DEREK SIVERS | Making Decisions, Achieving Excellence & Finding Meaning | Modern Wisdom Podcast 150

Derek Sivers is a writer, entrepreneur & musician. Derek's episodes on The Tim Ferriss Show are some of my all time favourites so I was super excited to speak to him. Expect to learn how to guide your choices at a crossroad, his views on excellence, why it doesn't matter if life has no meaning, why truth is less simple than it might seem, why the truth can be more complex than a simple answer, and when Derek is finally going to release his new books. Extra Stuff: Check out Derek's Website - https://sivers.org/ Check out all Derek's Book Recommendations - https://sivers.org/book Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #dereksivers - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hello people of Podcastland, welcome back. My guest today is none other than Derek Sivers. Writer, entrepreneur, programmer, fascinating human. He is one of the best guests I've ever heard on Tim Ferriss's show. So I'm very fortunate to have got a hold of him and sit him down on the big stage, obviously, all the wisdom. So yeah, had a long list of questions to go through today, including what have you been working on recently? Get to find out where Derek's been spending his time. When are you going to finally release the now three books that he's been sat on? Excellence in Life and How He Perceives It.

• 0:40Chris Williamson?

  Why Nuance is Where Truth Lies Rather Than in a Simple and Succinct Answer. Values and How They Can Both Guide and Restrict the Way That We Operate. Why It Doesn't Matter That We Only Live For A Short Period Of Time And In 50 Years, No One May Even Remember Our Names. Oh, it was so good. Derek, man, thank you so much for coming on. It was phenomenal. I already want to do another one. In other news, if you are new here, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. You will receive one episode every Monday and every Thursday with the world's most fascinating humans delivered directly to your listening device of choice.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.

• 1:53Chris Williamson?

  But for now, please welcome the wise and wonderful Derek Sivers.

• 2:15Chris Williamson?

  Derek Sivers in the building. How are you, man?

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Any particular building will do. Yes, I am in a building.

• 2:24Chris Williamson?

  You are in the building. You're in our building today.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  That's true. I'm in our audio building. Thank you for having me to your audio home.

• 2:32Chris Williamson?

  Thank you very much for joining us. So as a man who says no to a lot, very glad that you said yes to coming on this podcast. It's been a while since I've heard you put out an audio podcast. I'm very honoured to be the guy that we've re-entered 2012 with.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  Well, it's 2012.

• 2:48Chris Williamson?

  2012, 2020. You can tell it's been a long day.

• 2:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I really, really like what you're doing with Modern Wisdom and I really like your topics of conversation. So these days when somebody asks me to do an interview, you know, I've got nothing I'm promoting or pitching. So it's all about the quality of conversation. And you sent me some really interesting topics of conversation.

• 3:13Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. Yeah, it's, um, there's two, two types of guests I've found doing the podcast. One are guests who do their due diligence and then jump in. And then there's another type who like to really go deep before we begin about what we're going to be talking about. And both of them I find have their, have their merits. But yeah, it's, I'm really looking forward to today to the, the listeners. I've been going back with Derek since November time, before I went to Bali, before I went to Greece, and I've been thinking about all of these different questions. So we've, we've got a big breadcrumb trail of stuff that we've been thinking about. But first question that I've got for you is what have you been working on recently?

• 3:57Chris Williamson?

  If you were to update your now page today, what would it say?

• 4:03Speaker 04

  I have been programming, um, up until Christmas, I was working maniacally on my next book, which is called How to Live, which I'm so fucking excited about. And I was seriously doing like fifteen hour days of writing, which I think you're not supposed to do for health reasons. But I would just get out of bed at six AM and I would just write and write and write and write and write. You know, I'd stop for lunch and I'd just write until I would drop at midnight. And I was doing that for months on end. And I was so into it. But then around Christmas time, um, my assistant reminded me that some other things having to do with my first and second book are on hold

• 4:48Speaker 04

  because they're waiting for me to program some things for the translators and the the store. So ever since Christmas, I uh paused. So what have we now, March, something? So two and a half months? For two and a half months, I've been doing nothing but programming every day, programming, programming the the store where I'm gonna sell the books directly from my site, programming a translation system to manage all the translations of my books and stuff like that. I've just been in programmer head, which is fun.

• 5:16Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. I um, I had Stephen Wolfram on the podcast a while ago. You know, Stephen?

• 5:22Speaker 04

  I met him when he was a teenager and I was a little kid. I, my dad's a particle physicist. We were living here in Abingdon, England. And Stephen Wolfram, my dad tells me, I don't remember this, but when I was five, I had dinner with Stephen. Um, haven't seen him since then.

• 5:41Chris Williamson?

  You should, you should reach out to him. Stephen, for the people, for the people who don't know who he is, go back and listen to the episode, just search Stephen Wolfram in the Modern Wisdom page. But um, that is a man who has really, really optimized the ability to code as much as possible. You know, he's got a special laptop harness where he can go for a walk while he's still, while he's still coding, which just looks like the maddest thing. You've got this guy with essentially a baby stroller attached to him, but instead of it being a child, it's just like some Python or some Wolfram Mathematica or Wolfram Language or whatever it is.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  But you know, I did a five day long walk in the forests of New Zealand. And I had so many thoughts during that time. For one, I just enjoyed it so much. Just walking, walking, walking through a gorgeous forest felt like, yeah, this is how life should be. Like, if you can get away with it, this is a great way to live, to spend most of your time walking through a gorgeous forest. And I, but then I have other aspirations in life, you know, I, there are a lot of things I want to write and there are things I want to read. So, reading while walking, I think we've solved that pretty well with audiobooks.

• 6:56Speaker 04

  But, writing while walking, I can't do that yet. I'd like to. That would be maybe like a skill that one could practice, you know, the way that you decide, look, okay, I'm gonna start speaking Portuguese or, you know, learning to play the sitar. You would start at the very beginning and you would understand that you're not expected to know how to do this thing today. But, yeah, something like this idea of writing through voice and like recording your voice.

• 7:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Instead of having to write down visually, you know, on a typewriter and see it in front of you. That would be just a very different skill to, to learn, but it seems like it'd be really useful. Like, I think we have, between the voice recording and uh, voice recognition dictation software, I think we have the tools where it'd be really, really viable to do this as your main method of writing is to just do it orally. Um, it's very appealing.

• 7:58Chris Williamson?

  How much of it is the being outside and how much of it is the movement? Because you could get, you could quite easily get a treadmill desk. You could get a true runner desk, which is one of those self-powered.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  That's just sad.

• 8:11Chris Williamson?

  No, no, you, you gotta, you gotta have the landscape going by, right?

• 8:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's, it's the combination. It's a walk, because I mean, you could also say, if it was just the outside, you could say, okay, we'll set up your laptop on a picnic bench.

• 8:22Chris Williamson?

  Out fresco.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  Outside. Uh, so no, I think it's, it's the both. It's the walking outside through a forest. God, I've never, I think I've tried a treadmill once in my life and it just felt like the saddest thing.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  I mean, we use them as a as a negative metaphor, don't we? Like, you know, how's work? It's just, you know, the treadmill.

• 8:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you are right. It's badly branded. They should rebrand. They should call themselves something else, shouldn't they? So that's what you've been working on recently. You've been programming and writing. Am I right in thinking that your How to Live book, is that a descendant of the directives that you wrote?

• 8:59Speaker 04

  Yes, very good. Yeah.

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  So that's the child, the love child of the directives?

