Listen Now

It’s hard to predict the future, but you can be better at predicting the future. All you need is a few delicious avocados. Even the “experts” are bad at predicting the future Wharton professor Phillip Tetlock wanted to make the future easier to predict. So he held “forecasting tournaments,” in which experts from a variety of fields made millions of predictions about global events. Tetlock found that experts are no better at predicting the future than dart-throwing chimps. In fact, the more high-profile experts – the ones who get invited onto news shows – were the worst at making predictions. But, Tetlock found that some people are really great at telling the future. He calls them “Superforecasters”, and regardless of their area of expertise, they consistently beat the field with their predictions. Tetlock also found that with a little training, people can improve their forecasting skills. The superforecasters in Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project – people from all backgrounds working with publicly-available information – make forecasts 30% better than intelligence officers with access to classified information. Creative work is uncertain. Does it have to be? As someone working in the “Extremistan” world of creative work, I’m always trying to improve my forecasting skills. If I publish a tweet, how many likes will it get? If I write a book, how many copies will it sell? The chances of getting any of these predictions exactly right are so slim, it doesn’t feel worth it to try to predict these things. But that doesn’t mean I can’t rate my predictions and make those predictions better. Introducing the Avocado Challenge If you would like to be better at predicting the future, I have a challenge for you. I call it the Avocado Challenge. Elon Musk recently asked on Twitter “What can’t we predict?” I answered “whether or not an avocado is ready to open.” 12 likes. People agree with me. https://twitter.com/kadavy/status/1309643017599569920  Here’s how the Avocado Challenge works. The next time you’re about to open an avocado, make a prediction: How confident are you the avocado is ripe? Choose a percentage of confidence, such as 50% or 20% – or if you’re feeling lucky, 100%. To make it simple, you can rate your confidence on a scale of 0 to 10. State your prediction out loud or write it down. Now, open the avocado. Is it ripe? Yes or no? Scoring your avocado predictions You now have two variables: Your prediction as stated in percentage confidence, and the outcome of avocado ripeness. With these two variables, you can calculate what’s called a Brier score. This tells you just how good your forecast was. The Brier score is what Phillip Tetlock uses to score his forecasting tournaments. Two variables: confidence and outcome It works like this: Translate your percentage confidence into a decimal between 0 and 1. So 50% would be 0.5, 20% would be 0.2, and 100% would just be 1. Now, translate the avocado ripeness outcome into a binary number. If the avocado was not ripe, your outcome value is “0.” If the avocado was ripe, your outcome value is “1.” (You may wonder: How do I determine whether or not an avocado is ripe? I’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s pretend for a second it’s easy.) Calculating your Brier score Once you have those two variables, there are two steps to follow to find out your Brier score: Subtract the outcome value from your confidence value. If I was 50% confident the avocado would be ripe that confidence value is 0.5. If the avocado was in fact ripe I subtract the outcome value of 1 from 0.5 to get -0.5. Square that number, or multiply it by itself. -0.5² = 0.25. Our Brier score is 0.25. Is that good or bad? The lower your Brier score, the better your prediction was. If you were 100% confident the avocado would be ripe and it was not, your Brier score would be 1 – the worst score possible. If you were 100% confident the avocado would be ripe and it was ripe, your Brier score would be 0 – the best score possible. So, 0.25 is pretty solid. Predict your next 30 avocados This is a fun exercise to try one time, but it doesn’t tell you a whole lot about your forecasting skills overall, and it doesn’t help you improve your forecasting skills. Where it gets interesting and useful is when you make a habit of the Avocado Challenge. After you’ve tried the Avocado Challenge a couple times, make a habit out of it. For 30 consecutive avocados, tally your results. Calculate your Brier score, and find the average of your 30 predictions. If you regularly open avocados with a roommate or partner, make a competition out of it. My partner and I predicted the ripeness of, then opened, 36 avocados over the course of several weeks. We recorded our predictions and outcomes on a notepad on the fridge – then tallied our results in a spreadsheet. Our findings: 28% of avocados were ripe. Her Brier score was 0.22 – mine was 0.19. (I win!)   The Avocado Challenge teaches you to define your predictions Most of us don’t make predictions according to our percentage confidence. We say, “I think so and so is going to win the election,” or “I think it might rain.” Phillip Tetlock even found this with political pundits – the ones who get lots of airtime on news shows. They’ll say things like “there’s a distinct possibility.” That’s not a forecast. If so and so wins the election, you can say, “ha! I knew it!” If it didn’t rain, you can remind your friend you said you thought it might rain. And what does a “distinct possibility” mean? You can be “right” either way. And when it comes to getting airtime on news shows, the news show doesn’t care if the political pundit gets their prediction right. All that matters is they can be exciting on camera, speak in sound bites, argue a clear point, and hold the viewer’s attention a little longer so it can be sold to advertisers during the commercial break. We normally don’t make our predictions with a percentage confidence, because we aren’t used to it. The Avocado Challenge gets you in the habit of rating the confidence of your predictions. The Avocado Challenge helps you define reality The Avocado Challenge also helps you define reality. This is something we’re also bad at. If you’re on a walk with your friend and you say you think it’s going to rain, how much rain equals rain? By what time is it going to rain? You’re traveling on foot – is it going to rain where the walk started, or the place you’ll be a half hour from now? To rate your predictions and become a better forecaster, you need to make falsifiable claims. It’s hard to tell if an avocado is ripe before you open the avocado, but it’s also hard to tell if an avocado is ripe after you open the avocado. You’ll have to come up with criteria for determining whether or not an avocado should be defined as “ripe.” When we did the Avocado Challenge, we defined a “ripe” avocado as a “perfect” avocado: uniform green color, with the meat of the avocado sticking to no more than 5% of the pit.     The Avocado Challenge can improve your real-life predictions A few weeks after we did the Avocado Challenge, my partner and I were at her family’s finca – a rustic cabin in the Colombian countryside. It was Sunday afternoon, and we were getting ready to head back to Medellín. I was eager to get home and get ready for my week. I asked my partner what time we would leave. She said about 3 p.m. As I mentioned on episode 235, the Colombian sense of time takes some getting used to for me as an American. Even though my partner is a very prompt person, I’m also aware of “the planning fallacy.” I know the Sydney Opera House opened ten years late and cost 15 times the projected budget to build. So when I looked at the Mitsubishi Montero parked in the grass, and thought about how long it might take to pack in eight people, three dogs, and a little white rabbit, the chances of us leaving right at 3 p.m. seemed slim.     Fortunately, we had done the Avocado Challenge. I asked my partner, in Spanish, “what’s your percentage confidence we’ll leave before an hour after 3 p.m. – 4 p.m.?” She shifted into Avocado mode, thought a bit, and said sesenta por ciento. She was 60% sure we’d leave before 4 p.m. That didn’t seem super confident, so I asked for another forecast. I asked what her percentage confidence was that we’d leave before 5 p.m. – two hours after the target time. She said cien por ciento. She was 100% sure we’d leave before 5 p.m. Now, instead of choosing between expecting to leave at exactly 3 p.m. – or leaving “whenever” – I now had a range. It was a range I could trust from someone with experience with similar situations – and training in forecasting. The time we did leave: 3:30 p.m. My partner’s Brier score for that first prediction: 0.16. Average Brier score for the two predictions: 0.08. Not bad. Mind Management, Not Time Management now available! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays. Listener Showcase Abby Stoddard makes the Dunnit app – the "have-done list." It’s a minimalist tool designed to motivate action and build healthy habits. 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/avocado-challenge  

If you want to write a book, don’t ask, “How much money does the average book make?” In this context, “average” is meaningless. You’re in the world of Black Swans. The Black Swan is a book by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and I have found the ideas in it critical to navigating my career as an author. Here – in my own words – is my summary of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. These are the ideas I think about when I’m considering writing a new book.   Where does the term “Black Swan” come from? Imagine a world where you’ve only ever seen white swans. If someone asked you whether or not black swans existed, you might say no. You’ve seen thousands of swans, and they’ve all been white. Therefore, black swans don’t exist. You’ve mistaken an absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Just because you haven’t seen evidence of black swans, does not prove they don’t exist. What is a Black Swan? A positive Black Swan: In 2010, I wrote a blog post. That blog post prompted a publisher to reach out to me. I got a book deal. A negative Black Swan: A Las Vegas casino had an insurance policy. They protected against every cheating scenario they could imagine. They had the most popular show in Vegas, where magicians worked with giant live tigers. So they protected against the scenario of a tiger jumping into the audience. But they never imagined the tiger would maim one of the performers – Roy of Siegfried and Roy. Siegfried and Roy lost their careers. The casino lost $100 million. Both of these incidents are Black Swans: Black Swans are outliers: They’re not what we expect. Nothing in the past predicts a Black Swan. Black Swans have extreme impact: The impact could be positive, such as my book deal, or negative, such as the tiger attack, or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We backwards-rationalize Black Swans: After a Black Swan happens, it seems obvious. We look back and come up with explanations for how it happened. This gives us the illusion that Black Swans are explainable and predictable. Note: COVID-19 is not a Black Swan. As Taleb has explained, global pandemics happen regularly. They’re uncommon, but they’re inevitable, and we know that. The Black Swan Turkey Imagine you’re a Turkey. Every day, humans come and feed you. You think humans are pretty good and nice. Each day you get new information to confirm this belief. A graph of your opinion of humans might look like this:     Notice the sharp drop-off at the end. That’s the day before Thanksgiving. Things seemed good, until they weren’t. History does not always predict the future. Events come along that shatter all assumptions we’ve made based upon past information. Mediocristan vs. Extremistan Black Swans happen in a place Taleb calls “Extremistan.” Extremistan is the opposite of “Mediocristan.” There’s a joke I like, “Bill Gates walks into a bar. On average, everyone there is a millionaire.” We’re attracted to the “average” and the predictable. But oftentimes the concept of “average” is misleading. Some things happen in Mediocristan and are predictable. The “average” is meaningful in Mediocristan. Other things happen in Extremistan and are unpredictable and extreme. The “average” is meaningless in Extremistan. Mediocristan is about “the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted.” Mediocristan is about risk spread out amongst many, to avoid surprises. An hourly-wage job at Starbucks is possible only in Mediocristan. Extremistan is about “the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted.” It’s where the Black Swans happen: random events you never expected, caused by forces you’ll never understand. Such as I experienced suddenly getting a book deal or working with a company that sold to Google. Mediocristan is about variables that fall within a predictable range. In the history of humanity, there’s never been a man 100 feet tall, or a woman 2,000 years old. Nobody has even come close to these extremes. Height and life expectancy follow a bell curve.   A bell curve. (Source: D Wells, Wikimedia Commons)   Distribution of height. (Source: Our World in Data)[/caption]     Extremistan is about variables that scale indefinitely. There’s no known limit to how rich a person can be. The “average” net worth of a U.S. family is about $700,000. But to be richer than half of all Americans you need only $100,000. Still, Jeff Bezos has more than $100,000,000,000.   Wealth distribution, by percentile, in the U.S. Jeff Bezos is 10x as wealthy as the highest point in this chart. (Wikipedia)[/caption] Why are Black Swans important? Understanding Black Swans can prepare you for the unexpected. If you learn about the impact that unexpected and extreme events can have, you can avoid foolish choices that expose you to negative Black Swans. Exposing yourself to Black Swans can make you successful. As we’ll talk about later, when you behave as if you’re in Mediocristan, you miss out on the positive Black Swans you’d find Extremistan. Businesses that thrive on Black Swans include venture capital, scientific research, and publishing. (Note: Another reason Black Swans are important is – as I talked about in Mind Management, Not Time Management – if it’s predictable, it can be automated. Your edge as a human is not in Mediocristan where the robots are taking over. It’s in Extremistan – in doing something nobody could expect.) Black Swan barrier: Platonicity One way we blind ourselves from Black Swans is through what Taleb calls “Platonicity.” Named after the philosopher, Plato, “Platonicity” is our desire to define things, and to pay more attention to things that have been defined. We create names for objects, we create terms (yes, such as “Platonicity”), and we invent nationalities. Because we’re so focused on things we define, we miss all the messier stuff that also matters. Taleb describes it as “[mistaking] the map for the territory.” (I once wrote about a similar concept, and called it Stuff and Things.) It’s helpful to categorize things, but it becomes a problem when we see a category as definitive, and don’t see the fuzzy boundaries between categories or revise them when we see new information that doesn’t fit how we categorize things. We’ve seen this in the gendered bathroom debate. We broke gender down into two categories. Based on that we made two bathrooms. But we’re realizing it’s not so simple. To be Platonic is to be top-down, formulaic, and close-minded. To be a-Platonic is to be bottom-up, open-minded, skeptical, and empirical. The Platonification of breast milk Doctors in the 1960s replicated breast milk in a laboratory, by replicating the components they could see in the milk (the things they had “Platonified”). It seemed to make no practical sense for women to go through the inconvenience of breast feeding when you could just use bottles and lab-made formula. There was an absence of evidence of what the benefits of breast milk were, and that was taken as evidence of absence of benefits. We didn’t know the full benefits of breast milk, but we assumed the components we could see were the only important parts. It turned out children who were not breast fed were later at an increased risk of some cancers. If the mothers themselves had breast fed, they would have had a reduced risk of breast cancer. Black Swan barrier: The Triplet of Opacity Another way we blind ourselves from Black Swans is through what Taleb calls “The Triplet of Opacity.” Those are: The Illusion of understanding. We think we understand what’s going on, but the world is more complicated and random than we know. The retrospective distortion. We assess things after the fact, so we backwards rationalize and come up with reasons why things happened. The overvaluation of information. We place too much emphasis on facts – the things we can “Platonify” – which blinds us from stuff that isn’t so easy to Platonify. How to make Black Swans happen? Since Platonification blinds us to Black Swans, and we suffer from the illusion of understanding and the retrospective distortion, it may seem silly to try to make Black Swans happen. You can’t engineer a Black Swan, but you can create the conditions for positive Black Swans to happen, as I talked about on episode 146. Tinker Top-down planning gives us the illusion of control, and keeps us in Mediocristan. Instead, tinker as much as possible, and learn to recognize opportunities when they present themselves. Taleb says the reason free markets work is not because they give rewards or drive incentives. Rather, free markets work because they let people get lucky through trial and error. (Then we explain away the brilliant things we did to arrive at this wonderful discovery.) Many discoveries come from searching for what you know, and finding what you didn’t expect. Europeans first learned of the American continent while searching for a route to India. I got my first book deal when I was trying to get votes for my speech proposal for a conference. Be patient Negative Black Swans happen suddenly, but positive Black Swans happen slowly. “It is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build.” Black Swan discoveries take time to have an impact. The computer, the internet, and the laser all had a huge impacts, but were underappreciated after initial discovery. Charles H. Townes was teased by his colleagues for inventing the laser, because they thought it was useless. It turned out to be important to eyesight correction, surgery, and data storage and retrieval. Denarrate The triplet of opacity feeds into the “narrative fallacy.” We’re wired to come up with stories of why things happen, but Black Swans happen for unknown reasons. Taleb realized that as a stock trader, there was no way for him to get an informational edge. He realized any piece of news that came out would quickly be worked into the market price of any security. So, he stopped reading the news. He recognized that reading the news as a stock trader would just support the narrative fallacy. Taleb describes a study where sports bookmakers were given ten variables to predict horse races. When they were later given double the information, these bookmakers were no more accurate in their predictions – yet they were much more confident. So Taleb decided that by reading the news he wouldn’t get an edge and he would become overconfident. The Barbell Strategy The main method Taleb recommends for protecting against negative Black Swans while exposing oneself to positive Black Swans is what he calls the Barbell Strategy.   Think of a barbell, with weights on either side. On one side of the barbell is your sure bets – things where you have little chance of losing. On the other side of the barbell is your wildcards – things with unlimited upside. The Barbell Strategy in investing (Note: I’m not a finance expert and nothing I’m about to say is investment advice.) In investing, the sure bets would be treasury bills, cash, and gold. Obviously Black Swans could come along and make these bets not so sure bets, but they’re as sure as you can get. The wildcards would be highly-leveraged option trading, angel investments, or cryptocurrency. You have a decent chance of losing your money, but there’s almost no limit to how much you can gain. In an investing context, Taleb recommends putting 85–90% of your assets into the safe investments, and the remaining 10–15% in the speculative investments. What you’re avoiding is the stuff in the middle. People think index funds are safe because they historically gain about 7% a year, but the entire stock market has lost up to 30% of its value very quickly. Since we’re living in an increasingly complex world, there’s no telling what kind of Black Swan could come in the future and cause an even bigger drop. The Barbell Strategy in creative work I hadn’t realized before reading The Black Swan that I had used the Barbell Strategy to build my creative career. When I was first starting out, I made sure to get just enough freelance work to pay my bills. I also spent a portion of my time building passive income streams. The rest of the time, I spent tinkering and exploring my own ideas. After three years, I randomly landed a book deal to write Design for Hackers. Dan Ariely mentioned a Barbell Strategy in my latest podcast conversation with him. He says he “gambles with his time.” He spends some portion of his time on things that don’t make sense, such as collaborating with a mentalist on-stage in one of his speeches, or working with a cartoonist. My own Barbell Strategy has benefitted from Dan’s Barbell Strategy. A blog post I wrote as a “wildcard” – during one of my Weeks of Want – prompted Dan to reach out to me. I collaborated with him on a productivity app. We sold it to Google. That blog post also led to my third book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. There’s your The Black Swan summary! I hope you’ve found this The Black Swan summary useful and clear. Taleb’s writing can be confusing and even off-putting at first, but if you take the time to understand his ideas, they can help you navigate an uncertain world and find breakthrough opportunities. I highly recommend The Black Swan. It’s one of my favorite books.   Mind Management, Not Time Management now available! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays. Listener Showcase Abby Stoddard makes the Dunnit app – the "have-done lilst." It’s a minimalist tool designed to motivate action and build healthy habits. 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/black-swan-summary 

