The Tim Ferriss Show - #357: Susan Cain — How to Overcome Fear and Embrace Creativity

Episode Date: January 24, 2019

"So often, when you see someone who's really good at almost anything, it's because they actually started out exactly the opposite — and then they cared so much about fixing that problem." ��� Susan CainSusan Cain (@susancain) is the author of the bestsellers Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can't Stop Talking, the latter of which has been translated into more than 40 languages. Quiet is in its seventh year on The New York Times Best Sellers list, and it was named the number one best book of the year by Fast Company magazine, which also named Susan one of its Most Creative People in Business.She is the Chief Revolutionary of Quiet Revolution, and her writing has appeared in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Her record-smashing TED talk has been viewed more than 20 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his all-time favorite talks.Please enjoy! Click here for the show notes for this episode.This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn and its job recruitment platform, which offers a smarter system for the hiring process. If you’ve ever hired anyone (or attempted to), you know finding the right people can be difficult. If you don’t have a direct referral from someone you trust, you’re left to use job boards that don’t offer any real-world networking approach.LinkedIn, as the world’s largest professional network and also used by more than 70 percent of the US workforce, has a built-in ecosystem that allows you to not only search for employees, but also interact with them, their connections, and their former employers and colleagues in a way that closely mimics real-life communication. Visit LinkedIn.com/Tim and get $50 off toward your first job post!***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? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.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.

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 seem the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by LinkedIn. The right hire can make a huge impact on your business.

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That's linkedin.com forward slash Tim, T-I-M, to get $50 off your first job post. Linkedin.com forward slash Tim. Take a look. Terms and conditions do apply. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on demand, which is what I do. We'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up,

I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies. Hard to do that at the gym. Take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on demand. And you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip hop, rock and roll, or say low impact versus high intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers and I tend to do on demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over

and over. But I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities. So you can find what you're in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time. And that will help, I would say, catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was. And it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So check it out.

Discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's O-N-E, Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com. And enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So get a great workout at home. Anytime you want, check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started. Why, hello there, you sexy little minxes. Minx, is it? Murder of crows? A gaggle of geese? I to get started. My guest this episode is Susan Cain. She's been very widely recommended, widely requested by all of you. And here she is. Susan is the author of the bestsellers Quiet Power, subtitled The Secret

Strengths of Introverts, and Quiet, subtitled The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, the latter of which has been translated into more than 40 languages. Quiet is also in its seventh year on the New York Times bestseller list. That is a long time. And it was named the number one best book of the year by Fast Company Magazine, which also named Kane one of its most creative people in business. She is the chief revolutionary of Quiet Revolution, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Her record-smashing TED Talk has been viewed more than 20 million times and was named by Bill Gates one of his all-time favorite talks. You can find Susan on Twitter at Susan Cain, C-A-I-N,

at the website QuietRev.com, and on Facebook under Author Susan Cain. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Susan Cain. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Susan Cain. Susan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I have been looking forward to having you on the show for some time, and we have a lot of terrain to possibly cover. So we may end up having a part two and three, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. I thought that we could look at public speaking just for a second,

because many people will associate you with this blockbuster mega hit of a Ted talk. And a rumor has it that you straight in the delivery room from the get-go, were a natural-born killer on stage. Is this true? Were you born a spectacular public speaker? Oh, my gosh. Okay, well, everybody listening, you can't see Tim right now, but he has a very devilish smile on his face because of course the answer is the complete opposite. Um, so I had a lifelong while dating back to middle school. I know exactly when it

started. I had an almost lifelong fear of public speaking. And a lot of people say they're afraid of public speaking and you know, they're telling the the truth but like they didn't have a fear the way i had a fear of it it was it was so extreme what was the triggering event oh okay the triggering event was i had recently switched to a new middle school and um i was in an english literature class and i probably appeared to the teacher in that class to be not a shy person at all because i love love English, so I was always participating. So anyway, she called me up to the front of the room, we were doing Macbeth. And she called me up with a friend of mine. And she said, Okay, you're going to play Lady Macbeth. And your friend Rob is going to play Macbeth and just improvise this scene. And for me, as a shy person in a new school. This was like total kryptonite

and I couldn't say anything. I just completely blanked out and just stood there dumbly at the front of the class and finally just had to kind of sit back down, red-faced, not having said a word. And- That sounds terrible.

Oh my God. It's making my palms sweat. Just listening to it. Yeah, yeah. And I know this now, now that I've studied all this stuff, that if you have an experience like that, it gets encoded into your amygdala, which is the part of your brain that registers all your fears. And then the amygdala for the rest of your life is doing its job by saying, oh, I'm going to steer you clear of any situation ever approximating anything like that literature class ever again. So after that, anytime I had to give a speech and I did it, you know, I used to be a lawyer on wall street and stuff. Anytime I would do it, I would just sort of suffer my way through. And I would always lose five pounds because I couldn't eat before, like for a week before.

So then I started writing this book, Quiet, after I had left law. And I really, really, really cared about it. It was my dream come true to be a writer. And I cared so much about the ideas in the book. And I didn't want my fear to stand in my way. And I was giving this TED Talk. So I had to overcome it. How did the, sorry to interrupt, but now that I've had a cappuccino, as long-time listeners know, I tend to jump a lot. How did the opportunity for the TED Talk come about? So I had a friend who worked at TED, told him about the book, and he kind of passed on the idea to the curators at the time. And I think that they understood that most of the TED audience is really introverted. And so they knew that it would relate with their audience. And I think that that was probably why they invited me in.

And I mean, I'll come back to how I overcame my fear in a minute, but I will tell you, they turned out to be so accurate that after I gave the talk, I came down off the stage and I was absolutely mobbed for the whole rest of the week by every single other audience member who were all coming to tell me, you know, that's my story too. And I'm going around pretending to be this very confident extroverted person and that's not really who I am. So amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Um, present company included. Oh yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I went to, I will, I will steer us back and you will also bring us back to what we were just talking about. but last night at a group dinner which i helped organize keep in mind uh at a wonderful restaurant here in new york city called the lily it's a lebanese place i had to take four or five bathroom breaks which were not to use the bathroom it was that is what i do at any dinner of more than one or two people. I have to exit not just the conversations, but the environment to just recharge my batteries and gather my bearings for a few minutes and then go back out. It's like you're feeling a kind of overstimulation in the setting.

Overstimulation. Yeah. I mean, that's so interesting because I've heard you talk before about moving to Austin and having these group dinners. And I thought, oh, that's so interesting that that's what Tim wants to do because I would never choose to socialize that way. I always love to socialize one-on-one, like four to six I can handle. It depends. It depends for me also on the environment, I think more so than the number of people. So when I do these group dinners, I will generally host them at home or have them at one of my friends' homes, not in a popular restaurant like I did last night. I'm just going to say, what's interesting about that is how strategic you are about it.

And I've really noticed this with people. So we were just talking about Ted. I was just talking to Chris Anderson, who runs Ted, about this whole phenomenon. And he describes himself as an introvert too. And he said he loves group dinners if there can, if there's a specific topic that everybody has gathered there to discuss and he knows it's going to be something really substantive, then he's in his comfort zone, you know, but if it's just kind of this amorphous socializing,

he wants to leave. So just on the, on the tactical practical side, I also tend to very frequently cook the meal for the group so that I have a task while people are arriving and talking. Also deliberate because I'm often inviting people who don't know one another. So I want them to have a chance to chat without having me as a mutual crutch, if that makes sense. Yep. But in any case, we could talk about that for a long time. No, and that's a really common strategy. I hear that from many people wanting to have the task.

I can play extrovert. I'm good at playing extrovert. But up until, say, sixth grade, I wouldn't even go out to recess. I would sit on a step and read usually books about sharks and fish because I wanted to be a marine biologist. But I wouldn't even go out to recess. I would sit on a step and read usually books about sharks and fish because I wanted to be a marine biologist, but I wouldn't even go out to recess. Wow. So it's a lot of what you talk about and have written about certainly strikes a chord. Now I feel like I want to ask you so many questions about this. I'm really curious if we talked about, if we could go back and talk to sixth grade you right this minute, like would sixth grade you have any idea that you would have the life path that yours has taken that's so public?

