Spaghetti to Bento #5 - Derek Sivers

Guest : Derek Sivers

Topics :

Wanna know more about Derek? His about page is amazing: https://sive.rs/about

The episode

The podcast

Spaghetti to Bento

Transcription

Alexandre

I've spent the last 5 years writing code for a living. On the side, I collect stories from the people I meet along the way. And today's guest is: Derek Sivers.

Derek was a professional musician for 10 years. That include, touring in Japan with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and performing as a ringleader / MC musician in a circus.

While trying to distribute is own music, he accidentally founded CD Baby. It's been one of the first internet company. He grew it from 1 to 85 people, sold it for 22M in 2008 - and gave everything to charity.

Since then:

His latest book, "Useful - Not True", explores how our beliefs shape our lives, and how we can reframe them.

What fascinates me about Derek, is how he consistently walks the road less taken:

If Derek were born an ant, he'd be a scout ant.

Over the past year, his work has shaped a lot of mine:

His mindset inspired me to:

Somewhere along the way, I started writing down questions I'd love to ask him. That list grew to 150. I trimmed it down to 90.

So yes - this might be a long conversation. But, I promise: it will be a rich one.

Derek, welcome.

Derek Sivers

Thanks Alex.

Audience, you're up for a different kind of podcast today because Alex sent me his 90 questions in advance. So we're going to bang through a lightning round of fascinating questions with short questions, short answers.

Alexandre

The questions are organized in two parts: technical / broad life questions.

Let's start with the technical part.

What do you think made CD Baby work so well, technically speaking?

Derek Sivers

Your original question said, was it because you were not part of a team and didn't have to deal with politics and didn't have to deal with code reviews? And yes, I think you guessed it in advance that, CD Baby, because it was just me doing all of the programming, I wasn't trying to please some jury. There was nobody telling me these are bad practices, you should do it a different way. I got to just make the code just good enough so that it works. And I would often push things up to the server live as a way of seeing if it works. There was no test container. I didn't have unit tests even. I would just make something on my laptop, try it a couple times myself, and then push it live to the server to see if it works. And I would stay logged into the inbox so that if people said, "hey, your site's broken!", I'd say, ⁓ "okay!, hold on, let me fix that". ⁓ And I would just fix it live. It helped me move very fast.

Alexandre

Okay, so you had no unit test at the time. Still no unit test today?

Derek Sivers

I've just started using a PostgreSQL unit test framework called pgTAP, that is very interesting, as a way of testing my PostgreSQL functions, but other than that, no.

Alexandre

How often do you get regressions? How do you prevent regressions?

Derek Sivers

I don't know what that word means.

Alexandre

Okay, so you don't have lot of regressions?

Derek Sivers

No, I literally don't know what that means. I'm sorry.

Alexandre

Oh okay. When something works, you add some functionality and break something else. It's called a regression.

Derek Sivers

No, well, I don't know. Again, I still do this same approach. I tend to push things live to my website and wait for real users to tell me if something is broken.

Alexandre

Yeah, okay. You're just very reactive.

Do you have some alert mechanism? or your users are your alert mechanism?

Derek Sivers

No. Yeah, just users. I have no logs. I don't even keep logs on my website. Nothing is logged. Nothing is monitored.

Alexandre

Okay, no logs.

Working solo provide a lot of freedom. You can test everything you want, you don't have to negotiate. There is no ego clash, no soft compromise, no handoffs, no big-bang-merges. Just simple solo development.

Derek Sivers

Yeah.

Alexandre

Have you ever wanted to work with or learn with other developers?

Derek Sivers

No.

I did once, near the end of CD Baby, I worked with a Ruby on Rails expert. And it was fascinating. And I learned a lot. In that case, it was he and I sitting side by side where he did most of the work and I was watching in awe and helping to guide requirements while he fulfilled the requirements.

I learned a lot, but ultimately I would rather just hire a teacher if I want to learn and then just continue to work solo.

Alexandre

Interesting.

By the way, when it comes to learning, how do you decide between learning by yourself or learning with a trainer or with a coach?

Derek Sivers

I always do it by myself. One or two times I've hired a coach. I tend to get rebellious. Like if a coach says, all right, I need you to do this for me and report back to me on Wednesday to show me that you've done it. I notice that inside, I get like a rebellious teenager. I'm like, well, screw you, I'm paying you. I don't have to report to you. Who the hell do you think you are?

And I find that I end up not doing what a coach is telling me to do. But then as soon as I fire him, I start doing it. This has happened to me twice now. So apparently accountability doesn't work well for me.

Alexandre

It was on which field?

Derek Sivers

This was once in like health and fitness and once in like a general life coach that I hired long ago.

Alexandre

Okay, it's interesting. Even if it's not your core business, you get rebellious.

Derek Sivers

Yeah. You actually reminded me, there was one more business type coach I hired in my last year of CD Baby, and I didn't like that either.

Alexandre

What terminal do you use? Do you stick with the built-in one? Or do you use another?

Derek Sivers

Yeah, default terminal.

When I read about people using other alacritty or kitty terminals, I just don't see the benefit. I'm happy using the default terminal.

Alexandre

Color schemes: clarity or distraction?

Derek Sivers

I like color schemes. I like the color coded code to help me see immediately if I've made a typo. If suddenly everything below my cursor is red, it lets me know that I must not have closed a quotation mark somewhere. So I think it's very handy for that. I'm very happy with color coded code.

Alexandre

Do you still code with Vim?

Derek Sivers

Yes, everything in Vim in Terminal.

Alexandre

What are your favorite plugins in Vim?

Derek Sivers

I have none. My vimconfig, it's five lines, just making sure that it's UTF-8 encoding, file type, and that's it. No plugins.

Alexandre

No plugins, ok.

So where does the linting come from?

Derek Sivers

I don't do any linting.

Alexandre

Hm, because just before we've talked about colored code.

Derek Sivers

Right, so I think that's one of the few lines I have in Vim just says to look for the file type. So there are the file type settings. So if you open a file in Ruby, it colors it one way. If you open an SQL file, it colors it that way. But that's just, I think, the defaults built into Vim.

It's funny, in Ruby, I talked with a Ruby programmer once years ago and he asked, how big is your bundler file? And I said, I don't use bundler. He said, well, how do you manage all of your gems? I said, I don't use gems. I just use one. I used one gem to connect to the PostgreSQL database and everything else I just write myself.

But I think it's a different mission. My mission is to deeply understand the problem by making myself create the solution from scratch. Whereas if I was programming for money, if I was doing this for a business or for a client, I would have a different mission. I would want to get the job done as quickly as possible. But I'm doing it for my own self-discovery, so... That's why I don't use any of these tools. I like to learn it myself.

Alexandre

Using tool is faster in the short term, but learning to do it yourself is more rewarding in the long term.

Derek Sivers

Yes. I think of it like physical fitness. You can hire a taxi to take you 26 miles, or you can train for a marathon. Training for a marathon takes a lot longer, but in the end you're healthier. You would not sign up to run a marathon and then call a taxi to take you to the end. I want the hard work. I want the self-improvement that comes from doing the hard work myself.

Alexandre

Do you use git?

Derek Sivers

I stopped using Git because I realized I was never branching. It was not actually doing source control. I was just using Git mindlessly. So about three or four years ago, I stopped.

