659: Derek Sivers - Not Waiting for Permission, Hell Yeah or No, Leadership Lessons From The Dancing Guy, & Why The Standard Pace is for Chumps

Go to www. LearningLeader.com https://www. LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global https://insightglobal.com/learningleader/. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Derek Sivers is the founder of CD Baby and author of "Hell Yeah or No" and "Useful Not True." He shared how he graduated from Cal Berkeley in two years instead of four because the "standard pace for chumps" - a lesson that shaped his entire career of institutional skepticism and unconventional thinking. From creating viral shipping emails to understanding why explorers make bad leaders, Derek shares why being busy means being out of control, how your first thought is an obstacle to your best work, and why you can't predict what the world will want from you until you try everything and listen closely to what it's telling you. Notes: No Speed Limit – Most things are paced so the slowest person can keep up. If you're driven and motivated, you can go so much faster than the standard pace. I graduated from Berkeley in two years by learning four semesters of harmony in one hour. "The standard pace is for chumps. You can do so much better than that." Question the Standard Process – When someone says you must go through usual channels or something will take a certain time, assume there's probably a hack. Develop institutional skepticism - there's usually a better way than how most people do it. Create Opportunities, Don't Wait for Them – You don't have to wait until a company is hiring. If you can see how to benefit them, walk in and show them what you can do for free first. Alan Tepper made Warner Brothers more money than anyone that year by just showing up with a plan. Make Everything Valuable to Others – The starving artist spends all their time on work valuable to them but not to others. Use money as a neutral measure - if you can make money with your art, it ensures what you're doing is valuable to other people. "It's almost impossible to predict what the world will want from you... Keep yourself out there and listen closely to what the world is telling you it wants from you." Stand Out by Being Different – Don't imitate what everyone else is doing. I wrote a silly shipping email in 10 minutes that became one of the most viral emails ever mentioned in business books. Ask yourself constantly: What has nobody done before? The First Follower Creates the Movement – We focus on the shirtless dancing guy, but the first follower is what made everything happen. Until then, people kept their distance from the freak. If you find someone doing something great, follow them and show others how to follow. Every Sentence Must Matter – My books are 90-100 pages, but start as 1,000-page rough drafts. I spend 1-2 years full-time chopping every sentence that doesn't absolutely need to be there. "I'm not gonna put a single sentence out into the world that doesn't need to be there." Make every word count - eliminate everything that doesn't add value. Hell Yeah or No is Context-Dependent – This tool is for when you're overwhelmed with options and need to raise the bar. Straight out of college, say yes to everything because opportunities are like lottery tickets. Once something rewards you, then say no to other things and double down. Busy Means Out of Control – "Busy to me implies out of control. You're busy if you've let other people shove shit into your schedule." Leave space instead of filling it - that time to think is what creates valuable insights others don't have time to develop. Your First Thought is an Obstacle – Don't honor the thought that came first. In brainstorming, acknowledge the first idea, then keep going - don't stop at two or three. Even silly ideas can seed great ones you'd never reach without that stepping stone. All Beliefs Are a Myth – People worshiped Zeus for centuries; now we call it mythology. But we say our own beliefs are true while others' are superstitions. I expected China to be awful from American news, but found it wonderful - question what you've been told. Use Prejudice as Your Compass – If you notice you're prejudiced against something, that's exactly what you should explore. Burning Man sounds awful to me; therefore, I should probably go. Steer into your biases to overcome them and gain new perspectives. Explorers Make Terrible Leaders – Explorers try everything and change direction constantly, which frustrates teams. Leaders go in a straight line to a clear destination, unwavering in mission even if the path changes. I loved changing my mind, which made me a bad leader until I learned the difference. Set projects with clear missions, even if you're personally exploring other things. Try Everything Until the World Says Yes – I had a booking agency, a record label, a recording studio, and my own music - all failures. Then, a side project to help friends (CD Baby) took off. You can't predict what the world wants from you, so try many things and listen closely to what it's telling you. Reflection What "standard pace" are you accepting in your business or career that you could actually accelerate if you questioned it? Where have you assumed something has to take a certain amount of time just because that's how it's always been done? Are you spending time on work that's valuable to you but not to others? How could you test whether what you're creating actually solves problems people are willing to pay for? Are you acting more like an explorer or a leader right now? If you're constantly changing direction, how could you set clearer missions for your projects while keeping your personal explorations separate? Resources & References Derek's Content: Derek's website https://sive.rs and blog https://sive.rs "Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement" (First Follower) TED Talk - Derek Sivers "No Speed Limit https://sive.rs/kimo" essay Former Episodes Referenced #647 - Tim Ferriss https://learningleader.com/timferriss/ - Chasing Your Curiosity #562 - Nikki Glaser https://learningleader.com/nikkiglaser562/ - The Creative Process of a Comedian #644 - Blaine Anderson https://learningleader.com/blaineanderson/ - Confidence, Curiosity, Connection Episode Timestamps 02:20 Early Life Lessons from Kimo Williams 05:21 Corporate Lessons and Unconventional Paths 09:10 The Power of Adding Value 13:57 Viral TED Talk: Leadership Lessons from the Dancing Guy 22:03 The 'Hell Yeah or No' Philosophy 27:29 The CD Baby Experience 28:02 Starting an Online Record Store 29:10 Creating a Unique Shipping Notice 30:01 The Viral Impact of Creativity 32:53 The Importance of Regular Writing 35:17 Questioning Assumptions and Beliefs 36:23 Exploring New Perspectives 40:41 The Explorer vs. The Leader 48:21 Advice for Aspiring Leaders Resources: Read: The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/4glzVHs Read: The Pursuit of Excellence https://amzn.to/463ta9O Read: Welcome to Management https://amzn.to/41SDTkU To Follow me on X: @RyanHawk12 https://x.com/RyanHawk12

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Hawk?

