Drink and Think
host: Tate Hackert
Negotiability of Rules, Intrinsic Motivation, Happy Smart Useful, Embracing Change, Pace of Life.
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Transcript:
Tate Hackert
Derek has been a musician, circus performer, entrepreneur and speaker. He's a slow thinker, explorer, xenophile which is a lover of cultures, and you love a different point of view. That is awesome.
Derek Sivers
The ending of that is more applicable these days. I think more and more I'm getting even more interested in understanding other cultures. I've been to China three times this year and India two times and I'm just kind of fascinated with trying to understand a different point of view.
Tate Hackert
I remember I heard you talk about Dubai and how like Dubai was never really something that you thought you wanted to to get into, like you didn't think you'd enjoy the city. So i'm curious like the fact that you're going to China more and India more like was that spurred out of that trip a little bit in trying to like change your point of view in those things or was that something you'd already enjoyed before?
Derek Sivers
No it's actually it's all part of the same the big idea. If you notice that something repulses you and you have like a revulsion response to something, steer into it to learn more about it instead of avoiding it. So it could be like "I hate opera therefore i should go learn more about opera i should listen to opera more until i don't hate it" or "I hate baseball, so I should really get to know baseball better so that I don't hate it."
Derek Sivers
So to me then it was the same thing with places. China just sounded like an awful place. So foreign, so, like I have so many prejudices against it. So I went. And oh my God, all my prejudices were wrong.
Derek Sivers
You mentioned Dubai earlier. Dubai was in my top five list of places I never want to go in my whole life. "Fuck that place. It just sounds like hedonistic millionaire pandering bullshit. No way. I never want to go there." But once I noticed that in myself, I went, hmm, I should probably go there because I've got an unfair prejudice against it. So I keep trying to steer into the things that I'm repulsed by.
Tate Hackert
At what point do you decide that, like, okay, so baseball, for example, you hate baseball, I should probably learn more about that until I like it. At what point do you decide, like, ah, you know what, I'm just not going to like it? Or you decide, hey, like, I really like the moneyball aspect of it, but there's nothing else I like about it.
Derek Sivers
Right. Good question. If you've given it your best to get to know it, then at very least you'll feel your feelings change from hatred to like, "Okay, I get it, but it's just not for me."
Tate Hackert
All right. I like that. I like that. Okay. I have like a bunch of questions and I'm going to dig into them. And then I'm hoping that it just takes us down random paths.
Tate Hackert
One thing I love is your commentary about rules. I think it was in the book Anything You Want. You said something like when you make a business, you get to make this little universe and all the laws in it and whatnot, you can kind of make up. And then again, in Useful Not True, you talked about how rules are the starting point not final answer. This quote by the way i love it "the world is as negotiable as a flea market in marrakesh only a fool doesn't haggle". When did you realize this like like was there significant events or was this always you you were like a i'll use the word like hustler from from day one like when did you realize that you could bend those rules and like create your own reality distortion field?
Derek Sivers
Good question. Two different answers.
Derek Sivers
There's a brilliant book everyone here should consider reading called You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen. If you go on my website, sive.rs, there's a page where I put my book notes. The exact URL is sive.rs/book - If you go there, you'll see my notes from the last 430 books I've read since 2007 is when I started taking notes. Every time I read a nonfiction book, I highlight my favorite passages and then type them out if it's a paper book or transfer it if it's a Kindle. And I paste them on my website, edited with my favorite ideas from that book. And then I give the book like a one out of 10 rating for how much I think you might like it. So I'm saying all this because You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen is at the number one top spot in that whole list. It's the top book you'll see on the page because it is so damn good. It was written in 1980 or so, so its examples are dated, talking about Jimmy Carter and Nixon or whatever. But this guy was a professional negotiator.
Derek Sivers
You'd think that this is just a book on negotiating to save you money or something. But no, it ends up being an entire philosophy about not accepting the rules as they are. And he has so many wonderful, colorful stories and examples of this that just get you into this mindset of looking at the whole world, that when somebody says "You can't do that", you go, "I don't think that's true. I don't think that's written in stone. I don't think God put that in the commandments. I think you're just saying that. I think somebody told you to say that." It's such a beautiful reframing of the world to just see nothing is written in stone. Everything is negotiable, flexible. So highly recommend reading that. I read that when I was a teenager and a few times since, and it changed the way I see the world.
Derek Sivers
But the second half of the answer has almost nothing to do with that book. It was years later when I was starting my own little music distribution company. I had been a professional musician for 10 years, trying to make a living in New York City as a full-time musician. Doing the grind, doing the hustle. It was hard work. And so when I accidentally started a music company, I was just, for context, I was just selling my CD on my band's website. But this was in 1997, when nobody was doing this. And if you were an independent musician, there was nowhere on the internet that would sell your music. So when I did this, my friends in New York said, "Hey man, could you sell my CD?" And I said, okay, sure. I did it as a favor to some friends and then friends told friends and then strangers started calling. And that's when I realized that, oops, I've accidentally started a business. I was getting new signups every day. So then I said, if I'm going to do this thing, and this is, sorry, this is like a question we should all be asking ourselves, no matter what you're doing. If I'm gonna do this thing, how could it be amazing? How would it be in a perfect world? In an idealized utopia how would this work? I just daydreamed for a couple hours based on my experience as a musician. I thought, "Well in a perfect world I'd get paid every week instead of once a year like the usual distribution does and in a perfect world they would always sell my even if I don't sell very much, because the usual distribution would kick you out." So you get the idea. So I just daydreamed, like, in a perfect world, how would it work?
Derek Sivers
And I made that my mission statement for this little business. And then even as time went on, somebody would say, like, hey, I already paid you to set up my album in the store, but now I want to make some changes. How would that work? And so again, I asked myself, well, in a perfect world, how would it work? I don't really need to get paid again, but it would be nice to get a little something. So I'll make it that I'll make any change to your album if you send me a pizza. That would be really cool. Like if I was a customer of this business, I would think that was cool. So I made that the official policy. Changes need pizza. If you want us to make a change to your account, here's my address. Here's I prefer pepperoni. And that just became the official policy. So the idea is when you start a business, you get to make all the rules now. You can, like in this little part of the world, you get to decide how things should work. You don't have to follow norms.
Tate Hackert
Has there been a moment where like that reality distortion field has failed you? Like where you find yourself up against a wall or like you're in the thick of bureaucracy and it's just it's not working. Like, oh, yeah, I'm sure that there's those frustrations that creep in and you're just like, oh, this truly isn't negotiable just because of like the constructs that exist.
Derek Sivers
OK, I think it's a different mindset. It's like everything is negotiable, but it's just a matter of how far you're willing to go to make it happen. And yes, there are many things where it's just butting your head. You're trying again. You're trying to, I don't know, something with your local electric company or something like that. And the fact is that, yes, if you actually went down to their office with a cake and hired a dancing bear to do something or other, you know, or decided to make a big giant fuss and write columns in the local newspaper and plaster all over social media, you could probably still get what you want. So I think everything is negotiable, but it's just a matter of how far you're willing to go.
Tate Hackert
Going back to CD Baby, you had ended up optimizing it to an extent where you were working only a few hours a year type thing on it. Is that correct?
Derek Sivers
At the end, yeah. So to be clear, the first seven or eight years, I was working like 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Literally, I never took breaks. I was like 7 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week. I was obsessed. And only after seven or eight years, my girlfriend moved down to L.A. to go to film school, and I wanted to go with her. So I just felt like the only way to make this business sustainable is to turn it into a system that runs without me. So that's what I spent a year doing that. But that was only after seven years of nonstop work.
