#202: Tools of Titans: Derek Sivers Distilled

Derek Sivers(@sivers https://twitter.com/sivers) is one of my favorite humans, and I call him often for advice. Think of him as a philosopher-king programmer, master teacher, and merry prankster. Originally a professional musician and circus clown (he did the latter to counterbalance being introverted), Derek created CD Baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Baby in 1998. It became the largest seller of independent music online, with $100 million in sales for 150,000 musicians. In 2008, Derek sold CD Baby for $22 million, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. He is a frequent speaker at the TED Conference, with more than five million views of his talks. In addition to publishing 33 books via his company Wood Egg, he is the author of Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1591848261/offsitoftimfe-20, a collection of short life lessons that I've read at least a dozen times. I still have an early draft with highlights and notes. I posted the following on Facebook while writing this chapter: "I might need to do a second volume of [Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers http://toolsoftitans.com], 100% dedicated to the knowledge bombs of Derek Sivers. So much good stuff. Hard to cut." Here's a bit of what made it into the first edition -- cherry-picked from the nuggets I've applied to my own life. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Audible http://audible.com/tim. I have used Audible http://audible.com/tim for years, and I love audiobooks. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book http://www.audible.com/pd/Teens/The-Graveyard-Book-Full-Cast-Production-Audiobook/B00LXHQO22/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding http://www.audible.com/pd/Travel-Adventure/Vagabonding-Audiobook/B00GCHWZHG/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim and get started today. Enjoy. This podcast is also brought to you by FreshBooks https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email. FreshBooks is The #1 cloud bookkeeping software, which is used by a ton of the start-ups I advise and many of the contractors I work with. It is the easiest way to send invoices, get paid, track your time, and track your clients. FreshBooks https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email tells you when your clients have viewed your invoices, helps you customize your invoices, track your hours, automatically organize your receipts, have late payment reminders sent automatically and much more. Right now you can get a free month of complete and unrestricted use. https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email You do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month and see how the brand new Freshbooks can change your business, go to FreshBooks.com/Tim https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email and enter "Tim https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email" in the "how did you hear about us section."

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

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, we're seeing appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I have used for years. I love audiobooks, and I have two to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing. You will thank me. The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The Four Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim, and you can choose one of those two books, or you can choose from more great options than you can

• 1:05Tim Ferriss?

  possibly imagine. So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class. It's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim. That's audible.com/tim and grab a book. Enjoy.

• 1:21Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. Back in 2003, a busy freelancer named Mike McDermott, who I've actually had dinner with, accidentally saved over an invoice and lost all of his work. To make sure that never happened again, Mike set out to create FreshBooks, which is now the number one cloud accounting software designed exclusively for self-employed professionals around the world. It is used by now 10 million plus folks in total who need to send invoices, get paid fast, and track their time. A lot of you fall in that category. In September of this year, Mike and his entire team relaunched an all-new version of their platform, built from the ground up, doubled down on what made it great in the first place, namely simplicity and speed.

• 2:05Tim Ferriss?

  So I can't cover all the features in this particular sponsor read, but you can send a branded invoice in under 30 seconds. You can see when a client has looked at their invoice, and you can enable online payments in two clicks. If you need customer support, you will get a real human being on the phone in three rings or less. And there are many other things you can do. Take pictures of receipts on your phone using their iOS mobile app, and make expenses a million times easier, etc., etc. It is a rad service. A lot of you have recommended it to me. That's how this came to be, as a sponsorship. So to claim your 30-day unrestricted free trial, that means no credit card needed, and see

• 2:44Tim Ferriss?

  how the brand-new FreshBooks can change your freelancing game, go to freshbooks.com/tim and enter TIM, T-I-M, in the "How did you hear about us?" section. That is freshbooks.com/tim.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 3:02Tim Ferriss?