I just rsync my code away to a few other backup boxes so that if I accidentally screw up something or I deleted something that I need, then I'm able to just go onto one of my backup boxes and restore that file. But other than that, I don't do source control right now.

Alexandre

How do you deploy?

Derek Sivers

R-Sync.

Alexandre

Disabling copy-pasting, great idea or hell on earth?

Derek Sivers

I love copy paste.

I understand that there would be people copy pasting major code from Stack Overflow or now from an AI tool, but it's always been your responsibility to understand it. Back to this metaphor of running the marathon instead of calling a taxi. Even if I ask an AI tool, to help me write this PostgreSQL query and it gives me 20 lines. I'll copy paste it, see if it works, and if it does work, then I'll stop and figure out what it's doing and make sure I really understand it.

I will go through and refactor in my own way any code that I copy paste from the internet or from an AI tool. I'll first test it to make sure if it works and if it does, then I'll go through, make sure I understand it and while going through and making sure I understand it, I'll change variable names to what I want them to be. I'll fix the code to make it the way I like it. And that's a good way of making sure that I really understand it.

Alexandre

What's a software design principle you often use?

Derek Sivers

You aren't gonna need it. Y-A-G-N-I. I try to only satisfy what's actually needed now because I have a tendency to live in the future in my head thinking of what it might be. But I know if I follow that type of thinking I will build too much stuff with too many abstracts. So instead I try to constantly remind myself that I might never need that and I will just solve the current problem.

Alexandre

So you apply this to functionalities. Do you apply this also to performance?

Derek Sivers

Yes, I never worry about performance because I know who I'm building for and it's usually just a few hundred users at any time. So I'm very happy that I do not need to optimize for millions.

Alexandre

Do you plan for the worst case? Like if you create a field, do you think "Okay, people will try to put a very long text in it"?

Derek Sivers

Yes, I whitelist everything instead of blacklist at every step, whether it's the HTTP routing or the form inputs or the URL parameters. I always just whitelist what's allowed and everything is denied by default.

Alexandre

Okay.

As you like having no more than necessary, to keep a track of a post date: date or datetime?

Derek Sivers

Hahaha, ⁓ date. I figured nobody cares what time of day I wrote this article, so only date.

Alexandre

Okay. I came across this question when I implemented the comment section in my blog. And I was like: "Using date, wow, this is bold". Because I always use daytime. By default, it's datetime everywhere, "in case of".

Derek Sivers

You know, with the comments on my site, I just do date, but then of course, it's in a database table that has a sequential ID, auto-generated. So I sort by date and then ID. That puts comments in the correct order, because that's all what really matters. It doesn't matter if this person commented at 4 16 p.m. and this person commented at 5 19 p.m. You don't ever really care about that. All you need to know is which one of these was first since they might be responding in order. So I just use the sequential ID and the date.

Alexandre

What does our building learn can teach us about software design and refactoring?

Derek Sivers

The book, How Buildings Learn by Stuart Brand, emphasized that a building is never done. It's a constant changing process. That the best buildings are the ones that are the easiest to adapt by the people that live in them. So same thing with software.

There's that brilliant talk by Rich Hickey called Simple Made Easy where he emphasizes the same thing, saying that our programs are easier to change if they are less complected together. If they are individual units, then we can change them more easily. And I think that's a similar lesson from the book, How Buildings Learn by Stuart Brand.

Alexandre

Do you document the architecture of your code? Like do you create some diagrams?

Derek Sivers

No diagrams, but I do put a README file at the top explaining to my future self, since I assume I'm the only one working on this. I try to explain to my future self what this is, because I've felt the pain of going back to a project I did five years ago and having no idea what's going on here. So now I always try to tell my future self what this is.

Alexandre

You developed a lot of custom tools for managing many aspects of your life. What is the structure of your People database?

Derek Sivers

So the people database, or I should say the people table in the database, was the original inspiration for keeping everything in one place. Because at CD Baby, I saw how I had a database table called customers and a different one called musicians. So my clients that gave me music and the people that bought the music, those were two separate tables. But sometimes those two tables were referring to the same person. Somebody would send me their music, but they would also buy music. And the person who sent me music changed their email address. And I didn't update the contacts of people who bought the music because I didn't know it was the same person.

So I learned from that experience that we should have one table just called people that is unique per person. And if that person leaves a comment on your website or buys something from you or signs up to be a translator ⁓ these are different roles that should refer back to that one-person ID. So if that person moves from France to Vietnam or changes their email address, that it's updated in every aspect.

So my people table is just like name, city, phone number, and now I even have a one-to-many relationship with the email addresses. Finally. That took me 20 years to do. I used to think that everybody should have just one main email address, but there were some people that have five different email addresses and they keep emailing me from the different ones. So finally, I now have a one-to-many relationship between the person and the email addresses.

Derek Sivers

The people table itself is quite simple, but everything builds off of it.

Alexandre

Is there a page where we can update like this relation? I was thinking about my case. I emailed you with two email addresses. How do I tell you like, "hey, these two emails, it's me"?

Derek Sivers

You should just tell me. Yeah. I figured it's, it sounds like it would be too much trouble and create room for disaster if I let people just log in and update their email addresses. I don't want them to change it to, you know, president at white house.gov and you know, I'd just rather say I, I just tell people to just email me from your new one and I'll fix it.

Alexandre

To manage your e-mails, do you still use Mute or do you use a custom client you built yourself?

Derek Sivers

Everything is custom.

I built it originally for CD Baby's customer service. And so when I left the company, I took the code with me, and I still use a very changed, updated version of that. Everybody that emails me, my database imports the actual email file off of the server, attaches it to a person in my database, inserts it into an emails table, and then I answer it from the emails database table. It's already in there. And so when I reply, it inserts a new outgoing email in the emails database table so that I can always have this complete history of everybody's emails since 2008, when I started this.

Alexandre

How does it work? It's a client app?

Derek Sivers

It's all just a server-side Ruby PostgreSQL web app.

And there's literally one user. I'm the only person allowed to log into this. So it's an entire web app for me.

Alexandre

Okay.

Do you answer your emails directly on your server or from your local post? No, always on your server. Directly on the server. And do you really... Because really the act of answering an email is just inserting a reply email into the database and then a cron job sends out the queued outgoing emails that haven't been sent yet every 10 minutes. ⁓ that's why the... Yeah, that's why you answer me at four...

Derek Sivers

Yes, directly on the server. Because really the act of answering an email is just inserting a reply email into the database. And then a cron job sends out the queued outgoing emails that haven't been sent yet every 10 minutes.

Alexandre

Alexandre

OK, that's why you answered me at 4am exactly. I get it now.

Derek Sivers

I didn't know anybody ever noticed that, but yes. You will see that all of my emails are probably sent exactly on the 10 minute mark.

Alexandre

Do you your emails FIFO or LIFO?

Derek Sivers

Yes, first in, first out. It's by default.

I always answer the next email chronologically. So my system doesn't even have the ability for me to jump ahead and answer a newer email. It's always set to just give me the next oldest email that has not been answered yet.

Alexandre

Okay, so you don't have a "Later" box. Ff you want to go to the next, you have to reply.

Derek Sivers

That's my way of keeping an empty inbox. I have to answer everything in order.

Alexandre

Okay. So when you read something, do you sometimes say you'll answer later? Or no, you always answer right away.