Tate Hackert
You were like AI before AI. Is that like on the topic of creating things and new ideas and doing new things, have you been toying with, I know it's general, but like AI? and have you been trying to it just seems so like in tune with your sort of minimalist mindset I'm just curious if you've been looking to build stuff with AI tooling
Derek Sivers
I haven't built anything with it yet but oh my god has it woken up my curiosity there are so many things for the last 20 years that I might have wondered like I don't know just pick some random trivia question. Why do some people have hair on their knuckles here and some don't? What's up with that? I feel like if I were to search the web about that, you would get this kind of like, "Hey, 10 things you need to know about the body. Click here to subscribe!" You know, the banners, you're just like, everything is so commercial. I just want a paragraph of text to answer my damn question. I don't want to subscribe to your thing. I don't want the hype. I don't want the little face in the YouTube, you know, thumbnail. I just want a paragraph of text, please. And for the last 20 years, that's been ungettable. And as soon as I realized that the newer models are really good and they've taken all of the text of the Internet, compressed it, and can give you just the text you want, I've been using it to ask so many questions about the world that now I think like 30 times a day I'm asking it little curiosities, some of which have sat there for years. It's so satisfying.
Derek Sivers
Using it to build things? Not yet. Although it's interesting that for the last 20 years almost, every email I've ever received and every email I've ever sent is stored in a database. And every interview I've ever done, there's a full transcript that's parsed with host said this, Derek said this, host said this, Derek said that, all tagged as this is a question, this is an answer etc so someday i'm very uh well set up to load all of my thoughts and everything i've ever said or written into the AI, but i have not done it yet.
Tate Hackert
What are the projects you're working on right now? Are you doing much in technology or are you mostly focused on yeah writing?
Derek Sivers
Yeah tech wise I love programming. It's my happy place. I love building things in the command line often just for my own interest like right now i'm building a system to help translators translate all of my books. That's just exciting to me - Every sentence i've ever written is in its own entry in the database and that's tied to languages that people might translate into done on a per sentence basis and that's just nerdy and exciting for me.
Derek Sivers
The house is not interesting i just mentioned it once on Tim's podcast that yeah uh about 20 minutes north of us right now i'm on a piece of land i've got a four by eight meter cabin and the carpenters are still building the outdoor toilet shower and deck and um that's all that is right now
Tate Hackert
Maybe like you said it was perhaps a throwaway comment that ended up getting more uh more air time than you'd hoped for the house but like i wanted to talk a little bit about it, because I think it's interesting like it's sort of like a concept of like delete delete delete and then like you start from this like bare foundation and you worked your way back up um maybe just for like some quick context for the team if you can provide like where your mind was at with that yeah i have a i have a question on that specifically um as well but yeah maybe just like quick context for the team sure
Derek Sivers
Okay the context is 20 years ago i read a brilliant book called How Buildings Learn by Stuart Brand. Again, I highly recommend this book. In fact, I think it's my most gifted book. I love this book. I've read it so many times. And during COVID, I moved back to New Zealand, and I wanted a remote home just on a piece of land somewhere. So luckily, like during COVID, everything in New Zealand was dirt cheap because only citizens were allowed in. There was nobody here. So I bought 10 hectares of land, and I thought, okay, I get to put the advice of this book into place. So what this book says is all buildings are predictions, and all predictions are wrong. The buildings that win awards in architecture magazines are the ones that have hundreds of beautiful photos taken of it the day before anyone moves in. But experience has shown that people who try to live in those architecturally award-winning homes hate them because they are untouchable. They've got weird curved walls that you can't expand, or they're too perfectly and artistically designed so you can't make any changes. But people love to adapt the spaces they're in to fit their needs. He said one of the most beloved buildings in the world is an old MIT campus building that was thrown together quickly in a few months during World War II, but has stayed there for 70 years, and people love it because it's so cheap and just a big dumb box that you can just pound a hole in the wall if you need to rub some cables from one room to another. You could just pound a nail into anything. You can knock out a wall. You can make any changes you want because it's just an old cheap building, but people love it because it's so flexible. So he said there's really a lot of lessons to be learned from this. So following that philosophy, when I got this piece of land, just a bare piece of land off the grid, no electricity, no water, no nothing, I said, okay, I'm going to start from scratch and I'm going to just get a rectangle, a four by eight meter rectangle. And once I'm living in it, then I'll decide what it needs. So where do the lights go? I don't know. Wait till I've been there a while, then I'll know where the lights go. Where do I want a chair? Where do I want a wall? Where should the windows be? I don't know. Let me start spending time in it, then I'll know where the windows should be, etc. So there's some lessons for that metaphor in everyday life as well.
Derek Sivers
And at the risk of monologuing too long, I'll tell another adjacent story. It's probably a fable, but it's a good one. Is that in a college campus, there was a town green, you know, where you have kind of the buildings around and then you have the green space in the middle, just grass. And the committee was trying to decide where should we put the pavement? Should the pavement cross across the middle or should we just have pavement around the edge and leave the middle green. And the winning suggestion was this. Do nothing. Let's not put any pavement there for a whole year. And next year, let's reconvene and see where the grass is worn away. And then that's where we should put the pavement. Let the world show us what it wants instead of us trying to predict what it wants.
Derek Sivers
And that's the key theme between these two, between architecture and life. As much as possible, try to not predict what the future may hold, but just wait as long as possible for that future to become the present and show you what it actually needs.
Tate Hackert
It's like UI versus UX.
Derek Sivers
Ooh, good one.
Tate Hackert
The UI looks beautiful, but is it actually usable?
Tate Hackert
So I guess on that topic, because I like it and I like that there's probably part of it that's an experiment and a game for you and just this thing that you want to try out for the sake of trying it out. And so I totally get that and it makes sense and that's fun. On the flip side of it, I guess, there's also this aspect of like, um, you, you probably know to a 90% degree of like what you want, I would assume. Um, and like, it's going to be 90% useful with next, next to no effort having to be put into the process, or you're like, okay, I'm going to optimize the shit out of this so that it is, you know, truly built from the ground up. And, like every last thing is is is extremely useful I guess what I'm asking is like I I've I've heard you talk about like your time being very valuable you only spend your time on on things you want to do like even so like am I gonna watch Game of Thrones well no because if I say my time is worth a thousand dollars an hour that's like seventy thousand dollars that I'm spending to watch this show um but then like you do this house thing and it feels like there's a lot of over complication when the alternative is like hey this is going to be 90 correct if i just you know build a normal house
Derek Sivers
It's all about what you want to spend your time doing. When I was the owner and president of CD Baby, I had 85 employees and about 40 computers, workstations where people needed to work at a computer. And I built every one of those computers myself. I really enjoyed going down to the electronics store, picking out a motherboard, CPU, the RAM, the hard drive, the graphics card, a fan, the case. And late at night, I would screw the motherboard into the case, attach the CPU, stick in the RAM, the graphics card, whatever. And then I would install Linux onto the computer, get everything working nicely, set it up at the new employee's desk. And the process would take a few hours. And I told this story years later to somebody who scoffed and said, yeah, that's a really stupid use of the CEO's time. I said, no, it was a great use of my time because it made me happy. That's what I wanted to be doing. I didn't want to be out on sales calls. I didn't care about making more money. I had plenty of money. I wanted to do whatever was fascinating me. And I found it both relaxing and fascinating to build the computers myself and install Linux myself and get it working myself. It was fun. I enjoyed it.
