Less Clueless
host: Steve Sima
Great conversation around reframing beliefs and limitations. Cut off at the end but that's OK because we'll probably do a Part 2.
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Transcript:
Steve Sima
Okay, so Derek, I first became aware of you through one of Mark Manson's articles, and it really doesn't surprise me that you guys are friends, because of all the public intellectuals that I've seen, I've never seen someone quite give less of a fuck than you. And for anyone who's read Subtle Arts, they'll know that this is one of the best compliments that I can give in the sense that you live such an unconventional life, but it's not different for the sake of difference. You seem to me to have such clarity on what your values are, what you want out of life, what makes you happy, what your needs are, and you seem to have this ability to just say, "Fuck conventions, fuck societal pressure," and all kinds of different expectations, and you just live by your own rules. So I'm sure that this is a process. You weren't just born this way. So how did you get this way, and how do you think the rest of us can live a bit more with a bit more clarity, a bit more alignment, and a bit more intention?
Derek Sivers
That's a big recipe!
Derek Sivers
It helped that at the age of 14, I decided I wanted to be a successful musician. I was living in suburban Chicago, surrounded by kids that were prepping themselves to go to Ivy League colleges and I just felt none of this applies to me. For what I want, everything they're doing is a recipe for a different kind of life than I want. For what I want, I don't want to go to college. To be a successful musician, university would be a distraction, not a help. For what I want, I will never have a job. I will be completely self-employed. I'll be a freelance musician. I'll never have security. I'll never have insurance. For what I want, I don't need to learn world history. I don't need to learn calculus. I know what I want. I can understand how world history and calculus would be important if you want to spread out your options. But I already knew exactly what I wanted, and I was fiercely determined to get it.
Derek Sivers
And that was such good luck for me that that happened. Because it makes you resourceful. Because when you know what you want, you look at the whole world through that filter. "How can this help me?" That's what drew me to self-help books. When I heard about Tony Robbins, when at the age of 19 somebody told me about Tony Robbins, I went, "Oh, that could help me!" Tools for being more effective, tools for being more productive, tools for communicating better, tools for thinking bigger, that can help me. Books on marketing, even though they were written in a corporate style as if you're promoting your cough medicine, I thought that can help me with my music. That can help me find a niche for my music in the crowded marketplace.
Derek Sivers
And it also helps you filter requests from friends wanting to sit around and get high on the couch watching TV. Suddenly that is not a pleasurable activity, that's the enemy of success. If I say yes to sitting on the couch watching TV, that will prevent me from getting everything I want in life. So I'm so thankful that little 14 year old Derek had this intense passion to be a musician. Because it changed everything.
Derek Sivers
To answer your question more directly, it helped me see the world around me through the lens of, "Your rules are a recipe for a life I don't want."
Steve Sima
Wow, 14 years old, you already felt that way.
Derek Sivers
It started at 14 with just hearing heavy metal guitar. I was like, "Oh, I want that!" After picking up a guitar and practicing my scales and reading every issue of Guitar Player magazine and learning all the guitar solos and everything, somewhere in there, age 14, 15, 16, I just, I knew I want this so badly. This is all I want. I'm focused.
Steve Sima
So, two things. First, this reminds me a lot of what Steven Pressfield talked about in his book Going Pro, where he said, once you go pro, once you have that pro's mindset where you have your one goal and your goal being music, all the distractions kind of just fade away and you have this tunnel vision, this clarity and life in a way it's incredibly liberating because all the unnecessary things that you have your one priority. In American English it became plural became a verb, but priority just means one. And once you have that one priority, then everything seemed to kind of fall away.
Steve Sima
And the other thing is: How did you manage the pressure? You never felt peer pressured at all from parents or your peers where, hey, let's go hang out, or you should go to university, none of that?
Derek Sivers
They would ask, but I was driven. It's like an Olympic athlete being asked by his buddies to eat a giant pot of lasagna or do heroin or something, you know? Like, "What? No, never! Never in a million years would I do that. That's the opposite of what I want out of life!" So yes, of course, friends would ask me to sit around and do nothing with them, but in college my nickname was The Robot because I got into Berklee College of Music. Like, oh my god, this is the place where it all happens. This is where dreams are made. And there in Berklee College of Music, my classmates would sit around in the cafeteria for two hours just shooting the shit and eating their food for two hours. I would walk in, slap some peanut butter on some bread and go right back to the practice room and they're like, "Dude, come on, relax, hang out, man, chill a bit." I'm like, "No, I've got to practice."
