REPLAY: Derek Sivers On Life Advice, Writing and Entrepreneurship (BONUS EPISODE)
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Deep Dive featuring the one and only Derek Sivers. Derek, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, Ali. Nice to finally... We have never talked virtually. We have only spoken in person in Cambridge. Exactly. Yeah. That was so weird because normally when... If I reach out to someone that I kind of admire on the internet, it's always like a virtual conversation. But the first time we met was actually in real life, which was... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So I wonder if you might be able to, if we might be able to start, if you could just give us a quick introduction to kind of who you are and what you do, if that kind of makes sense. Sure, that kind of makes sense. Who I am?

The background in a minute or less. Let's try that. Sounds good. My whole life, ever since I was 14, all I wanted was to be a successful musician. So I was completely obsessed with being a successful musician. That's all I did.

until I was 28, 29. And I had kind of achieved my dreams for the most part. I've achieved some pretty good success in music and bought a house with the money I made making music. And then I started a little hobby website to sell my CD called CD Baby, but it totally took off and became the largest seller of independent music on the web from 1998 to 2008. And

In 2008, after doing it for 10 years, I felt done. So I walked away, sold the company and have just been an author, writer, speaker, pop philosopher guy since then. How's that? That was pretty good. So thank you. Thank you very much. So I first I first heard about you through when you were on Tim Ferriss's podcast for the first time, which would have been like years and years ago now. Can you can you remember when that was?

That was December 2015. Yeah. Yeah, it must have been. Yeah. So that was ages ago. And then you had this book, Anything You Want, which I often list as one of the three books that's most changed my life. So kind of, again, thank you very much for that. It's strange to me that I know people that have wrestled with books for like 10 years, you know, their PhD thesis kind of thing. And that little book I wrote in 10 days and it was just effortless.

I didn't think anything would come of it. It was just Seth Godin asked me to share my lessons learned and I,

spit them out into 80 tiny little chapters. And he published it like two months later, and I didn't think it would go very far. So it's nice to see how it's traveled. Yeah. And I think that's like one of the really kind of, so initially when I first read the book, it was sort of, it's subtitled 40 lessons for a new kind of entrepreneur. And I got a lot of kind of life advice, but also kind of business advice from it that I really needed at the time. But now kind of when I reread it, I see it more as an inspiration for

Essentially, how doable it seems to write a book. Good. Well, it's... Yeah, you know, some people think that writing a book is a big, serious thing. It's got this history behind it, these legends of writers going off into the mountains to sweat blood into the pages with their quill pen dipping into their veins and burning their soul onto the pages. But...

I think it is so much better to not think in terms of a book, but to think in terms of ideas that you want to share. And then each core idea, you just make that one article per idea and never more than one idea per article. Like if you've got a second idea, you need to make that a separate article. Think in terms of articles.

And then, most importantly, you share the articles in the public as you go. So then you're also not making this situation where all of your writing and all of your ideas kind of kept jailed until finally it's released. Instead, one idea at a time, you can put it out into the world and air it out. And there's something that happens when the public encounters this one idea at a time

They might ask a few questions that you never thought of. And so now you can continue to develop that idea before it's permanent inclusion in a book. And then the big idea is, I mean, I shouldn't use that word twice. Then the plan is that when you've got all of the ideas that you feel make this book, then you kind of wrap a bow around it, call it a book as this collection of articles. Now you call them chapters instead of articles. And you've got a book. And that is so much easier

and I think it's a healthier process than thinking I need to go write a 300-page book and this is going to take a long time. Oh, yeah, that's interesting because for the last year or so, I've been kind of toying with the idea of writing a book, but I...

I think I've fallen into this trap of considering it like a big deal with a big B and a big D. And so in my head, I've got it like, okay, so first I need to spend a few months just preparing the outline. And then I need to spend a few months in the planning stage. And then I'll set my own funeral. Exactly, yeah. And after I'm dead, they will release it. Absolutely. Yeah.

So actually, a couple of days ago, I sort of made a commitment to myself and I posted about this in my email newsletter that I was going to write a thousand words every day. And so far for the last three days, I've been writing a thousand words every day. And just kind of having a low bar for the things that I'm writing has made it actually pretty easy. Like it takes me 20 minutes just at an iPad or at a computer to just kind of type away and

then a thousand words comes out. So I've been thinking that, hey, this would be a good time to get on with that book. So I really like the way of thinking about it as one article at a time, just like one key idea. Yeah. It also presents the ideas better. I often feel bad when I'm reading a brilliant 350-page book that has a brilliant idea buried in page 293. And I know that hardly anybody reads that far in a book.

I think like what, 5% of the people that buy a book actually read the whole thing, right? So the number of people that are going to make it to that brilliant idea buried near the end of the book are so few that I feel bad for that brilliant idea. And I think that that's where I came up with this desire or this rule for myself to just put one idea per article and make sure that that's out in the world so that each idea gets a spotlight. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And

I wonder, so these days I've made a few videos on YouTube where I'm talking to people about how to build an audience, for example, online. And the thing that I've been saying, as everyone does, is just put stuff out publicly and put it out for free.

But I've had a few people saying that, oh, what if, for example, you want to release a course further down the line and someone is plagiarizing your stuff? As someone who puts a lot of stuff out into the world and you're recommending we release sort of chapters of this book as we go along, how do you think about this fear that some people might have that people might, I don't know, pirate your stuff, essentially? Yeah.

There's always an excuse to not do things right. Like, I'd love to travel around Asia, but, you know, what if I get diarrhea? What if I get lost? You know, it's like everybody's got the what if this, what if that's that they use. It's some rationalized excuse for not doing something. But I think you just have to have a certain confidence that you're

Not just confidence, but you can actually look at so, so, so many public examples where authors have shared the fact that releasing their book for free, even as a complete book, actually boosted sales. Releasing individual articles from the book, I think, boosts attention and sales. Even the way that I think of my books these days, at least, you know, my next three books, is that the contents are all

on my site for free, but you'll have to click 90 different times to read 90 different articles, or you can spend $7 and lay down on the couch and read it. So I'm just confident that most people are probably going to spend the $7 to lay down on the couch and read it in one go instead of clicking 90 times, because I know that that's what I would want too. I've bought some books by Seth Godin

um including one of my favorite books by him called small is the new big where it really was just a compilation of articles from his site and yes i could have read it all for free with 130 clicks but i'd rather just spend a few dollars and read it you know it's not a it's not a 200 thing now if somebody's talking about a course if you're hoping to sell a 200 course someday

I can see there's arguments that maybe you shouldn't put the entire contents of that course online for free if you're hoping to sell it for a high ticket. But, you know, books are pretty cheap. Excellent. And I think that brings us on nicely, too. So you're working on three books at the moment. I wonder if you could kind of tell us a little bit about those. And also, I'm curious about your setup for writing the books, because like online,

on this channel, I like to talk a lot about favorite apps and all that kind of stuff. And I feel I fall very much into shiny new toy syndrome, whereby when I decided that I was going to start writing, I spent hours and hours trying to figure out, do I use Notion or Roam or Evernote or Ulysses or Bear or Scribner or all of these different things? And then I sort of realized, hang on, wait a minute, this is not legit. So I wonder what your thoughts are about that. I only use plain text. I use no apps. I write everything in a Linux

terminal, looking like an old 70s Unix terminal, using an old 70s text editor called Vi, which I just type in plain text in the terminal entirely offline. Oh, wait, I don't know if I said this already, but I think writing offline is my biggest productivity hack. My biggest productivity tip is that when you have said it's time for me to write now,

Actually go over your broadband modem and power it down. Cut off yourself from the world. Go to your phone. Hold down the two power buttons for the whole three seconds until it goes completely off. Turn it off. Make it so that you cannot go online. And then you write. And as you're writing, you'll have those moments where you think, oh, I need to look that up. And we all just have this habit of

of constantly thinking we need to research something, we need to look something up. Like, yes, I'm writing, but oh yeah, what year was that that, you know, the Titanic sank? Let me go look that up. But now you've fallen down a rabbit hole and now you're not writing. So I find instead,

to stay offline and when you think you need to look something up, just add it to a to-do list somewhere else, a separate file called research, and look up those things later when you're back online. What's funny is how many of them just disappear. You didn't actually need to research that. You can get to the point you were trying to make without finding the year that the Titanic sank or whatever it is. Or if you really, really need it later, you can look it up later when you're online. So yeah, my biggest tip, go offline.

As for the apps, I personally see apps as the enemy. I'm using this old text editor from the 70s, like I said, and it works. And I type my words into a terminal and it saves them as plain text. And that's all I need. Whenever somebody says, you need this app, you need to organize your thoughts with this. No, you don't. People wrote with typewriters and pieces of paper fed into typewriters for 100 years. Before that, they used a pen and a stack of paper for hundreds of years.

Just the fact that you have a word processor that can paragraph and move it somewhere else is amazing. And any plain text editor does that. What I like about not using apps too is I really like to think super long-term and equipment agnostic. Like 20 years ago, I was a Mac guy. 15 years ago, I was a Windows guy for a little bit. 10 years ago, I switched to Linux.

