Happiness Explorer
host: Mike Duffy
achievement vs. serenity, simplicity and consumerism, immersive vs. tourist travel, the purpose of purpose
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Transcript:
Mike
Hi, and welcome to The Happiness Explorer podcast. I’m your host, Mike Duffy, and we’re joined today by our guest, Derek Sivers. Derek, welcome.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Mike.
Mike
Really excited to have Derek on the call today. He’s the author of five books. Describes himself as a author of pop psychology books. I found the books to be very courageous, very revealing, a lot of wisdom bombs. So I’m really looking forward to digging into your work. And then, by way of background, he’s a former entrepreneur, had a $22 million exit from a company called CD Baby. He gave the majority of proceeds to charity. He’s 54, originally from California, moved around a lot. Now he lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Right now, he’s most excited about a lot of computer programming projects, putting his content in AI and leveraging that in various ways around his content. And we talked about some of the themes to dig into and a central theme from for both of us, I think certainly for my research and from looking across your work, is what I’ll introduce as this balance of achievement and serenity that the ancient wisdom tradition points to both an achievement you tend to read one set of books for achievement, and then one set of books for serenity, and they don’t come together. Whereas I think they’re a vital way of living a different set of states, perhaps that we can step into. Um, there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that use achievement as a medicine, and then find out that that medicine doesn’t work long term. At the same time, if you just lean into serenity and sitting under the Bodhi tree, nothing ever gets done. So it’s a real question for me. My research points to the question of how do we do it? I was hoping to get your perspective on how you view that balance of serenity and achievement.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I just now realized I can start with a little story.
Mike
Perfect.
Derek Sivers
Just a month after I sold my company, I treated myself to a trip to Japan. I was actually on the way to Vietnam to go meet with my music teacher for his concert that I was a part of. But I left a few days early so I could spend a few days in the very southern island of the Japan mainland, not down to Okinawa. I believe it’s called Sakurajima. It is a dormant volcano that had a natural hot springs on it. And I went there on a Wednesday and I was just the only person there. I stayed at the hotel in this hot springs, and I brought along some interesting books that I was really excited to read. And one of them was Charlie Munger who was Warren Buffett’s partner, wrote a book called “Poor Charlie’s Almanack”. And here I am in this most tranquil hot springs in beautiful rural Japan, soaking in the hot water, going, “Ah.” And again, remember, I had just sold my company one month before, and I’m reading this Charlie Munger book, and I got really excited about some of the ideas in it. And I went, “Oh, oh, this is oh, I want to try this.” And as soon as I said, oh, great, I want to try this, I went, “Oh no, I don’t have a company anymore.”
Derek Sivers
And it felt like my company had been my Lego set, my laboratory, my chemistry set. It was a place where if I had an idea, I could go try it. And that was the exciting thing. It’s not just theoretical. You hear an idea, you want to try it right away. And that’s what I loved about having a company. And in that moment I was really disappointed, or I felt a little empty that I didn’t have a company to play with anymore. And so I felt a little less tranquil because of it. You know, I think so this is that balance of what did you say? Achievement and serenity.
Mike
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
To me, the two are so linked that a lot of what we call achievement is just grown up play. It’s just like, “Oh, I want to try that.” You know, like a kid seeing his friend playing a video game, and you go, “Ooh, can I play?” And I feel that way about the world of business or even the world of philosophy. Different ways you could live. It’s like, “Ooh, I want to try that. Can I play?” It’s the fullest expression of being human and having fun is to try ideas. And so there I was in this peaceful hot springs going, “Oh, I wish I could play with these ideas that Charlie Munger’s laying down.” So, yeah.
Mike
It’s interesting. I love how you brought in play that may or may not be how most people think about their work, but it sounds like something that you brought to your your career. Can you just expand on on what play means to you in that context?
Derek Sivers
I think most people would think of it this way if they weren’t stressed about money. I think if you take away the stress of money and if you no longer have to do anything. If you’re not, you know, back against the wall, forced to do something, then you do things just because they’re interesting or because they’re fun. And then it is like play. Ideally, most of us are in a field we find interesting. That’s why we were drawn towards it. Unless, you know, some of us were forced in. But most of us, I think, were drawn towards something we found interesting. And so I think I just got lucky in the fact that my company was successful right away. But by successful, I mean I made $500 because my cost of living was so low at that point that making $500 was a success for me. I had no employees, I had no expenses. It was just me and my living room. So this little hobby I started made $500 its first month in business. I went, “Wow, cool.” 500 bucks in the second month it made $1,000. In the third month it made $2,000. And yeah, I never had investors or never had any debt. I didn’t start hiring employees. Until a whole year later I hired my first employee, but I was never back against the wall for money. I was only doing this thing because I felt it was fun and interesting. So, I guess I always approached business as fun. I could read books like Guerrilla Marketing or Seth Godin books or whatever and go, “Ooh, I want to try that.” And go apply it to my business. And that was the fun.
