Community Collective
host: Paz Pisarski
Marie Kondo your goals, mistakes are the fountain of youth, Buridan's donkey, suspending judgement, concise writing, your first thought is an obstacle.
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Transcript:
Paz Pisarski
I'm so curious, when we did that check-in question, was there a great decision that you've made recently that you were thinking about of like, "Oh, actually, I've made a really good decision." What kind of came up to you from there?
Derek Sivers
I think it's the things we stop doing. Well, but that's what I was going to say. For me, I think it's the things that I've decided to stop doing that feel like the hard but rewarding decisions. But then when you read out some of the other people's answers, I went, "Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, deciding to move or deciding to have kids. Wow, that's a big deal." So for me, it's been the things that I've decided to stop doing.
Paz Pisarski
I love that. What are some of the things that you've been decided to stop doing? Are there some particular categories or opportunities that keep coming up and you're like, "You know what? I'm actually just going to say no to these from now on."
Derek Sivers
Yeah, the details don't matter. We all have opportunities or projects or things we could do. Your friend tells you about this thing that they love and for like a minute you think about it and you think, "Oh, maybe I'll do that." And then you say, "Wait a second. Doing that would spread me too thin." And when you think about your heroes, the people that you admire most, I'll bet you that she or he is mainly just known for one thing. There's one thing you love about these people that you admire the most. And it's okay to do just one thing in life. Nobody really cares what you're bad at. You're only known for the one thing you're great at. Everything else is kind of moot, except for the few people that have to be around you. You know, if you're terrible at cleaning up, okay, two or three people might be affected by that. But really, for the most part, the stamp we leave on the world can really come down to just one thing we're good at. So if you let go of everything else, it's okay.
Paz Pisarski
I love that point because, you know, I've been reading How to Live recently, and one of them was, you know, be a master. It's like, pick one thing, just be known for that, like, be a master of that. I remember I consciously made a decision about eight years ago in my career, I said, I'm just going to be, I'm just going to do community building as a career. I'm just going to help connect people in all these different contexts, and that's all I'm going to do, and that's all I want to be known for.
Derek Sivers
Which, I want to interrupt to say how good you are at this. I was just marveling at this introduction going, "Damn, she's good at this!" Everything from the Butter to the this, and click on that, and this, and introduction. Man, you're good at this. It's really amazing to watch.
Paz Pisarski
Wow. I mean, I could say the exact same thing about you, Derek, but I really appreciate that. That's very—oh, I'm going to round up. I love it. I mean, it's just, you know, that, that mastery is just like one thing of just like, you know what, I'm just going to go so hardcore on that decision, but it helps make so many other decisions more obvious in that sense.
Paz Pisarski
And, you know, some of the questions that we had from everyone here live today was like, why did you write that book, Derek? You know, I'm really curious, like, did you have an idea of why you wrote How to Live? It is pretty much like 27 conflicting pieces of advice of how to live.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Okay, wait. We're going to get to that in a second. But just in case somebody's tuning in and has to go soon or something like that, since you said that a big topic of the day is going to be about making decisions, I wanted to get a really crucial idea in first before I forget it. So I'm going to tell a story about that.
Derek Sivers
Five years ago when my boy was only seven years old, his school had a big sports day. And everybody at the school takes it really seriously. It's like one day a year, the big sports event day. Buy my boy's not into sports. So I dropped him off for the day and when I picked him up at the end of the day, he was beaming full of smiles. I said, "How did it go?" He said, "It was great! It was so much fun! Everybody's really mad at me though." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because they made me the goalie for the soccer team, and my best friend was on the other team, so I just let them kick all the goals in." And he said, "But it was great, it was really fun, and my friend's team won, and we got smeared, but it made my friend really happy, so it made me happy." And I laughed because my boy was judging whether this was a good game by a different criteria than everyone else. Everyone else was looking at their score and whether they're winning. My boy wanted his friend on the other team to win! So for him, it was a great game that the opposing team won so many goals.
Derek Sivers
I was reminded of this story just two days ago because he and I, now he's 13, we played the board game Carcasonne, which if you've ever played it, there's a strategy to placing your towns and the roads and the rivers. So he gets the monastery piece and just puts it out in the middle of nowhere. I said, "Why are you doing that? That's a dumb strategy." And then he chose to not even put the little player on it that would give him all the points. I said, "You gotta put your player on it!" And he said, "No, I'm not going to!" And I said, "That's crazy. Just put you've got lots of little players, just put one on there!" And he said, "You know why I'm not going to do it?" I said no. He said, "Because it makes me so happy to see you squirm!" So to him, winning the game was how much dad will squirm. That's his criteria for what's winning.
Derek Sivers
So as you were talking about decision making, in the intro, I was thinking that one of the hardest ideas to digest is that we don't have to follow the same criteria as other people. That other people might be trying to maximize their membership, maximize the social media followers, maximize their income, and your criteria might just be something different. It might be about how deeply you can affect the lives of just a few people. Or it might be what a broad range of experiences you're having. So, people around you will tell you you're crazy if you're not playing the game by their rules, like my son's teammates on the soccer team. But if you know your own criteria, that's all that matters. You follow your own criteria, not others.
Derek Sivers
So sorry, I had to get that out of the way first, because I think it's a really important point.
