How to Live
host: Sharad Lal
deep vs. shallow happiness, storytelling, journaling, emotional processing, flow state, parenting, creativity in business
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Transcript:
Derek Sivers
Shallow happy is eating an ice cream. Deep happy is being proud of yourself for not eating the ice cream. Mastery is more and more rare in our day and age and our culture, where anyone can have hits of shallow happy all the time.
Sharath
Hi Derek, welcome to the How to Live podcast. How are you doing this afternoon?
Derek Sivers
Great. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Audience, we are talking via Singapore to New Zealand morning to afternoon. I am so thrilled to be on a podcast called “How to Live” since my last book, and I still think of it as like, the greatest thing I’ve ever made is my book called “How to Live”, and it’s amazing that we haven’t talked until now.
Sharath
It’s such an amazing book, Derek, and it’s such a huge, huge honor to speak with you. So there’s so many areas we can go into Derek. But I thought where we’ll start was I remember the first Tim Ferriss show I listened to. You talked about the story of Tarleton. You were working in a circus, and this lady who you described as hot, and we call her drop dead gorgeous. She was 33. You were 18 and you were working in the circus, and she told you that you were the brightest person she’d seen. And when she said it, that single handedly, the biggest thing that drove your confidence and you went and thrived in life. So firstly, does Tarleton still impact you? Are you in touch with her?
Derek Sivers
Still impact me? No, we’re in touch occasionally.
Sharath
The big thing that I took out of there is how you tell stories. It was such a beautifully told story. And then as I tracked other podcasts, you were telling so many of these beautiful stories. How did you become a good storyteller and have you actively honed the skill of storytelling?
Derek Sivers
Thank you. That’s nice. I think it just comes from talking in social situations and trying to not be boring. I’ve lived in international cities for most of my life, which means I’m constantly meeting strangers. And so when you meet strangers, you have to communicate things in a non boring way because they’re not so invested in you yet. And maybe it also comes from telling stories repeatedly, like I think I’ve told many people the story of how I met Tarleton and how she gave me my confidence. And I’ve probably told that story, I don’t know, ten times. And maybe just over the years of telling it, it starts to get a little more honed. Maybe it’s also my value system because. I wanted to be a professional musician. Which part of that definition is to be an entertainer. So I wanted to be good on stage. I wanted to be entertaining in the media. That’s kind of part of the job. So maybe it’s my value system, right?
Sharath
Turning to your book, How to Live, one of the things that struck me related to storytelling there, was you of course, journal a lot. You put your memories down, you talk about, and that’s how you deepen the experience. But what was interesting is you take the liberty to embellish your stories, to make them interesting. There was something out there on that whole storytelling. While you’re looking at your memories to make them better, to serve you better.
Derek Sivers
So for myself, I wouldn’t embellish a story to make it more entertaining. But that’s something I would do for others. I would feel it’s almost my moral obligation to make a story a little more entertaining, not just because it’s considerate for your listening audience to tell a good story, but it helps a story travel further. Right. So Aesop’s fables, Aesop’s Fables are thousands of years old, and we remember them because they’ve been told a thousand times, and so they’ve become more and more memorable. If there were some unnecessary details in those stories, those details have fallen away. And what’s left are these little stories that you can picture, whether it’s the scorpion and the frog or whatever it may be, you can picture that story and therefore remember the lesson that story was meant to communicate. But when you’re talking about privately in your journal or just to yourself, what I might have been talking about there was the importance of taking a useful point of view. So you could say that person in my past was evil and they did wrong. They wronged me. You could stick with that version of the story, but you might notice that interpretation of the events is disempowering. It makes you into a victim and there’s nothing you can do about it. But on the other hand, if you look again at the past and say, “Actually, wait, that was my fault, I created that situation that made that person act that way. I might have done the same thing if I were in their shoes, or they might be saying the same thing about me. They might be saying that I wronged them and what they did was just payback.” It can help you make peace with your past to find a more empowering point of view.
Sharath
Thank you for that. And as I understood, that’s an iterative process. So first, of course there is emotions that come out and you just get the emotions out of page and then you start questioning them and making it a little more empowering. How does that process work for you? Does it take days? Do you sit down in one go and do it? How does that shift reframing happen for you?
Derek Sivers
Oh, that’s a fun question. Both. Sometimes it’s something slow that happens over days, or sometimes even months or years. Sometimes I’ve slowly thought again and again and again about a subject even as simple as like, should I get a dog? I’ve spent years asking myself that question. If I had, why would I have a dog? What do I want from a dog? What would be the downside? What would be the plus side? These perspectives might slowly form over years, but on the other hand, sometimes I have to make a decision about something, and so I will just sit with my journal for hours and keep challenging myself. But then I also call friends, and I have thoughtful friends. I think that’s actually the core trait. My core definition of friendship are the people that I most love talking about life with, and they do the same to me. My friends call me up and and ask me about, “Hey, what are your thoughts on this? You know, this thing happened today. What do you think of this?” We talk about things that we’re processing.
Sharath
Those conversations with friends. Do they go like you’re speaking and you figure it out and say thank you for your help? Like quite often you’re processing on your own and just the ability to speak to someone and get your thoughts in the right place help you. Or is it like advice? How does it normally work?
