express it in the book as well. It’s like, no, no, no, decide. Cut off, make the best of it. Commit, and that is your best choice. I also believe that when you truly believe that and again, here we are. Who knows if this belief is correct or not, but it’s useful. Wittgenstein said, “Don’t look for meanings, look for use.” So this is useful and like your book about beliefs that might not be true, but boy, some are really useful. I think that’s one of them, because if you really do that, you’re probably going to end up putting much more of your all into it. You’re going to really 100%, it’s the burning the ships mentality. And that is what’s interesting. I’m sure you’re aware of that story, right? Where the commander comes and everyone doesn’t want to be there. And sometimes people talk about it as the Spanish when they’re going after the Aztecs, and the commander burns all the ships. What I didn’t know about that is that’s a myth in every culture. So the Japanese have the myth. The Chinese have the myth. All of them have the same myth. And it is just what you’ve just described. Talk about cutting off. Burn the ships. Meaning you’re stuck, man. You can only go forward.
Derek Sivers
It’s why I renounced my US citizenship was to burn the ships.
Jim
To burn the ship. All right.
Derek Sivers
You know what’s fun about talking with you is that, you know, all these references that usually I feel like I’m the one that when I’m talking with friends and people, I say, “Have you heard this metaphor about burning the ships?” And they say, “No.” And I tell them about burning the ships. I say, “Have you heard the tale about the man with the horse?” And they say, “No.” And I tell them, and I say, “Did you know that the word decide is Latin root comes from to cut off.” And here these things, that I’m usually the one telling people, I love that you know all these references already. So it’s like, okay, we can just have that as a base and build on top of that. It’s so much fun.
Jim
I know, I know, I think we might be quantumly entangled.
Derek Sivers
But then you’ve also read a bunch of stuff that I haven’t. And so every time we talk, I also learn a lot from you and I go, “Oh, okay, hold on. I got to write this down. I got to remember this.” I love our conversations.
Jim
As do I, and I just want to highlight for our listeners and viewers, that’s what makes you, you, I think, and I try to do the same. I love when somebody springs on me, something I hadn’t thought about or read. And I’m like, “Whoa, wait a minute, what book was that?” And then I just-- it’s like pure joy for me to like, go and read that book or see that movie or whatever. And I think that kind of swings us back to the beginning of our conversation where we were talking about, can you teach people to be creative. And I like your idea about the showing, because that’s one of the hallmarks is, you know, very well show, don’t tell. And I think that I am sometimes flabbergasted when people are like, “Yeah, no, I don’t care.” I’m just kind of like, “What? Why? Why not? This is so much fun.” And I just wonder, have you found in your many travels and all the people you’ve spoken with and all your experiences in life, is there like an archetype for the type of people like me and you?
Derek Sivers
Hunger. We call it hunger. That yearning, the striving to go further. I suspect that cities are healthy because they can help demystify. It’s an interesting word. Demystify. I think of it as like clearing the mist away. Clear the fog. Living in New York City, I watched people get successful, get famous. I watched people build companies from an idea into 100 employees and millions of dollars within a couple of years. And you’d see it happen first hand, and you’d get to know the people that did it and know that they fart and have bad taste in food, and it would de glorify them. You’d see that they’re just regular people. That make these decisions that just did something and made it happen, or tried something and then try it again and failed a few times, and then something went better, but it didn’t end up the way they intended it to in the first place. But they persisted, and they did this, and they took some chances and they made it happen. And you live in a place like New York City or LA. You can see this happen first time even, oh my God, the pedestal of Hollywood. There are some people that oh my God, when you see them on a big movie screen, you go in person to a theater and their face is huge, and then you get to know them as people and you go, “Oh, well, that’s just somebody applied for the gig. That producer hired a director, the director needed an actor, and the casting person just needed somebody to play that role, to say those lines with a certain look on the stage, to make this vision happen. And this person that I know just went for the audition and got it, and suddenly their face is huge on the screen.” They’re not a special person. They’re not a special breed. They’re not a different type. They are just like you. They just took the chance and showed up at the gig. 90% of success is just showing up.
Jim
You’re showing up as Woody Allen. Yeah.