Six years ago, I switched to OpenBSD. I used to use Android for a few years. Just last year, I switched to Apple for the fun of it. I might go back to Android. I like the fact that I've been editing my plain text files on all of those platforms. I'm not tied to any...

piece of overpriced hardware. I can switch at any time. Even new things that haven't been even invented yet. New technologies will come out and they will read plain text files because everything does. I'm not sure that they're all going to read Scrivener files or whatever, you know. So I see apps and that desire to find apps as the enemy of productivity. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah, I think that's a lesson that I definitely need to

take more to heart. And I find that kind of these days, I've been getting all sorts of emails. This morning, I had one from someone asking, hey, do you have the MX Master 1? Or do you have the Series 2? Or do you have the Series 3? I'm looking for a mouse. And I was kind of thinking that, I mean, I've got the Series 1, but it really doesn't matter. It's a mouse. It kind of does the job of a mouse. Yeah. Before we leave this point,

It's interesting. I heard an interview with Seth Godin. Sorry, his name's come up like three times in a few minutes. Somebody asked him, like, what tools do you use to write? And he goes like, no, I'm not going to answer that. He said, because here's why. It's you're going to look for some excuse to buy something thinking that because I use this, maybe you should use that. No, stop it. Just use whatever you have. It doesn't matter what you use. Don't blame the tools. Also in a book called, I forget what book it was called, but there was a book that, uh,

it said that real professionals don't hide behind their tools he said show me somebody with the fanciest newest top-of-the-line computer using that to make their art and i'll show you a procrastinator he said the real professionals are just using whatever's around it doesn't matter they've got something inside them that needs to come out it'll come out using whatever's here um it's the amateurs that try to nerd out about their tools

And they kind of kind of like the people that when you see them cycling and they're like the fanciest titanium bike and they're all covered in this latex thing and all this accoutrement. It's not necessary. Some people just really like to nerd out on things and get into it as like a hobby fascination. But that's it's all a distraction from really doing the work. Sorry, you're hearing a common theme here. I just think all these things are they're obstacles. Obstacles.

They're distractions. The Internet, the Internet itself. I shut off the Internet. I try to eliminate all distractions, all obstacles, all of this nonsense that's not necessary. And always think in terms of like the minimum necessary thing to just do my work and then shut up my brain that thinks it needs to find something new.

Yeah. Um, my favorite, uh, kind of line, uh, on, on this theme is I think, uh, I heard that Stephen King was once asked in a Q and a, uh, which pen do you use to write? Exactly. Big rant about how bad it's not about the pen. Exactly. Perfect example. Yeah. Um, so you're working on, on three books at the moment. I wonder, can you give us any sort of sneak peek about what, what they're about and how we might kind of, uh,

Have you got like a mailing list or something that we can join if you want to? Yeah. Yeah. It's fine. I didn't, I wasn't planning on talking about them. They're not, they're not out yet, but yeah, it goes like this. Two years ago, I finished writing a book for musicians called your music and people creative and considerate fame.

But what I love is that my non-musician friends that have read the advanced copy say that they think it's a great book about marketing and communicating in general. So it's written to musicians, but kind of like when I was a musician, I read a brilliant book called The Inner Game of Tennis that was just about your performing self versus your over-analytical self. And even though it was about tennis,

you could apply its lessons to whatever you're doing, in my case, music. So now I've written a book about music, which people can read metaphorically about creative and considerate fame in whatever you do. So then my second book is called "Hell Yeah or No,"

which is just a collection of my best 80-something articles from the past 10 years, which I found had a common thread around the subject of what's worth doing. So that's why the Hell Yeah or No subject and our title and the What's Worth Doing subtitle. So those two books are done and

I was giving a sheepish look because like they were supposed to be on sale two months ago, but I'm still like tweaking my store where I'm selling them because I'm building my own store because I'm a nerd like that. So any old day now, those two books will be ready. So yes, you can go to Sivers.org and get on my email list, which is just a private list that I don't spam or anything. And I will tell you when they're ready. And then my third book is called How to Live.

And that is the one that I'm still writing right now and I'm so damn excited about. It is, I don't know, do I need to describe that? Maybe not. No. It's looking at 27 radically different one-sided arguments on how to live and one succinct conclusion.

Oh, that's, that's all I'll say for now. That sounds very intriguing. It's so exciting to write. It's like, it's one of those things, like while I'm writing this, I'm like, you know, in the solitude of my writing room, just shrieking with excitement sometimes because it's so much fun to write and I can't wait to finish it. No, I can, I can imagine. I can't, I can't wait to read it. The thing that kind of fascinates me about

the way that you're approaching these books is the fact that you're like coding and building your own store. And that's like, there was like a bit from this book that really resonated with me. It was about how, I think the line was that if you sign up to run a marathon, you don't want to get a taxi to take you to the exit. And I think that sort of thinking is probably an action here with you building your own store. Yeah.

Yeah. I met a tailor in London. Not only makes clothes for other people, but he makes all of his own clothes, too. And it's funny because when I met him, he was just wearing what looked to be a normal polo kind of shirt. And as he was talking, he said, you know, look at this shirt here. He said, I made this one because most polo shirts don't have this kind of color. I wanted this kind of color, but with a polo. So that's why I made this shirt. I was like, wow, this dude even makes his own shirts like everything he wears. He made it.

Is that efficient? No. But this is what he loves to do. And there's more to life than efficiency. Sometimes you do things just because you love doing them. And I'm just very process-driven. I do things for the doing, not for the goal. There have been many projects that I've finished 90 or 95 percent and then just shut it down because I finished the fun part.

And the actual launching didn't matter to me. So I sometimes just shut things down before finishing them. But no, I will release these books. But yes, I've thoroughly enjoyed not just making a story, but also the book is translated into 25 languages. And I built a whole translation system to manage all the translators. And every sentence in the book is saved in a database on its own sentences. So now I can look up any English sentence I wrote and see that sentence in 27 languages, which really helped when I had to make an edit to the book and I had to cut out a paragraph.

If my system wasn't like that, it would have been really hard to find that paragraph in Arabic and that paragraph in Chinese to cut out. But because it was mapped per sentence, it was easy to do. It's going to be fun for learning languages later when I'm learning Portuguese or Mandarin or whatever to use my own sentences for language learning. But yeah, I had something like 165 different translators kind of crowdsourced and working on this and 55 editors and

100 reviewers, and I built the whole system to manage the translation of the books.

And that was fun. And so now I'm putting the finishing touches on the store. And what's fun with that is I get to do some things that you can't do at Amazon, for example, custom dedications. So if you buy the book from me, you ask me how you'd like to dedicate it, you know, to the coolest guy I ever met, Ali. That'll be the first page of the e-book, you know, to the coolest guy I ever met, Ali. Or whatever you ask me to put in as a custom dedication, Ali.

And then I got so excited realizing, wait a second, I can do that with the audiobook.

I can make it so if you buy the audiobook from me and request a custom dedication, I just turn this mic on, say for three seconds, like, you know, hit record to the coolest guy I ever met, Ali. Send. Upload it to my server. It merges it with the master way file of the audio, compresses it into an MP3, and now you download it in the intro to your audiobook. It's my custom dedication. And that stuff excites me so much more.

than just putting it on Amazon like every other person does. I really like this

punky kind of do-it-yourself we don't need the man kind of ethic so that's what i'm doing yeah and i think you were saying in in another interview that this is it's sort of like the era of the internet that you grew up in where it was very much about sort of individual sort of creators before creator was even a word um kind of putting stuff together sticking it to the man man as it were

Yeah, it was specifically in music. Like in 1994-95, when I first got online, the independent... Actually, no, sorry, it was more like 98-99 when MP3s became a thing. 94-95 was still exciting because the internet was so new. It didn't even have graphics at first. It was just text, but that was just exciting in itself. You were connecting with people around the world. But then when MP3s really became a thing in 1998-99...

That was super exciting because then every musician went, "Oh my God, I don't need to sign my life away to EMI or Warner Brothers or whatever."

I can just distribute my MP3s directly to my fans or just use the Internet to sell my CDs directly and mail it to them. Like, I don't need a record label. I don't need distributor. We don't need record stores. I don't need a publisher. It's like, wow, I don't need to sell my soul anymore. This is amazing. Self-distribution. It was like a huge revolution. And I was so happy to be right in the middle of all that.

It was just like this renaissance, this blossoming of entrepreneurial spirit. And everybody was doing everything themselves. And it was so cool. And then, yeah, like 2007, Facebook started to get more popular. Things started to get more centralized.

and it kind of started to feel corporate and icky to me so yeah i don't care if what i do is unpopular uh it really makes me happy to do things myself with this kind of do-it-yourself ethic yeah and like again so it it's gonna sound a bit weird but like it's it seems like with a lot of the things you say i think oh yeah that i i came across a variation of that idea in the book and one of the ones that just came to mind is is this other quote that i think about a

The only point of doing anything is to make you happy. Therefore, just do what makes you happy. Yeah. I mean, yes, profit's important in a way, but even profit, the reason you want profit is to be happy, right? So when you do what makes you happiest,

it puts fuel in your tank. It just gives you that go power. It makes you excited to get up and do things. If you're just trying to optimize everything for maximum analytical blah, blah, blah returns because somebody tells you this is what you should be doing, yes, it may be optimized, but it can be depressing. You find that you don't want to get out of bed in the morning. You're not excited about what you're doing. I just think whatever excites you the most

is what you should probably be doing. - Yeah, yeah, and I think like, so often I get asked a lot of questions about kind of from students struggling with productivity or like, you know, how do I maintain the motivation to do the thing?

And they would see kind of the stuff that I'm doing on the internet because I'm a doctor by day and I do this YouTube stuff in the evenings. And they say, like, how do you have time for all of this stuff? And I always kind of find it quite hard to answer because in general, I don't really ever do something that I don't want to do. I just kind of, like, in every moment, I'm kind of doing what I most want to be doing at the time. And so, I don't know, it's a difficult thing.

thing to be able to kind of answer that how do you force yourself to do something that you actively don't want to do yeah exactly i mean well sometimes we have to sometimes you have to push yourself through doing something you don't want to do and as for i don't know what you do i just i literally will yell i'll just yell at nobody i'll yell at nothing i'm like no i don't want to do this kick the floor and i'm like i'll get some caffeine i'm like and then i'll just do it and i was like i don't feel like doing this but it needs to be done here we go but those you know that's like

a few minutes per week or maybe a few hours per week tops. And usually the,

if we can personify the muse as inspiration, usually she'll come to meet you halfway, you know, like when you sit down to do something, even if you don't want to do it, it's just that initial thing, like jumping into a cold pool. Once you're in the pool, it's usually all right. You know, it's just cold for the first 10 seconds. Once you're in it, it's like, okay, this is, this is actually all right. But damn, that first 10 seconds really sucked, you know? Um, so yeah, the inspiration meets me halfway and then,

Yeah, I don't spend hours cursing and yelling. It's just those initial minutes when I have to get started. Okay. And so kind of a final point on the writing thing that I wanted to talk to you about. So I think...