Derek Sivers
There's a beautiful saying that I put onto the back of my notebook that I brought with me everywhere that said, "When you are not practicing, someone somewhere else is practicing, and when you meet him, he will win." And I just had this drive of like, "Nobody's going to beat me. Nobody's going to keep me down. I'm going to get this thing. I want success so badly." So yeah, that was me from age 14 to 29.
Steve Sima
So this is interesting because I'm working on a video essay right now about how to find your purpose. And it's one of those things where seemingly for some people, like the Kobe Bryants, the Elon Musks, and yourself, there was just, from a young age, you just knew. At least for a certain period of your life because I know you you've reinvented a few times and had a few interesting careers and then there are some of us who we didn't we never felt that itch and the sort of "follow your passion" advice kind of falls on deaf ears And in fact, it actually shames a lot of people because some people never felt that way about a certain thing. So I look at the the Kobe's of the world: It's funny: There would be all these stories about Kobe getting angry at Shaq for being fat and lazy when Bill Simmons a sports writer said Kobe is like the kid at school who gets the 4-0 who never went to any of the parties and he just was obsessed about his thing and Shaq is the one that he gets the 3/6 but he went to all the parties. For you it was very much like "I didn't have to go to the parties because this was the funnest thing I can do."
Derek Sivers
Yeah, I like the phrase "more fun than fun" or similarly "deep happy versus shallow happy". Shallow happy is having the ice cream. Deep happy is the pride of being super fit and healthy because you didn't have the ice cream! Deep happy is making yourself proud. Shallow happy is going for the immediate gratification. Deep happy is delayed gratification. I think more in those terms, of the long term. I will sit and practice with my fingers on the fretboard for hours to get those arpeggios, so that ultimately I'll be able to play this thing like I want to.
Steve Sima
Yeah, it's, you know, I see a lot of content nowadays about morning routines and optimizing productivity and all these things and your buddy Mark Manson just kind of cut through all the noise and basically said the best morning routine is having work that you're excited to do. And that's definitely the way I feel where when it's, I want to make a little room for the folks who haven't found their thing yet, because I think this is important to touch on where I think it's possible if you invest in something and you go all in and you get to a certain level of competence that even you didn't feel that spark about that thing the way that Derek has or Kobe did, that you can get to a point where you're that excited about something. And once you do, there's really just, you know, you forget about eating, you forget about going out and all of that.
Derek Sivers
Cal Newport wrote a brilliant book called So Good They Can't Ignore You, where he points out that passion is a feeling that comes later after you get good at something and the world is rewarding you for it. Then you feel this feeling that we call passion. But at first, it can just be accident. You might just stumble into getting a job at a newspaper that requires that you write a column every week. And you do it just for the money at first, but then it becomes a passion for writing. He points out Steve Jobs as saying his passion was yoga. He was not so into computers. He was into yoga and spirituality. But then his friend Steve Wozniak said, "Hey, I've got this opportunity. It's a computer store. Wants to order a thousand computers if we can build them. I think I can build them, but can you go sell them?" And he went, "Yeah, okay." It was not a passion. Later, he got passionate about computers and design and all these other things. But that was after the world started rewarding him for this thing that he got good at.
Derek Sivers
So Cal Newport in "So Good They Can't Ignore You" points out the importance of just focusing on your craft, just picking something, anything, and doing it and getting good at it, Even if it's not a passion and this feeling of passion comes later when you get deeper into the good stuff, and you start getting the joy of your abilities increasing, and you start getting the joy of people thinking higher of you because they see you having this exceptional skill. That's really just the result of you spending some time on the craft So I think it really starts with the craft. It does not start with the passion
Steve Sima
We definitely have it backwards. We've done a great disservice to young people by telling them to chase their passion. Which there is a nugget of truth in that it's just you gotta tell them the nuance as well in the sense that nowadays we tell young people to go chase their passions and what happens is they start a career and then when they don't feel passionate right away, they quit! But how are you supposed to get good at anything if you don't stick with it? I think it was in Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck when Mark talked about how you shouldn't look for the rewards you want but you should look for the pain you want. That was such a such an important little detail to point out where it's not gonna be sunshine and rainbows when you find that thing right away. Not like a love at first sight. For Mark he also went to music school and right away just being in the practice room by himself just drove him nuts because there were no screaming girls, no backstage parties, so he just he just quit. When he started writing, writing for him wasn't like fireworks and amazing, but it wasn't that bad So he was able to put in the thousands of hours to get good at the thing and like you said reap the rewards so if anything It's what is the day-to-day that I can put up with so that I can get enough hours in to get good at the thing, right?