  This episode is brought to you by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company that builds world-class technical teams for clients around the globe. If you need help with your applications, infrastructure, or data layer, Insight Global's team of technical experts can build custom or manage services to deliver the outcomes you desire. Getting the most out of your technology can be tough, but growing your business with the right technical solutions can be magic. Visit insightglobal.com/learningleader.

• 0:37Ryan Hawk?

  That's insightglobal.com/learningleader today to learn more. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now on to the night's featured leader. So great, Derek Sivers, the entrepreneur who built Seedy Baby from nothing into the largest seller of independent music online. Then he sold it for $22 million and gave the money away.

• 1:20Ryan Hawk?

  You might know Derek from his viral TED Talk called "How to Start a Movement About Leadership Lessons from a Dancing Guy," or from his books, including "Anything You Want: Hell Yeah or No" and "Useful Not True." During our conversation, we discussed why the standard pace is for chumps and how you can go faster at whatever it is you're doing. And Derek shares how he put together his viral TED Talk and how he handled having Bill Gates, Tony Robbins, and the founders of Google sitting in the front row staring at him while he gave, by the way, a three-minute TED Talk that earned him a standing ovation.

• 2:05Ryan Hawk?

  And then we closed talking about the difference between explorers and leaders. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Derek Sivers.

• 2:20Ryan Hawk?

  So you're 17 years old and you're about to start your first year at Berklee School of Music and you meet this guy, tell me if I'm pronouncing his name wrong, Chemo Williams.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:32Ryan Hawk?

  And you have a conversation with him. What happened next?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  It was about two months before I was set to go to Berklee College of Music. And I mentioned to him that I was going and he said, oh, really? He said, I used to teach there. He said, I have an idea. He said, come by my studio tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. And I think I can help you graduate Berklee in two years because it's a four-year college. And I showed up at 9:00 a.m., which surprised him because he said that he often says this to people that shows some mild interest and nobody ever shows up at 9:00 a.m. But there I was, at his door at 9:00 a.m., ready to go. And that impressed him.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  And then he sat down with this intense pace and taught me four semesters of harmony classes in an hour. Because he just went really quick and intense and I was quick enough to keep up with it. And what I lacked, he said, learn this over the next week. And we met a week later and he taught me four semesters of Berklee College of Music's arranging classes in two hours. And we met maybe four times total. And that was enough for him to teach me essentially two years of required courses at Berklee.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Because his main point was, most things are paced so that the slowest person can keep up. But if you're driven, if you are motivated enough, you can go so much faster than the standard pace. He said, the standard pace is for chumps. You can do so much better than that. You can graduate a four-year university in two years.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  And I did.

• 4:28Ryan Hawk?

  Man, what do you draw? I mean, 17 years old, what a great life lesson. How have you taken from those moments with chemo to say, wait a second, I can go way faster. This pace, that's for chumps, right? The regular speed's for chumps. What have you taken from that that has helped you later on in life?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Institutional skepticism.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  When someone says you have to go through the usual channels and file the forms as such, I think, hmm, not necessarily. And when someone says that'll take this long or you need to do this first, I think there's probably a hack. That's probably the standard way that most people do it, but there's probably a better way.

• 5:21Ryan Hawk?

  Derek, let's say somebody who works in a corporate America or just a corporate job in the world and they're ambitious and growth focused for the right reasons. Right? They want to provide for their family. They want to enjoy their work. They want to build a career. I know this is slightly different from the way that you've looked at it, but I, I think that's a lot of people and I still love to do whatever I can to try to help them. What could they take from that story to say, hmm, maybe there's a different way. Maybe there's a better way to do this thing than just try to climb the regular corporate ladder like everybody else is trying to do.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Here's a real example. After I graduated Berklee College of Music, I got a job at Warner Music in New York City. Even the way I got the job, quick aside, was because a visiting speaker from New York City from a different music company was visiting Berklee College of Music and As he walked into the classroom to begin speaking, I heard him say to the teacher, "Are we starting now?" And the teacher said, "Yeah." And he said, "I thought we were gonna eat first." He said, "Oh, man, I haven't eaten lunch. I thought we were gonna eat first." So I quickly, while the class was getting settled, I dashed out to the payphone and I called Supreme's Pizza, whose phone number I had memorized.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  And I had them deliver three pizzas to room number 314. And so about 30 minutes into his talk, the pizzas come and I paid the guy and brought the pizzas up to the speaker, who looked at me and said, "All right, good one. I owe you one." And we kept in touch for the next few years. He's the one that got me the job at Warner Brothers because he heard them mention in passing that they were hiring a new guy to run the tape room. And he said, "I've got just the guy for you." And he called me in Boston and said, "I got you a job in New York City if you can start on Monday." And that's how I got the job. I never had to interview or anything.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  His recommendation alone just got me the job. So that's not even the real story I'm telling, though. That's just another example of how there's always a different way than the usual channels, right?

• 7:36Ryan Hawk?

  Be proactive, take action, like get it done, be valuable. That's something I--

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:40Ryan Hawk?

  We'll talk about that in a second. But yeah, I want you to finish the story.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  So while I'm working at Warner Brothers, there is one empty little office that one day wasn't empty. And there was a guy there named Alan Tepper, who just showed up and said, "Hey, I'm Alan. I've started working here." And I said, "Oh, what are you doing?" And he said, "Well, I don't officially work here yet, but I told them to just give me a desk and I'm gonna make the company a lot of money." I said, "How?" He said, "Because I used to be in advertising and I saw that Warner Brothers is not proactively pushing their music catalog to advertising agencies. So I said, "Just give me a desk, give me a phone. You don't have to pay me. Let me show you what I can do."

