The Tim Ferriss Show - #202: Tools of Titans: Derek Sivers Distilled
Episode Date: November 20, 2016Derek Sivers(@sivers) is one of my favorite humans, and I call him often for advice. Think of him as a philosopher-king programmer, master teacher, and merry prankster. Originally a professio...nal musician and circus clown (he did the latter to counterbalance being introverted), Derek created CD Baby in 1998. It became the largest seller of independent music online, with $100 million in sales for 150,000 musicians. In 2008, Derek sold CD Baby for $22 million, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. He is a frequent speaker at the TED Conference, with more than five million views of his talks. In addition to publishing 33 books via his company Wood Egg, he is the author of Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur, a collection of short life lessons that I've read at least a dozen times. I still have an early draft with highlights and notes. I posted the following on Facebook while writing this chapter: "I might need to do a second volume of [Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers], 100% dedicated to the knowledge bombs of Derek Sivers. So much good stuff. Hard to cut." Here's a bit of what made it into the first edition -- cherry-picked from the nuggets I've applied to my own life. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years, and I love audiobooks. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim and get started today. Enjoy. This podcast is also brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks is The #1 cloud bookkeeping software, which is used by a ton of the start-ups I advise and many of the contractors I work with. It is the easiest way to send invoices, get paid, track your time, and track your clients. FreshBooks tells you when your clients have viewed your invoices, helps you customize your invoices, track your hours, automatically organize your receipts, have late payment reminders sent automatically and much more. Right now you can get a free month of complete and unrestricted use. You do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month and see how the brand new Freshbooks can change your business, go to FreshBooks.com/Tim and enter "Tim" in the "how did you hear about us section."***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Can I ask you a personal question?
Now would have seemed the perfect time.
What if I did the opposite?
I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
The Tim Ferriss Show.
This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that
supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take
one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually
drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1?
AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins,
probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients.
In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support
for the brain, gut, and immune system.
So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today.
You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D
and five free AG1 travel packs
with your first subscription purchase.
So learn more,
check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by
Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter.
It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of
subscribers, and it's super, super simple.
It does not clog up your inbox.
Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found
that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets,
new self-experiments, hacks, tricks,
and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time, because
after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet
Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free, it's always going to be free,
and you can learn more at tim.blog forward slash Friday.
That's tim.blog forward slash Friday.
I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast,
some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with,
and little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them
because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday.
So you'll be in good company.
It's a lot of fun.
Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email.
I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else.
Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing,
special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet
Friday subscribers.
So check it out,
Tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd
dig it a lot. And you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again,
that's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you.
Hello, this is Tim moves you. Hello.
This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show,
where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from many different worlds,
many different industries, many different areas of speciality,
to tease out the philosophies, habits, routines, etc. that you can use.
This episode is going to be a little bit different.
It is an experimental
episode doing something that many, many thousands of you have requested, and that is a highlight
episode. But this is not just material that some of you have heard. This is cherry-picked
to highlight the information that I have most applied to my own life, A, and B, it includes
some of my own commentary for those of you who are interested.
And I'm inviting back in the form of his highlight reel, and there are many others, but this is
certainly a selection that I enjoy, Derek Sivers. Derek Sivers, who can be found on Twitter and
Facebook at Sivers, S-I-V-E-R-S. He has many, many golden nuggets at Sivers.org,
is one of my favorite humans, and I often call him for advice. You can think of him as a
philosopher, king programmer, master teacher, and of course, merry prankster. He's a hilarious guy.
Originally a professional musician and circus clown, I kid you not, he did the latter to
counterbalance being introverted. Derek created CD Baby in 1998. It became the largest seller
of independent music online, with $100 million in sales for 150,000 musicians.
Then, in 2008, Derek sold CD Baby for $22 million, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for
music education. He is a frequent speaker at TED
with more than 5 million views of his talks. In addition to publishing 33 books via his company,
Wood Egg, he is the author of Anything You Want, which I highly recommend. It's a collection of
short life lessons that I've read personally at least a dozen times. I still have a very early
draft printed out with highlights and notes. Behind the scenes, Derek has read, reviewed, and rank ordered more than
200 books at Sivers.org forward slash books. They're automatically sorted from best to worst.
He is a huge fan of, among others, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner.
And Derek, in fact, introduced me to the book Seeking Wisdom, subtitle From Darwin to Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner. And Derek, in fact, introduced me to the book Seeking Wisdom, subtitle From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin.