Paz Pisarski
Hey, no apologies needed in this room. It was a fantastic story. And just so, I think just it really highlights the element of the lens in which you see the world, right? And you go, okay, great. I'm putting on a big event. I really would like, you know, a hundred people in the room at this event. And there have been events that I've hosted where only two people rocked up to dinner. And there was three of us, but they have been some of my favorite because it wasn't about how many people attended, but it was the depth of conversation. And we sat there and we went around for hours. We got to learn things that we've never even heard about other people. And so I walked away feeling so content. But when someone, one of our advisors looked at metrics, they were like, Oh, that number's really low. Like what's happening there? Is there, is the marketing not working? And so you're really just thinking, okay, what does that constitute as? And so, you know, it kind of lends into this idea of having a philosophy or a lens. And I'm super curious:
Paz Pisarski
Do you have a lens or a philosophy in which you are living your current chapter of life?
Derek Sivers
I think it's the variety of experiences. That's my lens. I just finished reading a philosophy book that was perplexing to me because the whole book, he was trying to figure out the right answer and he was doing it in a very logical, deductive way. Therefore, the greatest amount of good with the least amount of harm and this and that. And therefore, this is the correct approach to that. This is the correct approach to what you should eat. This is the correct approach to where you should live. This is the correct approach to taxes. This is the correct approach to immigration. A variety of experiences. Which, by the way, I'm kind of looping back to your question about the How to Live book, as you can tell. For me, a full life is to do things one way and another way and this way and that way to mix in the different approaches to life without judgment, without deciding that one is right and the others are wrong. But to do one and then do the opposite and then do the opposite of that and then the opposite of that to feel and see and experience life from different perspectives. That's what I'm after.
Paz Pisarski
Yeah, it's almost like I remember hearing some of the advice of do what scares you, you know, just like follow that for six months and let's just go hard on understanding what scares me. And when I noticed that trigger going, okay, let's go do that, right? That sounds like something I should lean in towards because our innate, you know, reaction would be, Oh no, no, no, that's like not for me. Right. And so I feel like a lot of those kind of really help us into making decisions in all areas of our life. And someone was asking, um, today they were like, Oh, I'm really curious to hear in, in Derek's perspective at the moment, what constitutes as a hell yeah. You know, we have a whole book on like a hell yeah, like it's a 10 out of 10 or it's a no, like there's nothing in between. And so, you know, that really is a decision-making framework. Could you talk us through and unpack that framework in hell yeah or no of making decisions?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. And to hold true to my promise, I'm going to first answer the previous question to tie it together about why I wrote the How to Live book is that How to Live is 27 different chapters, each one with a different answer on how to live. Each one very opinionated. Each chapter says, "I know how to live. This is the answer. You must live for the future." And then the next chapter says, "No, no, no. This is how to live. I got it all figured out. We must live for the present moment." And then the next chapter is like, "No, no, no, no. The way to live is to make money. That's all that really matters." And the next one's like, "No, it's all about how much you give." And the effect it was supposed to have on the reader was the thing I was just talking about, where ideally you could use all of these approaches to life, like instruments in an orchestra. How interesting to listen to an orchestra that uses all of the instruments instead of just an oboe and a violin. You want all of those instruments. You want the xylophone. You want the timpanis. You want the bassoon, bring it all in. And the last page of the book is a picture of the orchestra seating chart with 27 instruments, not coincidentally because of the 27 chapters. And the idea is to use all of the different approaches to life and not decide that one is right and the others are wrong, but to just use them. Okay, so that ties together that whole thing. I promised I would answer that eventually.
Derek Sivers
So what constitutes a "hell yeah"? It's different at different times. There have been times when the only "hell yeah" is to get out of this place. When I was living in... I won't say where, I don't want to diss it, but I was living somewhere in the past that I said that I was just miserable. And the only "hell yeah" was, "I need to get out of here right now, I need to get far away from this place." That was my only hell yeah at that time in my life. And there are others, like now, where I'm more seeking a variety of experiences, where the things that make me say hell yeah are the ones that are the most unlike me.
Derek Sivers
Like, for example, Burning Man. Nothing sounds worse to me right now than attending Burning Man. That is so not what I want. It sounds like hell. I do not want to go to Burning Man. It sounds awful. As soon as I hear myself think that, I think, "Wait a minute. I kind of want to go to Burning Man now." Because it sounds so awful. Therefore, I think I'm being prejudiced against it. Therefore, I should go to Burning Man. Hell yeah, I should go to Burning Man. You know what I mean? That's my thought process these days, is give me the experience that sounds so counterintuitive to who I am. That's my current hell yeah.
Paz Pisarski
We actually just locked in a speaker from Burning Man. He is the founding member of Burning Man Project and he's coming in to speak about how to build community. I met him in San Francisco any unpacked like the burners and how they have 180 chapters around the world. They've donated millions to the burning man project with artists grants. And, you know, obviously they don't exchange with money. And so just this whole philosophy of like a value system. And it's just so fascinating. I mean, it's on right now, burning man. Yeah. It's like, it's like literally this Saturday or something. So we'll all go. All right, gang, we're going to buy our tickets now. We'll get the flight. We'll meet, we'll meet over there.
Paz Pisarski
But you know, I mean, what's interesting in that Derek is that it's, it's having one thought and then questioning it. It's almost having that like critical lens is, okay, wait, why am I, let's like unpack that a bit more. It's like, what, why are we conditioned to think one way and we know what's best for us. But really sometimes when I've made a decision, if I have been asked, for example, I was asked come in to Melbourne on Saturday to have lunch with a friend who I haven't seen in a very long time. And I was like, "Oh, that sounds amazing." But I live in Torquay, I have to get a two-hour train. I'm also dog sitting at the moment. I'm also just learning how to drive manual car and I'm like terrified to drive over the Westgate Bridge. So like getting in the car, it seems like... And I was like this, and I'm sitting there being like, "But I really should go." It's like I'm having a debate with myself about whether I should go or not. And when I realized that I'm having the debate, it's a no. that internal dialogue, like I'm pulled a lot of directions and it's just that there's something that's not right. And I feel relief when I make a decision and say no, and actually honor that I need to look after the dog. Like I've made some commitments, like I can't leave Maddy at home. So things like that, where for me, the sign of confusion or arguing with myself means that it's not a hell yes.
