Create for No Reason
host: Kate Volman
Great questions about creativity, self-editing, what to release, minimalism, the book everyone should read, generating ideas, and focus.
listen: (download)
watch: (download)
Transcript:
Kate Volman
Derek, thank you so much for joining me today.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Kate. Audience, listening to this, I'm going to let you in on our backstage secret: Kate emailed me, just a day or two ago, the most interesting questions I think I've ever received in my history of ever doing podcasts like this. And I just spent hours in advance of our recording, thinking about her interesting questions. So what you're going to hear today is kind of pre-curated with Kate's interesting questions and my pre-considered answers. And I'm so excited.
Kate Volman
I'm so excited. I just love that you love those questions. It's easy to generate great questions when I get to read your incredible work and think about your life experiences. I've been such a fan of your work for years, Derek, and I feel like your work is almost, it's like an invitation to think about life differently and to help us believe that we have the power to create a better future. That's how I think about your work. And I also think a lot about creating a body of work. The older that I get, I feel, you know, you've lived, I feel like you've lived a lot of lives. You've lived in a lot of places, you've lived a lot of lives. And I'm curious how you think about your body of work.
Kate Volman
How would you describe your body of work?
Derek Sivers
Well, what you call someone's body of work is the stuff that they've chosen to release, right? Because there's more that you keep to yourself. And then it's about what you choose to put out into the world.
Derek Sivers
So the stuff I put out into the world is usually just finding other perspectives and sharing the bits that I think are the counter melody to the main melody. In musical terms there's this thing called counterpoint where you have a melody that you hear on top but then underneath it is a melody that's sometimes doing the opposite, that supports the higher melody but it's usually more subtle. It's the counter melody underneath the main melody. So that's what I try to share. When I find a point of view that I think is surprising and underrepresented in the world, I consider it the counter melody and then that feels worth sharing. Everybody else is saying this, but what about that? I need to say that thing down there. So that's what I share and I think then my body of work becomes a bunch of countermelodies, thought explorations.
Kate Volman
Thought explorations. I love that.
Derek Sivers
Difference between being a thought leader and a thought explorer. A thought leader says, "Here's the right answer. This is where we're going. Follow me." I don't want anybody to to follow me. I'm just an explorer.
Kate Volman
Yes, and that's why I feel like your work is such this invitation because you change your mind all the time. You invite people to change their mind. At different times of your life, you just need to think about life differently or or consider ask different questions, consider your circumstances differently throughout your life. And that is I feel like that's what you've really done throughout your career. It's beautiful, it's beautiful to watch.
Kate Volman
There are so many different projects that you that you can work on. A lot of creatives have this conflict of knowing what to do next? What project to work on? There's so many things that interest them. How do you decide what projects that you're going to work on next?
Derek Sivers
It all really comes down to self, others, and time. And what I mean is, by self, it's like, how excited am I about this? Am I personally psyched about this? Like I can't stop thinking about it. That's a huge number one. But then it's filtered through number two, which is how useful or helpful is this for other people? Will this benefit other people or is this really just something just for me? And lastly, how time sensitive is this? Is this something where it's really the sooner the better? This kind of needs to happen now, sooner? Or is it just something that would be nice to happen anytime, even years from now? So then I weigh those three things together.
Derek Sivers
I have to constantly do this to say, "Yes, I'm really excited about this, but it's just of no use to others and it could happen at any time in the future. It's just something that someday I want to do." Then I'm okay putting that aside because if I've got something else that maybe I'm still excited about but not quite as excited about but it's going to be much more useful to other people, then that can make it happen next. And lastly, if something's time sensitive, like if something's broken on my website, like nobody from Europe is able to order my books because something's broken, okay, well obviously that's time sensitive. That's next. Or right now, the thing that I've literally started today, last night before bed, I just started a new project, which is a translation system for translating my books into other languages because so many people have emailed and asked and publishers have been asking, saying they'd really like to release a Chinese translation of my book. And I say I have to build this thing first. Can't do that yet. I need to build this tool to help work with the translators. So that's got an urgency to it. So in short, yeah, the combination of personal excitement, how helpful it is to others, and how time sensitive is it, neither one of them absolutely makes the decision on its own, but I weigh them all together.
Kate Volman
How do you stay disciplined in that practice, especially for those decisions that you make around, yes, this would be helpful, but I'm not that excited, but it's very timely?
Derek Sivers
Well, that's when it just feels like just work. We don't always do whatever we want at all times. Sometimes you have to do the dishes, even if you don't want to do the dishes. Sometimes you have to go pay your taxes now or fill out the tax forms, even though you're never excited about it, you have to do it. So sometimes that's just the case. There's something I have to do, so I do it. You get some caffeine, put on some good music, go buy yourself a sugar treat, and make it okay. Sometimes I literally kick and scream. I mean, literally, I'll just like, "Ahh! I don't want to do this! Ahh! Ahh! Ahh!" Make it happen.
Derek Sivers
Kate, this is so up your alley. One of my favorite ideas I've ever heard around this is the personification of the muse. And it said, "Inspiration, like any good muse, will never make the first move. She'll only meet you halfway." I love this idea that inspiration will never make the first move. It always has to be you starting first, without any inspiration, and only after you begin, she will come and meet you halfway.
Kate Volman
Yes, yes, I love that.
Kate Volman
In fact, Stephen King writes about this in his book On Writing. He talks about the muse and he says the muse is a basement kind of guy. You got to get down into the basement and you are there to do the work, but he's not helping you. He's sitting over there smoking his cigar and looking at his bowling trophies, but you have to get to work and only when you start working will he help you because you need the muse. But he's just going to sit there and do nothing. But I love that imagery of this basement kind of guy sitting and smoking his cigar. Oh my gosh, it's so beautiful. But I love that idea of muses and getting people's opinions around. Do you believe in a muse? Does it help you? Does it support you? But yeah, you got to do the work. That's what it comes down to.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Do the work even if you don't want to. But if you know in your higher self, in your lucid moments, if you know it's the right thing to do, then you just do it whether you feel like it or not.
Kate Volman
So I read this on your website, Derek, and I thought it was so interesting. You said, "I've optimized my life for creating and learning. I've cut out most things from my life that most normal people do, like hanging out or media consumption in pursuit of my bigger goal." How intentional was that decision?
Derek Sivers
It wasn't a decision. No, it was never a decision. It's a value system. I just get more long-term joy and more deeper happiness from creating, from learning. It's like I want so badly for this idea to happen. I have this idea in my head and I want more than anything to turn this idea into reality. I passionately, desperately want that to happen. Or that there's something I'm fascinated with right now that I desperately want to learn more about. Those two things drive me all the time. I'm almost always in a state of desperately wanting to make something or desperately wanting to learn something. Sitting on a couch and watching season five of some TV show? No, never. That to me is the enemy. Why would I want that? That is so that's like eating not just ice cream. That's like bad ice cream. That's like no nutrition and not even that satisfying. And sitting around with With friends at a bar, just spending time? No.
