#357: Susan Cain — How to Overcome Fear and Embrace Creativity

"So often, when you see someone who's really good at almost anything, it's because they actually started out exactly the opposite — and then they cared so much about fixing that problem." — Susan Cain Susan Cain (@susancain https://twitter.com/susancain) is the author of the bestsellers Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Secret-Strengths-Introverts/dp/0803740603/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=71a50a383f782a5be9dc60ae8db9ada1&language=en_US and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can't Stop Talking https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352145/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=d850dbd60813804aede26f6fe53f9bfa&language=en_US, the latter of which has been translated into more than 40 languages. Quiet is in its seventh year on The New York Times Best Sellers list, and it was named the number one best book of the year by Fast Company magazine, which also named Susan one of its Most Creative People in Business. She is the Chief Revolutionary of Quiet Revolution https://www.quietrev.com/newsletter-signup/, and her writing has appeared in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Her record-smashing TED talk https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts?language=en has been viewed more than 20 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his all-time favorite talks. Please enjoy! Click here for the show notes for this episode. https://tim.blog/2019/01/24/susan-cain/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn https://linkedin.com/Tim and its job recruitment platform, which offers a smarter system for the hiring process. 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• 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

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by LinkedIn. The right hire can make a huge impact on your business. The wrong hire can create your business. And I have seen example after example from thousands of my readers, at a minimum, where they've told me stories of how finding the right person at the right time, and in some cases, not even asking, "What should I do?", but asking, "Who should I find?", because that person can help me determine what exactly to do more intelligently. And I've had a chance to hire two such people in the last year, and that has just made my business take a quantum leap forward and my complexity in my personal and business life get cut dramatically.

• 1:09Tim Ferriss?

  And this type of simplification cannot be overvalued. We think a lot about hiring, and I think a lot about hiring, and it is a skill that I've had to learn. It is important to find the right person, but where do you find that person? You can post a job on a job board and hope that that right person finds your job, that they are on the internet, happening to scan something here and there, and then find you. But, think about it, how often do you hang out on job boards? The answer is probably not very often. So don't leave finding someone great to chance when you can post your job exactly where people go every day to make connections, grow in their careers, and discover job opportunities. That is LinkedIn. Most LinkedIn members haven't recently visited the top job boards,

• 1:53Tim Ferriss?

  but nine out of 10 members are open to new opportunities. And with 70% of the US workforce on LinkedIn, posting there is the best way to get your job opportunity in front of more of the right people. And you can be very, very highly targeted and specific. People who are qualified for the role you have and ready for something new. This is where you find them. It's the best way to find that person, that key person who will help you grow your business. And this is why a new hire is made every 10 seconds using LinkedIn. That's bonkers, every 10 seconds. So head to LinkedIn.com forward slash Tim and get $50 off your first job post. That's LinkedIn.com forward slash Tim, T I M, to get $50 off your first job post.

• 2:38Tim Ferriss?

  LinkedIn.com forward slash Tim. Take a look. Terms and conditions do apply.

• 2:47Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do, we'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies, hard to do that at the gym, take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country

• 3:32Tim Ferriss?

  on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on-demand, and you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip-hop, rock and roll, or say, low-impact versus high-intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers, and I tend to do on-demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over. But I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities, so you can find what you're in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time,

• 4:18Tim Ferriss?

  and that will help. To catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now, that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was. And it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So, check it out. Discover this cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer.

• 4:58Tim Ferriss?

  Go to onepeloton.com, that's O-N-E Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N dot com, and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So, get a great workout at home anytime you want. Check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started.

• 5:24Tim Ferriss?

  Why, hello there, you sexy little minxes. Minx, is it? Murder of crows? A gaggle of geese? I don't know. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and attempt to deconstruct people who are excellent, world-class at what they do. My guest this episode is Susan Cain. She's been very widely recommended, widely requested by all of you, and here she is. Susan is the author of the bestsellers Quiet Power, subtitle, The Secret Strengths of Introverts, and Quiet, subtitle, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, the latter of which has been translated into more than 40 languages. Quiet is also in its seventh year on the New York Times Bestseller List.

• 6:08Tim Ferriss?

  That is a long time. And it was named the number one best book of the year by Fast Company Magazine, which also named Cain one of its most creative people in business. She is the chief revolutionary of Quiet Revolution, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Her record-smashing TED Talk has been viewed more than 20 million times. And when Named by Bill Gates, one of his all time favorite talks. You can find Susan on Twitter, at Susan Cain, C A I N. At the website, quietrev.com and on Facebook, under Author Susan Cain. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Susan Cain.

• 6:51Tim Ferriss?

  Susan, welcome to the show.

• 6:53Susan Cain?

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  I have been looking forward to having you on the show for some time. And we have a lot of terrain to possibly cover. So we may end up having a part two and three, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. I thought that we could look at public speaking just for a second, because many people will associate you with this blockbuster mega hit of a TED Talk. And rumor has it that you, straight in the delivery room from the get go, were a natural born killer onstage. This is true? Did you, were you born a spectacular public speaker?

• 7:35Susan Cain?

  Oh, my gosh. Okay, well, everybody listening, you can't see Tim right now, but he has a very devilish smile on his face, because of course, the answer is the complete opposite. So I had a lifelong, well, dating back to middle school, I know exactly when it started. I had an almost lifelong fear of public speaking. And a lot of people say they're afraid of public speaking and, you know, they're telling the truth, but like, they didn't have a fear the way I had a fear of it. It was, it was so extreme.

• 8:07Tim Ferriss?

  What was the triggering event?

• 8:09Susan Cain?

  Oh, okay, the triggering event was I had recently switched to a new middle school. And I was in an English literature class. And I probably appeared to the teacher in that class to be not a shy person at all, because I love English, so I was always participating. So anyway, she called me up to the front of the room. We were doing Macbeth. And she called me up with a friend of mine and she said, okay, you're going to play Lady Macbeth and your friend Rob is going to play Macbeth and just improvise this scene. And for me, as a shy person in a new school, this was like total kryptonite. And I couldn't say anything. I just completely blanked out and just stood there dumbly at

• 8:53Susan Cain?

  the front of the class and finally just had to kind of sit back down, red-faced, not having said a word. And

• 9:00Tim Ferriss?

  That sounds terrible. It's making my palms sweat, just listening to it.

• 9:05Susan Cain?

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

• 9:43Susan Cain?

  week before. So then, then I started writing this book, Quiet, and this, after I had left law. And I really, really, really cared about it. You know, it was my dream come true to be a writer, and I cared so much about the ideas in the book. And I didn't want my fear to stand in my way. And I was giving this TED Talk, so I had to overcome it.

• 10:12Tim Ferriss?

  How did the, sorry to, sorry to interrupt, but now that I've had a cappuccino, as, as longtime listeners know, I tend to, to jump a lot. How did the opportunity for the TED Talk come about?

• 10:24Susan Cain?

  So I had a friend who worked at TED, told him about the book, and he kind of passed on the idea to the curators at the time. And I think that they understood that most of the TED audience is really introverted. And so they knew that it would relate with their audience. And I think that that was probably why they invited me in. And, and I mean, I'll come back to how I overcame my fear in a minute, but I will tell you, they turned out to be so accurate that after I gave the talk, you know, I came down off the stage, and I was absolutely mobbed for the whole rest of the week by every single other audience member who were all coming to tell me, you know, that's my story too. And I'm going around pretending to be this very confident, extroverted person. And that's

• 11:08Susan Cain?

  not really who I am. So

• 11:10Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing.

• 11:11Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Tim Ferriss?

  Present company included.

• 11:15Susan Cain?

  Is that right?

• 11:15Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I want to, I will, I will steer us back and you will also bring us back to what we were just talking about. But last night at a group dinner, which I helped organize, keep in mind, at a wonderful restaurant here in New York City called The Lily. It's a Lebanese place. I had to take four or five bathroom breaks, which were not to use the bathroom. It was, that is what I do at any dinner of more than one or two people. I have to exit, not just the conversations, but the environment to just recharge my batteries and gather my bearings for a few minutes.

• 11:54Susan Cain?

  And is it?

• 11:55Tim Ferriss?

  And then go back on.

• 11:55Susan Cain?

  It's like you're feeling a kind of overstimulation in the setting?

• 11:59Tim Ferriss?

  Overstimulation, overstimulation.

• 12:00Susan Cain?

  Yeah. I mean, that's so interesting because I've heard you talk before about moving to Austin and having these group dinners. And I thought, oh, that's so interesting that that's what Tim wants to do because like I would never choose to socialize that way. I always love to socialize one-on-one, like almost the way we're doing right now, you know, sitting here just talking.

• 12:18Tim Ferriss?

  There's a, there's a, there's a kind of boiling point for me in terms of size, like four to six I can handle. It depends, it depends for me also on the environment, I think, more so than the number of people. So when I do these group dinners, I will generally host them at home or have them at one of my friends' homes.

• 12:39Susan Cain?

  Right.

• 12:39Tim Ferriss?

  Not in a popular restaurant.

• 12:41Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Tim Ferriss?

  Like I did last night. So.

• 12:44Susan Cain?

  I'm just going to say what's interesting about that is how strategic you are about it. And I really noticed this with people. So we were just talking about TED. I was just talking to Chris Anderson, who runs TED, about this whole phenomenon. And he describes himself as an introvert too. And he said he loves group dinners if he can, if there's a specific topic that everybody is gathered there to discuss. And he knows it's going to be something really substantive, then he's in his comfort zone, you know? But if it's just kind of this amorphous socializing, he wants to leave.

• 13:16Tim Ferriss?

  So just on the, on the tactical, practical side, I also tend to very frequently cook the meal for the group. So that I have a task.

• 13:27Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 13:28Tim Ferriss?

  While people are arriving and talking, also deliver it because I'm.

• 13:35Tim Ferriss?

  Often inviting people who don't know one another. So I want them to have a chance to chat without having me as a mutual crutch, if that makes sense.

• 13:44Susan Cain?

  Yep.

• 13:44Tim Ferriss?

  But in any case, we could talk about that.

• 13:47Susan Cain?

  Yeah, no, and that's a really common strategy. I hear that from many people wanting to have the task.

• 13:53Tim Ferriss?

