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Love Your Work

297 Episodes

9 minutes | Aug 11, 2022
285. Crumb Time
“Crumb time” is the little pieces of time that get lost throughout the day. Instead of giving away your crumb time to unproductive distractions, build systems that complete big projects with small actions. Today, I’ll tell you how. Crumb time is everywhere throughout our days. Whenever we do something substantial with our time, little chunks of time of various sizes and shapes fall to the floor. What is crumb time? Crumb time has a combination of the following qualities: Short amounts of time. Crumb time can be less than a minute, or several minutes. Unknown lengths of time. You often don’t know when your crumb time will be over. It could end in a few seconds, or a few minutes. Distracting environments. It’s hard enough to focus when you don’t know when you’ll be interrupted, but the environments in which crumb time take place are often noisy, with lots of activity. Some examples of crumb time: Standing in line at an airport: Lots is going on, you’re waiting for your boarding call. Riding in a cab: The scenery is changing, but you might have a good idea how much time you have. Waiting for a friend to meet you for lunch: They could come in the door in two seconds, or twenty minutes. Why do we give away crumb time? Crumb time feels insignificant, and we think we need a controlled environment and a big block of time to do anything useful. You don’t have the time or mental bandwidth, it seems, to make substantial progress reading a book, or writing an article. So, we doomscroll on Twitter, blow off steam with a game such as Wordle, or do something pseudo-productive such as check email once again. Productive uses of crumb time We just give away our crumb time, but we could turn it into something useful. Here are some things you could do with crumb time: Review highlights in your Zettelkasten: My favorite use of crumb time is reviewing my highlights from a book. I export them to Markdown, and whenever I have a moment, I scroll through the highlights in a plain-text app on my phone. I bold any of the highlights that are extra interesting. When my crumb time is over, I mark my place and lock my phone. Learn about something: A crumb-time list is a key component of a system of curiosity management, which I talked about on episode 284. Keep a list of subjects you’d like to learn about, and when you have crumb time, read a Wikipedia page. (I’m not a fan of read-later apps, because the easier it is to save articles, the harder it is to read all of them). Brainstorm social media updates: Twitter is a great place to share ideas, a terrible place to have them. Brainstorm potential tweets in a text file, to polish and schedule later. How about doing nothing at all? Another valid use of your crumb time is simply doing nothing. But when you choose to do something, you may as well do something useful. Anything other than giving away crumb time is better than building that bad habit. The more you give away crumb time, the easier that becomes the default use of your crumb time. Take a seven-day crumb-time challenge You don’t need to change your crumb time habits all at once, forever. Instead, try a seven-day crumb-time challenge. Here’s how: Delete social media apps. You can do most things on Twitter or Instagram from desktop. Get them off your phone, to force yourself to make good use of crumb time. Block social media websites. Use the parental controls on your phone to block websites to which you give away your crumb time. For me that’s twitter.com and instagram.com. On the iPhone, use the “Limit Adult Websites” feature, and add whatever sites you want to the block list. (You can also add adult websites to the allowed sites if that’s your thing.) Set up crumb-time actions. If you have a Zettelkasten, you know what to do. If you don’t have one, for a quick-start you could export your highlights from your favorite book and have them available on your phone. Set up a list of things you’d like to look up when you have crumb time. Set up a scratch file for brainstorming social media updates, or set up anything else you could make progress on when you have a minute. Audio crumb time You’re of course not always able to use your hands during crumb time, such as when you’re driving. This is actually a great reason to have a podcast. Sharing your ideas with others is nice, but if you want to review your own ideas during crumb time, with a podcast you already have a convenient format in which to do so. But, you can also listen to articles or text you’d like to review using the text-to-speech feature on your phone, or an app, such as Otter. Crumb time becomes something bigger I like the term “crumb time” not only because it implies crumb time’s perceived insignificance, but also because substantial things consist of crumbs. Bakers talk about the “crumb structure” of a cake, which is the mix of air and pastry that makes up the cake. In agriculture, soil has taken on a “crumb structure” when it has the right amount of moisture for the soil to bead into crumbs. Soil with a crumb structure has an ideal mix of air and moisture to be a good environment for plants to take root, and for microorganisms to assist in the plant’s growth. Crumb time is powerful because it seems too insignificant to be worth anything. But if you use your crumb time well, those little pieces of time can build into something bigger. Here are some ways: Write a book: A book is little more than a collection of thoughts, and crumb time is enough to develop individual thoughts. I shared on episode 260 my newsletter system, which makes use of crumb time: My tweets grow into newsletters, which grow into podcast articles, which grow into books. Or, you can take a more direct approach. Walter Isaacson has said he writes on his phone while waiting in the airport, and Kirsten Oliphant wrote an entire book during two weeks’ time on the treadmill. Build a database of knowledge: Instead of writing a book, you can aim to build a database of knowledge, such as the Zettelkasten I talked about on episode 250. Highlighting highlights is the easiest use of crumb time, but you can do other Zettelkasten tasks with your crumb time, such as clearing your inbox. Make real progress: Even if you don’t aspire to write a book or build a Zettelkasten, you can use your crumb time to make real progress on any of your projects. Think of crumb time as a “context”, a la Getting Things Done. Just as you might mark a next action as “@home”, “@office”, or with my Seven Mental States of creativity, you can mark tasks as “@crumbtime”. Then you have a list of tasks you can do with little time and attention. Imagine what your crumb time could become Pay attention to how you use your crumb time, and you’ll find significant uses of time and energy that could be put toward something productive. In the same time and mental effort it takes to play Wordle every day, you could build a database of knowledge, write articles, or even books. I encourage you to try a seven-day crumb-time challenge. Let me know how it goes! Image: Pexals Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to Ben Henley-Smith at Cord’s Best Work podcast. As always, you can find all podcasts I've been on at kadavy.net/interviews. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/crumb-time/
12 minutes | Jul 28, 2022
284. Curiosity Management
Do you ever feel like you don’t have the time and energy to learn about everything you want to know? Is it hard to stay focused on reading one book, when there’s ten others you want to read? You need curiosity management. Curiosity management is the management of your thirst to know things. In a world with unlimited access to information, and finite time and energy, it’s impossible to read every book, watch every documentary, or take every online course. Unmanaged curiosity leads to “curiosity pressure” This leads to a feeling of “curiosity pressure.” Curiosity pressure is the feeling you’ll never learn all the things you want to learn. When you’re under time pressure – curiosity pressure’s close cousin – and feel you don’t have enough time to do everything, your anxiety makes it hard to do one thing. When you’re under curiosity pressure and feel you can’t learn everything, your anxiety makes it hard to learn one thing. A good curiosity-management system matches your level of curiosity with an appropriate level of engagement with the topic, given your available time and energy. The downward spiral of poor retention, & feelings of inadequacy A day in the life of a curious mind looks like this: Think of thing you want to learn about, such as the chemical processes behind making soap. Instantly go to Wikipedia. Follow every link and every footnote. Regain consciousness four hours later, with one-hundred tabs open, and no recollection of what you’ve consumed. Inexplicably, one of the tabs is about the Lorena Bobbitt scandal. Feel bad that you got nothing done, and didn’t learn much either. Surplus curiosity When you don’t satisfy your curiosity, despite doing the activities of investigation – such as reading or watching videos – you’re overcome with “surplus curiosity.” Surplus curiosity is a feeling you should always be investigating more topics. The anxiety and inadequacy you feel from not satisfying your curiosity cause you to be curious about even more things. This drives a downward spiral: You feel bad for not knowing all you want to know, you want to know more things, but poorly managing your curiosity makes it impossible to satisfy your natural curiosities, much less your surplus curiosities. The goal of curiosity management: Learn just enough, and remember it You’re not going to stop being curious. Your curiosity is a good thing. But if you can manage your curiosity, you can remember more of what you consume and reduce curiosity pressure. If you successfully reduce curiosity pressure, you’ll reduce the anxiety and feelings of inadequacy that actually drive some surplus curiosity. The fundamental error: All-or-nothing curiosity The fundamental error most curious minds make is they want to learn everything about a topic the moment they become curious about it. Instead of spending five minutes perusing the Wikipedia page, they watch the four-hour documentary. Instead of reading the book summary, they try to read the whole book. This drives the downward cycle: At some point, the media they’re engaged with calls for more time and energy than their actual curiosity for the topic merits. This causes fatigue and frustration. Yet there are still so many things they want to learn about, and feelings of anxiety and inadequacy flare up. The most immediate solution seems to be to read more, watch more, consume more – surplus curiosity. Yet little of it is absorbed, and the original curiosity that began the cycle is only vaguely satisfied. The right engagement for the level of curiosity To engage appropriately with what you’re curious about, first assess the level of curiosity. There are three: Compulsory curiosity is a feeling that you should know about this. Like, “What is this TikTok thing about?” Cursory curiosity is a feeling you’d like to know something about this topic. Like, “What is Marie Curie’s story?” Compulsive curiosity is a driving obsession to learn everything you can about a topic. If you need an example, you don’t need curiosity management. Of course, as you learn about topics, your level of curiosity may progress. You try TikTok a few minutes and are intrigued. You read the Marie Curie Wikipedia page, and want to learn much more. Your compulsive curiosity may be more intense for one topic than another, or change from day to day. Three basic components of curiosity management The main mechanism behind curiosity management is categorizing topics about which you’re curious according to the level of curiosity, and engaging with those topics only to the point that your curiosity is either satisfied, or further aroused (with some exceptions). I propose four components to a good modern curiosity-management system: A rule: Never consume information upon first encountering it: (With one exception, coming up.) Take only a quick glance to assess your level of curiosity about the information, and the informations’ potential for satisfying that curiosity. Then put it in the appropriate place, for later processing. Keep a “crumb-time” list: Your crumb-time list has things about which you have either compulsory or cursory curiosity, with a simple action that will satisfy that level of curiosity. Use your crumb-time list during “crumb-time” – those little pockets of time of indefinite shape and size with which you normally do unproductive activities such as check social media or play Wordle. An example list item would be: “Watch a YouTube video on the chemical processes behind making soap.” Deep curiosity time blocks: Have regular time blocks for deep investigation about things that have reached the level of compulsive curiosity. Give yourself time to read books, and watch documentaries. ”Cheat” pockets: Freewheeling engagement with your curiosity is fun. If you never allow yourself to open a hundred tabs on your browser again, you’ll do it anyway and drive the downward spiral. Much like some diets allow a “cheat day,” a good curiosity-management system has pockets of time during which you allow yourself to be at the whim of your curiosity. It might be Friday afternoons, or fifteen minutes after lunch – so long as you’re actually able to prevent yourself from slipping into internet-induced comas. Using your curiosity-management system That’s the basic structure of a curiosity-management system, now, some examples of how to use it. A topic comes to mind that you’d like to learn about, such as Soviet dekulakization. Don’t stop what you’re doing or suppress your curiosity. Put it on your crumb-time list to look at later. You have a few minutes while waiting for an appointment to start – aka “crumb-time.” Open your crumb-time list on your phone, and find a topic that fits the time and energy you have available, and your level of interest. Do a quick search, or visit a link you’ve already saved. If your curiosity is satisfied, move it to a “done” section of your crumb-time list. If you’ve become more curious, move it to a “second-level” section, to investigate more, later. If you’re intensely curious and have time available within your deep-curiosity blocks, you may graduate to buying a book. You see a link you want to investigate, while investigating something else on your crumb-time list. Open it in another tab and give it a quick glance. If you’re interested in learning more, put it on your crumb-time list. Close the tab, then get back to the original article. Note-taking supports curiosity management You’ll better satisfy your curiosity if you don’t forget what you’ve just learned. So, a note-taking system, such as a zettelkasten, supports a curiosity-management system. Take notes even on items for which you have merely compulsory or cursory curiosity. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You don’t even have to take perfect notes. You’ve just invested time and energy in learning about this topic, so you’ll never remember more than you do right now. Jot down a few of the things you remember. It could be as simple and informal as “saponification uses a strong base to break apart fat molecules and make soap.” Start managing your curiosity Those are my initial thoughts on curiosity management – why it matters, what it consists of, and how to construct a system for managing your curiosity. There are of course many details and inner workings I didn’t include, or that would vary from one person to another. Do you find this idea useful? Say hello on Twitter, or email me. Image: Red Waistcoat by Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/curiosity-management/
14 minutes | Jul 14, 2022
283. Fifteen Years as a Creator. (I'll Never Make It.)
Five years ago, I wrote about how - after ten years as a self-employed independent creator - I hoped to "make it." I now realize, I never will. Five years ago, I sat at my keyboard to have a serious conversation with myself. It had been ten years since I had woken up to a day with nothing scheduled, and wondered how I was going to fill it with something that both made life worth living, and also paid the bills. In this conversation, I asked myself, How did you end up here? Have you made a big mistake? I had spent a good chunk of my retirement savings, left Silicon Valley in the midst of a boom, and now found myself barely getting by in South America. About a thousand words in, I stopped and cracked into tears, not only because I was scared out of my mind, but because still – despite not seeing a clear path to making this work - I couldn't see myself giving up. I concluded: Take it from me, a ten-year veteran self-employed creator: If you are looking for security or reassurance, I do not recommend this line of work. However, if you are burning with curiosity – if your heart and intuition lead you to do things that don’t make sense – well, then you don’t really have a choice in the matter, do you? When I was done with that conversation, I had a massive vulnerability hangover. I felt embarrassed to publish it, but since I had resolved to be writer, I felt I had to. However, I didn't do anything I normally did to promote a post: no Medium publication, no email blast, no podcast episode, not even a tweet. I just quietly pressed “Publish” and got on with my day. It slowly, then quickly, became the most popular thing I had ever written. Now, five years later, I've been a full-time creator for fifteen years. (It wasn't called that when I started. I was just a weird guy who wouldn't get a job.) Not long after publishing my personal conversation, I started publicly reporting my income on my blog. While more famous bloggers were excitedly reporting six- and seven-figure months, I was reporting one three-thousand-dollar month after another. One month I even lost money. However, about a year ago, my numbers started to climb. I recently reported a six-figure-year for the first time. I had made six-figures before the reports, but most of that was from an uninspiring blog I had written under a pseudonym. This was the first time I could look at every dollar I had made and say to myself, "I made this money doing exactly what I want to be doing. I am officially me for a living." I looked in the mirror later that day at the gray hairs that have come to dominate my beard and the stray ones sprouting from my temples. I thought back to when I was twenty-five and I'd stare in the mirror, looking at the young man I felt was full of potential, but who had no idea how to get out of Nebraska. Every cell of skin and hair on my body had regenerated since then, but I figured I still had the same eyes. So I looked into them and said, "You did it, kid. You made it." Not the next day, nor the day after that, but soon after, I felt a deeper emptiness than I had before. I thought back to my twenty-five year old self hearing for the hundredth time the CAD technician with hair as tall as the man was wide yell out, as he waddled through the break room, “Kadavy, with another Banquet meal!” Those microwaveable meals had been frequently on sale at Hy-Vee, ten for eight dollars, and the best strategy I could come up with in 2004 had been to save up and buy Apple and Google stock. As I had rolled my eyes and sighed at the Office-Space-like monotony of my existence, I would have gladly traded places with my current life. I had struggled for so long, so hard, and had passed up so many other opportunities a normal person would have taken. I risked failure, and hadn’t failed. Why did I feel a lack of inspiration, a malaise? Around that time, I read and resonated deeply with an essay by Joan Didion, where she marvels at how a six-month stay in New York crept into eight years, "with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve." Young, foolish, and non-committal, she felt she "could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count." It wasn't until it was over she had realized, "it had counted after all." The dozenth friend said to me recently, "If you can sell 25,000 copies of a book, do you have any idea how much you could make on a course, consulting, or coaching!?" I politely explained I had heard the same many times before and I had tried courses, consulting, and coaching, and didn't enjoy them. Basically, what I wrote five years ago: I want to make a living creating. I don't want creating to be merely a marketing strategy for other things. Is that completely insane? This friend, like seemingly all I had at the beginning of this fifteen-journey, is now a millionaire. Did I feel this emptiness because it had taken so long to get here? Because there are many more definitions of “making it,” financially, beyond a six-figure income – that everyone else seems to reach so easily? I know every time I hear an outrageously popular twenty-something creator on a podcast say, "I wrote online for a long time before I had success. Like eight months," I scoff and wonder, Just how fucking bad at this am I? Maybe this six-figure milestone so close to my fifteen-year anniversary was just a reminder that it had all counted. Maybe it brings to the surface memories of the times I almost had a big break: Like the time I paid my own way to fly from Colombia to San Francisco to be interviewed on a massive podcast, only for them to can it. Or the time a big chest-thumping entrepreneur podcast didn’t run my interview because I openly told them how little money I made (given my public income reports, I wonder why they bothered inviting me). Or, maybe I had failed at what I had actually wanted, but had invented a false goal ex post-facto, so what counted wouldn’t feel as if it had gone to waste. I dug into the paper trail I've left throughout this journey. The stack of journals I've collected confirmed that this, indeed, was something I had wanted all along. In 2007, just before getting fired, I wrote, "I have lots of projects in mind, but the main one is making 'being David Kadavy' my full-time job." There it was, plain as day. As I continued my investigation into potential revisionist history, I re-read my conversation to myself after ten years as a creator, and saw a graph: On New Year's Eve, as 2008 turned to 2009, I stayed home by myself and schemed on my mission to make it as a creator. I knelt on the hardwood next to my portable radiator and drew this graph on an eleven-dollar piece of tileboard from The Home Depot. The plan was for "Active" income to give way to "Passive" income, to give way to "Speculative" income. In other words, I would freelance just enough to get by, build passive income on the side, and as that passive income built, I would follow my curiosity and see what I could find. I had done exactly that: I had freelanced ten hours a week, made $150,000 on a passive income stream, and through the exploration I had done on the side, gotten my first book deal, then built this career as an author. I had followed my plan perfectly. When a successful author friend had warned me not to write my first book – that there were better ways to make a living – I had reasoned I was just starting, maybe after ten years I’d be really good. In the back of my mind, I thought I could do it faster. Suffice to say, this has taken way longer than I had imagined. Didion’s essay resonated with me because some part of me didn’t expect these years to count. At forty-three, with one parent gone, having narrowly-missed losing the other, and with my own body declining, I feel as if I’m in the final levels of a video game. I’ve gained power-ups and magic swords hidden along the way and in many ways feel more capable than ever. But that meter at the bottom of the screen marked “life” is lower, and I’m increasingly paranoid I’ll be devoured by a dragon before I storm the castle. I ultimately realized, this emptiness wasn't unfamiliar. I had felt it in some small way at every major milestone in this journey. With every goal I had achieved, there had been emptiness that followed the absence of that goal. That emptiness was soon replaced by the pursuit of the next. But, this was the top of the mountain. There was no next goal on the horizon. Maybe I should feel bad for how long this has taken. Maybe I'm putting up blinders I won't see around until it's too late, and I'll later be overcome by crippling regret. More likely, the journey is the destination. The beginning of each creative project is characterized by an emptiness, a void that must be filled through the act of creation. It's a great feeling to go from spinning your wheels to getting traction, but ultimately, you want to go back to the starting line and do it again. To once more see if you can storm the castle. You could argue I feel this way because this struggle is all I know. I've been at it so long, like Red and Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption, I’ve become "institutionalized." But one got busy living and the other got busy dying, and as Victor Frankl has said, "What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task." So, after fifteen years, I've "made it" as a creator, financially-speaking, in a relatively minor way, for now. But maybe the best part of making it is realizing you now have the privilege of feeling you haven't. So you can freely struggle to reach your destination, only to do it again. Take it from me, a fifteen-year veteran self-employed creator: You’re burning with curiosity. Your heart and intuition lead you to do things that don’t make sense. You feel you have no choice but to take this path. But be forewarned: Once you get to where you so deeply ache to arrive, your journey won’t be over. You can "make it" in one way or another, but to be happy with this life, you must always find a way to feel you still haven’t. Photo by Ryan Halvorsen About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart t