Today is the day! My new book, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available everywhere! Writing this book has been a long journey. Over the past ten years, I slowly discovered the things I share in the book, and I also scrapped several drafts, before I finally got it right. I’m very excited to share with you a cohesive system for managing your energy, instead of your time – to be productive when creativity matters. If you bought the Preview Edition of Mind Management, Not Time Management, I’ll be sending you the First Edition. Otherwise, go buy it today. In five years of this podcast, this is the single biggest event – this is my single biggest ask – go buy this book! It’s available wherever books are sold. Or go straight to Amazon. I’m going to share with you a sample from the first chapter today. Chapter 1: Mind Management, Not Time Management “There’s only twenty-four hours in a day.” The natural conclusion we’re supposed to draw from this common observation is: If there are only so many hours in a day, you should make the most of each of those precious hours. Time management, it seems, is critically important. When you start managing your time, you find you really are getting more done. You’re keeping a calendar, so you don’t forget things. You’re building routines, so you can get repeating tasks done faster. You’re learning keyboard shortcuts for the apps you use every day. You may even start saying “no” to some opportunities, so you can make better use of your time. But it becomes harder and harder to get more out of your time. Your calendar becomes jam-packed with a kaleidoscope of colored blocks. You start “speed reading,” and listening to audiobooks and podcasts on 3x speed. You start cutting out all but the most essential activities that move you toward your goals. No more lunches with your friends – you’ll eat at your desk. Next, you figure, you can get more out of your time if you do two things at once. So you start multitasking. You’re checking your email while brushing your teeth. You’re holding conference calls while driving to work. You start searching for extra bits of time, like loose change under couch cushions. You used to sleep eight hours a night, but now you’ll sleep five. You can check emails at family dinners. You can steal a couple extra hours of work on your laptop after everyone in the house has gone to bed. You’re tired all the time. It seems there’s not enough coffee in the world to keep you going. Your anxiety levels are sky-high, and you’re becoming forgetful. You’re always in a rush. With each new tactic you learn, each new “life hack,” each new shortcut, life gets more hectic. You would start outsourcing some of the load, but you’re so busy and so exhausted, you can’t even explain what’s keeping you so busy. The harder you try to get more out of your time, it seems, the less time you have. Even if you did have the time, you still wouldn’t have the energy. Until one day you realize: “There’s only twenty-four hours in a day.” Maybe that doesn’t mean what I thought it meant? I thought it meant I should get the most done in the least amount of time possible. What I’m learning is, if there’s only twenty-four hours in a day, that means there’s a limit. I can only get so much out of my time. “Time management” is like squeezing blood from a stone. This story is not too different from my own. For my entire adult life, I have been a productivity enthusiast, with time management as one of my key strategies for getting more done. It started in college. As a graphic design student, I learned all the keyboard shortcuts I could for Photoshop. I used training software to teach myself to type faster. When I graduated and got a job, I constantly experimented with different ways of keeping a to-do list and prioritizing my tasks. I pontificated with any colleague who would listen about how to cut down on the number of emails in my inbox. One thing I loved about working in Silicon Valley was that there was no shortage of tech geeks with whom I could swap tips on the latest productivity apps. Eventually, I ran out of ways to get more done in less time, and my quest went on a detour. That led me to embark on the adventure I’m sharing in this book. Four years ago, I found myself sitting on the bare hardwood floor of my apartment in Chicago, eating lunch from a takeout container with a plastic fork. I had no furniture, no plates, no silverware. I had sold my last chair to some guy from Craigslist fifteen minutes prior. I was about to embark on my most audacious productivity experiment yet. As I looked around at the three suitcases which housed my final remaining possessions, and the painters erasing from the walls any trace that I had lived there for seven years, I was trying to wrap my head around one fact: That night, I would fall asleep in another country. For the foreseeable future, I would be a foreigner – an extranjero – in a land with a checkered history, where I barely spoke the language. It all started, six years earlier, with an email. It was the kind of email that would trip up most spam filters. I wasn’t being offered true love, millions of dollars from an offshore bank account, or improved performance in bed. I was being offered a book deal. I had never thought of myself as a writer. In fact, I hated writing as a kid. As I considered accepting that book deal offer, every author I talked to warned me that writing a book is extremely hard work, with little chance of success. But I figured, How hard can it be?, and signed my first literary contract. I didn’t know how to write a book, but the most obvious method was: time management. I needed to make sure I had the time to write the book. In an attempt to meet my tight deadline, I used every time management technique I could think of. I scheduled writing sessions on my calendar. I developed a morning routine to start writing as quickly as possible after waking up. I “time boxed,” to limit the time I would spend on pieces of the project. Still, I didn’t have enough time. I fired my clients. I cancelled dates and turned down party invitations. I started outsourcing my grocery shopping, my meal preparation, even household chores. If there was anything I had to do myself, I made sure to “batch” it into blocks of time when I could do it all at once. Writing the book became my one and only focus. I cleared away any time I could, and I dedicated it to writing. But it still wasn’t enough. I spent most of my day hunched over my keyboard, rocking back and forth in agony. I felt actual physical pain in my stomach and chest. My fingers felt as if they had been overtaken by rigor mortis. I struggled to write even a single sentence. I was spending plenty of time on my book, but I wasn’t getting anything done. My case of writer’s block was so bad that, weeks after signing my contract, I accepted a last-minute invitation to go on a retreat to Costa Rica. Logically, it wasn’t the best use of my time, but I desperately hoped that a change of scenery would work some kind of magic. A few days into the trip, I was more worried than ever. According to my contract, if my manuscript wasn’t twenty-five percent finished within a few weeks, the deal was off. Yet I still hadn’t written a single word. Unless a miracle happened, I would write a check to the publisher to return my advance, and I would humiliatingly face my friends, family, and blog readers to tell them I had failed. Does that sound like a lot of pressure? It was. I went for a walk, so I could feel sorry for myself, by myself. I was dragging my feet down the gravel road, head hung down and arms crossed over my chest. How could I be so foolish?, I wondered. Not only had I committed to writing a 50,000-word book – with detailed illustrations – despite having little writing experience beyond a few blog posts, but I had wasted time and money going on this retreat. Then, I heard someone call out. I looked up, and on the next road over was a man waving and yelling, ¿¡Como estáááás!? I had briefly noticed the man moments before. His fists had been wrapped around the simple wires of a fence, his arms stretched out in front of him as he leaned back in ecstasy, singing to himself. I had felt vaguely embarrassed for him, assuming he didn’t know someone else was around. As the man motioned for someone to come to him, I hesitated. It looked as if he was motioning to me, but that seemed unlikely. Yet I looked around, and saw nobody. I had just passed a fork in the road, and the fence the man stood behind was on the other side of the fork. I didn’t want to backtrack, because I felt I should return to the house and try to write. But I felt rude for ignoring his friendly invitation. So, I reluctantly retraced my steps, and walked over to the man, still unsure of what he wanted. What followed was the first conversation I ever had entirely in Spanish. Though, I’m using the word “conversation” loosely. The man – Diego was his name – taught me the words for the sun, the beach, the rain and the sea. It turned out Diego just wanted to chat. My conversation with Diego was refreshing. I was used to everyone ignoring each other on the crowded streets of Chicago, but here was a man who wanted to talk to someone on the next road over about nothing in particular. I was suddenly in such a relaxed state of mind that, after bidding Diego farewell, it was several minutes before I noticed I was going the wrong way. I had continued down Diego’s side of the fork in the road. When I realized this, I panicked at the prospect of getting lost in a foreign country, but then I shrugged it off and decided to keep going. It turned out I got back to the house just fine anyway. Between the pep talk I got from my friend Noah Kagan – as described in my book, The Heart to Start – and my conversation with Diego, I felt as if I had turned over a new leaf. I set my laptop on a desk on the interior balcony of the house. There, looking out at the sapphire blue Pacific Ocean, I had my first breakthrough writing session. What once seemed impossible, now seemed easy. After an hour of writing, I had most of a chapter drafted. It suddenly seemed as if I might make my deadline after all. That random conversation on a gravel road in Costa Rica became the seed of an idea that would eventually drive me to sell everything I owned and buy a one-way ticket to South America. I had discovered that making progress on my first book wasn’t so much about having the time to write. It was about being in the right state of mind to do the work at hand. I had discovered that today’s productivity isn’t so much about time management as it is about mind management. Mind Management, Not Time Management now available! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays 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/buy-mind-management

When I first heard of Getting Things Done, I was skeptical. How could it possibly live up to the fanaticism of its cult following? But once I saw the power of the “next action,” of “someday/maybes,” and of organizing tasks by “context,” I knew there was a good reason for the hype: “GTD” works. More than fifteen years later, GTD still helps me stay productive and in control of all of the things going on in life and work. GTD has helped me write three books, build a business, and move to South America. I regularly re-read it, and I always find new ways to apply its principles and techniques. Here’s my Getting Things Done book summary – in my own words – after many years of practice and two podcast interviews with author David Allen. The principles that make GTD work These are not “principles” as expressed in the Getting Things Done book, but this is my summary of its most important ideas. 1. Trusted System: GTD is your “trusted system” The most important idea behind GTD is to get everything out of your head and into a “trusted system.” What is a trusted system? A “trusted” system is a system in which you can “trust” that you will engage appropriately with everything in the system. 2. Appropriate Engagement: Your trusted system helps you “engage appropriately” GTD handles a wider breadth of things than your typical to-do list/calendar combination. Because GTD helps you “engage appropriately” with everything. What does it mean to “engage appropriately?” That means you’re doing no more and no less than is necessary to achieve your goal. You can trust your system will remind you to buy cat food only when you’re physically capable of buying cat food, and before you run out of cat food. You can also trust your system to hold ideas that you may or may not act upon. If you daydream about moving abroad, you can trust your system to hold that idea and remind you periodically, so you won’t forget to do whatever you do or don’t want to do about it. So GTD handles everything from important tasks that must get done to fleeting thoughts that you merely might want to do something about. 3. Close Open Loops: GTD keeps your mind free of “open loops” Build a trusted system that helps you engage appropriately with everything, and your mental energy will be free to handle whatever is going on in the moment. This is because your trusted system keeps your mind free of open loops. If you can’t trust that you’ll buy cat food before you run out, you’ll be thinking about it. If you can’t trust that you’ll revisit that idea about moving abroad, you’ll be thinking about it. You’ll have open loops in your mind. These open loops use mental energy that you could use on other things. These open loops also make you feel like a victim of the things you have to do. It’s demoralizing to keep reminding yourself something needs to get done because you’re also reminding yourself that you haven’t followed through. If you trust it will get done, you don’t have to remind yourself. As David Allen says, ”Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.” 4. Bottom-Up: GTD is a “bottom-up” approach to personal organization By getting control of the ground-level things in your life, you have more energy to think about the higher-level things. By trusting that you’ll buy cat food, you have more energy to think about how your idea to move abroad fits into your long-term goals and your life purpose. One quick exercise to get a taste of GTD One quick way to get a taste of GTD: Write down every single thing that’s on your mind that either needs to get done, or that may need to get done. Don’t worry about doing those things, just get them out of your head. You may feel a little overwhelmed from writing all of those things down, but you probably also feel a lot lighter. You’ve just done the first of the five key steps to mastering GTD. The five-step process of GTD Capture: Capture everything. Anything you need to act on or might need to act on needs to be captured. Get it out of your head and into the system. Clarify: With each thing, you’re asking yourself Is this actionable? If it’s not actionable, what should you do with it? If it is actionable, what’s the “next action” (more on this soon). Organize: Put the thing in the right place. If it’s actionable, it’s in your task management system. If you don’t need it, it goes in the trash. If you might need it, you store it for reference. Reflect: Review and think about the things in your system, regularly. How often? Often enough to keep them out of your mind, which helps you trust your “trusted system.” Engage: Do what you intended to do with the things. That might be taking action, that might be not taking action. Whatever action you do take, that’s the “next action.” Identify the “next action” If you take away only one idea from this Getting Things Done book summary, it should be the “next action.” The “next action” is what it sounds like: What is the next thing you can do about this thing you’re thinking about? I used to write vague items on my to-do list: I’d write “Mom,” to remind me Mom’s birthday was coming up, and that I needed to buy her a gift. Look at how many steps removed “Mom” was from the next action! You might think the next action was to buy Mom a gift, but it wasn’t. Instead, the next action was “brainstorm gift ideas for Mom.” That’s easier to act upon than just “Mom.” You might not think it makes a difference. But – like closing open loops – identifying the next action saves mental energy. When you look at your to-do list you don’t have to wonder what action to take. And sometimes you don’t need to take action at all. Keep a “someday/maybes” list If you take away only two ideas from this Getting Things Done book summary, it should be the “next action,” and the “someday/maybes” list. Why? Because these are the two ideas that free up the most energy. The next action makes it easier to act. Your someday/maybe list makes it easier to not act. Before I knew about someday/maybe, I’d make one of two mistakes: I’d either write something down on my to-do list, not realizing I didn’t really intend to do it, or I’d recognize that I didn’t really intend to do it, and so not write it down, and thus keep thinking about it. Both of these were the wrong way. Your someday/maybes list lets you capture things you would like to do, only it’s not the right time or you’re not yet sure you want to do them. Because the things you someday or maybe want to do are in your “trusted system” you close the loops, and you stop thinking about them. But for your someday/maybe list to work, you have to review it regularly. Do a “weekly review” If you take only three ideas from this Getting Things Done book summary, it should be the “next action,” the “someday/maybes” list, and the “weekly review.” Because the weekly review is what puts the “trusted” in “trusted system.” Remember the five-step process behind GTD: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage. Capturing, Clarifying, and Organizing help you identify what to do and be sure you’ll do it. Reflecting – which you do in your weekly review – helps you feel confident nothing is falling through the cracks. Find a time once a week where you consistently have the time and energy to Reflect on your life and work. Make sure you’ve Captured, Clarified, and Organized everything. I do my weekly review on Sunday afternoons. Some people like Fridays. It is really a game-changing habit. There’s your Getting Things Done book summary! (some final ideas) Those are the most important ideas behind GTD from my fifteen years of using it. There is of course a whole book’s worth of ideas behind the system. I highly recommend you pick up the book. Honorable mention includes: Contexts: Assign a “context” to your tasks, such as “@home” or “@office.” Some to-do items, you can only do in certain places. Projects: If you think it’s a task, it’s often a “project.” (If it takes more than one task to achieve your desired outcome). Two-Minute Rule: If you’re Clarifying, and you come across a next action that will take two minutes or less, do it right away. Download your free “GTD toolkit” I’ve been using GTD for more than fifteen years. It’s helped me write three books, build a business, and travel the world. Want to know which tools I count on to get things done? I’ll instantly send you the tools I count on most if you sign up to my newsletter here. Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays 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/getting-things-done/

