Good Life Project - David Heinemeier Hansson | A Different Lens on Work

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

Living in Malibu, by way of Denmark, David Heinemeier Hansson is the co-founder & CTO at Basecamp and the New York Times bestselling coauthor of Rework and Remote. His latest book is It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. In his writing, he offers powerful reframes on work and life. David is also the creator of the programming framework Ruby on Rails, which has powered massive websites like Twitter, Shopify, Airbnb and over a million other web applications. He is also an avid photographer and lover of beauty in all things. Over the last decade, he developed a passion for endurance auto-racing that eventually led to a first-place finish in his category at the legendary 24-hours of Le Mans race.You can find David Heinemeier Hanssone at: Website | Twitter-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today, David Hennemeyer Hansen, or as most people refer to him simply DHH, grew up in Denmark at a time when the early home computers had barely any memory. Recording happened on a floppy disk or maybe even cassette. Even if you wanted to play games, one of the easiest ways to make that happen was to literally copy the code that was often printed in a monthly computer magazine into your computer and then hit run. He became fiercely immersed in the world of gaming, ended up building a number of online review websites. But at least in the early days, he had no interest in programming. That came because he simply couldn't do what he wanted to do with the programs and the websites that he wanted to create.

It's pretty fascinating because he's now known as the creator of Ruby on Rails, which many of the largest websites and social platforms in the world run on. He's the co-founder and CTO at legendary, almost kind of like anti-establishment tech company called Basecamp, a bestselling author with really provocative and insightful thoughts on the way we work and how it often wars with our ability to both flourish in life and do our best work. And along the way, he also became fascinated with endurance auto racing, began training to drive and eventually won his category in the legendary 24ours of Le Mans race and has also become a really accomplished photographer. Amazing to see how he has become so accomplished at a number of different things.

And we talk about that very specific thing and the myth of being able to do all of that simultaneously. We cover a pretty astonishing amount of ground. His lens on nearly everything, not only provocative and profound, it may really kind of shake you into re-examining the way you work and live and relate to others in a really good way. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll be right back. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

So a lot of different places I want to touch down with you. In different parts of life, different parts of work. We're hanging out in LA. You're in Malibu. You've been here for a long time. Born in LA. You're in Malibu. You've been here for a long time. Born in Denmark. And sounds like also had an interesting relationship with technology when you were really, really young. Got a computer. But the side that eventually you would drift to, it wasn't your jam at all in the early days. No, it wasn't. I mean, I was always into computers. I got my first computer when I

was six years old. But all of my early childhood exposure to computers were about video games. They weren't about sort of what goes on inside of a computer. I wasn't like a geek in that sense. I didn't really care that much. It was all about, hey, I really like video games. I want to play more video games. How can I get more video games? I got into video game journalism to get more video games because I couldn't afford them. And hey, if you review them, they send them to you for free. Or actually, in my case, when I started, they didn't even send them for free. I would just go down to my local video game store and I would ask, hey, can I borrow some games?

I review games. How old were you when you were doing this? I think when I started, maybe I was like 14, 15. So a 14-year-old kid walking in and saying, Hey, can I borrow Ova Chicken? I promise I'll bring it back. And the guy was looking at me like, what? Right.

But then I found this one guy who himself had done some journalism or something, or writing of some kind. This was a mixed store that had both hip-hop DJ gear, and then they also sold video games. And this guy, I think, had written something in passing. He was like, just the audacity of this kid to walk in and say, hey, can I borrow your games? He lent me a couple of games,

and we actually got to be good friends over the years. And that all led into then finally publishing on the internet, which led me to the web and led me to essentially get back into computers from a perspective of using them to build stuff because I was really just using them to play video games, play more games. I was such a big video game fan. But eventually it ended up that using computers to make things was more interesting. It just took a while. Yeah. I mean, and this was also at a time where

home computers were, I mean, they're not what they are now. Like this is a time where it was like, you know, 64K, 128K of RAM and, you know, like a little floppy disk or maybe even a cassette player. So when you talk about playing games, this is sort of like an entirely different universe to what people think about now. It really is. And it was funny because in those days, the way video games were distributed, at least sort of the small games, they were actually written down at the back of the magazines I had. The game, the code, the code was listed out. It was like two pages of very dense code and you had to type it in yourself. And I did that and it would take like, I don't know, two hours to type it in. And at that stage, I didn't know English. I was

just sort of a Danish kid, like what, six, seven, eight years old. Didn't know English. And of course I got it wrong. And programming is just such a unforgiving, you have one comma wrong and the thing just doesn't work and you have no idea why. So that was kind of some frustrating years, but that was, the computers were just nothing. I mean, the Commodore 64, which was the main machine back then, had one megahertz. Right. One. Like not, like that's not an exaggeration. The CPU, literally one megahertz. It's amazing.

I remember our first computer in our home. I think this was actually even a little bit before that was RadioShad. They had the TRS-80, the quote, trash 80. And you had to hook up this external cassette deck and hope you got the volume right. So if you recorded something, you know, it actually was sort of like you could play it back and get something that wasn't total gibberish. I remember that because this was also the era of when I started playing video games, we didn't buy games. We shared games. So you would copy the cassettes.

And there's always degradation as you copy them back and forth. And at some point, you'd be like, well, this is the seventh copy. I don't know if it's going to make it. And then you could see it on the screen when you were loading the game on the Commodore 64, the screen would flash in very specific ways. It had these bars of color and you develop the sense of like, is it loading? Like, is it getting the right things? And it was just, it was just so fascinating. And I have those vivid images of the loading screens, what the loading graphics looked like, which was just this random noise, which reminded me of when I got into BBSs, bulletin board systems. You'd have the modems, and they'd play this very specific sound. It'd be like, and you could hear what a proper connection sounded like.

And I thought that tactility of computing, it's just something I'm kind of sad we lost. There was just some analog dimension to it that was really satisfying. Yeah, it's like it almost made it tactile in a certain way, like sensory in a way. It's also kind of funny that you bring that up because it's almost like now we look at technology and all these apps and stuff like that. And intermittent reinforcement is intentionally built into all this stuff. But that was like this early hint of like, is it going to or is there going to be completely a meltdown? Totally.

Yeah, I remember even with the cassette. So you'd have multiple games in the same cassette. So you'd fast forward. All right, we've got to get it to like three minutes, 32. And and sometimes the way it would set up it'd be right in between and you wouldn't know quite when to start the play button for it it was it was just magic or i mean maybe it wasn't magic maybe it was just total shit and you look back through nostalgic eyes and you go like oh that was great right connected with a certain moment or window of your life. But, I mean, what's interesting also about that is it seems like even in the earliest days, it wasn't enough for you to just know what was happening on the surface.

Like there was something in you that's like, no, I need to understand what's happening underneath the hood, which has been this consistent theme literally almost everything that you've done. I certainly would get very deep into something. So video games, for example, even if there were some parts of it that were the mechanics of the electronics or how it's all built, but then there would also just be the social aspect. So for example, if you'd like to play video games and you wanted a lot of video games,

you kind of had to have friends. And you had to have friends, for me at that age, who were older, who had access to different things, who could get different things. There was a very sort of you got to work the crowd sense to it. You got to organize.

You got to get into these communities. You got to dive underneath. You got to find out these communities. You got to dive underneath. You got to find out what makes these people click. So I said, hey, I'm a, what, nine-year-old kid. And I show up at some 14-year-old boy's house. And like, how do we connect? How do we connect over the fact that like, otherwise we don't really share a lot of things, right? And I had that for, I mean, basically my entire childhood that revolved around video games and computers.

I was always thinking like, who can teach me more? And inevitably, it'd be people or other kids who were five, six, seven, eight years older than me. I remember, it's funny now living in the US and living in an environment where like, you just don't see nine-year-olds walking the street, right? Like, that's just not a thing anymore. Especially in LA, nobody walks. Right, nobody walks. But just the whole criminalization of childhood and self-driven child. When I was, I think, like 11, 12 years old, I'd go to these computer parties with like

15, 16, 18-year-olds. And you're like, you're just even trying to picture that image now. And it's such a difficult image. But it really enabled me to learn without speed limits, that I was not confined as an eight-year-old to learn from other eight-year-olds. Because, I mean, really, that's a pretty slow way of learning. If you want to learn fast, you've got to learn from someone who really knows a lot more than you do, who really have access to a lot more than what you have. And I picked up on that very early, that to go faster, to suck in more, you had to deal with people who were multiple levels ahead of you, and then just try real hard

to keep up. And that was just so much more fun. Because I was never on this sort of schedule of like, all right, here's the curriculum, like year one, you do this. And no, no, like what's the shortcut? How can we get there faster? Like I quickly could see where I wanted things to go. Like with the gaming journalism, I could quickly see like, hey, I want to run my own site.