  This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from many different worlds, many different industries, many different areas of speciality, to tease out the philosophies, habits, routines, etc., that you can use. This episode is going to be a little bit different. It is an experimental episode, doing something that many, many thousands of you have requested, and that is a highlight episode. But this is not just material that some of you have heard. This is cherry-picked to highlight the information that I have most applied to my own life, A, and B, it includes some of my own commentary, for those of you

• 3:42Tim Ferriss?

  who are interested. And I'm inviting back, in the form of his highlight reel, and there are many others, but this is certainly a selection that I enjoy, Derek Sivers. Derek Sivers, who can be found on Twitter and Facebook, @Sivers, S-I-V-E-R-S. He has many, many golden nuggets at Sivers.org, is one of my favorite humans, and I often call him for advice. You can think of him as a philosopher-king, programmer, master teacher, and of course, merry prankster. He's a hilarious guy. Originally a professional musician and circus clown, I kid you not, he did the latter to counterbalance being introverted, Derek created CD Baby in 1998.

• 4:25Tim Ferriss?

  It became the largest seller of independent music online, with 100 million in sales for 150,000 musicians.

• 4:33Tim Ferriss?

  Then, in 2008, Derek sold CD Baby for $22 million, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. He is a frequent speaker at TED with more than 5 million views of his talks. In addition to publishing 33 books via his company, Wood Egg, he is the author of "Anything You Want," which I highly recommend. It's a collection of short life lessons that I've read personally at least a dozen times. I still have a very early draft printed out with highlights and notes. Behind the Scenes. Derek has read, reviewed, and rank ordered more than 200 books at sivers.org/books. They're automatically sorted from best to worst.

• 5:14Tim Ferriss?

  He is a huge fan of, among others, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner. And Derek, in fact, introduced me to the book "Seeking Wisdom," subtitle "From Darwin to Munger," by Peter Bevillen. He read "Awaken the Giant Within" by Tony Robbins, who's also been on this podcast. And if I mention any past guests, you can find all their episodes at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. But he read "Awaken the Giant Within" by Tony Robbins when he was 18, and it changed his life. I posted the following on Facebook when I was, in fact, working on this chapter from my new book, "Tools of Titans," and it read as follows, quote, "I might need to do a

• 5:57Tim Ferriss?

  second volume of my next book, 100% dedicated to the knowledge bombs of Derek Sivers. So much good stuff, hard to cut," end quote. There are many comments that flowed in. The most upvoted comment was from a gent named Kevin O., who said, quote, "Put a link to the podcast and have them listen. It's less than two hours and it will change their life. Tim, you and Derek got me from call center worker to location-independent freelancer with more negotiation power for income and benefits than I previously imagined. You both also taught me the value of enough and contentment and appreciation in addition to achievement." So that made my week, and I do highly recommend everybody listen to the whole episodes. And there are more than one with Derek, but especially the first.

• 6:41Tim Ferriss?

  And of course, you can find that at fourhourworkweek.com/derek. But moving on.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with the perfect abs.

• 6:53Tim Ferriss?

  This is a direct quote from Sir Derek, and it really underscores that it's not what you know, it's what you do consistently. And Tony Robbins, just to bring him up since I did already, has said something along the lines of, "What you know doesn't mean shit. It's what you do consistently that makes the difference." It's not about just more how-to information. It's about why-to incentives and much more than that. So, it's not just enough to ingest more pages and so on. You have to put it into practice and you have to rig the game so you can win by creating incentives, which I've talked about a lot in the diss and stakes section of The 4-Hour Chef.

• 7:36Tim Ferriss?

  But you can use tools like stick, S-T-I-C-K-K.com, or something like coach.me.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  How to thrive in an unknowable future? Choose to plan with the most options. The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans.

• 7:51Tim Ferriss?