12 minutes | Jun 30, 2022
282. How I Put My Book on a Times Square Billboard (What Did It Cost, & Did It Work?)
I recently advertised my book on a billboard in Times Square. It was cheaper than you think, and was up for less time than you might expect. But it’s still paying dividends. Times Square is a big deal (duh) Times Square is the epitome of mainstream success. The biggest brands have locations there, and any big brand you can name advertises there. 350,000 people walk through Times Square on a typical day. It’s also one of the most-photographed places on Earth, with many of those photos and videos being shared on television shows such as Good Morning America, and on TikTok or Instagram. A lowly self-published book advertised next to the biggest brands When my friend, Robbie Abed, told me you can advertise in Times Square for cheap, I knew I had to run an ad for Mind Management, Not Time Management. A book about a new approach to time management, in a city obsessed with time management, in a place with “time” right in the name? It was a match made in heaven! The very thought of my lowly self-published book advertised on the front of Forever 21, above a Sunglass Hut, across from the Disney store, next to McDonald’s, in Times Square made me laugh the maniacal laughter of an evil villain plotting to take over the world – in some Disney movie, of course. Will a billboard sell books? Before I explain how I advertised in Times Square for cheap, I’m sure some of you are thinking, “Will advertising on a billboard sell books?” You’re right to think that since people are walking or driving through Times Square, even if they noticed my billboard in this place that is nearly all billboards, they’re not going to stop what they’re doing, take out their phones, and order my book on Amazon. The making of a pseudo-event But that’s not the point. By advertising my book in Times Square, I was creating a “pseudo-event”. I talked about pseudo-events in my summary of Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image on episode 257. A pseudo-event is a reality constructed just so it can be covered in media. By being covered in media, the constructed reality becomes reality. Pseudo-events can be funny, or horrifying. They can be based upon truth, or lies. But our media is full of them. Most “leaks” you see, every talk-show interview, and every planned event are pseudo-events. Instagram is one pseudo-event after another. Reality is constructed for media, and media constructs our reality. My book really was advertised in Times Square. My lowly self-published book really is a “big deal.” How much does a Times Square ad cost? People want to know, how much does it cost to advertise your book in Times Square? Some people guess five-thousand dollars. Some guess twenty-. I advertised my book on a Times Square billboard with Blip Billboards. Blip is a platform that lets you buy short displays of an ad on electronic billboards across the U.S. Each “blip” lasts fifteen seconds. I paid about nine cents per blip in tests I ran in Chicago, and had a blip run in Times Square for as little as twenty dollars. “As little as” twenty dollars? I’ll get into my exact costs in a bit. But first, was my pseudo-event worth it? Here are some of my wins from this fifteen-second ad so far. Win #1: A retweet from Tim Ferriss My first big win from my Times Square billboard was a retweet from Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss asks his podcast guests what message they would advertise to the world. I’ve always thought if I were asked that question, my answer would be the title of my book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. So, I made sure one of my billboards was as plain as possible. It just said, “Mind Management, Not Time Management.” Then, I shared a video of the billboard on Twitter, making sure to tag Tim (whom I’ve never met nor talked to). It was a long shot, but it worked. Tim retweeted it. Tim has 1.8 million followers. I did see a decent spike in sales. Hard to know if this was the cause, but I didn’t have competing promotions. Win #2: Speaking for the New York Public Library My second win was speaking for the New York Public Library. When I emailed my readers to let them know my book was advertised in Times Square, it turned out one reader organizes events for the New York Public Library. This reader was excited to hear about my book being advertised in Times Square, and this prompted them to invite me to speak over Zoom to the library’s audience. They promoted the event to their email list of one million subscribers, and the day before the event, my new friend there informed me that: The NYPL stocked all of my books, in paper, ebook, and audiobook formats. My event was featured on NYPL’s home page My book was selected as the NYPL Business Center’s “book of the month.” The video of my speaking event is now listed on the library’s CEO series page, along with talks by Marie Forleo, Seth Godin, and A.J. Jacobs. I also got a couple links to my website from nypl.org, high-authority links which boost my site in search rankings. Win #3: Advertising that paid for itself My third win is that some of my advertising paid for itself. And I don’t mean through book sales. If you sign up for Blip, you’ll get $25 free advertising credit. Some people have already used that link, and apparently spent enough for me to also earn a couple $50 credits, which reduced the price of my ads! Win #4: ? My Times Square ad came and went in a flash, but it continues to pay dividends I can’t predict. For example, in May I was telling someone at a conference in Phoenix about advertising in Times Square, and it turned out they had already seen one of my posts about it. There’s no telling who is reading this article, and what effect it will have on them. Like I talked about on episode 280, hidden complexity makes simple actions very powerful. Fun pseudo-events like this breed positive Black Swans. A pseudo-event lasts a moment, but lives on forever. A Times Square ad lasts a moment, but the photo, video, and story lasts forever. What did this cost? I advertised on a Times Square billboard for as little as $20, but what did this all cost in the end? Here’s the breakdown: Chicago test campaign: $65.58 (I ran some test campaigns in Chicago, to get familiar with the system.) Times Square campaign: $290 (I ran a small test, got impressions for as little as $20, but then increased my bids and budget to be sure the ad would run during a given time block.) Photographer: $200 (I got referred to a photographer from my friend, Robbie Abed, who had found them on Craigslist. I hired them for the one hour my ads were scheduled to run.) Blip referral credits: -$100 (A couple people must have used my referral link, and spent enough for me to get $50 in credits each.) Total cost: $455.58 This was a really fun campaign, and though the ROI isn’t as clear as the Amazon ads I talk about in my income reports, I think it’s safe to say it has been paying off, and still is. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/book-times-square-billboard/
10 minutes | Jun 16, 2022
281. E.R.A.S.E. F.E.A.R. and Finish Your Creative Projects
In fifteen years as a self-employed creator, I’ve learned how to finish what matters. I follow a nine-step process that makes an easy-to-remember acronym, that also describes what this process does: E.R.A.S.E. F.E.A.R. Fear is Resistance Fear is at the root of most struggles to finish creative projects. Even when you think you’re merely getting interested in another project, that’s often fear masquerading as curiosity. Steven Pressfield calls it Resistance. It can cause the dreaded shiny object syndrome. But if you can break down most of the sources of fear, you can clear the way for decisive action. You can erase fear. The E.R.A.S.E. F.E.A.R process First, what does “erase fear” stand for? Envision the outcome Rehearse the process Ask questions Search for answers Enjoy the process Face the obstacles End perfectionism Assess the outcome Record the process A little more about each of those. 1. Envision the outcome. If you have a clear picture of the outcome you want, you can reverse-engineer your way to making it happen. Executing visions is a skill to work on, because we usually have a vision that outpaces our current abilities and resources. To get better at envisioning, work on your vision muscle. Practice having a vision, then carrying it out. You do this every time you cook a recipe or plan a party. Write down the outcome you’d like to see. Use the methodology I described on episode 245, about the avocado challenge, to rate your odds of success. 2. Rehearse the process. Once you have a vision, mentally rehearse the steps. Do you have any idea what steps to follow to make this vision a reality? I want “Goldilocks” fear in my projects. If you know exactly what to do, it won’t be fun. If you don’t know where to begin, you’ll be paralyzed. You want just the right amount of fear, to keep it interesting. If you’re too familiar with the process, ask yourself, How can you scale up your vision? If you’re too unfamiliar, ask yourself, How can you scale it down? 3. Ask questions about the gaps in your knowledge. Now you have a vision that challenges you just the right amount. There are parts of the process you don’t understand. These unknowns can be sources of fear: They could turn out to be way more complicated than you expected, which would put in jeopardy your ability to follow through. Write down the questions you have about the process. 4. Search for answers. Look at your questions about the process. Set aside time and energy to answer them. You can make a surprising amount of progress just guessing. Before you ask anyone else, ask yourself, How would I do this? You might find a new way of doing things. If too much is unknown, you may have to scale back your vision once again. If it’s all too easy, you may need to scale it up. But don’t get frustrated if you don’t find all the answers. You’ll learn them in the next step. 5. Enjoy the process. You’ve planned and worked to pick the right project. But you can’t go into it without some unknowns. Otherwise, by definition, it wouldn’t be a creative project. You’ll find the rest of the answers to your questions in the act of doing. This is where you need to do a little mental wrestling. Whatever fear you have, flip it over and slam it on its back. Turn that fear into excitement about discovery. If you’ve done the first four steps well, picking the right-sized project with the right amount of uncertainty, you’ll be able to pull this off. 6. Face the obstacles. As hard as you try to take on a project you can handle, you’re going to run into obstacles. Fear often manifests itself as convenient excuses. The most dangerous excuses are the true ones. Yes, your project hasn’t gone as planned or a bomb went off in your personal life, but that doesn’t mean this is impossible. Slaughter your scapegoats and move forward. Anything worth doing requires some grit. 7. End perfectionism. You’re nearing the end of your project. In fact, you could ship it right now. That is, if it weren’t for perfectionism. Perfectionism can turn the final five percent of a project into a hundred-five percent. Just when you put on one “final touch”, you notice another that needs to be improved. Part of this is due to the Finisher’s Paradox, which I talked about on episode 267: You learn in the process of a project, so by the end, you can already do better. Another part of it is fear. Fear makes you anxious. When you’re anxious, you notice imperfections. Some of those imperfections are figments of your imagination. You’ve done all you can up to this point to erase fear, but there’s still going to be some in the final stretch. Know perfectionism is there, and push through to ship. Like I talked about on episode 265, shipping is a skill. 8. Assess the outcome. Even though we’re done with the project, we’re not done erasing fear. Now that your project is out in the world, ask yourself, How did it turn out? Look back on the vision you wrote down, and your predictions about success. Does it fit that vision, and if not, why? What did you not foresee? What would you do differently next time? Write it down. 9. Record the process. Reflect on the actual process you followed. Write it down, and brainstorm how you might do it better next time. You now have a process you can follow, even if it’s just a Sloppy Operating Procedure, like I talked about on episode 224. Preparation is the antidote to fear. The next time you do a project like this, you can do it a little bigger, so you add a few unknowns to the new process that keep it interesting. Go forth and erase fear This process is exactly how I erase fear in my projects, whether it’s in the three books I’ve written, or more than 280 podcast episodes. I hope it works for you, too. Image: Broadway Boogie Woogie, by Piet Mondrian About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/erase-fear/
11 minutes | Jun 2, 2022
280. Surround and Conquer (Your Biggest Dreams)
When Facebook was first expanding, they used a timeless military strategy to win their most-crucial first users. You can use this strategy to attack your toughest projects, by leveraging hidden complexity to lend devastating power to simple actions. Facebook faced tough competitors When Facebook was starting, in the mid-aughts, it was only available at colleges. It wasn’t easy to win new users on campuses that had their own social networks. Who wants to join the network nobody is on? That’s not where you find the big parties. That’s not how you spy on your crush. There was no point in promoting to students who already had better alternatives. Facebook would waste their limited resources, driving themselves out of business. There were plenty of competitors they needed to outlast. An established network at a college was a barrier to winning over any user at that college – a “defense,” if you will. Facebook needed to break through those barriers. The surround strategy: Attack from the flanks So they used what they called a “surround strategy”. Instead of directly trying to get users on a given campus, they got them indirectly. The strategy that decimated the Roman army 1800 years ago Facebook’s surround strategy was borrowed from the “pincer” military strategy. When you’re up against an opponent with strong defenses, it’s often not the best use of your resources to attack them head-on. It’s better to focus on the flanks. Hannibal used a pincer strategy in one of the greatest military upsets in history, at the Battle of Cannae, in 216 B.C., sending the Roman empire into a panic. As the Romans attacked from a concentrated center, the center of Hannibal’s forces fell back, creating a “crescent” shape that helped them attack the flanks. Eventually, Hannibal had the Romans surrounded. The Romans lost so many men that day, they had to lower the draft age to replenish their forces, and they reverted to using human sacrifices to try to please the gods. How Facebook won key users indirectly Facebook used this pincer strategy to indirectly win users at Baylor University, in Texas, which already had its own social network. Instead of promoting Facebook to users at Baylor, they focused on campuses near Baylor There weren’t already competing social networks at UT Arlington, a one and a half-hour drive to the north; Southwestern University, a one-hour drive to the southwest; and Texas A&M, a one and a half-hour drive to the southeast. To get the dirt on their exes, they needed to be on Facebook While Facebook wasn’t wasting resources trying to get Baylor students to switch social networks, those students started to hear about Facebook, anyway. The students in these surrounding colleges were former high-school classmates of the Baylor students. They were driving to one another’s campuses to bong beers and eat jello shots. They were hearing rumors their high-school sweethearts were getting naked with half the campus. They were laughing maniacally upon hearing the former bully was found passed out, naked with an armadillo. To get the dirt, to creep on one another’s profiles, or, sometimes to just stay in touch, they too needed Facebook accounts. So, without any promotion at Baylor, Facebook started winning users at Baylor. The birthday problem reveals the hidden complexity that make the surround strategy work This surround strategy works better than people expect it to. To understand why, think about the birthday problem, which I talked about on episode 237. How many people have to be in a room for a fifty-percent chance two of them have the same birthday? Most people guess 180 or 150, but the real answer: only twenty-three. The odds of shared birthdays climb rapidly as you add the first few dozen people to the room. Network effects between each person’s potential birthdates quickly add potential matches. Adding one person to a room of twenty people doesn’t add just one potential match, it adds twenty. Network effects...outside the network Facebook’s surround strategy leveraged these network effects. The colleges they focused on didn’t have social networks, so Facebook quickly became very appealing, as they added users. Meanwhile, Facebook also became more appealing to the students at Baylor. Who wants to use a social network that only has students from your college?! With each new user Facebook added in a neighboring campus, they added multiple contacts to potential new users at Baylor. After someone heard about Facebook enough times, they had to sign up. As Hannibal’s men surrounded Rome’s, there were more angles from which each soldier on Hannibal’s front could attack soldiers on Rome’s front, but not vice-versa. A complementary strategy to the pincer is also the “pocket,” or isolating small portions of a battalion to conquer them bit by bit. Surround & conquer your dreams Now, how can you use this surround strategy on some of your biggest and most-intimidating visions? When you want to accomplish something that’s too big to attack head-on, use the surround strategy to break down the project’s defenses. Here’s how to surround, and conquer, your toughest projects: Make a list of all the things you’d need to know or have to accomplish your goal. Brainstorm ways you could learn those skills or gain those resources with smaller projects. Take on the smaller projects that are most interesting to you, or that use your existing resources. As you take on these smaller projects related to your target project, network effects take over. The skills and resources you gain will make the larger project seem easier than it would otherwise, and you get some successes to build your confidence along the way, and learn the skill of shipping, like I talked about on episode 265. Surround & conquer Shakespeare Here’s a very simple example: Let’s say you want to read a Shakespeare play, but you can’t keep track of what everyone is saying in that language that doth make one scratch one’s head. Do this: Watch the movie. Read the Wikipedia page. Listen to the podcast. Finally, read the play. By staking out the easier-to-conquer territory in your mind, it’s easier to conquer the more-fortified territory, and run back for supplies – or a reminder of what the heck is going on, based upon the other ways you’ve heard the story. How creators surround & conquer Other creators use the surround strategy, whether they say so, or not. Before the Steves Jobs and Wozniak built their first Mac, they worked on “blue boxes” they used to tap into phone networks and make prank calls. It was just a fun and mischievous and illegal project, but it helped build their collaborative relationship on something smaller and less complex. Henry Ford got a job working on steam engines, while running experiments in his garage to perfect the internal combustion engine. He made a living gaining the background he needed, and making connections with potential investors, while on nights and weekends he tinkered on the finer details. Michelangelo didn’t paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling from scratch. He had libraries of plaster-casted drapery and terra cotta body parts he mixed and matched to draw compelling figures in his scenes. How I use the surround strategy I, personally, use the surround strategy whenever I can. For example, I want to write fiction, though I’m not a huge fiction reader myself. But, I do like movies. So, I’ve been reading screenplays of my favorite movies and reading the novels those movies are based upon, while dabbling in short stories under a pen name, and working on my storytelling skills in my non-fiction writing whenever possible. I’m learning to love fiction, while working on my fiction-writing skills. In fact, all my work is a surround strategy for conquering new books. Each of my tweets, my weekly Love Mondays newsletters, my podcast episodes and articles and notes in my Zettelkasten, are experiments with progressively larger ideas, the best of which build into a book every few years or so. Go forth and conquer The next time you’re dreaming about something that seems impossible, surround it with projects that are possible. Then, your bigger dreams will be easier to conquer. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/surround-conquer/
17 minutes | May 19, 2022
279. Summary: Industrial Society and Its Future (The Unabomber Manifesto)