Absolutely not. No, definitely, definitely not. I mean, what happened in sixth grade also, just for people who might be wondering, well, what happened in sixth grade? If it's up until sixth grade, what happened in sixth grade, or I should say more accurately, the summer of fifth grade is that I had a huge growth spurt and I had been bullied really badly. I was born premature and very small and I was bullied really, really badly up until the end of fifth grade. Then I left to a summer camp and gained about 30 pounds of muscle and grew four to five inches over the summer, came back. And then, uh, it's like a captain America. Yeah, exactly. And then the bullies who had been accustomed to

bullying me, uh, tried their usual playbook. And I just went on this vigilante spree, like the punisher. And, um, that changed the dynamic, social dynamics. So I was able to actually go outside and do things that I wanted to do at recess from that point on. So it didn't mean that I socialized a lot more, but I had more mobility. So that is what happened. But like you, and this is part of the reason why I wanted to start with this question about overcoming a fear of public speaking is that it's when people see the finished product, it's easy to assume that it comes from an attribute as opposed to a skill. Yes. And in fact, a lot of what appears to be natural appears only to be natural because it started

off very, very unnatural. And someone has worked at chipping away at it over time. I think that's true. I think almost so often when you see someone who's really good at almost anything, it's because they actually started out exactly the opposite and then they cared so much about fixing that problem. But in terms of how I overcame that fear, and I have this kind of evangelical desire to share it because it was so extreme. I feel like if I could do it, then I know anyone can overcome any fear. So, first of all, I spent years sitting in therapists' offices kind of cozily discussing, well, what might be the sources of this fear and what do I trace it back to and like that.

And that does no good at all. I'm actually a big believer in therapy, but not for this type of issue. And so what really does it, if you're afraid of something, you have to expose yourself very slowly to the thing that you fear in really manageable doses. So you can't start off by giving the TED Talk. So in my case, I signed up for the seminar. It was a seminar for people with public speaking anxiety. It was here in New York. And you'd get there, and on the very first day, all you had to do was stand up, say your name, sit back down,

declare victory, you're finished. And that's it. What was the organization? Oh, gosh. Was it Toastmasters or something else? No, and I am a big fan of Toastmasters, but this was almost like more remedial than Toastmasters. Toastmasters Lite. Yeah, this was like pre of Toastmasters, but this was almost like more remedial than Toastmasters. Toastmasters Lite.

Yeah. This was like pre-Toastmasters. Yeah. So the guy's name, he's amazing. His name is Charles DiCagno. And you can find his organization. It's speakeasy.com. And I think it's spelled with three E's.

Perfect. And I'll put a link in the show notes for people as well. Yeah. Yeah. I really recommend him. Yeah. And so, you know, you'd come back the next week and maybe you'd stand up and and he would do these things like he'd have people stand on either side of you so you didn't feel all alone up there on stage it's brilliant yeah yeah and then the audience would ask you questions like where are you from and where'd you go to college? You know, so really easy stuff. You answer the questions and you're done.

And it's like, if you do that little by little by little, you actually really can overcome it. It's kind of crazy, but true. But I will say, having said all this, still, you know, there's something about a TED Talk that's on some whole crazy other realm of public speaking nerves. Yeah.

Even if the setting is exactly the same, there is a performance anxiety associated with that three-letter acronym for sure. Yeah. We were talking about this before we started taping that so many of the speakers are really practiced on stage and yet you see them minutes before they go out and they're sweating bullets and and they're they're all losing it yeah we were chatting for a second about uh and chris anderson could certainly correct me i'm blanking the exact term but there's some space right next to the stage behind the curtain called the zen room or

the relaxation cube there's some very pleasant sounding name for this space. And it's intended to be the next up batting cage for the two or three speakers to come. And I remember it was probably 15 or 20 minutes before I was supposed to go live. Or no, it couldn't have been that. It was probably an hour before. And I really didn't want to be around a lot of people. And in the green room, there are all sorts of staff and lots of people milling around and working on production. And I thought to myself, I need to go to the Zen room.

We'll just call it the Zen room. And so I walk out to the Zen room and I won't mention names, but there are like three just killers. These are consummate professionals who have done this type of thing thousands of times people I look up to and would love to someday have a coffee with, and they are freaking the fuck out. And I was like, not helping, not helping. I need to leave the Zen room right now.

So yes, it's a different beast. So how do you go from talking about your favorite color on stage with two people next to you to Ted then? Right. Okay. So I graduated from that to Toastmasters, which I also completely recommend. And should I describe what that is? Yes, please. Yeah. Okay. So Toastmasters, it's a worldwide organization. You can absolutely find one near you because they're everywhere. And it's basically this non-for-profit thing where you sign up for a group that meets near you. And once every two weeks, you get together and you practice public speaking together. And they have this ritualized way of doing it. And some of the time you're practicing speaking off the top of your head.

And sometimes it's a prepared speech and it's just kind of giving you that exposure therapy of you know putting you in the beast of the thing that most frightens you you have to show up every two weeks and do it so I did that but then the next stage after that and it was my husband's idea was I hired a coach for the full week before the TED Talk. It was a really amazing guy named Jim Fife, who I also completely recommend. And since then, he has coached many other TED speakers. So I worked with him morning till night for a full week before the talk. Good for you.

Yeah. What did the working with him look like? Okay. So he did a really brilliant thing. He was very psychologically attuned. And I said to him, you know, I'm really comfortable in general talking to people one-on-one and kind of like cozily sitting on a couch and talking about life. I love that. For me at that point, though, getting up on a stage and holding forth was the hard thing.

So he said, okay, let's practice your talk sitting on the couch and just talk to me about it. And we did that for like two days. And it was only after that that we then moved to the stage and started getting into kind of the theatrics of it. That's brilliant. And that really, that kind of transition was so helpful. I just want to note that this is, I spend so much time with, and I'm so obsessed with good teachers, good coaches. This is very common where they will effectively say, let's start from where you are right now.

Right. And they will always return if they sense any type of overwhelm or fear to bring you back to a point of familiarity or comfort. Yeah. And then edge into sort of the next concentric circle of what is your limit of comfort.

Yeah. And I think they also have to show a lot of non-judgment because I had some dark moments during that week. You know, for me, this was the abyss and I was just hanging out in

the abyss for a week. And so he saw me, you know, I had only just met him and he saw me not in the most flattering circumstances. And yet I didn't feel embarrassed by that. Did he do anything in the beginning to assess you or establish a baseline or was it more of an interview that he used like an intake? Do you remember what it wasn't really formal like that you know he's such a human guy it was just like we were just talking you know we were just yeah yeah disguised as intake smart smart smart fella yeah and then um so the amazing thing to me now is i now super ironically have a career as a public speaker. Like I travel the world going and giving talks to all different companies and conferences all over the place.

And I mean, like I asked you, well, if we could tell sixth grade Tim where he would be, what would he say? And I say that to myself too. Like if you could have even told me eight years ago that this would be my life, I would have been so shocked by it. And now I've come to like it. So- Did you have any particular pregame ritual or anything that you did in the hours leading up to your talk that helped or that you didn't do? I have things now. Back then, I just suffered. What do you have now? Now, I have a few things. I mean, I do deep breathing, just like everyone else. I'm sure you've heard that a million times, but it's got to be

real deep breathing, you know, where you really feel your belly and your diaphragm filling up. But for me, what I also do is I usually think to myself, and I do this especially when I'm speaking to an audience that I find more intimidating, like a group of finance people at an investment bank or something. I will say to myself, there, I am sure, is one person in this audience who has a child who is shy or introverted. And if that child has a better life because of one tidbit that that person hears today, then it's all good. And that pulls me out of myself instantly. Yeah, it gives you also a hurdle that you can clear for winning the presentation, so to speak. Yeah, right.

It's a manageable goal. But I think it feels deeper than that to me. It feels also like, I think when people get nervous about speaking, obviously, they're really nervous about being judged, right? But this completely shifts the energy where it's not any longer about how anybody judges me. It's about, can I help that kid out there? And I want to say also that part of the reason I am more than happy, actually excited to spend so much time talking about this, is that it is not specific to public speaking. Right. This just happens to be a very common fear

and perceived weakness of many, many, many people. Also, as a side note, what Warren Buffett says is his greatest ever investment, put more specifically, a Dale Carnegie course that he took in public speaking. Right, right. Because it magnified his ability to do almost everything else to communicate effectively,

uh, both in spoken word, but also in the written word in some respects. Yeah. Uh, go ahead. I was just going to say that, uh,

I've never, I don't think I've ever, I've ever spoken about this, but I also did Toastmasters. And, uh, if you have trouble finding it, oftentimes there are large companies that will have within their HQ or any large location, their own Toastmasters group. And that's actually how I found it in San Jose. Initially it was at

Adobe. So I would go in and I would do this Toastmasters and uh your uh your description of having this very logical progression of small wins layered upon small wins getting up on stage and then getting off stage right getting up on stage having two people next to you and answering a few questions and getting off stage is so incredibly effective and I I'm laughing right now because I remember when I was preparing for my first presentation at South by Southwest. So this is a very large festival and conference in Austin, Texas. And the timing was 2007. It's about, I want to say, a month, month and a half before my book is going to come out, my first book, which I'm very nervous about.