He read Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins, who's also been on this podcast. And if I mention
any past guests, you can find all their episodes at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast.
But he read Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins
when he was 18 and it changed his life. I posted the following on Facebook when I was in fact
working on this chapter from my new book, Tools of Titans. And it read as follows, quote,
I might need to do a second volume of my next book, 100% dedicated to the knowledge bombs of Derek Sivers.
So much good stuff, hard to cut, end quote.
There are many comments that flowed in.
The most upvoted comment was from a gent named Kevin O who said, quote, put a link to the podcast and have them listen.
It's less than two hours and it will change their life. Tim, you and Derek got me from call center worker to location
independent freelancer with more negotiation power for income and benefits than I previously
imagined. You both also taught me the value of enough and contentment and appreciation in addition
to achievement. So that made my week and I do highly recommend everybody listen to the whole
episodes and there are more than one with Derek, but especially the first. And of
course, you can find that at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash Derek. But moving on. If more
information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect dabs. This is a direct
quote from Sir Derek, and it really underscores that it's not what you know, it's what you do
consistently. And Tony Robbins, just to bring him up since I did already, has said something along
the lines of what you know doesn't mean shit. It's what you do consistently that makes the
difference. It's not about just more how-to information. It's about why-to incentives and
much more than that. So it's not just enough to ingest more pages and so on.
You have to put it into practice
and you have to rig the game
so you can win by creating incentives,
which I've talked about a lot
in the dis and stakes section of The 4-Hour Chef,
but you can use tools like stick, S-T-I-C-K-K.com
or something like coach.me.
How to thrive in an unknowable future?
Choose the plan with the most options.
The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans.
My commentary.
This is one of Derek's directives, as he calls them,
which are his one-line rules for life,
distilled from hundreds of books and decades of lessons learned.
Other directives of
his include be expensive, which I think certainly echoes the sentiment of Mark Andreessen, who's
been on the podcast. Expect disaster, which echoes one of my favorite podcast guests. He's only 2000
years old, Seneca. I've had him on before, my favorite Stoic philosopher.
And own as little as possible, which echoes other podcast guests,
including Jason Niemer and Kevin Kelly, in fact.
Who do you think of when you hear the word successful?
Well, the first answer to any question isn't much fun because it's just automatic, right? Like,
what's the first painting that comes to mind? Mona Lisa. Oh, name a genius. Einstein. Who's a composer? Mozart. But this is the subject of the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
There's the instant, unconscious, automatic thinking, and then there's the slower, conscious, rational, deliberate
thinking. So I'm really, really into the slower thinking, like breaking my automatic responses
to the things in my life, and slowly thinking through a more deliberate response instead.
And then for the things in life where an automatic response is useful, I can create a new one
consciously.
So, like, what if you asked, when you think of the word successful, who's the third person
that comes to mind?
And why are they actually more successful than the first person that came to mind?
Well, in that case, the first person would be Richard Branson, because he's like the
stereotype, right?
He's like the Mona Lisa of success to me.
And honestly, you might be my second answer, but we could talk about that a different time.
And my third and real answer, after thinking it through, is that we can't know without knowing
a person's aims, right? Like, what if Richard Branson set out to live a quiet life,
but like a compulsive gambler, he just can't stop creating companies?
Well, then that changes everything, and we can't really call him successful anymore.
My commentary.
This is absolutely genius.
I love this approach, and it is not limited to Derek.
Ricardo Semler, CEO and majority owner
of the Brazilian-based Semco Partners,
whose writing I've read quite a bit of early on
just after graduating from college,
practices asking why three times.
This is true when he is questioning his own motives,
doing self-work, so to speak,
or when tackling big projects
and collaborating with others.
The rationale is identical to Derek's.
For people starting out, say yes.
When Derek was 18, he lived in Boston, and he attended the Berklee College of Music.
I'm in this band where the bass player one day in rehearsal says,
Hey man, my agent just offered me a gig. That's like $75 to play at
a pig show in Vermont. He rolls his eyes and he's like, I'm not going to do it. Do you want the gig?
I'm like, fuck yeah. A paying gig. Oh my God. Yes. So, uh, I took the gig to go up to Burlington,
Vermont. And I think it was like a, you know, $58 round trip
bus ticket. And I get to this pig show in Vermont. I strap my acoustic guitar on and I walk around a
pig show playing music and did that for like three hours, got on the bus home. And the next day,
the booking agent called me up and said, hey, so yeah, you did a really good job at the pig show.