Industrial Society and Its Future, is otherwise known as “The Unabomber Manifesto,” written by Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynsnki is a terrorist who killed three people, and injured twenty-three others, by sending bombs through the mail, between 1978 and 1995. He used his terror campaign to exploit the negativity bias of media and pressure the Washington Post and New York Times into publishing his 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto. Obviously, what Kaczynski did was horrible, but his manifesto is a thought-provoking, albeit extreme, perspective on technology. And so here is my summary of Industrial Society and Its Future. Leftism creeps towards totalitarianism The manifesto begins with a seemingly out-of-place rant about leftism creeping toward totalitarianism: According to Kaczynski, leftists have low self-esteem, are defeatist, and hate themselves. They hate success, and feel the groups they try to protect are inferior. They are overburdened by guilt over their natural drives, and so want to turn into issues of morality things that don’t have anything to do with morality, such as policing the use of words to which they themselves have applied negative connotations. Anti-left is not far-right When people hear anti-leftism, they tend to assume the person with those views is far-right. But it’s worth noting that’s not Kaczynski’s view. A quote, for example: [Leftists] want to preserve African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black- style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects most leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white, middle-class ideals. In sum, Kaczynski is anti-left, because ultimately leftists still work to preserve the industrial system. This appears to come out of “left-field,” but the meat of the manifesto is more coherent, and later we’ll better understand why he brought up his views on leftism. Industrial society robs us of the “Power Process” As industrial society progresses, Kaczynski says, people lose more and more freedom. This makes them miserable, because it robs them of what he calls the “power process.” The power process consists of four main elements: A goal Effort put forth toward that goal The attainment of that goal Autonomy in pursuit of that goal To be happy, a person needs goals that require effort, a reasonable rate of success in achieving those goals, and personal control throughout that process. We replace the power process with “surrogate activities” You might think we, in industrial society, have many goals we pursue and attain through effort, but Kaczynski says we merely pursue what he calls “surrogate activities.” Surrogate activities are artificial goals, because they aren’t for the purposes of meeting our basic biological needs, and so aren’t totally fulfilling. He says we merely think surrogate activities, such as our jobs, are fulfilling, because we have to do very little in industrial society to meet our basic biological needs – such as eating, or having shelter. So, we’ve never felt true fulfillment. All we do is either easy or impossible He says there are three kinds of drives we experience in the pursuit of goals: 1) minimal effort, 2) serious effort and 3) impossible. The power process, he says, is more about group two, or serious effort. Our surrogate activities require minimal effort. But at the same time, many other things are impossible in industrial society, because we don’t have control over them. For example, our security depends upon decisions made by others, such as safety standards at a nuclear power plant, how much pesticide is in our foods, and how much pollution is in our air. Somebody else makes these decisions for us, and in many cases we can’t even know if what we’re being told is true. As technology grants freedoms, it takes them away He points out that technology seems to grant us freedoms, but it really takes them away. As each advance in technology is collectively accepted, we lose control in some new area. Cars have become so ubiquitous you can’t walk in many places. So you need to get further integrated into the industrial system by getting a drivers’ license, insurance, and registration. Or, you can take the bus and have even less freedom. As we’re increasingly able to alter our genes, it will become harder to enforce a code of ethics. First, genetic engineering will be used to treat genetic diseases, then further alterations will be seen as “good.” The upper class will decide what’s good or not, until we have a genetically-engineered upper class, and a distantly-lower class taking genetic rolls of the dice. (This is already happening, as gene splicing is being used to treat diseases such as sickle-cell anemia, meanwhile a scientist in China crossed the agreed-upon ethics line and genetically-engineered children.) We’ll outsource decisions to computers, until we no longer understand ourselves the decisions the computers are making. So we’ll keep them running to keep the system afloat. At that point, the machines will be in control. Kaczynski thinks mood-altering drugs are over-prescribed, often just to deal with the psychological stress of living in industrial society. If more people need, say, antidepressants to tolerate living in a depressing world, that world is then allowed to get even more depressing, until the drugs are a requirement. (This reminds me of the soma everyone in modern society takes in the dystopian science-fiction book, Brave New World. That book has also been made into a series.) My thoughts: Coronavirus and the power process I couldn’t help but think about this loss of control Kaczynski describes as I watched people’s behavior during the coronavirus pandemic. While I personally chose to follow protocols and get a vaccine, it was an interesting moment when industrial society clashed with individual autonomy. To sustain industrial society – which is so ubiquitous it’s impossible to “opt-out” – institutions deemed it necessary to make blanket decisions on the behalf of individuals. Some people weren’t cool with that. Whether their reasoning made logical sense was irrelevant – the emotional roots of their reactions were understandable. Industrial society and the gig economy One thought-provoking quote from the manifesto sounds like a prediction of the gig economy. It has been suggested, for example, that a great development of the service industries might provide work for human beings. Thus people would spent [sic] their time shining each other’s shoes, driving each other around in taxicabs, making handicrafts for one another, waiting on each other’s tables, etc. This seems to [me] a thoroughly contemptible way for the human race to end up, and [I] doubt that many people would find fulfilling lives in such pointless busy-work. They would seek other, dangerous outlets (drugs, crime, “cults,” hate groups) unless they were biologically or psychologically engineered to adapt them to such a way of life. Industrial society makes us fear mortality Your immediate reaction might be that industrial society is worth the lack of control. It increases average lifespan, and prevents early deaths from infant mortality, disease, or relatively easy fixes, such as an appendicitis. Kaczynski says our obsession with longevity and staying youthful is a symptom of our lack of fulfillment, due to the disruption of the power process. If we lived lives full of autonomous struggle toward goals that directly met our biological needs, we would be more at peace with aging and death. A quote: It is not the primitive man, who has used his body daily for practical purposes, who fears the deterioration of age, but the modern man, who has never had a practical use for his body beyond walking from his car to his house. Activism is a surrogate activity He then ties the disruption of the power process back to his criticism of leftism. He says leftists’ surrogate activity is activism, or joining social movements. They have a goal, and struggle toward achieving that goal, but they’ll never be satisfied. This, he says, is how leftism creeps toward totalitarianism. Once one goal is achieved, another will be invented. The proposed plan: let the system destroy itself His entire manifesto is written from the perspective of “we.” He poses as a group of people called “FC,” standing for “Freedom Club,” and presents a strategy for his goal of destroying industrial society, and replacing it with primitive society. Kaczynski points out that modernity separates us from our local communities. We break ties to family and move, so we can work a job, in the name of efficiency. He advocates for living in small groups, and growing his anti-technology movement by having as many children as possible. The conflict line: masses vs. power-holding elites Interestingly, he says to draw the conflict line in this movement between the masses and the power-holding elites, and cautions specifically against turning it into a conflict between those who are revolutionaries and those who are not. This is some impressive strategic thinking, as it was also mentioned in the book, Blueprint for Revolution. I interviewed the author, Srdja Popovic, on episode 179. Popovic pointed out, for example, that Occupy Wall Street was a poorly-branded movement, because it drew a conflict line between those who could participate by camping out in the financial district, and those who could not. Calling it “the 99%” would have drawn a more effective conflict line. Don’t strive for political power Counterintuitively, Kaczynski advises to not try to gain political power. He says that if the “green” party were to get voted into office, it would cause massive unemployment, they would get voted out of office, and it would turn people off to the party. He supported free trade agreements such as NAFTA, because he felt it would further integrate the industrial system, making it more likely it would collapse, and causing such a collaps
12 minutes | May 5, 2022
278. Summary: The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase
There are some invisible structures in language, and using them can be the difference between your message being forgotten or living through the ages. These are The Elements of Eloquence, which is the title of Mark Forsyth’s book. I first picked this up a couple years ago, and have read it several times since then. I think it’s one of the best writing books, and has dramatically improved my writing. Here is my summary of The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase. How powerful could this stuff be? Can hidden patterns in language really be the difference between being remembered and forgotten? The technical term for the study of these patterns is “rhetoric,” and yes, it can make a big difference. Misremembered phrases While it’s hard to find data on what has been forgotten – see 99.9% of everything ever said or written – there are examples of things that have been misremembered. You’ve heard the expression, “blood, sweat, and tears.” That comes from a Winston Churchill speech. He actually said he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” Remember when, in The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West said, “Fly, my pretties, fly!”? Well, it never happened. She actually merely exclaimed “Fly!” four times in a row. The line remembered as “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”, was actually "Heav'n has no rage, like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned." I’ll get into some theories about why these phrases were misremembered in a bit. Non-sensical expressions You can also see evidence of the power of rhetoric in expressions that have spread through culture. Sometimes they don’t make literal sense, but have appealing patterns. It “takes two to tango,” but why not “it takes two to waltz”? People go “whole hog,” but why not “whole pig”? Why “cool as a cucumber”? Why “dead as a doornail”? Alliteration You may have noticed these phrases all have alliteration, which is the simplest of rhetorical forms. You’re probably already familiar with it. All you have to do to use alliteration is start a couple words in a phrase with the same letter. I’ve noticed some evidence of the power of alliteration looking at expressions across English and Spanish. For example, if you directly translated “the tables have turned,” which is said often, nobody would know what you were talking about. But they would understand if you directly translated “the things have changed,” which nobody says. In Spanish, that’s “las cosas han cambiado.” See? Alliteration. Tricolon So, why was Winston Churchill’s quote misremembered as “blood, sweat, and tears.” Forsyth thinks it was probably because the tricolon is more appealing than the tetracolon. A tricolon is when three things are listed, a tetracolon, four. Famous tricolons include, “Eat, drink, and be merry,” and “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s superman.” Barack Obama’s short victory speech in 2008 had twenty-one tricolons. Forsyth points out that tricolons seem to be more memorable if the first two things are short and closely-related, and the final thing is longer and a little more abstract. Like, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Isocolon Tricolon is three things, tetracolon is four, so is isocolon just one? In a way. An isocolon is not one thing, but one structure, repeated two times. For example, “Roses are red. Violets are blue.” Epizeuxis When you do repeat one thing, that’s called epizeuxis. So, when the Wicked Witch of the West said, “Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!,” that was epizeuxis, but it didn’t turn out to be memorable. Diacope People think the Wicked Witch of the West said “Fly, my pretties, fly!” That structure is called a diacope, which is essentially a verbal sandwich. It’s one word or phrase, then another word or phrase, then that same word or phrase once again. So “Burn, baby burn,” from the song “Disco Inferno” was diacope, and so was one of the most famous lines in film, “Bond. James Bond.” Why do people think the Wicked Witch of the West said, “Fly, my pretties, fly!”? Probably not only because diacope is a more memorable form than epizeuxis, but also because there’s other diacope in the film, such as “Run, Toto. Run!” Zeugma So, why did the phrase “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” live on? I notice there’s some alliteration in the phrase (“Hell hath...”), but Forsyth doesn’t attribute any rhetorical structures to the phrase. However – besides the sweeping generalization about women that can’t help but tickle the tribal human mind – the actual, original phrase came in the form of zeugma. Zeugma is using one verb to apply action to multiple clauses. So if you write “Tom likes whisky, Dick vodka, Harry crack cocaine,” you’re using the verb “likes” one time for all three clauses, instead of repeating it. So the original phrase was from a seventeenth-century play called The Mourning Bride, and, once again, went “Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned.” The having is attributed to both heaven and hell, which makes it a zeugma. Ironically, Forsyth points out, there’s a few phrases using zeugma that aren’t remembered as such. So zeugma is memorable, but it’s not. My personal theory is zeugmas take more attention to process. They make you stop and read it again. That extra attention helps us remember, but our memories are simplistic. This is something I get to see firsthand when people tell me they’ve read one of my books. You’d be amazed the different variations the human mind puts on simple titles such as The Heart to Start or Mind Management, Not Time Management. Chiasmus We’ve established that alliteration is pretty powerful for creating memorable phrases, and we’ve talked about why some short phrases are misremembered. But what about longer pieces of prose? The most powerful rhetorical form for a full sentence has to be the chiasmus. The word chiasmus comes from the Greek letter, “chi,” which is shaped like an X. So, chiasmus is when language crosses over. For example, when the three musketeers said, “One for all, and all for one,” that was chiasmus. The structure is ABBA, which happens to also be the name of a band that didn’t do too poorly. Politicians use chiasmus a lot. Hillary Clinton said, in her bid for president, “The true test is not the speeches a president delivers, it’s whether the president delivers on the speeches.” Forsyth points out that JFK’s inauguration speech was “chiasmus crazy.” Having watched it on YouTube, I have to agree, there’s enough chiasmus to make you dizzy. But at least one of those phrases lived on: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” One chiasmus I’ve noticed – on a more granular level – is in the title of The Four Hour Work Week. It’s a chiasmus of assonance – assonance being the repetition of vowel sounds. It goes, E-O-O-O-E: The Four Hour Work Week. Mix that in with a little alliteration (“Work Week”), and a promise you can’t ignore (working four hours a week), and you’ve got a book title with a chance to be a hit. Anadiplosis, Epistrophe, Anaphora A few more rhetorical forms that have to do with the order of words within clauses: anadiplosis, epistrophe, and anaphora. Anadiplosis is repeating the last word or phrase of a clause as the first word or phrase of the next. Yoda used anadiplosis when he said, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Malcolm X used anadiplosis of phrases when he said, “Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude.” That’s also anaphora, which is starting each sentence or clause with the same words. Anaphora was also used in the Bible: “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted,” which just sounds wrong if you’re more used to the adaptation of this in the song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, by The Byrds. Now, if you end each clause, sentence, or paragraph with the same word or phrase, that’s something different. That’s called epistrophe. Dean Martin used epistrophe, singing, “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, That's amore. When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine, That's amore.” Honorable mention There’s of course much more to The Elements of Eloquence. The terms for these rhetorical forms are intimidating and hard to remember, but Mark Forsyth weaves together his descriptions with incredible, well, eloquence. Some other forms that deserve honorable mention: Syllepsis: using a word one time, but in two different ways. “Make love not war,” is a subtle syllepsis. Polyptoton: using a word twice, as both a noun and an adjective. “Please please me” was a polyptoton. Hendiadys: using an adjective as a noun, such as if you were to say, “I’m going to the noise and the city.” Merism: referring to the parts, rather than the whole, such as when you say, “ladies and gentlemen.” Metonymy: using a thing or place to represent something that thing or place is connected to, such as if you were to say, “Downing street was left red-faced last night at news that the White House was planning to attack the British Crown with the support of Wall Street.” There’s your Elements of Eloquence summary There’s my summary of The Elements of Eloquence. There’s a lot more in the book about bringing eloquence to longer passages of text, such as through rhythmical structures like iambic pentameter. Will using these structures automatically make your writing great? No, in fact if you practice these structures, your writing will probably be a little strange at first. But you’re probably already using some of these concepts, and with some knowledge and practice, you can use them more adeptly. The Elements of Eloquence is a fantastic writing book. I read it over and over. I highly recommend it. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook Y
18 minutes | Apr 21, 2022
277. Summary: Trust Me, I'm Lying – by Ryan Holiday
