The One You Feed - Srini Rao

Episode Date: February 1, 2017

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Srini Rao about being unmistakable Srini Rao is the host and founder of The Unmistakable Creative podcast. He has written multiple books including the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Art of Being Unmistakable; and his latest book: Unmistakable: Why Only Is Better Than Best He is the creator of the 60-person conference called the Instigator Experience; He has an economics degree from the University of California at Berkeley and an MBA from Pepperdine University. In This Interview, Srini Rao and I Discuss... His book, Unmistakable: Why Only is Better than Best That the process holds so much joy and that there really is no moment of arrival How doing the work itself is the reward and the importance of being present The temptation of trying to copy something that works and expect the same result The three layers under which everyone's unmistakable nature lies Stories, Labels, and Masks The story of I have enough and the story of I don't have enough That labels limit our capacity The importance of constructing environments That 96% of personal development projects fail Just because it's a best practice doesn't mean it's best for you That life is basically just one giant experiment The idea of being ready and how it gets in our way How crucial it is to commit to the process rather than the outcome The insidious nature of validation Our warped perception of longevity     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Turning off the fire hose of information that comes at you on a daily basis, that has to be a choice. 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 Srini Rao, the host and founder of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. He has written multiple books, including the Wall Street Journal bestseller, The Art of Being Unmistakable, and his latest book, Unmistakable, Why Only is Better than Best. Srini is the creator of the 60-person conference called the Instigator Experience, and he has an economics degree from the University of California at Berkeley and an MBA from the Pepperdine University. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment.

Go to oneufeed.net slash support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to 5% of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the 5% that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you feed.net slash support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Srini Rao. Hi, Srini. Welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you for coming back on. You and I talked before. It was a great conversation, and our hard drive failed, and I lost the interview. So I do appreciate you being willing to come back. Oh, yeah. I'm happy to. We'll get into your podcast and your latest book, Unmistakable, Why Only is Better Than Best. We'll dive into all that, but let's start like we usually do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. 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, love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he 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. It's funny because I've heard you ask that question to so many people, and I've heard so many interesting answers to that question.

And to me, I think the evil one really, I think, stems from ego and this need for all sorts of external things like validation, approval. And, you know, those things come in a lot of different forms. But when you look at those things, I think what we fail to realize as much as it is wonderful to say, you know, have your book hit the New York Times bestseller list or have, you know, 20,000 people listen to your show or any of the things that, you know, I think we all seek, like everybody, I think when they start out, they're like, I want an audience of millions of people and I want to be like the next Oprah. But I think the thing that we fail to realize

is that the process itself contains so much joy and that there really is no moment of arrival necessarily. And I guess to me, the good wolf is when the work itself is something that you do for its own reward. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there's no value to external rewards, and there's no point in setting goals, which we can talk about. But I think we have to be careful because the problem with that approach

is that it actually detracts from the work itself while you're doing it. Like you really can't be thinking about, you know, your name in shining lights, your book on a shelf and all that while you're actually writing the book, because your job at that moment is to write the book. And when you're present, that's when you do your best work. That's something that I've talked about on this show a lot and wrestle with is sort of the intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, you know, the intrinsic motivation being doing it because I love doing it. And I think it's very hard to get to a place of being pure. Like, I only do this because I love it.

Because it's hard to ignore that external stuff. But what I find is when I start to focus on the external stuff, I tend to get fearful. And like you said, it's constricting. And when I go back to why am I doing this and what I love about doing it, I feel totally different about it. And so it's really useful for me to turn back to that very regularly and remember like, oh yeah, this is what I set out to do. And by the standards I set to start, I'm succeeding wildly because I love what I'm doing.

Yeah. And you know, it's interesting because I can tell that to you and I'm telling you that because it's mainly a reminder to myself more than anything else. And there's this very strange paradox with intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. It's that the more intrinsically rewarding you find something, the more likely it is to become extrinsically rewarding as well. Whereas the vice versa, you know, is not true. Yeah.