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Yes. And if you have read the book by David Eagleman called Sum, S U M, it's it's an homage to that book. Sum is probably my single favorite book. If there's a page on my website where I collect my notes from every book I've read since 2007, it's sivers.org/book. And I think there's 300 something books there now that I've read. And so I take detailed notes whenever I'm reading something. And so Sum is the number one book at the top of that list because I have it sorted with my top recommendations up top. And I wish everybody would read that book. I just think it's one of the most brilliant,

• 9:47Speaker 04

  creative, think piece books. It's like 40 little short stories, just two to three pages long each, each one answering the question, what happens when you die? And so it's it's a it's a it's a constant reimagining. So it's 40 different answers to that one question.

• 10:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 10:06Speaker 04

  And I just love that format so much where, you know, chapter three will say, when you die, you're, you know, you awaken in a grave hall and it's just empty. And you find out that God is a creator. He's not a manager. You know, he tipped over the first domino billions of years ago, and he's on to other things. He doesn't even know we exist. You know, chapter six, when you die, you find out that what you knew as your life was actually just an artificial intelligence program. You are an artificial intelligence program. And so I just like this. This idea of forty answers to one question, each one deliberately disagreeing with the previous chapter, because it's just a re- a reimagining of the different answer.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  And so my book, How to Live, is an homage to some. It's using that exact same format to answer the question, how to live.

• 11:01Chris Williamson?

  It seems like your approach to writing, your approach to content production in general at the moment, based on, if anyone goes to civvies.org, you can see it's lean is how I would describe it. That's a diplomatic way of putting it. It's lean, right? There's, there's very, very little fluff. And the directives that you came up with, I think, a list of one hundred and twenty, essentially instructions. We have a series on this podcast called Life Hacks, and that is essentially directives for Gen X who have an iPhone in their pocket and probably thirty quid to spend. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it seems to be very, very lean, very no fluff.

• 11:46Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if that's something that you've developed recently, or whether that's something that you've always liked to do, whether you've always liked to kind of remove the fluff.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  If you, when people come visit my house, I'm living here in Oxford now, when they come to my house, the first question most people who come in ask is, do you live here? Because it's just empty. I'm like, yeah, well, I don't know. To me, I feel quite settled. I mean, look, I have a couch. That's, that's kind of big for me, you know, a couch. So, yeah, I think the minimalism goes through all aspects of my life, but when it comes to writing. I think it's just considerate. I think the more you say, the less people hear, or the more they kind of tune out. If somebody, if you tell somebody, check out this article and they click the link and they see

• 12:45Speaker 04

  the article and they say, oh, okay, this is like 50 paragraphs or 100, like this is going to take me half an hour to read. They may skim it quickly. On the other hand, if they click and it's only 18 sentences, well, then hopefully they're going to read all 18 sentences. So I found out that the average length of one of the articles on my site, and therefore the chapters in my book, the average length is just 22 sentences. So I really, you know, I chiseled them down. I get rid of every single word and sentence that isn't absolutely necessary. But I think that also comes from the fact that I spent the 15 formative years of my

• 13:25Speaker 04

  life as a songwriter, from age of 14 to 29, my primary goal in life was to be a great songwriter. And I wrote over 100 songs. And, you know, that's 15 years of my life trying to say what I want to say in six syllables to match the melody, you know? So maybe it's just like I spent so many years, you know, choosing the exact words in the minimum syllables to match the melody. So I think I still kind of take that approach to my writing.

• 13:57Chris Williamson?

  I understand. Yeah, it's, um, there's a wonderful article by Scott Adams. It's the day you became a better writer. And I think it's probably two paragraphs long and it's one of the most, it's one of the most cited bits of advice for fledgling writers. And Tim Ferriss quoted it on a podcast a while ago and essentially broke the internet with it. You just completely just annihilated poor Scott's site and Scott's got to buy extra server space and stuff for all this traffic. So moving on to some of the things that I wanted to talk about today. So something I've been thinking about a lot recently is to do with crossroad opportunities in life. So we have these kind of like epochs.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  In our life, right? We have these grooves that we've greased and then often there comes a time where we need to choose whether or not we continue to grease that groove. Or we decide to take ourselves outside of that. And often, like a river, we take the path of least resistance.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  But to change the flow of that river, there's a lot of inertia to get over, a lot of stagnation to get over. I wanted to know your thoughts about that, about crossroad opportunities in life.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Um, well, I think when we're at those times in life where we're making decisions, we forget to explicitly name the benefit of doing nothing, of just continuing as we are now, right? Like, too many people, they say, okay, well, I have to, I have to make a choice between A and B. But then they forget, well, there's option C, which is to just do nothing, um, and just carry on as you are now. So I don't mean consider it, I mean, actually state it and say it out loud, like, name it as an option. So the usual thing, you know, people say, should I do this new thing? What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks?

• 15:54Speaker 04

  So I think that you should also ask, what are the benefits of not doing this new thing? Like, what are the benefits of doing nothing? I really like this, I heard this idea in a book called, um, The Courage to Be Disliked, which is also really brilliant, one of the best things I've ever read.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  And it tells you to consider why you're not changing. Like, why are you just continuing on the way you are? It is clearly offering you a benefit if you keep doing it. So if you ask yourself, why am I just carrying on as usual? You might come up with an answer like, well, my life is pretty good now, I'm happy. Or there's a chance that doing this new thing would make my life harder. And I don't want to risk that. Um, so you can name the mental mindset ones, right? Like my life feels under control right now and I like feeling in control. I like feeling like an expert. I like feeling smart.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  If I do this new thing, I'm going to feel dumb and out of control. Like trying to write a book while walking through the forest. But then I think that once you bring these to the surface, then instead of sitting in your subconscious, you've you've now brought them to the table, right? Like you can now weigh them in your decision. You've laid them out as an alternate option. And then you have to admit that it's okay to do nothing. Like, I think often we we feel that we're always supposed to be doing something. But, you know, Warren Buffett is quite public, but he has a quiet partner, Charlie Munger, who's a really interesting thinker.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  Charlie Munger gave this interesting advice to young investors. So people, of course, you know, say, everybody just, you know, gets him up on a stage and says, how can we be successful investors? So one of his top bits of advice he gave specifically to young people, I think it was a speech he gave at a college graduation, was, he said, imagine you've got one of those little loyalty punch cards. You know, one of those little loyalty cards with 10 holes in it that they can punch out. Yes. He said, imagine it's got 10 holes in it that can be punched. And that is the total number of investments you're allowed to make in your life. That's it. You can only make 10 investments in your life. And he said, if that was the case,

• 18:26Speaker 04

  you'd be better off just waiting and waiting for years for the right thing to come by. And then, when the right thing comes along, you you'd knock it out of the park, to use the baseball metaphor. You you just dive in all the way when you see the right opportunity. Um, which is kind of what my, you know, next book called Hell Yeah or No is about.

• 18:50Chris Williamson?

  I wanted to talk about your approach to decision making in general, and you have a page on your site which is slash slow, right? I think that's a

• 19:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:01Chris Williamson?

  Considered, again, the same way that the articles are lean, the decision making is considered. Is that because of Charlie's approach that if you make the right decision, you only need to get a couple of them very, very right?