  My commentary. This is one of Derek's directives, as he calls them, which are his one-line rules for life, distilled from hundreds of books and decades of lessons learned. Other directives of his include be expensive, which I think certainly echoes the sentiment of Mark Andreessen, who's been on the podcast, expect disaster, which echoes one of my favorite podcast guests, he's only 2,000 years old, Seneca, I've had him on before, my favorite Stoic philosopher, and own as little as possible, which echoes other podcast guests, including Jason Neemer and Kevin Kelly, in fact.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Who do you think of when you hear the word "successful"?

• 8:36Derek Sivers?

  Well, the first answer to any question isn't much fun because it's just automatic, right? Like, what's the first painting that comes to mind? Mona Lisa? Oh, name a genius. Einstein? Who's a composer? Mozart? But this is the subject of the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. There's the instant unconscious automatic thinking, and then there's the slower conscious, rational, deliberate thinking. So I'm really, really into the slower thinking, like breaking my automatic responses to the things in my life and slowly thinking through a more deliberate response instead. And then for the things in life where an automatic response is useful,

• 9:19Derek Sivers?

  I can create a new one consciously. So like, what if you asked, when you think of the word successful, who's the third person that comes to mind? And why are they actually more successful than the first person that came to mind? Well, in that case, the first person would be Richard Branson, because he's like the stereotype, right? He's like the Mona Lisa of success to me. And honestly, you might be my second answer, but we could talk about that a different time. And my third and real answer, after thinking it through, is that we can't know without knowing a person's aims, right? Like, what if Richard

• 10:01Derek Sivers?

  Branson set out to live a quiet life, but like a compulsive gambler, he just can't stop creating companies? Well, then that changes everything, and we can't really call him successful anymore.

• 10:13Tim Ferriss?

  My commentary. This is absolutely genius. I love this approach, and it is not limited to Derek. Ricardo Semler, CEO and majority owner of the Brazilian-based Semco Partners, whose writing I've read quite a bit of early on, just after graduating from college, practices asking why three times. This is true when he is questioning his own motives, doing self-work, so to speak, or when tackling big projects and collaborating with others. The rationale is identical to Derek's.

• 10:44Tim Ferriss?

  For people starting out, say yes. When Derek was 18, he lived in Boston and he attended the Berklee College of Music.

• 10:53Derek Sivers?

  I'm in this band where the bass player one day in rehearsal says, "Hey, man, my agent just offered me a gig that's like $75 to play at a pig show in Vermont." He rolls his eyes and he's like, "I'm not gonna do it. Do you want the gig?" I'm like, "Fuck, yeah. A paying gig? Oh, my God. Yes." So I took the gig to go up to Burlington, Vermont, and I think it was like a, you know, $58 round trip bus ticket. And I get to this pig show in Vermont. I strap my acoustic guitar on and I walk around a pig show playing music. And did that for like three hours, got on the bus home and the next day, the booking agent called me up

• 11:37Derek Sivers?

  and said, "Hey, so yeah, you did a really good job at the pig show. We got good reports there. Wondering if you can come play at an art opening in Western Massachusetts. I'll pay you 75 bucks again." "Sure." So same thing. I took, you know, like a $60 bus out to Western Massachusetts, got 75 bucks for playing at an art opening. And the agent was there and he was impressed. And so he said, "Hey, look, I've got this circus and the previous musician just quit, so we really need somebody new and I really like what you're doing. So there's about three gigs a week. I can pay you 75 bucks a gig. They're usually Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Do you want the gig?" And I said, "Hell, yeah. I'm a professional musician now. This is amazing."

• 12:18Derek Sivers?

  So I said yes to everything, which is gonna come up later, you know, with the hell, yeah or no thing. But I think it's really smart to switch strategies. But when you're earlier in your career, I think the best strategy is you just say yes to everything, every piddly little gig. You just never know what are the lottery tickets. So this one ended up being a real lottery ticket for me.

• 12:41Derek Sivers?