In Trust Me, I’m Lying, Ryan Holiday reveals the media manipulation tactics he used as Marketing Director of American Apparel, and for his PR clients. Meanwhile, he exposes the inner workings of a modern media machine in which incentives make it impossible for the version of reality depicted in the media to come close to resembling the truth. I think it’s Holiday’s best book, and one of the best media studies books. So, here, in my own words, is my Trust Me, I’m Lying summary. Yes, this book is about lying Before Ryan Holiday became known as an author of modern stoicism books, he dropped out of college at nineteen to apprentice under 48 Laws of Power author, Robert Green. He later was the marketing director for American Apparel, and now has a PR agency, Brass Check, where he advises corporate clients and authors. As the title of the book suggests, the tactics Holiday confesses to might make your skin crawl. They involve deliberate provocation, bribery, impersonation, and – since it’s called Trust Me, I’m Lying – making stuff up. But everyone should read it This may turn people off to the book, but if you’re an author, marketer, entrepreneur, musician, filmmaker, or comedian, you’re in the business of trying to get your message into the world. So, ignore this book at your own peril. The people with whom you compete for attention are using these tactics. Understanding these tactics is a good way to understand the mechanics of media. You can use this knowledge to get your message out in less nefarious ways (more on that later). And, if you’re someone who thinks it’s your duty to read the news, to “stay informed,” you owe it to yourself to read this book. But be prepared to have that belief challenged, and your conception of reality altered. Media is a “racket” Holiday describes the modern media system as a “racket,” the word which Major General Smedley D. Butler once used to describe war. He defined it as something “where only a small group of insiders know what’s really going on and they operate for the benefit of a few and at the expense of basically everyone else.” Journalists are poor, busy, and desperate for a story The main insider in the modern media system is the journalist, more generally, a “blogger,” who might be someone writing articles for a small blog, or even a major media outlet such as the Huffington Post. Holiday uses “blogger” and “journalist,” interchangeably, and I will, too. Journalists are poor To help you understand the motivations of many of these journalists, Holiday points out this: They might have gone to an expensive grad school, and now live in a big, expensive city, such as NYC, San Francisco, or Washington D.C. They’ve been close enough to taste a $200,000-a-year journalism job. But now they’re churning out articles at a breakneck pace, without even getting health insurance. Meanwhile, the people they cover are rich and successful, and may include talentless reality TV stars. New York magazine called the result “the rage of the creative underclass.” Journalists are busy These bloggers have to write a face-melting amount of content. When journalist Bekah Grant left VentureBeat, she wrote a post saying she averaged five posts a day – more than 1,700 articles in twenty months. Henry Blodget, founder of Business Insider, said his bloggers need to generate three times their salary, benefits, and overhead costs to be worth hiring. So, an employee making sixty-thousand dollars a year needs to produce 1.8 million page views a month, every month. (1.8 million page views is a lot. At my current traffic, it takes me about a decade to generate that much on my blog, and I make more than sixty-thousand dollars a year.) Journalists are desperate for a story Most sites that journalists write for make their money from ads, and the way to make money from ads is to generate page views. As such, many journalists are paid by the page view. I’ve personally heard this from a friend who worked for a newspaper with a good reputation, covering news for a major city. So, journalists are desperate for a story that will generate page views. So, if you give them a juicy story that will generate page views, they will generally publish it. They’re too busy to fact check it, and since they’re compensated by the page view, they aren’t motivated to care whether or not it’s true. Readers want to be entertained, and don’t care what’s true So you’ve got poor, busy, and desperate journalists paid by the page view, and the people they’re writing for want to be entertained. Negativity attracts attention In 2010, Jonah Berger analyzed 7,000 articles from the New York Times’ most-emailed list. He found that the best predictor of virality was: how much anger does the article evoke? Increasing the anger rating of an article had two-and-a-half times the impact of increasing its positivity rating. The human mind is irresistibly attracted to negativity. When subjects of a study were shown footage of war, airplane crashes, and natural disasters, they paid more attention and remembered more than non-negative footage. Corrections don’t work Negativity attracts page views, so journalists want juicy stories, and don’t care if they’re true – and neither do readers, it seems. One study found that when people were shown a fake article with a correction at the bottom, they were more likely to believe it than those who saw an article without a correction. (Note from me: this finding hasn’t been consistent across other studies. (Is that a correction you believe?) In any case, people’s beliefs are still resistant to contrary facts.) Despite this, online news outlets are financially motivated to publish stories, whether they’re true or not. A Gawker reporter once said, “Gawker believes that publicly airing rumors out is usually the quickest way to get to the truth,” going on to say, “Let’s acknowledge that we can’t vouch for the veracity or truth of the rumors we’ll be sharing here.” Journalists are motivated to publish false stories, and, as Holiday points out, “While the internet allows content to be written iteratively, the audience does not read or consume it iteratively.” In other words, they see the story, not the correction. Media manipulation strategy: Trading up the chain Holiday shares nine media manipulation tactics in the book, but they all essentially serve the strategy that Holiday calls, “trading up the chain.” And trading up the chain is something you can do, even without lying. The chain Here’s how it works: Get coverage on smaller outlets. Those stories then get covered on mid-level outlets. Finally, major outlets pick up stories from the mid-level outlets. Smaller outlets can be individual blogs, social media, or local websites that cover a neighborhood or scene. Mid-level outlets are blogs of newspapers or local television stations. They can also be “sister sites” of bigger outlets, so they might be affiliated with Newsweek, or CBS. Major outlets are the big ones, like the New York Times, CNN, or The Today Show. It’s easy to get coverage on the small outlets It’s easy to get coverage on smaller outlets, Holiday says. If there’s a bigger outlet on which you want coverage, review stories for patterns. What are the stories about? Is there a smaller outlet where stories consistently show up before stories on the bigger outlet? The smaller the outlet, the less they fact-check Holiday says the smaller an outlet is, the less they fact check. This is where the lying comes in. Holiday confesses to creating fake email accounts to send tips to bloggers, leaking fake internal memos, and having his assistant pose as him over email and even over the phone. You don’t even have to start with the small outlets. Holiday says he successfully “conned” reporters from Reuter’s, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, The Today Show, and the New York Times. Using HARO, or “Help a Reporter Out” – which is an email list reporters use to find story sources – he found journalists who were looking for experts on various subjects. Holiday isn’t an expert on, say, vinyl record collecting, but these reporters were presumably on deadlines, and so not inclined to fact check. Holiday says he did it as a stunt to prove how ridiculous he thinks HARO is, and points out that even after he publicly embarrassed these outlets, they continue to use the service. Subprime truth One of my favorite observations from the book is that the fuzziness of truth in the media is like the subprime mortgage crisis. During the subprime mortgage crisis, banks sold loans to other banks, who sold those to other banks. These loans were rated by ratings agencies that were overwhelmed, and driven by conflicts of interest. One example of false information in the media Holiday seized upon was when a journalist misinterpreted the Wikipedia page of Holiday’s client, Tucker Max. Holiday had written Max’s page to show that his book had been on the New York Times best-seller list for some period of time in each of three consecutive years. The journalist apparently read that, then wrote a story saying Max’s book had been on the best-seller list for three years. That was wrong, but Holiday ran with it, updating the Wikipedia page to say Max’s book had, indeed, been on the list for three years, citing the incorrect article as proof. (The Wikipedia page has since been corrected.) Like the subprime mortgage crisis, in the news media, overwhelmed and conflicted reporters write stories, which are then picked up by other overwhelmed and conflicted reporters. In Balaji Srinivasan’s second appearance on the Tim Ferriss show, which I summarized on episode 274, he describes how a different kind of chain could ensure verifiable truth gets traded up the chain – in this case, a blockchain. Pseudo-events By getting a story into one outlet, then “trading up the chain” to get it covered in another, you’re creating a “pseudo-event.” If you remember my summary of The Image on episode 257, author Daniel J. Boorstin describes pseudo-events as fake events that are deliberately placed in the news, so that they become real. Holiday created a lot of pseudo-events for Max when his movie based upon his book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, was d
15 minutes | Apr 7, 2022
276. How Matthew Walker Ruined My Sleep (& How I Fixed It)
In 2018, Matthew Walker was on a media blitz, promoting his book, Why We Sleep. I was one of the many people who picked up the book. It slowly ruined my sleep. But recently, I fixed it. No, this is not a takedown Before I go further, this is not a “takedown” of Why We Sleep, like the one that’s been floating around. I’ve read that takedown, and I didn’t find it convincing. I trust that Why We Sleep is mostly full of accurate information. I say “mostly,” because I understand Walker has been on a mission to elevate the importance of sleep. Sometimes you have to say something like “the shorter you sleep the shorter your life span,” for a sleep-deprived public to get the point, when, technically, research shows people who sleep longer than the recommended 7–9 hours live shorter lives. It’s called rhetoric. When FDR said “we have nothing to fear but fear itself,” thankfully there weren’t blogs to write pedantic takedowns of his logic. My complaints about Why We Sleep don’t involve ill intentions. I’m sure Walker wants people to get more sleep. But I don’t think the book has the effect he expected. Why Why We Sleep will scare the sleep out of you In Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker, PhD says if you don’t sleep enough, you are at risk of the following: Obesity Cancer Dementia Alzheimer’s Heart disease Depression Anxiety Diabetes Car crashes Lower income Low sperm count Deformed sperm Female infertility Not being able to jump as high Longer workout recovery Vulnerability to colds and flus (today, that also means COVID) Low testosterone Smaller testicles So, yeah, Walker makes not getting enough sleep sound extremely scary. If that’s not enough to keep you awake at night, Walker also points out there’s also a rare sleep disorder that develops in mid-life, where a person cannot sleep, and eventually dies. Again, I get that society is full of a lot of ignorant or toxic beliefs about sleep, such as “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”. I may be in the minority in that I had the luxury of being able to take Walker’s recommendation of 7–9 hours sleep to an extreme that actually harmed my ability to get enough sleep. I was doing everything right After reading Why We Sleep, I, like many people, decided I was going to take sleep more seriously. But, as a creative with an interest in the neuroscience of creativity, I had already been taking sleep pretty seriously. I already slept with earplugs and a mask. I already avoided screens before bedtime, and had for years worn blue-light-blocking goggles before bed. I already didn’t read or watch TV in bed, and didn’t allow electronics in my bedroom. I already didn’t consume caffeine and rarely drank alcohol. I already lived a low-stress lifestyle with plenty of exercise and friends. I didn’t and don’t have kids that wake me up in the middle of the night. I already had a bedtime, and a nighttime routine, like I talked about on episode 259. I tried to do it right-er I was doing everything right. Where I went wrong was trying to follow Walker’s recommendation of 7–9 hours of sleep per night. The way I went about that: Stay in bed until I got eight hours of sleep. At first, it wasn’t a big deal. I would occasionally wake up much earlier than I had intended. But I brought to mind a graph from the book, which showed that sleep cycles come in ninety-minute increments. Now, this wasn’t a recommendation from Dr. Walker, and was my big mistake: I figured that since sleep cycles came in ninety-minute increments, if I happened to wake up too early, all I had to do was stay in bed until I could fall asleep again – which could take as long as ninety minutes. Yes, I understand I’m incredibly privileged to have the luxury of being able to stay in bed an extra ninety minutes just to fall asleep again. But, as an author, my ability to be productive is more a matter of mind management than it is of time management. It doesn’t matter, to some extent, how long it takes me to get enough sleep, but I need that sleep to get in the right state of mind to do my work. At first, this technique worked. When I woke up too early to get eight hours of sleep, I stayed in bed until I fell asleep again, and got my eight hours. Eventually, I settled on a rule: Most people use an alarm clock so they can get out of bed early. I, instead, set a time until which I had to stay in bed. For me, that was 8 a.m. If I slept past 8 a.m., that was fine, but if I woke up before 8 a.m., I stayed in bed until then. So, I was going to bed around 11 p.m., and staying in bed for nine, sometimes ten hours. If I was sleepy, I’d go to bed earlier, but I’d still stay in bed until 8 a.m. This went fine, until early-morning insomnia kicked in. It’s 3 a.m. I must be lonely (and awake) There are many kinds of insomnia, but they mostly consist of either sleep-onset insomnia or early-morning insomnia. I didn’t and still don’t have much trouble falling asleep (thanks to my nighttime routine). My problem was, waking up way too early. Not 5 a.m., but 3 a.m., and I was awake. My thoughts were racing, my heart was pounding, and I could not get back to sleep. I shared this problem with a number of friends. It turns out a lot of people have this problem. But multiple friends told me, “Matthew Walker’s book ruined my sleep.” Then, they all happened to recommend the same book to me, which had fixed their sleep. Enter Say Goodnight to Insomnia Why We Sleep takes the approach of telling you sleep is so important, if you don’t do it you’ll die. The book, Say Goodnight to Insomnia takes the opposite perspective. It essentially tells you, not to worry about sleep. Here’s some things it actually tells you: You can function fine without enough sleep. As long as you’re, in the long run, getting at least 5.5 hours of sleep a night, you’re fine. If you feel bad after a night of poor sleep, you’re probably blaming the effects on poor sleep, when they might be caused by something else – such as stress, nutrition, or normal variations. Insomniacs generally get only a couple hours less sleep than normal people, and don’t perform any less well. Your body compensates for a poor night of sleep by sleeping better the following night. People often mistake light, Stage 2 sleep, as wakefulness. So even when you think you’re not sleeping, you might be! The book was published in 2009, so I don’t know how true all of this still is, but to some extent, it doesn’t matter. That’s because Say Goodnight to Insomnia is essentially a self-administered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy program for insomnia, developed at Harvard Medical School. It’s all about restructuring your thoughts about sleep, so you can settle into a routine where you’re getting as much sleep as you need, not causing undue stress about all the things that will go wrong if you don’t get an arbitrarily-recommended amount of sleep. Hours-sleep recommendations are arbitrary Did I just say Matthew Walker’s sleep recommendations are arbitrary? Well, they kind of are. Here’s why: For one, there’s a difference between self-reported sleep, and actual sleep (in fairness, this is in the takedown I mentioned earlier). People who say they slept six hours tend to have actually slept five. People who say they’ve slept seven and a half hours, tend to have actually slept seven. Self-reported versus actual sleep duration is all over the board, and the discrepancy varies according to a bunch of factors. We can’t study sleep interventions across populations This is hard enough to deal with when trying to figure out how much you’ve slept, but when you’re trying to study the effects of sleep, over long periods of time, across entire populations, it’s simply impossible. Researchers have to use self-reports, which are unreliable. And it’s not practical to randomly split up the population into two groups and say, “You people, sleep a ton!,” and “You people, don’t sleep more than five hours a night. Oh, and both of you, do this for life!” So we can’t know how much sleep you need So while studies show people who get little sleep are at a higher risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, and we can piece together studies to form an explanation of how a lack of sleep might cause Alzheimer’s, we can’t really know if it’s being caused by a voluntary lack of sleep, or if the same thing that causes Alzheimer’s also causes a lack of sleep. Even if we did know, for sure, how much sleep exactly do you need in order to prevent Alzheimer’s? Epidemiological studies covering large populations are self-reported, so we don’t know how much sleep these subjects are actually getting. Yes, that is changing as more people are using personal sleep-tracking devices. But we still can’t force random sections of the population to get more or less sleep, and people who wear these devices are a self-selected group of people. I don’t have one, and don’t want one. Turn negative into positive sleep thoughts When you worry about not getting enough sleep, you’re having what Say Goodnight to Insomnia author, Gregg D. Jacobs, PhD, calls “Negative Sleep Thoughts,” or NSTs for short. What do you tell yourself when you can’t sleep? Things like, “I won’t be able to function tomorrow,” “I feel terrible because I didn’t sleep well last night,” and “Everyone else has an easy time sleeping.” If you’ve read Matthew Walker’s book, you can add to that, “If I don’t get enough sleep, I’ll get diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s, and won’t be able to jump as high.” Say Goodnight to Insomnia program summary Here’s the gist of how the Say Goodnight to Insomnia program works. Each chapter ends with a sleep journal. For the first week, you record your baseline patterns: What time did you go to bed, and to sleep? How many times did you wake up, and for how long? How do you rate the quality of your sleep? Each week of the program, Jacobs introduces a new way to assess your sleep, and turn poor sleep habits into better sleep habits. In week one, he introduces you to “cognitive restructuring.” Every time you have a Negative Sleep Thought, you turn it around into a Positive Sleep Thought. So if you think, “I’m sleeping terribly tonight,” you remind yourself that you’re probably sleeping more than you think, and that you’ll sleep better tomorrow if y
11 minutes | Mar 24, 2022
275. Finish What Matters (Forget the Rest)