Derek Sivers
They just went and did it. They did the thing instead of watching TV. And that’s all the difference it took.
Jim
That is so great though. They just-- I love that.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I think that’s all it is.
Jim
Don’t lie on your couch. Don’t watch TV. Go do the thing. Go do the thing.
Derek Sivers
So I don’t think there’s an archetype. I don’t think it’s a different type of person. In fact, I would call that a not useful, not true belief that if you think that it’s just a different type of person, then that could mess with your psyche to think, well, I’m just not that kind of person.
Jim
That’s the incredibly useful part of what you’re saying. Again, what you’re good at, better than me, is that you are sensitive to the turning off that the, “Oh, I’m just not X.” And I think that I’m going to try to incorporate that more when I’m having chats with people or confronted by that type of attitude. No. Yeah. Just go do like the just go do the thing. I referenced this book that I’m reading by Howard Bloom, The God Problem, and he’s talking about how did numbers, how did writing get started? And so you got to go all the way back to ancient Sumeria, and it’s like 2800 BC, and the priests in Sumer are getting these barley, these bushels of barley, corn, as the member of the communities offering to “the gods”. And the priests have to literally count barley corn by barley, corn. How many are in there? That’s very laborious. And so one of them’s like, “Huh? You know, we got a lot of mud around here. Let’s come up with a system where we can mark it out.” And so the letter Y, what we think of is the letter Y was their symbol for one. And then the less than sign was their symbol for ten. So ten with a bunch of Y’s after it was 15 or 20. And then they iterated and they found out, hey, you know what this is like really useful. Because now that we know how many, give or take ten, 20, 30 individual barle ycorns, now we know what one of those bags they hold.
Jim
Let’s see whether we can transform through this knowledge. And then we don’t have to count them anymore. We can just go, yep, yep this works. But then that all got extrapolated into, “Hey, we might be able to use these little ones and zeros for marking out farms we might be able to use it for--.” And then ultimately they’re using it for astronomy and they’re using it for everything. But really it was just iteration. And that’s why I think maybe we make the title of this one “Just do the thing”. Because what’s the worst thing that can happen? It doesn’t work or you fail or you’re unhappy with doing the thing, and then you stop and it gets back to memes. Why are memes so effective? Well, they’re effective because they operate the way cells in our immune system works. When Covid came around, our immune system is like, “Whoa, what the fuck is that?” And all of the cells in the immune system start attacking the problem, and then some of the cells start making a little headway. You know what happens when that happens? Most of the other cells go to where the ones are making progress. The ones that don’t have a built in switch on the human cells. It’s called apoptosis. It’s a suicide switch. They kill themselves. And then a new cell is created. So they could go do that. Well guess what? That also sounds very much like Matthew’s parable of the talents.
Jim
To him that has much more will be given to him that hath not what little he hath shall be ripped away from him. And that is kind of the way it all works. The immune system works that way. They make the metaphor in Matthew’s gospel to be that way. And then, weirdly, termites. You know how a termite mounds get built?
Derek Sivers
No.
Jim
Okay. Termites are very fastidious. Their scat looks like little bricks. And so in the termite mound, when any individual termite finds a piece of scat, they pick it up and they look around and guess where they put it, on the highest place that they can see. Because the highest place means it’s the best. So they crawl up there and they put it up there. And out of that emerges these beautiful. Have you ever seen a termite mound?
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Jim
They’re beautiful. They kind of look like Gaudi architecture from Barcelona. And yet it’s just from that one thing these complex, beautiful things happen, like the summer priests, who they ultimately called magicians, where we got mathematicians from the Magi. The thing that I’m really resonating with here is you’re just do the thing. Give me a couple examples of something that had a really great outcome in your life where it was just you like, Yeah, you know what.” Other than CD Baby, you just sort of like, “Yeah, you know what? I’m going to do the thing.”
