The One You Feed - David Kadavy on Getting Started

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

David Kadavy is a best selling author, blogger, podcaster and speaker. Through his blogging and podcasting, he helps people find satisfaction through following their crafts even if it takes them down an unconventional path. His book, The Heart to Start: Stop Procrastinating and Start Creating, is what he and Eric discuss in this episode. If you ever struggle with procrastination, you’ll find this episode helpful, informative, inspiring and empowering. There’s some real, practical wisdom here that will enable you to get started with whatever it is that you want to do in your life.Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, David Kadavy and I Discuss…His book, The Heart to Start: Stop Procrastinating and Start CreatingHow to get startedThe things that stand in the way of us startingWhat it means to be creative, or to createThe resistance that comes from the ego surrounding getting startedMotivational JudoTricks to get yourself to just get startedGive yourself permission to suckYou can’t do good work without doing bad work firstPerfection paralysisWhat happens when the scale of a creative project is too bigFortress fallacyThe role of curiosity in getting startedBalancing exploitation and explorationFollowing your curiositiesDavid Kadavy Links:davidkadavy.netFacebookTwitterCalm app – Reduce your anxiety and stress and help you sleep better. Meditations for anxiety, adult bedtime stories, soothing music, calm masterclasses with may One You Feed Guests. Visit www.calm.com/wolf for 25% off a Calm Premium SubscriptionCapterra – find the right software for your business – read thousands of real software reviews. Capterra is the leading free online resource to find the tools to make an informed software decision for your business. Software selection simplified. Go to www.capterra.com/wolf for free todayQuip – looking for a gift for a dad or a grad? Give them the gift of good oral hygiene made automatic, affordable and easy. Go to www.getquip.com/wolf and get your refill pack for freeIf you liked this episode, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Tim PychylTim UrbanSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shouting the destination at somebody doesn't really help them with their journey. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is David Kadavy, a bestselling author, blogger, podcaster, and speaker. Through his blogging at kadavy.net and his podcast, Love Your Work, he helps people find satisfaction through following their crafts, even if it takes them down an unconventional path. His book is The Heart to Start, Stop Procrastinating and Start Creating.

Hi David, welcome to the show. Eric, thankinating and Start Creating. Hi, David. Welcome to the show. Eric, thank you so much for having me. Really a pleasure to be here. Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you on. We talked not too long ago on your show, so I'm excited to have you on here to continue the discussion. We're going to primarily talk about your book, which is called The Heart to Start, Stop Procrastinating, and Start Creating, which are topics that are very near to my heart. But before we get into the book, let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf,

which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love. And the other is a bad wolf, represents things like kindness, bravery, and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at her grandfather. She says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah. I'm probably not supposed to say this, but the first time that I heard the parable, it rung hollow for me. It didn't really hit me like the way that a parable is supposed to hit somebody, I think. And I've come to realize, I think that it's because there was another parable

that did really strike me when I heard it. And there was another parable that did really strike me when I heard it. And it was the parable that I'm sure everybody's heard about a farmer and a string of things happens to him, like a horse comes to his farm and then his son breaks his leg riding the horse. And then his son gets passed up for fighting in the war that the village is going into. And all along, the neighbors saying, oh, you're so lucky, or, oh, this unfortunate thing happened to you. And the whole time, the farmer's saying, who's to say what's good or bad? And I remember that was something that really struck me when I heard it. And I think that that's part of the reason why when I first heard this parable of the two wolves, it didn't really mean a ton to me. But