Paz Pisarski
And there's a quote that I love that is in one of your books that says, "Goals shape the present, not the future." And really thinking about, okay, goals are fantastic to understand how we should make decisions and what we should do and what we should say hell yeah or hell no to. But this element that goals are not about the future is also contradicting. Can you kind of unpack that quote? Like what makes a good goal? What makes a bad goal? Isn't helping us with the future, like what's the whole point of it?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. This to me was one of the most interesting and useful insights ever in life, is that we think when we make goals that we're somehow shaping the future. But if you just think that through for one second, you realize that the only thing that shapes the future, which is what we call our imagination, because come on, let's admit it, the future doesn't actually exist. It's a concept that we all have agreed to call it the future, but by definition it doesn't exist yet. That's why we call it the future. So it's the word that we call for our imagination, our projections, our predictions. We call that collectively, we call that the future, as if it's a thing. But really, it's just there's the present moment. So when you're choosing a goal, you should only judge it by how well that goal improves your actions right now in the present moment. That's all a good goal can do. So we all know the feeling of thinking of a goal that makes you go, "Yeah, that's a really good goal. That would be great. Wow, that would be really noble. That would be really impressive. Other people would really admire me for doing that. I should probably do that. Yeah, I should do that. But it doesn't make you take action, right? And there's some goals that as soon as you think of it, you go, oh, fuck, yes, oh, my God, yes! And you jump out of your chair, you take action, you do something right away, you immediately pick up the phone and call somebody or you immediately fire off the alarm and you sign up for the thing, right now you go, "Oh, man, yes, yes!" You can feel yourself take action. Now, even if that goal might not win you the Nobel Prize and a round of applause, it's the goal that made you take action. Therefore, that was the better goal.
Paz Pisarski
I'm like sitting here being like, yeah, that goal was definitely in the poor goal bucket. That was a good goal. But you're right. It's like the element where it's, let's do it now. I can't sleep because I'm so excited. Not like I'll sleep on it and decide tomorrow. You know, obviously there's like delayed gratification in that. And I'm sure a lot of people here who are running their own businesses, we are like running or have multiple different roles. There are always going to be goals that we're setting metrics, you know, things to achieve, but obviously the ones that measure success are the ones that actually point you in the right direction. And I like to have great goals that encourage the behavior that I like to see in my day to day. So I have a goal to like run a marathon. I'm up at 6am, I'm out for a run with Maddie the dog, you know, that's a great goal because it's just, even if I didn't run the marathon, it doesn't matter because every day I've gone for a run and I feel great after that in that sense. having a goal that might be, "Oh, I might just move to Spain." It's like, I've had that goal for a while, maybe like six years now. Like it still has, like it happened once, it hasn't happened again. So you just start to really think about that. And one thing that was super clear, Derek, in the 170 questions that we had from everyone here before was like, there was this, there was this vibe of like, overwhelm of like, I have too many goals. I have too many priorities. I have too many hats. I have too many decisions to make. I don't even know how to make a decision. I feel paralyzed. I can't even make the decision.
Paz Pisarski
Do you have any advice for anyone here who is kind of, I mean, out of reaction, if you've ever felt like that audience crew, legendary folks who are here live today and nowhere else, I appreciate that. Like, what do we do when we're overwhelmed? We can't make a decision. We're just like paralyzed?
Derek Sivers
We should all Marie Kondo our goals. Hold up each one and say, "Does it spark action?" Marie Kondo says, "Hold up a thing and ask you, 'Does it spark joy?'" Hold up your goals and say, "Is this sparking action in me? Is this goal making me jump into action?" If not, discard it. It is so liberating to let go of goals. That's my top recommendation. Feel the joy of letting go of those goals that are not sparking action.
Derek Sivers
Maybe if you already keep things organized in a computer somewhere, write them down and put it in a someday folder. And just the act of writing it down, I think also psychologically helps you let it go. As long as you save your files. Maybe you'll come back to that in five years, ten years. There are some goals that I wrote down ten years ago and did not take action on, but it was still in there somewhere, then years later I did take action on it. And I was really glad that I wrote it down earlier. There are some that just have to wait for the right time. When I moved to Woodstock, New York, it felt like an impulsive decision. There was one day, living in New York City, I was at the CMJ Music Fest, and the Beastie Boys were doing a concert there. And I was just feeling like, "I gotta get out of here. I'm going to move to Woodstock." And it felt like an impulsive choice for me, right? And I was doing a gig up in Massachusetts the following week after I moved, and I ran into an old redhead I know named Renee that I hadn't seen in a few years. I said, "Renee, Derek Sivers, remember me?" She goes, "Oh my God, Derek!" And I said, she said, "So what's new with you?" I said, "Well, I just moved to Woodstock last week. That's new." And she screamed. She goes, "Ahhhh!" I said, "What? What? What?" She goes, "I can't believe you did it! What?" I said, "What are you talking about?" She said, "Three years ago, you told me your dream was to move to Woodstock." I said, "I did? I don't remember that at all. I thought this was a new decision." She goes, "Oh my God, you finally did it. After all these years, you achieved your dream. You moved to Woodstock." So anyway, I think there are some dreams, goals, whatever you want to call them, that now might just not be the right time. So write it down somewhere, let it go, just take it off your plate and feel the joy of letting go of goals.