In the game of golf, there’s an expression: “Drive for show, putt for dough.” What it means is: If you want to win tournaments, practice putting. It makes sense. In a standard even-par round of golf, putts make up half of all strokes. You’ll use your driver less than half the number of times you’ll use your putter. There’s more strokes to get rid of in the putting part of the game. “Drive for show, putt for dough” makes sense – but it’s wrong. Why? It can tell us a lot about other places in life and work with “raised floors.” Golf is a reality-distortion field First, a little background on the game of golf, for those unfamiliar. You’ve got a roughly one-and-a-half-inch ball, you’re trying to hit into a roughly four-inch hole. That hole is anywhere from one-hundred yards away to five-hundred yards away. A one-hundred yard hole is a short par 3. A five-hundred yard hole is a long par 5. Meaning you have three strokes to get the ball in the hole for the par 3, and you have five strokes to get the ball in the hole on the par 5 – that is, to shoot even par. In between these distances are the more-common par 4s. So you’re hitting a tiny ball with a chunk of metal on the end of a long stick, and you’re trying to get it into a tiny hole a few football fields away. It’s insanely difficult, and trying to accomplish this will challenge your perception of reality. So no wonder the common wisdom in golf is wrong: It’s hard enough to make solid contact with the ball. It’s even harder to look back on a round, or even a hole, and have a clear picture of what the hell happened and how you could do it better. Golf is essentially a reality-distortion field. It’s endlessly multivariate. It’s full of hidden risks and difficult decisions. It’s also frustrating and emotionally challenging, which makes it even harder to see reality and improve. So, yes, golf is a good analog to life. Seeing reality in Golf Mark Broadie of Columbia University wanted to make it easier to see reality in the game of golf. So, he collected a ton of data. He got detailed data of more than 100,000 shots from 200 men and women of all ages and skill levels. He knew where each shot started, where each shot ended, whether the shot was from the sand or the fairway or tall grass – he even knew whether each putt was uphill or downhill, left-breaking or right-breaking. This is a lot of data. At the time, if you were a stats-minded golfer, you were counting how many fairways you hit in your drives, how many greens you hit in regulation (A “green in regulation” is par minus-two, because the goal is to average only two putts on each hole.) Since you believed you were “putting for dough,” you were also counting how many putts you had. But this information stats-minded golfers were collecting didn’t really help. Maybe you had only 28 putts instead of the standard 36 putts, but the reason you had so few putts was because you didn’t hit any greens, so you were hitting the green from a shorter distance and thus your putts were shorter and easier to make. It didn’t help you see reality. If anything, it made reality harder to see. The “strokes-gained” method of seeing reality But Mark Broadie revolutionized golf stats. He developed a system called “strokes gained.” Basically, for your skill level, where on the course are you gaining strokes and losing strokes? Your average PGA Tour golfer hitting from the tee on a 400-yard hole – a par 4 – averages 3.99 strokes. From 8 feet, he averages 1.5 strokes. So imagine a golfer who is better than other pros from 8 feet. Instead of 1.5 strokes on average, he takes 1.3 strokes. Yet this golfer still averages 3.99 strokes from 400 yards off the tee. He’s better than other pros from 8 feet, but somehow just as good as other pros from 400 yards. That means somewhere between the tee and that 8-foot putt, he’s losing a fraction of a stroke – 0.2 strokes to be exact. It’s almost like for every single shot on the course, the golfer is starting with a new “par” based upon the distance from the hole and the conditions of the shot. If you crunch all of that data, you can find exactly where your game needs work. Why “putt for dough” is wrong After crunching all this data, Mark Broadie discovered why “putt for dough” is wrong: Putts make up 50% of the strokes in a standard even-par round of golf. But Broadie found that putting performance only accounts for 15% of the strokes that separate the wheat from the chaff. From Broadie’s fascinating book, Every Shot Counts: Between the best pros and average pros, between pros and amateurs, and between good amateurs and poor amateurs, the numbers show that putting contributes about 15% to the difference in scores. Tee-to-green shots explain the remaining 85% of score differences. In fact, if you took a golfer who usually shoots 90, and you gave that golfer the putting skill of a pro – who usually shoots 20 or 25 strokes less – that amateur golfer’s score would drop not by 20 or 25 strokes, but by four strokes. Instead of shooting 90, this amateur golfer with the putting skills of a pro would shoot 86. Golfers have been saying putting is the most important part of the game since the early 1800s. Mark Broadie’s work didn’t come around until the early 2000s. How could popular wisdom get it so wrong for so long? “Raised floors” can’t be lowered This is what I call a “raised floor.” It’s an area where you have a standard of performance. Since that standard of performance seems to have lots of room for improvement, you think you can improve that performance. But there’s a floor. It’s a raised floor, and you can’t lower it. We know no unassisted human will run a 10-second mile. We know there’s a raised floor, and that if you want to run a mile in record time, it’s a matter of shaving off fractions of a second. Why golfers focus on “raised floors” Yet golfers, for the longest time, thought it was putting that mattered most. Why? If you know anything about perception, you can see a few ways putting would seem like the most important part of the game. Putting is the action you’re usually making when you reach your goal – when the ball finally goes in the hole. Putting is also where you miss the hole, sometimes by a hair. When you reach the green in three strokes from 500 yards away, you have a ten-foot put for birdie, and you end up taking three more strokes to get in the hole – that’s frustrating! Three strokes for 500 yards, three strokes for ten feet – it seems clear where you need improvement. Because it’s frustrating, because it causes golfers to feel an emotion, putting seems more relevant. These examples are components of the “availability bias.” That we remember things that are easy to remember – such as “lipping out” a put or three-putting from ten feet. The availability bias is why people are often more worried about dying in plane crashes than in car crashes, despite the fact they’re far more likely to die in a car crash. Look out for “raised floors” Raised floors are in other areas of your life and work, and they can waste your energy. How many calories can you cut from your diet, really? How much can you cut your spending, really? How much time can you save, really? Don’t lower the floor. Raise the ceiling. If putting isn’t the biggest part of golf, what is? Among the top 40 PGA Tour golfers, putting accounted for 15% of the game, driving 28%, and shots from around the green 17%. The most important part of the game: approach shots – that is, shots to the green from long distances – these accounted for 40% of the game. The greatest golfer ever, Tiger Woods, gets his advantage not from great putting, but from great approach shots. In the data Mark Broadie has analyzed, when hitting from the 150–200-yard range, Tiger Woods hit his shots three or four feet closer to the hole than other pros. Those approach shots alone gave Tiger a 1.3 stroke per round advantage. There’s four rounds in a tournament. It only takes one stroke to win. 1.3 strokes per round is a lot. So instead of getting good at the short game of golf, get good at the long game of golf. Instead of cutting more calories from your diet – as we learned from the Body by Science book summary on episode 160 – build muscle that burns calories. Instead of struggling to cut your spending, make more money. Instead of stressing yourself out to save more time, manage your energy. Don’t lower the floor – raise the ceiling. Image: In the Style of Kairouan, Paul Klee Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays 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/raised-floors/ 

Each November, writers around the world make a commitment. They commit to writing a novel within a month. It’s called NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writer’s Month. Since 2013, software developers have also been making a commitment. They’ve committed to generating a novel within a month. It’s called NaNoGenMo – National Novel Generation Month. The novels these programmers create – if you can call them novels – can tell us a lot about the future of work. How well can AI write a novel? (Not at all, really.) The novels that programmers generate are all over the board. One “novel” was just Moby Dick, written backwards. Another “novel” was called Paradissssse Lossssst. It was a reproduction of John Milton’s epic poem, but with each “s” in the poem replaced with a varying number of other s’s. But, some programmers take the task a little more seriously. They train AI models and see what they come up with. One such model is called GPT-2. GPT-2 was once considered too dangerous to release to the public, because you could supposedly generate subversive content en-masse, and do some pretty nefarious things. Kind of like [Russia did with a farm of human-generated content around the 2016 election]. And what is this advanced AI model able to generate? So far, nothing impressive. Programmer and author of [aiweirdness.com] Janelle Shane tweeted, “Struggling with crafting the first sentence of your novel? Be comforted by the fact that AI is struggling even more.” The sentence this AI model generated for Janelle: “I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.” Not exactly Tolstoy. The follow up to GPT-2 is now out, so we’ll see this year what kind of novel GPT-3 can generate, but if Janelle Shane’s experiments so far are any indication, humans will still have the edge. She asked GPT-3 how many eyes a horse had. It kept telling her: [four]. Your edge as a human lies in your creativity According to Kai-Fu Lee, author of AI Superpowers, forty- to fifty-percent of jobs will be replaced by AI and automation within the next couple of decades. But humans won’t be replaced across the board. It’s the creativity- and strategy-based jobs that will be the most secure. If your job is an “optimization-based” job, you might want to start reinventing yourself. If your primary work is maximizing a tax refund, calculating an insurance premium, or even diagnosing an illness, your job involves so-called “narrow tasks.” These tasks are already being automated, or soon will be automated. You could type out 50,000 nonsense words in about a day. A computer can generate 50,000 words faster than you can blink. But, you could write a novel in a month. A computer can’t write a novel at all. Which means your edge as a human is not in typing the words faster. Your edge as a human is in thinking the thoughts behind the words. This doesn’t just apply to writing novels. If you’re an entrepreneur building a world-changing startup or a social worker helping a family navigate taking care of a sick loved-one, your creativity matters. No AI will be able to do what you do for a very long time – if ever. So when a computer can do in the blink of an eye something that would take us all day, and when our creativity is the one thing keeping us relevant, that has powerful implications on how we get things done. Time management isn’t built for creative work Remember from episode 226 when we learned about [Frederick Taylor]? How he stood next to a worker with a stopwatch and timed every action and broke down all of those actions into a series of steps? He optimized time as a “production unit.” But creativity doesn’t work like stacking bricks or moving chunks of iron. Remember there are three big realities about creativity that make it incompatible with the “time management” paradigm: Great ideas come in an instant One idea can be infinitely more valuable than another idea You can’t connect inputs directly to outputs In a world where creativity not only matters, it’s arguably the only thing that matters, the ways that time management is incompatible with creativity are big problems. They’re especially big problems because the more you’re watching the clock – the more you’re a [“clock-time” person], like we talked about on episode 235, the less creative you’re going to be. So the things that used to make us more productive, now make us less productive. We can’t try to do more things in less time. We can’t multitask. We can’t skip out on sleep or otherwise neglect our health. If you want to kill creativity: Get five hours of sleep a night, fight traffic for two hours a day, and start each day with a piping hot thermos of a psychoactive drug. This is the unfortunate and inescapable reality of most Americans today. Don’t expect technology to be creative for you, use technology for you to be creative Will an unassisted AI be winning the Nobel Prize in literature in the next ten years? Some might think so. I’m no AI expert, but I’m skeptical. Remember from Episode 237 that [the birthday problem] shows us how hard it is for us humans to understand how complex some things are. GPT-3 is one-hundred times more powerful than GPT-2. But is it one-hundred times better at writing a novel? We’ll see – I doubt it. Does that make AI and other technologies useless in creative work? Far from it. We can use technology not only to lift us out of drudgery, but to assist us in being creative. Here’s just some of the ways I use technology to be more creative: I live in a cheaper country, where I can have more flexibility to do work with unpredictable success ([Extremistan] like we talked about in the previous episode). When I moved to South America, I mourned the loss of easy access to paper books. But now, five years later, I have many thousands of highlights of the most important ideas I’ve come across in my reading. This is because I’ve been forced to read almost everything on Kindle. I can quickly and easily search through those highlights. This makes writing new books much easier than it would be otherwise. I’m able to live in South America because of cheap air travel, access to massive amounts of knowledge through the internet, and global publishing power, communication, and electronic banking. Not to mention easy Spanish translation in the palm of my hand. Aside from those Kindle highlights, I can store, organize, and quickly retrieve relevant information I’ve previously consumed or taken notes on. I can quickly reference old ideas and connect them to make new ideas. I’m able to test out my ideas and get instant feedback on what’s working or not through Twitter, and email, website, and podcast stats. Amazon’s algorithms help relevant readers find my books, which earns me money so I can write more. There are starting to be some glimmers of AI assisting us in creativity in some more direct ways. A new service called [Sudowrite] won’t write a novel for you, but it uses GPT-3 to suggest characters or plot twists for your novel. If you combine advances in AI models with the trends there are in studying the structure of stories, it’s not hard to see a future where AI plays a big role in assisting writers in coming up with stories. But for now, don’t expect technology to be creative for you. Instead, use technology to help you be more creative. New times call for new measures. When we’re trying to define what it means to be more productive, we can’t apply thinking from the industrial age when we’re in the midst of the creative age. Image: [Traverse Beams, by Patrick Henry Bruce] Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays 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-creative-age/