There was a post on your blog, maybe a year or two ago, where you said something that I thought I disagreed with at the time, which is that you said that you avoid quoting from other people. And I know that almost any time, like if I'm doing an interview or if someone's, even in real life, often...

often I find myself being like, oh, you know, there's this guy called Derek Sivers and he's got this thing about how, you know, or whatever. Or, you know, I would quote from Seth Godin or Tim Ferriss or Gary Vaynerchuk. I've got this kind of long list of sort of mentors, lots of whom don't know I exist, who I quote from regularly. And I've always been a bit like, does the person on the receiving end really care that I'm quoting? But then I sort of feel that, well, I guess I probably should because then I can attribute the idea. How do you think about that sort of stuff? Yeah.

Okay, so first I did the exact same thing to a fault. And I would hear myself telling friends, you know, in this book called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, which, you know, I read it in 1997. It's a brilliant book about, you know, he's a Harvard psychologist. And I would go with this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, bibliography. Bibliography, that's a fun word to say. And then after my long bibliography, I would say the sentence is,

that I was trying to say. And after I heard myself do that enough times, I thought, "I should just say that sentence, shouldn't I?" The idea is not to hide the source, but just not to force it on someone that didn't ask for it. So I think of the metaphor of eating at a restaurant. Imagine if it was the norm that every time you went to a restaurant and you ordered a meal, it would come out to you and the chef would come out and say, "Okay,

What you're eating here, we got the lettuce salad.

from the Wilson's farm, which is about 30 miles down that way. Now we picked a lettuce and it came to us on a truck that was run by the Miller shipping company. Now these parsnips came from over here. Now we brought the parsnips here to our kitchen and back here and back, a man named Jeff is the one that chopped them up. And then the chicken came from this farm. You know, the chicken's name was Tracy and now she's dead. And you just be kind of going,

Can I just now I just I just came for this meal. I didn't need the whole history of where every ingredient came from. If I want to know, I'll ask you. But if I don't ask, you don't need to tell me the ingredients and the source of every ingredient in my meal. So I feel that.

metaphor applies with the ideas and the stuff we're sharing. Okay. And sort of if you're writing, how do you do it in the form of kind of writing a book? Do you kind of quote from it? Because I noticed you haven't got many quotes in here at all. So how do you think about it in the context of a book, for example? So this third book that I'm writing right now called How to Live is

If I was to attribute every sentence to its source, the page would just be littered with sources. So instead, with each idea that I'm tempted to quote from somebody, I actually go through a really deliberate process of adopting it. And again, I like this metaphor of adoption, that whether you think of it as adopting a child or an animal or whatever you want to use, like, I'm going to adopt this.

And now it's mine. I know that it originally came from somewhere else, but I'm going to fully embrace it as my own now. And I'm not using it word for word. And in fact, I'm going to alter it a little bit because I felt that Oscar Wilde said it good. But I think I can say it a little better or mix it together.

to my point a little better and sometimes i do get ideas from books that are a little long-winded and have a flowery sentence structure i don't like and i don't want to quote that exactly but i like the seed of that idea and in fact i'm going to mix it with this other idea over here and now the combination is my unique thing and in fact i've put some more thought into it so yes if anybody wants to know the source like the restaurant example i'll be happy to tell you the source if you want to know but i'm not going to force it on anybody so no um

I think I'm taking this as my, my new stance that in by default, I won't quote others unless you really ask me like, wow, that's a really interesting idea. Where did you think of that? And I'll say, glad you asked. It's from the boom and stumbling on happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Now I'll tell you, cause I know where everything came from. Musicians are the same way. Um,

Every idea, I mean, every melody, every note, every lyric, musicians usually got it from somewhere. They heard this Joni Mitchell and they mixed it with this, you know, Beck song and this, that, and then they mix it up and it comes out as their own thing. But they know what their sources are. But the combination comes out sounding unique. But if you really ask them to dissect where did you come up with this, they'll tell you. But yeah, you don't need to bother people with that if they don't ask. Yeah, and I think that...

that kind of takes us nicely onto another thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is music. So you've been a professional musician for much of your kind of early life. I don't know if you would still identify as a musician. I guess you're identifying more as a writer these days. Yeah. Up until a year ago, I still thought of myself as a musician. A year ago, I had a funeral for it. Oh, okay. Why was that?

Um, I was torn. Uh, every single day I was torn between writing and making music. My instruments were sitting in front of me and every day I was choosing to write and not to make music. And every day I was feeling bad about it until I finally just kind of had a, uh,

Actually, it's funny. I had a moment where it was more like sitting down and deciding to get serious about my music. Kind of like you with a thousand words, like I got to do this thing. I got to put in an hour every night to making music. Then my very first thought when I thought that was like, "But that's time I could be writing."

And then I was like, man, listen to yourself. Like, if you don't want to make music so much, why are you forcing this thing? It's like, because it's my identity. I'm a musician. And so instead I thought, well, what would happen if I gave away all my instruments to a good friend of mine here in Oxford that's a professional musician? And my first thought was like, that would be a huge relief.

And so I just tried it. First, I just called him to ask what he would think. I was just like, hey, Jeff, would you like my two guitars and my synths and my speakers? And he's like,

"Are you serious? You're talking about the Native Instruments Complete Control SD-VIII? You're going to give it to me? I was just about to buy one of those. Oh my god, that would be amazing!" And so I said, "Alright, that answers it. It's yours." And whereas I wasn't using it, he's using it every single day and loves it. It changed his life. And so, yeah, that was just six months ago. So that felt pretty amazing. But it definitely meant a little mini funeral for that identity of mine.

Okay, so that's very interesting. And this is kind of going off on a tangent from music, but this is kind of exactly how I've been feeling about being a doctor. Really? Yeah, genuinely. It's such a big part of my identity. And it's also very much tied up now in my...

I suppose my quote online brand that, hey, I'm a doctor who does this kind of other stuff on the side. But now kind of I've been a doctor for the last two years and I'm approaching. So from August, there's a very natural career kind of break where a lot of people will take some time out of medicine, maybe travel the world for a bit and then apply to a sort of further training program in whatever specialty they want. And so what I've been thinking is do like,

Is being a doctor really what I want to do long term or am I just kind of tied to the identity of it? And I just really haven't found a way to think about it, especially because I'm very early in the journey at the moment. I've only been a doctor for the last two years. And so at the moment, I'm thinking, I guess it's very reasonable to take a break and see what happens, like not hold the funeral just yet, but at least kind of give it a shot and see what life is.

Being unemployed is like and just being a citizen of the internet and then I often ask myself when I'm confused about what I Love doing I reverse it and I ask myself. What do I hate not doing? Like if I were to remove everything just give myself a big blank slate in life and just sit here and do nothing What would I hate not doing the most like what thing? Yeah, I find that a more useful question to ask but well, but that's tough because I

With something like music, you could say, okay, it's not going to be my primary thing, but I'll dabble here and there. I don't know if you can really dabble. I'll be a doctor as a hobby here and there when I feel like it. Stop in, see if anybody needs any help. I don't know. I don't know how that would look. Yeah, I think so. That's...

Interestingly, that's sort of the direction I'm actually heading with it. Especially in fields like anesthetics and emergency medicine and even general practice, there's a lot of people who now have what we call portfolio careers, whereby they would do medicine maybe two days a week and then run their wine business on the side for two days a week and then make some music on Fridays. And I think that is ultimately kind of a good direction to sort of aim for. Wow. Yeah, that's really cool.

But kind of coming back to the music thing, I think, so I've been taking singing lessons for the past few months. The whole lockdown thing has sort of put a stop to that. But I've been sort of dabbling in music since I was a teenager. And

I kind of want to get better at it. And I've been kind of dabbling with music production. But I think like for me, I'm falling into the trap of like, for example, with music theory. A few years ago, I happened to have a piano in my university room. And so I started figuring out chords. I mean, oh, I can play an Ed Sheeran song. I can play the chords and I can sing along and that works. But kind of through doing that and trying to pick up playing by ear, I sort of

I feel like I missed the boat on music theory and actually kind of knowing how to read music. So now that my reading of music is so basic that I get very frustrated learning, you know, the sort of grade one music pieces when I could be playing at a kind of high level by ear. As a professional musician or ex-professional musician, how important is music theory when it comes to kind of producing and singing and things like that? Music theory is like language grammar, right?

So if you were to ask a linguist, they'll tell you that there are about 6,000 languages in the world and only a few hundred of them have ever been written down. Most active languages, living languages in the world today have never been written. Therefore, most languages today have never codified their grammar and turned it into a book on grammar or certain lessons or rules on grammar. But most of these languages in the world

People learn to speak them well anyway without getting analytical about, like, well, is that a subjective term? Is that the conditional verb? They just listen and they speak. So I think it's the same thing with music theory, that music theory always comes later as kind of like the music version of linguists analyze what's been done, give names to things that people did intuitively, right?

so that they can turn it into a lesson and teach it to somebody else. But all of that is just later analysis and is absolutely not necessary, the playing or even the learning of music.