Derek Sivers
Good question. I think it’s 50/50. I think it’s sometimes just the act of saying something out loud to somebody, the act of explaining your thought process to another person that is not in your head is very useful. But sometimes, many times, actually, I feel it is. Maybe most of the time my friend, whoever, whatever friend I’m talking to will say something really helpful, like they’ll push back a little bit and say, “I don’t know, Derek, what about this?” And you go, “Oh my God, that’s such a good point. I’d never thought about that.” And those are such wonderful moments, you know, for both of us. And hopefully it happens both ways. I know that so many of my life epiphanies have been sparked by a thing that a friend said.
Sharath
Absolutely. When I think of reframing, sometimes in my experience, I tend to fall into this trap of, all right, I want to look at the positive, I want to look at the useful, and I keep going down that path where I could take something which is not good. There’s very little good about it, but I would want to quickly get away from that feeling of it not being good and try to make it useful, which sometimes might take my life in a direction where I’m just maybe living in fool’s Paradise, where I’m just looking at things which are not necessarily okay, but I’m just telling myself, this is fine, this is fine, and I keep going. So I wonder if that happens to you, and what’s the balance of saying, “Oh, I’ve gone too far. This is not working.” Let’s call it as it is.
Derek Sivers
Well, you said the key there. You said this is not working. That’s the real judgment. And sorry, I have way too much to say about this subject because it is the subject of my next book. It is what I was writing until 15 minutes ago. I was working on my next book, which is called “Useful Not True”, and this is basically the subject. It’s to judge ideas or perspectives not by whether they’re true or not, but by whether holding that idea or belief is useful to you. And that’s the best judge is to ask yourself, is this positive? Would you say fool’s Paradise point of view useful to me? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. None of them are true. Everything is just a perspective anyway. So you just have to notice in yourself which belief or which idea is most useful to me right now, because sometimes the negative ones are the most useful and I’ll give a real concrete example of that. Years ago in Singapore, I met this wonderful, amazing Australian scientist woman that we just fell head over heels in love like the day we met and had this great romance. But then one day in Singapore, something just felt a little bit off. I don’t know what it was, but instead of talking to her about it, I just left.
Derek Sivers
I just booked a flight and left with basically a couple hours notice. I said, “Hey, I know that we were going to spend the whole week together, but I changed my flight and I’m leaving tonight, so goodbye.” And she went, “Oh my God, okay.” And she was so shocked that she didn’t say anything about it. And I got on the plane and a few days later I really, really regretted it in a really deep, horrible way. Like I’ve made a huge mistake. That was the wrong thing to do. I should not have done that. I should have talked with her about it. And when I talked to friends about this, they said, “Well, it’s probably for the best.” I said, “No, no, no, no, no, no, don’t do that. That’s not what I need right now. I don’t want the Fool’s Paradise thought right now I need to feel the pain of that mistake. I did the wrong thing, and I don’t want to sugarcoat it and make it okay. Because if I do, I won’t learn the lesson. I need to feel this pain. To remember this lesson.” So that’s an example where the negative point of view is the most useful one to you.
Sharath
That’s such a good example. And as you were talking that I had a similar experience some time back, and it was a very tragic event. So I won’t go into the details. But for me, whenever things were bad, that’s how I would start. Put your head up and move forward in life and that’s what I do. But at that time I couldn’t do that because the more I did it, it became worse and worse, and I needed to have a huge good cry and I needed to feel it. And I did that during-- I’d gone to yoga for the first time. I did a chakra cleansing class, and for the first, I’d never done all that before. But I let go and it was the first time I found crying therapeutic. And it’s exactly your point. It was that negative emotion, supposedly negative emotion, which helped me heal and move forward. And if I hadn’t done that, I would not have moved forward. I’ve looked back at life. Sometimes it’s anger. Stay with the anger because that can help you versus reframing all the time and getting to a positive.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Great example. Yeah. I found that the things that get me angry are things that are worth doing something about, instead of just convincing myself to not be angry about it. Anger can be a great call to action. So yeah, anger can be a good thing. Yeah.
Sharath
And I think with that usefulness, it brings about movement, call to action. It makes you move out of that state, whether it’s mentally acknowledging it or physically actually going out and doing something.
Derek Sivers
What it’s worth for the “Useful Not True” book I’m working on now. My definition of useful is whatever helps you do what you need to do. Be who you want to be, or feel at peace. Because sometimes what you need is not to take action, it’s just to feel at peace with what’s already happened.
Sharath
That’s interesting. So if I was thinking of movement, movement can be mentally moving from a state of anger or unclear to a state of resolution, healing, feeling at peace, it need not be. You go out and start partying the next day and you’re back to normal life. You know? Because that’s what some of my friends wanted to see me do, but I didn’t. That was faking it, right? So it was like faking. I don’t really feel like doing it. I need to take the time, but when I mentally shift, that is movement and I know that is movement.
Derek Sivers
I like that.
Sharath
Let’s go to “How to Live”. One of the things that struck me was mastery. And I’ll read something that you wrote, which was just beautiful, “Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.” Can you talk a little bit about this idea?
Derek Sivers
Sure. First, I’m going to take a tiny tangent and say, I love that quote so much that I almost forget it’s mine. There are some quotes in this “How to Live” book that I think are so beautiful, and I feel like I’m not supposed to say that. But then I hear it quoted back at me and I just think, “God, that is great.” And it’s a strange feeling. I’ve never heard anybody talk about that publicly before, about being really, really proud of something you’ve made to the point where you just think it’s the most beautiful thing ever made. That’s how I feel about the How to Live book. I just think it’s my favorite book I’ve ever seen, and coincidentally, I’m the one that made it. So I love that feeling. Okay, so oh my gosh, mastery. Deep happy versus shallow happy. Shallow happy is eating an ice cream. Deep happy is being proud of yourself for not eating the ice cream. Mastery is more and more rare in our day and age and our culture, where anyone can have hits of shallow happy all the time. So I think even 30 years ago, it was much more common to be sequestered away in your practice shed. Improving and improving, improving at something six hours a night without distraction, getting great at playing an instrument or painting or being a gymnast on the high bars or whatever it may be.
