The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 117: Tim Urban – Using Procrastination to Perform A Ted Talk & Befriend Elon Musk

Starting point is 00:00:00 Everyone feels like a fraud. No one is actually that awesome at anything. I mean, it's like, you know, and so I'm there with all these people who are much more experienced speakers, a lot of them. Or just rat are people like the founder of Airbnb or the guy who discovered the largest known dinosaur or someone who's, you know, done, you know, 2,000 talks. And you find out that they are just as nervous because they're just people too and they're all insecure also. And it's just nice to be able to remind yourself of that so that you don't get in your own head. about being insecure when it really doesn't, it's not actually based on reality to be, you know, to feel that way.

Starting point is 00:00:36 Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders. Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk. Hey, everyone, it's Ryan. I wanted to make a quick announcement. A number of you had sent me.

Starting point is 00:01:07 emails in regards to asking for a place to further this dialogue with like-minded people, other listeners, fans, and friends of the Learning Leader show. So I set up a group on Facebook. It's Facebook.com slash groups slash learning leader. It's a closed group, but if you'd like an invite, simply shoot me a quick note and I'd be happy to bring you into the group. This is a place where we can freely communicate and discuss leadership, learning, creative ideas, podcasting and new and innovative ways of thinking a place where we could potentially argue a little

Starting point is 00:01:40 bit, have an open mind and have constructive dialogue. I've loved the early response from the people who are already in the group, but simply send me a note. I'll add you to it. I look forward to talking with more of you very soon. Hey, and welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Wow, what a featured leader tonight. It's with Tim Urban. Tim has become one of the Internet's most popular writers. He both writes and illustrates at wait but why.com. Topics ranging from procrastination to artificial intelligence and many in between. His website receives millions of unique page views per month and he has famous fans all over the world like Elon Musk's. Fast Company said, Wait But Why has captured a level of reader engagement that even the new media giants would be

Starting point is 00:02:34 envious of. A few of the topics we got into. Tim says, Look at your life like a blank canvas. Notice that it's white. Most people are just simply painting white on top of that canvas, meaning you don't even see them. You don't even recognize them. You don't realize they're doing anything. They're not leaving their mark.

Starting point is 00:02:54 The true originals of the world are willing to paint blue and red and purple and green and pink and all different colors on that canvas because they're willing to stick out. They're willing to try and leave their mark. He urges all of us to do that. And then we talk about the process for him being asked to speak at the one and only TED conference and Vancouver this year. And you can go check out the speech. It was incredible, but I loved learning how scared and nervous he was to give that talk. And then to see him do it simply mind-blowing.

Starting point is 00:03:27 And then there was a time with about a year and a half ago that Elon Musk was reading his sight, wait, but why. I loved what he was reading and decided to place a phone call and speak to Tim. And to hear that story and to all of the conversations that Tim and Elon had along the way, absolutely loved it. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it's Tim Urban. Tim, it's an absolute thrill for me to have you here on the Learning Leader Show. So first, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. And I got a question to get us rolling, and that's around leaders and people that you,

Starting point is 00:04:14 spent time around who have been able to sustain excellence over an extended period of time. What are some of the characteristics that you found that those people all seem to share? Yeah. So they're all very different, you know, of course. It's definitely not kind of helpful for someone to try to define, you know, what is leadership, what makes leadership? because leadership is such a complicated, vague, and, you know, broad concept. But I'm just, you know, thinking through some different kinds of, you know, leaders that I look up to or that I followed. And the key word there is, you know, sustained amount of time.

Starting point is 00:04:59 I know, how can people stay relevant for five, ten, twenty years and continue to lead? And I think that, you know, if you want to boil leadership down, you know, it comes down to two, kind of doing something or having a voice or actions that, uh, that can kind of make a splash that can kind of, uh, shake things up or, or,

Starting point is 00:05:23 or, you know, in a way that, uh, changes what other people do. And, uh, that,

Starting point is 00:05:29 you know, either other people will actively follow or just without realizing if they'll be affected by it. It's kind of like the impact, I feel like the level of impact you make is, is, is, is,

Starting point is 00:05:38 is, is, is, is the metric for, you, you know, what kind of leadership you're providing. And so to continue to make impact, the point is, you know, impact usually happens because it's something different than what is normal.

Starting point is 00:05:51 I like to kind of compare life in a lot of ways to like a canvas. And you can kind of say if it's a white canvas, most people are painting in white, which means they're kind of contributing, but not really. They're not changing it. They're part of it, but they're not really when they paint white on white, nothing is really different about it. And that's normal. That's most of us most of the time. And then it's when someone can kind of be outside of the status quo and they can kind of do something that the conventional wisdom suggests is wrong. But it happens to actually not be wrong.

Starting point is 00:06:25 And they're painting a different color. And that shakes things up. Sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it leads to spectacular failures. But often, if it goes well, it can suddenly, okay, that whole part of the canvas is now a different thing. Now everyone's painting a different color on that side of the canvas. So this is a long way of saying that. If you want to sustain that concept, and so you start painting a blue on the canvas by, you know, doing something new.

Starting point is 00:06:49 Classic example you can bring up always is Steve Jobs. You know, everyone's doing, you know, the head of IBM is saying there will never be a personal computer in someone's home. That's not, no, and not something that will happen. That was a landscape. That was a normal thing to say in the 70s. And, you know, Steve Jobs comes out, you know, with stuff and Wozniak. They come out with something like the Macintosh. Okay, that's major leadership.