Derek Sivers
So same thing with programming now. There's so many times that I could just use some off-the-shelf software. But instead, I build things myself. And sometimes it can take months and months and months of work to do something that could have been done in 10 minutes if I just bought somebody else's solution.
Derek Sivers
But here's the key. You ready for the punchline? It's a quote from Richard Feynman the physicist that said, "What I cannot create, I do not understand." You can take apart a car. Anybody can take apart a car. But can you put a car back together? Can you build a car? That's how to know that you really understand a car. So i think it's the same thing software. I'll build software myself. It takes months because I want to really understand this problem. I find it fascinating.
Derek Sivers
And then same thing with this house. I just thought this might be the last time in my life that I own a house. I've always just lived in other people's houses that other people built as some kind of normal, this is what people probably need. Just do the usual. Put the kitchen there. Put a bathroom there. But I don't really need a big kitchen. And I've never used a dining room. And I've learned that buildings rot from water. Water is always the thing that ages buildings. So what if I had no water in my house anywhere? Anytime there's a running tap that needs to be there, put it outside so that the buildings themselves have no water. Then they would last much longer. Things like this, the questions like this fascinate me and I think it just it'd be a really fun experiment. So yes, It's way harder than just buying a house and once again living in somebody else's space. But isn't it fascinating to try it from scratch based on what I actually need, not what I think I might need or how I've just adapted to norms, but to scratch it from the beginning and say, you know, I don't think I need a kitchen. I don't think I need an indoor bathroom. Things like that. Challenging assumptions.
Tate Hackert
Do you ever find yourself, like there's a certain, like there's a minimalist aspect to you and there's the persona of Derek, at least from like an outward perspective. I don't know if you feel that internally, but I guess that's sort of my question. do you ever find yourself attaching to the idea of maintaining the Derek Sivers persona versus truly doing what you want? Do you ever find yourself at odds sometimes in that regard?
Derek Sivers
No, because I would love to completely upend expectations. I feel no need to be consistent. with my past self. I love changing my mind. If I stop flip-flopping, that means I'm a dead fish. Changing my mind is life. That's what I want to do. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to change my mind. I want to be surprised. I want my mind to be changed. And therefore, I want to keep living different ways and approaching life in different ways.
Derek Sivers
Right now, I'm a minimalist. It should not surprise you if 10 years from now, I'm a maximalist. Or in five years from now, I'm a horse trainer. Or 15 years from now, I'm a devout Muslim living in Saudi Arabia. None of these should surprise you because I love to keep trying different aspects of life. So no, I do not want to be consistent with my public persona.
Tate Hackert
There's a lot of character traits, at least again, like an outward perspective that, or an outsider's perspective that feels like there's been a lot of consistency. What has perhaps changed over the last 15 years for you where you think that you've upended a certain part of your personality or character or just like way about life.
Derek Sivers
I think probably the things you asked about earlier with Dubai, China, etc. I think it's not so publicly visible, but there have been more and more and more things that I used to hate and even defined myself by hating. Like, I'm against that. But now I'm no longer against it. The biggest one, of course, is 14 years ago, if you would have said, are you going to have kids? I would have said, hell no, I'm never going to have kids. I've never wanted kids. I do not want kids. And then, oops, 14 years ago, right after my girlfriend and I broke up, we found out she was pregnant. So we got back together. And I have a 13-year-old kid. That was totally unexpected and changed a lot of things for me. Even the fact that I'm here in New Zealand after 12 years is the opposite of what I ever would have predicted for myself. I thought I would be fully nomadic, and I've been here for 12 years because of my boy. This is where he is, so this is where I am.
Tate Hackert
That's cool. I like that.
Tate Hackert
Maybe change the topic a little bit then. The topic of like you're taking multiple months maybe to build a piece of software. You're building this house from the ground up and being meticulous about, or being intentional, I suppose, about where things go. One of my favorite stories or anecdotes, I guess, that I've heard you talk about is the music teacher and just talking about like the standard pace is for chumps. And you like accelerating. Was it two years at Berklee instead of four?
Tate Hackert
But then also, I guess, like, I want to know how you're thinking about pace now. And because, like, you were at a really, really fast pace for so long, it seemed like anyways. And now it seems like a little bit of the opposite. And I wonder if that's true or if you just think of pace differently. And, yeah, let's maybe dig into that a little bit.
Derek Sivers
That's a great question about pace. I don't even think I've asked myself that. Okay, the Kimo Williams story For those of you Patiently listening And thanks Tate for these questions This is a blast I'm really honored
Derek Sivers
Kimo Williams. I was 16 years old Living in Chicago There were classified ads at the time. I'm 55 now, so this is almost 40 years ago. There's a classified ad in the Chicago Sun-Times or something like that about a music typesetter. I called the guy and I started asking some questions. And he said, why do you want to know? And I said, because I'm going to Berklee College of Music in a few months. He said, oh, really? Berklee College of Music, huh? He said, I used to teach there. He said, you know what? How about this? Come by my studio tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. And I can help you graduate Berklee in two years instead of four years. I said, OK, what's your address? And he gave me his address. So the next morning at 9 a.m., I was so excited. I was standing at his door, knocked on his door. He answered the door a little confused. And he goes, oh, my God, you're the guy that called yesterday. And it turns out whenever people would ask him questions, like ambitious questions, he'd say, show up at my studio at 9 a.m. tomorrow. And he said, in all my years of saying that, nobody had ever done it. People always said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And nobody ever shows up. He said, you were the first one that ever showed up with me saying that.
Derek Sivers
So he sat me down for free, spent hours of his time saying, okay, here's the way you're going to graduate in two years. He said, look, essentially, I'm going to teach you four years of harmony classes today. Because here's the gist of it. You just need to know you got the tritone here. What's a replacement chord? How do you do this? Now, a 2-5 substitution is this. What other chord has that same in here? I went, okay, try this, try that. And he just kind of gave me this fast-paced introduction, and it was so exciting. It was like this adrenaline of playing a video game. You know that thing when it's like you've got to learn something from a book, and you're going, and you keep feeling like you need to fall asleep. But then if you take a break and play some first-person shooter video game, you're so full of adrenaline, right? So this was the first time in my life that I was learning something with that same adrenaline. I was like, boom, boom, boom. Are you catching me? Can't do this. You got to keep up with me. You could do this. All right. This, that. Whoa. After three hours of that, I went home and he assigned me some work. He said, okay, come back next Monday, 9 a.m. Do all these things before I see you next. I drove home like, wow, that was amazing. and I went home and I did the work and then I came back for one more lesson the next week. I think I only had a total of four lessons with him and sure enough, a couple months later when I went to my entrance exams at Berklee College of Music, I tested out of like eight semesters of classes thanks to his four lessons.
Derek Sivers
But more importantly was the philosophy behind it said, universities, like everything else, are set at a standard pace for normal people. The whole idea is, let's take it nice and easy so that nobody gets left behind. He said, but if you're ambitious, you're driven, if you're smart, you can go so much faster than that. The standard pace is for chumps. You can do so much better, so much faster. Never accept the standard pace. Maybe you could say actually this might have been my introduction to the life's negotiable idea four years of university i don't think so i challenged that notion uh so yeah i graduated in two years and moved to new york city with a bachelor's degree when i was 20 years old and kept that same intensity um not taking no for an answer not accepting the standard pace pushing through, challenging it, making it happen.