There had been no speaking slots, but I had pitched Hugh Forrest at the time, who I had been introduced to, that I would take anything available, corner of a room, hallway, if there were any cancellations, I would really appreciate the opportunity to speak at the event. And lo and behold, there was a last minute cancellation, not by a keynote speaker, but by a sponsor who was going

to have a stage to pitch their products from in this makeshift cafe. And I was like, I'm in, I'm in. But I was so incredibly nervous about this that in the beginning in particular, I was, and this is true today, too nervous to practice my rough, rough draft of the presentation in front of people. Yeah, I guess. And so what I did,

I was staying in a guest bedroom at a friend's house. He had three chihuahuas. And I went outside, I was playing with a guest bedroom at a friend's house. He had three chihuahuas. And I went outside, I was playing with the chihuahuas, and they followed me into the garage. I practiced in the garage. I didn't want to practice in the house where my friend's wife was. And I gave my presentation. I felt reasonably confident about the content, but I wasn't comfortable with any of the performance aspects of trying to keep attention. So I gave my draft of this talk over and over again until I could get the dogs to sit and stare at me, somewhat bewildered, but to hold their attention. And that was the litmus test for me to graduate to giving a rough draft in front of humans for those people out there

who are wondering whether this all comes naturally to me. It does not at all. Have you talked about that before or is this the first time you are doing that? I've talked about that. Certainly, I don't think I've talked about it on the podcast. And the TED Talk also, something I did which I did not do for the South By Talk, which I thought really made a difference was I practiced giving the talk in front of small groups of strangers once I had a reasonably polished version.

And I asked friends of mine who worked at larger companies who had teams during lunch hour, if there happened to be an empty conference room, could they invite people to hear a rough draft of a TED Talk? And then I would ask them for feedback. And usually there was enough time that I could give it two or three times. So I could actually incorporate their feedback, give another version. And once I'd given the second version, there were a lot more people in the room who are willing to be critical, right? The first round you get one or two.

Yes, that's so true. And then this is just something I've thought about a lot because I've been so nervous about public speaking for so long. And by the way, it doesn't really go away. At least for me, I still have those nerves. But with Ted very specifically, I assumed, and this came from sports, but I'd never applied it, that I was going to be, my heart rate was probably going to be 30 beats per minute higher than normal. And that it was not just important for me to practice the content, but to practice under the physiological stress that I would probably experience when trying to deliver the content. So I would do a bunch of pushups in another room

and drink two double espressos and wait for it to hit and then go in and give my dress rehearsal to see if I could handle that stimulation. That was so, so smart. And, you know, listening to that story is reminding me of this crucial step that I left out. Um, in, in, in a lot of ways, a kind of mistake that I made, which is, you know, I told you I worked with that guy, uh, Jim for a week, who was amazing. And I thought I was pretty well ready at that point. So I talked to my friend, Adam Grant, who's a very dear friend. Very good speaker too. And a really good speaker

and who also started out as a very nervous and by his description, a terrible public speaker. He says he used to get like terrible reviews from his students and he just worked and worked and worked at it. And now he's the most popular professor at Wharton. But okay, so I was talking to Adam about all this. And so he said, so I'm leaving for TED on Sunday morning, right, to fly

out to California, which is where it was at that time. And he says, oh, I'm going to pull together a group of friends and you can practice your talk in front of them. And so this is Friday night and I'm leaving Sunday morning. And so I show up at this apartment full of Adam and his friends. And I think that I'm pretty well done with the talk. And this is the first time that I'm giving it in front of any kind of group because I didn't have the foresight of what you just described. And not only was I so nervous, but I realized from the feedback that a lot of the content was all wrong. And it's Friday night and I'm leaving, you know, like the next day basically, or the day after the next day.

So I went home and I just spent the whole entire night rewriting the whole final third of the talk. And then I'm like on the plane going out to Ted, trying to memorize the new talk. So I don't recommend that kind of approach. You need to get real people in front of you. This is just like entrepreneurship and people try to get the product perfect

before exposing it to any prospective clients. You really need to get into the messy reality of what a live audience or a real customer looks like. And the same was true for me. I made a lot of changes in the last few days, which I thought were just going to be fine tune. Right.

And then you find tuning. And I was like, Oh, actually I really need to come. I need to completely change by 30% of this. Yeah. And, uh,

I was very, very nervous before the Ted talk and i came off stage and i did not think that i i didn't i didn't think that i blew it but i didn't think that i i did a great job i came off stage thinking that there were definitely bits and pieces i could have done better uh but worked out seems to have worked out okay wait but i want to come back to one thing that you said for the benefit of people who are listening now. So you said that you still are really nervous when you give a talk, but I mean, are you really as nervous as you used to be? Because I really want people to understand that like you can get to a point, you might still have butterflies. It's

not like the nerves completely disappear, but they get to, I, you might still have butterflies. It's not like the nerves completely disappear, but they get to, in my experience and from all the literature that I've studied on this, they really do get to a point where you can manage them. And the difference between manageable and non-manageable is gigantic in terms of its effect on your life and your career and everything. So I just want to make sure that people know that.

I can clarify. So it depends a lot on the event. Right. So if it's, we're going to do a Q and a, and it's a friend of mine interviewing me on stage. That's not from my perspective, really public speaking. I mean, it is, but at this point, I could do that with zero preparation. If it's anything resembling a keynote, if it is Tim on stage talking to an audience and they expect something that has been well rehearsed, my physiological response is still very strong. I get really sweaty hands. I pace. I have very minimal contact with, with anyone beforehand.

Uh, but let me mention a few, a few things. Number one, and I, and, uh, both Mike Tyson and Dean Martin used to vomit before nearly every performance, but the way that they psychologically contended with that evolved over time and what well since i mentioned mike tyson custom auto who was the trainer who really in a lot of respects i think um boxing boxing scholars or boxing fans would agree made Tyson into what Tyson was at his prime as an athlete used to say something along the following that the hero and the coward feel the same thing. It's how they respond. Yes. Oh, I so believe that. Yeah. And I mean, there is no courage without the presence of fear. And for me, I have come to see those physiological

symptoms that used to make me panic, that used to make me feel like I was doing something wrong, that used to make me feel like I was unprepared as simple precursors to a performance. The way that I frame them for myself is completely different. And I've learned to view it as this energetic asset that I can use. And that has made all the difference. And it has decreased in some circumstances, but certainly before TED, I mean, I'd given hundreds of different presentations, and it was like I was getting on stage for the first time. In part also, for people who don't know, they are very, as they should be, strict about many things at Ted, including running over.

Oh, yes. If running over, I mean, and I want to say, and this is exactly what they should say, but in effect, they say, if you run over by, you should not run over. Number one, do not run over. If you run over, like if you get to the point where you're like 30 seconds over, we will come up and remove you from stage. And while I'm preparing and while I'm rehearsing, one of the things that made me most stressed out is that my finish times were really variable

and i would say like 30 40 percent of the time i ran over then other times i would run two minutes under but miss something really really important yeah because i was rushing and i was like good god this is just a crap shoot like i am at the craps table with my timing. And that really was a concern for me. So that was another element that made Ted unique for me was that degree of cutoff. Yeah, I felt that way too. And I did end up going over it by over a minute. Oh, good for you. And there it is.