Derek Sivers
It's a very, very short term pleasure that's a little satisfying for half an hour at most: There are times when I'll just go play a stupid little video game for 30 minutes or call a a friend for 30 minutes and just shoot the shit and gossip or whatever. There are times, of course, where you need to blow off a little steam or just kind of exhale. But no, for the most part, I'm driven by this desire, this deep, deep, deep desire to make this thing in my head.
Kate Volman
Do you have a lot of those conversations with friends just around what they are working on and creating?
Derek Sivers
A little bit, two of my best friends are professional musicians. But for the most part, when I'm talking with my friends, I just talk about usually whatever is on their mind the most, whether it's somebody they're seeing or whatever, just life.
Kate Volman
Alright, so you you still hang out just not in-person.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, it's mostly phone friends. So my, no seriously, my six best friends in the world are phone friends, spread out around the world. None of them are in New Zealand where I live. They're all spread out around the world in different time zones. The person I consider my single best friend in the world, we actually haven't seen each other in person in 12 and a half years. But we talk on the phone every single week and have great conversations. That's my best friend. And my other best friends are like this too, that we talk on the phone, which then tends to keep it more focused. have a really great one-hour conversation instead of, say, six hours of just sitting around doing nothing together.
Kate Volman
Yeah. Oh, I like that. Well, I New Zealand is on the top of my list of places that I want to travel. So if I ever come to New Zealand, that's where you are now, right?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I've been here for 12 years, and I'll be here for a few more at least. So yeah, if you come to New Zealand, let's meet.
Kate Volman
You wrote this really wonderful book called Useful, Not True. You've written. Five books, two of which I have right here. But Useful, Not True. I'm obsessed with this book. This book, I feel like every page you could just think about, have discussions on, just contemplate for days and days. And so I have actually been asking my friends who haven't yet read the book and have no context. I've been but the title is so good alone. I've just been asking them, what in your life is useful, not true? And they're like, what? Like, just think about it. Think about it. So it sparked some very interesting conversations without even having read the book, but then you dig in and you have all of these really great ideas.
Kate Volman
I'm curious, especially because this audience is full of creatives, a lot of writers, a lot of aspiring writers and authors, people that want to create more, people that I feel like when you were talking about, you just have this, when you wake up, you just want to create, you want to do something and build something. I feel like that is, that's inside so many people. And I know that many of us just lose that over time, but I feel like even as you're saying it, I'm like, yes, yes, I'm on that mission, I love that. And this book, "Useful Not True" has so many great ideas to help push people forward. So what useful not true ideas are most important for an aspiring writer or creative to embrace?
Derek Sivers
Number one, is that your work matters. You got to have this feeling that what you're doing matters. People need this, or people are going to like this. This is going to make a difference. If you don't feel that, I find it hard to proceed without that feeling.
Derek Sivers
There was a sad moment when I first moved to New York City and I got a job inside Warner Chapell Music Publishing, the Warner Music, or Warner Brothers Music Division, and suddenly I was in a room with their entire music catalog. I was the librarian of the entire music catalog at Warner Chapell Music Publishing, and suddenly I was surrounded by tens of thousands of albums of material that nobody ever heard or cared about. And each of those musicians put so much love and care into it and released it to crickets. And it set me back a year. I thought, "Oh, God. Nothing I'm doing matters. At best, even if I get signed to Warner Music, it's still likely just going to be crickets. Oh man."
Derek Sivers
And so I just realized noticing the difference between that mindset, that belief, which is "What I'm doing doesn't matter. Nobody cares." And the other belief that "What I'm doing matters. People are going to care." I saw that one of those mindsets demotivated me and one of those mindsets motivated me, so I just deliberately chose the one that motivated me.
Derek Sivers
You have to choose the mindset that helps you do what you need to do. It's a certain mindset that gets you out of bed in the morning instead of just laying in bed all day long. You have to adopt a certain mindset to help you get out of bed. You have to adopt a certain mindset to help you do what you know you need to do. So same thing with your creative output. You have to adopt whatever mindset helps you.
Derek Sivers
So now let's use the counter. You might not be driven by the idea that other people are going to like this. Maybe for you, the driving mindset is that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. "I just need to please myself. I'm going to make the best book ever written for I don't care what anybody else thinks. I'm going to make my dream book come true. I'm going to make the best song that I wish existed. I don't care what anybody else thinks. I'm making this song for me." That might be the mindset that makes you take action. "Never mind everybody else. I'm doing this just for me."
Derek Sivers
And lastly, a belief that I've found really helpful for deciding what to put out, or all those little creative decisions on the way, is surprise. That public work shouldn't exist unless it contains a surprise. It has a surprising insight, a surprising twist, or upending expectations, it will be boring if you just give people what they expected. And if you're not giving people what they expect, that's a surprise. So if it doesn't contain a surprise, it's boring and you should not release it. You should keep it to yourself or keep working until you find something surprising in this.
Derek Sivers
And it could be even something musically surprising. It could just be a surprising note in the melody. I'll give one tiny example. The song "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia, the 90s hit "Torn." A friend of mine said, "You know that song is only good because of one note." I said, "What do you mean?" She goes, "It's where she sings, 'That's what's going on.' Everything else about that melody is completely what you'd expect it to be. But that one note is surprising. That one note made that song. And I think she's right.
Derek Sivers
And so same thing whether you're a writer, a musician, visual artist, every work that you release to the world has to have something surprising about it, some little twist. If you're just giving people what they expect, then it has no need to exist.
Kate Volman
It feels like, as you're saying that, I'm thinking like a listicle, right? Top five ways to.... It's those that are almost like clickbaity versus something that's really meaningful.
Kate Volman
But for someone who deals with perfectionism or feeling like their work isn't good enough to share yet, but maybe there really is that surprise in there, but they don't see it because they're so critical of their work. How do you know what to share and what not to share?
Derek Sivers
Okay, well this is where you need to know yourself and know your own internal motivations and where you're at and what works for you and what doesn't. So if I'm right now saying, "Don't release anything unless it's surprising," and if that idea makes you go, "Oh crap. Yeah, I guess I shouldn't be doing any of this stuff unless it has a surprise." Well, then that's not for you. Obviously, if you catch yourself being demotivated by an idea, dismiss it. It's not for you. No idea is true. No idea is the gospel. It's just an idea that you can consider. And if a different idea...
Derek Sivers
Say for example, here's another one, "Your best work is a hundred deep." There's probably a better way to say that. The Beatles never even released their first hundred songs. John and Paul wrote 100 songs that they played at the Cavern Club and in bars in Germany. And then they got their record deal and wrote 14 songs for their record deal. And we never heard those first 100 songs. The Beatles great stuff didn't even come until after they had written and performed 100 songs. And then we heard the rest. It could be the same thing with your articles, with your books. Your best book might be book number 35, that you need to just keep writing your books. Or it might be article number 1,000, is where you really start getting good. That might be a more useful idea for you. You just have to know your own motivations.