Derek Sivers
Yeah James Altucher had an interesting article that said, "Go into the field that you would be happy to read 100 books about." And for him that was chess. And I like that a lot. For me it feels like my ongoing passion I could read a hundred books about is basically anthropology or cross-cultural psychology. I'm fascinated with understanding different world views shaped by different cultures. That just fascinates me endlessly. I've read probably 20 or 30 books on the subject and it feels like nowhere near enough.
Derek Sivers
But wait, I want to go back to one important point. It could be anything.
Derek Sivers
This benefit that I got from going deep into music from the age of 14 to 29, for me it was music, but it really could have been anything. It could have been sewing, It could have been dancing. It could have been marine biology. It's the idea of having one thing that you're focused on that you become really good at. Getting great at one thing teaches you how to be great at anything. It teaches you how to learn. It's the mastery path. It's being on the path that matters, not the field or the destination. It's just being on that mastery path makes so much difference to keep you focused when the rest of the world is distracted.
Steve Sima
I read this idea about how essentially it could be a steelworker. It could be a line cook just flipping burgers and onions when you are completely focused and you reach a certain level of competence and you have a certain level of dedication and mastery, it's it's a way of finding God in whatever craft you do. So it could be the master samurai where the two swords clash and you have that moment where time slows down. It could be that line cook that has four different stacks of onions stacked and the different burgers and it's a way of, I guess, in a way, we can learn about life through so many different paths where I truly believe that the person who's never left their country could also be just as interesting as someone who's been to every country in the world if they've really dedicated themselves to certain things, or someone who has only had one sexual partner could be amazing in bed compared to the one with a thousand partners. This reminds me a little bit about a section of your book, How to Live, where you talked about the dichotomy between freedom and commitment.
Steve Sima
Let's go back a little bit to your clarity and your alignment on how you want to live your life.
Derek Sivers
Former clarity, former alignment. I don't want to give the impression that I am as focused as I was from age 14 to 29. I think that was a single-minded goal I was on for 15 years to become a successful musician. But at 29 I started a music distribution company and so for 10 years then I was focused on making that a great company. And then around the age of 38 I sold the company, and ever since then - for the last 17 years - I've been on a very different path. I'm much more of an explorer.
Derek Sivers
You saw in my Useful Not True book, my definition of the difference between a leader and an explorer. That an explorer, kind of like the classic cliché of the British or Portuguese guy in a pith helmet with a machete in the jungles, braving into lands that have never been explored before, perhaps on a boat or in a kayak or with a small group of people going through uncharted lands. That's an explorer. But then when the explorer finds a good harbor and sends a message back to the queen to say, "We found a good harbor here in this place," then the queen sends a leader, not an explorer, a leader with a narrow focus to bring her citizens to this new harbor. The leader is extremely narrow focused. He says, "This is where we're going - to that harbor. This is why it's going to be great. This is why you should follow me. I'm going to take you to a better land." That's a really good leader that goes in a straight line with an unwavering path. But that's a very different thing than being an explorer. So I'm currently living the life of an explorer.
Steve Sima
It's very fascinating that you would think that it would go explorer, then leader, like in the Age of Exploration, whereas right now you started off in your leader role and now you're in an explorer phase again.
Derek Sivers
You could picture it - if you want to keep using that metaphor - that at the age of 14, I saw this destination that I wanted. I want to be a great musician. And I was narrow-minded and focused on that single goal for 15 years. And I think I achieved it by my own measure. Enough. It would have been nicer to be more successful. But I reached enough where I was happy. And that's when I accidentally stumbled into creating this company.
Derek Sivers
And then I saw this next vision of like, "Ooh, this could be a really great service for musicians. Not as commercial as possible, but just as helpful as possible." And that was my singular vision for ten years. And then I achieved that.
Derek Sivers
And then it feels like, "Well, twice I've set out for some single goal and done it. Now let me just lift my head up and see what else is out there in the world!"
Steve Sima
When I hear about the roles of explorer and leader, I look at the lives of people around me and it seems very easy to get stuck in one of these sort of phases, shall we say, where it's very easy to get stuck into just do, do, do routine more of a how.
Steve Sima
You're familiar with the term digital nomad. Lisbon is the world's most popular digital nomad hub right now. So I meet a lot of these people and they travel around with their laptops two months here, two months there, no home. I meet some people that do this for years, 10 years, and there never seems to be this kind of motivation or some kind of inciting event to get back into the leader phase of it.