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Alan Tepper, later that year, made more money for the company than anybody had in years. Officially, they did hire him eventually, but the company was not hiring. He walked in saying, "I know how I can make you more money. Just let me show you." And that's it. I love this story because you don't have to wait until a company's hiring. If you can get a little insight into an industry or a company and see how you can benefit them, you don't have to wait for them to hire anyone or say that they're hiring. You can just walk in and show them what you can do for them and say, "You don't even have to pay me. Let me show you." And I've seen this work in action. I think it's a great approach.

• 9:10Ryan Hawk?

  I love that. One of the things you also did was give a talk to the Berkeley students, and it was titled, "Six Things I Wish I Knew the Day I Started Berkeley." And I think the one that I pulled out from that six that I want you to expand on is very similar to what Alan Tepper did, and that is, when done, be valuable. You're right. When you leave here, you said to them, "Head to the business aisle of the bookstore and start reading a book a week about entrepreneurial thinking, things like marketing. Make sure you're making money. That's a way to continue on and make sure you're doing something to add value to others." Sometimes people think like, "Oh, I'm just gonna be good or I'm gonna make this art or I'm gonna do this thing." And you said, "No, there's

• 9:55Ryan Hawk?

  a part of it that you gotta create a business. You gotta add value to other people. You have to make money." And I think to be excellent at whatever you're doing, constantly thinking about how am I adding value to others is a good way to approach it. How have you used that in your life?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Well, first, I gotta give a little context that probably people listening to this podcast say, "Well, yeah, duh, making money. I know." Especially on the internet, it feels like that's all everyone's talking about. It's how to make money. But at a music school, there's this tendency to go...

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Too deep into chord voicings and timbre and the structure of your second verse as it leads into your pre-chorus and whatnot. It's just diving deep into the mechanics of music, which is important. It's super important, which is why elsewhere in that talk I say, shut out all distractions, stop reading all media, dive deep into these things that I just mentioned. But then, yes, when you're out of here, shift your focus and find a way to make that valuable to others. Because we've all heard the phrase starving artist.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  The essence of the starving artist is someone who is spending all of their time on work that's valuable to them, but not valuable to others. Meaning, they might be pouring hundreds of hours into some expression of their feelings of the meta-universe we all live in, but other people can't relate to it. And so, nobody wants it, nobody's interested, but that person is spending all of their time on this thing that nobody else is interested in. That's a problem. It's a very common problem for artists, writers, musicians. So, the point was, keep in touch with the

• 11:58Speaker 01

  objective measure of value we call money, which is so loaded with baggage. But if you think of it just as a neutral measure of value and try to find ways to make money with your art, it's a way of making sure that what you're doing is valuable to other people, not just to you.

• 12:18Ryan Hawk?

  Yes, I think the key learning for anybody, whether you view yourself as an artist or not, is What am I doing to add value to the lives of the people around me? I learned this in sports early in my life, Derek, where if I didn't give our team the best chance to win, I played quarterback, so only one guy gets to play, then they're going to play the other guy. And that happened to be in college, right? Where the coaches looked me dead in the eyes and said, that guy gives us a better chance to win than you do. He's adding more value to our team than you do. That's a great lesson to learn, man, especially when you're 19 years old. As you learn valuable lessons at that age in your formative years, because that's kind of how the world works. Like, if you add value to people's lives and help them and put them in a better position,

• 13:03Ryan Hawk?

  you're probably going to have a lot of work. And if you don't, you got to find a way to do it. I think. I don't know. What do you think? I see you thinking right now.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'm thinking about when you had the dating coach on, how a hard thing with dating is to how to see yourself through other people's eyes.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  And it's kind of the same thing, isn't it? To get out of yourself and stop thinking of the intrinsic, internal value of what you're doing to you and think of it as how valuable it is to someone else.

• 13:38Ryan Hawk?

  Yes, I think that's something to be regularly thinking about. That shows high levels of emotional intelligence, high levels of self-awareness, supreme levels of intelligence. There's a million different things to get to with your story, Derek. I love it. We've talked about it in the last time. But one of the things you did is I love how you put together one of the many viral things you've done, which the title, if you just search "leadership lessons from the dancing guy", maybe it'll also say in parentheses, "first follower". I'm curious, what were you thinking when you put that talk together with the video? And then maybe you can describe it too for those who haven't seen it yet.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Sure. 2009, I was living in New York City.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  And there was a video, maybe it was Reddit, maybe it was Dig, I don't know what it was at the time, that just somebody showed this video of a guy dancing alone. There was this shirtless guy dancing, kind of like tripping balls, as we'd say, dancing at this music festival, just all alone. And people are just casually sitting there, looking at the funny shirtless dancing guy. And at one point, somebody jumps up to imitate him and starts doing all the same moves he's doing. And because one guy imitates him, a second one jumps in right away. And now the two of them are imitating the shirtless guy. And then, right away, three,

• 15:00Speaker 01

  four, five, six, seven, eight, 20 people, all jump in to do the same thing, because that first one had the confidence to do it. And I had just finished reading two books. One was Tribes by Seth Godin, and one was The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. And both of these books describe how actions start a movement. And so while I was watching this video of the dancing guy, I thought, this is kind of like a visual metaphor of what Seth Godin's Tribes and Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point are talking about. So, I just

• 15:45Speaker 01

  blogged it. At the time, I was blogging almost every day. So just that day, I posted a blog post, showing that video, saying, isn't this kind of like making a movement? I said, but notice how we focus on the shirtless dancing guy, but actually, it was the first follower, that first guy that jumped up. That's what made everything else happen. Until then, it was people keeping their distance from the freak. But the first person jumped up and started imitating him, that let the second person do it. And then there was no reason not to, because other people had already begun. And I thought it was really interesting then, how the first and second followers

• 16:27Speaker 01

  were the ones that really showed everyone else how to follow. And then, of course, you think of the metaphors in real life. Like, if you find some lone nut doing something great, it might be a mad scientist in their computer basement somewhere. But if you find somebody doing something great, one of the best things you could do is to follow that person and show other people how to follow.

