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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 sai

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

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 chan

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, Produc

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

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 Cho

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 make

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 yo

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 si

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 editi

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 toda

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 mo

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 a

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 “thir

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 hou

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 late

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

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 Sa

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 lon

As I kicked and punched at the man, I glanced at the knife in his right hand. And I felt it dig into my side. It all started as I crossed paths with the man. He reached in his pocket, and pulled out the knife. I then did what surely only an idiot would do. I began to fight him. A few seconds earlier, as the man approached me on the path, he stared at me fiercely. He charged toward me, and bared his gritting teeth. His eyes reduced to snake-eye slits, and glowed under the harsh night lamplight. He shook his head from side to side, growling. When the man transformed from just another passerby into a mortal threat, I felt something I had never felt before, and that I haven’t felt since. A bolt of lightning rose from my stomach, to my chest. I heard a deep growl grow into a roar. An authoritative “NOOO!” It wasn’t until I heard that roar echo off the surrounding buildings that I realized -- it had come from me. It’s worth noting, I’ve never been a “tough guy.” I had never been in a fight. Yes, my older brother be