Starting point is 00:07:12 Suddenly all these companies are scrambling to try to do stuff like that. People are buying it. Completely impacts the world. So, you know, suddenly he's painting in blue on a white canvas. Okay. But now, if he just keeps painting in blue, he kind of loses his ability to continue to lead. He kind of, you know, becomes part of the canvas. So if you want to sustain and continue to lead and continue, you have to keep reinventing yourself.

Starting point is 00:07:34 And you have to keep, which requires an element of humility, I think. So I think a lot of the leaders, no, not that's. Steve Jobs wasn't exactly a humble person. But I think you're someone like Seth Godin, you know, is definitely an influence of mine. I look up to him as a really wise person. And if you look at, you know, he is constantly searching. He's constantly rethinking his own thoughts and reinventing himself and, you know, writing books with new concepts in them that he's thought up recently. That's someone who's continuing to do the hard work of continuing to try to be original,

Starting point is 00:08:08 even in the landscape of their previous own work. And so the Steve Jobs comes into that because then he suddenly says, okay, well, how about music and rent the iPod? How about phones? How about tablets? I mean, that's why Apple stock went so crazy because they kept leading. They kept painting in a new color that no one expected. So I think that that's maybe the quality I would say I see the most is the ability to stay hungry

Starting point is 00:08:35 as the Apple kind of slogan goes. and to kind of continue to say, well, okay, but now how can I reinnovate beyond myself again? I think that's kind of the quality I would say I see most often. Wow, what a thoughtful and insightful response. I really, I really appreciate that, Tim. How do you, you obviously have given that a lot of thought, how do you try to embody those characteristics so that you can sustain excellence, so that you can constantly evolve and search?

Starting point is 00:09:06 And as Seth Godin would say, and he was great on my podcast. podcast talking about the fact that he's spent so many years noticing things, and that's all he writes about. And I love that simplistic view because it's hard, but simple. How do you, how do you try to do that? Yeah. Well, one thing I have going in my favor is just writing wait, but why, the topics vary considerably. And so I, and I get to kind of almost reinvent what I'm doing every couple weeks. And so the medium stays the same, at least right now. There's long form illustrated blog posts. Okay, so that's the medium. But if I'm writing something about why we care so much what other people think of us, and I have to kind of get into that zone,

Starting point is 00:09:58 think really hard about that. And then when I start to be finally comfortable with that, because I thought about it and I've written about it, and now I feel like, okay, I know what I think about that. I've changed topics to artificial intelligence, and I'm back on ground zero, and I'm back on the bottom of the mountain, and I have to go and climb up the mountain again. I'm learning, and when I finally conquer that mountain, I pop to the bottom of the mountain again for the next topic. So that, I think, is a healthy, sometimes it can be a little bit grueling, but it's a healthy system for me in that it continues to force me to kind of start with the blank I have no choice but to be humble because I'm in, I start every topic, not knowing anything about what I think about it or what the deal is with it.

Starting point is 00:10:42 So at least for me, that helps me to continue to stay, stay, kind of keep it fresh and not to get too comfortable and not to get into a rut with what I, you know, like I, I see, you know, an example is I see, you know, Louis C.K. has this, you know, one of my favorite comics, a lot. not alone there. And he has this policy that he does a new every year he does a new hour of stand-up, fresh new hour of stand-up,

Starting point is 00:11:13 which is really unusual in the comedy world. I went and saw Seinfeld in like 19, or maybe it was like 2003, and then I saw him again in like 2013. It was about exactly

Starting point is 00:11:24 10 years apart. And it was incredible how much of the set was the same. I mean, the intonation, and, you know, it's great both times,

Starting point is 00:11:32 but Louis doing, what he's doing, in my opinion, it allows him to continue to be like a real thought leader because comedians are thought leaders and allows him to continue to, you know, to sustain in a way that I think is harder for Seinfeld. So for me, having to do the new blog posts every time, I can't get into the Seinfeld zone. I can't get comfortable with one thing and just start doing it again and again. And so for me, at least, that's helpful. For the people who have not heard of you, Tim, how would you describe what you do in about 30 seconds? Sure. So I write the blog, Wait But Why, Full Time, and it's evolved in what it is over the two and a half years since I started it. I started it with a business partner, Andrew Finn, who is running our previous thing while I do this, kind of a weird arrangement. But anyway, I try to just get to the bottom of every topic I take on. So if I take on a new topic, if I need to research for a while, I will. If I need to think about it for a full week, I will. In order to try to really,

Starting point is 00:12:33 get my head around the full topic and then I write as long as I need to, to express that information. So sometimes the posts get really long. But then I try to also keep it light with illustrations and colloquial language so that it's something I would want to read and something that wouldn't bore me. That's kind of my starting place. How do you decide what to write about? What's your process there? So it reminds me a little of what you said, Seth Godin said, about noticing things. I mean, it kind of comes from life. Like, when you're out in the world, you have conversation. And it's so when you, when you start blogging, it's funny because you start realizing that your whole lens now is, would this make a good blog post? Would this make

Starting point is 00:13:15 a good blog post? Everything. And once you have that lens on and you get in the habit of writing down every time you have a thought, ooh, that could be good. Suddenly, you end up with this document that's 500 topics long. And that's where I am. So it's not, it doesn't take any kind of crazy ingenuity to end up with a huge list of potentially good topics. It just takes the habit of writing down a potentially good topic when it comes up in conversation, when it comes up as a thought in your head, when it comes up in a movie you're watching, whatever it is. And so anyway, I end up with this big list. And then for each new topic, I look through the list. I usually don't plan very far ahead. I think, what am I not sick of right now? If I just did a big research he post, I don't want to do