Kate Volman
Okay, that's very helpful. That is very helpful because I know a lot of people who stop themselves from sharing and it actually is good work. I had a friend of mine who is a beautiful poet. His poetry is so wild and different and very surprising. And he just would only share it with a couple of people. And then I was encouraging him to share it with more people. And then I would read his poetry to other people and tell him the feedback I would get. And then it gave him a little bit of encouragement to push him. And he finally published his book of poetry. And I was thinking, what are you waiting for? It doesn't get better than this. I mean, it can, but anyway, so I love that.
Kate Volman
It just goes back to the useful, not true. Whatever, whatever works for you at that time.
Kate Volman
I love asking this to authors because as you're writing a book, you just never know what other ideas are coming at you while you're writing and what you're discovering. So did anything surprise you while writing Useful Not True or How to Live?
Derek Sivers
"Useful Not True" especially was surprising to me all along the way because that's why I was writing it. My other four books were me sharing something I already knew, whether it was just telling my tale, sharing my existing ideas, putting them out. But for this book, It's my newest book. It's my fifth book. I was taking a little germ of an idea I had. It was a germ of an idea that I had that I didn't know much about, but I wanted to dive more into it.
Derek Sivers
So I emailed a philosophy professor, Sharon Kaye. She wrote a book called "Philosophy: A Complete Introduction". She teaches at the University of Ohio. She is the single clearest writer I have ever read. When I read her book "Philosophy A Complete Introduction", it was so amazingly clearly written that I sought her out and contacted her, I said, "Oh my God, you're the clearest writer I've ever read. You're amazing." And she said, "Thank you." And it was nice to even just get a thanks back from her, you know, 'cause a few times I email authors of books that I love and they never reply and it's a little sad. But she emailed back and said, "Thanks." So then a year later when I was exploring this idea of useful not true, I emailed her and I said, "Hey, you're a philosophy professor. Let me describe this idea, and can you tell me what philosophers have already thought this, because obviously I'm not the first." So she said, "It sounds like what you're describing is pragmatism."
Derek Sivers
So I went and read six books about pragmatism. And it kind of is, kind of not. But that introduced me to some new ideas. So then I realized I had to learn a lot about religion, because I don't really know much about religion. I read a ton of books about religion and that surprised me. And then I went to go learn more about nihilism and skepticism, because it turns out that Useful Not True is actually very tied together with skepticism and nihilism. But never mind all the isms, just along the way I learned so much that the top ones off the top of my head:
Derek Sivers
It surprised me to realize that everyone's point of view is like their time zone. That right now, I can tell you Kate, it's Wednesday morning. That's what it is. It's Wednesday morning. It's a sunny day right now. And you can say, Derek, it's Tuesday night for me. Like, no, it's Wednesday morning, Kate, because I'm in New Zealand and you're in Florida. So you realize that everybody's perspectives are like a time zone. To them it feels like absolute reality. This is what it is. And they think that therefore it's everybody's reality like the laws of physics. But no, it's just their one perspective. So that was surprising.
Derek Sivers
It was super surprising to find out that our brain invents explanations. That our brain never says, "I don't know." It will always tell you why you did what you did, but it's lying. It's making up reasons for your past behavior because it will never tell you, "I don't know." So it will say, "This is why you broke up with your ex. This is why you got into your career. This is why you chose that house." But it's all a lie. It's not the real reason. And this has been proven in lab tests where they work with patients that have split brains where their left and right hemispheres of the brain are disconnected. And they will ask a question. No, sorry, they'll give a command to one side of the brain saying to just one ear, they will say, hey, get up and close the window. And the person will get up and close the window. And then they will ask the other ear, "Why did you just get up and close the window?" And the person will say, "Oh, it was just getting chilly. I'm sorry. Was that okay? I just felt like it was getting a little cold in here." And because the two halves of their brain are not communicating, it's now proven something that not just they do, but we all do this, that we take an action and then we think we know why because our brain tells us why, but It's not the real reason why. Our brain is lying to us. So that's amazing to realize that any reason you ever give for your behavior is a lie, or at least not necessarily true, and therefore so is everybody else's. You can learn to just ignore everyone's explanations about anything they do. You never need to ask why ever again, because no matter what anybody could say, It's likely not true. That was a surprise.
Derek Sivers
I learned so much about religion. I found out that religion is action, not belief. That there are religions like Zen Buddhism that have basically no beliefs and it's just an action. And it was a beautiful distinction between beliefs and action. That people often argue about beliefs but their actions are actually totally unoffensive. This religion's actions are beautiful and that religion's actions are beautiful, but they disagree about their beliefs. But it doesn't matter because your beliefs are all just a lie anyway. They're all just nonsense. No beliefs are necessarily true. So yeah, I learned a lot while writing this book.
Kate Volman
Well, it sounds like it. And even in reading the book, it felt almost like I was searching for, "But Derek, then nothing is true." I was like, "But nothing is actually true."
Derek Sivers
By the way, sorry Kate, for the sake of the listeners, we should clarify, in case they haven't read the book, that whenever we say "not true," it means not necessarily true. It doesn't mean false. So when you say your beliefs aren't true, that doesn't mean your beliefs are false. It just means they're not necessarily true. There might be another or there is another way of looking at it. It might not be the only option.
Derek Sivers
Because once you call something true, it's closed. It's a fact and that's that. You don't question it. So it's really useful to go where you just went to say, wait, but then nothing's true. It's like, that's great. That's right. It's all negotiable.
Kate Volman
Yeah, that's the purpose. I mentioned this to you when I wrote you, I said, I've been thinking about what's useful, not true, and I'm going to share some of those later on just to get your ideas on. But I found it to be challenging to even come up with those because I was justifying why they actually are true. But then I'm like, "But wait, is it just my perspective on why they're true?" So oh my gosh, it is, yeah. I mean, the same thing with "How to Live". I felt that same, there was just, "Oh, you're telling me to live this way, but then the next page is, but also do the opposite!"
Derek Sivers
Do the opposite. Yeah. Yeah, that's it's I realized while writing Useful Not True that it was actually kind of a prequel to the book How to Live because the book How to Live is this very unusual book I just put out into the world with no explanation, which to me was almost like kind of a smug, sly, in-joke, which was like, "Yep, there it is. I'm not going to tell you why it's like that. See what you think. Make up your own conclusions." And then while writing Useful Not True, I realized, you know, this kind of explains why the How to Live book is the way it is. So now I actually highly recommend anybody read Useful Not True first before you read How to Live, because then How to Live will make more sense.