Derek Sivers

Yeah, I answer right away.

Alexandre

The same for SMS?

Derek Sivers

Ooh. Yeeees, mostly. Yeah. But I try to keep things off of my phone. I don't use my phone very much.

Alexandre

And so the macro ...

Derek Sivers

Yes, I have 26, maybe 36 macros, assigned for every alphabet letter and the zero through nine numbers.

They're my most commonly used sentences. It's not usually a big form letter. But if I'm constantly saying: "cool, thank you, I really appreciate it". Or if I'm constantly saying, "I'm really glad you liked my new book". Or if I'm constantly saying, "hey, I haven't heard from you in a few years, it's good to hear from you again. How are you doing?", or when people ask how I'm doing, I have a link that sends them to my Now page, or a link that sends them to log in at the store. All of these things are sentences that I was typing over and over and over again. So I just gave it a hot key.

Alexandre

How often do you update them?

Derek Sivers

Good question. When I need to add a new one, and I've run out of letters, I will look through my old ones to see which ones I never use anymore.

Alexandre

Interesting. So it's not an extensible list. There is 26 keys, and no more. You won't add more.

Derek Sivers

Yeah, exactly. 26 or 36. I know that I use the A to Z and I think there are a few that I have assigned to numbers.

Sometimes I change them per project. A few years ago I was hiring a translator, so I suddenly needed four different form letters for four different levels of translators. And so then I remember I used keys number one through four for those. So I could constantly just send those shortcuts.

Alexandre

Okay.

For your podcast, how do you handle the publishing of the episode? Because I think it's available on several platforms.

Derek Sivers

Yeah, once again I looked at what most people were doing and it seems that they were handing over their podcast to some service provider, that would say, no, no, no, this is all very difficult. We'll do it for you. You just pay us money and we'll set up your podcast. But when I looked into it, I realized a podcast is nothing more than an XML file and MP3s on a server. That's it.

So I just put my MP3s on my server and I learned how to make the XML file by hand. ⁓ I output it as a static file onto my website and then I posted it on Apple and Spotify and some of those places. I gave them the location of the XML file on my website. And voila, that's it.

Alexandre

Okay. That's very simple.

Yeah. That's what I did. Like, I rushed. I said, okay, everybody use Ausha, I will use it. I paid money and then I realized, but why? Why did I do that?

Derek Sivers

Yeah. I've done that too. My first version of my blog used WordPress. And after a year, I thought, I'm not using 95 % of the features of WordPress. Why am I using WordPress? I can just do this myself.

Alexandre

Yeah. And even the most annoying part for me is that I cannot come with my own transcription. I can use there AI tool to generate the transcription, but I cannot give it mine. So it's like, wow, I'm paying, but it limit what I can do. It makes no sense.

Derek Sivers

Yeah.

Alexandre

Is the project of making a tech independence training still active?

Derek Sivers

Yes, it's fifth or sixth priority under some other things I'm doing now, which why it hasn't happened much.

It was a year and a half ago that I started the tech independence page and I did a big overhaul after six months. I made like a version 2.0.

Now I need to do a version three, which is setting up my own dedicated server and letting a few hundred people have an account on my server. That will greatly simplify things. So I don't have to tell people to go use an external SMTP emailing service. I can just set up my server so it can be their email sending service.

And I can have shortcuts to say, for example, if you want to add another user to your account, just hit the letter "a" and tell me their name and I'll create another user there.

And I can show them while it's going on, here's how it's done. Here's the commands that my script is entering into the server. You could do this yourself. You don't need to just type "a". You could manually enter these commands yourself, but to save you time, to show you how it works, voila, we've now entered a new user.

But in the future, you can do this without my help, or if this project is shut down next year and I die, here's how it's done yourself. You don't need me for this. My goal was empowering people to be self-reliant. I don't want them to be dependent on me as if I'm some replacement for Dropbox or WordPress.

Alexandre

I'm really happy with my server now that I have it. It makes me want to develop on it. I want to deploy applications on it. And each time I need to add something, I check in the documentation and I learn step by step, at my rhythm. I really like it.

Derek Sivers

Yeah. I like that too.

It's probably beneficial if in the future when people ask me a question, like "how do I get my SMTP server to respond to outgoing emails? It's not working". I should probably answer it by asking an AI tool a question and then I'll send them the link to that AI chat so they can continue asking the AI this question instead of asking me. Because right now there are some people who email me and then they wait three or four days for me to personally reply, telling them how to send an email.

It's all very general stuff. It shouldn't need to wait on me to reply.

Alexandre

Yeah, the idea is to figure out by yourself, try to learn.

Derek Sivers

Yeah.

Alexandre

You have your own calendly.

Derek Sivers

Yes, that's how we're talking today at this time and this date. I sent you a link to schedule this. So yeah, same thing with Calendly. When I started booking podcasts, I looked at Calendly for a second since everybody uses that. And again, like WordPress, said, I don't want all these features and I don't want to pay these people to do something I can do myself.

And ultimately I need to get this into my own server so that Alex, user number 43625, I know that this is my podcast interview with Alex. Not some separate information entered into somebody else's system. So it was a fun challenge to ask myself what was needed.

First I had to whitelist to say who could book time with me. So that I have to enter by hand. I enter in the ID number of the person that is allowed to book my time now. And then I entered in the dates that I'm available and the times that I'm available.

When you asked if we could do this podcast, I decided yes. Then I entered your ID number into my system to say, okay, Alex is allowed to book my time. And then I sent you the link so that you could choose what time worked for you.

Alexandre

And then I was able to walk through the sequence.

Do you use it only for incoming inquiries?

Derek Sivers

Yeah. I actually specifically only use it for this, for podcasts.

Partially because of where I live in New Zealand. Now, I'm not meeting up with people in person. I don't schedule phone calls, I don't schedule meetings. I really only do these podcasts once every week, and everything else is just my own free time.

But if I was living in Shanghai or Bangalore and meeting with lots of people constantly, I probably would set up a system like that for meeting people in general.

Alexandre

Okay, it's made for this very specific use case of arranging meeting for podcasts.

Derek Sivers

Yeah. Actually, when you scheduled it, it entered this time and date directly into my podcast interviews table in my database.

Alexandre

And there was a confirmation message. I received the hour in your time zone, the hour in my time zone — which is very helpful because sometimes it's not clear what timezone it is. This custom message, is it automated or is it personalized?

Derek Sivers

It was all automated. I try to make it clear when you are emailing with me personally, you get my kind of like, "cool dude", "alright!", "Awesome, I like your questions!", "Love what you're doing!". That stuff is custom. But the other stuff is form letter.

Alexandre

You did a lot of podcast interviews. I don't remember the exact number, I think it's 200 or 300 podcasts?

Derek Sivers

Yeah, I think about 250 now.

Alexandre

Yeah. How do you prepare when you are the guest on a podcast?

Derek Sivers

I used to need to prepare.

But as of the last few years, I've gotten better at being able to do it with no preparation because many podcast hosts say they have no questions prepared in advance. They like to wing it and have a natural conversation. Whereas you, for example, had 90 questions in advance that you wanted to talk about.

