Transcript of 659: Derek Sivers - Not Waiting for Permission, Hell Yeah or No, Leadership Lessons From The Dancing Guy, & Why The Standard Pace is for Chumps

This episode is brought to you by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company that builds world-class technical teams for clients around the globe. If you need help with your applications, infrastructure, or data layer, Insight Global's team of technical experts can build custom or manage services to deliver the outcomes you desire. Getting the most out of your technology can be tough, but growing your business with the right technical solutions can be magic. Visit insightglobal. Com/learningleader. That's insightglobal. Com/learningleader today to learn more. Welcome to The Learning Leader Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader. Com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader. Com. Now on to the night's featured leader. Great. Derek Sivers, the entrepreneur who built Seedy Baby from nothing into the largest seller of independent music online. Then he sold it for $22 million and gave the money away. You might know Derek from his viral TED Talk called How to Start a Movement About Leadership Lessons from a Dancing Guy, or from his books, including Anything You Want, Hell Yeah or No, and Useful, Not True.

During our conversation, we discussed why the standard pace is for chumps and how you can go faster at whatever it is you're doing. And then Derek shares how he put together his viral TED Talk and how he handled having Bill Gates, Tony Robbins, and the founders of Google sitting in the front row staring at him while he gave, by the way, a three-minute TED Talk that earned him a standing ovation. And then we closed talking about the difference between explorers and leaders. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Derek Sivers. You're 17 years old, and you're about to start your first year at Berklee School of Music. You meet this guy. Tell me if I'm pronouncing his name wrong, Keem Homo Williams. That's right. You have a conversation with him. What happened next?

It was about two months before I was set to go to Berklee College of Music. I mentioned to him that I was going, and He said, Oh, really? He said, I used to teach there. He said, I have an idea. He said, Come by my studio tomorrow morning at 9: 00 AM, and I think I can help you graduate Berkeley in two years because it's a four-year college. I showed up at 09: 00 AM, which surprised him because he said that he often says this to people that shows some mild interest, and nobody ever shows up at 09: 00 AM. But there I was at his door at 09: 00 AM, ready to go, and that impressed him. Then he sat down with this intense pace and taught me four semesters of harmony classes in an hour because he just went really quick and intense, and I was quick enough to keep up with it. What I lacked, he said, Learn this over the next week, and we met a week later, and he taught me four semesters of Berklee College of Music's arranging classes in two hours. We met maybe four times total, and that was enough for him to teach me essentially two years of required courses at Berkeley.

Because his main point was, most things are paced so that the slowest person can keep up. But if you're driven, if you are motivated enough, you can go so much faster than the standard pace. He said, The standard pace is for chumps. You can do so much better than that. You can graduate a four-year university in two years. And I did.

Man, what do How did you draw? I mean, 17 years old, what a great life lesson. How have you taken from those moments with chemo to say, Wait a second, I can go way faster. This pace, that's for chumps, right? The regular speeds for chumps. What have you taken from that that has helped you later on in life?

Institutional skepticism. When someone says you have to go through the usual channels and file the as such, I think, not necessarily. When someone says, That'll take this long or you need to do this first, I think there's probably a hack. That's probably the standard way that most people do it, but there's probably a better way.

Derek, let's say somebody who works in a corporate America or just a corporate job in the world, and they're ambitious and growth-focused for the right reasons. They want to provide for their family. They want to enjoy their work. They want to build a career. I know this is slightly different from the way that you've looked at it, but I think that's a lot of people, and I still love to do whatever I can to try to help them. What could they take from that story to say, Maybe there's a different way. Maybe there's a better way to do this thing than just try to climb the regular corporate ladder like everybody else is trying to do.

Here's a real example. After I graduated Berklee College of Music, I got a job at Warner Music in New York City. Even the way I got the job, quick aside, was because a visiting speaker from New York City from a different music company was visiting Berklee College of Music. As he walked into the classroom to begin speaking, I heard him say to the teacher, Are we starting now? The teacher said, Yeah. He said, I thought we were going to eat first. He said, Oh, man, I haven't eaten lunch. I thought we were going to eat first. So I quickly, while the class was getting settled, I dashed out to the pay phone and I called Supreme's Pizza, whose phone number I had memorized, and I had them deliver three pizzas to room number 314. And so about 30 minutes into his talk, the pizzas come. And I paid the guy and brought the pizzas up to the speaker who looked at me and said, All right, good one. I owe you one. And we kept in touch for the next few years. He's the one that got me the job at Warner Brothers because he heard them mention in passing that they were hiring a new guy to run the tape room.

And he said, I've got just the guy for you. And he called me in Boston and said, I got you a job in New York City if you can start on Monday. And that's how I got the job. I never had to interview or anything. His recommendation alone just got me the job. That's not even the real story I'm telling, though. That's just That's another example of how there's always a different way than the usual channels, right?