Oh, absolutely. The vice versa is definitely not true. So you host a podcast that's been around a long time. You've had amazing interviews, the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. And then you've written a few books, but your most recent book is Unmistak conclusion. So where it really started, and I think it's fitting that, you know, we're using podcasting as an example, but I kept seeing this pattern online. And, you know, I jokingly said the alternative title to this book, which I'm sure my publisher would hate me saying could have been titled Everybody is Full of Shit. And of course, they don't mean that at all. But what I kept seeing was this pattern. And you would see somebody who was very successful do something, they would talk about the result that they had gotten from doing that thing. And then everybody and their mother would go out and try to do that exact same thing and produce the exact same result with nowhere near the same degree of success. So you look at something like Humans of New York. And of course, you know, everybody knows what Humans of New York is. But

what you might not know is that if you do a search for Humans of on Facebook, you'll find a Humans of project for dozens of other cities, and none of them have been anywhere as near as successful. And this is very personal to me because that's exactly how I started. There's a girl named Jamie Verone who started this project called Twitter Should Hire Me back in 2009, and Twitter Should Hire Me was really successful. I mean, we're talking national media attention, tons of job offers, even though she never got one from Twitter. But the interesting thing is there was so much demand for her work that she started her own company. And I was just at the tail end of graduate school and I read about her story. And I tried to create a website called 100 Reasons You Should Hire Me. And I couldn't come up with 100 reasons why anybody

should hire me. So the project was like- How many did you get? Like seven, ten? I got to about 10. And the reasons were all nonsense. They were just the bullet points on my resume and blog form. They didn't really make compelling cases for people to hire me. And I realized at that point, I'm like, I got a much bigger problem than trying to come up with a unique way. I can't even come up with a hundred reasons why somebody should hire me. Maybe I should go get some reasons. So that temptation to look at something that works and to copy it, I realized was not unique to me. In fact, I saw more and more of it over the years. And I think it really comes down to this notion of

instant applause, right? Because you live in a world for the first time where we have access to instant applause. And that's really only happened in the last 10 years or so. You can easily do something like put a picture of yourself with a cute baby on Facebook, and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. I know because I've tested this theory multiple times. And when I put a picture of myself with a cute baby that belongs to one of my friends or one of my cousins, I get like 100 likes or 200 likes. And that's a sign of, OK, instant applause.

But you can't build a sustainable career by putting up cute pictures of babies on Facebook. And what bugged me was that you've got all these very unique and very interesting and very creative people. And yet their temptation was to say, okay, I will look at whatever this person who is a so-called guru says, I will copy, you know, what it is they're telling me to do. And I will produce the exact same result. And this is sort of the great fallacy of authority and influence. And that is that if you do exactly as some person in a position of authority tells you, you will get the result that they have promised. And so what I realized was that in a world with so much noise and so many things

competing for our attention, being very distinctive, so distinctive, in fact, that nobody else could do what you do in the way that you do it, was an incredibly powerful thing. And I saw it with a handful of people where, you know, you could take one look at what they have done and you would instantly know there's nobody that could do it other than that person. So a perfect example of this is our visual illustrator and special projects artist, Mars Dorian. So if you follow Mars Dorian on Instagram or Facebook, you could walk into a room, if pictures were hung that were done by Mars, and you didn't know his signature wasn't on there, you could instantly if you knew who Mars was from having seen him on Facebook, you could take one look at it, because there's only one person who could have done that.

And that's Mars. And so you know, when you become the only person as opposed to the best, then all of a sudden, your competition becomes becomes irrelevant because nobody else can do what you do in the way that you do it. Like when we want something done by Mars Dorian, there is literally not a single person that we can hire to replace him. Right. And I think that's awesome. I think that is an amazing thing. And I think it's much more important in the world today. I mean, part of why I like what you guys do here at the one you feed, you know, we're just talking about sort of the podcast ecosystem where we're seeing a very similar thing happening. So this is what I call the mimicry epidemic, right? And the problem with this sort of mimicry epidemic is it leads to a giant echo chamber

