Love Your Work

It's 1997, and Tiger Woods is in a sudden death playoff, against Tom Lehman. Lehman shoots first, on a par three, and hits his ball into the water. Now Tiger's up, and this is Tiger's tournament to lose. All he has to do is hit a safe shot, far away from the hole, and far away from the water. But that's not what he does. An aggressive and dangerous play The hole is way on the left side of the green, near the water. There's water short, and there's water left – where Tom Lehman's shot went. The smart play is just hit the ball onto the green, way right of the hole, so there's no chance it goes in the water. Then Tiger can putt twice, for par, and win the tournament. Tiger hits his shot, watches with anticipation as it flies through the air – and almost goes directly into the hole. It's eight inches away. He just won the tournament. The crowd goes wild, meanwhile, the announcers are trying to figure out why Tiger would make a play like that. Why shoot directly at the hole, when there's water all around? If he had made the slightest error, Tiger would have tied Lehman, and extended the playoff to the next hole. The announcers say, Well he's 21 years old. He's aggressive. Some of you are no doubt thinking, Why would he make a play like that? Because he's Tiger Woods, that's why. Perfection comes from imperfection I recently showed my partner a career highlights video of Tiger Woods. She had never heard of him, and had never seen golf (remember, she's Colombian). By the end of the video, she was convinced Tiger Woods was a witch, who could magically conjure a ball into a hole from 200 yards away. Because that's what she saw. Over and over, this guy swinging, then a tiny ball flying through the air for several seconds, and jumping and spinning and rolling into a tiny hole. When we see an expert in any field, we marvel at what they're able to accomplish. When we compare our own skills, we can't help but feel insignificant. But sometimes, what seems like perfection is someone not striving for perfection, but instead working cleverly with their imperfections. Several years after this playoff, where Tiger Woods made this bold play. He re-lived it in his book. He explained that he was very much aware all he had to do was hit the green – to play safely away from the water. In fact, that's exactly what he did. When you're missing right, aim left Yes, Tiger's ball almost went in the hole, but that's not where he was aiming. Besides knowing the smart strategy in this playoff situation, Tiger had noticed something during his warm-up before the playoff: His shots tended to go left. Like Tom Lehman, Tiger had pulled his ball to the left, but because Tiger was aiming to the right, he almost had a hole-in-one. This is hard to process for many who don't play golf – indeed many who do play golf. How can the greatest golfer who ever lived be missing to the left? And why would the greatest golfer who ever lived aim away from the hole? When we see greatness, this is often what's happening. Tiger was missing to the left, so he aimed right. I call it "aim left," because it's just less confusing than "aim right." Aiming left is simply accepting you're not perfect, and shooting your shot according to your tendencies. You can use this in your creative work, in your habits, and yes – in golf. When you're missing to the right, aim left. Michelangelo aimed left When Michelangelo was hired to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he faced an impossible task. As if it weren't hard enough to paint 12,000 square feet of ceiling, Michelangelo wasn't a painter! He was a sculptor. He had hardly painted anything to that point. Add to that, this was fresco – which is incredibly unforgiving. You get a patch of wet plaster to paint on each day, and once it's dry, it's literally set in stone. So what did Michelangelo do? As Ross King – who I talked to on episode 99 explained, Michelangelo aimed left. He started with an inconspicuous part of the ceiling – one of the last places someone would look when entering the chapel – and one of the last places the pope would look while sitting on his throne. By starting with an inconspicuous part of the ceiling, Michelangelo was free to let his fresco-painting skills develop throughout the project. By the end of the project, he wasn't even transferring drawings to the ceiling, and was instead painting directly onto the plaster. Other greats aimed left Accomplished creators are always aiming left. They're always compensating for the weaknesses they know they have. Ernest Hemingway knew starting a writing session was always the hardest part. So, he aimed left. He made sure to end writing sessions knowing what he was going to write next. That way when he returned to his writing the next day, he'd have no trouble writing his first few words. Kingsley Amis did this, and Todd Henry, who I talked to on episode 109 has said he stops in the middle of a sentence. Edna Ferber built her dream house, complete with a writing study

Shiny Object Syndrome is an affliction that causes you to be attracted to "shiny objects." Shiny objects can be whatever is new and trendy in your field. But oftentimes, the shiny objects are simply new ideas you have – other projects you'd rather be working on. In this form, Shiny Object Syndrome will ruin any chance you have of finishing your current project – unless you do something about it. Two sources of Shiny Object Syndrome How do you overcome Shiny Object Syndrome? What you need to do is simple: Commit to your current project, ignore the new projects, suck it up, and follow-through. The reality isn't so simple. Shiny Object Syndrome causes mental distortions that will have you 100% convinced you're doing the right thing: This old project is a dud. This new project is sure to be a success. To cure Shiny Object Syndrome, we need to know its true sources. That way, we can nip them in the bud, keep Shiny Object Syndrome at bay, and finish projects. There are two main causes of Shiny Object Syndrome: Naïveté of the novel Frustration with the existing We don't know much about the new project, so we view it with rose-colored glasses. We know a little too much about our current project, so it looks terrible in comparison. This creates a "grass is greener" effect. Now how do we get in this position in the first place? 1. Naïveté of the novel As humans, we're naturally attracted to the novel. That's how we've become such an innovative species. We were not satisfied with the old way of doing things – eating our meat raw and sleeping in the elements – so we're curious about our neighbor who's cooking with fire and has built a straw hut. That explains why we're attracted to the "shiny objects" in the first place, but there's more happening in our minds that makes us not only attracted to the shiny object, but that makes us abandon what we have to pursue the unknown. The Dunning-Kruger effect A powerful force that makes us hop from one shiny object to another is the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is named after it's originators, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who found that when we know a good deal about a field, we underestimate our knowledge, but when we little about a field, we overestimate our knowledge. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a favorite of internet "gotcha" culture. People love to point out the Dunning-Kruger effect at work in others, but it does a lot of good to recognize it in ourselves. When we get a great idea for a new project in a field we know little about, we often think that project will be easier than it actually will be. It seems like a good idea to drop what we're doing, and move on. 2. Frustration with the existing This naïveté of the novel colludes with frustration with the existing. In fact, it adds fuel to that frustration. If we start a new project, thinking it's going to be easy, we're even more disillusioned when we realize it's actually hard. We've run up against all the challenges we didn't think about. We've seen the hidden complexity in the current project. As former guest, Tynan has pointed out, when we're in the middle of a project, we've experienced all of the downsides, but none of the upsides, such as revenue or respect from our peers. Meanwhile, we know very little about the new project. It seems fun and easy. When we started the current project, we said to ourselves, This will be easy. We've realized it's not so easy, but the Dunning-Kruger effect takes over again. We tell ourselves of the new project, Now THIS will be easy! Just knowing how the naïveté of the novel and frustration with the existing work together to cause Shiny Object Syndrome isn't enough to cure it. When you're in this situation, it seems rational. You can come up with good-sounding reasons why the current project isn't worth the trouble and the new project has a better chance of succeeding. And we won't admit we might be fooling ourselves. Shipping is a skill I have some good news: Your tendency to come up with new ideas is a good thing. Instead of trying to fight it, Shiny Object Syndrome is much easier to manage if you instead accept it. Accept it will tempt you to switch projects, then change the way you approach projects accordingly. Remind yourself that shipping is a skill. The mere act of finishing a project, no matter how small, is a skill you should cultivate. If you've never picked up a golf club, you would know better than to expect to play like Tiger Woods your first time out. So if you've never finished a project, why would you think you could take on a giant one the first time around? When I started on my own, I had almost zero shipping skills. I had piles of unfinished projects, and nothing to show for them. Fortunately one day, as I contemplated a giant shiny object I was about to take on, I realized I didn't have what it took to make my vision a reality. I had had enough of my Shiny Object Syndrome, and was ready to put it to an end. So, I treated even

If you want to grow an audience online, it's great to have a consistent newsletter. It keeps you in touch with your subscribers, and it gives you a place to test out small ideas you can later grow into big ideas. I've been delivering my Love Mondays newsletter every week for more than 100 weeks (and you can sign up at kdv.co). Here's how I streamline and automate the process, so I never miss a week. Small bites of information Newsletters work great as small bites of information. Your subscribers get your newsletter right in their inboxes, so they're in a hurry. If they know they can get a quick hit or two from your newsletter, they won't put off opening it. You can see this with newsletters such as Tim Ferriss's Five Bullet Friday, or James Clear's 3-2-1 Thursday. The fact that these newsletters are full of quick hits is right there in the titles. Keeping the bites organized I design Love Mondays to have a few tiny bites of interesting things, as well as a light main dish. Each Love Mondays newsletter has a quick thought – maybe 150–300 words, about navigating the Extremistan world of making it as a creator. Plus, I have what I call "ABCs" – Aphorisms (or Quotes), Books, and Cool tools. Additionally, I may make a short announcement in the postscript. Each newsletter has the main quick thought, two ABCs, and sometimes there's a P.S., sometimes there's even an P.P.S. That's a lot of different things to think up each week, so I've designed my system so I don't have to do it all at once. Using a spreadsheet I built from a service called Airtable, I'm able to organize the ideas I'd like to share in Love Mondays, as well as Aphorisms, Books, Cool tools, and other announcements. I combine them to create each week's newsletter. My system keeps me from switching mental states trying to think up each item. The spreadsheet also allows me to track the performance of things like subject lines and clicks on items I share, so I can keep making my newsletter better. Collecting ideas Each newsletter idea starts as an even smaller idea. There's a sheet in my database that's full of some of my best-performing tweets. Using Zapier, I have an automation set up so that anytime I "like" one of my own tweets, it gets saved to this sheet in Airtable. It saves the body of the tweet, the number of favorites it has, a link to the tweet, and the date of the tweet. I "batch" my Love Mondays newsletters on a monthly basis, using the "creative system" I talked about in my book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. To begin a batch of newsletters, I start looking for ideas in this sheet of high-performing tweets. I sort them by date, then make sure the number of likes is updated on all the newest tweets. Then, I sort them by number of likes. I don't always grow the most popular tweets into newsletter ideas, but seeing the number of likes does help me get a feel for what ideas resonate with my readers better than others. Collecting Aphorisms, Books, and Cool tools I also have individual sheets in my database for Aphorisms, Books, and Cool tools. My Aphorism sheet also gets populated with a Zapier zap. If I like one of my own tweets, and it has an em dash in it ("—"), that filters the tweet into the quotes sheet, instead of my sheet of ideas. Again, I can sort quotes I've shared according to how many likes they got, to get a better feel for which ones my readers will enjoy. Other than that, I manage the sheets for Books and Cool tools manually. Reviewing the data Each week, I enter the stats from the previous week's Love Mondays newsletter. I plug in the number of subscribers it was sent to, and how many opened, to get the open rate. For Books and Cool tools, I enter how many clicks the links got, so I can see each item's click through rate. As I consider new Books and Cool tools to share, I check the performance of the past Books and Cool tools I've shared, to get an idea of what people will like. The data has been really surprising sometimes, as things I thought people would love got little interest, and things that didn't seem like a big deal got a lot. Again, the numbers aren't the only thing that decides what I share. I share a lot of things I just like, even if I don't think the highest percentage of readers will be into it. Identifying finalists I keep a big backlog on all these sheets, so I never feel pressure to think up new ideas, or new ABCs to share. I just capture things as they come. But as each new month approaches, I comb through these sheets to identify finalists I'd like to share. I just change a field in each record in Airtable, so my top candidates for tweet ideas and ABCs are at the top of each sheet, where I can later narrow them down further. Writing the drafts Once I've collected some of my favorite ideas, I write the idea section of the emails. I usually get the month's emails – four or five, depending – written in two sessions. In the first session, I write really awkward drafts. In the second session, I re-write t

