x.com/orslimy
host: Or Azulay
Audio-only, live on X Spaces, about distractions, fears, travel, and more.
listen: (download)
Transcript:
Or Azulay
Derek Sivers, thank you so much for the time today. You really don't need any introduction. You're one of my favorite authors. And I really want to talk to you about, in general, about having a useful life, because In my opinion, you are really living what you preach. You write and you do all sorts of things and I'm a big fan.
Or Azulay
So I wanted to ask you, how do you maintain a useful life? Because for me personally, my feelings getting the way. Like that's my biggest hurdle of having a useful life. So I wanted to hear your thoughts about that.
Derek Sivers
Feelings always get in the way. That's the big challenge.
Derek Sivers
Well, let me ask you this. You did your time in the military. Weren't there times when you didn't feel like doing what you had to do? You just had to go run through the mud or climb a wall and you didn't want to?
Or Azulay
I was in military intelligence, which is basically like working in a tech company. And yes, there were shitty days, but it was super convenient. I was just in front of the computer doing cool stuff. It wasn't like I was depressed because I didn't wanna do. It was compulsory. It was mandatory service. That was the shitty thing about it. But in any other sense, it was like college, just a bunch of hormonal teens inside an army base in some shitty location.
Derek Sivers
There's something to be learned from our reaction to situations where we have to do something for someone else versus for ourself. And when you tell yourself, "I need to get up and lift weights", or "I need to skip that dessert" or "I need to go do this marketing plan I don't want to do." There's not a boss telling you you have to do it. So you kind of have to make a boss in your head. This person that is requiring you to do this thing you don't want to do.
Derek Sivers
I thought it was really interesting that the famous artist Andy Warhol in his autobiography said, "If I could hire one person, I wish I could hire a boss. I miss having someone just telling me what to do. Every day I wake up, I could do anything. There's anything in the whole world I could do. I miss having a boss just telling me what to do." So I think it's like that for ourselves too, that we either through sheer discipline or through a really smart plan need to let this other aspect of ourselves be the boss.
Derek Sivers
So for example, there are times when I'm sitting at night peacefully with my journal thinking about life and what I want out of life. And I come up with a plan and say, for what I want, I need to change direction. I need to do it like this. And I'll make a specific plan. I need to start turning this direction more, pursuing this kind of work. I need to read more of this. I need to learn more of that. Practice more of this. Do more of these actions. Less of this, less of that. And I make a plan. And then the next day, I wake, and of course I want to just keep doing the same thing I usually do, but now I've got a plan. So I make myself stick to my plan, whether I want to or not. And I will literally be kicking and screaming, I'll literally yell at the world in complaint, but I'll do it anyway.
Or Azulay
So basically you're very disciplined in a sense.
Derek Sivers
No, I'm not. I'm really not though. I fall off the wagon, as the slang term goes. I fall off the wagon often and I just keep getting back on because I want the end result so badly. I want to be a great programmer or I want to be a great author or I want to speak Chinese, whatever it might be. I want it so badly that I just keep getting back on the wagon no matter how often I fall off. I'm really not very disciplined.
Or Azulay
So once you find that specific obsession, then every challenge towards that, like that stands between you and that obsession is not that big of a deal because you have that light in the end of the tunnel, the stuff that you really, really want.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, you've probably heard this fable before, but it's a good time to tell it again. A student went to Socrates and he said, "Socrates, how can I get wisdom?" And Socrates said, "Here, come with me. Let's just walk down to the ocean together." So they walked down to the ocean, they started to go into the ocean about waist high in the water. And then Socrates suddenly, without warning, grabbed the student's head by the hair, pushed his head underwater and held his head underwater, despite his kicking and struggling - and held his head underwater for a whole minute until he felt that the student was starting to really, really panic and give up. And then he lifted his head up. The student went, "What was that for?" Socrates said, "When you wisdom as much as you wanted that next breath, nothing will stop you." And that's how I often think about the things that I want. If you want it really badly, nothing will stop you. You'll make it happen.
Derek Sivers
So there was only one time in my life that I've lost weight. If you were to look at my weight since I was a baby, it just goes up and up and up and up and up and up. Except one time in 2020, I lost weight. And it was really noticeable. People saw me on camera and said, "Wow, you lost a lot of weight. How'd you do it?" I said, "You know the how. Everybody knows how. It's just that this was the first time in my life that I wanted it badly enough to do the how."
Or Azulay
Yeah, for me, it was like I wanted to lose weight, but the motive was weak, so I didn't. I just ate candy. But once I realized that, yeah, I love candy. So once I realized that walking outside makes me a calmer person, and being calm is my number one goal in life, I think serenity and clarity of thought is my ideal self. Once I understood that walking outside makes me a calmer person, a better person, then I started walking daily. And losing weight was just a secondary effect of that habit. So yeah, I changed the motive, so then I created the action.