  The standard pace is for chumps. Chemo Williams is this large black man from Hawaii that was a musician that attended Berklee School of Music and then stayed there to teach for a while. And so what he taught me in four lessons got me to graduate Berklee College of Music in half the time it would take. And here was his thing. He said, "The reason I wanted you to like study with me for a bit," he said, "I know you only have like eight weeks before you go to school." He said, "I think you can graduate Berklee School of Music in two years instead of four." He said, "The standard pace is for chumps."

• 13:22Derek Sivers?

  I should get a T-shirt made. Yes, I know. This is like totally Tim Ferriss stuff, right? This is like, I can't believe we hadn't talked about this before, that he's the one at the age of like 17, 18, got me into this mentality. He said, "The standard pace is for chumps." That's, the school has to organize its curricula around the lowest common denominator so that almost nobody is left out. So they have to slow down so that everybody can catch up. But he said, "You're smarter than that, or anybody can be smarter than that if they want to be. So you can go as fast as you want, and here's how." And so he sat me down at the piano. He said, "Okay, what do you know about music theory?" I said, "Well, I don't know. Let's find out." And he, you know, he just asked me a few of these music questions like, "Okay, what, how does a major scale go?" Da, da, da, da, da, right? "Okay, show me

• 14:07Derek Sivers?

  the tritone. Do you know what a tritone is? Okay, play me a tritone in the C major scale." I'm like, "Uh, uh, uh, okay, B and F." He said, "Okay, now, how can you take that? And what other chord can you make from B and F?" He said, "Okay, that's called the substitute chord. Now, what is a resolution?" We realized, and he was just like boom, boom, boom, at this kind of pace. He was doing all this music theory stuff with me. It was so intense. And I was like, I had all this adrenaline, like a video game. I was like, "This is amazing. Okay, keep going." He said, "Okay, and that, and this, and this." And that was like a two-hour lesson that went at that kind of pace. And then he dumped a bunch of homework on me. He said, "Okay, now go home tonight and take this big book of jazz standards. Find me all the II-V substitutions or II-V closures. Now substitute chords for that and then come back next Thursday and we'll do this again."

• 14:50Derek Sivers?

  So we did that for like four Thursdays in a row. And sure enough, what he taught me in four two-hour sessions was basically like two years of Berklee College of Music. He compressed it into four lessons. Wow. So that when I showed up to my first day of Berklee, I tested out of the first few years.

• 15:13Derek Sivers?

  Just thanks to him. And then he even taught me a strategy. It just he offhand mentioned, he said, you know, I think they might still have a rule in place where those other required courses, you know, that you have to take to graduate. He said, I think you could pretty much just buy the books for those and then contact the department head and just take the final exam to get credit.

• 15:35Tim Ferriss?

  Don't be a donkey.

• 15:37Derek Sivers?

  What advice would you give your 30-year-old self? My advice to my 30-year-old self would be, um, don't be a donkey. So does that mean? Well, I meet a lot of 30-year-olds that are trying to pursue many different directions at once, but not making progress in any, right? And then, or they get frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing because they want to do them all. And I get a lot of this frustration like, but I want to do this and that and this and that. Why do I have to choose? I don't know what to choose. But the problem is, if you're thinking short term, then you're acting as if you don't do them all this week, that they won't happen. But I think the solution is to think long term, to realize

• 16:21Derek Sivers?

  that you can do one of these things for a few years and then do another one for a few years and then another. So what I mean about don't be a donkey is you've probably heard the fable about, I think it's Buridan's donkey, who it's a fable about a donkey that is standing halfway in between a pile of hay and a bucket of water. And he just keeps looking left to the hay or right to the water, trying to decide, hay or water? Hay or water? And he's unable to decide, so he eventually falls over and dies of both hunger and thirst. So the point is that a donkey can't think of the future. If he did, he'd clearly realize that he could just go first to drink the water and then go eat the hay.

• 17:05Derek Sivers?

  So my advice to my 30-year-old self is don't be a donkey. That you can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Business models can be simple. You don't need to constantly pivot.

• 17:23Tim Ferriss?

  Derek tells the story of the sophisticated origins of CD babies' business model and pricing.