Be proactive, take action, get it done, be valuable. That's something I... We'll talk about that in a second, but I want you to finish this story.

While I'm working at Warner Brothers, there is one empty little office that one day wasn't empty. There was a guy there named Allan Tapper who just showed up and said, Hey, I'm Allan. I've started working here. I said, Oh, what are you doing? He said, Well, I don't officially work here yet, but I told them to just give me a desk and I'm going to make the company a lot of money. I said, How? He said, Because I used to be in advertising and I saw that Warner Brothers is not proactively pushing their music catalog to advertising agencies. So I said, Just give me a desk, give me a phone. You don't have to pay me. Let me show you what I can do. Alan Tapper, later that made more money for the company than anybody had in years. Officially, they did hire him eventually, but the company was not hiring. He walked in saying, I know how I can make you more money. Just let me show you. And that's it. I love this story because you don't have to wait until a company is hiring. If you can get a little insight into an industry or a company and see how you can benefit them, you don't have to wait for them to hire anyone or say that they're hiring, you could just walk in and show them what you can do for them and say, You don't even have to pay me.

Let me show you. I've seen this work in action. I think it's a great approach.

I love that. One of the things you also did was give a talk to the Berkeley students, and it was titled It's 6 Things I Wish I knew the Day I Started, Berkeley. I think the one that I pulled out from that 6 that I want you to expand on is very similar to what Alan Tepper did. And that is, when done, be valuable. You write, When you leave here, you said to them, head to the business aisle of the bookstore and start reading a book a week about entrepreneurial thinking, things like marketing. Make sure you're making money. That's a way to continue on and make sure you're doing something to add value to others. Sometimes you will think like, oh, I'm just going to be good, or I'm going to make this art, or I'm going to do this thing. And you said, no, there's a part of it that you got to create a business. You got to add value to other people. You have to make money. I think to be excellent at whatever you're doing, constantly thinking about how am I adding value to others is a good way to approach it.

How have you used that in your life?

Well, first, I got to give a little context. That probably people listening to this podcast say, Well, yeah, duh, making money. I know, especially on the internet, it feels like that's all everyone's talking about. It's how to make money. But at a music school, there's this this tendency to go too deep into cord voicings and timbre and the structure of your second verse as it leads into your pre-chorus and whatnot. It's just diving deep into the mechanics of music, which is important. It's super important, which is why elsewhere in that talk, I say, Shut out all distractions, stop reading all media, dive deep into these things that I just mentioned. But then, yes, when you're out of here, shift your focus and find a way to make that valuable to others. Because we've all heard the phrase starving artist. The essence of the starving artist is someone who is spending all of their time on work that's valuable to them, but not valuable to others. Meaning they might be pouring hundreds of hours into some expression of their feelings of the meta universe we all live in, but other people can't relate to it. And so nobody wants it, nobody's interested, but that person is spending all of their time on this thing that nobody else is interested in.

That's a problem. It's a very common problem for artists, writers, musicians. So the point was keep in touch with the objective measure of value we call money, which is so loaded with baggage. But if you think of it just as a neutral measure of value and try to find ways to make money with your art, it's a way of making sure that what you're doing is valuable to other people, not just to you.

Yes. I think the key learning for anybody, whether you view yourself as an artist or not, is what am I doing to add value to the lives of the people around me? I learned this in sports early in my life, Derek, where if I didn't give our team the best chance to win, I played quarterback, so only one guy gets to play, then they're going to play the other guy. And that happened to be in college, where the coaches looked me dead in the eyes and said, That guy gives us a better chance to win than you do. He's adding more value to our team than you do. That's a great lesson to learn, man, especially when you're 19 years old, as you learn valuable lessons at that age in your formative years, because that's how the world works. If you add value to people's lives and help them and put them in a better position, you're probably going to have a lot of work. If you don't, you got to find a way to do it, I think. I don't know. What do you think? I see you thinking right now.

Yeah. Well, I'm thinking about when you had the dating coach on, how a hard thing with dating is to how to see yourself through other people's eyes. It's the same thing, isn't it? To get out of yourself and stop thinking of the intrinsic internal value of what you're doing to you and think of it as how valuable it is to someone else.

Yes. I think that's something to be regularly thinking about that shows high levels of emotional intelligence, high levels of self awareness, supreme levels of intelligence. There's a million different things to get to with your story, Derek. I love it. We've talked about it in the last time. But one of the things you did is I love how you put together one of the many viral things you've done, which the title, if you just search leadership lessons from the dancing guy, maybe it'll also say in parentheses, first the follower. I'm curious, what were you thinking when you put that talk together with the video? And then maybe you can describe it, too, for those who haven't seen it yet.