I want to have this thing. And with the gaming journalism, I'd be like this 14, 15 year old editor of this site. And I'd have like these 20 year old game reviewers and I'd be sending them games because I'd be getting so many games, I couldn't review them all myself. So I had this whole team of like eight or 10 people who I were distributing this stuff to. And that all came from just learning to kind of aggregate your power in some sense that it's not just about what you can do individually. It's how you can turn bigger gears than yourself. I can be this little gear, but then I can turn a slightly bigger gear and a slightly bigger gear and we can move a whole machine that I'd never

have any opportunity to move myself. Yeah. I mean, and what a unique point of view at any age, let alone that age, especially, you know, when you're talking about your mid teen years where so much of the average kid's energy is all about quote fitting in, you know, it's all about sort of like social relationship. Am I okay? How do I bend myself so that I feel like I belong in some way, shape or form? And something he was kind of saying, no. Or like maybe you have that impulse, I don't know. But the bigger impulse is, no, there's some really cool stuff going on out here. I don't care about credit. I don't care about having to be like the ego

that everyone's attracted to. Let's just see if we can rally things and do something really epic together. That was really a key part of it because when you show up as a 10-year-old amongst a bunch of 16 17 18 year olds 10 year old you're not the center of attention right you're like the at best just curiosity right right it's like we humor this kid for now yeah that was exactly what it was so you just you in

some ways that's a gift right like you're not in the spotlight you're not you just get to soak things up in a way that is unencumbered because no one is really kind of making yourself conscious about that. Or if they were, I just missed it. Maybe they probably did think it was weird. I don't know. But that part, I just didn't really care about. I saw very quickly just how quickly I could go and just how utterly worth it that was. And then the rest of it, I don't know, didn't really

matter. I've talked to my wife about this because she often goes like, how do you tolerate the level of conflict that you're involved in on a daily basis? And it's funny, she'll ask me these questions where I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, that's actually true. I argued with like 15 different people on Twitter this morning about like 12 different topics ranging from like the social state to the gig economy to programming. Yeah, I didn't even think about that as conflict where I go, clearly, she sees that conflict. Most people would, right? Like it is actually tense in some sense when you're just observing it from the outside. And I just don't even notice that.

I have to take a step back and go like, oh, yeah. Yeah, you're right. I was just kind of yelling at people. Yeah, I guess. Like that was a thing that was happening, but it just didn't register. So it may just be that like I'm missing a bit, like I'm missing a bit where remote people would go like, you know what evolutionary biology taught us that being in conflict in a group is not actually a good thing. You got to get along. and like that gene didn't get activated in my brain yeah or maybe there's just something about you that from a really early age was able to separate the information from the emotion in an experience

or an exchange where you can kind of like say like okay yeah there's the emotion here and it is what it is um but the more curious thing like for reason, your brain goes to the Intel side of things, the data side of things. Like that's what I care most about. So I'm just going to kind of live there. It's funny though because I also – I use emotions as motivation. Like I get really fired up. I'm not – it's funny, I'm otherwise a student of Stoicism and the collegial sense of what a Stoic is, is someone who's perfectly calm, who never let their emotions impact their rational

side. That's not me. I mean, not in the sense of the analysis part, but in the sense of the motivational part, I absolutely use emotions because the key thing for me often that gets me energized is, I mean, it sounds bad, but it's anger. Like I'll get really pissed off about how something is or how broken something is. And pissed off, again, it sounds bad. It's not always pissed off at someone when it's social issues. It's often at someone. But it can also just be technology. Like, why is this so hard? This does not need to be this hard.

We can make it easier. I can see where this could be. And it's just infuriating to me that it's this hard. And I just go like, do you know what? I'm going to fix it. I'm going to fix it because it doesn't need to be this hard. It's just ludicrous that we're subjecting so many people to such a bad experience all the time. It's just a waste of human potential on this grand global scale. That's how I felt a

lot making Ruby on Rails. This programming toolkit that I created as part of Basecamp that's now being used like Shopify and Twitter and whatever. A lot of it was like I looked at technology. I had just started sort of getting proficient. And I looked at it and said, like, I'm no expert, but this is bullshit. This is just bullshit. And it doesn't need to be bullshit. And here's how we can put it together in a way that's not bullshit.

And the energy that fired that up was not just a rational deduction of like, oh, well, this is technically not efficient. No, no. It was like the anger. I fed off that anger of like this needs to be different. This could be different and it could be so much better. And it's just wrong that it's not better. It's almost like there's a justice element to this. There really is.

There's injustice being done here. Yes, I have a huge sense of that, of injustice, which really powers a lot of things, both on sort of social issues and on technical issues, that I can't deal with things that are not fair. And I know that this sort of like psychologically, there's all these different parameters of how people view the world. Like mine is very much focused around justice and it makes it difficult sometimes. Like one of the things I've been occupied with recently has been the difficulty of being someone who sees the world through that lens living in the United States. It's a very difficult cognitively pressurized environment to see that. And you just go like, this is just so patently unfair. It's so inefficient. It's so wrong. Particularly

coming from the experience that I had growing up in Denmark, where it was none of those things. As I've talked about before, we grew up in the US would have qualified as working poor. And I didn't know. I didn't know. Because the Danish society is structured in such a way that you can have working class poor next to upper middle class. And that's like 80% of the population. And you don't notice. And I thought that that was really a magic spell of epic proportions that you can have a kid grow up like that and not really realize until it's over, until childhood is over. And I get to business school and I go like, oh, I hear from other students who didn't come from that background, who were perhaps in the top 20% talk about like what they did growing up, like going on vacations to foreign countries and so on. And just go, oh, yeah, we didn't do that. But still coming out of that experience, essentially sort of innocently thinking like, oh, well, we're all the same, right?

And then coming over here to the US, immigrating 15 years ago and just going like, yeah, no working class poor person is going to delude themselves. That like they're essentially having the same experience of life as someone in in the upper middle classes and top 10 and just thinking like you know what that's a bad configuration we should fix that so that's been one of the things that's been powering just my engagement in a variety of issues lately just thinking i have a literal personal lived experience of society that was structured remarkably differently, even though it was still within the same sphere. It's still the West. It's not like some completely foreign thought process.

It's still the same institutions. They're just configured slightly differently. And the outcomes are so different. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

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Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to me also because they're, so the, we'll fill in some of the gaps a little bit, but just like piggybacking on this, you know, like you, you've ended up doing something that effectively can have you be location independent. You can choose anywhere in the world you want to be and do the work you want to do. And you know, like you said, you came up in a culture and a country where the ethos was profoundly different, which makes me curious, why did you choose here? And then once you really started to see the tension, why stay? Not saying you should leave, but I'm just – I'm curious what the thought process is behind it. It's been one of those great revelations, personal revelations that move. Because when I moved here in 2005, I had just finished Copenhagen Business School, which has a very specific The Economist-style ideological bend that you kind of get programmed into.

And you fall into these traps of thinking like, you know what? The taxes are too high in Denmark or like they're really keeping entrepreneurs back or whatever. So I had that bias already, that bias that like, you know what? Look at America. I mean, did this lower taxes and people really – I had bought into the bullshit a bit. And I bought into the bullshit because I hadn't been exposed to it myself directly. So I moved over here in 2005 partly because of that but not wholesomely. Mainly it was because of an opportunity. Right. ended up getting sort of connected with someone who was already here, Jason Fried, my business

partner of soon 20 years, who had a business in Chicago. And we started working together and I'm done with university and I think, you know what, here's an opportunity to try something else. Let's try something else. So I moved to Chicago in 2005. And when I first land, I mean, there are some of these jarring cultural differences. You're like, oh, I need a car, my first car. And I need to do a bunch of these things. But you don't really notice. It doesn't get under your skin. You don't really appreciate it for some time.

So I still lived under this general fairy tale of like, oh, American dream. And like, I'm coming over here and I'm an immigrant. I'm like building up a company. I'm doing all these things I'm supposed to do according to the ethos and the myths. And then it really took a fair while until I started realizing, oh, there's also other things here that are not just quite as rosy. And they're not about me personally, because my story is just purely one of getting all the best of the United States, right? I get to build a business, get to enjoy the spoils of a successful business, get to do all these things.

And I think the U.S. is in the Western sphere. It's both like it has the best of the best in these small niches and then it has the worst of the worst. And there's not a lot of room in between. And it just takes a while to recognize that the worst of the worst is here too, while you're sort of in the depths of the best of the best. Right. And then I guess at some point, once I started developing this appreciation, things are not that great.

Like I'm already hook, sinker in. I already have a life here. I've been married for 10 years. We have three kids. This is one of those things when you argue on Twitter, because I get this response all the time. Whenever I critique the US, you go like, well, if it's so bad, why don't you just move? That's not what people do. Also, what kind of shitty society would you end up with if everyone who thought that there was something that could be improved just bailed? That wouldn't actually be a good thing.

And then the other thing is just a realization is like I can't unsee the things I've seen. If I move back to Denmark, like is there going to be any less misery here? No, there's not, right? In some sense, I almost feel like an obligation. This, of course, is completely self-serving, ego-boosting bullshit, but I have this different perspective. I spent 25 years in a different society that was structured in a very different way, and the US could be too. I'm taking that experience. I'm trying to infuse it into at least the people I touch, just giving them an appreciation of how things could be different.

Because when you read about it, you don't know. You really don't know. And I forget what the quote is, but something about like you don't know your own country until you've lived in another one. I think this is so true because I really did not know what we had in Denmark until I moved. There were so many things I just took utterly for granted and realized only after living in another country where this wasn't true at all, that these were really pivotal, super important things. And I really just embraced that aspect of remote work.