I have thought about it a lot more since then, especially, you know, in preparing to interview you for my show. And it started to make a lot more sense to me, especially in the context of, you know, your struggle with addiction and things like that. But then I've also found that for me, and things like that. But then I've also found that for me, it's, it's a useful parable because I realized that there's a certain kind of courage in deciding that something is good or bad. And like, I think that's easy. That's probably an easy decision to make if you're struggling with addiction. Uh, I mean, maybe not mentally, but from the outside, it's an easy, it's an easy judgment call that, you know, that that's a bad thing. That's your bad wolf. But I think in everyday life, there's all these sort of shades of gray where we can very easily rationalize to ourselves that, oh, you know, this isn't good or bad. This is just the way that it is. But there's some

benefit to saying that something is a good wolf or saying that something is a bad wolf. Because when you start doing that, then you start to be able to make some sort of a judgment call and you start to be able to make some kind of a measurement. You start to be able to, to improve your, your behavior because you can say, well, that didn't work because I did this thing that I've decided is bad for me. Or I, that didn't work because, or that did work because it helped me do this thing that is good for me. And so since then, it really has come to resonate with me in that way. And that, you know, maybe it's a cop-out sometimes to say, who's to say what's good or bad. Like maybe it's better to say that, yeah, this is, this is good. And this is bad. Like you can argue your way that, that, that maybe it's not, but for the thing that

you want to see happen, then you have to make that judgment call. And for me, that's, that's about creative work is like creative work. Creating things is my good wolf, for sure. And then the things that keep me from creating would be my bad wolf. think it's a very wise tale because I think that in the short-term view of events that happen to us, we don't really know what comes next. So I think it's really wise in looking at the events in our lives and not giving them a permanent meaning, you know. So I totally agree with you there. And I agree with you that I think in my own life, addiction being a clear example, but there are other things that I know know, for lack of a better word, my soul, right? Or my spirit. And regardless of what, whether that thing that I created goes anywhere or does anything, I know that it's good for me in doing it in the same way, like a very prosaic example is like, I know when I exercise that that's a good thing for me because I tend to feel

better. It tends to bring up life enhancing qualities in me. So, so I, I agree, but I, I am also, um, reticent to, to assign anything too much of a good or bad label because I think we don't often know. Yeah. But I mean, it's still, it's useful because there are those shades of gray where, you know, creating is a good wolf for me, but I mean, it can actually, it can become a bad wolf for me. Uh, but also it's not always pleasant, uh, especially when you're trying to do it professionally. Uh, it's not always a pleasant thing in the moment. And so there can be these things that maybe they don't make you feel that good right away, but they're a good wolf. Or there's things that do feel good. Like maybe

you love to scroll through Instagram and that can be fine. But, you know, eventually you maybe start feeling bad about yourself and you aren't quite sure why. And it turns out it's actually a bad wolf in some way. And maybe it pulls you away from feeding your good wolf. And so there are these gray areas and that's where I think it can be useful to, I don't know, maybe it's not so much who's to say what's good or bad, but maybe it's more like you can look at anything

and say that's good and that's bad. You can say that's good or that's bad. And it really depends upon the context and what you're trying to achieve with your own self-talk. Yep. So let's talk about the heart to start, stop procrastinating and start creating. You say, just get started. It's good advice if you can follow it. But I was always left wondering, yeah, but how do I start? And so I think that's a really great place to jump off into this. So what are the things that stand in the way of us starting to do creation? Yeah. I want to address that idea of just get started or, you

know, Nike says just do it. And it took me a really long time to come to clarity on this. Actually, probably even after I had written the book before I really saw this, which was that that's really pithy advice. It's advice that we hear a lot from people who are successful in, say, like an entrepreneurial context is, you know, just get started on this, that or the other thing. And sort of a vicious cycle in that there is a survivorship bias in that advice is that the people to whom we look up are giving us that advice. But most of them probably didn't really struggle with the type of level of procrastination that some of us who get stuck did.