Subject: “IMMEDIATE Action Reqeusted [sic]” They misspelled “requested,” which had the unintended effect of highlighting that this email was urgent. There were some documents attached to the email. They wanted me to review the documents and sign them. Then, I would get a wire of money to my bank account – from Google, Inc. I had no idea this email was coming. It was a nice surprise, since it was my birthday. It was all thanks to a decision I made three years prior. Three years prior, I cleared my schedule and declared what I call a “Week of Want.” I gave myself an entire week to work on whatever I wanted. I had no plan at the time – that was the point of my Week of Want. Three years later, here I was getting a surprise paycheck, thanks to that Week of Want. Creative work happens in “Extremistan” What was happening was a [Black Swan]. A rare and unpredictable event – in this case, a positive one. If you made several copies of the universe, and repeated my decision from three years prior, in most of those parallel universes, I probably wouldn’t end up getting money wired to my bank account from Google. That’s because creative work happens in Extremistan. Nassim Taleb introduced Extremistan in his book, [The Black Swan]. Extremistan is a world of Black Swans – rare and unpredictable events. Creative work does not happen in “Mediocristan” Other kinds of work happens in the opposite of Extremistan – what Taleb calls Mediocristan. Mediocristan is a world that’s stable and predictable. Serving coffee is a good example of work that happens Mediocristan. There’s a steady supply of coffee, and a steady demand for coffee. If you get a job at Starbucks, they can more or less predict that supply and demand, as well as their overhead costs. So, they can pay you by the hour. When your line of work is thinking of ideas and bringing those ideas into the world, you can’t get paid by the hour. Beyoncé does not get paid by the hour to make her music, even though she’s Beyoncé, and her next record is guaranteed to sell. Much less is the world’s next Beyoncé getting paid by the hour. Nobody knows she’s the next Beyoncé. If you made copies of the universe, in many of those parallel universes, she wouldn’t even become the next Beyoncé. You need clear priorities in Extremistan When you’re working in a pure Mediocristan, you don’t even need priorities. You know exactly what needs to be done, and you do it. When you’re working in Extremistan, you do need clear priorities. There are a million things you could do – a million things that might work – so you have to be ruthless with your priorities. You have to be ruthless in what you say yes to and what you say no to, and in trying to find some way to objectively see what the results are so you can make better decisions in the future. Clear priorities have a dark side But clear priorities have a dark side. It’s that when you have clear priorities, you only put your money on the sure bets. And when all of your money is on sure bets, you aren’t even gambling anymore. You’ve moved yourself from Extremistan to Mediocristan. You can keep steady paychecks coming, but you’ll never hit the jackpot. So employ the Barbell Strategy So how do you give yourself the opportunity to hit it big, without going bust? You need to spend some time in Extremistan. Taleb calls it “The Barbell Strategy”: Imagine a barbell, with fat weights on the ends, and a thin bar in the middle. On one end of the barbell is your sure bets. If you’re investing, that’s treasury bills. On the other end of the barbell is your risky bets. If you’re investing, that might be options, or cryptocurrencies. What you’re avoiding is the stuff in the middle. Don’t make big bets where you can lose your shirt, and avoid the seemingly-conservative investments in which you can actually lose a lot. Give yourself a “Week of Want” One way I spend time in Extremistan is by giving myself a “Week of Want.” In a week of want, I clear as much as I can from my schedule for a whole week, and I let myself explore whatever is interesting to me. In 2012, after publishing my first book, I gave myself a Week of Want. I spent most of my week reflecting on the experience of writing that first book. Why did it seem nothing I had learned about productivity had prepared me to write that book? I reflected on the grab-bag of rituals and routines I eventually developed to keep my writing process moving forward. I shared my thoughts in a blog post, called [Mind Management (Not Time Management)]. Nothing happened right away. That’s the nature of creative work. There’s often a delay before your bets pay off. But another year and a half later, I got an email. The renowned behavioral scientist, Dan Ariely, had read my blog post, and wondered if I’d like to help him with a productivity app he was building. Another year and a half after that, I got a surprise payday from Google. Google bought that productivity app. The Week of Want is a way of “gambling with your time.” [Dan Ariely] himself talked about gambling with his own time back on episode 203. He’ll spend some amount of his time on things that don’t make sense, such as working with a cartoonist, or inviting a mentalist to perform at one of his speeches. The Week of Want exposes you to “asymmetric opportunities,” like [Tynan] talked about on episode 145. Oftentimes we hold ourselves back from pursuing a silly idea. There’s very little downside to pursuing the idea, but the potential upside is unlimited. Why “want?” The Week of Want is a great way to make sure you spend a little time in Extremistan. But it has another valuable purpose, and that purpose lies in the idea of “want.” When we’re spending all of our energy on what we feel we should do, we soon forget what we want to do. But remember that creative work is unpredictable. Even when we think really hard about what we should do, a lot of the time we’re going to be wrong. Additionally, the things we want to be doing are powerful. The things we want to be doing are the things we’re curious about. And curiosity is powerful in two ways. One: Curiosity is motivational fuel. You can work harder on something you’re curious about. Two: Curiosity is a path to originality. Your curiosity will lead you down multiple paths. When those paths converge, you’ll be where no one else has been. Why a week? You may recognize elements of the Week of Want in Google’s famous “twenty-percent time” strategy. When Google was first starting out, they allowed their engineers to spend twenty percent of their time on whatever project they wanted. The strategy worked great. Some of Google’s best products were created during twenty-percent time – including Gmail and AdSense. I’ve heard some people say that they spend one day a week on a side-project. Hey, that’s a good use of the barbell strategy, and it will expose you to positive Black Swans more than not working on a side project at all. But there’s something special about spending an entire week doing whatever you want. Working on what you want to work on, and doing so for an entire week, takes you further and further from the norm. It brings you deeper and deeper into the territory where you’ll discover truly original ideas. When I asked neuroscientist John Kounios – way back on [episode 8] – about the benefits of taking an entire week to do what I want, he said there were two potential ways that could improve creative thinking. One: Doing what you want improves your mood, which leads to better ideas. He explained, “It gives you pleasure, puts you in a positive mood, and it’s something you can sustain over the week – and then it can lead to creative insights.” Two: Taking a whole week puts you in a deeper state of creativity. Dr. Kounios said that the “insightful state of mind is very fragile.... It’s easier to get into an analytical state of mind than it is to get into a creative, insightful, state of mind. So if you can create this whole block of time for a week, it allows you to really sink into that state.” Week of Want rules To do your own week of want, clear away as much as you can for a week. Act like you’re going on vacation. Set up the out-of-office autoresponder on your email. Approach the Week of Want with no expectations as to what you’ll discover during that week. The goal of the Week of Want is much less about actually finding great ideas. It’s more about reconnecting with the feeling of wanting in the first place. We so regularly do the things we feel we should do, we soon forget what it feels like to want to do something at all. Image: [Insula Dulcamara, by Paul Klee] Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays 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/week-want/ 

In New York City, sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century, a young art student sat for a portrait. The artist who painted this portrait won a prestigious award for that portrait. The young woman who sat for the portrait suddenly became a sought-after model. She could actually earn money sitting for portraits. She needed that money. Her family was poor, and art school -- especially art school in New York City -- was expensive. But she decided to never model again. The tough decision that made a good artist a great artist This young artist later recalled the moment she decided to stop sitting for portraits. She drew a line down the middle of a sheet of paper, so that there were now two columns. At the top of one column, she wrote “yes.” At the top of the other column, she wrote “no.” She said, “The essential question was always, if you do this, can you do that?” Here’s one thing that probably focused her attention on the question of whether or not she could keep modeling: She had skipped class to sit for that prize-winning portrait. So, if she was going to model, could she go to class? If she was going to model, could she put in the work necessary to achieve her dream of becoming a great artist? Her answer was, “no,” she could not keep modeling. And art history should thank her for it. Her name was Georgia O’Keeffe, and she lived on to become one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. One of her paintings was sold at auction several years ago for more than forty million dollars. The unearned can hurt more than it helps I don’t want to assume that because O’Keeffe is one of my favorite artists -- not just for her work but also for her contrarian personality -- that you, too know who I’m talking about. You’ve seen her work: abstract close-ups of flowers and cattle skulls, paintings of the desert landscape surrounding the New Mexico estate where she spent most of her time. This story about quitting modeling has one good lesson in it: That if you want to be great at something, you sometimes have to quit something else that you’re merely good at. That’s a valuable lesson. It’s the obvious one. It’s not the lesson I want to talk about. I want to talk about the unearned. That when you accept something you didn’t earn, it often hurts you more than it helps you. Money you didn’t earn will make you foolish with finances. Flattery you didn’t earn will make you settle for mediocrity. Power you didn’t earn will disconnect you from reality. If you want to become great at what you do, you have to be on the lookout for the unearned. You have to shun the unearned. The unearned is an easy path to mediocrity When I tweeted about the dangers of the unearned, most people agreed. Some people were suspicious. “What about Universal Basic Income?,” they’d say. I don’t have an opinion on Universal Basic Income. I haven’t thought about it enough. But this is not about Universal Basic Income. As I understand it UBI would be about getting your basic needs met. Do you have a roof over your head, and food in your stomach? Having a roof over your head and food in your stomach is a good thing, especially if you don’t have to work for it. But beyond that, the unearned becomes dangerous. When I’m talking about the dangers of the unearned, I’m not talking about the basics. When you have your basic needs met, it’s an easy path to mediocrity. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I happen to think it would be nice if we lived in a society where more people could get by being mediocre. That competition wouldn’t be so fierce that you need to be the very best in your field to have a chance at survival. But, this isn’t about basic needs. This isn’t about mediocrity. The unearned is an easy path to mediocrity, and that’s fine. But if you want to be great, you need to be on the lookout for the unearned. The unearned is an easy path to mediocrity, but the unearned is an obstacle to mastery. The great Georgia O’Keeffe shunned the unearned Yes, Georgia O’Keeffe could have “earned” money sitting for portraits in the sense that she would be doing the work of sitting. But she didn’t want it. Much of what she would have “earned” would have been unearned. What Georgia didn’t earn was being an attractive young woman, that people wanted to paint portraits of. That didn’t get her much in the early 1900’s. She couldn’t even vote. She was a young woman, trying to make it as an artist in America. At the time, that was unheard of. Georgia instinctively knew the dangers of what she could get being an attractive young woman, and she actively rejected those things. Even then she was already dressing daily in her trademark black frock. She sewed them herself, and they happened to have the effect of hiding her figure. As Georgia grew into a famous artist, she consistently shunned the unearned when others tried to categorize her not just as an artist, but as a “woman artist.” When Peggy Guggenheim invited Georgia to exhibit her work in a show of women painters, Georgia rejected the invitation and proclaimed, “I am not a woman painter!” What would have been the harm of Georgia exhibiting in a collection of women artists? Certainly her achievements as an artist were more difficult because of her standing in society as a woman. But she still saw exhibitions like this as the unearned. It would cloud her judgement of what really mattered. What really mattered was not being a great “woman artist.” What really mattered was being a great artist. The artist whose work was forgotten We normally don’t think that someone in a marginalized class as getting much of anything unearned. So maybe the dangers of the unearned will be more clear if we look at the man who painted that prize-winning portrait of Georgia which launched her potential modeling career. The painter of that portrait was a classmate of Georgia’s. He also went on to become a successful painter. He studied in Paris, he won numerous awards, he rubbed shoulders with the great painters of his time. People like Robert Henri and Edward Hopper. He was regularly commissioned to paint portraits of famous actors. He was inducted into the National Academy of Design, which includes members such as architects Frank Ghery and Frank Lloyd Wright. At the height of his fame, Esquire magazine named him America’s most important living artist. His name was Eugene Speicher Ever heard of him? Me neither. After a successful career as an artist in his lifetime, Speicher has been forgotten. His work used to be exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, most of his work has been sold off to smaller museums, or taken off display. In 2014, as one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings was being sold for more than forty million dollars, one museum in New York did hold a retrospective exhibition of Speicher’s work. No, it wasn’t the Met or the Guggenheim. It was a small museum, somewhere between Manhattan and Albany. The big question behind this exhibition: How is it possible that Eugene Speicher was so successful and famous during his lifetime, only to be -- as one critic put it -- “virtually erased from the canon of American art history.” In articles about the exhibition, critics threw about theories: Was it because he switched from portraiture to landscape painting? Was it the financial pressures of supporting a family? It’s funny, in terms of the impact of his art, Speicher didn’t achieve mastery like Georgia did. You could say he achieved mediocrity. He embraced the unearned and stayed mediocre I have a theory why Speicher’s work was forgotten: He never got really good. He didn’t shun the unearned. Worse yet, Speicher embraced the unearned. To say Eugene Speicher has been forgotten is an exaggeration. He does live on in art history for one incident. This incident supports my theory. When Speicher asked Georgia to sit for what would become a prize-winning portrait, Georgia hesitated. She wasn’t sure it was worth skipping class to sit for that portrait. And that’s when Speicher showed his true colors. Georgia later recalled what Speicher said: “It doesn’t matter what you do, I’m going to be a great painter, and you will probably end up teaching painting in some girls’ school.” Talk about not shunning the unearned. Speicher thought he could shovel the unearned into his coffers. He knew that just because he was a man, he had a better shot at making it as an artist than Georgia had. The unearned: An easy path to mediocrity, an obstacle to mastery Look at these two differing attitudes when it comes the unearned: Georgia didn’t even want to sit for portraits. It may have helped pay for art school tuition, but it was going to take away from the work that mattered. The work of becoming a great artist. Speicher thought that, because he was a man, he was entitled to a successful career as an artist. Speicher floated through his career, earning commissions, being invited to display his work in exhibitions. He was good enough to get a little further, with the help of the unearned. Georgia didn’t want a single thing she didn’t earn. Because she didn’t have money -- not even the money she could have made sitting for portraits -- she had to drop out of art school and leave New York. She supported herself through various jobs around the country. It probably looked like Speicher was right, at least for a little while, one of those jobs was, indeed, teaching at some girls’ school. But, Georgia got the last laugh. Eugene Speicher -- well, the thing he’s most famous for today -- is that he painted a portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. Images: Revolution of the Viaduct, Paul Klee; [Georgia O’Keeffe (“Patsy”), Eugene Speicher]; [Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1*, Georgia O’Keeffe] Thanks for sharing my work! On Twitter, thank you to @jovvvian, @allenthird, @niceguylife2, and @coreyhainesco.   My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of 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/shun-the-unearned/ 