At least until we had kids who went to school, like I can live anywhere, let's live anywhere. So we lived about 10 years in Spain, majorly in the south of Spain, which was a wonderful experience as well. We lived in Chicago. We lived here in Malibu. And just getting all those impulses really broadens your perspective. It's such a trite cliche, but it's one of those things you can't read, right? You can't read what it is like to live and breathe in a different society. You have to actually do. It's one of those experiential truths that they don't get under your skin until you've been there yourself. Yeah, it's so great. I think every kid at some point

should have to say, okay, so you need to pick somewhere else to be, preferably the more different culturally it can be the better. Yes. Just so you can really understand like your small, the microcosm in which you've inhabited the first 18, 20 years of your life is not the world is not the universe. Maybe you come back, you know, like most likely you come back, but in some way you'll be wired a bit differently and you'll see things a little bit differently. I mean, it's interesting also, we look at all the,

you know, the global studies of happiness over what the last decade now it's sort of, it's, it's, it's the countries around, it's like, like Finland, Denmark,

it's like, those are the countries that actually always are clustered at the top. It's not the U S it's not like some of the Western European, like apparently like best resource countries. So you got to kind of wonder when you see things like U.S. It's not like some of the Western European, like apparently like best resource countries. So you got to kind of wonder when you see things like that. Yes, I think this is one of those great things where you see those studies. And I think of like, well, I've lived in three or four spots on the list here. Denmark right now is number two.

Finland is number one. The U.S. is 19. I think Spain is like 13. This is just the World Happiness Index or whatever. And you know what? This is such an aggregation. There's no individuality in those scores, right? Like it's hundreds of millions of people.

But I can see the truth. I can see how those scores get to be what they are. And a lot of it is simply about the easiest, biggest gains obviously happens at the bottom, right? Like the price of which to improve life for the bottom 50% of society is minuscule compared to how do you make a billionaire feel a little happy about his life, right? It's pretty hard, right? Once you have all that, you don't even have to be a billionaire. A millionaire, how do you make a millionaire feel happier about their life? It's not the small things, right? Versus how do you make someone who have poor access to healthcare, poor access to education, poor access to housing,

how do you make them feel better? They're simple answers. And I think that those are some of the answers that societies like Finland and Denmark have just gotten right. And one of the realizations that I've come to lately has been, do you know what? These aren't my concerns, right? I'm not concerned with material needs because it's been a long time, literally. Like almost long enough that I need to check myself all the time about the fact that I haven't cared about what anything costs in like 15 years in terms of like going out to eat or groceries or anything else like that or bills. I haven't cared about what anything costs in 15 years.

And that makes like, that it's sort of like a string to reality that constantly grows thinner. And you really have to work on it. You're like, oh shit, I'm really getting kind of out of touch here touch here and i gotta connect back to that and for me bringing it back to just growing up in denmark not sort of having those concerns very up front right and yet being able to navigate in such a world where it like it wasn't horrible um is has just been very important

in sort of keeping that connection yeah it feels like it's an anchor you keep sort of like reverting back to in a good way. It's like touching stones, like, oh yeah, this is what matters. This is what I know can be like, and there's a sense of possibility attached to it also. I mean, interestingly, at the same time that justice is clearly a driver for you and seeing things that are broken, it's like it gets under your skin. It feels like, at least from the outside looking in, that another one of those sort of like DNA level things is beauty, is the search for beauty, which, if you think about it, has a really interesting and complex relationship with justice. Yes, that there's just something true about something that is simple and beautiful. And the sense of aesthetic for its own sake is something I've embraced deeply. And when I took that to the programming world, well, even still, it's extremely controversial

that there's these domains where like aesthetics are supposed to be superficial or they're shallow or it doesn't's it doesn't really matter and especially in the programming world there's a lot of techies who like they're i don't know maybe this is a stereotype right right there's sort of the pencils in the in the front pocket and like just this they ooze this sense that like i don't give a shit about aesthetics i don't give a shit about style i don't give a shit about any of these things. And I just thought like, you're missing out, dude. You're just missing out on an entire aspect of human life that is deeply, profoundly satisfying. And when I found that in programming, a lot of it was finding a specific programming language. For me, it's a language called Ruby that was just more beautiful than any other programming language I'd

ever seen before that cared about this as a top level primary concern. The creator of the Ruby programming language has literally said his number one objective is to make programmers happy. And for me, a lot of that happiness is derived from that sense of beauty, that sense of clarity. And for its own sake, oftentimes when I'm programming, I will write something in the beautiful, clear way knowing that it's a tiny bit slower or uses a tiny bit more memory or it's wasteful in some other very scientific, objective way. But when I look at it, I just derive this pure joy and I go like, that's totally worth it. And I think that appreciation of aesthetics is something I wish was more widely distributed, especially in engineering circles. There's some of it, right? Programmers, some programmers who care about this can see the beauty in like a mathematical theorem or something like that. That's not my spiel.

I care about the beauty of language, the beauty of writing, the clarity that lays in that. And I'm just trying to boost that, right? Like a lot of what I've been doing in the programming world has been trying to boost some of these base appreciations and go like aesthetics are important. Working in an environment that is beautiful and satisfying is important. These things have an ambient influence on your proficiency, on your competence, on your ambition, on your satisfaction, on all these important areas of life. You can't trace it directly, but it really truly matters. And I have this with a lot of other things.

I'm not a designer or anything, so we built our house here in Malibu. It took about seven years. And I have this very ambivalent relationship with aesthetics of most things I don't care about. And then a few things I care about to this obsessive degree. And it would sometimes drive the people I'm working with on the house nuts where I'm like, yeah, I don't care about this. I don't care about this. But this line right here, like I can just see like it's one

millimeter off. It just, it destroys my mind. Or we have this long mirror in the bathroom. There's this tiny black dot in like one of the corners. I've lived in the house now for two years. I see it every morning. And every morning I just go like, rage against the dot. I do. And they're like, I don't know what to tell you, man. This is just how you produce mirrors. They're long. There's imperfections. It's just the thing. And I just go like, I wish I could turn it off sometimes. Most of the times I'm really happy I have that eye for it. And I think even talking about in those terms, like developing an eye, this is something I felt like both with writing, with photography, with programming, it was a lot about developing an eye, seeing the things that others weren't seeing when they were at a lower level of

competence. This is what gives you competence, is that you see more, right? Like your field of vision literally gets wider. You zoom in more. You see see the dot like that dot reminds me of all the ways in which i do programming well i see the dots and i want to get rid of those dots and the compound effect of getting rid of a thousand tiny dots is not just that those dots are not there anymore it's a different kind like you've created a new thing. You've ironed things out in such a way that whole domains of concern are no longer there and people can just skate over it. It's a

smooth surface because you've whittled it out. And each individual one, you're like, is that really worth it? Will anyone really care? No, they wouldn't care. You cared. I cared. And the compound effect, people can't necessarily always put their eye on. When we talk about programming in Ruby or with Rails, people are, well, I just feel good.

Like, it feels good. Like, this is what aesthetics often do. They give you a sense of calm you cannot explain. Someone can explain it because someone have developed an eye that's sort of refined enough. It's the same with photography. When I first got into photography, I'd look at a good picture and I'd go like, wow, that's a great picture. Can't explain why. It's a great picture. Then you learn the rule of thirds. You learn about sort of white balance or composition or contrast colors. You learn to describe why things make people feel good.

There are these rules of aesthetics and you can learn them, but the greatest gift you can do is you can learn all those things. And then you can simply just deliver them to people who haven't learned yet and they can appreciate and enjoy and feel better living in a beautiful world. Yeah. And it's not even like you have to teach them what the rules are. It's just that when you create, when you solve, when you make within sort of like the structure of those rules, you know what you're going to generate. That generative process yields a profoundly different output than a sort of like a more, I don't know, baseline level process where you're just trying to plug holes. I almost see it as this is the transcendent aspect of creation and creativity.

But yeah, so one of my curiosities around this is you love learning, you love deconstructing, you love kind of like figuring out all of these things and then sort of like rolling with them. And you have this deep sense of justice matched with beauty, which makes you push really hard to get to this place most people don't get. That sense of seeing all these things and then knowing, yes, it can be trained to a certain

extent. Do you feel like the creative output across any domain that really changes conversation, changes culture, changes taste, do you feel like that's trainable? Or do you feel like that there's just something about the way some people are wired where no matter how much somebody else studies the rules of the game, they see, they create, they process, they integrate, they synthesize differently in a way that others just never will. I think it's all trainable. It's all trainable within the scope of getting to the top 1%. If you want to be the literal best at anything, no, you're right.

There's just some innate talent there that enables Michael Jordan to be Michael Jordan, right? That's just in his prime. There's just, there's factors there that you cannot teach. I've never gotten to the Michael Jordan, right? That's just in his prime. There's just, there's factors there that you cannot teach. I've never gotten to the Michael Jordan level of anything. What I've gotten to is the realization that I can get into the 1% because you can get there through effort.

Or effort sounds wrong because I'm actually not a big believer in effort in terms of like pouring in the 80 hours and so on. Dedicated study. Commit on. Dedicated study. Commitment. Dedicated study, doing it over the long term, paying attention, so on and so forth. You can get to the top 1%. And then the magic for me often happens is you don't get to the top 1% in just one thing.