Mike
You know, I love that. Sometimes I think about achievement and serenity as an equation where achievement is the numerator and serenity is the denominator. And what I mean by that is when we have our denominator that’s full of stuff. Stuff we need to pay for, stuff we need to do, high standard of living. We have to put more achievement into the numerator in order to feel good. And a really central theme in your life is simplicity and serenity through simplicity. As Seneca said, To make a man rich, take away his desires.” It seems like you’ve done a lot of that. Can you--.
Derek Sivers
Oh, yeah. Very intentionally so. Maybe I just got that value system early on. And I still wield it every day. I mean, I’ll just tell you an example from yesterday. I’m doing a lot of computer programming lately, and I started thinking it would be really nice to have a vertical computer monitor instead of horizontal, because then I could see more code this way. And so I spent about 15 minutes diving down the rabbit hole of learning what good vertical monitors were out there, and reading some reviews and seeing what my local store had. And I almost just bought one. It would have been about 1200 bucks or something like that. It was a really nice monitor that people raved about. And then I just had that brief moment. Well, actually, first I just slept on it. It was like, you know, my finger was hovering above the buy button. I went, “Oh, hold on.” And the next morning I thought, “That’s just going to be another thing weighing me down, isn’t it? Like I’ve already got a monitor. It works. How many seconds of my life have been lost to having a horizontal instead of a vertical monitor? None. Maybe. Maybe 1 or 2 seconds a day, tops. That’s not my bottleneck, is it? No. What am I doing? Am I in that consumer mindset that I criticize others for being in. Of thinking that some thing will make them happy? Yes, I am.”
Derek Sivers
All right. So nope, it’s kept in a bookmark somewhere. Like I have a text file. I keep my bookmarks in a text file instead of keeping browser tabs open, so it’s in there. If this monitor I have ever breaks and I actually need a new monitor, I guess I’ll get a vertical one. But instead it’s like, no, it’s just that’s yet another thing to maintain. So I do this every day. Well, okay not every day. Let’s say every week some little choice comes up where a little tiny micro fork in the road, you could choose the the simplicity choice or the complexity choice of being tied to another thing. By the way, I love the fact that I learned of the origin of the words simple and complex. That complex is the adjective that comes from the verb complect, which means to braid two things together. So if you’re braiding hair, you are complecting hair. And simple comes from simplex, which means the lack of complex, which means not braided with other things. So when you buy a thing, you’re making your life more complex because now your life is tied together to more things now. And so over and over again. All the time. I won’t give it a measure like a day or a week. Let’s just say all the damn time. I constantly realize that that’s the choice I’m making, and I choose the simple choice.
Mike
So that’s an unusual path. Have you always been that way?
Derek Sivers
I was a traveling musician for 15 years, and I think--
Mike
What instrument?
Derek Sivers
I was the lead singer, guitarist of my band. And also I performed in a circus for ten years. So those two were kind of tied together. Basically. I spent 15 years of my life on the road. And you just learn that one single bag on your shoulder can have everything you need. And how nice and simple that is to know that everything you need is there and I would see my friends kind of gathering things and buying TVs and buying toasters and buying bagel cutters and buying crap and buying a house and filling it with stuff. And I’d think, “I’m so glad my life is much easier than that.” So I think I just still have those value associations.
Mike
Absolutely. Well, I think it’s an important part of the equation to work on, certainly throughout ancient wisdom is this consistent thread of want less, enjoy more. It’s across the wisdom traditions. But I mentioned it’s it’s an unusual choice. How do you recommend people move towards that?
Derek Sivers
Oh no, I don’t. Please don’t think that you, anyone listening to this that you need to do this. My sister’s only two years younger than me. We grew up the same. And yet her value system is the opposite. Her and her husband bought a house 25 years ago in their late 20s and said, “This is it. This is the house we’re going to die in.” And they both agreed. They’ve had three kids, four dogs, a few cats, hundreds of friends. You go to their house. It is filled with stuff, but like cherished loved stuff and memories and heartfelt stuff. It looks like a real home, you know? She’s thoroughly happy with that way of being. And I think a lot of people are that I realise that I’ve chosen a way of being that suits me. But please never think that I’m saying this way is good and other ways are bad, or this way is right and other ways are wrong. It’s just you have to notice inside yourself what makes you flourish.
Mike
Yes.
Derek Sivers
And I’ll tell you one more tiny story Well, I’m sure there will be many more, but here’s my next tiny story is in 2020, when Covid hit, I was living in Oxford, England. You know, we didn’t know how long Covid was going to go on. And I was a citizen of New Zealand, which was one of the few Covid free places in the world. So I moved back to New Zealand in 2020 and I felt, “All right, well, here I am again.” And I was thinking so nomadically at the time. I just wanted to live all around the world. I wanted to go everywhere and see everything and experience everything and do it all. But there we were, locked down on an island in the Pacific Ocean. Airports were closed or basically, you know, you couldn’t go anywhere. And so I met a woman at the time, I was single and met a woman that was very domestic and very hot and lived a few blocks away from me. And we got involved. And for two years we were very domestic and we planned on getting married, we planned on having kids and all that stuff, but it was definitely me trying to fit myself into that life, you know. It was another way of living, of saying, I could do that.