Derek Sivers
Whereas now that’s becoming more and more rare, since it’s more and more tempting and possible to indulge in every little shallow hit of pleasure. That’s why I think it’s going to be more and more valuable, like not just immediately valuable, but I think in our lifetimes, because it’s going to be more rare, that makes it more worth doing, because you’ll probably be more rewarded for it. Since it will be more rare. But just even in the present moment, pursuit is the opposite of depression, and that in itself is a great reason to pursue something and get the constant rewards that come from leveling up and improving and improving. One thing you get these deep rewards that most people don’t get to true mastery instead of just a little bit of dabbling. The status thing is, I mean, I hope it’s kind of self-evident that doing this is so rare and so difficult and you can’t just buy your way into it doesn’t matter who your dad is, you have to earn it yourself. You have to do the hard work.
Sharath
As you were speaking, I just had some thoughts around you talked about it, the pursuit. And as you pursue and reach a certain level, it gives you a deep happiness. And then you get deeper and gives you deeper happiness. Doctor Paul Conti and Huberman had a lovely podcast on peace where they talked about peace as the ultimate state, which takes a generative drive. So you have the urge and the pursuit to do something. And as you do it, more and more and more, it gets you to that state of peace. And I don’t know if peace and mastery are related, because that was, for me, very different from the way I thought of peace. First, I thought of peace as a static state that you just relax. But this is a very high state where your generative drive is taking you deeper and deeper into what you, your craft or whatever you’re looking at towards mastery.
Derek Sivers
That’s a nice one. I’ve never heard of that. Maybe like in the same way that I said deep happy versus shallow happy. Yes. Maybe it’s like shallow peace versus deep peace. Yeah, maybe shallow peace is a hot bath in a quiet room with a candle that anybody can do. And deep peace. Is this feeling--.
Sharath
Fulfilling.
Derek Sivers
Yeah fulfilling. Good word. Yeah. Fulfillment that comes from setting out to do something difficult. And you did it and you achieved it and you feel, wow, I did it. What a great deep feeling of peace.
Sharath
And I do a little bit of work commercially on purpose at work. And with work we can get filled with noise, like in the corporate world. I mean, you would know that it’s just so much of noise around that. We forget about things. There’s fame, there’s other things. And I’d love to click into noise with you. But sometimes when I do like a little meditative exercise and all of us kind of go deeper and we think of a few things in work where we solved a problem, where we got that joy and satisfaction. That’s when we connect to the craft part of it that you were talking about the craft, the mastery part which is inherent in us, and that once we can use more of, gives people purpose beyond paying the bills, beyond other things, because there is inherent purpose, but we lose it along the way because of all these things.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, yeah, I like that. I agree.
Sharath
Now, one of the things about mastery, as you start, of course, you start with enthusiasm. You’re trying to improve and get better, but over a period of time it can start getting a little boring. That’s where the rigor needs to come in. Now of course, there’s rituals, things that you make sure you do. There’s discipline, there’s habit creation. But I was wondering, is there any mindset kind of way of thinking about it that, “Hey, this rigor, I have to keep going through it. I have to keep going through it to get towards mastery, towards a new level.”
Derek Sivers
I think the rewards are more subtle and they’re more work. A friend of mine is a professional weightlifter, lifting huge barbells over her head, and when I was telling her about the the squats and deadlifts I do, I talked about putting an additional five kilograms on the bar every time I do it, and she goes, “Oh God, I miss those days.” I said, “What? What do you mean?” She goes, “Derek, I have to work for weeks just to add another like one kilogram to my deadlift.” She said, “Yeah, because I’ve been doing this for so many years that I’m really hitting the max of my capabilities, and it takes weeks of work to add another kilogram.” Yeah, those gains are very small, but she’s getting a bigger reward because now she’s out there competing against the world’s best power lifters that are flying across the world to get together in South Africa for an international competition. And that’s where she’s competing. So it might be a little more boring on the day to day level. You’re not making the huge improvements that you made to the first year, but I think you get this deeper sense of like, “Oh my gosh,I’m one of the top 0.1% in the world at this now, just because I’ve been doing it for a few years.” So I think maybe the satisfaction comes in different shapes.
Sharath
I was wondering if something around purpose is useful there, like if you connect to a deeper story that this is your purpose, this is what you’re meant to do, this is what you’re meant to manifest, and there’s hard work to get there. I wonder if that is also another kind of motivator in those moments.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, well, I’d say that’s the whole purpose of purpose is--
Sharath
I love that.
Derek Sivers
It’s a story. Thanks. I should remember that. I just made that up. It’s a story that keeps us going. It’s not true. I’ve never seen a purpose in nature. It’s just in our heads. So it’s not true, but it’s a story that we tell ourselves to keep going, to do what we need to do, be who we want to be or feel at peace.
Sharath
Maybe we dig a little deeper into purpose. Since you’ve come here, how have you seen purpose in your life?