• 19:14Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  There's a theme I think is going to come up a few times in this conversation, which is there's no right or wrong approach. All of these things, this, you know, this modern wisdom, these philosophies are just tools that we use for specific situations.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  So I have this article called Hell Yeah or No that a lot of people quote, and they tell me that they, they like that idea of hell, yeah, or no. And so they email me saying, oh, this is great. I'm going to use it. I'm using it for everything in my life now. I say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Hell, yeah or no is like one specific tool for one specific situation when you're overwhelmed with options and you're in danger of drowning. Well, then you raise the bar all the way and say no to almost everything and say yes to almost nothing. But it's for a situation where, you know, you're in danger of drowning.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  If, for example, you're straight out of college and you're welcome to the world and you're about to jump out there and try to make something of yourself, then it's probably a better strategy to say yes to everything. Just do it all, sleepless, say yes to everything, try everything, go everywhere, meet everyone, do, you know, 20 different jobs per year for a few weeks each and just do it all. And then when something hits, when the world starts rewarding you in a certain aspect, well, then you can double down on that. And then when you start to get successful in that one thing, and then everybody wants a piece of you, well, then now maybe it's a time to start saying no to almost everything

• 21:06Speaker 04

  and just stay focused on this one thing that is like giving you major payoffs. So. When you ask about my slow thinking, that was more of just like that felt like a cathartic admission.

• 21:24Chris Williamson?

  Also, probably a little bit of a disclaimer.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  Yes, thank you. Good word. It was a bit of a disclaimer.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  Because

• 21:37Speaker 04

  partially because I meet strangers that ask me deep questions.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  And they go, oh, Derek Sivers, oh, my God, I want to ask you something. They ask me a question and I say, huh? I don't know. Like, just look at me a little disappointed.

• 21:54Chris Williamson?

  I thought you were Derek Sivers.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  You're supposed to have the answer. I'm like, well, in a few days I will.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  So I just noticed that I'm just not the quickest draw, but that's okay. It was just, I just spent a little time thinking that through and realizing, I don't, I don't need to be quick. And in fact, I think it's really kind of cool not to try to be quick. Because when, when you try to be quick, you know, you think, oh, my God, I have to answer in two seconds. You know, like, what's that game Jeopardy? Where you have to press the buzzer quickly.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  You just give this kind of knee jerk reaction off the top of your head. You get the first thing that comes to mind. And I've just found that the first thing that comes to mind isn't as interesting as the the things that come to mind much later, whether it's five minutes or five days later. But it's those things that, once you work through the usual reaction and get to the other side of that, that's the shit I want to, you know, dive into. So, yeah, it was kind of embracing my slow approach.

• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I think certainly there's, there's something to do with closing the loop as well. We all want to appear.

• 23:07Chris Williamson?

  Competent, capable. You ask me a question. Oh yeah, of course. I've got, you know, I've already written an article on that. Don't you worry, man. Like, let me just pull out the bibliography and I'll start citing from all the different books because it makes me look really cool. I fall into that trap. I'm watching myself now. I'm trying to constantly strip away the very sticky elements of the persona of now becoming a competent, regular podcaster. So when people ask me things, oh, well, you know, I had this conversation with Aubrey Marcus. It's very interesting. On episode 117, when he said that, I'm like, no, no, no, Chris, for fuck's sake, mate, like, just, you know, just allow yourself to sit with the question. Don't try and broadcast this, this version of you, which is competent

• 23:51Chris Williamson?

  and capable and this, that and the other, because I don't think that's me. And for some people, that might be, you know, you're the, maybe the Gary Vaynerchuk of this world, perhaps. Someone who's one of these hyper quick thinkers who does the Q and A on stage and, you know, the, the big conference thing and, you know, the life advice. I'm not, I'm not convinced that that's where my value lies. And it would appear that you have identified in yourself that you add more value by waiting and considering and then coming back than giving something to close the loop and, and look cool and look capable and competent.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Right. But it isn't just about looks. In my case, I am pursuing the path of being a great writer thinker kind of guy. I'm not pursuing the path of being a great interviewer or, you know, debater. If I wanted to be a great interviewer or debater, then I would have to change my value system accordingly. I would say, okay, well, I used to be a slow thinker and that's my default, but I need to practice being a quick thinker now because I really want to be a great debater or interviewer. And that just, you need to be quick. That's just how that game goes.

• 25:10Chris Williamson?

  The Ben Shapiro approach, yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Right. So, yeah. The slow thinking is for me, for my current situation.

• 25:20Chris Williamson?

  I get it. And it facilitates that. So you've touched on one of the words I wanted to move on to there, which is values. What would you identify as your life values?

• 25:32Speaker 04

  Okay, that's a big one.

• 25:34Chris Williamson?

  That is a big one, but it's a question that I like, it's a question that I like to ask and it's one that I've been pondering a lot recently and I managed to, well, why don't I tell you mine? Should I tell you mine?

• 25:42Speaker 04

  Okay, please, thank you.

• 25:43Chris Williamson?

  Cool, so I did an exercise at the start of the year and I refined mine down to five. You're supposed to have no more than five. I mean, who's, who's the, the master of values told us that you're not supposed, the values agency told me I wasn't allowed to have more than five values or else I'd have to pay tax on the remaining, on the ones over the top. So mine actually spelled out words, so I spelled out an acronym, cases. So number one, curiosity, to be curious, to learn new things about myself and the world around me. A, adventure, to experience new things and meet and see new people. A word that I made up, which was selfless development, which is to learn about myself, improve and then teach others what I've learned. E was excellence, to be precise with my thoughts, words and actions. I want to fulfill my potential.

• 26:28Chris Williamson?

  I want to make the most of minutes. And then the final one was self-care. If I don't look after myself, I can't do the things that I want to do for myself and others. And I realized that at the moment, if I ensure that broadly, most of the stuff that I do on a daily basis meets some of those, most of those, at least one of those, I'm, I'm probably in the right ballpark.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  Wow, very cool.

• 26:53Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  I like that. Um, hmm, okay, well, um, I think my big ones are, they're not single words like that, but they're more like a concept. So to me, one of the biggest ones is to ignore what you say, but notice what you do.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  So I think about this one a lot, that, um, that the words, your, your actions reveal your values. So it kind of doesn't matter what you say.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Your actions show what you really value. You can say that you you think it's important to be kind to everybody, but then if you're going around being an asshole, well, then that's clearly not one of your values, no matter what you say.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  So I think that we do too much thinking about what we want in theory and too little noticing what we want in practice. So that's kind of the same thing, right? Like, we we can say, we can think that we want something, but you really have to go out into the world and try things. So if you have a theory about what you want, you have to go try it as soon as possible to find out if you really want that, and then be very open to the fact that your theory might have been wrong. And and don't be upset about that. You just say, oh, OK. Especially once you acknowledge the difference, you can say, OK, well, sitting at home in my bedroom with my notebook, I thought I wanted this thing. But now that I'm actually doing it, I found out I don't. And that's OK.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  So another value, or, yeah, I think we often oversimplify.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  Like, you think, I'm sick of the city. I want to live in the country. So you move to the country. But then after a few months, you miss the city. So the truth, and I have a lot of friends in New York City that did this. New York City is one of those places where it has this really nice upstate New York area. It's like just an hour north of New York City. And so a lot of people feel like burnt out in the city. So they say, you know what? I need to move upstate. And then they do. But then after a few months, almost every time, they miss the city. So I think the truth was more nuanced, which is that sometimes you prefer the city and sometimes you prefer the country. But that nuanced truth is less dramatic. It's less simple. So it's harder to, you know, tweet your stance on that.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  Like, we kind of, I think we we want to have a very simple version of our self-identity so that we can fit it into our little social profile and say who we are quickly in a sentence. But then I think we often oversimplify.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  Or, sorry, the thing that we said a couple of minutes ago, where Often, things are situational. Like, you want one thing when you're in a certain situation, but not when you're not. Right? Like I said, the hell yeah or no is an idea for a certain situation. But then the problem is, we feel some need to decide, like, well, which is it? Do I value this thing or not? So, I think often about this kind of rule of thumb of don't oversimplify, that you need to acknowledge nuance and acknowledge conditional situations.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, friends of mine that... When my friends and I... Like, my friends are kind of spread out around the world, so most of our conversations are by phone. And when friends have these kind of life situations, I hear they're often trying to decide, "Am I going to do this thing or that thing, or do I prefer this or that?" And I'm always the one that I feel it's like my job to remind them to acknowledge nuance, that the answer might be both. I like this idea that in-between black and white is not only gray, but actually every color in the world. So, I think you can choose to be colorful in your values. And like colors in nature, you can also acknowledge that you're ever-changing.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  You know, like, I've gone through some very distinct phases in my life, where I've made a life decision to be in the middle of everything. You know, I'm gonna move to Singapore, I'm gonna be in the middle of Asia, I'm gonna meet everybody and do everything, and I did that for a few years. And then I had a kid, and I was like, hmm, I've got a baby now. I want to move to the middle of nowhere in New Zealand, and just raise my kid in nature, and, you know, give the finger to the world. So, I was just like, goodbye, world, I'm gonna raise a kid for eight years. And so, I just like, I just disappeared off to New Zealand for seven years, and had that phase. And now, just this past year, I moved here to...