in which everybody sounds the same. Everybody's parroting everybody. And the worst part is that people deny their gifts and they don't trust their own instincts. They don't trust their own instincts. They don't trust their own intuition. In the process, I think they robbed the world of a much greater creative gift that they could give us than simply replicating what already exists. I agree. It can be hard to find that. The idea is solid because very few people are ever going to be the best, right? It's a concept that doesn't have an exact measuring. But yeah, I mean, I have found in my life, the longer I've gone on in all aspects of my life, the more I've just been who I am and let that kind of come out regardless of who and

what I'm around. Totally. The more successful I've been in every area, even areas that I used to think like I do consulting and do some other work in the corporate world. And, you know, I thought I had to keep some of this stuff buttoned down. But the more I realized that I would just be myself wherever I was, it wasn't like I was being fake. I was just holding part back. And the less I do that, the more successful I am and the better relationships I have and everything goes better. Yeah, I can tell you. So I've gotten on a stage in front of 1000 people and told them I've been fired from just about every job I've ever been at. And the talks that I've been giving on this subject have been incredibly resonant, unlike anything I've ever

experienced. I think for the very reason that you say so, because you're more and more yourself. And you know, that takes us into sort of what I call the three layers under which everybody's sort of essence of what makes them unmistakable lies. And those are stories, labels and masks. Right. So we all wear masks in different ways. And we start doing it at a very early age when we're old enough to understand that other people have opinions of us and we want those opinions to be favorable. And in a lot of ways, our entire sort of online persona is a mask. There is inevitably a little bit of a gap between who you are online and who you are in person.

It's just, there's no way it's not because you do want to present some sort of image to the world that draws people in. Obviously you want the gap to be as narrow as possible, but a more simple mask is when you try to be cool in junior high, when you start to discover that there are popular kids and unpopular kids. This is a stupid story from when I was a kid, but you know, I wasn't one of the popular kids. You know, I came from a family that didn't have a lot of money at the time

and my dad picked me up from school one day and I said, hey, there's going to be a fifth grade dance and I need a pair of sunglasses. And he said, why do you need sunglasses for a fifth grade dance? It was like, because then I can look cool and I can go and ask the prettiest girl in the class to dance with me. So my dad bought me the sunglasses. I never asked her to dance. I never became any cooler. And that's the sort of simple example. But what we do is we keep going through life and we keep putting on these masks one after another. And what you've got at that point is you are no longer staring at a pale imitation of anything else, but a pale imitation of your true self. And to get to what you're talking about

requires us to let go of masks one at a time. And, you know, this is not to say, go out and air all your dirty laundry on Facebook and make the world wonder what you were thinking, but rather, you know, treat every opportunity that you have to do work as an opportunity to do for full self-expression. So then outside of masks, you have stories, right? We all have stories that kind of shape and color our perceptions of what we think is possible with our life and our work. This is probably the most relevant one. And you know, you're hearing some of my keynote speech here. But one story that we have is I have enough. And another story is I don't have enough. So maybe you have enough traffic to your website, subscribers to your email list, money in the bank account. And maybe, you know, the other stories, you don't have enough of any of those things. But

who's to say what enough is like, who determines what enough is. That's, you know, an entirely made up concept. You know, in 2015, at the end of the year, I decided to create this list of 100 insanely interesting people you should know and publish on a medium. And the reason I created that list was because every year when Forbes published its list of 40 under 40 and Fast Company published their list of the most creative people in business, I was envious. Like I always less than, as if the people on that list were more important than I was, were doing something more meaningful. So I was like, all right, I'm going to create my own list. And the most ridiculous paradox of creating this kind of a list was how everybody who was not on the list responded. The whole purpose of the list was to celebrate this notion that you don't have

to get picked. And everybody who wasn't on the list said, I hope I am on the list next year, or I wish I was on the list. And that's how deep this culture will need to be validated to be picked and to be approved of runs. And then you have labels, right? So you and I were talking about the fact that podcasting is one of the many things that I do. In fact, I hate the term podcaster because it just sounds so stupid. I think it's incredibly limiting, like labels limit our capacity. When we over identify with one particular label, it's like I'm a podcaster. So suddenly you think that all that is possible within your body of work is what's possible as a podcaster. Well, that's nonsense. I'm a storyteller who happens to use podcasting as one of the mediums in which I tell my stories. Another happens to

be the stage on which I do keynote speeches. Another happens to be animated shorts. Letting go of your labels allows you to do is to look beyond the medium that you're operating in or creating. So, you know, underneath all of those things is the essence of what I think makes every one of us unmistakable. 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