And they were just like, we cannot stop this performance. I don't know about that. But I want to say also for anybody who is listening and who is right now in the grip of this kind of fear and isn't sure whether they can really get past it. Also, like what is waiting for you on the other side of it is so gigantic because there's something, there's something

weird about public speaking where it has such disproportionate value to, in a way, what you're investing in it. You know, like you're going up on stage for 18 minutes or 40 minutes or whatever, or maybe within your own workplace, you know, even giving a two minute talk, suddenly everybody is regarding you as a leader and as someone who they can turn to in a new way from if you hadn't been willing to put yourself forward in that way. Definitely. Definitely. I mean, there's public speaking as the force multiplier for the value of your other skills, which is absolutely true. And then public speaking in a way is also a, a, a wonderful diagnostic tool. And what I mean by that is I was, I remember talking to a friend of mine who, uh, he's, he's a wealth manager for a lot of muckety mucks who you would recognize. And he said, I know them generally better than therapists

they've been seeing for a decade within the first few hours because money brings up everything. That's interesting. Talking about money brings up the full spectrum of someone's insecurities, fears, desires, neuroses. Sex also, true. And public speaking, I think, if it makes you remotely nervous when you start to learn public speaking, at least for me, it kind of brings up all your stuff. So if you were simply interested in personal growth,

it brings to the surface many different pieces of your personality and psyche that you can then work on in a way that transfers to other areas so that to me it was my experience and i find really interesting okay well maybe you don't have to play hide and go seek with talk therapy for 20 years to find all of the bits and pieces when if rather than following these different gingerbread trails, you can use certain fearful circumstances to just bring it all right. Or a lot of it to the surface. That was my experience. I'm not saying it's true for everybody, but it was one of those things, like talking about money, talking about sex, or public speaking.

It's like, okay, now we just bring everything to the forefront. So for me, that was also, even if I had not had any interest in getting on stage and giving presentations, it would have been valuable in and of itself. Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. Are there other things that you're fearful of or have been afraid of that you've overcome? No, I mean, that was really the big one for me. But yeah, we were talking about this before, I guess, you know, my bugaboo in general is that I just tend to be a worrier. So, I don't know. Other than the experiences I had with public speaking it's not like i have

full-on panic or anything like that it's more like it's a a very familiar companion for me so i've had to just come up with various hacks around it what what are some of your hacks um this is going to get us into another big topic but but why not? Why not? So, for example, when I stopped practicing corporate law and I decided that I wanted to be a writer, I told myself that it's really hard to make a living as a writer. And I said, okay, the goal is to publish something by the time you're 75. And at the time I was 33, at the time that I said that. And I kind of did that instinctively because I was always doing these hacks of like just wanting to completely take the pressure off of something that I otherwise loved so deeply. And like, I just knew that if I turned this thing that I deeply loved into a source of like, this has to be the place where I make my living. This has to

be the place where I derive some kind of professional stature. It was going to soak a lot of the joy out of it. And so that's the kind of hack that I just naturally do. So on a very related note, could you give us a little bit of context around the leaving law? Like why you left law? And then you decide you want to be a writer and you kind of alluded to it, but does that mean that suddenly your rent is dependent on writing? Right. Okay. So I had wanted to be a writer from the time I

was four. And then, you know, for a whole bunch of reasons, and like so many people, I graduated, I took some creative writing classes in college. And I decided, you know, I'm not actually that good at this. And I need to make a living. And I also kind of had a desire, I think, to show myself that I could be out there as a kind of alpha person out in the world of finance or something. So I went to law school and I practiced law, Wall Street law, for almost a decade. And during that time that I was practicing law, it was so all-consuming that I completely forgot about the fact that I had wanted to be a writer. It wasn't like, you know, I was walking around conscious of this broken dream or something. I'd completely forgotten. And the first few years of practicing law, I really loved it. It was just

this kind of crazy adventure that I was on. And as the years went by, it started to get really tough for me. I'm not a very natural lawyer in a million different ways, but I was on this partner track and I was committed to it. And then came the day, and I think I may have told you about this in an earlier correspondence, but then came the day when a senior partner in my firm walked in and said, I was supposed to be up for partner that year. And he said, well,

we're not going to be putting you up. And the funny thing is to this day, I don't really know if he meant we're not putting you up ever for partner or just not anytime soon. I don't really know what it meant. All I knew was like, number one, I burst into tears. And number two, here was my get out of jail free card. So three hours later, I had left the firm. Like I was gone. I took a leave of absence and I just started bicycling around Central Park. Like I didn't know what I was going to do next. But as soon as that space opened up, that I now had free time for the first time in like 10 years, I started writing.

And I had no idea that was going to happen. It was almost like in a movie. That's cool. Yeah, it's like it's just been waiting for you. Yeah, I mean, literally. Like, I remember that night, you know, like kind of curled up on my sofa in my apartment, and I just started writing on my laptop. And then a week later, I signed up for a class in creative nonfiction at NYU. And I just had this complete feeling of certainty that this was what I wanted to be doing. And zero expectation that I would make a living out of it. So, and this is a really important thing, I think. I think if you have that kind of a creative dream

and a creative love, you have to do everything you can not to spoil it with the pressures of paying the rent and all those other things or the pressures of needing to derive professional status from it. So I set up a little side business teaching people negotiation skills, and that was how I was paying the rent. But the thing I was really doing in my heart was this beloved hobby of writing.

This is super, super, super, super, super important. And there are, I think it's true in creative fields, which is pretty much every field, but just for the sake of illustration, writing, music, et cetera, that also in entrepreneurship, you hear these stories of desperation, where necessity is the mother of invention, and you know, bada bing, bing but a boom magic wand and then there's a billion dollar company or there's jk rowling or whatever it is yeah but those are in my experience the outliers right those they make for great cover stories and magazines but the fact of the matter

is that from what i've seen, certainly with guests on this podcast is that, for instance, Soman Chainani, who has a number of mega successful novels, but he had a SAT prep counseling service that he offered well past the point that his first book was successful because he wanted to always feel like he had a safety net so that the writing would not be tainted or even subconsciously influenced to match the market or whatever the lens might become by this pressure. And that is something that whenever possible has come up as a really valuable, I suppose on one hand, financial survival mechanism, but even more so a psychological freeing device. really glamorous narrative for things and the glamorous narrative is you know you you you had

so much courage you took the risk you know you you were dependent on this company or this book or whatever and if it didn't work it was going to be a disaster but you know you you were the one who beat the odds like we love that narrative and for most people that's a really bankrupt narrative and there's a kind of deeper glamour actually in, in, in the kind of story that you just told. Um, yeah, because you're, because the glamour comes from your, you're doing everything that you can to deeply protect the thing that you love most. Definitely. Now the book itself, people may not, may not know backstory. I'm sure a lot of people don't. How long did it take to get that book done? Okay. So I'm laughing because it took a really, really long time, especially by Tim

Ferriss standards. I listen to you and like, look at your life trajectory. I'm like, how does he do that? Um, but lots of cheating with format is the short answer, but I don't want to take us off track. Um, so yeah, it took from start to finish. It was about seven years. And I will say in my defense that during those seven years, I also had two children, um, and was raising them. So that was part of it. But I also just think I'm kind of a slow writer. Like I like to really, really think about everything super deeply. And what I think is probably, people might not know, I had a deadline as all writers do. And I turned in some sort of draft upon my deadline coming due, you know, after 18 months or two years. And my editor

basically read it and said, this is terrible. And she said, you know, go back and completely throw that out, start from scratch and take all the time that you need. And, uh, and you might think that when that happened, that I would have been really bummed. But I was actually elated because I knew that it was terrible and I knew that I needed much more time and I had no idea what I was doing. I'd never written anything before. So, yeah, I was just really happy to have that time. And it's actually really unusual. Like usually in publishing, they'd given me a big advance for the book, and usually they want their advance back, and they're not willing to delay like that.

So that was huge. Very understanding editor. Yeah, she's brilliant. And I'm working with her again on my next book. Yeah, it's also smart in the sense that a mediocre book is more of a liability than no book at all. Yes. For everyone involved. For everyone involved.

For everyone involved. Yeah. Yeah. And because, you know, I have this philosophy about writing that it's the deep love that has to be protected at all costs. Because of that, I don't care how much time it takes, you know? Yeah. Like, I'm just interested in doing it as well as I can.

What does your writing process at this point look like? So you've had your experience with that book. And now when you are writing, do you have a daily practice? Does it go through phases of research period, then organizing, then putting all of that into prose through synthesis? What is, what is your, what are your writing routines or how do you think about writing these days? Um, so for me, I take whatever thesis I'm working with and then I spend a year or two just walking around the world, looking at everything through the lens of that thesis, you know, so it used to be introverts and now it's onto a new topic. And I'm, I'm taking crazy notes through that period.

So every conversation that I have, every book I read, it's all going in. How do you, how do you take and organize your notes? Do you do it? Notebooks? Do you do it digitally? What are the, I know this is nerdy, but I'm into it because a lot of writers do it differently the reason i'm laughing is i'm thinking when you hear my answer you're gonna know that i need a consultation with you for the next book because i i don't do it in in a super systemic way i um i basically all those conversations all those ideas and notes and thoughts i'm having, I stick them all into one word document and then I go and that document becomes about seven or 800 pages by the time I'm done.