Paz Pisarski
Yeah, it's like the spaciousness of just that, the relief, right? If you feel a sense of relief, you've made a right decision. You know, it's a great signal in that sense. And And she said, "Oh, I loved that advice from Derek about not being a donkey." And I was like, "Yes!" I was like, "Yes, yes, yes!" I can't remember what that advice was, though. And one thing she was saying, she was like, "Oh, it helped me when I couldn't make a decision." And so I feel like you're going to have to tell us all, what does it mean to not be a donkey?
Derek Sivers
The donkey metaphor comes from an old French philosopher named Buridan. So if you want to search the web, Buridan's donkey is a story of a donkey that was exactly halfway in between a stack of food and a bucket of water. And he was both thirsty and hungry, and he couldn't decide. "Stack of food, bucket of water. Stack of food, bucket of water. But I want both. I don't know what to do. I want both." So he dies of thirst and hunger. So the way to not be a donkey is to use the future, to have a little foresight to know that you can do one thing now and another thing after. You can go get your drink first and then go have the food. You can pursue this project first and then do that other project later. You can take some of the goals you have now and take them off your plate. Put them in a folder and take all but one off of your plate. And then you take one thing and you say, "I'm going to do just this now. When I'm done with this, I will look at my folder of possible goals and pluck one from there and then I will do the next one."
Paz Pisarski
I feel like that is so helpful when anyone here, even myself included, feels like we can't make a decision. Actually, sometimes sitting in paralysis is even worse than making the decision because you're just sitting in that limbo. You're like the donkey of like, "I want the water. I want the food, but I can't have that." And it's like, just get out of that. Just make a decision. Just step in, have the momentum. And I think that is always something that we kind of forget of like, well, what if I make the wrong decision? You know, do you have any advice, Derek, of people here who've like, I feel like I've made bad decisions. I can't trust myself to make good decisions. And, and I don't know what to do when I keep making all these mistakes because I'm making the wrong decision. You know, what, what, what kind of advice do you have in that situation?
Derek Sivers
Two things. For one, I'd say, notice in yourself when you're being judgmental. We use that word in a very limited way, usually, but it can actually be applied in a very broad sense. Anytime you're saying this is a good decision, a bad decision, the right choice, the wrong choice, you're being judgmental about all of that when in fact, these are all just neutral things that you're projecting a judgment onto. Because sometimes doing the thing that seems stupid now will lead to a great outcome later. And sometimes what seems like a good choice leads to a terrible outcome, and what seems like a terrible choice leads to a great outcome. You never know. So first, try to suspend judgment way more often. Catch yourself being judgmental and suspend judgment. That's one idea.
Derek Sivers
A completely different idea is that making mistakes is the fountain of youth. You should do it more often. Teenagers and people in their 20s make so many mistakes. And that's kind of part of the fun of being young, is you do stupid things. You meet somebody on a Thursday afternoon and by Friday morning you're moving to Tibet with them, you know? This is part of being young and stupid: the adventure and the randomness and excitement it creates in your life. So there have been some times in my life, in fact, there was one particular period right after I sold my company, where I deliberately went out to make some stupid decisions. Whatever felt like the smart thing to do, I honored that as my old instinct and I wanted to create new patterns. So whatever I instinctively felt yes towards, I would say no to. And whatever I instinctively felt no towards, I would say yes to. And it had me doing some really stupid things. I married someone I hardly knew because everything in me said no. So I said, "Well, yes!" So maybe it was stupid, but it led me to this place of being in New Zealand with a kid that I adore. So many weird, interesting things have happened in my life because I said yes to marrying this woman I hardly knew. And I don't know, renouncing my U.S. citizenship, you already mentioned that one earlier. I had so many things. I turned down big, huge money offers that would have led me down one path. It just felt a little too normal to me. Amazon wanted to spend a ton of money to buy my company. And I just thought, "Oh, sounds too corporate for me. No, thank you." So there have been a lot of choices I've made. That where I deliberately tried to make the stupid, silly decision and it feels like the fountain of youth.
Derek Sivers
But the real theme here is to just suspend judgment, to quit calling choices right and wrong and just go experience life and try things.
Paz Pisarski
I love that.
Paz Pisarski
I've definitely had seasons where I've played the opposite game because my previous patterns and choices didn't lead me to where I wanted to be and I wasn't happy. I mean, even like thinking about when I kept taking different jobs, working for someone else, and then kept hitting this ceiling or people would drag me down or I would just feel frustrated. And I remember feeling in this moment of just, I know that I'm unhappy and I need to do something different, but I don't know what, but I know that I'm destined for more. You know, I had a lot of those thoughts of just like I'm frustrated and this isn't it, but I don't know where it is. So I said, let's just make the opposite decision of what you would usually do. I was like, well, what I would usually do is I just go get another job. I was like, well, that hasn't served me up until right now. So I'm going to quit the job and build myself a job. And that has led me to here, which has led me to so many different things. I even remember catching up with a naturopath for psoriasis. And he said, you know, I think you should stop the steroid cream and everything that you've been previously doing and play the opposite game. Like cut the tar gel, cut the Western medicine, like meditate, just meditate daily. Don't put anything on your skin and meditate daily. I was like, that feels so counterintuitive. I've been meditating for four years and the skin cleared up about 80% and, and just so many other things happen in my life because of that. And sometimes I think that we for us in that sense as well. So, mmm.
Derek Sivers
This is related to one of my favorite insights ever in life, is that your first thought is an obstacle. We should not honor our first thought as some kind of pure, untainted, natural embodiment of our soul. A lot of people do that. They think that what comes to mind first, who I really am. That's why they act on all their emotions instead of taking a second to consider if that's smart. But I think if you think of your first thought as an obstacle, it's something you need to get past to get on to the second, the third, the fourth thought and to consider different options and then use your wisdom to ask yourself, which of these options do I actually want to take? Does my lucid higher self want to be taking?
