Work for Humans
host: Dart Lindsley
name origin, work as product design, “How to Live” insights, writing process
listen: (download)
watch: (download)
Transcript:
Derek Sivers
A big demon is guarding the bridge and I’m working on the demons voice. It’s like, “No one can cross.” I’m like, trying to like how demonic do I want to get? And I’m having fun putting on voices for characters.
Dart
Really weird. Have you listened to back to it?
Derek Sivers
Not yet.
Dart
No, because when you just did that voice, there was almost like a feedback on the mic. And it was cool sounding. It sounded like, I don’t know, it sounded like you were maxing the mic or something. It was kind of cool.
Derek Sivers
All right. Cool. So wait, before we begin, can you tell me about your name? I’ve never met somebody named Dart.
Dart
Okay, so my real name is Dan Arthur.
Derek Sivers
Ah, okay.
Dart
And so Linsley. And so my father liked wordplay. And they were saying, “Well, we’ve got a lot of Dans and a lot of Arthurs. What are we going to call this one?” And so they started calling me Dart, and I’ve been called that ever since.
Derek Sivers
Cool, nice. Oh, so your parents, like, even as a little kid, you were always Dart?
Dart
I’ve always been Dart.
Derek Sivers
It’s a great name. Okay. So well, wait. I promise not to say his name on the internet, but I’ll just say my kid has a similar cool short name. Except in his case, we made it his legal name.
Dart
Yeah, yeah, I wish. I actually wish my parents had done that. It would be I don’t know. Better, more thorough.
Dart
There was a guy-- it was actually when the internet arrived. A guy named Dart called me up and said, and found me. And he said, “Are you really named Dart?” He was named dart. And I said, no, not really. He says, “Okay, bye.” And he was just looking for people really named Dart. But I met a guy-- there was a guy up in the mountains here. It turned out his name was Dart. I run across him occasionally.
Derek Sivers
Nice. So nice to finally meet you. I’m glad that you found me.
Dart
I am too, I don’t know how I did, honestly, I can’t remember. It’s lost in the fog of lots of things. But I should tell you a little bit about the show. Just so you know, my the context that my listeners are listening within and then we’ll go and I’ll give you a high level structure of what the sorts of things I want to ask. Well, the structure of what I want to ask. So the show it starts on the premise that work is a product that companies sell. And so they should be designing it like a product. If you’re designing it like a product. Well, you start by doing lots of market research to understand what people really want from it. And I’ve been doing a lot of that research. And my general feeling is that work’s always going to suck until companies actually decide to treat it like a product. And so I talked to a lot of designers. I talked to a lot of people in the experience design community for instance. I talked to business architects about the structure of businesses and how if employees or customers, all companies are multi-sided businesses. I talked to philosophers and political scientists and all that sort of just all just super huge variety.
Dart
And I didn’t know exactly what I would want to talk to you about when I saw your work, but I thought, I don’t know. I’m going to find what I want to talk about. And here’s sort of the structure of what I’m thinking of doing is I’m going to talk about what you’re doing now. And just because I actually, I think the way you do things is so principled and so focused that I want to understand it better. I mean, you actually said one of the things you said is, you know, business is creative. You can do the things any way you want that, you know, there’s no need to adhere to norms. Norms are for businesses without personality. So pour your personality and philosophy on. So I want to say clearly yours is coming through in what you do. And I want to know about that. And then I want to get on to “How to Live” and how you arrived at that. And then I want to explore the idea, if you don’t think it’s a terrible idea of of using “How to Live” to listen.
Derek Sivers
Okay.
Dart
So the thing is, I’ve interviewed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people about what they want from work. What I didn’t recognize is that a lot of what people say underlying it is this idea of how they should live and what life is. And so I want to explore that. And beyond that, I want to know what you want to talk about today. Like, is there anything like hot on your mind? But we’ll find things if there’s nothing that’s like hot on your mind.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, you know I don’t do things like this to sell books or to promote a product. I’m just here for an interesting conversation. So yeah, when I saw your email and I clicked through to see what you’re doing, I went, “Ooh, okay, this sounds interesting.” And I was hoping that you were reading How to Live that way. Sorry with the listening angle because a lot of people don’t get that book, and I’m totally okay with that. I made it the way I wanted it to be. I made something that was like my dream come true. And honestly, even if everybody on earth hated that book, I would have been okay with that because I love it. And it is about empathy. It’s about understanding that for each of those 27 different chapters, there are people who thoroughly believe that and thoroughly live their life with these values. And they are clashing and that’s life. Which even jumping right into a work point, it was so interesting once I was comparing notes with a friend of mine that liked co-working spaces, and I said, “Why? Why on earth do you?” And eventually she said, “If I’m all alone in a room, I feel drained.” And she said, “But if there’s even one person, even if I don’t know them, and even if they’re on the other side of the room when we’re not communicating or looking at each other at all, but just knowing that there’s somebody else in the room or even in the building, I feel a little more charged up.” And I went, “Oh, I’m so glad you put it that way, because to me I’m the exact opposite. If I’m all alone, I feel no friction. I can go indefinitely if I’m alone, as soon as you put one other person in the building, even if we’re not communicating, even if I can’t see them. But I know there’s somebody else in this building. It drains me.”
Dart
Says the man in a box in New Zealand.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s as far away as I can get.
Dart
You’re in a very small box. Well, let’s start because we’re going to talk about all that stuff.
Derek Sivers
Okay, great.
Dart
That’s exactly right. And rather than all preamble, we’ll just get into it. I’m going to welcome you. You can say thanks. Say your last name for me.
Derek Sivers
Oh, Sivers rhymes with rivers.
Dart
All right. Derek Sivers, welcome to work for humans.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Dart.
Dart
I spent a lot of the last week, you know, reading your book “How to Live”. And it’s the weirdest experience. I’ve got to tell you, it’s like 27 cult leaders talking in in my ear.
Derek Sivers
Yes, yes. Great comparison. You’re the first person that’s ever said that I love that. Thank you.
Dart
So it’s 27 descriptions of how to live in the voice of the people who might be telling you to live that way. And so it’s a bewildering and almost disorienting thing. Because there’s many of these beliefs about how to live are so ambient that you don’t notice them when they’re blowing by you and making you feel bad or good, or like you should be something that you’re not. So we’re going to get into them a little later in the show, but I want to start with what you’re doing right now. I don’t want to know where you’re going. I don’t want to know what you’re doing next. But I want to know the way you do business, the way you exist in the world is very different from anybody I’ve spoken to. It feels like you’re creating yourself in public. And I can feel you gardening your digital presence to match, and in particular to match your philosophy and your belief system. So is is that perception accurate?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s very, very accurate.
Dart
You said something that I thought was really powerful. I’m going to talk for the whole show. Let me just say you this is going to be very easy podcast for you.