Um, and then I go through that document and I, and I'm kind of tagging as I go along and then I'm separating everything out by topic. So I end up with like eight or nine loose leaf binders that are organized by topic. But in each of those binders, it's just like one big,

one big massive notes. And then I think about where do I want everything? I don't. And also whenever I'm right, whenever I have an idea, um, like whenever I'm emotionally moved by one of the ideas that I'm taking notes on,

I try to write out the riff around that idea right then and there because you don't know if that emotion is going to come back. So you have to capture it when it happens. I think it's a perfectly fine system. I feel like technology must have come up with something better. Like I do it in Microsoft Word. There are probably better tools available. But I would say also that a lot of people confuse new tools for better content.

It's very easy, at least let's speak for myself for a second. When I'm writing, I have to disallow myself from thinking about, say, marketing. Because marketing is fun and exciting and easy for me. Because I've had insomnia as a kid and watched many infomercials or something. In any case, it's a way to procrastinate doing the harder piece, which is the actual research and digging and prose.

That's the hard part for me. Always has been, but it's the most important part. And I think similarly, a lot of folks can become consumed by upgrading their tools, multiplying their tools versus just the words. You got to put the words in. And I have some questions about this word doc though so when you're going through and adding things to the word doc and you come in and you're tagging things so you can separate them uh and you mentioned binders so you're printing this stuff out and then separating them does that mean that when you put in a new note in the word doc you go to a new page if it's tagged differently so you can separate them more easily later does

that make sense as opposed to uh each time you add a note then hit return twice and then add a new note if they're tagged differently it would seem like you would have to cut up the page into multiple pieces so do you start a new page uh are there any particular ways that you tag? For instance, would it be a chapter name or would it be a theme? What would a tag look like? Yeah, it would just be a topic or a theme. And yeah, so every time I'm adding a new note, if I know that it relates to something I've already done,

then I'll search for the thing I've already done so I can add it to that section to make it easier later. That makes sense. But sometimes I don't or I can't think of it and then I'll just add it to the end of the document. Yes. Which control F right. Word. Yeah. Yeah. Good to go. Yeah. Simple, simple works. Uh, Robert Rodriguez, the filmmaker, keeps a journal. I think he does puts it in almost every day at midnight and it's word doc, word docs. Yep. It works. Yeah. Yeah. I actually, I will say, I tried for this next book,

I spent a few days reading the instructions for Scrivener, one of these programs. Scrivener's. And I just ended up thinking, you know, this isn't for me. It looks great, but. Scrivener, well, some other time we can sit down. That is one tool that if you set it up really simply and you don't use 98% of the features,

I find really useful just because you can create a view by which you see all of your separate documents, or actually I should say rather you see your tentative table of contents on the left side in a vertical pane, and then you can look at what you're, on the right-hand side, then I would have it set up so that I have two split windows. So the left-hand side, you see your table of contents, and then there's research, and then you have whatever research you want. That way, you can be working on a document in the upper right-hand pane while you have your research that you're working off of in the bottom right.

And if you decide to move docs around to see how it affects flow, it's just drag and drop. It's actually quite wonderful. They did have some issues with footnotes, or maybe I was just too technically incompetent at one point when you then had to export when the publisher insists on, say, Word,

which maybe that'll change at some point. But getting a little geeked out. But the Scrivener, I've used Scrivener for almost all of my books. There may be one exception, I think, for Our Chef because of how visually intensive it was. It was done outside of that. And in terms of routine or ritual,

you spend a year gathering these notes. So then you have... Yeah, maybe more. Yeah, or more. So you a year gathering these notes. So then you have, Yeah, maybe more. Yeah, or more. So you have 700 to 800 pages. It's a big word doc. Yeah. And then what happens? Yeah. So then I spend the time sorting them out. And so I get to the point where I've got my eight or nine loose leaf binders that are more or less organized by what the chapters are going to be. Yeah. And then comes the time to write,

during which I'm still doing more research, but I'm starting to write. And yeah, for me, the writing, like the sitting down with my laptop and thinking about it all, that's like, I want to say it's my happy place, but that's not really the best description. It feels like it's this place that I go deep in my mind.

And I really love being there. And it's like, no matter what happens to be going on in my outside life, I always have those few hours a day where I'm going to a cafe or a library or whatever. And I'm sitting with my laptop and my cappuccino, and I'm just doing it. I'm stressing the emotional aspect because that's so huge for me, and I feel like I train myself to associate writing with all of these pleasures of sitting around in cafes and things like that.

Do you have a consistent time when you sit down with your cappuccino and do this? Are you a morning writer or are you a catch-as-catch-can writer? Are you an evening writer? I mean, you also have kids. You have other obligations. So when do you tend to do your writing or do your best writing? You can answer it however you like.

Well, I mean, there's what I do and there's what would be ideal. But as you say, I have kids. So my routine is that I drop my kids off at school. That's at around eight. Then I go and I either play tennis or do yoga every day. And then after that, I do my writing. And that's a pretty good time for me. But what time of day would that typically end up being? Yeah, that probably ends up being around 10 or so that I'm starting. Yeah. But if I had no other obligations, the best times of day would be more like either 7 in the morning

and also super late at night. So two time periods that I have no access to for this stage of life. Right. But yeah. And you start writing. This is really interesting to me, hopefully interesting to other people. So you start, let's say, round 10.

Do you break for lunch? Do you skip lunch? Do you have a standard type of lunch that you would have? And the reason I ask is that I think part of the reason so many writers seem to work between the hours of say, let's make this up, but 10 PM and 7.30 AM. And they tend to either be night owls like me or early risers is that there are fewer distractions and they can get a relatively uninterrupted block of three to five hours. But if you're starting at 10, then most people would have lunch scheduled shortly thereafter, like two hours later.

So do you break for lunch? Do you have something really small? How do you handle that? Because for me, just speaking personally, I might have time. Of course I have time for a five-minute phone call, but if I do a five-minute phone call about something very mechanical or mundane,

like calendaring stuff or whatever, and I'm juggling 15 pieces that were on paper in my head, I kind of have to start over a lot of times. Like I drop all those balls that I'm juggling because of the task switching. So I'd love to hear, not that that's true for everybody, but it's true for me. So what does your schedule look like then once you sit down? I'll just kind of go until I realize that I'm not concentrating well anymore. And very often that happens after two or three hours and I just have to take a break. Like I actually, I have a lot of discipline if my brain would cooperate.

Like, so I would happily sit there for seven hours until my kids come home from school. But at a certain point I'll notice that it's just not coming anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And so then I'll take a break and I'll eat or something like that. But, you know, I would say like you were mentioning,

well, people might work at night because it's when you get uninterrupted time. And I think that that's one factor, but I also think the reason that those hours tend to be so good. So nighttime is when your cortisol levels are really low, you know, which of course is your stress hormone. And so I noticed this in myself all the time that the ideas that I come up

with late at night are different from the daytime ideas because they're completely unfettered by any stress. And so I'll just, I don't know. I just make different kinds of associative leaps and there's, there's like a softness and an ease in my thinking and my feeling about the ideas. So I think like that's one advantage of late night writing. And then in the morning you've got the high cortisol, but you also have this sort of acute attention. Yeah. So I can totally see that. I can totally see that.

I can definitely see that. I also find that writing late at night, if I'm writing at two in the morning, it's very hard for me. I remember, I want to say it was Ayn Rand who wrote a, she had a book about the craft of nonfiction and there was some,

it's not exactly, it wasn't a metaphor. I think it was a real world example, but in effect, it's not exactly, it wasn't a metaphor. I think it was a real world example. But in effect, she's saying writers, many writers will do almost anything to not write. And there's this story about the white tennis shoes. Like, I have to clean my white tennis shoes before I'm going to write because I'm going to go out. And when it's two or three in the morning, I have to check email to make sure x is just not a viable excuse right so it also just removes a lot of bullshit distraction that i would impose on myself to avoid doing what it is that i find hard i still relate to this so when i was

writing quiet i suddenly developed this idea that i had to learn everything in the world about digital photography and i was reading all these books about it and the rule of thirds and all this stuff and i have never had any interest in photography before or since it was just these two weeks of mania where i didn't want to have to be looking at that manuscript over there are there any are there any uh are there any, uh, any particular, I mean, you are student of the craft, right? You've taken creative nonfiction courses. Are there any particular books or resources or writers who have had a significant impact on how you view or practice writing?