• 16:51Ryan Hawk?

  And then when you put it together, there was a TED Talk, right? Yeah, it was a TED Talk.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Okay, so sorry. So, yeah, I just blogged it, and that was it. But then, a few months later, the TED conference put out a call saying, "We're taking submissions for new talks." So I just submitted that, and they said yes. And then began the day that I thought my heart would explode. I was there at the big main stage TED conference. I mean, like, Al Gore, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Tony Robbins, all of these VIPs. Bill Gates is sitting right there. All of them in the front row, looking at me like, "All right, anonymous speaker I've never heard of, impress me." So I got up on stage and delivered that talk to that room.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  And it was terrifying.

• 17:42Ryan Hawk?

  Was it?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Especially because, oh, god, yeah.

• 17:43Ryan Hawk?

  You made it look easy.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. But what was terrifying is it was like memorizing a four-minute-long monologue. Like, if you think of being in a school play or something like that, you have to memorize a monologue. Because if I forgot a single sentence, the whole thing gets out of whack with the video. I have to memorize, word for word, this four-minute-long speech about leadership in order for it to match up exactly with the video of the dancing guy. And to do that while my heart was racing was so scary. I seriously, I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. But got offstage, and one of the coolest moments of my life is the musician Peter Gabriel, whose music I had loved for years,

• 18:29Speaker 01

  saw me, interrupted his conversation with someone else, and ran up to me to shake my hand, saying it was the best thing he had seen. And then later that day... Tony Robbins and a bunch of other people tweeted it and I was very proud.

• 18:42Ryan Hawk?

  Wow. How many times did you practice it?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Oh, God. At least a hundred.

• 18:47Ryan Hawk?

  Really?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, over and over and over and over again. I would just call up friends and say, come on, let me do this one more time with you on the phone. Okay? Hit play on the video. I'm going to do this with my eyes closed now. Let's see how I do.

• 18:59Ryan Hawk?

  Wow. I think that's the inspiring part to me, Derek. It means it is possible. We can do it. Now, you're a really smart dude, but it's the practice. I had Nikki Glaser, the stand-up comedian on this podcast. And to hear her talk about the number of times she has repped her material before any of us see it. It's very similar to what you're saying. And so to me, that is inspiring. Now, it's a ton of work. And you got to be super dedicated to excellence and wanting it to be great. Cause you probably, you wrote the blog, you knew the material well enough where you could have just kind of riffed on it. And it probably would have been decent, but instead you're like, I want this thing to be excellent.

• 19:43Ryan Hawk?

  I want it to be as good as it can possibly be. So I'm going to practice it with my eyes because I'm going to practice it so many times that I can't forget. I think there's a lot to take from that.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  It started this idea of wanting every sentence to matter. So anybody listening here, if you check out any of my books, you'll see that they're all very short. Like my three-minute TED Talk. They offered me to 18 minutes. I said, no, I think I can do this in under three minutes. So same thing with my books. My books are 90 pages, 100 pages. They're meant to be read in an hour. But the reason is the rough draft is a thousand pages. And then I will literally spend full time for one or two years to squeeze it and squeeze it and squeeze it. And chop every sentence that doesn't absolutely positively need to be there.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  And in the end, what's left is this itty-bitty little book. That's almost like poetry because it's so succinct. But the idea is I'm not going to put a single sentence out into the world that doesn't need to be there.

• 20:54Ryan Hawk?

  I think a lot of us as leaders could learn from that. Think about your next quarterly business review, town hall meeting, Monday morning meeting, thinking about pruning that thing down, making it so that every word that comes out of your mouth has to and nothing more. It's kind of like Robert Greene, do not speak unless you can improve upon the silence. But thinking about that for everything you say and do, we'd have a lot better meetings, man.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 21:26Ryan Hawk?

  That's one of the things you said, speaking of that. So a little bit of background, I asked you to come back on because when I was talking with Tim Ferriss, one of your good buddies, he talked about you. He brought up quotes of yours. We talked about you off air too, you know, all this stuff. And so I sent that to you like, hey, you know, I thought you might want to check this out because we talked about you a little bit and I'd love to have you back on. And you said basically like you're going to go on a sabbatical from doing podcasts, but hell yeah, let's do it. And you have this thing that has now been copied, I think, by tons of people of basically, hell, yeah, or no. So either I'm going to go do it 100%, give everything I got, or it's going to be zero. I'm not going to do it. Can you go deeper on that? Hell, yeah, or no, that's also the title of the book. But that mentality of how you approach projects, how you approach life in general.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  We've all felt the pain from saying yes to too many things so that you're spread too thin. And I did this like everyone else. At a certain point, I realized that if I were to say no to almost everything, what it would give me is the space and the time.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  So that when that occasional thing comes up that I'm actually really excited about, well, now I can just fucking smash it. I can throw myself into it entirely and do something like the hundred closed eye practices of a speech, or an entire year editing a rough draft down to a hundred pages. I have the time to do something like that because I've said no to almost everything else. So it's about leaving space instead of filling your space. It's leaving the space so that when that opportunity comes up, you can say, yes,

• 23:14Speaker 01

  absolutely. And I can start right now and I can throw myself into this entirely because I said no to almost everything else.

• 23:23Ryan Hawk?

  What's the response to that book and to that mentality from people like, I'm more curious about the negatives because-

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm glad you brought that up.