Starting point is 00:13:58 research anymore. I don't want to write, I don't want to be a big list of sources at the end of this next article. I want to do an article that I can just think, or I want to do something light. If I've been really heavy and kind of dark, I want to lighten it up and just do something kind of fun. So I try to mix it up and just kind of, you know, kind of get a feel for what I'm in the mood to do. And then I pick from that big list. Like seven ways to be insufferable on Facebook. Yes, that was the very first post and that was a get attention post. That was a, hey, I'm anonymous. This is an unknown blog. Someone notice it post. And my headlines, I'm proud to say, have gotten a little, little bit less clickbaity since then. Because I try to kind of have

Starting point is 00:14:45 weight, but why be like the anti short, you know, super short form, super clickbaity stuff. But sometimes it's tempting with headlines to go there. That worked. And you got a ton of response from readers, you know, if you just measure it based on comments, which is one of the things I did in preparation for our time together was to go through all of the posts in your archive and kind of look at which ones seem to elicit a lot of comments from fans and readers, and that's one of them. And I obviously read it, and it's really funny. I think that's the thing that I wanted to bring up next was the fact that you have, I think humor, when done right, it's seems so easy and smooth and just like flawless.

Starting point is 00:15:30 But then the people who aren't good at it and try, it's, it's so painful. It's awful. And you mix in incredible humor with the written word plus the illustrations that are, you know, stick figure type drawings that I wanted to learn about. What is your, where does this humor come from when it comes to writing plus the, the illustrating of your post? Yeah, so yeah, I'm rarely kind of writing when I try to write like a comedy post. There's a couple that I'm like, okay, this post is the intent is to just basically make people laugh.

Starting point is 00:16:09 But most of the time, it's more of a spectrum where on one side you'll have a post that's almost not, you know, entirely serious. And the other side you're a post that's very light and I'm kind of joking a lot. But really, they're usually some, it's some mixture. and if there's something that's funny in a blog post, it's not usually planned. It honestly depends on my mood as I'm writing. Like if I'm writing and I'm in a kind of serious mood about what I'm writing or I'm caffeinated or depending on what's going on, I will sometimes not really be in the mood to be joking in the writing.

Starting point is 00:16:45 And I will really want to be getting a point across and, you know, if I'm emotional in some way when I'm writing out, that will end up coming through. And then the times when the writing is funnier is when I happen to be in kind of an irreverent mood, that's the mood that will bring out the funnier writing is when I'm kind of, I just want to make, if I'm in a certain mood like that, everything is to be made fun of. Myself, the topic, the famous people I'm writing about, the ancient people I'm writing about, whatever it is, every single thing is suddenly, I'm viewing it through the lens of why is this hilarious. Why are these people taking themselves too seriously?

Starting point is 00:17:23 Why am I, like, an object of ridicule right now? And so it kind of just comes through, and it can really happen in any topic, I guess, is the point. Like, whatever the topic is, whatever the part of the post is, if I'm in that mood when I'm writing it, like, I will be more likely to be kind of trying to be, you know, poke fun at the situation. And the problem can arise if I start writing a section. in one mood, and I go to bed the next day, totally different mood. And I start reading this, I'm like, oh, God, why am I being so serious?

Starting point is 00:17:58 And suddenly I want to go rewrite the first part. So you have to be careful with the long post when you're in a bunch of different moods throughout that post when you were writing it. And then as far as the stick drawings go, those are almost always in the vein of poking fun at stuff. Partially, when you're a bad artist,

Starting point is 00:18:17 you don't really have any other option. If I try to draw something like really serious, like I can do a serious diagram or chart, but if I'm trying to draw like stick figures and it has in a serious, it makes no sense. It would be like trying to illustrate some serious thing with like Sesame Street characters. Like you're, there's an inherent tongue and cheek like absurdity, no matter what you're talking about if you're, if you're doing very badly, like low grade drawn stick figures. So those to me are, you know, some, you know, um, some, you know, humor enhancer, you know, and if I'll often, as I'm, you know, drawing, if I think something's

Starting point is 00:18:55 kind of funny, my head will go to that immediate spot, wait, is there a drawing that could be added here? Or could a drawing do the work of what I'm about to say? And if the answer is yes, usually I find that to be a good move purely because I would like that if I were the reader, I would rather have a funny drawing here than not. And I'd rather have a funny drawing than and then two paragraphs of funny writing. That's just my preference. So I try to bring in drawings whenever I can. But, you know, there's no formula to when they come in or when they wouldn't.

Starting point is 00:19:26 Absolutely. I got you. Tim, I think a lot of people, there are a lot of, as you know, I think you could look at the stats. There's millions and millions of people who have started a website or a blog. But very few, and there may be others, but I have. I haven't seen others that have a combination of these few things that I'm about to say. So obviously millions of unique hits a month and then 3,980 people who pay you $12,985 per month in total to write on wait but why.com. And you can do that by becoming a patron.

Starting point is 00:20:11 And I was digging into your site and learning this. I was just blown away to see that you're, you know, you guys asked in order to keep this thing going for people just to become a patron and they can give as little as $1 per month on a regular basis so that you guys can keep it going. But talk to me about the process for from running your business in that regard that it's to say, hey, we're going to work incredibly hard to create really high quality blog post. And here's one way that we want to keep the lights on, so to speak. Yeah. Well, so I mean, I think there's two ways to think about, I mean, first of all, the most common question that I get about wait, but why is like, so do you make money? Like, how do you, because people are trying to figure out like whether this is like a cool thing I'm doing or whether they're like, oh, God, like this poor guy is trying to make a living. They're trying to like figure out how to judge me basically when they ask that question. And so I've gotten used to kind of talking about how a blog makes money. And I think there's two. two buckets of discussion here. I mean, the first bucket is, how do you keep the lights on? How do you keep the runway long so that you can just do your thing and, like, figure out the long-term plan later?