You know, like there's some people who just have no hesitation. And I talk about my conversation with James Altucher and how that helped me come to that realization was that he's somebody who is a writer and seems very fearless. And that's because he actually is fearless. It wasn't that he had to fight through some sort of things. And myself, it's the complete opposite, is that I've always been filled with so much self-doubt or fear of judgment. And I think those were probably some of the main things. Or perfectionism is another thing that causes people to not get

started on something is that they can sort of mentally perfect this thing that they want to create. And they can feel good in the process about that. And they can tell themselves that, well, one day they'll get the opportunity to do this. And time passes and that day never comes. And, you know, next thing you know, it's too late. And so those are just some of the things that cause anybody to procrastinate, especially on creative work. And it's the things that I've struggled with myself. And it's the reason why I wrote the book was to, uh, to help myself, uh, stop hesitating, to stop procrastinating and to start creating things. Yeah. I think just get started is advice. It's similar to, to use addiction and alcoholism

as a reference to, you know, just don't drink. Oh yeah. At the end of the day, that is the fundamental truth, right? Like, just stop being depressed is like, is the perfect example as well as these people who are saying just get started, who don't struggle with, with the type of hesitation and self doubt that a lot of people do are saying just get started. It's easy. You know, it's like telling somebody who's clinically depressed started. It's easy. You know, it's like telling somebody who's clinically depressed, just stop being depressed. You know, like, oh, you know, it's all in your head or something like that. But, you know, there's actual steps that you can take that can

help you, you know, but shouting the destination at somebody doesn't really help them with their journey. That's right. Yeah. And what I was saying with, you know, just don't drink is that ultimately that is the end of the road. That is what it all comes down to that at the end of the day. However, there can be a lot of instructions along the way to that, that make that a more likely destination, right? Your first law of art is that there is art inside you, but let's define art for a second, because a lot of people are going to hear that and think, well, I'm not an artist, right? Like, I don't paint. I don't make music. So when you're using that term, what are you referring to? I believe that you could make music and you can paint and have it not be art, you know, to some extent. You know, if it paint by number,

to some extent, it's a craft. It's not art. To me, art is that you're taking your individual unique personality and skills and experience. we always interact with the world in some way. And the world creates this sort of potential energy in us, our influences, our experiences, technology that we're exposed to. And it creates this potential energy in us. And when we create something and put something out in the world, that's our art. And that can be a painting, that can be music,

that can be a podcast, that can be a business, it can be a nonprofit, it can be a relationship or a trip that you plan. It's this creating of something that's uniquely yours that nobody else could do it the same way that you're doing it. So that's what it means to me. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you two? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

One of the things that you say is that when we're going to create art, it's a process of self-actualization, and that whenever we do that, we are going to face Whenever we do that, we are going to face resistance. We're going to face internal chatter that is going to stop us from doing that, and that the ego will come up with reasons not to start. So why is the ego coming up with reasons for us not to start? Where is this resistance coming from. Yeah. So you've mentioned the word resistance, which I mentioned in the book, which comes from something I think a lot of your listeners are probably familiar with, which is David Pressfield wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance and a number of other books. And he's a tremendous writer, but he also identified this force that has resonated with so many people, including Oprah, It's resonated with so many people, including Oprah, of resistance. And resistance really comes from this conflict between your actual self and your ideal self. Or as you try to achieve this future self, your ego is there holding you back the whole time. self, your ego is there holding you back the whole time. So when you want to create something and you come up with reasons not to do it, that's often your ego holding you back because your ego is there to protect you, right? So if you say you want to start blogging or you want to start a podcast and

you're thinking about all the different things that people might say and you then decide not to start, that is your ego protecting you from this fear of judgment or fear of failure. However, or fear of failure. However, it's often not so simple and obvious. It can manifest itself in a lot of ways. I was on a podcasting board the other day, a message board. I like to go on there and see if I can help people out. And there was somebody on there saying, hey, I've got all this podcast equipment. I want to know what's the right podcast table for me to get. What kind of table should I get for my podcast? And thankfully, people were chiming in and saying, like, hey, you know, something else is going on here. You haven't started your podcast yet, and you're worried about what table you need. you are procrastinating. You're finding a way to let your neuroses go into some other direction that's going to be