Derek Sivers
And again, who knows how long Covid will go on? Ten years, who knows? So I thought, well, here I am, trapped on this island. I could do the domestic life. So I tried it for two years. We had a house full of things. It was mostly her things, but I tried to live that way. And after two years, we broke up for other reasons. Well but mostly because I just didn’t feel I couldn’t live that way. And so a couple months later, I booked a flight to India, and I went out and I met with 50 people in Chennai and Bangalore And just instantly like the change in me was night and day, all my good friends are just like, “Oh my God, Derek, it’s so good to see you back again.” Because I think for like a year and a half, I was kind of, you know, I was weighed down with this like domestic life, to me I have mostly negative associations with it. I can do it, but it’s not really who I want to be.
Derek Sivers
And as soon as I was out in the world and meeting strangers in India, I just was like, “Ah!” The phrase that kept coming to mind was like, “I’m in the world again. Ah, it’s so nice. I’m in the world again.” And oh my God, I just felt like my soul re-entered my body. I just felt happy for the first time in a couple of years. And I mean, I’m always a happy person, but I felt the happiest I had been in a couple of years because I was living according to my values.
Mike
Yes.
Derek Sivers
Which includes this kind of expansionary, you know, constantly learning and growing, constantly like new experiences and trying new things and trying different ways of being. And I just felt better. So it was a nice reminder that this is the life I want, that I want a light, simple life where everything I need can fit into one bag and I can just up and go to Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan or Uruguay or wherever and just go be in another place and just be thriving out in the world. That’s the life I want. I don’t want domestic comfort.
Derek Sivers
Long answer to your short question. Sorry.
Mike
Well, I--
Mike
No, you said a lot there, a lot of important things I love that you started with. No, no, no, this is not a prescription for other people. I love that there’s real honest, real wisdom there. As we were talking about prior to the call, I believe from my work that we all have slightly different happiness recipes, just as we have different personalities, different experiences, different stressors, different traumas. And what I heard you saying was, “I’m in the world again.” And the parenthetical that came to mind to me was authentically, I’m in the world being my authentic self. And just this question of what inside makes me flourish. I think it’s a brilliant question, and also a tough question for most people to answer. Certainly I do that in my work to help people answer that question. Anything that worked for you there or works for you there on flourishing and how you know you’re on track or not?
Derek Sivers
Mostly you just feel your energy.
Mike
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
I think Tim Ferriss made this point in his first 4-Hour Work Week book that he said, really, the enemy is boredom. When you feel bored, that’s the state that we should most be avoiding. That’s just wasting your life. So I think of the compass as having the north and south of the compass are what excites you and what drains you. And when you feel something draining you, to me, that’s a sign that you’re off course. You know, even on just a moment to moment basis, you know. Feel something draining you? Probably not the right way. I mean, granted, there are some things we occasionally, you know, need to clean the toilet. Nobody loves to clean the toilet. Well, maybe somebody somewhere does. But, there’s some things that we have to do. But for the most part, I think we should keep our compass constantly noticing what excites you and what drains you, and avoiding what drains you, and steering towards what excites you.
Mike
I think that noticing is so powerful and also so difficult when we have awareness and the value of it, the value to us, then we can get leverage. We can do something about it. The risk is when we don’t notice, when we’re not aware of it, there’s some real introspection there and testing. You know, the other theme that really and I wonder about this, another thing that really emerges from your work is action. It’s experimentation. And how much of that is a component? So you know, this gives me energy and I’m flourishing. How does that stack together? You know, how do you build that schema of where should I be going? Is it mostly experiential or how much do directions or outcomes play into this? How do you balance those two themes of being in the moment, taking action versus destination plan outcome.
Derek Sivers
That’s a good question. The only thing that comes to mind when you say destination is right now, there’s a certain way that I would like to be. Here’s a weird thing about being me right now is that the second most important thing in my life is to live around the world. And now you’re supposed to say, what’s the first?
Mike
What’s the first?