  I can play extrovert. I can, I'm good at playing extrovert, but up until, say, sixth grade, I wouldn't even go out to recess. I would sit on a step and read usually books about sharks and fish because I wanted to be a marine biologist, but I wouldn't even go out to recess.

• 14:09Susan Cain?

  Wow.

• 14:10Tim Ferriss?

  So it's, so a lot of what you talk about and have written about certainly strikes a chord.

• 14:16Susan Cain?

  Now I feel like I want to ask you so many questions about this. Like, I'm really curious if we talked about, if we could go back and talk to sixth grade you right this minute, like, would sixth grade you have any idea that you would have the life path that yours has taken that's so public?

• 14:33Tim Ferriss?

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

• 15:06Susan Cain?

  It's like a Captain America narrative.

• 15:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. And then the bullies who had been accustomed to bullying me tried their usual playbook and I just went on this vigilante spree like The Punisher and that changed the dynamic, social dynamic. So I was able to actually go outside and do things that I wanted to do at recess from that point on. So it didn't mean that I socialized a lot more, but I had more mobility.

• 15:35Tim Ferriss?

  So that is, that is what happened. But like you, and this is part of the reason why I wanted to start with this.

• 15:44Tim Ferriss?

  Question about overcoming a fear of public speaking is that it's when people see the finished product, it's easy to assume that it comes from an attribute as opposed to a skill.

• 15:57Susan Cain?

  Yes.

• 15:58Tim Ferriss?

  And in fact, a lot of what appears to be natural, appears only to be natural because it started off very, very unnatural. And someone has worked at chipping away at it over time.

• 16:12Susan Cain?

  I think that's true. I think almost so often when you see someone who's really good at almost anything, it's because they actually started out exactly the opposite and then they cared so much about fixing that problem.

• 16:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 16:25Susan Cain?

  So, but in terms of how I overcame that fear, and I have this kind of evangelical desire to share it because it was so extreme. I feel like if I could do it, then I know anyone can overcome any fear. So first of all, I spent years sitting in therapist's office, offices, kind of cozily discussing, well, what might be the sources of this fear? And, you know, what do I trace it back to? And like that. And that does no good at all. I'm actually a big believer in therapy, but not for this type of issue. So what really does it? If you're afraid of something, you can't, you have to, you have to expose yourself

• 17:07Susan Cain?

  very slowly to the thing that you fear in really manageable doses. So you can't start off by giving the TED Talk. So in my case, I signed up for the seminar in, it was a seminar for people with public speaking anxiety. It was here in New York. And, you know, you'd get there and on the very first day, all you had to do was stand up, say your name, sit back down, declare victory, you're finished. And that's it.

• 17:35Tim Ferriss?

  What was the organization?

• 17:37Susan Cain?

  Oh gosh.

• 17:38Tim Ferriss?

  Is it Toastmasters or something?

• 17:39Susan Cain?

  No, and I am a big fan of Toastmasters, but this was almost like more remedial than Toastmasters.

• 17:44Tim Ferriss?

  Toastmasters Lite.

• 17:45Susan Cain?

  Yeah, this is like pre-Toastmasters, yeah. So, the guy's name, he's amazing, his name is Charles Decagno, and you can find his organization, it's speakeasy.com, and I think it's spelled with three E's.

• 18:00Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect, and I'll put a link in the show notes for people as well.

• 18:02Susan Cain?

  Yeah, yeah, because I really recommend him. Yeah, and so, you know, you'd come back the next week, and maybe you'd stand up, and he would do these things, like he'd have people stand on either side of you, so you didn't feel all alone up there on stage.

• 18:15Tim Ferriss?

  That's brilliant.

• 18:16Susan Cain?

  Yeah, yeah, and then the audience would ask you questions, like, where are you from? And where'd you go to college? You know, so really easy stuff. You answer the questions, and you're done. And it's like, if you do that little by little by little, you actually really can overcome it. It's kind of crazy but true. But I will say, having said all this, still, you know, there's something about a TED Talk that's on some whole crazy other realm of public speaking nerves.

• 18:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, even if the setting is exactly the same, there is a performance anxiety associated with that three-letter acronym, for sure.

• 18:54Susan Cain?

  Yeah, we were talking about this before we started taping, that, you know, so many of the speakers are really practiced onstage, and yet you see them minutes before they go out, and they're sweating bullets, and they're all losing it.

• 19:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we were chatting for a second about, and Chris Anderson could certainly correct me, I'm blanking on the exact term, but there's some space right next to the stage, behind the curtain, called the Zen Room, or the Relaxation Cube, there's some very pleasant-sounding name for this space, and it's intended to be the next-up batting cage for the two or three speakers to come. And I remember, it was probably 15 or 20 minutes before I was supposed to go live, or no, it couldn't have been that, it was probably an hour before, and I really didn't want to be around a lot of people, and in the green room, there are all sorts of staff, and lots of people milling around, and working on production, and I thought to myself, I

• 19:53Tim Ferriss?

  need to go to the Zen Room, we'll just call it the Zen Room, and so I walk out to the Zen Room, and I won't mention names, but there are like three, just... Killers. These are consummate professionals who have done this type of thing thousands of times. People I look up to and would love to someday have a coffee with, and they are freaking the fuck out. And I was like, not helping, not helping. I need to leave the Zen Room right now. So, yes, it's a different beast. So how do you go from talking about your favorite color onstage with two people next to you to TED then?

• 20:28Susan Cain?

  Right. Okay, so I graduated from that to Toastmasters, which I also completely recommend. And should I describe what that is?

• 20:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please.

• 20:36Susan Cain?

  Yeah, okay. So Toastmasters, it's a worldwide organization. You can absolutely find one near you because they're everywhere. And it's basically this non-for-profit thing where you sign up for, you sign up for a group that meets near you, and once every two weeks, you get together and you practice public speaking together. And they have this ritualized way of doing it. And some of the time, you're practicing speaking off the top of your head, and sometimes it's a prepared speech. And it's just kind of giving you that exposure therapy of, you know, putting you in the beast of the thing that most frightens you. You have to show up every two weeks and do it. So I did that. But then the next stage after that, and it was my husband's idea, was I hired

• 21:21Susan Cain?

  a coach for the full week before the TED Talk. This really amazing guy named Jim Fife, who I also completely recommend. And since then, he has coached many other TED speakers. So I worked with him morning till night for a full week before the talk.

• 21:37Tim Ferriss?

  Good for you.

• 21:38Susan Cain?

  Yeah, and

• 21:39Tim Ferriss?

  What did the working with him look like?

• 21:42Susan Cain?

  Okay, so he, he did a really brilliant thing. He was very psychologically attuned. And I said to him, you know, I'm really comfortable in general, talking to people one-on-one and kind of like cozily sitting on a couch and talking about life. I love that. It's, for me at that point, though, getting up on a stage and holding forth was the hard thing. So he said, okay, let's practice your talk, sitting on the couch, and just talk to me about it. And we did that for like, two days. And it was only after that, that we then moved to the stage and started getting into kind of the theatrics of it.

• 22:20Tim Ferriss?

  That's brilliant.

• 22:20Susan Cain?

  And that really, that kind of transition was so helpful.

• 22:25Tim Ferriss?

  I just want to note that this is, I spend so much time with it, I'm so obsessed with good teachers.

• 22:32Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Tim Ferriss?

  Good coaches. This is very common where they will let effectively say, let's start from where you are right now.

• 22:41Susan Cain?

  Right.

• 22:41Tim Ferriss?

  And they will, they will always return if they sense any type of overwhelm or fear to bring you back to a point of familiarity or comfort.

• 22:48Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Tim Ferriss?

  And then edge into sort of the next concentric circle of

• 22:53Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 22:53Tim Ferriss?

  That is your limit of comfort.

• 22:55Susan Cain?

  Yeah. And I think they also have to show a lot of non-judgment because I had some dark moments during that week. You know, for me, this was the abyss and I was just hanging out in the abyss for a week. And so he saw me, you know, I had only just met him and he saw me not in the most flattering circumstances and yet I didn't feel embarrassed by that.

• 23:15Tim Ferriss?

  Did he do anything in the beginning to assess you or establish a baseline or was it more of an interview that he used like an intake? Do you remember?

• 23:25Susan Cain?

  It wasn't really formal like that. You know, he's such a human guy. It was just like, we were just talking. You know, we were just, yeah.

• 23:33Tim Ferriss?

  Disguised as intake, smart, smart fellow.

• 23:36Susan Cain?

  Yeah. And then, um, so the amazing thing to me now is I now, super ironically, have a career as a public speaker. Like I traveled the world going and giving talks to all different companies and conferences all over the place.

• 23:53Tim Ferriss?

  Go ahead.

• 23:55Susan Cain?

  I mean, like I asked you, well, if we could tell sixth grade Tim where he would be, what would he say? And I say that to myself too. Like if you could have even told me eight years ago that this would be my life, I would have been so shocked by it. And now I've come to like it.

• 24:10Tim Ferriss?

  Did you have any particular pre-game ritual or anything that you did in the hours leading up to your talk that helped or that you didn't do?

• 24:24Susan Cain?

  I have things now. Back then I just suffered, but

• 24:27Tim Ferriss?

  What do you have now?

• 24:29Susan Cain?

  Now, I have a few things. I mean, I do deep breathing, just like everyone else. I'm sure you've heard that a million times, but it's got to be real deep breathing, you know, where you really feel your belly and your diaphragm filling up. But for me, what I also do is I usually think to myself, and I do this especially when I'm speaking to an audience that I find more intimidating, you know, like a group of finance people at an investment bank or something.

• 24:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 24:58Susan Cain?

  I will say to myself, there I am sure is one person in this audience who has a child who is shy or introverted. And if that child has a better life because of one tidbit that that person hears today, then it's all good. And that pulls me out of myself instantly.

• 25:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it gives you also a hurdle that you can clear for winning the presentation, so to speak.

• 25:26Susan Cain?

  Yeah, right. It's a manageable goal, but I think it's, it feels deeper than that to me. It feels also like, I think when people get nervous about speaking, you know, obviously they're really nervous about being judged, right? But this completely shifts the energy where it's not any longer about how anybody judges me. It's about, can I help that kid out there?

• 25:49Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to say also that part of the reason I am more than happy, actually excited to spend so much time talking about this is that it is not specific to public speaking.

• 26:02Susan Cain?

  Right.