We got good reports there. I'm wondering if you can come play at an art opening in Western Massachusetts. I'll
pay you 75 bucks again. Sure. So same thing. I took, you know, like a $60 bus out to Western
Massachusetts, got 75 bucks for playing at an art opening. And the agent was there and he was
impressed. And so he said, hey, look, I've got this circus and the previous musician just quit.
So we really need somebody new. And I really like what you're doing.
So there's about three gigs a week. I can pay you 75 bucks a gig.
They're usually Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Do you want the gig?
I said, hell yeah, I'm a professional musician now. This is amazing.
So I said yes to everything, which is going to come up later, you know, with the hell yeah or no thing.
But I think it's really smart to switch strategies.
But when you're earlier in your career, I think the best strategies, you just say yes to everything, every piddly little gig.
You just never know what are the lottery tickets.
So this one ended up being a real lottery ticket for me.
The standard pace is for chumps.
Kimo Williams is this large black man from Hawaii
that was a musician that attended
Berklee School of Music
and then stayed there to teach for a while.
And so what he taught me in four lessons
got me to graduate Berklee College of Music in half the time it would take. And here
was his thing. He said, the reason I wanted you to like study with me for a bit, he said,
I know you only have like eight weeks before you go to school. He said, I think you can graduate
Berkeley School of Music in two years instead of four. He said, the standard pace is for chumps.
I should get a t-shirt made this is like totally tim ferris stuff right this is like i can't believe we hadn't talked about
this before that he's the one at the age of like 17 18 got me into this mentality he said where
the standard pace is for chumps that's the school has to organize its curricula around the lowest common denominator
so that almost nobody is left out. So they have to slow down so that everybody can catch up. But
he said, you're smarter than that, or anybody can be smarter than that if they want to be.
So you can go as fast as you want. And here's how. And so he sat me down at the piano. He said,
okay, what do you know about music theory? I said, well, I don't know. Let't know let's find out and he you know he just asked me a few of these music questions like
okay what how does the major scale go right okay show me the tritone do you know what a tritone is
okay play me a tritone in the c major scale I'm like okay b and f he said okay now uh how can you
take that and what other chord can you make from b and f he said okay that's called the substitute
chord now what is a resolution we realized and he just like, boom, boom, boom, at this kind of pace.
He was doing all this music theory stuff with me.
It was so intense.
And I was like, I had all this adrenaline like a video game.
I was like, this is amazing.
Okay, keep going.
I said, okay, and this, and this.
And that was like a two-hour lesson that went at that kind of pace.
And then he dumped a bunch of homework on me.
He said, okay, now go home tonight and take this big book of jazz standards. Find me all the two five substitutions or two five closures. Now substitute chords for that and then come back next Thursday and we'll do this again. two hour sessions was basically like two years of Berkeley College of Music. He compressed it
into four lessons. So that when I showed up to my first day of Berkeley, I tested out of the first
few years just thanks to him. And then he even taught me a strategy. He offhand mentioned,
he said, you know, I think they might still have a rule in place where those other required courses, you know, that you have to take to graduate.
He said, I think you could pretty much just buy the books for those and then contact the department head and just take the final exam to get credit.
Don't be a doggy.
What advice would you give your 30 year old self?
My advice to my 30 year old self be, don't be a donkey.
What does that mean?
Well, I meet a lot of 30-year-olds that are trying to pursue many different directions at once, but not making progress in any, right?
Or they get frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing because they want to do them all.
And I get a lot of this frustration, like, but I want to do this and that and this and that. Why do I have to choose? I don't know what to choose. But the problem is, these things for a few years and then do another between a pile of hay and a bucket of water.
And he just keeps looking left to the hay or right to the water, trying to decide hay or water,
hay or water. He's unable to decide. So he eventually falls over and dies of both hunger
and thirst. So the point is that a donkey can't think of the future. If he did, he'd clearly realize that he could just go first drink the water and then go eat the hay.
So my advice to my 30-year-old self is don't be a donkey.
That you can do everything you want to do.
You just need foresight and patience.
Business models can be simple.