ultimately protective because you aren't going to have your work out there. Your work will be free of judgment. And all the while, you have this perfectly good reason that you've come up with about why you're not doing it. So in addition to protecting yourself from that criticism or from that failure, your ego is also protecting you from understanding the way that you're fooling yourself and the way that you're ultimately cheating yourself. And that can drag on for years and years and years before you realize what's going on. And so that's why it's so dangerous. And so what are some techniques to work through that? One of the best techniques is something that I call motivational judo. And

in the martial art of judo, I believe you, I'm not a judo master myself, but basically you're using your opponent's energy against your opponent. So your opponent comes at you with a punch, you use that punch to throw them over your shoulder, so to speak. The forward energy, you allow that to forward energy. You allow that to propel them over your shoulder onto the mat. And we can do this with ourselves because we all have some way that we're maybe fooling ourselves, but we all often have some other mechanism of preserving our own self-perception that we can then use to counter whatever way we are holding ourselves back. I'll give you an example that works for myself. And it works for a lot of other people, but some people have different ways that work for them. It's all about knowing yourself and knowing the ways that you can hold yourself back and

the ways that you like to maintain a positive self-perception. So for myself, if I really just cannot get started on something, say just a task, not even necessarily a project, but a task, I'll set a timer for 10 minutes and then I will say, let's say for writing. So I'll say, okay, I have to write for 10 minutes. I can't do anything else. Make sure my phone is off, et cetera. And I will just write for 10 minutes. And when I'm done, I'm going to pat myself on the back and congratulate myself for having done a good job. Well, what happens is by the time I get to 10 minutes, I have momentum going. That 10 minutes usually turns into 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, sometimes two hours. And the reason that it even worked was because I first started with this goal where I was really kind of lying to myself.

I knew when I set the timer for 10 minutes that this was going to happen. But somehow, my, you know, some other little part of me is like, well, 10 minutes, I mean, that's ridiculous. I can totally do that. I mean, that's ridiculous. I can totally do that. In fact, it's so easy that if I were to fail at 10 minutes, my own need to see myself positively would be offended to such an extent that I just am not going to accept that happening. It could be two minutes. It could be 10 minutes. You know, it can be any sort of thing where you're kind of telling yourself that you have this very small goal when in actuality, what's going to happen is you're going to do this that you have this very small goal, when in actuality, what's going to happen is you're going to do this larger thing. And a lot of it is just

understanding what is it about your own personality that you are able to use for your own benefit that way. Yeah, I love that one. I use it all the time for all kinds of things. And I do think that it is effective to some degree because I will say to myself like, oh, for crying out loud, you can do anything for five minutes. Like, you know, there's a, there's a, just enough self pride. That's like, I can push through five minutes. It is such a useful tool. And it's funny because I know on one hand that I'm tricking myself and yet it still seems to work. Yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, we have, I don't know if you've ever heard about split brain studies. It's, it's, it's pretty fascinating. Have you heard about this? You know, if somebody who has a, their corpus, uh, colossum, I think

I'm not sure how you pronounce it is, is severed, you know, to stop seizures, so to speak. So their left and right brain aren't talking to each other. And like the left brain can be doing one thing and the right brain just has no idea. So, I mean, that may extend to a lot of other things where, you know, consciously we're telling ourselves, yeah, oh yeah, I'm just going to do this. But in reality, something else entirely happens. So I think whenever you can take advantage of that, that's great. For me, it's the sort of low-balling thing. I even do it on my task management, where if I have a task that I need to do that is pretty large and hard to break up into chunks, I'll say, you know, brainstorm this for five minutes. And I'll just write that in the task. And that alone is enough to reduce that. I guess it's your nervous system, your amygdala kind of taking over and saying, hey, hey, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's too much. We can't handle that. So getting around that.