• 26:03Tim Ferriss?

  This just happens to be a very common fear and perceived weakness of many, many, many people. Also, as a side note, what Warren Buffett says is his greatest ever investment. Put more specifically, a Dale Carnegie course that he took in public speaking.

• 26:24Susan Cain?

  Right, right.

• 26:25Tim Ferriss?

  Because it magnified his ability to do almost everything else, to communicate effectively, both in spoken word, but also in the written word in some respects.

• 26:34Susan Cain?

  Yeah. Go ahead.

• 26:36Tim Ferriss?

  I was just going to say that I've never, I don't think I've ever, I've ever spoken about this, but I also did Toastmasters. And if you have trouble finding it, oftentimes, there are large companies that will have within their HQ or any large location, their own Toastmasters group. And that's actually how I found it in San Jose. Initially, it was at Adobe. So I would go in and I would do this Toastmasters. And your description of having this very logical progression of small wins layered upon small wins, getting up on stage and then getting offstage, right? Getting up on stage, having two people next to you and answering a few questions and

• 27:17Tim Ferriss?

  getting offstage is so incredibly effective. And I'm laughing right now because I remember when I was preparing for my first presentation at South by Southwest. So this is a very large festival and conference in Austin, Texas. And the timing was 2007. It was about, I want to say, a month, month and a half before my book is going to come out, my first book, which I'm very nervous about. There had been no speaking slots, but I had pitched Hugh Forrest at the time, who I'd been introduced to, that I would, I would take anything available,

• 28:02Tim Ferriss?

  corner of a room, hallway, if there were any cancellations, I would really appreciate the opportunity to speak at the event. And lo and behold, there was a last minute cancellation, not by a keynote speaker, but by a sponsor who was going to have a stage to pitch their products from in this makeshift cafe. And I was like, I'm in, I'm in. But I was so incredibly nervous about this, that in the beginning in particular, I was, and this is true today, too nervous to practice my rough, rough draft of the presentation in front of people.

• 28:37Susan Cain?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 28:39Tim Ferriss?

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

• 29:20Susan Cain?

  Wow.

• 29:21Tim Ferriss?

  To graduate to giving a rough draft in front of humans, for those people out there, who are wondering whether this, this all comes naturally to me. It does not at all.

• 29:34Susan Cain?

  Have you talked about that before, or is this the first time?

• 29:37Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think, I don't think I've talked about that. Certainly, I don't think I've talked about it on the podcast. And the TED Talk also, something I did, which I did not do for the South by Talk, which I thought really made a difference was, I practiced giving the talk in front of small groups of strangers. Once I had a reasonably polished version, and I asked friends of mine who worked at larger companies who had teams during lunch hour, if there was, if there happened to be an empty conference room, could they invite people to hear a rough draft of a TED Talk? And then I would ask them for feedback. And usually, there was enough time that I could give it two or

• 30:18Tim Ferriss?

  three times. So I could actually incorporate their feedback, give another version. And once I'd given the second version, there were a lot more people in the room who are willing to be critical. Right? The first round, you get one or two.

• 30:30Susan Cain?

  Yes, that's so true.

• 30:32Tim Ferriss?

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

• 31:13Susan Cain?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 31:13Tim Ferriss?

  two double espressos and wait for it to hit, and then go in and give my dress rehearsal to see if I could handle that stimulation.

• 31:21Susan Cain?

  That was so, so smart. And, you know, listening to that story is reminding me of this crucial step that I left out.

• 31:32Susan Cain?

  In a lot of ways, a kind of mistake that I made, which is, you know, I told you I worked with that guy, Jim, for a week, who was amazing. And I thought I was pretty well ready at that point. So I talked to my friend, Adam Grant, who's a very dear friend.

• 31:48Tim Ferriss?

  Very good speaker, too.

• 31:49Susan Cain?

  And a really good speaker and who also started out as a very nervous and by his description, a terrible public speaker. He says he used to get like terrible reviews from his students and he just worked and worked and worked and at it. And now he's the most popular professor at Wharton. But, okay, so I was talking to Adam about all this. And so he said, so I'm leaving for Ted on Sunday morning, right, to fly out to California, which is where it was at that time. And he says, Oh, I'm going to pull together a group of friends and you can practice your talk in front of them. And so this is Friday night and I'm leaving Sunday morning. And so I show up at this apartment full of Adam and his friends. And I think that I'm pretty well done with the talk. And this is the first time that I'm giving it in front of any kind of group because I didn't have

• 32:34Susan Cain?

  the foresight of what you just described. And not only was I so nervous, but I realized from the feedback that a lot of the content was all wrong. And it's Friday night and I'm leaving, you know, like the next day, basically, or the day after the next day. So I went home and I just spent the whole entire night rewriting the whole final third of the talk. And then I'm like, on the plane going out to Ted, trying to memorize the new talk. So I don't recommend that kind of approach. But

• 33:08Tim Ferriss?

  You need to get real people in front of you. This is just like entrepreneurship and people try to get the product perfect before exposing it to any prospective clients. You really need to get into the messy reality of what a live audience or a real customer looks like. And the same was true for me. I made a lot of changes in the last few days, which I thought were just going to be fine tuned.

• 33:34Susan Cain?

  Right. And then you end up

• 33:35Tim Ferriss?

  And I was like, oh, actually, I really need to come, I need to completely change by 30% of this.

• 33:40Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 33:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I was very, very nervous before the Ted Talk. And I came off stage and I did not think that I, I didn't, I didn't think that I blew it, but I didn't think that I, I did a great job. I came off stage thinking that there were definitely bits and pieces I could have done better. But

• 34:01Tim Ferriss?

  Worked out, seems to have worked out.

• 34:02Susan Cain?

  Okay, wait, but I want to come back to one thing that you said for the benefit of people who are listening now. So you said that you still are really nervous when you give a talk.

• 34:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Susan Cain?

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

• 34:42Tim Ferriss?

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

• 35:23Tim Ferriss?

  contact with, with anyone beforehand. But let me mention a few, a few things. Number one, and both Mike Tyson and Dean Martin used to vomit before nearly every performance. But the way that they psychologically contended with that evolved over time. And what, well, since I mentioned Mike Tyson, Customato, who was the trainer who really, in a lot of respects, I think.

• 35:58Tim Ferriss?

  Boxing, boxing scholars or boxing fans would agree, made Tyson into what Tyson was at his prime as an athlete, used to say something along the following, that the hero and the coward feel the same thing. It's how they respond.

• 36:16Susan Cain?

  Yes. Oh, I so believe that.

• 36:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And, I mean, there is no courage without the presence of fear.

• 36:22Susan Cain?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:23Tim Ferriss?

  And for me, I have come to see those physiological symptoms that used to make me panic, that used to make me feel like I was doing something wrong, that used to make me feel like I was unprepared, as simple precursors to a performance.

• 36:39Susan Cain?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 36:40Tim Ferriss?

  The way that I frame them for myself is completely different. And I've learned to view it as this energetic asset that I can use.

• 36:52Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 36:53Tim Ferriss?

  And that has made all the difference. And it has decreased in some circumstances, but certainly before Ted, I mean, I had given hundreds of different presentations and it was like I was getting on stage for the first time. In part also, for people who don't know, they are very, as they should be, strict about many things at Ted, including running over.

• 37:19Susan Cain?

  Oh, yes.

• 37:20Tim Ferriss?

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

• 37:47Tim Ferriss?

  And I would say like 30, 40% of the time I ran over. Then other times I would run two minutes under, but miss something really, really important.

• 37:55Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Tim Ferriss?

  Because I was rushing and I was like, good God, this is just a crap shoot. Like I am at the craps table with my timing. And that really was, was a concern for me. So that was another element.

• 38:11Tim Ferriss?

  That made Ted unique for me was that degree of cutoff.

• 38:17Susan Cain?

  Yeah, I felt that way too. And I did end up going over by over a minute.

• 38:21Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, good for you.

• 38:22Susan Cain?

  And there it is.

• 38:23Tim Ferriss?

  And they were just like, we cannot, we cannot stop this performance.

• 38:26Susan Cain?

  I don't know about that, but I want to say also for anybody who is listening and who is right now in the grip of this kind of fear and isn't sure whether they can really get past it. Also, like, what is waiting for you on the other side of it is so gigantic because there's just, there's something weird about public speaking where it has such disproportionate value to, in a way, what you're investing in it. You know, like, you're going up on stage for 18 minutes or 40 minutes or whatever, or maybe within your own workplace, you know, even giving a two-minute talk. Suddenly, everybody is regarding you as a leader and as someone who they can turn to

• 39:09Susan Cain?

  in a new way from if you hadn't been willing to put yourself forward in that way.

• 39:14Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely, definitely. I mean, there's, there's public speaking as the force multiplier for the value of your other skills, which is absolutely true. And then, public speaking in a way is also a, a, a wonderful diagnostic tool. And what I mean by that is, I remember talking to a friend of mine who, he's, he's a wealth manager for a lot of muckety mucks, who you would recognize. And he said, I know them generally better than therapists they've been seeing for a decade within the first few hours because money brings up everything.

• 39:55Tim Ferriss?

  Talking about money brings up the full spectrum of someone's insecurities, fears, desires, neuroses. Sex also, true. And public speaking, I think, if it makes you remotely nervous when you start to learn public speaking, like, it, at least for me, it kind of bring, brings up all your stuff. So if you were simply interested in personal growth, it brings to the surface many different, many different pieces of your personality and psyche that you can then work on in a way that transfers to other areas. So that to me was my experience and I find really interesting.

• 40:37Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, well, maybe you don't have to play hide and go seek with talk therapy for 20 years to find all of the bits and pieces when if rather than following these different gingerbread trails, you can use certain fearful circumstances to just bring it all right, or a lot of it to the surface. That was my experience. I'm not saying it's true for everybody, but it was one of those things like talking about money, talking about sex or public speaking. It's like, okay, now we just bring, we just bring everything to the forefront. So for me, that was, that was also, even if I, even if I had not had any interest in getting on stage and giving presentations.

• 41:17Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 41:17Tim Ferriss?

  It would have been valuable.

• 41:18Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 41:19Tim Ferriss?

  In and of itself.

• 41:20Susan Cain?

  Yeah, no, that makes complete sense.

• 41:21Tim Ferriss?