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Well, I was gonna say I moved to Europe, you know, I moved to England, a little island off the coast of Europe. But um, I'm kind of, you know, I'm next to Europe, I'm kind of in Europe. But yeah, this was this decision to, it was a new phase for me to, to explore more. And, you know, so yeah, you can acknowledge that you're, that what you wanted five years ago is not what you want now. And just because you said it in the past, doesn't mean that you need to still honor it. I think a lot of people do that thing where, you know, there's this question, um, I've heard asked around, like, what would your teenage self think of you now? And the funny thing is that I think that that question implies some kind of authenticity,

• 32:27Speaker 04

  like, as if the, your teenage self was your real authentic self, and you now-

• 32:33Chris Williamson?

  Some unencumbered, pure version of your spirit that actually wasn't befettled by all of the crap that you've done over the last 20 years or whatever. Yeah, I get it.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Right. But, you know, I think that, no, no, no, no, no. Like, I, in fact, I think it would be pretty sad if I was still living some kind of life to please my teenage self, you know, that would just be like, that would kind of acknowledge that I haven't changed. But man, I've changed a lot. Um, I've changed so much. Yeah, that me now is very different from the me from 10 years ago, and very, very, very different from the me from 30 years ago. I love that.

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  There's some bits, some parts of me as well, at 17, there was some bits of me that I was just a dick. You know, it was good in some bits, but I was a total dick in others. This really loops back to the crossroad opportunities in life, right? Well, we're talking about, we have this momentum which we've built up, we're moving in a direction like a river cutting through rock. And there's this continuity bias. I, I am a musician, writer, podcaster, club promoter, DJ, whatever, I am that thing. And there's this, there's this requirement, this feeling like, like, I, what, what is the new thing? I didn't do the do about the new thing. Like, if I try, if I change, then I'm not, I'm not that thing

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  anymore. That is me, that was me. That's where I get my quantifiable metrics of status and success from the people around me. This is what society has put me on a pedestal for. I've had some form of success with this. If I do this new thing, what if it all goes to pot? You know, it doesn't surprise me that all of us sometimes find it challenging to let go of the tether to that balloon.

• 34:12Speaker 04

  Well, let's think about that question you've asked about what are you optimizing your life for, about the difference between existing with an understanding of your values, your goals, your plan versus just allowing life to, you know, blow your, blow your leaf around. Like, was that, you know, was that Forrest Gump where that leaf was like, that was like the intro to Forrest Gump, right? The little leaf blowing in the wind. But I thought about this with, there can be reasons at stages in your life to make yourself stick with one thing, even if you kind of want to chase every distraction. And then

• 34:56Speaker 04

  in the other times, there can be times where it's just, it's the right time for you to go chase distractions. So I think about this wonderful rule of thumb of asking yourself what you want now versus what you want most. And I love that, the simplicity of that sentence, that what you want now.

• 35:17Chris Williamson?

  That's a difficult question to answer, sorry.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Well, it's, I think of shallow happy versus deep happy. Right? Like shallow happy is just having the ice cream. Deep happy is being proud of yourself for not having the ice cream. Right? But most importantly, it's, it comes back to whatever works for you. Right? Like, there is no philosophy or approach to life that is inherently right or wrong. You just have to try it and see if it works for you or not. Like, I don't mind holding some beliefs that are completely false if holding that belief works for me right now, if it gets the desired action for me. So.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  You have to ask yourself, well, what does works for you mean, right? Like, what makes you take action? What makes you take the right actions? But maybe for you, for now, at this stage in your life, maybe the right action for you is to stay focused. Or maybe the right action for you at this stage in your life is to open your mind to new inputs and to try new things and to indulge every curiosity. Like, only you know what stage in your life you're in. Like, do you need to keep focusing right now for your current desires in life? Or is it time for you to stop doing the thing you've been doing? No podcast is going to tell you the right answer. But I think that what these conversations, what these podcasts, or even articles and books,

• 36:48Speaker 04

  and whatever inputs we get in the world, are useful for hearing other people's thoughts. It's useful to help you consider another way of being. But ultimately, you need to try it on and see if it works for you, in fact, not just in theory.

• 37:07Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting, as I produce more content on this podcast, I feel myself playing between the prescriptive model of life. You know, like I say, we have this life hacks series. And by no means is that something to live your life by. It's like how to make the best toasted sandwich in a Breville sandwich maker and stuff like that. You know, it's not game changing stuff, although they're pretty good sandwiches. You know, I see that side. I see the prescriptive side. You know, the more, the best sleeping posture, how you can scale your business using Google AdWords and blah, blah. You know, I see that side. But then this nuance is for me where all of the interest is. That's where I really enjoy sinking my teeth into. And I think you arrive at a solution

• 37:52Chris Williamson?

  which is perfectly curated for you because we are all world experts in us, right? You were a world expert in Derek Zippers, and I'm a world expert in Chris Williamson. So really, there isn't anyone who's as qualified to make a decision about what you should do than you.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  I get it.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  It's, yeah, taking in the inputs of others, but yeah, hear it all, take it all in. But yeah, ultimately, only you know what's best.

• 38:23Chris Williamson?

  Yes. So this leads us on to another point I wanted to bring up nicely, which is our mortality and playing the game of life. So we have very fleeting time and our existence doesn't last. It doesn't mean much after 50 years' time. Very few people will remember that we were there or that care that we're gone. How does this impact the way that we should view our lives and our occurrences within them?

• 38:55Speaker 04

  I have a very tiny answer, but then I'm curious to ask why you're asking.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  Cause I just never understood people's need for meaning. All right. Like I just tend to go from desire to desire, from interest to interest, from project to project. Like I'm, I'm always, always, always, always working towards something. So that is my meaning in life at any given moment. Like even if I zoom out, if you were to say, no, Derek, but what's the big picture? Then there's a project or a path there too. I can say, oh, okay. Well, in the bigger picture, I want to, you know, find interesting thoughts that others haven't considered and share those with the world. And you could say, okay, well, what's the bigger picture to that? I'd say, okay, well, I, it honestly just tickles my brain and is

• 39:46Speaker 04

  viscerally pleasurable to find a new way of looking at things. And it's creative and inventive and fun. Then you could say, yes, but what's the real point of that? It's okay. You know, it just, it keeps going. You could say, well, then I'm, I'm growing. I feel that it's like I'm constantly growing and changing and this and that. And it's, it's learning more about the world. I'm understanding the world better, which makes me happy on a day to day basis. The world becomes my playground. Like at any point, you could zoom in and say, why are you doing this thing this minute, this hour? Or zoom out and say, why are you doing this thing this decade? And it always has a purpose. So I don't really understand.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  This mind or this kind of this question of saying, yes, but what's the meaning of life? And it won't even matter in a hundred years. I think, well, I don't, I don't care. Like, I, you know, the, that thing of the, um, what are those Tibetan monks that make those elaborate sand drawings and then just, you know?