Derek Sivers
And then you can make a smarter choice instead of always honoring that first impulse.
Paz Pisarski
One thing that comes up a lot is, when we're thinking about how to live, how to live a great life, how to live fulfilling moments, we think about like, what is enough? And I think this idea kind of comes back to an equation that I listened in one of your podcasts, which are like three minute episodes. It's like the shortest podcast I've ever heard. And they're, they're so fabulous. So one of them was the equation of wealth equals to have divided by what you want. And I was listening to this and I was like, Oh, that's so interesting. Like this really understand is like an equation to understand and define in all of our lives, like what is enough. So I'm curious, like what is enough for you? And also what is that equation that you kind of walked through that was wealth equals have divided by what you want.
Derek Sivers
Hmm. OK, we'll take the easy half of that first. So the money aspect: I have some rich friends. One that's actually a billionaire, believe it or not, a friend of mine is a billionaire, that's weird. But this poor dude has six houses and ten cars. And to me, that's so stupid. He was talking about it like he's proud of it. But man, that's... you got problems! Why would you want six houses? That sounds like something's wrong in there. What's going on with you? But for him then, the money, once you start dividing it, if you keep adding up your needs or your wants, I should say, then it reduces the wealth. So he thinks of himself as he still needs to try harder to make more money because now he's got a lot of cars and a lot of houses. And suddenly it doesn't look like so much anymore because he has so many needs. Whereas if it weren't for those needs, then man, you know, a hundred thousand dollars would be plenty. A million dollars would be rich if you don't have that many needs. So I find it way more interesting to keep challenging myself on the needs, to keep lowering the needs and keep asking myself, do I really need that? Do I really need that? You lower those and for each need you eliminate, it feels like you've just doubled your income. Such a great feeling. So that's the money half. But don't forget, you can apply it to other things. How many romantic partners do you really need? How many exotic adventures do you really need? How many followers do you really need? You can use this in any aspect of life.
Paz Pisarski
I like to have a similar philosophy in how I run a business around how can this run without me. Like whenever I'm taking on a new project or doing something, does this really need me? And am I really needed here? Is this the best use of my time that I can give to the community collective and serve the team and the members and the audience in the best way possible? Or is this a selfish element? But that element of how can this run without me? It puts you in a completely different element where you're thinking of these obstacles. And similar to the wealth equation, if I have $20 and I think that, but I only need $5, like I'm rich, I've got four times as much. But if I have $100,000 and I'm looking to be a billionaire, well, I'm really poor. And that whole kind of element again is coming back to like, what is the lens that you have on the world? And so, you know, coming back to that question, Derek, like what is enough for you?
Paz Pisarski
You were chatting with Tim Ferriss on your recent podcast about buying a block of land and having like a four by five, like cement slab to like build a house from scratch and things like that. Like, is that enough? Have you built the walls and put things in there?
Derek Sivers
I've actually, I've been living there for a couple of weeks. And in fact, I just came back into the city to record this podcast because there is no Internet at my little cabin in the valley at all. There's no cell phone service either. So when I'm there, I'm completely cut off. I have to drive into the nearest village in order to get cell phone reception, which then I set up a little Wi-Fi hotspot for myself to download my email. And then I bring my offline laptop back to the cabin. And I'm getting so much work done because I have no internet access. Nobody can reach me. I can't reach anybody. I can't ChatGPT things. Anytime I have a random question, I just write it down to ask the internet tomorrow when I go into town again. And it's been really nice. And that's one of those things that I, yeah, it's also got only an outdoor shower, only an outdoor toilet, only an outdoor kitchen. Because I've asked myself, do I really need hot water in the kitchen? Do I really need a roof over the shower? No. So I keep challenging these needs. But hey, that's my quirk.
Paz Pisarski
I love the extreme. I mean, no Wi-Fi at the... I was like, how are you doing this right now? But obviously you've gone into the city. That makes sense. Very cool.
Steph
Hi, everyone. I'm Steph. I'm tuning in from Sydney, Australia. And my question is, "Hi, Derek. You're known for your short books and podcast episodes. How do you take a big idea and distill it into just a few words while keeping the depth and making it memorable?
Derek Sivers
Ooh. Okay, by the way, everybody, in order to do a lot of questions, I'm going to give very short answers, but I am happy to elaborate on any of this if you email me. So go to my website, sive.rs, email me, and if you felt I didn't say enough today, we'll do more over email.
Derek Sivers
So, how I make these ideas and books short? First, the reason I do it is I'm trying to be both pessimistic and assume that people are too distracted to pay attention for more than 60 seconds, and I'm trying to be considerate, assuming that people want the idea in the minimal amount of time possible. They want the best bang per minute of their effort. So to me, it's super important to be considerate so that I get your attention and make it worth it. So that's why the stakes to me are really high. That's why I put so much effort into being concise.
Derek Sivers
How to do it is first, to get rid of all the disclaimers, you have to understand that nobody is expecting you to be their sole guru. You know that you are just one voice in the chorus, so it's better to just be a clear, pure voice instead of giving all kinds of caveats and precursors and explanations. Because don't worry, you're nobody's sole guru. So just say your damn thing without qualifications, and that's going to be more useful than wrapping it in all kinds of apologies. Then you have to assume that your reader is smart, so you don't need to over-explain. You can say the thing and leave a little space so that they can fill in the explanations themselves. It's assuming you have a smart reader. So thanks for asking. I'd never actually talked about this. I should write Derek's guide to editing.