Derek Sivers
My kid, my boy is the most important thing in my life. And his mother is bound right here. She works for the New Zealand government. And so I so desperately want to be living around the world. And the funny thing is, he wants that too. But he also wants to be with his mother. His mother wants to be with him. I want to be with him every week. So we are bound to this one spot in New Zealand. But the destination I’m yearning to get back to my nomadic life. And so the only destination I really think of is like, it’s a way of being. Kind of like years ago, well, always in my life, ever since I was a teenager, I remember I’ve never wanted to have a thing. I’ve always wanted to be something. It was never like, “Oh, I want to have a mansion.” It was like, “I want to be a great songwriter.” And I never wanted to have $1 million. I wanted to be a great business that was helping a lot of musicians and making a lot of people happy. Or I want to, uh, ideally be something I hadn’t even imagined, this idea of constantly expanding your self-definition so that who I am in two years might be something that I haven’t even fathomed yet. Those are my favorite moments, are when I expand my self-definition in a surprising way. A tiny example to just tell you what I’m talking about. Two years ago, if you would have asked me if I want to go to Dubai, I would have said, “Hell no. Sounds like an awful place. Shallow, materialistic, you know, Instagram hashtag millionaire. Pandering luxury. Hedonism. Wasteful crap. No way. Dubai is not my kind of place.”
Mike
Don’t sugarcoat it, Derek. What do you really feel about that?
Derek Sivers
And then about a year ago, I went for my first time, partially because I noticed my prejudice against it. And so I was on my way to a conference in Switzerland, and when I saw that I could either change planes here or change planes there, I went. “Huh Dubai. I hate Dubai. Why do I hate Dubai? I’ve never been to Dubai. I should go to Dubai because I hate Dubai.” So I booked the flight and I made it a three day layover instead of a three hour layover.
Mike
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
So I said, “Okay, I’m going to go look at Dubai because I hate it.” And after booking the flight, then I picked up three books about, well, two about United Arab Emirates, the country that Dubai is in, and then one about the history of Dubai, the city itself. And oh my God, it was fascinating. And I got this appreciation for the work and the foresight and the discipline that it took to make that city happen and the vision of its founders and then United Arab Emirates as an incredibly well-run place. So I was excited, even before I went. And then I went and I met so many really interesting people, and it’s the most international place I’ve ever been. It is the cantina in Star Wars.
Derek Sivers
It is like people from all around the universe gather in this one place to trade. And the point is, I loved it so much that I actually kind of want to move there now. I love Dubai a lot. But most of all, even more than my love of Dubai right now is the wow feeling of overcoming a previous prejudice. So something I thought I hated. Now I love, and that always gets me thinking of how many other things in life right now that I think I hate or don’t want might I love. And I just told you the story about breaking up with the woman, the domestic relationship I was in. But I’m glad that I gave domesticity a try. You know, I really gave it my all. I really tried as hard as I could to be a good domestic husband, and I tried, I just wasn’t into it. But yeah, I love expanding my self-definition. Sorry. Wait I accidentally took a tangent. You were asking about process versus goal driven. And so I said the only outcome thing I can think of is my desire to be fully nomadic again. But I guess everything else is process.
Mike
Well, I love the Dubai story. Hated it, you were aware of that and then you got experience and it completely changed your perception and that hunger to say where else am I wrong?
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Mike
And one of my heroes, Marcus Aurelius says, and I’ll paraphrase, I seek the truth from which no man has ever been harmed. The harm is when we are deceived. And it’s interesting. We’re in the green room, and Derek took the happiness diagnostic, and he had some very helpful and acerbic feedback for me. And I went into it with just that mindset of Marcus Aurelius. Is there a truth here? Is there a truth here I don’t understand? And so we had a nice chat about that, about what your perspective was. I revel in being wrong, and it’s good because I’m wrong so often. I want to go next down into achievement a little deeper into purpose. And I wondered, what is the purpose of purpose?
Derek Sivers
That’s what my last book was about “Useful Not True”. And since you brought up the Marcus Aurelius quote, there is so little that is actually true. Almost everything we say is not true, but it’s just one way of looking at it. All these moral judgments. This is good. This is bad. This is what you should do. This is the right thing. This is the wrong thing. None of that is true. Absolutely none of it. Because there may be another way of looking at it that is also, “true”. And so if they conflict, well, then technically, neither one is absolutely objectively, empirically, necessarily true. You have to realize it’s just one perspective. So that’s what I get out of the Marcus Aurelius quote. I don’t know what his life was like, but, you know, let’s say that he was in battle and somebody is saying, “We’re being defeated. The other army is stronger than us.” It’s like, none of that is true. The actual facts are we have this many men here. They have that many men here. We are in this location. This is what has happened so far. Now we’re talking about objectively, empirically observable, true things. Everything else is just your take on it. Your stance, which you can swap out for another one.
Mike
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
And so even purpose. Your clients or audience talks about purpose as if it’s real, but it’s not. It’s a story you’re telling yourself. So then you ask yourself, “Well, then what is the purpose of purpose? Why do I think I need a purpose?” And you can say, and maybe everybody has a different answer for themselves. You can say, “I like to feel a strong sense of purpose so that I know where I’m going.” It’s like, well, what do you mean, know where you’re going. Even going is a metaphor. Unless you’re going to a specific physical location that you’re going to walk or drive to. Even like where I’m going in life is a metaphor. So what is that metaphor for? You’re saying you like perhaps to have a rule book to choose your day to day actions. Is that what you’re saying? Because now we’re talking about physical things. You’re going to actually physically do this thing or not do this thing or do that thing or not do that thing. Maybe you’re saying you want a framework to help guide those little moment to moment decisions, and that framework, you’ve put it into the metaphor of I am going somewhere. You know, metaphorically, I’m going to be a millionaire or something.