My best advice, if I see Marty be doing a version of this, is to make up your own, to analyze music, yes, to analyze your favorite music, but make up your own system for writing. Like the whole reason that we have the sheet music with the treble clef and the five lines and the dots and circles with the flags was to make universal standards so that you could

Mozart could write out his music and she music and hand it to a bunch of musicians that aren't going to be there with him, didn't have recording, and a bunch of people could play this thing that weren't in the room with him. But you're not going to be writing parts for cellists. You're just going to be doing this for yourself. So you can take your favorite song or each of your favorite songs and just make your own system for analyzing them and maybe just have some

Maybe you do it in an app. Maybe you do it on a piece of paper. Maybe it doesn't matter what it is. You just kind of notice and pay attention to the organizing of instruments, the layering. Sometimes I love listening to these arrangements where something comes in for eight bars and you think the song's going pretty well. And then something else comes in for the next eight bars and layers it. But then that thing at the beginning drops out, leaving only the second thing. And I'll enjoy writing this on a piece of paper just to kind of see it.

see the way that instruments are dropping in and out of the arrangement and seeing how they build and then where they all drop down. And then I'll imitate that in my own productions. I'll kind of use, I'll kind of abstract that lesson and for a different song, not imitating the original, but in my own song, I'll use some of these ideas for the arrangement. Yeah, you can just analyze a hell of a lot of things without needing to do any of the standard music, treble clef, note reading kind of notation and definitely without music theory.

I think just whenever you hear something you like, a certain chord, you go, ooh, ooh, what is that? Then you just stop and you poke around until you find that chord. You go, ah, I don't even know. Sometimes there are things that we don't even really know how to analyze. I'm very, very, very versed in music theory. I went to Berklee School of Music. I got a degree, a bachelor's degree in music. And yet, when I hear the song Lithium by Nirvana,

I'm so happy, cause today I found my friends, they're in my head. It's like D, F sharp major, B, D, B, B, B, B, C, D, A, C. It makes no sense. I have no idea what the hell he's doing. I don't know what kind of analysis you would put into this chord progression, but damn, it sounds so cool. And I don't know whether to call that the flat six or a key change or whatever, but it doesn't matter. It sounds awesome.

Yeah, all of this music theory is just a way to kind of turn things into workbooks to teach students, but you don't need that. Okay. Yes, I was watching an interview with John Mayer a few days ago, and he said something almost identical. I think he also went to Berkeley School of Music, and he was saying that when you're listening to a song, or for example, learning how to play a song on the guitar, don't just kind of memorize the sort of the

the fingering you know the the position of your fingers think about what that chord is and why they chose it and and then think about how other ways you can make that chord and he was saying that eventually if you do that enough you develop your own music theory and you don't have to kind of read a book about it like what even if it's a diatonic scale all this kind of stuff and he was saying that he didn't really care about music theory despite having gone to berkeley so i thought cool yeah yeah that is a good example especially on guitar i know i guess the piano too like

this idea of like this is a C chord but so is that third on top and so is that with the pinky and so is this and yeah it is good to do that and then go through chord progressions that you might have learned down at the bottom of the deck like any

beginner on acoustic guitar, yeah, now to play those up higher on the neck with the same chord progressions. Yeah, that can be a fun example. And then it also brings out different notes in the melody. Next thing you know, you've written your own song. That's what I love. There were some interviews with the Rolling Stones when they first got famous where Keith Richards and Mick Jagger said that they never even set out to write original songs. They would just play songs by their heroes and

And then just as they'd be jamming and playing, their own song would kind of tumble out. Like something would just tumble out of the mix that was somewhat unique that just happened accidentally almost. And that's how they would write songs, just by imitating their heroes and their own thing tumbles out. I think that's a fine way to look at it. Yeah. And I think one of the things that I love about kind of diving into music like this is that I think there are a lot of

analogies to sort of other aspects of life when it comes to originality. This is something that I used to struggle with a lot when making YouTube videos and when writing blog posts and things that, oh, you know, I feel like I'm not really saying anything that's original. But I love how in music, like an original song feels like it's sort of just a remix from different sources. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, the biggest...

pop songs of all time sound almost like nursery rhymes. They're so like do, re, mi simple. And you guys might have heard the story. Yeah, I'm always aware of the audience. I'm saying you guys, nobody, whoever's out there listening. That when Paul McCartney came up with the melody for the song Yesterday,

He thought, this is too good. Somebody must have written this. Like, this can't be original. And he went around singing it to everybody he could. Just like, you know, hey, John, yesterday. He said, what song is this? Everybody went, I don't know. He kept asking. He asked its producer. He asked musicologists. Finally, somebody said, I don't know it. And he said, I think I wrote this.

But it didn't even feel original to him. It felt like he had heard it from somewhere. But no, he accidentally wrote yesterday. It was called Ham and Eggs at first. Ham and eggs. And he came up with better lyrics later. Yeah, that's a good story. So

It seems like you're a pretty good singer. Were you born that way? Oh, yeah, singing lessons. No. Was this in my book? I think you know my book better than I do. I think there was some reference to how you had singing lessons. So I just wanted to kind of hear what your story was with singing lessons and kind of what the process of improvement looked like. I don't know if this story was in the book. I think there was a reference to my voice teacher. But no, I was a horrible singer.

At the age of like 14, 15, it was actually my guitar teacher. I was just like a heavy metal guitarist. And my guitar teacher at the time said, you're going to have to learn to be a singer because if you don't learn to sing, you're always going to be at the mercy of some asshole singer. And so I took that to heart and I was like, yeah, I think he's right. Like I had no desire to be a singer at the time. But then after thinking about that, I was like, that's right. I don't want to be at the mercy of some singer. I'm going to have to do this myself.

So I started singing and I was terrible. And dude, I took voice lessons every week or so, at least every month for 15 years.

And every single night I would go into a piano room by myself, a soundproof practice room. And I would go, I would sing my arpeggios, my scales. Then I would do tone practice. So it's like, God, this is weird to do. But you can pick a note like, Oh,

And then you go... So you experiment with your throat and opening your throat or tightening your throat or singing through your nose and getting different tones out of your voice. Which is still the thing I love about techno music. It's how they play with timbre. You know...

Like, that was all one note, but they're just bringing out the treble, rolling it back, cutting it off. You can do that with your voice, to just pick a note and sing that note in as many different ways as possible. And it'll sound terrible. You can imitate your heroes. Like, go sing somebody that doesn't sing like you. Well, first try to imitate your heroes, but then take somebody like Stevie Wonder. Try to sing a Stevie Wonder song like Stevie Wonder.

uh voice teachers will point out that singers like john lennon's things through his nose and paul mccartney sang through his throat and that's like anyway uh i nerded out on this for like 15 years but although i loved doing it and i was determined to be a great singer the whole time for 15 straight years everybody that would hear me sing would just kind of say like

dude, you're just not a singer. I hope you find a real singer someday, you know, because you've got pretty good songs, but you're just not a singer. And I was unfazed. I was like, I don't care. You know, this is what I love doing. I'm going to do it. And sure enough, after 15 years of trying, about the age of 28, 29, my last few songs I ever recorded before I accidentally started CD Baby, I really liked the vocals. And I would listen to it for the first time feeling like,

That sounds good. I like this singer. And yeah, now when I hear myself sing now, I feel like, yeah, after 14, 15 years of trying, I finally got it. So yeah, most people, it doesn't take that long. But yeah, I think you've got a good voice to start with. I think some of us, you can hear certain people have a speaking voice that's already pleasing to begin with.

Whereas, you know, if somebody really talked like this to begin with, they might have a longer struggle in learning to be a good singer. They're going to have to undo all this before, you know, if your speaking voice is good to begin with, you've got a head start.

Oh, well, thank you. That's very kind. So I've been taking singing lessons once a week-ish for the last few months, kind of pre-lockdown. And for the past couple of years, I've been posting on my Instagram. Occasionally, I'd get home from work and just bang out Hey Jude or something like that on the piano and sing along with it. And in general, people are just really nice. And this is

One of the great things about the internet, like everyone kind of thinks that, oh, if you stop putting stuff on the internet, you're going to get, you're going to be met with this open sort of hostility towards you and people coming at you. But like in general, people are just so nice and supportive. Like, oh, you've got a great voice. Oh, you're a great singer. And that was always really nice. But then occasionally I'd get like a couple of people being like, hey man, stick to productivity advice. You're not really a singer. And I would always be a bit like, like,

I know I shouldn't care, but I feel very imposter syndrome-y when it comes to music or singing, just because it's not a big part of my identity at the moment. And I was sort of thinking that, oh, well, I've been having lessons for the last six months and I don't feel I've improved. But it's very reassuring to hear that you had them for like 15 years before you thought that you were pretty reasonable at it. I do two hours a night for 15 years. I was driven. And so, yeah, it can take a while, but...

Yeah, I think you're doing the right thing by putting it out there. It also, it helps to remember that this is just something that you enjoy doing for its own sake, that it's process driven, not just a goal, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, that kind of reminds me, I'm not sure if it was you who said this, but it's this idea that occasionally goes around that you don't need to try and make a living from your hobbies because by trying to make a living from it, you're actually going further away from the art itself and much more towards the business side of things, which you might not necessarily want to do. Yeah, most professional musicians I know

only really spend one to three hours a day actually making music. The rest of the time is just spent managing their career. So I think it's actually the happiest people I know are the ones who make a living doing something that pays well and then do their art, whether it's painting or music or writing or whatever, just for the love of it and not trying to

uh make good money doing it that said you have to take the art seriously to get the full um enrichment of the happiness you know there's shallow happy and there's deep and sometimes deep happy comes from doing the more difficult thing so it's taking your art seriously even though you're only doing it at night yes release it to the world yes try to sell it but you won't be depending on it

for an income because you've got this other thing in the day that pays your cost of living. I think that balance is healthier. And like I said, the happiest people I know are the ones that have balanced those two things. Awesome. So we've talked about writing and we've talked about music a little bit. I wonder if we can shift gears and talk about making friends.