Derek Sivers
So for your fellow writers, you might find this interesting. There was a book I read like 30 years ago called You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Coen. And I remembered that it told some really vivid stories, which is why I remembered it after 30 years. There are so many books you read, even one year later, you don't remember it. But there was something about this book that where he gave such vivid little examples of his points in visual stories that it stuck with me. So I went back to find this old book to glean its storytelling craft. And in doing so, though, I was still writing the Useful Not True book when I went back to go find it. It blew my mind that I realized that:
Derek Sivers
This whole Useful Not True idea is about negotiation. It's making life negotiable. So when somebody says, "You can't do that." You say, "That's not necessarily true." This is possible! Somebody says, "No, that's just the way it is. This is what happened and here's why." And you think, "That's not necessarily true." That's the key to the "You Can Negotiate Anything" book. He keeps saying people are going to tell you, "Nope, that's the fixed price." He said, "No, not necessarily. Nothing's fixed." He said, "Oh, you're acting like that's handed down from Moses stone tablets or that God etched that price into reality. No I know that you have some people in a back room that came up with that price and they just picked it arbitrarily. So I'm throwing it back at you. That's an arbitrary price and I don't think that's fixed." I love the way that his whole approach to life was to claim that everything's negotiable. And I realized that's actually what I was trying to communicate with the Useful Not True book - is that this is negotiable. That's a very empowering viewpoint is to realize that all of the limiting beliefs that others tell you or that you tell yourself are not necessarily true.
Kate Volman
And what a more empowering way to live. That's what's so beautiful about it. And how cool that, see this.
Kate Volman
It's exciting to think that you can create something that you read this 30 years ago, that you can create something that in 30 years someone's going to say, "So I read this book, Useful Not True, and this could be like, you're gone and this is still out in the world and helping people." Like that's so cool to think about because especially there's a lot of books and I know you read a lot of books and have many books in your queue. So for you to be highlighting one, I just think, I mean, I need to go check it out because I need to see how this person wrote the book.
Derek Sivers
It's a brilliant, wonderful, beautiful book anyway. If you go to my top recommended book list, which is - for the last 18 years, I've been taking detailed notes on every nonfiction book I read, and I post the notes on my website for anybody to use. So there's over 400 books there now with my notes on them. The URL is sive.rs/book. So if you go to sive.rs/book, you will see a list of over 400 books that I've read and taken notes on and they're sorted in order of my top recommendations. So my top recommendations are at the top of the list and right now number one at the top of the list is You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen.
Kate Volman
Wow. So these are all nonfiction books on the list?
Derek Sivers
Yep. Yeah, I don't take notes on fiction books. I just enjoy the story.
Kate Volman
Okay. Well, good. Yeah, I pushed myself probably like five years ago to start reading fiction because I was such a voracious reader of nonfiction. And my useful not true was fiction doesn't help and that I should just learn. I need to learn something from. The nonfiction books, I was like, fiction is a waste of time, I'm not going to. And then I realized, wait a second, no, there's a lot you learn about the human condition while reading fiction and also its stories. It's fun stories. And how do you and then even learning how to write dialogue and writing stories and becoming a better storyteller. So I've learned to really appreciate fiction in a way that years ago I did not.
Kate Volman
Okay, your books, super thought-provoking like we're talking about. I read this quote, however long ago, and I sent it to you because it reminded me of you. And it's from Charles Bukowski. And he said, "An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way." And you are the artist because that's how you write. How can a writer learn this minimalistic approach to writing?
Derek Sivers
Well, first, thank you. That meant a lot to me that you said that. Because I often feel out of place in this world of entrepreneurs and even productivity people that are using AI LLM tools to spew out content to get them their clicks. I just I can't relate to any of that. So much so that I think we're just fundamentally pursuing something massively different in life. If that's your approach.
Derek Sivers
We can never assume somebody's goals by their choice of profession. Somebody could choose to be a doctor because her mother died of cancer and so she wants to be a doctor so she can cure cancer and nobody will ever have to die of that cancer again. And somebody else can choose to be a doctor because it pays well. End of story. So those two people have chosen the same profession, but they're in it for massively different reasons. And same thing with being a writer. Some people are out there trying to spew out lots of content. And they go, oh, great, AI tools. Now you can help me spew out some more content. But even though technically that person's a writer and I'm also a writer, our aims could not be more different. Like I already said, I try to cut out everything that's not surprising.
Derek Sivers
But now to answer your question, to take a more minimalist approach to writing. My two big tips are #1: make each idea stand alone. Don't mix together your ideas into one jumble. Make them stand alone. Ideally, each one getting its own article so that you're really shining a spotlight on that one idea. And you're always clear what is the one idea you're highlighting here. As soon as you catch yourself trying introduce a sub-idea or a second idea, stop and extract it into its own separate article. And so that even if that means that this article is only going to be 12 sentences long, if it highlights the one idea, clearly that's all you need.
Derek Sivers
By the way, Kate, I counted and found that the average chapter length in my book is 22 sentences. So that's me chopping away every sentence that doesn't need to be there. And also very often having to take what was, say, a 50-sentence long chapter and realizing I was actually talking about two different ideas. So I'd pull one out and put it into a separate chapter.
Derek Sivers
So then #2 is writing one sentence per line. So this is a nerdy, crafty little thing that you can find on my website. I wrote more about it at https://sive.rs/1s - as in one sentence. In my text editor, I write every sentence on its own line. And then you get to see clearly and visually your starting word and your ending word. Because the first word always has a punch to it and the last word lingers in the reader's ear a little longer. And you can also see your sentence length very clearly. The importance of not having all your sentences be the same length. Some long ones, some short ones. It's more musical that way. Make sure that you're not being monotonous in your sentence length. You write one sentence per line and then when you actually publish it in HTML or Word or whatever, then you copy paste your text and it turns it into a single unified paragraph. But while you're writing it, I highly recommend writing one sentence per line.
Derek Sivers
So those are my two tips. Make every idea stand alone. Give it its own spotlight, ideally in its own article. And number two, write one sentence How can someone almost self-edit to make sure that they're talking about one clear idea? Just ask yourself if it could be extracted into a second article. Could I possibly make this two different articles without repeating myself or without just saying the same thing again? See what I just did there? If it can be extracted, if these are two different angles, then present the two different angles separately, two different spotlights.
Kate Volman
I feel so I know a lot of writers will say a lot of writing is editing and chopping things down and it is taking. You just got to get a ton of words out when you wrote useful not true. Like what's your writing process? Was it a huge, huge book that you had to distill down or what did that look like?
Derek Sivers
The craft of Useful Not True went like this. I spent a year and a half dumping all of my ideas into this folder full of thoughts. I wanted so badly to explore this idea called Useful Not True. As I said, I learned so much about it. I read so many books about religion and philosophy and compiled all of my thoughts into a big, messy jumble full of words. And it was overwhelming. I spent a year and a half feeling like this is going to be a terrible book because I have too much to say on this subject.