Derek Sivers
That's really cool. Maybe the lesson in that is, for something we want, we need to keep trying methods until you find the one that works for you, which might not be the one that works for your heroes.
Or Azulay
Whenever I read your books, my number one question was, does this person have any shitty days? Because whenever you write, you write so clearly, and you seem like the ideal person to me. But then I really want to imagine you having a really shitty day. Just so I can see you as another human being. So I was super curious about you having a really shitty day and when and how.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, pretty often. Maybe the goal in life is to try to arrange our situation so that we have less and less shitty days.
Derek Sivers
For two years I was in a romantic relationship that seemed great at first, but But then just slowly, slowly got worse and worse, but we were living together and we were trapped together. It felt like I was living with this person that was miserable and he was making me miserable and I slowly got acclimated to it. I look back at my diary that I wrote two years ago, and I was miserable on a daily basis, living with this woman. It just became my new normal. And then I broke up, and oh my God, life has been so much better since then. And it was just one single aspect of my life, who I was living with, was bringing me down so much on a daily basis that it almost brings a tear to my eye what a huge difference my life has taken since breaking up. So much better.
Or Azulay
And you didn't see it at the time, right? Because you just lived through the motions, right?
Derek Sivers
Right. I had slowly grown acclimated to it. I did see that it was bad, but I didn't realize how bad it was until I had something to compare it to. Now, two years later, I forgot how good it would be to not be in it.
Derek Sivers
So that's one example, but we probably have other examples which might be based on the job you have, maybe even your health, maybe somebody who's really fat is not realizing how much better they feel to be skinny and by comparison. Sometimes it can be how you're pursuing your work specifically. I could be a computer programmer and and take one approach to programming and be miserable, and take a different approach and feel much better about what I'm doing, which can just be a mindset change. So I guess this is what a lot of my writing is focused on, is changing your mindset about how you look at something to help you be more effective or just feel better about the situation.
Derek Sivers
So here's a real concrete example. By the way, I'm finally answering your question directly. Yes, actually the last two months for me have been pretty bad. Better than when I was in that relationship, but pretty bad in the sense that I've been feeling really overwhelmed. I was working on that last book called "Useful Not True" for two years and I was so into it, loved it, gave it 100% of my attention every day. It was the only thing I did. Anything else that wasn't my useful not true book, I would just push it aside. And I'd say, "When I'm done with this book, I will take care of that." And I did that for two years. So then the book came out at the end of last year. And then suddenly all of this work I had been putting aside for two years was back on my plate. And I felt so overwhelmed. So many little broken things many things that needed attending to. I mean, even like paying taxes or doing the accounting so I can pay my taxes. It was just so many things. I was freaking out. I was miserable with overwhelm. And just a week ago, I called a friend who talked to in a few weeks and she said, "How are you doing?" I said, "Not good. Not good at all." And I told her. After I explained everything, she said, "Well, you don't have to do that stuff." I said, "No, I really have to. I have to do this stuff." She said, "But Derek, you don't have to. You're choosing to." And it all came back to me.
Derek Sivers
I actually knew this somewhere deep in my soul. I knew this. She was reminding me of something I already knew, but I had forgotten, which is that all of this is optional. It's a different mindset. You don't have to do anything. I was choosing to do it. And that slight shift in perception of my situation changed everything. I took this to do list - I had actually had it all neatly organized on my computer, this to do list of 75 things - and I just put it all into a different folder that said "Someday Maybe". And then I just took one thing out of that folder and put it on my to do list. So now I'm just doing that, only doing that one little web app for a few days until it's done. And that's it. That's the only thing I have to do in life. And if none of those other things happen, I've changed my mindset to be okay with that. So that was it. Conversation with a friend, a slight mental shift, turned everything from bad to good.
Or Azulay
You know there's like three layers to that, right? There's "I have to", there's "I choose to", and there's "I get to" do these things. Ideally we all know that there are three layers to that, but we fail because we always go back to our defaults, and our default is, "Shit, I have to do this". Right?
Derek Sivers
You know, it's fun when you catch yourself saying something like there are two ways to look at this, or there are three kinds of people that you keep adding more, like a creative challenge to yourself. Like, what other ways are there to look at this? It would be fun to keep going and say here's another option. Another one I just heard last week is to look at your to-do list like a restaurant menu. These are things you could choose if you want to. That's it. You could keep going. There are other ways of thinking of anything.
Derek Sivers
Even programming. Sorry, I'm doing a lot of programming lately, so I've got tech on the brain. There was a certain way that I was programming with Mustache templates and storing the data in the database. And suddenly I looked, even though I've been doing it that way for 15 years, I looked at it with fresh eyes and I said, what if the database itself did the Mustache templating? So instead of having these two things coupled together, it's just one single thing. I was like, that would be really weird. Nobody does it that way, but logically it makes sense, doesn't it?