• 23:33Ryan Hawk?

  I personally have borrowed this from you, stolen it from you, share it with like leaders I work with who have the calendars that you've probably seen them back to back to back to back. That's every day. That's like five. Sometimes they meet on Sundays like, and I'm like, dude, you gotta, are these all hell yeses? Like all of them? Every single one of those? Every one of them? Well, you know, they're pretty important, man. I gotta do this. So I have a lot of people who report to me. And I'm like, wow, I don't know. I don't know. So I'm just curious to the response you get to that.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Well, two things. For one, it's cute when people contact me out of the blue and say, well, I'm sure you're very busy, but, and I say, no, I'm not busy. Because busy to me implies out of control.

• 24:17Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  You're busy if you've let other people shove shit into your schedule.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  If you leave space, then to me, it leaves time to think. Part of the reason people buy my books and want to hear my thoughts is because I'm this weirdo that spends a lot of time thinking. I don't spend a lot of time doing. I don't have a full schedule. And because of that, I'm able to sit around and think for six hours about the impact of language on our approach to life, or something like that, that most people don't have the time to do. But I do because I sold my company and retired and I spend my time thinking. So if you tune into my thoughts, ideally, you're going to hear something you haven't

• 25:09Speaker 01

  heard before because I just spend more time thinking about the kind of stuff that most people don't have the time to think about. That's why you outsource it to me. Okay, so that's one hell yeah or no aspect. But where I thought where you were going with this when you said the negatives are that I get emails from people that are straight out of college saying, hey, I saw this hell yeah or no book of yours and I'm applying this to everything now. I'm not taking any jobs unless it's really a hell yeah. And I say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Look, it's one tool in the toolbox. You don't use the monkey wrench as a hammer. You don't use the monkey wrench as a toothpick. It's a monkey wrench. It's meant for a certain situation.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  So hell yeah or no is a tool for when you're overwhelmed with options and it's time to raise the bar all the way. It's the wrong strategy to be using straight out of college when you'd be smarter to say yes to everything because opportunities are like lottery tickets at that point. The more, the better. Sleep less, work 21 hours a day, say yes to nine jobs at once if that's what it takes to open those lottery tickets. And then, once something's rewarding you and pays off.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Then you say no to these other things. You double your efforts and raise the bar all the way. But hell yeah or no is a specific tool for a specific situation.

• 26:40Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, I like that clarification because I think yes, sometimes people just hear the part they want to hear. And then, yeah, you're 23 and you're like, eh, I don't know. I'm like, dude, the job you get when you're 23, for most of us, most, you know, I don't mind, cubicle, pounding the phones, 60 cold calls a day. Sometimes you go 0 for 60 in a sales job. Great job, though. It was hard. I didn't love it most days, but I grew to get good at it and I grew to develop skills that have helped me for the rest of my life. If you would have said like, well, is that a hell yeah or do you love that job? Like, no, are you kidding me? When I got done with college, that's what I thought I was going to be doing? Of course not, but I'm so grateful for that experience and that opportunity that it's made me better and all other things.

• 27:23Ryan Hawk?

  Now, I want to shift, Eric, to, I think this is a leadership thing. You may view it as a creativity thing. So when you were running CD Baby, so this is your company that you already mentioned that you have sold. When somebody makes a purchase of something, you usually get like a canned email, like, hey, you ordered these socks and they're going to get there in three days from Amazon or whatever. And you had that same thing initially when people would order a CD, but you changed it. So can you tell me how you changed the, hey, you bought this CD email?

• 27:57Speaker 01

  I love that you said socks and we'll come back to that in a minute.

• 28:01Ryan Hawk?

  Okay.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  But imagine this, yeah, it was 1998. I had just started my little online record store in my living room, no employees, just me, a little tiny website I made myself that had 100 musicians selling their music through me. And yeah, the default shipping notice was the default. It said, your order has been shipped, it's on its way, thank you. And I just looked at that and thought, I can do better than that? Like, why be normal? I think this is a lesson that every musician learns, is you don't want to write a song that somebody else has written.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  You want to write something that nobody's done before, say the lyric that's never been said before. And so same in business. Don't just do the same thing that everybody else is doing. Ask yourself constantly, what has nobody done before? What would add something to the universe and make the world a better place? Surprise somebody. Make eyebrows go up, not down. So in 10 minutes, I wrote this silly little thing saying, "Your CD has been placed onto a satin pillow," "and a hush fell across the crowd as we lit a candle "and put your CD into a gold-lined mailer "and onto our private jet,

• 29:27Speaker 01

  "which is on its way to you in Dayton, Ohio, "on this day, Friday, August 13th. "We hope you had a good time shopping at CD Baby. "We're all exhausted, "and your picture is now on the wall as Customer of the Year. "We can't wait to hear from you again," etc. And that's it. I wrote it in 10 minutes. It was a bit of silliness. It became the default shipping notice. I just set it to automatically send that to everyone that bought something. But because it was so weird and different, people started forwarding it to their friends and then blogging about it and then talking about it. And Seth Godin had a chapter about it, I think,

• 30:10Speaker 01

  in The Purple Cow or a mention of it somewhere in Purple Cow. And other business books mentioned that particular email as like one of the most viral shipping confirmation emails ever. And then, just two years ago, here in Wellington, New Zealand, I heard about compression socks because I was flying a lot and somebody said you should look into having compression socks if you're sitting on planes a lot. I thought, I don't know what compression socks are. But I went online, typed "New Zealand compression socks", found a seller, ordered two pairs.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  The next day, I got an email that said, "Your socks have been placed onto a satin pillow."

• 30:53Ryan Hawk?