Steve Sima
So what were the cues that hit you where it was, "OK, now it's time to do this and now it's time to do that."?
Derek Sivers
Hmm. Well, two of them I said already, it's just having a clear vision and a deep desire to get to the target of that vision, to make that vision come true. But then, I think what I've been doing more for the last 17 years since selling the company is following principles or rather exploring principles. And that's kind of what my book How to Live was about.
Derek Sivers
Imagine you have an idea like, "it's good to be connected to the whole world. Everybody on earth are my cousins." Then you make your own plan for how you're going to put that into action. If it's good to be connected to the whole world and you've decided that is a value that you subscribe to and have adopted as one of your core principles or values, then what are you going to do about it? Everybody can do something different. You could just read lots of books, you could have an open email inbox, or do Zoom calls every day with somebody from across the world. You could go learn to speak ten languages like a polyglot, or you could be a digital nomad that constantly goes to different places and meets people. That's a way of picking a principle that you like and then expressing it however you think is right for you.
Derek Sivers
You might hear or subscribe to the idea of simplicity and say, "I think it's very important for me to live a life of simplicity." Well again, there are different ways to express that. Somebody could call themselves a minimalist by constantly buying smaller and smaller gadgets and saying, "There, I keep searching for the most minimal backpack, the most minimal laptop, the most minimal power adapter." Or you could say my life of simplicity is a life of not being a consumer. I'm going to stop wanting. I'm going to stop consuming. I'm going to eat the minimum necessary food and I'm going to stay in one place and I'm going to write. Or whatever it may be.
Derek Sivers
There are different ways that you can follow principles that you believe in. And it's a really a creative life experiment to explore those and how you want to follow those principles and values that you believe in. It's as creative as anything. It's as creative as music or painting or writing or whatever. It's choosing to shape your life around these however you want.
Steve Sima
It's interesting. What you're saying reminds me of the phases we have in high school where we'll have a goth phase and then a hip-hop phase where we wear the baggy jeans and everything. And I think back to my, let's say, fashion phases. There was always an overcorrection where you would do one thing and then do almost too much of it, and then you would do another thing and overcorrect to the other direction. And if you look at the meniscus in the glass, eventually that water settles down to an optimum level, but it takes a lot of overcorrections in different directions. And then maybe once it settles, after a certain point, your life priorities change and you you've got to go explore again to find the new meniscus. I think the challenge, because you did mention that you hit those goals. I asked you what the cues were because I think a lot of folks, they initially have a goal and then once they get some success, they like doing the things that they're good at and it becomes, OK, let's go public. OK, let's do this. Let's do that. And the goal keeps shifting. So it's, you manage to stick with the goal and just move somewhere else, where, I guess what I'm trying to say is:
Steve Sima
For a lot of folks, to put something down and to take a new path is pretty scary. Did that ever come up for you?
Derek Sivers
Of course, but one of my core principles, compasses in life is whatever scares you, go do it. That's been guiding me since I was a teenager on micro and macro levels. The micro-level is, "Oh my god, I'm scared to talk to this person that I'm next to. Oh, I'm noticing that I'm scared, therefore, whatever scares you, go do it. Here we go! I'm going to talk to this person now." On a macro-level, "Wow, I'm a musician and I'm just a musician. I've only ever been just a musician. That's all I know. What would life be if I stopped making music? Whoa, that's terrifying. So, let's do it."
Derek Sivers
That's a real core value of mine, which sits on top of an underlying value of wanting to live the fullest life I can before I die. I want to explore life from different points of view and embody different approaches to life before I go. I really want to try being religious. I want try being a hedonist, I want to try focusing on money, I want to try doing nothing, I want to live in nature, I want to live in the city, I want to chase the future, I want to live in the past, I want to try to live all of these different approaches to life in my life. And to do that you have to notice in yourself what your bias is, what your tendencies are, and then try to go against them in order to do what doesn't come naturally to you in order to expand.
Steve Sima
First of all, I want to thank you for something, because when I heard you talk about this topic on I think it was Tim Ferriss' show, where you were talking about doing things that scared you and that you wanted to live a full life. I heard that in the gym, and I went straight from the gym to the dance studio and signed up for a seven month course. And it's one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life.
Derek Sivers
Mission accomplished!
Steve Sima
It's so funny that these identity things where you have these identities of, I'm not a dancing kind of guy. Well, two lessons in, I'm a dancer. Not a good dancer, but I'm a dancer. So thank you for that.