Here’s a brain teaser for you: Imagine we’ve got a room full of people. We’re trying to figure if any two people in the room have the same birthday. For us to reach a fifty-percent probability that there are two people in the room with the exact same birthday, how many people need to be in the room? I told you this was a brain teaser, so suffice to say that the answer -- to how many people need to be in a room for there to be a fifty-percent probability that two people have the exact same birthday -- is not what you would intuitively expect. The “birthday problem” tells a lot about how we fail to see hidden complexity For the sake of this puzzle, let’s assume there are no twins, no leap year birthdays, and there are no seasonal variations. No spike in birthdays nine months after Christmas or some big snowstorm. Most people start with a rough calculation like this: There’s 365 days in a year, so for there to be two people in the room with the same birthday, take 365, divide it by two -- you’ve got about 180, give or take. With 180 people in a room it seems you’d have about a fifty-percent chance that two of them have the same birthday. This intuitive calculation is wrong. It’s very wrong. If you had 180 people in a room, the chances that two of them will have the same birthday is damn close to 100%. Even if there were only 100 people in the room, rather than 180, the chances that two of them would have the same birthday would be 99.99997%. The actual answer is fun to know, but it also tells us a lot about our minds. It tells us a lot about how bad we are at understanding complexity. It tells us a lot about how complexity tends to get out of hand, and weigh us down, and cause us to stagnate. Complexity creep. If we know the answer to what is known as the birthday problem, maybe -- just maybe -- we can fight against complexity creep: That insidious tendency for us to make things more complex and more complex and more complex, until we find ourselves paralyzed. And there’s a flip side. If you can understand complexity creep -- if you can understand how things that seem simple are actually complex, you can also use that to your advantage. Each “one thing” interacts with every other thing So how do you actually find the answer to the birthday problem? Let me start by saying that if you have trouble following the next minute or so, don’t worry about it. That’s the point. Our brains aren’t wired to intuitively understand this. On a basic level, you wouldn’t just calculate based upon the total number of people in the room and the total number of potential birthdays. In actuality, you would calculate based upon potential interactions amongst the birthdays of every person within the room. Like this: If there’s only one person in the room, there’s a 365 out of 365 -- 100% -- chance that person does not share a birthday with another person in the room. There are no other people in the room, after all. Add a second person, and there’s a 364 out of 365 chance that person does not share a birthday with the first person in the room. With each person you add, you take away one from the numerator of that fraction. With the third person, instead of 364, it’s a 363 out of 365 chance that person does not share a birthday with either of the first two people in the room. So on and on, that numerator gets lower -- from 363 to 362 to 361 -- with each additional person in the room. So far, there’s five people in the room, and a 361 out of 365 chance that fifth person does not share a birthday with any of the other four people in that room. That’s a 98.9% chance of no match. A merely 1.1% chance that this fifth person shares a birthday with one of the other four people in the room. But wait. If there are five people in a room, the chances that any two of them share the same birthday is not 1.1%. It’s 2.7%. More than double. Why? Because with each person you add, there’s a probability that a person shares a birthday with one of the other people. But as we add people to the room, each person’s individual probability is added to the total probability. This total probability is an aggregate of all probabilities we calculated each time we added a person to the room. So adding a 1.1% probability with the fifth person to get a total 2.7% probability may not sound like much, but when you keep adding people, that new probability you’re adding onto the total probability gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The answer: The number of people who have to be in the room for us to have a fifty-percent probability that two of those people share the same birthday is: twenty-three. If there are only twenty-three people in the room, there’s about at fifty-percent chance two of them have the same birthday. We aren’t wired to see complexity. We’re wired for survival. I don’t know about you, but when I first heard this puzzle, that is not the answer I expected. In fact, even now that I understand how these odds are calculated, it’s still hard for me to believe. But as I say, we’re not wired to understand these things. We’re individual creatures, wired to survive, wired to take mental shortcuts that drive us toward safety and pleasure and help us avoid pain. In the millions of years of human evolution, I can’t think of any good reason for a human to understand the hidden complexity we see demonstrated in the birthday problem. Things were simple: How many berries are in that bush? Not How does each of those berries interact with every other berry? If there’s anything we want to know about besides those berries, it’s Is there a tiger in that bush? But, we aren’t hunting and gathering in the Sahara anymore. We live in a dizzyingly complex and interconnected world. We’re getting a lesson on this in the coronavirus pandemic. Since the beginning, those of us who aren’t trained epidemiologists have struggled to comprehend how quickly a virus can spread. How a five-percent-per-day increase in cases starts to really add up. If and when we reach herd immunity -- that will probably be equally as counterintuitive to our primitive brains. Keep complexity from holding you back as a creator Understanding complexity creep, and understanding that we struggle to understand complexity creep, also applies to our work as creators. Because the single most valuable thing you have as a creator is your creative energy. The better you can make use of that energy, the more and better work you can do. It’s hard to make use of that energy if you’re being weighed down by hidden complexity. This is something I’m personally looking out for a lot lately. Remember when I told you about the time I killed that $150,000 passive income stream, back on Episode 214? That was about mitigating hidden complexity. Here I had something that was making me some money. I wasn’t doing any work on it. But I sensed that complexity lurked within. There was the complexity of opportunity costs. It was occupying space within my brain. Our thoughts have opportunity costs. When you choose to think of one thing, you choose not to think of another thing. That’s hard to see when you’re too busy thinking. There was the complexity of Black Swans. Day to day, I wasn’t doing any work on this site. But one day, something could have happened like a server could go down, and next thing I’d know, I’d be thinking about this other website, and not about the more important parts of my business. I still don’t know what I missed out on by killing that website. That’s the nature of complexity creep. You can’t see it, you kind of have to act on faith. But I do know that it’s a relief to have it out of my life. It’s created space for me to work on this podcast and my upcoming book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. Hidden complexity in everyday life You can see complexity creep in your life, too. Ever since I sold everything and moved to South America, I’ve been trying to practice practical minimalism. I had a furnished apartment, which got rid of lots of complexity. I just got my first unfurnished apartment in Colombia, and every day, I see complexity creep in to take my precious energy. It’s in buying furniture and having to pay bills I didn’t have to pay before. It’s in deciding whether or not to purchase an item: It looks like it will make my life better or easier, but it’s never just “one more thing.” Like the birthday problem, it’s one more thing, and the way that thing interacts with everything else. Leverage hidden complexity. Turn small things into big things. I promised you that hidden complexity isn’t only a thing to be avoided. It’s also a thing to be leveraged. If one little thing can also interact with many other things, that means a small thing can lead to bigger things. That’s what we see in the power of tiny habits, like BJ Fogg talked about in episode 107. That’s the power of something like the Ten-Minute Hack. I’ve noticed it myself lately as I’ve been focusing more on Twitter: That a tiny tweet can lead to a Love Mondays newsletter, which can lead to a podcast episode, which can become a book. Hidden complexity can weigh you down, or hidden complexity can be leveraged to lift you up. Both the devil and the angel are in the details. Image: Flowers in Stone, Paul Klee My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of 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 indepe

Maya Angelou was right, “People will forget what you said...but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Because I don’t remember what this woman said to me, but I do remember how I felt: Attacked. My heart was racing. I had two options: Lash out and defend my position, or excuse myself from the conversation. My brain hastily searched for the best way out: Slip into the kitchen to get another drink? Go to the bathroom? Awkwardly appeal to my need to mingle? But then I realized something: I felt attacked, but she wasn’t attacking me. She wasn’t even disagreeing with me. She had merely asked a question. Don’t be other people. Be a thinking person. Only now, years later, do I understand why I felt so threatened. I had met a thinking person. Oscar Wilde said it well, Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. -Oscar Wilde Forgive the quotation, but it accurately describes who I was. I was someone else. Whatever I had said to that woman at that cocktail party, it wasn’t a thought. It was someone else’s opinion. And I was encountering someone who was not someone else. She was herself. She was someone who didn’t speak in pre-programmed sound bites. Someone who didn’t merely parrot the latest news headline or social media meme. Someone who listened to what you said, asked questions about it, and expected a response. Someone who, in good faith, assumed I, too, was a thinking person. Since that day, I have endeavored to become a thinking person. I’ll never truly master thinking. If I thought I could master thinking, that wouldn’t be very thinking-person-like of me. But once in awhile, I do have a genuine thought. Some people agree with me. Because I’ve tried to become a thinking person, I was proud when an Amazon reviewer of my latest book called me “a very original thinker,” and when best-selling author Jeff Goins called me “an underrated thinker.” (Though it would be nice to be an appropriately-rated thinker.) So, I humbly submit to you the way I think about thinking. How to have a thought. There are four keys to having an original thought: Read widely (not the same shit as everyone else) Stop having opinions (stop defending your “beliefs”) Stop wanting to be liked (start being intellectually honest) Write regularly (explore what you really think) In sum, assume nothing, question everything. https://twitter.com/kadavy/status/1217900835503558656 Now, a little more about each of these points. 1. Read widely (not the same shit as everyone else) Haruki Marakami said, If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. -Haruki Marakami The same way you are what you eat, you also are what you read. This is a little counterintuitive, because, in trying to become a thinking person, we’re trying not to have all of our thoughts be mere re-hashings of something we’ve read. Don’t think of reading as a way to put thoughts into your brain. Think of reading as a way of trying on someone else’s brain for a little while. This is why a book is such a bargain: Someone spends their whole life thinking. They write all of that down. Now for ten bucks you get a lifetime worth of thinking, sewn into a costume you can try on for a few hours. Charles Scribner, Jr. said, “Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own.” With a book, you can try on someone else’s thoughts, and see how they feel. You can question those thoughts, and compare them to your own thoughts. Sometimes a book completely reorganizes the way you process the world. Other times, you just get one or two good ideas. But to have original thoughts, you can’t be reading the same thing everyone else is reading. This is tough, because we’re all fishing from the same stream. The stream of information that rushes by each day in the news and in our social media feeds. Every week, thousands of new books are published. A few dozen will be hot. Most of those books won’t have a lasting impact on culture. And they shouldn’t. Most of the books mainstream publishers are publishing are crap. They’re blog posts with 250 pages of filler. They don’t have new ideas in them. Even when the book is written by someone who has done original research, you’re better off reading one or two of their twenty-page academic papers than you are reading their 250-page book. If you want to have a thought, you can’t read the same shit as everyone else. I love the story of Tyler Cowen, who I interviewed on episode 155. He talks about how he drove all over New England going to used book stores. Used book stores are great, because that’s where you can get stuff that isn’t even available on Kindle. And cheap, too. When I graduated college, and recognized that I was still clueless, I did something similar to Tyler. The Omaha Public Library frequently had these used book sales. I’d come out of there with tote bags packed fat with books that were two dollars, one dollar, sometimes twenty-five cents. My policy was basically: If I had heard of it, I bought it. I suppose at some point in my education I was supposed to read Plato and John Stuart Mill, Jane Austen or J.D. Salinger. But somehow, I hadn’t. You might think that if I heard of it, that contradicts this idea that I should be reading something different from everyone else. But honestly, few people have read the classics. They’re too busy reading whatever new book is being shoved in their face. Besides, you’ve gotta start somewhere. Starting with classics, you can start digging into what books are in the bibliographies of the books that really move you. That’s where you come across the really weird gems. If you’re going to break free of The Matrix, you can’t be taking in the same source code as everyone else. Key number one to having a thought is to read widely. 2. Stop having opinions (stop defending your “beliefs”) There truly are few things in this world that any of us know enough about to have an opinion. That doesn’t stop people, though. Mostly, we have opinions based upon emotions, not facts. Yes, we may have enough information to feel 70% confident about an opinion, but after that, it’s all ego. Someone else has a different opinion. We don’t want to be proven wrong. So, we defend our 70% certainty as if it were 100% certainty. Then, we all end up in echo chambers where we’re parroting sound bites to one another and nodding our heads, or we’re talking shit about the people in the other echo chamber. It’s all so we can feel good. This is why many conversations these days are like using Photoshop without realizing you have “snap to grid” turned on. When snap to grid is turned on, you try to draw something in one place, but the grid forces it to show up in another place. With most people you talk to, you say one thing, and they immediately interpret what you said as meaning some other thing. Some other thing that’s only remotely related to what you actually said. You’re not talking to a thinking person. You’re talking to someone filtering everything through their inaccurate opinion. The inaccurate opinion that’s actually someone else’s opinion. Most people get their opinions from the news. This is unfortunate, because Phillip Tetlock has proven that the pundits who show up on the news the most, are also the pundits who are terrible at predicting the future. Here’s why having opinions prevents you from having original thoughts: The stronger you hold onto an opinion, the harder it will be for you to change your mind if you see new information. It’s a threat to your ego. It’s called “motivated reasoning” and Annie Duke talks about it on episode 197. Opinions are like impressionist paintings. They’re fun and may even look beautiful from far away, but up close, you can see opinions are never an accurate representation of reality. It can be fun to hold an opinion and argue the position of that opinion, but you ultimately have to accept that your opinion is not fact. The alternative is to think of your opinions in terms of percentages. As in, I’m 95% certain global warming is caused by humans. Tyler Cowan talks more about using percentages for your opinions on episode 155. 3. Stop wanting to be liked (and start being intellectually honest). Many conversations, in fact much of day-to-day interactions, are just people using their feelings as filters for selecting which pre-packaged sound bites they’re going to repeat. It’s all driven by identity. If somebody identifies as a conservative -- whether consciously or unconsciously -- what they hear is going to be filtered by that identity, what they feel will be dictated by that filter, and how they respond will be dictated by a combination of that feeling and the collection of scripts available for them within that tribe. And it’s no different for a liberal or a libertarian or an anarchist. This identity effect could also be called “tribalism.” It’s human nature to feel like we want to belong to a tribe. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, long ago, being cast from the tribe was the worst thing that could happen to you. You would have no resources and no social contact. You’d be left to fend for yourself, and you’d end up getting strangled by a giant anaconda. So, staying in-line with the tribe was an advantage. If you were ostracized, you weren’t going to survive. Fortunately, we no longer live in tribes. We live in a global civilization. You have to do a lot more than speak out of turn to truly be left to fend for yourself. You won’t be cut out of the meat share from the latest hunt -- you can order Seamless to your house. You won’t be shunned out of finding a partner -- you can connect to millions through the internet. You won’t even miss the next play by the f