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I was thinking earlier about how I listen to, I don't listen to as much as I did, but I listen to public radio and they have those fun drives. And from the minute the fun drive starts, I start thinking to myself, well, I'm going to probably should do that. I'm going to do that. And of course I don't do it till the very last minute. So I spend that entire time thinking I should do it. I want to do it. And then I only do it at the very end. And I spend all that time kind of just feeling bad or feeling like I need to be doing something. So if you're in that boat, you feel like you should or you want to donate to the show, this would be a great time to do it. Go to oneufeed.net slash support and you can make the donation. I know a lot of you are walking or cleaning the house or doing other things. So maybe you just make note to yourself on your to-do list

or send yourself an email or whatever that reminds you. Go to oneufeed.net slash support and give. I released a mini episode this last weekend. And for people who pledge at the $10 level, you get a bonus exclusive mini episode just for the people who are patrons of the show as well as an Ask Me Anything evening where we get online and just sort of, you know, shoot the whatever for an hour. I appreciate so much those of you that have given. If you haven't, this would be a great week to do stories. You mentioned one more. Masks, stories, and labels were the three. So you and I talked about this before, but I want to explore it again because I think it's an interesting concept and it's something that I spend a lot of time thinking about and maybe worrying is a strong word. Maybe fretting is a better word. But you and I both put a lot of time thinking about and maybe worrying is a strong word, maybe fretting is a better word. But you and I both put a lot of content out into the world. Every week we're

putting out another person, another idea. And yet I believe in a lot of cases, what a lot of us need is not necessarily more knowledge, but to use the knowledge we have or to go deeper in it. And so sometimes I think about what role am I playing in that? And I'm just interested to see how you see that as a person who's also, you know, doing a very similar thing. Do you share any of those same concerns? Yeah, I do, actually. You know, I wrote a piece on Medium titled,

Why Excessive Consumption Limits Your Creativity. Weird being somebody who is a creator of all forms of media and actually somebody who fuels consumption to say something like that. I think that we have a really weird sort of problem in that, you know, I think as a creator, you should absolutely be creating far more than you consume, which is clearly what people like you are doing. That being said, turning off the fire hose of information that comes at you on a daily basis, that has to be a choice. So I think the notion that you and I could control somebody else's consumption habits and as a result, their

behavior based on what we're creating, maybe a bit of a stretch. You really have no control over somebody else's behavior. I really would love it if every single person who listened to one of our interviews went out and implemented something they learned in an interview. But it's the sort of vicious cycle of personal development where you get the people who get a result because they'll get a result just because that's who they are. You get the people who might change because of the thing you created or the thing they enrolled in. And then you get the people who are stuck in this vicious cycle. And, you know, they basically are getting high on inspiration and Kool-Aid and they're addicted to it. Yeah. But they don't do anything. You did a podcast recently to start the new year and why 96% of personal development efforts fail.

So I'm hooked by that line. Tell me. Yeah. So, you know, where that came from was a former podcast guest named Jim Bunch who was on our show. And he talked about this idea of designing environments because environments are stronger than willpower. And, you know, when you think of environment, don't just think about physical environment, but this is literally what he said. Everything that you see, hear, smell, taste, or touch is an environment. And that environment is either adding energy to your life or draining energy from your life. It's either inspiring you or

expiring you. And that means it's the physical space that you live in, the people that you surround yourself with, the information that you consume, the food that you put into your body. Now, the thing that happens with most personal development efforts is people decide that they want to make some sort of drastic change. But what happens is that the environment doesn't change. And so as a result, the environment pulls them back down to being who they were before. So a simple example is if you want to be a more prolific writer, a good environment is one that is free of distractions. So you do something like use a tool called Focus at Will or Hey Focus, and you block distractions for 14 hours the night before. So that way, when you wake up in the morning, there's no option to get yourself involved in something distracting.