You hear a lot about morning routines, but nighttime routines are every bit as important. Your parents probably had a bedtime routine for you, and if you have kids you probably have bedtime routines for them. But we need bedtime routines as adults, too. I follow a specific nighttime routine, and it helps me get to sleep faster, and wake up better-rested. Wind down, and don't try to force sleep My nighttime routine follows two overarching principles: Wind down Don't try to force sleep 1. Wind down: Before I started my nighttime routine, I didn't think about what I was doing before bed. I just went to bed when I was tired. I was treating all hours of the day as equal – following time management instead of mind management. Once I started my nighttime routine, I realized "going to bed" starts well before you're tired. It's like the difference between crashing a plane and a smooth landing. 2. Don't try to force sleep: I recently did a sleep study at a lab, and started doing my nighttime routine. But the study was supposed to start before my usual bedtime, and the nurses at the lab wouldn't let me follow my routine. I didn't sleep the whole night and the study was a waste. The problem for me was trying to force sleep. I had insomnia as a kid and trying to get to sleep always made me more anxious and less able to sleep. So now I'm careful not to force sleep. Two phases: wind-down and sleep-time In the spirit of not trying to force sleep, my nighttime routine follows two phases: wind-down and sleep-time. Wind-down phase: During the wind-down phase, I want to signal to my body that it can get ready for sleep. Again, I'm not trying to force sleep, just giving my body permission to get sleepy. I'll get more into how I do that in a bit. Sleep-time phase: In the sleep-time phase, I'm again careful to not force sleep. But I have specific steps I follow that help me transition from the wind-down phase to actually getting to sleep. Five rules for my nighttime routine Your parents probably had bedtime rules for you. In your bedtime routine as an adult, you need rules for yourself. Here are five rules I follow: No social media after 9 p.m. No bright screens after 10 p.m. Blue-blocking glasses after 10 p.m. Reading only after 10 p.m. In bed by midnight. Here's some more detail about each of those: 1. No social media after 9 p.m. I have a theory that associating with anyone you're not close to before bedtime disrupts your sleep quality. The only proof I have of this is I've experienced it myself. Though it would make sense from an evolutionary perspective: You and the tribe might find it hard to sleep if strangers from another tribe were lurking around your campfire. I don't want to think about a news story in the world at-large, witness a petty argument amongst strangers, or read a hostile Twitter reply too close to bedtime. I sense that it sets my brain on alarm, making it hard to sleep. Twitter is my social media of choice, and it's valuable enough to outweigh the above negatives, generally, but not after 9 p.m. When I say no social media, that doesn't mean that I won't chat with a close friend on WhatsApp or Messenger. I would guess associating with people you're close to before bedtime makes it easier to get to sleep, if anything. I often make a FaceTime call to my father after 9 p.m., but no Twitter. 2. No bright screens after 10 p.m. By now it's well-established that blue light exposure late at night disrupts sleep and is even associated with higher cancer risk. Yes, our devices have nighttime modes that reduce this light, but I don't trust that to eliminate blue light completely. So I avoid bright screens, wholesale, after 10 p.m. I stow my phone and tablet in a charging station in my living room, and ignore them until the next morning. This also makes it easier to follow my rule of no social media. The brightest thing I look at after 10 p.m. is my Kindle. It's not great to be on an electronic device, but I set it in dark mode, so it's actually less light exposure than I would get reading a paper book under lamplight. As part of this rule, I also switch off my internet and WiFi at 10 p.m. This is a good way to keep yourself off the internet, but it also may be better for your health. Studies have shown that EMF exposure before bed alters your brain activity during sleep. Scientists haven't found any ill health effects from this (yet), but why not turn off your WiFi? We didn't evolve to have our brain activity altered while we sleep, and you're not using it anyway. 3. Blue-blocking glasses after 10 p.m. Even if the nighttime modes on my devices did eliminate all blue light, there's still blue light in the lights in my house, or from street lights outside. So, I nip that in the bud with blue-blocking glasses. The blue-blocking glasses I wear are not fashionable. They are orange, and large enough to wrap around most of my face, as well as cover my glasses. Very little blue light gets past these, and I get sleepy easier an

I once was a professional dater. I was good at getting dates. I was terrible at finding a partner – which I really wanted. I went on so many dates, I made $150,000 on an online-dating-advice blog (which I recently shut down). I've now been in a relationship for several years. Here are the harsh truths I wish my single self had known. Dating is noise. There's nothing about dating that has anything to do with being in a relationship. Dating provides false signals. If someone is exciting on a date, that's often a sign they'll be a nightmare in a relationship. If someone is boring on a date, they may be great in a relationship. I don't know how to fix that, other than be very careful how you judge whether or not a date went well. You'll never be "ready" for a relationship. Self-help books will tell you, "You have to love yourself before you can love someone else," as if you'll never be ready until you've achieved the platonic ideal of a fully-formed human. At that point, you and another fully-formed human will fit together like puzzle pieces – forever. More likely you'll meet someone who's screwed up in the perfect way to complement your own screwed-up-ness. You'll change one another, and your best hope is the people you change into will also be compatible. You'll never be "ready." You'll always be changing. Yes, you need someone. Once in a while you might decide you're fine being alone. A self-help book will tell you it's okay to be single and you'll be happy in life with hobbies, personal achievements, and pets. This is just fuel for the hedonic treadmill that keeps capitalism running. New products and services are always being invented with the purpose of replacing some form of love – whether that's a meal delivered to your door, or a ride home from the airport. Love is free, but priceless. Love is bad for GDP. If dating is miserable, you're miserable. Many people's stated dating preferences are emotional judo to justify their own unhappiness. If you say to yourself, "I cannot be happy until I meet someone with [insert impossible set of criteria]," you have a great scapegoat for your unhappiness, besides its true source. Don't blame your misery on not finding what you want. Perfectionism is a refusal to start the journey before you've reached the destination. Beware the ferris wheel. There's a self-selection bias in the dating pool. It's full of miserable people who blame their dating life on why they're miserable. If you want proof, look at dating profiles. I don't know how men feel about this question, but when I was dating I remember seeing many a woman's profile demanding men have something better to say than "How are you?" The problem is, there is literally no question more central to existence than "How are you?" Every action every person takes their entire day is in pursuit of affecting the answer to the question, "How are you?" A truthful answer to "How are you?" is guaranteed to lead to a conversation relevant to your well-being. And isn't that what dating is supposed to be about? So why would someone not want to answer the question, "How are you?" Because they're miserable. They don't want a real conversation – they want a source of entertainment. What does this have to do with a ferris wheel? Dating apps are especially full of these miserable people. Dating apps are like ferris wheels: Some people would like to see the lay of the land, but the seats are taken up by people addicted to the ups and downs. People are not e-commerce items. Dating apps give the illusion of customization. There is no magic algorithm, there is not an unlimited supply from which to deliver your perfect match, and you would be shocked with whom you can be happy. The lines of code are designed to play into your narcissism. Like Narcissus, you'll think you're looking at someone else, when you're only seeing yourself. It's a person, not a made-to-order blazer. You do not need to be "challenged." You hear it all the time: "I want someone who challenges me." This is usually code for them having an impressive job or education. I get it, you want to be successful and achieve things in life. You'll do a lot more of that from a foundation of caring and support than from partnering up with a drill sergeant. If you want to be challenged, look for someone so attentive and considerate they challenge your own self-centeredness. So what if they like Nickelback? Oh, the energy you'd save if you realized similar taste in books, movies, and music is the last thing to look for in a partner. There you have it – eight harsh truths about dating from me, a former professional dater. I have to admit, dating is mysterious and it's possible I know little more about what sequence of actions cause love to land in one's life than does a cargo cult. But since I'm delivering these truths from my privileged position in a happy long-term relationship, I think I have a clear head about it. Think of me as your designated driver: More sober than you single pe

Does image-based media make us think less about our principles and ideals, and more about pursuing mere appearances? Daniel J. Boorstin thought so. In his book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Boorstin breaks down why "The Graphic Revolution," has built a world where our fantasies are more real than our reality. In this book summary, I'll explain why Boorstin says, "By sharpening our images we have blurred all our experience." Pseudo-events The thirtieth anniversary of a hotel is coming up. They reach out to leaders in the community to form a committee: A banker, a society matron, a lawyer, a preacher. The committee plans a banquet to celebrate the thirty years of service the hotel has given the community. They invite journalists to the banquet to take photos and report it in the newspapers. This hotel's anniversary banquet is what Boorstin calls a "pseudo-event." Pseudo-events have these four qualities: Pseudo-events are planned, not spontaneous. Pseudo-events are created so they can be reported. Pseudo-events are only ambiguously related to reality. Pseudo-events are self-fulfilling. The event is evidence of the thing the event was planned to illustrate. The thirtieth anniversary banquet didn't happen spontaneously: The hotel created a committee for it. The main reason to have the banquet was to generate press. If the hotel was so valuable, would they have to task members of the community with planning the banquet? It was hardly real. But since this contrived banquet happened, it served as evidence that the hotel was, in fact, valuable to the community. The Graphic Revolution Boorstin blames the proliferation of pseudo-events on what he calls "The Graphic Revolution," or our rapidly-growing ability create and disseminate imagery. The Graphic Revolution was cited, by the way – as a trigger to our departure from long-form text – in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I summarized on episode 252. The foundation of The Graphic Revolution was built when the telegraph was first applied to news reporting in the 1830s and 40s. The first American newspaper was monthly, but when information could suddenly be transferred around the world in seconds, news became a product to be manufactured. The Associated Press was founded in 1848, making news a salable commodity. As printing technology became more sophisticated – such as the New York Tribune's press, which in the 1870s could print 18,000 papers per hour – the capital required to run a newspaper meant it made good business sense to find more and more news to report. The American Civil and Spanish-American Wars, while newsworthy events, made the news machine bigger and more hungry, leaving more space to fill with pseudo-events once the real events subsided. As the term "Graphic Revolution" implies, graphics were a part of the proliferation of news. The first photograph that appeared in a newspaper was published in 1880. But also, audio is a part of the Graphic Revolution. The phonograph was invented in 1877, followed by radio broadcasts in 1900. The copy is more real than the original In 1922, De Witt and Lila Acheson Wallace used scissors and paste to put together the first issue of their magazine, in a one-room basement office in Greenwich Village. They carried the magazine copies to the post office and mailed them. It was an instant success. The Wallaces were able to start Reader's Digest with almost no money, because they didn't need editors or writers. De Witt simply went to the New York Public Library, and wrote summaries of articles in the magazines there. Reader's Digest became more popular than the magazines it was summarizing. In fact, it was nearly twice as popular as America's second-most popular magazine. Reader's Digest became so popular, that – according to the company's official historian – they had to help the magazines they were summarizing stay in business. To do this, they would write a short summary of an article. They would then write the article and place it in another magazine. At one point, more than half of summaries published in Reader's Digest were of articles they had placed in other magazines. The copy is more real than the original As Boorstin says, "The image, more interesting than its original, has itself become the original." The runaway success of Reader's Digest was a symptom that reading had become not about reading – it had instead become about creating the perception of being "well-informed." People wanted to browse the summaries to feel that they were aware of what information was out there, not to learn anything from the information itself. As the Graphic Revolution and our ability to reproduce images has strengthened, copies have become more real to us than originals. We go to an art exhibit to see the original of the painting we've seen copies of – visitors to a Gauguin exhibit once complained that colors in the original paintings were less-brilliant than the reproductions they were used to. Movi

The business of creative work is the business of riding randomness. If you want to write a bestselling book or launch a revolutionary company, you're going to need luck. You're navigating Extremistan, not Mediocristan, as I talked about in episode 253. How do you increase your chances of having a hit without risking everything? You do it with "The Barbell Strategy." You can use the Barbell Strategy in many areas of life and work. The Barbell Strategy defined The Barbell Strategy is introduced in Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, which I summarized on episode 244. The Barbell Strategy protects you from catastrophic losses that can take you out of the game. Meanwhile, it gives you chances to make big gains. Why "barbell"? Think of a barbell – a very lopsided barbell. On one side of the barbell is a big weight. On the other side of the barbell is a small weight. In the middle is the thin bar that connects the two. The Barbell Strategy is an investment strategy Taleb introduces The Barbell Strategy in an investing context. This is the strategy Taleb has used as a financial trader. As we'll see, you can apply it to other areas as well. Taleb says: If you know that you are vulnerable to prediction errors, and if you accept that most "risk measures" are flawed, because of the Black Swan, then your strategy is to be as hyperconservative and hyperaggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative. (emphasis mine) In other words, you have to accept that the world is full of Black Swans. As a review, Black Swans are outlier events with extreme impact. We think we can explain Black Swans after the fact, but we really have no idea. They can be positive, or negative. Things like financial market crashes or mega-best-selling books. By being hyperconservative, you avoid the negative Black Swans. By being hyperagressive, you expose yourself to positive Black Swans. 85% hyperconservative investments, 15% hyperaggressive investments Most people go with the "safe" investment. I'm not a financial advisor, and nothing I'm saying is investment advice, but for most people, that's the index fund: Keep putting money in an S&P 500 ETF. Expect to get a 7% return over your lifetime. The strategy Taleb espouses is to avoid so-called "medium risk" investments. Instead, put 85% of your portfolio in hyperconservative investments – places where you won't lose money. Invest the other 15% of your portfolio in hyperaggressive investments – places where you might lose your money, but where there's also no limit to how much money you could make. When you're invested in the index fund, your entire portfolio is exposed to Black Swans. The stock market dropped nearly 90% during the Great Depression, and swift drops of 30 or 40% are not uncommon. If 85% of your portfolio is spread across hyperconservative investments, you're unlikely to need to weather such storms. With 15% of your portfolio in hyperaggressive investments, you can only lose 15% of your money. Meanwhile, there's no limit to how high those hyperaggressive investments can go. Imagine you put 1% of your net worth in Bitcoin five years ago. Multiply that by 100, and that's your current return. Even if you lost all the other 14% of your net worth in hyperaggressive investments, you would have nearly doubled your money, with little downside risk. The Barbell Strategy in creative work As you learned in episode 253 about Mediocristan vs. Extremistan, creative success is unpredictable. As award-winning screenwriter William Goldman said, "Nobody knows anything." Most creatives expect their success to go "up and to the right." When someone suggests they take some chances, to justify not taking those chances they abuse survivorship bias – as I talked about on episode 251. So they stick to "the middle." They do the thing they feel will get them a little success. For authors, this is the strategy of cranking out a formulaic novel every month that's sure to sell some copies – but for which nobody is ever going to camp in line outside a bookstore to be the first to get. Maybe they make the graph go "up and to the right," but they'll never have a breakout success. Find some "sure bets" – protect your downside To play the Barbell Strategy in creative work, first, you need to find some sure bets. Protect your downside, so you can stay in the game. Remember on episode 251 when I told you about my poker-player friend who needs a certain "bankroll" to make $100 an hour? That's what you need. You need some room to explore long enough to let ergodicity take over. That could be a literal bankroll. I personally invested a lot when I had a secure job, knowing that some day I'd use the bankroll as runway to start something on my own. Some creatives like to have a secure day job, and spend a little time creating before or after work. Anthony Trollope and Charles Bukowski worked at the post office. Octavia Butler's many jobs included potato chip inspector. Comedian Mark Normand was a janitor