Derek Sivers
I don’t tell myself much of a story of purpose. I don’t usually think in those terms. What I do think in terms of are the Venn diagram of happy, smart and useful. I wrote a little article on my site and I gave it a nice short URL, so I can just tell you that it’s sive.rs/hsu. Like happy, smart, useful. And if you go to that URL, you will see the diagram of happy, smart and useful and my thoughts around it, because somebody asked once, “How do you decide what’s worth doing?” I had to put some thought into it and I realized that’s how I decide. It’s this intersection of what would make me happy, but also is useful to others, and also is a smart strategy. And if all three feel like the intersection, then it really feels like it’s worth doing for me to really throw my life’s energy into something. It has to, for me at least, I have to feel that I’m doing it for other people as well as myself. And then it has to be somewhat smart. So by smart, I mean strategic. Like it might make me happy and be useful if I were to quit everything I’m doing right now and go work at a soup kitchen. Ladling soup for the homeless. But I think for me that would be not smart because I have a big audience online just because my life circumstances brought me here and I could do more good for the world by doing things that reach a bigger audience. And then maybe I could do something that could pay for thousands of people to feed the homeless, instead of just me down there holding a ladle. That would feel like a dumb strategy for me, whereas for somebody else, that is a smart strategy. So that intersection of those things, I don’t call it purpose, but I guess it has that same feeling inside.
Sharath
Love that, love that. And I was very curious about smart, so I’m glad you explained it. But maybe if I can double click on that because that kind of puts it together. A story came to mind. Somebody I had actually talked to on the podcast. He worked in consulting with BCG. He retired and he wanted to do good, and he signed up for hospice service. And they kind of then put him towards cutting someone’s hair. And he was going to do that. And I think the smart lens came to him and he said, “This isn’t my competitive advantage. I’ll probably spoil someone’s hair. I’m a consultant. I can impact people in a different way. That’s my competitive advantage.” And now he’s working with a bank where he gets to change the culture, bring in purpose and make a bigger impact. So in that smart, I like competitive advantage moving forward. You talk about creating and one of the other quotes that you talked about, which I really like, “The most valuable real estate in the world, is the graveyard. There lie millions of half written books, ideas never launched and talents never develop. People die with everything still inside of them.” With this context, you get people, you tell them that go out and create. Even if you’re not sure, just pick something and create. So I’d love for you to talk about that.
Derek Sivers
Sure. Again, I’m going to take a tiny tangent first to say, you know, listening audience. If you haven’t read the book yet called “How to Live”. It’s a weird format where every chapter thinks it has the answer. It’s kind of the joke, and the point of the book is that the title is ironic. The book does not tell you how to live, so the title is meant as almost sarcastic because every chapter disagrees with every other chapter. Every chapter thinks it has the answer. So there’s a chapter that says, “Be independent. This is how to live. You must be independent. And that is the most important thing, is to be independent, to depend on nobody.” But then the very next chapter will say, “Here’s how to live, commit. Commit to a place, commit to a person, commit to a career.” So it’s the exact opposite of what the previous chapter was saying. I’m never saying that one thing is the answer, and that’s actually the punchline of the book. You’ll see at the end there are two pictures. The unspoken point is that no one thing is the answer. When I was finished writing the book and it was time to do the audiobook, I tried hiring 27 different actors to read the 27 different chapters. The whole point is like I know this Italian woman. She speaks like this. It’s very, very sensual. This. And so her name is Laura. So I had Laura read the chapter about fill your senses, “Feel the wind in your fingers, feel the sun on your face.”
Derek Sivers
And so like she embodied that chapter of hedonism because that’s also like how she lives. And I know her and she’s got an amazing voice. So I said, “Okay, I want you to read this chapter.” And then I found, like a really old actor from Finland that was reading the chapter on commitment, and he had one of these deep, gravelly voices with a Finnish accent. He said, “Commit, this is how to live.”
Derek Sivers
That’s what I really wanted from the book, so that you could hear that it was like 27 different people giving their answer on what they feel is the best way to live. But unfortunately, I found Laura and I found this guy in Finland and I found maybe 6 or 7 others, but I couldn’t find all 27. And I tried and I tried and it wasn’t working out. So finally I just went, oh well. And I came in here to my recording booth and I did all 27 chapters myself. But if you listen to the audiobook, you’ll hear I do it in kind of 27 different voices, not quite to the extreme. I just did right now, but almost.
Sharath
I look forward-- as you were describing it, I wish at some stage you get 27. I’d love to hear it, but the way you describe those 27 things, I was like, “Hey, I need to get to the audiobook right away.”
Derek Sivers
Okay. Anyway, creating. Yeah, that one is very dear to my heart. I think one of the values of creating is not just making something for other people, but you learn something about yourself in the process of making something. Everything is an experiment. If you sit, whether you’re a painter or a musician, you sit down with this feeling of, well, let’s see what happens if I take, you know, a cellos instead of a bass guitar, or I’ll use a bass as a drum instead of using a drum. Or let me see what happens if I write lyrics that have no verbs and I’m going to give myself that creative restraint. So it’s like you’re kind of challenging yourself to see if you can do this. And then by doing this, you’re kind of exploring yourself. You know, can I do this? Like I said, just 20 minutes before we hit record today, I was working on my next book called “Useful Not True”. And just because I’ve been sitting with this idea for so many hours, I came up with a new definition of a belief, and I’ve never heard somebody say this before. I didn’t read this in any philosophy book, but I really like it. A belief is a stance on what’s inconclusive. Like, we don’t say, “I believe” unless what we’re going to say next is not necessarily true, because if it were true, there would be no need to say “I believe”. We don’t say I believe in squirrels, or I believe a square has four sides. We only say “I believe” for things that are not facts, where there’s a need to take a stance because it’s disputed, it’s not conclusive. So yeah, a belief is a stance on something inconclusive. And that’s why now I’ll say that no beliefs are true. Anytime you say “I believe such and such”, it means that’s not necessarily true. If it were conclusive, it would be called a fact.