Derek Sivers
Just talk about me. I’m enjoying this. Thank you
Dart
I’m just going to tell you about you. But you said, you know, “Business is creative. You can do things any way you want. There’s no need to adhere to norms. Norms are for businesses without personality. So pour your personality and philosophy into the way you do business. People actually appreciate it when you do things in a surprising way.” So what is your personality and your philosophy that you are pouring into your work right now?
Derek Sivers
Oh.
Dart
Or how does it manifest in your work? I guess is the better way to ask it.
Derek Sivers
I’m going to answer that in a second. But you just reminded me about the personality of a company. If I go to the origin of why I started thinking that way, I think it was as a consumer first. I noticed that I really felt more loyalty for companies that exuded personality. So bicycles, there is a company in Minnesota called Surly Bikes. And their website just exudes personality. They like to do things kind of like muddy and dirty, and just the way they talk about their bikes is just kind of like, “Yeah, well, Jim said that our previous ogre model wasn’t tough enough for him, so we just made the new snot ogre bike. And, you know, if this isn’t tough enough for Jim, I don’t know what is.” And I just love these guys. And I feel this incredible brand loyalty for Surly Bikes. Like, I won’t consider buying any other bike, even if rationally maybe I should, but I just feel loyalty to them because they exude personality. So even something as wonky as DNS. I was using Cloudflare for my DNS because they had the fastest ping times and the most locations around the world, and I used them. But like, I never felt great about that.
Derek Sivers
It was just Cloudflare, whatever. And then I saw a Bunny bunny.net from Slovenia and they exude personality and soon I just poked around for maybe like 20 minutes on their site, and I saw that they could do everything that Cloudflare does, maybe not quite as well, but probably just as well. But I felt better about it. So it’s like, you know what? I did it. So it’s like I took the 90 minutes of work and I moved all of my domains off of Cloudflare over to Bunny DNS, and I’m really happy about that because it feels better. So those are just two silly examples. But then when I accidentally started my own company. The accident is a just circumstance. I didn’t mean to start a company, I was selling my own CD, and then it grew. But when I realized, oh, shit, I’ve just started a company, I thought, well, I could just do it the normal way, but then why bother? I want this thing to exude personality the way that businesses I love exude personality. So that’s where it all began. That’s maybe why I started thinking this way. I thought we should mention that first before we get into what I’m doing now.
Dart
No, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Let’s keep going. Okay.
Derek Sivers
Okay. So on that note, for example, formalities. We’ve all probably been to a very casual business at some point. Like if you go to a beach somewhere in the Caribbean and you want to get a snorkel and fins, there’s just a guy in a grass shack that you just give $5 to, and he’ll give you a snorkel and fins. And business can be that simple. And so when people try to do things in an extremely complex and formal way in order to impress investors or, you know, they have these dreams of becoming the next Google, I think it doesn’t have to be that complicated, because I’ve rented a snorkel and fins on the beach before I know how simple it can be. And so at every stage of my business, even, you know, inside the workplace. I just chose the simple, casual way. So remember, after years of having employees, I think after I got to 40 or 50 employees, somebody came by in Oregon and said that we needed to have some kind of a notice posted up in the workplace by Oregon law. And that was always my question by the way, if somebody said, “You have to do this for your business.” I said, “Will I be arrested if I don’t.” Like, you know, this isn’t just a should or best practices, right? If it’s best practices, I’m not going to do it.
Derek Sivers
Only if you’re telling me it’s absolutely the law. Like I will be fined and may be arrested if I don’t, then I’ll consider it. And there is one thing I forget what it was. Some kind of notice that yes, by law in the state of Oregon, any business with some number of employees needs to have this posted somewhere in the office. I said, “Can it be anywhere in the office?” They said yes. So I put it on the ceiling of the bathroom. I got a ladder, and I went up to the ceiling of the bathroom and I tacked it up. I said, “There we have now officially posted our notice.” Stupid rule. Okay and then you mentioned my website. So I, I do these same things with the website, like I learned HTML long ago. I mean, that takes two hours to learn. I learned some basic programming in my spare time, and I make a website that’s really just about getting my ideas from my brain into yours. And of course, you see, some people use these web frameworks that just have hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Just to get a paragraph from their brain into yours. And I look at that and I think, “God, that’s a lot of bloat.”
Derek Sivers
That’s really not necessary. So I try to just strip everything down because for the same reason, like I said, like buying a Surly bike. It just makes me happier when I see a really lean, handmade site that doesn’t have the bloat. It feels like the product of somebody living a thoughtful life. You know, if you just go with the defaults in life, that’s kind of the cliché that we’ve all heard, right, of, just like, “Well, you know, you just live a normal life. You have 1.5 kids and a dog and a white picket fence with a house.” Right? We’ve all heard that line it’s a cliche. But some people do that with their website. They’re like, “Well, you just fire up WordPress and it loads in 100,000 lines of PHP and 12 includes of JavaScript files and 6 CSS files.” But then you get your paragraph of text from your brain to theirs. But all you really wanted to do was get that paragraph of text, and it feels like you’re just going through the defaults without questioning them, just living the default life. And yeah, maybe I care too much about websites or something, but that’s why I do things in a non-standard way.
Dart
It’s all through your aesthetic, I think. I think your writing has-- if I was going to say, is without bloat. And so one of the things that your writing does is it’s the exact kernel of information that you want to get across without any extra. And that information that you want to get across happens to be something from down close to the operating system of the world. It so happens, right, that kernel of truth that you’re after is usually like, no, this is fundamental. And so it’s fun. It’s fast to read.
Derek Sivers
I wish more books were like that again, that came from a pain point of reading other people’s books, going, “Uh, get to the point or enough with the examples. I got it, I got it, okay. Shut up. Come on 300 pages to say what you could have said in 20. I wish I could buy a book that would just say it in 20.” Yeah.
Dart
So let’s let’s start down the path of-- well, we never quite answer.
Derek Sivers
Yes. Sorry Dart. I just realized I tangent it first because I wanted to, you know, set the scene. You asked, what am I doing now? Okay. Well, right now, for the last two years, I’ve been completely focused on one idea, which is “Useful Not True”. Which is my next book, and I’m not saying this to promote it, but I noticed that this was my kind of unspoken assumption behind my beliefs and the way I think. So you said, you know, when you’re looking at workplaces, people have this unspoken assumption that, “Well, yeah, this is how to live. This is what a workplace should be.” And somebody else thinks, “Well, yeah, well, this is what a workplace should be.” But it’s very different from what this person thinks and hence the clash. So we all have these things that seem so obvious that we don’t even say them. And so to me, something that was so obvious that I wasn’t even saying it was that I choose my beliefs because they’re useful, not because they’re true, but because believing this creates an emotion which creates an action, that is the action I want. So I choose the belief that generates the emotion, that generates the action that I want. And that’s why to believe something. And every now and then somebody in my comments would say, but that’s not true. I’d say, “Well, I don’t care if it’s true. Who’s going to say what’s true or not based on what measure?” I mean, yes, there are some factual things like there, I’m clapping my hands. That’s true. But God all things are in the mind are debatable whether it’s true or not. By what measures? So why would you use truth as a measure? No, no, no. I choose my beliefs because they’re useful, not because they’re true. And I’d been saying this for a couple of years without diving deeper into it. So then two years ago, I thought, you know, this is kind of an interesting subject. So I spent the last two years learning more about it and now writing about it.