Derek Sivers
Lonely Planet was an inspiration. Only when I found out that it was just a little newsletter that a husband and wife were sharing with their friends that they would go travel somewhere, and it was before the internet. And so they just had literally like a little paper newsletter that they’d say, we went to this place and here’s what we found. We liked this restaurant and this was interesting and this was good, but don’t go there, but do go here. And they just sent this newsletter to a dozen friends that started sharing it around, and then that grew into the Lonely Planet empire of books and such. And when I heard that, I thought, okay, well, even baby elephants start small. Even big things start small. So I started in 2011, I had just moved to Singapore, and I was having a hard time learning more about the region, that there were almost no books about Indonesia, there were almost no books about Malaysia and these places that I wanted to learn more about, but I guess just hadn’t been worth publishing companies writing much about. I decided to just start it. And so. All right, just kind of like Lonely Planet. I’m just going to start this thing now, just me. And I’m just going to keep doing this every single year. And it’s going to suck at first. But give me ten years and it’ll be good. So I whimsically called it Wood Egg and began in 2012, hired a bunch of writers and editors and researchers to learn more about each country. And I knew that the first round was going to suck.
Derek Sivers
I was like, “All right, if I know that in advance. Like watching Picasso draw, like learning about Lonely Planet’s newsletter, I’ll just begin.” And I did that for a couple of years, and I think it’s okay to tell this story, even though it didn’t turn into a big success, because I had a weird circumstance happened where just because of family reasons with my kid being born and then his mom not wanting to live in Singapore anymore, we moved to New Zealand. And so suddenly the idea of me putting a lot of effort into writing books about Asia seemed moot because it was like, well, I’m not going to live there anymore. So I stopped after 2 or 3 years. But that was something where I’m really glad that I just began, like I just started. So yes, CD Baby was my most popular example of that, but there were little examples along the way. An old fashioned credit card processing machine. Those of you who were around in the 90s might have known that they used to actually take a carbon copy paper thing and put it into this metal machine where you’d put your physical credit card in there and they’d go chunk, chunk to get a carbon imprint of the digits on your credit card. And that’s the way that you would charge people’s credit cards in a place before there was ubiquitous Wi-Fi or 4G or whatnot. If you had to charge somebody’s credit card at a concert, you do that.
Derek Sivers
So I just made the call and I found out, like, all right, how can I get one of those machines? And I found out how. And then I said, “Okay, how much would it cost to get 100,000 of those machines?” And I got a much better price. And so then I just told 200,000 musicians on CD Baby, I said, “Hey, if you want one of these machines now, I can send you one dirt cheap and you just mail me your credit card slips. I’ll process the cards for you. And you can charge people’s credit cards at gigs.” Which was like a first. Until then, there was no way for musicians to do this, and I just kind of did the thing and made the call and made it happen. Same thing with UPC barcodes. So if you were a musician or a self-published author, even putting out your own thing and you wanted to have a UPC barcode on it so that it could go into retail stores, the only way you could get a UPC barcode if you hadn’t signed away your rights to a bigger company, was to contact the Universal Code Council. That would charge you. I think it was $700 to get an account with them, but then under your account you could have up to 100,000 products. So I’m the guy that did the thing. And like even when it was just me and my CD for my own music, I paid them the 700 bucks. But now I had the account with them, so I had 100,000 barcodes I could give away.
Derek Sivers
So I contacted the musicians on CD Baby and I said, “Hey, if you need a barcode, I can make you one $20 bucks. Yeah, I made $2 million selling barcodes for 20 bucks each. And everybody was happy. I did the administration of it, the record keeping and all that kind of stuff. So I guess I picked a couple examples that were all like, I call that the co-op business model, where you get a resource that many people could use. Somebody has to be the first one to go get that resource, and then you could share it with many other people. That’s how I got into web hosting. It’s just like I was just hosting my own website. It was really difficult, but I learned how, got my own server. But then when my friends were complaining about their web hosting companies, I’d say, “Oh, come on, I’ll host you on my server for free. It’s fine, you’re a friend.” But then after doing that for like ten friends, I said, “I think I’ve accidentally started a web hosting business.” So I don’t talk about it much. But Host Baby was my web hosting business that was equally profitable to CD Baby. It was also making a couple of million dollars a year web hosting, and that was just like, I just figured out how to do it, and I’m the guy that just went and got a server and just told my friends, I can help you with this. And yeah, I don’t know, those examples help.