I recently got a message from a reader, who said, "I don't know if it's meditation or you reaching a new level professionally, but I feel like your writing is on FIRE!" I do feel my writing has improved over the last year. They're right to think the meditation I talked about on episode 246 has helped. If I had to pick one thing that has improved my writing, it's starting to use the Zettelkasten method I talked about on episode 250. But I wouldn't be able to manage my Zettelkasten if it weren't for a recent breakthrough in how, physically, I write. It wouldn't be possible without my new low-EMF computing setup. What are EMFs? On episode 206, my Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs summary, I talked about evidence suggesting non-ionizing EMFs, or electromagnetic fields, may cause health problems. EMFs are emitted by electronic devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and computers – even the electricity these items run on emits EMFs. (I'm cautious to use the term "radiation", since – as the irrationally rational are always quick to point out – it's non-ionizing radiation. But it is radiation). When I learned about these potential health effects, I started to look more closely at my day-to-day exposure. What I discovered through trial-and-error has changed the way I use electronics, and it has improved my well-being, and thus the clarity of my thoughts and the clarity of my writing. Your Mileage May Vary I'll preface this with a couple things. One is that I have long struggled with a mysterious illness. I won't go too far into details here, but my worst symptoms are chronic muscle tension, brain fog, and a wide breadth of food sensitivities. One doctor thinks it's chronic Lyme disease, and I'm one of the unlucky people highly sensitive to the contents of amalgam fillings, as I've been responding very well to replacing my fillings and following a heavy-metal chelation protocol. Everything I just said is controversial in traditional medicine, and I remain open-minded about the true sources of my suffering. The fact remains I'm one person, living in this body for what remains of this life, and I can't wait for definitive answers when it comes to treatment and management – especially when all traditional avenues have repeatedly failed me. But I mention these things to say, also, that Your Mileage May Vary. You may have zero sensitivities to EMFs, and you may deem the potential health risks worth the benefits. I am not here to convince you that I am sensitive to EMFs, nor that you are sensitive to EMFs. I'm only here to share what I wish I had known years ago. Electrohypersensitivity (EHS): Is it real? I'm 95% sure that I have electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS. This, once again, is controversial in the medical establishment. Some say this is totally a thing. Others say it's all in my head. Governments such as France and parts of Sweden recognize EHS as a disability. But The World Health Organization does not recognize EHS as a medical condition, despite the fact a former head of WHO claims to suffer from EHS. The WHO suggests – in addition to searching for other root causes such as noise or flickering lights – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Still, as much as 10% of a population have reported they suffer from EHS. Well, I've done plenty of therapy, and I've done a ton of meditation. I've pushed the edges of self-control and self-knowledge in emotional, behavioral, and dietary interventions. I've systematized and tracked diets and symptoms, trying to reduce noise and find patterns. I'm an active student of the many biases and errors of observation that can cause one to fool oneself. Still, reducing my exposure to certain bands of EMFs has been one of the biggest breakthroughs in my health struggle. I can't be 100% sure, but I'm sure enough that I've changed how I use technology, and I feel much better since I've done so. Which types of EMF to reduce? When I started trying to reduce my exposure to EMFs in my daily computing, I was thinking only of WiFi, Bluetooth and LTE. I started using a wired Ethernet connection at home. I reduced my use of Bluetooth devices. I felt better, but it wasn't a dramatic improvement. Then, I noticed something strange: On my iPad, I could write for hours. On my computer, I quickly got fatigued. I had long used a program on my computer that reminded me to take a break every hour. Whenever that reminder came, I was already having trouble concentrating. I didn't have that program on my iPad, and I didn't need it. I got fatigued less often on my iPad. No, a wired keyboard is not magically low-EMF I got a wired external keyboard, and distanced myself from my computer, thinking maybe my fatigue had something to do with being close to the computer itself. Again, I saw an improvement, but whenever I returned after a break, I could feel muscles in my chest twitch and tighten, and my breath shorten. Even far away from my computer, on a wired keyboard, I needed to limit my computer use, and take long break

After fourteen rejections, as I outlined on episode 247, I finally landed a BookBub Featured Deal. Once I tallied up my results, I had lost more than $4,000 running the promotion. I'll tell you why, and why I'd still do another BookBub Featured Deal in a heartbeat. My BookBub Featured Deal Results Book: The Heart to Start: Stop Procrastinating & Start Creating BookBub Category: Advice and How-To Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 List Price: $9.99 Deal Price: $1.99 Territory: United States BookBub Promotion Fee: $1,008 Promotion Size: ~1,000,000 subscribers Copies Sold: 2,541 Revenue: $1,841 Supplemental Ad Spend: $4,847 Total Profit (Loss): ($4,014) The breakdown of copies sold (across all countries): Amazon: 2,236 Apple: 204 Barnes & Noble: 49 Google: 36 Kobo: 16 Total Copies Sold: 2,541 The breakdown of revenue results (across all countries): Amazon: $1,462 Apple: $266 Barnes & Noble: $59 Google: $34 Kobo: $19 Total Revenue: $1,841 Overall ad spend results, broken down by network: BookBub Ads: $1,910 BookBub Featured Deal: $1,008 Amazon: $1,761 Facebook: $1,187 Instagram influencers: $185 Total Ad Spend: $6,051 My BookBub Featured Deal made my book a bestseller across several categories The Heart to Start ranked as high as: #136 overall on Amazon #1 in Self-Help/Creativity #1 in Arts & Photography #1 in Entrepreneurship & Small Business #6 overall in Self-Help #6 overall in Business & Investing Three reasons my BookBub Featured Deal results were poor (financially) The three main reasons I lost $4,000 running my BookBub Featured Deal are: I was trying for a bestseller list I poorly allocated advertising spend throughout the promotion I poorly allocated advertising spend amongst platforms 1. I was trying for the WSJ bestseller list Word on the street is, to qualify for the Wall Street Journal nonfiction ebook best-seller list, you need to sell 3,000–5,000 ebooks in a week, in the U.S. Supposedly you need to sell at least 500 of those copies in a single non-Amazon channel to trigger reporting to the list. I contemplated not trying for the list and instead reaping what profits I could, but decided to go for it. I felt The Heart to Start was a longshot, but was curious to learn so I could later apply what I learned on my then-upcoming-now-out book, Mind Management, Not Time Management (read about my BookBub Featured New Release results for my new book). Despite spending more than $6,000 on the promotion, I did not break the 3,000-copy barrier. Here is my sales breakdown for U.S. sales (the above sales are worldwide): Sales (U.S.) Amazon: 2,123 B&N: 51 (countries unknown) Apple: 185 Kobo: 7 Google: 29 Total U.S. Copies Sold: 2,395 As you can see, perhaps harder than selling 3,000 copies overall is selling 500 copies in a non-Amazon channel (for this book in this genre with my audience, anyway). 2. I poorly allocated ad spend throughout the promotion I broke my ad spend down into three buckets: Warm Up: Starting around 10 days before the promotion, I built awareness about my book to "warm up" the audience, so they would act more readily when the deal hit their inboxes. During: The day of and a couple days after my promotion, I advertised the discount (where possible). Last Day: The final day of the promotion, I advertised the discount, with messaging that it was the last day (where possible). My ad spend results amongst these three buckets: Warm Up: $2,225 (46%) During: $1,477 (30%) Last Day: $1,145 (24%) Total: $4,847 I do not recommend this allocation. Without much time to plan my promotion, I got overly-zealous, and spent way too much early on. By the time I got to the Last Day, I was trigger shy and didn't want to spend more money. If anything, this should have been reversed. The last day of any promotion will generally get you more bang for your buck. In the future, I plan to spend 50% of budget on the Last Day. 3. I poorly allocated supplemental advertising spend amongst platforms I ran ads on Amazon, BookBub, and Facebook. My breakdown amongst these channels: Amazon Ads: $1,761 (36%) BookBub Ads: $1,910 (39%) Facebook: $1,177 (24%) Total: $4,847 (note, I spent $10 on Instagram ads, which went to Facebook thus the discrepancy from above "Facebook" numbers. I also paid $185 for promotion from Instagram influencers, which is not reflected in this report, for simplicity.) I do not recommend this allocation. I spent too heavily on Facebook, and I especially did so during the Warm Up phase. I do not normally advertise on Facebook, and don't aspire to build my skills in running Facebook ads. I already run Amazon Ads regularly, but their terms and platform features make it impossible or impractical to advertise discounts, especially with "Last Day" messaging. I think you get more bang for your buck on a BookBub Featured Deal by advertising on BookBub itself. Yes, you can target BookBub subscribers on Facebook, but it's more straightforward to advertise on BookBub. Therefore, in the future, I plan to spend 50% of bud

If you want to succeed in anything creative – whether that's writing, art, or entrepreneurship – you're navigating unfamiliar territory. Everyone else is living in Mediocristan, but you're living in Extremistan. You need a different approach for deciding how you define success. "Extremistan" is a term introduced by Nicholas Nassim Taleb in his book, The Black Swan, which I summarized on episode 244. We tend to think we're living in the opposite of Extremistan: Mediocristan. When we as creatives measure success and make our decisions as if we are in Mediocristan, we ruin any chance we have of succeeding in the world we're actually in: Extremistan. Extremistan defined Extremistan is an imaginary place where events are random and unpredictable, and the impact of those events are extreme. It's a world full of "Black Swans." Extremistan vs. Mediocristan Mediocristan is a place that's the opposite of Extremistan. Extremistan is unstable. Mediocristan is stable. Extremistan is the world of the unpredictable and unexpected. Mediocristan is the world of the predictable and expected. Extremistan is full of singular events ("Black Swans"). In Mediocristan, the same things happen over and over. Extremistan is full of variables that scale infinitely. In Mediocristan, all variables fall within a range. We're used to Mediocristan Our modern world is built to be Mediocristan. We think we can predict what will happen. Some of this may be that our mental hard-wiring makes it difficult for us to think in terms of the unpredictable and unstable. Some of it is definitely because we've spread, across the collective, risks that face the individual. An hourly-wage job is in Mediocristan Imagine you have an hourly-wage job serving coffee at Starbucks. You're working in Mediocristan. There are plenty of unpredictable things Starbucks has to deal with serving millions of customers across tens of thousands of locations. Employees will call in sick or stop showing up. There can be a coffee bean shortage, causing prices to suddenly spike. Someone might slip and fall in the bathroom and sue for millions of dollars. All these things affect Starbucks' profits. One month, they may make a big profit. The next month, they may lose money and need to take out a loan to stay in business. But all the while, you know exactly how much you're getting paid each hour you work. Starbucks can handle these shocks and pay you a steady wage because they spread risk across the entire organization. You don't even notice if a water main breaks, flooding another location, or if the Director of Operations gets in a car wreck and ends up in the hospital for seven weeks. Your hourly-wage job at Starbucks is mind-numbing, it's boring, you're living on rice and beans from Aldi. But, it's impressively predictable. It beats the heck out of foraging in the jungle and hoping you don't get pounced on by a puma. Creative work happens in Extremistan A Mediocristan job is a pretty sweet deal if the wage is livable. Though, stable, well-paying Mediocristan jobs are more and more scarce. That's not the thing I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is how important it is to understand that when you're doing creative work, you're not in Mediocristan, rather you're in Extremistan. An author works in Extremistan Imagine if when you get off your shift at Starbucks, you sit down and write each day. After you build a writing habit and keep it for several years, you finish your first novel. You upload your novel to Amazon, and: nothing. You get a few sales a month. Then one day, you log into your Amazon dashboard, and see a huge spike. You've sold 3,000 books, and it's not even 10 a.m. Turns out an influencer shared your book on TikTok. 3,000 books is just the beginning. Your book becomes a massive best-seller. You sell millions. A big publisher picks it up and distributes it around the world. You're getting six-figure checks for foreign rights deals, then you get a seven-figure check for the movie rights. You quit the Starbucks job. Your life is forever changed. Extremistan is a world of extremes Your job at Starbucks is in Mediocristan. Your work as an author is in Extremistan. Remember, Extremistan is unstable, unpredictable, with singular events and variables that scale infinitely. You wrote every day after work, with no financial returns – suddenly you had more money than you knew what to do with. That's unstable. It looked as if your book was a failure, until it wasn't. That's unpredictable. By some fluke, the influencer shared your book. That was a singular event (a "Black Swan"). There's virtually no limit to the number of books you could sell. Your book sales are a variable that could scale infinitely. As the name would imply, Extremistan is a world of extremes. In Mediocristan, variables fall within a range In Mediocristan, variables fall within a range. The height of humans is a good example. The height of humans is distributed on a bell curve. There are a lot of