That's a really simple example of making a change to your environment. Another example is clutter. You know, we all have a lot of clutter in our lives and it's in all sorts of our spaces. It might be in your car, it might be in your office. But the thing is when you free your space of all this stuff, and if you've seen the minimalism documentary, they talk about a lot of this.

You know, really minimalism is a documentary about building environments that are conducive to the person you want to become, not just getting rid of all your stuff. Right. And the thing that you'll see is that as you start to basically upgrade environments, other environments start changing. So, you know, here's another crazy example. And this, you know, is a very sort of new agey example. But, you know, I started reading Marie Kondo's book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. And I thought the notion of, okay, does everything you own spark joy in your life? And I thought, you know, there's all these books that I don't really care about that have been sent to me over the years that I've

bought. So I packed them up and put them in a box. And what was left were books by Penguin. And three weeks later, or a month later, an editor from Penguin called and said, hey, we'd like you to write a book. And I was like, that's a really strange coincidence. But it's the whole, I want to go to the gym every day, but I don't do something as simple as put my bag and my shoes right by my bed. So when I wake up in the morning, that's the first thing on my mind. That's a big part of the reason that so many personal development efforts fail. But another maybe more relatable example is anybody listening to this has probably been to some sort of self-help seminar. Like you go to a Tony Robbins event, you go to a conference, and you've probably experienced the sort of thing

where, you know, you come back from the conference and you're high as a kite. Like you're just, you know, ready to conquer the world. You know, everything seems perfect. And then a week later, everything is back to normal. Now, there are some people who basically think, okay, I need another conference just like that. And they just keep going to conference after conference after conference, but nothing changes. And the reason for that is you're coming back to your own environment. And that is really the core of this 96% of personal development efforts fail. Again, this sort of idea that I'm sharing with you is not mine. It came from an episode of the unmistakable creative and a guy named Jim Bunch. So I want to make sure I give credit where credit is due. And you can learn more about his

work at the ultimate game of life. Yeah, it's so true, though. Environment and the outside influences play such a role in that. I recently did a TEDx talk, and that was one of the things I talked about was that when we're trying to change things, one of the things that most of us completely leave out of the equation is how do we get support from the people around us? us completely leave out of the equation is how do we get support from the people around us? It can make such a big difference if you've got people who are on your side versus not. And that's one example of an environmental thing. You mentioned some physical ones, but you combine all that stuff and your chances go way up in these areas. Yeah, for sure. They're so simple. And yet people don't think, you know, I think we don't like simple because it's not sexy. Yep. It's not. One of the things that you say is just because it's a best

practice, it doesn't mean it's best for you. I love that line. And we touched on it briefly before, but expound on that a little bit more. Yeah. In the business world, you've basically seen, you know, people go to conferences where they say, hey, you're going to learn best practices. So it's the business version of if you do this thing that this person has done, you will get the result that they have gotten. And of course, that's nonsense because there's one giant variable that throws off that equation and that's you. You know, like to not take into account the variable that is the most dynamic is ridiculous. So we see this across the board, even you see it with people who do diets,

right? People like, oh, you know, this keto diet or this diet or that diet or the paleo diet. And I just talked to a food blogger and a neuroscientist named Daria Rose. And she said, you know, science is really great for telling us what works on a sort of massive level. But on an individual level, it's really shitty because you're not really, you know, taking what works for you. And that's really, I mean, the notion of best practices might be a best practice, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's best for you is something that I think applies not just to business, but life, right? So it's like everybody should go to college. No, not really. That doesn't make any sense at all. There are plenty of people who shouldn't have gone to college who did go to college. And there