• 40:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, just get rid.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Which is fine. Like, I've done so many, like, there have been projects that I've worked on for years. And then just a month or two before launching, I went, eh, chucked it. But it's fine because I was just doing it. I was enjoying it the whole way. Like, I was, it wasn't a goal. It's like, didn't launch. So what? You know, so that's like, you know, it won't mean anything in 50 years. Well, so what if you enjoyed doing it? So I don't know. So let me turn it back on you. Why, what is your thought behind answering or asking that question?

• 41:17Chris Williamson?

  So I think it's twofold. The first one is, I think, many people don't get to do what they want to do in life. And by asking, what is the meaning of life? How can I find meaning and purpose in my daily, yearly, decadely existence? They're hoping that someone will prescribe them the steps to get away from doing the things they don't want to do and move toward doing the things they do. And the second thing, which I've been thinking about a lot recently to do with this question is, I think a big part of it is a repackaging of a fear of death.

• 41:59Chris Williamson?

  I think humans don't like the idea of dying unless you've absolutely taken the red pill on Stoic philosophy or free will, whatever it might be. There is an innate fear in dying and previously we might have had that serviced by religion. Previously, we might have had that serviced by a belief in an afterlife or a higher power or whatever it might be. And now as we have an increasingly secular society, I think people are trying to find a meaning in their existence right now, which is so great that it justifies the fact that one day it's all going to end. How's that as an answer?

• 42:40Speaker 04

  Thank you. That helps.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  I think that might be it. I genuinely do. I did a podcast a couple of years ago with a guy who was talking about how he thought happiness, people's search for happiness, this proliferation of how to be happy, ten, five steps for your fulfilled life. He was adamant that it was just people fearing death and then trying to run away from it. And I, upon reflection, I can see more and more of that now.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, it's funny, I consider my written output, well, let's just say any of this output. I mean, you know, this conversation is going to be recorded and kept around.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  I definitely think of all of this stuff in terms of like after death, you know, like I think this is my legacy. I'm leaving all this stuff that I've written.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  Darren Brown, in the book called Happy, did you read that?

• 43:42Chris Williamson?

  I did. I actually got to see him speak about it a couple of weeks ago in London as well. It's great.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. I wish I would have known about that. I'm a massive fan of his. Just huge. Whenever people do that fictional kind of, you know, if you could have any person ever in history, living or dead, at a dinner party, who would it be? To me, it's just Darren Brown. That's it.

• 44:03Chris Williamson?

  He's a beast.

• 44:06Speaker 04

  No need for Jesus or Buddha or whatever. No.

• 44:09Chris Williamson?

  Just give me Darren.

• 44:10Speaker 04

  Gandhi, just Darren Brown. So near the end of his book called Happy, he had such a wonderful tiny point in passing where he said that your thought patterns

• 44:28Speaker 04

  are your personality. Like this, the way you think is your personality. And

• 44:35Speaker 04

  you sharing your thoughts and your personality with your loved ones, or even sharing them publicly like this carries on after you die. So therefore, like that is the, that life after death is your personality carries on after you're dead. That's, you know, it's always funny to me when, say like,

• 44:57Speaker 04

  George Harrison from the Beatles dies or somebody like that or Ray Charles and people go, oh, oh God, that's so sad. You know, David Bowie, something like that. I think really, oh, were you waiting for David Bowie's next album? Have you bought all of his albums in the last 20 years? They go, no. It's like, well, then he's not dead to you. Like, you're enjoying what he did in 1972. So you can carry on enjoying that. Like, David Bowie is not dead for you. David Bowie is very much alive. Um, yeah, same thing with a lot of these like famous musicians that were legends is you weren't buying their current output anyway. You weren't a dear friend of theirs. They weren't stopping over at your house next week for dinner. So what they put out there in the world is completely alive for you.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  Like, that is the only version of them that you get. And so, yeah, I think of this creative output as quite eternal, at least lasting for another couple of generations.

• 45:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, definitely. It definitely is. The people that we leave behind, the effect that we have on them, the content we put out, you know, to your hell yeah or no concept, you know, like, how many people has that touched? How many people, as much as you don't want them to use it as a heuristic for life, that they are. So we need to accept that. And

• 46:14Speaker 04

  You know, at the very beginning of the call, you asked, or you mentioned my hyper simple website. Part of that is because I'm expecting this website to go on 100 years. So who knows what holographic devices beamed into people's retinas or implanted in their brains, like websites will be used on in the year 2300. But I expect that my site will be around then. So I think people using WordPress and current plugins filled with Google Analytics and JavaScript bullshit is very, very short sighted. Like, my site's completely ready that if I were to die tomorrow, this site is going to keep working for a

• 46:58Speaker 04

  couple hundred years because it is just plain HTML and text with absolutely no Contemporary tooling that will expire. And that's very much on purpose, like everything. I make my site by hand. I don't use any frameworks. I don't use any software. I just type every HTML line by line by hand. So when you asked like, it was funny because you even put the question like, you know, you said something like removing everything or stripping it down. But actually, it's the opposite. Since I'm, I open up a blank text document to create a webpage. It's a matter of like, why would I take hours of time to type, you know, loads of unnecessary div tags and JavaScript includes. Unless it was absolutely necessary. That's too much typing. It's unnecessary.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  So, no, I just don't put in anything that isn't needed. But a lot of that's because I'm, I'm making a site that's intended to be around for at least a hundred years.

• 47:50Chris Williamson?

  That's hardcore. I like, I really, really like that. I was going to ask actually what code your site was written in. I thought I'd seen something to do with Raspberry or I have no idea.

• 48:00Speaker 04

  No, it's, you're thinking of Ruby. I do use the Ruby programming language for a little bit of automation, but it just helps me output static plain HTML pages with nothing in it.

• 48:12Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you originally do your book summary in, was it plain text? Like a notepad file or something like the most hardcore text version that you're going to get? Like it doesn't matter what happens in future. It's always going to be future proofed.

• 48:25Speaker 04

  Oh dude, I do. Basically, I only use two programs on the computer. I use Vim, which is a plain, like a raw programmer's plain text editor, which is like notepad. Like it just does nothing. It doesn't do bold print or anything like that. It does no fonts. It's just, it's just plain text, which is, yeah, it's eternal. Like, you know, civilizations on Saturn's moons will be able to read plain text files. I don't think they'll be able to run WordPress 7.2 necessarily, but plain text files, yes.

• 49:02Speaker 04

  And uh, and then I use Firefox and that's it. That's like, I basically just do everything all day long in Vim, just a plain text editor. I don't, I refuse to use any, I don't do any, yeah, I don't do any, I don't use the cloud for anything. I do nothing online. I don't use Google Docs. I, in fact, I actually prefer working offline. I, I kind of do this, a funny little nerdy work habit of mine is about two hours before I go to sleep, I completely power down my broadband modem. I just go over to the wall and I click off that, you know, our, our British power switch on the wall. I just go, and it like shuts off the internet. So I am now not connected to the world. I hold down both buttons on the phone, so it powers off completely. And so now I'm kind of like in a dark house with no connection to the world.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  And that's how I spend the first, I mean, the last two hours of every day. I may continue writing, but it's completely offline. And then same thing when I wake up in the morning, I spend like the first four or five hours of the day, completely offline. I don't turn on the internet usually until noon or so, when I've gotten a few good hours of writing and working and programming.