Just a quick note here to tell you loyal listeners about a new opportunity over on Patreon. As I've said in my Patreon pleas at the end of the episodes, some money that I make feels better than other money. When I sell a book, that money feels good. When I get a sponsor for the podcast, that money feels...not as good. Other money I get that feels good is the money I get from Patreon supporters. This is why I don't take podcast sponsors anymore. Each dollar feels like a little note that says, "Hey, I like what you're doing. Please keep doing it." And practically speaking, the money I get from Patreon supporters helps keep the business running. Books are the biggest part of my income, but it takes a long time to finish a book. Getting a few bucks a month from a reader helps me keep doing my work until I have enough ideas worth putting into a book. I've asked you over the years many times for your support and many of you have joined, and for that I'm grateful. But now I have a special opportunity: For a limited time I'm offering a special "True Fan" level. The name of this is inspired by Kevin Kelley's essay, "1,000 true fans." Basically, if you can find 1,000 people who think your work is worth $100 a year, you have a sustainable business. This special True Fan level brings you all the benefits you'd normally get at a higher level of support, but at a discounted price. You get early access to episodes – there's two waiting you could listen to right now – plus audio of my monthly income reports, masterclasses with folks like Noah Kagan, and patron-only Q&As – all delivered to your own personal RSS feed you can easily copy and paste into your favorite podcast app. Normally, all of this goes to Patreon supporters at the $15 a month level. For a limited time, you get all this for only $9 a month. If you're already a supporter, this offer is open to you, too. Whether that's bumping your support up a bit, or if you're at a higher level you can get locked in for the same benefits at a lower price. The offer, as I said, is only available for a limited time, but after it goes away, you're locked in at this price. Plus, if I add anything to the package in the future, you'll get that, too. The more members we have, the more cool things I can offer. Not everyone is in a position to pay for something they could get for free. If you can't support my work, nothing will change and you can keep enjoying my free work as long as I can afford to do it from here in South America (assuming I can still live in South America). So far we have over 250 episode of Love Your Work from the past five years, and more than 100 Love Mondays email newsletters, all free to enjoy. Otherwise, if you consider yourself a "True Fan" *and* you have the means, please take advantage of this special Patreon level. As I said this is a limited-time offer. It's an experiment, and I will close sign-ups to this level at some random time in the near future, so do act now. Again, that's patreon.com/kadavy

Can the way we consume information make us unable to tell truth from lies? Neil Postman thought so. In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman says everything has been turned into entertainment: Our politics, religion, news, athletics, our commerce – even our education – have all been turned into forms of entertainment. This has weakened our ability to reason about society's important questions. In this Amusing Ourselves to Death book summary, I'll break down – in my own words – why Postman believes the shift from a society built around reading, to a society built around moving pictures and music, has devolved our discourse into a dangerous level of nonsense. America was built upon reading In 1854, in a lecture hall in Peoria, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln was in a debate. His debate opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, had just finished a three-hour speech. Lincoln reminded the audience it was 5 p.m., he himself would be speaking for at least three hours, and Douglas would get a chance to respond. He told the audience, Go home, have dinner, and come back for four more hours of lecture. Is today's technology "nothing new?" Every time a new technology comes along, there are people who think the sky is falling. There are also people who say it's nothing new. They'll show you that old picture of men on a commuter train, with their faces buried in newspapers, or they might remind you Socrates worried people would be made forgetful by the breakthrough technology of: writing. If we think back to our own memories from ten or twenty years ago, we have to conclude that not much has changed. It's different technology, with the same people. Yes, attention spans are shorter But this scene from Lincoln's debate from more than 150 years ago is a stark contrast from today's world. It's hard to imagine ordinary citizens gathering in the local lecture hall to sit and listen to seven hours of debate, without so much as a smartphone to stay occupied if things got dull. What's even more remarkable is neither Lincoln nor Douglas were presidential candidates at the time – they weren't even candidates for the Senate. America was the most reading-focused culture ever Postman uses this lecture scene to paint a picture of what he says was probably the most print-oriented culture ever. Unlike in England, in Colonial America reading wasn't an elitist activity. Postman estimates that the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was around 90 or 95%. Farm boys plowed the fields with a book in hand, reading Shakespeare, Emerson, or Thoreau. Thomas Paine, who wrote the mega-best-selling Common Sense had little formal schooling, and before coming to America, had come from England's lowest laboring class. Still, Paine wrote political philosophy on par with Voltaire and Rousseau. When Charles Dickens visited America in 1842, it was as if a movie star had visited. Dickens himself said, "There never was a King or Emperor upon earth so cheered and followed by the crowds." Today's media is built around images Since Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in the 1980's, it's not concerned with Facebook nor TikTok nor Twitter. It's concerned with television. But as Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message", and the characteristics of the television medium translate well into the characteristics of today's media. Today's media isn't built around words – it's built around images. Television is images It's easy to turn the channel on a television, or to turn the television off completely. They sit running in the house while people do other things. Remember from my Understanding Media summary that pieces of content within a medium compete with one another in what I summed up as a "Darwinian battle." Only the strong survive, and to survive on television you need many moving pictures, changing every fraction of a second. Whatever content is put on television, it needs to be adapted to these demands. Internet media is images Extend that thinking to Instagram or YouTube. For your media to get noticed, you need eye-catching images. If it's video, you need quick cuts, graphics, and music. Even where there are words, words are used as if they were images. Headlines are too short to carry much content, but are also misleading and hyperbolic. Our media shapes how we decide what is true Our media is how we share ideas. It's how we have discussions about what is important. To decide what is important, we need to compare one fact to another. But to compare facts, we also need to agree upon what is true. The media is the metaphor Postman revises Marshall McLuhan's famous statement, "the medium is the message." As Postman points out, a message says something directly. It makes a concrete statement that can be agreed or disagreed with – a proposition. Media based around images is not sending messages that make concrete statements. So, Postman says "the medium is the metaphor." Today's media merely makes suggestions. By not making concrete statements

I just got word that the Mind Management, Not Time Management audiobook is now live on Audible.com. And you can listen to it free. If you are not already an Audible member, you can listen to the Mind Management, Not Time Management audiobook free, with a free trial. Just go to kdv.co/mindaudible. If you prefer another platform, check it out, Mind Management, Not Time Management is probably available there. I'll leave a list in the show notes with links to the audiobook on many retailers, but it's going live in forty retailers, so I can't get them all. It may even be available for check-out at your local library. Here is a partial list of retailers where the audiobook is currently live: Audible Apple Google Play Kobo/Walmart Scribd Chirp Barnes & Noble NOOK Hibooks Thanks to Findaway Voices' distribution, the audiobook is slated to go live on forty platforms. Check out your favorite platform, and it may even be available for check-out at your local library. I'll try to keep the Universal book link updated as it becomes available in more places.

There's an important bias to avoid: Survivorship bias. Unfortunately, people who might otherwise do something with their lives hide behind survivorship bias. Just as important as knowing when survivorship bias matters is knowing when survivorship bias does not matter. Survivorship bias has a fatal flaw. Example: Abraham Wald avoided survivorship bias to bring back more survivors In WWII the US military was trying to improve their planes. Each time a plane came back from a mission, they made a record of the bullet holes. Since most bullet holes were on the wings and tails of the planes, the military concluded they needed to add more armor in the wings and tails. But statistician Abraham Wald said, No – that's not where you want to add more armor. You want more armor around the engine. That seemed weird. Their map of bullet holes showed very little damage to the engine compartment. What Wald noticed that the military hadn't noticed is they were only seeing bullet holes on planes that returned from missions. The bullet holes they weren't seeing were the bullet holes on planes that did not return. And the bullet holes on planes that did not return were the ones bringing the planes down. Abraham Wald was cleverly taking into account what would become known as survivorship bias. Example: How survivorship bias can be used by an investing con artist In his book, Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb tells a story of a con artist. He'd send out 10,000 letters. Half the letters predicted the stock market would go up in the next month. Half the letters, down. The next month, the con artist would send not 10,000 letters, but only 5,000. The following month, 2,500. Then 1,250, and on and on. Why did he keep sending fewer and fewer letters? Because he only sent follow-up letters to those who had received correct predictions. After enough letters, he had 150 or so victims hanging on his every word, eager to have this mystery genius invest money for them. Of course once the con artist received their money, they never heard from him again. They had been "fooled by randomness." They had been fooled by survivorship bias. Survivorship bias doesn't account for ergodicity Both these stories are useful examples of survivorship bias. In the first case, Abraham Wald used an awareness of survivorship bias to avoid getting a false signal from the data. In the second example, the recipients of the letters didn't realize they could be getting a false signal from the letters. Survivorship bias is an important phenomenon to understand, but survivorship bias has a fatal flaw: Survivorship bias doesn't account for ergodicity. What is ergodicity? What is ergodicity? Imagine you enter a dimly-lit bar just as it opens. A table of patrons across the room light up cigarettes. You can see the cascading trails of smoke rising. When they're done with their cigarettes, they don't smoke anymore the rest of the night. When you get home, you realize your clothes smell like smoke. How could this be? You were nowhere near the trails of smoke. Well, after the trails of smoke rose from the cigarettes, they dissipated around the room, until a faint haze of smoke filled the entire room. Randomness eventually touches everything That's ergodicity. The smoke was rising from the cigarettes in a random pattern. But when a random pattern continues for long enough, that random pattern eventually fills the entire space it could have filled. The smoke spread randomly, until it filled the whole room. Ergodicity is why it's not only 1% of Americans who are in the top 1% of income. As time passes, people enter and leave the top 1% of income. In a lifetime, 10% of Americans spend a year in the top 1%. More than half will spend a year in the top 10%. Ergodicity is why – even though life expectancy is about 76 – a 76-year-old only has a 4% chance of dying. The small risks of dying each year of life accumulate over time. Not every game is do-or-die Next time some entrepreneur or creative gives advice, or is profiled in an article, look at the comments or responses. You'll probably see something like this: Don't forget about survivorship bias! You didn't hear from the thousands of others who followed that same advice, but didn't succeed! Sometimes this is useful. More often than not, this is as damaging as survivorship bias itself. Example: Survivorship bias in Russian Roulette Imagine Russian Roulette was a spectator sport (thank God it's not, but imagine). Chances are, there would be some "Michael Jordan" of Russian Roulette. Through mere chance, this person has survived hundreds of Russian Roulette matches. It just so happens that of the thousands of times this "champion" has spun the cylinder on the revolver, pointed the gun at their temple, and pulled the trigger, the chamber hasn't had a bullet in it once. If there were millions of Russian Roulette players in the world – playing college Russian Roulette and little league Russian Roulette, hoping to make it to the Russian