When it came time for me to choose a college, I had no idea what I was doing. For reasons I still can’t explain, I chose to go to The University of Nebraska at Kearney. At least until I recognized my mistake. Kearney is a town in the middle of Nebraska. I grew up in Omaha, a city on the east edge of Nebraska. You may laugh, thinking, What’s the difference? It’s a flyover state. But to most of my classmates, I was a “city slicker.” So, I regularly made the drive. Two and a half hours down I-80. Two and a half hours at eighty-miles-an-hour, with a steady stream of semi trucks passing by. Each time a truck passed, the powerful winds blowing across the plains of the oxymoronically-named Platte River Valley would disappear. Those winds, blocked by the massive eighteen-wheeler, once it passed, would then reappear with more force than ever, sending my little Honda Accord swerving. I couldn’t swerve too far. My tires were firmly embedded in grooves. Grooves like wagon tracks on the Oregon Trail I-80 follows. Grooves pressed into the concrete by the tires of those heavy semi trucks. I made this drive -- often over a mixture of ice and snow and gravel and salt -- to leave a city. A city with plenty of educational options, and arrive in a cow town where one of the main forms of entertainment for my classmates -- and I’m not exaggerating here -- was hunting raccoons. Path dependency: Your future depends on it One time, I missed the exit for Kearney. This was especially frustrating, because I-80 exists mostly for big trucks to drive through Nebraska. It’s not so much for the sparse scattering of people living in Nebraska to get from point A to point B. Which means, there aren’t a lot of exits. So, if you missed the exit for Kearney, that added a bunch of time onto the end of what was already a long trip. You had to drive another twelve miles past your destination, get off the interstate and turn around and get back on the interstate and drive back another twelve miles. So we’re talking an extra twenty minutes tacked onto a two-and-a-half-hour drive, if you missed that exit. It was the kind of mistake that you only made once. And it was a good lesson in path dependency. The concept of path dependency states that once you go down one path, it’s difficult or impossible to go down another path. You’ve passed the fork in the road. Our lives are full of path dependencies. If you eat a bunch of donuts in the afternoon, you won’t have room for a healthy dinner. If you go to one party, you can’t go to another. A single moment can be the difference between dying young, or living another fifty years. Matters of life and death are the ultimate path dependency. In other words, path dependency is really, really important. It’s important to making decisions, and it’s important to designing your behavior. One area of life where path dependency has a big impact is with the devices that we use. Take your mobile phone, for example. Think of your mobile phone as like I-80, running through central Nebraska. Once you get on the interstate, once you touch your phone, at what exit will you get off? There’s Facebook Parkway, or there’s Kindle Boulevard. There’s Meditation Timer Square, or there’s Twitter Plaza. There’s Instagram Alley, or there’s Scrivener Circle. Like any interstate, once you get off at an exit, it takes some time to get back on the road. If you miss an exit, or take the wrong exit, it will take you a little longer to get where you’re going. You can get to the same place through multiple paths There are often multiple ways to get to your destination. I remember one time, I drove home from college on an old highway, instead of the interstate. This seemed outrageously adventurous at the time. The highway is slower, it’s more narrow, it cuts through towns. Part of me wondered if I’d ever make it home. Yet, it turned out to be a nice drive. It took longer to get home, but not much longer. And I didn’t have to deal with so many eighteen-wheelers. It was probably a safer drive. This ties into the grippy and slippy tools I was talking about on episode 230. Sometimes speed isn’t the most important thing. Less time isn’t always more better. Choosing the right road to take is important for designing your behavior, so you can do more of what matters to you and less of what doesn’t matter to you. But once you’re on that road, path dependency also matters a lot. You don’t want to take the wrong exit. If you want to go down Scrivener Circle and get some writing done, it’s a problem if you accidentally pull into Instagram Alley. If you’re trying to settle in for the night to read a book on Kindle Boulevard, it’s a problem if you take a detour on Facebook Parkway. And God forbid, if you mean to go to Meditation Timer Square, you instead end up in Twitter Plaza. Introducing the Device Divorce: Stop taking the wrong turn on your devices This is why I’m a big advocate of divorce. No, not divorcing from a marriage (though, if you need a divorce, get one). I mean divorcing your devices. A “Device Divorce.” When a marriage goes through divorce, you split up. You split up your possessions, you split up your assets, you divide custody amongst your children. You split up the paths. You say, “That path I was going down, I don’t want to go down that path anymore.” A Device Divorce is where you split up your devices. The activities you do with your devices, the paths you can go down once you’re on a device, you split them up. Let’s say you have a computer, a tablet, and a smartphone. Each of these devices can do a lot of things. Just like you can get to one destination through many different roads, you can do one thing with each of these three devices. You can check email with your laptop, your tablet, or your smartphone. You can use social media with your laptop, your tablet, or your smartphone. You can write a book on your laptop, your tablet, and yes, even your smartphone. But, should you? Should you use each device you own to do every little thing each device can do? Fortunately, most of us don’t evenly distribute all of our activities amongst all of our devices, anyway. If we’re going to write a book, we’ll do it on our laptop. If we’re going to make a call, we’ll do it on our smartphone. If we’re going to watch a movie, we’ll do it on our tablet. But, even though we don’t evenly distribute all of our activities amongst all of our devices, we still do a little of everything on all of our devices. Maybe we do most of our social media on our phone, but we also do a lot of social media on our laptop. Maybe we do most of our email on our computer, but we also do email on our tablet. The problem with this is, it exposes us to path dependency, gone rogue. If we take a wrong turn, we end up on the wrong road. Once we’re on the wrong road, it takes that much longer to get where we’re trying to go. Think of it this way: You can do a lot of things with a toothbrush. You can scrub your teeth with a toothbrush. You can also scrub your toilet with a toothbrush. But would you scrub your teeth and your toilet with the same brush? No! So why use the same device to do two things that are completely at odds with one another? Why surf the web with the same device you use to write? Why chat with your friends on the same device you use to meditate? You need to split up. You need a Device Divorce. You need to make it easy to get to the places you want to go, and hard take a wrong turn to the places you don’t want to go. A simple exercise to begin your Device Divorce To begin a Device Divorce, try this exercise: Draw three columns on a piece of paper. At the top of each of the respective three columns, write laptop, tablet, and smartphone. Now, in the respective column, write down the activities that you primarily do on each of these devices. Do you see any contradictions? If you go down one path to do one of these things, will that take you farther and farther from another path to do another thing? Will it break your focus? Will it dampen your momentum? Will it alter your mental state to go down Instagram Alley instead of Scrivener Circle? If so, you aren’t using your devices, your devices are using you. Next, make a decision. Decide what activities you will do on each of the three devices. But, just as important, decide which activities you will not do on each of these three devices. My personal device arsenal Me, I do most of my writing on my iPad, with an external keyboard. I do not do email on my iPad. I do not do messaging on my iPad. I try to do as much email as I can on my iPhone. But, I don’t have Twitter or Facebook installed on my iPhone. I’d be taking wrong turns, left and right. My laptop, I simply try to limit its usage as much as possible. My laptop is a “slippy” tool. Too many side roads and detours. Your Device Divorce doesn’t have to stop at your primary electronic devices. According to a poll I did on Twitter, three out of four of you already have an extra tablet or smartphone just lying around. These old devices often can’t run the latest software (thank you, planned obsolescence). But just because a device can’t do everything, doesn’t mean it can’t do something. I have an extra iPad. It’s so old, I can’t even run most apps on it. But, I use this old iPad for listening to a relaxation recording by former guest Andrew Johnson, I use it for reading on the web, and I use it for reading PDF articles. I have a friend who has an old iPod Touch. When he works out, he listens to music, and writes down his progress on the iPod Touch. But he knows he won’t get interrupted by a message or a phone call, and he won’t be tempted by social media. Love Your Work listener Adam Thomas told me he has a “study nook” in his apartment. In his study nook, he keeps an old laptop. He uses an app called Freedom to block any distracting webs

I used to be a time management enthusiast. I say “used to be,” because time management eventually stopped working for me. How I became an accidental author It all started with an email. It was the kind of email that would trip up most spam filters. I wasn’t being offered millions of dollars from an offshore bank account, true love, nor improved performance in bed. I was being offered a book deal. I had never thought of myself as a writer. In fact, I downright hated writing as a kid. I remember reading about how Stephen King said that when he was a kid, he was “on fire” to write. I remember saying to myself, That makes no sense! Who on Earth would enjoy writing? I had never thought of myself as a writer, but I had fantasized about being an author. I guess that means I didn’t think so much about writing, but I liked the idea of having written. As I considered taking this book deal, I talked to everyone I knew who had written a book. They all warned me that writing a book is extremely hard work, with little chance of success. One author simply said, You’ll want to die! But, I figured, how hard can it be? So, I signed my first literary contract. How I tried to write a book, when I didn’t know how to write a book I didn’t have any idea how to write a book, so I did it the only way I could think of: through brute force time management. I simply needed to find enough time to write this book. So, I used every time management technique I could think of. I put writing sessions on my calendar. I developed a morning routine that would get me writing first thing in the morning. I “time boxed” to try to limit the time I would spend on parts of the project. I fired my clients, I outsourced my meal preparation, I cancelled dates and turned down party invitations. I did everything I could to focus all of my time on writing my book. But it still wasn’t enough. I spent most of my day hunched over a keyboard. I felt actual physical pain in my stomach. It felt as if rigor mortis had taken over my fingers, as I struggled to write even a single sentence. Sure, I had the time to write my book, but I wasn’t getting anything done. My case of writers’ block was so bad that, a few weeks after signing my book deal, I accepted a last-minute invitation to go on a retreat to Costa Rica. With a signed contract in my file drawer and a deadline breathing down my neck, it wasn’t the most logical thing to do with my time. But I desperately hoped that a change of scenery would work some kind of magic on my writer’s block. But a few days into the trip, I still had nothing. Zero! Zilch! My contract said that if I didn’t have my manuscript twenty-five percent done within a few weeks, the deal was off. So, unless a miracle happened, I would write a check to the publisher to return my advance, and I would humiliatingly face my friends, family, and readers to tell them I had failed. Does that sound like a lot of pressure? It was. The chance encounter that changed the way I thought about writing productivity I wanted to feel sorry for myself, by myself, so I went for a walk. I was dragging my feet down the gravel road in Costa Rica, with my head hung down. How could I be so foolish?, I asked myself. Not only had I signed a contract to write a 50,000-word book, with little writing experience under my belt, I had wasted time and money going on this retreat. Just then, I heard someone call out. I looked up, and saw a man on the next road over waving big in my direction, with his entire arm, ¡¿Como estááááás?! I had noticed this man earlier in my walk. He was gripping onto the simple wires of a fence, leaning back in ecstasy, singing to himself. I had felt vaguely embarrassed for him, assuming he didn’t know someone else was around. I looked behind me, trying to figure out who he was waving at. But there was no one. He was waving at me. I hesitated. What could he possibly want? I had just passed a fork in the road, and the man was on the other side of the fork. I didn’t want to backtrack. I wanted to get back to the house and make one more attempt at writing. But, I was beginning to feel rude for ignoring the man’s friendly invitation. So, I reluctantly walked over to the man, trying my best to fake enthusiasm. What followed was the first conversation I ever had entirely in Spanish. Though, I’m using the word “conversation” loosely. The man, Diego was his name, taught me the words for the beach, the rain, the sea, and the sun. Mostly, we pointed at things, and he would say the word in Spanish. My conversation with Diego was refreshing. I was used to everyone ignoring one another on the streets of Chicago, yet here was a guy who wanted to talk to someone on another road entirely, about nothing in particular. My first breakthrough in writing my book I was in such a relaxed state that, after bidding Diego farewell, a few minutes passed before I realized I was going the wrong way. I had continued down Diego’s side of the fork in the road. At first, I panicked at the prospect of getting lost in a foreign land. But then I shrugged it off and continued down the road. It turned out I got back to the house just fine anyway. Between my conversation with Diego, and the pep talk Noah Kagan gave me the day before -- as described in my book, The Heart to Start -- I felt as if I had turned over a new leaf. I set up my laptop on a desk on the interior balcony of the house. There, overlooking the sapphire blue Pacific Ocean, I had my first breakthrough writing session. By the end of an hour, I had most of a chapter drafted. It seemed as if I might make my deadline after all. Throughout writing that first book, I still got stuck all of the time. But, I had discovered a different way of getting things done. Writing a book is not about time management It was clear that creative work wasn’t so much a matter of time. After all, I was still spending most of my day banging my head against a wall. But, every once in awhile, writing would come easily. The pain in my stomach would subside, the rigor mortis in my fingers would dissolve, and, suddenly, I’d be writing. Sometimes I did an entire day’s writing in only fifteen minutes. Why can’t I do that fifteen minutes of writing, then get on with my day?, I asked myself. That random conversation on that Costa Rican road became the seed of an idea that would eventually drive me to sell everything I owned, and move to South America. Throughout writing my first book, patterns started to emerge. At first, when writing came easily, it seemed to be a random occurrence. Over time, I realized it wasn’t random at all. There were certain conditions that had to be met for writing to come easily. Most of all, I realized that, in order to write easily, I had to be in the right mental state. As the great sculptor Constantin Brancusi said, “Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.” Writing a book is about mind management Creative productivity isn’t about having enough time to do the work. It’s not about typing faster, so you can type more words in less time. It’s not about shoehorning as much work as possible into every sliver of time available. Like planting a seed in nutrient-rich soil, and feeding it the water and sunlight it needs in order to grow, creative productivity is about creating the conditions within your mind to have valuable thoughts. Creative productivity isn’t about time management, it’s about mind management. Image: [Guitar and Fruit Dish, Juan Gris] New Book: Mind Management, Not Time Management (Preview Edition) Read my upcoming book months before anyone else. Grab it, for a limited time, here. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of 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 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/time-management-book-writing/

Sometimes people tell me, “Hey David, The Heart to Start is a great book, but now that I’ve figured out how to start, how do I finish?!” If you’re anything like me, finishing is tough. You can always find a good reason not to finish what you’ve started. It’s not fun anymore, you don’t want to paint yourself into a corner if it goes well, or – my personal favorite – now you have an even better idea! (which you soon abandon, like the thousand projects before it.) Our guest today can help you stop floundering, and start finishing. In fact, he’s the author of a book called Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done. He’s got all of the discipline of an Army officer, and all of the wisdom of a philosophy professor – he’s even been both of those things. He’s Charlie Gilkey (@CharlieGilkey). Whether you’re flip-flopping, floundering, or fluttering about from project to project like a butterfly in a botanical garden, Charlie can help you start finishing with his book, or start flourishing, with his podcast, Productive Flourishing. Today, we’ll talk about: Charlie says, “be courageous enough to commit more fully to fewer projects.” For lots of us, that’s easier said than done. Hear Charlie psychoanalyze me out of my own straitjacket. Finishing a big project changes who we are. How can you push past your comfort zone just when you’re about to make a transformation? You’ve heard of “fear of success.” I’ve always had trouble believing in it. But Charlie cleared it all up. Hear the four stories we tell ourselves that hold us back from success. P.S. Charlie is the last guest for awhile. Because I’m dedicating every ounce of creative energy to my upcoming book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. (Remember, the Preview Edition is available for a limited time.) I’ll still be workshopping ideas from the book in my bi-weekly essay episodes, so stay subscribed for those. Interestingly, since Charlie is all about finishing, and I’m on the home stretch for finishing this book, that makes him the perfect final guest. New Book: Mind Management, Not Time Management (Preview Edition) Read my upcoming book months before anyone else. Grab it, for a limited time, here. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of 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 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/charlie-gilkey/