Oh, gosh. I'm sure the answer is yes. And I can try to buy some time, too, if helpful. I mean, Draft No. 4 by John McPhee, I think, is really, I was very fortunate to spend time with him when I was an undergrad in college because he was teaching a seminar. Yeah, at Princeton. That's where I took my creative writing classes. Yeah.

So the structure, thinking about structure in the way that McPhee thinks about structure saved me because I thrive with some type of predetermined blueprint for structure. It's very hard for me to just freehand flow of consciousness, let things take some emergent form. It's very hard. I do know friends who do that really, really well. That terrifies me. So I need the scaffolding. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Oh, I love that book. Such a good book. Bird by Bird, for people who don't know the book,

I will say just before getting into a short description, has saved at least a half a dozen friends of mine from the precipice, meaning they were at the point of throwing in the towel and just quitting their books. And they were all writers in this case, but they were at the point where they're like, I'm done, I can't do this, it's too stressful,

I don't like this, I don't want to do this, it's going to be terrible. And they were going to, in some cases, return their advances and just walk. And I want to say at least half of them read this book, went on to finish their books, and their books went on to become New York Times bestsellers. So talk about an important window for making a decision.

And the gist of the book, the title, I should say, comes first from, I think it was her brother, Anne's brother. Anne Lamott is a writer, and her brother had this experience where he'd had something like an entire semester in, I'm making this up, but let's just call it fourth grade to prepare for this end of semester project. And he was supposed to put together a term paper on birds or something like that. And it was like the night before he hadn't done any preparation. And this poor kid who granted kind of deserves it because he didn't do any prep but nonetheless is having this like nervous breakdown at the kitchen table with like 15 books about birds and he just

is paralyzed and i want to say it was ann's dad who came over and like put an arm on his shoulder and said just take it bird by bird buddy bird by bird you know something something like that and it's sort of a psychological life raft, break glass in case of emergency kit for writers who are just hitting that point. Like maybe you did with the photography where you're just like, I want to do anything

other than look at that screen or that page. I just, I can't handle it and I don't know what to do. So for that reason, not necessarily for the nuts and bolts of the writing process itself, but for the psychological component. It's like if you were a top athletic coach and you had your sport-specific technical coach, and then you had a mental toughness coach who also doubled as a shrink. The mental toughness coach who doubles as a shrink is the bird by bird.

Yeah. And I'm remembering she also talks about shitty first drafts. Yes. And just those three words are incredibly helpful because, you know, when you're looking at your draft and it is always really shitty at the beginning. And so just knowing, okay, that's what it's supposed to be. But yeah, you know, the other thing that's been really helpful to me. So I told you I started taking that creative nonfiction class at NYU. And the student, all of us who took that class got along really well. So we formed a writer's group after the class was officially done.

And we stayed together for years. And we would meet once every week, every two weeks and read each other's stuff. And especially at that stage, that really, really helped, you know, getting the feedback, but also having the kind of camaraderie and support system. Not feeling totally isolated. Not feeling isolated. And I actually met my literary agent from one of the people who was in that group, who was a publishing lawyer. And I said, you know, I have this idea for this book about introverts, which at the time, to me, seemed like the most idiosyncratic project on earth. But she said, when you're ready, I know the right agent for that. And that's a really serendipitous thing, because wait, I want to share this. When I put together

the proposal for the book that became Quiet quiet I sent it out to that agent who she recommended and to four other super amazing agents two of whom I had connections to and every single one of the other ones passed and some of them said you know I really like the writing but I think this topic is not commercial enough and I just don't think it'll sell. So could you come back with a different topic? And the guy who became my agent instantly saw what the potential was going to be. And we've been together ever since. And I feel like I owe him everything and I love him. And his name is Richard Pine, if you're out there looking for an agent. And I think about this story all the time, not only because of book writing, but because all these people, these other agents,

these are experts and these are the culturally anointed gatekeepers and they know what they're doing. And yet they didn't see this one particular thing. And I think that that happens all the time. Totally. Now, I'm glad you shared that. And I had a very similar experience. I reached out to, I want to say it was four agents who were introduced by a very successful author who I'd met something like seven years earlier by volunteering at a nonprofit, which is a great way to meet people above your pay grade. As a side note, just like filling water glasses for panelists works really well and so i had the right introduction uh the writing i didn't think my writing was tolstoy or anything but it was it was passable and um complete rejection from three of the four uh this was the four hour work thehour work week? The four-hour work week. Two of them were pretty heavy-handed about it.

One of the third, I remember her name, Jillian Maness, a very good agent, and she passed, but she gave me a lot of really helpful feedback. And she didn't say this won't work. She just said, I don't think this is the right fit for me. Right. And that wasn't fair enough, which is totally fair.

But like, here's a bunch of advice. And one of the pieces of advice she gave me actually, wow, I haven't thought about this forever was think of each. I was intimidated by the prospect of writing a book. I'd never written a book before. She said,

treat each chapter like a feature magazine article, beginning, middle and end self-sufficient. Yeah. book before. She said, treat each chapter like a feature magazine article, beginning, middle, and end. Self-sufficient. Each chapter can live on its own. And I've followed that advice ever since with nonfiction, which makes it easier to write also, because if you get stuck somewhere, it's not like you have to cross that bridge to get to a chapter that sequentially should show up three chapters later, you can treat it in a modular way. If you get really bogged down, you can skip, which also, in some cases, like the rest of

my books, it leads to a book that can be read non-sequentially, in any case. And I, so three out of four, turn it down, finally sign with my current agent, Stephen Hanselman, who I still work with to this day, very similarly. Yeah. And he had just become an agent. Wow. He had just become an agent, but part of what attracted me to him was that he had a long career as a very successful editor and was also, is just an eclectic guy.

Went to divinity school, plays in a jazz band and really like my kind of, my kind of person. Yeah. And then we went out to sell it and I think it was like, I always forget if it's like 26 or 27, but nonetheless it was something like 27 or 20, somewhere between 26 and 28 publishers turned it down. Really? Yes. Wow.

And then the, but you only need one. That's the thing. It's like, it's not about how many people don't get it. Yeah. It's about having the right person or people who do get it.

And I mean, which is so clear with your book, right? And it's like, you don't need all the people in the world to think it's It's like, you don't need all the people in the world to think it's a good idea. You don't need half the people in the world to think it's a good idea.

You need the people who it resonates with to have it resonate. Yeah, that's right. And it does not need to be millions of people. It could be, but it doesn't have to be. And I had a note down also to just, and we don't have to necessarily spend a ton of time on this, but just to clarify the talk about introversion versus shyness.

And so I came across this when I was doing a bit of homework, which is people think of, say, Bill Gates, right? Bill Gates is sort of maybe one example of someone who could be useful in distinguishing between the two. But could you clarify what an introvert is or how you define introvert and how it might differ from? From somebody who's shy.

Right. Yeah. So introversion is really about kind of about the preference for lower stimulation environments. And you can trace it to our neurobiologies. Introverts have nervous systems that react more to all the incoming stimuli. And so that means that we're kind of at our most alive and happiest

and switched on when things are a little more chill around us, which is probably why when you're in those group dinners, you're going to the restroom every so often because your nervous system wants to tone it down. And extroverts have the opposite situation and the opposite liability because for an extrovert, you've got a nervous system that's reacting less to stimulation.

And that means when you're in an environment that you find too quiet, you start to get really listless and checked out. So that's the liability there. Shyness, and I always feel like my work has to do with both introversion and shyness, by the way. But shyness is much more about the fear of social judgment. So you'll know if you're a shy person because when you encounter someone who has a neutral expression on their face, you will have a tendency to read disapproval in there and to react really strongly to the disapproval. You feel kind of really unhorsed by it. And it can take different forms. So it could be a fear of public speaking, or it could be a job interview or any kind of situation where you feel you might be evaluated.

So in reality, lots of introverts do tend to be shy and vice versa, but not necessarily at all. I don't know Bill Gates personally, but my guess is that he's an introvert, but not especially shy. And then somebody like an Eileen Fisher, who, you know, she's got this wonderful and I think it's been decades now, super successful fashion brand. She describes herself as a shy extrovert. So like she really wants to be around people all the time. She wants to be connecting all the time. You talk to her, she's constantly like setting up this workshop and that program.