  No way.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  And into a gold... A hush fell across the crowd as we lit a candle. "And your socks are now on our private jet on their way to the... And your picture's on our Wallace Customer of the Year." And I said, "Wait a second. Are you doing this because you saw my name in the shipping notice?" And the woman running the shop said, "What? Sorry, no, I don't... What are you talking about?" I said, "I wrote that 25 years ago. I wrote that." And yeah, she had no idea. She just copied it out of a book.

• 31:22Ryan Hawk?

  Oh, my God, that is awesome. Again, though, you're thinking differently. And anybody can do this. Anybody can think differently about how you do it. And it's hard to quantify what that did for your business, but the virality of it, how creative it was, caused it to spread. And then ultimately had to have had an impact on your business. It had to.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Like, literally hundreds of customers that I knew about that mentioned it, said, "I heard of you from this blog post about your shipping confirmation. I heard of you because of this book mentioned your shipping confirmation." So a lot of people heard of me because of that silly email I wrote in 10 minutes. But you're right, the bigger deal is not looking to the outside world to see what we can imitate, but to look at what's been done already and see how you can try something different.

• 32:18Ryan Hawk?

  It's harder, but I bet part of why this happened is because you were writing a lot. You were getting your thoughts out of your head onto the page regularly. You published a lot of them, maybe some of them you didn't. But I think that is the ultimate tool for clarity. It's the ultimate tool for teaching. And I think teaching is the ultimate tool for learning. This show is called The Learning Leader Show. I'm very focused and fascinated by people who are chasing down their curiosity with great rigor and trying to learn, to grow, to get better, and hopefully positively impact the world and other people. Can you talk more about the importance of being a regular writer, of getting those thoughts out of your head onto the page?

• 33:02Speaker 01

  For me, it's healthy doubt, skepticism. It's questioning the defaults.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  If you jot down your thoughts, ideally, you occasionally question them. If you say, "That person wronged me." Ideally, then you add a question mark. "That person wronged me?" Maybe, maybe not. How can I look at that situation through another light? "We need to adopt AI." Let's add a question mark. "We need to adopt AI?" Everybody says it's the greatest thing. Is it necessary? Do we have to do this? It gives you time to question assumptions

• 33:55Speaker 01

  and to not just stick with your first impression. Our first thought is an obstacle. We should not be honoring the thought that came to us first. Like a brainstorming session, you need to acknowledge that that's the first idea. Okay, what else? Give me another one. And then don't stop at two. Don't stop at three. Make yourself come up with a bunch of different perspectives. Sometimes the silly ones can help seed a really great idea that you never would have thought of if you didn't have the silly step in between.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  But all of this is taking the time to go past your first thought, past that obstacle, on to the more interesting perspectives just by taking the time to think through it. Whether that's in writing or just make sure that just in case somebody is averse or allergic to writing, it can also just be talking into a voice recorder. It could be talking to your cat or talking to a friend. It could be journaling into a paper notebook. It could be typing into a text file. Just some way of collecting your thoughts and just giving yourself the time to reflect and think.

• 35:16Ryan Hawk?

  Well, I think part of it, this comes from your book, Useful Not True, is that We just make these assumptions that our beliefs are true. And I like this part. You said for hundreds of years, people worshipped Zeus and Athena and others. And now, this was crazy, now we call that mythology. Those are myths. But now, when it comes to our beliefs, no, no, no, those are just true. Other people's beliefs, those are superstitions, or those are myths. But my beliefs, they're true. That part really spoke to me because I think as a learning leader, as the one who's chasing down my curiosity really, really hard, I'm always questioning, like, maybe there's a

• 35:58Ryan Hawk?

  better way. Maybe there's something I don't know. Maybe what I currently think is wrong. And if I find that, I get pumped. I'm happy. Like, I found a better way. This is great. So bringing in this kind of like, hey, people used to like worship these gods. I think that's why it's worth it for us to question our own beliefs, because that could be our beliefs, you know? I don't know. What do you think?

• 36:23Speaker 01

  I went to China for my first time last year, only because my boy had watched Kung Fu Panda enough that for his school holiday, he asked if we could please go to China. So I thought as part of his education, I should take him to China. But I expected it to be awful. You hear American news stories about this awful place. It's always spun negative with the dystopian government and the oppressed people and the ghost towns from the stupid real estate developers that built skyscrapers that nobody wanted. You

• 37:07Speaker 01

  only hear the negative. But if you go there, it's wonderful. The cities are amazing. The people are happy. Just forget every other measure. Just sit and observe. All the smiles you see in the middle of the major cities. People are happy. They're thriving. They're productive. The cities are clean and the people are entrepreneurial and driven and optimistic about the future. And it's amazing. So I've been back four times in the past year.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  More than anything, really surprised how pleasant this place is that I've always been told it was part of the evil empire. And then you think about how many other things we've been warned against are not actually bad, it's just that maybe the two governments or even the two corporations have something against each other and so they tell us to agree with them. But there's so many different perspectives to be had out there.

• 38:14Ryan Hawk?

  And it's worth it to go experience them, to go try to gain your own perspective and approach it with curiosity instead of judgment, right? There's like this spectrum.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Yes. So now I even use this as a compass that if I noticed I'm prejudiced against something, that makes me want to go into it to find out more about it. So let's give a non-political example. To me Burning Man sounds awful.

• 38:44Ryan Hawk?

  Me too.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  It sounds like the last place I'd want to be in a desert for a week with no food and water except what I bring in myself and everybody's on drugs and it's all crazy. It sounds terrible. Therefore, I should probably go. I thought, what's another? Insane Clown Posse. I don't know their music. I've heard maybe one song once, but I think the fans of Insane Clown Posse paint their face black and white and they call themselves Jugaboos or something like that. And then once a year, somewhere in Indiana, I think, they have the annual Jugabo Festival where all the fans of Insane Clown Posse get together for this crazy festival.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  And somebody passed a little YouTube clip of it and I thought, that sounds awful. I should go. Because I'm full of prejudice against it.