Now I got to say something. Do you remember when we first connected and you said, all right, hi, Derek, hi. And then I just kind of like sat here awkwardly for a second. We just kind of looked at each other for a few seconds of silence. It's because I was thinking of saying something. But then I was like, oh, we'll see if we talk about this. That you and I met, I think, probably a year and a month ago. Yeah, a year and a bit. Yeah. April last year.

I'm not just saying this because I'm talking to you right now. I would say I've said this to other people too. You were the coolest person I've met in a long time. And the first person,

A guy I've met in a long time where I thought like, I really want to stay better friends with this guy. That was a really cool guy. Like I didn't, we were talking into the night in Cambridge and I didn't want to leave. I was like, that was a great conversation. It's like, he's really, really cool. And I almost never add anybody to my phone. Even when I meet up with people, like I, we trained phone numbers, but I don't actually add them to my contacts. I actually like added you to contacts. I was like, we need to be real friends.

And yeah, I just, I liked you a lot. I was like, that's a really, really cool guy. So I think it's kind of cool that when you emailed me about coming on your show, that you said you wanted to talk about friendship because I was like, okay, not only do I have a lot to say about that, but how appropriate that is you asking me. So yeah, that was the awkward silence at the beginning of the phone call. Oh, wow. Well, thank you. That's, that's incredibly kind of you because when, when we met, I,

like really enjoyed our conversation, but I was so worried that I would come across as kind of a fan because I was like a huge fan of your work. And so I was really like, oh, you know, I really don't want this to become just like kind of like a podcast interview. Um, and,

And I was sort of like, throughout the whole conversation, I was having a lot of fun, but I was also like really overthinking that, oh, I don't know if he likes me. I really want to be his friend. And then at the end, when he said that, that you enjoy the conversation and that I should consider you a friend, I was like, that made me like so, so, so happy. And I was always like, oh, I'm not really sure if he was just being polite or if it was just like a... But so...

That aside, the thing I wanted to kind of riff on with you is sort of what does friendship kind of mean in your book? Because I know that you sort of consider yourself a citizen of the internet rather than a citizen of any one kind of location. And how does kind of making friends come into that? Well, first, we all know that

The word friend is too vague. It should have many subdivisions. And I think the French language has many more divisions I read, but there are, I feel like a recent lesson I learned is that just because somebody is smart and a good conversationalist doesn't necessarily mean that you're good friends. I think that to me, like the, the,

The real friends, if we can use that as the adjective to separate from acquaintances, it's the number one thing to me is emotional safety that I can have interesting conversationalists.

and good conversations with strangers. And I could meet a different stranger every day and have good conversations and kind of feel friendly with everybody. But there's this tight inner circle of people that you actually feel emotionally comfortable with, like that you could call when you're really down and you need to be selfish and say like, you know, I just really need to talk. And you will know that you feel safe to do that, feel safe to be not your best self.

That to me is like, I've been thinking a lot about that because I meet a lot of smart, interesting, cool people. And then it's always kind of sad or strange or something to notice then which ones don't turn into friends because it just stays at the interesting conversation level and doesn't get to the emotional safety level. But that's, sorry, that's, that's one side of your question, but there's, I'd say almost all of my friends are,

are people that have initially either reached out to me because they heard something I put out in the world, whether a podcast or read my article or book or something like that, and reached out to me because they found something I put into the world, or vice versa. A few of my best friends now are people that I reached out to them because I heard something they put out in the world, either like a book that I read and I loved, and so I emailed the author and I just said, like, that's brilliant. And then we trade a few emails back and forth and

But either way, whoever reaches out to who first, there's always that stage where in this kind of arm's length distance emailing, you get the feeling like this is a really cool person. And so somebody has to suggest like taking it to the next level. Let's let's talk on the phone. So that's my thing is I really like the phone.

My friends are spread out around the world, kind of like my five best friends are practically on five different continents, definitely in five different countries. And so the phone is crucial to me. So if somebody doesn't like the phone, then we're just not going to be friends. You know, I've met some people that were really cool. We stayed up into the night over drinks in a square talking room.

but then i stay like we should talk on the phone sometime they go oh i don't i don't do the phone i'm like okay well then we're only going to be you know c-level friends not a-level friends or whatever you call it um but yeah somebody has to suggest taking it to the next level like let's talk on the phone or let's meet up and yeah okay i have so much more to say about it sorry if you might need to direct the the topics a bit yeah so so on the i think i

I think that's a really interesting point that someone has to suggest taking it to the next level, right? Because I guess from all of our perspectives, of anyone listening to this, we all know that feeling of slight anxiety that you get when meeting someone new where you're like,

I want to be your friend, but I don't know if you want to be my friend. And then like it, it requires some level of vulnerability to sort of put out the suggestion that, Hey, we should, we kind of meet up outside of work or do you want to kind of chat on the phone sometime? I kind of get the impression that you're okay with it to kind of, kind of taking that, uh, sort of exposing, exposing yourself in that sense. Well, you have to, um,

At least from my American point of view, I know it's not the classic British reservist. You know, maybe nobody ever says that. But, you know, I'll tell a specific example. Actually, if you want, I'll tell a few quick, colorful examples. Yes. I shouldn't name people's names.

And somebody mentioned me in a tweet, and I said, that name sounds familiar. And I went and clicked and found out it was the person who wrote one of my Wood Egg books. I had a publishing company like six years ago, and it was somebody that wrote one of my books. But now she's living in Oxford, England. I was like, I live in Oxford. This is like a month after I got here. But she didn't used to live in Oxford. So I emailed and said,

Hey, I'm the guy that hired you years ago to write this book. I live here in Oxford now. Are you really living in Oxford? She said, yeah, oh my God, you live here? And I said, look, here's my local phone number. Let's meet up. And it turns out that she has kids the same age as my kid. And so we met up in a playground to let the kids play. And I had low expectations. I didn't know anything about this person except that I hired her years ago to write a book. But as soon as we met, it was just like,

"Wow, you're really, really cool." Again, sorry, it was like when you and I met. It's like, "You are exceptionally cool. I like you more than I like most people." And just something about her right away. And so we hung out for like an hour while our kids played in the playground and then it was time to go. And I said, "Hey, I really like you."

you're a really cool person she goes oh my god i'm so glad you said that she goes yeah i you know i feel the same way oh my god she said my husband and i like you know we moved back here from hong kong only a year ago we just don't generally meet anybody we like and she said i was having the same feeling about you like you're a really cool person i had no expectations i said yeah same here she goes okay i think we'll be friends yeah we'll be friends and uh so yeah that's actually her husband is the one that i gave all my musical instruments to um so uh

And then I guess if it was somebody else, I would tell the story about you and I, that I was coming to Cambridge to speak at a conference. Did I? I reached out to you, didn't I? I told you I'm in Cambridge. Yeah, so I think...

Around that time I released a video called three books that changed my life and your book was on the list and someone tweeted Sort of mentioning both you and me saying that hey Derek this guy's mentioned you in his video And then you replied to that tweet saying hey, I'm gonna be in Cambridge Do you want to hang out when I was like, oh my god mind blown right? Yeah Okay, so here's a good one somebody sends me an email and

saying that she really likes my book reviews on my site and that it's changed her life. And she admires the fact that I put my email out there publicly because she gets a lot of emails from strangers and she knows that if she were to receive an email like this, it would be weird too. And I looked at her email signature and she's like this famous Olympic athlete. And then I looked at her work online. I was just like, oh my God, your work is amazing.

And I read her bio and stuff. I was like, you're you're amazing. And you're like saying you're inspired by me. I said. And so with that case, I just emailed back and said, here's my phone number. We should talk. And she called me the next day and we talked for three hours that night and three hours the next night and three hours the next night. And it actually turned into like a full on romantic relationship for a year. And it just started because she reached out.

And then, yeah, my, my, another good friend of mine wrote a book that I absolutely loved. And so I just emailed the author, like totally on a pedestal, like, Oh my God, I read your book. I absolutely loved it. And he wrote back saying, Oh my God, I read your blog. How cool that you know my book. Wow. How did you get it? And same thing. I just said, let's talk on the phone. And so we started talking and yeah, we talked for a few years before we finally met up in person when we like, we're in the same country someday. And in fact,

I'd say two or three of my best friends now are people that we met randomly online like that, like just one of us encountering each other's work and have only talked on the phone for years. In fact, one of my top five best friends I've never seen in person and never even clicked the video button on our calls. It's just been an audio only friendship for like five years. Anyway, yeah, those are some tales, but it's...

I'm sorry, that was like really indulgent of me to go into those stories. But I think the point is that, yes, you should reach out to your heroes. Heroes is maybe to, you should reach out to people that you feel a connection with online and introduce yourself and say hello, because you probably have a lot in common. The reason that you were drawn to this person's work is because it really resonates with you. That means you're probably this

That person's kind of person, too, that you'd like to know or that that person would also like to know. So you just have to be careful not to put people up on a pedestal too much, because if when you meet in person, you are fawning as if they are something special and you are nothing, you know, that metaphorical putting somebody up on a pedestal. What you do by doing that is you put yourself below.

that person. And nobody wants to be friends with somebody down there. You want to be friends with somebody that you're seeing eye to eye with. So my advice for when you meet people that you look up to is to not do the fawning thing and just talk about anything else. Just talk about random surroundings and whatever. And that's where you'll actually connect more than the,

Yeah. Yeah. Now that makes a lot of sense. It doesn't mean don't say I love your book. You can say I love your book because that's just kind of like, oh, cool. If you love my book, you're probably a pretty cool person. But yeah, I've also tried not fawning when I was with people whose work I really admire. And because I don't fawn, then it became a real friendship with the emotional safety that I talk about where it's actually like, yeah, then it turns into a real friendship.

which is always more emotion-based than intellect or success-based. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, like, I'm curious, what's your...