Derek Sivers
I’m going to live on the beach. I’m going to have a beautiful wife. So purpose then maybe fills somebody with more intrinsic motivation because they just like the feeling of feeling like they’re partaking in a story that kind of is over and above this. Like, “I’m not just selling bicycle parts. I’m helping people liberate themselves from the chains of of society and get freedom and explore their true selves.” When maybe from another observable point of view, no you’re just making bicycle parts. But having this story and a sense of purpose that you’re liberating people into the great outdoors gives you more intrinsic motivation to help you make those bicycle parts better without getting too sleepy or bored, because you like the feeling like you’re in a big story. Now. To me, that might be a purpose of purpose. But it’s really Useful, I think, to see it for what it is, because then you can deliberately choose it instead of feeling like there is a right or wrong answer.
Derek Sivers
Like Mike, I need to find my purpose as if it’s a thing that you’ve lost that you need to find under the couch. No there’s no right or wrong. You get to choose and you get to choose moment to moment. If you let go of this idea of having a purpose with right or wrong, you can choose a purpose to get you out of bed in the morning and choose a different purpose to help you sleep at night. You know, you could change your philosophy minute to minute as it serves you. Because even philosophy is not right or wrong. It’s thoughts that help you take the actions you want to be taking. So there can be a philosophy that you use to make yourself go to work in the morning, and then a philosophy that you use to help you leave it behind at night when you go to be with your family and you want to be fully present. It’s a different philosophy, and I think we need to let go of this idea of the right or wrong and arguing about which one is right, and just realize that we’re all just using these stories to help guide our actions.
Mike
And I love where you took that. You know, story is so powerful for humans, has been throughout our history, ostensibly, and I think it’s always helpful to be able to look at the stories that are running the automatic programs with a critical eye and some compassion. So I like that looking at why do I want a purpose. And as I mentioned prior to the call, a number of people I work with have been very successful. They had a lot of purpose, they achieved success and they still have a hole inside. And the first thing they come back for is, “Where’s my next purpose?” And so I like what you also said about there are multiple purposes. There are a whole plethora of purposes that we have ongoing at any one time. That’s the nature of being human. But what I take out of your viewpoint is just a lightness about it. Because when people feel they need a purpose and they don’t have one, that can be very distressing for them. And one thing I saw in your writing is to relax. And I see that in some of the other authors that I study on purpose. It’s great to have a purpose. Sometimes it’s galvanic, sometimes it’s CD Baby was a purpose for you, right? And took you on a beautiful experience. But sometimes purposes aren’t here. Sometimes they’re lying dormant. Sometimes we need to go, you know, act and experiment in the world to find new purposes. So I agree that it feels really heavy to most people. And by saying it’s just a story, it’s just a tool that I’m using. Let me be aware of that. Let me lean into it when it serves me and let me release from it when it doesn’t. Makes a lot of sense.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. For what it’s worth, I’ve almost never had a purpose or a passion. I started my company with a purpose. The company itself had a DNA of helping musicians. That was why I started that thing. But that was never my purpose. That was like the goal of this project, you know, in the same way that maybe the purpose of this cup is to hold liquid, the purpose of that company was to help musicians, but that’s it. I think it can it can be dangerous to think in terms of passion and purpose, because we think it has to be so big that like suddenly it’s going to fill us with like a lightning bolt, like Thor, you know, our eyebrows are going to stand up and our eyes are going to turn bright white and lightning is going to shoot out of our fingertips. But this is the problem with thinking that love needs to look like Romeo and Juliet. And if you think love needs to be like, oh my God, this huge, passionate thing. If you think that’s what love looks like. And if I don’t have that big love, well then it’s not love. You will overlook what could be a beautiful relationship because you’re expecting love to be giant. It’s the same with passion and purpose that if you expect those big giant feelings to come, you’re going to overlook beautiful, simple actions of doing something that you find interesting, doing something that makes someone happy, doing something that’s useful to others, doing something that makes your house a little nicer, makes your neighborhood a little better. These are all thoroughly valid actions that don’t come with lightning shooting out of your fingertips.
Mike
No lightning out of the fingertips Derek, I’m a little disappointed about that, but I agree with you. No, I thought that was beautifully said, that you know, making you happy, making others happy, making your home happy. You know, and you write, it’s about what excites and interests you in the moment and trusting that. But also with this lens of being able to not be led by something like a purpose, but to look at it critically and clearly and with lightness. I think that’s something I’m really taking away from your work. It’s just to see things as they are and be light as we go through them. Is that a fair characteristic characterization?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I’m quite skeptical. And I mean that as an overarching kind of attitude towards anything. Any thing you insist is important. I’ll go, “I doubt it. You know, you need to have a purpose. Do you really. Nah. Come on. You don’t need that.” I think it’s really healthy to doubt everything. So I doubt purpose.