• 50:10Chris Williamson?

  Is that just to give you time to focus? Or is there something more symbolic about that? Do you like being off-grid in that sort of a way?

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Both. I find there's a wonderful relief, peace and relief when I know that there's no way to contact me. You know, like my phone is off, the internet is off. I mean, you know, I like the fact that it's like, if there was a real emergency, like somebody would come bang on my door, you know? But I like being unreachable. It's, it's a different thing when you're sitting there focusing on work, knowing that a little part of your brain knows that there are alerts happening. Or at any point, you could just grab your phone and hit Reddit or whatever your fix is.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  And I like that thing of just not being able to. I'm the kind of guy that I don't keep cookies in the house, you know, like I can't like have a box of cookies and then just not eat them. So it's better for me to just not have the cookies in the house. It's better for me to just completely shut off the internet and my brain kind of just goes, ah, like that's not an option. I really like that. So yeah, I work usually offline, plain text files, et cetera. Yeah.

• 51:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. One of the best lifestyle changes I've made over the last few years has been charging my phone outside of my bedroom. So it means.

• 51:31Speaker 04

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 51:31Chris Williamson?

  It means.

• 51:32Speaker 04

  No electronics allowed in the bedroom.

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  It's so unsexy.

• 51:36Chris Williamson?

  It isn't. That's, yeah, it is unsexy. And I found as soon as I did it, I'd start going to sleep. And previously, I remember the old me who, when he couldn't sleep for 15 minutes, would just roll over and go on YouTube, which obviously then extends the time.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:51Chris Williamson?

  You're going to sleep by hours because you're just scrolling down this endless cat video portal. And by putting it outside of the room, it's the same as that, right? It's just, it's not there. It's no longer an option. It's like it doesn't exist.

• 52:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, to me, I, yeah, I literally ban electronics from the bedroom. There's nothing. There is a little, a clock by the bed, just a clock. It's one of those, you know, little five pound clocks. It just does nothing but show you the time and that's it. No phones allowed in the bedroom.

• 52:23Chris Williamson?

  Is it firelight? Is it just candles? Like, like, like an old man with a lamp wandering around?

• 52:28Speaker 04

  I wish. That would be great.

• 52:30Chris Williamson?

  That would.

• 52:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I do have a candle in the bedroom, but you know, it's, actually, you know, it's kind of cool is that my kid is now eight and he's been kind of raised this way. So he's not an iPad addict like a lot of kids his age are. He, he actually scoffs at video games. He had a friend two years ago that.

• 52:55Speaker 04

  It's next door neighbor. He was like, he's one of his best friends ever. And this kid's dad was always in the basement, playing Fortnite or something for just hours and was like a completely absent dad, was just completely not there for the kid, was just like grumpy because all he wanted to be doing was playing video games. And he would just never play with his kids. And so it was so interesting that my son saw that. And not just noted it, but mentioned it to me like a few different times. Like how sad it was. And so one time we were playing just a little word game of opposites, you know, what's the opposite of of music? What's the opposite of a cloud? What's the, it's just a little fun.

• 53:36Chris Williamson?

  Music.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  Oh, you want to know my favorite answer?

• 53:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, sure.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  Oh, wait, first take a guess. What do you think is the opposite of music?

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  Silence?

• 53:44Speaker 04

  No, because silence is part of music. It's an important part. What else could it be?

• 53:49Chris Williamson?

  Singing?

• 53:50Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. Um, my, my favorite answer, the opposite of music is business.

• 54:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  See, these are the kind of funner answers, right? That, that, see, this is, that was a fun example of like, you have your first and second, you know, that, that's like the slow thinking.

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  It's like this idea of like, it was a word game we kept playing. So the opposite of music is business. That's an idea that didn't come until like a week after trying to answer the question. Um, that was my favorite answer. It's like, oh, that's good. Anyway, I asked my son, what is the opposite of parenting? Or what is the, I forget, of being a dad. That's, he, yeah, he's, I think he brought it. He said, what's the opposite of being a dad?

• 54:38Chris Williamson?

  I didn't say being a mom, did you?

• 54:40Speaker 04

  No, I was like, and his answer was the winner. It was playing video games.

• 54:47Chris Williamson?

  Nice.

• 54:48Speaker 04

  Because, yeah, he just has such a negative association with watching his friend's dad just play video games instead of being there for his kid. Like, anyway, so, point is, yeah, we have a household that is very offline. No, no, let me take that back. Not very offline. It's part-time offline, and I really like that. It's not the primary thing. Like, there's no TV in the house. It's not like the house isn't arranged around a television, like most are. Yeah, anyway.

• 55:12Chris Williamson?

  That's a self-aware kid that you've got there, Derek. It sounds really, really cool.

• 55:17Chris Williamson?

  I like it. I wanted to touch on excellence for a minute. So I mentioned it as one of my core values, and it's something that we've been talking about a little bit recently.

• 55:28Chris Williamson?

  And I wondered how you, how you balance between wanting the best work out of yourself, wanting to produce something which you're proud of and connects with other people and is a, a high representation of your cumulative skills and talents and stuff, with also giving yourself sufficient of a break. And I wondered what, what your thoughts were on excellence, something that I see as a core value to my life, but I wondered what your thoughts were on it.

• 56:00Speaker 04

  Hmm. Well, let's look at the micro example of procrastination, right? Like, if you look at why people procrastinate, it's usually if you're facing something difficult, it's easier to retreat into the safe thing, like surfing the webber, playing video games, instead of uncomfortably facing what needs to be done. So the way to stop procrastination is to catch yourself doing it, to deliberately interrupt it, and then go back to doing what you need, doing what you know you need to do, no matter how unpleasant it is. And then

• 56:42Speaker 04

  I think it always gets easier after you begin. So when I think of excellence, I think of like a life-size version of that. Like if there's something you've always wanted to do, you need to stop wasting time and do it. Kind of like I said earlier, like what you want now versus what you want most. If you write out your bucket list, you know, like the things you want to do before you die, I'll bet you could do almost all of them in a few months, you know, most of them in just a few weeks. It's usually like people's bucket lists are like places they want to go and some things they want to do. And I think, well, you know, if you just took a couple of months off work, you could do two thirds of that list right now.

• 57:26Speaker 04

  Be done by next month. It's just a matter of doing them instead of doing other things. Like watching shows, surfing the web, playing video games, or just sitting around on couches, hanging out, tasting the local beers. Like it's, there are these things that we do.

• 57:45Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, I'm kind of answering your excellence question in a way of like, well, what's the opposite of excellence?

• 57:51Chris Williamson?

  We're all enjoying it. Keep, let's keep going, Derek.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Procrastination. Like the opposite of excellence is giving into,

• 58:01Speaker 04

  I don't want to call it procrastination, but that same thing that triggers procrastination, which is usually like you're facing the uncomfortable thing that you know you need to do. And so you do the easier relief thing instead. People who choose the easy path in life don't ever get excellence at anything. Like excellence is usually choosing the more difficult path, which gives the greater rewards. It's doing what you know you need to do, even if you don't feel like it.

• 58:38Speaker 04

  I mean, my definition of excellence is tainted by the fact that, you know, I was in music for 24, but if years of my life, you know, so I think in terms of like being an excellent performer, being an excellent writer, being an excellent producer, whatever. So you might have a different definition of being an excellent gentleman or something like that.