Derek Sivers
Okay, so that's the background. So Tate, your really challenging question was about my current pace. Mostly these days, I'm a full-time dad. That's like my main thing in life. It's my top priority. And not just in lip service, but like I'm kind of weird. I spend between 30 to 50 hours a week one-on-one with my kid, just giving him my full attention. So that's when I say I'm a full-time dad that, yes, he has a mom, but I spend as much time on my kid as most people do on a full-time job. And so everything else I do is on the side. It's in the few hours when I'm not with him.
Derek Sivers
So because of that, no I don't have the same pace but also I'm not usually pursuing a single goal although okay let me take it back those last couple books of mine you read especially the two newest ones Useful Not True and How to Live - those last two books I did write at a pretty intense pace. How to Live was like every single waking hour for four years. Anytime I wasn't with my kid, I would sometimes do 16-hour days just writing that damn book for four years and editing the hell out of it to take this 1,300-page rough draft and compress it into 105 pages at the end. That was intense.
Derek Sivers
And I've just, like a couple weeks ago, started learning Chinese at a pretty intense pace. So I think I still have that in me. It's just that it's everything I do now is second priority until my kid is 18 and doesn't need me at all.
Tate Hackert
I was on a panel recently in Calgary where I live with a pretty influential local business guy. he gave his email out to the crew and obviously like your emails public on your website and stuff and but I said to him like oh man like aren't you gonna be flooded with like all these messages from these students he was like yeah I bet you no more than two will actually email me and then yeah chatted with him a couple months later and I just asked him you know out of curiosity on the follow with me he's like but yeah one person messaged me yep and it's just so funny because it's like right there and it's so easy to to to do um but yeah for whatever reason there's something that keeps people from that follow-up yeah or from that from that reach out to begin with. what what do you think that was for you where you were like okay like i'll show up like is is is that something where you always were eager and yeah like let's dig into that
Derek Sivers
It depends what it is. If i'm casually reading a book about architecture like i said earlier i'm not super passionate about architecture if you were to uh put a situation in my lap where I could move to China tomorrow and never step foot in New Zealand ever again, I would just go, oh, great, yeah, let's do that. And I would just completely dismiss this house-building project and sell it at a loss. It's not a core passion of mine. But when I've got something that I'm really into, I can be very passionate, very driven.
Derek Sivers
So becoming a successful musician was my sole focus from the age of 14 till 29. I was monomaniacal. I was laser focused. You couldn't get me to hang out. You couldn't get me to watch a movie or go to a restaurant or hell no, watch TV. Hell no, go to parties. No, I was just 100% focused on being a successful musician. That's all I wanted in the whole world.
Tate Hackert
What about that did you want? Did you want the fame from that? The money from that? The ability to write music and and make a living from it?
Derek Sivers
It was the pursuit of self-actualization. It was setting out to achieve a difficult goal and seeing if I could do it. It was similar to somebody wanting to be an olympic athlete like this is something that a million people want and only one in a million is going to get it, and I'm going to be that one. This is my challenge to myself. It was intrinsic not extrinsic. I didn't care about the money, didn't care about the girls, didn't care much about the fame although it seemed like the fame would be the natural side effect - kind of like a gold medal would be the side effect of being the best athlete at something. But it was really mostly just the intrinsic motivation i just passionately wanted to be a great great musician.
Tate Hackert
When did you decide that that was something you achieved or didn't achieve and you're like all right i'm gonna move on from this?
Derek Sivers
I achieved it just enough. Just around the age of 28/29, I bought a house with the money I made touring. I had recorded an album released an album it sold pretty well got played on 300+ radio stations around the country. I'd been touring, I think i did almost a thousand shows in eight years or something like that, six years. It was at that time that I accidentally started CD Baby - that little story i told earlier where i was just selling my CD on my website and then oops a whole bunch of people asked if i could sell theirs. It came at just the right time in my career what i where i had just kind of plateaued with my touring and i was welcoming a change so that's where i hung it up after 15 years of being a full-time musician. I stopped playing music and just turned my attention to this new thing.
Tate Hackert
So you you do CD Baby, you effectively give give all your proceeds from the sale away or like into a charity trust like 20 million dollars or whatever which is just crazy or like crazy in a good way. Like it's, it's wild that you did that. By the end of it, it feels like you'd figured out the game a little bit, like you're, you're working on it last year, not doing the 16 hour, you know, days spent on it. Um, you, you have this love for creating things. Um, like why not start another, you know, $20 million success, um, or $200 million success? What kept you out of the business world and put you more into this philosopher world is really how I see you.
Derek Sivers
Maybe I should talk about that moment more publicly. Because it was a real key moment. It was literally the morning after I sold the company. I went to bed that night with this, oh my God, clear head, like, whoa, I just sold my company for $22 million. Wow, I slept like a baby that night. But then the next morning at breakfast, I was like, oh, I've got an idea. I know what my next company is going to be. And I immediately went back to work. I went to the terminal. I started typing out the database. I started coding it. I immediately went and hired my first employee and went three or four months into it before I realized that if I do this, I will actually not be changing my trajectory. Even though my trajectory is going up and to the right, which is what most people want, and yes, this new idea of mine will probably keep going up and to the right, if I'm going to live a full life, I want to change my trajectory. I want to go a different direction that I haven't gone before. And starting another company would be like just taking one nameplate off my door and putting a different nameplate there. It would just be doing the same thing I've been doing for 10 years, but just under a different company. And that's when I decided to very deliberately change my life in order to live a full life.
Derek Sivers
I said, what I need to do for a while is do the opposite of my instincts. If my instincts say to say yes, I will say no. If my instincts say to turn right, I will turn left. I'm going to do the opposite of what I've been doing. And that's what I did. I went and deliberately scrambled my life. I went and spent a month in India, a month in Iceland. This is coming after having never traveled before. Met a girl. Wasn't really in love, but she was hot. And then she said, my parents say we need to get married. Everything in me said no. So I said yes, we got married. Didn't want to have kids. Had a kid. just did a big scramble. And it was wonderful.
Derek Sivers
And yes, it was philosophical because I think when you've got your nose to the grindstone and your blinders on and you're single track focused on one thing, you're not philosophical. You're not questioning. You're not looking for new ideas. You're just trying to get to your damn destination. And it's when you're lifting your head up and deliberately questioning things and wanting to make a change in your life that you start looking for different perspectives. So that's what the last 15 years has been for me is deliberately keeping my head up, looking for different perspectives. Coincides well with being a full-time dad and living around the world like I am. I guess I'm living around the world because I was searching for different perspectives. But there may come a time when I put my nose back on that old grindstone and put the blinders back on. But yeah, that's why I'm acting this way.
Tate Hackert
I mean, in a sense, you are - but just in a different way, right? Like you've released however many books in the last, you know, however many years here.
Derek Sivers
Oh, you mean like nose to the grindstone? No, those books are, I mean, that's me just sharing my thought process. Most of it are, like, the books you see there are the things I would be thinking about anyway, writing about my diary anyway, talking about with friends anyway. I've just put forth a little extra effort to turn them into something that you guys can read. That didn't feel so much like a... blinders on grindstone thing like i was saying that's still like a head up exploring but just capturing the ideas into print
Tate Hackert
Maybe it's inherent in that in that answer itself but like you know you you make your books available for super cheap um it's it's uh it's through your website. Like, do you ever think, oh, like, I should, I should use my words of wisdom in a more like, profound way where I do start like touring the book and I do start like, you know, trying to trying to get it out there more and like making a business out of it more than it is?