Sharath
There’s probably a hierarchy in stance. Belief is up there where maybe you have some level of evidence, some level of proof. It’s not fully there, but there’s an opinion which is one level below where maybe you start with some sort of an opinion, where I think it’s like you’re leaning towards a certain angle and then you start gathering some proof that gets into belief. And when then everyone believes it, it becomes a truth which also is not the truth, like science is also not fully true. Like if everything changes.
Derek Sivers
Earlier we said the purpose of purpose. I think for a lot of people, they would say the difference between an opinion and a belief is almost just like a level of intensity. Like, no, that’s not just an opinion. This is my belief, this is my conviction. And hahaha, I’m not prepared to go deep into this yet. But the next chapter I’m writing after our call today. The title is “The more emotional the belief, the less likely it’s true”.
Derek Sivers
Because if you’ve tied up your emotions in this, it’s an indication that there’s something else going on there. Yeah, that you’ve attached some weird kind of identity or meaning to this. We don’t get all emotional about a square has four sides unless there’s a big fight about it. You know, some people got very emotional about vaccines because in 2020 there was a fight about it. But for the most part, if you’re getting all emotional about something, it’s a sign that’s not necessarily true. Because if it were absolutely true, you would be able to just point to it and say, “Well, there absolutely.”
Sharath
I’d love to dig into it, but I respect that there’s ego and stuff. We won’t dig into it.
Derek Sivers
Next time we talk.
Sharath
Next time we talk. I was curious, like, you’ve been a creative. You started in music. After that, you created a business. In my view at least, sometimes there are two minds. There’s a creative mind which I hadn’t used for very long, and I’m trying to start using it. And there’s a business mind. So do you come from one source? How do things work inside your head when it’s coming to creative business stuff?
Derek Sivers
Business is as creative as any art form it can be. If you’re starting a business, you get to create a world, a universe where you make all the laws in this little world that is your business, that anybody that interacts with your business is playing by your rules of the game. Yeah, maybe that’s another way of saying it. It’s like you’ve just made a game where you’ve made the rules. Like those people that make board games. You say, “Okay, in this game, here’s what you do. So when you’re dealing with my business, I don’t care what you do anywhere else, here’s how we do it here.” You get to make up all these rules. It is so creative because you don’t have to do what any other business has done. You can just ask yourself from scratch. Like in a perfect world, what would happen when somebody calls my company? You think, “Well, in a perfect world, somebody would pick up within the first two rings and say, ‘Hello, hello, company name.’ Not be sent to a voicemail.” Not, you know, “Thank you for calling. Please press one for this and that.”
Derek Sivers
You’d say, “Oh, but that would be difficult.” You think, “Yeah, but this is the challenge. This is the creative challenge. How can we make it so that any time somebody calls our company, we answer in the first two rings, a real person answers and greets them.” Or whatever your values may be, “How can we make it so that I can offer everybody a money back guarantee for anything they get from us? How can I do it so that instead of paying people once every quarter like my competitors do, how can we make it so that we pay them every day or whatever the challenge may be?” This is your creative envisioning.
Sharath
That’s so empowering. Unfortunately, I’ve been an entrepreneur in a boring type of business and I’ve taken it like, “Hey, what’s the PnL? Where’s the revenue going to come from? What’s the client?” It can be more interesting, and I haven’t thought about it. I like yeah--
Derek Sivers
Sorry, but even in what people would consider boring businesses, I think that the process I’m describing gives you a competitive advantage. And sorry my memory is a little fuzzy on this, but I think if you read the story of Federal Express, aka Fedex, and I think the founder’s name was Fred Smith, I think what he was doing back in whenever it started in the 1970s or 80s was like revolutionary at the time, but in a way that’s just straight up B2B logistics, moving packages and planes. And where do we set up this hub and how can we solve this logistical problem. But I think he was solving it in a way that nobody had considered doing before. And his creative approach is what made him a huge success. So I think it can be the same in almost any industry. You know, I actually was thrilled to see this story today about BYD, the Chinese car manufacturer, about how they’re going to be marketing this car or have started selling this car for $11,000 to compete with $50,000 American cars. And I almost wanted to applaud reading it like, right on. Great job. I’m so happy to just hear this news. Like, good for you. I don’t know what they’ve done differently in their whole supply chain or battery technology or whatever it is, but hell yeah, that’s amazing. And you could say that, “Well, it’s just cars, you know, not a creative industry.” But I think there’s room in any industry to find a way to do things differently.
Sharath
When I think of creativity in my mind goes towards art, and I think there’s ingenuity and those kind of things which are creative as well. And maybe a lot of this was because I had left art personally long time back. I grew up in India, where it became very clear that math is going to take you forward. So I was like very nerdy math kind of a guy. And now I’m trying to get some part of the art, part of creativity. I found something that you said very interesting when you kind of have constraints, like for me, if I have an empty canvas and I’m to create, it’s very difficult from an artistic way. But if I have constraints that, hey, don’t use nouns like you said or speak without saying this word, my creativity comes out. So I found that extremely interesting.