• 17:29Derek Sivers?

  So I was living in Woodstock, New York at the time, and there was a cute, tiny little record store in town that sold consignment CDs on the counter of local musicians. So I walked in there one day and I said, "Hey, how does it work if I want to sell my CD here?" And she said, "Well, you set the selling price at whatever you want. We just keep a flat $4 per CD sold, and then just come by every week and we'll pay you." So I went home to my new website that night and I wrote, "You set your selling price at whatever you want. We just keep a flat $4 per CD sold and we'll pay you every week." And then I realized that it took about 45 minutes of time for me to set up a new album into the system because I had to lay the album art on the scanner

• 18:12Derek Sivers?

  and Photoshop it and crop it and then fix the musicians' spelling mistakes in their own bio and all that kind of stuff. That took about 45 minutes of work per album. So it shows you what I was valuing my time at those days, that I thought, "45 minutes of my time, that's worth about 25 bucks." So I'll charge a $25 setup fee to sign up for this thing. And then, ooh, at the last minute, I thought, "Wait a second. In my mind, 25 and 35, they're in the same, like, brain cell in my head. 25 and 35, those numbers don't feel very different when it comes to cost, you know? Like, $10 is different and $50 is different. But 25, 35, that occupies the same space in the mind. So you know what? I'm going to make it 35.

• 18:54Derek Sivers?

  That will let me give anyone a discount anytime they ask, you know? Even if somebody's on the phone and upset, I'll say, "You know what? Let me give you a discount." So I added in that little buffer so I could give people a discount, which they love. So yeah, $35 setup fee, $4 per CD sold. And then, Tim, for the next 10 years, that was it. That was my entire business model, was generated in five minutes by walking down to the local record store and asking what they do.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Once you have some success, if it's not a hell yes, it's a no.

• 19:29Tim Ferriss?

  This mantra of Derek's quickly became one of my favorite rules of thumb. I apply it all over the place and it led me to take, in effect, at this point, certainly, an indefinite startup vacation, which started in late 2015. I've elaborated on that in the past in my blog post, which was how to say no when it matters most. But here is his origin story and how he arrived at the if it's not a hell yes, it's a no.

• 19:59Derek Sivers?

  And then, once it came close and it was like time to book the ticket, I was like,

• 20:04Derek Sivers?

  I don't really want to go to Australia right now. I'm busy with other stuff. And it was actually my friend Amber Rubarth, who's a brilliant musician. I was on the phone with her and kind of lamenting about this. And she's the one that pointed out, she said, it sounds like, you know, from where you're at, your decision is not between yes and no. You need to figure out whether you're feeling like, fuck yeah, or no. And I said, yeah, that's really what it comes down to, right? Because the idea is, if you're feeling anything less than like, oh, hell yeah, I would love to do that. Oh, my God, that would be amazing.

• 20:45Derek Sivers?

  If you're feeling anything less than that, then just say no. Because most of us say yes to too much stuff. And then we let these little mediocre things fill our lives. And so the problem is, when that occasional, big, oh, my God, hell yeah, thing comes along, you don't have enough time to give it the attention that you should, because you've said yes to too much other little half-assed kind of stuff, right? So, once I started applying this, uh, my life just opened up.

• 21:22Derek Sivers?

  Busy equals out of control. Every time people contact you, every time people contact me, they say, you know, look, I know you must be incredibly busy. And I always think like, no, I'm not. Because, because I'm in control of my time. I'm on top of it. Busy to me seems to imply like out of control. You know, like, oh, my God, I'm so busy. I don't have any time for this shit. That's, to me, that sounds like a person who's got no control of their life.

• 21:50Tim Ferriss?

  My commentary. Lack of time is lack of priorities. If I personally am busy and I'm inclined to say, ah, busy and answer the how are you question that way, it's because I've made choices that put me in that position. So I've forbidden myself to reply to how are you with busy. I have no right to complain. And if that is the case, if I am too busy, instead, it's a cue to reexamine my systems and rules, do additional 80/20 analysis and so on, that I've talked about ad nauseam before.