Derek Sivers
And one day, after a year and a half, I was feeling so overwhelmed and so frustrated that I opened up a brand new blank text document and I wrote: What time is it? For who? You? I'm in New Zealand and you're in Florida, so that's not the time for everyone right now. What day is it right now? Well, for me it's Wednesday. For you it's Tuesday. There's an island called Taveuni in Fiji, where I went, and that's where the international date line crosses. There's actually a sign and a line in the sand where this is where the international date line crosses. You can put one foot in Monday, one foot in Tuesday, back and forth. Now it's Monday. Now it's Tuesday. And it reminds you that even the day of the week is not necessarily true. It's an arbitrary thing, like all of our perspectives. And so whatever point of view you hear somebody say, like, "Here's what women want," or "You can't do that," you have to hear it like them just telling you the time of day where they're at.
Derek Sivers
So I wrote that and it was 22 sentences. And I went, "Ah, see, that just described the idea in so much more of an appealing way. I could have spent a thousand words to say that same thing, but telling a tiny little 22-sentence tale and stopping, that felt great." So then I started another chapter that was about a bridge guard. It was a tiny little story about a big demon protecting a bridge, saying, "No one can cross until you tell me what's true." And I made that a tiny little tale, about 23 sentences. And it felt so good to communicate that one idea, incomplete, but in a tiny digestible way. And I was so excited that I called a friend in Australia and I read her one of these. And she said, "Oh God, I like that so much." But she said, "But you know why? It's because you're not saying everything. You left so much unsaid that now my brain is trying to fill in the gaps." I went, "Yes, that's what I want. I want to say just enough to open the idea and then I want the reader, the listener, to realize this is so incomplete that they need to fill in the gaps themselves. That's what I want. I do not want to try to be the final be-all end-all on this subject. I'm just going to introduce it in an incomplete way, open up the idea so that you can close it yourself. That felt so much better.
Kate Volman
Oh my gosh. Well, I totally agree with your friend because that's how the book felt. And it almost was, I almost felt like I was saying, "How does this feel satisfying but also frustrating at the same time?" How is it that I didn't want him to write anything else, but also I did? It felt so weird because I was like, "Oh, I wish that I learned," but no, I don't. It was perfect as it was. So it's so conflicting. It was so fun to read.
Derek Sivers
Thank you. I did a lot of public speaking 15 years ago and learned an important bit of advice, which is if the audience wishes you would have said a little bit more, then you've said just the right amount.
Kate Volman
Okay, so going off of that same idea, how do you decide which ideas are worth writing about and which to leave alone? Like what are books or what's worth actually spending time on versus, okay, I'm going to maybe hold off on doing something with that.
Derek Sivers
It's like that question you asked at the start about deciding which project to do now. Same thing with writing. Is this intrinsically exciting to me right now? Is this useful for other people? Is this going to help people? And I guess when it comes to writing, then the timely thing doesn't matter. So let's just say it's the balance of those two. If I'm super, super, super excited about something, Even if it's not necessarily going to be useful to others, I'll still write about it. And if I think something is going to be really useful to others, even if it's a little tedious for me to go, "All right, let's do this one more time. Here's the three things you need to do to make shit happen." People keep asking me this. I need to put this out there into the world. This isn't fun for me to write, but it's really helpful to other people. Then again, those two things balance each other out. So if something's extremely helpful to other people, even if I'm not excited, or if I'm extremely excited, even if it's not helpful to other people, or ideally both.
Kate Volman
What is your process? Because I feel like you have a process for everything. I feel like you're very good at process and documentation. Not everyone excels at that. You have a lot of, even on your website, the way that you include everything on your website and how much you want to share and like some of the things that you've already shared, like with the books and some of the resources, how do you keep track of your ideas and kind of document them? And do you store them somewhere? What does that process look like for you?
Derek Sivers
I journal like a motherfucker. I just write and write and write and write and write. I write sometimes hours a day just for me. Nobody but me ever sees it. I explore new ways of thinking for my current conundrums or even questioning my old routines. I share everything I'm feeling today. I share what I did today. I write in my private journal what I did today, what I'm thinking today. And I just question, yeah, I question everything, whether it's the current dilemma or even just old tried and true things.
Derek Sivers
I just two days ago dropped my own jaw at an idea I had about my own programming. There's a certain way that I've been doing computer programming for 15 years. It's a very special methodology that is the core to all of my programming. And just two days ago I said, "Wait a second, but am I actually using those error responses I'm sending myself?" I went, "Okay, let me check my code." I went, "Oh my god, I have never ever in 15 years used the error responses I'm sending myself from my code. Why am I spending thousands of lines writing all of this? That's not necessary." And just two days ago just tried a whole new approach to programming that I'd never tried before. It just upended everything I've been doing for 15 years, and I think it's an improvement. Whoa. Oh my God, this changes everything.
Derek Sivers
Same thing a year and a half ago with travel. I realized that in all the traveling I've ever done in my life, I was traveling to a place to see the place. I'd say, "Okay, I'm going to go to this place so I can see the place. Let me look at this place. I'll look at the buildings. Let me go to the little places inside the place. You know, the little restaurants inside the city or the parks inside the region." And I'd go to the place. And you can get where I'm going with this, is I realized, what if I traveled not for the place, but for the people? And deliberately took that to an extreme. Where I travel only for the people. So I tried it. I flew all the way to Bangalore, India, where I had been emailing with many people over the years that seemed like really smart, interesting people. And we had really interesting emails, but I'd never met them in person. And I just picked a hotel in the middle of town And I had 50 meetings in nine days where people would just come in every two hours. I never left the hotel. I stayed in that hotel and like literally did not step foot outside the hotel in nine days. But I got into in-depth conversations, really, really in-depth with 50 people in nine days and then went straight back back to the airport and flew back to New Zealand. And I think I saw more of Bangalore than if I had been putting around the city looking at buildings because I got into the it's all about the people, right? Who cares about the building? Okay, so there's a stone structure. So what? It's the people you want to get to know. So I feel more connected to Bangalore now, I should say, than if I had just gone and looked around.
Derek Sivers
Sorry, that was a long way of answering your question about my process for generating new ideas is often questioning everything whether it's current things upsetting me, current problems I'm stuck on, or even old tried and true ways of doing things.
Kate Volman
I love that. All right. You have a chapter, a section in the book that talks about asking great questions. And that is, I run a coaching company, so that's what we do, right? We are constantly in pursuit of finding great questions to ask people to help them think about their circumstances differently. I love that in the book you said, "I'm not going to put the list of questions here because There's so many and I'm probably going to come up with more. So of course you can go onto your website and there's a whole section where you list a bunch of resources, including some questions. And I was looking through the questions and I thought, "Oh, I would love to know Derek's answer to this particular question that you asked, which is:
Kate Volman
What advice would I love to hear from an all-knowing sage?