You don't need to constantly pivot derek tells the story of
the sophisticated origins of cd baby's business model and pricing so i was living in woodstock
new york at the time and there was a cute tiny little record store in town that sold consignment
cds on the counter of local musicians so i walked in there one day and I said, Hey, um, how does it
work if I want to sell my CD here? And she said, well, you set the selling price, whatever you
want. We just keep a flat $4 per CD sold and then just come by every week and we'll pay you.
So I went home to my new website that night and I wrote, you set your selling price at whatever
you want. We just keep a flat $4 per CD sold and we'll pay you every week. And then I realized that it took about 45 minutes of time for me to set up a new album into the system because I had to lay the album art on the scanner and Photoshop it and crop it and then fix the musicians spelling mistakes in their own bio and all that kind of stuff. That took about 45 minutes of work per
album. So it shows you what I was valuing my time at those days that I thought 45 minutes of my time,
that's worth about 25 bucks. So I'll charge a $25 setup fee to sign up for this thing.
And then at the last minute, I thought, wait a second, in my mind, 25 and 35, they hold that
they're in the same like brain cell in my head, 25 and 35, they hold that, they're in the same like brain cell in my head.
25 and 35, those numbers don't feel very different when it comes to cost.
You know, like $10 is different and $50 is different.
But 25, 35, that occupies the same space in the mind.
So you know what?
I'm going to make it 35.
That will let me give anyone a discount anytime they ask.
You know, even if somebody's on the phone and upset, I'll say, you know what? Let me give you a discount anytime they ask you know even if somebody's on the phone and upset i'll say you
know what let me give you a discount and so i added in that little buffer so i could give people
a discount which they love so yeah 35 setup fee four dollars per cd sold and then tim for the
next 10 years that was it that was my entire business model you know was was generated in
five minutes by walking down to the local record store and asking what they do.
Once you have some success, if it's not a hell yes, it's a no.
This mantra of Derek's quickly became one of my favorite rules of thumb.
I apply it all over the place.
And it led me to take, in effect at this point, certainly an indefinite startup vacation, which started in late 2015.
I've elaborated on that in the past in my blog post, which was how to say no when it matters most.
But here is his origin story and how he arrived at the, if it's not a hell yes, it's a no. And then once it came close and it was like time to book the ticket,
I was like, I don't really want to go to Australia right now.
I'm busy with other stuff.
And it was actually my friend, Amber Rhubarth,
who's a brilliant musician.
I was on the phone with her and kind of lamenting about this.
And she's the one that pointed out, she said,
it sounds like, you know, from where you're at, your decision is not between yes and no,
you need to figure out whether you're feeling like, fuck, yeah, or no. And I said, yeah,
that's, that's really what it comes down to, right? Because the idea is, if you're feeling
anything less than like, oh, hell, yeah, I would love to do that. Oh my God,
that would be amazing. If you're feeling anything less than that, then just say no,
because most of us say yes to too much stuff. And then we let these little mediocre things
fill our lives. And so the problem is when that occasional big, oh my God,
hell yeah, thing comes along, you don't have enough time to give it the attention that you
should because you've said yes to too much other little half-ass kind of stuff, right?
So once I started applying this, my life just opened up.
Busy equals out of control.
Every time people contact you, every time people contact me,
they say, you know, look, I know you must be incredibly busy.
And I always think like, no, I'm not.
Because I'm in control of my time.
I'm on top of it.
Busy to me seems to imply like out of control, you know, like, oh my God,
I'm so busy. I don't have any time for this shit. That's to me, that sounds like a person who's got
no control of their life. My commentary, lack of time is lack of priorities. If I personally
am busy and I'm inclined to say, ah, busy and answer the how are you question that way,
it's because I've made choices that put me in that position. So I've forbidden myself to reply
to how are you with busy. I have no right to complain. And if that is the case, if I am too
busy, instead, it's a cue to re-examine my systems and rules, do additional 80-20 analysis and so on
that I've talked about ad nauseum before.
What would you put on the billboard?
I really admire those places, like I think Vermont and Sao Paulo, Brazil, that ban billboards. But I know that that wasn't really what you're asking. So my better answer is,
I think I would make a billboard that would say, it won't make you happy.
And I would place it outside any big shopping mall or car dealer.
So ideally, actually, I think, you know what would be a fun project?
Is to buy and train thousands of parrots to say, it won't make you happy.
It won't make you happy.
And then you let them loose in the shopping malls and super stores around the world. That's my life mission. Anybody in? Anybody with me? Let's do it.