I much prefer it if somebody's able to send me the questions in advance because then I can put aside time to think about them. So that when we record, I've thought of a more interesting answer. Because often the more interesting answer is not the first one that comes to mind. It's the one you think of a few minutes later. And I'd rather record the more interesting answer a few minutes later. So it's really helpful when somebody sends the questions in advance — but because almost nobody does, I've gotten better at doing this with no preparation.

Alexandre

Do you warm up before an interview? Like your voice, your energy.

Derek Sivers

No.

Alexandre

By the way, I love the energy you bring in your interviews. Something I noticed is that, often, the same question come back. How do you keep it fresh?

Derek Sivers

I try to find a new angle I haven't said before.

I imagine how hard it must be to be a movie star or a rock star that gets asked the same question so often that you could either just perform your prepared answer. Like Paul McCartney on stage singing Yesterday for the 5,000th time. I'll bet that he doesn't perform the song yesterday different every time he performs. He just has to enjoy doing the same song over and over again, for a different audience every time, and enjoy the connection between him and the crowd.

So that's one approach.

But another approach is to challenge yourself to never answer it the same way twice. Luckily I'm not Paul McCartney, so I can try to answer a question a different way every time.

Alexandre

Okey. I'm asking because it's something we also encounter with small talks. We often ask the same question like, "how is your week?". The same questions come back. So I was wondering. But yeah, two interesting approaches.

Derek Sivers

Yeah.

Here in New Zealand, a common question that strangers will ask you at the supermarket is, "are you having a busy week?". And that question always confuses me. Am I having a busy week? I don't know. Busy by what measure? What does busy mean? That I have scheduled too much that I don't have time for? That my schedule is overflowing and it's full? I don't understand the question. So instead I've had to just create a nothing answer that says like: yep, how are you? How you doing? yep, how about you?

Alexandre

Is it a way to ask how's your week going?

Derek Sivers

Honestly, I think it's just to fill the silence, because it's coming from a stranger that asks the same question of everybody that passes there till every minute of every day. So I don't think they really want to hear my personal answer.

Alexandre

What do you do the interview you enjoyed the most as in common?

Derek Sivers

Questions that challenge me to think of something I've never thought of before. Like your first question won me over about developing solo versus developing on a team. I never had honestly thought about that before. And that was really fun to think about how it is different for me to not be on a team. And then your other tech questions won me over. So those are my favorite, when people ask me questions that make me go somewhere new.

Alexandre

Yeah, okay.

What's a question you wish someone would ask you but never does?

Derek Sivers

It would have to be something I never would have thought of so I can't give the answer to that.

Alexandre

I love how you play with your voice. You speak fast, slow, loud, soft. It's very playful. Is that from your singing background or, I don't know, reading books to your son? Do you have any tips on how to improve?

Derek Sivers

First, thank you.

I think it's from being a social person in big cities, high social situations where you have to learn to be interesting or else lose attention. So maybe it's 30 years of me socializing in big cities. It teaches me to try to be interesting. Although notice, I'm actually speaking more slowly now than I ordinarily would because I'm aware that we're recording this and I'm going to edit the transcript of this. So I started watching my words more carefully after I spent many hours trying to edit transcripts of me stumbling through an answer. I've learned to slow down and pick my words more carefully in order to make a better transcription.

Alexandre

By the way, how do you transcribe your podcasts?

Derek Sivers

I use a computer to do the first round of the transcription and then I painstakingly go through it by hand. It takes almost as long as the length of the interview for me to go through and edit the transcription carefully. Two-hour interview means about two hours to edit it. That's after a computer has done the first draft, because I want it to very accurately represent what we meant to say. Even if I stumbled and said a wrong word, I want the transcription to be the definitive record of what we talked about today so that future AIs can be trained on the transcription.

Alexandre

And how much do you cut? Do you keep everything or do you use to cut a lot of things? Do you cut like 10%, 20%, 50%?

Derek Sivers

Oh, I keep 99%. I keep almost everything. Unless there was a half-started, abandoned sentence or too many fillers. I just cut those.

Alexandre

Okay. I've tried to do it too. Everybody tell me "don't do that. You lose your time". But it's very interesting, because when I use a lot of filler words, then I inflict myself the pain of removing them. So I'm incentived to not say them at all next time.

Derek Sivers

Yes, exactly! And I'm also editing these myself instead of hiring someone else to do it so that I can feel the pain from saying too many filler words. I want to feel the pain myself, to motivate myself to stop using filler words in the moment.

Going through the transcription also helps me reflect back on that conversation and how I could do it better next time. It's all very important. I considered hiring someone else to do it, but I think it's really good self-improvement to do it myself.

Alexandre

Where do your writing ideas come from?

Derek Sivers

Usually, from ideas I've had that I'm trying to communicate at first to friends. If friends give me good feedback, and say that that's really interesting, then I'll go write it up on my website to email to everyone. Sometimes they're inspired by questions that a single person asks by email and if my answer would take a long time to write, well then instead of writing it only to that person, I write it on my website and publish so everybody can read it.

Alexandre

How do you approach writing? Do you draft? Do you outline? Do you write line by line?

Derek Sivers

Ooh, yeah, all of that.

Line by line doesn't come till later.

I dump all of my messy thoughts into a text document. Including arguing against myself, changing my mind, taking a different angle, disagreeing with what I just wrote, asking myself what's a different point of view I haven't considered yet. I put all of that mess into one big text file until I feel exhausted, which then maybe I'll save it and open it again next week and continue with fresh ideas.

But when I feel that I've had enough insight that is worth sharing, then I try to make an outline of the most important things I'm wanting to say here.

I'll make the outline and then just find a way to make the outline the final article. I'll add just the necessary sentences that the outline needs to be complete. And then ideally just post that outline and save my readers the trouble of reading all the mess. The outline becomes the final product.

Alexandre

Yeah. Because you don't want to publish an outline, you add just the necessary connectors to make it like a text, readable for humans.

Derek Sivers

Yeah, necessary connectors, that was beautifully put.

Alexandre

Ehe.

Do you use a grammar corrector?

Derek Sivers

Never. No spell check, no grammar check. I'm just raw in my Vim terminal.

Alexandre

And do you have someone who proofreads your articles? to be sure the meaning is ok.

Derek Sivers

No. No proofreading of articles.

And for my last two books, I didn't even have an editor for the books. I spent so much time self-editing that I knew that every word was exactly how I wanted it to be. So the idea of sending it to another editor felt silly.

Alexandre

Wow, okay.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to develop a minimalist writing style?

Derek Sivers

Read the book Several Short Sentences About Writing. Read the book called On Writing Well by William Zinsser. These are both linked from near the top of my book page, is sive.rs/book. On that page, I have all of my book notes sorted with my top recommendations up top. And those two books I named are two of my most favorite books ever about writing.

They both emphasize the importance of being succinct and clear so it's the best place to start. They can say it better than I can.

Derek Sivers

Alexandre

Several short sentences about writing is really unique on its kind. There is no structure, but it flows very smoothly. It's a really special reading, really special experience.

Derek Sivers

Yeah, it's really fascinating those books.

Alexandre

Has song-writing influenced how you write today?

Derek Sivers

Absolutely. I'd say, the reason I write so succinctly is because I spent 15 years first writing song lyrics, where usually the melody would come first and so I have only seven syllables in order to say what I want to say. It really makes you compact your message and pay attention to every single word. So I think I still write that way, as if it's song lyrics and pay attention to every single word.