Steve Sima
But I do want to ask you, in your book you talked about, you made a metaphor to bowling. I think you called it curve into it. So many of us, we have our, like you said, our natural biases, our natural tendencies. And I think it was Mario Andretti that says, we look at the wall and we drive into the wall. The car goes where we look. So how, or maybe you're just an anomaly in the sense that you are able to be so much more aware of your biases and tendencies than the rest of us, but how do you think we can kind of adjust for our core habits, let's say?
Derek Sivers
I don't think I'm more aware than other people. I think I'm maybe just more driven to do something about it. I think most people will tell you, "This is who I am. This is what I like. This is where I live. This is what I like to do. This is my favorite kind of music. This is my favorite food." To me, when I hear myself saying or thinking those things, I think, well, if that's my favorite kind of music, I need to stop listening to that music and find the music that I currently hate and try to learn to love it. I need to try to appreciate the foods I currently dislike. I need to go get to know the place that currently repulses me. This is my challenge to myself, to understand the world from different points of view, is to notice my repulsion and steer into it. Go there to get to know it.
Steve Sima
I guess to play devil's advocate here is, from what I hear, it seems like this is, I think on your website, in your bio, you said you were a xenophile, and you love to try different things. But for someone who may be on the personality dimension of openness to experience is a little bit lower, the question may be, why should I examine, why I dislike cucumbers or something.
Derek Sivers
Right. Okay. Please understand, anybody listening to this, that I'm not saying everyone should be like this. This is my mission, to understand all the different points of view that I can. For somebody else, they might want to just dive deep into one. And let me pick an easy stereotype, the devout religious Muslim. I so admire that lifestyle. When I went to United Arab Emirates for my first time a year ago, I was so enamored because I so admire this different approach to life that is so devout, so non-questioning. Islam means surrender. It is giving up and saying that basically the recipe for the best life has already been dictated and it is Muhammad's life. This is the ideal life. No further questions. I'm oversimplifying. But in short, it's just a surrender to saying this is it. This is the answer. This is the way. And that is so beautiful and can create such social harmony when an entire culture or country aligns themselves to one way. It's incredible. So I admire that as much as I enjoy my own approach. So, and of course there are infinite ways in between those two axes, that you just have to notice what inspires you, what interests you, what you keep thinking about, what idea in your head won't go away, whether that's you really want to be a digital nomad or you really want to have six kids and a big family and three dogs and a farm in Montana. Whatever idea you just can't get out of your head, you just kind of need to admit to yourself that "This seems to be fascinating me and I need to go into this."
Steve Sima
Yeah, on a big picture note, it just keeps bringing me back to the that self-awareness is everyone's life's work because you for us in order to pick the right path we need to peel the onion right to the core to find out what is it that I actually want to get out of this is it financial security is it peace of mind is it whatever it may be and when For example, I admire the way that you live, but I imagine there's a price, right, in terms of all this critical thinking, all this uncertainty, all this murky kind of path where living like that, it must not be easy. And I live in Portugal, and you've lived here yourself a bit as well, so I'm sure you're familiar that this is one of the most conservative and risk-averse cultures and conformist cultures that we have in the first world. And it's easy to make fun of it that, "Oh, everybody follows the same life path, you know, do the same job, married at 24, buy a house at this age," or whatever. But if peace of mind is your thing, then lean into that and be honest about that. But I think the problem is just doing it without any kind of questioning or critical thinking. Right?
Derek Sivers
Yeah.
Derek Sivers
So Steve, now we come to your video essay you did about "There is no spoon," the Matrix and Sprinter video, which was so good and honestly it's the main reason I'm here. You reached out and you emailed me, you said hello, and you gave me a couple links to say this is what I do, and one of them was to this YouTube page. What was the actual title of that video?
Steve Sima
Oh, that was a couple months ago. I don't quite remember. Oh, who can remember that far back?
Derek Sivers
The whole idea was we all have these limitations that are just a story that are, "I'm not a dancer," or, "I just want a quiet life." that might just be a story that you told yourself years ago that might not be the only possibility for you. So again, I don't want to disturb anybody's peaceful path, but it can be worth challenging yourself to expand your self-identity a a bit. So if you say, "Well, you know, I'm Portuguese, so this is how it is. This is who I am. You know, this is just how we are here, because I'm Portuguese." Or, let's say, "I'm Brazilian! We're loud! We're big! It's not my fault! I'm Brazilian! What do you expect?" It's like, you know, that's not the only way you can be. Just because you were born in Brazil, you might be using that as an excuse that is limiting you from being other ways.