One day, I was in a coworking space, here in Colombia, writing in my Moleskine notebook. One of the other co-workers came up to me and asked me a question. He said, in Spanish, and with a sense of earnest curiosity, “Why are you writing in your notebook? Your computer is right in front of you. You can write much faster on your computer. Why aren’t you writing on your computer?” That question really stuck with me, because I thought the answer was obvious -- though I guess it wasn’t. And it got me thinking about the tools we use to create, and why we use them. Creativity is hard You already know, from listening to episode 218 about the Four Stages of Creativity, that we don’t solve creative problems all at once. We need to go through stages. We need to go through Preparation, learning about the problem. From there, the problem goes through Incubation. Our subconscious works on it while we do something else. Only then can we reach Illumination -- our “aha” moment. Finally, to get it ready to ship, we need to go through Verification. And you also know, from being a human being, that when you’re up against a really tough problem, anything in the world suddenly becomes more appealing than that problem. You’ll get “shiny object syndrome,” and want to escape to another project. Or you’ll check social media. I even find that I sometimes procrastinate on a really tough project by working on a slightly less tough project, that I have been procrastinating on until now. Ayn Rand called it “white tennis shoes syndrome.” That if she came up against a tough problem while writing, she’d suddenly remember that there were some white tennis shoes in the closet that had smudges on them, and needed to be cleaned. Distractions, it seems, are nothing new. Choose the tool for the creative job But, I’ve found, depending upon where you are in the Four Stages of Creativity, the tool you use can make all of the difference in whether you keep moving forward, or fall off the tracks. Through lots of trial and error, I have collected for myself the perfect arsenal of different tools for different situations. Here are some of them. First thing in the morning, I write, with my eyes still closed, while still in bed, on my AlphaSmart. It’s a portable word processor. Discontinued. Available used on Amazon for about forty bucks. I do my morning writing session on an iPad, with a wired external keyboard. I have multiple 9” x 12” whiteboards lying around the house. I jot down ideas when they come to me. Sometimes I’ll even take a whiteboard to a cafe and write on it in long form. Then, I have my 6” x 9” Moleskine Classic notebook. I also carry with me everywhere the tiniest notebook I could find: the Moleskine Volant, which is 2.5” x 4”. And, of course, I have an iPhone SE, on which I occasionally brainstorm, if there’s no better tool around. Sometimes, I even find it useful to simply pace around and talk out loud. Finally, there’s plain, old-fashioned thinking. Just sitting in the park or swinging in my hammock, trying to navigate the twists and turns of a problem in my own mind. Oops, I almost forgot. I also have a laptop. I try to avoid using it, but sometimes I simply need to be on a full-blown computer. Some tools are slippy, some tools are grippy Some of these tools are “slippy.” Some of these tools are “grippy.” Slippy tools are tools are efficient. There’s little friction. You can create your final product quickly with a slippy tool. Grippy tools are inefficient. There’s lots of friction. You can’t create your final product quickly with a grippy tool. Often, you can’t create your final product at all with a grippy tool. Slippy tools sound great, but they have a drawback: Because slippy tools are so powerful, you can more easily get distracted. Yes, I can type fast and switch between documents and quickly do web research on my laptop. But I can also just as easily check my email, putz around on social media, or waste a couple of hours on Reddit. Grippy tools sound terrible. Writing by hand is slow, and worst of all, you can’t even use the writing. When I write on a whiteboard, I have to erase it all eventually. The right tool isn’t about the fastest output Some people will protest: But David, you could get an iPad with Pencil, and you could write by hand, and it would convert the characters into text. Or, David, you could get a special pen that would store the writing as text in the cloud. When I wrote about my AlphaSmart, my beloved portable word processor, people had all sorts of objections and suggestions. Why don’t you just get a Chromebook!?, they’d say. Or, Don’t you know there’s this word processor that costs ten times as much but that syncs with the cloud!? Or, my personal favorite, Why don’t you just get some self control and learn how to focus!? Sigh. It Shakes My Head. This is the sad state of our world. This is how little respect we have for real thinking, and the space and time and mental energy that it requires. If we don’t wake up, we, as a species, are fucked. Your tools & your thoughts are one Fortunately, that was five years ago that I wrote about my AlphaSmart, and since then people are starting to get it. They’re finally starting to realize that they don’t have perfect control over their thoughts and actions. They’re finally starting to realize that others want control of their thoughts, and that others profit from that control. They’re finally starting to realize that the tools they decide to use shape those thoughts -- whether that’s through enabling clearer thinking, or making them vulnerable to disruptions in their thinking. Imagine the most simple example possible of a primate using a tool. Imagine a chimp fishing ants out of an anthill with a twig. In the moments when that chimp has her hand wrapped around the twig, she cannot use that hand for some other purpose. This is the nature of tools. Tools give us new powers, but, in the process, tools take away other powers. Imagine you’re Superman, and you have the power of X-ray vision. Wouldn’t you prefer to be able to turn off your powers of X-ray vision? If you had X-ray vision all of the time, that would actually suck. You’d be bumping into things, because you couldn’t see them. Everyone you saw would be naked. Before you get too excited, remember: Everyone you saw would be naked. Tools help exercise thoughts, or record them. They rarely do both. Here’s another thing that surprises most people when I tell them about my arsenal of tools. Much of what I produce on these tools disappears. My morning writing session on the AlphaSmart? When I’m done, I delete everything I just wrote. The writing I do on the whiteboards? I usually erase it all as soon as I’ve run out of space. When I speak out loud? I usually don’t record it. And when I sit and think? Those thoughts disappear into the ether. Yes, if I really come across something great using any of these tools, I have options. I can write down a thought in a notebook, I can record my own speech, I can take a picture of a whiteboard. I can even hook up my AlphaSmart to a computer, and transfer my writing. But that’s not the point. The point of each of these tools is not what I produce with these tools -- it’s the way these tools enable thoughts. In the early stages of any project, the thinking I do with these tools serves as Preparation, one of the Four Stages of Creativity I mentioned in episode 218. Preparation can be about research, but Preparation can just as easily be the exploration of a problem in your own mind. What do you think about this? What questions do you have? What are the ins and outs and ups and downs of it all? I know that once I’ve done that Preparation, the next stage, Incubation, will take over. I know that when I return to the problem, I may have my “aha” moment. I may have my moment of Illumination. Grippy tools for thinking, slippy tools for producing This is why I want “grippy” tools for the early stages of any project. In a way, your progress on the project is itself slippy or grippy. When I’m in the early stages of a project, it’s like I’m scaling up a wet rock face. I don’t have a firm grasp of the problem. I need all of the grip I can get. I need any threat of dis-traction to be as far away as possible. I don’t need dis-traction. As Nir Eyal would say, I need traction. Yes, after the tools -- like training wheels on a bicycle -- have enabled the thoughts, after I’ve explored the twists and windings of the problem in my head, I eventually have a grip on the problem. The rock face is no longer wet. I don’t need grippy hiking boots to keep going. I can wear more comfortable and nimble cross trainers. When it’s time to turn clear thoughts into finished products -- when the project is ready for Verification -- then I can use a slippy tool, such as a laptop, connected to the internet, and all its myriad dis-tractions. So the next time you’re working on a tough problem, and the next time that tough problem is making distractions more attractive, ask yourself: Am I using the right tool? Let go of the dangerous expectation of an instant breakthrough. Trade in your slippy tool for a grippy tool. Thanks for sharing my work! On Twitter, thank you to @geekosupremo, and @mtr_amg. Thank you to @balancethegrind for naming Love Your Work in their Top 26 podcasts you can listen to about work, life, and balance. On Instagram, thank you to @wepublishhorror @success_from_books @jasonjclement, @ecemtombas, @shelbsimone, @eifgul, @wetherscold, @bluevalewriting, @mel_thecreative, @almahoffman, @michigan_st8ler Image: [Boaters Rowing on the Yerres, Gustave Caillebotte] New Book: Mind Management, Not Time Management (Preview Edition) Read my upcoming book months before anyone else. Grab it, for a limited time, here. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The H

Offer expires soon. You don’t want to miss it! It’s the investment of a lifetime! It’s going to be the party of the century! Can you feel the anxiety piling up? You know what it is – it’s FOMO. The Fear of Missing Out. In a hyper-connected world, FOMO is more intense than ever. Our friends are sharing amazing travel photos on Instagram, people are talking about the hot new investment opportunity on Twitter, news headlines bait us with the mystery of what we’ll find out if only we’d click. Even social distancing isn’t enough to calm FOMO. Sure, you have little choice but to stay home, but then you see the screenshot of the Zoom party you weren’t invited to. Having a fear of missing out is an innately human thing – it’s been around forever. But FOMO is relatively new. In fact the term FOMO – so ubiquitous it’s in the dictionary – was invented in 2004, by today’s guest, Patrick McGinnis. Patrick McGinnis (@pjmcginnis) is the author of Fear of Missing Out: Practical Decision-Making in a World of Overwhelming Choice. When Patrick invented FOMO, he was a student at Harvard Business School – a choice-rich environment. More than fifteen years later, Patrick still thinks about the dark side and the bright side of FOMO – as a venture capitalist. If you’re going to love your work, you have to make great decisions. That’s what this conversation will help you do. There’s more to FOMO than you think. In this episode, you’ll learn: How can FOMO be a good thing? If you’re feeling the FOMO, it might be a sign. With all the lip service FOMO gets, it’s a shame more people don’t think about FOMO’s cousin: FOBO. What is FOBO, and why is it all bad? FOMO and FOBO can wipe out your mental energy with decision fatigue. Learn a quick and fun hack for saving brain cycles called “ask the watch.” You’ll love it. P.S. Patrick McGinnis is one of the last guests we’ll have on Love Your Work for awhile. Why? Because I’m dedicating every ounce of creative energy to my upcoming book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. (Remember, the Preview Edition is available for a limited time. I’ll still be workshopping ideas from the book in my bi-weekly essay episodes, so stay subscribed for those. You don’t want to miss this conversation. If you do, you’ll regret it! New Book: Mind Management, Not Time Management (Preview Edition) Read my upcoming book months before anyone else. Grab it, for a limited time, here. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of 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 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/patrick-mcginnis-fomo/

To get exceptional results, you need to do exceptional things. Most things that are normal are normal only because very few people can resist them. Just because it’s normal, doesn’t mean it’s good for you. It often means the opposite. It’s like the Ancient Chinese proverb says, “If five million people do a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” Don’t let them get a piece of you If you want to carve out your unique place in this world, you need to rise above the noise that other people succumb to. Which means that you have to ruthlessly eliminate the self-destructive things that most people do. The economy runs, like a flywheel, off of exploiting our weaknesses. Sell us addictive and unhealthy substances, then you can sell us drugs to treat the diseases they cause. Hold our attention with news that convinces us we can’t trust one another, then you can sell us suburban developments and home security systems. Then there’s even more attention leftover to sell to advertisers because our social isolation makes us bored and lonely. Getting us to do things that aren’t good for us is great for the Growth Domestic Product. We’re so vulnerable to these things that if you can cut out the things that break you down, and replace them with the things that build you up, you can be way more effective than most people. I say you could be one hundred times more effective than most people. Here are eleven things you can do to be one hundred times more effective than most people. Before I go further, I want to acknowledge that this list really pisses some people off. I posit that it threatens their self-perception. I’m not saying you’re a bad person if you do or don’t do these things. I’m saying you’d be better off if you did all of these things. Let’s be honest -- it’s darn near impossible to do all of these things. I know I don’t. This is just the list I aspire to. Also, some people hear this list and think it sounds like a boring life. I would encourage those people to get a life -- I’ll explain at the end of this episode. Okay, on with the list. 1. No sugar Sugar is an addictive substance. Sugar stimulates dopamine, and the more dopamine you stimulate, the more dopamine you need in order to feel stimulated. If you want to hear more about that, listen to Robert Lustig in episode 186. It is downright criminal how much sugar surrounds us every day. The last time I was in a hospital, the only things in the vending machine were products filled with sugar -- in a hospital. 2. No alcohol Again, why is this normal? Just look at how many bars and liquor stores are on every city street. At some point in my 20’s I realized that each Saturday night I was regularly spending the equivalent an entire working day going from bar to bar -- not to mention the way that drinking affected me the next day (and likely throughout the week). You can accomplish a lot if you cut out alcohol. I’m lucky enough to not be addicted to alcohol, but economist Tyler Cowen shared an interesting perspective on this podcast: that alcohol is so harmful to much of the population -- those who are addicted to alcohol -- that the only responsible thing to do is to not drink, so it won’t be such a normal thing anymore. 3. No caffeine This one is hard for the coffee lovers. Caffeine, again, is an addictive substance. What happens when you’re addicted to something? You don’t use it, it uses you. The more caffeine you use, the more caffeine you need, until you simply can’t get enough. Many people don’t realize that their caffeine use is at the root of other conditions, such as anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, even schizophrenia. Additionally, using caffeine, even in the morning, can reduce the quality of your sleep that night -- whether you know it or not. 4. 8 hours of sleep a night Speaking of sleep, one of the best things you can do for your health and well being is get enough sleep. Sleep is especially important for creativity: To have great ideas, you need to have knowledge to connect into great ideas. To have knowledge, you need to form memories. To form memories, you need to sleep well. Yet another reason to cut out caffeine. Sleep is the new coffee. 5. Throw your TV in the garbage According to Neilson, Americans watch an astounding four hours a day of television. Imagine everything you could do in four hours a day. I think there’s a neurological component to this, too. As someone who watches very little TV, when I do finally see TV, it’s jarring. The way people interact is childish, everything is broken down for short attention spans. Even if you do something productive while watching TV, I bet you would do it better if you would turn it off. 6. Delete social media from your phone Social media can be fun and valuable. Trying to function in this world with no social media accounts is a tall order (though some people manage to do it). A good compromise is to delete social media from your phone. Only use it on your computer. The danger of having social media on your phone is all of those pockets of time and focus that it steals from you. When you’re waiting in line, or on the bus, or just lounging on the couch, it’s way too easy to go straight to social media. If you must be on your phone, why not read a book, or jot down some notes for your next creative project in a text file? 7. Keep your phone in silent mode A great way to keep your phone from sucking up your time and attention is to simply keep your phone in silent mode, or “Do Not Disturb.” This, in addition to eliminating as many app notifications as possible. Check your phone on your schedule, not on your phone’s schedule. If you’re concerned about emergencies, you can set up certain contacts to bypass silent mode. 8. Read 1 hour a day It’s a lot easier to cut out lots of attention-stealers, such as social media and television if you replace them with an attention cultivator. Reading in long form, such as books or long articles, cultivates your ability to focus, which makes it easier to focus. I recently experimented with cutting out reading during a media fast. It was a valuable exercise, but I did eventually notice a drop in my ability to focus. Now that I’m back to reading an hour a day, I’m re-gaining that focus. 9. Meditate 15 minutes a day Meditation rewires your brain for focus. Meditation makes you more aware of what’s happening in your body and mind. And self-awareness boosts creativity. It may not make sense that by sitting and doing nothing for fifteen minutes a day, you can be more creative. But when you let your thoughts settle, each action you take can be more purposeful. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if you don’t want to meditate, try simply doing nothing for fifteen minutes. Just stare at a wall, or look at birds. Much of the benefits people see from meditation come simply from what they’re not doing. So, try doing nothing. 10. Journal 10 minutes a day I think of writing like training wheels for thought. When you write down your thoughts, whether that’s in a journal, on a scratch file, or on an AlphaSmart, it helps solidify those thoughts. Like meditating, taking some time to journal will help you take more decisive action in your life and work. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You’ll be surprised what mental clarity you can achieve by writing down even your most mundane thoughts. 11. Get therapy When I published this list on social media, some people proclaimed that they don’t need therapy, and that therapy is “for crybabies.” I don’t know where these people got their ideas of what therapy is -- probably from watching too much TV. Therapy, I’m thinking of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in particular, is not about being a “crybaby” or even “venting.” It’s hard work, but it helps undo thought patterns at the root of self-destructive behaviors. It also eliminates the feelings that trigger those self-destructive behaviors. If you try it and stick with it, it can be like magic. One day, you just find yourself not reacting in the way you once did to something that used to make you feel sad or anxious. Here’s the list again: No sugar No alcohol No caffeine 8 hours of sleep a night Throw your TV in the garbage Delete social media from your phone Keep your phone in silent mode Read 1 hour a day Meditate 15 minutes a day Journal 10 minutes a day Get therapy Discipline is a byproduct of meaning Now some people protest that following this list sounds like a boring life. I think that just shows how deep the cultural programming is that we should for some reason seek pleasure at every turn, and avoid pain whenever possible. As someone who follows much of this list, most of the time, I can tell you I don’t find my life boring at all. But that’s because I have meaning. Discipline, if that’s what you want to call this, is not the cause of meaning -- discipline is the byproduct of meaning. “Get a life,” by that I mean find meaning in your life, and the opportunity costs of not being disciplined skyrocket. How do you find meaning? Well, that can be a future episode. Let me know if you want to hear about it. Image: Composition with Grid IX, Piet Mondrian Our Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of 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 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/100x-more-ef