You combine three different things. And it's like colors. You mix them together and boom, there's a new color. And everyone can do that. You can be really good in one domain and you're in the top 1%. It's not that special. Top 1% just means like you're better than 99 people, right? Like if there's a million people, there'll be thousands like you. You're not that special. You're not unique snowflake just because you're in the top 1% of one thing, but you combine top 1% in one thing

with top 1% in another thing, or even just top 5% in a third thing, all of a sudden you have a very unique constellation of perspectives that allow you to see things in a way that anyone who just had this specialized notion just in one area, they wouldn't see. So for me, thinking of both the business aspects, business fascinates me, for me, thinking of both the business aspects, I just, business fascinates me, right? Profit loss, that whole thing, the mechanics of business, even accounting fascinates me,

which fascinates me that it fascinates me. But I can be interested in that. I'm interested in programming. I'm interested in photography. I'm interested in philosophy. I'm interested in a lot of things. You take all that and you get a very unique thing where, okay, I'm the only person who has the intersection of all those things in the world, who have the intersection of all those very specific things. And that to me is far more

interesting. And I want more people like that. Like, yes, there's going to be Michael Jordans of the world, but there's too many people trying to become Michael Jordan. There'll only be one. Yeah. I love this sort of like cross-domain pollination thing. As you're speaking, But there's too many people trying to become Michael Jordan. There'll only be one. really good at what she did at a very young age, went out into the gallery world in New York City, which is brutally hard to make it in. So even if you're really, really good, couldn't make it. After a couple of years, she goes back home, living with her parents, who owned a bakery, and just to kind of like kill some time, make a little bit of walking around money. They'll come like, just hang out, like work the counter, you know, like decorate the cupcakes at the bakery. She starts decorating cupcakes and she starts realizing,

oh, these are mini canvases, right? So she takes what she learned, like this incredible artistry and eye in the world of fine art, and she starts inventing technologies to paint with chocolate. And in that domain, when they start to put that out,

everyone's like, what just happened here? I mean, the line is out the door and around the block at this bakery, but for exactly that reason. That's exactly what we're talking about. Were any of those individual things, like you can be really good at making cupcakes,

not that special. Really good at fine arts, even sort of in the grand scheme, not that special. Like you're still not going to necessarily make – combine those two things. Boom. Totally unique. Totally interesting. All of a sudden, you're one of a kind.

And that to me is such a more approachable, achievable goal rather than thinking, do you know what? If I just play basketball really hard, I'm going to be Michael Jordan. You're not. You're just not. I can say that with such statistical certainty because there literally is just one person like that, right? Versus you take the number of people who are pretty good at one thing, pretty good at another thing, putting those two things together and boom, here's something unique. Yeah. No, I love that concept also because it just expands the invitation to step into a place of possibilities so many people and just like explore it differently. Look at different domains and different ways to sort of like blend. It's pattern recognition fundamentally. And even within domains, I see the same things. So when I started creating Ruby on Rails,

I wasn't inventing anything. I was taking ideas from two camps. There was this thing called Java, which was this sort of very enterprise-y, highbrow development language where people were really proper and there were proper engineers. And then there was this thing called PHP, which were for all the sort of hackers who just wanted a website to get online. And it was very easy to get simple things done. And I just took like, hey, if you took the good ideas from Java about like how to structure programs, but you put it in sort of the approachable mold of a PHP, that's what Ruby on Rails is. I took the ideas from one context, put them in another context. And all of a sudden people go like, wow, this is amazing.

And I'm like, I didn't come up with anything. I mixed two colors and I got a third. That's it. Yeah. And meanwhile, this becomes sort of like a game changing offering that becomes the backbone for these major, like massive, massive things. Let's fill in a little bit of detail here. You, cause we've been referencing a whole bunch of different things. You end up, as you mentioned, um, you meet Jason, um, back in the early two thousands. Originally you had taught yourself programming, not because you want to, but because you were running these game online game review news sites and you want to add features that, you know, you're like, well, I guess I'm going to have to figure out how to do this myself. That becomes a thing. You hook up with Jason, who starts to pay you 15 bucks an hour, some equivalent in product, you know, to join the team and start developing stuff. now Basecamp, with some products which have really profoundly changed the game, especially

for small companies who are trying to get stuff done in a clean, efficient, light way. But along the way, you and Jason and the whole crew there have really, you have developed a profoundly different perspective on work, on why we work, what it means to work, what good work is and what it is not. That is really fascinating. It's led to a bunch of different books and conversations and thoughts. When did you, I'm curious, you know, cause you start with the fascination about, okay, we're a product company. Let's dive into the product. What happens along the way that makes you zoom the lens out and say, there's a bigger injustice here that's happening

that's not about project management and making teams work better, but fundamentally the way we wake up in the morning and do the thing we're here to do. I was given the gift of working for some truly awful bosses at some bad places of work. And I say gift with no hint of irony, because really that is what it was. It was a gift of perspective to be an employee for quite a while at a number of different tech companies in Copenhagen, watching how people who hadn't had that gift would naturally come to conclusions about how work should be structured and how utterly terrible those decisions and organizational principles were. also as just a curious observer where I would go, how is it in a company of 50 people that the 48 people who sort of just work here, they all have a pretty fine-tuned understanding of how this is all seriously fucked up. And yet the two people who are in charge seem to be utterly oblivious to all the ways this

is broken. How did they get to be in charge knowing so little? How are we not in charge knowing so much? And I just soaked all that in. I soaked it all in and I observed all of it and I burned it into my retina of all these sort of mini micro injustices or mini micro stupidities or inefficiencies. And I just collected. And that book was like, if I have the chance one day to set the tone, how we should work, you know what? I'm going to have a whole catalog here of ideas of how to do it. And I'm going to have a perspective that is a worker perspective. Because just as we were talking about that thin thread that ties me back to reality of caring about what things cost, that thin thread is the same as a boss tying me back to what is it like to work here.

And I work very hard, even though you're at a great disadvantage. Once you are no longer working for someone else, the easiest thing in the world is to drift off in la-la land and think that all your ideas are just wonderful and why can't people appreciate it and so on. And I try very hard to anchor myself in that experience, those formative experiences of working for someone else thinking, geez, what an idiot. And now that I'm sitting on the other side, I want to, I try to put myself in that perspective. I don't want to be the idiot. Like it's not that hard in terms of sort of skill, right? Like at that company I was working at, 48 people figured it out. We were all in pretty clear agreement on all the ways the workplace was broken.

It was the two people who didn't have to live under their own decrees, who didn't know what was up. So it's not that it's difficult in sort of a technical sense, but it is very hard to stay in connection with that. So when Jason and I started working together, the 37 Signals was four people, and two of them were Jason and I. So we had two employees. We were essentially starting from very much a blank sheet of paper. And I think Jason had the right way to do it would be. And let's think about the whole thing as, like, it's a product. We can refactor it. We can change it.

This company is a product, and we can make it better. And that has really just stuck with us. And I think it's one of those glues that tie Jason and I together is that we both have this intense interest in continuing to iterate and make it better. The structure, the organization itself, because most of the time they ossify very quickly. You have this initial burst of energy within a new company, three, four, five years, right? Where everything is new and then it ceases up. And then it becomes, this is just the way we do things here. And we try so hard to break that because this is the natural thing, right? It's kind of like you're stirring cement. If you stop stirring, it'll grow hard.

If you keep stirring, it'll keep being putty. So we keep stirring. We keep stirring the cement that is the construction of our company. And then we learn things all the time. And we take those things and we write them down and we try to sort of think, are there things we can make it better? Oh, if not, then at least we can write it down and we can share it. And that's what we've been doing in the books. The books are as much for ourselves as for anyone else to remind ourselves of the lessons that we've taken, right? One of my great inspirations

theories is Marcus Aurelius, who wrote The Meditations. He's a Roman emperor who's writing a book with no intention of having it published. He's writing a book for himself, trying to teach himself and remind himself about the lessons that are truly important. And that is very much the ethos that, even though we didn't know it at the time, but Jason and I tried to follow, that this is really difficult. That thin line where you lose the connection to reality, where you lose the connection to what it is like to work for someone else, the natural path is that it's going to be broken.

And this is why the stereotype of the clueless boss is there. This is the natural path. If you do nothing special to counter it, this is where you will end up, completely disconnected, completely delusional about how the world works, how your workplace works. it, this is where you will end up, completely disconnected, completely delusional about how the world works, how your workplace works. You're going to be the last to know about everything that goes on inside your company.

And it's this sort of just perverse dynamic that pushes you in that direction. And we just, we saw that. We saw that and we're like, that's not going to be us. And it's going to be a lifelong struggle to make sure that it's not us. But that struggle is also fun, right? That's the kind of good pressures that I like. I like this sense of seeing where I fucked up from a perspective of like, if I was on the other side. Because as I said, this is hard work. And even with all our focus on it, we still get it wrong. And I cherish those moments. I really do.