Alexandre

Interesting, I never thought about lyrics that way.

Derek Sivers

Sorry, I don't speak that way unless you made me self-conscious because we're talking about the editing process and now you can hear it. I'm slowing down even more thinking of myself transcribing this next week. But usually, if you and I were sitting over a beer in Vietnam, I would be talking much less minimalistically, ⁓ much more verbose.

Alexandre

Okay, you always have this in mind, running in background like, "not too much words, I will have to type them after".

Derek Sivers

Also, because you have so many questions! If you said, okay, Derek, we're going to record a podcast today. ⁓ It's one hour and I have only one question. Well, then maybe I would go on and on and on. But I know you have so many interesting questions, so I'm giving you succinct answers.

Alexandre

Yeah.

What kind of day is a day without journaling?

Derek Sivers

A day where I've been with other people the whole time.

Whether that's a day where I was with my kid. From the minute he wakes me up in the morning by jumping into my bed, till the minute we fall asleep together. Those days I don't journal. Days where I'm with other people all day, I don't journal. But even in those cases, then the next morning I will go back and write yesterday's journal entry.

Alexandre

Do you have a recipe for discovering a new culture?

Derek Sivers

No, I'd like to do more of that.

There was a beautiful book called The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner. He went to Iceland for only ten days after I had been there for a month. And I felt that he discovered more insights about Icelandic culture in 10 days than I had in a month. So I emailed him and asked, how did you do that? And he gave me some advice.

But I would really like to spend many years doing that. Going to places I've never been, like Vietnam, digging into the local culture, asking a bunch of dumb questions until I understand it, making friends with a lot of people that grew up there, getting into good conversations — not just shallow chit chat at the store — to really help me understand places better. So I would like to develop a set of skills for helping me do that better, like he did with Iceland. But as of now, I think I'm not very good at it.

Alexandre

Ok. On my side, I've started with some of your advice. Somewhere I think you advise to read a few fiction books, have conversations with local people, watch popular movies. It gives you a first picture of the culture.

Derek Sivers

Yeah.

Alexandre

When you travel, how much do you plan or improvise?

Derek Sivers

That's a good question.

These days I only have two kinds of travel. Either I'm traveling with my son, then almost nothing is planned. We will just go where he wants to go, and we will leave the days wide open to just wander and follow whatever he finds interesting. Maybe we'll schedule one specific target. We'll say, on Tuesday we're going to go to this Buddhist monastery. But that's all we know. We leave everything else out in the open. So if he says, ⁓ let's go to that forest, or hey, let's see what's down this alleyway, we can just do that. Things are very loose.

That's one kind of travel.

The only other kind of travel I do now is social travel, where I go to a place where I know a lot of people, like Bangalore, or Dubai, or Shanghai. And I try to meet with as many people as I can in a short period of time — because my boy doesn't like me to be away for too long, and I don't like to be away from him for too long. So I often go to a city like this for only six days. And in six days, I try to meet with 50 people. So ⁓ I'll meet with eight or nine people a day for six days, for one or two hours each, and then fly home. So I will see nothing of the city, but I will have had in-depth conversations with 50 people, and to me that's worth it.

Alexandre

The two are very different, radically different.

Derek Sivers

Yeah.

Alexandre

I find it fascinating.

Who leads the conversation? Is it you? Is it the person? Does the person come with questions? How does it go?

Derek Sivers

When I meet with somebody like this, it's usually people that already know my writing, or they already know me from podcasts. We meet up, and usually, I'm the one filled with questions for them. I say, okay, we're imbalanced right now. You know more about me. I know very little about you, except from your emails that you've sent me. Because I'm not meeting with anybody. I handpick people that have emailed me that seem really interesting, because they've told me something about themselves by email.

I'm usually filled with questions for them, either about them personally or questions about this place. What can you tell me about Bangalore culture, and how does it compare with Mumbai, and how does that compare with Delhi, or tell me about living here in Dubai, or tell me about growing up in China in the 1980s and 90s.

I'll have personal questions about just them and general questions about the culture.

Alexandre

You recommend, Au Contraire, Figuring Out The French. I'm French, so I'm a bit curious, like, what made you read it? Was there a moment where you thought, "I really need help decoding these people"?

Derek Sivers

No, I started with a book called Watching the English by Kate Fox, and that book was so good that it got me searching for other books like this from anywhere, about any country. Someone recommended Au Contraire, Figuring Out the French. So it wasn't like I went looking for a book to explain the French. I just went looking for any book that explains a culture I don't understand fully.

I would love to find a book like that about New Zealand, even though I've lived here for 13 years. It would be fascinating to read a book like that about New Zealand culture. Maybe I'll have to write it, ⁓ because there isn't one yet.

The Au Contraire Book, think, was the best I've ever read about explaining a culture because it had two co-authors, one American and one French, that have already been running a consulting business for 20 years, helping American businesses do business in France, and helping French businesses do business in America. So for 20 years, they've already been explaining each other's cultures to each other.

And then they wrote the book. It was really ideal.

It had so many surprising insights about the metaphorical importance of the rooster, and the hexagon, and things that I never would have noticed just from walking around. Some really wonderful deep insights. I really hope to find more books like that about so many cultures in the world.

I'm only slowly now realizing that big countries like China and India might be impossible to do a book like that because the different regions of those huge countries are so different. To write a book about the Yunnan region of China is very different than the Hainan region of China. Or the Rajasthan book would be very different than the Kerala book.

That really it's an accident of history that region we call India is just one country, whereas it could have been 27 countries. And that region we call China could have been many countries. So, I think I'm learning that I need to break it down smaller if I want to understand the big places. But I found some fascinating books about Switzerland, Germany, yeah the France one was the best, and I've got a few more queued up to help me try to understand other countries.

I love this subject.

Alexandre

Dubai was on the top 10 places where you don't want to go. You learned about it, now you love it. What are the 9 other places on the list?

Derek Sivers

Okay. I'm glad you sent me that question in advance because I thought about it last night. Nine more places right now I do not want to go.

I don't know if this will be exactly nine. But last night I was thinking: - Russia - Peru - Burning Man (the festival in Nevada) - Laos - Democratic republic of the congo

I forget I had a few more in here. But surprisingly, the other one I really do not want to go to now, I'd be really upset if I had to go there, is the United States. I really don't want to go. I have zero interest in going. I've had a few invitations to be on some famous podcasts, but I would have had to go to America to do it. So I said no. I don't want to go.

Alexandre

It's a difficult question. I tried to answer it and I was like, I don't know. I don't have ten places.

Derek Sivers

But see, there are some in that list to me. Let's use Russia as an example. Right now, I'm inherently not interested in Russia. It sounds like a place I don't want to go. I don't want to get to know. But just realizing that in myself, now makes me a little interested in it because I assume that it must be a blind spot in my understanding of the world.

But some of the ones I named like Peru, Costa Rica, I don't want to go there because it seems to me like there's just not much going on there. It's not that interesting. It's not a vibrant culture. It's not an influential culture. There's just not that much to captivate me. But again, once I put that into a list, I have to doubt it. Maybe Costa Rica and Peru are fascinating. Maybe Central Democratic Republic of Congo is a fascinating place that I would love getting to know.

I try to let my prejudices guide me by steering into them instead of away from them. Once I notice I'm prejudiced against a place or a subject, that makes me more likely to want to look into it instead of avoid it.