Take 45 minutes instead of 43. Is your red face worth it?
So yeah, I've always been very type A. And so a friend of mine got me into cycling
when I was living in LA. And I lived right on the beach in Santa Monica where there's this great bike path in the sand that goes for, I think it's 25 miles in the sand.
No, hold on.
Something like that.
The exact number doesn't matter.
But what I would do is I would go onto the bike path and I would get like head down and push it as hard as I could.
I would go all the way to one end of the bike path and back and then back home. And I'd set
my little timer when doing this. Huffing and puffing, red faced.
Yeah, just red face huffing it, but like just pushing it as hard as I can. Every single,
you know, thrust of the leg just. And of course, you know, that made me quite fun if somebody was in my way on the bike path.
Sure. That guy's got places to go.
So, but I noticed it was always 43 minutes. I mean, you know, if you know Santa Monica,
California, you know, the weather is about exactly the same all year round. So
unless it was a surprisingly windy day, it was always 43 minutes is what it took me to go as fast as I
could for that on that bike path. But I noticed that over time, I was starting to feel less
psyched about going out on the bike path. Because just mentally, when I would think of it, it would
feel like pain and hard work. It sounds like pain and hard work.
Yeah, I mean, it was. But you know, I guess at first that was okay.
And after a while, I just felt like, I don't know, running the bike, why don't I just hang
out?
So then I say, you know, that's not cool for me to start to associate negative stuff with
going on the bike ride.
Why don't I just chill for once?
Like, I'm just going to go on the same bike ride, but just, you know, I'm not going to be a complete snail, but I'll go at like half of my normal pace.
So yeah, I got on my bike and it was just pleasant. I just went on the same bike ride,
but I was more like standing up. And I just noticed that I was, I was looking around more
and, and I looked out in the ocean. I noticed there were that day, there were these dolphins
jumping in the ocean. And, and I went down to Marina del Rey to my turnaround point.
And, oh, no, actually, it was when the breakers at Marina del Rey, there was a penguin that was flying above me.
I was like, no way.
I looked up.
I was like, hey, a penguin.
And he shit in my mouth.
Was it a penguin or a pelican?
Oh, sorry a pelican oh sorry pelican yes a flying penguin above my head that would be more amazing i was like what what did you take before your ride so you had to see
it a pelican pelican shit in your mouth what was that's incredible accuracy was that from like how
far away was it uh like 20 feet up wow i guess I don't know if he was accurate or I was, you know.
So the point is, I had such a nice time.
It was just purely pleasant.
There was no red face.
There was no huffing and puffing.
I was just cycling.
It was nice.
And when I got back to my usual stopping place,
I looked at my watch and it said 45 minutes. And I was like,
no way. How the hell could that have been 45 minutes as compared to my usual 43?
It's like, there's no way, but yeah, it was right. 45 minutes. And that was like a profound
lesson that I think changed the way I've approached my life ever since.
It's because I realized that, I guess, you know, what percentage of that huffing and puffing then
we could do the math or whatever, what a 93 point something percent of my huffing and puffing
and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra two minutes. It was basically
for nothing. I mean, you know, of course, we're not talking about me competing in something where the huffing and puffing might
have been worth it. But for life, I think of all of this optimization and getting the maximum
dollar out of everything and the maximum out of every second to the maximum out of every minute.
And I think I just take this approach now of going like, or you could just take the lesson,
take most of that lesson and apply it and be effective and be happy. You don't need to stress about any of this
stuff. And so honestly, that's been my approach ever since I do things, but I stop before anything
gets stressful. Is there any particular way that you remind yourself of that given a lifetime of hard charging? If I would find, I do find that I
sometimes lose track of that type of truth, which I think is a truth in almost every aspect of the
endeavors that I partake in, at least. Are there any particular ways that you remind yourself of
that or keep it present for you? I think it's just noticing the
pain. I, I luckily I live in a world where I, there's more psychic pain than physical pain,
right? So you have to notice the psychic pain that you're feeling, um, of whether it's doing
things you don't want to be doing and feeling the pain and regret of that or the frustration. Just when you notice this internal, that always, that's my cue that I treat that like physical pain of like, what am I
doing? What I need to stop doing that thing that hurts. What is that? And it usually means that
I'm just pushing too hard or doing things that I don't really want to be doing because I was
asking the wrong questions and following the wrong, yeah and following the wrong path, the wrong outcome.