And you look at her life and she's always surrounded by lots of people and things going on. But she's often feeling intense discomfort and needing to work through that. Wild. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I would, I would certainly describe myself as an introvert.

Uh, and I never knew quite how to frame it until coming across your definition of preferring lower stimulation or environments or environments with, with fewer stimuli. Because I've, ever since i was a little kid been very sensitive i mean my sight is very sensitive right my hearing is very sensitive yeah but i'm not shy in the sense that i don't i want to engage and ask questions and interact but if the volume is turned up too much or there are too many speakers, metaphorically or physically, I have a lot of difficulty parsing it all. But you don't have like, shyness would be like, you know, before you go into those group dinners,

are you feeling a kind of social anxiety? No. Right. That's the difference. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There are so many questions that I want to explore. But let's, because we have maybe 10 or 15 minutes more, let's ask a few of the questions that I always like to ask. Sure.

Are there any books that you have given the most to others as a gift? Or any books you've gifted often to other people? I think that the book I've probably for the last few years been giving out the most is Waking Up by Sam Harris, which it's such a fantastic book. And it was really for me completely life-changing, I think, for probably the reasons it is for many people, which is I hadn't really known much about meditation before reading it. And because, and I'm kind of, you know, I think by my nature, I'm sort of a cross between a skeptic and a mystic or something. You know, in the skeptical side of me,

and it's a pretty deep skeptical side, it really needed somebody like Sam, who's such an extreme skeptic. Right. And then who very conveniently spent, like, what, 28 years of his life or something investigating all these different spiritual tools and then reporting back on them. You know, for me, that was a narrator I could really, I felt I could really rely on.

Fantastic book. You know, I just, I have to, I think you'll, we were talking a bit about Sam before we started recording because we were both, you know, sort of fanboying and fangirling about his meditation app and a handful of other things. But I haven't told you, and I don't know if I've even mentioned this publicly, but here we go. So the first time I met Sam, this relates to Ted,

went to Ted for the first time as an attendee, which, by the way, was too much stimulation, so I never went back. Interesting. Yeah, but I went to Ted for the first time as an attendee and I was invited to one of these group dinners. Right. And so I go out to this group dinner and, uh,

we're eating dinner and off to the side on a separate table, there's this tray of brownies and I love brownies. It's one of my weaknesses. It is like an Achilles heel and I have zero portion control. And these brownies are large brownies. And I, I sneak over kind of in between courses and I'm like, you know what, I'm going to skip one of the later courses and just substitute the brownies because I love brownies. And so I eat two of these brownies and about 20 minutes later, the host who I shall not name comes up to me and goes, Tim, did you eat any of the brownies?

I go, yeah, I had two of them. And he goes, okay, everything's going to be fine. And I'm like, wait, what? Everything's going to be fine? What the hell are you talking about? They were heavily dosed pot brownies. That's hilarious. And I am not a habitual pot user. And so I suddenly in the middle of dinner,

just get hit by this tsunami of cannabis. And you combine that with my discomfort with high stimulation environments. And I'm like, I need to get the hell out of here. So I excuse myself to go to the restroom. And by this point, I'm already a huge fan of Sam. But I've never had any contact with him. So I run off to the bathroom to escape. And I open the door and literally at the sink, run straight into Sam Harris in the men's room. And I'm like, Sam Harris?

High off my rocker. run straight into Sam Harris in the men's room. And I'm like, Sam Harris, hi, off my rocker. And that was my first interview. And he looks at me kind of like, he's like, hi, it's kind of sideways. Cause I'm just beyond reality at that point.

And that was my first meeting with Sam. That's hilarious. And did you tell him your brownie story? I did. I did. I did tell him, which he appreciated because he does have some history with altered states. But yeah, no, I found that book and the subsequent meditation app and all of it incredibly helpful and fantastic. The one piece of it that I'm kind of trying

to explore separately because I feel like he looks at much less is the whole tradition of loving kindness meditation and all the meditations around that. So that's really, really

of interest to me. Yeah, and so I'm sort of charting a different course there. And I'll tell you, like even just last night, I was interviewing on stage this guy, guy Heyman Sunim I don't know if you've heard of him but he's a a really renowned zen buddhist monk from Korea and his books are all number one bestsellers in Korea and lots of other countries but here he's less well known but anyway he has a new book out. So I was doing

this interview and we're up on stage so you can see the audience and it happens to be a pretty formal audience. So before we start, you know, the audience is kind of sitting there, kind of still in their seats. And then he opens by doing a loving kindness meditation. And it was so amazing to see the transformation on their faces. And he did this for maybe one or two or three minutes. It wasn't long. And suddenly they're totally smiling and they're open and they're happy. It's remarkable. It's remarkable, and I think it's so weird and dispiriting how in the mainstream media and in corporate life, I mean, it's great that there's been this incredible embrace of mindfulness meditation, but I think there's a kind of allergy towards going too much in the loving kindness direction. direction um and i spoke to sharon salzburg about this who's one of the great uh teachers

and and and she said that people have this sense that it must be phony like that you couldn't possibly actually have those feelings and so it kind of gives them a sort of creepy feeling to do it totally but i feel like that all needs to get completely rethought loving kindness the label i think smells of kind of hand wavy hippie uh associations and therefore people veer away from it yeah or if they have sensitivity to that stuff which i do and have for a very long time but so did mindfulness for many years. Absolutely. And that's been recast. But I mentioned that as a contrast to my then subsequent experience with loving kindness meditation, also called Metta, M-E-T-T-A meditation, which I was introduced to not first by Jack Kornfield, though I did spend some time with him, who's sort of of the same cohort as Sharon Salzberg. I mean, they're close friends, and Sharon's been on the podcast. But Meng, Chad Meng Tan of Google,

actually, who started this class within Google called, I think it's Search Within Yourself. It was a course that included many tools, including mindfulness. And he has a book called Joy on Demand, which is fantastic. I thought it was a fantastic title. I was like, I could use Joy on Demand. Let's take a look at this. And there's a very short part in that book, which I ended up excerpting for, I want to say, Tools of Titans, about loving kindness meditation. And he tells the story of this woman who, as an experiment, guided or suggested by Meng, did a one one minute loving kindness meditation on the hour every hour for one work day and she would and she would pick people who are walking about the office or so and she came back and she said that is the that is the best day i've had at work in seven

years wow and i i think part of that is at least for me that that I am very, historically I've been very trapped in my head. I'm very prefrontal. And I come from a family of warriors, people who are- Warrior or worrier? Ah, warriors. Not the battle axe type, but the like Larry David type. Yeah, I come from one of those too. Right. And when you are consumed with worry or anxiety, and this is not my description, but it's been described to me as being trapped in the future, right? Like depression is being trapped in the past, anxiety or worrying is being trapped in the future.

And it's also, at least for me, it's a focus on the self. It's like me, me, me. It's all things that at least for me, it's a focus on the self. It's like me, me, me. It's all things that might happen to me, things that I should do. And the loving kindness meditation, which can be so short and have an impact, gets you, unlike most types of mindfulness practice that are popular or becoming popular in the West, it gets you out of yourself. Yeah. And I recall when I was writing Tools of Titans, I decided to take Meng's advice and I did Loving Kindness for literally two or three minutes every night. I was at this hotel and they had a dry sauna and I'd go into the dry sauna really late because I was doing my writing really late and just do two to three minutes of thinking about a friend and wishing

them happiness and seeing them smiling and giving them a hug and having them smile back at me and wishing me the same. And it was transformative as, as regards with regards to my mood. It was really just incredible. Low dose, really, really low dose. And I'm curious, you mentioned that you were thinking about or meditating on loving kindness to your friend. Did you also start with a traditional practice of wishing it to yourself? Or is that less comfortable for you?

This is a great question. So I did not, it did not even occur to me to do this until years later when I went to my first seven day, might have been 10 day, seven day? No, 10 day silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock. Right. And Jack Kornfield was there. Yeah. And I went in, they check in with you to make sure you're not having a total psychotic break for a few minutes every other day.