Starting point is 00:21:31 And you have to do that because there's my salary. The site upkeep is more than, you know, people think. There's just hosting, when you have a, you know, a lot of traffic. There's hosting. there's, you know, we want to send an email out to a few hundred thousand people. Like that, that's a pretty expensive service once you have that size of a list. There's stuff going wrong with the site. There's always some kind of glitch.

Starting point is 00:21:55 Every day there's something going wrong. I get an email saying this page isn't working or the text is distorted or the social buttons are covering up the text. There's so many things that go wrong. That costs money. You know, on Facebook, the best, you know, we do very little marketing. thinking and marketing spending. But one of the ways that's just really helped us early on

Starting point is 00:22:18 is by just paying some money on Facebook to get your post, not to go to the strangers, just to go to the people who have already liked the page. People who have said, yeah, who said,

Starting point is 00:22:29 I want to see this. Just to get it to those, to half of those people, you have to pay money. You know, you can complain, but like, I'm paying.

Starting point is 00:22:38 So it's obviously not like, Facebook has not being dumb because it's worth it to me to pay. So between all that stuff and my salary, you know, it quickly adds up to, you know, that's not a small amount. That's not a trivial amount of money. We need to, you can't, I can't be sucking that off of my other business. And I'm not going to, I don't, of course, don't have the savings to kind of go through that. So, you know, you pretty quickly need something that can say, you know, that can allow this to go on at least for a while. So for me, that Patreon was a total godsend. I mean, we have a store, sell T-shirts and stuffed animals and

Starting point is 00:23:10 posters, and that's fine, and that's been good, and that's covered a decent amount of it. But Patreon was a whole different level. It's just, yeah, I like Patreon has been an incredible godsend, and it's not, you know, Patreon itself is a cool site, but the godsend has been the, like, you know, like you said, almost 4,000 people who have said, yeah, sure, I'll give, I'll give a buck or five bucks a month to this. It seems like a small thing, you know, to that person, but it adds up to this complete game changer for way but why.

Starting point is 00:23:38 Like because of that, it's suddenly like, okay, building a new wait but why, like a better one that's more interactive. Okay, that's a possibility now. I desperately needed an employee to someone to talk about translation requests and redistribution requests and, you know, to schedule stuff that's happening and, you know, respond to some, you know, some of the reader emails that I can't get to. And to maintain the store to deal with the site glitches, that stuff was taking up so much more of my time than writing. I didn't have time for writing because of all that stuff. So I needed an employee. Suddenly because of Patreon, I now have an employee. There's a full-time person now working for Wayford-Wye who's incredible and has been solely paid.

Starting point is 00:24:25 Her salary is paid entirely by a patron. So that is kind of the first bucket. And Patreon plus the store is solving the problem for us. Now, of course, that's really fortunate to have enough readers that that's possible. I think it's a challenge. This is the really hard part at first when there's not that the readers yet figuring out how to stay afloat. Most people do it by just writing part-time. They have a full-time job or they bartender or some part-time job to pay the bills, and then they write.

Starting point is 00:24:52 For most situations, that's going to be the way to do it. And the really fortunate situation I was in was because there was the other company, I was able to go full-time right from the beginning. But the second bucket, I would say, is once you have the longer runway and you're doing your thing, you can start to then think creatively about, you know, is there some kind of revenue model that can be brought in here in a long-term sustainable way that's not going to impede on the integrity of the content and the brand and is not going to make you self-loathing that you're doing? It's not going to make readers lose respect for you and for what you're doing and for the brand. And that, you know, we haven't figured that out yet. And but we have the luxury now taking our time.

Starting point is 00:25:35 The last thing you ever want to do is be forced to set up a revenue model to make money off of, you know, your readers in a way that you're not comfortable with. It's a terrible feeling. And it like, you know, it's like soul crushing to violate your own integrity and your brand's integrity because you need to for money. And so, you know, we're fortunate to not have to do that. And we're going to take our time. And, you know, maybe it's start, you know, putting out compilations of posts into a book. So I don't know. Maybe you find a service that, you know, that Andrew and I happen to actually love, you know, truly that we would tell our friends about.

Starting point is 00:26:14 And you can market that to readers and be up front and open to readers about how we have a partnership with them and we'll make some money if you, if you purchase this thing. But we would only recommend it if we recommend it to our friends. So that's the kind of, you know, authentic. and true to the brand revenue models that we're trying to think about as we move forward. But we haven't quite come up with any of them yet. And one of the, I think, I'm guessing you would say cool things that have happened based because of Wait, But Why, and your writing and the fans you've amassed is the fact that the people at TED came to you and asked you to speak at the TED conference, the one.

Starting point is 00:26:55 There's a ton of TEDx conferences all over the world. going on all the time, but there's only actually, I don't know if everyone knows this, there's only one TED event per year. And earlier this year, you were asked to speak and did, and right now, if you go on, it was just released very recently, so it has hardly been online for that long, and it's already got over 1.5 million views. It's basically gone viral. It's incredible.