  Are there other things that you're fearful of or have been afraid of that you've overcome?

• 41:28Susan Cain?

  No, I mean, that was really the big one for me. But yeah, we were talking about this before, I guess, you know, my bugaboo in general is that I just tend to be a worrier. So I don't know, other than the experiences I had with public speaking, it's not like I have full on panic or anything like that. It's more like it's a, a very familiar companion for me. So I've had to just come up with various hacks around it.

• 41:56Tim Ferriss?

  What, what are some of your hacks?

• 41:58Susan Cain?

  Um, this is going to get us into another big topic, but I'll, but why not?

• 42:03Tim Ferriss?

  Why not?

• 42:04Susan Cain?

  So for example, when I stopped practicing corporate law and I decided that I wanted to be a writer, I told myself that it's really hard to make a living as a writer. And I said, okay, the goal is to publish something by the time you're 75. And at the time I was 33, at the time that I said that. And I kind of did that instinctively because I was always doing these hacks of like just wanting to completely take the pressure off of something that I otherwise loved so deeply. And like, I just knew that if I turned this thing that I deeply loved into

• 42:42Susan Cain?

  A source of like, this has to be the place where I make my, my living. This has to be the place where I derive some kind of professional stature. It was gonna soak a lot of the joy out of it. And so that's the kind of hack that I just naturally do.

• 42:59Tim Ferriss?

  So on a very related note,

• 43:04Tim Ferriss?

  could you give us a little bit of context around the leaving law? Like, why you left law? And then you decide you want to be a writer. And you kind of alluded to it, but does that mean that suddenly your rent is dependent on writing?

• 43:22Susan Cain?

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

• 44:06Susan Cain?

  It wasn't like, you know, I was walking around conscious of this broken dream or something. Like, I'd completely forgotten.

• 44:14Susan Cain?

  And, and the first few years of practicing law, I really loved it. It was just this kind of crazy adventure that I was on. And as the years went by, it started to get really tough for me. You know, I'm not a very natural lawyer in a million different ways. But I was on this partner track and I was committed to it. And, and then came the day, and I think I may have told you about this in an earlier correspondence, but then came the day when a, a senior partner in my firm walked in and said, I, I was supposed to be up for partner that year. And he said, well, we're not going to be putting you up. And the funny thing is, to this day, I don't really know if he meant

• 44:58Susan Cain?

  we're not putting you up ever for partner or just not anytime soon. I don't really know what it meant. All I knew was like, Number one, I burst into tears. And number two, here was my get out of jail free card. So three hours later, I had left the firm. Like, I was gone. I took a leave of absence. And I just started bicycling around Central Park. Like, I didn't know what I was gonna do next. But as soon as that space opened up, that I now had free time for the first time in like 10 years, I started writing. And I had no idea that was gonna happen. It was almost like in a movie.

• 45:37Tim Ferriss?

  That's cool. Yeah, it's like you've just been waiting for you.

• 45:40Susan Cain?

  Yeah, I mean, literally, like, I remember that night, you know, like, kind of curled up on my sofa in my apartment, and I just started writing on my laptop. And then a week later, I signed up for a class in creative nonfiction at NYU. And I just had this complete feeling of certainty that this was what I wanted to be doing. And zero expectation that I would make a living out of it. So, and this is a really important thing, I think.

• 46:10Susan Cain?

  I think if you have that kind of a creative dream and a creative love, you have to do everything you can not to spoil it with the pressures of paying the rent and all those other things, or the pressures of needing to derive professional status from it.

• 46:26Susan Cain?

  So I set up a little side business, teaching people negotiation skills. And that was how I was paying the rent. But the thing I was really doing in my heart was this beloved hobby of writing.

• 46:38Tim Ferriss?

  This is, this is super, super, super, super, super important. And there are, it's, I think it's true in creative fields, which is pretty much every field, but just for the sake of illustration, writing, music, etc., that also in entrepreneurship, you hear these stories of desperation, where necessity is the mother of invention.

• 47:04Tim Ferriss?

  You know, bada bing bada boom, magic wand, and then there's a billion dollar company, or there's J.K. Rowling, or whatever it is.

• 47:11Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 47:11Tim Ferriss?

  But those are, in my experience, the outliers. They make for great cover stories in magazines, but the fact of the matter is that, from what I've seen, certainly with guests on this podcast, is that, for instance, Soman Shenani, who has a number of mega-successful novels, but he had a SAT prep counseling service that he offered well past the point that his first book was successful, because he wanted to always feel like he had a safety net.

• 47:47Susan Cain?

  Yes.

• 47:48Tim Ferriss?

  So that the writing would not be tainted, or even subconsciously influenced, to match the market, or whatever the lens might become by this pressure.

• 47:59Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 48:00Tim Ferriss?

  And that is something that, whenever possible, has come up as a really valuable,

• 48:09Tim Ferriss?

  I suppose, on one hand, financial survival mechanism, but even more so a psychological freeing device.

• 48:16Susan Cain?

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think we're so addicted to having a really glamorous narrative for things, and the glamorous narrative is, you know, you had so much courage, you took the risk, you were dependent on this company, or this book, or whatever, and if it didn't work, it was going to be a disaster, but you were the one who beat the odds. Like, we love that narrative, and for most people, that's a really bankrupt narrative. And there's a kind of deeper glamour, actually, in the kind of story that you just told.

• 48:47Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 48:47Susan Cain?

  Yeah, because the glamour comes from you're doing everything that you can to deeply protect the thing that you love most.

• 48:56Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. Now, the book itself, people may not know backstory, I'm sure a lot of people don't. How long did it take to get that book done?

• 49:09Susan Cain?

  Okay, so I'm laughing, because it took a really, really long time, especially by Tim Ferriss standards.

• 49:17Susan Cain?

  I listen to you, and like, look at your life trajectory, and like, how does he do that? But...

• 49:23Tim Ferriss?

  Lots of cheating with format is the short answer. But I want to take us off track.

• 49:29Susan Cain?

  So, yeah, I took from start to finish, it was about seven years. And I will say in my defense that during those seven years, I also had two children and was raising them. So that was part of it. But I also just think I'm kind of a slow writer. Like, I like to really, really think about everything super deeply. And what I think is probably, people might not know, I had a deadline, as all writers do. And I turned in some sort of draft upon my deadline coming due, you know, after 18 months or two years.

• 50:05Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 50:05Susan Cain?

  And my editor basically read it and said, this is terrible.

• 50:11Susan Cain?

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

• 50:49Tim Ferriss?

  She's a very understanding editor.

• 50:51Susan Cain?

  Yeah, she's brilliant. And I'm working with her again on my next book.

• 50:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's, it's also smart in the sense that it's like a mediocre book is more of a liability than no book at all.

• 51:03Susan Cain?

  Yes, yeah.

• 51:04Tim Ferriss?

  For everyone involved.

• 51:05Susan Cain?

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

• 51:20Tim Ferriss?

  What is your, what is your writing process at this point look like? So you've, you had your experience with that book. And now, when you are writing, do you have a daily practice? Does it go through phases of research period, then organizing, then?

• 51:41Tim Ferriss?

  Putting all of that into prose through synthesis, what is, what is your, what are your writing routines or how do you think about writing these days?

• 51:50Susan Cain?

  So for me, I take whatever thesis I'm working with and then I spend a year or two just walking around the world, looking at everything through the lens of that thesis. You know, so it used to be introverts and now it's onto a new topic and I'm taking crazy notes through that period. So every conversation that I have, every book I read, it's all going in.

• 52:13Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, how do you take and organize your notes? Do you do it notebooks? Do you do it digitally? What are the, I know this is nerdy, but I'm into it because a lot of writers do it differently.

• 52:27Susan Cain?

  The reason I'm laughing is I'm thinking, when you hear my answer, you're going to know that I need a consultation with you for the next book because I don't do it in a super systemic way. I, I basically, all those conversations, all those ideas and notes and thoughts I'm having, I stick them all into one word document and then I go and that document becomes about seven or 800 pages by the time I'm done. And then I go through that document and I, and I'm kind of tagging as I go along and then I'm separating everything out by topic. So I end up with like eight or nine loose leaf binders that are organized by topic. But in each of those binders, it's just like

• 53:08Tim Ferriss?

  One big.

• 53:09Susan Cain?

  One big massive notes. And then I think about where do I want everything?

• 53:13Tim Ferriss?

  I don't.

• 53:14Susan Cain?

  And also whenever I'm right, whenever I have an idea, like whenever I'm emotionally moved by one of the ideas that I'm taking notes on, I try to write out the riff around that idea right then and there because you don't know if that emotion is going to come back. So you have to capture it when it happens.

• 53:32Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's a perfectly fine system. So you.

• 53:35Susan Cain?

  I feel like technology must have come up with something better. Like I do it in Microsoft Word.

• 53:39Tim Ferriss?

  I heard there are probably better tools.

• 53:44Tim Ferriss?

  Available, but I would say also that a lot of people confuse new tools for better content. People, it's very easy, at least, let's speak for myself for a second. When I'm writing, I have to disallow myself from thinking about, say, marketing, because marketing is fun and exciting and

• 54:07Susan Cain?

  To you.

• 54:08Tim Ferriss?

  Easy for me.

• 54:09Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Tim Ferriss?

  Because I've had insomnia as a kid and watched too many infomercials or something. In any case, that takes, it's a, it's a way to procrastinate doing the harder piece, which is the actual research and digging and prose. That's the hard part for me, always has been, but it's the most important part. And I think similarly, a lot of folks get, can become consumed by upgrading their tools, multiplying their tools versus just the words. You gotta put the words in. And I have some questions about this Word doc though. So when you're going through and adding things to the Word doc, and you come in and you're tagging things so you can separate them, and you mentioned binders, so you're printing

• 54:54Tim Ferriss?

  this stuff out and then separating them. Does that mean that when you put in a new note in the Word doc, you go to a new page if it's tagged differently so you can separate them more easily later? Does that make sense? As opposed to each time you add a note, then hit return twice and then add a new note, if they're tagged differently, it would seem like you would have to cut up the page into multiple pieces. So do you start a new page? Are there any particular ways that you tag? For instance, would it be a chapter name? Or would it be a theme? What would it tag?

• 55:29Susan Cain?