Derek Sivers
You know, let’s add one more example to this because it’s an interesting subject. Yeah, I think most people think the way that you do or did, which is equating creativity with like the arts. The colorful fountain of creativity, whereas, you know, business is just PnL. I’m going to give another example where you may have heard the story because it’s easy to find everywhere online and people included in my bio, which is when I sold my company, I gave all the money to charity, and that was actually a creative solution proposed by my tax attorney. I should say he was my attorney. He’s my lawyer, but he had a background in tax law. And when I had this handshake of a deal to sell my company for $22 million. He said, “What are you going to do with the money?” I said, “Well, I’m just going to give it away. I mean, I don’t need it. That’s stupid. What would I do with $22 million?” He was the one that said, “How serious are you?” I said, “Very serious.” He said, “Are you sure? Like, irrevocably like this is a final decision. You can never go back on.” I said, “Ah, why? What’s up?” And he said, “I know of this thing in the US tax code that says if you create a charitable trust and you transfer the ownership of your company into the charitable trust now before the deal is final, then the purchasing company buys your company not from you, but from the trust, and therefore the entire $22 million will go to charity. Whereas if you sell the company, you’ll get taxed at 35% or something like that. And like $7 million will go to the IRS and only $15 million will go to charity. So I could set it up in such a way that said da da da da. And the entire $22 million goes to charity.” And to me that is creative accounting at work. That’s like accountants can be creative. I mean, we just don’t think of it as such because it’s not colorful fountains.
Sharath
Ingenuity, creativity. That’s a good way to think about it, that many people in Asia, like me, who’ve come very straight jacketed, mathematical oriented, we’re realizing that the world has shifted. Now there’s a whole visual element that comes in, and if you incorporate some amount of artistic what was initially thought of as creative stuff to yourself, that helps you become whole in your thinking and that helps you perform better. Like now I’m doing workshops and speaking. I’m using storytelling versus frameworks. That’s one example. Like earlier I was B-C-G A, B, C frameworks. That kind of a thing where like stories are better and there’s a creative way of doing it. So I was wondering if you have noticed that and what are the ways in which if we go in one way mathematical oriented, how can we use the other part of the brain? How can we get both together to get the most throughput out of ourselves?
Derek Sivers
You just have to know your own context. You have to pay attention to what mindset is helping you do what you need to do. Be who you want to be. For me, thinking in those very artistic thinking of it as art for some reason works against me. Whereas the example of creative accounting inspires me more than paint in a canvas or a sculpture, or thinking when I think of like the arts. In that case, for me, my brain clicks into a different place. That’s almost anti-productive. But when I think of just day to day reframing, these ways are more inspiring to me of-- is it called first order thinking like this kind of basic like first principle? Thank you, first principle thinking, like stripping everything down to the basics. And so often in almost any project I do, I ask myself, “Okay, in a perfect world, how would it be?” You know, like I said earlier with answering in the second ring, I ask myself this with even strange questions like-- okay, sorry, I brought up a dog twice now because just this morning on the phone, I was talking with an old friend about the subject of having a dog or not. She asked, “Under what situation would you want to have a dog?” And I said, “Well, in my perfect world, the dog would actually be like a wild dog that lives outside. That takes care of itself. But I feed it sometimes and it’s there when I want it. I can open my door and call and the dog comes, but other times I don’t need to take care of it, you know?”
Derek Sivers
She laughed. She’s like, “Oh, you and your perfect world.” But this for me, this kind of thinking works better than thinking in terms of the arts. But it sounds like for you, you’ve been feeling like your life was too numerical and was missing that balance.
Derek Sivers
Maybe. Well, hey, look at our difference in backgrounds. I spent 20 years as a full time musician. I was doing nothing but the arts. I was a ringleader of a circus. That was my life. So now when I sit down to do computer programming, I feel like, ah, you know, maybe that’s my balance is like, “Oh, how nice to be in code.” You know. So yeah. Audience don’t let any particular podcaster or guest tell you that this is how you should be. You have to discover it for yourself and notice in yourself which mindset or way of looking at things works for you and what doesn’t.
Sharath
Exactly.
Sharath
Absolutely your own context and you’ll be driven towards that. I’ve been kind of driven towards the other that I’m finding for myself now. Moving on. You talk about being not dependent on anyone, keeping friends at a distance so that then you can have a better relationship with them. And I get that whole thing of independence. But there’s this other thing of belonging. Belonging in a community and dependence. So I don’t know, how do these sit in your mind? Like where is the balance?
Derek Sivers
Well, I mean, the balance is in the last page of the book where you see the orchestra seating chart that I think of, say, independence as the trumpet in the orchestra. It is a loud, brash sound that can occasionally play a startling solo on its own, but can work wonders when you combine it with a more soothing instrument. A lot of my life philosophy that I tend to live by is driven by independence, technology wise, absolutely. In fact, one of the most popular things I wrote last year was a blog post called Tech Independence. Like the metaphor of the trumpet, in real life, I’m never saying this is the answer in the book. I said, this is the answer because that was the silly format of the book. It was meant a little tongue in cheek, the book that disagrees with itself. Wait, I don’t know if you noticed. In that chapter in particular, I did something that I was originally going to try to do with every chapter, which is to take an idea and follow it through to its logical conclusion, which became almost absurd. Like independence is good, you should not be dependent on any particular company. You should not be dependent on any particular person. You should not be dependent on such and such, and therefore you should live in a cabin growing your own food, not dependent on any. And so the whole idea was to bring it to its absurd conclusion. And originally I was going to try to do that with every chapter, and instead I let taste override that choice. But does that help explain my stance on it?