• 59:00Chris Williamson?

  Definitely, I'm definitely not yet.

• 59:03Speaker 04

  I know, I mean, I mean that somebody listening to this could have a a different definition where maybe excellence to them is just excellence in their um composure every day. Maybe it isn't something you need to practice for 20 years. Maybe it can actually just be in in the moment, like you could just decide right now today to like from this moment on to be excellent and you can achieve that, you know, by just um not giving into your temper or um stopping drinking or whatever it may be. So um.

• 59:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think it's um, precision is the word that I like to associate with excellence.

• 59:38Speaker 04

  Huh, why precision?

• 59:40Chris Williamson?

  Because precision for me is doing the thing that you said that you were going to do or doing the thing that you mean to do, not doing another thing. It's one of the reasons why I like yourself as a speaker, why I like Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris as a speaker, because the speech is very precise. The number of words that are used are the number of words that are needed. Um, a link back to what you said earlier on about the the way that people make choices and the kind of life they have, there's that a meme that everyone will be familiar with with, which is easy choices, hard life, hard choices, easy life. Um, and I think about that. Another thing, I read a really interesting article from Taylor Pearson

• 1:00:23Chris Williamson?

  on procrastination. And one of the things that he came up with was he says procrastination exists because people have a fear of failure, they're concerned that they may be not good enough or that they don't have the skills that are required. I certainly think there's an element that he didn't touch on in this bit, which is to do with it's it's just difficult, there's some inertia to get over, I have to do a hard thing. And there's something easier floating around, the cookie jar, the the social media fix. Um, and he has this beautiful quote where he says, um, interestingly, sometimes we procrastinate to ensure that we inoculate ourselves from public failure. But the interesting thing is by procrastinating, we do inoculate ourselves from public failure by assuring ourselves of private failure.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:01:09Chris Williamson?

  And I loved that. I love the the reframing of that. It's like, look, like if you do not do this thing, it doesn't matter whether you think you would or would not fail because you're guaranteeing the fact that you will by not starting it.

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:01:24Chris Williamson?

  I thought that was a really powerful model. It was an interesting way to to loop it back around. But look, Derek, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm taking up your time and it's it's an evening. I've got I've got two questions that I want to ask before we finish, if that's okay. First one, what have you changed your mind about recently?

• 1:01:46Speaker 04

  The a lot of the things that I said were core values are actually pretty new to me. Maybe that's why they came to mind first when you asked, because I think they're the most interesting because they're the newest to my brain, the stuff that's been in my, you know, value system for 30 years. I just take for granted and I probably don't even know it's there anymore.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  But

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  acknowledging nuance, looking for not deliberately making sure you're not oversimplifying.

• 1:02:21Speaker 04

  Even though I write succinctly because I think it's considerate, I don't think truth is succinct.

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  I think truth is very nuanced.

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  Memorable soundbites are succinct.

• 1:02:43Speaker 04

  Quips and aphorisms are succinct. Helping an idea carry further.

• 1:02:53Speaker 04

  In a succinctness is good to carry ideas. It makes a good, you know, what do you call that in nature when those seeds that have little barbs on them?

• 1:03:02Chris Williamson?

  Like dandelions?

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  Thank you. Yeah, dandelions or birds. So succinctness is a good tool to help ideas spread and carry. But succinctness is

• 1:03:17Speaker 04

  Almost the opposite of truth, because yeah, you can make catchy slogans that make people go, "Ooh, wow, that's good." But it's just, it's one little ingredient in the truth. The truth of things, I think, is often very nuanced. It's like, well, in these situations, if you're in that stage in your life and for the kind of person you are and the kind of things you want, well, then this is true. But if in another day, you know, in the morning, or you know, last year, or if you were a little bit of a different person, for your sister, that is not true, but for your brother, it is, and you know, at this age you're at, and for what you want in life. But if, in fact, if you were to quit your job tomorrow, then suddenly that would no longer be true. And it's like, all of these, but that doesn't tweet well. So.

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  That's, that's pretty new for me, like this constant acknowledgement of the nuance of things to get at the truth. I can actually talk about this thing, because I'm not going to name names. I have a dear friend who's been with the same guy for years, but complaining about him for years, often calling me to kind of like, "What should I do? Should I leave him? Should I stay? What should I do?" And finally, I thought with this kind of new focus on nuance, we realized like, I

• 1:04:43Speaker 04

  think she's actually happy being one foot out the door. Like, that's, we don't need to oversimplify it into an either-or, "Should I stay or should I go now?" It's, the, the truth is, she's happiest with this one foot out the door feeling, and she doesn't need to oversimplify that into in or out.

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  This one, yeah, that's right. That example just actually came up yesterday. So that's, that's on my mind.

• 1:05:16Chris Williamson?

  I really like it. I meant to bring this up earlier on while I was podcasting with George McGill last year, the highest played ever Modern Wisdom episode that we've done about mental models. He talked about the barbell strategy, which is where you don't just have black or white thinking, you have black and white thinking and you push yourself to the ends. You're able to do incredible deep work, but then also be very social when you need to turn that on. You are able to use the succinct side of things, but you're also able to understand the nuance as well at the complete opposite end of the scale. There's another point on that that I'll just have to bring up, which is I love aphorisms. And I think that guys like Naval, who are able to distill down incredible wisdom into what 160

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  characters or whatever it is, it's just, it's a skill that I absolutely do not have and wildly envy. Cause I think it's really cool. But you, the reason that you created your directives was because you realized that most of what a book is, is getting people to believe and trust the author and provide sufficient context that they believe the instruction that they're then given. But if people were to sufficiently trust whoever it is that was giving it to them, the directive can be the leanest takeaway from that particular book. And the equivalent is when you see on Instagram, you scroll through Instagram and there's someone's put up a quote, you know, Seneca's

• 1:06:41Chris Williamson?

  life's work distilled down into a single sentence, but the context isn't there. You're just scrolling past booty picture, booty picture, funny dog video, aphorism of Seneca's life, booty picture, booty picture. You know what I mean? Like there's no context, there's no buy-in. You're not in the right frame of mind. You haven't had the, I trust Seneca, I know who he is, da, da, da. Like I think you're right. I think you are correct there. There's, there's the nuance and the understanding of that. I think it all ties together.

• 1:07:11Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 1:07:12Chris Williamson?

  Final question, final question. You have brought up today a couple of different projects that you're working on, some books that will be released in the future. Have you got, is it within a year? Is it within six months? Is it within a decade? Can we give the people that are listening that are fans of yours, any idea on when they can expect this new piece of work from you?

• 1:07:33Speaker 04

  Oh, there's three. Um, I finished my next book two years ago. I finished my second book one year ago, and I'm finishing my third book now. But the thing is, I nerded out on self-publishing. Um, my first big book called Anything You Want was published by, well, first by Seth Godin, but then he sold his little publishing imprint to Penguin. So then Penguin re-released it. So it's, you know, it's on a major publishing company, but I didn't actually like that experience.

• 1:08:08Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:08:09Speaker 04

  I didn't like that I didn't fully own the rights to my own book. And so I get, you know, I got contacted, like, here's just one core example. Sorry, you asked me a kind of like a

• 1:08:19Chris Williamson?

  Hey, no, no, I want, I want this answer. We want the new ones. We are here for the new ones.

• 1:08:24Speaker 04

  There were two or three different times when I got contacted by people that were putting on a conference that wanted to buy like 750 copies for all of their attendees. And I said, great, that's amazing. I would love to do that. And they say, okay, can, how do we do that? Can we get like a quantity discount for 750 copies? And I have to go ask Penguin, hey Penguin, hello, my rep.