Dart
It is, and I haven’t read or thought about it much either. Except for occasionally writing paragraphs where I say, I’m not saying this because I think it’s fact, I’m saying it because it opens the next can on the shelf, like it’s a can opener or something. And--
Derek Sivers
You know, on that point. Brian Eno, the record producer, said that. Sorry. Have you heard of him? Do you know who he is?
Dart
Oh, yeah. I’ve actually tried to get him on the show. I don’t think I have the right email.
Derek Sivers
Oh God, that would be great. He said once that his job as a record producer is mainly just to have strong opinions so that if the band is sitting there in the studio and they’re not sure whether this or that A or B, he’ll say, “What about Z?” And they’ll go, “What? That’s crazy. No way. No, that’s an awful idea, Brian.” And he’ll go, “Okay, great. It looks like I’ve just helped you decide.” And so he wasn’t proposing that idea because it was the right answer. He was proposing it because of the effect it had on their decision making. And that’s his job as a producer is to just have the strong opinions that help the artist better realize what they actually want.
Dart
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you can do that to yourself.
Derek Sivers
Exactly. Like you just said with the can opener. I really like that. I’ve never heard that metaphor.
Dart
Yeah. And I don’t know if this will make it into the show, but I’ll just describe it because it’s fun talking. One of mine is that in terms of experience design, when you’re thinking about experience, you should ask, “What’s experience?” And I’ve come up with a set of rules for what experience is. One is all experiences in the present. If you’re remembering something from the past, you’re remembering in the present. And if you’re thinking about it in the future, you’re remembering it in the present. And by the way, I heard this in one of your how to lives. I did hear this. I heard you say that. And all experiences internal, which is that by the time you actually experience it, it’s gone through all the filters and it’s gone through all of the processing, immense processing that happens before something from the outside world makes it to your internal world and it’s mediated during that passage. And so it’s important as a designer to know these things or at least to believe them, right. To actually have an opinion about what experience is. Because then you know what you’re acting upon. All you’re acting upon is that person’s now.
Derek Sivers
Nice.
Dart
And that’s a very useful framing for me. And I don’t know if it’s true- it’s a conceit.
Derek Sivers
A conceit, I like that.
Dart
I think that’s the word. I need to look it up.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Well, I agree with you. And it’s a very useful way to look at it because it keeps you focused on the now instead of ruminating about the past or trying to predict the future, to just let’s just keep this to the here and now.
Dart
Okay. A conceit is a fanciful expression in writing or speech, an elaborate metaphor. It’s okay. It’s close to what I was trying for, something, I believe, because it’s useful. Yeah, well, I can’t wait to read the whole book. But it’s a very good example, I think of the kind of kernel of truth that you pursue, which is that you are pursuing like these essential-- again, I want to say operating system kind of questions. Which I found really compelling. And so how did you in particular come to write “How to Live”?
Derek Sivers
Oh. Okay.
Dart
And I should read the whole title. It’s “How to Live 27 Conflicting Answers and One Weird Conclusion”.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, it’s an homage to a book called “Sum”. S-u-m by David Eagleman. So I read Sum by David Eagleman, loved it. Read it again a year or two later, felt, wow, I think this might be one of my favorite books of all time. And shortly after that, I was driving down the road-- wait. No, sorry, sorry. I got to tell you what I love about some. Sorry to give a little context. Some is-- it’s subtitle is “40 Tales from the afterlives.” And it’s fiction-ish, where it’s 40 little short stories, fables about what happens when you die. But each chapter disagrees with rest, so it’s basically 40 different answers to the question “What happens when you die?” And each one takes a radically different take on it. So one will say, “When you die, you’re alone in this giant mansion and you wander around for days. There’s nobody else there. And finally you see another person, who tells you that this is God’s house. But God is a creator, he’s not a manager. So he created life billions of years ago. You know, the first time the an amoeba split into two and then four and then eight cells, he was done. And he’s off doing other things now. He forgot we exist. He doesn’t know about human life. He created life. Not humans.” So then another chapter will say “When you die, you sit in a waiting room and you have to wait there until the last person on earth that knows who you are dies and only then are you allowed to go on to heaven.”
Derek Sivers
And then another one is like, “When you die, you find out that in your last life, you chose to be a man. But in your next life, you can choose to be any animal you want. So you decide to be a horse.” And that one has a beautiful ending. But these are all just these little 2 to 3 page long short stories. But I love the format. I love that every chapter disagrees with every other chapter, but each one is so confident to say, here’s what happens when you die. This is what happens. And then just three pages later, it says, here’s what happens when you die. That happens. And it’s completely, you know, disagrees with every other chapter. So I love the format so much that one day I was driving down the road. And I just went, ‘Oh, I want to write a book called How to Live in that exact format. Where it’s going to have these opinionated answers where, like you said, what’d you say? Cult leaders. Yeah, yeah, as if written by like I was going to aim for 40 because it was an homage to the book “Sum 40 Tales from the afterlives”. I was going to try to have 40 ways to live, where each chapter makes its best argument why this is the way. “This is how you should live, live for the future. Everything must be done for the future. Everything you’re doing in the present is serving your future self. And this is why this is the best way to live. And everybody should be living this way.”
Derek Sivers
And the next chapter will say, “Live for the present. The future doesn’t exist. All that really is, is the present moment.” And the next chapter will say, “Follow pain. Pain is the compass that leads you to the right thing to do, the right thing to do is always the difficult thing to do.” And I thought, “God, that would be wonderful. Oh my God, I want to write this book.” So yeah, with that flash of inspiration, it took four years to make it happen. It was also shortly after my son was born, and I had that thing that a lot of parents have, which is “I want to teach him everything I’ve ever learned in life. And what if I die before I get the chance to do that? I want to write it all down.” I’ve heard a lot of other parents have the same idea, so I kind of combined these where it’s like I wanted to put everything I’d ever learned in life into this book. But I’m never going to tell people to read a thousand page book. So my rough draft was 1300 pages, but there is no way I was going to publish 1300 pages. That’s inconsiderate. So then I spent two years whittling it down to these short little poetic sentences that communicated all of the ideas I wanted to communicate, but as succinctly as possible. Oh, and the final book is 112 pages.