Derek Sivers
I used to have on the front page of my website, "Hi, I'm Derek, this is me. I was an entrepreneur. I'm an introvert." And something else. And a guy from Germany emailed me saying, "You shouldn't limit yourself like that. You are more than just an introvert. You should rethink that." That's about all he said. And just prompted by that email, I gave it a minute and I went, "Huh. I'm *not* only an introvert! There are times in my life where I turn on the extroverted skills, and there are times when I am more nuanced. It's a tool. This is not my only way of being. I'm not limited to just being an introvert." I was really glad that he challenged me. And by the way, to be clear, this is at the age of 50. It was at the age of 50 that I thought, "Huh, maybe I'm not just an introvert." This is an ongoing process to peel back the layers of restrictive clothing that you might have been swaddled in since birth.
Steve Sima
So, a little bit of context for the listeners who haven't seen that one…
Derek Sivers
Everybody should see that video. Everybody listening, if you watch Steve's or listen to Steve's podcast, you need to see that video. It's a great, great video. Everyone should watch it.
Steve Sima
Thank you. It's one of those funny things where we have certain works that we find are our masterpieces and nobody watched it and then there are certain pieces of work that just get hundred times the views or the kind of exposure than the other one. And the only thing that matters is our own opinion.
Steve Sima
But a little bit of background on that is I use Neo's journey in the Matrix, as well as this Chinese sprinter called Su Bingtian and his journey where he continuously just could not break the 10 second barrier. And he was frustrated and he was frustrated. And he had all the disadvantages, where he was 5'7" and Usain Bolt is 6'4" and Asians have short legs and long torsos, whereas West Africans have long legs and short torsos, perfect for running. And he just didn't let the "I'm Asian, I'm Chinese, and therefore I can't do this" limit his actions.
Steve Sima
I think this is a nice little pivot towards your book Useful Not True where there are physical realities where I'm not going to do things that Shaquille O'Neal can do because I'm 5'9" and he's 7'1", but that doesn't mean that there isn't, let's say, an extra 10, 20-30% of potential that is untapped within me that if I let the limiting beliefs just limit me as I'm not a dancer or Derek is an introvert then we'll never take the actions to to actually realize that kind of untapped potential so in many ways a limiting belief is a not useful, not true, and I'll leave the floor to Derek to explain what useful, not true, the concept is about.
Derek Sivers
It is about limiting beliefs. The core is that I found that I was following beliefs, or I would hold beliefs and follow their implications because I found them useful to me. A classic one is if you get invited to an event with a bunch of strangers, you can walk into the room and think "everybody hates me", you can walk into the room and think "I don't belong here", or you can walk into the room and think "everybody here is just waiting for someone else to break the ice. So I guess it's gonna be me." None of those beliefs are necessarily true, but one of those beliefs will lead to the actions you want. Maybe the action you want is to leave, and if the action you want is to leave, then the best belief to create that action is "Everyone here hates me, this is a waste of my time." Okay, that belief helped you take the action to leave. But if the action you want is to make the most of this and meet people and enjoy yourself and make a new friend, then the correct belief, or the most useful belief to hold, is "Everyone here is a potential friend just waiting for me to initiate the conversation."
Derek Sivers
You realize as you get out of your hometown, if you get away from your initial beliefs that were passed down to you from your parents, that there are infinite ways of looking at things, and no belief is true true. If it was absolutely, positively, objectively true, it wouldn't be called a belief, it would be called a fact. A belief is something that we define as something held in our head. It's a way of looking at it. I believe that people should such and such. It doesn't mean that that's an absolute fact, it's a belief. So, I noticed the distinction between the beliefs I was holding and absolute fact and people would point out saying, "Hey Derek, these beliefs you're talking about, business or adventuring, that's not true." And I'd say, "I never said it was true. I said that I choose to believe this because I like the actions that it leads to."
Derek Sivers
I decided to write a whole book about that, which ended up being a huge exploration for me because I knew nothing about religion, I knew nothing about pragmatism, skepticism, nihilism, so I went and learned for years about all of these well-explored ideas before me and made this cute little book. It's very catchy, only 90 pages, called Useful Not True, and I'm really proud of it. It's a bunch of little thought experiments and stories around this subject.
Steve Sima
Well, first of all, the book is fantastic. And the in terms of in terms of takeaways, what I found was just incredibly useful from this book is the idea that beliefs are tools. What is the most useful tool for me right now?