• 22:23Derek Sivers?

  What would you put on the billboard? I really admire those places, like I think Vermont and Sao Paulo, Brazil, that ban billboards. But I know that that wasn't really what you were asking. So, so my better answer is, um, I think I would make a billboard that would say, it won't make you happy. And I would place it outside any big shopping mall or car dealer. So ideally, actually, I think, you know, what would be a fun project is to buy and train thousands of parrots to say, it won't make you happy. It won't make you happy. And then you let them loose in the shopping malls and superstores around the world. That's my life mission. Anybody in? Anybody with me? Let's do it.

• 23:10Derek Sivers?

  Take 45 minutes instead of 43?

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Is your red face worth it?

• 23:14Derek Sivers?

  So yeah, I've always been very type A. And so a friend of mine got me into cycling when I was living in LA and I lived right on the beach in Santa Monica where there's this great bike path in the sand that goes for, I think it's 25 miles in the sand. Uh, 25, no, hold on. Something like that. The exact number doesn't matter. But what I would do is I would go onto the bike path and I would get like head down and push it as hard as I could. I would go all the way to one end of the bike path and back and then back home. And I'd set my little timer when doing this. Huffing and puffing, red faced. Yeah, just red faced huffing it, but like just pushing it as hard as I can. Every

• 23:54Derek Sivers?

  single, you know, thrust of the leg, just. And of course, you know, that made me quite fun if somebody was in my way on the bike path. I'm sure. That guy's got places to go. So, but I noticed it was always 43 minutes. I mean, you know, if you know Santa Monica, California, you know, the weather is about exactly the same all year round. So unless it was a surprisingly windy day, it was always 43 minutes is what it took me to go as fast as I could for that on that bike path. But I noticed that over time, I was starting to feel less psyched about going out on the bike path. Cause just mentally, when I would think of it, it would feel like pain and hard work.

• 24:38Derek Sivers?

  It sounds like pain and hard work. Yeah. I mean, it was, but you know, I guess at first that was okay. And after a while I just felt like, oh, I don't know, running a bike. Why don't I just hang out? So then I say, you know, that's no, that's not cool for me to start to associate negative stuff with going on the bike ride. Why don't I just chill for once? Like, I'm just going to go on the same bike ride, but just, you know, I'm not going to be a complete snail, but I'll go at like half of my normal pace. So yeah, I got on my bike and it was just pleasant. I just went on the same bike ride, but I was more like, ah, standing up. And I just noticed that I was, I was looking around more and, and I looked out in the ocean. I noticed there were, that day, there were these dolphins jumping in the ocean

• 25:20Derek Sivers?

  and, and I went down to Marina Del Rey to my turnaround point. And, um, oh no, actually, it was when the, the breakers at Marina Del Rey, there was a penguin that was flying above me. I was like, no way. Looked up, I was like, hey, a penguin. And he shit in my mouth.

• 25:39Tim Ferriss?

  Was it a penguin or a pelican?

• 25:42Derek Sivers?

  Oh, sorry, pelican.

• 25:45Tim Ferriss?

  Flying penguin above my head, that would be more amazing. I was like, what, what did you take before your ride? See it, see it a pelican, pelican shit in your mouth. What was, that's incredible accuracy. Was that from like, how far away was it?

• 25:58Derek Sivers?

  Uh, like 20 feet up.

• 25:59Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 26:00Derek Sivers?

  Because I don't know if he was accurate or I was, you know, anyway.

• 26:05Derek Sivers?

  Point is, I, I had such a nice time. It was just purely pleasant. There was no red face. There was no huffing and puffing. I was just cycling. It was nice. And when I got back to my usual stopping place, I looked at my watch and it said 45 minutes. And I was like, no way. How the hell could that have been 45 minutes as compared to my usual 43? It's like, there's no way. But yeah, it was right. 45 minutes. And that was like a profound lesson that I think changed the way I've approached my life ever since. It's because I realized that, I guess, you know, what, what percentage of that huffing and puffing then?