Dart
It’s incredibly condensed, considering that it started off at 1300 and just as an example of the internal conflict, the first one is, “Here’s how to live. Be independent. Depend on nobody.” The second one is “Here’s how to live, commit. And it’s all about connection.” And a lot of them are paired that way. It’s like, do this, do the opposite of this. And many of them are equally compelling. Like you’re like, “Oh, that, that actually sounds pretty good.” But a lot of them are repulsive to me. But the reason that I wanted to have you on the show. Is that I’ve been doing research for a long time, about what people want from work, and I hear strains of these beliefs about how to live flowing through how people feel they should work because it’s so closely related. And so it struck me that that this might be a very powerful listening tool, which is a way-- and also the people that I have on the show. So one of them is “Think super long term.” I had Ari Wallach on the show a little while ago. He’s a futurist. He wrote the book “Long Path”, and he has the company called Long Path Labs, and it’s all about how to live that way. And so it’s a perfect example of that. So people come on the show, people I talked to. Let me think for a second about how to go through this. I’m going to just pause for a second. Here’s what I want to start. So as you developed this book, what surprised you?
Derek Sivers
Hoo hoo hoo! Every chapter completely convinced me that it was, in fact, the right answer, even though I knew what book I was writing. And even though I had just been working on the other chapter yesterday and the next chapter tomorrow. Every day I worked on that book, I felt, “Yeah, you know what? This really is the answer. I know the format. I know there are 26 other chapters, but come on, this one really is it.” And let’s just say follow the pain. This really is the best way to live. Like that would be the most amazing life. If at every life’s choice you went towards the more painful option, you would constantly grow like nothing else. That really like man, you know, I know I need to finish this book and write the other 26 chapters, but this one really is it. And then the next day. I’d be writing the chapter that’s just like, fill your senses, taste it all, do it all, hear it all, go everywhere. And I’d say, “You know what? This really is the answer. This really is it. Never mind those other chapters. This truly is how to live.” It surprised me that every chapter had me convinced while writing it that this was truly the right answer. But then the next day, I’d be on the next chapter and feel the same.
Dart
How did you research it?
Derek Sivers
Oh, it’s the culmination of everything I’d ever learned in my life up to this point. It’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books. I mean, hell, I’ve probably read--I’ve taken notes on over 450 books I’ve read since 2007. That’s when I started taking notes. But I probably read a few hundred books before that. Conversations with friends. Diaries, insights. I went through them all. I reread all of my notes from every book I’d ever read. I reread all of my diaries. Since I started keeping a diary. I revisited every interesting insight I’ve ever had about life, and I squeezed them all into that little book, but then had to, of course, categorize them under like, you know, I’ll just pick any random thought, “Whatever scares you, go do it.” One of my life mottos, and I have to think, “Well, which one of the 27 chapters does that really fit into? I think it’s more, you know, it’s more along this kind of philosophy, isn’t it?” Yeah, so I didn’t do specific research to write the book. It was just the culmination of everything I had learned up to that point, which, by the way, I hope everybody gets that the the title is ironic.
Dart
Going back to How to Live.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Dart
Yeah, it’s not an instruction manual.
Derek Sivers
Not at all. It’s meant to, uh, confuse you. And then, of course, the challenge was how to end it. You can’t just give the 27 and then say the end. Did you get a takeaway from that punchline at the end?
Dart
I did do you want me to talk about it on the show or do you want people to find the punchline themselves?
Derek Sivers
Actually, it doesn’t really-- let’s just say there’s there’s a punchline at the end. Anybody who reads this book email me if you want to talk about it.It doesn’t fit into what we’re talking about on the show, so never mind.
Dart
Well.
Derek Sivers
Oh, unless maybe it does and not or I mean, okay. All right without going into the actual two pictures at the end. For the workplace and not or. So right before we hit record or right before we begin. I mentioned this example of the introvert versus the extrovert, where I was comparing notes with a friend of mine that likes coworking spaces. Even though she could work at home, she pays money to go to another place to be surrounded by people she doesn’t know, willingly. And that shocked me. Like, why would you? You’ve got a beautiful home couch with a view and you could just sit here and work for free, but you pay money to be around other people. And she finally explained that she gets drained and exhausted if there are no other people around, and if she’s just in a place that has even strangers that she’s not communicating with. Just their presence in this room, or even in the same building, even if she can’t see them, just knowing that they’re there gives her energy. And that’s why she chooses to go to a co-working space.
Derek Sivers
And I went, “Wow, I’m so glad you narrowed it down to that. Or put it that way, because I’m the exact opposite.” If I’m all alone, I can work indefinitely. There’s no friction. I can just go forever if I’m completely alone. As soon as you put one other person in the same building with me, even if I can’t see them. But I know there’s another person in this building, then part of my brain is thinking about that person and thinking about their well-being. And if I’m being a bad person for not interacting with them more, or how they’re doing or something, and it drains me. And so I just keep trying to find scenarios where I’m completely alone with nobody else around. Then I can really work and get my work done. And I think, man, workplaces are tough because you have both types in the same workplace. So kind of like the clashing views on how to live. The conclusion at the end of the book, in short, is and not or there’s no one right answer. You have to find the combination, the intersection, the orchestra.
Dart
That’s right. And by the way, that is a central design problem in the experience of work, which is that there are some people who like to work alone and some people who who say that they want to work with teams, they want to work with other people. They like the ambiance of the buzz around them, of people. Like I know people who work in sales offices. They’re not salespeople. They just like the buzz. And then other people who like to work in engineering offices because they’re like mausoleums. And so you know, these very differences. Well, it’s challenging to actually satisfy a team of people where they have such different interests and so you’re right. And that’s like a surface detail compared to what you’re talking about in “How to Live”. So for the listeners I’m going to read some of the how to lives because we’ve been we’ve been hopping around a little bit. But I’m just going to say what some of them are. Be independent. And I’m going to do them as a bulleted list.
Dart
So how to live? “Be independent”. Next one “Commit”. Next one “Fill your senses”. Next one “Do nothing”. Next one “Think super long term”. Next one “Intertwine with the world. Make memories. Master something. Let randomness rule. Pursue pain. Do whatever you want right now.” When I read that one by the way, while I was interviewing you just now, while I was talking to you, I was like, “Yeah, I want to do that one.” “Be a famous pioneer”. And actually I’m going to stop on that, this list obviously goes on for 27 different ones, but I want to stop on that one because it really made me think about where there are urges to follow one of these lives comes from. Which is I mean, I suppose they can be taught. In fact, I know they can be taught because one of them is “Follow your book”. And I know that one can be taught because churches have taught that one forever. But I almost feel like this is what people use to explain what they are already compelled to do.
Derek Sivers
Yes.
Dart
And so on the one hand my parents were scientists. And so it was all about discovering the unknown. And so it was about, you know being a famous pioneer. And I have that too. Now, I don’t know if I learned it from them, but man, it feels compulsive as hell. So anyway, do you feel like these can be learned. Or do you feel like they’re more like compulsions?