Because they remind me of those early days where I could watch The Boss and I could like, what an idiot, right? I get to watch myself and then I get to a point and I go like, what an idiot. And then I learn something and I write it down and I try to share it and I become really passionate about sharing it because I go like, hey, take Rework, for example, the first major book we published. It had 88 chapters. All of those chapters were individual essays of very hard learned lessons where I went like each of those lessons, I have just this like, I got to tell. I got to tell people. They don't know. Most of them don't know. If I tell them, they'll know and they'll do it better. Especially when we talk to other CEOs or executives, not only would they know better, they will take that knowledge, hopefully, ideally, and they'll do better.

And then there's going to be like five people who work for them or 10 people who work for them who will have a better life. Like this is that tiny gear again, right? I'm this little gear. I'm distributing that one lesson. I hit another gear and then boom, all of a, we make the robot, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

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Underneath all of that is this openness to being perpetually wrong. And know? And also it's this bigger lens. It's the metal lens that says, okay, so our job, like our quote product is not this thing that we're selling to people. Yes, it is. Yes. And right. And we also have this other product. That product is the whole damn company. Yes. It's the culture. It's everything that happens. And if we take the same lens that lets us

constantly look for bugs and iterate and solicit feedback on the quote product that we sell for dollars to customers, and we apply that to iterating on our culture, our people, the way we work, the way that we understand how people become inspired or disinspired, then, I mean, it's a profoundly different way. It's that meta lens that sort of allows you to step back and say, it's okay to say, I don't know. It's okay if it's broken, if it's okay, if it's not working, because we have the opportunity to learn that and iterate on, if it's okay if it's not working, because we have the opportunity to learn that and iterate on, make it better, which makes me so curious why so many companies

don't do it. I get why big companies don't do it because there's so much invested individually and structurally in the way things are. It would be the creative destruction to rewire a larger entity would be brutal. I get that. Maybe my curiosity is why do so many smaller organizations not sort of like pause for a moment and say, huh, look at this. How do we do this differently or better? I have so many answers to that question.

So I'll just dip in and take a few of them. I think one of them, particularly in small companies, is that they don't take the time to breathe. So many small entrepreneurs, they fall in love with the work to the exclusion of everything else. They get addicted to the work itself. If you're addicted to the work and you're doing it 80 hours a week, you have no time to think.

You have no time to reflect. This is one of those early core values that we internalized at Basecamp was we were going to work 40 hours and that was going to be it. Because I need the rest of life to have perspective, to be in connection, to be anchored. Once you devote the entirety of your being, once you go all in with your chips on that ego board that says, I'm a business owner, I run this business, this is my business, right? You've already lost half the battle. You're already physically incapable of simply having the thoughts.

You're going to be too exhausted. You're going to be too narrowly focused on just like what the next day is, which in some ways, I mean, we advocate that. Don't sit down and just freewheel and think about, oh, this is where we're going to be in five or 10 years. But you need some of it. You need some perspective to reevaluate. What are we doing? Is this right? Are we achieving the things we want to achieve or are we just moving forward? If you're constantly running, you have no idea where you're going. And you may very well just be running in circles, which is what a lot of people end up doing. I'd say the other thing is that, and I see this because I see it in myself, it is so seductive to fall in love with the idea that you're the boss, that you know this is your

company, that I'm just uniquely clever because I happen to have title over this. No, you're not. But it is so alluring. And then you fall into the trap of thinking, well, I know best. I'm the most invested, right? I'm the one putting in 80 hours a week. It's my equity. I have the most invested, right? Like I'm the one putting in 80 hours a week. Like it's my equity. I have the most skin in the game. Ergo, I know the best all the time. No, you don't. Most of the time you don't. And most of the time you're wrong. So I think that those are some of the challenges you face.

And it's so counterintuitive to think that if you really want to do the best possible work, you need to do less of it. It is an inherent contradiction that to become truly great at something like running a business, to become truly empathetic and kind, you need to step away from it. You need to have other things going on in your life because otherwise, how can you ever empathize with employees who do, right? This is how you end up with this moronic notion that like work is a family and like we should all put in everything. And why bosses can't understand. Why wouldn't you want to come in on Saturday? Why don't you want to come in on Sunday, right? Because they're all in.

So for them, it's all natural to think like this is all I am anyway, right? For Jason and I, we're like, do you know what? We're going to be normal people. We're going to fucking watch TV some of the time and we're going to have a family and we're going to go out and I'm going to read books. I'm going to enjoy nature. I'm going to have a hobby. I'm going to be normal in a sense of a sort of proportionate assignment of my waking hours. I'm going to sleep normal hours too, right? This is the other thing. So many people, they fall into like, well, I'm more heroic. I'm better if I just work more hours, if I sleep fewer hours. Like, no, I need eight and a half, nine. Like this is magic time. Sleep

time is magic time where you take all those impulses and you put them together and you wake up and boom, now you see things more clearly. So both of those aspects have really been very important. And they're difficult, right? Especially when things are going well. Yeah. Especially when things were taking off with Basecamp. And there's always more work.

This is the thing that gets me about work. Even if you put in 80 hours as a business owner, that's not like you're done. You're never done. You could put in literally every waking hour and every sleeping hour and you'd still not be done because there's always more work to do. So just setting a constraint, setting a barrier and say like, this is it. I'm going to work 40 hours a week, allows you to then think about how you're spending that time. Most entrepreneurs don't think about how they spend their time. They waste the vast majority of their time on all sorts of bullshit that doesn't move the needle at all,

but they delude themselves into thinking that it does because they can't do otherwise. They're all in. Yeah, that makes so much sense. And plus, we're not wired to do good work for that long on any given day. I mean, I know for myself, if I'm working on a book or if I'm deep into something like hyper creative where my mind really has to be there, I got three, four, maybe on like the best day of the year, five hours, maybe. But after that, I know I'm kidding myself. Bingo. I know I'm kidding myself. There you go. So yes, I got a couple hours of administrative stuff where I just kind of, I got to check some boxes, answer some emails and have some calls. But the stuff that's really going to move my work, my offering, my life forward,

I don't have much of that on any given day. And nobody does. Yeah, we can train it to be a little bit longer, but not that much. And like you said, so often the thing that I think allows us the life force and also the data on the input side to actually be able to find how disparate pieces go together is the fact it's the stuff that we do outside of the confines of that capital W work. And when we eliminate that, it's like everything kind of shuts down. But you also brought up something else that's fascinating to me. And it's this idea of a culture of intentionality. In the very early days of the show, when we were filming video, actually, it's one of the first conversations we aired. I sat down with a guy named David Marquette,

who ended up writing a book called Turn the Ship Around. One of my favorite books. Right. So you know where I'm going with this, right? Like he's a guy, he's like a, you know, like a nuclear sub commander who last minute gets thrown onto a sub that is not something he's familiar with. And he's sitting there because he doesn't know the ship. He's barking orders. Everybody's following him. For our listeners, what happens is basically he comes like 30 seconds from grounding a nuclear sub because nobody on the ship is willing to say, no, sir, you're wrong. We need to go the other direction. And him basically saying, I am the commander of this vessel and I need to model for everybody the fact that I don't know what the answer is. You all need to, instead of saying permission to, like you need to come from a place of intention. And I, as a leader, need to be open to that. It's such a powerful lesson.

I think it's also so hard for so many of us to really stand in that place of the power of ignorance. It's been one of the things that I've struggled with intently. And I think a lot of small business owners struggle with when they go from, hey, I used to do everything myself and I could, to now there's 10 people. Now there's 30 people. Now in the case of Basecamp, there's 56 people. This is not a good way of working, right? What you need to switch to as Marquette is like, you need to switch to like, what I want is outcomes. If I'm prescribing how everything should be done, you know what? I'm actually taking agency and ingenuity and creativity away from the people I specifically hired for those qualities, right?

I didn't just hire someone to do what I told them to do. I'm hiring someone to inform me to make it better, right? And I've had a hard time with this because I've worn all the hats in the company. I've done the accounting. I've done the customer support. I've done the operations. I've done the programming. I've done some of the design. I've done the marketing. I've done all of it, right? So when you've done all of it, you're sometimes at a disadvantage because you fall into this trap of thinking like, well, I can just do it or it's better if I do it. And then every single time I delegate just an outcome instead, it becomes so much better because of course it's better because of course people know better than me because of course they have different ideas than me.

And isn't this the whole point of sort of the sum being greater than our parts when we're 56 people? It's not just that there are 55 clones of one person. It's that they're all individual diverse people who bring different aspects to it. It's like the colors again, right? The magic for me was I took two inputs and I made a third. The magic when you take 56 inputs with some asterisks and moderations, not everything can be a committee, but that you get new novel outcomes that even surprise yourself. That's again, it's hard.