are plenty of people who didn't go to college and made a brilliant choice not going to college and have probably become much wealthier because of it. So best practice has often become these very blanket statements. Another example, the notion that everybody should start a podcast. That's stupid. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. One of the dumbest things I've ever heard. That's like saying everybody should be a public speaker. And that's absolutely not true. I'm not saying that people shouldn't do those things, but the notion that everybody should is ludicrous. Yeah, I agree. I think that brings up a lot of things for me. I do some exclusive episodes for people who support the show. And the one I did recently was about like, what do we really know? Like there's so many scientific studies about everything these days. You know, eggs are good,

eggs are bad, fats good, fats bad, all these different, you should do this for three minutes, you should do that for five minutes. And I kind of arrived where you landed, maybe not as eloquently, which was you've got to try this stuff for yourself. You've got to know what actually works for you because you're different. And I also think you have to do what you're comfortable with.

Like there's a lot of great advice about how to grow and sell and do things on the internet that I would feel very foolish doing them. And so I don't do them. But I think it's, you know, sort of knowing yourself and what's important to you and how you work and testing things and trying them. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think life is just one giant experiment, basically. 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. The other thing that you talk a lot about in your book is this idea of being ready. Tell me more about this idea of being ready and how it gets in our way. The idea really, I think, came from surfing, right? It really came from an experience I had when I first started learning how to surf. The instructor who was teaching me how to surf was trying to teach me how to pop up, and it took almost an hour because it just wasn't clicking.

And he said, you realize that if you were a little kid, a little kid would not want to be on land for an hour. They would be like, why are we not in the water? Because that's where surfing actually happens. And it was a really, really good point because what happens is that we have this sort of illusion in our mind of what we think is going to be the perfect time to do whatever it is we want to do. The perfect time to start this ambitious creative project. The perfect time to write a book. And, of course, the perfect time never comes because it's just this day in the future that is an imagined reality. It's just a mythical date. And so basically, it's a perfect excuse for procrastination when I'm

ready. But the thing is that there's not going to be any moment when you're suddenly perfectly adequate to do exactly what it is that you want to do. In fact, it is the doing of the thing that gets you ready for it. Because without doing it, you don't have the skill to even do what you want to do. Like, so you have to start. I couldn't agree more. I think my favorite quote of all time, and I'll get it wrong, is something along the lines of, start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. You write very eloquently about being ready in the book. The other thing you talk about is committing to the process instead of the outcome. And again, we sort of touched on this

a little bit with the extrinsic versus intrinsic goals, but walk me through that a little bit more. Here's the thing, right? Outcomes are so largely out of our control. You have no control over, you know, how an audience is going to respond to whatever it is that you've created or, you know, the book you've written, the movie you've produced. But what is in your control is all the effort you put in during the process. Are you working to do the best work that you can, that you're proud of, you know, creating things that you're proud to put your signature on, I think. Because, you know, process is really where you spend most of your time. You know, I've said this in my upcoming book, it is out of the spotlight with nobody watching where most creators spend the bulk of their lives.

Only a small fraction of what a creator creates interacts with an audience. And that's true for even the most prolific of creators and the ones who've had best-selling books and amazing movies. So much of what they're doing doesn't see the light of day. You don't see the thousands of hours that go into a movie before it hits the screen. All the takes that they do for one scene just to get like one line right. Like we don't see any of that. By the time we experience

it, we think that that's how it comes out. And that's what, you know, the whole experience is. But that is not the experience of that. It's the process where the experience occurs. I read somewhere, and you always read these numbers, you're like, where do people come up with these? But it was a similar idea that even to the creative person themselves, that only a small part of what the creative process is, is what comes out on the page. There's all the germination that's going on inside a person also, you know, that leads up to that point, which I found to be an interesting way to look at it. Yeah, yeah, there's no doubt. I mean, that's a huge part of it. That's so much more of the process than the work itself. In your book, you talk about the insidious nature