Derek Sivers
As a musician, I did not envy the rock stars that had to go on a 300-night tour playing the same songs every night, 300 times. I envied the record producer that got to spend six creative months in the recording studio with that band. And then as soon as the record's done, the record producer goes back into the studio with a different band and spends six more creative months with somebody else. And when that's done, they spend more creative months. The producer is in constant creation mode. The touring artist is in promotion mode, which is inherently not very creative. I tend to think of live concerts as kind of like the art opening. Like after the art is done, we have a little celebration at the museum to go look at it. That's what a live concert feels like to me. And so same thing with a book tour or going and spending a lot of effort to promote a book I've written in the past. It's just more celebration. It's kind of over-celebration. And it's not so interesting. So yes, it would earn more money. But I'd rather optimize my life for more ideas, not more money.
Tate Hackert
Hell Yeah or No. I know that like that book is so much more than the title. And like there's so many key learnings and just like useful ways to think and stuff. But like, you know, a big part of that book is like hell yeah or no. And like if something's not like a hell yes, then it's a no. And I know it's like easy to think in absolutes, like there's easy to communicate in absolutes like that. And perhaps like this is missing the point in it. But I want to ask you, like, how do you think of hell yeah or no? and contrast that with time horizons because there's many instances where like it's really easy to say hell no in the present but you could be sacrificing your future self a ton um and and how do you think those trade-offs in the present moment while still staying true to that um i guess like that that mantra
Derek Sivers
Okay, I am not true to that mantra. I think of hell yeah or no as one tool in the toolbox that's rarely used, but I mentioned it because I hadn't heard anybody else mention it like that. The "hell yet or no" mentality is, or let's say, the tool is used when you are overwhelmed with too many options. You've said yes to too many things, and you need to raise the bar all the way up so that almost everything doesn't pass the bar. It's a tool for a certain situation so I rarely use it. I would not call it a approach to life that everyone should use all the time. It's just an occasional tool you should be aware of so that if you catch yourself in that situation you busted out uh but your question was really good that i do often think in the long term uh i do things that are not pleasant now but will lead to long-term fulfillment, short-term discomfort, long-term thriving, long-term flourishing, short-term pain. So things like learning Chinese and getting to know China, it's going to be like years of struggle and feeling like an idiot. But damn, I love the long-term dream of like 10 years from now being fluent in Chinese and unlocking that huge culture and everything that's going on over there that is so opaque and out of my reach right now. To unlock that and to be able to feel at home and familiar in that culture oh my god that's so worth the effort so until then i'm spending thousands of hours slogging away memorizing scribbles so that i can unlock that culture. I guess the obvious example we can all relate to is exercise that you don't always enjoy doing the sit-ups and running and lifting weights, but you do it because you want to have a better future. So I'm not saying hell yeah to lifting heavy weights over my head. That tool is not used for that situation. I do it because it's the long-term fulfillment.
Tate Hackert
that's um yeah that's fair it's it's it's something that uh yeah like as i've gotten busier um really trying to like to rate the calendar more and and try to adopt that hell yeah and hell yeah or no mindset but at the same time yeah like ensuring that you are thinking of like all dimensions of future time horizons as well um so i i i think i yeah i i get what you're saying there and um of course there's like trade-offs in it but uh really it's like this you know a tool in a toolbox let's say
Derek Sivers
Tate, I don't remember - you probably know better than I do - in my Hell Yeah or No book did I have the chapter called "happy smart and useful" with like the Venn diagram with the intersection?
Tate Hackert
Oh, God. I don't know. Maybe not.
Derek Sivers
On my website, I gave it a nice short URL so I could easily just tell people the link. https://sive.rs/hsu - which stands for happy, smart, useful. This is actually the way that I more often make big life decisions, or even just day-to-day, what's-worth-doing-today type decisions, is finding the intersection of what makes me happy, what's the smart thing to do, and what's useful to others. So those are the things that I give weight to. There are things that make me happy and are smart to do, but they're not useful at all to others. It's indulging only myself. that will often take second priority to something that is smart, that needs to be done, that is really useful to others, and maybe makes me a little less happy in the moment. I will choose that over the other because it's more useful to others, which matters to me. It's more smart, like it's worth doing, it's worth my time, it's a good use of my time. And I'm generally a happy person anyway, so I don't need to optimize everything for my happiness. I'm happy by default. So, yeah, on a day-to-day basis, the thing I often choose to do is more based on that Venn diagram of what's happy, what makes me happy, what's smart, and what's useful to others. I think of that all the time. Hell yeah or no, that comes up a couple times a year.
Tate Hackert
I think another thing for the technical specific people on the call, I saw one thing in the chat there being like, is Derek a Ruby developer?
Derek Sivers
Yes, I am.
Tate Hackert
Yeah, our entire stack is Ruby. But also Derek, yeah. And Derek, Ruby is like everything that you have? You actually maintain your own server.
Derek Sivers
Man, way to make my face light up - to mention Ruby. God, these days, you know, I've been a Rubyist for 21 years, 22 years. I attended the, I got into Ruby a year before Rails came out. I attended the San Diego, the annual RubyConf, which was held in San Diego that year. And it was just 50 sweaty guys in the room. And that was it. There were 50 of us at the Ruby users group. And these technologies that you take for granted now, like Rake and Builder, I was like there sitting next to the guy that made those things, Jim Weirich. He passed away after, but man, I love Ruby. I never really got into Rails. I tried Rails a few times, but it's just, I like, I use Sinatra and I just do everything by hand. I tend to not even really use gems. I use like one or two. I use the PG gem to connect to PostgreSQL. I now use the Sinatra gem to route the HTTP routes, but everything else, no gems. I just do everything by hand. It's that idea of like, you can't understand something unless you can build it yourself. So I like to really understand what I'm working on. So I apply all the minimalist stuff. But yeah, Ruby, it's so nice to hear somebody mention it. These days, it's become sadly obscure. So I love that you guys are using it.
Eric
Yeah. So sorry to disappoint. It's not a Ruby question, unfortunately. But so curious, you talked about being a minimalist, at least as of today. I know that that's subject to change. How does your 13-year-old son do with that approach, knowing that as a teenager, I have a 14-year-old son myself, you know, constantly you're faced with all these new beliefs and challenges and hurdles to overcome. Does he embrace that like you do? And does he preach the same thing with his own friends? And I guess maybe what I'm asking is, how do you balance your passions, the things that get you going, get you up in the morning with his passions and beliefs?
Derek Sivers
Fun question. There was a key moment when he was three years old, that I had been applying my minimalist approach to him. There were no toys in the house. There were just almost nothing. He had like a teddy bear and then we would just go out and play in nature. And when he was three years old, we went to a cafe that had a big giant crate full of toys. And I intended to just stop at that cafe for 30 minutes and get some eggs on toast. But he sat there playing with those toys for four hours. He was just riveted. Oh my God, toys! And I watched him play for four hours and thought, I've got to stop applying my philosophy to his life. His life is a different situation than mine. So the next day I went to the equivalent of eBay. Here in New Zealand, it's called Trade Me. And I found somebody selling three huge boxes of toys for $25. Just used crap because they were moving to Australia. And he grew up on those three boxes of toys. And now our house is so filled with crap. There's crap everywhere. Crap that inspires him. Crap that he made. Crap that he found. Junk on the street that he comes home and brings it home full of excitement. it bothers my minimalist sensibilities, but I keep reminding myself that the rules I apply to my life do not apply to his.