One thing I hear from a lot from readers of The Heart to Start, is that many people have no problem starting new projects. They instead struggle with finishing them. I can relate. Like many creative people, I once struggled to finish projects. I always had new ideas, I left books half-read, projects half-finished. I had done lots of creative work, and had little to show for it. Now I still always have new ideas, and I still leave books half-read and projects half-finished. But now, I have lots of finished projects to show for all the work I’ve done. What’s changed? I’ve learned to finish what matters, and forget the rest. Embrace your inner Perceiver A turning point in my own creative journey came when I learned to embrace my inner Perceiver. As much flak as the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator gets for being pseudoscience, it’s still a useful lens for understanding your own tendencies. The concepts of Introversion and Extroversion have wide scientific support, but also useful I think are the concepts of “Perceiving” and “Judging.” If you watch in awe as one friend after another executes on ideas and achieves success, while you flounder, working on one idea after another, but never truly following through, your friends are probably “Js”, and you might be a “P.” This is the position I was in, until a friend at a party explained this dichotomy to me. Why was this other friend of ours so great at follow-through, while we both struggled to find our paths? This friend was a J. We were Ps. Another way of thinking about being a Perceiver is you’re someone who sees Possibilities. You can’t move forward with one idea, because you keep having other, better ideas. Meanwhile, your “Judging” friends find an idea, make the judgement to stick with it, and see it through. Shiny objects aren’t shameful Perceiving Possibilities is a necessary part of being creative. For DNA to be discovered, the researchers had to entertain the Possibility that they should pursue something other than the original intent of their grant application – which was to study cancer treatments. For Alexander Fleming to discover antibiotics, he had to see Possibilities in experimental petri dishes that were contaminated. If you want a treasure trove of Perceivers, look no further than nearly every person Walter Isaacson has written a biography on. For Leonardo Da Vinci to paint the Mona Lisa, he applied his knowledge of optics to his sfumato technique, which allowed him to model the painting with no hard lines. He applied his knowledge of anatomy to crafting the Mona Lisa’s mysterious smirk. He had dissected humans and animals, studying exactly which muscles were recruited to express various emotions. In episode 272, I talked about how Steve Jobs and the engineers and executives at Apple had to consider the Possibility that while a trackwheel served as a useful interface for an iPod, it might not be such for the iPhone. Isaacson himself has said, “People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns across nature.” So if you’re someone who beats themself up over Shiny Object Syndrome, consider the Possibility that it’s a necessary component of creative thinking. Creative success happens in Extremistan On the rare occasion that someone with shiny object syndrome does finish a project, it might not be successful, and that can make matters worse. Why bother following through with anything, you might think, when you aren’t assured of success? But, creative work calls for a different approach to success. As I talked about in episode 253, creative work happens in Extremistan. Nobody knows anything It’s impossible to predict which creative projects will be successful. If record companies knew hits, that’s all they’d release. If movie studios knew blockbusters, that’s all they’d produce. If publishers knew bestsellers, that’s all they’d launch. If Venture Capitalists knew unicorns, that’s all they’d fund. And they wouldn’t be called “Venture” Capitalists – they’d just be Capitalists. As two-time Academy-Award-winning screenwriter William Goldman said, “Nobody knows anything.” The sky is the limit Even when a creative project is released into Extremistan, there is a huge range of potential outcomes. When Art De Vany analyzed the box-office proceeds of various movies, he found that the top 1% of movies accounted for 20% of sales. My latest book, Mind Management, Not Time Management is a success. Book-marketing expert Tucker Max calls a self-published book that sells 2,500 copies in its first year a “home run”. Mind Management, Not Time Management sold 10,000. But, Mark Manson’s Subtle Art has sold more than ten million. This podcast episode will get more downloads than about 97% of other podcasts, but it’s not unusual for an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast to get 1,000 times the downloads of this one. It’s a long night to overnight success When you follow through and put a creative project into the world, you may have mild success, or you may have wild success. But there’s no telling how long wild success can take. The Queen’s Gambit took thirty-seven years to become a New York Times bestseller. Jane Austen’s books went out of print after her death. There’s no telling when a box-office bust will become a cult classic, or just a straight-up classic. People forget that The Shawshank Redemption was a box-office bomb, now considered by many to be the best movie of all time. Like I talked about on episode 251, you can’t call out Suvivorship Bias so easily in creative work, because you often don’t know if a project is truly dead. We’re raised in Mediocristan Creative success happens in Extremistan, not Mediocristan, and this is at the heart of why many people feel ashamed of their shiny object syndrome. We’re raised in Mediocristan, so we evaluate success and our ability to follow through based upon how things get done in Mediocristan. The whole point of civilization – with its steady paychecks, fixed-rate mortgages, and insurance policies – is to smooth out the shocks of the natural world. Mediocristan is built upon predictability, and to succeed by Mediocristan’s standards, you need to yourself be predictable. If you can follow the curriculum, do the reading, and fill out the bubbles on a standardized test with your standardized #2 pencil, you can get a good grade, that adds up to a good GPA, which lets you graduate and get your degree to put the right keywords in your resume so a computer can read it and find you. You can get a job, a steady paycheck, a fixed-rate mortgage, and an insurance policy. But for any of these niceties of Mediocristan to exist, someone has to invent something. Before Henry Ford could double the going rate for a factory worker, introduce the five-dollar day, and have 10,000 people banging on his gates, he had to create those jobs. You are a Maker/Capitalist Even if you wanted to work in a factory in Mediocristan – besides the fact that few humans could handle the monotony of working on Ford’s assembly-line – these kinds of jobs are becoming more scarce. More of our drudgery is being handled by automation. This is reducing the barriers to entry for putting ideas into the world. You can build a no-code app with Adalo or Webflow, you can print and ship artwork and memorabilia with Printful, you can – like me – sell thousands of print-on-demand books in dozens of countries around the world, and not touch a single one. It used to require capital and labor to produce a good or service. Now, less labor is needed, and almost no capital. It used to require management to organize all that labor. Now management is the arrangement of automation – but “management” isn’t the right word for it, and neither is labor. The word “creator” embodies the trifecta of coming up with ideas, doing the work, and distributing the goods. More and more of us can be creator/capitalists. We require little capital to fund our making, but we have to be adept at using what little capital we have wisely. Balaji Srinivasan would call us “capital allocators.” Finish what matters, and forget the rest If creative success is random, and happens upon a long timeline, how do you stay the course to embrace your shiny object syndrome and still ship projects? Start by building your shipping skills, like I talked about on episode 265. Treat even the smallest projects in your life as opportunities to have a vision, form a plan, and carry out that plan. You can do this by cooking a recipe, planning a party or trip, and build into shipping small creative projects. Learn to navigate uncertainty. Get used to making percentage-confidence predictions about the future, then evaluating those predictions down the road. You can learn with the Avocado Challenge I talked about on episode 245. Remember that for Henry Ford to build the Model T, he had to iterate on Models A through S. Like a construction project that seems to make no progress, until suddenly a twenty-story building appears, you need to let the Foundation Effect happen, like I talked about on episode 266. Remember the Iceberg Principle, like I talked about on episode 263. The same way ninety-percent of an iceberg is underwater, what you present to the world in your masterpiece will be just a small fraction of the knowledge and experimentation you put in. You have to embrace creative waste, like I talked about on episode 264. As a creator/capitalist, you need to use your resources wisely. Use the Barbell Strategy that I talked about on episode 244. Put most of your resources toward “sure bets” that keep you in the game. But set aside time and energy to play wildcards – crazy ideas with little downside, but unlimited potential upside. Creative work is the business of breeding Black Swans. Through this process, you won’t finish every project, and you won’t always be able to tell which projects matter. But with enough practice, over enough time, you’ll become adept at finishing what matters, and forgetting the rest. Image: Characters In Yellow, Paul Klee Mind Management is a Kindle Deal! Amazon has hand-selected Mind Management, Not Time Management for a promotional discount. It’s only $2.49 on A
22 minutes | Mar 10, 2022
274. Summary: Balaji Srinivasan – Centralized China vs Decentralized World – The Tim Ferriss Show #547
What will the future look like? In his most recent November appearance on the Tim Ferriss Show, entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan presents a cohesive explanation of the current world, and plausible scenarios of how things will play out. I found Balaji’s theories so mesmerizing, I listened to the four-and-a-half-hour podcast several times, then read and took notes on the transcript. Listening to this episode was like reading a book, so – like I do with my book summaries – I wanted to improve my own understanding of the content. So, here is a podcast summarizing a podcast, in my own words. Needless to say, the podcast is worth listening to, and since this is just a summary, you should absolutely listen to it – over on The Tim Ferris Show – to get the full context. The decline of the nation state One of the main forces at play in world events, according to Balaji, is the decline of nation states. He presents this idea in reference to a prescient twenty-five year-old book called The Sovereign Individual, which he cites in this podcast appearance and others. Since the nation state is declining, it is becoming increasingly difficult for countries to control their citizens. When it’s hard to control citizens, it’s hard to collect tax revenue to fund institutions. This loss of control is accelerating with the rise of remote work, catalyzed by the coronavirus pandemic. As more people have been able to work from anywhere, they’ve become increasingly aware of how local laws and taxes affect their lives. The power of “exit” The control of a nation state over its people is limited to the extent that people have the right to what Balaji summarizes as “exit.” If you’re unable to leave a place, either because the government is oppressive, or because you’re tied down because, say, you have land to tend and a flock of sheep, the government has more leeway in what policies they can enforce. Citizens as “customers” If people can exit their jurisdictions – whether that’s a country, a state, or a city – then citizens stop being “subjects” that jurisdictions can extract resources from, and start being “customers,” that jurisdictions want to appeal to. We’ve of course seen this for a long time, as cities have given tax breaks or other perks to compete over companies shopping for jurisdictions in which to place their corporate headquarters. But citizens are starting to look more like customers as smaller players have exited en masse. For example, lots of people and companies have been leaving California for Texas, in search of less state control. Balaji points out that not everyone has to exit to influence policies, but the fact that some do is tremendous leverage on any system. Crypto entrepreneurs call New York’s bluff An example Balaji cites of this struggle happened when New York state introduced the BitLicense – a series of regulations required for companies to do certain kinds of cryptocurrency transactions. Balaji characterizes New York’s posture in introducing these regulations as “We’re New York. What are you going to do? We’re the center of the world.” At least ten crypto companies then left New York, including Kraken, Bitfinex, and Poloniex. In some cases they had to pack up and move. In other cases they just stopped servicing New York customers. New York apparently overestimated their leverage, and companies left for other jurisdictions, who were more accommodating to their “customers.” Declining returns on state violence Something Balaji doesn’t talk about much but that is a major theme in The Sovereign Individual – and is relevant to the decline of state control – is declining returns on violence, at least at the state level. You can think of a nation state as a collection of people who contribute taxes in exchange for protection. Serfs used to pay, to their feudal lords, the returns of farming on their plots of land, in exchange for protection. Businesses in organized-crime-controlled neighborhoods pay a fee to the mob so their businesses won’t “burn down.” U.S. taxpayers pay taxes, the U.S. keeps a strong military that defends the interests of those taxpayers, and protects U.S. taxpayers’ green-bill privilege by ensuring the U.S. dollar remains the world’s reserve currency. A relevant observation that stands out to me: Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari once essentially said that wars used to be about control over natural resources. You can invade a country and get control over such resources, and maybe even control over labor. But China can’t invade Silicon Valley, force all the engineers and entrepreneurs to work, and by doing so extract the resources there. That’s a decline in the returns on violence, on the state level at least. Centralized China vs. decentralized world The main conflict Balaji sees playing out in twenty to forty years is between “centralized China” and “decentralized world.” China is a nation-state, and one of the main forces at play is the decline of the nation state, so how does that work? What is centralized China? As Balaji describes it, China is the most centralized government. It has “root” access to everything – much like you have over your computer if you have the root password. We’re seeing that in the coronavirus pandemic: If there’s a couple cases in a city, China can and will shut down everything, and they have total surveillance over their citizens. This high degree of centralization will be, according to Balaji, an advantage in the short- and medium-term. It’s been an advantage in the coronavirus pandemic. I think the implication is that in an interconnected world with so much technological power, being highly-centralized is the only way for a government to retain control over its citizens, and thus extract resources to keep itself running. How do we get to “decentralized world?” If Balaji thinks it will take twenty to forty years for China’s centralized model to cease being an advantage, that implies that a “decentralized world” will emerge as an opposing force within that twenty to forty years. So as less-centralized governments lose the ability to stay together and fund themselves from their citizens, that will fragment into smaller jurisdictions – sometimes based upon geography, other times based upon ideology. From that no-doubt messy process would emerge new models for organizing people and resources. These new models would rise to become so much better that they rival the reigning world power in this scenario – China. Sidenote from me on guns, germs, and innovation The idea of fragmented jurisdictions competing and developing “better” models makes me think of the theories presented by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond theorizes that Europe came to dominate the West hundreds of years ago because Europe had itself fragmented into many competing nation states. Europe’s east-west orientation also meant new methods of agriculture or livestock management easily travelled from one jurisdiction to another. If a new method was developed in Spain, it could be used in France. Those two nation-states would then compete to improve that method, along with other neighboring countries, and any improvements could easily be traded back and forth, thus optimizing a “better” method. (I say “better” in air quotes because obviously European dominance of the West is morally unsavory. Their methods were “better” merely from a game-theory standpoint: If there is one playing field – in this case, the world – the player with Europe’s set of characteristics probably gains control over that playing field in most scenarios. Other methods could be considered better, depending upon by what criteria you rate them.) Since agricultural technology was so important to the success of a nation at that stage of global development, the portability of technology depended a lot upon climate – thus Diamond’s theory that continents with long east-west axes, and thus similarity in climates amongst jurisdictions – innovated rapidly. But in a world where innovation in digital technologies is so important, technological innovations are more portable, and so an idea can be iterated upon and improved within every jurisdiction in the world. The three-way struggle for power: woke capital, communist capital, crypto capital Balaji presents a theory of three forces that are and will continue to be struggling for power over the coming decades. I think the implication here is many “jurisdictions” will emerge with various levels of these values. As these jurisdictions compete, some will emerge as “winners” that collectively act as a “decentralized world,” which competes with centralized China. Those three forces are: woke capital, communist capital, and crypto capital. The three organizations that represent each of these, respectively are: The New York Times, the Chinese Communist Party, and Bitcoin. A little more about each of these: Woke Capital: As embodied by NYT, says, “you should sympathize.” Communist Capital: As embodied by CCP, says, “you should submit.” Crypto Capital: As embodied by BTC (or Bitcoin maximalists, in its extreme), says, “you should be sovereign.” Both woke capital and crypto capital essentially say “you are powerful…” But woke capital finishes that sentence with “…and you should apologize for that power.” Crypto capital finishes “you are powerful...” by saying “…and you should be self-sufficient.” Communist capital instead of “_you_ are powerful,” says “_we_ are powerful…” but, like woke capital, encourages a posture of submission or bowing down as you make yourself subservient to that power. Crypto capital on the other hand encourages a confident posture with head held high. An optimal “decentralized center” Any of these forces taken to their extreme is bad. Different jurisdictions will embody different mixes of these values, and, Balaji hopes, we’ll reach an optimal “decentralized center.” We’ll hopefully have a decentralized world, with a good mixture of concern for one’s fellow human, self-sufficiency and personal responsibility within the populace, and some degree of control by competent leaders and organizations who are qualified to make decisions for large swaths of pe
9 minutes | Feb 24, 2022
273. Write on a Typewriter
It seems even the most devout techno-utopiasts carry around a Moleskine notebook. They appreciate the way writing longhand on paper alters their thought processes. Yet the same people think writing on a typewriter is absurd, performative, pretentious, or a deliberate troll. Over the past year, I’ve grown to love writing on a typewriter. I didn’t write my first three books on a typewriter, but I am my next one. I use my typewriter to write articles (yes, this one), email newsletters, and even tweets. I think you should try it. Write on a typewriter. The typewriter is the best writing tool ever If you’ve followed my work a while, you’ve seen me experiment with progressively more-primitive writing tools. I first used an AlphaSmart – a portable word-processor – seven years ago. Readers of my latest book, Mind Management, Not Time Management will recognize the typewriter as another “grippy” tool. It helps you get a grip on your thoughts, without letting them slip. But, I think the typewriter is the end of this road. I won’t be making cuneiform impressions on clay any time soon, and I won’t even bother experimenting with a chisel and stone tablet. As the musician John Mayer – who writes his lyrics on a typewriter – has said, “I’m not picking the typewriter because I think it’s hip. It’s the best version of the idea that’s ever come around.” Or, as I say, there is no more pure writing device than a typewriter. Before you dismiss that statement, think about it carefully. Notice I said “writing,” not “editing,” nor “publishing.” Computers are great for publishing A computer is the greatest publishing device ever. I have a computer to thank for my career as an author. It not only helps me lay out the interiors of my books and design my covers, but without my computer, I couldn’t then publish my books to a market of hundreds of millions of readers around the globe. None of it could be done without my computer. And since my computer is also what I use to crowdsource editing from my readers and prepare manuscripts, the computer is not only the best publishing device, it’s the best editing device. Typewriters are great for writing Write, edit, publish: Those are the steps you must repeat to be a writer, and they have to be done in order. You can take a step backward, but you can’t skip a step forward. No device does the first step better than a typewriter. It’s for writing, not research Some will protest that you can’t look things up on a typewriter. Well, that’s “research,” and it can be done before writing, or after writing, while editing. Research, however, is not writing. Only writing is writing. Your first draft doesn’t belong on the cloud Some will point out that when you write on a typewriter, your work isn’t stored on a hard drive or backed up to the cloud. It’s too easy to lose sheets of paper. These people fundamentally misunderstand the writing process. As Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” The typewriter is where you say everything you might want to say and explore how to say it. While it shows up on a page, the real work takes place in your mind – daydreamt in your own personal cloud. As you write, you print Not that your first draft isn’t handy to have. This makes the typewriter the better writing device than its cousin, the AlphaSmart. The AlphaSmart has a tiny screen, which is a good forcing-function to keep your fingers moving. But once the writing is done, you mostly have to