Yeah, feeling overwhelmed. Yep. So another one that you mentioned, and I think this can be helpful when we're, you know, our ego is trying to protect us, right? Is giving ourselves permission to suck. Tell me about that. Yeah. And that's another little kind of lie that you tell yourself. Um, I mean, it's in some ways it's, it's not a lie because when you first start doing any type of work, it's not going to meet up to your standards. Like there's this famous video of Ira Glass, the, the podcasting pioneer, uh, where he talks about this thing called the gap. And the gap is essentially that whenever you start doing some work, some kind of creative endeavor, you're into it because you have good taste because you, maybe you're starting a podcast and there's some podcasts that you really love, or you're a musician and there's some musicians and bands that you really love.

You have good taste and that's why you get into it. But then you start doing the work. And it's nothing like it does not live up to your tastes. Right. So it's it's it's not good. And it takes a very long time for it to become good. Well, you can't do good work without first doing bad work. And so the great remedy for that is permission to suck. Just the very act of giving yourself permission, it sort of shuts off that critic, that internal critic that keeps you from getting started. And then the trick that happens is that after you have started, after you are doing work, well,

you know, in part, part of the reason why you stopped yourself from doing the work is maybe because you're a bit of a perfectionist. You're imagining in your brain how great it's going to be. a bit of a perfectionist. You're imagining in your brain how great it's going to be. And now you've put the work out there and it's not that good because you gave yourself permission to suck, but you know, you're a perfectionist. So you have the work out there and it sort of calls you and it causes you to keep doing it or to iterate on what you have out there. And the next thing you know, you're getting better and better and better at it. And you've gotten past that fear. So that's what the way permission to suck really helps to make somebody get started and then improve upon what they put

out there. Such an important thing to be able to do is just to allow ourselves to be as good as we happen to be at the moment. And without losing sight of the fact that that's how we get better by continuing to do it. You know, even Michelangelo has done this. Michelangelo, when he started painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he hadn't painted anything in like 20 years. But then the Pope says, hey, you've got to paint the ceiling and it's probably going to have bad consequences if you don't. And so one interesting thing happened with the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which was that after he got halfway done with the ceiling, he took off the

scaffolding off of that half so he could put up on the other half. And it was the first time that he ever got to see the work that he had done from the floor looking up at his work. And it wasn't quite right. So he had kind of painted his too many figures and too small of an area. Things looked a little bit muddled. And, you know, he could have just said, I'm just going to chop it all off and start over again. Well, that probably wouldn't have worked out too well. But he didn't, you know, complain about it. He just started on the second half. He allowed himself to adjust. And the very next panel that he painted is a panel that I'm sure all the listeners have seen before. It's called The Creation of Adam. It's the old, you know, his representation of God touching fingers

with his representation of Adam, you know, the moment of creation. It's one of the most famous pieces of art in all of art history. And I mean, I like to think that part of the reason why it became that way was because, one, he wasn't such a perfectionist that he said, well, I can't paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He went ahead and painted it. he went ahead and painted it. And believe it or not, even though it's one of the great masterpieces, you know, one of the great wonders of the world, believe it or not, it wasn't perfect by his own standards. He allowed himself to adjust. To this day, you can look up the Sistine Chapel ceiling, you can see that the two halves of the ceiling are very different in terms of approach in that way. are very different in terms of approach in that way.

And I mean, it just goes to show you, I find it comforting to know that even, you know, when you're painting one of the wonders of the world, you're still giving yourself kind of permission to suck in a way. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, Really No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com and

register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So tell me about what the fortress fallacy is. I wasn't able to find anything to describe this phenomenon that I suffer from all the time. And that is one of the most common things that I see when people come to me looking for help in overcoming their own procrastination is that when we first have a vision for what we want to create, the scale of it is usually a lot more than anything that's anywhere near what we're capable of. And I was just talking about permission to suck,