Derek Sivers
The best answer I've got is that just the past couple months I've been treating the AI top tier large language model engines like chat GPT, I've been treating them like an all-knowing sage. I pay the $20 a month for Claude and for the past couple months I've been paying the $200 a month for the 01-Pro version of ChatGPT, which is really intense and truly feels like an all-knowing sage. But like somebody who hires a personal trainer, even though they could go themselves to the gym, the fact that I'm paying for it makes me use it more. I want to get my money's worth. So it started me asking it all kinds of questions that I've had sitting under the surface for years that I wouldn't have bothered asking the open Google Internet because it would just send me a bunch of stupid spam and hey, sign up for my newsletter and you'll get my top nine. You know, I don't want all that marketing junk. And it's so beautiful to have this all knowing sage, you know, useful, not necessarily true, answer all of these questions that have been sitting below the surface for so long. So it's made me more curious. It's awakened that curiosity part of my brain. So yeah, I treat OpenAI's 01 Pro as the all-knowing sage, and I ask it probably 10 things a day.
Kate Volman
Is there anything that you've asked that really stands out to you that you are particularly interested in getting an answer?
Derek Sivers
Sorry, it's just the stupidest little thing, but I was wondering, like, okay, what's the right way to charge a phone? What's the actual science behind lithium batteries? Should I let it go all the way to zero before charging it? Should I constantly be charging it in little doses? And it patiently explained with a few back and forth rounds of questions how this actually works and what is the real way that I should be charging my phone and that batteries are best when they're kept between 20 and 80 percent. And so it makes sense to charge it to 100% if you're really going to go out all day long, but ideally you'd keep your battery between 20 and 80% all the time." I went, "Wow, that felt so good to get a factual answer to something that I just thought was unanswerable for many years because it felt like anybody I was going to ask that of would just give me an opinion." But you can structure your prompt in a way where you say, "Please do not share people's opinions but only give me the scientific findings as backed by laboratory research." You can say things like that that just trigger it enough to discount blah blah blah in chat forums and just give you the actual findings.
Kate Volman
Look at you, you created your own sage. I love it. All-knowing sage right at your fingertips.
Derek Sivers
Well, sorry, I thought a lot about your question. If I had a genie and a magic lamp or a direct connection to an all-knowing God, what would I ask? There were some things that were like fortune-teller things, you know? When am I going to die? Things like that, but that doesn't that's not advice, that's not a sage, that's fortune-telling. But when it comes to actual advice, I guess I have a base assumption that nobody knows my internal everything. So I'm happy to just hear lots of perspectives and facts and I'll just make it into my own advice for the moment.
Kate Volman
All right, you, we've already said you've read a lot of books, you're reading a lot of books. What book do you wish more people read?
Derek Sivers
Well, I've mentioned You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen. And I've mentioned that if you go to my website, you'll see my top recommended books. There are over 400 there, but sorted in order so you can see the ones that I've given a 10 out of 10 rating to. So there's probably about 20 books that I think, yeah, basically everybody should read these.
Derek Sivers
But really, I don't want to sound self-promoting, but my real, real answer is "Useful Not True". Even if everyone read it for free and didn't even tell me that they read it. But what I discovered while writing this book is that this is such an empowering, empathetic and peaceful way of seeing the world. To see that your own thoughts and beliefs are not necessarily true and neither are anyone else's. It keeps you focused on the outcomes. It says OK, you believe your religion, you believe your political view. It just doesn't matter what anybody believes because none of our beliefs are necessarily true. Just show me the actions. It keeps it very focused on reality.
Derek Sivers
Someone's actions are true. If somebody punches you, that's a true thing they did. They actually did punch you. Their reasons for why they did it, their moral belief on why you deserve it, none of that's true. All that's true is that they punched you. And same thing with anybody's actions. Any politician can say anything. It doesn't matter what they say. You just look at the actions and then the actual consequences of the actions, in fact, not in opinions and moral judgments, but keeping us all focused on our actions.
Derek Sivers
That was one of the most, maybe the single most profound surprising belief, sorry, surprising profound thing I learned while writing the book was that was about religion. A book by James P. Carse called "The Religious Case Against Belief." He's a theologian at New York University, a very religious man arguing against belief, saying that beliefs don't matter, that religion is all about action. It's about what you do. That was so profound for me because you can even swap out the word religion for your politics or your morals or your, where you call yourself liberal or conservative or, doesn't matter. What matters are your actions, how that generates into reality. I think that's really profound.
Derek Sivers
So anyway, in short, that's why I wish everybody would read Useful Not True because I think it introduces these ideas that I've never seen introduced in one place before.
Kate Volman
Well, one of the sections in the book is called "Explorer to Self-Leader." And this sparked my question around what advice would you give to someone with so many passions, who's very multi-passionate, and it's hard for them to focus on one, which is really the advice that you share. In the book you say, "Describe the plan clearly and simply so it's easy to remember. Go in a straight line, obstinate and undistractable. Ignore that explorer inside of you that says, 'What if I tried something else instead?' You can go back to exploring after you arrive at your destination." I love that advice. I also find it challenging.
Derek Sivers
To me, it really helped to truly memorize and internalize this idea, which is: You can do anything, but you can't do everything. You have to decide. And if you don't decide, you get nothing.
Derek Sivers
So the etymology of the word "decide," the Latin root, means "to cut," as in to cut off other options. You decide you're choosing one thing and cutting off the rest. So to prioritize one thing, you actually have to deprioritize the rest. You have to convince yourself that nothing else matters as much as this right now. Not just for creative works or projects.
Derek Sivers
Even when hanging out with my boy, for example. When he was first born, he's 13 now, but when when he was first born, I was still in the habit of looking at my phone a lot. When I was with him, here's my baby right next to me, going, "Ah, oh, yeah," and like experiencing the world and looking at me, and I'm looking at the phone. And I caught myself doing this. I went, "What the hell am I doing?" He is more important than everything else in the whole world. My attention to him matters more than anything that's coming through this little piece of glass in my hand. So from that point on, any time I was with him, all electronics were shut off. I'd hold down the power button for the three full seconds, slide the slider, off completely off, computer off, shut down, power down. And I would give him my full undivided attention. Nothing matters more than him right now. He's only a child once. He's only a baby is all we get. I'm only going to have one kid. This is my only time I'm doing this." I gave him my full attention, knowing that I can get back to my work when he's sleeping or when he's at school during the day. And still, now he's 13, I still take this approach. Whenever he's home from school, as soon as I hear him come in at 3.30, I shut down everything I'm doing and give him my undivided full attention until he goes to bed or he wants to go play with friends or watch a movie or something, then I get back to what I was doing earlier.
Derek Sivers
So it's the same thing with our work is you have to give something your full attention and you have to have a belief in you that this matters more than anything else.
Kate Volman
Gosh, there's this level of discipline, but when you put it that way, It's like the why plus discipline. If you really have that strong sense of this is why you're doing something and this is why it matters so much, it should be it should make it easier to let go of those other things.
Derek Sivers
I think of discipline like making yourself go to the gym even though you don't want to. You do it because you have to, or not ordering dessert at the restaurant when you know you could. That to me is discipline. This to me is more about realizing what matters most to you.