And the easiest thing to fall into, again, as someone who's built a company up is to think, well, I got it to this place. So like I know better and you just don't. The flip side I'll say is it's almost like you have to aggressively embrace your own ignorance while at the same time aggressively embrace your own certainty. intently certain about a variety of things and a variety of values and practices and approaches. And that intent and certainty sort of pushes a certain direction that actually gets people sort of marching towards a similar-ish goal, right? At the same time, I have to embrace that I could be wrong, right? That's always a possibility. I could be wrong about some of the things I'm uncertain about. And then I am definitely wrong about a bunch of things I don't even know anything

about, right? But it's not just like, well, I'm always like, sometimes people fall into this false modesty that, well, I'm just wrong about everything. I don't know anything. No, I don't think that's true. I think I know a lot of things. Like I've spent 20 years building things in this particular way. I know a lot of things about a few things, right? And I'm very dedicated to it. It doesn't mean you can't change your mind, right? Like one saying about this is strong opinions loosely held. But I kind of need that energy too. Because if everything is just like, I don't know, like everything is up. If everything is uncertain, if everything is just fuzzy, if everything is vague, we're not getting anywhere, right? You need both sort of fuzzy and outlined at the same time. And it's hard.

I mean, it's interesting because the way you're describing it is almost the way you would describe sort of like a dualistic spiritual practice, right? It's like, you've got to hold these two supposedly truths that are opposing each other simultaneously and the capacity to do that for an extended period of time. And I would also even add like when there are significant stakes on the line, like when you can do that, I think that is, that's where the magic happens. You know, and like you said, along the way, you're, you're giving the people that you've brought in to help manifest this outcome, a sense of autonomy and respect for their competence that like lets them step into a place of agency and probably do things that they would never have done had you prescribed the steps to get there. Totally. And then the last bit in that, you give them the autonomy, you give them the path to mastery,

and then you rally around a purpose. And that's where the certainty does come in. People who join Basecamp often, they feel uncertain. Like, can we do that? Are we supposed to do that and then one of the main things i can bring to the table is absolutely yes like we've done far crazier things we've we've worked with far fewer people sometimes you develop this self-consciousness i don't know if we're ready can we launch it doesn't have all the features it doesn't cover all the bases and

you're like dude let me tell you about what it was when we launched the first version of base camp that I wrote on 10 hours a week as the sole person who didn't actually know what the hell they were doing. And we set it up on a server where I was learning Linux. I had the book open next to me as I was entering the commands. Like, do you know what? I think we got this. And just exuding that confidence, not just from sort of blind faith, but from experience. You're drawing the confidence from experience. So that's where you're resting on the fact that like, hey, I did this for 20 years.

At least I have just some historical knowledge that these things are possible. And that's the gift that you can give at the same time. And then you got to let the creativity and autonomy and mastery go and do its magic. But if you're providing some purpose, if you're providing a direction, I think you're really giving a great gift there too as well. Yeah, I love that. No, such an important addition to it. Switching gears a little bit. So you've been here, you've built this incredible company, allows you to also create something

that's helping millions of people and at the same time view the company itself as a product and iterate around the ideas of what work is and isn't in a way that lets you then write and share ideas that are going out and touching millions more people who are rippling that into the companies that they're building. Along the way, you do this really interesting thing which is um you step into race car you know there's something in in you that says huh i want to get into a car that goes really really really fast partner with two other people and see what happens when we drive

for 24 straight hours you end end up competing in Le Mans, I guess for many, what, six, seven, eight years now? Eight times. I've done three. Right. Winning the category, at least once that I know of, 2014 for the Aston Martin team. So my bigger curiosity around this is what does that experience give you that makes you so fiercely committed to continuing to step into it and iterate on it and progress through it? Yeah, it's interesting. First I got to it, I think in part because I was good enough at the other stuff. By the time I started racing cars, I was good enough at programming.

As I said, I'm not interested in being the best programmer in the world. I'm not interested in being the best race car driver in the world. I'm not interested in being the best photographer, the best business owner, none of these things. I'm interested in getting into the top 5%, the top 1%. And I felt like at that point, 2007, I was a good enough programmer. So it didn't need all my thought capacity. I could spend some of it on something else. And in fact, as we were just talking about earlier, I would be better off if I did. I could spend some of it on something else. And in fact, as we were just talking about earlier,

I would be better off if I did. I'd be a more full-rounded individual if I had something else going on besides computers. So that was one part of it. The other part of it was I've just always liked fast things. Like I played video games, as I said, for a long time.

It was really what got me into computers. And then one of the prime categories of video games I would play was racing games. Got it. I'd play Gran Turismo. I'd play Metropolitan Street Racer on the Dreamcast. I'd play all these games. And I really liked racing, but I never had any opportunity to do it in real life because, hey, I was living in Denmark. Cars have like 220% tax. I lived in Copenhagen. You don't need a car. In fact, a car is kind of dumb in the city. So I never had this

opportunity. Then I come to the US, buy my first car at age 25, think, oh, it's kind of fun. Then two years later, a friend of mine take me to a racetrack and stick me in this race car. And it blew my mind in almost like a drug sense. You know where you take... Actually, I shouldn't say you know, because actually, I haven't really done a lot of drugs. But this is what I imagine what a drug sense, like a very intense drug experience is like from just the accounts that I've read is that it's just, it's so all consuming. Another sort of word for this is flow. In programming, I'd get these moments of flow, but I never was able to plan them. They'd just be these serendipitous moments where like, just the right problem, just the right frame of mind and boom, you're like, oh, where did three hours go? And I would imagine programming also that it probably takes months, if not years,

before you reach a place of confidence where you can really drop into it easily. Bingo. Absolutely. It takes such a buildup of mastery and it's such a delicate thing where you're just sort of sitting. Well, you're not just sitting there, you're programming, right? But most of the time when I'm programming, I'm not in a flow state. And then suddenly, boom, you get the flow state and you're like, whoa, this is amazing. And you look at sort of descriptions of flow. I never am able to pronounce his last name. I should learn it.

Csikszentmihalyi. There you go. That wasn't actually that hard. Csikszentmihalyi, his description of flow and not only the descriptions of flow, but its connection to happiness. Right. That most people, when they think of their happiest moments, they think of flow moments where they lose themselves into a pursuit that's just outside of their grasp where they have to actually learn and improve. So this is one of the key things I love about program, why I'm so wild about program. I get into this race car and flow is literally the turn of a key. I turn the key in the car.

Boom. I'm in a flow state because you turn of a key. I turn the key in the car, boom, I'm in a flow state. Because you're driving a race car, you're going, I don't know, 140 mile an hour. Flow is almost like a survival instinct. Because you need to focus your attention to such a degree, otherwise you will crash and burn and possibly die, right? Like it's a survival trigger. And I find that this is repeatable. Every single time I get in the car, I turn the key, boom, I'm in flow.

I'm going like, this is magic. I wish I had this magic key that I could turn in other areas of my life and get into this flow state. But hey, I found it here. I'm going to hold on to it. So for a very long time, every single time I'd step into a car,

I'd be in a flow state and it was addictive, just so addictive. And it's such a fascinating thing because racing is such a closed circuit. Literally, the circuit is closed. It goes from one end to the other. There's a number of turns and you're right back where you started. And there's a stopwatch that tells you how long it took. And the stopwatch might say it took 1 minute 47 seconds. And you go like, you know what? I can do better. I know that turn, that turn. All the refinements, all

these improvements as we were talking about, you can improve a company, you can tinker with it, you can learn something. These are all true in a microcosm of racing and the feedback loop is addictively instant. You do another lap. Well, that was 146.8. I just scored two tens on that run. And not only do you get that, you get to

compete against yourself. Then you get the same thing as I was talking about earlier, where when I was younger, I'd be 10 years old and I talked to someone who was 15 and learned a lot about computers. Race cars, they're all these experts and they're available and you can hire them. And you can see them. So the expert goes out in the car, the race car driver, the professional race car driver goes out in the car. I just did a 146.9. I'm really proud of myself. Goes out, does a 142. Go like, what? There's five seconds here? Where the hell is five seconds? How can I find that? And then you look at the data and you go and you, again, you internalize it and you start learning all these systems. You start

developing an eye. When I started driving racing cars, I wasn't sure what the difference between oversteer and understeer was. I had to look that up and I had to really study it. Understeer is when you can't steer and you literally go straight and you're going to hit a tree in a straight line. Oversteer is when the car's rotating around on you, right? Just learning the terms, learning sort of the friction circle, learning all these things. They're like, I'm learning a system. I'm learning computer here. I'm learning physics within an environment when I'm in the driver's seat, just like when I'm a programmer and I can program these things and I can do it more efficiently and I can do it more beautifully. There's a style to race car driving where you see someone who's developed an eye for for driving

and they'll see someone else driving like uh i don't know one of the great masters senna for example they just marvel at the aesthetics of the expression of race car driving so we've got the beauty thing again the beauty thing again and you go you go like, beauty is truth. Beauty is fast. The fluidity of the hands, the controlled motions, all of this. And I just go like, this is just such a fascinating domain. So I spent the next few years trying to go as fast as I could, both on the track and through the learning process. I would just do just enough racing in a certain category that I knew enough to jump to the next. And then I would just do just enough racing in a certain category that I knew enough to jump to the next. And then I kept just going. I never finished anything until I got to essentially the top level because I just got bored at the lower levels of racing. As soon as I was like, do you know what? I'm good enough. I'm not even winning yet. I'm just good enough to be competitive.

Boom. I can work to the next phase. This is like you, this is like 10 year old you hanging out with a 16 year old. It's like the repeating the cycle with every domain you say yes to. And this is the first, race car driving is the first domain where this is a conscious process, where I know the mechanism of learning. I know this, I got to develop an eye. I got to know that there's a system here. There are patterns. I can learn these patterns.