Derek Sivers
Do you have kids?
Dart
Yeah, I do.
Derek Sivers
How many?
Dart
Two. Twins. Nice study.
Derek Sivers
Perfect. Are they very different, personality wise?
Dart
Radically.
Derek Sivers
I love this. Oh, man. I couldn’t have asked a more appropriate. So twins, I think are a great example of-- ah well, it goes either way. Sorry. Identical twins?
Dart
No. Not identical.
Derek Sivers
Okay. All right. So I’m talking way out of my pay grade here as they say. I’m no expert in this stuff, but we’ve heard the examples of identical twins that were separated at birth, you know, World War Two, whatever. A hospital in Poland, identical twins. One is sent away to Argentina and one grows up in Germany. And then 30 years later, they find these two identical twins and find that they’ve made the same life decisions all the way through and have the same preferences. They have the same beard, they smoke the same pipe. They both married a woman named Maria. They’re both really into model trains whatever. Even though they grew up unaware of each other and completely different cultures, their DNA seems to have somehow shaped their life preferences. But we’ve also seen, say whether it’s two kids, fraternal twins or, say, even pets. I used to have two cats. Now I have two rats, that were, like, never more than a yard apart from each other growing up, but yet have these very different personalities, even though they were treated exactly the same. One is so, you know, timid and the other is so brave and one is so sleepy, and the other one’s always a bundle of energy.
Derek Sivers
And so I think our DNA or whatever, our nature. I didn’t use to believe in nature, but now I do. I believe that we have a nature that pushes us a certain way that we can do anything and we can live by any belief system or value system. But some ways you’re going to feel better than others. And I just had a case of this myself last year. Where during Covid here in New Zealand in lockdown, I was trying to be domestic. I thought, “Okay, well, we can’t travel. I need to try to be a good domestic person.” And I tried that, but it was so against my nature every day felt hard trying to be like a home bound domestic person. And as soon as I got out into the world again, you know, intertwined with the world, I was like, “Oh, my God, this feels so much-- like I now I’m so full of energy. It just feels so good to be connecting with other people and other cultures that aren’t just right here.” And just it felt so much better. And I was actually just this morning, yes, at six in the morning talking with one of my best friends in Bangalore, India, comparing notes on this, how she can’t understand how some people want to spend their lives doing one thing.
Derek Sivers
She said her greatest joy is to do lots of things a little bit, just so that they’re like, enough. And she likes the broad balance of doing many things. She thinks it would be horrible to pick just one and do it all the way. And I went, “Oh God, no, I totally disagree. I love the the deeper reward, the deeper satisfaction of going all the way into one thing and proudly cutting off the other options and everything I say no to is like dropping a sandbag out of the hot air balloon. It just like, sends me higher and higher.” And it was funny comparing notes on this because we were saying, like, do you think this is a learned value thing? And she’s like, “No, I just think this is just in my nature somehow.” And I’m like, “Yeah, same here.” Like, I think this might be a nature thing. It wasn’t just that you grew up reading different books. Actually, we read most of the same books. Yeah, we can live any way we want, but I think our nature pushes us one direction
Dart
Or 3 or 5.
Derek Sivers
Well, yeah.
Dart
Right. Because there’s a lot. Yeah.
Derek Sivers
Some ways of being light us up and some ways of being drain us.
Dart
And so what I want to explore is this as a listening tool, and I wonder if it has changed writing the book how you listen when other people say what they’re doing. I mean, you just told a story that’s like that where in fact the two things you just described are two things on the list of 27. One of them is, “Change all the time”, and one of them is “Go deep. Go deep in your community, have one job, establish mastery.” You know, all those things. So it’s very much about stability. And so does it change how you-- I’m not even going to say change. Does it make how you listen more perceptive or subtler? Or different?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Not the book itself, but I think traveling did that for me. I recently figured out how to articulate why I travel. It’s because I want to inhabit philosophies. I want to experience a philosophy viscerally instead of theoretically. And so to go to Brazil and be tossed around on the presentism of the Brazilian way of life is a visceral experience. Whereas to go to Japan and experience the kind of deep, almost too much consideration for everyone else, where you’re socially rewarded. Its culturally valued to hold back what you’re really thinking and only say what the other person needs to hear, or what you think is best for the social harmony. That’s a completely different way of being. So being in Japan and experiencing that way of life, being in Brazil, experiencing that way of life and giving into it and not judging them as right or wrong. Well, we all instinctively do that at first. We grow up in a certain way, and then you experience another way and you think, “Uh, you’re you’re doing it wrong. You’re you’re weird. You’re wrong.” It takes a little while to to see it their way, imagine their point of view. I used to think it was so weird that Russians never smile. And finally, like, three different Russian people explained to me separately why smiling makes you look like an idiot by their value system.
Derek Sivers
And if you smile, it just shows you’re a stupid fool. Because life is hard and nuanced. And if you’re not smiling, it shows that you’ve understood life. Whereas if you’re smiling all the time, it makes you look like you’re an idiot. That is imperceptive and a fool. And I went, “Wow. Okay, I’m starting to understand that way of seeing things.” So just same, you know, even if we’re all just working in an office in Ohio, just seeing that we don’t have to go all the way to Brazil and Japan and Russia. But just in one small town in Akron, you can have people with vastly different value systems that say, “If you can if you value my, uh, place here at work, you’ll run everything by me.” And somebody else would say, “If you value my place here at work, you won’t bother me with these details.” You know, people have these clashing value systems, even just in one location, even if on the outside they look exactly the same and they’re both named John but they can have very different value systems. So I think it does help us to realize that we are not right and they are not wrong.
Dart
Yes and I suppose one way, I’m going to use it to listen when I ask people about what they want from work. Is sometimes people, you know, there’s a say do gap between what people say and what they do. And sometimes what people say, including me, is what I think I should do. As opposed to what my nature is. Your thinking, by the way, aligns very much with my own, which is that people are incredibly diverse. And actually I have data on it now which I’ve identified some 35 different things that people want from work. And I asked people, I turned it into a survey and I sent it out, and I asked everybody what they which of those things they wanted. And out of 100 people, 120 people, only four picked the identical pattern.
Derek Sivers
Wow.
Dart
So even while you’re having differences between two things, like you just named two two dimensions, right? If you add people up into all of those, all of the different things that they want, they turn unique really fast. And mathematically, it’s not a surprise because 35 different things there’s over a billion combinations you can have. But from a design perspective, it’s still a design problem, which is how am I going to satisfy a universe of unique people? How am I going to actually make something that works? And the answer may be you can’t, or it may be you set up systems that can, I don’t know.
Derek Sivers
This is out of my realm but I wonder about the effectiveness of trying to help each person in a workplace realize that their way is neither right nor wrong, that it’s just how they like to work, and that they need to understand that everybody else has a different set of preferences that is neither right nor wrong, but that’s how they like to work. And to understand that we need to interface between these separate desires.