Derek Sivers
And it's fun that you can just keep challenging yourself to look at your existing work or life in a new way. Even if it's just a silly exercise for half an hour before bed someday, or when walking, as you say. You can get amazing creative insights that change everything about how you approach life or your work, just from this creative challenge of making yourself look for a different perspective.
Or Azulay
So I think the biggest challenge is that because I work for myself, so I don't have a doctor house thing where I have my workers that I can jump, like I can throw ideas to. So I'm basically talking to myself for a day or to my wife. So my creative problem solving or simplification or just looking at the problem from different perspectives happen either when I read books, your books, other books, philosophy books, or when walking, or when showering, or when sleeping. Obviously writing is the best. So it's still hard because we live, like people like you and I, we live in a solitary sort of way. Like we don't work as a team. We work for ourselves, with ourselves. So it's a challenge, I would say.
Or Azulay
So let's ask an opposite question. Shitty days happen. What are amazing days? What are like the days that you are so excited about that you wanna just tell everybody about them?
Derek Sivers
My favorite days are when I do one thing from beginning to end. I'm so happy when I wake up at 6am and throw myself into something, and I do that one thing until 10pm when I'm going to sleep. That one thing could be writing or programming, or even just spending the whole day with my kid, just giving him my full attention on a Saturday. He wakes me up at 6am. He jumps into bed. We cuddle. We go out. We have an adventure. And I just give him my full attention until 9pm. I tuck him into bed. I fall asleep at 10. And I say, wow, what a great day. Or a whole day spent writing a whole day spent programming a whole day spent reading that almost never happens to be so into a book that you read one book for 14 hours in one day. Those are my favorite days. A few years ago, I had one of these days where I did one thing all day long. And a friend called at the end of the day and said, "How are you doing?" I said, "Amazing, because I just did this one thing all day long." And she said, "Derek, I've known you for 15 years. You've told me this exact same thing like five times." I said, "I think it's really clear that you are at your happiest when you do one thing all day long. You should really remember that. You should write that down and remember that and shape your life accordingly, because I've never heard you so happy as when you do one thing all day long. Maybe there's a recipe for yourself in there."
Or Azulay
And how do you stay distraction free? You know, phone notifications, whatever. Life is hectic.
Derek Sivers
Oh, come on. That's not true. You make it true. I don't have notifications.
Derek Sivers
By the way, audience, anybody listening here, Or and I had quite a bit of back and forth because I don't have any social media apps on my phone. I never have. And when he told me that we were doing this interview on X Spaces, I went, "Oh man, I'm gonna have to install the app?" Uh, and that's what I was trying to do for the few minutes before we joined. It's like, "Oh man, I gotta dust off that social media account with a long 32-character long password that I don't have memorized. I gotta type that password into my phone?"
Derek Sivers
Okay, so the point is, most people set up their lives to be full of distractions. That's normal, but anybody listening here, we don't want to be normal, do we? You don't have to do what other people do.
Derek Sivers
I have a junk email account that I give to any business or anybody that is not a dear friend. And I don't hardly ever look at it unless a company really sends me a link I need to click to log in. So I don't get distracted by email. I don't have any social media apps on my phone. Only maybe 15 people know my phone number. And if I had the kind of life where I had to give my phone number to lots of people, like if I was a carpenter or something, then I would just get a separate phone and say, "Okay, this is the work phone." So other people get this number and turn it on when I want to be distracted and just turn it off when I'm done working and have my private number where I can just call my family and friends. I just set up my life in a very undistracted way. Even my screen, my computer screen, I I use a weird window manager called Rat Poison where there are no pixels on the screen that are not what I'm doing. It just takes up literally every pixel. There's no menu bar at the top with a notification. There's no taskbar at the bottom. It just fills the whole screen because I've noticed about myself that I hate distractions. I like the monofocus of one thing all day long. So I've adjusted my life accordingly so that I don't get interruptions unless it's my boy calling from school or something like that.
Or Azulay
So you don't have YouTube shorts or TikTok or that stuff that is never?
Derek Sivers
You have to if you respect yourself, if you value your time at all, you have to see that it as the enemy, not just as a distraction, but as the fucking enemy that deserves your loathing and wrath. I hate that shit with a passion. I will do anything it takes on my computer to install, not just the ad blockers, but on the deep level, like my /etc/hosts file in my Linux PC has all the constantly updated blockers so I don't see anything there. My phone has nothing but a few dear friends on it. No social media apps. My computer is blocked at every level, so it can only do my work. My login for any social media accounts that I have, whether it's Facebook or X, the passwords are these really long, randomly generated 30-character things that only sit inside a password manager. It's a bit of a pain to do, and I use Firefox with cookies disabled as my browser, so I can't really log in. I have to really jump through hoops and add a specific exception. So I do all these things for myself to make sure that distractions are the enemy. I will never give up that fight.