Alexandre

You were a professional musician for 10 years, then you fully shifted into building CD Baby, you gave all your material, your recorders, your guitars. What place does music have in your life now?

Derek Sivers

It's a language I speak.

That's about it. I can still occasionally get excited if I hear a piece of music on the radio that I think is brilliant. Like just last week I heard a song called Vampires by Olivia Rodrigo that I've listened to 20 times since then, because it's a fascinating melody that builds and builds and builds and builds and builds, and then falls in three lines, and then builds again. I've never heard a melody quite like it before. I still speak that language of the craft of music, so I can appreciate it the way that somebody who trained as a carpenter for 20 years can appreciate a well-built chair, but I'm not playing music anymore.

Alexandre

Okay. Do you sing sometimes?

Derek Sivers

No

Alexandre

Do you listen to music when you work?

Derek Sivers

Never.

Nothing.

Not even instrumental music.

Because even the simplest instrumental music distracts me. Because it's a language I speak. Like, I think about this when you're in a place like Vietnam, where I assume you do not speak Vietnamese. And so if some people are talking at the cafe next to you, you're able to focus in your French, because the Vietnamese noise going on in the background is just noise. But if you were fluent in Vietnamese, it would be very distracting. Or if you were sitting in a cafe in France, it would be very distracting to listen to people talking right next to you about some crap in their lives that's distracting you because you know the language.

So that's what music is to me. I know the language so well that I can't have it on in the background, because there's no such thing as background. To have music playing anywhere makes me tune into it because I understand it.

Alexandre

Okay, yeah, that's why people recommend that you can listen to music, but only instrumental. That's because most people don't speak this language, so that's okay.

Derek Sivers

Yeah, I speak the instrumental language too.

Alexandre

But even when you don't speak it, I've noticed that the level of energy of the music is not always aligned with my level of energy. Sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's slower, sometimes I want to skip it anyway. I like it, but when I do this, I know that I'm not really working anymore.

Derek Sivers

Yes, yeah, I'd rather just give a piece of music my full attention later. Yeah. Like literally lay down and close my eyes and just listen to it instead of having it on while I'm supposed to be doing other things.

Alexandre

Yeah. That's what I've tried doing after reading The Power of Less by Leo Babauta: to do one thing at a time.

When I listen to music, I try to only listen to the music. And I noticed that instead of listening to music for one hour, I just listen to three songs. I'm really focused on it. I enjoy them, and then I do something else. It's more intense.

Derek Sivers

Yeah.

But there are some things like, say if I'm riding on my exercise bicycle, like if it's raining outside, I have an exercise bike so I can go get one hour of cardio exercise. Or even honestly, if I'm walking on my usual walking path through the forest next to me, it's a good time to put on something I can listen to, whether it's a Chinese lesson, or a podcast or music, because the physical thing I'm doing takes no attention at all. I'm just pushing my legs on a bicycle, or I'm just walking on the same path I've walked 20 times before. It takes none of my attention. So I'm able to give my full attention to what I'm listening to. But for example, I could never listen to music while walking through a place I've never been before.

Alexandre

Okay.

You damaged your hearing at 13? How did it show up in your life? What's the impact?

Derek Sivers

It's there all the time. Like right now, as soon as you asked about it. Yep, I listened and there it is, a high tone in my hearing at all times.

And I think same as you, it makes it harder for me to distinguish an individual voice in a crowd, which means I spend less time in crowded places and I much prefer one-on-one conversations like this. I'd be happy to have hundreds of one-on-one conversations and never be in a group crowded setting, like in a bar with a hundred people.

It's exhausting to be in a noisy crowd for even five minutes. But having one-on-one conversations like this, if they're interesting, I could do this almost indefinitely.

Alexandre

Yeah. The same happened to me but later, like I was 26. I used to go a lot in clubs, noisy environments, have parties. It changed my lifestyle a lot. At first, I was terrified. But maybe it was a gift in fact, because now I've a more healthy lifestyle, I work more. Maybe it was a gift.

Derek Sivers

That's a great way to think about it, yeah.

Alexandre

How to Live is one of my favorite books. I read it three times last year. It's really deep. I don't try to make highlights because you end up highlighting the whole book. Well, actually, I highlighted it, but then I trashed the highlights because there was almost all the books. So I just thought, okay, I will come back to it later.

How often do you revisit it?

Derek Sivers

I'd say once a year. I should revisit it more. Because every time I do, It's so helpful.

At the time I wrote that in 2021, I put everything I had ever learned, every important lesson I'd ever learned in my life, I found a way to fit it into that book. So now, since finishing it, I'm on to new things. I wrote Useful Not True when I was thinking of other things. But then I go back and I read a chapter of How to Live. It blows me away with how important those lessons are to me. It's a beautiful reminder to make that wisdom surface again in my life, to stay at the forefront of my mind.

Alexandre

You listen to music with an analytical hair. Do you experience the same thing with reading?

Derek Sivers

Yes. To a fault. There are some books that might have a good message, but if I hate the way the author writes, I find it hard to get through the book. It's like listening to a song with a terrible singer. Maybe that's a good song, but if you can't stand the singer, it's so hard to get through it.

You can see on my book page that I mentioned earlier on my website, there are some down at the bottom of list because they're sorted in my order of recommendation. The ones at the bottom of list, there have been some where I've had to abandon the book early just because I hated the author's writing style. I just couldn't get past it.

Alexandre

Yeah.

I stopped Moby Dick, the book. Everybody says it's great, but the sentences, they are very long. I went up to 30 % and then I just gave up. I was like, I can't do more. Someone told me that it's just when it starts. But I was like, no, I cannot.

Thus, to be fair with the book, I read the French version, so maybe it's better in English.

Derek Sivers

Probably not.

Alexandre

Do you skim when you already know about the topic or do you always read cover to cover?

Derek Sivers

Cover to cover.

But I've just recently started taking a new approach to books. The first time I hear of a book, I will find a way to download the EPUB of the book, which lets me unzip it into plain text, and then I feed the plain text chapter by chapter into an LLM and tell it to give me a summary of each chapter. I find that's better than asking an LLM to summarize the whole book for you. Then I read the summary and decide if that's enough for me. It turns a book into an article, which often is enough. But if the subject is really interesting, then I will sit down and read the whole book cover to cover. It becomes a beautiful way to preview a book, like standing in a bookstore and skimming the entire book. If you can imagine ⁓ spending 10 or 15 minutes really flipping through a whole book to decide if you really want to spend 10 or 15 hours with this, LLMs are helping the summary become like skimming.

Alexandre

Okay, and you don't need to take a subscription to a third party service that provides you a summary.

Derek Sivers

No, yeah, I wouldn't. I guess I could do that. You're right. That would be another way of doing that. But I like managing it myself because then I can ask the LLM follow up questions. Like there was a book about China that many people recommended. I asked for a summary, and then I was able to ask a few more questions. Like "is the tone of this book generally negative and critical?". It was able to tell me: yes, the the main point of the book is that it's highly critical of the Chinese Communist Party, and it is very opposed to this, and it it talks about the Chinese government as a threat to American flourishing.

It went that okay, nevermind. Thank you. That helps me know I don't feel like reading this book. I don't need yet another source telling me that China is the enemy of the American way. I don't want to read that book. So that helped me not read it, because I was able to ask some follow-up questions.