Starting point is 00:27:20 It's a great talk. And, you know, especially talking about procrastination, you wrote a great post about how you prepared for it and some of the struggles and how scary. you were and I love to how just open and honest you were. I'd love to hear how did the whole process start from you being this guy

Starting point is 00:27:39 who writes phenomenal post has a lot of fans and then all of a sudden you're on the main stage at TED. How did that happen? Yeah, so I'm just like shuddering hearing you describe this. So I

Starting point is 00:27:59 I think it started when I got an email from Chris Anderson, who actually it started when we got a really nice, really generous donation from Chris Anderson, who's the owner of Ted and the curator. He's the, you know, very heavily involved. You know, the main TED stage has the people it has on it every year because Chris and his team, but, you know, he's in charge, you know, went out and kind of sought out those people or filtered through lots of applications and chose those people. So Chris gave a nice donation to Wait But Why, which was super exciting because I was like, oh, Chris Anderson's aware of Wait But Why? And so, you know, I emailed him back and he wrote back and said he's been reading the stuff and he likes it. And we went back and forth a little and, you know, he ended up saying, let's let's, you know, we should talk about potential for, you know, you're doing a TED talk. Why don't we go get dinner? So we went and got dinner one night and was great. I mean, he's he's like my exact just type of guy. He thinks about all the things that I think about. And, and. is interested in all the same things. And of course, you know, his job is the best job in the world. He just gets to go and, like, you know, find people who are doing things he likes and talk to them and get them to come and, you know, try to try their best to give the talk of their life.

Starting point is 00:29:10 And it's not his problem. He gets to sit back and just watch them all scramble to do it. But so anyway, we had a great time and, you know, we didn't come out with a topic, but he kind of said, look, let's have you get on the stage this year. And I was just like, oh, you know, I was so hoping he would say, you know, let's maybe 2017, 2018, Lou. We'll get you in one of those. And I could say, okay, great.

Starting point is 00:29:30 That's going to be a problem for some other Tim way down the road. But it's also kind of maybe going to happen. So I can be excited about it. I don't have to actually deal with it. Perfect. Instead, he said, let's do it this year, which was only six months away. And, you know, even that, the good news was still not really me. Like six months away, Tim is a pretty different Tim.

Starting point is 00:29:51 So it was okay. But it was much more stressful. And I kind of said, you know, I kind of left and said, this is going to actually happen. Like six months is going to go by, and I'm going to be standing on the stage saying something. I don't know how to do that. B, I don't know what I'm going to say.

Starting point is 00:30:08 So, yeah, so I started kind of thinking about it, and he kind of, you know, we talked about a couple potential topics. You know, one of them was talk, you know, the Fermi paradox, which I wrote a post on about why we haven't seen evidence of alien life. Really interesting topic. And he liked my post on it and thought maybe that could be a good talk. I had been doing a talk on artificial intelligence that started with like an intro about the fact that the time we're living in now, 2016, is just a total anomaly. The entire era we're living in now is nothing to do with what human history has been like and that everything we think is normal is not.

Starting point is 00:30:47 And I kind of thought that could be expanded into a talk. And then another obvious potential was procrastination just because it was a topic that would have, I wrote about it, it really resonated with readers. I got a lot of emails about it. I think it can be, a lot of people can connect to it different kinds of people from all different kind of ages and different backgrounds. You know, it really affects a lot of people. And I, in particular, it's one of the few things I feel like an expert on. I'm not an expert on anything I write about, but I know what it feels like to be a procrastinator really, really well. So that one was, you know, is a typical kind of inexperienced speaker and I'm kind of new to even anyone caring what

Starting point is 00:31:25 I have to say about anything. I'm very insecure about giving a TED talk and thinking, why am I giving this particular talk? There's experts on this. So procrastination was appealing in that. I'm like, no, you know what? I'm as good a person as any to just talk about the experience, not the solution. Those are, you know, the psychologist who did that, but this is the experience being a procrastinator. So I, in typical form, procrastinated on making that decision for a while until, you know, two months before he kind of was like, hey, Tim, we're kind of waiting on you. like we were trying to schedule this, you know, arrange the order of speakers and we really need to know your topic, any thoughts. And so I finally wrote back instead of, you know, being a typical

Starting point is 00:32:03 indecisive. I wrote, I wrote him like three potential topics and kind of outlined them. And then he helped me by just being decisive. And it was like, I like procrastination. Go do that. That'll be really, you know, good timing. It'll be good for this conference. Done. So I was like, okay, you just helped me and made that decision. Then I went through the, the fairly excruciating process of, I mean, it wasn't that I was working hard on it for most of the next two months. I was dreading the whole situation for most of the next two months. That was really what the process was, was me so upset with myself for not having worked on it yet. A complete, like, this like looming immense panic coming my way, like knowing this is now, this is now 55 days away. This is 20, you know, this is 33 days away.

Starting point is 00:32:43 This is happening. Like, and, and it's not the kind of thing where I'm like, oh, well, I can cram at the end, write something good and get it up there, like on the site. No, this is, you have to memorize this. You have to finish the writing well before the talk so you have time to practice and memorize so you don't freeze on the stage. I mean, what a nightmare, right? So it was really quite stressful. And I was lucky to have a friend, Adam Grant, who you might know. He just did the TED Talk, probably going to be the TED Talk of the year. It went up five days ago, and it's already at a million views, which might be a record. He's a, you know, he's an super productive person, and he's the opposite

Starting point is 00:33:23 to me. So he found out I was doing a talk, and we're friends, and he said, because he's doing a talk at the same conference. He said, let's schedule like a rehearsal in New York in December. So that was great, because it gave me a whole jolt of panic early. I had to get something ready for that. And so at least it got me