  Yeah, it would just be a topic or a theme. And yeah, so every time I'm adding a new note, if I know that it relates to something I've already done, then I'll search for the thing I've already done so I can add it to that section to make it easier later.

• 55:41Tim Ferriss?

  That makes sense.

• 55:42Susan Cain?

  But, you know, sometimes I don't, or I can't think of it, and then I'll just add it to the end of the document.

• 55:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yes. Which, Ctrl F, right? Word.

• 55:49Susan Cain?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:50Tim Ferriss?

  Good to go. Yeah, simple, simple works. Robert Rodriguez, the filmmaker, keeps a journal, I think he does, puts it in almost every day at midnight, and it's Word doc, Word docs.

• 56:01Susan Cain?

  Yep.

• 56:02Tim Ferriss?

  It works.

• 56:02Susan Cain?

  Yeah, yeah. I actually, I will say, I tried for this next book, I spent a few days Reading the instructions for Scrivener, one of these programs.

• 56:11Tim Ferriss?

  Scrivener is.

• 56:11Susan Cain?

  And I just ended up thinking, you know, this isn't for me. It looks great, but.

• 56:17Tim Ferriss?

  Scrivener, well, some other time we can sit down. That, that, that is one tool that if you, if you set it up really simply and you don't use 98% of the features. I find really useful just because you can create a view by which you see all of your separate documents. Or actually, I should say, rather you see your tentative table of contents on the left side in a, in a vertical pane. And then you can look at what you're, on the right hand side, then I would have it set up so that I have two, two split windows. So left hand side, you see your table of contents and then there's research and that you have whatever research you want. That way you can be working on a document in the upper right hand pane while you have

• 57:01Tim Ferriss?

  your research that you're ringing off of in the bottom right. And if you decide to move docs around to see how it affects flow, it's just drag and drop. It's, uh, it's actually quite, quite wonderful. They did have some issues with footnotes, or maybe I was just too technically incompetent at one point when you then had to export when the publisher insists on, say, Word, uh, which maybe that'll change at some point, but getting a little, a little geeked out. But the Scrivener, I've used Scrivener for almost all of my books. There may be one exception, I think, for our chef because of how visually intensive it was, was done outside of that. And in terms of routine or ritual, you spend a year gathering these notes. So then you have.

• 57:45Susan Cain?

  Yeah, maybe more.

• 57:46Tim Ferriss?

  So yeah, or more. So you have 700 to 800 pages. It's a big word, doc.

• 57:51Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 57:51Tim Ferriss?

  And then what happens?

• 57:53Susan Cain?

  Yeah, so then I spend the time sorting them out. And so I get to the point where I've got my eight or nine loose leaf binders that are more or less organized by what the chapters are going to be. Yeah, and then comes the time to write, during which I'm still doing more research, but I'm starting to write. And, um, yeah, for me, the writing, like the sitting down with my laptop and thinking about it all, that's like.

• 58:20Susan Cain?

  I want to say it's my happy place, but that's not really the best description. It feels like it's this place that I go deep in my mind. And I really love being there. And it's like, no matter what happens to be going on in my outside life, I always have those few hours a day where I'm going to a cafe or a library or whatever. And I'm sitting with my laptop and my cappuccino and I'm just doing it. And I'm like, I'm stressing the emotional aspect because that's so huge for me. And I feel like I train myself to associate writing with all of these pleasures of, you know, sitting around in cafes and things like that.

• 59:02Tim Ferriss?

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

• 59:23Susan Cain?

  Well, I mean, there's what I do and there's what would be ideal. But as you say, I have kids. So my routine is that I drop my kids off at school. That's at around eight. Then I go and I either play tennis or do yoga every day. And then after that, I do my writing. And that's a pretty good time for me, but.

• 59:43Tim Ferriss?

  What time of day would that typically end up being?

• 59:45Susan Cain?

  Yeah, that probably ends up being around 10 or so that I'm starting. Yeah. But, you know, if I had no other obligations, the best times of day would be more like either seven in the morning and also super late at night. So two time periods that I have no access to for this stage of life.

• 1:00:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:00:02Susan Cain?

  But yeah.

• 1:00:03Tim Ferriss?

  And you start writing, this is, this is really, uh, interesting to me, hopefully interesting to other people. So you start, let's say around 10.

• 1:00:17Tim Ferriss?

  Do you break for lunch? Do you skip lunch? Do you have a standard type of lunch that you would have? And the reason I ask is that I think part of the reason so many writers seem to work between the hours of, say, let's make this up, but 10:00 PM and 7:30 AM.

• 1:00:39Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40Tim Ferriss?

  And they tend to either be night owls like me

• 1:00:42Susan Cain?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:43Tim Ferriss?

  or early risers is that there are fewer distractions and they get an un- they can get a relatively uninterrupted block of three to five hours.

• 1:00:52Susan Cain?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:53Tim Ferriss?

  But if you're starting at 10, then most people that have lunch scheduled shortly thereafter, like two hours later.

• 1:01:02Susan Cain?

  Right.

• 1:01:02Tim Ferriss?

  So do you, do you break for lunch? Do you have something really small? How do you, how do you handle that? Because for me, just speaking personally, it's like if-

• 1:01:11Susan Cain?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:12Tim Ferriss?

  You might, I might have time, of course I have time for a five-minute phone call, but if I do a five-minute phone call about something very mechanical or mundane, like calendaring stuff or whatever, and I'm juggling 15 pieces that were on paper in my head,

• 1:01:28Susan Cain?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:28Tim Ferriss?

  I kind of have to start over a lot of times. Like I drop all those balls that I'm juggling-

• 1:01:32Susan Cain?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:01:33Tim Ferriss?

  Because of the task switching.

• 1:01:34Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd love to hear, not that that's true for everybody, but it's true for me. So what, what is, what does your schedule look like then, once you sit down?

• 1:01:43Susan Cain?

  Um, I'll just kind of go until I realize that I'm not concentrating well anymore. And very often that happens after two or three hours and I just have to take a break. Like I actually, I have a lot of discipline if my brain would cooperate. Like, so I would happily sit there for seven hours until my kids come home from school. But at a certain point, I'll notice that it's just not coming anymore.

• 1:02:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Susan Cain?

  Yeah, and so then I'll take a break and I'll eat or something like that. But, you know, I would say, like you were mentioning, well, people might work at night because it's when you get uninterrupted time. And I think that that's one factor, but I also think the reason that those hours tend to be so good-

• 1:02:25Susan Cain?

  So nighttime is when your cortisol levels are really low, you know, which of course is your stress hormone. And so I noticed this in myself all the time that the ideas that I come up with late at night are different from the daytime ideas because they're completely unfettered by any stress. And so I'll just, I don't know, I just make different kinds of associative leaps. And there's, there's like a softness and an ease in my thinking and my feeling about the ideas. So I think like that's one advantage of late night writing. And then in the morning, you've got the high cortisol, but you also have the sort of acute attention.

• 1:03:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Susan Cain?

  So.

• 1:03:05Tim Ferriss?

  I can totally see that. I can definitely see that. I also find that writing late at night, if I'm writing at two in the morning, it's very hard for me. I remember, I want to say it was Ayn Rand who wrote, she, she had a book about the craft of nonfiction. And there was some, it's not exactly, it wasn't a metaphor. I think it was a real world example, but in effect, she's saying writers, many writers will do almost anything to not write. And there's this story about the white tennis shoes. Like I have to clean my white tennis shoes before, before I'm going to write because I'm going to go out and da, da, da. And when it's two or three in the morning, like I have to check email to make sure X is just not a viable excuse.

• 1:03:47Susan Cain?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:03:48Tim Ferriss?

  It also just removes a lot of bullshit distraction that I would impose on myself to avoid doing what it is that I find hard.

• 1:03:57Susan Cain?

  I so relate to this. So when I was writing Quiet, I suddenly developed this idea that I had to learn everything in the world about digital photography.

• 1:04:08Susan Cain?

  And I was reading all these books about it and the rule of thirds and all this stuff. And I have never had any interest in photography before or since. It was just these two weeks of mania where I didn't want to have to be looking at that manuscript over there.

• 1:04:24Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any, are there any, any particular, I mean, you are a student of the craft, right? You've taken creative nonfiction courses. Are there any particular books or resources or writers who have had a significant impact on how you view or practice writing?

• 1:04:45Susan Cain?

  Oh, gosh, I'm sure the answer is yes.

• 1:04:48Tim Ferriss?

  And I can, I can try to buy some time too. I can, if helpful. I mean, I, draft number four by John McPhee, I think is, is really, I was very fortunate to spend time with him when I was an undergrad in college because he was teaching a seminar.

• 1:05:03Susan Cain?

  Yeah, Princeton. That's where I took my creative writing classes.

• 1:05:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so the structure, the structure, thinking about structure in the way that McPhee thinks about structure saved me because I thrive with some type of predetermined blueprint for structure. It's very hard for me to just freehand flow of consciousness, let things take some emergent form. It's very hard. I do know friends who do that really, really well. That terrifies me. So I need the scaffolding.

• 1:05:36Susan Cain?

  Right, right.

• 1:05:38Tim Ferriss?

  Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

• 1:05:39Susan Cain?

  Oh, I love that book. That's a good book.

• 1:05:42Tim Ferriss?

  Bird by Bird, for people who don't know the book, I will say, just before getting into a short description, has saved at least a half a dozen friends of mine from the precipice, meaning they were at the point of throwing in the towel and just quitting their books. And they were, they were all writers in this case, but they were, they were at the point where they're like, I'm done, I can't do this, it's too stressful, I don't like this, I don't want to do this, it's going to be terrible. And they were going to, in some cases, return their advances and just walk.

• 1:06:15Susan Cain?

  Wow.

• 1:06:18Tim Ferriss?