Kate Volman
I have this conversation with other people about about discipline. I look at it as almost you're disciplined in something until it becomes a habit and the way of that you think, just the way that you live. So discipline, like to me. For someone else, it takes discipline to go to the gym. For me, it's my way of life. I get up and I go to the gym. I don't have to think about it. It's harder for me to not go to the gym than it is to go to the gym. But that's for me. So but in other areas, I have to be disciplined and that it's that forced I have to make it happen. So I think there's some things that start as discipline, but turn into a habit or just your belief system. And to your point, just you discover through that discipline how much you appreciate that and how it becomes important. Different ways of getting there.
Derek Sivers
I like that a lot. I like that a lot. I like that distinction. Thank you.
Kate Volman
OK, since you wrote the book full of all of these Useful Not True ideas, have you uncovered any any new idea, any new useful not true ideas that you wish were in the book or that maybe you'll write about in the future?
Derek Sivers
Oh, there's so many that I can't think of any one. It's like almost every single day I have some new perspective that I think, "Ah, okay, that perspective helps." Like, For example, I'm thinking where to go for my boy's school holidays in April, which are coming up in six weeks. And he has two weeks off of school. And I think of where we could go, what we could do. And you can argue on either side of the cultural experience versus staying put. Each one of these perspectives has a little lawyer arguing its case in a way that is persuasive, but not the only way of looking at it. So anything to do with my work, my life decisions, even romantic love life stuff, there are so many ways to look at it. And I often find perspectives that are useful, but realizing that it's just a perspective, it's not an absolute physical reality that any creature or machine could observe and agree. So it's just a way of looking at it. It's not necessarily true, but boy, that perspective really helps.
Kate Volman
All right, I want to share a couple of useful, not true ideas and get your thoughts on them. And again, these are just a couple that I was thinking about and I kept arguing myself into, "No, this is true." But maybe it's not. Okay, the first one is hard work will always pay off.
Derek Sivers
Does that work for you?
Kate Volman
Well, how I kept coming back to it being true is, well, hard work will always pay off. Depends on what outcome you're looking for. So if hard work always pays off and you're going to get the outcome you expected, it might not necessarily be true, but hard work, Right. it'll get you somewhere. I think you'll get somewhere with hard work. So that's why I was You might not get the results that you were looking for, but you'll uncover something new. Maybe the business that you started didn't work, but if you work hard, it'll open up another door. So that's why I kept arguing it to be true.
Derek Sivers
Well, it's funny, there are lessons in there. It's got an assumption of another perspective inside, which is every action has value. So you could work incredibly hard at something that completely fails. Fails career-wise, financially, it was a waste of your time. You might even damage your personal relationships because people got upset at you for ignoring them as you were working on this thing for so long and so hard. And it got nothing you wanted. It's almost a different belief then that could look back at that past and go, "Well, it was a good thing that now I know I don't want that." Whatever it may be, that you could find value in any action or any circumstance.
Kate Volman
Well, one of them is everything happens for a reason.
Derek Sivers
I hate that one. That's that one is a pet peeve of mine, because it sounds external. It's framed externally. It is said as if there is a reason contained in everything, like there is a seed inside of every fruit. It's spoken as if it's a reality of nature, but it's just a projection. What it's really saying is I can project a reason onto anything. The reason's not inherent in the thing, like a physical nature. That's why I say it's not like every creature and machine in the universe could observe this and agree that that is the reason contained in that thing. No, everybody would have different opinions. Therefore, there is not an inherent empirical observable reason inside that action. It's just a perspective that you choose to give a reason to that action. But that's a choice that's under your control. It's you saying, "I can give a reason for everything that happened." That's not... I think it's quite different than "everything happens for a reason." You know what I mean? It's a subtle but important difference.
Derek Sivers
Same thing with your "hard work always pays off." It also has this inherent assumption that you're saying it as if the work itself pays off but no, it's what it's really saying is "I can always find some literal or metaphorical payoff in anything I've worked at in the past." It's more self empowering. That's more under your control. I can find or give a payoff for everything that's happened. You know what I mean?
Kate Volman
Well, this is why you write these books.
Derek Sivers
Let's not think that the author or the poet or the songwriter is inherently more insightful than any of us. It's just somebody that just sat down and nerded out on this idea for longer. You know, the poet sat with this metaphor for a really long time and dug into it in a way that most of us don't have the time to do. The songwriter sat with this emotion that they're trying to express to another person and spent 17 hours nerding out on different ways of expressing that emotion with a certain number of syllables to match the melody. And I just sat for two and a half years, almost full time, like 12 hours a day, most days a week, around this one single idea of "useful not true" and just nerded out on it more than most people have. So I am not more insightful. I'm just the nerd that spent more time on it.
Kate Volman
Wow. And we get to benefit from it.
Kate Volman
So, OK, my last my last of three is: Creating is essential to happiness and living a fulfilling life.
Derek Sivers
You know that's not true. Come on. There are many, many happy, fulfilled people in life that are not being creative. They're just serving people. They're helping people. They're nurses. They're parents. They're caring for others. They're doing good work. Selling high-quality vegetables to their community or whatever. Come on, you know that's not objectively true.
Kate Volman
Well, okay, that is true if we're talking about art. So I guess my definition of creating is different because as you're talking about like a nurse, to me the nurse is creating experiences for her patients and she's using her creativity and she is, yeah, create, like to me, creating, I guess there's two different ways, like the artist who's actually writing or painting or designing, and then human beings who are creating experiences and moments and using their creativity to think about a project differently or to think about work differently or to show up in a different way, to communicate differently to their spouse or their kids. So that's how I was thinking about this particular idea.
Derek Sivers
I love that.
Derek Sivers
So when you asked earlier how I generate ideas, it's often through questioning even tiny daily assumptions we make, like being a nurse is not creative, or I need to be creative, which means I need to be writing poems. All of these things can be challenged. You could say, "Well, what is the point really? What am I really after? What's really the point of creativity? What do I consider to be creativity?" You just question these assumptions inside yourself and get to your real definition, which might not be other people's definition, which can help you so much decide what you really want to pursue.
Derek Sivers
Sorry, I'll just give to emphasize that just like my travel example, where I realized I had had decades of unfulfilling travel looking at places. And I had, it was through many hours of sitting and reflecting in my journal, I went, "Why am I really traveling anywhere? What is the point of traveling somewhere?" It's like to make a connection with the people that you couldn't make just from your computer at home. Getting in knowing the people face to face would help me feel more connected to this place. Isn't that what I'm about when I go to a place and visit it? Isn't that I want to I want to feel a connection with this place? I want to feel like this place is one of my places. That's what I'm really at. What makes me feel connected to a place? Hmm, I don't know. Is it this? Is it that? Is it the food? No, it's the people. Yes, it's the people. Therefore, shouldn't I be traveling to meet the people?"
Derek Sivers
You can use this same digging under the surface process with yourself with anything you're doing that's feeling anything less than its most effective best. You can question why this isn't feeling satisfying or how you could be doing this in a more directly rewarding way for yourself.