Jim
Oh, do they help. I think they’re fantastic. And I think everyone listening should stop. Rewind to the beginning of Derek’s telling this story and listen to it again. The reason is there’s all sorts of things that grow wildly out of just doing the thing. Like, oh, I need a bar code. Okay, I’ll figure out how to get one. Oh, I can give them to the great. I can give them to the musicians. Oh, I need a credit card thing. Get it? But see, what happens is magic, I think because you can do that. And I’m speaking more to our listeners here. You can use Derek as a great example of the fact that he just thought, “Oh, that makes sense. I’m going to try that.” We do a lot of venture capital at O’Shaughnessy ventures. So many times you get these decks from people and, you know, it’s like we’re forecasting that we will have a total addressable market of. And it’s just a word salad. And it’s just like, come on, come on. And then some of the best stuff that I’ve ever invested in was just like, yeah, I think that this might work. And we’ve got several examples of just really clever people who said, ’Oh, huh, there’s a tech bottleneck here. What if we could write software that routed around that so that the company wouldn’t lose all their workflow?” Boom. You’ve got Prefect, which we are an investor in, and it’s very, very successful data company.
Jim
And so what I love about your examples is you don’t have to have some grand plan already formulated in your mind. For what’s going to happen. As a matter of fact, I think again, back to one of your consistent messages that you make so well. Iterate, iterate, iterate. And one of the things that I’ve found is that people who do that like you and or express or have demonstrated ability to be agile in terms of, “Oh, I wasn’t planning on needing this credit card machine or this barcode thing, but they might come in very useful. Let’s just do it. Let’s just see where it goes.” But that’s where iteration comes in. Now we’re back to Picasso’s bull, because if you start and you look at his first bull, they’re good, but they look just like a regular bull. And then as you go down the line, it gets more and more and more abstract because he kept iterating. Those examples are great examples for people who, instead of saying, I’m not that kind of person or that’s not going to be right for me, that’s a small thing to try. Just give it a shot. You said 700 bucks. It cost you for the bar code.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Jim
Okay. Spend the 700 bucks. Give it a try. That’s what I love about you. Other than your book, what else are you working on right now that people might love to hear about?
Derek Sivers
It’s a tricky answer, because-- or it’s a satanic question because I really need to be working on nothing but my book right now. I’ve let myself get distracted too much over the last few months, and so I literally just got back from a month on the road, and I got back yesterday and I’m like, all right, enough of this traveling, enough I’ve spent a lot of social time
Jim
Book time.
Derek Sivers
I was like, yeah, time to just put my head down and finish this book. And then Jim says, what else?
Jim
Or I could do the voice for you, too, Derek, if you want.
Jim
Derek. What else?
Derek Sivers
Something else is interesting, isn’t it? Derek. There must be something besides your book that’s worth doing.
Derek Sivers
So right now I’m just finishing my book “Useful Not True”. Sometimes if you wonder what’s worth doing, you think of what annoys you the most. What upsets you the most? What makes you unreasonably angry? So what makes me unreasonably angry is people who let the big tech companies say, “No, no, no, no, no. Let us take care of all your data. No, no, that’s much too complicated for you. You’re just not really technically savvy. We’ll take care of all this. No, no, no. Put it in our cloud. Give us all of your contacts and all of your data, and we’ll manage it for you, for life.” So it really upsets me that a lot of people have just tossed up their hands and just thought, “Well, I don’t know this stuff, so I’ll just let the cloud take care of it for me. I’ll just let Google do it. I’ll let Apple do it. Dropbox, Apple, Google, LinkedIn, whatever.” Just name all the big platforms and suddenly you’re paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month in subscription fees. Because each one of these places has got you. You don’t know how to do anything without their control. You don’t know how to manage your own photos.