• 1:08:50Chris Williamson?

  A thousand sales here for you. Yeah.

• 1:08:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. How can we do that? And they went, oh, well, you just have to tell them to buy it at Amazon. Like, there's no way to buy seven, you can't order it from us. We're not a retailer and, you know. And they said, oh, man, like, that's that sucks to like, I want this person to have 700. I mean, for a dollar each would be fine, you know, like, just how cool that they're gonna give. And so to have to tell this guy, like, yeah, just go to Amazon and type 750 in the quantity. I was like, man, this sucks. Like, I, I want to be able to do the right thing, but I don't even own the rights to, you know, Penguin has the rights. I mean, I wrote that book for Seth Godin, and then, you know, that's what happens.

• 1:09:30Speaker 04

  So even though my rep at Penguin loves me, and she's wonderful, and she's great, and I like her as a person, I just didn't like the experience. I have, I don't need the, the ego gratification of being on a major publisher. So I just really decided to self-publish to keep control, which kind of reminds me of way back when I started CD Baby in like the mid 90s, like, the internet was just kind of getting started. There was a cool kind of do-it-yourself pseudo-punky kind of ethic about, like, sticking it to the man. Like, you know, fuck the major record labels, man, I'm gonna do this myself. Like, I'm not signing away my rights to some label.

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  But here we are, 20 something years later, and everybody's like selling their soul to Amazon. Just every, like, you know, you said earlier, here's how to do the Google AdWords to increase your business. It's just like, everything's trying to please the man. You know, the man is now like Facebook, Google, Amazon, whatever, Instagram, and everybody's just trying to please the man. It reminds me of that kind of pre-internet thing where everybody was selling their soul to the major record labels in hopes of getting rich. And I appreciated that kind of giving it all the finger kind of spirit, knowing that you're probably gonna sell less by choosing to be independent, but fuck, yeah, it felt so much better.

• 1:10:52Speaker 04

  Point is, I nerded out on not just self-publishing, but like self-printing, self-layout. Like, I, you know how I told you I do everything in my plain text editor called Vim?

• 1:11:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Speaker 04

  Well, do you think I did the book design layout in Adobe InDesign? No, fuck Adobe. I did it in fucking plain text and I found a program of like software called Latex, which you can like do book design in like as a programmer in plain text and like fucking went hardcore on that. And I, and I'm just building my own store on my own site because fuck Amazon. I don't want to sell my book on Amazon. I will eventually. And it's just like, you know what? I, I understand that I'm choosing to sell less by doing this, but goddamn, it feels better. It's like so much more fun.

• 1:11:42Chris Williamson?

  Well, each book's worth a hundred of what the one would have been before, right? Because you, you crafted the thing out of ancient technology in a programming language that no one's seen since the 1800s. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:53Speaker 04

  It's, it's funny, you know, we talk about rationality. Well, you and I don't, but people talk about rationality. And um, yeah, there are things where you could say that this is a rationally unwise choice, but emotions matter and the way that something feels is a big reason why we do anything. In fact, you know, I think if you want to get meta, meta, meta, the reason that people like to be rational is because it feels better. Right? And um, yeah, there, so anyway, uh, sorry, I was answering your question about when are these books coming out?

• 1:12:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, we understand why that, we understand why they're not here yet.

• 1:12:34Speaker 04

  Yes, because I nerded out on the self-publishing and the self-printing and oh, and lastly, I decided to print hardcover books for the emotional reason that I found that knowing that I was going to be printing hardcover books, even though like I'm a total tree hugger. I don't want to waste a single sheet of paper ever. I thought, well, damn, if these things, if I'm going to be cutting down trees, like really every sentence has to be worth cutting down a tree now. And it made me a better writer, knowing that I was going to print hardcover, um, books.

• 1:13:16Chris Williamson?

  You upped the stakes of the writing because the externalized costs were, were increased. That's interesting.

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so, um, anyway, it's all just about done and I'm putting the, uh, I was actually this morning, I was programming the store on my site with the, you know, the whole, put your thing into a cart. And then by doing it all myself, I get to do some fun nerdy things like. I can do custom dedications and things that, you know, people who sell their book on Amazon can't do. So everybody that orders their book from me can ask it to be custom dedicated to them and the server will create a custom dedicated book for you.

• 1:13:50Chris Williamson?

  That is cool.

• 1:13:52Speaker 04

  And I'm going to see if I can do that with the audiobook too. So everybody who buys the audiobook gets a custom little like, you know, hey, Chris, it's Derek, this book's for you.

• 1:14:00Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:14:01Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, again, fuck Amazon. They can't do that.

• 1:14:08Chris Williamson?

  You're right. You're right. Sivers.org/podcasts and then slash audiobooks slash books slash everything.

• 1:14:16Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:14:17Chris Williamson?

  And then it can be Sivers baby.

• 1:14:21Speaker 04

  God.

• 1:14:23Speaker 04

  Ew.

• 1:14:25Speaker 04

  Anyway, so anybody who, um, yeah, anybody who wants my stuff, uh, you can probably tell because you know, you and I have emailed a bunch. I, I actually enjoy taking a few minutes a day to answer all my emails. I really like hearing from strangers. I actually really like it when people introduce themselves. I like it when somebody's like, you know, I'm a guitar technician in Arizona, or I'm a whatever, a dentist in Estonia. I just really like hearing what people around the world are doing and, and all that kind of stuff. So I really like it when people introduce themselves and feel free to email me and ask me a question. And if you go to Sivers.org, my email address is out there in the public and you can email me and ask me anything and I always reply.

• 1:15:07Chris Williamson?

  Cool. That's certainly cooler than just saying, oh, head to my Twitter. It's like, email me and I might, I might get back to you if I've turned my internet on.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  Right. Well, even, you know, Twitter, that's like, that's a, that's still like a corporate middleman. Like, you know, actually, I'm really thankful that I got online in 1994 because I went through that first dot com boom and crash where a lot of companies that people were totally dependent on, like MySpace, like every musician was 100% dependent on their MySpace page to manage all of their fan list, all of their music and their releases and their announcements and their gigs were all done through their MySpace page. And then MySpace disappears. And I was like, so I think I just have this healthy distrust of any corporate middleman. I think they're always about to go belly up any day. So, um, no, I would never. Tell people to like, you know, Twitter was the way to reach me because I don't trust

• 1:16:01Speaker 04

  that they'll be around tomorrow.

• 1:16:02Chris Williamson?

  I think that if you've got plain text files as the future-proofed version of writing things down, I think you've got email lists as the most likely to survive a nuclear apocalypse.

• 1:16:15Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:16:16Chris Williamson?

  Contact.

• 1:16:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, because it's an open standard and it's like, it's uncommercial. I really like those uncommercial media forums, like, right? So, so paper books have no advertisements in them, no, Amazon's not tracking what you highlight in a paper book. Email, yeah, open technology. I love that kind of stuff. Anyway, nerd, nerd, nerd. We were saying goodbye, so maybe.

• 1:16:41Chris Williamson?

  Derek, man.

• 1:16:41Speaker 04

  I shouldn't keep taking tangents.

• 1:16:42Chris Williamson?

  It's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much. To the people that are listening, anything that we have spoken about will be linked in the show notes below, along with Derek's website, where you can go on and hassle him via email, and not his Twitter, because fuck Twitter. And there won't be a link to Adobe After Effects in there either, because fuck Adobe too. Derek, man, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

• 1:17:06Speaker 04

  Thanks, Chris. It was a fun conversation.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

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• 1:17:30Speaker 02

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  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.