I have to seek out the people who are better than me. I have to be in a variety of different experiences. I have to be in different cars. I can't just be in the same thing. And I'm doing this in a very conscious way because I'd gone through it unconsciously with computers, with programming. Semi-unconsciously with photography. I arrive at race car driving. At this point, I'm 27.

I know how to learn. And I just go in very explicit, very focused on like, I'm going to learn enough to go to the greatest endurance race in the world and I'm going to compete. At this point, I didn't even say I was going to win. But like that was also sort of like unconsciously latent thing that like I wanted to do that. The other thing here was this sense of motivation. The best endurance race car driver in the world is a fellow Dane named Tom Christensen, who's won the 24 Hours of Le Mans more than any other-

Seven, eight times or something like that, right? I think nine times. Nine times, yeah. More than anyone else in the world who enthralled the nation, the nation of Denmark, going from like, they didn't give a damn about race car driving, really. He comes on the scene.

He starts just winning everything, right? All of a sudden, you get to the point where the 24 H hours of Le Mans something like 10% of the Danish population is watching the race at 2am in the morning you literally have

an entire nation sitting up at 2am in the morning to watch this endurance kind of an obscure thing right like most nations they don't care that much

about endurance racing but here you have this one guy Tom Christensen who's just motivating an entire nation to follow it and I just go there's some sense of permission there again where you go do you know what here's a Dane you have this one guy, Tom Christensen, who's just motivating an entire nation to follow it.

And I just go, there's some sense of permission there again, where you go, do you know what? Here's a Dane. He grew up in this flat country. If he can do it, I can do it, which of course makes no sense. We share nothing beyond a flag and nationality, but there was some inspiration in it. And it gave me a goal. It gave me the goal that I want to get to the 24 hours of Le Mans. I want to get in the grid. I want to get in a car like Tom Christensen. I want to get it in a Le Mans prototype, not just any car, a Le Mans prototype. And I want to be good at it. And I went through all of that and I got to the 24 hours of Le Mans in 2012. And right from the get-go, of course, I get totally hooked because we're competitive right out of the box, right? Somehow I ended up a great team, great teammates.

We lead the race for, I don't know, two or three hours. Then we didn't finish very well. We had four punctures, blah, blah. But I'm just like, I go, yes. So I have the process, start racing 2007, really put a lot into it. 2012, I'm on the grid. I'm getting my goal here. And I get enough of a taste of it like, hey, I could actually be good at this.

Within my category of, as they call it, gentleman driver, amateur driver, I can be good at this. I can be competitive. And I just sort of stuck with it. That's the other thing. I find with a lot of things that I'm not passionate about that many things. I'm passionate about a few things but quite intently so programming i've been doing that now for 20 years i don't want to stop this is great i can keep programming for another 20 years right photography is it's the fact that i learned

photography before i had kids and then i had these amazing subjects where i really wanted to capture the childhood was just i don't want to stop that i'm going to be doing photography until i'm 70 right race car driving, a little bit of the same thing. You just add something. And now I'm at this place where like, okay, the plate is kind of full, right? I can't be this good. That sounds such bragging, but I can't be this good at like 10 things. I can be pretty good at like three or four or five things. That's it. And just having that sort of sense that the appetite is full, I think, is also an important part of it. And also just that it's sequential.

I couldn't learn to be really good at programming, really good at race car driving, really good at photography within my sense of good. It's mostly a personal assessment at the same time. I had to do them sequentially a bit. Right. But then you can sustain them. As I said, with programming, what made space for race car driving was a little bit, I was good enough.

It's good enough. I'm going to keep getting better, just not at the rate I was getting better in the beginning versus I pick up a new domain like race car driving, I'll get better really a lot fast, right? And now it's at the same, now it's at the sustaining level again. I don't go to the track all the time.

I just go to the races that I go to and it's good enough and then I mean then the next thing is like hey now you make some a little more space and you make a little more time and you can focus on some other things yeah I mean it's such an interesting point also right that because I want to make sure that our listeners don't miss what you just said

which is that because I think there's a tendency these days to say, I love a whole bunch of different things and I'm, you know, I'm multi-passionate. I'm going to do them all. Right. So if, if your internal wiring is, is, is at a level where you're kind of like, you're good being like mediocre to like half decent at all these different things. Okay. Have at it. Much of the research that I've seen shows that that is not how the average human being flourishes. You know, we are wired towards progress, towards growth, and towards mastery at a certain point. And like you just said, we also, every person has a certain

amount of bandwidth that we have and it is what it is, right? So the idea that we can drill these 10 wells simultaneously and they'll all get drilled like to a point of beauty is total mythology. That doesn't mean that over the course of decades, you can't drill those 10 things, right? But you start with the one and you get to a point where it's extraordinary, right? And then, and then this is what I love, what you said, it's so much easier to sustain that level once you've hit it than it is to get there, that to kind of stay there-ish, you still have the bandwidth now to step aside and say, okay, so let me start to devote myself more to this other one. And I can kind of keep sustained in this other place. Yes. It's one of the funny things. So to do well in a race car, you have to be in relatively good physical shape. So I train with a trainer and trainers often have this thing of like, so what are your goals? What do you want to accomplish? How do you want to get bigger? And so on. And I had just been training for a number of years. And then I got a new trainer and he was like, oh, what are your goals? And like, want to accomplish? Like, how do you want to get bigger and so on? And I had just been training for a number of years.

And then I got a new trainer and he was like, oh, what are your goals? And like, I just want to stay where I am. And he was like, what? Like, where's your vision? Like, no, no, no. I'm at good enough. I'm at enough. Like, I just want to be fit enough.

I want to be in shape. I want to be able to drive my race car fast. I don't want the sort of my physicality to be a limiting factor here. But I've reached that point. I don't need to be an Olympic athlete here. So, for example, for working out, I don't like it, right? I'm not like I'm not I don't enjoy sort of working out. I do it in service of something else.

I do it in service primarily actually of race car driving, which is one of those things where I'm kind of afraid to stop racing because I think if I stop racing, I'll have zero motivation to actually be in decent shape. You put on 30 pounds. Yeah, exactly. I would be, I'm a little worried about that. But it's also one of those things where like, sometimes you can decide that like, I can just be mediocre. I'm an extremely mediocre athlete in sort of this general sense of physical proudness, right? Like I go to any gym where people have actually, I'm doing the CrossFit thing, right? And like there's a billion people who are better at CrossFit.

I mean, not literally, but almost. That CrossFit and me, I just don't care. I just need to get to good enough, right? And I've had that, I've hit that level with other things where i'm not even like that good take our business for example right we've done well financially but like i'm not i'm not making any forbes lists here but i'm good enough i don't need this business to grow i don't need to make more money like i can already do all the things i want to do so like i'm not going to put in more

energy there right like my energy is energy is finite resource. Let me put it into some racing. Let me put it into some photography. Let me put a tiny bit of it into some exercise. Let me put some of it into writing these other things. I'm not going to put it into like accumulation of money. Yeah, I love that. You referenced photography a bunch of times. Let's touch in on that a little bit because it does follow this similar pattern. You know, it's intensely growth oriented. You can do this and keep getting better and pursue getting better for the entirety of your life. Like there's no peeking out in this particular domain. And fundamentally, it's about beauty. It's about sort of like, but also, and maybe this is the thing that then if we really kind of get meta here, like ties a lot of this together, you know, like, and it goes back to our early earlier conversation around sight, you know, it is, and I found this I love photography also not as devout as you,

but what I found is that it's just when I'm in the mode where I'm a photographer, it changes the way your mind just moves throughout a given day because you become much more active in seeing the world around you. And I feel like you see beauty so much more than you ever saw it before in the smallest little things. And it's not even, it's almost like in the beginning, I feel like it's about capturing it. But the deeper thing is it's just about noticing it. It's beautifully said. And I think it's one of those fascinating domains where when I started in photography, I was like, well, I want to show that I'm getting good. I want to show the world.

I don't publish any of my photos anymore. All of it is for my own and my family's satisfaction of capturing our lives and noticing that beauty. And it is such a just rewarding thing to be in notice and in appreciation. I think that's really the other part of it. So I live out here in Malibu and I've lived here for on and off for about 10 years. And the sunsets are just amazing. Yeah. And I never get tired of it. Like, I've seen the sunset literally thousands of times, but it's always subtly different.