Derek Sivers
So even in where I live: I chose to move from Singapore to New Zealand, which took nine months of work. But I could tell that Singapore was a wonderfully social, fascinating, distracting place for me. So I moved to a place in New Zealand where I knew nobody so that I would have less distractions. That's how much I care about distractions. I'm willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars, months and months of paperwork in order to have less distractions.
Or Azulay
Yeah, that's why I don't move to Tel Aviv, by the way. Tel Aviv is so vibrant and you're always in contact FOMO. So I live in my very sleepy town 20 minutes away. So yeah, I totally get what you're doing. I'm gonna do the work. Now that Derek Sivers told me to stop being distracted, I'm gonna do the work.
Derek Sivers
Well, you don't need to hear this from me, but that story that gets attributed to Warren Buffett, where his driver said, how do you do it? And he said, show me your top 20 things you want to do. And then he said, you need to start thinking of all but these top three. The rest of these are now the enemy. These are your "do not do" list. These things are keeping you from what you want to do. We all could use more focus instead of spreading yourself thin saying I want to do these 10 things. You say no, these eight are the enemy.
Derek Sivers
I'm going to do these two things only. That's how I'm going to be effective. That's where my deeper happiness is going to come from that deep fulfillment from achieving something difficult because you weren't spread too thin. That's my goal.
Or Azulay
And speaking of that, what do you want? Because, and this is a deep question, I'm going to elaborate. I mean, you wrote amazing books. I have read all of them except one. Sorry about the musicians. I did it because I'm not one, but maybe I was just too soon to judge. And I know you also like you also built and sold a business for like a very respected respected amount of money. And you're a developer and you build stuff and you do all sorts of stuff. What do you really want more than anything right now?
Derek Sivers
My real answer? I don't know. I am pursuing ideas that interest me. I think I want to understand the whole world. Okay, if I had to give an answer, you heard my first answer. My first answer was I don't know.
Or Azulay
Which is a great answer. Which is a very zen answer, right?
Derek Sivers
It's my honest answer. I wish I could sound like a know-it-all right now.
Derek Sivers
I know exactly what I'm going for. I love finding and understanding a new perspective on life. I love when I read a book that shows me a new way of looking at life. And I import it. I adopt it. I internalize it. And I start seeing the world through that new perspective. Wow! It changes everything. I start replaying my whole past through that perspective. I start looking at the future through that perspective. It's fascinating. It's more exciting than traveling to some exotic land. It's to start seeing the world through some exotic point of view. Exotic to me. So that's the bigger thing I'm pursuing. Is importing and adopting more.
Or Azulay
More perspective in order to reach some sort of clarity about life?
Derek Sivers
No, it's not clarity. Clarity would mean that there's one right answer that I'm trying to see clearly. It's more about creativity and imagination and understanding that there's more ways to be the world. Not factual things like how I'm clapping my hands, knocking on this thing, or physical world science things: water is made out of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. That's just a fact. I mean everything else, the social world, this interpersonal world, how we see our life as compared to other people, how we see what we're doing every day when we get up and start the day, or what you're doing with your life, what's the meaning of life, all of that stuff has no right answer.
Or Azulay
So the deeper questions that have tons of different perspectives that you would like to explore?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. And even just the day to day what it means to interact with others. Is your goal in talking with others to tell them your thoughts? To understand theirs? Is it just to achieve harmony? Is it to have disharmony, to make things up and question norms? Or is it to go with the flow of the norms because that's social harmony? All of these things. It's infinite. The different ways you can look at life. That's what excites me more than anything. I think if you had to say that I'm ultimately pursuing one thing, that's my one thing.
Or Azulay
So it's basically being curious about life in general and then satisfying that curiosity with books and meeting new people and traveling and all that stuff that keeps life rich.
Derek Sivers
Right, but the point of the curiosity is to try to adopt and internalize other perspectives. It's not just touristing. I'm not just going to go look at the Eiffel Tower. I want to try being French. To see the world as a French person sees the world. (That's an overgeneralization.)
Or Azulay
That's why when we first met, what you did was to just meet a bunch of people from Israel and hear about different perspective about Israel, which is cool because whenever I visit a new place, I just go and find like the coolest restaurants because I only care about the restaurants. And like, I didn't even bother to go to the Eiffel Tower. I just watched it from below and said, oh, cool. And then everything I remember about Paris is just having that amazing restaurant, like where I ate meat with a spoon. So yeah, I don't internalize spaces, but I see what you're saying.