Ruben
I listened to your interview with Tim, Tim interviewing you whilst training for a marathon in Portugal many times over. So awesome to be chatting with you. I've got a fair bit of context that I'd love to email you separately about my question, but I am in the process of writing a book that acts as a bit of a gateway drug for young men to approach therapy. And the context is why I'm uniquely positioned to write this. But I guess one of my questions is given the like, you know, Scott Gallagher says this is young men crisis and loneliness that's having a whole lot of impact around the world in the moment. One of the missions that I have for the book is to get into the hands of every young Australian. If you were in that position, how do you go about getting the book into the hands of as many people as possible?
Derek Sivers
If you don't already have a big, giant public platform, I would find a target market for who does and only try to get it to them. Let somebody else go get famous talking about why this is important, instead of you necessarily being the one that needs to get famous talking about why this is important.
Derek Sivers
In Australia, Taki Moore in Noosa, has an interesting collective of million-dollar coaches, where personal coaches that are making at least a million dollars a year, and then they get together once or twice a year. That incredible group. I met that group a year or two ago and was blown away by how impressive they were as people and how hard they were trying to be useful to others. And each one of them has a big platform. So by the way, my short answer is I have no idea. I've never tried to get my books into everybody's hands. My second answer, if I try to answer anyway, I would just find the people who already have a greater reach and I would really target them. Even if that means flying to where they are, sitting down and spending a couple days with them. Just reaching a few people like that can do more for your reach than spreading yourself thin for months.
Ruben
Awesome. Thank you. One more quick one, because I am currently being a bit of a donkey between this book and my current business. Are there any books that you've always wanted to write that you've come back to years later that the impact of the book has not changed due to the time in which you wrote it?
Derek Sivers
Yeah, your book should be timeless. Somebody could read it in five years, ten years. You could write it in five years, ten years. Ideally, it could wait. And it might not be a book. There are a lot of people on earth who I found the hard way will never read a fucking book. They will watch YouTube for a thousand hours. They will listen to a thousand hours of podcasts. They will never spend one hour to read a book. They just don't. They just won't. So don't forget to be multimedia. It's about the message. It's about communing, hitting the idea from your brain to theirs, not the damn book.
Ruben
Thanks, Derek.
Paz Pisarski
Thanks, Ruben. One of the quotes from Seth Godin comes up in my mind of if you want to make something that people will remark about, you have to make it remarkable. So focus on writing a really goddamn good book that changes lives and the rest should follow as well. We've got a question in the chat here from Luke Marshall.
Paz Pisarski
So Derek, Luke is asking, it sounds like you're someone who is very in tune with your semantics, emotions, and feelings around what to do and what not to do. Do you feel like this is something that you've always had and it's inherent? Or has this been a skill in which you have refined and developed over time?
Derek Sivers
Refined and developed by journaling. Journaling has been everything for me. I learned later that what I've been doing for decades is akin to cognitive behavioral therapy, aka CBT. It's a lot of writing down my current conundrum, writing down my thoughts, and then challenging the thoughts that I've said in there. So if I'm saying something like, "This is terrible. This situation's a dead end. This sucks." I go and put question marks after that. Like, "Is it really terrible? Is it really a dead end? Does it really suck? What's the opposite of that? How could this not suck? What is great about this bad situation? How could I make the best of it?" I start challenging my own instinctive reactions in a journal, and I've been doing this for 30 years. And seemingly odd choices I've made in life and the ways I seem weird - that people seem intrigued by - came from my journaling, where I just take the default thing the norms that we're surrounded by we all are affected by norms and our culture that surrounds us and I challenge those in my journal. I get past that first reaction - get past the first thought - and I ask myself, "What do I really want here? What's the real point? What's the real outcome I want? Isn't there a more direct way to go for that?" And I try to go straight for that. That all comes from journaling.
Paz Pisarski
Everyone, we're all going to get a journal after this and we'll all commit to deciding to write for 30 minutes a day if that's useful.
Derek Sivers
You know, the previous question about writing the book that all men need. Not everybody reading that book is going to go pay the $200 per hour to a professional therapist. Some people really could benefit just from a lot more of this journaling time to go turn off the TV, shut down the Internet, close all your tabs and open a blank text document Or shut your computer and pick up a paper, notebook and pen and look into your own thoughts more. There's a lot going on in there that's worth spending some quiet time with.
Paz Pisarski
I feel like meditation for me, I've had every good decision and idea after meditating twice a day, 20 minutes. I'll put the link in the chat for the meditation technique I do, for anyone curious. But hey, this is not about me. This is about Stella. So Stella has a question live. Stella and Prusha, we've got two. Wow, I've never had two people, one screen. All right, what is your question?
Stella and Prusha
I guess when we were talking about, you know, what we believe instinctively and reversing that decision, I guess I'm just curious to know like, you know, 'cause in a lot of books and a lot of positive quotes and affirmations that you read out there, it says always trust your gut instinct. So if we're going the opposite, I'm just curious how that works.
Derek Sivers
Anything I say in general is meant to be the counter melody to the conventional wisdom. I know that we are all hearing the main melody loud and clear, it's everywhere. The conventional wisdom is ever present. So I try to say the thing that seems underrepresented. So when everybody else is saying trust your gut, I think it's underrepresented to say, well, maybe don't trust your gut.