Sharath
That helps. That helps explain. Maybe if I can dig in to understand that, let’s talk about friends. There’s something that I like where you keep at a distance so you can actually see who they are. When you’re too close, you’re not really seeing them. And I think there was a metaphor where which made the point very clear. Yes. It was that a great metaphor. I’d love to talk to you about friendship. How does independence, friendship, dependence, how does that play out for you?
Derek Sivers
I can say that the most painful moments of my entire life, the 2 or 3 most painful moments of my entire life, were times when somebody I thought was my best friend basically ended the friendship or disappeared. We depend on our dear friends. We lean on them. I’d say it’s almost my definition of what makes somebody a best friend versus just an acquaintance or just a friend. Is your best friends are the ones that you can lean your weight on like a walking stick. You depend on each other. Anybody you know, somebody who uses crutches to get around with a broken leg, or an old person that uses a walking cane, you really lean on that thing. You depend on that walking cane to help you get through your day. That’s how I feel about my best friends. I lean on them and they lean on me. Sometimes they call me at 2:00 in the morning and say, “I need to talk.” And sometimes it’s me calling at 2:00 in the morning going, “I need to talk.” I love that, having a mutual dependence like that or mutual leaning on each other is one of the most rewarding, enriching feelings is to have somebody that is truly reciprocal of that. And conversely, when somebody who you’re really leaning on and maybe used to mutually lean on you then suddenly disappears. Those are those have been the single most painful moments in my entire life.
Sharath
If you don’t mind me asking. So with that complicated relationship, how do you think of like when you go into friendship? Is it like, I’m going to be close, but I’m going to keep a distance, I’m going to be independent. I’m going to enjoy this, but I’m also going to be independent of this depth. Like where--
Derek Sivers
I think they’re very, very few people that you really get into that mutual dependence. We all have met hundreds or thousands of people. And this mutual dependent friendship that’s usually just maybe three people. So I think it’s the ideal. It’s the goal. It’s something worth moving towards if you’re both feeling that way. Like, you know, you meet somebody and you initially like each other right away, like, “Wow, I just met you, I really like you.” And then time goes on. And, you know, sometimes there’s some people that just grow on you. Maybe it’s a colleague and you have been working side by side for five years. A friendship grows slowly, even if it wasn’t a big wow at first. But eventually, I think there might be a mutual recognition of mutual dependence that can be really beautiful if it’s kept balanced. Even so, no, I don’t try to keep friends at arm’s length. I don’t apply my value of independence to friendships. You know that brings up an interesting subject, though, that not just in my “How to Live” book, but anywhere in life. I think of everything as a tool in the toolbox that is never meant to be used for all situations. I have another saying that got pretty popular. It says “Hell Yeah or No”, which is if something if you’re feeling less than hell yeah to something, just say no.
Derek Sivers
It leaves more space in your life. So then when you do find the occasional rare thing that makes you go, “Oh, hell yeah, that would be amazing. That’d be great.” Now you have time and energy to throw yourself into that completely, because you said no to all the little yeses in between. So that idea spread. Tim Ferriss talked about it a lot in his podcast and his book and the idea spread around a lot. And so I meet people that tell me that they’re applying it to everything in their life. And I say, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” That’s like, “Hey, nice screwdriver. I’m using it to wash my hair. I’m using it to make my breakfast.” No, it’s a screwdriver. It’s meant for one thing. Hell yeah or no is a tool for some situations, but not for everything. And so same thing with independence that for me, applying self-reliance to the world of tech and especially like big tech and all these cloud services that try to make you depend on them, I apply it very, very fiercely there. I am dependent on no big tech company at all. Ever. But friendships? No, I don’t apply it there.
Sharath
I love this analogy of toolbox because there’s so many things that are applicable based on certain contexts. It could be very powerful. Like hell, you know, and you’re the one who created and says that. Don’t use it everywhere. So sometimes we tend to think that this is wisdom coming from someone that, “Hey, this is the way we’re supposed to live life.” I think that makes it better. Let’s have quite a few of these with us and use whatever we want to, depending on the situation. But good to have a lot of this wisdom in the toolbox.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, there’s a human tendency, not for everybody, but a lot of people have a tendency to want to turn every idea into an ideology. They can’t just say, “Ooh, good idea.” A lot of people have this tendency to think that’s the answer. This is it. This is the way. No no no no no no. It’s just a tool. Yeah I strongly advise against making anything into an ideology.
Sharath
I love that I was trying to relate it back to finding what’s useful versus what’s true. All these things are there, but you see what’s useful and you take it out. So that was interesting.
Derek Sivers
Anybody listening to this, you might know this about me already. You might not. I really enjoy my email inbox. I really like hearing from people around the world. It’s one of my favorite things. In fact, I think it’s one of the main reasons I do podcasts like this is to meet new people, and I really like it when people contact me and email me and introduce themselves. I answer every single email and I really enjoy it. So anybody listening to this should definitely go to my website, go to sive.rs and there’s a big link that says email me, contact and introduce yourself. Say hello, ask me a question if you want or just say hello.
Sharath
Absolutely. We leave the links and thank you for replying to my email. To clarify that happens and I think I read a stat on your website that you’ve replied to 36,000 emails last year, or that was a staggering number.
Derek Sivers
Actually I know I was just updating my database last night in my database because I keep track. I built my own system. There are 480,000 emails. So that’s how many I’ve answered since 2008. Yeah, I enjoy it.