rely on what new connections you’ve made in your mind. As you write on a typewriter, you also print. When you’re done, you have a page you can pick up and mark on while you pace around or read parts aloud. By the way, if you’re thinking that piece of paper is bad for the environment, consider that one hour of computer use is worth about seven sheets of paper. We all have scrap paper lying around with a bare side we can type on. You can save that from a landfill – and a typewriter, too! When you write longhand on paper, you also get something tactile you can review. That is, if you have great penmanship. I, for one, still have illegible handwriting, even after forty years experience holding a pencil. I love how no matter what you write on a typewriter, it always looks the same: Invectives, tirades, and vituperations are printed with the same font as love letters, manifestos, and fan mail. The shapes of the letters impart no meaning, leaving only the words to do their jobs. Typewriters are faster than longhand As someone who wrote a book about how time management is overrated, I have to admit, it isn’t the most important thing in the world that you can write faster on a typewriter than by hand. The way longhand writing slows down your thought process has its place – as does the nimble qualities of writing on a computer in those rare cases where you merely need to record something you’ve already thought through. A typewriter sits right in the sweet spot between speed and deliberation. The keys require more force than those of a computer, and you can only write a dozen words or so before a bell rings, bringing you back to the present moment and reminding you to push the carriage to the start position. Typewriters are tools for thought The typewriter is the best writing tool, which makes it a great thinking tool. This is less about what the typewriter makes you think and more about what the typewriter doesn’t make you think. When I wrote about my AlphaSmart seven years ago, I was bombarded with comments about how it was weak to want a device that didn’t connect to the internet. If I wanted to avoid distraction, I should just suck it up and focus – at best disconnect my laptop from the internet. By now, more people have realized they aren’t infallible masters of their actions, and are prone to distractions. So, the first thing people usually appreciate about the typewriter is that it will prevent them from checking email or their favorite social media vice. The only web you’ll find on a typewriter might be made by a spider, but you’ll only have those if you aren’t a writer. Typewriters are great for what they don’t have The typewriter has no software and no firmware – it only has hardware. This means not a single software-update notification. My Smith-Corona has been running on the same hardware since the Truman administration. And isn’t it true, man, those annoying software updates, while they promise to improve the interface, are really for security? The typewriter is immune to attacks and hacks. And the NSA can’t touch it because there’s No Software Aboard, and so No Suspect Apps, thus No Snitching to Apple. No thought crimes will be committed on the typewriter. You can write your thoughts, No Strings Attached. You don’t get lost on a typewriter. There’s no main menu, no hamburger navigation, no apps to sample – just a writing feast. The only thing that crashes are the keys. Since the typewriter lacks modern features such as the internet or software, that means no spelling- or grammar-check. If you make a mistake, you have three choices: strike it out, paint on whiteout (if you can still find some), or my personal favorite: live with it and move on. There’s no fooling yourself when writing on a typewriter: This is a first draft. It will not be televised. Do not collect 200 edits. You can only pass “Go.” Digital Zettelkasten now on Audible! New Audible users listen free through this link. Also available on other platforms. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/write-on-a-typewriter/
12 minutes | Feb 10, 2022
272. Ode to the Unfinished
There’s a reason the expression, “unfinished business” has such provocative power. Unfinished projects stack up like skeletons in our cluttered mental closets. We know if we crack open that door, we’ll be reminded of our failed intentions, our foolish optimism, and our broken promises – to others and to ourselves. But unfinished business doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Unfinished projects are a valuable and necessary part of the creative process. They build skills and plant seeds of ideas for future projects. And even when a project seems as if it’s unfinished, sometimes it’s not. The iPhone came from unfinished business We wouldn’t have the iPhone if it weren’t for unfinished business. When Steve Jobs set out to make a phone that didn’t suck, he drew upon unfinished projects, and he left unfinished projects in his wake. The iPhone we know and love – and all the imitation ancestor smartphones it spawned – may seem like an obvious invention. But at the start of the project, it was far from obvious. A trackwheel phone!? From the beginning, the iPhone was built upon the foundation laid by the iPod. The iPod had transformed Apple’s business. iPod sales were forty-five percent of Apple’s revenue in 2005. But in the early 2000s, when you left the house, you had a dilemma: Do I bring my phone, my digital camera, my iPod – or some combination of the three? Jobs had seen how the digital camera market was getting eaten up by phones that had cameras. That was one less device you had to carry with you. He knew the iPod’s market share would erode, too, as soon as there was a decent phone that could hold music. If Apple could develop that phone, they could stay alive. So the first iPhone prototypes looked like iPods. You’d use the iPod’s then-famous trackwheel not only to navigate through menus, but also to select letters to type with, or numbers to dial the phone. Fortunately, this trackwheel phone became unfinished business. But the winning prototype also created unfinished business. The iPhone killed the iPad After toying with the trackwheel phone for months, it became apparent that Apple might want to explore another approach. So, Jobs and the other executives assigned another team to develop a different prototype. This time, they would develop a multitouch prototype – one where you’d actually use your fingers on a screen to interact with the phone. Apple had been experimenting with touch for many years now, such as when they developed their trackpad. There was one project they already had in the works that they borrowed from to develop the iPhone we know today. Apple had been working on a tablet computer with multitouch technology. Not only would you touch the screen on this tablet to “click” on items, or drag them around, but it could also sense various gestures, such as swipes, or even multiple fingers. So, Apple drew upon the technology from this tablet-computer project to use that technology in their phone project. They essentially placed what would become the iPad on hold, thus making more unfinished business. Creativity is messy Let’s stop for a second to think about how horrible it would be to use a trackwheel phone. You’d have to run your thumb over a trackwheel circle to find the letter you’d want to type, then click on the center of the wheel to select the letter. Or, you’d have to click on the right part of the circle to activate the corresponding letter. You’d have to do this to dial phone numbers, or select applications, enter names into your address book, or – God forbid – to write text messages. It’s obvious to us now this is a horrible idea. But that’s because we’ve used the iPhone. Creativity is a messy process. What will later seem an obviously bad or great idea will not be obviously such when you’re in the thick of a project. Want proof? In the process of making history, the smartest product designers and engineers in the world, including Steve Jobs, spent months exploring a trackwheel phone. Not only that, but at the end of those months, they said to themselves, “Hey, maybe there’s a better way?” They didn’t kill the trackwheel phone, though. They merely started working on another prototype in parallel. You’d think that as soon as they saw multitouch, it would have been obvious it was the better solution. But instead, even after six more months, working on both the trackwheel and multitouch versions of the phone, the solution still wasn’t clear. As Walter Isaacson describes in his biography of Jobs, the executives had a meeting to finally commit to one of the paths – and it still wasn’t an easy decision. They hadn’t figured out how to make the trackwheel experience elegant. They saw potential in the multitouch experience, but they weren’t sure it was technically possible. Isaacson says this was what Jobs liked to call a “bet-the-company moment.” They finally killed the trackwheel phone, and pursued the multitouch phone, unsure if they could make it work. Professionals make unfinished business on purpose So, by deciding to pursue the multitouch phone, instead of the trackwheel phone, Jobs and the other executives deliberately created two kinds of unfinished business. One: they killed the trackwheel phone. All the time and energy they put into that project essentially went to waste. Two: They killed their multitouch tablet computer. They had to divert resources from that project, to give this multitouch phone a shot. But notice none of this is a surprise. Notice we use words like “prototype,” and when you’re making two different versions of the same product, you’re pretty sure one of those paths will become a dead end. This is very different from the way most of us work when we’re first learning how to be creative. We start a project assuming we’ll finish it. But when we realize it won’t turn out as we envisioned, we quit. And we feel bad. We lament our “shiny object syndrome”, and fall into a downward spiral of guilt. We feel bad that we can’t finish projects, so we don’t start projects, to avoid feeling bad if we don’t finish them. But professional creatives and dilettantes aren’t so different. Both professionals and dilettantes start projects, and fail to finish them. But professionals know what to expect. They try multiple approaches, knowing they’ll scrap some. They also know that even when it looks like a project is over, it’s not over. The unfinished business that was the key to iPhone’s success The day after Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world, he called VP of operations, Jeff Williams. There was a problem with the phone. He said, “I’ve been carrying this thing around and it’s scratched in my pocket.” Those of us who had a first-generation iPhone know, it’s always had a glass screen. But once again, the obvious solution isn’t always obvious – or possible. The iPhone that Steve Jobs introduced on-stage in January of 2007 didn’t have a glass screen – it had a plastic screen. Jobs told Williams, “We need glass.” Williams explained that yes, it looked like as technology evolved, it would be possible to have glass screens on future iPhones, but all the current technology they had tested broke when dropped, every time. “No, no, no,” Jobs said. “You don’t understand. When it ships in June, it needs to be glass.” “Shut up and let me teach you some science” Jobs called the CEO of Corning, Wendell Weeks, who came to visit Apple in California. Weeks probably wondered why Jobs had bothered, because he started going on about how it was impossible to make a strong, scratch-resistant glass, good enough for a mobile phone. He had learned a lot about glass, building Apple retail stores around the world. Weeks finally said, “Can you shut up and let me teach you some science?”, then drew on the whiteboard, explaining an ion-exchange process that made a super-strong compression layer on the surface of the glass. Jobs wanted the glass, but there was a problem: This glass was unfinished business. Corning had developed it way back in the 1960s, but, it was a failed project. They never found a market for it, so they stopped making it. When Jobs told Weeks he wanted this glass for the iPhone launch in six months, Weeks had to break the bad news to him. “We don’t have the capacity,” he said. “None of our plants make the glass now.” Jobs is of course famous for his reality-distortion field, so he pushed Weeks, telling him, “Yes, you can do it. Get your mind around it. You can do it.” Weeks converted Corning’s Harrisburg, Kentucky plant into a full-time factory for iPhone screens, practically overnight. “We couldn’t have done it without [your unfinished business]” So the iPhone that has transformed the way we communicate and live came from unfinished business. Apple had to start work they knew they wouldn’t ship to make it happen. And they had to create unfinished business by diverting resources from that tablet-computer project – which of course finally became finished business years later, in 2010, when it launched as the iPad. Thankfully, Corning had gone through the trouble of making a super-strong glass, not knowing what they would need it for. It sat on the R&D shelf for decades before it became finished business – now known as “gorilla glass.” Corning CEO Wendell Weeks received a memo o n the day the iPhone launched, which he later framed and hung in his office. It was from Steve Jobs, and it underlines the power of Corning’s unfinished business – which they later made finished. The note said, “We couldn’t have done it without you.” Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone image: Dan Farber Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you to Andrew Skotzko for having me on Make Things That Matter. As always, you can find all podcasts I've been on at kadavy.net/interviews. Digital Zettelkasten now on Audible! New Audible users listen free through this link. Also available on other platforms. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Tw
19 minutes | Jan 27, 2022
271. How to Be Somebody
There’s something I want to talk about, but frankly, I’m a little embarrassed to do so. However, I write with my former self in mind, and my former self would want to know about this. So here I go. I want to talk about how to be somebody. What do I mean by “somebody?” To be somebody is to be known for your work. To have your name synonymous – or even better, eponymous – with your accomplishments. I used to be “nobody.” Now I am “somebody.” I am known in some circles for my work. My work has led to accomplishments I’m proud of. My work and I are one. There have been many steps on my journey to becoming somebody, but if I had to pick one day, it was September 14th, 2011. That was the day my first book debuted in the top 20 on Amazon. It’s hard to overstate what a massive change it was, in every aspect of my life, to overnight go from an unknown tinkerer to a “best-selling author.” The day I became somebody, my life changed. The benefits of being somebody Being somebody comes with some benefits. Here they are: Career success: This the best reason to become somebody. Name recognition helps you make money for the work you do. The money for the work you do helps you do more of that work. But career success can come in other forms. Being somebody has meant that I’ve gotten speaking invitations all over the world. Thanks to the ones I’ve been able to accept, I’ve spoken all over the U.S., and in eight countries. Respect: When I became somebody, everyone started to show me more respect. Introductions went from, “This is David, he is weird and I’m not sure what he does” to “This is David, he’s a famous author.” (Prior to becoming somebody, I was introduced by a well-known Chicago entrepreneur – right in front of my face – as a “malingerer.”) When I became somebody, my idiosyncrasies and lifestyle choices suddenly weren’t viewed as odd. Instead, they were seen as something you would expect from a creative person who is somebody. Connections: Because I am somebody, I can make connections with other somebodies. If I’m interested in the work of another somebody, I can reach out to that person, and they will generally respond. Or, I can ask for an introduction from another somebody. I’m rarely more than a degree or two away from the somebody I want to meet. This is how I managed to interview many somebodies I admire for my podcast, such as Adam Conover, Elise Baurer, David Allen, James Altucher, Seth Godin, and many more. Dating prospects: When I became somebody, my dating prospects improved immediately. This admittedly has downsides, because you don’t want to be with anyone who wants to be with you because you’re somebody. And if you think being somebody entitles you to love you’ll become a horrible person. But being somebody serves as a signal that you’re trustworthy. Even though, in recent years, many much-bigger somebodies have turned out to not be trustworthy, the social proof that your accomplishments have gained you name recognition counts for a lot in at least getting someone to acknowledge you as a potential mate. Random perks: I’m only known for my work in small circles, but that doesn’t prevent me from being “somebody” outside those circles. I don’t flaunt my somebody-ness, but people Google. Oh, do they Google. There have been many situations where someone has discovered I was somebody, because they Googled me, and then they commented on it. Which means there have been many other situations where they didn’t admit to it. This improves your prospects in a variety of situations. Sometimes that’s intangible, but I know it once at least helped me rent an apartment for a couple months during a mini life. Being somebody isn’t all upsides. I’ll get to more of the downsides later. But if you want to become somebody, how do you do that? Why do you want to become somebody? Before you try to become somebody, ask yourself why you want to become somebody. This can be a hard question to ask and it gets to the heart of why I’m a little embarrassed to even be talking about this. American culture is driven by people desperate to become somebody, but it’s unfashionable to openly admit it’s something you want. What do you want out of being somebody? If you want to become somebody, ask yourself what you expect to get out of it. It might not even be necessary to become somebody to get those things. The best reason to become somebody is to get paid to do what you love, so you can do it more. Being somebody is a job requirement behind many creative professions, such as an author, musician, or entertainer. It’s hard to substitute the benefits of being somebody in these cases. But if you want respect, or for various parts of life to become easier, there are other ways to get those things. For example, you can make connections with somebodies simply by being more outgoing and intentional. A dirty little secret about the benefits I mentioned earlier is that much of the value of becoming somebody doesn’t come from being somebody in the eyes of other people. Much of it comes from being somebody in the eyes of yourself. If you want to be somebody, and you feel you are not, you will have little confidence. If you don’t want to be somebody in the first place, nothing stands in the way of your confidence. And confidence is a big part of success. What are the downsides of becoming somebody? Being somebody comes with downsides and risks, and you should have these in mind if you’re going to try to become somebody. I think I have about the right amount of somebody-ness. The vast majority of people have no idea who I am. A small circle of people respects what I do, and when I meet them, they are always interesting and nice people. As of yet, I have few vocal haters. I am not enough of a somebody to frequently be recognized in public, outside of industry conferences. (One time in my life, I was recognized in a gym, and that went just fine.) I’m not enough of a somebody for it to impede my daily life, such that I would have to be wary of going to public places, or worse yet, followed by paparazzi. I would see those as downsides. The main risk of being somebody is reputational damage, known today in its most-extreme form as being “cancelled.” For many professions, reputational damage can be devastating, but mostly only if your career depends upon others risking their reputations by working with you. If you are an actor, comedian, and perhaps a musician, if your reputation is damaged, you may have trouble getting work. If you are an author, you have to be pretty heinous to have a publisher drop you. If you are a self-published author, you’d have to be even worse. If anything, an author should be so lucky to be “cancelled” (considering it’s for an unfair reason). You’d have to be pretty successful to even qualify to be cancelled, and you’d sell even more books. The best way for someone to prevent being cancelled is to not do awful things. But “tall poppy syndrome” does exist. People may want to cut you down just because you are somebody, because they would benefit by doing so, or other reasons that are beyond your control. Even if the majority of reasonable people are on your side, there are a lot of psychopaths in the world who could make your life hell, and being somebody likely increases the chances of that. Should you become a pseudonymous somebody? More and more people are becoming pseudonymous somebodies, in what Balaji Srinivasan calls “the pseudonymous economy.” Depending on what work you do, you can build a reputation for that work without anyone laying eyes on you or your real name. So, you can reap the career benefits of being somebody, without the personal risks of reputational damage. If your pseudonym’s reputation is damaged, you still lose those career benefits, but hopefully your true identity is still safe. You won’t get the public-facing benefits of being somebody, but you might get the boost in your self-perception that comes along with doing work good enough to be recognized. You can also work under a pseudonym without remaining totally anonymous. In other words, people might recognize your face, but not know your real name. This way, you get some of the public-facing benefits, but prevent your privacy from being violated. I have no idea what Tynan’s real name is, and I don’t need to know. If I could start over, I would write under a pseudonym, but probably still show my face. A big benefit of pseudonyms is you can improve your chances of becoming somebody by making your name easier to remember, and perhaps even associated with the area in which you work. Joanna Penn uses her real name, which would have been a perfectly-chosen pseudonym, since she writes about writing. I can’t help but wonder if some of the success of authors such as James Clear, Ryan Holiday, and Mark Manson can be attributed to their memorable and easy-to-spell names. So many entertainers work under “stage names”, it feels silly to even present an example, but Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson. Are you trying to fill a hole in your heart? The older I get, the less I care about being somebody. I want to be somebody to the extent that it helps me sell more books, so I can write more books. But when I was nobody, I wanted very badly to become somebody. I may think I don’t care about being somebody, in part because I’ve gotten used to being somebody. It’s the “water,” that I, a fish, swim in. Some of it may be that being somebody isn’t quite as amazing as I had expected it to be when I was nobody (though it’s still good). But I have to admit – and this is part of where my embarrassment comes from – I to some extent wanted to become somebody to fill a hole in my heart. If you don’t have enough love in your life, you may search for it in becoming somebody. There are many examples of celebrities who had absent or abusive parents or traumatic upbringings, though I don’t know for sure if that comes out to a higher rate than the rest of the population. I would guess many of them wanted to become celebrities to fill holes in their hearts. Wanting to become somebody because you have a hole in your heart can be great motivational fuel. It can be, like I talked about in The Heart to Start, That