Derek Sivers
Your gut usually is just echoing stuff that you decided on long ago and are sticking with, but maybe it's expired. Or maybe you're just echoing what you've heard other people say, because you didn't take the time to think for yourself. So if you say, hey, name a genius, people will say, Albert Einstein. Well, did you meet him? Did you know that he's a genius? Have you read all of his works? Maybe he is, but other people tell you he's a genius, and so you just echo that. But it can be the same thing with so many things in life. Hey, should I start a business? Echo, echo, echo. You just echo the things that you've heard other people say. And that's your gut. We call that our gut, but it's often just a thoughtless response. Like when the doctor hits your knee with a hammer. So I don't think it should be honored.
Stella and Prusha
Thank you very much.
Paz Pisarski
So, Derek, Perzen has said, "One of the things I admire most in your approach is replying to everyone," which I assume is replying to every email from the Wi-Fi when you have it. And so how has that worked out for you? Perzen would like to embrace that as a life philosophy. So how do you reply to every single email and why is that important to you?
Derek Sivers
I love it. It's not as hard as it seems. I'm not taking 30 minutes per email. I take one to four minutes per email. There are some sentences that I say a lot and I assigned them to the 36 hotkeys, letters A through Z and 0 through 9 are all hotkeys to me. I trigger it with the backwards slash that we never use above the enter key. And then, so they're sentences that I write often. Like, "Thanks for reaching out." "As for me, check out my /now page." Things like that shorten the time it takes to answer an email so I I can just spend more time on the unique communication of this particular email. I could get the boilerplate out of the way. Tick, tick, tick, tick it, with a few keys, get onto the good stuff in one or two minutes and hit send. It's not a place to make deep friendships. I'm not getting deeply involved, but it's starting to make a connection.
Derek Sivers
Which, then, I've just started in the past two and a half years, turning into in-person relationships. I realized that I knew, through my email inbox, almost 500 people in Bangalore, India. I went, "You know, I've never been to Bangalore. I'm flying to Bangalore and I'm going to meet..." not with all 500, but I sat down and met with, I think, 50 one-on-one for two hours each over the course of nine days. It was intense. It was wonderful. But I picked them by looking through my email inbox, looking at my past communications, picking who seemed like friend material, like who seemed exceptionally interesting or had really interesting questions or maybe had done a lot or seemed to have some interesting insights. And then I met up with those people in person. And then I did the same thing in Tel Aviv, did the same thing in Shanghai and Chengdu and Shenzhen and where else have I... Oh my god, I went all the way through South America for my first time doing the same thing. So I'm trying to turn these initial email meetings into deeper friendships. And yeah, a lot of my best friends and in fact, two of my greatest romances even came originally from the stranger emailing me out of the blue. So totally worth it.
Paz Pisarski
Whoa, well, I can't wait for all of us to go to Burning Man and connect all in person all at once. So that would be fabulous.
Paz Pisarski
Derek, just to put into practice exactly what you're saying with the hotkeys, I want to show everyone here, what you can do is you can set up text replacements. So if you always say, "Hey, someone needs a job," or "Hey, I've got a program," or "Hey, here's my email," or "Hey, there's like, thanks for XYZ," you can set up these text replacements based on past touch typing. Is that what you're talking about?
Derek Sivers
Yes, and Paz, oh my god, greatest tip ever for everyone listening. You know how hard it is to say no? Just once, in a form letter, write a heartfelt, empathetic, but solid no. "Thank you for asking. I'm honored by your request. So sorry, I'm staying focused on my work at this time. I've got to keep my head down and work at this. I hope you understand. Maybe again someday in the future. Don't hesitate to ask again in a year or two if this invitation still stands. I wish you the best. I'm sorry I'm unable to help." Whatever it is, you write something like that once and you just trigger it with the letter N. It is so easy to say no to so many things without stressing yourself out.
Paz Pisarski
I love it. I want everyone as a action to write their no sentence, put in text replacement.
Paz Pisarski
I'll send it in the post event email about how that whole tech situation just works so you can all use that practically. Well, we've got about five to 10 minutes left of audience Q&A. We are going to come to a question from Rochelle, who is here live. So Rochelle, city name question, pretty please.
Rochelle
Hello, good bit of butler stuff there. Yes, Rochelle. So from Melbourne, currently in Cremorne. Derek, I loved the way it's probably answered it a little bit just before, actually, but I loved kind of hearing you say about how you actually interrogate your goals and kind of give yourself freedom to kind of reshuffle that. And I'm somebody who probably can't see the forest for the trees, I think in my life as well. I've got a very fast-moving ratty brain. So it sounds like you might do this in your journaling, but do you have like an external mechanism that you use to kind of pull yourself out and look at your life? Do you take yourself off like once a month or is it something that - it sounds like you're quite a curious questioning person, so is it something that you do nightly when you're journaling or on like almost a goal-by-goal basis? I'm just, yeah, curious to know.
Derek Sivers
I'll tell you the answers from two people smarter than me to that same question. One is David Allen, one is Erika Lemay.
Derek Sivers
David Allen wrote the legendary book called Getting Things Done, which I highly recommend. He says that every Sunday you should do what you're asking about. Every Sunday, put aside an afternoon, an evening, a morning, whatever it is, Sunday's the best day to every week clear out some things, assess your life on a bigger zoomed out picture, asking yourself, "Am I really going the direction I want to be going? Am I really focusing on the right things?" He says to do that every week.
Derek Sivers
Now one of my main heroes of my life is an aerial acrobat named Erika Lemay. Erika wrote a beautiful book called Almost Perfect that I highly recommend. She is a superhero, and I just love the way she lives her life. But she does this every single morning. As soon as she wakes up, gets out of bed, goes to her journal, and reminds herself of her mission in life and her mission for the day. Every single morning. "What am I doing with my life? What am I pursuing at this stage of my life? And how am I taking a step towards that today? What am I doing today?" Okay, and begin. She does that every morning. I so admire both of those approaches.