As a nonfiction author, retaining what I read is my job. Through the process of writing three books, I've experimented with different ways of reading, remembering what I read, and using that knowledge to develop my own thoughts. I'll share today my note-taking system. I hope it serves as a good example of a digital "Zettelkasten" or slip box. Listen to My Zettelkasten: An Author's Digital Slip-Box What is a Zettelkasten? I talked about Zettelkasten in my How to Take Smart Notes book summary on episode 249, but here's a quick review. Zettelkasten is German for "slip box." In the analog form, a Zettelkasten is a box filled with slips of paper. On each slip is an idea, notes about which other slips that idea is related to, and keywords used for organizing the slips. Wikipedia: Kai Schreiber The Zettelkasten method originated in analog, but is being adapted to digital Much of the original Zettelkasten techniques were developed to adapt the limitations of physical paper to non-hierarchical organization, like today's internet. Now, writers are adapting the Zettelkasten method to digital software. "Zettelkasten" is a "slip box" and "note-taking system." A "slip" is a "note" A note about terminology for this article: I'll be using the terms Zettelkasten, note-taking system, and slip box interchangeably. They all mean the same thing. The same goes for "slip" and "note." They're the same thing. What do I use a Zettelkasten for? The Zettelkasten method is most commonly used by academic writers. That use case has its own unique demands. I, however, am a blogger and nonfiction (self-help) author. Here's what I aim to do with my Zettelkasten: Retain what I read: I want to be able to put interesting things I read into my own words. Access my knowledge: I want to be able to quickly access quotes, facts, figures, and story details, when I don't remember them perfectly. Direct my curiosity: I want to have options for things I can read that will drive my knowledge more-or-less toward learning something useful. I call it strategic curiosity, which I talked about on episode 184. Develop my ideas: I want to guide ideas through the four stages of creativity, which I talked about on episode 218. Ship writing: I want to mix my knowledge and ideas into shipped tweets, weekly newsletters, articles, and books. Four misconceptions about note-taking Like many things I've come to love, I was resistant to the idea of note-taking at first. Some misconceptions I had: 1. Note-taking does not take the pleasure away from reading Note-taking doesn't have to take more mental effort than reading. It can be broken into low-effort activities that build into something great. Additionally, you can still read "for pleasure." Not all my reading goes through my note-taking process. 2. Note-taking is not mindlessly writing down everything you read Note-taking connects your consumption of knowledge with your creation of knowledge. If you mindlessly write down everything, there's no room for creativity. Only take notes on the parts of your reading that interest you, or that you otherwise want to retain. 3. Note-taking is not boring Some parts of note-taking look boring. For example, looking at a highlight you've made, then writing it in your own words, looks boring. But it's fun. It's just enough of a challenge to keep you engaged. 4. Google is not a substitute for notes Your notes are not simple records of facts and figures. You would not get the same results by Googling anything you'd like to reference. Inherent in the system is your own thoughts. My Zettelkasten notes are plain-text Markdown files I have a lot of notes in Evernote, but those notes are distinct from notes in my Zettelkasten. Evernote is mostly for project-related or operational things. After using Evernote for ten years, and watching it get slow and bloated, I didn't want to get locked in to any software. A lot of Zettelkasten practitioners love Roam Research, which is very powerful. But I like the portability, simplicity, and offline-capability of plain text. My plain-text Zettelkasten notes are synced through Dropbox I love writing in Markdown, which is a simple, human-readable way of adding formatting and links to plain-text. My notes are text files (with the extension .md) sitting in folders on my hard drive, and are also synced to Dropbox. I edit my plain-text Zettelkasten notes through Obsidian, 1Writer, and Ulysses Since my notes are plain-text files, I can access them on a ton of different software. I mostly work through Obsidian on desktop, and 1Writer on iPad. I also sometimes use Ulysses, because I like how it allows me to preview the contents of many files at once. The structure of my digital Zettelkasten As I covered in my How to Take Smart Notes book summary, the general structure of a Zettelkasten is: Fleeting Notes Literature Notes Permanent Notes I have three additional categories: Inbox Someday/Maybe Raw My Zettelkasten folder structure, as viewed through Ulysses. A flo

If you're a fan of using Getting Things Done to stay on top of all the, well, things you need to get done – you'll love How to Take Smart Notes for staying on top of all the things you want to learn. I'll give you an introduction – in my own words – in this How to Take Smart Notes book summary. The note-taking system introduced in Sönke Ahrens's How to Take Smart Notes is a bit like Getting Things Done for learning. GTD is great for things that have a clear objective. But creative insights can't be planned, by definition. That's the point of an insight, it comes out of nowhere. One of my favorite quotes from the book: It is a huge misunderstanding that the only alternative to planning is aimless messing around. The challenge is to structure one's workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward. —Sönke Ahrens In other words, you can't plan an insight, but you can structure the way you read and learn in a way that not only improves your retention, but that also leads you to new insights. What is a Zettelkasten? The system introduced in How to Take Smart Notes is called a Zettelkasten, which is German for "slip box." A slip box was originally a box full of slips of paper, each slip with a little note on it. The slips were arranged and annotated in a certain way to facilitate thinking and to link ideas. The most famous user of the Zettelkasten was a German sociologist named Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann credited his slip box for his prolific career, in which he published 58 books and hundreds of articles. His actual Zettelkasten is being studied in a long-term project at the University of Bielefeld, in Germany. The linking, keyword, and organization characteristics of a slip box were a precursor to our modern-day internet. But now that we're no longer limited to slips of paper, writers and researchers are adapting the Zettelkasten technique to digital tools. How do you take smart notes? There are four basic steps to follow to make smart notes for your own Zettelkasten – or "slip box", if you prefer: Make fleeting notes: Always have a way to capture ideas that pop into your mind, or – if reading – read actively, highlighting and taking notes. I personally carry around a tiny notebook, and use the Drafts app on iOS to capture quick thoughts. I don't take notes while I read, but I do highlight on my Kindle. Make literature notes: Rewrite the important parts of what you've read. But, do it in your own words. It sounds pointless, but it's surprisingly fun, and later on we'll get to how it helps you learn better. Make permanent notes: Break any literature notes or fleeting notes down to individual notes. Do this only for the most important ideas – the ones that are relevant to your interests and your ongoing projects. Do this a little bit each day, so you don't get a huge backlog. Add permanent notes to the slip box: Luhmann used a special branched numbering system to organize his notes. I prefer plain-English note titles. You also want to add relevant tags to each note, and link your note to related notes. How to use your smart notes for learning and writing The main reason to have a system like this is to direct your curiosity in a productive way, and turn your learning into writing. There are three things you'll do with your slip box: Develop topics: As you make new notes, themes will start to develop around your areas of interest. You can interact with your notes to follow the links, and you'll see holes in your knowledge to guide your learning. Getting research/writing ideas: You'll never have to wonder again what you'd like to read about or write about. It will be clear from where there are lots of notes clustered around a topic in your slip box. For example, you may have many notes with a certain tag, or if you use a piece of software such as Obsidian you can visualize which notes link to one another to see patterns in your thinking. Turn your notes into writing: You can collect your notes together, and quickly form rough drafts for articles or books. Don't simply copy your notes, though. Rewrite them, stitching them together along the way to create a completed piece. How to Write Smart Notes is primarily directed at academic writers, and, as Ahrens points out, most books on academic writing see writing papers as a linear task, with a beginning and an end. I talk about the Four Stages of Creativity in my book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. Taking smart notes allows you to do "Preparation" on creative problems through small habits. By the time you write your first draft – after "Incubation" – "Illumination" is easy. Most of the work is already done. Dos and don'ts Sounds exciting, right? But when you try to create your own slip box, the possibilities can be overwhelming. Here are some dos and don'ts that can help guide your thinking. Do choose keywords sparingly When choosing keywords for your notes, your first instinct might be to make sure you tag your note wi

Hey, just a quick note to let you know I'm launching a new (free) email course. It's 100-Word Writing Habit, and you can sign up at kdv.co/100 I built my writing career by building a writing habit. Three books later, I still write 100 words first thing in the morning. That gets me going so – in addition to books – I can ship an email newsletter each week, and a couple 2,000-word articles on this podcast, and a 5,000-word income report each month. Sure, I write more than 100 words a day, but it all starts with my 100-word habit. 100-Word Writing Habit: New FREE email course (starts March 3rd) My 100-word writing habit is so powerful, I'm starting a new email course to teach it to others. Learn the power behind the 100-word habit, as well as how to set yourself up so you never miss a day. Sign up before March 3rd at kdv.co/100

You've heard the expression, "The medium is the message." But what does that really mean? "The medium is the message" is a term coined by Marshall McLuhan in his book, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. More than fifty years after it was published – in 1964 – Understanding Media reads as if it's from the future. In this Understanding Media summary, I'll break down – in my own words – why "The medium is the message," as well as other key ideas within this media theory classic. Three key ideas in Understanding Media I'm going to cover three key ideas in this summary: The medium is the message. Basically, it's not the content of the medium that matters. Instead, the characteristics of that medium determine its content. We're shifting from mechanical technology to electric technology. Mechanical technology such as wheels, roads, and the printing press influence us in different ways from electric technology such as the lightbulb, television, or – today – the internet. Mechanical technology detribalized humans. Now electric technology is retribalizing humans. This shift causes stress in the ways we interact with one another. Our lack of awareness of how technology changes the way we interact is a threat to civilization. McLuhan weaves these and other ideas throughout the book as he analyzes things you might normally think of as media – such as radio, television, and books – but also things you might normally not think of as media – such as roads, clothes, money, and clocks. Now, each of those three main ideas, in more detail: 1. The medium is the message What does "The medium is the message" mean? McLuhan says: The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Media are extensions of ourselves Let me break down some ideas within this quote. First, McLuhan refers to media as "extensions of ourselves." Remember, the subtitle of the book is Extensions of Man. McLuhan casts a wide net in what he thinks of as media. To McLuhan, media is anything that extends our capabilities as humans. As he says, "Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the psychic and social complex." In other words, any media extends our capabilities. In the process, it changes how we think, and how we interact with one another. Media changes our "sense ratios" How does media change how we think and interact – the "psychic and social complex?" In the quote I presented earlier, McLuhan also talks about "the new scale that is introduced into our affairs," by these extensions of ourselves. Every medium alters what McLuhan calls "sense ratios." We read a book with our eyes and our mind. We watch television with our eyes and our ears. The content of the medium comes to us through specific senses (sight, sound, touch, thought, etc.). As those senses are engaged, it affects how we use our other senses. I've referred to this before, myself, giving an example of a chimp fishing ants out of an anthill with a stick. The stick is an extension of her hand. While she's holding that stick, she can't use that hand for some other purpose, such as to defend herself from an attack by another chimp. Even if she could, she might not notice the attack, since she's focused mentally on the stick, and whether or not it has ants on it. So as a medium makes one thing easy, it makes other things hard. If you are reading this summary, you're using different senses than if you are listening to it. That changes how you interact with this summary. If you're reading, you can easily re-read parts. If you're listening, it's less likely you'll rewind to re-listen to parts. If you're reading on a laptop or a phone or an ebook reader, each of these devices will also change how you engage with the content. Reading on an ebook reader while lying alone on your couch is different than listening on a subway surrounded by people, or listening on a bluetooth speaker while cooking dinner. The medium itself alters the content A really subtle part of McLuhan's basic description is that "personal and social consequences of any medium...[result]" from this altering of sense ratios. In other words, the characteristics of the medium cause personal and social consequences. What's subtly implied here is that the content we're so often concerned about – violence in video games, for example – is really caused by the medium itself. As I write this summary, I'm thinking about what medium you'll use to consume it. That's changing the decisions I make. I know you might listen to it instead of read it, so I use shorter sentences. I may even be repetitive. I know if you find this summary through a search engine, you'll be in a hurry. I know that search engines will rank my article based upon signals that suggest whether or not it was helpful for you. For these reasons, I'm t

What is BookBub, and what is a BookBub Featured Deal? BookBub is a gigantic email list that sends discounted or even free books to people. BookBub curates the deals they send to their subscribers. They send them "Featured Deals." A BookBub Featured Deal is a chance to get your book in front of hundreds of thousands of readers – or even a million+ readers – interested in your genre. You'll sell hundreds, maybe thousands, of copies, and you may even hit a bestseller list. However, a BookBub Featured Deal can be expensive. (It's not like a Kindle Daily Deal, which is pure gravy). My BookBub Featured Deal itself cost over $1,000. I sold over 2,500 books. (I hope to break down my full campaign results in a future article subscribe to blog post updates so you don't miss it). A BookBub Featured Deal is not a BookBub Featured New Release, nor BookBub Ads Note that BookBub has other ways of promoting books besides the Featured Deal. There are BookBub Ads, which are display ads you can run on BookBub's website or in their emails. BookBub does not curate these ads – any author can advertise their book with BookBub. BookBub also has the Featured New Release, for new books, which is curated but is generally not as competitive nor sought-after as the BookBub Featured Deal. How do you get a deal on BookBub? Landing a BookBub Featured Deal is highly competitive, but if you stick with it, you can one day get a deal on BookBub. My book, The Heart to Start: Stop Procrastinating & Start Creating was finally accepted after fourteen rejections, over the course of eighteen months. Here's my advice for finally getting accepted for a BookBub Featured Deal. Go wide Many self-published and indie authors only publish to Amazon. One reason they do this is that it's more simple. Amazon makes up about 90% of my revenue from book sales, and it has nearly that share of the entire ebook market. BookBub (generally) only selects wide books But, BookBub rarely selects for a Featured Deal a book that is only on Amazon (though I've heard of exceptions). BookBub has many subscribers who read on other platforms, such as Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble. So it's a waste of email real estate for them to bother with books that are only on Amazon. By the way, what is "wide?" Amazon is so dominant in the ebook market that to have your book available in places other than Amazon is to be "wide." Being wide is a lot of extra work: You have to upload and manage your book on a bunch of different platforms. This means any time you fix an error in your book, you have to re-upload it to all these places. Because Amazon matches the price of your book on other outlets, you also have to be careful not to have price discrepancies when you're wide (more on a hard pricing lesson I learned in a bit). When you consider all the different markets and currencies in which your book is available, this is a lot to keep track of! BookBub is the best reason to be wide BookBub Featured Deals have been one of my main motivations for bothering with all the extra work of being "wide" (That and trying to "fight the good fight" to give readers choices other than Amazon.) Because being wide is so much work, I publish direct to Amazon, and use an aggregator to publish to all other outlets. I've tried publishing direct to various outlets, and I've tried different aggregators, but I've settled on PublishDrive. They have easy reporting, which saves a lot of energy putting together my monthly author income reports. If you want a shot at the "big break" of a BookBub Featured Deal, start by going wide. Rack up reviews (everywhere) When BookBub chooses your book for a Featured Deal, they're putting their reputation on the line. Yes, they charge you money to feature your book, but they only have that privilege because readers trust them. Readers only trust them because readers know if BookBub has chosen to feature a book, it's not just because they're getting paid for it – it's also a quality book. BookBub can't go through the trouble of reading each book that applies for a Featured Deal. So how do they decide if your book is a quality book? Reviews! Work hard to get reviews for your book, not only on Amazon, but on other outlets as well. At the time The Heart to Start was accepted for a deal, it had about 275 ratings/reviews on Amazon (with a 4.8-star average), and a handful of reviews each on Apple Books, Kobo, and Google Play (If you check my book out, note that I've since lost some of those precious wide reviews because I switched to an aggregator. It's best to choose the right aggregator from the start.) I had and still have no reviews on Barnes & Noble. Get reviews by asking or running other promotions You can get reviews by sending an email to your audience and asking for it. Or, if you have a direct relationship with any of your readers who have reviewed your book on Amazon, ask them if they would kindly copy and paste their review to one of these other outlets. Any