Starting point is 00:33:39 into a certain position to have something well before, which was a blessing. But even then, when I finished that, I was like, well, this is not nearly ready. You know, this is so far. It was double the length of time. I take. It was rambling. It was a mess. But, you know, at least I was like, okay, I had to have thought through the structure and get some of the slides together. And so, yeah, anyway, it kind of led

Starting point is 00:34:01 to getting up to January. And then, you know, there was a rehearsal in the TED offices that was, you know, definitely not where I should have been at that stage. And anyway, I'm getting way beyond your question. But, no, it's, it's a great story. And I heard, you know, I've watched Adam's speech as well. and he calls himself a pre-craccinator, meaning he gets things done way early, and you procrastinator wait to relate to the last second, and I would urge people to go to Wape at Y and read the post you wrote about,

Starting point is 00:34:34 you talked about some of the things here, but read about the whole process into you making that decision and then what happened leading up to the speech, and then if you were to watch the speech, and obviously go watch the speech, a ton of people already have, everyone's going to be floored that you had all this kind of doubt and were shocked at it, it went well.

Starting point is 00:34:56 What do you think now or how has your life changed since it's been online? Well, I mean, yeah, it's nice. It got a nice reception, which was really just nice validation because until you've, you know, I feel confident about running a good blog post now because I have, you know, validation. I can do it. And there's kind of two kinds of confidence. There's internal confidence. Like, you know what?

Starting point is 00:35:19 I think I'll do. I'll think I'll be good at it. this. And that's an important starting place. And then there's the confidence I know for a fact that the world likes this when I do it. Like this is officially something I can do well. And that's a whole different thing. And, you know, every kind of creative pursuit starts with the first kind of confidence. If you don't have that kind of confidence, you don't do it. People just, you know, that has to be very strong. So I had the belief in my head that if I put time into speaking, I didn't have to just be a writer.

Starting point is 00:35:51 I could also transmit ideas in that medium, and I thought I could be good at it. But you have no idea until you've done it. And Ted is so different than a normal talk. It's not just you talking through some points. It is kind of what I call a widely distributed short film, and you get one take. And the only actor is like your face saying things.

Starting point is 00:36:13 And it's totally not a normal talk. It's like, you know, if you mess up a sentence, That sentence is immortalized as messed up forever in that talk. And so it's a whole different thing. And that I didn't actually have any reason to believe I would be, I would be able to do that as well as I want to do things. So to have that gone up and have gone well and to have seen myself respond well under the pressure, which you never know if you're going to freeze or not.

Starting point is 00:36:43 And I felt calm under the pressure, which is a good thing to tell, you know, remind myself. now that I can be good under pressure. In that way, just internally, it is left me feeling better about stuff like that in the future. So that's probably the main thing it's done. And then as far as, you know, what has done kind of externally, yeah, there's been more opportunities to speak that have been coming in, which is great. I mean, things like, I feel like this podcast I'm on right now.

Starting point is 00:37:09 I feel like things like that are happening more than they were before. But, you know, nothing groundbreaking. I mean, if you already have a platform that's somewhat possible. public, I don't think doing a TED talk is a total game changer in the way it is if you're one of these scientists who does a TED talk or someone who doesn't typically have any kind of relationship with the public, that can totally like, you know, change someone's life more so than someone who's already kind of writing or doing something that is already kind of outputting to the public.

Starting point is 00:37:41 You've written a lot about the reason I'm bringing this up, changing gears here a little bit, Elon Musk has been in the news a lot. Tesla has been in the news based on the fact that their new Model 3 came out and got hundreds of thousands of pre-orders, people paying $1,000 with the helping giving them the right to buy the car when it comes out in about, I don't know, maybe 18 months or so or longer. And if you go to the TED.com speakers page under Tim Urban yourself, it says you have famous fans like Elon Musk. is he somebody that you've spoken with about wait but why? Yeah, so definitely the coolest thing that's happened so far with this website is Elon has took notice of it at some point.

Starting point is 00:38:27 He tweeted out a few different posts throughout 2015, which was each time it happened, it was like, I just won the Super Bowl in my apartment somewhere, just like running around the apartment. Is that what happened? I'd love to hear when Elon Musk tweeted a Wait But Why article. What were you doing? No, so I, you know, one thing I do two or three times a day is I'll just check the traffic on the site. Just to get a feel for, you know, if it's, is it normal or is something interesting happening? You know, does some article get really popular on Reddit? Someone posted it or something else, you know, that, okay, you know, so I check it just to see anything going on.

Starting point is 00:39:04 And one day, this is the very first time this happened, too. I see like the thing is surging. It's like weirdly, like every time, every, you know, five seconds, it like jolts up another 150, you know, people on the site. I'm like, what the hell is going on? And I look over and, you know, there's not anything going on to another site. And then I look down and there's like, you can see this is, I use the site chartbeat for analytics. It's a little more actually useful than Google analytics for just checking chart beat.

Starting point is 00:39:31 Chart beat. Chart beat one word. Chartbeat.com. It's great, actually. Okay. So it's, you know, it's surging upwards. And I look down and I see they show actually where if there's any tweets that are bringing in. There's one tweet that has, you know, 1,500 people on the site.

Starting point is 00:39:45 And it takes a second for it to come in with what it is. First, it just says, like, some long string of numbers. And then I kind of refresh and it suddenly says Elon Musk, and I'm like, no way. And so I go to his thing. And there it is. He tweets out my AI article saying, you know, this is a, you know, excellent primer on the subject. People should read this. I remember that.