Ari Meisel (@arimeisel) created a productivity system out of necessity. He was suffering from a chronic and life-threatening illness that was so severe, he had no choice but to make the most out of every ounce of energy he had. He took everything in his life and he applied what he now calls “OAO.” He Optimized, Automated, and Outsourced everything he could. Through his own system, which is now called Less Doing, he was able to track the symptoms of his illness, and what triggered those symptoms. This helped Ari work his way to a clean bill of health. He eventually competed in an Ironman competition. I talked to Ari several years ago, after I first discovered the Less Doing system. That webinar conversation is available to Patreon backers of certain levels. Now, as I am working on my next book, Mind Management, Not Time Management, I wanted to talk to Ari again. I realize that so much of what I’ve learned and developed over the past several years is built upon what I learned from Ari’s Less Doing system. If you’re going to love your work, you have to do less of what doesn’t matter, and more of what does matter. In this conversation, you’ll learn: Why does OAO – Optimize, Automate, and Outsource – have to be done in order. Avoid the common mistakes people make when they try to “scale up” broken systems? Ari says there are deep-seated psychological reasons behind why we procrastinate. What are some of those reasons? You might learn something surprising about yourself. You’ve heard me talk about weekly routines instead of daily routines on the podcast before. We’ll dig deep into how Ari organizes his three-day, fifteen-hour work week. For example, why is Thursday his content day? Photo: TechCrunch My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of 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 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 »     Shownotes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/ari-meisel/

As the nineteenth century was turning to the twentieth century, Frederick Taylor grabbed a stopwatch. He stood next to a worker, and instructed that worker on exactly how to pick up a chunk of iron. Over and over, Taylor tweaked the prescribed movements. Grip the chunk of iron in this way, turn in this way, bend in this way. Once Taylor found the optimal combination of movements, he taught the process to other workers. Their productivity skyrocketed. “Taylorism,” as it came to be called, brought us leaps and bounds forward in productivity. Today, the remnants of Taylorism are ruining productivity. After Taylor’s intervention, the workers who were moving only twelve tons of iron a day were now moving forty-eight tons of iron a day. They quadrupled their productivity. Only a few decades before Taylorism, most people’s concept of time was more closely linked to the movement of the sun than it was to the stopwatch hand. The availability of daylight, the height of a stalk of corn, or the day of first frost that signaled the coming of winter, ruled the work of farmhands. Many of Taylor’s workers objected to having their movement so closely watched and timed, down to the second. Actually, more accurately than that -- Taylor’s stopwatch timed according to the hundredth-of-a-minute. But, “scientific management”, as it was called, swept through the industrial world. Companies couldn’t stay in business without adopting it. The goal of Taylorism was to produce the most work possible in the minimum amount of time. As Taylor watched the movements of the workers, he was trying to reduce waste. He wanted each motion to be as quick and efficient as possible. He wanted each hundredth of a minute to bring the job closer to being done. But, Taylor discovered there was a limit. Logically, there’s no point in a worker sitting idle. Logically, if the worker keeps moving iron, he’ll move more iron than the worker who stops for a smoke break. Intuitively, if you want to get the highest output possible out of the minimum amount of time, take your efficient movements, and fill all of the time with those movements. But, Taylor discovered, it didn’t work that way. The point of diminishing returns There’s a concept in economics called the point of diminishing returns. We can see the point of diminishing returns in action if we imagine Frederick Taylor filling the yard of Bethlehem Steel with workers. Imagine Frederick Taylor has one worker moving iron in the yard of Bethlehem Steel. Thanks to following Taylor’s prescribed movements, that worker is moving forty-eight tons of iron a day. Then, Taylor adds another worker. Now, the workers are moving ninety-six tons of iron a day. Taylor can keep adding workers, and the productivity in the yard will keep going up by forty-eight tons for each worker Taylor adds. Until... Until they start to run out of space. There’s just not as much room in the yard for the workers to pick up the iron, and move it from one place to another. They get in each other’s way, they run into each other, or one worker will have to wait for another worker to finish his job before that first worker can finish his job. At first, it’s not a huge problem. Taylor has merely reached the point of diminishing returns. The point of diminishing returns is the point at which each additional production unit -- in this case, the production unit is workers -- each worker doesn’t return as much benefit as the previous production units did. The return is diminishing. At some point, Taylor adds a worker, and doesn’t get an additional forty-eight tons of production. He gets only forty. Like I say, it’s not a huge deal. They’re still moving more iron than they were before they added that worker. Their margins are high enough on the labor costs that they’re still making more profit. Now, let’s apply this concept to a single worker. Only now the production unit isn’t the workers themselves. The production unit is time. As Taylor filled the available time with motion, the output of a worker rose. But at some point, Taylor hit the point of diminishing returns. As he filled the available time with efficient, optimized motion, at some point, the additional time filled didn’t bring the returns that the previous units of time did. Maybe he tried instructing the worker to move three chunks of iron in ten minutes, then had no problem adding a fourth chunk of iron within that ten minutes. He could string together these ten-minute units, one after another. He could fill up a day with those units, and get the output he expected. But then, at some point, moving an additional chunk of iron in that same unit of time didn’t bring Taylor the returns he expected. In this case, let’s say that number was five chunks of iron within ten minutes. Maybe the worker could keep it up for an hour, but soon the worker would get tired. Eventually, the worker couldn’t move that fifth chunk of iron within a ten-minute unit. The worker got too fatigued. Taylor had reached the point of diminishing returns. The point of negative returns Let’s go back to the steelyard, where Taylor is adding workers. At some point after the point of diminishing returns, Taylor isn’t getting forty-eight tons of output per additional worker, nor is he getting forty tons of output per additional worker. At one point, workers were waiting for one another or getting in each other’s way once in awhile. But now the yard of Bethlehem Steel is nearly gridlocked. The workers are constantly in each other’s way. They’re getting fatigued holding the chunks of iron. Injuries are skyrocketing. Productivity in the steel yard collapses. Taylor is way beyond the point of diminishing returns. Not only is he not getting the output he expected from adding an additional worker. That would be the point of diminishing returns. Taylor has now hit the point of negative returns. He’s now getting less output overall per additional worker. For each worker Taylor adds, he’ll get less output than he would have if that worker had just stayed home. Creative work is not industrial work Scientific management is simple enough when you’re moving chunks of iron. Simply experiment with the amount of iron moved in a given amount of time. Eventually, you’ll find the right formula. But creative work is different in a number of ways. There are three ways: One: Some ideas are more valuable than others. Two: It doesn’t take time to have an idea. Three: In creativity, actions don’t link to results. Some ideas are more valuable than others First, some ideas are more valuable than others. Imagine you write two 50,000-word novels, in parallel. Let’s say you work equally as hard on the first novel as you do on the second novel. You spend just as much time typing the first novel as the second. The first novel sells zero copies. The second one sells a million copies. They’re both free of misspellings. They’re both quality writing. Why does one sell a million copies, while the other sells zero? If the performance of the traditional publishing industry tells us anything, it’s that nobody has any idea why one novel falls flat and the other takes off. But, you can know this: Not all ideas have equal market value. In fact, the difference in market value, for the same amount of work, can be infinite. So, words typed, while a worthy unit of output to track if you’re trying to convince yourself you’re a writer, is not the only thing to optimize for. The quality of ideas matters. Ideas don’t take time The second thing that makes creative work different from moving chunks of iron is that moving chunks of iron takes time. Yes, all of the things leading up to having an idea take time -- we’ll talk about that next. But the act of having the idea takes no time at all. Neuroscientists can look at people’s brains and give them a creative problem. The people can go from being nowhere near solving the problem, to solving the problem, in an instant. Again, sitting yourself down and forcing yourself to come up with ideas is a worthy exercise. It will increase the output of ideas you have, it will build your skill in your craft, and it will increase the chances that one of those ideas is a hit. But you may be just as likely to have that idea while not working at all. Remember Helmholtz’s speech from episode 218, about the Four Stages of creativity? He said his ideas didn’t tend to come to him “at the writing table.” The moment of having an idea takes no time at all. Technically, you could have nearly unlimited ideas in a given “production unit” of time. Actions aren’t linked to immediate results in creative work Now, the third thing that makes creative work different from moving chunks of iron is that, in creative work, actions don’t link to results. By that I mean that if you grip a chunk of iron and pick it up off the ground, you have done work. You have moved that chunk of iron a little closer to its destination. Creative work doesn’t work that way. Say you have an idea for that novel that sells a million copies. Where did it come from? Think about Paul McCartney’s song, “Yesterday.” McCartney famously heard the melody for “Yesterday” in a dream. At first, he was convinced it was a melody he had heard before. He thought it was an old Jazz tune his father had played when he was a kid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCV9oqtwyVA “Yesterday” has stood the test of time as an original song. But musicologists have found numerous similarities to other songs. One such song is called “Answer Me, My Love.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhr94uOdElU “Yesterday”’s lyrics are as such: Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, Now it looks as though they’re here to stay, “Answer Me, My Love”’s lyrics are as such: She was mine yesterday, I believed that love was here to stay. McCartney didn’t steal from “Answer Me, My

Andrew Mason (@andrewmason) started a little website called The Point. An investor friend of his gave him a million dollars in seed money. The Point failed, but Andrew then used that seed money to pivot his idea into the fastest-growing company in history. Groupon hit a $1 billion valuation in only sixteen months. For someone with no entrepreneurial experience at all, this was crazy. Yahoo! offered to buy the company for $3 billion. Google offered more than $5 billion. Early on, the media wanted to adore him. After the company went public, the media wanted to abhor him. Groupon’s current valuation: a modest $400 million. After Groupon, Andrew started a company called Detour. Once again, the idea failed. But once again, he was able to find a great clue for a new company in the company he was already building. Now, Andrew is the CEO of Descript. Descript is like a word processor for audio. If you’ve ever tried to edit spoken-word audio, you know how time-consuming and frustrating it can be. Descript makes editing spoken word audio as easy as editing a Word doc. With Descript, not only can you edit spoken-word audio by copying, pasting, and deleting text, but you can also edit by typing words. Descript’s Overdub feature can actually create audio based upon your voice. All you have to do is feed it several hours of training data. If you listened to the episodes here on Love Your Work in December, you heard my Descript Overdub voice double fill in for me on the intros. If you’re going to love your work, you have to read the signals the market gives you. Sometimes plan “B” is a billion-dollar idea. In this conversation, you’ll learn: After going from having no experience as an entrepreneur, to founding the fastest-growing company ever, how has Andrew approached building his new company differently from how he built Groupon? Andrew says at Groupon there was “more tolerance for assholes.” What has Andrew learned about building a company culture where the mission doesn’t get in the way of kindness. Andrew said he had a “useful naïveté” about the money that he first raised. How does he still hold onto this naïveté, even as a seasoned entrepreneur? Thanks for sharing my work! On Twitter, thank you to @dbarrant, @keozdev, @podcastally, and @JeffNartic. On Instagram, thank you to @frekihowl, @_imperialpurple, @daizymann, and @paych_arte. Our Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of 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 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 »     Sponsors http://linkedin.com/loveyourwork Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/andrew-mason/

First of all, I hope that you are taking good care of yourself during these unprecedented times. I hope that you and the people you love are safe and healthy.   I have something I’ve been working on for a looong time. And it’s very relevant to what we have going on today. Many people are working from home. They’re thrust into unstructured days, and trying to make the most of them.   So, I don’t want to delay. I want to get this thing in the hands of people ASAP.   It’s my next book, and it is a BIG one.   Since you’re a loyal podcast listener I want you to have the first chance to read it.   It’s called Mind Management, Not Time Management, and it chronicles my decade-long quest to find the keys to the future of productivity.   Learn how to: Quit your daily routine. Use the hidden patterns all around you as launchpads to skyrocket your productivity. Do in only five minutes what used to take all day. Let your “passive genius” do your best thinking when you’re not even thinking. And, very relevant to today’s world, Keep going, even when chaos strikes. Tap into the unexpected to find your next Big Idea.   If you feel like you have the TIME, but you struggle to find the ENERGY. If you feel like the more time you save, the more overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted you feel, then this is the book for you.   Mind Management, Not Time Management, will help you learn faster, make better decisions, and turn your ideas into reality.   I’m offering a very special Preview Edition of the book to my loyal listeners. Read the chapters that are available right now, and get the rest of the chapters as I finish them. The First Edition is scheduled to come out in Fall, so this is a chance to overhaul how you get things done before anybody else does.   Learn more and buy at kdv.co/mind This is a limited-time offer, so do it now. That’s kdv.co/mind