What's your like and and this might sound a bit overthinking but like what's your process for like talking to people on the phone? Do you just kind of randomly ring them or do you do like text message back and forth? Do you schedule a calendly? How does it actually work? Because I don't do this phone thing very much Occasionally I'll ring someone up in the car and they'll probably be busy or occasionally get through to someone like I think oh I should do this chatting on the phone thing more often. It's quite nice. But like what's it? What's it look like?

I have such a strong opinion on this. I think it's funny that we all have these phones where we use so many of the buttons, except that one that's in the shape of a phone. Nobody ever uses that button. Everybody's scared of that green button with a picture of a phone on it. Yeah, I think, okay, I'm a little weird like this, but you ask my opinion, you'll get my opinion. You don't need to text somebody to ask if they can talk.

because the sound of a ringing phone is the inquiry asking if somebody can talk. And if they can't talk, they hit decline. You don't need to make it a separate ask. Can you talk? Can you talk? Just call. Um, granted that's after you have some comfort. That's after you've probably met with somebody. Um, yes, I think it is maybe polite the first time to text first and say, are you free to talk and then call? Um,

But there's really no harm in just calling somebody. It's just like getting a text. You can decline it. But I'm so glad you asked this because I have a great little story. And once again, I won't name names. A very famous Broadway musical writer is one of my best emotional friends. And I'm not saying that to...

named opportunity to impress but but because the reason we met is i bumped into him at the ted conference and i went oh my god you're the guy that wrote these musicals and he goes uh-huh and we just started talking and then it turns out that he knew cd baby and then we had a thing and uh we just had this great conversation for an hour and i said let's trade phone numbers so he gives me his phone number and for the next year and then the next half year

I just had him kind of up on this pedestal, like, oh, he's very famous and very busy. So I would do things like text, like, hey, are you free to talk next Thursday night? And I loved his reply. I think this is like by the second or third time I did that, he I mean, second or third time I did that. And yes, then we would talk or whatever. But after I kept doing that, hey, are you free to talk next Thursday night thing? He finally said, Derek.

I'm your friend. He said, call me at two in the afternoon or two in the morning. Wake me up in the middle of the night if you need to talk. Like, I adore you. I would love to talk to you in the middle of the night if you need to talk to me. I'm your friend. You're my friend. So don't never ask. Just call. He said, I adore you and would always love to hear from you. Just call. I thought, oh, that was really sweet. It was like one of the nicest things anybody's ever said to me. And

What's funny is I said, okay, deal. And then once I said deal, he started calling me at three in the morning. What's funny is I would often like be asleep. I didn't use to turn off my phone every night and I'd be asleep. And then it's like three in the morning, pick up. And it's like, Hey man, can you talk? I need to talk.

I'm like, yeah, okay, hold on. Give me a minute. I gotta get up. And then we'd have like a 90 minute conversation as he was like sad about something. And, uh, but I thought that was really sweet that, you know, there's three in the morning. It's like, yeah, that's a real friend. Um, yeah. And we need that. People are too scared to bring people into their inner circle. And yeah, I'm so glad you asked this stuff. It is such a fun thing to talk about that nobody talks about. We're talking productivity tips and all that. And nobody talks about friendship. Yeah. So, um, uh,

Me and my brother actually started this weekly podcast called Not Overthinking, where we talk about things like friendship and happiness. And how did we make friends in school versus how do we think about making friends now? And why do we hate networking events at school?

things like that and we were thinking that oh it would be love to have you on the podcast at some point to talk about friends because i feel like you would have some some good views about it and we we kept on thinking oh you know it'd be nice to do it in person we should totally go up to oxford um and then lockdown happened and we were like oh damn again so there's been all these kind of things in the pipeline where like we both really want to talk to you about about making friends but like so this the story that you tell about this guy's is really interesting because i think

I think it speaks to an experience that lots of us have where we feel one way about something and we just assume that other people feel a different way about it. Like, for example, if any of my friends were to just call me, I would be delighted to hear from them pretty much at any time. And if I'm in the middle of something like, you know, doing a live stream or filming video, then I'll decline the call and be like, hey, you know, what's up? But I would just love to hear from them at any moment of the day. Whereas even with friends that I've known since kind of primary school, uh,

I would feel bad about being the one to call them because I would just sort of think, oh, you know, this person's busy. They're doing stuff. Why did they want to hear from me? And I suspect that a lot of them would be like, oh, I'd be happy to take a call from you. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those kind of asymmetries where we like, for example,

Even though, for example, you gave me your number and said, hey, call me. We should hang out. In my head, it was like, oh, you know, he can't really mean that. He must be such a busy guy. You know, he's got this kid. He's writing his books. He's doing his stuff. You know, what's the kind of little old me going to... Yeah. It's just all very strange. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, we all do that. I mean, I think that's why I wanted to tell you that story and why I included the detail that my friend was this like famous Broadway musical composer. Cause it's like, yeah, I was intimidated and just felt that he's totally swamped. And you know what? Everybody's busy, but everybody makes time for the people that they love talking with, you know? Cause that's, it's rejuvenating to talk to people you adore and,

And you always have time for rejuvenation. Yeah, absolutely. So there was another thing that you mentioned at one point, which is weird like me. What does that phrase mean? I think a lot about Kindreds, the writer that's here in Oxford that wrote a book for me. When I told you that we almost instantly went like, I really like you. I really like you too. We had this really specifically weird thing in common where she said, why did you leave America?

And I said, have you heard the phrase burning the ships? And she goes, oh, my God, I was just researching the phrase burning the ships this morning. How weird that you're talking about that. She said, why do you mention it? I said, well, when I left America, I wanted to burn the ships behind me. You know, I said, do you know the reference? She goes, yeah, I know the reference. Do you know the story about burning the ships? No, I don't. What's the story? So we all know the saying burning bridges. We think about that burning bridges of the friendships.

The phrase burning the ships is when you make a drastic move to prevent yourself from retreat. And it's a reference to some Spanish conquistador or something that went off into South America and had maybe 100 men on his ships. And but when they arrived, they were like 10,000 Aztecs waiting to kill them.

they said we must not retreat from this he said send one of the men to burn the ships to show the soldiers we have to push forward we cannot retreat to the homeland um so yeah somebody went and burned the ships so they could not retreat and they won the battle whether that was for better or worse historically that's a separate story but yeah so the phrase burning the ships means to

to dramatically cut off your options as a treat and so that's what i did when leaving america 10 years ago and she had just been having a discussion with her husband that morning about burning the ships and because they had left hong kong and and um so it's like we instantly have this weird thing in common and she's like all my friends think i'm really weird for leaving hong kong it's like all my friends think i'm really weird for leaving america and it was like

It's like, wow, so you get why I did it. And we both had this thing of like, OK, you get this weird thing about me. And so weird like me to me means like it's a relief to know that there is this thing about yourself that other people find weird that you might have to explain to some stranger and feel in this defensive way.

struggle to explain yourself. But when you meet somebody who's weird like you, it's like, ah, what a relief. I don't have to explain myself to you. You get it. So that's just kind of sweet when you meet somebody. Yeah. Who has, you know, that the Olympic athlete that I mentioned earlier that we kind of like fell in love after a couple of phone calls. She's just like a absolutely like monomaniacal driven, ambitious person.

uh person like me and i've always been so weird that my friends are like dude relax just chill get a nice life balance work-life balance like uh-uh and it's like i met her it's like she got that thing and in fact she took it even further than me i was like ah it was such a relief to meet somebody else like i said something once about hanging out she goes

Hang out? You mean like people who sit on couches? No, I do not do this. I do not sit on couches. Life is too short. I was like, yes, you're so cool. I love this. Somebody who gets it. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah. The people who have kindred interests are weird like you. Yeah. Now, I've definitely found that as well. And I think that one of the things I like most about kind of dabbling in

other sort of areas, like when I started dabbling in music and started dabbling in like tech stuff and then the YouTube thing, is that you then have this sort of shared language with other people who are doing the thing. And so now, you know, almost any time I meet someone who is a YouTuber or someone who is into music or someone who's into tech of some description, we've got that sort of shared experience as like a thread that's tying us together.

And one thing that my brother and I often talk about is that, for example, in general, like we both find that when it comes to making friends, we are more instantly comfortable around each

other, around other ethnic minorities. And even though it's kind of not a big deal and we don't experience that much sort of, you know, outward racism and stuff, it's just that the experience of being an ethnic minority in the UK does in a way sort of give you some similarities and some shared experiences with other people who are ethnic minorities. Equally,

you know, I would always find that at university, whenever I'd meet, sort of, I was part of the Islamic society, whenever I'd meet someone from the Christian union, we'd just get on really well because, you know. Right. We talked about that. Yeah. So you've got this kind of like shared, generally religious sort of conservatism, even though they're different religions, but just that kind of vibe sort of has this sort of kindred spirits sort of feeling. Yeah.

Yeah, that's really cool. That's a good example. So on the friends theme as well. So you, my understanding is that you lived in Singapore for some time. But I think I've read on your blog, which I do a lot, is that you sort of,

didn't really care much about sort of, and this is going to sound bad, but in a non bad way, I didn't really care about much about engaging with the local community in Singapore. And you were more interested in sort of meeting people online. Like what, Oh, wait, no, sorry. It was, it was reversed. Singapore is where I did get deeply involved and was deeply interested in the people. Um, Singapore and New Zealand are kind of opposite to me. I love both countries, but for opposite reasons. Um,

In Singapore, I deeply connected with the people. The whole reason I love Singapore is for the people. The land itself is just almost a non-issue. It's the people. And then I went to New Zealand.

And I just fell in love with the land. I've never been so in love with a place before and felt so connected to a place. But it was probably also because it was just an antisocial time in my life because I just had a baby and I just wanted to be a very present full-time father that I was totally antisocial and not social.

part of the local community in New Zealand. So New Zealand people would ask me to meet up and I'd say no. In Singapore, everybody who wanted to meet up, I'd say yes. I met up with like 500 people one-on-one in Singapore, but in New Zealand, you know, three in six years. So yeah, anyway, but yeah, that's...