of validation. And you talk about critics voices, how they can be loud, but that probably the worst voice and the thing that holds us back is ourselves. We all have an inner critic that is harsher than probably most of our external critics, with maybe some exceptions here and there. There are assholes on the internet. But I think the thing that you start to realize is that, you know, and this isn't an entirely original idea, but you realize if anybody else talked to you the way you talk to yourself, you would never tolerate it. You would not allow them to be in your life very long. But somehow we're okay with this sort of self-abuse. And the thing that you learn when you're creating on a regular basis, you know, when you're putting out episode after episode after podcast, you're writing a thousand words a day, you know, for five,

six years in a row, you're putting up articles, is that the only sort of antidote to that voice is the actual creative process. That if you start in spite of that inner critic, it starts to sort of lose its power over you. It doesn't ever go away. It's always there. There's not a day that goes by that I don't get to the end of the day and say, oh, this is terrible. Or, you know, even 10 minutes into a writing session, I'm like, why do I even bother? And that just comes with the territory. But the more you create, the less that will impact you. Yeah, exactly.

We're going to wrap up here in a second, but I want you to talk about the idea of longevity. What is the role and what is so important about, as a creator, this idea of longevity? The thing is that we live in a world that moves so fast that people basically want to start a blog today, have a book deal tomorrow, and be on the New York Times bestseller list by next week. And that's just not how it works. Not for 99% of the people. No. The reality of it is that if you look at anybody who has succeeded at anything, it takes a really long time, especially to get to the level where they're good.

You know, there are sort of flukes, but the thing is, flukes are what lead to one-hit wonders. Like, anybody remember the Spin Doctors? Probably not, unless you grew up in, you know, the early 90s. Hopefully nobody who's a member of the Spin Doctors is listening to this. For what it's worth, I liked their music. If you are, I'll give you a chance to rebut Srini on air. So just drop me a note.

You get the point is that it's not a one-hit wonder that really turns you into having this really prolific career. It's longevity because it takes time to get good at the things you want to get good at. We have a very warped perception of longevity in the world that we live in because of the fact that it moves so fast. We're like, oh, a year. That's a long time. A year is not really a long time in the grand scheme of things. When you look at some of the biggest things that are a huge part of our lives, those are 20, 30, 40 years in the making. I mean, just read the biography of somebody like

a Warren Buffett and you realize, oh, the guy's like 70 something years old. That's taken a lifetime of work and a lifetime of hard work, not just, you know, screwing around. So longevity plays a huge role. I think that, you know, we underestimate how long we think something is going to take. As a result, we don't commit for a long enough timeline. You know, most people say, you know, I think the statistic is that most blogs are abandoned within 90 days. And, you know, I said this in the book, the internet is littered with the digital graveyards

of people who spend a Saturday afternoon trying to make a dent in the world. And, you know, you look, go look through the podcast feeds in iTunes. There's probably a podcast that haven't been updated in months. And, you know, I've even heard people I knew of just sort of peripherally,

you'll hear them say, hey guys, I know it's been like a month since I've been on the show. And you're kind of like, dude, you lost all your listeners three weeks ago. Yeah. So yeah, longevity is a big, big deal. I agree. I think the other thing that we run into, and I thought of it when you mentioned Warren Buffett and other people is I think sometimes we see people who are further along in their careers, where when they do something things happen very quickly for them whereas it's the length of time that they've put in up to that point that that allows those things to sort of happen and a lot of times we sort of lose that

and there's also a great ira glass uh thing out there on the internet that i saw which you've yeah you've probably seen i'm sure where he just talks about like, not only in like the gap between you starting something and having an audience, but when you start something until you actually think you're any good at it is a pretty good gap sometimes. Totally. I'm embarrassed by things we did a year ago. So yeah, I would agree with that completely. Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up. Srini, thanks so much for coming on the show twice now and getting the message out once. As I mentioned, the book is called Unmistakable Why Only is Better Than the Best.

And you can find Srini at unmistakablecreative.com and we'll have links in the show notes. But it's another great podcast. If you like this show, you're going to love what he's doing also. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. Yep. Okay. Take care. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast.

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