which kind of helps you overcome perfection paralysis. This isn't so much about quality, this is about scale. So this is, you know, I want to make a feature film someday, you know, I want to make a feature film someday, but I've never made a short film. Or, you know, I want to start this podcast that has all this music coming in and out and all these people that I've interviewed and all this research that I've done, but I haven't even done like a small little audio thing. I want to open a restaurant, but I've never even run a dinner party before and cook for some people. And it's another way that our ego protects us in a way is that we have this grand fortress in our mind. That's why I call it the fortress fallacy, this grand fortress that we want to build. But we can convince ourselves all along like,

oh, I'm not quite ready for that. I still have to do this research. I still have to kind of plan things out. And then all along, we're not getting started at all. We're not doing anything. And we're feeling just fine. We're feeling like we're on the right track, but really time is just going by and we're not getting any closer to making that vision a reality. And so for me, the solution to that is instead of building the fortress, start with a cottage. And that cottage doesn't have to like become a part of the fortress. It can just be that, you know, you learn a little bit about building and, you know, applying for city codes or whatever while you build this cottage. And as you do that, you build up your skills. So with the podcast, maybe you make a two-minute clip or something like that beforehand.

You share it with your friends. Or if you want to write a book, well, you might want to start doing some writing and maybe build a habit where you're writing 100 words a day. Or if you want to start a restaurant, have that dinner party, go ahead and charge people for it. Do some type of little thing that your nervous system can handle that your ego isn't going to push you back and say, oh, wait, wait, wait, we're not ready for this. In fact, try to come up with something that's so small that your ego can't even get in the way because your need to sort of see yourself positively is stronger than any sort of distortion field that your ego can possibly put up in your way. Yeah, I love that idea of just

like, you know, I think of them as little experiments, like, you know, try like a very small version of what you want to do and see where it takes you. And a lot of times I think this can be really helpful because a lot of times we have, to your point, this fortress fallacy, we dream of doing this grand thing, right? And since it's so grand, we never really start on it it but the dream sort of sticks around and occupies us and sometimes when we do some small version of it we go i don't even really like doing that much right like all of a sudden but we could have spent the next five years thinking that's what we're gonna do right and and it can be really helpful to do some small experiments and be like

okay great i learned and i want to do more, or I might've learned this isn't even the thing for me. And that's really worth knowing. I have a little simple thing that I've done. I'm somebody who can, fortunately, I'm fortunate enough to be able to live kind of where I want to, or at least I certainly was a few years ago. And I think that we all have these sort of fantasies about living in different places, like, oh, what would it be like to live in New York? Or what would it be like to live in London for a while or Rome for a while? Well, I kind of do this thing I call mini lives where I'll set up and plan like a month or two months or three months, and I'll go live in

this other city and see what it's like. And I did that in New York a couple times and I enjoyed it. It was wonderful. But one of the things that was most valuable about it was that it helped me shut off that part of the fantasy in my brain of living in New York because it helped me realize like, hey, I love New York. I don't want to live there. I've experimented. I've had a little taste of it in some way. So, I mean, that's still a relatively grand thing to do. And I guess I built up to it with smaller trips and such.

But, I mean, I kind of wonder about you and this podcast. Because I've heard the first episodes of this podcast, and they're quite good. Were there some sort of tests that you did when you first started? There were not, but I started it from an experiment perspective. Like, I'm going to do this and just see if I like doing it. Now, I had Chris, who had been an audio engineer in previous lives. So we had some professionalism going in right out of the gate that helped having him do that. But no, I had not done it before, but I really approached it in a low risk way. Like, I'm just going to try this and see if I like doing it. And if I do, I'll keep doing it.

You know, I knew a lot of people around that time who were doing things like I'm going to become a podcaster and they quit their jobs and the end, you know, and they were, you know, the, this big bet. Right. And, and I was much more in a like, well, you know, I'm just going to start this as sort of a hobby and see what, what I think. And then I did it and I realized, oh, I really like doing it. And, you know, and, and then that eventually built to, to where it is today. But so I started it in a really low risk kind of way. Like, I just want to try this today. So I started it in a really low-risk kind of way. Like, I just want to try this and see if I like it. I'm always thinking about how to categorize that.