Derek Sivers
Everybody's got their own. Don't let somebody else on an X Space tell you that this is the way to be. There are wonderfully valid arguments that you're doing it right, not doing it wrong.
Or Azulay
Oh, no, no, I'm super comfortable with my way of viewing the world. I'm just very curious.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I figured out that succinct poetic way to describe what I'm doing is I travel to inhabit philosophies. That's my goal. I want to live inside a philosophical view. I want to live inside the different outlooks on life, which aren't always drawn at country borders.
Derek Sivers
I say something like live like a Frenchman. But of course, within France, there are many ways of looking at life. I just use it as a shorthand for an example.
Or Azulay
Other than doing one thing from like morning till dusk, are there any other stuff that are super exciting to you?
Derek Sivers
You're bilingual? Do you speak two languages?
Or Azulay
I speak four. Hebrew, English, Russian, and Persian.
Derek Sivers
Wow! Are you pretty fluent in Russian and Persian?
Or Azulay
I'm pretty fluent in Russian and Persian. I forgot most of it, but I can speak a little bit.
Derek Sivers
Wow. I'm not even bilingual. I can say a few touristy phrases in other languages and that's it.
Derek Sivers
Right now it seems unbelievably exciting to think of what it would be like to be fluent in Chinese so that I could go around that vast country and that huge culture and talk about food, oh my God, something like 2000 different cuisines within one place we call China. So many different people, so many different perspectives. If I could be fluent in Chinese, I would unlock that place. I could go there and I could understand the apps, I could understand the people, I could understand the system. It's a huge culture that's kept behind a wall of language from me.
Derek Sivers
So that's one specific one that continues to excite me for years and it won't go away. It's an interesting thing to notice about yourself: if there is a passion or an interest of yours that won't go away, it's worth heeding.
Or Azulay
And you're making strides or you're making like moves and motions to learn the language more and more or you're still looking at it as a someday?
Derek Sivers
That was a classic case of the thing we talked about 20 minutes ago with my friend that heard me all stressed out and said, you don't have to do any of those things. Learning Chinese was one of those things. It was right there on my to do list along with my taxes. I need to learn Chinese and I was spending an hour every day and it's stressing me out. And I was spread too thin because as you know, I like to do one thing at a time. So trying to do six different things per day for one hour each was making me miserable. So I'm not sure right now where learning Chinese falls into my life. Knowing what I know about myself it would seem like I should wait till I can give it my full attention and then just have a chunk of my life where I'm learning Chinese 16 hours a day. That would be logical based on my past, so I'm not sure.
Or Azulay
A cooler challenge would be to, I mean in the future, obviously to challenge yourself to write a book in Chinese. So then it's not just learning Chinese but it's also something you're creating and then And it sounds even more exciting.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I like that.
Or Azulay
So, right now your primary focus is just doing those things that you put aside, like the web app thing. Is that your primary focus or it may be another book? Or what's the plans now?
Derek Sivers
Did you see this new movie called A Complete Unknown about Bob Dylan?
Or Azulay
Uh, no.
Derek Sivers
It's so good. I just saw it last night. And there's a moment where he's writing a new song. And he's trying to come up with a line. It's a famous song now. So anybody who's ever heard him sing this song knew what the next line was going to It's a really good line, but he's singing the lines before it a few times. He's looking for that line. And then he says that great line and oh, you see this joy in his face. Oh, yeah, that's good. So I miss that joy. I miss the years I spent writing my book called How to Live. That was four years of my life of coming up with some really fascinating insights in life and figuring out how to put them in a really beautifully succinct way. That was four years of hard work, but it was so satisfying. Every time when I had those moments, almost every day, I would come up with a line that make me go, "Oh, that's good. Oh, that's great. Wow."
Derek Sivers
And same thing with writing my Useful Not True book. It was two more years of that, but this time I was learning along the way. I was writing a book about something I didn't know about. I was learning about religions and beliefs and perspectives and stoicism and pragmatism and skepticism, reading, reading, reading about these, and then very succinctly trying to explain what I had learned. And it was such a deep joy coming with those lines. So I realized while watching that movie last night that it's been six months since I've done any real writing and I miss it a lot.
Or Azulay
Okay, so writing will always be a part of what brings you joy. Therefore, something that you will always pursue.