Mike
Do you happen to know your Myers-Briggs offhand?
Derek Sivers
Years ago it was INTJ. I haven’t done it.
Mike
There is an iconic classic streak in your work that’s very consistent and is kind of the heart of the INTJ, so I’m not surprised.
Derek Sivers
I’m so predictable. You know, a related story related to the company. So there I was, I had 85 employees and a big warehouse. The company was growing. Every now and then I needed to hire a new person. And so every time I needed to hire a new person, they needed a computer. And I enjoyed building my own computers. I would go down to the Fry’s Electronics part store, and I would just pick out a motherboard, a CPU, a graphics card, a hard drive, a case, a fan, a power supply, and it would take me about an hour to put together a computer and maybe another 30 minutes to install Linux on it and set it up and get it ready to go. And I enjoyed doing it. It was peaceful. I would do it at the end of the night when everybody else had gone home. I was the only person there in my warehouse. The fans of a computer whirring away as I was just kind of plugging things in, listening to music and setting it up. And then the next morning, the new employee would start with a new computer. And years later, a friend of mine said like sarcastically, he goes, “Yeah, that’s a good use of the CEO’s time.”
Derek Sivers
And I said, “Yes. It was because I was happy. That’s what I wanted to be doing. What do you think I should go home and watch TV or something like that? Like I had nobody waiting for me at home.” There was nothing I would have rather been doing than setting up a PC from scratch and putting Linux on it. That made me happy. And so therefore, it was a good use of the CEO’s time, because that’s what made me happy. And if we don’t keep noticing that little compass inside of us, of what excites you and what drains you. If you ignore that for too long, you end up hating your life and you go like, “Ah, I hate my job.” It’s like, well, maybe you just need to broaden the possibilities of what you could be doing in that job. Maybe these things that you don’t like should be somebody else’s job, and maybe there’s some things that you think of as not your job that you’d actually would rather be doing. Like I was building PCs. That made me really happy. And that’s one of the things that kept me excited about working there for ten years, is that I would just do whatever I enjoyed doing.
Mike
I like it, that resonates with me. I think when we’re in companies and leading people, it’s a lot of thought stuff, a lot of degrees of freedom. There’s a lot of complexity for me when I work on a motorcycle or a car or a house, there’s something radically simple about it. It’s nourishing to me. It’s a really good balance for the thought work.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Good example.
Mike
So when I hear you building computers, I totally get it. Speaking of how we make decisions, this has been a key theme in your work, “Hell Yeah Or No”, “Useful Not True”. A couple of books that you go into it. And we’ve talked about what excites you, what drains you. What other advice do you have around the choices we make around prioritization and decision making that that haven’t come up yet?
Derek Sivers
Nothing very interesting.
Derek Sivers
Actually somebody asked me yesterday because now that I finished my “Useful Not True” book, I’m resurfacing dozens of things that I had been pushing aside for the last two years while I finished the book. So I’m doing lots of little things right now that I’ve been ignoring. And somebody said, “Yes, but how do you decide?” I was like, well, it’s just kind of obvious. Some things need to be done before other things like, yes, I want to learn Chinese, but my website is currently broken, so I think I need to fix this thing in my website first before I learn Chinese. That’s just obvious that some things need to come before other things, even though I’m actually a little more excited to learn Chinese. Well, I need to fix this broken thing first. Everything else is pretty obvious. It’s like that. I really do think that David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done” is still just genius. I just follow that methodology exactly. It’s such a good one. I know the book is, whatever, 20 years old or something by now. But yeah as soon as it was time to get back into project mode, as soon as my book was done, I said, “Okay.” I reread “Getting Things Done” and I got myself back into that mindset of organizing everything into these little projects. And every project is filled with actions. You can’t do a project, you can only do actions inside the project and things like that. So if anybody’s open to that idea, I would highly recommend reading or rereading “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.
Mike
Okay.
Mike
It’s been a long time. It’s back on my list Derek, I appreciate that. I like things that are burned in 20, 25 years..
Derek Sivers
Yeah,
Mike
This has hit social sciences. But I think it still applies to business as well. The reproducibility crisis that they’ve looked at hundreds and hundreds of social science projects or studies and find that they can’t replicate them, which calls into question the findings themselves. And that’s been a past number of years. That’s been a real issue by the time you let a couple decades pass, particularly in wisdom, things that aren’t cutting edge or novel, then there’s been a chance for it to burn in. I think about what Paul Ravikant says, that for old questions go to old answers, they’re likely to be more directionally correct. And so thinking something like, how do we organize ourselves? Seems like such a wonderful base part of psychology and human decision making. I like something that has that vintage and is still being recommended. That’s awesome.