I'm sorry, I accidentally interrupted. I felt like I had to set the record straight that no, I was deeply interested in the people of Singapore. Okay, no, cool. So that was what I wanted to kind of ask more about because for the last few years, I've had this kind of thing buried in the About Me page on my website saying that, hey, if you happen to be roaming around Cambridge, drop me a message and I'll buy you a coffee. And through that over the last two years, kind of pre-lockdown,

I've met up with at least 30 or 40 people just like after work on random days. And it's just been really fun. And people often see that as like kind of weird. They're like, why would you meet up with random strangers on the internet? And I sort of think, well, why wouldn't you meet up with random strangers on the internet? And like even sometimes, you know, we'd meet up for a coffee, have a great chat. I'd invite them over to my place. We'll get a takeaway. There was one...

There was one time there was a student who was visiting the UK from America and we just end up, we were chatting until like midnight and he missed the final train back to London. So he just kind of slept on my airbed and kind of went out the following morning and my mum was like, what the hell? You know, this guy could have been anyone. And I was sort of like, well, you know, he went through the effort of finding this niche page on my website and emailing me. How bad can he really be? And you hit the key point. It's not like...

You're it's it's not like oh you like reddit. I like reddit. Let's meet up. It's like that's too broad Yeah, this is somebody who found your site and went to the about page So I think that shapes a lot of this conversation we're having about friendship, too It's like it really narrows it down in the world when you're talking about like people who have found You and what you're doing and something you're putting it out putting out there. I

And then went to your site and clicked the about page. Like, yeah, this is, it's narrowed down all the way. So it's almost like, yeah, it's very often at the end of the podcast interviews I do, I say like, look, if you made it all the way to this end of this interview, send me an email. Like if you listen to this whole conversation, I'd probably like to meet you. So yeah, I will say that right now, but that is the filter, isn't it? Like you've just listened to an hour and a half of me talking. So yeah,

Yeah, we probably have something in common we should meet. And especially in Cambridge, it's also not like you're in London or New York City or something like that. It's like if you're here in Cambridge, yes, let's meet. That's a double filter. Yeah, it's sufficiently out of the way that if someone kind of is missing London, they would kind of have to do an hour long train journey. And people have, which is always really like flattering, like, why would you want to meet me? But it's always been kind of really fun, kind of from my end.

Another thing I wanted to talk to you about is that we talked about this a little bit when we met in Cambridge. You're sort of famous on the internet for replying to every email that you get. How do you do that? Why do you do that? Because it would, for example...

As much as we both love Tim Ferriss, like, you know, you try and send him an email and you get this auto-responder being like, I'm sorry, I'm not replying to emails for the next 20 years. Don't try and contact me. Whereas you, you're openly like, hey, yeah, send me an email and we'll talk. Like, how does that work? How do you think about that? Well, first, it's just a matter of who you want to be in the world and how you want to be, you know, like Tim, my friend Ramit Sethi, they like this

"Auto responder, you can't reach me" thing. I don't like that. I wouldn't feel good about that. I wouldn't make a change in some other way in my life if I felt that I was so famous that I needed an auto responder. I would find a way to be less famous so that I didn't need an auto responder. I like being the guy that replies to every email. So that's first and foremost. Everything else I can say will rationalize that thing I just said. It's like, this is who I want to be.

But then the next thing is I get a huge sense of security. It's one of the, I get a deep sense of happiness from all the people I know around the world. And I have a system that I built. I built my own email client. So it's at its core, it has this database of every single person I know. And so every email that comes in attaches itself to this central database. And that's where I keep what I know about this person. So

I can get an email from Jennifer from 12 years ago. And as soon as I get it, it's like, oh, my God, it's Jennifer from Alaska. I remember this girl who emailed 12 years ago about thinking of majoring in music and asked my opinion on Berklee School of Music. And right there, I can see her past emails. Jennifer, good to hear from you again. What's going on? Did you go to Berklee? What's up? It can honestly just be...

deeply rewarding to see this email history and feel a connection with these people. But then I also love knowing people from around the world. So just like minutes before you and I connected, I checked my email one more time and there was like an email from some guy who was a

a metallurgist in Slovenia. And I was like, cool. I know a metallurgist in Slovenia now. And he like has a few paragraphs telling me about himself and like, how cool. In fact, some people who have heard of me through your show have emailed out of the blue. Oh, really? Yeah. And, um, you know, so I'm like, Hey, you know, this is me. I'm in Saudi Arabia and this and that. And, and, uh,

and I heard of you through Raleigh's show and I'm like how cool and you know we trade a couple emails it's like now I know somebody in Saudi Arabia if I were to ever go to Saudi Arabia someday I would look up this guy and so I do actually do that when I'm traveling if I go somewhere I've never been before you know hey it's my first time in Salzburg Austria let's see who I know in Salzburg you know hey Jens uh Derek Simmers I'm in Salzburg for a few days do you want to meet up um

Yeah, that's been really fun to kind of turn these random email connections into in-person connections. And yeah, I just get a lot of deep satisfaction out of these connections. And time taken, it takes me a couple hours a day tops to do all my emails, sometimes just 20 minutes. Sometimes when it gets really extreme, it can be 12 hour days where I'm just emailing. But it's exhausting, but it's all right. You know, it's worth it to me.

Yeah, so seeing the way that you reply to emails. I actually first emailed you after hearing about

hearing your thing on Tim Ferriss where you suddenly I guess sort of opened the floodgates to a lot of people to email you and I didn't realize this show was so popular he was just an old friend of mine I didn't know anybody listened to his podcast I'm like yeah you might email address yeah yeah just email me the 12 hour days dude I guess came out that was January 16 actually sorry it was Christmas 2015 and I'll never forget that because my next two months are

full-time, 12 hours a day, six days a week, or just answering emails from his podcast. My God. Wow. Yeah, because that was one of those people that emailed you and you sent like a really thoughtful reply. And I was thinking, wow, this guy, he must be getting thousands of emails right now because he's on Tim Ferriss' podcast and he's taking the time to reply to me. And so I kind of made it like a sort of an ideal for myself that I would also try my best to reply to

as many emails as I could. And up until a certain point, I was very proud. Like, oh, you know, I was replying to every Instagram DM that I was getting until it started to get super, super, super overwhelming. And it was like, it would be a full-time job to reply to these emails, which, you know, it kind of is for you when you get like a big, a big influx of them. So I think another thing I wanted to talk to you about is just this sort of the, the institution of life advice. Cause I,

Certainly when I first emailed you, I think it was, I feel like it was about this idea of hell yeah or no. But like, I imagine you get a lot of emails about, from people asking you for advice about certain things.

And I wonder how you deal with that. Because I get sort of a few tens of emails each day, and about half of them are like huge, long essays with someone kind of laying out their life story and sort of like bearing their soul to the email client and asking them for my advice about this sort of messy, tangled situation that they're in. And I sort of think that...

Part of me feels that there's no real right answer here. Another part of me feels, how on earth am I possibly qualified to comment on this? I'm just a dude who makes videos about productivity on the internet. How do you think about this? First for me, I think of them as writing prompts. So if somebody's asking me a question that I've already answered in an article somewhere,

I just keep my URLs handy and I just send them. I say, good question. Here's the answer. Read this. Let me know if you're still, if that helped. Or if I've read a book that specifically answers your question, I'll say, good question. Read this book. It answers better than I could here. Let me know when you do. So that handles more than half of them. More than half the emails I get asking my advice. I know the answer is in an article I've written or a book I've read. But for the rest, I take it as a writing prompt.

Sometimes I'll let emails sit for a week because somebody will ask me a question. I'll go, Ooh, that's good. And I, instead of answering in my email client, I'll open up a new text document and I'll think around the subject and might even spend two hours on it. But I'll take it as a writing prompt. And so basically I'm spending two hours writing what turns into an article. And then I post the article and then I send them the link to the article saying that was a really good question. Thanks for the prompt. Here's,

an article about that that I wrote inspired by you. And so you'll notice that there's it happens a few times in my articles that I say, like, somebody asked me a question and here's my thoughts. So I really like that. But here's the bigger idea behind giving advice is that it's always easier to give advice than to take it because you're not because you're detached.

from the person. You're seeing it from a distance. Whereas inside your head, you've got so, it's such a tangled mess of concepts in there that it's hard to figure things out yourself. But when you see somebody else's situation from a distance, you can see the overarching theme or you can see, well, you know, it sounds like for your situation, you should do this. And

Then by giving someone else advice, you're actually kind of being your highest self, right? Like you're giving the best advice because you're emotionally detached. The emotions aren't confusing you because it's just an email. And then I found it useful that then you can take your own advice when you find yourself in a pickle situation.

And yes, you're filled with emotions about this, but you can think for a second like, oh, if I were a stranger emailing myself asking advice, it would be easier to say what to do. I would say to do this. Therefore, I'm going to take my own advice and do that. So I find it useful to give advice because of this, because it puts you in your highest self and then you can take your own advice later. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like that's given me a lot of like confidence.

tips in the sense that I'll often kind of reply to email. So I've got a few like hotkeys now that I've set up to my most sort of answer to most frequently asked questions. And so for example, in YouTube comments, I will invariably get the question on every single video that what keyboard is that? Because it looks a bit weird and janky. So I've now created a hotkey to just post a link to that keyboard, just because I know like, at least 20 people will ask on every video. But the idea of

Thinking of emails as writing prompts, that's really good. And I suppose for me, like it could turn into an article. It could also just be a concept for a YouTube video. Be like, hey, someone emailed me asking this question. We've had a few emails about this. Here is what I think about what to do in the summer holidays before university. Don't start studying. Start learning interesting skills. Whatever my answer to that thing would be.