  I want to say at least half of them read this book, went on to finish their books, and their books went on to become New York Times bestsellers. So talk about an important window for making a decision. And the gist of the book, the title, I should say, comes first from, I think it was her brother, Anne's brother, Anne Lamont is a writer, and her brother had this experience where he'd had something like an entire semester in, I'm making this up, but let's just call it fourth grade, to prepare for this end of semester project. And he was supposed to put together a term paper on birds or something like that. And it was like the night before, he hadn't done any preparation. And this poor

• 1:07:01Tim Ferriss?

  kid, who granted, kind of deserves it because he didn't do any prep, but nonetheless is having this like nervous breakdown at the kitchen table with like 15 books about birds, and he just is paralyzed. And I want to say it was Anne's dad who came over and like put an arm on his shoulder and said, just take it bird by bird, buddy. Bird by bird. Something like that. And it's sort of a psychological life raft, break glass in case of emergency kit for writers who are just hitting that point, like maybe you did with the photography, where you're just like, I want to do anything other than look at that screen or that page. I just, I can't handle it, and I don't know what to do. So for that

• 1:07:42Tim Ferriss?

  reason, not necessarily for the nuts and bolts of the writing process itself, but for the psychological component. It's like if you had a, if you were a top athletic coach and you had your sport-specific technical coach, and then you had a mental toughness coach who also doubled as a shrink, like the mental toughness coach who doubles as a shrink is the bird by bird.

• 1:08:03Susan Cain?

  Yeah. And I'm remembering, she also talks about shitty first drafts.

• 1:08:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:08:08Susan Cain?

  And just those three words are incredibly helpful, because, you know, when you're looking at your draft, and it is always really shitty at the beginning. And so just knowing, okay, that's what it's supposed to be.

• 1:08:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:20Susan Cain?

  But yeah, you know, the other thing that's been really helpful to me. So I told you, I started taking that creative nonfiction class at NYU. And the student, all of us who took that class got along really well. So we formed a writers group after the class was officially done. And we stayed together for years and we would meet once every week, every two weeks and read each other's stuff. And especially at that stage, that really, really helped. You know, getting the feedback, but also having the kind of camaraderie and support system.

• 1:08:54Tim Ferriss?

  Not feeling totally isolated.

• 1:08:55Susan Cain?

  Not feeling isolated. And I actually met my literary agent from one of the people who was in that group, who was a publishing lawyer. And I said, you know, I have this idea for this book about introverts, which at the time to me seemed like the most idiosyncratic project on earth. But she said, when you're ready, I know the right agent for that. And, and that's a really serendipitous thing. Because wait, I want to share this. When I put together the proposal for the book that became Quiet, I sent it out to that agent who she recommended and to four other super amazing agents, two of whom I had connections to. And every single one of the other ones passed.

• 1:09:38Susan Cain?

  And some of them said, you know, I really like the writing, but I think this topic is not commercial enough and I just don't think it'll sell. So could you come back with a different topic? And I, and, and my, the guy who became my agent instantly saw what the potential was going to be. And we've been together ever since and I feel like I owe him everything and I love him. And his name is Richard Pine, if you're out there looking for an agent. And I think about this story all the time, not only because of book writing, but because all these people, these other agents, you know, these are experts and these are the culturally anointed gatekeepers and they know what they're doing. And yet they didn't see this one particular thing. And I think that that happens all the time.

• 1:10:21Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 1:10:21Susan Cain?

  So.

• 1:10:22Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm glad you shared that. And I had a very similar experience. I reached out to, I want to say it was four agents, who were introduced by a, a very successful author, who I'd met something like seven years earlier by volunteering at a nonprofit, which is a great way to meet people above your pay grade. As a side note, just like filling water glasses for panelists. Works really well. And. So I had the right introduction, the writing. I didn't think my writing was Tolstoy or anything, but it was passable and complete rejection from three of the four.

• 1:11:03Susan Cain?

  This was the four hour work week?

• 1:11:04Tim Ferriss?

  The four hour work week. Two of them were not, were pretty heavy handed about it.

• 1:11:11Tim Ferriss?

  The, one of the third, I remember her name, Gillian Manus, a very good agent and she passed, but she gave me a lot of really helpful feedback. And she didn't say this won't work. She just said, I don't think this is the right for me.

• 1:11:25Susan Cain?

  Right.

• 1:11:26Tim Ferriss?

  And

• 1:11:26Susan Cain?

  And that one, fair enough.

• 1:11:27Tim Ferriss?

  Which is totally fair.

• 1:11:28Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:29Tim Ferriss?

  But like, here's a bunch of advice. And one of the pieces of advice she gave me actually, wow, I haven't thought about this in forever, was think of each, I was intimidated by the prospect of writing a book. I'd never written a book before. She said, treat each chapter like a feature magazine article, beginning, middle and end. Self sufficient.

• 1:11:47Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:47Tim Ferriss?

  Each chapter can live on its own. And I've, I've followed that advice ever since.

• 1:11:52Susan Cain?

  Yeah, that's great advice.

• 1:11:53Tim Ferriss?

  With nonfiction.

• 1:11:54Susan Cain?

  Yep.

• 1:11:54Tim Ferriss?

  Which makes it easier to write also, because if you get stuck somewhere, you don't, it's not like you have to cross that bridge to get to a chapter that sequentially should show up three chapters later. You can treat it in a modular way.

• 1:12:07Susan Cain?

  Right.

• 1:12:07Tim Ferriss?

  If you get really bogged down, you can skip, which also, in some cases, like the rest of my books, it leads to a book that can be read non sequentially. In any case. And I, so it's three out of four, turn it down, finally sign with my current agent, Stephen Hanselman, who I still work with to this day, very similarly.

• 1:12:30Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Tim Ferriss?

  And he had just become an agent.

• 1:12:34Susan Cain?

  Wow.

• 1:12:35Tim Ferriss?

  He had just become an agent, but part of what attracted me to him was that he had a long career as a very successful editor. And was also, is just an eclectic guy. Went to divinity school, plays in a jazz band, and really like my kind of, my kind of person.

• 1:12:52Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Tim Ferriss?

  And then we went out to sell it and I think it's like, I always forget if it's like 26 or 27, but nonetheless, it was something like Twenty seven or twenty, somewhere between twenty six and twenty eight publishers turned it down.

• 1:13:07Susan Cain?

  Really?

• 1:13:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:13:08Susan Cain?

  Wow.

• 1:13:08Tim Ferriss?

  And then the, but you only need one. That's the thing. It's like, it's not about how many people don't get it.

• 1:13:14Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's about having the right person or people who do get it. And I mean, which is, is so clear with your book, right? And it's like, you don't need all the people in the world to think it's a good idea. You don't need half the people in the world to think it's a good idea. You need the people who it resonates with, uh, to have it resonate.

• 1:13:35Susan Cain?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:13:36Tim Ferriss?

  And it does not need to be, does not need to be millions of people. It could be, but it doesn't have to be. And I, I wanna, I had a note down also to just, uh, and we don't have to necessarily spend a ton of time on this, but just to clarify the, talk about introversion versus shyness. And so I, and I came across this when I was doing a bit of homework, uh, which is people think of, say, Bill Gates, right? It's sort of maybe a, a one example of someone who could be useful in distinguishing between the two. But could you clarify what an introvert is or how you define introvert?

• 1:14:14Susan Cain?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:14:15Tim Ferriss?

  And how it might differ from?

• 1:14:15Susan Cain?

  From somebody who's shy?

• 1:14:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:14:17Susan Cain?

  Yeah. Um, so introversion is really about, kind of about the, the preference for lower stimulation environments. Um, and you can trace it to our neurobiologies, like introverts have nervous systems that react more to all the incoming stimuli. And so that means that we're kind of at our most alive and happiest and switched on when things are a little more chill, uh, around us, which is probably why when you're in those group dinners, you're going to the restroom every so often because your nervous system wants to tone it down.

• 1:14:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:51Susan Cain?

  And extroverts have the opposite situation and the opposite liability because for an extrovert, you've got a nervous system, um, that's reacting less to stimulation. And that means when you're in an environment that you find too quiet, you start to get really listless and checked out. So that's the liability there.

• 1:15:11Susan Cain?

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

• 1:15:52Susan Cain?

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

• 1:16:37Susan Cain?

  on. But she's often feeling intense discomfort and needing to work through that.

• 1:16:43Tim Ferriss?

  Wild.

• 1:16:44Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would certainly describe myself as an introvert, and I never knew quite how to frame it until coming across your definition of preferring lower stimulation or environments, or environments with fewer stimuli. Because I've, ever since I was a little kid, been very sensitive. I mean, my sight is very sensitive.

• 1:17:10Susan Cain?

  Right.

• 1:17:11Tim Ferriss?

  My hearing is very sensitive.

• 1:17:13Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14Tim Ferriss?

  But I'm not shy in the sense that I don't, I want to engage and ask questions and interact. But if the volume is turned up too much, or there are too many speakers, metaphorically or physically, I have a lot of difficulty.

• 1:17:31Tim Ferriss?

  parsing it all.

• 1:17:32Susan Cain?

  But you don't have like, shyness would be like, you know, before you go into those group dinners, are you feeling a kind of social anxiety?

• 1:17:39Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 1:17:40Susan Cain?

  Right?

• 1:17:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Susan Cain?

  That's the difference.

• 1:17:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:42Susan Cain?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:17:45Tim Ferriss?

  There are so many questions that I want to explore. But let's, because we have maybe, maybe 10 or 15 minutes more.

• 1:17:55Tim Ferriss?

  Let's ask a few of the questions that I, that I always like to ask.

• 1:17:58Susan Cain?

  Sure.

• 1:18:00Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any books that you have given the most to others as a gift? Or any books you've gifted often to other people?

• 1:18:08Susan Cain?

  I think that the book I've probably, for the last few years, been giving out the most is Waking Up by Sam Harris, which

• 1:18:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's fantastic.

• 1:18:17Susan Cain?

  It's such a fantastic book and it was really for me, completely life-changing. I think for probably the reasons it is for many people, which is, I hadn't really known much about meditation before reading it.

• 1:18:34Susan Cain?

  And because, and I'm kind of, you know, I think by my, my nature, I'm sort of a cross between a skeptic and a mystic or something.

• 1:18:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Susan Cain?

  You know, the skeptical side of me, and it's a pretty deep skeptical side, it really needed somebody like Sam, who's such an extreme skeptic.

• 1:18:53Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:18:54Susan Cain?

  You know, and then who very conveniently spent like, what, 28 years of his life or something, investigating all these different spiritual tools and then reporting back on them. You know, for me, that was a narrator I could really, I felt I could really rely on.

• 1:19:10Tim Ferriss?