Derek Sivers
It really helped that there's only one food in the whole world that I hate. Just, it makes me puke if I try it, and that's olives. And he knows this about me, and I love that one day at the age of 8, we went to Subway and get to make your own sandwich. And he said, I will have ham and olives. That's it. I went, really? You're going to eat a sandwich full of olives? He said, yes. I went, okay. And I sat back and waited for him to retch it up. But no, he loves it. He's been eating olives on his sandwich ever since. And it's a beautiful reminder that his life is his own. And yes, in many ways, he is very influenced by me. But it's a great reminder that our kids have their own life, that we should not try to apply our rules to them.
Tate Hackert
Laura, you're up next.
Laura
Thanks. Number one, I want to say it's so motivational. It's actually been very refreshing to listen to you. I actually started writing down notes about things that I've wanted to do, which I probably haven't done for years because life took over in my own life. So thank you so much for the refresher. The question I'm going to ask, please don't take it negatively. It's something that I actually kind of want to learn is that as you go through life and you try to accomplish your goals and you try to see your paths. And as you said, sometimes you go a certain way, even though you don't think it's what you want to do, you try it. So if you want to go right, you go left, blah, blah. You want to not date this person, try dating this person. But how do you prevent hurting people in the process of that?
Derek Sivers
I don't know. There's one methodology that could say, keep everyone at arm's length, don't get involved, observe the world as an outsider. There's another methodology that would dive in and tell yourself that it's not your responsibility to not hurt people. Or, it's the wrong word, it shouldn't be your primary concern to not engage with the world for fear that they might get hurt. It might be overestimating your influence, that to most people you're not a very big deal. I used to really struggle with this idea of canceling something that I had previously agreed to do. I used to think, even if I was just attending, one of a thousand people sitting in the audience, I'd think, oh, but I said I would be there. I bought the ticket. I have to go. I said I'd go. Eventually, I realized, you know, I don't think anybody really cares. I think somebody might kind of shrug, but that's it. I'm not really breaking someone's heart. So I think it's the same thing with a lot of things in life. Yes, there are maybe one or two hearts that you'll break, But even then, is that such a bad thing? Should we avoid all minor chords in the music? Should we insist that life can only have major happy chords? Or do we just embrace heartbreak as a pretty delicious part of life and not try to optimize our life to avoid it? Hopefully you're not an absolute sociopath deliberately harming people, And I think it's a constant life lesson to keep learning from. But I should give a little context. Part of what you're hearing me say is because I did spend a few years after I did break someone's heart, avoiding all people because I was scared of breaking someone's heart again. I broke up with this woman that wanted to marry me. She was devastated and she let me know it. And all of her friends let me know it. And it was as if I had run over somebody with my car that was now paralyzed for life. They were like, you're the bad person for what you did to her. How dare you? And I spent the next few years just trying to tread carefully and not get involved with any people. And then I realized that that's not the correct response. We shouldn't be too careful.
Tate Hackert
a good answer Parham you're up next man
Parham
hi so the first time that I received a message from Tate talked about your name I just checked the YouTube videos from you and it was really interesting and it's really nice to have you here my question is: How much the age can have can affect your decision? I mean, I'm getting old, but sometimes I'm thinking to start some stuff like being an entrepreneur might be late for me. I'm 34, 35, almost 35. And I think, is it late now or should I have started earlier? So what do you think about age and how it affects your decisions?
Tate Hackert
Barham, you got to quit Zayzun and become an entrepreneur tomorrow, man. You can do it. You can do it.
Derek Sivers
Okay. It's funny that I told you I'm 55. So to me, 35 is like not quite a kid, but almost. You're so young that to me, I thought you were going to ask her like, Oh, I didn't see your photo until I looked down the monitor. But I thought you were going to say, Oh, you know, I'm 58. I'm starting to think. But you're like, Oh, I'm 35. Am I too old? Hell no. Absolutely not.
Derek Sivers
Okay, look, I'm going to say a few things that sound like cliches, but it's where you're at, not how long it took you to get there. Your actual biological age is really moot. Anybody over the age of, I don't know, 17 that has a pretty adult mind, all the way up until you're senile and getting Alzheimer's or dementia, anything between there, we're all pretty much equal. One of my best friends in New Zealand, or maybe my single best friend in New Zealand, is 22 years old but fascinating. And I spend so much time with my kid that's 13 and one of my other best friends is 73 in America and I see them all as basically equal. The 73-year-old has more wisdom but the 13-year-old and the 22-year-old have a lot of great ideas and amazing fresh insights into life. So anyway, your biological age is pretty moot But it can be interesting to adapt for age things. So this is where I thought you were going.
Derek Sivers
You guys might have heard of a best-selling book from the past year called Outlive by Dr. Peter Atiyah, where he's studied the intersection of aging and fitness for how you can stay strong and fit as you age. And one thing he says is, if you want to be able to walk up the stairs when you're elderly, you need to be able to run up those stairs now. If you want to be able to lift 20 kg when you're old, you need to be able to lift 60 kg now. The idea is your physical capabilities will diminish. Don't be surprised. This is a human nature thing. Your physical capabilities will diminish, like it or not. So therefore, we should be training like athletes now to prepare for that. So you might guess where I'm going with this, is you can use this as a metaphor for your mental skills. knowing that you're as you get older you might get more set in your ways you can take the peter t approach to say okay i need to be extremely unset in my ways now so that i will diminish down to merely normal i need to be i need to counter uh balance the natural tendencies of aging by doing things that are extremely anti-aging with my mind. Taking on new skills at the age of 60. Learning to dance at the age of 50. Learning a new language at the age of 70. These are things that we can do to counteract our tendency. So I'm definitely living my life by this recipe now. starting to learn Chinese at 55. I actually just applied for a residency visa in the Middle East, where I'm hoping to go live for a few years and study Arabic and try to live according to the local customs. And doing these things that are intentionally against my nature or against my tendency to just want to be comfortable and live somewhere easy and comfortable and pleasant like New Zealand. So yes, start a company.
Parham
Thank you so much.
Derek Sivers
Sometimes I take these tangents that loop around, but I hope you guys follow what I'm doing.
Tate Hackert
No, it's so good. Like I said, my entire goal, or maybe I didn't say this, but in the back of my head, I was saying my entire goal is to just have Derek talk for like an hour and a half because I just like it's just so soothing. It's awesome. Emily, go for it.
Emily
So I know a lot of your work is around designing life and business around values and a high level of intentionality. This can often be kind of ideologically opposed or in a lot of contrast to very highly capitalistic settings or very capital driven systems, hyper growth environments, things like that. So for those of us who are operating in two worlds, if you will, or operating mindfully inside very highly capital driven systems, how have you introduced or even held space for philosophical values driven thinking without losing momentum or even just being dismissed as too idealistic?
Derek Sivers
Wonderful question.