I recently saw a tweet storm by entrepreneur/investor/philosopher Naval Ravikant. He was challenging people to meditate sixty minutes a day for sixty consecutive days. The view from the location of my 60th hour-long meditation session. Here's a quote from Naval about his meditation challenge, from The Naval Almanack: Meditation isn't hard. All you have to do is sit there and do nothing. Just sit down. Close your eyes and say, "I'm just going to give myself a break for an hour. This is my hour off from life. This is the hour I'm not going to do anything. If thoughts come, thoughts come. I'm not going to fight them. I'm not going to embrace them. I'm not going to think harder about them. I'm not going to reject them. I'm just going to sit here for an hour with my eyes closed, and I'm going to do nothing." An hour a day of doing nothing? I thought, "That's crazy!" So, I did it. It changed the way I think about productivity. Who can give up an hour a day? Giving up an hour a day for two months seemed impossible. But I knew if I didn't at least try it, I'd be a hypocrite. I had just finished writing a book called Mind Management, Not Time Management, after all. Taking on this challenge meant I'd be giving up an hour a day in the midst of launching a new book – which is always a busy time. But it also looked like the best possible test of my belief that time management is dead. I'd give up an hour a day of "doing" to just sit. I'd place less emphasis on time, and more emphasis on my mind. Here's how it went. Meditation killed my motivation (in a good way) The first couple weeks were the strangest. My mind was blank. I felt numb. I lost all motivation. But probably not in the way you think. Usually, when people say they've lost motivation, they feel bad about it. They feel they should be motivated, but they are not. Instead, I lost motivation in a good way. I didn't feel bad about my loss of motivation. I didn't think, "Oh no, I want to do things but can't find the motivation!" But I sensed my brain needed to discover new routes to motivation. What would that be like? I wanted to find out. So I kept going. Do it, Delegate it, Defer it. How about Forget it!? My lack of motivation didn't manifest itself as a lack of motivation to do things I otherwise wanted to get done. Instead, when I thought of something I might do, I'd say to myself, "Nah! That's not important!" I've long been a practitioner of Getting Things Done (which I summarized on episode 242). One of the keys to making GTD work is to write down everything you think of doing – big, small, unimportant, important – even things you might do, "Someday/Maybe." After you write something down, you either do it, delegate it, or defer it. Thanks to meditation, I discovered a fourth option: forget it. In other words, don't even write it down. Just let the thought pass. This is easier said than done. GTD works because it closes "open loops" in your mind. If you don't write the thing down – GTD wisdom states – you'll keep thinking about it. By meditating an hour a day, suddenly I was able to think of something I might do, decide it was unimportant, then forget about it completely! But as I decided not to do the things I would otherwise do, the things I wasn't going to do started bubbling to the surface. Meditation sharpened focus on the things I did do Setting aside an hour a day where I couldn't do anything but let thoughts flow had two effects. It reduced the time I had to "do" the things I intended to do. It increased the time I had to think about things I would do, "if only I had the time." These effects had a symbiotic relationship: I didn't have as much time to "do" things I intended to do, so I had to be more efficient with things I did do. Doing begets more doing. Each time you do something, it reminds you of other things you could be doing. The more you do, the more entropy sets in and you make bad decisions. By meditating an hour a day, I had less time to do things, and more time to think about how I would do those things once I did them. So the things I did, I did better. It is more productive to delete from the to-do list than to mark done. Meditation made room for "wildcards" Setting aside an hour a day also gave me more time to think about things I would do, "if only I had the time" – those crazy ideas you normally let pass through your mind. You say to yourself, "I wish," "wouldn't that be nice," or "that would never work, anyway." By thinking more about the crazy ideas I wasn't likely to follow, those ideas started to take on more importance in my mind. As I thought more about these ideas, they started to seem doable. Things like taking a solo retreat to a cabin in the Colombian countryside. I still wasn't sure my crazy ideas were going to work, but I came to a realization about that, too. We're bad at using our conscious attention anyway I realized we're bad at consciously using our attention. Scientists have known this for a long time. Daniel Kahnema

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

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 Swa

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 la

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 abo

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 st

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 A

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."

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 p

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 believ

When I was working with Timeful -- the productivity app co-founded by behavioral scientist and Love Your Work guest, Dan Ariely -- we had a great feature. You could put todo items on your calendar. You could estimate how long a todo item was going to take, and then you could drag that todo item onto your calendar. It would be right there on the timeline, along with any other events you had planned for the day. This todo-items-on-calendar thing was a handy feature. It makes sense, really. Too many of us have a todo list a mile long. We know what we intend to do, but we have no idea when we'll actually do those things. When Timeful built this feature, and I finally got to use it regularly, I made a discovery. We're really bad at estimating time. It shouldn't have been a surprise. Our vision is distorted by our "time worship." Our perception of time is warped My own faulty time estimates went both ways. I might think it would take me less than fifteen minutes to respond to an email. I'd be shocked to discover that it took half an hour. I might think it would take an hour to draft a blog post, and I'd be pleasantly surprised to see I could do it in only ten minutes. Instinctively, we know that our perception of time is warped. We know the saying that "time flies when we're having fun." Our perception of time changes. It changes according to our mood, our personality, or the number of events that happen within a certain amount of time. But if our perception of time is so warped, why is time so important to us? Why do we treat time as if it's the only thing that matters? Why do we practice "time worship?" The way we measure time is arbitrary It turns out, the way we measure time is pretty arbitrary. There's nothing in the natural world that says that we should divide our days up by twenty-four hours, with sixty minutes in each of those hours, with sixty seconds in each of those minutes. Our heart may beat about sixty times a minute, but if we're exercising, it could be 160 times a minute. We breathe about fourteen times a minute, but if we're running, it might be forty times a minute. Aside from the rotation of the earth and the earth's revolutions around the sun, there's nothing about the natural world that says we need to measure the time the way we do. Dividing the day up into twenty-four hours, sixty minutes an hour, sixty seconds a minute -- that's leftover from a 4,000-year-old Babylonian numbering system. And hours weren't even originally a fixed length of time! Back in the days of sundials, hours were relative to the amount of daylight in the day. Hours in one season were shorter than hours in another season. It wasn't even until the late 16^th^ century that there was a mechanical clock that kept track of sixty minutes in an hour. To measure seconds, we had to wait until a century later -- the 17^th^ century. Even the earth's rotations are unreliable Yet even with this mechanical precision, the way we measure time doesn't totally match up with the natural world. In an atomic clock, 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation in the caesium-133 atom represents one second. The atomic clock uses this atom's radiation to keep time, because it's one of the most reproducible and stable things in all of nature. Certainly more reliable than grains of sand falling through an hourglass, or even the vibrations of a quartz crystal. But still, even with the help of one of the most reproducible and stable things in all of nature, the atomic clock is not perfect. We still have to add an extra second -- a "leap second" -- to our measurement of time. We add a leap second eight times a decade. It's hard to match mechanical or even atomic precision to time, in part, because even the thing that time is based upon isn't perfect. There are tiny, portions of a millisecond, differences in the length of a day -- that is, the amount of time it takes for the earth to rotate. These differences fluctuate over the course of multiple years and throughout the year, as well as every several days. So why does time rule our lives? So if our perception of time is warped, if our measurement of time is arbitrary, if even the things upon which we measure time are unreliable, why are we so reliant on time? Most of us wake up to an alarm clock. We break for lunch at a certain time. We meet for coffee at a certain time, through synchronized clocks on our phones. We go to bed at a certain time. You probably looked at how long this podcast episode was before you decided to listen to it. One reason we're so reliant on time is because keeping track of time is useful. It allows us to do more things in less time. It allows us to coordinate with others, so we can synchronize complex systems that make our world work. Keeping track of time helps us make connecting flights, it makes sure the grocery store shelves are stocked, and it even helps us remember to do things we might otherwise forget. Time is our "God value" (and it shouldn't be) In a complex world, there

Before I moved to Colombia, I lived several "mini lives" in Medellín. I came and lived here for a few months. I escaped the very worst portion of the Chicago winters. There was a phenomenon I experienced every time I came here, which taught me a lot about how I think about time. It always happened right around the three week mark. Getting used to a slower pace of life The pace of life in Medellín is different from the pace of life in Chicago. It's slower. People talk slower, people walk slower. That thing where you stand on the right side of the escalator so people can pass on the left -- yeah, people don't really do that here. They stand wherever they like. It's usually not a problem. It's rare that anyone climbs up the escalator while it's moving, anyway. Whenever I came on a trip to Medellín, the same thing happened: The first week, the slower pace of life was refreshing. The second week, as I was trying to get into a routine, it started to get annoying. The third week, some incident would occur, and I would -- I'm not proud to say -- lose my shit. A comedy of errors The last time I went through this transition, it was a concert malfunction. I showed up to the theater to see a concert, and the gates were locked. A chulito wrapper rolled by in the wind, like a tumbleweed. Nobody was around, except a stray cat. Is it the wrong day? I confirmed on the website: The concert is today, at this time, at this place. So where is everybody? As I walked around the building, looking for another entrance, I saw a security guard. He told me the concert was cancelled. Something broken on the ceiling of the theater. This was especially aggravating because of everything I had gone through to get these tickets. My foreign credit card didn't work on the ticket website, so I had to go to a physical ticket kiosk. But then the girl working the kiosk said the system was down. So I came back the next day, and the system was also down. No, it wasn't "still" down -- it was just down "again." So I waited in a nearby chair in the mall for forty-five minutes. Then I finally got my tickets. And now the concert is cancelled. I go to the ticket booth at the theater to get my money back. But they tell me I can't do that here -- I have to go to a special kiosk, across town. Oh, and I can't do it today -- they won't be ready to process my refund until tomorrow. I take the afternoon off to go get my refund. After standing in line for half an hour, they tell me they can't process my refund on my foreign credit card. I have to fill out a form, which they'll mail to the home office in Bogotá. I should get my refund within ten days. I'm always wary that I'm an immigrant living in another country -- that sometimes the way they do things in that country makes no sense to me. I never want to come off as the "impatient gringo." But at this point, I become the impatient gringo. I demand my money back, and recount the whole experience to the clerk. In my perturbed state, my Spanish is even more embarrassingly broken. I give in, fill out the form, and leave the ticket kiosk -- without my money. And I've been through this enough times to know what's coming. Out on the sidewalk, in an instant, as if a switch were flipped in my brain, I go from steaming with anger, to calm as a clam. Months worth of pent-up tension melts away from the muscles in my neck and back. I feel relaxed -- almost high. Flipping the "temporal switch" I call this moment the "temporal switch." I've talked to other expats about this phenomenon, and they report something similar. That when you first come to Medellín, it takes awhile to get into the rhythm of life here. But once you're in that rhythm, you're more relaxed, more laid back. You're even happier. You might wonder what my concert catastrophe has to do with the rhythm of life in Colombia. I might be wrong, but somehow it seems that malfunctions are incredibly common here. It certainly seems so to myself and other expats that live here, and even Colombians agree. (If the concert incident is any support for this theory, I'll add that I never did get a refund -- I ended up calling AMEX to do a chargeback.) These malfunctions have a symbiotic relationship with the rhythm of life. The internal chatter I experience whenever I make the temporal switch might provide some insight. I'm telling myself, "Things aren't going to work out the first time you try them. You might as well relax, go with the flow, and enjoy the moment." So perhaps everyone is telling themselves that. "Things aren't going to work out the first time you try them." That could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. In any case, even if things don't work out on the first try, don't worry. It will work out eventually. As the Colombians say, ¡No pasa nada! Some people are on "clock-time." Other people are on "event-time." The main reason I chose Colombia as a place to double down on writing was that I simply do better writing while I'm here. I think this temporal switch has a