Derek Sivers
I'm wary of the word always. I've had so many different chapters in my life. For 15 years my life, I was only a musician. And everybody knew me knew that I cared about nothing but music, you couldn't get me to travel, you couldn't get me to read a book. All I wanted to do was music. And after 15 years of doing only music, suddenly, I had this moment where I wanted to make this company to help musicians. And so for the next 10 years, I didn't do any music, I did only this company for 10 years, you couldn't get me to do anything else. 16 hours a day I was obsessed with making this company to help musicians distribute their music. You couldn't get me to travel. You couldn't get me to watch a movie. For 10 years I did nothing but that. And then one day I was just feeling done, sold the company, and then everything changed again. Lots of travel, lots of books. Who knows? Maybe this phase I'm in will come to an end soon and I will just go start an ostrich farm
Or Azulay
Yeah, I'm getting older, I'm gonna be 37 soon. So I'm not saying older as in old, like older as in wiser. So I have finally noticed what you're talking about, those shifts in life. Everybody in Israel wants to be a startup founder because there's so many of them. And they're like the heroes, like the locals here. So I wanted to be that and then I didn't. And then I wanted to, I don't know, just be a really good consultant and then I didn't. And now I just do events and I'm giving it my all and I'm only doing that. And I already see, like you're saying, that this won't last. Like this will be a phase. This will be all 3.0, but over 4.0 will be something vastly different, even though my younger self always thought in absolutes. Like if you're X, you're always gonna be X. But my mom told me, I changed like career like five times, but I told her, hey, no, we're living in a digital era. We don't have five versions of ourselves, we only have one, we have the internet. But she said, no, wait, you're a child. You are going to change yourself vastly from, I don't know, from every five years or whatever. So I totally get what you're saying.
Derek Sivers
That's a really cool example, thank you.
Derek Sivers
Anybody listening to this, you could strongly consider that the phase you're in right now is going to end and you are going to do something completely different in a few years, like vastly different, a way that you can't even imagine that you would be that person. We should all be opening our minds to those possibilities because most people don't. They get stuck in their ways, especially after the age of 30. They say, well, this is who I am. This is how I like my eggs. This is what I do. This is where I live. That's it. And they stop changing like they used to in their teens and 20s. They think they're done.
Derek Sivers
In fact, OK, so this is why I left America, is because I was too happy. I was living in Santa Monica, California on the beach, beautiful weather, perfect place, lots of friends in Los Angeles. I was at the peak of my career in the music business. I didn't know it was the peak at the time. And life was so good that I felt done. My girlfriend at the time wanted to travel and I'd say, "Why? We live in the most beautiful place in the whole world. Why go anywhere else?" And I was doing the thing that I thought I was going to do for the rest of my life.
Derek Sivers
And it was because I noticed that feeling in myself, that I was feeling done, that I suddenly flipped that and said, "Okay, wait, that feeling is the enemy." Sorry, I've used this phrase a few times now, but I'm going to treat that feeling as the enemy. I can never feel done. I'm only 36. I've got a long way to go. I need to set up my life in such a way that I'm the opposite of done. So that's why I left America forever to get out of my comfort zone. I renounced my US citizenship to burn the bridges to prevent me from returning. And I constantly force myself into doing the least comfortable thing where I'm a total beginner. So I will hopefully never again feel done.
Or Azulay
Yeah, I get that. I mean, I take a less extreme approach to that. Whenever I lean into my curiosity or to what Tim Ferriss calls, like, your weird, that always changes, that always evolves. So I am always in motion, I am always changing. Like in Zen Buddhism, there is no self, and me five minutes ago, me in the beginning of this conversation is not the me that I'm currently speaking. So, and I truly believe that. That's why I really hate when people say, that's me, no, it's not. There's no you, fuck off. So, yeah. So once I have the compass or that trajectory that says, I find this interesting right now and lean into that, I always evolve.
Or Azulay
Life keeps getting interesting, even though it's extremely scary. I mean, I am scared constantly and I don't know how you deal with that. I would love to learn how you handle fear, because I haven't learned how to manage my fears yet.
Derek Sivers
Oh, I don't manage them. I heed them. I heed them as a compass of what I should be going towards. I was a teenager when I heard the phrase, "Whatever scares you, go do it." And the idea was, whatever scares you, go do it, because then it won't scare you anymore. Our fears are almost entirely the unknown. And if you just walk into that dark room, bringing your torch with you, suddenly it's not a dark room anymore. Same thing with any aspect, going to a country that seems scary, doing the thing that seems scary, talking to the person that seems scary. So many times I have felt intimidated by a person that is scary to me that I'm scared to talk to. And I notice that feeling in myself and I say, well, whatever scares you, go do it.
Or Azulay
Here, you could get stabbed. You could get stabbed that way. Especially here.
Derek Sivers
You're right. We don't always have to give the disclaimer: "Obviously don't be an idiot." You know, if you're scared to jump off a tall building, come on, that's not what we're talking about.
Derek Sivers
I'm talking about the kind of scared where you can clearly see that this is the unknown to you, that you're scared of your own potential, you're scared because of your self-identity, that this is outside of your realm, all of these kinds of things. Every time I've gone up to speak to the scary person, it's always been rewarding. Every time I go do the scary thing, it's been rewarding. So I just learned early on this rule of thumb, whatever scares you go do it because then you won't be scared anymore.