Derek Sivers
You just let Apple do it or Google do it. So anyway, that really bothers me. And it’s not that hard. It’s just one of those things like riding a bicycle or it’s easier than learning to drive a car, is to just set up your own server, to have your own data on your own server. So I’m very intrinsically motivated, even if I do it at a great loss to me. If I spend my own money doing it, I want to teach the world how to have their own server and control their own data. And it’s almost kind of punk. It’s funny, I was thinking that like, I don’t really like punk music, but the punk attitude of like, get your fucking corporation out of my personal life. Screw your damn business. This is my stuff. It’s rebellious in a way, but I’m still trying to put my finger on that. Like, why do I have such an aversion to mixing business with or other people’s business in my personal stuff. It just feels icky and wrong. I’ve put out two articles now called Tech Independence. You can find them at sive.rs/ti. As in tech independence. It’s about self-reliance with technology.
Jim
We truly are simpatico because I’m basically doing the same thing setting up servers here. I don’t want to trust the big platforms that, oh, they’ll take care of all my data in the cloud. Mhm, mhm. They will mine it and make me the product. And I think one of the big transformations coming with both AI and the various platforms available to us is that we’re going to be able to sell our data to them, not the other way around, and only if we want to. And that gives me a certain glee. Your point about punk rock, the author, Ryan North, he’s a comedic writer, but he makes some very serious points, and one of the points that he made about the scientific method was he said, “No, no, no, science is never settled. The scientific method is the ethos of pure anarchy, punk rock. Fuck you. I don’t believe you.”
Derek Sivers
Nice.
Jim
And want to test it. And I want to make sure that when you go through the scientific method, its disdain for existing authority. I want to make sure that this works. “Trust No One” is the motto of the Royal Society in Great Britain, founded by Isaac Newton, among others. What’s so funny about it is we’ve gotten so far from that, and that is what gave us all of this. I absolutely love that you’re doing that. I’m going to really impose on you and ask you on the air whether you might be willing to just stop by quarterly and so that you and I can have these chats.
Derek Sivers
Oh yeah.
Jim
Great. Good.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, definitely. I mean, dude, if if we lived in the same town, I think we’d be meeting up every week.
Jim
Oh, for sure. Absolutely. For sure. For sure we would.
Derek Sivers
Every quarter on a zoom call recorded like this. Absolutely. I would love to.
Jim
Fabulous. Okay, now you get a special treat, Derek. I am waving a magic wand and I’m making you the Emperor of the world for one day. You can’t kill anyone. You can’t put anyone in a re-education camp. But what you can do is we’re going to hand you a magic microphone, and you can speak two things into it that will incept the entire world’s population whenever their next morning is. They’re going to wake up and think, “Wow. I’ve just heard the two best ideas.” And now, going back to our earlier part of our conversation, I am going to decide to do both of these things. What are you going to incept? What two things?
Derek Sivers
Oh man. I should have had this question a month ago and thought about it for a month. Put me on the spot. In the interest of not having the listener listen to me sit here for half an hour and think. If I were to pick two things right now, they would be no surprise. They’d be the things that we’ve talked about already because they’re so important to me, which is there’s another way to think about this. There’s a better way to think about this. Like anything that’s going on in your life right now. What seems true is actually just one perspective. Okay? If I had to make it one sentence for the one of the two sentences, it’s what seems true is actually just one possible perspective. And it’s probably not the best one. So force yourself to think of other perspectives.
Jim
That’s great.
Derek Sivers
So that’s one thing. And the second one, there is a nice underlying theme in this whole conversation today of humbly beginning, just do the thing. Whether it was Picasso’s painting or somebody trying out for a Hollywood movie or Lonely Planet as a newsletter, or we didn’t get to the examples of hearing the Beatles old demo tapes, hearing those unfinished songs that later became Strawberry Fields or whatever. It’s so encouraging to hear rough demos, to see unfinished paintings, to see messy business plans that later became great. So I think the second sentence in the bullhorn to the universe would be to just begin knowing in advance that it will not be great at first, but it will get better.
Jim
I love it. The first draft always kind of sucks. And as an author of so many wonderful books yourself and I’ve written four books, boy, I know at least my first draft always really sucked. You just got to keep iterating and working on it. Well, as always, this has been an absolute delight for me, and our listeners are now going to know that we get to do this quarterly starting next quarter. Thank you so much for your time, and great to see you.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Jim. Look forward to the next one.