Dart
Yeah, I like that. It’s just a true thing. Which is your way is one way, right? It’s not the way to live. Yeah. It’s one of at least 27, you know or whatever it is. Actually, I’m going to jump into some closing questions because I know in your particular case this is going to launch into a wide variety of things. So a lot of times I do this 15 minutes toward the end of the show, but I’m doing it a half an hour before because I know we are going to have a half an hour of things to talk about.
Dart
What I ask at the end of every show is what do you hire your work to do for you? And I’m going to go back and I’m going to say that again in a different way, which is your work. This is especially true if you have a job hires you to do something for you.
Dart
I said it wrong. Your work hires you to do something for it. What do you hire it to do for you?
Derek Sivers
You’re just asking for me personally?
Dart
Yeah, you.
Derek Sivers
Okay if we define my work as writing these days. Then it’s the combination of learning myself by diving deeper into something. And I love the empathetic communication challenge of how to best get this idea from my brain to yours. But then in doing so, I have to really get better at defining what is this idea that I’m trying to communicate from my brain to yours. And maybe that’s why I love writing so succinctly. Is because the default way I did this and still do with friends on the phone is we go talk, talk, talk talk, talk, talk for hours and hours and hours around an idea. And somewhere at the end of that we, maybe not the end. Somewhere along the way, we hit these occasional insights where we go, “Oh, wait. So I think what you’re saying is da da da.” And the person will go, “Oh, wow, I never thought about it like that. I think you’re right. That is the way I think about it.” And we got there through hours of blather. But because I don’t want to put hours of blather into the world. I do the blathering myself, or on the phone with a friend or just in my rough drafts, and then I just take out those little tiny gems, those little pearls from all the muck in the oyster and just put those out into the world. And that’s why I’m hiring this work. Funny way to put it. I would do this even if it never made a dollar. I would do this even if I had to pay to do it. I would do this if I was the last person on earth. Although there would be a little less motivation to communicate to others, but maybe I’d etch it into a stone tablet somewhere and hope that future aliens would find it. Yeah, I find that the process of figuring out how to succinctly communicate something makes you realize what your own thoughts are. And that’s what I’m using my work for.
Dart
Can we talk a little bit about the phases of that? So there are certain patterns of what people want from work, which are I call narrative patterns. And that’s because they have a start, a beginning and middle and and they have like one thing that people hire their jobs for is to solve puzzles. Well, that starts off with a knot. And it ends with a denouement. You know, where the knot is untied and. And in the middle there’s this suspension of “Can I untie this knot?” And what’s wagered, usually my ego. And it has to be a puzzle that is hard but not impossible. And it has to have incremental wins. And so there’s all these things about sort of the arc of a puzzle solving experience. Now you’ve named a couple of them, one of them is, “I don’t know what the beginning is. Actually I care about that.” The end is, “I found it. This is the kernel of truth that I’ve discovered through this process in me.” Right. How does it start?
Derek Sivers
It could be--
Dart
Actually, I know how it starts. You’re driving along in the car and you say, “Oh my gosh, I have to write this book.”
Derek Sivers
Yeah. That was a rare homage inspiration. But no, usually I think it’s confusion, upset, dissatisfaction, unease. You know, a year and a half ago, I broke up with a long term girlfriend and I had really mixed feelings about it. I mean, I could tell it was the right thing to do, but it wasn’t 100%. It was like 95%. And so that other 5% here a year and a half later I’m still looking at that 5%, friends and I talk about that. What is that? And the lessons learned from that 5%, and thinking about how many of us maybe follow that 5% and plug our ears and close our eyes to shut out the 95% because our parents told us we should be doing this thing. But then I feel this unease inside myself at something not being solved, or I feel like there’s more there to look at or I’m just feeling a little lost or confused, and I try to sort out my thoughts. So that’s what I first use a diary for, is I just spend hours and hours and hours in a journal. “What am I doing? What is this? Why is this upsetting? You know what’s a real point of that? Why do I think that? What are they? Well, what if it was another way? What if I did try to do this? Well, what have I done that in the past?” And I just ask myself so many of these questions and just write for hours. And then if along the way, yeah, I come up with a little gem that I think would be useful to others, then I share that. But yeah, that’s where it starts, I think is with the unease.
Dart
That’s really interesting. And what’s also interesting is that your method is largely internal. And so a part of your experience, which by the way makes a lot of sense why you might want to be alone for this internal work. A part of your experience is the working your way through it toward the idea, the ultimate kernel. That’s really interesting, I think. Do you have any other jobs? Any other work?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, we could talk about programming, but before we do, I just heard an interesting idea yesterday related to this. Which is imagine that-- okay, use the computer program metaphor for a second. Imagine that you are a computer program that’s been given an amount of data, and you need to process it somehow, and it’s a long process. It’s going to take you, let’s just say, and they’re going to take the program an hour to compute the data where protein folding or something like that, compute the data it’s been given. As soon as you drop one more bit of data into it, it has to start all over again. And I think about how many procrastinators I hear from that say, I listen to so many podcasts. I read so many books. And I just don’t get anything done. And then I thought about this program. It’s like, well, of course, every time you listen to another podcast, every time you take in more data, you’ve got to start all your calculations all over again because you’ve just taken in more information. And I think it’s so valuable to stop with the inputs when you know that it’s important to output now. At a certain point you think, all right, “I know there’s always more inputs. I’m just going to stop now. I’m just going to do the output based on the inputs I’ve got.”
Dart
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Derek Sivers
Sorry, I don’t remember exactly how that fit into what we were just talking about, but it seemed to.
Dart
No it does. Which is I think it’s that I was saying that your process is internal and I’m looking at that as sort of a phenomenological thing, which is what’s it like to do that? And how would someone who’s designing work for you design it so that you could do that better, so that you could experience that more, more often. And I say this to you as a musician, which is that, you know, experience design is an art and it’s an aesthetic pursuit. That is followed with an artistic mindset. But usually what you’re working on with experience design is not a physical thing like a sculpture or music. It’s the system that people live in.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, yeah.
Dart
And so now you’re having to think analytically about a system and how it’s going to create a work experience that people want. So anyway, that’s the reason I ask these questions is because it’s from that perspective.