Sharath
You’ve written a lot about parenting, and what struck me was so good, and I won’t be able to phrase it the way you wrote it, where you’re enjoying those moments with your son. It doesn’t matter whether he’ll remember them, what’s going to impact him. But that particular moment, choosing to spend that time is huge, and you don’t want to have expectations of him, that because you spend that time, he needs to be a certain way. I was wondering if you have some thoughts and if you can talk about that.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. In short. I try to think of everything from my kids point of view. How old are your kids now?
Sharath
Two and four.
Derek Sivers
Oh, perfect. Okay. Great example. Okay, so the way that a two or a four year old is seeing life right now is so, so, so different from the way that you see life. They do not understand time and clocks and what’s going on in the world or anything. It’s just so right here. It’s this toy and this thing and these crayons and that’s it. So my main thing I would try to do ever since my kid was born and he was born in Singapore. We moved down here to New Zealand when he was nine months old. But yeah, he was born in Singapore and we were PR at the time, thought I was going to live there forever and I would just always try to enter his world. So it’s like when mom is on duty, I just work as hard as I can. And when it’s time for daddy duty, I shut down everything. I like hold down the power button on my phone. Swipe it across, it is off. I leave it at home. There is no point in having that with me, because it would just pull me into its little stupid world of urgency. So I enter my kid’s world and I squat down to his eye level, and I see the world through his eyes. And I think of things from his mind. And there are no clocks and hours and minutes and deadlines. He’s just living in the moment, and he’s doing what’s exciting to him and what’s interesting in his brain or what would be fun. And so we just do that, and I make him the top priority when I’m with him. And I think it’s that hard boundary for me. That really helps of saying, now I’m working, I’m working, I’m working. Oh, okay. It’s, you know, whatever time it’s 3:00 or it’s 8:00, I’m on duty, shut down the computer, shut off the phone, change into comfortable jeans and a t shirt or whatever, and just get down on the ground with him and he’s the boss. And that’s it. Everything else just leads from that.
Sharath
I love that.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, and I love it too. It’s so peaceful. It’s surrender. It’s not trying to fight the difference in worldviews. It’s just surrender to let his timescale lead the way. And there were so many times when we would be at a playground and just sit there playing for like four hours at a playground, and all these other kids with their parents would just come in and go like ten minute little bursts because their parents would say, “Okay, fine, ten minutes of playground, okay.” And, you know, kids would come and go and they’d swing and they’d play. And then after ten minutes, the parents are like, “Come on, we got to go.” And I’d always feel bad with this whole, like forcing kids into an adult time schedule, you could say, but that’s reality. You have to. And I think, well, no, that’s not true. You can schedule your life in such a way that you can just let your kid lead the way.
Sharath
I love that I was guilty of doing something similar earlier where it was like, If I’m taking my kids out, I would want to have it a certain way, “Let’s go here, let’s do this. Let’s do that.” The minute I let go. And it happened by accident because it wasn’t really working well with the two year old. You hear no’s very clearly and you see what works by default. I just started following what the kid was doing, what my elder daughter was doing, and it was such a beautiful experience. And then recently I was taking my other one, who’s now two years to school and just letting her do like she wants to walk, then wants to get on the pram, wants to do whatever. And somebody passed by and said, “Oh, it’s a special time for you.” And I thought, what a great way to put it. I thought, it’s a special time for this girl because I’m taking time out to take her. But it’s a special time for you to be able to do that with that kid. The kids are going to be that small. So I love everything that you’re saying, that if you’re able to this all experiences in life, but there’s one experience where if you can get into the kid’s mind and see the world as a kid and just be present for them, that’s the ultimate thing you can do for yourself. Yeah, of course, for the kid, but for yourself.
Derek Sivers
And I got to say it’s fun in the moment and it pays off that people now comment as my boy is 12. What a close relationship he and I have. Even if when we’re hanging out in person, he’ll often just like sit on my lap or we’ll touch our two heads together as we’re reading something. Or he just we’re just really, really close. Somebody commented on that recently, like I was in Japan for his school holidays. I took him to Japan because he begged me to. And so a guy we stayed with in Japan, that was his main comment, like after we were leaving, he said, “Got to tell you like the most remarkable thing is how close you two are.” And I thought, “Well, that’s actually just the culmination of an entire lifetime of what we’re talking about, because I gave him my full attention and showed him his value. It paid off in the deeper relationship.”
Sharath
Absolutely. So, Derek, as we close out, I have this last question for everyone. At the end of your life, how would you know you’ve lived a good life?
Derek Sivers
I will use the answer of many other polled people that you’ve heard of the concept of flow. The term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And he apparently interviewed a lot of people. And granted, now that I say this out loud, I’m realizing maybe he had a bias in order to support his work, but at least he said that the people interviewed near the end of their life that were happiest with their life, looking back, were the ones that had spent the most time in the state of flow. I often use this as a compass for what’s worth doing is whatever is intriguing me the most. You know, it also matches that happy, smart, useful thing. I try not to waste too much time doing something entirely stupid, but whatever’s intriguing me the most is the thing that’s going to give me that rapturous state of flow where you’re just lost in something, and it’s what a great feeling. So I think a life spent pursuing that and a life that is structured to support that will probably give the best feeling at the end of your life that it was a life well spent.
Sharath
Thank you for that, Derek. Thank you very much for making time and spending time with us in the How to Live podcast. I wish you all the best and I look forward to seeing you in Singapore sometime soon.
Derek Sivers
That would be wonderful. Yeah, and I hope to talk to you again.
Sharath
Thank you, Derek, for such a deep, insightful conversation.