Steve Sima
I was at a book club the other day and everyone, the subject was Sam Harris' book on free will. And everyone was really up in arms because this idea that we have no free will, which scientifically I think Sam might be right. It might be more correct than wrong at least. Everyone was so upset because, "Oh, I don't want to be told that I have no free will or no agency." And the way I saw it is, you can be flexible and contradictory about it, right?
Steve Sima
Then I think of my parents and how they weren't perfect parents, they hurt me in many ways, and what is the point of me holding on to all this anger when I can just say, "You know what? They're a product of their genes. They're a product of their culture they grew up in, they are a product of their circumstances. And they didn't choose to be this way. So in this moment, I used the there is no free will to make me help me forgive my parents.
Derek Sivers
Ah, brilliant. I love that!
Steve Sima
But then in other parts of my life, I like to believe that I have free will.
Steve Sima
The reason that I wanted to chat with you was you have a certain intellectual flexibility that is hard to find in a public figure nowadays because everyone is so scared to flip-flop in terms of "I've said this once on a podcast and I'm never gonna go back on it again" and as if intellectual flexibility is some kind of bad word.
Derek Sivers
If I stop flip-flopping that means I'm a dead fish!
Steve Sima
I remember when China - I don't physically remember, but I was too young then - when China opened up its economy in the 80s and switched to a pseudo-capitalist open market, the communist hardliners were really upset with President Deng Xiaoping, where they said, "This is not ideologically pure. This is not Marxism. This is not socialism." And the president said to them, "Look guys, it doesn't matter if it's a black cat or a white cat. If it can catch mice, it's a good cat." As in, "My people are starving, so whatever, if it's communism or capitalism, as long as I can feed bellies, that's the point." So yeah, I think a little bit of stepping back in terms of beliefs or tools, that was such a powerful thing from your book.
Derek Sivers
Well, in your video, the Matrix Neo Sprinter video, whatever that's called, you talked about the importance of stories and realizing what in our limiting beliefs are just stories. So think of how many people you've met that have said like, "Yeah, I just don't have confidence because I had a hard childhood. You know, my parents always told me I was no good and so That's why I can't start my own company. That's why I can't just get a plane ticket and go to a new place like you because you don't understand what it's like. I had a bad childhood." You think, "Wow, that's a really good story. How's that working out for you? Is that story getting you the results you want?" Maybe the result you want is to not have to try and to just resign yourself to just be a blob and to just sit where you are for the rest of your life and stop doing anything. And if that's what you want, then telling yourself a story about how your childhood was exceptionally hard, making you not like all those other people, no no no, everyone else had great childhoods, but you, you have a hard childhood and that's why you're gonna sit here and do nothing. Well then that's a useful story to get you that result.
Derek Sivers
I love your focus on stripping away the stories and you use the metaphor of Neo in that, you initial Kung Fu training room where Morpheus is saying, "Do you think my muscles are what's making me stronger in this simulated training room?" Like, come on, no, this is just your ideas. This is all just up to you. So, there are some people listening to this that don't want to hear this and they will ignore it and they will go right back to complaining and blaming, and there are some people, like me when I was 14, that need to hear this and use it as the key to unlock more potential.
Steve Sima
You touched on a really important point just now, which is, if that is all you actually want, let's say you're complaining and you create a sob story if this is the actual life that you do want that's okay like one perfect example for this is a lot of the in-cell red pill stuff that I see where they have all these stories about women being horrible and the the dating market being completely impossible now it is difficult for a lot of men I don't I don't want to deny that, but being impossible. And I think there's a lot of, "Okay, this justifies my position, this justifies my inaction, and this would be okay if you knew deep down that you didn't want a partner." But there's a reason that a lot of these guys with these kind of ideologies, the moment that they lose their virginity, the moment that they get a girlfriend, flip-flop on that ideology right away. So if you're spouting this and you secretly want a woman, that's being dishonest with yourself and that's you're not getting to where you want to be. If you actually are okay with just complaining for the rest of your life, then do that. But I think it's important to ask ourselves what do we actually want out of our life and is Is this useful?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. A lot of people are not like me and you. They did not get on a plane to move somewhere far away. They just are like trying to get through their day, trying to just make it to the end of this week, trying to just make it to the end of the month, that's all I can handle. Obviously those people are probably not tuned into your podcast, But that's a way of living that is helped by believing stories that say, "I can't" and "It's impossible."