Derek Sivers
I think it takes self-awareness and communication. So first, you need to be aware of what you're actually pursuing. Or in other words, what you're optimizing for. It takes some soul searching to know like my story earlier about how yes I spent lots of time building the computers for every employee in the office and yes that was a good use of my time because I know what I'm doing here at this company I'm doing this company for my own personal self-interest. I find it fascinating. I'm the 100% owner. I'm not pleasing shareholders. This is the recipe. This is what I'm here for. This is the DNA of this project. When people would come to me and say, hey, we could make a lot more money if we would start selling porn. I'm like, no, I will not do that because that's not interesting. I'm not here for the money. I would be doing things differently if I was from the money. So first you need that self-awareness of what you're actually pursuing, which might be metrics like, we're going to change the lives of as many people as possible, or we're going to deeply change the lives of a few people, or we're going to go down in history as having changed our industry, even if we get the arrows in our backs and die trying. Any of these are valid answers.
Derek Sivers
Let me take it out of the corporate sphere and just make it life for a bit. In life, you could be pursuing fame, adventure, money, glamour, whatever it is. Whatever you pursue, someone's always going to tell you that you're wrong. They're going to say, that's bad. You shouldn't be doing that. If your goal is to make a lot of money, somebody will say you're bad, you should be giving it away. If your goal is to give away all your money, somebody's going to say you're stupid. You should keep some for yourself. No matter what you do, people are going to tell you you're wrong. So therefore, number two, is to practice communicating it to others, which really, number one, does most of the work. First, you just need to really know what you're really pursuing. And then find a simple, non-self-indulgent way of explaining it simply and clearly to others. To just say something like, there are other things to pursue besides money. Money is just one measure. That's not what we're doing here. What we're doing in this division or in this project or with this thing, this company, whatever. what we're doing here is we're pursuing this measure. This is how I'm measuring the success of this is based on this. How often are my team smiling every day? How fascinated are we with our work? That's our measure here, not money. Open your mind that there's more to life than money. Whatever it may be, you get used to communicating it simply and clearly. I think those two solve that problem.
Tate Hackert
What questions do you ask yourself um when you try to challenge your own ideas in that sense um because i think like what i'm trying to get at is uh there are certain ideas that people will attach themselves to or they think they want a certain thing and it's not actually what they want and it's perhaps fabricated because of like societal constructs or whatever else and like And so what you're actually striving for, like you learning even something as simple as like learning Chinese, like why do you actually want to learn Chinese? Like, are you doing it because of like an external factor? Are you doing it because like you think you want to do it? Are you falling in love with the idea? And I guess like what are the questions you ask yourself to really distill down and truly figure out like, no, this is what I want to do. And this is the value that I'm setting on it. And like, you know, this is my core value in this aspect.
Derek Sivers
I daydream a lot in a journal. It doesn't have to be in a journal, but the daydreaming of the implications of following this path to the end. So if I'm pursuing money, then let me vividly daydream what will happen when I get a million, 10 million, 100 million, a billion dollars. How will that actually change my life? And at each of those measures, how would a million dollars change my life? Okay, how would five million? How would 10 million change my life? How would a hundred million dollars change my life? At a certain point, your daydreams might make you realize that you do want a million dollars, but you don't actually want more than, say, two million. After that, your daydreams stop. You're like, well, actually, if I had $2 million and I got another $20 million, what would change? If nothing, then man, that would be a huge waste of your time pursuing $20 million that's not going to actually make any concrete improvement in your life. So then you daydream and you ask yourself, what would make a big change in my life? What if this? What if I had more connections? What if I had more abilities? What if I had more skill? What if I had more knowledge? What if I had more experiences? What if I, you know, keep filling in the nouns and adjectives there. Something in there will shake your guts and make your heart race faster. And you'll get the feeling that this is something I'm actually excited about. Doing that thing doesn't excite me. Doing this thing does excite me. You just start to notice these internal compasses inside of you. Or, yeah, I should use singular. You start to notice the compass inside of you that is pointing a certain direction. And to me, that just comes from daydreaming. So in my journal, I have a question I do ask myself often as a reminder, which is, what would I do if I had $100 million? Or actually, it's just called richer. What would I do if I was richer? And I really have tried hard for 15 years to come up with a good answer to that. And there's never been a good answer. It's always just some little bullshit like, oh, I guess I'd hire a personal trainer. Like, well, why don't I hire a personal trainer right now? If I think that I need more money to do that, I don't.
Derek Sivers
A friend of mine in Los Angeles, actually, I can tell you who he is, Jeff Marx. He's the guy that wrote the Broadway musical Avenue Q and then the Broadway musical Book of Mormon. He wrote both of these two Broadway shows the guy makes like a million dollars a year from royalties from that and I was talking to him once about like a major life decision and he said well let me ask you this what would you do if money was no object and I answered it and he goes well I've got good news for you man he goes money's no object and I think of that punchline often and he would have said that to anybody The point is that if you think that money is the only thing holding you back from what you want to do, you're not thinking very clearly. There's always a way around it. But, sorry, to get back to your real question, lots of daydreaming to think through the implications of, if I were to take this direction all the way to its logical conclusion, where would that get me? And is that what I really want?
Derek Sivers
Sorry, did you notice that my book called How to Live was based around that whole idea? Here's 27 different approaches we could take to life. Let's take each one to its logical conclusion and say, is that what you really want? If you took this idea all the way, is that what you want? But it's written in directives saying, here's how to live, do this, follow this all the way. But it's really asking the question of, here's what this philosophy would look like if taken all the way. Is this what you really want?
Tate Hackert
So when I first read that, I didn't read what this book is about, I think, which you have in the intro. Or maybe you just have that on your website. But so I hopped into it and I read the first page and then the second page is just like an exact parallel universe or I guess a contrasted universe of the first page. I'm like, wait a second. It was like contradicting yourself. And then like I kept reading like this is such a smart book because, yeah, it's just like a perspective shift. Right. Which is which is so powerful. Same with I got this beside me right now.
Tate Hackert
Like same with Useful Not True. Like it's such a such a perspective shift, which is why I love your writings and your content.
Tate Hackert
Anthony, you got your hand up. Go with the question. Nice background, too. I love it.
Anthony
Thanks. Yeah, thanks, Derek. Loving this session, by the way. Very inspirational and a lot of things that I can emphasize with. You mentioned you love building things. You build a lot of things. I love building a lot of things myself, too, in many different categories. I love making music. I love coming up with new recipes. And I just create them because I love, enjoy doing those. I just have a good time. That's why I just do it. And for those stuff that I build, I don't necessarily have to sell or I don't really need to pitch these. I don't need to pitch my music or my food. I can just share them and people will have a good time. And that's the part that I feel the most joy from when people actually appreciate and enjoy from the stuff that I created. And because I love building, that's also one of the biggest reasons I came into the software development industry, the tech industry. I myself is a software developer at Seizun, and I've been building a software product for about a bit more than a year now. And the reason why I started that was because I just found something that might be fun to build. And I just wanted to try building that with technology that I've never used in my life so that I can learn from building that. At the same time, I can build something that I think is fun. And then I've been doing it for like, I thought I was going to like, I don't know, stop at like six month mark. But I'm here like a year and four months and I've made a lot of progress on it. And now that I'm thinking, you know, people might actually like this and I want people to use this. But I never started this because I was seeking for money or revenue and I still am not seeking for money. Although when I think about it, I might be able to make money. But that's not my main focus. And here's my question.