On lack of morning routines.
Not only do I not have morning rituals, but there's really nothing that I do every day
except for eating or some form of writing. But here's why.
I get really, really, really into one thing at a time.
For example, a year ago, I discovered a new approach to programming my PostgreSQL database
that made all of my code a lot easier.
So I spent five months, like every waking hour,
just completely immersed into this one thing.
I would bounce out of bed at five in the morning
and programming SQL code for like 19 hours
from 5 a.m. till midnight.
You know, I'd stop maybe an hour or two a day
to go for a run or talk on the phone with a friend.
But then after five months, I finished that project.
So I took a week and I went hiking
in Milford Sound in New Zealand, totally offline.
But when I got back from
that, I was so like Zen nature boy that I spent the next couple weeks just reading books outside.
What's something you believe that other people think is crazy?
Oh, that's easy. I've got a lot of unpopular opinions. I believe alcohol tastes bad,
and so do olives. I've never tried coffee, but I don't like
the smell. I believe all audiobooks should be read and recorded by people from Iceland, because
they've got the best accent. I believe it would be wonderful to move to a new country every six
months for the rest of my life. I believe you shouldn't start a business unless people are
asking you to. I believe I'm below average.
It's a deliberate, cultivated belief to compensate for our tendency to think we're above average.
I believe the movie Scott Pilgrim is a masterpiece.
I believe that music and people don't mix.
That music should be appreciated alone without seeing or knowing who the musicians are,
and without other people around.
So just listening to music for its own sake, not listening to the people around you,
and not filtered through what you know about the musician's personal life.
Treat life as a series of experiments.
So my recommendation is to do little tests, like try a few months
of living the life you think you want, but leave yourself an exit plan, being open to the chance,
the big chance, that you might not like it after actually trying it. The best book about this
subject is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.
His recommendation is to talk to a few people that are currently where you think you want to be and ask them for the pros and cons,
and then trust their opinions since they're right in it, not just remembering or imagining.
Even when everything is going terribly and I have no reason to be confident, I just decide to be.
There's this beautiful Kurt Vonnegut quote that's just a throwaway line in the middle of one of his books that says, you are whatever you pretend to be.
The most successful email Derek ever wrote. At its largest, Derek spent roughly four hours on CD Baby every six months, four hours every
six months. He had systematized everything to run without him. Derek is both successful and
fulfilled because he never hesitates to challenge the status quo, to test assumptions, to question legacy belief systems or any type of system really
that others are saying he should use. It doesn't have to take all that much to test these assumptions
or to do a lot with a little. And the following email, which is his most successful email he ever
wrote, illustrates this beautifully. And I'm going to
read what he has written about it and the email itself. Enter Derek. When you make a business,
you're making a little world where you control the laws. It doesn't matter how things are done
everywhere else. In your little world, you can make it like it should be. When I first built
CD Baby, keep in mind, I'm speaking in Derek's voice. When I first built CD Baby, keep in mind, I'm speaking in Derek's voice. When I first
built CD Baby, every order had an automated email that let the customer know when the CD was
actually shipped. At first, it was just the normal, your order has shipped today. Please let us know
if it doesn't arrive. Thank you for your business. After a few months, that felt really incongruent
with my mission to make people smile. Side note from Tim Ferriss, this is very true.
Derek takes making people smile very seriously.
Does a pretty good job, I think, too.
Back to Derek.
I knew I could do better, so I took 20 minutes and wrote this goofy little thing.
This is the email.
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD baby shelves with sterilized, contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees
inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD
into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards,
and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved bon voyage to your package on its way to you in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your pictures on the wall as customer of the year were all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to, in all caps, cdbaby.com,
two exclamation points. That one silly email sent out with every order has been so loved that if
you search Google for private cdbaby jet, you will get more than 20,000 results. Each of those
results, each one, is somebody who got the email and loved it enough to post it on their website
and tell all of their friends. That one goofy email created thousands of new customers. When you're thinking of how to
make your business bigger, it's tempting to try to think all the big thoughts, the world-changing
massive action plans. But please know that it's often the tiny details that really thrill someone
enough to make them tell all of their friends about you.
Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one,
this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And
Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found
or that I've been pondering over the week.
That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered.
It could include gizmos and gadgets
and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up
in the world of the esoteric as I do.
It could include favorite articles that I've read
and that I've shared with my close friends,
for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off
for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com.
That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very
next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.