14 minutes | Jan 13, 2022
270. My Cooking System
Systems save energy. Especially if the system helps you with something you do every day. This is why I have a system for cooking. When you’re hungry, you make bad decisions, such as grabbing the quickest food you can find – which often happens to be unhealthy food. My cooking system ensures I never have to think about what to eat, or how to prepare it. It frees my time and my mind, so I can focus on creating. A little disclaimer before I begin: I’m not suggesting you eat what I eat. I have a mysterious chronic illness and am sensitive to damn near everything. This particular diet is optimized for very specific things that apply to me. If you build a system for yourself, you might want to eat something different. The basic principles still apply. Three principles of a cooking system My cooking system is based upon three principles: Batch what you can To batch, prepare what you can beforehand. You save time and energy, and – since many of your ingredients are already ready – you have a healthy meal in no time. As I’ll explain in a bit, in my system, I cut and store vegetables beforehand. This is a little extra work up-front than cutting vegetables before any one meal, but over the course of several meals, it’s less time and hassle. You sometimes have to make compromises for the sake of a system. Pre-cut vegetables are ever-so-slightly less tasty and fresh than vegetables you’ve just cut, but cutting in advance is still a net-positive. Never run out A good system prevents emergencies. After a long day, you don’t want to suddenly discover you have no food, or are missing a crucial ingredient. Even if you had the energy to do so, it would be a waste to run to the grocery store. But you probably don’t have that energy, so you’ll probably order delivery – and that delivery food will not be as healthy as a home-cooked meal would have been, and will cost more. My system is designed to never run out of ingredients. I know the minimum amount of each ingredient I can have before its time to order more. I also know my ingredients won’t go bad because I’ve had them too long. As you use your system, pay attention to just how perishable your regular ingredients are. How long can you keep them? At what minimum supply is it time to order more, so you won’t run out? For example, I have two jars of coconut oil. When I run out of the first, coconut oil goes on my shopping list. I know I’ll buy again before I run out of the second jar. Monotony first (variety later) To start your cooking system, make the same things every single meal. Through repetition, you can gradually sprinkle in variety. Many people think this sounds boring. “I could never do that,” they say. “I could never eat the same thing every meal!” Well, you don’t have to. Eating the same thing every meal is only temporary. It allows you to put together the pieces of your cooking system, such as how often you’ll order ingredients, and what compromises you’re willing to make to have ingredients ready. Making the same things with the same ingredients and the same processes gives you one opportunity after another to optimize your system. When you run out of ingredients or they go bad, you learn how often you need to order. You can also experiment with different processes, and learn how different trade-offs affect the quality of what you cook. Once you have the building blocks of a system in place, you can start adding in variety. Through many iterations of my cooking system, I no longer eat the exact same thing every meal. Many components, such as the vegetables, garnishes, spices, or proteins, can easily be substituted in the same processes to make different dishes. Many people think they couldn’t eat the same thing every meal, but then they continue to do what I used to do: Wait until I was famished, then desperately look for whatever food I could find to shove in my mouth – making bad decisions in the process. If you do this, too, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You don’t have to eat the same things forever. Try it for a while, then mix in some variety. Categories of ingredients While you may not want to eat my exact diet, there are categories of ingredients that are nearly universal: protein, vegetables, spices, and garnish. Here’s how those apply to my cooking system. Protein I eat a variety of meat-based protein sources. I mostly alternate between ground beef and ground pork, but I also occasionally eat ground turkey. My butcher in Colombia has both beef and pork, and packs them into bags of individual serving sizes. I stack them up in my freezer. At the end of each day, I take a couple packs from the freezer, and transfer them to the fridge. The packs are thin enough, they’ll be thawed by the next day. Vegetables The main vegetable in my system is zucchini. I eat a lot of zucchini. My other staple vegetables are carrots, red bell peppers, mushrooms, cucumbers, and celery. Variability in the sizes of zucchinis has had a big effect on my cooking system. The zucchinis in Colombia are not like Whole Foods, in the U.S., where every zucchini is pretty much the exact same. When I am in the U.S., I can quickly enough make zucchini noodles on-demand with a small handheld spiralizer. But since there’s so much variance in zucchini thickness in Colombia, I use a table-top spiralizer, and store the noodles in a container. You can also buy pre-cut zucchini noodles at some grocery stores, generally not in Colombia, so I’ll sometimes buy these if they’re available and I’m feeling lazy. Carrots, I spiralize if they’re big enough for the table-top spiralizer. Otherwise, they’re cut down to a small size that can cook quickly. The bell peppers and mushrooms are also cut down to size for cooking. Celery is cut into short sticks for garnish. Cucumbers are cut into half-moons, separated from the seeds for longer storage. Spices By changing the spices in a dish, you can totally change the flavor. But, I have one go-to spice mix that I make over and over. It’s a taco mix from a keto cookbook, consisting of chili powder, non-sugar sweetener, salt, black pepper, and some other spices. I fill a Tupperware container with the mix every few weeks. Each time I make the mix, I pay attention to my supply of each of those spices, and put on my shopping list any which are low. This way, I never run out of key spices. Garnish I already mentioned that I garnish my dish with cut celery and cucumber, but I have other things I use in each meal. First, I put on a seed mixture. It’s made of various high-fat seeds: hemp, sunflower, and pumpkin seeds, and sometimes flax seeds. Then, I put on oil. It’s usually coconut oil. Sometimes it’s flax oil. Less often, it’s olive or sunflower oil. My body hates me if I eat a carb, so these seeds and oils help add fat to my dishes, which gives me hard-to-find calories, and helps keep me in ketosis. I also get some extra calories (and fat) by accompanying each meal with avocado. This is as freshly-cut as possible – unless there is some left over from a prior meal. Avocados are just a little too perishable to systematize much, though I’ve gotten better at identifying ripe ones through the avocado challenge I talked about on episode 245. Starches Honorable mention goes to the starches category. As I said, my body hates carbs, but starches would be a key part of a cooking system for most people. You could use a rice-cooker, and always have hot rice available. Pasta would be a little more work, as it wouldn’t be too good if you didn’t cook it fresh every time. The same probably goes for potatoes or sweet potatoes. Then again, you might be able to make all these starches in a rice cooker, which could save a lot of time. My cooking process Now that I’ve talked about the principles and categories of my cooking system, here’s the process I follow. As I talk about some of the decisions I’ve made in this system, you’ll get an idea of how you can build your own system. Step 1: Begin cooking protein To begin, I start the burner and put the pan on the stove. I pull a bag of meat out of the fridge, slice it open, and put the meat on the pan. I then put some of my spice mix on the meat, turn it over, and turn up the heat a bit. I want to burn some of the spices onto the ground meat, for extra flavor. Step 2: Take out other ingredients Through repetition, I’ve figured out the exact order to do each step in my system. Notice that I started the burner first. That gives it a little time to heat up, while I’m removing the meat and unpacking it to cook. It takes time to take so many containers of ingredients out of the fridge, so I do that after I’ve started cooking the meat. Step 3: Begin cooking “round 1” vegetables I could add all my vegetables at the same time, but then they wouldn’t each be optimally cooked. So, I take the extra effort to add my vegetables in “rounds,” based upon how long they will take to cook. At this point, I add my “round 1” vegetables: mushrooms, and if my carrots are sliced and not spiralized, I’ll also add them. Otherwise, they get added later, which I’ll explain in a later step. Step 4: Prepare plate with garnishes While the meat and first round of vegetables are cooking, I prepare the plate, with garnishes. I take a plate out of the cabinet, and add some celery and cucumber to the edge of the plate. Step 5: Break up protein, and add “round 2” vegetables Now that the meat and round 1 vegetables have cooked a bit – while I prepared the plate – I break up the ground meat, and stir it up with the vegetables. I then add the “round 2” vegetables, which is usually just sliced up red bell peppers. Step 6: Cut avocado While the red bell peppers are cooking, I cut an avocado, and add half of it to the plate as garnish. Step 7: Add “round 3” vegetables Finally, I add the “round 3” vegetables. This is my zucchini noodles and – if the carrots were large enough to make noodles – my carrot noodles. Since carrots and zucchinis are of different consistencies, the carrot noodles are sliced thinner than the zucchini noodles. This way, I can add both at the same time, and they will both cook to the right point, in parallel. I’ve been cooking without a cover on the pan this whole time (other
12 minutes | Nov 25, 2021
269. Farm What You Forage
Many people think our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived short and miserable lives. In fact, that’s what most anthropologists thought. Until the 1960s, when they looked more closely at how foragers got by. The way foragers “worked” can tell us a lot about the way we, as creators, work. Farming gets a lot of output with little effort No one can be exactly sure when a human first planted a seed to grow food, but this one act was one of the most revolutionary in human history – up there with the invention of fire, or the internet. The agricultural revolution meant humans no longer needed to roam around, searching for food. But, with the innovation of agriculture came some trade-offs. We had to wait for our crops to grow, so we had to stay in one place. But staying in one place didn’t work out-of-the-box everywhere. As anthropologist James Suzman points out in his book, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, the first successful cities sprouted up in floodplains. These areas flooded regularly, and that refreshed the nutrients in the soil, which was a must for successful farming, as crop-rotation hadn’t yet been invented. Which brings us to another drawback of farming. Yes, farming gets you a lot of food with little effort, but eventually your once-fertile soil runs out of nutrients. Creative “farming” grows ideas into finished products As creatives, it’s useful for us to “farm.” Plant seeds of ideas. Give them water, sunlight, and fertile soil, and eventually you’ll have a crop of creative products to harvest. I talked in my book, Mind Management, Not Time Management, about “creative systems.” Cultivating ideas takes time. By working with the cycles of your energy to do short bursts of work, and letting incubation do the rest, you can always have creative products to ship. (I talked specifically about my creative system for Love Mondays newsletters on episode 260.) Creative farming is a great way to consistently turn ideas into finished products. But foraging is where you get the ideas in the first place. Foraging is more effective than you think In the 1960s, anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee lived with a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Kalahari desert. He carefully tracked what they spent time on, and what they got out of it. Lee found these tribes met all their needs for food in just fifteen hours work a week. They consumed well over the daily recommended intake of 2,000 calories, and they did it all without farming. They did it by foraging. Fifteen hours a week to get everything you need. That sounds appealing to many of us. Fifteen hours a week is ironically the number of hours economist John Maynard Keynes once predicted we in the industrial world would work. In 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, Keynes had the guts to predict that by 2030, we would at least quadruple our productivity. As a result, he said, we would work only fifteen hours a week. But foraging doesn’t lead to progress We reached that quadruple-productivity mark way back in 1980. But we still work way more than fifteen hours a week. Why? We can make philosophical arguments about the hedonic treadmill, and how we buy too much junk. But one thing is for sure: We want to see “progress.” These hunter gatherer tribes, who have sadly been all but completely driven off their foraging land by the industrial world, did lead rich lives. They worked for what they needed, they had plenty of leisure time, and everything they did was deeply integrated with their families and communities. But they didn’t have running water, electricity, or modern medicine. Many lived as long as anyone in the civilized world – if they reached adulthood. But they had a high infant-mortality rate, which pushed down the average lifespan. They didn’t have what we consider “progress.” They didn’t wonder if their children would live in a world with human flight, space exploration, or the internet. Each generation’s life was essentially the same as the previous. Creatives need to forage As creatives, we can’t just farm. We need to “forage,” too. We need to wander around, follow our curiosities, and see what surprises we can find. The hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari lived in such a rich ecosystem, they could always feel confident they could find something to eat if they went and looked for it. But as a creator, happening upon a feast is less common. It’s not every day a song comes to us in our sleep, like it did when Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday.” Or that a happy accident occurs, like when Charles Goodyear spilled chemicals and developed vulcanized rubber. This is why you need to farm what you forage. Forage, then farm, to have great ideas, then make them real Farming what you forage isn’t just a good way to do creative work. If you want to be consistent, it’s the only way. This is hard to see, because we’re working in a world that’s a relic of the assembly line. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, and software developers, themselves, are produced on assembly lines. They follow curricula. They take exams. These exams have bubbles they fill out, so a machine can read them – as long as they’re filled out with a number-two pencil. But, like farming, these professions grow stale, like soil being sapped of nutrients. The curricula have to change, as do the exams. But those curricula don’t change from farming over and over. Someone has to farm what they forage, to change the field. Remember from episode 266 that for Henry Ford to put workers on the assembly line, he had to first farm what he foraged. It took a lot of experimentation and tinkering – from Model A to Model S, in addition to the work he did in two previous failed car companies – before the Model T was ready to be produced en masse. But the soil eventually got sapped of its nutrients. While Ford refused to change the Model T until sales dwindled, other car companies were farming what they foraged – innovating to build better cars. We’re not used to farming what we forage. It’s not how work has gotten done in recent history. But as automation and AI threaten more and more jobs, we’re freed from the drudgery of just farming. We need to forage, too. I talked in episode 250 about how I farm what I forage with my digital Zettelkasten (that article has since expanded into a successful book by the same name). To forage, I explore what interests me – reading books, listening to podcasts, and having conversations. To farm, I take notes, then categorize and connect them. These seeds of ideas grow over time, until I’m ready to harvest them. An idea can grow into a tweet, then a newsletter, then a podcast episode, maybe eventually even a book. Farming = clock time; Foraging = event time Farming and foraging call for different ways of thinking about time, too. In episode 235, I talked about the difference between “clock time,” and “event time.” Clock time’s most recent roots come from Frederick Taylor’s scientific management. Breaking actions down to split seconds was a big departure for farmers who moved to cities to work in industry. But farming, too, was a likely predecessor of clock time. Foragers could usually be confident that if they were hungry, they could find something to eat. When you live in a diverse ecosystem, if one thing is not doing so well, something else is. In fact, when Richard Borshay Lee was studying foragers, there was a drought. The nearby farmers couldn’t grow crops. To survive, they had to rely on outside food aid. The tribe he was studying did not. They got by on foods they had found in the wild. When you’re farming, you can’t count on finding food whenever you’re hungry. You have to grow it. So, you have to think carefully about time. If you don’t plant your seeds, pull weeds, or water crops today, you’ll be hungry a long time from now. This is probably one reason cultures close to the equator tend to think more about the present, whereas cultures in climates with changing seasons think more about the future. When surviving tomorrow depends upon what you do today, you think ahead. If you focus too much on farming, you’ll always be on clock time. If you keep planting the same seeds and growing the same crops, your soil will become sterile. If you focus too much on foraging, you’ll always be on event time. If you only rely on what you find in the wild, you’ll always be living hand-to-mouth. You’ll be waiting a long time between one idea and the next, and you’ll struggle to develop them into finished products. Find a seed with potential, then plant it To farm what you forage, make space to wander. Follow your curiosity, even when it feels as if it will take you nowhere. But when you find something interesting that might have potential, plant the seed. Build creative systems that help you keep ideas growing, without sapping your soil. If you do those two things, you’ll never have famines, and always have feasts. Image: Southern Gardens, Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/farm-forage/