  Fantastic book. You know, I just, I have to, I just think you'll, we were talking a bit about Sam before we started recording because

• 1:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  we were, we were both, you know, sort of fanboying and fangirling about the, his meditation app and handful of other things, but I haven't told you, and I don't know if I've even mentioned this. Publicly, but here we go. So the first time I met Sam, this relates to TED. Went to TED for the first time as an attendee, which by the way, was too much stimulation. So I never went back. Interesting. Yeah, but I went to TED for the first time as an attendee and I was invited to one of these group dinners. Right. And so I go out to this group dinner and we're eating dinner and off to the side on a separate table, there's this tray of brownies and I love brownies. It's one of my weaknesses. It is like an Achilles heel and I have zero portion control.

• 1:20:08Tim Ferriss?

  And these brownies are large brownies and I, I sneak over kind of in between courses and I'm like, you know what? I'm going to skip one of the later courses and just substitute the brownies because I love brownies. And so I eat two of these brownies and about 20 minutes later, the host who I shall not name, comes up to me and he goes, Tim, did you eat any of the brownies? Yeah, I had two of them. And he goes, okay, everything's going to be fine. And I'm like, wait, what? Everything is going to be fine. What the hell are you talking about? They were heavily dosed pot brownies. And I am not a habitual pot user. And so I suddenly in the middle of dinner,

• 1:20:50Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:21:29Tim Ferriss?

  And that was my first interview. And he looks at me kind of like, he's like, hi. Kind of sideways because I'm just beyond reality at that point. And that was my first meeting with Sam.

• 1:21:40Susan Cain?

  That's hilarious. And did you tell him your Brownie story?

• 1:21:43Tim Ferriss?

  I did. I did. I did tell him, which he appreciated because he does have, he does have some history with

• 1:21:48Susan Cain?

  Yes, he does.

• 1:21:50Tim Ferriss?

  Altered states.

• 1:21:53Susan Cain?

  But yeah, no, I found that book and the subsequent meditation app and all of it incredibly helpful and fantastic. The one, the one piece of it that I'm kind of trying to explore separately because I feel like he looks at much less is the whole tradition of loving kindness meditation and all the meditations around that. So that's really, really of interest to me. Yeah. And so I'm sort of charting a different course there. And I'll tell you, like even just last night, I was interviewing on stage this guy, Heyman Soonim. I don't know if you've heard of him, but he's a really renowned Zen Buddhist monk from Korea.

• 1:22:36Susan Cain?

  And his books are all number one bestsellers in Korea and lots of other countries, but here he is less well known. But anyway, he has a new book out, so I was doing this interview and we're up on stage, so you can see the audience. And it happens to be a pretty formal audience. So before we start, you know, the audience is kind of sitting there.

• 1:22:58Susan Cain?

  Kind of still in their seats. And then he opens by doing a loving kindness meditation. And it was so amazing to see the transformation on their face, on their faces. And he did this for maybe one or two or three minutes, like it wasn't long.

• 1:23:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:12Susan Cain?

  And, you know, suddenly they're totally smiling and they're open and they're happy. And yeah.

• 1:23:19Tim Ferriss?

  It's remarkable. Yeah.

• 1:23:20Susan Cain?

  It's remarkable. And I think it's so. Weird and dispiriting how in the mainstream media and in corporate life, there, I mean, it's great that there's been this incredible embrace of mindfulness meditation, but I think there's a kind of allergy towards going too much in the loving kindness direction. And I spoke to Sharon Salzberg about this, who's one of the great teachers. And, and, and she said that people have this sense that it must be phony, like that you couldn't possibly actually have those feelings. And so it kind of gives them a sort of creepy feeling to do it.

• 1:23:57Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 1:23:58Susan Cain?

  But, but I feel like that all needs to get completely rethought.

• 1:24:01Tim Ferriss?

  Loving kindness, the label, I think smells of kind of hand wavy hippie

• 1:24:11Tim Ferriss?

  associations, and therefore people veer away from it.

• 1:24:14Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:14Tim Ferriss?

  Or if they have sensitivity to that stuff, which I do and have for a very long time.

• 1:24:21Susan Cain?

  But so did mindfulness for many years.

• 1:24:23Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. But I mentioned that, I mentioned that as a contrast to my then subsequent experience with loving kindness meditation, also called meta, M E T T A meditation, which I was introduced to not first by Jack Kornfield, though I did spend some time with him, who's sort of of the same cohort as Sharon Salzberg. I mean, they're, they're close friends and Sharon's been on the podcast. But Meng, Chad Mengtan of Google, actually, who started this class within Google called, I think it's Search Within Yourself. It was a course that included many tools, including mindfulness. And he has a book called Joy on Demand, which is fantastic. I thought it was a fantastic title. I was like, I could use Joy on Demand. Let's,

• 1:25:05Tim Ferriss?

  let's take a look at this. And there's a very short part in that book, which I ended up excerpting for, I want to say Tools of Titans, about loving kindness meditation. And he tells the story of this woman who, as an experiment guided or suggested by Meng, did a one minute loving kindness meditation on the hour, every hour for one work day. And she would, and she would pick people who were walking out of the office or so. And she came back and she said, that is the, that is the best day I've had at work in seven years.

• 1:25:37Susan Cain?

  Wow.

• 1:25:37Tim Ferriss?

  And I, I think part of that is, at least for me, that I am very, historically have been very trapped in my head. I'm very prefrontal.

• 1:25:49Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:49Tim Ferriss?

  And I come from a family of Warriors, people who are-

• 1:25:54Susan Cain?

  Warrior or warrior?

• 1:25:56Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, worriers.

• 1:25:58Susan Cain?

  With a "O"?

• 1:25:59Tim Ferriss?

  Not the battle axe type, but the Larry David type.

• 1:26:02Susan Cain?

  Yeah, I come from one of those two.

• 1:26:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right, and when you are consumed with worry or anxiety, and this is not my description, but it's been described to me as being trapped in the future. Right, like depression is being trapped in the past, anxiety or worrying is being trapped in the future. And it's also, at least for me, it's a focus on the self. It's like, me, me, me. It's all things that might happen to me, things that I should do. And the loving kindness meditation, which can be so short and have an impact, gets you, unlike most types of mindfulness practice that are popular or becoming popular in the West, it gets you out of yourself.

• 1:26:44Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:45Tim Ferriss?

  And I recall when I was writing Tools of Titans, I decided to take Mang's advice and I did loving kindness for literally two or three minutes every night. I was at this hotel and they had a dry sauna and I'd go into the dry sauna really late because I was doing my writing really late.

• 1:27:05Susan Cain?

  Right.

• 1:27:06Tim Ferriss?

  And just do two to three minutes of thinking about a friend and wishing them happiness and seeing them smiling and giving them a hug and having them smile back at me and wishing me the same. And it was transformative as regards, with regards to my mood. It was really just incredible.

• 1:27:24Susan Cain?

  Yes.

• 1:27:25Tim Ferriss?

  Low dose, really, really low dose.

• 1:27:27Susan Cain?

  And I'm curious, you mentioned that you were thinking about or meditating on loving kindness to your friend. Did you also start with a traditional practice of wishing it to yourself? Or is that less comfortable for you?

• 1:27:39Tim Ferriss?

  This is a great question. So I did not, it did not even occur to me to do this until years later when I-

• 1:27:50Tim Ferriss?

  Went to my first seven day, might have been 10 day, seven day, no, 10 day silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock.

• 1:28:00Susan Cain?

  Right.

• 1:28:01Tim Ferriss?

  And Jack Kornfield was there.

• 1:28:02Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:02Tim Ferriss?

  And I went in, they check in with you to make sure you're not having a total psychotic break for a few minutes every other day. And I had this meeting with Jack and one of his co-teachers for the event. And we were talking about loving kindness, talking about loving kindness. And as I was leaving, the woman with Jack said, just out of curiosity, have you been doing any loving kindness for yourself? And it struck, I don't know how to describe this in a way that doesn't make me look like an ass, but it just struck me as such a silly question. I was like, no, of course I haven't been doing it for myself. And then I realized how much that probably explained a lot of my problems. And she goes, yeah, you might want to try that. Why don't you experiment with that?

• 1:28:47Tim Ferriss?

  And, and I remember Jack later saying, you know, if, and I'm paraphrasing, but you know, if your compassion doesn't include yourself, then it's incomplete.

• 1:28:55Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:55Tim Ferriss?

  And that has become-

• 1:28:56Susan Cain?

  And you can't really give it to other people in a complete way either.

• 1:28:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So that has become probably, I'm so glad you asked that. One of the biggest changes in my, and I could call it a mindfulness practice, but my way of relating to the world and thinking about helping others has been actually taking time to show or think on self-compassion specifically for myself at a handful of younger ages.

• 1:29:24Susan Cain?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:26Tim Ferriss?

  Which I do at mealtimes. And I might talk about that more at some point, but yeah.

• 1:29:31Susan Cain?

  Oh, I think you should.

• 1:29:32Tim Ferriss?

  It's become really, it's become a very, very, very, very important ritual for me.

• 1:29:35Susan Cain?

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

• 1:30:15Tim Ferriss?

  It reminds me of this story I heard of this, I don't know what it was Nepalese or I know Buddhini monk who came to the US and he was in a car on the way to some event. And there were these, this was in the US and there were these people running, you know, jogging on the side of the street to get in shape, but they're just, they looked like they were dying. I mean, they looked like they were running from hyenas. And he was just like, are they okay? What's wrong with them? It was so foreign.

• 1:30:47Tim Ferriss?

  My goodness. So we have just a few minutes. Let me ask you the billboard question. So if you could put a message on a billboard, this is metaphorically speaking, to get a message, a quote, a question, anything, non-commercial out to millions or billions of people, what might you put on that billboard?

• 1:31:09Susan Cain?

  I think I'd probably put this one aphorism that I've loved since high school, I think, which is only connect by E. M. Forster.

• 1:31:18Tim Ferriss?

  Only connect?

• 1:31:19Susan Cain?

  Only connect. Yeah. Like that at the end of the day, that's all that really matters.

• 1:31:24Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean to you?

• 1:31:27Susan Cain?

  It just means connecting on some really deep level with the people around you. And that might sound like an ironic aphorism for someone who wrote a book about introversion, but to me, those are not contradictory things at all. You know, and so for me, like connection, it can happen in person for sure, but it could also happen just by listening to the music that's really touching you. And you feel completely connected to this musician who may not even be alive anymore, you know, or a writer who might not be alive anymore, but they're expressing something deep and unchanging about what it's like to be human. So those, I think there's kind of nothing more important than that.