• 39:37Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Therefore, I should steer into it.

• 39:40Ryan Hawk?

  It's kind of like the Lincoln quote, right? I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  I never heard that.

• 39:47Ryan Hawk?

  Really?

• 39:48Speaker 01

  That's Abraham Lincoln?

• 39:49Ryan Hawk?

  I think so, from what I read on the internet. That might not be true. But from what I've read, yeah, I don't like that man. I must get to know him better. I think that is kind of a broader way of... You know what's funny is like usually when you do meet those people, at times I've seen people on the internet where maybe I cringe a little bit. And then I'll be at a conference or something and we're both there. I'm like, good dude. He's a good guy.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:09Ryan Hawk?

  A good guy. Like, yeah, he was great. He was great. We had fun. Maybe we shared a meal or something. It's like, yeah, good guy. There's one thing too, Derek, about, and useful, not true about leadership and exploring. And I wanted to touch on this because you've openly talked about you not being a good leader. And not many people do that, especially on a leadership podcast where they admit like, no, I'm not really that good of a leader. Yet you create this business and it grows and you sell it, make a bunch of money. And now you do whatever you want. And you have for a while now. But can you talk to me about the difference between explorers and leaders?

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I learned this lesson in hindsight. Hard lesson learned. While I was running my company, I was actually a pretty bad leader. As proven by how frustrated my employees were that I loved changing my mind.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  And I loved changing my mind for the reasons that we've talked about right here. Introspection, reflection, considering other approaches. I'm always hoping to change my mind. That's one of my favorite things to do in life is to change my mind. It's, it's great when I find a new perspective that changes my mind. But my employees were so frustrated by this that only years later in hindsight, looking back, I can see now why I was such a bad leader.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  It's because, let's use the archetype of the 1800s explorer from England that gets on a boat for six months to go to the unexplored jungle, machete in hand with a pith helmet, a few workers carrying the baggage. But for the most part, it's an explorer going into uncharted lands to hack around and see what's there, to go where nobody else has gone. Maybe go up that hill? There's nothing up that hill. Let's go into this inlet. There's nothing in that inlet. What about this inlet? Oh my God, there's a gorgeous bay. Look at this amazing paradise bay in this inlet. Well, nobody's ever been here before.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  This is a great harbor. This would be a great port. So then the explorer sends a message back to the queen saying, I've found this great harbor. And then the queen appoints a leader. Now, this is very different than the explorer who's trying everything. A leader is someone that goes in a straight line that says, we're going to this harbor. We're going to set up a city here. These are the benefits. This is how you will gain by doing this. Follow me. And the leader goes in a straight line. And if halfway there, somebody were to say to the leader, hey, what do you think about

• 43:02Speaker 01

  going to a different direction instead? The leader would say, shut up. Lock that man in the jail. We're going straight ahead. I'm not changing my mind. And the leader goes in a straight line to the destination with a clear mission, undeterred. That's a great leader because that person is easy to follow. It's clear where we're going. Even if you're in the back of the crowd and you can't hear what the leader is saying, it's easy to see where we're going, what we're doing. And in hindsight, I see then the difference between the explorer and the leader, and how I was just an explorer, which made me a really bad leader.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  But next time, if I were to do it again and I wanted people to follow me, I would pause my explorations, declare a certain harbor to be the destination, and I would set that project as having a clear, unwavering mission.

• 44:04Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Even if I personally might go explore some other things, I would declare this project to have a clear mission, straight line, easy to follow.

• 44:12Ryan Hawk?

  Is that distinction too black and white? In the real world, leadership is a little bit more messy than that. I think it's a little bit more gray, whereas you can have some exploration and some set the vision and the objectives and let's go, no deviations, follow me, we're going. But the great ones, I feel like, also are curious enough and humble enough to listen to people on their team, even if those people work for them. When they say, "Boss," or "Leader," dude, this part of the plan is actually not right. Like, this part needs to be tweaked a little bit. And a good leader will say, "Hold on, let me think about that. Ah, you're right.

• 44:57Ryan Hawk?

  We still have the same vision, right? We're still heading in the same direction. But yeah, what you're telling me, I missed on that part. Let me adjust." Right? So like, there seems like there is a little bit of gray in there, whereas the explorer versus leader thing seems more black and white.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Two thoughts.

• 45:15Ryan Hawk?

  Okay.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Black and white examples are made intentionally purified for the sake of clarification, so that we can see what we're talking about.

• 45:26Ryan Hawk?

  Good call.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  But even in that metaphor of the leader going on the boat to the harbor across the world somewhere, yeah, you're right that ideally, if there was a storm in the way, a good leader would not go through the storm, he'd go around the storm. The destination hasn't changed, but maybe the path changed. Or, in that metaphor, you're right, if somebody looked at the map and said, "Hey, boss, by the way, I love how you said boss, leader, dude."

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Hey, boss leader, dude, we could actually get there better or faster if we were to take this alternate route, which you had not planned, but it actually gets us to the destination better. I think anybody listening to this, yeah, you get the metaphor for your own situation, but it's good to realize that some of us have started businesses for our own satisfaction in exploring.

• 46:20Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  And you should be wary. If you notice that you were more of an explorer, but you're calling yourself a leader, you might need to take a different approach or keep your explorations personal and keep your business in a straight line, even if your personal interests are keeping you astray.

• 46:37Ryan Hawk?