Alexandre

What's the current composition of your wardrobe? I

Derek Sivers

I have ⁓ maybe five t-shirts, one pair of jeans, one pair of shorts, three pairs of socks, eight pairs of underwear, ⁓ three shoes, two jackets, and a few of these turtlenecks. A hat. And that's what I've got.

Alexandre

Okay, it's quite a small quantity. Do you them by hand or with the machine?

Derek Sivers

Machine

Alexandre

Okay. It's a weird question. But I'm asking because, now that I traveled, I took the last thing possible with me. So I have just one pant, one short, 3 t-shirts, 3 underwear. I experiment washing them by hand.

Derek Sivers

Yeah, it makes sense.

Alexandre

Now, Vietnam is a tropical country. I do a lot of sports. So I watch them like every day. But yeah, it works.

Derek Sivers

Yeah. My friend Tynan, you can see his website at tynan.com. Tynan travels with one shirt, one pair of underwear, one pair of socks, and he travels the whole world that way. So it is his daily routine. At night, he washes his only shirt in the sink, washes his underwear in the sink, hangs them up for dry. He goes to sleep, and puts them on the next day. This is his daily routine when traveling. It's impressive.

We do not all need to imitate Tynan. But it's interesting to know that that's a possibility.

Alexandre

Okay.

Last time, I went on a date. And I was like, okay, I've a jean, a t-shirt. It's very casual. ⁓ We'll see. Do think minimalism is compatible with dating?

Derek Sivers

If you meet somebody that appreciates that about you.

A lot of people admire minimalists and they're envious of somebody who has been able to draw the line and say no to some things that they find themselves unable to say no to. I think it feels like a weakness to a lot of people that they aren't able to say no to having more stuff in their life.

But many people also feel the opposite, where they think minimalists are crazy and they would never want to live with one because that would be too annoying to have somebody criticizing the amount of their stuff. A lot of people like their physical comforts and they like collecting knickknacks and having lots of different clothing. So somebody like that might find it annoying to live with a minimalist.

If this is truly your tendency, then dating while being minimalist would help filter out somebody that wouldn't like that anyway.

Alexandre

Yeah, it's polarizing, ...

Derek Sivers

Polarizing. Good word.

Alexandre

In your exchange with Mark in Aukland, you said that dating was your main focus for a long time. What changed? Is it having experienced many relations? Is it becoming a dad?

Derek Sivers

I think it's being old. I am in the last third or the last quarter of my life now. So everything has a sense of urgency. I bounce out of bed at five o'clock in the morning, sometimes four o'clock, because there's so much I want to do in every day and so little time. I have such a sense of urgency that I can't waste a single hour on something unessential.

Somebody tried to show me a video game that they love. I tried playing it for five minutes, and I ended up getting really upset, because this was five minutes of my life that could be spent doing the other things I want to do instead of this stupid game. Even if it's fun, it's pulling me away from my ultimate deeper goals.

And so that's how I see dating now.

Maybe if I were to suddenly find a soulmate, somebody that gets me like I've never been got before, and vice versa. That could be nice, but I'm not wanting that and so spending time looking for that feels like wasted time.

Alexandre

Yeah, it's lot of time and energy.

Have you ever used a dating app? Or did you meet people in other ways?

Derek Sivers

Long ago, yes. Yeah, I tried them all. When I became single for the first time in 2014, I tried them all for a while.

It's very disappointing, isn't it?

Alexandre

Haha, yes.

About your friendship, why have most of your best friends been women?

Derek Sivers

I think there's an emotional intimacy that's on the verge of romantic. It's not quite romantic but it's not entirely not.

Alexandre

Who usually calls? Is it you or your friend?

Either one. 50-50. Yeah.

Alexandre

And what's a key ingredient in your long-term, remote friendships? Is it a shared interest? Is it behavior?

Derek Sivers

Curiosity

Alexandre

Curiosoity?

Derek Sivers

I've noticed that the people that I become best friends with are the ones that are filled with questions.

Why do we do this? Why do we that? What is this? Have you ever wondered about this?

I can relate best to people that are filled with questions.

Alexandre

Okay. So, questions about you, but also about life in general

Derek Sivers

Not so much about me, unless it's ⁓ what are your thoughts on this subject?. In life in general.

People that are filled with questions about life in general are my kind of people.

Alexandre

I find it easy to meet new people but hard to make time for old friends. Any advice?

Derek Sivers

Schedule.

One of my old friends would make me laugh when she'd say, are you available next Thursday at 7 p.m.? I said, you're crazy. You're the only person I know that schedules weeks in advance. And she said, well, if I don't do this, you and I will lose touch. So are you available next Thursday at 7 p.m.? I'd say, yes, I am. And in hindsight, I'm really glad she did that because she was right that otherwise we would have lost touch. ⁓ And now we have. She stopped scheduling. Now I haven't talked to her in 12 years.

Alexandre

You met many people, you did a lot of one-one in Singapore, you met hundreds of people when you go to social traveling, you recorded a lot of podcasts.

Derek Sivers

Yeah. Only, well only four of them became ongoing friends. So it's a very high bar to actually trade phone numbers and become dear friends. It's really only one out of every 100 or 200 people do I really get that close with where we become good phone friends.

Alexandre

Well, you cannot be close friends with 100 people by the way.

Derek Sivers

Yeah. Or you'd have to change your definition of what is a close friend.

Alexandre

Do you try to keep up with the people you met? Do you follow any process you to reach out?

Derek Sivers

I don't, but I would like to. I wrote about it in my first book when it was a career technique for keeping in touch in the music industry, which is built on hundreds of connections in your local city to get gigs as a musician. You have to keep in touch with hundreds of people. So I wrote about this in the past, but on a friendship level, I don't do that, but I should, especially the people that I have sat with for two hours. So I don't have a system now, but I would like to.

Alexandre

I came across a system once that was smart, I thought. It was on Notion. I didn't implement it on my own yet, but the guy, used to, for each people, say, how often do I want to keep in touch with this person. Is it every week, every six months, every one year. And so, he had a reminder, a task appeared when the last contact was older than the wished frequency.

Derek Sivers

That's ideal. I think that's what the ideal system looks like.

Alexandre

Do you offer to help every person you meet?

Derek Sivers

No.

No. When I'm meeting with somebody I try to just give them my whole present self. I think an offer to help would be committing my future self, which I might not be able to follow up on, unless I had a team of assistants that I could tell my assistant to go help this person. But I don't think I'd want to commit my future self to doing a big task. I'd rather just engage with that person fully in the moment ⁓ and hopefully create the environment where if they really needed help that they would ask.

I actually don't like it when I meet somebody that says, "let me know if I can help in any way". It seems to be more of a business-y thing to say. That's a given when you have a real friendship. "Let me know if I can help in any way" is something you say to business contacts as a way of inviting future businessy communication. So I've always felt a little off put when somebody says that. It seems to take it out of personal and into business.

Alexandre

You are already retired, I'm broke, is it a good idea to follow your advice?

Derek Sivers

No. ⁓ Do not follow any of my advice from money. I don't know anything about making money. I haven't made any money since 2007, or you could maybe argue I haven't initiated the making of any money since I started CD Baby in 1998. That yes, CD Baby made a lot of money, but that was something I made in 1998. And all the money I made in the next 10 years was just following on from that initial building of the company. I feel that almost everybody on the internet has advice about making money except me.