• 1:32:11Tim Ferriss?

  Only connect?

• 1:32:12Susan Cain?

  Only connect.

• 1:32:13Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anything you've done that has helped you to?

• 1:32:18Tim Ferriss?

  More deeply or frequently experience those moments? Or any advice you might have for people who want to cultivate that?

• 1:32:30Susan Cain?

  Well, I mean, so aside from meditation, which I am a huge proponent of, but I think you really do have to pay attention to what works for you. And it really is so different for everybody. You know, so for me, I love to have deep one-on-one conversations. It happens through music, it happens through literature, and those, that's how it happens. But I think it really is a different answer for everyone.

• 1:32:55Tim Ferriss?

  Crazy person.

• 1:32:56Susan Cain?

  But I'll tell you, this is maybe a different topic, but

• 1:33:02Susan Cain?

  the whole idea for my next book came out of one of these kinds of experiences, which is, I have always had a love of bittersweet and minor key music. And the book's not about music, but I'm going to tell you this story anyway. Okay, so

• 1:33:23Susan Cain?

  when I was in law school, I was listening to music like that in my dorm and a friend came by. And he was kind of a funny, wise guy. And he said, why are you listening to this music to commit suicide to? And, you know, and I thought it was funny and I laughed, but I thought about it for decades afterwards. Like, I was thinking, well, why is it? First of all, what is it about our culture that makes this music so suspect? That you would make that kind of joke? And also, what is it about the music itself that for me is not suicide inducing at all? It's like, it's the opposite. I feel when I hear music like that, like completely connected to everything. Because it's like the

• 1:34:07Susan Cain?

  the composer is expressing some really deep truth about what it is to be human. And so, anyway, so I've thought about this for decades. And the place that I'm going with this next book is that I think that tuning in to the sorrows of the world actually is a kind of secret superpower that we're not really allowed to access very often. Because of course, we live in this culture that tells you, you know, don't go there and always wear the smiley face and so on. But, you know, if I can say, like, even look at somebody like you.

• 1:34:40Susan Cain?

  Even before you started being really open and upfront about some of the demons that you've struggled with, which, by the way, you know, like, all the honor to you for doing that, it's amazingly brave and generous. But even before you did it, and if you had never done it, I don't think you would have been touching all those people the way you have all these years if it weren't for those sorrows.

• 1:35:03Tim Ferriss?

  I agree.

• 1:35:04Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05Susan Cain?

  So it's all about that.

• 1:35:07Tim Ferriss?

  I'm excited to read your next book.

• 1:35:08Susan Cain?

  Thank you.

• 1:35:09Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's a really, really, really, really important topic.

• 1:35:12Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:13Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's really important. I think we'll have to do round two in that case.

• 1:35:17Susan Cain?

  I would love that. That would be awesome. I just have to write a little faster.

• 1:35:22Tim Ferriss?

  I will happily wait for your best work.

• 1:35:26Susan Cain?

  Thank you.

• 1:35:26Tim Ferriss?

  So no need to rush. Well, Susan, this has been such a joy, and I'm sure people can hear it, but just to maybe underscore the point, I mean, you are a very, you're a very present person when you're speaking with someone else.

• 1:35:46Susan Cain?

  Oh, thank you. So are you.

• 1:35:47Tim Ferriss?

  I can feel that in the room. And so you're walking the talk, which is always refreshing, and not always the case. So thank you for taking the time today.

• 1:35:58Susan Cain?

  Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

• 1:36:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:00Susan Cain?

  Great to hang out.

• 1:36:01Tim Ferriss?

  And I will link to everything in the show notes for folks, including the name of the Korean monk that I couldn't spell to save my life at the moment, but we will have links to everything at tim.blog/podcast. You can just search Susan, and it'll pop right up. People can find you online, presumably. Where are the best places to say hello, learn more about what you're up to?

• 1:36:26Susan Cain?

  Well, best thing is to sign up for my newsletter, which you can get to if you go to quietrev.com, which is for Quiet Revolution. So you'll find it right there on the homepage. There's a signup form, and there's a newsletter that goes out every week.

• 1:36:39Tim Ferriss?

  Great.

• 1:36:39Susan Cain?

  So that's the absolute best. And then I'm also super active on LinkedIn and on Facebook.

• 1:36:45Tim Ferriss?

  Great. And is that simply Susan Cain?

• 1:36:49Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, because I think Facebook, correct me if I'm wrong, I think is author Susan Cain.

• 1:36:52Susan Cain?

  Oh, gosh, thank you for saying that. Yeah. So on Facebook, it's author Susan Cain. And on LinkedIn, I actually don't remember, but it's part of the LinkedIn influencer.

• 1:37:00Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sure.

• 1:37:01Susan Cain?

  If you put in LinkedIn influencer and my name.

• 1:37:03Tim Ferriss?

  It'll pop right up.

• 1:37:04Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:05Tim Ferriss?

  And then Twitter may be less active.

• 1:37:08Susan Cain?

  Yeah, I am on Twitter, but a little less active.

• 1:37:10Tim Ferriss?

  But at Susan.

• 1:37:11Susan Cain?

  At Susan Cain.

• 1:37:11Tim Ferriss?

  At Susan Cain.

• 1:37:12Susan Cain?

  Yep.

• 1:37:13Tim Ferriss?

  And can't wait to see the next book and continue to follow your work.

• 1:37:18Susan Cain?

  Thank you so much. I will say the same to you. What is the next book?

• 1:37:22Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:38:03Tim Ferriss?

  for finding resolution for problems or challenges or insecurities or trauma that are, at least in current conventional practice, considered very difficult to treat or untreatable.

• 1:38:21Susan Cain?

  Wow.

• 1:38:22Tim Ferriss?

  So that would be, as far as I can tell, and I've been gathering notes for about five years now, that would be, that would be the thrust of it.

• 1:38:30Susan Cain?

  That's going to be your most important book?

• 1:38:34Tim Ferriss?

  I hope so.

• 1:38:35Susan Cain?

  I mean.

• 1:38:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36Susan Cain?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36Tim Ferriss?

  I hope so.

• 1:38:37Susan Cain?

  What's your timetable?

• 1:38:40Tim Ferriss?

  What's my timetable?

• 1:38:44Tim Ferriss?

  It's.

• 1:38:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, as, who was it? I think this was, this is something I heard on a, on a TV set once. They didn't want people to rush, but it was, the, the gist was, people need to rush. And they said, but they didn't want to say that and make people panic. So they said, we need everyone to move with purpose.

• 1:39:04Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:39:23Susan Cain?

  Oh, you'll write the whole thing first?

• 1:39:24Tim Ferriss?

  I'll probably do it on my own time.

• 1:39:26Susan Cain?

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 1:39:28Tim Ferriss?

  But it is, it is a top, if not the top priority.

• 1:39:31Susan Cain?

  Wow.

• 1:39:32Tim Ferriss?

  So.

• 1:39:32Susan Cain?

  So are you like working on it every day right now?

• 1:39:34Tim Ferriss?

  I am in some fashion, working on it every day, but it's going to be a while before I get to the, the composition prose stage. But the vast majority of the work that I do on my books is the experimentation and the traveling for subjecting myself to all sorts of unusual things and the note taking and the organizing of said notes.

• 1:39:55Susan Cain?

  Right.

• 1:39:55Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm doing some piece of that almost every day.

• 1:39:58Susan Cain?

  Wow.

• 1:39:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:59Susan Cain?

  Oh, I'm so glad you're doing this book.

• 1:40:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:02Susan Cain?

  So if I can help, you know, if you want an early reader or whatever, I would love to.

• 1:40:06Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome.

• 1:40:06Susan Cain?

  It's completely out my alley.

• 1:40:07Tim Ferriss?

  Well, likewise, likewise. This has been so much fun. And until, until next time, thank you so much.

• 1:40:15Susan Cain?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:40:16Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, same. Until next time, thank you for listening.

• 1:40:25Tim 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.

• 1:41:07Tim 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 fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 1:41:26Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on demand, which is what I do, we'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20 minute ride in my undies, hard to do that at the gym, take a shower and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country

• 1:42:10Tim Ferriss?

  on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on demand and you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip hop, rock and roll, or say low impact versus high intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers and I tend to do on demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over, but I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities so you can find what you're in the mood for.

• 1:42:51Tim Ferriss?

  You also get real time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time and that will help, I would say catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for Or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So check it out. Discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer.

• 1:43:37Tim Ferriss?

  Go to onepeloton.com, that's O-N-E Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com, and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So get a great workout at home anytime you want. Check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by LinkedIn. The right hire can make a huge impact on your business. The wrong hire can crater your business. And I have seen example after example from thousands of my readers at a minimum, where they've told me stories of how finding the right person at the right time,

• 1:44:22Tim Ferriss?

  and in some cases, not even asking, "What should I do?", but asking, "Who should I find?", because that person can help me determine what exactly to do more intelligently. And I've had a chance to hire two such people in the last year. And that has just made my business take a quantum leap forward and my complexity in my personal and business life get cut dramatically. And this type of simplification cannot be overvalued. We think a lot about hiring and I think a lot about hiring and it is a skill that I've had to learn. It is important to find the right person, but where do you find that person? You can post a job on a job board and hope that that right person finds your job,

• 1:45:04Tim Ferriss?

  that they are on the internet, happening to scan something here and there and then find you. But, think about it, how often do you hang out on job boards? The answer is probably not very often. So don't leave finding someone great to chance when you can post your job exactly where people go every day to make connections, grow in their careers, and discover job opportunities. That is LinkedIn. Most LinkedIn members haven't recently visited the top job boards, but nine out of 10 members are open to new opportunities. And with 70% of the US workforce on LinkedIn, posting there is the best way to get your job opportunity in front of more of the right people. And you can be very, very highly targeted and specific.

• 1:45:46Tim Ferriss?

  People who are qualified for the role you have and ready for something new. This is where you find them. It's the best way to find that person, that key person who will help you grow your business. And this is why a new hire is made every 10 seconds using LinkedIn. That's bonkers, every 10 seconds. So head to LinkedIn.com/Tim and get $50 off your first job post. That's LinkedIn.com/Tim, T-I-M, to get $50 off your first job post. LinkedIn.com/Tim. Take a look. Terms and conditions do apply.