  What would you do? Would you get help from other great leaders? Would you ask them questions? Would you read their books? Which you read tons of books, I know. Like, what would be your approach to be a better leader next time?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  I would just define it as a project, kind of like how we incorporate a company. You set up an LLC and you say, for this project, this project has this goal, clearly stated, straight line, this is what this project's doing. Follow me to this destination that this project is out to pursue. We're aiming to discover this technology. We're aiming to solve this problem. And just set it as a clear defined project so that then even if you hand that off to a different leader, that person also knows the clear aims of this. It's easier to communicate. Your marketing's easier. You're able to more clearly see exactly

• 47:30Speaker 01

  what this is, what it solves, how it will help, where it's going. Yeah, leave that as an individual project that goes in a straight line.

• 47:38Ryan Hawk?

  I think my dad was so, and he still talks about this, being so good at being vividly clear in the message and narrating the journey and making sure we knew how we played a role in helping us get to whatever that thing is. And we're like, okay, I got it. Now I can go like execute on this thing. That's the job of leader, though, is like to rally the people and make sure you're clear enough as a communicator that they know. Where we're going, why we're going that way and how you specifically help us achieve this big thing, then you can get on board. Derek, I got one more question, man, before we run. This is awesome. I appreciate you getting up early over there in New Zealand. It's kind of cool that this technology exists that I'm here in Ohio, you're in New Zealand. We can talk like we're just hanging out. But let's say you're meeting with one of those.

• 48:23Ryan Hawk?

  We mentioned the early college grad when hell yes or no might not always work for them. But let's say they're like, hey, man, I want to, I want to leave a positive dent in the world. I really do, like you have, but I'm not really sure yet how or what I'm going to do. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you give to that person?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  If you see yourself from the outside, like we talked about earlier with the starving artist, it's almost impossible to predict what the world will want from you. You can read the stories of successful people that maybe moved to California to take a job in insurance, but then suddenly randomly got a job as an actor because somebody saw them in a restaurant and thought they fit the part of a Haggard Army general. And they took that job and it ended up being their biggest success. You never know what the world wants from you.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  So therefore, it helps to try lots of things and not get too hung up on one thing that you're guessing is going to be your contribution to the world, but might not be. I'm going to use a music metaphor here. In my years in the music business, I'd occasionally run across somebody who had written a song, one particular song that meant the world to them. And they kept trying to push that song on to everybody, but people just didn't like that song. But it was frustrating for them because they said, no, this is, this is the song. This song has great value. But listen again, maybe you'll like it the second time. And they were trying to push this thing that people didn't want.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  And then I see that in business, too. Somebody that has an idea that they're just sure that the world is going to want this, but the world doesn't want that. And it's unwise of you to keep persistently pushing without changing. You need to persistently keep trying variations until you find the thing that the world clearly tells you, yes, we want this from you. That's what happened when I started CD Baby. I had done many, many, many things. I had a booking agency, a record label, a recording studio. I had my own music. None of it went well. It was just failure, failure, failure, failure.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  And then this silly whimsical little thing I did on the side to help a few friends, that's the thing that took off. And it feels such a difference. Suddenly, all the doors that had been locked were suddenly opened to me. Everybody that had been booting me out suddenly was inviting me in. And I never could have predicted that it was that one thing that would have been the big success. So do lots of stuff, try many things, keep yourself out there, and listen closely to what the world is telling you it wants from you.

• 51:34Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah, you never know, but you gotta like keep chopping, like keep going, keep trying to add value to other people's lives. And like eventually, it seems like things find a way of working themselves out. Derek, part of the reason I love your approach just in general to life is your dedication to excellence, is your willingness to do a lot of the hard work that nobody sees, to edit down these massive books down to small ones where there is literally not a single wasted word. I even read the transcripts that you've published of podcasts you've been on, including this podcast. And even the transcripts are edited beautifully. I know I don't speak as well as what it looks like in those transcripts.

• 52:19Ryan Hawk?

  And so I'm thinking, was I really that good? I'm like, no, obviously I wasn't. Derek edits them because he cares about even the transcripts that he puts out. So like this dedication to excellence, these high standards, that is inspiring to me. And so I just want to make sure you know that. I appreciate that. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Thanks Ryan, I really appreciate it.

• 52:42Ryan Hawk?

  So good.

• 52:47Ryan Hawk?

  It is the end of the Podcast Club. Thank you for being a member of the End of the Podcast Club. If you are, send me a note, [email protected]. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Derek Sivers. A few takeaways from my notes. The standard pace is for chumps. Most things are paced, so the slowest person can keep up. You don't have to go that slow. In fact, you probably shouldn't. Think of ways you can increase your pace, much like Derek did, by graduating from college in two years instead of four. The standard pace is for chumps.

• 53:27Ryan Hawk?

  Next, we should question our beliefs. For hundreds of years, people worshipped Zeus, Athena, and others. Now, we call that mythology. They're myths. But when it comes to our own beliefs, those, no, no, those are just true. Only others' beliefs are myths and/or superstitions. We should question our beliefs too. We should get excited when we find that something we had originally thought to be true turns out not to be. I love that. Then, the shipping email he wrote for his customers at CD Baby. Initially, he was like everybody else. When the CD was actually shipped, the first note was just normal. "Hey, your order has shipped today. Please let us know if it doesn't

• 54:10Ryan Hawk?

  arrive. Thank you for your business." Then he changed it to a variety of fun, creative things, one of them being, "Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized, contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow." The whole point is to be yourself, be different. You don't have to do it like others do. In fact, You probably shouldn't be creative, be funny, enjoy it. Create something that might make somebody forward it to their friends or write about it in a book or want to spread a cool story. We all can do that. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, "Hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Derek Sivers."

• 54:55Ryan Hawk?

  I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts and write a thoughtful review and rate the show, hopefully five stars and subscribe to it. Doing all of that helps me continue to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.