Kate Volman
When you talk to creators or you're you're talking to someone that's listening right now who is Maybe they have a podcast, maybe they have a YouTube channel or they're writing books or poems or whatever it is that they're creating. And they haven't yet really found their audience. Right. Like they're they're sharing. They are not quite getting what they were told they would get. If I just keep showing up, if I just keep posting, if I just keep creating. Those 1000 true fans or whatever, they will come and they just haven't gotten there. How does somebody in that in that situation think about? Like, do you keep going like like what's that useful, not true idea? Like the right people will find me if I keep creating and if I keep putting out work, like how would you advise someone who is feeling frustrated because their work isn't necessarily getting out there in the way that they intended it to?
Derek Sivers
Okay, please know that whatever I say next is my personal bias on this. That it helps to separate yourself from your creations. So even if you pour your heart and soul into something. It is now a thing that is released. And I love the double meaning of this word when you say you release a book, you release an album. Letting go is important. It's released to the world now. It's not yours. You've released it. It is not you. That's why it really helps to have a pen name or a stage name so that you can put on a persona and that persona creates things for the world. And if people attack that persona, you're detached from it. You know, it is not you that that persona, the public persona is something that you've made. And it's not your core essence that cuddles with your family. That's not what the people are attacking. It's just your external creations that you're choosing to put out into the world. Once you've detached from that a little bit, then you can specifically request and even pay for critique to say, how can this creation be better? How can I communicate this emotion better or this idea better?
Derek Sivers
There is a craft around this. I studied songwriting at music school for years. And songwriting is something that people think of as almost divine, like the song just comes through you and through your soul and out your fingertips to the world. But there's a concrete craft for what makes a certain melody more appealing than another melody. Like we said earlier with the song "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia with one note, one note was a make or break it with that melody. It is so often the case with the difference between a great title and a bland title that nobody he cares about can be one word. Mark Manson could have written "The Subtle Art of Not Caring Much." And it wouldn't have been a hit. You change one word and it's a hit.
Derek Sivers
Same thing with anything you put out into the world. If you detach from it and then ask for critique, "How can I improve this?" and you don't take it personally, but you take their advice.
Derek Sivers
Here's another example from music school is the song "My Girl": "I've got sunshine on a cloudy day." Smokey Robinson and his co-writers, I think it was Gamble and Huff, worked for months on that song. They flew back and forth from Detroit to New York with that song three times over three months, they would take it back to Detroit and work on it and work on it, work on it and improve on it. Fly to New York to play it for the producer would say, hmm, changes, changes still not working for me. They'd fly back to Detroit, work on it for weeks and weeks, flew back to New York. And it wasn't till the third time after months of working on that one little song. That the melody worked and they nailed it. The words, the melody, it worked and then they recorded it and it was a huge hit. That couldn't have happened if they felt that that song was tied to their person and a critique on that song was a critique on their person. They had to detach and specifically request improvements on that separate piece of work to make it a hit.
Derek Sivers
So no, I do not think you should just keep creating and you'll find your audience. I think you should improve and improve and very deliberately, painstakingly chisel and improve your creations until they are having the piercing, powerful effect on the audience that you want.
Kate Volman
That so reminds me of comedians. Like what you're describing, getting up on stage. I mean, talk about that's brutal. getting their feedback immediately. You're either the audience is either laughing or they're not. And and to your point of the words, like it's crazy how they'll they'll shift. The the tone, the way they say it, just the it's so crazy that they have to go up and do it hundreds of times.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, a single lift of an eyebrow at the right time can make or break that joke's delivery.
Kate Volman
Yeah. Isn't that wild? Oh, my gosh. OK, I guess it's the same thing as songs that there's so that there's so many similarities between creations. All right. I always ask. This is the last question that I that I ask my guests, and it's:
Kate Volman
What one activity can the listener do in 10 minutes or less to live a more creative and fulfilling life?
Derek Sivers
All right, in 10 seconds or less, turn off your phone. No, first, delete all your social media apps from your phone. You don't have to delete the account. You could keep them on your computer behind long and difficult passwords that are only stored on your computer so you can't have them on your phone. Delete the apps from your phone. Then completely power down your phone and spend way more time journaling and diving into your own brain. Here's why:
Derek Sivers
It's because social media keeps you focused on what others are thinking and judging. It's like a cesspool of judgment. And by trying to please all the judgments, you're making yourself bland and normal. By deleting them and very deliberately deciding I don't care what the peanut gallery thinks. I am not trying to please the cesspool anymore. In fact, I just don't care what those people are talking about. You dive into yourself more, you become less and less normal. You become more and more uniquely you. You find more of your unique perspective. You become less of a perfect smooth mirror and more of a funhouse mirror that is wonderfully warped and reflecting the world in a more interesting way than a flat piece of glass. So explore how you're different from most people. Dive into that more. Shut off your electronics that keep you enticed with the chatter of the world.
Kate Volman
Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Derek, this is so great. I hope we get a chance to do this again because I could ask you so many more questions. I am just, it's just been so fun to get to talk to you because I feel, I'm sure you get this all the time, I feel like I kind of know you because I'm a fan of your work and I have read so many of your books.
Derek Sivers
Well, I loved this conversation more than most. No offense to the other podcasters in the world, but your angle on this is so much more interesting to me. It's the artistic side instead of this businessy productivity, churn, churn, churn. How do we get big? How do we grow? Instead you're focused on the creative angle on this. And that is so much more interesting to me that I could also talk about this subject with you forever. So let's do it again.
Derek Sivers
And hey, anybody that like made it to the end of this interview listening, go send me an email right now. That's how I met Kate. She emailed me. So go to my website - sive.rs - and click where it says contact me and email me and introduce yourself. I actually spend a few hours a week answering every single email and I absolutely love getting to know the people that email me. I meet some of the most interesting people that these days most of my friends and even some of my past loves of my life have been people that emailed me out of the blue. I really thoroughly enjoy it. So anyone listening here to the end that is a fan of Kate's show, please email me.
Kate Volman
Oh, I love that. And you know what's so funny is I didn't even realize that. I was actually, I emailed Derek because I was trying to get a hard copy of Useful Not true because I ordered the audio first, not realizing that the physical hadn't come out yet and I was like, "But where is it? I need it." And I wrote and I said, "Hey, Sivers team." And you wrote back and said, "Nope, it's not team, it's me."
Derek Sivers
I have no team. I love that I have no team. I'm sad for my friends that are influencers with teams. I'm glad they like their little team. I do not want a team. I really like interacting with everybody directly.
Kate Volman
Well, I'm grateful to know you and I'm so glad that we got to do this. And yes, we will have you come back on and we'll have a list of whole whole new questions to explore next time. But thank you so much for being here.
Derek Sivers
Yay!
Kate Volman
I so appreciate it.
Derek Sivers
Thank you.
Kate Volman
Oh, and everybody, of course, needs to get a copy of Useful Not True and then they can read How to Live. That's the order in which to read these books.