Anthony
You've created a lot of things. You've built companies. You've written books. When you actually decided to put your creations out into the world and when you didn't have the main intention to make money from all of those, what were your mindsets when you were actually like just opening up your stuff into the world, when you actually want people to use it because that's the part that you want from the whole journey. Because like just a little bit add on to that is the main reason why I'm asking this is because that's the part that I'm trying to do right now. But it's really hard because it's very different from sharing my own music or my food with different people because something like a software application I need people to like learn it and I need people to like spend time on using it but I need people to act on it or I need them to go into a specific platform download it you know sign up and stuff but it would be nice if they don't have to do that but like for the sake of the the functionality i need people to do that but i don't they they don't need to pay anything i just want to see people using it that's like the most excitement that i'll that i'll have but it like it kind of feels like i have to like sell it when i explain this thing to people like you know
Derek Sivers
When you say sell it you don't necessarily mean sell it for money you mean almost like you need to pitch it is that what you mean?
Anthony
Yes exactly i don't want to like sell something i just want to explain this thing to people and I want them to know that this might be fun so like try it out right but like that requires effort from their side as well so what are your um tips or like mindsets when when this kind of thought came to you?
Derek Sivers
If you read some books on psychology this idea keeps coming up that people appreciate something more for example if they build it themselves people are proud of their IKEA table partially because they built it themselves if it just showed up built for the same cheap price plus $20 assembly, they'd have less emotional attachment to it. Something about the fact that you built this thing yourself makes people happier. When people pay a lot of money for something, they find more benefit in it. Two placebo pills given to people, the $1 pill and the $100 pill, both are placebos, But the $100 pill did a lot better job at getting rid of their headache because they were told this is a $100 pill. This is the most effective painkiller in the world here. Versus, all right, try one of these. How you present something to somebody completely changes their experience of it, their enjoyment of it, or even how often they're going to use it. People who paid more for tickets to a show were more likely to show up instead of cancel. And sorry, these are just money, but it could go for time investment too.
Derek Sivers
Ideally, you're excited about this thing you're building. And so even just you, in your own nerdy, excited way, making a YouTube video or writing up a web page to say, oh my God, this thing is so great. It's going to help you so much. Here's why I spent a year and a half building it. Let me just show you all. You do need to do a few steps, but wow, the payoff is great. Your excitement in that can help people enjoy it. And ideally, yeah, same as me. It sounds like you and I are similar in this. I get so much more joy out of emails in my inbox saying, wow, Derek, thank you. That was a wonderful appearance on the podcast. Or I loved that article you wrote. Or I love this thing you said. It changed my life. That matters infinitely more to me than seeing another digit in the bank account. So that's why most of the things I do are for free as well. I put a price on some things like my books just to basically break even. I think I actually lose a dollar for every paper book I sell, but that's fine. The e-books make up for it. But I put a price on some things just to break even so it's kind of sustainable. But yeah, the real joy is the feedback from people that love your work.
Tate Hackert
Is it an appropriate question to ask, though, like, is it a bad thing to make money as a byproduct of that? So, sure, like, you can produce it and enjoy it, and you can get those emails. But, like, Anthony, if Anthony is making, you know, money from his pursuit, like, is there a bad thing in that, I suppose?
Derek Sivers
Not at all. Okay, so I never want to give the wrong impression that I'm saying everybody should be like me, do what I do. It's because of the daydreaming I do. I hit this point with selling my company. And even, you know, I had like $4 million in net profit before I sold the company. I'm still basically just living off of that. That was enough for me. So that's why I gave away the other $22 million is I just did some daydreaming and I realized I'm not going to use it. What the fuck am I going to do with $22 million? I'd have to be an idiot. to spend that. I don't want Ferraris. I don't want mansions. So therefore, why would I acquire this money just to hold on to it like the dragon in the volcano is sitting on a pile of gold? For what? There are people out there who need it. So, you know, let them use it. I don't need it. So that was just, to me, philosophically congruent. It was just a kind of a no-brainer. But if I did not already have $4 million sitting in the bank, then hell yeah, I would be charging as much as I could for what I was doing. If I felt that, if it was sincerely benefiting people, there's this idea of capture the value. It's almost a metaphor, almost like chemistry, like telling you to put a cork in the beaker, that if the chemical reaction of somebody using your thing is going to create value, well, then capture that value. Don't just let it waft off into the atmosphere.
Derek Sivers
People like spending money. People are often very happy to give money to people they like and companies they like. It makes me happy to buy bicycles from Surly, my favorite bicycle brand. I think I've bought five bicycles from Surly. I love them. I love giving my money to Surly. We all have companies like that where you, or especially if it's like directly to a creator. I love buying books directly from authors. It makes me so happy to bypass the traditional publishing world and go here. Here's 15 books directly to you. This makes me happy. I might not even read the book. It makes me happy to pay you directly. So people are often happy to give you money if they find value. And so you might as well capture that instead of just letting it waft off and let their money go to, you know, toast.
Derek Sivers
One more thought around that before we change the subject. Tony Robbins had two interesting ideas around this. One initially as a consultant early in his career, he started charging a million dollars per consultation. And jaws drop. And he said, here's why I did that. He said, I used to charge less, but I found that if I charge way more, I will have 100% success rate. And here's why. He was helping people like a coach make a change in their life. And he said, if I was doing it for free or doing it for cheap, people would come see me and they'd say, yeah, I need to quit smoking. And I'd give them all of advice and they'd go like, yeah, OK, maybe I'll try that. I don't know. And they'd keep smoking. And he'd say, now, if I say it's going to cost a million dollars to see me, said now they've parted with a million dollars. They're going to make the change. I'm going to have 100% success rate because nobody's going to spend a million dollars and not make the change. So that's one. The idea, like I said earlier about the $100 placebo, is that sometimes people will enjoy something more and use it more if you charge a higher price. So then two years later, he bought a resort in Fiji. He and his wife went to Fiji, loved it, found a resort. I said, oh my God, this is our second home. let's buy the resort. Then he did something interesting. He made it the most expensive resort in Fiji. And he explained why. He said because that inspires us more. Instead of cutting costs and seeing how we can cheaply get people in here, we ask ourselves every day how we... whoops, sorry. I've got to go in a few minutes. We ask ourselves every day, how can we blow our guests' minds? How about we get some horses and stables and anybody that stays here can ride horses around the beach in Fiji? How about we have a cinema here at the resort so people can watch whatever movie they want? And you can afford to do this if you're charging a high price. So it can actually be more joy for everyone, more joy for you as the provider, more joy for the customer. hey there are lots of people out there with money they're happy to spend it on a great experience so uh all of these stories to say no i'm not against charging money at all but you just have to ask yourself if it works for you does that inspire you and for me for things like putting out my books or whatever i've just realized i don't want any more money so that's just for me me. That's me not. I'm not prescribing that to others.
Tate Hackert
I feel bad about ordering 20 of your books now and knowing that it costs you 20 bucks.
Derek Sivers
See, but I'd say now that was like a soul searching thing. So sorry, everybody else listening here. Tate's bought a lot of my books, but only the first one costs 19 bucks. It's $15 for the content and then $4 for the paper. So after you've bought the $15 content. Now it's just $4 for every future copy. So that is my breakeven price for printing. And I think I'm losing a little money on the postage. But I did that on purpose because I want somebody who enjoyed the content to go spread the paper to other people so they can enjoy it too. I'm happy to do that at a breakeven.
Tate Hackert
Thanks so much, Derek. I know you got to hop and you've already been more than gracious with your time uh this is exactly what i hope for just a riff for you know almost a couple hours here which has been so so amazing um yeah thanks man thanks for thanks guys thanks for hopping on thanks for chatting with the team thanks for chatting with me.