• 26:48Derek Sivers?

  We could do the math or whatever, what a 93 point something percent of my huffing and puffing and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra two minutes. It was basically for nothing. I mean, you know, of course, we're not talking about me competing in something where the huffing and puffing might have been worth it. But for life, I think of all of this optimization and getting the maximum dollar out of everything and the maximum out of every second and the maximum out of every minute. And I think I just take this approach now of going like, or you could just take the lesson, take most of that lesson and apply it and be effective and be happy. You don't need to stress about any of this stuff. And so honestly, that's been my approach ever since. I do things, but I stop before anything gets stressful.

• 27:33Tim Ferriss?

  Is there any particular way that you remind yourself of that, given a lifetime of hard charging? If I would find, I do find that I sometimes lose track of that type of truth, which I think is a truth in almost every aspect of the endeavors that I partake in at least. Are there any particular ways that you remind yourself of that or keep it present for you?

• 28:01Derek Sivers?

  I think it's just noticing the pain. I luckily I live in a world where I, there's more psychic pain than physical pain. Right? So you have to notice the psychic pain that you're feeling of whether it's doing things you don't want to be doing and feeling the pain and regret of that or the frustration. Just when you notice this internal, that always, that's my cue that I treat that like physical pain of like, what am I doing? What, I need to stop doing that thing that hurts. What is that? And it usually means that I'm just pushing too hard or doing things that I don't really want to be doing because I was asking the wrong questions and following the wrong, yeah, following the wrong path, the wrong outcome.

• 28:48Derek Sivers?

  On lack of morning routines. Not only do I not have morning rituals, but there's really nothing that I do every day, except for, you know, eating or some form of writing. But here's why. I get really, really, really into one thing at a time. For example, a year ago, I discovered a new approach to programming my Postgres SQL database that made all of my code a lot easier. So I spent five months, like every waking hour, just completely immersed into this one thing. I would bounce out of bed at five in the morning and programming SQL code for like 19 hours from 5:00 AM till midnight. You know, I'd stop maybe an hour or two a day to go for a run or talk on the phone with a friend.

• 29:31Derek Sivers?

  But then after five months, I finished that project. So I took a week and I went hiking in Milford Sound in New Zealand, totally offline. But when I got back from that, I was so like zen nature boy that I spent the next couple of weeks just reading books outside.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  What's something you believe that other people think is crazy?

• 29:54Derek Sivers?

  Oh, that's easy. I've got a lot of unpopular opinions. I believe alcohol tastes bad, and so do olives. I've never tried coffee, but I don't like the smell. I believe all audiobooks should be read and recorded by people from Iceland because they've got the best accent. I believe it would be wonderful to move to a new country every six months for the rest of my life. I believe you shouldn't start a business unless people are asking you to. I believe I'm below average. It's a deliberate cultivated belief to compensate for our tendency to think we're above average. I believe the movie Scott Pilgrim is a masterpiece. I believe that music and people don't mix, that music should be appreciated alone without

• 30:38Derek Sivers?

  seeing or knowing who the musicians are, and without other people around. So just listening to music for its own sake, not listening to the people around you, and not filtered through what you know about the musician's personal life.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  Treat life as a series of experiments.

• 30:58Derek Sivers?

  So my recommendation is to do little tests. Like, try a few months of living the life you think you want, but leave yourself an exit plan, being open to the chance, the big chance, that you might not like it after actually trying it. The best book about this subject is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. His recommendation is to talk to a few people that are currently where you think you want to be, and ask them for the pros and cons, and then trust their opinions since they're right in it, not just remembering or imagining.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Even when everything is going terribly, and I have no reason to be confident, I just decide to be.

• 31:44Derek Sivers?