Rochelle
Amazing. Thank you. It's really helpful. Thanks so much.
Dan
Hi there. I'm Dan. I'm in Melbourne at the moment. And hey, Derek, I've been a fan of yours for many, many years now. So great to see you on a live forum like this. I love the advice that you've given so many times of kind of imagining someone that you look up to to get their answer back. One of the things that I haven't heard you speak to, so I find it hard to imagine, is that I recently exited my design agency and something I'm really in kind of struggling with is how to reorient, how to reorientate yourself once you've actually reached the top of a milestone or once you actually get to somewhere that you've been wanting to get to for such a long time and there's so much noise around how to get there, the hustle on the way there, what to focus on, but actually I feel like there's a real lack of philosophy around what to do after so I'd just love to get your thoughts on that.
Derek Sivers
Yeah, great question. You're right, nobody talks about this. One of the best bits of wisdom I saw on this was from a book called So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport, where he studied successful career transitions. This is so interesting. He studied people who left a job, whether through quitting or selling or whatever it may be, and switched to another career, he studied where has it gone right and where has it gone wrong. And what he found is that the ones who did it right spent what he calls career capital. So he says your career capital is your reputation, your connections, your expertise. Don't throw that away. So actually I'll do the failed example. He said there was a he found a lawyer that wanted to be a yoga teacher and she was a successful lawyer and at one point when she had rented the yoga studio and was ready to begin, she quit her job and threw it all away, left everything from the law world behind and began as a complete nobody in the world of teaching yoga and failed. He found somebody else who was a lawyer that wanted to quit his job to be a ski instructor. And what he did was he spent his career capital by slowly over the course of a year inviting all of his clients to go skiing with him, and then inviting his clients to take some ski lessons with him, and then inviting his colleagues at the law firm to go skiing with him at his expense and to give them lessons. And after a year of that, of making sure that all of his best clients and colleagues had gone skiing with him. Then after a year, he said, "Everybody, I'm going full time to be a ski instructor. I would invite you back again. Please come back again. I'd be happy to teach you." And he was very successful with that because he used his capital instead of throwing it away. So that was the best wisdom I've heard about how to make that career transition.
Dan
Yeah, awesome. Thank you. I actually haven't read that. I've read most of Cal Newport's books but I haven't read that one, so I will give it a go. So thank you so much.
Paz Pisarski
How good. That was one of the books I read, So Good They Can't Ignore You, right before I decided to go all in on community building. So very, very relevant. Derek, we have time for one last question. So this is going to be a rapid fire question with our last one from Kirstie in the chat, just about burnout and overwhelm. And so the question is:
Paz Pisarski
How do you reconcile when you are feeling overwhelmed and burnt out, and you're wanting to cut back and just focus on what brings you joy, but you still have things that have to be done, whether it's tax returns or admin or family requirements?
Derek Sivers
Two answers. First, I'll quote again David Allen from the book Getting Things Done. It's a great book, by the way. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. If you read it long ago, read it again. It's better than I remembered. I just reread it for the second time a year or two ago. Forgot how good it was. He says:
Derek Sivers
You should go through the painstaking process of doing everything you said you would do, so that you feel the pain that is necessary to prevent you from saying yes to too many things in the future. He said you need to feel that pain of following through on all these damn stupid things you shouldn't have said yes to, but you did. Do them all. Feel that pain. Use it to say no more in the future. I like that. I've done that.
Derek Sivers
But also, it's It's important to skeptically challenge all of these things that you say you have to do. That was one of the best bits of advice I got from an old coach where I said, "I want to quit my company." He said, "Why?" I said, "Because I have to do this, I have to do that, I have to do this, I have to do that." He said, "No, you don't." I said, " don't. And I got mad. I said, OK, you're just being stupid. He said, "No, you're being stupid. You don't have to do those things. You could walk away right now, go to a beach in Hawaii, switch your phone number and never reemerge. And you know what? Those employees would stop coming to work because you stop paying them. Some of those customers might file, file something in small claims court or just shrug it off. Oh, well. And maybe if you don't pay your taxes after five years, the IRS will audit you, come after you. You'll have to pay the interest along with the original tax. But you don't have to do those things. You're choosing to do them. You have to. You must know that this is a choice. You're choosing to do those things."
Derek Sivers
So I think of this especially with social commitments. This is especially hard with my Asian friends, where it is so ingrained in the culture that you have to take care of your parents. You have to be there for that wedding. You have to attend this event and that event with your family. You have to do these things. And I say, no, you don't. And they say, "That's easy for you to say. You're white. You grew up in America." I said, no, it has nothing to do with that. You actually as like a physical law of nature, you don't have to do this thing. You can choose not to. You're choosing to do it, but you need to recognize that. You need to challenge your own assumptions, truisms. Those truisms are not necessarily true. You don't have to do those things. You don't have to do your commitments. People will be a little upset. And it was an important day of wisdom in my life when I realized that when you say you're going to attend some social thing and then you quit or you drop out, people don't really care that much. There are many other attendees. They go, "Oh, Derek didn't show up. Whatever." They think about it for two seconds, whereas you anguished yourself over it for hours or days. It's nothing to somebody else. It's not that important. So I heartily and easily quit a bunch of obligations that other people would say that they have to do. I just bow out and nobody seems to care that much.
Paz Pisarski
You heard it here first, everyone. Derek Sivers, thank you so much for being here live with us all today. Derek, any final words before we wrap up our live session?
Derek Sivers
No, I just, I tried to be as succinct as I could today. So I meant it when I said, anybody, please go send me an email, say hello. Even if you don't have a question, just say hi so we can keep in touch.