9 minutes | Nov 11, 2021
268. The Void
There’s a story I think of every time I’m in the throes of a difficult project. It’s from the movie, Catch Me if You Can, about the infamous con artist, Frank Abignale, Jr. Frank’s Father, Frank Senior, tells him a story: Two little mice fell in a bucket of cream. The first mouse quickly gave up and drowned. The second mouse wouldn’t quit. He struggled so hard that eventually he turned that cream into butter, and crawled out. You hear the story several times throughout the movie. It’s really the theme of the movie. When Frank Junior’s parents separate, he feels like the mouse drowning in cream. He runs away and poses as an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, forging paychecks and flying all over, like a little mouse, frantically and desperately moving his little legs, trying to find his place in the world. You face The Void at the beginning of a project Whenever I start a creative project, I feel like a mouse in a bucket of cream. Every time I move one of my little legs to try to get traction, it just keeps floating in space. But, I’ve found, if you keep moving fast enough and long enough, that cream turns into butter. I talked on episode 265 about how there are a lot of different sub-skills to the skill of shipping. One of those sub-skills is overcoming your fear of shipping. In other words, facing the Void. The Void is the empty space you need to fill for your project to become complete. The Void is a figurative place. It mostly lives in your mind. But it has literal representations, too, such as the blank page or the blank canvas. The Void is present at the beginning of a project, and that prevents many creators from even getting started. But the Void has other, less obvious, effects. The Void doesn’t just prevent you from starting a project. It also prevents you from finishing projects. The Void holds you back from shipping There are plenty of things to fear as you’re about to finish a project and ship. You fear criticism of your work. You fear later seeing something you want to fix, after it’s too late. As I talked about in episode 267, you face the Finisher’s Paradox: You learn throughout the project, and by the time you’re done, you can already do better. But as you prepare to ship, and you see your perfectionism taking over, or you get shiny object syndrome, if you look deep within yourself, you’ll probably find a fear of the Void. Even though you face the Void at the beginning of a project, your fear of the Void can hold you back in the end of a project. Being in the “butter” is comfortable The fear of the Void gets in the way of shipping for two reasons. One: being in the “butter” of a project is comfortable. When something nebulous starts to solidify, we also sometimes say it “gels.” In either case, where there was once empty space where you couldn’t get traction, you’re now enveloped in something solid. When you’re in the final stages of a project that has gelled it’s like being in a warm blanket on your couch, with a bowl of popcorn, watching Netflix. When you finish this project, you have to face the Void on the next Reason number two the Void gets in the way of shipping: When you finish the project, and start the next, you have to face the Void all over again. Deep down, you know after you let go of that first project, and start the second, you’ll feel, once again, as if you’re drowning. Is it perfectionism? Maybe it’s the Void. So what are you to do? Simply being aware of your fear of the Void is a good start. When you catch yourself, in the final stretch, second-guessing or catastrophizing, simply remind yourself that you’re trying to a-void the Void, and that will help you snap out of it. What looks like perfectionism may not be perfectionism. It may be fear of the Void. Another great way to overcome your fear of the Void is to make sure you never have to face it again. As I talked about in episode 261, we’re taught shiny object syndrome is a bad thing. Working on a project, then quickly getting excited about and switching to another project, is not how traditional work gets done. But it has value in creative work. Starting projects on the side helps you a-void the Void If you get comfortable having a bunch of projects incubating on the side – and you don’t beat yourself up about the fact you may finish few, if any, of them – those projects on the side serve as buffers against the Void. Once you prepare your current project for take-off, you already have another project waiting in the wings. Your excitement for your other projects can even get you more excited about finishing your current project. But every once in a while, you’re still going to find yourself floating in space – or drowning in cream, if you will. When that happens, do whatever you can to keep forward momentum. Brainstorm and prototype, and be okay knowing most of what you come up with will suck. In other words, remember the little mouse, and get those legs moving. Image: After the Floods, Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/the-void/
9 minutes | Oct 28, 2021
267. The Finisher's Paradox
When Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he designed and built his own scaffolding. But, it only covered half of the ceiling. So he painted the first half of the ceiling, then removed the scaffolding. When he finally got to view his work from the floor, seventy feet below, it was as if he were seeing it with new eyes. After two years work, he didn’t like what he saw. Michelangelo faced what I call “The Finisher’s Paradox.” There’s a contradiction that happens when you try to ship your creative work: By the time you’re done, you can already do better. You learned in the process. Michelangelo learned on the job As I talked about in episode 262, Michelangelo “aimed left” when he started painting in the chapel. He had little experience as a painter, and even less experience in the wickedly-difficult “fresco” method. He knew the first panel he painted wouldn’t be his best. So, as art historian Ross King explained on episode 99, Michelangelo started in an inconspicuous part of the chapel. It was the last place the clergy entering the chapel would see, and the last place the Pope would look when sitting on the throne. Michelangelo did have at least one false start. A few weeks into painting the first panel, he wasn’t satisfied with his work. The salty sea air in Italy was staining the mixture of plaster he had chosen. There were probably also some things he wanted to change about his painting style. Once the plaster on a fresco dries, it’s literally set in stone. But, like stone, you can get rid of it if you destroy it. And that’s exactly what he did: Michelangelo chipped away three weeks of work and started over. If Michelangelo learned a thing or two in the first few weeks painting the Sistine Chapel, you can bet he learned even more painting the rest of the 12,000 square-foot fresco – which, in total, took him four years. Michelangelo faced the Finisher’s Paradox So after Michelangelo removed his scaffolding from the first half of the ceiling, he was faced with a dilemma: There was something he didn’t like about his work. Since, while painting on his scaffolding, he was very close to the work, the work looked very different from the floor. He realized the scenes he had painted were too complex. There were too many people on each panel, and, as a result, the people were too small. You couldn’t make out very well, from the floor, what was going on in the paintings on the ceiling. The dilemma then was that he was two years into the work. His patron, Pope Julius II, was a nasty man, known for going on tirades and beating people who disagreed with him – perhaps even worse. He’s gone down in history as “il papa terribile,” or “the terrible” Pope. He had probably even beaten Michelangelo by that point. Additionally, the project was taking a toll on Michelangelo. His back was killing him, from literally bending over backwards to paint the ceiling. So, would Michelangelo do as he did when he first started the project? Chip away all that work, put the scaffolding back up, then start over? Or, would he keep going and ship the work? Michelangelo was faced with the Finisher’s Paradox. He had learned a lot throughout the project, and he had learned even more by finally seeing his work from a distance. Would he fix what was wrong with his work, or would he just ship it as it was, flaws and all? The tale of two (Sistine Chapel) ceilings Since the Sistine Chapel ceiling has lived on as one of the greatest masterpieces in art, it’s surprising Michelangelo saw something wrong at all. It’s even more surprising that what he saw is still there in the final product. If you look closely at the Sistine Chapel ceiling today, you’ll notice something different about the two halves of the ceiling. On one side of the ceiling, the scenes are complex. There are lots of people, and the people are small. On the other side, the scenes are simpler. There are fewer people in each panel, and the people are bigger. When the first half of the ceiling was unveiled, it didn’t seem to matter to others that the people in the paintings were small. Raphael was so impressed by what he saw, he went back to one of his own fresco’s, The School of Athens, chipped away a spot, and in its place painted a likeness of Michelangelo. But Michelangelo, himself, made some big changes to his approach. And these changes seem to have paid off. The very first panel he painted on the second half of the ceiling is one of the most famous paintings ever. In The Creation of Adam, you see God himself, giving life to Adam, from fingertip to fingertip. Like other panels on the second half of the ceiling, there are fewer main figures – in this case, two – and, as a result, they’re bigger, and easier to see from the floor. Do the best you can until you know better In the process of doing your creative work, you learn. This is especially true because nobody can teach you how to do your creative work, with the unique style and idiosyncrasies that make it yours. Yes, there will be creative waste. Much of it goes into building the underwater part of your iceberg. As you get shiny object syndrome and switch from one project to another, as you scrap iterations by throwing them into the fire, and as projects simply fail (for now), there will be delays in achieving success, as you build your foundation. But just because waste, false starts, and failures are a part of the creative process, doesn’t mean you can hide away forever, toiling on a “perfect” masterpiece you will one day unveil. Shipping is a skill, and learning new skills is sometimes scary. Remember from episode 265 that one of the sub-skills of shipping is overcoming perfectionism. Perfectionism is a “humble brag” of a quality. It’s far easier and more comfortable to say you’re still working on your masterpiece, than it is to put it into the world and see how it’s received. But as Maya Angelou once said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” In other words, beware the Finisher’s Paradox. When you work on a creative project, you learn. Once it’s time to ship, you can already do better. You can’t ship your work without some small part of you saying, “this sucks.” It is better to build in enlightenment than to daydream in darkness. Image: Concert by Louis Marcoussis Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you to Chris Parker at Easy Prey, and Joyce Ling at The Abundance Podcast. You can find every podcast I’ve been on kadavy.net/interviews. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »"     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/finishers-paradox/
13 minutes | Oct 14, 2021
266. The Foundation Effect
On October 10th, 1901 – 120 years ago, almost to the day – the grandstand was full at the horse track in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. But not to see horses. There was a parade of more than 100 of these new things called automobiles, and several other events, including races of automobiles with electric engines and with steam engines. But the main event was a race of gasoline automobiles. By the time the event took place, it didn’t look like it would be much of a race. There had originally been twenty-five contestants. Only three made it to the starting post, then just before the race, one broke down and had to withdraw. So there were just two cars, driven by the men who had built them. One was the country’s most famous car manufacturer. The other, was a local. A failed car manufacturer, named Henry Ford. At the time of this race, the most famous car-maker in America was Alexander Winton. He had made and sold hundreds of cars. He had gotten tons of press driving from Cleveland to New York. At the time of this race, Henry Ford was a failed car-maker. He had made and sold a handful of automobiles, but his first car company had failed. It was clear who was going to win this race: Moments prior, Alexander Winton had set the world record for the fastest mile traveled in an automobile, going around the dirt track in a little more than a minute and twelve seconds. Winton’s car was seventy horsepower. Ford’s was twenty-six. He had never taken it on a turn, and it didn’t have brakes. The race was supposed to be twenty-five laps, but just before the event, the organizers shortened it to ten. According to Richard Snow, author of I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford, they probably didn’t want to see the local loser lapped over and over. This race was more of a sprint. The Foundation Effect Has this ever happened to you? You pass by a construction site for months, and there’s nothing going on. There’s just a wall with a project logo, peppered with graffiti. Then one day, there’s a six-story building frame there. Now, each time you pass, it’s gotten taller. There was no visible progress for months, then there was rapid progress. You saw what I call “The Foundation Effect.” The Foundation Effect is the delay in your progress, as you build your foundation. You have false starts and failures, and it looks as if you’re going nowhere. But once you have your foundation built, you progress rapidly. Back to the races Henry Ford, the failed carmaker, won the sprint. But it wasn’t until much later he also won the marathon. Eight years after that race, Henry’s Ford Motor Company released a car that changed everything. It was durable enough to make it over rough country roads, lined with horse-drawn-wagon tracks. It was versatile enough farmers could use the engine to run a wheat thresher or move hay bales down a conveyer belt. It was twice as good as any car out there, at half the price. The first year, they sold 10,000. The second year, 20,000. A few years after that, they sold almost 200,000. By the time the “Model T” went out of production nearly twenty years after introduction, the Ford Motor Company had sold nearly 15 million. More than half of all cars in the world were Fords. Meanwhile, Alexander Winton’s company kept building custom cars, made-to-order. He just couldn’t compete with Ford’s Model T, and had to shut down. Despite having over 100 patents on automobile technology, few today have ever heard of Alexander Winton. You need a foundation How did Henry Ford create such an incredible car, that sold in such incredible quantities? He built a rock-solid foundation. Over and over, he rejected the mere illusion of progress to scrap everything and start over. As a creator, you may feel as if you’re getting nowhere. You’re starting projects, but not finishing them. The ones you do finish are failing. You’re throwing iterations in the fire, like Radclyffe Hall. From recent episodes, you know creative waste is part of the process. You’re building the underwater part of your iceberg, so some future masterpiece will be that much better. But you’re also building your foundation. The foundation of a building holds it in place. Even when the building sways in the wind or shakes in an earthquake, the foundation is there to bare the stress. Architects and engineers can design a foundation using knowledge about the laws of physics. Many buildings have been built before, so there’s a lot of collective experience to draw from. You, as a creator, need to build your foundation from scratch. It’s what makes your work unique. As a creator, your foundation is made of the change you want your work to make, the medium through which you’ll make that change, and the process you’ll follow to make your product. These things take time to develop. It will look as if you’re getting nowhere, but once they’re in place – like a skyscraper once the foundation is laid – your progress will be rapid. How to build your foundation To build your foundation, you need to clarify your vision and master your execution, so you won’t topple over. Here are some ways to do that. 1. Keep shipping This seems counterintuitive, because when a skyscraper goes up, they only build one building. They aren’t putting up a few stories, scrapping it, and starting over. The reason they can build a foundation to support the skyscraper is, millions of other buildings have been built before that skyscraper. Architects and engineers can design a strong foundation because they have tons of data. You need to collect tons of data about your unique way of doing things. How do you get it done? How do people react? Does it express your unique point of view? What is that point of view? Overall, how do you make what only you can make? Henry Ford’s hit car was the Model “T.” Why was it called the Model T? Because he had already built the Model S, the Model R, Q, P, O – you get the idea. He started with Model A. It took until Model T to build the foundation for stratospheric success. The way you build your foundation as a creator is to keep shipping. Remember, shipping is a skill. And each time you ship, you make your foundation stronger. 2. Don’t just build. Experiment. It’s funny that when most people think of Henry Ford, they think of the assembly line. A bunch of guys on a line, each doing one tiny job, such as placing a nut on a bolt, or merely turning the nut on the bolt. But for Ford to create those tasks, he first had to design the product that could be broken down into those tasks. Ford treated each car he designed and built as an experiment. He made them as good as he could, but knew they couldn’t be perfect. They were going to break down, or have annoying maintenance requirements that needed to be improved. We can design buildings that don’t collapse because other buildings have failed. Ford made new and better cars because his cars failed. That’s how he improved the transmission, lubrication, and spark plugs. That’s how he found a steel alloy that would be lightweight and strong – and countless other improvements to the design and manufacture of his cars. And that’s how, even as he improved the Model T, he kept making it cheaper. When he introduced it in 1909, it was $825. Sixteen years later, inflation be dammed, it was only $260. 3. Walk away from failures (guilt-free) Henry Ford wasn’t afraid to quit. Yes, he went from Model A to Model T, but that was in his third car company. He had one failed company before the race, and after he won that race, he gained enough notoriety to attract investors for a second car company. But he walked away from that company, too – only four months later. By the way, Ford went from A to T, and not all those cars were introduced to the public. Many were internal experiments that he walked away from – or, if you will, iterations thrown in the fire, like Radclyffe Hall’s drafts. 4. Have a vision You can’t walk away from failures for no reason. You can’t learn from experiments if you don’t know what you’re looking for. You need a vision. You don’t have a crystal-clear vision from the start. That’s why you’re doing all that shipping and experimenting and quitting in the first place. Why did Henry Ford walk away from the car company he started after the race? It wasn’t going to help him carry out his vision. Ford had a vision to create an affordable automobile for the masses. His investors, on the other hand, wanted to build high-end cars for the wealthy. The company wasn’t a foundation that was going to help Ford achieve his vision, so he stepped back, to build a foundation that would. Keep building your foundation If you’re frustrated with your progress as a creator, maybe it’s because you’re still working on your foundation. If you’re scrapping iterations and walking away from half-finished, and failed, projects, make sure it’s in the pursuit of a vision. If it is, keep learning, until you get it right. Once your foundation is in place, the sky is the limit. Image: Monument by Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/foundation-effect/
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