  There's this beautiful Kurt Vonnegut quote that's just a throwaway line in the middle of one of his books that says, "You are whatever you pretend to be."

• 31:57Speaker 03

  The most successful email Derek ever wrote.

• 32:00Tim Ferriss?

  At its largest, Derek spent roughly four hours on CD Baby every six months. Four hours every six months. He had systematized everything to run without him. Derek is both successful and fulfilled because he never hesitates to challenge the status quo, to test assumptions, to question legacy belief systems, or any type of system really, that others are saying he should use. It doesn't have to take all that much to test these assumptions, or to do a lot with a little. And the following email, which is his most successful email he ever wrote, illustrates this beautifully, and I'm going to read what he has written about it and the email itself.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Enter Derek.

• 32:47Tim Ferriss?

  "When you make a business, you're making a little world where you control the laws. It doesn't matter how things are done everywhere else. In your little world, you can make it like it should be. When I first built CD Baby," keep in mind, I'm speaking in Derek's voice, "when I first built CD Baby, every order had an automated email that let the customer know when the CD was actually shipped. At first, it was just the normal, 'Your order has shipped today. Please let us know if it doesn't arrive. Thank you for your business.' After a few months, that felt really incongruent with my mission to make people smile. Side note from Tim Ferriss, this is very true. Derek takes making people smile very seriously. Does a pretty good job, I think, too." Back to Derek. "I knew I could do better, so I took 20 minutes and wrote this goofy little thing." And this is the email.

• 33:33Tim Ferriss?

  "Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized, contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards, and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved Bon Voyage to your package on its way to you in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6. I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on the wall as Customer of the Year.

• 34:16Tim Ferriss?

  We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to," in all caps, "cdbaby.com," two exclamation points.

• 34:24Tim Ferriss?

  That one silly email sent out with every order has been so loved that if you search Google for "private CD Baby Jet", you will get more than 20,000 results. Each of those results, each one, is somebody who got the email and loved it enough to post it on their website and tell all of their friends. That one goofy email created thousands of new customers. When you're thinking of how to make your business bigger, it's tempting to try to think all the big thoughts, the world-changing massive action plans. But please know that it's often the tiny details that really thrill someone enough to make them tell all of their friends about you.

• 35:03Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 35:45Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com, that's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. Back in 2003, a busy freelancer named Mike McDermott, who I've actually had dinner with, accidentally saved over an invoice and lost all of his work. To make sure that never happened again, Mike set out to create FreshBooks, which is now the number one cloud accounting software designed exclusively for self-employed professionals around the world.

• 36:25Tim Ferriss?

  It is used by now 10 million plus folks in total who need to send invoices, get paid fast, and track their time. A lot of you fall in that category. In September of this year, Mike and his entire team relaunched an all-new version of their platform, built from the ground up, doubled down on what made it great in the first place, namely, simplicity and speed. So I can't cover all the features in this particular sponsor read, but you can send a branded invoice in under 30 seconds. You can see when a client has looked at their invoice, and you can enable online payments in two clicks. If you need customer support, you will get a real human being on the phone in three rings or less. And there are many other things you can do.

• 37:08Tim Ferriss?

  Take pictures of receipts on your phone using their iOS mobile app, and make expenses a million times easier, et cetera, et cetera. It is a rad service. A lot of you have recommended to me. That's how this came to be, as a sponsorship. So to claim your 30-day unrestricted free trial, that means no credit card needed, and see how the brand-new FreshBooks can change your freelancing game, go to freshbooks.com/tim and enter TIM, T-I-M, in the "How did you hear about us?" section. That is freshbooks.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I've used for years. I love audiobooks, and I have two to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time,

• 37:51Tim Ferriss?

  and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing. You will thank me for The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The 4-Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim, and you can choose one of those two books, or you can choose from more great options than you can possibly imagine. So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class. It's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim. That's audible.com/tim, and grab a book. Enjoy.