Derek Sivers
And here's another one that's in the zeitgeist: making enemies out of other cultures. To say, "Well, those people are crazy, and those people are just evil, and those people are just greedy, and those people are insane, and therefore my culture that I grew up with, the way it was 30 years ago, that's the right one. This is the way life needs to be, is the way that it was when I grew up right here 30 years ago, that is the correct way and everything else is wrong." That's a really useful belief and a useful story if you just want to stay put and feel smug and feel good about your life choices.
Steve Sima
When I read your book, the feeling that I got was, you know, Derek wrote this, I don't even want to put a category on it, a philosophy, whatever you want to categorize the book, And in fact, it actually became very much an emotional intelligence book for me of just understanding why people believe certain things.
Steve Sima
And a great example is thinking about why people support certain wars, for example. And people will say, "Oh, how can those people support that war?" And to me, it's no surprise at all, because if you are of a certain ethnicity or from country and your entire identity is wrapped around being someone from that country, if that country does evil things, then you don't know this consciously, but you start to feel that I'm evil. So supporting that war is very much just supporting your own identity in many ways, but knowing what are underlying emotional motivations is very difficult.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. The reason I travel is I want to inhabit philosophies. I want to be Jewish, and be Muslim, and be Hindu, and be Brazilian, and be Japanese, and be Finnish, and be Chinese. I want all of these. I want to embody and experience life through all these different worldviews so that none of them are "they." It's all "we."
Steve Sima
I find that once you travel enough and live in enough different places and truly interact with people and are open to listening to their perspectives it's pretty much impossible to get mad at things where you really just get to a point where it's I understand I may not condone what you do but I understand why you do what you do.
Derek Sivers
Yeah and a lot of people don't want to get there! They like the outrage because the outrage gives them that smug feeling of "I am right and the rest of you are wrong. This is already solved. I'm right and all of you are wrong. I'm smart and all of you are stupid." That's a very pleasurable worldview to hold. It is much more mellow to understand the Israeli point of view and the Palestinian point of view. It takes more work, but man, it makes your head a more interesting place to live.
Steve Sima
To be a critical thinker is to lose almost all the time.
Derek Sivers
Yes!
Steve Sima
So when I'm talking to my European or North American friends and I talk about, say China or just Asian culture in general, I sound like this sort of Far East conservative because they are so inundated with Western propaganda that I'm just trying to show them a somewhat moderate perspective of someone who's been a part of both worlds all my life. And whereas when I talk to Asian people about, "Hey, you can't say that shit about gay people. Hey, you can't say that shit about women." I sound like this woke Western kid. And the thing is, you can just go one, all the way to one direction and be in a tribe and be accepted. But then, then you wouldn't be a critical thinker. So there's a price to everything.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. The last book I just finished a few days ago reading was "The Political Thought of Xi Jinping", where I had to mute my pushback tendency in order to just spend 300 pages or 15 hours or whatever it was, taking in and understanding Xi Jinping's worldview. It was amazing and wonderful and such a good exercise to just fully try to get into somebody else's worldview like that. I hadn't done one that extreme in a while.
Derek Sivers
Another good example is if you get a book called, I think it's like "Judaism for Complete Idiots" or "Judaism for Dummies" or there's another book called "What Everyone Should Know About Islam" and both of them are so well written, it really gets you into this mindset. Oh, another one was "Israel, world's most misunderstood country." Something like that.
Derek Sivers
All of these books were wonderful to read but also difficult if you are initially opposed to the core idea. You have to really turn off your resistance. Unclench your fists. You have to turn off that tendency to push back, and just take it in. Try to understand the world through this contradictory point of view.
Steve Sima
In your book, I think you mentioned that heaven was the first reframing of beliefs. And I thought that was the perfect, perfect ending in a sense that we, you know, anyone who's anti-religion likes to talk about science, I'd like to talk about the many and often valid bad things that organized religions do. I am an atheist who is often defending religion, which I imagine you might be as well, where religion brings all kinds of emotional solace that is so useful to billions of people. And it's easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater, where if you look at, let's say, the Judaism, Yuval Noah Harari, who is Jewish himself, loves to criticize that, how his own people have this kind of megalomaniac type of thinking that this tiny little nation in the Levant is people are the chosen ones. But if you've been persecuted for thousands of years every single where you went, well, you need a way to make sense of all this suffering of, "Okay, in the afterlife, once we've repented, once we do X, Y, and Z and endure all this suffering, then we will be brought to the promised land." And that makes a lot of sense if, like you said, you unclench your fists a bit and step back and try to inhabit someone's shoes, but it's very difficult to do.