So I don't know whether to say that that was a permission to suck thing or whether that was probably a combination of that and just looking at it with a sense of curiosity. Yep. I think both. I think both. I think definitely curiosity was the main driver. You know, I just sort of thought like, I think this would be fun. Now I don't know if it'll be fun, right. I might've done three interviews and been like, I don't like doing this, but it turned out I love doing it. Um,

so yeah, it was, I think it was both. I think it was giving myself permission for them to just be what they were in the beginning, but, and then also just following what made me curious. Yeah, I love that. And because I'm, I'm personally huge on curious. There's a chapter in the book called curiosity first, uh, which is kind of like my principle of how I operate is to always be trying to ask myself, am I curious about this thing that I'm doing? Because curiosity is this wonderful fuel. You can work harder on the things that you're curious about than you can on any other thing. And no matter what you do, even if you are curious about it, it's going to be

challenging at times. And so curiosity can kind of, can kind of pull you through yet at the same time, it can take you to all these like really interesting places that you, you never expected. Like I'm sure that this podcast, uh, you didn't expect it to take you to places that it has. Absolutely. Yeah. And I, I love that you talk about that in the book. You mentioned that, you know, that we have this tendency to be told to exploit what we've learned. So we've learned something. And now it's time to use that thing to be what, you know, that becomes our career, that we already know, as well as exploration and balancing those two. Because if all you ever do is explore, right, that doesn't necessarily lead anywhere. But if all we ever do is sort of exploit or build off what we already know, that doesn't lead us to very interesting places. Yeah. When you're exploiting knowledge, I mean,

I hate the way that sounds, but I don't mean for it to sound derogatory. But when you're exploiting your knowledge, that's kind of like what a job is for a lot of people or what jobs have been. I think that is going to be changing more and more as the world moves faster, as we have more automation and artificial intelligence going on, it's going to be a lot more about exploring and finding these things that nobody's ever done before. And that's a place that curiosity can take you because, you know, curiosities converge. I love the story of Steve Jobs when he dropped out of college and he started dropping in on various classes, uh, just whatever it was that was interesting to him. And one of the things he dropped in on was this calligraphy class. And it was this, you know, totally impractical, useless art that he was just fascinated with. And he learned all about the beauty of letters and he, and he learned all about, um, spacing and kerning and typography, which are, I mean, those are all passions of mine. So I can certainly

relate to that, that feeling of, of love for that craft. And it had no application whatsoever in his life at the time. There was no way to tell how he might use that. But as he described in his Stanford commencement address, years later, when he was building the Mac, he built all of that sort of typographic intelligence into the Mac. And it became the first computer that had optically spaced typography. And as he says, you know, since Microsoft copied the Mac, then it's very likely that maybe no computer would have optically spaced typography if that hadn't happened. So that's just one example of where curiosity can take you to places that you never expected, because one curiosity, in this case, typography or calligraphy, converged with

this other curiosity of computers. And that created this sort of groundbreaking innovation. And so I think that it's important to give yourself a little bit of permission to follow your curiosity. We live in a culture where we're kind of ashamed of our curiosity. your curiosity. We live in a culture where we're kind of ashamed of our curiosity. I can't tell you the number of times that I've had somebody write me and say, oh, you know, I'm curious about so many things and I just can't seem to focus on one thing. And these are brilliant people. And they feel bad about themselves because of it. And I think it should be the other way. I think that you should be embracing your curiosity. Maybe you'd spend a little bit of time exploiting, put food on the table, but give yourself a little bit of extra space

for that discovery to happen because that's where you can have incredible things that you never expected take place. Excellent. Well, I think that is a wonderful note for us to leave this on. So, David, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I really enjoyed the book and I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much, Eric, for having me on and for coming on my show too. So, anybody who wants to hear the interview with Eric, it's already on. Love your work. So thank you. Wonderful.

Take care. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

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