Derek Sivers
In fact, I ended up making that into a lullaby for my boy when he was two years old, I was singing him the usual lullabies every night. And I was doing that for six months. Then one day I realized I'm a songwriter. I'm a writer. I'm a musician. Why am I just singing other people's lullabies? I can make my own. And I thought, what message do I want to get into his subconscious to help steer his life? Singing nightly lullabies since he was two years old. I want that message in his subconscious.
Or Azulay
That's awesome. I have a similar story. I don't sing to my kids. Not because I'm a bad singer, just because I don't want to. But at some point I made up stories for them, like stories before bed. And now all they want is my made up stories because I make up stories about dragons and castles and I always put in some sort of a hidden message from their realities. Like if they had a shitty day in kindergarten, then I just use that and use the prince called Nikolai and who fights the evil queen or whatever. And they love that shit. They eat it up. So yeah, creativity within parenting is always a challenge, but it's also super rewarding. So I mean, I totally get what you're saying with fears and how to overcome them and how to use them as a compass. I'm going to try to do that myself.
Or Azulay
You saw the movie Red Dragon with Hannibal Lecter, you know, the third one?
Derek Sivers
No, I haven't seen that one.
Or Azulay
Awesome, I love it. People probably don't like it, but there's a point in the movie where Hannibal Lecter says to the detective Graham, he says, "You're scared, you reek of fear, but you're not a coward. You fear me, but you keep coming to visit me." So he's afraid, but he keeps doing what he's scared of. So it's fine being scared, but just do the thing. in order to accomplish what you're here to accomplish.
Derek Sivers
Tim Ferriss, in his first "Four Hour Work Week" book, said something like, "The enemy is boredom. Boredom is what you need to watch out for." The feeling of boredom means you're really on the wrong track, because you're not growing. I thought that was a beautiful reframing, because fear is also the opposite of boredom. Fear is excitement. We should be using excitement as a compass to steer towards whatever is exciting us and rethink of fear as just another form of excitement. It's excitement plus the unknown. And so therefore, if we think of fear as just a form of excitement. It's logical why we should do it.
Or Azulay
That's interesting. Yeah, it's just another form of being alive.
Derek Sivers
Hey, by the way, I'm looking at down at my screen here, all these people. Hi, everybody. I'm waving at your icons on my screen. There are all these people do they join in this conversation do they post messages or is it just us?
Or Azulay
Guys, if you want to ask questions you can either ask to join the conversation you can just write to us in the comment bubble on the right side of the screen, and we are going to ask Derek all the questions.
Derek Sivers
I see a guy I know from Bangalore India joined in. I see all these names I was about to call them out. But anybody here, if you want to ask anything, I'm sitting here looking at your photos. So ask anything instead of sitting there silently.
Or Azulay
Until they ask a question, do you have any plans to travel again like you did when we first met?
Derek Sivers
Oh yeah, I think I'm always going to keep doing that. And in fact, I'll tell you the reason why, because this might be a bit surprising.
Derek Sivers
Besides the obvious thing that I said about wanting to inhabit philosophies, when my wife got pregnant and I went, "Oh my God, I'm going to have a kid," I read a book on parenting written by a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, not giving his opinion on what he thinks should be good parenting techniques, but just sharing what he's learned about baby and childhood brain development. And therefore, considering these findings, what does this tell us about what we should be doing with our kids? So that book was called Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina. And it was such a good book. I highly recommend it. In fact, anybody that ever emails me and says they're going to have a baby or they just had a baby, I always say you need to read this book, Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina. So good. It's the only parenting book I really loved. Well, until they get a little older. And then there's another one called Playful Parenting.
Derek Sivers
John Medina later wrote another book called Brain Rules for Aging. I'm 55 now. This applies to me. So the book Brain Rules for Aging said that as we study healthy brain development for aging, what we've learned is you need to keep your brain active. You need to do difficult things. Learn to dance. Learn a second language, even if it's for the first time in your 50s. Communicate with people that are outside of your demographic, across age boundaries. Engage in conversation with teenagers and with the elderly. Engage in conversations with people that grew up in very different backgrounds from yourself. He said it's actually one of the most difficult and stimulating things you could ever do for your brain is engaging in conversation with somebody that has a world view so unlike your own. And along with other advice like play table tennis and learn to dance and speak another language, That one really hit home for me. And I thought that I need to set up my life situation in such a way that I'm encouraged to be social. Because like we said earlier, I have a tendency to want to live in serene, quiet, tranquil, and non-distracting places.