Do you ever get a sense of imposter syndrome in the sense of why do these people think I'm qualified to comment on this issue? Well, because I do it too. I have my heroes that every time I get stuck in a situation, I think, hmm, what would this person say? And sometimes I actually start to write an email saying,

to this person, to one of my heroes or one of the smart people I know that I think would know the answer to my predicament. I'll write the email, but then I'll think, well, I don't want to waste his time. So how can I make this as simple as possible? So then I'll simplify it. And then before sending it, I'll think, well, hold on. I know him pretty well. What will he probably say to this? He'll probably say that. So let me address this now to save a back and forth. I'll address that thing now that I think he's going to say now.

And so I'll add more to it. And then I'll think, okay, well, now what will we say?

I think actually I think I know what he would say to that too. So never mind, I don't need to bother him with an email at all. I'll just I think I think I've channeled him enough in my head now that I know what he would do. And so then I take his imaginary advice. Kim being I'm not even speaking about just one person. I'm just saying he but actually it's like, you know, a few different people that I would reach out to in different scenarios to ask what he or she would do.

So I end up composing this well thought out question and then just not emailing it. So when somebody emails me their predicament, I get it. I know how it goes and I'm happy to help because I've been in that position. Awesome. Okay. So a final thing I wanted to talk to you about is sort of a predicament that I've been having and I would like, I would love to hear what you're doing. And that is, so, um,

It's related to the idea of goal setting because it's all very popular. Set these goals that are smart, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely, something along those lines. And every business book, apart from yours, that I've been reading, talks about

the importance of setting KPIs, key performance indicators for your business and having like a sort of a five-year plan, a 10-year plan and a one-year plan, splitting that up into quarterly increments. And when it comes to, for example, my YouTube channel and like the businesses that kind of surround it, I've always felt a little bit uneasy about the idea of setting these sort of numerical goals because, you know,

what's the point of having a goal of, I want to hit a million subscribers by 2021. Things like that just seem a little bit pointless. And I'm not sure. I feel like a lot of that is the fact that I read this at a kind of like a formative time when I was first sort of, I'd, I'd been dabbling with business for a few years and then I came across this and a lot of the stuff in here seems quite like anti goals. So I wonder if that is still sort of your, your take on kind of goal setting and these sort of metrics. Yeah. Um,

Imagine you bought a car and somebody said, "Oh, all right, you've got a car. Now, we're going to need to optimize this gas mileage here. We're going to get you the maximum miles per gallon out of this car. Now, what you need to do, now always watch your odometer and while you're driving, you need to look at the ratio between the speed

and that this and now make sure you know what gear you're in fact you need to go manual transmission because sometimes you need to downshift even though it's you know and somebody could really nerd out about this stuff and tell you how to maximize your fuel efficiency and if they did that it would be hard to say that they're right like it's hard to find fault in somebody saying these things you'd think all right well that's a good point yeah i should be maximizing my fuel efficiency

But to me, it's missing the whole point of why you got a car. Like the reason you got a car is not to maximize your fuel efficiency or worry about how many numbers are on your odometer and try to make the odometer as high as it can be. You got a car just to get you somewhere. And that's it. And you don't need to maximize the process of getting somewhere. And

To me, a business is very often just a means to an end. You started a business because it's something you enjoyed doing or somebody needed help with something. You realized that you had a solution that could help people. You charge an amount that will keep it sustainable and make everybody happy.

And then that's it. It doesn't have to be super optimized. And so I think that all of this, you know, maximizing your return and analyzing every square inch of floor space and all that, it's missing. It's not wrong, but it's missing the point of why you're doing this thing. And then if you focus on that too much, you might find that your enthusiasm for doing this thing has been destroyed. Right.

And then you lose interest in doing it, and then you've really lost the whole point. And in fact, I'm going to make another music comparison with this, because there is a dreary, dreadful book out there called This Business of Music, or something like that, by Donald Passman. Sorry, Donald Passman. But his book's been around for like 20 years, and for probably 30 years now. For 30 years!

Every musician has been told you must read this book by Donald Passman. He's a entertainment lawyer that wrote this book about how to negotiate your record label contracts and the cross-collateralization clause that you'll find in your distribution agreement where they can hold back returns and returns. So many musicians have been told that they must read this book if they want to be a professional musician. And so many times,

I would see somebody that just, let's say, loved playing drums. You know, as a teenager, they loved this sound. They wanted to be John Bonham, and they got a drum set, and they practiced their ass off, and they play, and they love it. They love smacking the drums. They love letting out this physical aggression and keeping a rhythm. And then somebody says, you know, they put down the drumsticks, and somebody says, man, you're good. You know what? You could be a professional. You really need to read this book by Donald Bassett.

And they just find that every time they read it, they keep falling asleep. Sorry, that's why I keep doing this face. It's like chapter seven royalty agreements. And I've seen some musicians completely lose all interest in being a professional musician because books like this tell them that they need to care a lot about the cross collateralization agreement and their royalty contract and blah, blah, blah. But it's like, if that interests you, great. If you find that,

that this is draining your energy, well, then nothing is worth that. Like nothing is worth draining your excitement about something. So if somebody is telling you that, you know, you really should maximize your number of clicks and you should do A-B testing to find this and see if you can get the maximum number of ad revenue from the such and such, if that excites you, then it's worth doing.

And if it drains you, then you need to stop doing that immediately and just know that nothing is worth draining your energy. There's my take on that. Oh, okay. So that spoke to me in a lot of ways. Yeah.

I think, yeah, so one area in which I've kind of heard this from a lot of kind of advisors and that I sometimes think for myself is I've got a few online courses. I've got one on how to study for exams, another one on how to edit videos. But instead of selling them on my own website and charging...

and charging money for them, I put them on Skillshare, which is sort of like Netflix for online courses. And that means that if anyone wants to watch these courses, which are like sort of four hours long, they can just sign up to a free trial of Skillshare and then just watch it and then cancel the trial if they really want.

So I like the fact that it essentially lets people access the courses for free because then the information is out there. And I like the fact that I don't have to then... So the alternative would be to host them on my own website, to do the whole building an online course sales funnel, to get people into newsletter, to do this sort of drip feeding 25 emails in a row and...

I know. I just, the thought of that fills me with dread. And, and so even though I know I'm leaving money on the table by just putting my courses on Skillshare and then forgetting about them and moving on to the next thing that excites me, I'm definitely, definitely leaving money on the table, but you know, it's, it's profitable. It's very profitable. It's sustainable. It works. People can watch the stuff. Like I, the thing I'm trying to get okay with is like, it's okay. It's fine. I can kind of do the bits that make me happy and

forget about the optimization of the sales funnel. Right. One of the most powerful ideas to remember about goal is that goals aren't there to shape the future. Like not to sound new agey, and I swear I'm not, but like the future doesn't exist. The future is the name that we call our imagination. All that really exists is the present moment and your memories of the past. So a goal is only a good goal

If it makes you take action in the present. So if a goal excites you and makes you do something and actually changes your present actions for the better, then it's a good goal. If it doesn't, if it makes you sleepy or makes you dread something, then no matter how it's being praised, it's not a good goal for you. Goals only exist to change the present, your present actions for the better. That's it.

That makes sense. That makes sense. I have to remind myself of this often. You know, I very often will think of many different goals in my diary or in my head. And I'll often think that's a really good goal. Yeah, that's really worthy. I should do that. But then it doesn't make me take action. So I guess it wasn't actually a good goal. It was a good goal in theory, but not in practice. But then there are some goals that when I think of them, I actually like.

It was like I just took like a, you know, a adrenaline shot. Remember Pulp Fiction? The needle? Oh, yeah. She said something like this. Some goals do that to me. I like think of a goal. I'm like, oh, my God. Yes. Holy shit. Yes. I was like, yeah, OK, this is worth doing. I don't care if it's going to make money or not. That doesn't matter. Like this is worth doing because it's giving me this reaction. This is a good goal. Nice. Yeah. Like this is actually...

ironically, advice that I've given people over email, like I'll occasionally get an email from someone being like, hey, you know, my goal is to read a book a week for the next year, but I can't bring myself to do it. And I would kind of reply with, why is that your goal? Where did that goal come from? And I guess it sort of goes to that thing that it's, we are definitely our higher selves when we're giving out advice. And so in a way, it just kind of reminds us that we should possibly be following that advice for ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. So,

Thank you. That was kind of the list of things that I wanted to talk to you about. We could keep going for hours and hours. We'll put the Pulp Fiction needle in the chest. Yes, absolutely. So again, thank you so much. And thank you for continuing to inspire me and lots of other people through your writing.

writing and now you've got this podcast where you've got kind of these little sound bites of you and you've also been putting all of your other interviews on that so that's been really a really helpful way of just yeah guess what ali you are the last one no way in one minute i am done i have done something like 55 interviews in the past few months and when you asked me to do this one it was just the time when i'm thinking of winding down anyways i was like

I'm going to finish with Ali's. That's it. So I'm now saying no to all podcast requests for indefinite future. Yeah, this has been the concluding episode of season two of my podcast has been to share all these interviews where I've been the interviewee after the

After the host puts them up live on their feed and says it's okay, then I put a copy of it on my feed too. So yeah, if you go to Sivers.org and subscribe to my podcast, you'll hear season one, which are just these tiny little two-minute episodes of me sharing one idea per podcast, two minutes each. And then season two are these 90-minute long episodes of me being interviewed like this. And season three, I think I will go back to tiny tidbits.

Amazing. I look forward to it. But yeah, so it's an honor to be the last on the list. Thanks for taking the time. And I've certainly taken a lot away in terms of writing, music, friends, life advice, goals, like all of the stuff that we've been riffing on. So again, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. All right. Take care. Bye-bye.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode.

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