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

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,

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

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 wa

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 socia

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 reach

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

Many businesses have "SOP's" It sounds very official as an acronym, and what it stands for sounds even more official: Standard Operating Procedure. It's a document which outlines a process within a business. What's the purpose of the process? What are the steps to follow? Who will do different parts of the processes, and which parts can't begin until another part is finished? I was telling a friend about the process documents I have for running my business, and he said, "oh, you mean SOPs?" I could feel a visceral reaction to that term. It made the muscles in my back and neck tense up. "Yeah, SOPs," I said. "But they aren't Standard Operating Procedures. They're Sloppy Operating Procedures." Processes make businesses possible Every business has processes. The employees of that business follow these processes to build a product, or perform a service. Processes make businesses possible. Processes help the business create a consistent product, at scale. Through repetition, processes allow businesses to create more of their product, at higher quality, with lower expenses -- to increase profits. Each time a process is followed is another opportunity to reduce error, or to simplify the process. It took me a really long time to realize that processes are important for creatives, too. I thought that process was the enemy of creativity. I've come to learn that process is creativity's best friend. For creativity, forget the Standard Operating Procedure -- try the Sloppy Operating Procedure I wasn't completely wrong in thinking that process was the enemy of creativity. My problem was that I was thinking about process in the wrong way. I was thinking of process as an SOP -- Standard Operating Procedure, when I needed to be thinking of a process as the other SOP -- Sloppy Operating Procedure. Whenever I sat down to try to writing a Standard Operating Procedure, my brain would shut down. It wasn't until I gave myself permission to suck -- permission to create a Sloppy Operating Procedure -- that I really made progress. The Sloppy Operating Procedure is not a neatly-edited list of steps and standards and dependencies that help you deliver a product. No, the Sloppy Operating Procedure is a living document. It's disorganized. It has free-written paragraphs that might be incomplete or end mid-sentence. It's full of grammar and spelling mistakes. The Sloppy Operating Procedure is, well, sloppy. Sloppy Operating Procedures kill procrastination There are two important mechanisms that make the Sloppy Operating Procedure powerful. One is that the Sloppy Operating Procedure kills procrastination. It does this in a couple of ways. One way the Sloppy Operating Procedure kills procrastination is that it gets you started on creating a process document. If you're expecting to sit down and crank out a polished Standard Operating Procedure document, you're going to put it off. The second way that the Sloppy Operating Procedure kills procrastination is that it makes it easier to do things that are boring or repetitive. This point requires some more explanation. SOPs kill boredom and drudgery I may dread collecting data for my monthly income reports, but the reason for the dread can be found in a document called "How to Be a Hacker." A document dating back to 1996, which outlines the values of the "hacker" -- a word which has gained a lot of baggage over the years, but which to me still means someone who likes to know how something works, who will tinker around to find new ways of doing things. I shared this hacker credo in my first book, Design for Hackers, and rule number three of this credo explains the second way that the Sloppy Operating Procedure kills procrastination. That rule is as follows: Boredom and drudgery are evil. Boredom and drudgery are evil. Anything that you've had to figure out one time, you shouldn't have to figure out a second time. And this, I've found, is at the root of why I procrastinate on some tasks in my business. So the reason I used to dread collecting the information for my income reports is that I've already figured out how to collect information for my income reports, and I don't want to figure it out again. I don't want to ask myself again, "are book sales cash-based or accrual-based? What are all of the places my books are published again? How do I get a report from this aggregator?" I've already answered these questions once. I don't want to answer them again. Since I create Sloppy Operating Procedures, the second time I do a process, I don't have everything all figured out from the first time I did that process. I have some sloppy notes. My notes might say: "Collecting Amazon book sales: Have to convert currencies from each country into USD. Maybe there's a way to automate this?" That's what it might say after the first time I collect Amazon book sales. And because it says that, the next time I have to collect Amazon book sales, there's just a little less boredom -- just a little less drudgery. In fac

Megan Devine (@refugeingrief) is the author of It's OK That You're Not OK, and runs the Writing Your Grief workshop. It wasn't until Megan, a therapist, experienced grief herself that she discovered how we as a culture utterly fail to support the grieving. As loyal listeners know, I experienced a tragedy several months ago. My healthy, active, 69-year-old mother died suddenly. An abnormal blood vessel – which she was born with, but didn't know she had – burst in her brain. I lost my grandparents long ago, but losing my mother was by far my most profound experience with grief. For the first time, I found myself on the receiving end of attempts to acknowledge my own deep state of grief. Some attempts – which you'll hear in today's conversation – made me feel supported. Other attempts – which you'll also hear – not so much. I also went to some grief support groups with my father, and was shocked at what I discovered: It was like a hidden underworld of grief. People who lost someone six months ago, or six years ago – all in pain, all struggling to feel supported by friends, coworkers, or even family. It helped me realize how poorly I, myself, had handled other people's grief. Which is okay. Grief is by definition impossible. But we can always do better. If we're going to love our work, we have to be kind to one another. And part of being kind is supporting others when they're hurting. In this conversation, you'll learn: What are the top things to never say when trying to support the grieving? The list could get impossibly long, so Megan will share a quick shortcut. You may have heard of five stages of grief. I won't bother listing them, because these stages are horribly misunderstood. Learn why thinking of grief according to stages just makes things worse. The #1 thing that's broken about how we respond to grief is that we treat it like a problem to be fixed. There's one simple mindset shift that can help us do better. Chances are, you've had grieving people in your life. If you haven't, you most certainly will. Now is the time to build these skills, so let's get started. Photo Credit: Stephanie Zito 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 and his Love Mondays newsletter, 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/megan-devine/

What are you doing?! Didn't you read the title of this episode? I'm begging you: Stop listening to my podcast. You're still here? Okay, I'll see what I can do to persuade you to stop listening to my podcast. I'll admit it: It bums me the fuck out that there aren't more people listening to my podcast. I've been delivering an episode every week for the past four years, and I haven't seen any growth at all for the past three of those years. If anything, my stats tell me I get fewer downloads than I did three years ago. Before I get to why I want you to stop listening to my podcast, I have to be clear: Sometimes it makes me sad that more people aren't listening to my podcast. And it's not that I want to be rich and famous. I decided what I wanted when I made the decision, four years ago, to double down on being a writer and a podcaster. I told myself, "I want to make a living creating. I don't want creating to be merely a marketing strategy for other things?" So, I sold everything I owned, and moved to the "third world". I knew I would struggle to make money for awhile, but I never knew the struggle would take this long. I never knew it would be this hard. That's the reason I wish more people listened to my podcast. I don't need to make enough money to buy a Bentley, or even a Toyota. I just want to make enough money from my writing and podcasting that I can do more writing and podcasting. I wrote my first book ten years ago. I moved to South America four years ago. I don't want to write so I can make money, I want to make money so I can write. And that's the only thing that makes it fucking heartbreaking about not having more people listening to my podcast. What I learned on my media fast But there's no denying that people shouldn't be listening to my podcast. At the beginning of this year, I tried an experiment. I went on a "media fast." I stopped listening to podcasts. I stopped checking Twitter. I even stopped reading books. I stopped multi-tasking, and I started uni-tasking. At first, it was agonizing. I felt like I needed more stimulation. But I powered through it, and it was like rummaging through the junk piled up in your dead grandmother's dusty attic. I was surprised what I discovered underneath all of that clutter: My own thoughts. Instead of listening to a podcast while cooking and eating lunch, I simply focused on cooking and eating lunch. If I was chatting with a friend on WhatsApp, I wasn't switching to Instagram between messages. I was only chatting with that friend. I watched the sunset almost every day, and I didn't post pictures of those sunsets to Instagram. I just sat there and watched the colors change, like some enlightened Neanderthal. Eventually, things started bubbling to the surface. After lunch, I would jot down ideas on a little whiteboard. While watching sunsets, ideas would come to me for my next book, or for podcast episodes like this one. Creating is better than consuming It was hard to admit it to myself: Creating is better than consuming. The more you consume, the less you can create. Some people will protest: "If you aren't consuming, where are you going to get inspiration!?" "Inspiration" is bullshit. You've seen enough things in your life, and you've had enough damn ideas -- you never did shit with most of them (neither did I). Your need for "inspiration" is a fear of your own thoughts. It's a fear of doing the hard work of processing what's in your head, breaking out of the bullshit scripts that society writes for you, and having an actual thought. A true, sometimes uncomfortable, original thought. You don't need inspiration. You need action. I can't deny, from my own experience of going on a "media fast," that much of the time, when I was consuming, it was standing in my way of creating. And wasn't "creating" what I wanted to do in the first place? This was an uncomfortable realization. I even had a couple of friends point out that reading books is a form of procrastination. Sacrilege! But, they're right. How many books have you read? Can you recite what you learned from those books? Have you truly taken action on what you learned, or did you just move on to the next book? Everyone's trying to get a piece of you As you can see, for me, as someone who creates, as someone who writes books, and makes a podcast, this was a tough realization. I had to search myself for why I create what I create. I concluded that, more than anything, I create for my own self-development. In this world, everyone is trying to get a piece of you. Facebook wants your eyeballs, and your browsing history. The news media wants your attention. They'll manipulate your emotions. They'll try to fool you into thinking there's something virtuous about "being informed." But it's all bullshit. On top of it, addictive substances are all around us. How many lives have been destroyed by alcohol, or addictions to prescription drugs? Go to a hospital and look in the vending machine: Sugar, sugar, and more sugar.

Dylan Evans (@evansd66) had an intense experience with uncertainty. He was fifty percent certain that civilization would collapse within several years. So, he sold his house, gave up his job, and set out to learn how to survive the apocalypse. He tells the story in his book, The Utopia Experiment. He and a team of volunteers constructed yurts on the Scottish highlands, and started growing their own food and making their own clothes, trying to see if they could disconnect themselves from civilization. Civilization didn't collapse within the period of time that Dylan had predicted, and as he looked at what remained of his life, he started to ask himself, "where did I go wrong?" This led Dylan to study what he calls Risk Intelligence – he now has written a book by that title. Risk Intelligence is the ability to navigate uncertainty. That is what we'll be talking about today. Navigating uncertainty matters in creative work Imagine you serve coffee at Starbucks. Starbucks knows exactly how much to pay you each hour. They know exactly how much coffee you can make, they know exactly what that coffee costs them, they know exactly what profit margin they want. Creative work is not serving coffee. You never know how long it takes for an idea to brew. When a breakthrough does come to you, the results can be unpredictable. Sometimes a project takes off, and sometimes it doesn't. Some of that is due to skill, a lot of that is due to luck. If you're going to love your work, you need to know how to deal with uncertainty. If you write this book, what are the chances it will sell? When you launch this product, how much money will it make? Questions like these help you choose: Amongst the countless actions you can take, what actions are worth it? And when you do finally make a choice, and you look back at the results, do you really have a clear picture of whether you made the right decision? What can you learn from the decision you made which can make your future decisions wiser, more clear – better? When you're trying to love your work, you're dealing with uncertainty. Part of dealing with uncertainty is knowing how to be at least a little more certain in an uncertain world. It's as close as you can get to predicting the future. In this conversation, you'll learn: How can you make falsifiable forecasts on your creative projects? When you make falsifiable forecasts, you can start to score your ability to predict the future. If you improve your forecasting skills, you'll make better predictions, and better decisions. Dylan says, "The difference between a good decision maker and a poor decision maker...is that a good decision maker will rate the quality of his or her decision by the actual thought process going into the decision, not 'Did it turn out to be the correct decision?'" Well, how do you rate the quality of your decisions? You may have fantasized yourself about unplugging from civilization. I was curious: What's the one thing about civilization that Dylan realized he was taking for granted? Thanks for sharing my work! On Twitter, thank you to @CapeHornCHI and @analydiamonaco. On Instagram, thank you to @sonny_enslen. 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 and his Love Mondays newsletter, 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 https://linkedin.com/loveyourwork Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/dylan-evans-utopia-experiment-risk-intelligence/