Or Azulay
Solitary places.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, solitary places. But according to the healthy aging brain, that's the kind of stuff that leads people down into dementia and Alzheimer's because they aren't having enough social interactions with other people and their brain falls into ruts. So I do plan to constantly push myself out into the world, engaging with others. And as soon as my boy is done with high school here in New Zealand, I plan to live around the world for the rest of my life, ideally in places like Bangalore and Dubai, where there are so many fascinating people around me that I just have to engage with everybody every day.
Or Azulay
It's awesome.
Or Azulay
I'm out of questions for the time being but I'm going to bombard you with questions on the email later on.
Derek Sivers
Well, hey, actually, that's a good transition. All these people, these icons, these faces that I'm looking at of people that are here listening, go email me. Go to my website - sive.rs - and there is the email me link there. Or will tell you I answer every single email. That's how Orr and I met. And I answer every email and I actually enjoy it. I put aside an hour a day to answer every single email that comes in. So anybody, you got any question or just want to say hello, introduce yourself, just go to my website and send me an email. You will get a reply back from me within a couple of days.
Martin
Hi, Derek. This is Martin. How are you, Derek? Nice to hear your voice after a long time.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Martin. Where are you?
Martin
I'm in Chennai.
Derek Sivers
Chennai, alright.
Martin
Yeah. So, I wanted to ask you a question and I want to add your thought about fear. But I will ask the question later. I will add a thought on what you said about fear. Actually, recently I internalized an insight which I read from a very old book, a Chinese book. So whenever I used to talk to a woman who I like, when I say hi, I get a fear and then I don't do it because I fear rejection. So that book has a quote which says "The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences." So everything whenever we do everything like whether starting something or talking to a woman we have preferences. Like I have a preference not to get rejected. I have a preference to go things in my own way. So that is the thing actually, and that is the thing that is stopping us from pursuing. So what they say is the great way is not difficult for those who have no preference. So I thought to add this because you mentioned when you have a fear, you should go and do it. When you want, when fear is stopping you to talk to that girl, you should pursue that. So I thought this also, yeah.
Martin
And then my question is, Derek, I was always wondered: You always prefer this less-is-more approach to both business and life. I mean, that is so unique about you. What made you structure your life in that way? It's not only about business and life, the way you write books. I showed the book "How to Live" to my wife. She was almost amazed. I mean, it was so succinct, she never saw a book like that. So I just thought to ask this.
Derek Sivers
It's come from my experience of the opposite.
Derek Sivers
So I used to have too much stuff. I used to run a recording studio in New York City, where my house was filled with hundreds of little cables and instruments and microphones and things and stuff. And I was a self promoting musician. So my house was filled with CDs and photos and mailing labels and all these things and stuff. And I would collect little knickknacks that I liked. And so I had so many things. And then I moved house like five times in 10 years. Five times I packed all of my stuff into a truck and then had to unpack all of my stuff and then pack it all up and then unpack it again. And after doing that five times, I said, I don't want any of this stuff anymore. I would be happier to just have my little laptop, my thoughts, a week's worth of clothes, and that's all I really need. I think I would actually feel more deeply happy not having this stuff than I would having this stuff. But that realization came only after having too much stuff.
Derek Sivers
Same thing with writing. I've read so many books that use too many words. We've all seen those books, especially nonfiction books, that take 300 pages to say what really could have been said in 20 pages. And I value my time, and I get angry when I read books that they're using too many words. So I said, "When I write a book, it's going to be as short as can possibly be. No words that don't need to be there." And I tried writing that way. It takes more work to write that way, but it's so satisfying to me and hopefully to the readers.
Derek Sivers
Same thing with my computer setup I described earlier. No pixels on the screen that don't need to be there. I've just learned through experience that doing it this way makes me happier.
Derek Sivers
And that ended up changing the whole way that I approach life, because I'm not trying to make money anymore. I got just enough from selling my company that I know that I don't need any more for the rest of my life. That's good because the kind of life I want means that if I had too much money, if you suddenly gave me a hundred million dollars, I would just give it all away right away because I know that having that money would make me tempted or liable to buy things I don't need, which then would ultimately make me less happy. So I'd rather just not have the money. So it's shaped my life completely - that I'm not pursuing money anymore. Everything you see me doing out in the world, none of it is for the money. Because I know that that's not the life I want.
Or Azulay
That's great. I wish I can say the same.
Derek Sivers
I got a little purple heart from MJ. Thank you. And Martin, thank you for staying up so late tonight. I miss the dosas. I found a pretty good dosa here in New Zealand. I miss the real dosa.
Or Azulay
So Derek, thank you so much for the time and for the wisdom. And I really hope you keep writing books and I'm going to keep reading them to life. It's refreshing and it's different. And everybody, thank you for listening and have a great day or night or whatever, wherever you're from.