Derek Sivers
Nice. Rube Goldberg machine. Usually when I think of system, I think of like a beautifully running engine. I think of the metaphor of like an old fashioned car engine and the gears and this and the pistons and it’s leading this and like, oh, what a beautiful engine. It’s funny to think of the small version that could start as like a little Rube Goldberg machine, right? Like, okay, well, when I touch this, it begins and the ball rolls here, which lands on this, which makes the hammer hit, that, and then this. Yeah but those things can be fun to make. It can be just a challenge. Like putting a car back together. Meaning anybody with a screwdriver and a crowbar can take a car apart. But can you put one back together? And then if you’ve seen enough cars, could you actually from scratch using just a 3D printer and no preset templates. Could you go make a car from scratch? And that’s what programming feels like to me, is starting from scratch to build a store or a website generator or a login form or whatever. I just start from scratch. I always start with a blank document. No color by numbers, paint by numbers, frameworks and templates. I always start from scratch because that’s my biggest joy, is it’s philosophical. By starting from scratch, it makes you go, “What is a store? Really? What are we really doing here? What’s this really about?” And I know this is going to sound really shallow, but it felt profound to me at the time is I was trying to model a cart, a shopping cart and I was making a cart, a separate thing that in a certain point, when you pay for what’s in the cart, it becomes an order, an invoice, or, you know, yeah an order.
Derek Sivers
And I was realizing like, oh, man, then I have to write all those rules all over again. I thought, “Well, hmm, why do I have to write all those rules all over again? Wait a minute. It’s the same rules, isn’t it? An order needs to have the same rules as the cart. The cart needs to know all the rules of the order.” I was like, “Wait a minute. A cart is an order. It’s just an unfinished order. It’s just an unpaid order is the cart. Oh my gosh, why didn’t I see this before? It’s just because we have a different name for it. That we call it a cart, but actually modeled in the computer and all the functions that need to know about inventory. And, you know, the price has to be above zero if this and that, it’s just an order. Oh, wow.” Like that felt like a huge insight. And it felt philosophical, even though it’s just something as shallow as just a little storefront.
Dart
I don’t think it’s shallow at all. At all. I think data models are a completely unrecognized philosophical experience.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Dart
Which is they are absolutely ontological. What is there? And it’s very deep and I’m not even sure that it’s--. Anyway, I’m not even sure that it’s something that those structures exist because of how we think or if they’re actually a part of the universe. I think I think that when deep data models are close to the part of the universe of what is there, and so I don’t think it’s shallow at all. It’s a small example of a deep thing.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, that’s well put. It’s a small example of a deep thing. So it’s fun. I think it’s fun to do that with programming almost anything. I mean, obviously it helps if it’s something I care about. I don’t know if I’d want to be a paid programmer where somebody just says, “All right, we need you to get these, you know, move this money from here to there. Now figure out how to do that.” Okay actually I have enjoyed lots of that in the past, but it helps if I have a greater motivation. Like all those years at my last company. So in 2008. I started a company called CD Baby that was originally just me selling my CD on my band’s website, but it was at a time before PayPal, before Amazon or Amazon was just a bookstore at the time. And so my friends in New York had nowhere to sell their music. There was literally no business anywhere in the world that would sell your music unless you were on a record label. So they asked me if I could please sell their music on my band’s website. And so I did that as a favor for, I think, 4 or 5 friends until I realized that I had accidentally started a business.
Derek Sivers
So I gave it its own domain name. I made it cdbaby.com, and for quite a few years, from 99 through 2006 or so, it was the largest seller of independent music anywhere online. And all those years I was the sole programmer. I did it all myself. I never had a team because I just enjoyed so much this process of using this sandbox, this playground to figure out how to make all these things from scratch. Even once we started distributing music to Apple iTunes and Spotify and Yahoo music or whatever. Each time they’d send me this spec sheet saying, “Okay, we need to receive the file, receive your data as such.” And I think, “Oh, all right, how can I do this? How can I get my data into their data? And what’s the real point here? What are we really trying to do? You know, maybe there’s a creative solution, if I think of it from first principles and what we’re what this is really about.” It’s just fun being able to rethink all of these, but especially if you’ve got some kind of intrinsic motivation to do so.
Dart
Here’s another closing question. What does your work cost you?
Derek Sivers
Do you want to also put that another way? You could say no.
Dart
I can put it another way. I can tell you why I ask it.
Derek Sivers
Great.
Dart
Which is, the first question I asked was, do you hire it to do for you. It only pulls out the valuable things about your work. And so if you only ask that question like I did for years, you don’t think anything about actually the parts of work that are that are costly. And so the second question is filling in that gap. Because when-- this is a conceit, if that’s the right word. Which is that people don’t want a product that just does the job. They want that product at a reasonable cost. And so like looking through the how to lives. One of them is, “Pursue pain.” Very stoic, very stoic philosophy in that one, which is do the thing that that is hardest. Never do the easy thing. If you only do easy things you will be weak. And so I look at that one and I say, “I just don’t want pain.” It’s a little too costly for me. That might be a great way to live. I don’t want that much pain. I don’t want all of it to be pain. You can have some pain, right? So like that’s an example of where I was with that one.
Derek Sivers
So, by the way, sorry to interrupt. Thanks for getting that was stoicism. I worked very hard to not mention the s word because I don’t like isms and I don’t like tying it to some ancient Greek blah blah blah, but, you know, just say what you’re saying. You don’t have to tie it into historically or give it an ism. So, yeah, “Pursue pain” is definitely stoicism, but I didn’t want to say that word.
Dart
I get that, and actually, I hear echoes in a lot of them. I hear William James in that one, too. He wasn’t a stoic or anything, but he said something along the lines of, “Do something you don’t like every day. And then when things get hard, you will stand while others are scattered like chaff in the wind.” It’s beautiful. But it’s like that sort of thing, like toughen yourself up every day.
Derek Sivers
So back to your question. What does my work cost me? I get where you’re going with this now. If you just have a boss. And that’s how you see your life as like, “I work from 9 to 5. And that’s what I do.” It helps compartmentalize it. And actually I’ll give a real example here of a sculptor I know here in Wellington, New Zealand, that she was a sculptor out of passion. She’s just a very visual person and just liked turning a blob of clay into a ballet dancer, and did it so beautifully that Weta, the company that produced the Lord of the Rings movies here in Wellington, just a mile down the road from me, hired her as a professional sculptor to make all of their figurines. Well, not all. She’s one of a few sculptors that do the figurines. So you can buy a, you know, Lady Galadriel this tall, that takes her months to make each one. And what blew my mind is that she’s been working there for 11 years now. She goes into work every morning at 8:30, comes back every day at six, and she has not done a single sculpture of her own in the last 11 years since she got that job.
Derek Sivers
And then when I asked her why, she said, “It’s because I’m eight hours a day working as hard as I can, sculpting all day. I get home and I just want to read a book or play some music or just sit with a friend. Last thing I’d want to do is sculpt. I’ve been doing it all day.” And I think that is the answer of what is it cost you, for me is because I don’t have a boss and everything I do is for intrinsic motivation. It means that I’m completely unbounded. So I get out of bed at 4:30 in the morning and I immediately start writing, and then I’ll stop to do a call like this. And then when we’re off the call, I’m going to go back to writing, and I’ll sit there until 11:00 at night when I feel my head start to bounce, and I’ll go to sleep for 5 and a half hours and wake up and do it again. It’s obsessive because it’s unbounded. I’ve set up an environment that lets me obsess on getting every little word right, because I don’t have a boss saying, “Come on, Derek, we need it by this deadline.” I can obsess. That’s what it’s costing me. But I choose it, I like it. Same with the solitude. I like it. It has the occasional downside of loneliness. But to me it’s worth it. And the obsessing, working 18 hours a day has the occasional little downside, but to me it’s worth it. So there’s my cost. That’s what it’s costing me. But I’m happy with it.