In the 1600s, Penelope Kent boarded a ship from Holland to the New World with her new husband. Their ship wrecked off the coast, but still, Penelope and her husband made it to shore. There, they were attacked and tortured by the natives who lived on the land. By the time the natives were done with them, Penelope's husband was dead. Penelope was still alive, but partially scalped, with her stomach sliced open. She took shelter in a hollowed out tree. Days later, some other natives found Penelope. These natives were fortunately friendly, or at least enterprising. They sewed shut Penelope's wounds with fishbone needles and vegetable fibers. What happened next depends upon the source you read. By some accounts the native tribe released her to New Amsterdam -- now New York. By other accounts, they sold her into indentured servitude. Somewhere way up my family tree, Penelope was my first ancestor to come to America. Given all she went through to make it to what would become the United States -- a hundred years later -- it's astonishing that I would ever leave the U.S., in search of a better life. In fact, I moved to the so-called "third world." Sorry, Penelope. In 2016 I sold my possessions and moved from the United States to Colombia, looking for a better life. Four years later, it's safe to say that I've found that better life. The irony isn't lost on me: Centuries ago, my ancestors moved to America for a better life. And in the twenty-first century, I moved to the "third world" for a better life. I use air quotes for "third world," because I recognize that the designation of some countries as "third world" is passé and even offensive. I also recognize that many parts of Colombia -- even parts not far from my doorstep -- are very much "third world" by most people's standards. Finally, as many Colombians have pointed out to me, if I were Colombian, I'd probably want to do the opposite: I would want to move to the U.S. for a better life. I appreciate my blue-passport privilege more than most Americans I meet, and I know that the U.S. has a lot going for it. I don't write this article to gloat. This is not going to be about me working on a laptop on the beach, failing to mention the Malaria-ridden mosquitos that snuck under my bed net while I slept last night. I write this to offer some perspective: That if you're clear about what you want in life, that you can often get those things -- as long as you're also clear about what you don't want or, more important, what you can live without. Why Colombia? First, why did I think that Colombia was the place where I could find a better life? My primary motivation for moving was to double down on my career as a writer and podcaster. It wasn't just that the low cost-of-living in Colombia would provide me with the financial runway that I knew I would need, I also knew that the lifestyle that was possible in Colombia would support the habits and routines I needed to build in order to make it as a creative. Medellín, the Colombian city in which I live, is a popular destination for digital nomads. They spend the six months they are allowed on a tourist stamp -- depending on their nationality -- then they move on to other hotspots such as Bali or Budapest. While plenty of people have described me as a digital nomad, I don't consider myself one. I'm committed to building my life in Colombia, if for nothing else, because I'm more productive staying here than I am scrambling around the world. I haven't even visited many of the digital nomad hotspots, but the friends I've made who live that lifestyle all agree that Medellín is a fantastic place to build a consistent work routine. You can rent a furnished apartment for less than the price of an unfurnished apartment in most major cities, you can get just about anything delivered -- even a haircut -- for a fraction of the price of delivery in the U.S., and the temperature steadily stays at around room temperature year-round (In fact, Medellín is known as "the city of the eternal spring.") One friend who was visiting commented that Medellín isn't so much about seeing anything in particular, but rather witnessing the laid-back lifestyle. The cafes in the upscale Poblado neighborhood get packed at 3 p.m. every afternoon. A high ratio of the people are there talking to each other, rather than escaping into their devices. Colombians place a high value on spending time with family. They want everything to be tranquilo (peaceful or relaxed). If you're taking a cab home after dark, there's a good chance your driver will wish you to descansar (to rest, literally, to "un-tired" yourself). Designing my life around consistent writing About a decade ago, I got my first book deal, with little experience as a writer. I discovered through that process that writing is hard. I found that the more consistent I could be, the better my writing was. At the time, I was living in Chicago, where consistency is nearly impossible. If I could pick one word to ch

Dr. Aziz Gazipura is author of a great book, Not Nice: Stop People Pleasing, Staying Silent, & Feeling Guilty... And Start Speaking Up, Saying No, Asking Boldly, And Unapologetically Being Yourself. What does it mean to be a "good person?" If someone asks you to do something, do you have to do it? If someone invites you to hang out, do you have to make the time? If someone shares an idea, do you have to pretend to like it? Some people think that to be a "good person," you have to be "nice." You can't make someone upset. You can't hurt their feelings. So you withhold criticism, you don't express what you want. Eventually, you start to forget who you are, what's important to you, and what you truly want to get out of your life. You'll be a better person if you aren't too "nice" If you're going to love your work, you need to be authentic. And that's hard to do if you're too busy people pleasing to think about what it is you want. To be a good person, you don't have to be "nice" – at least not in the way many people think about what it means to be nice. In fact, to be a good person, you can't be too "nice." How being treated "not nice" led to a breakthrough in my career I can think of a time when someone was not "nice" to me, and it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I was trying to come up with an idea to present at the SXSW conference. I wasn't famous for anything, but I had a number of accomplished friends who were authors or ran successful businesses. So what do you do when you have no credibility, but you know people who do? You put together a panel. You get well-known people together, and moderate a discussion amongst them. So I came up with an idea for a panel, and I pitched it over email to one of my accomplished friends. He got back to me almost immediately. I still have the email. It said, "Hey man, I appreciate the intro but I don't think this is the best fit for me." I was really devastated for the rest of that day. But the very next day, I looked back over this email, hated my life, and sighed. I really felt like a loser. Finally, I said to myself, "okay, enough bellyaching. Time to come up with a different idea." This sounds like I'm making this up, but I swear this is 100% true. The very next moment – the very next idea I had – was for me to do a talk called "Design for Hackers." Through the process of pitching that idea to SXSW, I got my first book deal. To write a book called Design for Hackers. That launched my career as an author. That changed my life. That took me from being just another nobody to a respected, published, best-selling author. It was all possible because my friend was not "nice." He didn't try to protect my feelings. He didn't try to go along with something that wasn't right for him. He was authentic. By being authentic, he freed me up to be authentic. If he hadn't been honest, or if he had gone along with my first idea, just to be "nice," I would have been caught up doing something that wasn't right for me. By doing what was right for him, my friend allowed me to do what was right for me. Do what's right for others, by doing what's right for you But how do you find the courage to do what's right for you, even if it might upset people in the short term? I loved Not Nice so much. It really helped me see the ways I am too nice in my life. It helped me see how that doesn't just hurt me, but it hurts others, too. More important, it helped me see the fear and desire for approval at the root of my motivations to be too "nice." In this conversation, you'll learn: Dr. Aziz says, only apologize "when you act out of accordance with your own values." Easier said than done? Dr. Aziz will show you how to start with an "apology fast." Dr. Aziz says "someone having hurt feelings does not automatically equal you doing something wrong…. You could hurt someone's feelings by giving them a compliment." Learn how to let go of "over-responsibility." You'll be more authentic, and you'll ultimately help others get what they truly want. Dr. Aziz says "If you haven't asserted yourself very much...the idea that you're going to somehow glide into this really smooth way telling people no and asking for what you want, is a fantasy that's trying to deny the growth that's needed." Learn what you can do today to start getting comfortable saying no, ultimately have clearer boundaries, and living a more authentic life. Listener Showcase Jeffrey Mason self publishes books and tools that help create conversation, break down barriers, and inspire expanding one's parameters. You can learn more at www.jeffreymason.com. 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 and his Love Mondays newsletter, David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Ins

When I was writing my first book, Design for Hackers, I developed a ritual. I would lay all of my research materials on the floor. Graphic Design history books were splayed out. I had research papers or articles printed out and stapled. There were highlights and sticky notes everywhere. In the center of all of this, I had a whiteboard. Well, it wasn't actually a whiteboard. Whiteboards were too expensive. It was a piece of tile board -- tile board is what you would use for the wall inside of a shower. A whiteboard can go for more than $100. I bought this piece of tile board at The Home Depot for $11. It looked like a scene from a movie. I was the detective, trying to catch the killer. Where had the killer struck before? Is there a pattern to the killer's behavior? Where will the killer strike next? My living room looked like a detective's office. If a friend invited me out to do something, I would tell them a lie. I would say I couldn't go out. But that wasn't the lie. "Writing" doesn't always mean writing Saying I couldn't go out while I was kneeling over my research material on my living room floor wasn't the lie. I really didn't have much time for socializing while writing my first book. The lie was that I would say that I was writing. In actuality, I would do little, if any, writing during this evening ritual. I might scribble a note here or there. I'd write one or two-word concepts on sticky notes, and arrange them on the whiteboard by feel. I'd draw lines amongst the sticky notes. I might even sloppily squeak an outline onto the whiteboard with a marker. But nothing I produced on these nights had any hope of showing up in my book. My computer was nowhere to be seen. I hid it in another room. Writing? I wasn't really writing, per se. The speech that changed the way we see creativity In 1891, German scientist and philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz celebrated his 70th birthday. At the party thrown in his honor, he rose to give a speech. He reflected on his illustrious career. He had achieved one groundbreaking discovery after another. In physics, he formulated the concept of energy conservation. In art, he devised theories on color perception that influenced Impressionist painters. In medicine, he invented the ophthalmoscope. But Helmholtz was about to make one more contribution, this time to our understanding of creativity. He said: [Inspiration] comes quite suddenly, without effort, like a flash of thought. So far as my experience goes it never comes to a wearied brain, or at the writing-table. I must first have turned my problem over and over in all directions, till I can see its twists and windings in my mind's eye, and run through it freely, without writing it down; and it is never possible to get to this point without a long period of preliminary work. And then, when the consequent fatigue has been recovered from, there must be an hour of perfect bodily recuperation and peaceful comfort, before the kindly inspiration rewards one. Often it comes in the morning on waking up.... It came most readily...when I went out to climb the wooded hills in sunny weather. It wasn't until years after I wrote my first book that I discovered this passage. But when I did, my experience writing that first book came back in a flash. Research becomes writing No, I wasn't "writing" during these evening research sessions. Not in the sense that my fingers were moving on a keyboard, and that words were appearing on a screen. Yet I had come to learn that this work I had put in the night before would pay off the next day. The next morning, I'd amble across the creaky hardwood floor, sit down in a chair, and put my fingers on the keyboard. The notes from the night before were nowhere to be seen. The books were back on the shelf, the sticky notes were in the trash, and the whiteboard -- okay, tile board -- was erased and stowed away. I eventually learned that those nighttime research sessions made all of the difference. Even though my notes were nowhere to be seen, the success of my morning writing session depended entirely on whether I had taken the time to immerse myself in my source material. If I hadn't done my ritual, my writing session was agony. A dull pain would form in my stomach. My shoulders would round forward. My knuckles would tighten and my fingers would turn into claws. I'd struggle to get anything out. But if I had done my ritual, it was different. As if by magic, my fingers would move on the keyboard, and words would appear on the screen. Now, I really was "writing." So when I heard about Hermann von Helmholtz's speech, it all made sense. This was why I had settled into this pattern. This was why I had learned to perform this ritual with a whiteboard, sticky notes, and books strewn about the floor. I had been "[turning] my problem over on all sides." When it came time to write, it didn't matter whether I kept my notes. The "angles and complexities" were now "in my head." I couldn't go straight from research int

Demir and Carey Bentley are co-founders of Lifehack Bootcamp, where they help professionals make more of their time and energy, to get more results. They once found themselves getting sucked into the prevailing values of the place they lived. The place you choose to live can have an outsized influence on how you choose to live. If where you live is a bad influence on you, you'll do things that aren't good for you. If where you live is a good influence on you, you'll do things that are good for you. The place you live can influence you through cost of living, through weather, through how you get around – even through through culture. If people in a place value one thing, it can make it hard for you to value another thing. To design your life, start with your surroundings If you're going to love your work, you need to design your surroundings so you can pursue your values. One way to do that is by choosing the right place to live. The influence of place has long been an interesting topic for me because I've long felt like I was born in the wrong place. It wasn't until after college – after I had traveled a small amount – that this feeling really hit me. "Nebraska" for many people is synonymous with "the middle of nowhere." For me, until then, it was simply where I lived. As I struggled to find work after college and to set up a life somewhere, that was when I really started to feel profoundly unlucky for being born and raised in "the middle of nowhere." As an aspiring designer, the design scene in Nebraska seemed nonexistent to me. I wanted to live in a cosmopolitan city such as San Francisco, or Seattle. Even Minneapolis was a bustling metropolis, in my mind. Yet I still felt stuck, because of family ties, a lack of social connections in other places, and simply because I was afraid of change. Now, I've lived in some big cities. I lived in the Bay Area. I spent a couple of months in the NYC area. I lived for eight years in Chicago. The sneaky influence of cultural mindset Now, I know that much of the fear I felt for leaving "the middle of nowhere" was cultivated by the mindset of the people who lived there. When I finally did leave Nebraska for California, it didn't calm my nerves much to hear the fear-laden objections of the people around me. "The traffic is horrible," "you'll never buy a house," or "the people are different" (to which I thought, yeah, that's kind of the idea). Same thing when I moved from San Francisco to Chicago. I remember one guy said, "What's in Chicago, besides a bunch of big buildings?!" Uh, you run a Ruby on Rails dev shop, genius. (That technology was invented by a Chicago company.) It took many years of living many places to recognize how, no matter where you live, you can get swept up in the concerns that prevail the culture. Those big cosmopolitan places where I was desperate to live were no exception. How to leave "New York" Which brings us to the topic today of lifestyle design. How to "leave New York," or really anyplace that's a bad influence on your behavior. Demir and Carey were living in NYC, working tons of hours, and paying the price with failing health. Now they live right around the corner from me, in Medellín, Colombia – when they aren't traveling the world. I joined them in their home, just a few days after having their very first child. We talked about how they escaped the toxic mental distortions of the NYC lifestyle, traveled the world, and designed a new, better-balanced life, in another country. In this conversation, you'll learn: Demir says he started doing "irresponsible things" when he finally hit his "Office Space moment." What did he do that would have certainly gotten him fired? It's a funny story, but there's a lesson about lifestyle design in there, too. What's the "champagne moment" exercise? If you have a vision of a better life, but don't know where to start, learn a mental hack you can apply this week to make progress toward that vision. Looking for the next travel destination, and wondering whether you can get some work done? Learn about the "Pilates test." What does Pilates have to do with finding reliable WiFi? Thanks for sharing my work! On Instagram, thank you to @amrassaid and @motherhoodandmerlot. On Facebook, thank you to the Hello Boss Girl Bossgirl Breakthroughs Group. On Twitter, thank you to @winterknit, @StefanHeineken, @SaraTaricani, and @jovvvian. 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 and his Love Mondays newsletter, 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