Starting point is 00:40:04 Yeah. So that was super exciting. And then, you know, there was a part two of that. And I was kind of hoping he'd read it and hoping. and hoping he tweeted and it didn't happen. And then, like, two weeks later, he tweeted the set part two. And he said even nicer things. He was like, this is like, excellent and funny.

Starting point is 00:40:19 And then someone from SpaceX emails me and says, you know, you should know that Elon just sent your article to the entire company. So really, like, highly exciting stuff if you're a huge fan of Elon Musk, which I am. So, I mean, he was already a hero of mine. And then it just kept getting weirder from there. So then I get an email from his, someone who works with him, you know, his like head of messaging. And she was like, hey, you know, I don't know if you're interested in talking about there's some exciting writing projects that Elon had in mind that he wants to talk to you about.

Starting point is 00:40:45 Yeah, I will definitely do that. I'll definitely talk to Elon about that. So she sets up a call for us, and I'm suddenly in my apartment, in my pajamas, pacing around, just like I am right now, on the phone with him. And, you know, really highly surreal, highly surreal. And just, you know, I'm in a total, like, frenzy trying to be normal. And he's really awkward and weird, which doesn't help the situation. So we're in, like, an old-fashioned awkward off, like, just trying to, you know, We're having like, you know, and I'm trying to figure out if this is a normal interaction for him,

Starting point is 00:41:14 or he's thinking, oh, my God, this dude's awkward. Anyway, it ends up we settle in. We end up talking for an hour. And he kind of, he didn't have a specific idea. He just kind of said, do you want to, you know, because he's like, I liked what you write. I like the way you do it. Do you, would you want to write on some of the industries I work? I'm involved in, you know, something with Tesla and SpaceX.

Starting point is 00:41:32 And I'm thinking, yes, definitely. And his initial idea was maybe that I would write on those sites, like on their blogs. But for a few reasons, that didn't make sense. One, I write really, really, really long posts, and this just would make no sense on their, like, you know, websites, blog. And secondly, it's just, you know, I really, you know, even if it is Elon, I still really want that kind of creative integrity to be able to do it exactly how I want. That's really important to me. So we kind of, I kind of suggested, why don't I write about, why don't I, you know, talk to, you know, do all the research and do it, but do it on my site. And he was really cool about it.

Starting point is 00:42:09 He was just kind of like, yeah, okay, that's fine. That works. He's like, maybe we should come out here and we can talk and you can talk to some of my engineers. So this just keeps getting more rad, every thing that happens. So then, yeah, then I end up in California, going to the SpaceX factory, the Tesla factory. I sat down with Elon for a couple hours and asked him a ton of questions. And then a bunch of his engineers, a bunch of like the top execs at these companies, sat down with each of them, had really, like awesome access. And I told them that I would let them, you know, not edit the article,

Starting point is 00:42:42 but at least like veto any information that they didn't want the public to see yet or their competitors to see before I posted it. So that kind of said, okay, they kind of gave the message to the people who met with me. Say, say whatever you want to say. Don't worry about it. And we'll like filter later. And the truth is they ended up filtering almost nothing. Like one thing from each article basically got filtered. And so then I went home and I started working on it and the I ended up writing a four part series, you know, about Elon and his companies that ended up, you know, really being long, like 95,000 total words took six months. But the really cool part is I really had ongoing access to Elon. Like, I was able to get on

Starting point is 00:43:19 the phone with him, you know, every couple weeks and have like a pretty extensive chat about the questions that had built up as I had been writing whatever the latest post was. So it was an incredibly cool experience. And I learned an immense amount. And I think the access they gave, gave me, allowed those posts to actually be special and have some information that you're not going to find in other places. So it was an awesome project. That's an incredible story, man. He's a, when people ask me, there's a regular question, like, who is the one dream guest that you haven't been able to get yet? Because I've been very lucky to get guys like Seth Codin and Dan Pink and Henry Cloud and these Simon Cynic, these incredible people who are heroes of mine is from the writing space.

Starting point is 00:44:01 and obviously Elon, I think, is probably a lot of people's, like, number one person you'd want to meet. So I love the fact that you've been able to have those, like, you know, in-depth, regular conversations about him, and then it's documented for everyone to see on waypoint why.com. It's incredible. Yeah, thanks, man. I mean, it was pretty, pretty, you know, a lot of pinching myself during that. I bet, I bet. I have one more question, Tim, and I really are grateful for your time investment here.

Starting point is 00:44:31 You know, I sent you initially a cold email and asking you to be a part of this show because I'm a fan of your work, regular reader as well as. I love the process for speaking because speaking is an area that I'm getting more into. And actually, I have to tell you, I want to acknowledge the fact that you made me feel a lot better about some speeches I was nervous about because I watched your TED talk. And then I saw your nerves and all of the anxiety leading up to that speech. and then to see you deliver it, I'm like, hey, even these guys who give these world-class speeches get really nervous and they're scared and they don't know what to talk about and all these things. So even guys like you do that, I think it makes others who give speeches, obviously on smaller stages, at least at this at least at this point, feel much better about themselves.

Starting point is 00:45:20 And I think you've written about this, or I'm pretty certain you have where you said, you know, getting up on stage once you're kind of in the middle of it, it's much easier. It's not as big of a deal. You're just talking to the audience. And as Simon Sinek told me, just look at one person at a time, make eye contact, say your point to them, then look at the next one and say your point to that person. So I want to just thank you first before asking my question for putting it all out there and being transparent and open and honest and not trying to act like you're this invincible person who just easily can walk up on a TED stage and crush it and have millions of people want to watch it. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome.