Dart
Yes, it’s worth the cost. It’s worth the cost. And I get an answer more like that from from people who have created their own work life.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Dart
You know, they’ve had people are now next door. I don’t think we’re going to be able to hear them through my mic, but I don’t have a little soundproof booth like you do. So yeah, people who have managed to create their own work life will say, “It costs me nothing. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing.” But I think yours is is more right, which is it costs me something, but it’s way worth it. You know.
Derek Sivers
Hey, you know “How to Live” that book upset some people because they want simple answers. And some people-- I’ve got just a few emails of people that aggressively disliked that book and said, “That book really messed me up for months.” And I go, “Haha, thanks.” And they go, “No, dude, I’m serious. No, I mean, really messed me up like that really. Like you’ve really harmed my life in a way. Like you started to make me see these other things. Like now, at every given moment, it’s like, I’m always at a fork in the road. There’s 27 forks in the road at all times. This is not good. Derek.” And I think, well, again, this is to me, that’s a price I’m happy to pay. I think it’s fascinating and fun to realize that there’s not one answer. There are many, many, many options and none of them is the answer. It’s a choice. And again, that’s a pain that I like.
Dart
Yeah. And one of the things I thought reading it was that some people pick one to avoid the the cognitive load of having to choose between them.
Dart
You know, because that’s hard. And so you you pick one. Some of them are still hard, but some of them are not that hard. Which is, you know well. Yeah. I mean, just by having slogans that you can say to yourself, you reduce the cognitive load of decision making.
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, yeah, right. Which doesn’t have to be an entire ism. You don’t have to buy into an ideology. You could keep a bunch of little slogans and nutshells in your pocket.
Dart
Yeah and use those.
Derek Sivers
Moment to moment in life when you’re presented with any kind of option, you think to tongue and use this nutshell, this works for me.
Dart
Which is not the sort of thing you enjoy, hence the book. But right that reader. I’m curious. You really expose yourself very broadly to the public. You’re like, “Email me.” And you have some very nice sort of filters in front of that. You have to be a human, you have to be, you know, various other things. How does that feedback affect your work or?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, it’s the constant reminder of who I’m writing for. I only write for my existing fans. I’m never writing for the New York Times Best Seller list. I’m only writing for people that have already reached out to me. And so it helps me to hear, I mean I read and reply to probably about 50 emails a day and it takes me 1 to 2 hours a day and I enjoy it, though it’s work. So what did it cost me? Two hours a day and the occasional like, when people ask me a question like, “Hello, my name is Abhishek, what should I do with my life?” I’m like, “Hi Abhishek, I don’t know, have you read everything I’ve written?”
Dart
And notice that I’m not telling you what to do with your life. That’s not my point at all.
Derek Sivers
Right, but most emails I get are just nice. Somebody reaching out because they read my book and they liked it. And I can relate to that because most times I love a book. I make a point of emailing the author, even if they’re hard to contact. I go search the web and I try to find their email address. In a few cases, I’ve gone and emailed their agent instead. Same thing even when I hear music that I love, I go to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and every concert they do, they always include one or usually include one contemporary work by a new composer. If I love it, I make a point of finding that composer and telling them how much I loved their piece. Because I heard it tonight at the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and most of these authors that I contact, and most of these composers never get back to me, and I just forget about it. But every now and then somebody gets back to me and says, “Wow, thank you. That means a lot to me that you found me.” And I think, “Oh, cool. Like this person who I just spent like 12 hours reading their book. Now they’re replying to me. That’s so cool.” And that’s such a thrill to me that I think, well, I want to be that for other people.
Derek Sivers
If somebody just this morning before we talked, I answered an email from a woman in Bahrain, telling me how much she loves my writing. And then she showed me her writing. She writes on a website, and I really like her writing, too. And she was so thrilled that I replied. And I was thrilled that I know a writer in Bahrain. How cool. And I do actually meet with these people. So when I travel, there’s a blog on my website. I could give you the exact URL, but it’s sive.rs/metchbg, which stands for Chennai and Bangalore. So a year ago I went to Chennai and Bangalore in India, and I met up with 50 people that I had been emailing with for years. Yeah, all of them, only people I’d been emailing with for years already. And I knew that they would be interesting to talk with because I think I knew over 4 or 500 people in Bangalore and Chennai, but I only had time to meet with 50. So I had to go through and look at my email history and pick out 50 people I wanted to meet with based on our email history.
Derek Sivers
And then we meet up in person and now, my best friend that I told you I was talking with this morning, is somebody that I met because of that. And who knows, maybe this woman in Bahrain will be a future best friend. So I do like the real people connections I get from it. It gives me a huge sense of security, knowing that I have reciprocal friends around the world, people that if I found myself adrift in Bahrain or Kazakhstan or Uruguay, that I have people I could call on to say, you know, “Hi, Jose, my hotel is closed. I don’t know if you remember me. We emailed last year. Can I come stay with you?” You know these kind of scenarios have happened before, and I love meeting up with the people that have reached out to me. They’ve told me where they live. We’ve been in touch, we’ve emailed many times, and suddenly I find myself in Helsinki, Finland, sitting naked in a sauna with somebody that I’d been emailing with for years. And I just love those moments, you know? So that’s why I keep my email inbox wide open. And it’s really one of the greatest joys in my life.
Dart
Where along those lines, where can people learn more about you?
Derek Sivers
Only my website. I’m just not really into social media. So sive.rs everything is there. Even all of my books. And yes, I’d like it if you buy my books. I give all the money to charity. But even if you want to just read “How to Live” for free. You can sit there and read the 27 chapters for free on my website. So sive.rs. It’s all there.
Dart
It is a very easy to use website and very just like we said before, which is that everything has a purpose. There’s nothing extra. It’s really nice. It’s really a nice place to go. So thank you very much for coming on the show today really.
Derek Sivers
Thank Dart. I loved your questions. And that flew by faster than I think almost any interview I’ve done in years. There’s some that like after 30 minutes I’m going, “Oh God, how long are we going to talk for?” I can’t believe we’ve been talking for an hour and a half. So thank you for your wonderful questions and such fun insights.
Dart
Well, if you ever need a place to stay and you’re in Santa Cruz, California. Stop by.
Derek Sivers
Cool. Thank you.
Dart
All right. Thank you.