Alexandre

Wwhat's the secret of your enthusiasm?

My theory is that you always move towards what excites you, but I'm not sure. Do you agree?

Derek Sivers

I think that's right.

There are thousands of things that don't interest me enough. Like AI right now. AI itself, I find mildly interesting, but not super interesting. So you won't hear me talking about it because if you asked me an AI question, I would push it away with a short answer and we would not spend too much time on it. But you ask me about figuring out the French or about understanding cultures around the world, I have a lot to say about that, and a lot to ask about that because it interests me so much.

I get to just follow my intrinsic interests. Intrinsic being the main point that these are things that I'm internally driven to learn more about, not extrinsic, which would be doing it for some other purpose. Like if I learn about AI, then I can make big money. Or if I learn Chinese, well then I can, I don't know, ⁓ make a lot of money in China.

Those are extrinsic motivations — which I have had plenty of in the past. There's nothing wrong with them. I spent years extrinsically motivated by wanting to be famous or rich as a musician. But now everything I do now is just intrinsically motivated.

Alexandre

Have you ever done a therapy?

Derek Sivers

No, not at all.

Alexandre

Ok, maybe it's just talking with friends and having deep conversations.

Derek Sivers

Yeah. And lots of journaling in a way that I later learned is called cognitive behavioral therapy. That's how I've been journaling for 30 years, and it(s very similar to CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is writing down my beliefs, questioning the beliefs, learning where those beliefs might have come from. That's what my journal often looks like when I'm going through any difficult times. So maybe I have been doing therapy, but just not with a therapist.

Alexandre

Okay. So how do you identify your belief? It's just something that is not a fact, like a statement?

Derek Sivers

Yeah, well that's the subject of my new book called Useful Not True. It was all about that. Where we say things like, this situation sucks, or ⁓ I need to move to Vietnam, or ⁓ there are no good women here in ⁓ Australia. People say these things as if they are facts, and they often shape their life around them. They say, I've got to get out of here because nobody here is ambitious. This is a terrible place to start a company. I need to leave. But all of those statements I just made are not true. They're just one way of looking at it. So I think it helps you to see that your own statements aren't true. That they are just one perspective.

And other people's statements are not true. That if somebody else says, Alex, you can't do that. Alex, you're not qualified. Alex, we're not hiring. You need to also understand that those statements are not true. They're just one perspective. They're one way of looking at it. So that was the subject of my useful not true book. And it's also the subject of 30 years of journaling.

Alexandre

So journaling helps you catch your beliefs.

Derek Sivers

Yeah.

Alexandre

What's a belief that was hard to reframe?

Derek Sivers

Maybe, I don't need to make money anymore.

I still found myself trying to monetize my interests. And it took me a long time to realize that that's irrational, because when I sold my company, it gave me more money than I will ever be able to spend. So doing anything for the money ever again is irrational. That was a hard one to realize.

Alexandre

Do you still have beliefs that hold you back?

Derek Sivers

Probably but I don't know what they are otherwise I would have addressed it.

Alexandre

Do you believe writing is hard?

Derek Sivers

No.

It's work to edit something beautifully so that you can succinctly and beautifully get an idea from your head into someone else's head. That can be work and it can be hard. But writing itself should be no harder than speaking. The concept of writer's block is silly because nobody ever has speaker's block. You just start talking to your friend and so I think it should be the same thing on a page. You can just start talking into words on a page. Now we can use a computer to transcribe our voice into text. So we really can just talk.

There should be no more writer's block ever again. It's just an outdated idea that writing is hard. If you get too caught up in the world of academia and trying to please a harsh jury of teachers, that might be terrible training for writing because it will kill your enthusiasm for writing. But just writing in a journal every day, writing emails even, it's good practice to remind you that it's as simple as speaking.

Alexandre

What's harder for you, reading or practicing?

Derek Sivers

Practicing what?

Alexandre

I mean, reading lean on the theory side, while practicing is putting in action. Like coding.

Derek Sivers

Ooh, yeah, practicing is harder. When practicing, your ass is on the line. It's active, whereas reading is just passive.

Alexandre

Is there beliefs you sometimes question whether they help or hurt?

Derek Sivers

All the time!

Almost every day. That's a constant subject in my journal. Whether it's about parenting, or a social issue of the day, or a work thing, even a programming thing.

Still, I love questioning the fundamentals of things I'm programming. I'll tell you a recent one that I'm working on literally right now. Sorry, literally now I'm standing talking to you, but as soon as we get off the phone today, I'm to go right back to programming this thing.

I was keeping data in my database and I was using a separate language to get the data out of the database and then use HTML templates to convert the data from the database into strings that I could put into an HTML template. It's a very common way of doing things, But I was having so much trouble trying to use the Go programming language, because it's a static and pulling the information out of the database in static types and converting everything to strings and parsing JSON to do that was so hard in Go that it made me question the entire way of doing things. That if the hard part was converting things ⁓ from JSON to strings just to put it into an HTML template, I thought maybe I don't need to do it at all. So what I'm working on right now is making the PostgreSQL database itself parse the mustache templating language so that it will return HTML documents ready to show to the browser already. Do that all inside PostgresQL so that the programming language doesn't need to translate everything twice. It can just get it directly from Postgres.

Alexandre

Okay. Yes, questioning the usual way we do things.

Derek Sivers

Yes, it's really fun. Even if doing things a new way is not the best, it's fun to explore. It's like being an artist in the 1920s, saying, well, do we need to have our paintings be an accurate representation of what our eyes see? Do we need, as a writer, to have our words fully describe everything that's being seen.

It's wonderful to question these things artistically, not judging whether this is the right or the wrong answer, but just trying it to see how it goes.

Derek Sivers

It says your video is reconnecting. Should we wrap it up?

Alexandre

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe you feel it: my energy level is falling down.

Derek Sivers

Well, it's good. We've had a fascinating two-hour conversation. Thank you so much for all of these questions. I really, really appreciate how much time and effort you spent thinking of all these questions, gathering all these questions, preparing for the conversation. It's really an honor, so thank you.

Alexandre

Thank you. I'm grateful that I had this opportunity to interview you. Interviewing people that are more advanced in life really inspire me, and make me grow.

Maybe we do want to close with one last question?

Derek Sivers

If you have one last question you want, sure.

Alexandre

One of my favorite takeaway from you is whatever scares you, go do it.

What scares you today?

Derek Sivers

Moving to India and moving to China. It is my plan for myself when my boy doesn't need me here in New Zealand anymore. I'm laying the groundwork and getting the visas so I can move to China and try to live only in Chinese, speaking only Chinese.

It's terrifying, but that's what I like about it.

Alexandre

Okay. Yeah, sounds like a great project.

And I think it's a wrap.

Is there something you want to add?

Derek Sivers

No, well you know, I always end with telling anybody that listens two hours into something like this that they should email me and say hello. So anybody, go to my website, go to https://sive.rs — there's a link that says contact me, and you should email me because that's how I met Alex and I enjoy meeting strangers.

Alexandre

Great. Thank you, Derek. It was a pleasure to talk with you and to meet you.

Derek Sivers

You too. Thanks for having me.