Derek Sivers
Nice.
Mike
Couple other topics. One, we talked about travel, and one thing I really liked in your writing was this notion of of being immersed versus being a tourist. And I certainly see that in a lot of the guys that I know, they get to success. They’re like, “Okay, I’ve got a lot of passive income rolling in. Now it’s time to travel. Now it’s time to have adventures.” Well, there are there is travel that really leaves a lasting imprint on you. And then there’s travel where you’re ticking boxes. And I just wonder if you have any advice on how to get that imprinting experience, how to get a fuller experience from travel.
Derek Sivers
Ooh. Well, the shortest easy advice to give on that is to go read “Vagabonding” by Rolf Potts. He writes so beautifully about immersive travel with concrete examples like take a bus, not a taxi. Just by taking a bus, even if it’s just from the airport, you’re going to see so much more of the local experience and so many more unique things than you would see if you shut yourself inside a taxi. And then he says, you can have wonderful authentic travel experiences just a few blocks away from the main tourist site. He said, “If everybody’s going to the Eiffel Tower or to the Taj Mahal, you can walk just a half mile the other direction and and have a much more authentic experience than you could have seeing the thing that is on every postcard with its soul sucked out of it already.” He has a bunch of other really specific tips like this on how to get more immersive travel. Now, all of this is assuming you’re not looking to move somewhere. For me, I’ve never wanted to travel. I’ve only ever wanted to move to places. Even when I do travel now, everywhere I travel I’m looking at it as a potential home. Could I live here? If I did live here, where would I live? What it would be like living here? Well, let me go meet a lot of people as potential friends in case I do live here. That’s how I travel. Which is related to a bit of museum going advice I heard once, maybe from Tyler Cowen. Who said, “When you go to a museum, ask yourself, which one piece in this museum would you be willing to steal if you had to take just one and you could go to jail for for taking it. Which would be worth the risk? Which one piece would you steal?” And so I think of that with moving like, which place would I would I want to go so badly that I would do the months and months of paperwork or whatever it takes to become a legal resident of this place so I can live there so I can inhabit that philosophy This is why I travel.
Derek Sivers
I travel to inhabit philosophies. I don’t want to just see India. I want to like understand the Indian worldview. I mean, not that there’s one, but you know what I mean to say India is like to say Europe. It’s a region with many, many, many subcultures. But China, for example, I went to China for my first time this year, and it’s a place that gets maligned. I’ve never said that word out loud. But it’s got a conflicting worldview. So all right, Mike, quick dumb question. Do you have an investment portfolio? Like, do you have some stocks or ETFs or whatever? Okay. So rule number one of investing is you’re supposed to diversify, right? You’re not supposed to put all your money in Tesla stock. You’re not supposed to put all your money into tech stocks. You’re supposed to spread out. So you have some in commodities, some in internationals, some in REITs, some in, you know, small cap, large cap, whatever. Things that are uncorrelated. That’s the key word. So that if one of them goes up, they’re not all going up or all going down at once. You’re supposed to have uncorrelated holdings. So I was thinking about our thought portfolio that in each of our heads we have a collection of thoughts. And you don’t want them to be too correlated. So I was thinking how would I get uncorrelated thoughts. And I thought, well, I’m quite American. Which worldviews are most uncorrelated or at least correlated with the American Worldview. Oh, well, China, India, Iran, maybe.
Mike
Sure.
Derek Sivers
And I thought, well, then, therefore, by the rule of diversified investing of my thoughts, wouldn’t it be wise to really get to know these places and start to think like a local and start as much as I can at my late start, see the world the way that somebody growing up in Guangzhou, China, would see the world and see the world in the way that somebody in Calcutta, India would see the world. And I can’t get there perfectly, but I can try and it would help uncorrelate my thoughts so I could see things from different points of view, instead of just my one American point of view. So this is why I want to travel, is to inhabit philosophies and really be inside the living philosophy that you get from being in a place and fully adopting the local mindset.
Mike
I love that, I love that as a direction. I wonder about the correlation. So we’re looking for things that are least correlated. We’re looking for more diversity. But also those experiences then can become very rich as we then form connections and look for unusual combinations, look for how we can understand things differently. But I like the purity of I’m going to see what’s the least correlated worldviews from the US. That sounds like a great recipe for the front end of that to diversify your viewpoints. How do they then gel, or do they? How do they connect?