And I had this meeting with Jack and one of his co-teachers for the event. And we were talking about loving kindness, talking about loving kindness. And as I was leaving, the woman with Jack said, just out of curiosity, have you been doing any loving kindness for yourself? And it struck, I don't know how to describe this in a way that doesn't make me look like

an ass, but it just struck me as such a silly question. I was like, no, of course I haven't been doing it for myself. And then I realized how much that probably explained a lot of my problems. And she goes, yeah, you might want to try that. Why don't you experiment with that? And I remember Jack later saying, and I'm paraphrasing, but if your compassion doesn't include yourself,

then it's incomplete. And that has become- And you can't really give it to other people in a complete way either. Right, so that has become, I'm so glad you asked that. One of the biggest changes in my, and I could call it a mindfulness practice, but my way of relating to the world

and thinking about helping others has been actually taking time to show, uh, or think on self-compassion specifically for myself at a handful of younger ages. Yeah. Yeah. Which I do at mealtimes and might talk about that more at some point, but yeah, that's, that's become really, it's become a very,

very, very, very important ritual for me. But I don't think you're alone. I mean, Sharon Salzberg mentioned to me that many people have trouble. I mean, the traditional progression of the practice would be,

you'd start with yourself and then, you know, move traditional progression of the practice would be start with yourself and then, you know, move progressively outward to other people in your life. And she said many people have trouble beginning with themselves. And so I was really struck because last night, this monk, Haman Sunim, who I love, began in this meditation by directing it to ourselves. And I asked him about that afterwards. And he seemed kind of puzzled by the question, which made me wonder if this is a uniquely American problem. I don't know.

It reminds me of the story I heard of this, I don't know what it was, Nepalese or, I don't know, Bhutanese monk who came to the US and he was in a car on the way to some event. And there were these, this was in the U.S., and there were these people running, jogging on the side of the street to get in shape. But they looked like they were dying.

I mean, they looked like they were running from hyenas. And he was just like, are they okay? What's wrong with them? It was so foreign. My goodness. So we have just a few minutes. Let me ask you the billboard question. So if you could put a message on a billboard, this is metaphorically speaking, to get a message, a quote, a question, anything non-commercial out to millions or billions of people, what might you put on that billboard? I think I'd probably put this one aphorism that I've loved since high school, I think,

which is Only Connect by E.M. Forster. Only Connect. Only Connect, yeah. Like, at the end of the day, that's all that really matters. What does that mean to you? It just means connecting on some really deep level with the people around you. And that might sound like an ironic aphorism for someone who wrote a book about introversion, but to me, those are not contradictory things at all.

You know, and so for me, like connection, it can happen in person for sure. But it could also happen just by listening to the music that's really touching you and you feel completely connected to this musician who may not even be alive anymore, you know, or a writer who might not be alive anymore, but they're expressing something deep and unchanging about what it's like to be human. So those, I think there's kind of nothing more important than that. Only connect. Only connect. Is there anything you've done that has helped you to more deeply or frequently experience those moments or any advice you might have for people who want to cultivate that? Well, I mean, so aside from meditation, which I am a huge proponent of, but I think you really

do have to pay attention to what works for you. And it really is so different for everybody. You know, so for me, I love to have deep one-on-one conversations. It happens through music. It happens through literature. And that's how it happens. But I think it really is a different answer for everyone. For each person. But I'll tell you, and this is maybe a different topic,

but the whole idea for my next book came out of one of these kinds of experiences, which is I have always had a love of bittersweet and minor key music. And the book's not about music, but I'm going to tell you this story anyway. Okay. So when I was in law school, I was listening to music like that in my dorm and a friend came by and he was kind of a funny wise guy. And he said, why are you listening to this music to commit suicide too? And, you know, and I thought it was funny and I laughed, but I thought about it for decades afterwards. Like I was thinking, well, why is it, first of all, what is it about our culture that makes this music so suspect that you would make that kind of joke um and also what is it

about the music itself that for me is not suicide inducing at all it's like it's the opposite i i feel when i hear music like that like completely connected to everything because it's like the, the, um, the, the composer is expressing some really deep truth about what it is to be human. And so anyway,

I, so I've thought about this for decades and, and the place that I'm going with this next book is that I think that tuning into the sorrows of the world actually is a kind of secret superpower that we're not really allowed to access very often because of course we live in this culture that tells you you know don't go there and always wear the smiley face and and so on um but you know if i can say like even look at somebody like you even before you started being really open and upfront about some of the demons

that you've struggled with which by the way you, like all the honor to you for doing that. It's amazingly brave and generous. But even before you did it, and if you had never done it, I don't think you would have been touching all those people the way you have all these years if it weren't for those sorrows. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. So it's all about that. I'm excited to for those sorrows. I agree. Yeah. So it's all about that. I'm excited to read your next book. Thank you.

I think that's a really, really, really, really important topic. Yeah. I think it's really important. I think we'll have to do round two in that case. I would love that. That would be awesome. I just have to write a little faster. I will happily wait for your best work. So no need to rush.

Well, Susan, this has been such a joy and I'm sure people can hear it, but just to maybe underscore the point, I mean, you are very, you're a very present person when you're speaking with someone else. And I can feel that in the point. I mean, you are very, you're a very present person when you're speaking with someone else. Oh, thank you. So are you. I can feel that in the room. And so you're walking the talk, which is always refreshing

and not always the case. So thank you for taking the time today. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Yeah. Great to hang out. And I will link to everything in the show notes for folks,

including the name of the korean monk that i couldn't spell to save my life at the moment but we will have links to everything at tim.blog forward slash podcast you can just search susan and it'll pop right up people can find you online presumably where are the best places to say hello, learn more about what you're up to? Well, best thing is to sign up for my newsletter, which you can get to if you go to quietrev.com, which is for Quiet Revolution. So you'll find it right there on the homepage. There's a signup form and there's a newsletter that goes out every week. So that's the absolute best. And then I'm also super active on LinkedIn and on Facebook.

Great. And is that simply Susan Cain? Because I think Facebook, correct me if I'm wrong, I think is author Susan Cain. Oh, gosh. Thank you for saying that. Yeah. So on Facebook, it's author Susan Cain. And on LinkedIn, I actually don't remember, but it's part of the LinkedIn influencer.

I'm sure people- Like if you put in LinkedIn influencer and my name, you'll get there. It'll pop right up. Yeah. And then Twitter may be less active. Yeah, I am on Twitter, but a little less active. But at Susan Cain. And can't wait to see the next book and continue to follow your work. Thank you for doing it. Thank you so much. I will say the same to you. What is the next book? What is the next book? Well, you know, based on

the, an episode that came out a few days ago, I think it's going to be this book that I have been waiting to give myself permission to write, which is about, it's not that it'll be a close cousin to what you are thinking a lot about right now. It would be how to pay attention to the psycho-emotional undercurrents and components of life very closely and how to use tools both on the beaten path and very, very, very off the beaten path for finding resolution for problems or challenges

or insecurities uh or trauma that are are at least in current conventional practice considered very difficult to treat or untreatable that wow. So that would be, as far as I can tell, and I've been gathering notes for about five years now, that would be the thrust of it. That's going to be your most important book. I hope so. I mean, yeah. I hope so.

What's your timetable? What's my timetable? It's, well, as, who was it? I think this is something I heard on a TV set once. They didn't want people to rush, but it was, the gist was people need to rush. But they didn't want to say that and make people panic, so they said, we need everyone to move with purpose.

So I think my answer is move with purpose, but not in haste because I want to treat it with the depth and thought that it deserves. I don't want to rush. I will probably write it without signing before selling anything or signing any contracts. I'll probably, Oh,

you'll write the whole thing. I'll probably do it on my own time. Oh, interesting. Okay. But it is a top, if not the top priority. Wow. So are you working on it every day right now? I am in some fashion working on it every day, but it's going to be a while before I get to the composition prose stage. But the vast majority of the work that I do on my books is

the experimentation and the traveling for subjecting myself to all sorts of unusual things and the note taking and the organizing of said notes. And I'm doing some piece of that almost every day. Wow. Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad you're doing this book. So if I can help, you know, if you want an early reader or whatever, I would love to. Awesome. It's completely up my alley. Well, likewise, likewise, this has been so much fun. And, uh, until, until next time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And to everybody listening, same until next time. Thank you for listening. 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 for 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. 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.

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find them. It's the best way to find that person, that key person who will help you grow your business. And this is why a new hire is made every 10 seconds using LinkedIn. That's bonkers. Every 10 seconds. So head to linkedin.com forward slash Tim and get $50 off your first job post. That's bonkers. Every 10 seconds. So head to linkedin.com forward slash Tim and get $50 off your first job post. That's linkedin.com forward slash Tim, T-I-M, to get $50 off your first job post. Linkedin.com forward slash Tim. Take a look. Terms and conditions do apply.