And I notice the subtle changes in color, and I remember, oh, wow, this is just such a... And that appreciation just of nature and being part of it, photography has absolutely helped influence that. The other key point you say, you touched a bit early on this sense of the dichotomy or conflicting notions where Eastern philosophy and Western philosophy are quite different. One of the similar ways in which it's different is this sense of whether you're capturing or appreciating if to a sort of a western approach of things like oh well i see a beautiful flower let me pick it and then i can put it in a vase and it'll die and a more sort of eastern approach is like i see a beautiful flower let me go up to it and let me just look at it

and like my capture which is even the wrong language the appreciation is just in like it's a thing that is and i'm a thing that is and i'm looking at it and like that's the magic right there and it doesn't need to be anything else and photography really accentuates that and it doubles down on it and you just you start things things like wow the light is beautiful you're like i didn't know that light had beauty in it before i started taking pictures before i started caring about photography that like the different the warmth of the light that could have like a special effect like even one of the first things you learn in photography is the magic hour if you want to take sort of a flattering portrait you should take it like about an hour before the sun sets because this is where it's most flattering. And it's all about

those tones. And you learn the language, you develop the eye and it's almost, well, it's literally the incarnation of the metaphor of developing your eye. You literally see things you did not see before. You can look at the, a photographer who's sort of trained in all these things will look at the same environment and see different things, appreciate more detail, have a higher resolution of the literal world, which to me is just an amazing life skill in and of itself. Yeah, I so agree with that. I wonder why some sort of experience that puts a person into the role of actively observing and seeing more of the world around them isn't a part of just like every kid's education, whether it's photography or art training. And I think artists generally, they do get that training really young. Most people don't. I feel like it just leaves us in a weird way disabled to actually live and enjoy life to its fullest.

It's one of those things where having gone through all this to the point where, as we talked about, I don't care what things cost. I have an extremely materially comfortable life. And then you come to the realization at some point that, okay, it's enough. I can't get any more satisfaction out of this. I thought I could, right? Because that's what the entire sort of pressure of society is about. They're like, oh, you can get more and you can buy more and you can do all these things. Then you get to the point where you've done all of it. Literally you're done. You're like, I'm out of ideas. Like what the hell am I going to spend my money on? I'm out of ideas.

You start realizing that like, okay, all this is done. And I'm just looking at the sunset. I'm like, this was here all the time. And like, it beats so much of all this other stuff. I wrote this up a couple of years back in an article called When I First Became a Millionaire. And it focused in on this, as I said, even a kid growing up in Denmark, not being overtly aware of class and poverty and so on. There was still the magic of like, oh, you become a millionaire. This is just a magic moment, right? And to me, it was in large sense a disappointment because I thought like something magic was going to happen once I could sort of buy some more stuff. And it just, it didn't, right?

Not that good stuff isn't nice. It's very nice. And I have a lot of nice stuff and I appreciate it all. And there's a lot of beauty in all of it. There's a lot of craftsmanship and artisanship and so on. But it's very second. It's a great second, but it's such a distant second to all these other you know what, I would give it all. Like it's not even – even the consideration is a post-rationalization. It wouldn't even be – because I would throw all of it out, a second, all of it for just – for them to be able to flourish, right? And once you start really living that experience of, for example, seeing your kids or just seeing a sunset, something more mundane like that, you start putting things in a perspective that is very healthy, but also it's hard, right?

Because I remember as I wrote about this article, it's like, you hear this, oh, money is not the most important things in your life. And you go like, yeah, easy for you to say, asshole, right? It's one of those things that it can't be true for you until you experience it, which I find profoundly sad that you can sit with the lesson. I can tell you the lesson and you're like, I still can't communicate it. You still can't get it because it's one of those experiential truths that until you realize it yourself, and I mean, it's not like everyone has to sort of become a millionaire to realize that

some people do arrive at that epiphany on their own most don't most live in the fog thinking like oh man all my wildest dreams would come true if i have this material bliss and it's just not true and i'm sitting there thinking like man i wish i could tell you i'm trying to tell you but like words can't communicate this yeah you. You know what I mean? I think the inciting incident for the vast majority of people, um, is not wealth. Um, it's health, you know, it's the moment where they've been working and they've got all this good stuff. Like they've got status and stuff and all this stuff and they get the diagnosis, you know, and it's that sense of, oh, so I've now been reminded of my own impermanence in a profound and very real and visceral way. And it drops people into that place of, it drops them into the existential crisis. crisis where saying, okay, so now if I actually have a stronger sense that I may have a very limited time here, or that I am susceptible to things I didn't think that I was, like I am no

longer in the invincible part of my life, maybe I really need to explore this. And I've seen that happen. I'm sure you've seen, like everyone listening has seen that happen. Maybe it's happened to you. The curiosity of mine around that particular inciting incident is that invariably you get three, six months away from the pain of the incident. And if it's resolved enough, almost everybody reverts to the same choices and behaviors they made before. So one of my enduring curiosities has always been, how do we not, like, if we are fortunate enough to be brought to our knees on a level that allows us to reconnect with that sense of what matters and then continue on, how do we not lose it? This is why I'm such a passionate reader of Stoicism. If there's one driving lesson in Stoicism, it is remember death, memento mori, that life is short

and that most people on the last day regret how they spend it. But you don't have to. You can start earlier. And this is all the practical mind hacks and techniques and whatever there are in Stoicism. They're all about that. They're all about remembering that life is short and at the end, almost none of it matters.

There is the longitudinal study. I think it was Harvard that had it on like 100 years. Yeah, grand study for men. Exactly. What was the conclusion? It was the banal, trite conclusion of a greeting card that what really matters in life is family and connections to other people. Love, full stop. And you go like, here's all this regression analysis and 100 years and like it basically boils down to a greeting card, right?

Like what's on a greeting card? And you go, this is one of those things where sometimes the hardest truths are the simplest truths because you do not believe them. You cannot internalize them. You cannot live them until they're you. I had this myself about seven years ago. I had a health scare. I was in the hospital for three days. And it was bad enough that I was in the most excruciating pain I've ever been in my life, where the pain alone was enough to think,

you know what, if this is what it's going to be, it's not worth it. And just the whole experience, the uncertainty, we didn't know what it was, the uncertainty for several days thinking like, I don't know what it is, was enough to give that sense of like, you know what, this might be it. I might be laying here right now and I'm not getting out of it. And what was interesting was prior to that i'd already been reading some stoicism i already knew these things in my intellectual mind but it was that experience that moved it from the intellectual self to sort of the the emotional self and like oh i get it i get it at a different level and it's one of those things where modern

interpretations of stoicism often focus on uh on these accounts of people who've gotten cancer or whatever, where they say, this is the best thing that ever happened to me. The best thing that ever happened to me was that I almost died. Because that was the one lesson that really taught me just like what matters and what doesn't matter. And I mean, isn't that tragic that we have to get that close to the end to really realize it? And isn't it even more tragic that most people don't get that close to the end before it really is the end? They're 72, they're laying there and whatever, the health complications and they go like, shit, I misspent it. I misspent my time. And I think that fear is probably one of the only fears I have, that I misspent my time. And not in sort of this greedy way that all my waking minutes have to be spent amazingly. But there's some balance, there's some calm. I have three kids, a seven-year-old, a four-year-old, and a newborn.

I don't want to get, it's very real once you have kids in a way that I didn't fully appreciate before. Like 10 years from now, they're not, the opportunity is gone. Right? I spent the next 10 years not being there. I'm not getting that back. Right? Like once my oldest is 17, he's going to have his own life. I had my own life at 17. I didn't see my parents in the same light.

We didn't have the same connection after that, right? So I have this time right now. And if I misspend it, it is gone. So one of the reasons I keep rereading the manual, it is a, I think, 60-page book by Epictetus that summarizes all of the Stoic philosophy into a thing that could be read in 45 minutes. And it's not enough. If you just read it on its own, it's a profound book. If you read it after you've read all the other Stoicism stuff, it's extremely profound because it contains all the reminders that you need on a continuous basis. That's why I try to read it at least once a year because it reminds you about all these things we've just talked about, just how short life is, how you need to approach it. And again, it's full of things I already know, but I need to be told over and over again. And I think these are the kinds of lessons that I've really started to become more interested in.

The kinds of lessons that aren't just like profound in their initial exposure where you go like, whoa, my mind is blown because I learned this thing. No, they're profound because you need constant reminders because you constantly regress. And if you don't hold on to it, you will have lost it. Like you say, you lose the gift that was a close brush with death in five years if nothing bad happened. Yeah. So this feels like a good place for us to start to come full circle too. As we're talking about the wide swath of what matters in life and the container of this good life project, if I offer up this phrase container of this good life project. If I offer up this phrase to live a good life, what comes up for you?

To spend the time well. I think it's a good sense of it is that it literally is about how you spend the time. And this is why I'm so fascinated with time. I mean, even obsessed to some point, why we're so, but the 40 hour work week, why is that such a thing? What does it matter if it the last day is one of those missions that's incredibly hard. Even when you're focused on it, even when you have it in mind, right? I think back and go like, man, that last week, I didn't live up to that. I didn't spend my time well. Like if that was the last week, I would have gone like, meh, that was a bit of a miss.

So keeping that constantly in mind, the way to have a good life is to spend your time well. It's again, it's banal to the point of almost a greeting card again. And it's one of those things, it really is hard to communicate. And this is one of the other things that I've learned. I used to think the way to learn is just like, I'll read a book. I'll just, I learned the facts. And I've come to the realization that many of the most profound lessons, I just can't learn that way. I have to put myself in situations or otherwise expose myself to things that are going to get it under the skin, into the skull, not on top.

In racing, you often talk about if the car's not right, you're on top of the road. If the car's right, you're into the road. That. If the car's right, you're into the road. That's how I think about a lot of lessons. Like, if I've really learned something, it's into the skull. It's not on top of the skull. It's not just swimming on up there. It's like, it's in there. I am it. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life?

We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love.

If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need them. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.