Derek Sivers
You don’t need to gel them. I think kind of like the last page of my last book called “How to Live”, showed a diagram of an orchestra seating chart. And if you count, there are 27 instruments in that orchestra. And the subtitle of my “How to Live” book is, “27 Conflicting Answers and One Weird Conclusion”. So “How to Live” was a think piece about taking a lot of the philosophies of the world. But never using them by their name. Not calling them stoicism or pessimism or capitalism or whatever, but to just kind of inhabit that philosophy for a chapter. And then the very next chapter conflicts, of course and that’s the whole point. So it’s 27 conflicting answers on how you should live your life. And then at the very end, there’s just this picture of an orchestra seating chart where the idea is that these philosophies are just like instruments in the orchestra. That as the composer and conductor of your life, you can choose to bring any of them in and out when you want. You can bring up the volume of this philosophy for a while and bring this down. Or you can cease that philosophy completely for a while, while this one plays solo.
Derek Sivers
And then you can bring in two to combine at the same time. Put them to sleep for a while. Bring it back. These philosophies are tools that we use at different times in our life. And same with the thoughts. Like if you say that I actually had three homes right now that I lived a third of my year each in China, India and Saudi Arabia, and I had friends in each. I felt at home in each. And then you’re presenting me with a family situation that you’re not sure what to do with Well, these three places have three very different approaches to family. And I could see it the way that my Chinese friends would see it, or I could see it the way that my Saudi friends would see it, or my American upbringing. And so you could just, you know, there’s always different ways to look at anything. You don’t need to reconcile and decide what is right. You just need to be able to hold up a thing from many different angles and look through it however you want, and then you just pick one that serves you at the moment.
Mike
There’s such a powerful theme here today in this conversation about seeing and I think about, you know, the typical doing versus being. Well, seeing perhaps is in the middle of those, to be able to see the reality. See your reality, see Dubai’s reality. There’s just an openness to you, that I see in your work. And today that I think is is beautiful. I do have one last question for you. Do you have an art piece in a museum somewhere in the world that you would steal?
Derek Sivers
Oh, man. Yeah. If I could get away with it. There’s one and only one piece that has ever really moved me. And that is Picasso’s “Girl before a Mirror”. It’s at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, New York City. I do not consider myself a big lover of the visual arts. Music has always been more my thing and film, movies. But oh, man, I just walked into the Museum of Modern Art one day, strolled around like, I don’t know, this is some place I’m supposed to go and check out. I had low expectations and I even saw some of these famous works. And then suddenly I go up to the fourth or the fifth floor or whatever it is. I turned a corner and I saw that, oh my God, the colors! The colors are so bold. And her face, if you look at, you know, “Girl before a Mirror”, I believe it’s called by Picasso. Her face is like half yellow, this bright yellow with dark black lines on it. And it’s, I don’t know, I think it’s over six feet tall, the painting. And just standing right next to that thing, looking at it. Oh, man, it moved me so much. I went and found like a four foot tall poster of it, and I hung it up in my bedroom for many years, and I just, I can’t get enough of that painting. When my kid was two years old and we were going to New York City, I was like, “I gotta show you something.” And I put him on my shoulders, and I took him to the Museum of Modern Art and up to the fourth floor, and we stood in front of it for a long time. So that’s the one I would steal.
Mike
I just pulled it up. It’s gorgeous. You have fine taste, my friend. I do have a painting that I would steal. It’s a new gallery in Florence, and it is a freakish painting called “Madonna with the Long Neck” by an artist named Parmigianino. And it comes right on the heels of the Renaissance. Where do you go after the Renaissance? You know, it’s basically photographic realism, right. Well, you had a next generation of artists that had to be them, that had to express their uniqueness. Where do you go from realism to what’s next? So the very next school after the Renaissance is something called Mannerism, where the artists were aware of all of the convention, they had all the skills, but they decided to screw with it and they screwed with the convention. That was their artistic expression. So the “Madonna with the Long Neck” looks like her neck is three feet long. She’s holding the baby Jesus, and he looks like a space alien. He’s just messed with the form in these brilliant ways. And I love it as a story about human creativity. Okay, you’ve gotten to perfection, but I still have work to do to say what is my unique expression and helped me to understand modern art about how the generations built upon each other. So that may be becoming a stock podcast question, Derek. But what other piece would you steal in the world? I like it.
Derek Sivers
I love that.
Mike
Well, this was really cool. I think the themes that I heard again was just seeing. Seeing the world clearly, seeing it from a position of questioning your biases. You have an openness to you. You also have a real courageousness in the path you’ve chosen of how you’ve lived around the world. The courageousness I see in your writing, where you take swings at things unapologetically, which I really love. So I got a lot out of today. Really enjoyed it. I hope everyone did as well. I’m curious, how can people get in contact with you? How can they find your books?
Derek Sivers
Just my website. I don’t really do any social media, and I actually really do love my email inbox. Every day I spend an hour or two replying to every single email and I love it. So I actually really like when people email me. Some of the best friends I’ve made have been people that emailed me out of the blue to introduce themselves. So yeah, just go to my website sive.rs, send an email, say hello, introduce yourself, and my books are also on my website, sivers.com.
Mike
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for today and thank everyone for joining. Appreciate it.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Mike.