Starting point is 00:46:02 By the way, the same thing, I experience the same thing. I don't consider myself someone who is like, oh, well, you know, I do this. I don't do this. So the people who, when I went to this little dinner that Chris Anderson had for all the speakers this year, I felt like, you know, I can't believe I'm allowed in here. This doesn't make any sense. And then, you know, this is so much of life, by the way. You know, you just realize that everyone feels like a fraud.

Starting point is 00:46:25 No one is actually that awesome at anything. I mean, it's like, you know, And so I'm there with all these people who are much more experienced speakers, a lot of them, or just ratter people, like the founder of Airbnb or the guy who discovered the largest known dinosaur or someone who's, you know, done, you know, 2,000 talks. And you find out that they are just as nervous because they're just people too and they're all insecure also. And it's just nice to be able to remind yourself of that so that you don't get in your own head about being insecure when it really doesn't, it's not actually based on reality to be, you know, to feel that way. I love it. I think it's a good message for everybody to think about as well. My question that I was getting to, but prior to me acknowledging that,

Starting point is 00:47:08 was the fact that I mentioned you before we recorded that, I called this show The Learning Leader Show for a reason I love the art and science of leadership and we're very passionate about learning on a daily basis. When you first heard that phrase, what was the first thing that popped into your mind? Let me think about this for a second. The Learning Leader, The Learning Leader Show podcast. Or just Learning Leader. Yeah, Learning Leader.

Starting point is 00:47:34 I liked it because the subject line of the email itself made me kind of say, okay, well, what is this? And what popped into my head was pretty subconsciously, because you don't really think actively about these things. But thinking now, there was some kind of mixture of, okay, so I kind of, I wrote a post. This is how I get like that. Long-winded. But let me just explain. So I wrote a post called like it's about the last of the four Elon posts called like the cook and the chef. And it's about my analysis of why Elon is so much more successful than everyone else and how it's not actually that he's smarter. Well, he is smarter. But it's not just that it's not because he's smarter or richer or more ambitious. It's because of this way he thinks. And then I kind of realized that so many of the people who is this kind of gets to your very first question. So many people I admire, you know, whether it's the entrepreneurial leaders or the scientists like the geniuses like Feynman. And I. Einstein and Newton. They all sound the same in their quotes if you actually pay attention.

Starting point is 00:48:31 And they have this weird mixture of humility and confidence. And I think that it's an important distinction. Like humility is the opposite of arrogance. And confidence is like the opposite of insecurity, and they're very different things. And so I think the ideal place to be in life, whether you're a writer or you're an entrepreneur or you're whoever you or you're just a person trying to figure out how to go on the you know to be in the dating world is to have this mixture of kind of open-minded humility about what you already know and and this understanding that you don't actually know very much and that there's that whatever your assumptions are now are going to change which is again the opposite of arrogance and the combo of that and confidence

Starting point is 00:49:19 not because I know so much but confidence that I'm a good reasoner. I'm as good as anyone at coming up with the conclusion based on information that comes in, and I'm not scared of all the people who know more than I do, even though I don't know that much. No one else really knows that much either. And I have a lot of confidence that I am a rad person. And I'm going to be able to do awesome stuff. So it's this humble confidence, I think, is such an important combo that it's hard to really get your head around. And so when I I see learning leader for some reason. That to me, it's just my kind of things.

Starting point is 00:49:54 I was like, learning suggests that this host believes he doesn't know that much and like wants to, you know, wants to learn. And that the kind of guests that are going to listen to that show have a curiosity. You know, curiosity is born from that kind of humility of like, oh, there's so much I don't know. And I'm excited to learn it. And then leader means you're probably going to have people on who are doing cool things, who have something that say about leadership and may possess that kind of confidence.

Starting point is 00:50:21 So that's the really thorough answer. But yeah, it struck me as my kind of thing. And I try to make like wait but why, like a learning leader style platform. So yeah. Oh, I love it. I was thinking as you're getting started and you dug in more. I mean, that's one of the, maybe the best answer I've ever got to that question. I try to ask, I think people, regular listeners of the show know, I really want to know.

Starting point is 00:50:47 There's really only two things that are guaranteed to be asked to everybody I speak. with and that's you know common characteristics of sustained excellence as well as what they think of when they hear the phrase learning leader because I think there's a somewhat of a it's interesting to hear answers to similar questions from people who are world class and what they do because it can really create some incredible learnings for me and the the guest now I and the listeners I mean so I don't like to script anything but those are the two parts that I think if you sandwich the episode in that regard, it really makes for some great learning. So, Tim, I cannot thank you enough.

Starting point is 00:51:31 I'm not only for your time investment today, but for what you do on a regular basis at wait but why.com. Is there anywhere else you would send my listeners to go and read more about you other than Wait But Y? No, first day, thanks for having me on. This was great. And, you know, I mean, really, it's, wait,ohy.com is kind of my world right now. Everything I'm writing and doing is on there, including the TED Talk is linked on there.

Starting point is 00:51:59 So that's where I'm spending all my time. Okay. Awesome. Well, again, thank you again, Tim. I really appreciate it. And I absolutely want to continue this dialogue as we both progress. Okay. Thanks, Ryan.

Starting point is 00:52:12 Good talking to you. Thanks, Tim. Okay. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you. locked in until next time. Head over to learningleadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO,

Starting point is 00:52:27 world class athlete, or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on the Learning Leader Show.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 117: Tim Urban – Using Procrastination to Perform A Ted Talk & Befriend Elon Musk

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