Sure. 2009, I was living in New York City, and there was a video, maybe it was Reddit, maybe it was Dig. I don't know what it was at the time that just somebody showed this video of a guy dancing alone. There was this shirtless guy dancing like trip and balls, as we'd say, dancing at this music festival, just all alone. People are just casually sitting there looking at the funny shirtless dancing guy. At one point, somebody jumps up to imitate him and starts doing all the same moves he's doing. Because one guy imitates him, a second one jumps in right away. Now the two of them are imitating this shirtless guy. Then right 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 20 people all jump in to do the same thing because that first one had the confidence to do it. I had just finished reading two books One was Tribes by Seth Godin, and one was The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Both of these books describe how actions start a movement. While I was watching this video of the dancing guy, I thought, this is like a visual metaphor of what Seth Godin's Tribes and Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point are talking about.

I just blogged it. At the time, I was blogging almost every day. Just that day, I posted a blog post showing that video saying, Isn't this making a movement? I said, But notice how we focus on the shirtless dancing guy, but actually it was the first follower, that first guy that jumped up. That's what made everything else happen. Until then, it was people keeping their distance from the freak. But the first person jumped up and started imitating him, that the second person do it, and then there was no reason not to because other people had already begun. I thought it was really interesting then how the first and second followers were the ones that really showed everyone else how to follow. Then, of course, you think of the metaphors in real life. If you find some lone nut doing something great, it might be a mad scientist in their computer basement somewhere. But if you find somebody doing something great, one of the best things you could do is to follow that person and show other people how to follow.

Then when you put it together, it was a TED Talk, right? Yeah, it was a TED Talk.

Sorry. I just blogged it and that was it. But then a few months later, the TED conference put out a call saying, We're taking submissions for new talks. I just submitted that and they said yes. Then began the day that I thought my heart would explode. I was there at the big main stage TED conference. I mean, Al Gore, Sergi Brin, Larry Page, Tony Robbins, all of these VIPs, Bill Gates is sitting right there, all of them in the front row looking me like, All right, anonymous speaker I've never heard of. Impress me. I got up on stage and delivered that talk to that room, and it was terrifying, especially because...

Was it? Oh, God, yeah. You made it look easy.

Well, thank you. But what was terrifying is it was like memorizing a four-minute long monolog. If you think of being in a school play or something like that, you have to memorize a monolog. Because if I forgot a single sentence, the whole thing gets out of whack with the video. I have to memorize word for word this four-minute long speech about leadership in order for it to match up exactly with the video of the dancing guy. To do that while my heart was racing was so scary. I thought it was going to have a heart attack. But got off stage, and one of the coolest moments of my life is the musician Peter Gabriel, whose music I loved for years, saw saw me, interrupted his conversation with someone else, and ran up to me to shake my hand saying it was the best thing he had seen. Then later that day, Tony Robbins and a bunch of other people tweeted it, and I was very proud.

Wow. How many times did you practice it?

Oh, God. At least 100.

Really?

Yeah. Over and over and over and over again. I would just call up friends and say, Come on, let me do this one more time with you on the phone, okay? Hit play on the video. I'm going to do this with my eyes closed now. Let's see how I do.

Wow. I think that's the inspiring part to me, Derek. It means it is possible. We can do it. Now, you're a really smart dude, but it's the practice. I had Nikki Glazer, the stand-up comedian on this podcast. To hear her talk about the number of times she has repped her material before any of us see it, it's very similar to what you're saying. And so to me, that is inspiring. Now, it's a ton of work, and you got to be super dedicated to excellence and wanting it to be great. Because you probably, you wrote the blog, you knew the material well enough where you could have just rift on it, and it probably would have been decent. But instead, you're like, I want this thing to be excellent. I want it to be as good as it can it possibly be. So I'm going to practice it with my eyes because I'm going to practice it so many times that I can't forget. I think there's a lot to take from that.

It started this idea of wanting every sentence to matter. Sure. So anybody listening here, if you check out any of my books, you'll see that they're all very short, like my three-minute TED Talk. They offered me to 18 minutes. I said, No, I think I can do this in under three minutes. So same thing with my books. My books are 90 pages, 100 pages. They're meant to be read in an hour. But the reason is the rough draft is a thousand pages. And then I will literally spend full-time for one or two years to squeeze it and squeeze it and squeeze it and chop every sentence that doesn't absolutely positively need to be there. And in the end, what's left is this itty-bitty little book that's almost like poetry because it's so succinct. But the idea is, I'm not going to put a single sentence out into the world that doesn't need to be there.

I think a lot of us as leaders could learn from that. Think about your next quarterly business review, town hall meeting, Monday morning meeting. Thinking about pruning that thing down, making it so that every word that comes out of your mouth has to and nothing more. It's like Robert Green, do not speak unless you can improve upon the silence. But thinking about that for everything you say and do, we'd have a lot better meetings, man.

Hell, yeah.

That's one of the things you said, speaking of that. So a little bit of background, And I asked you to come back on because when I was talking with Tim Farris, one of your good buddies, he talked about you. He brought up quotes of yours. We talked about you off air, too, all this stuff. And so I sent that to you like, Hey, I thought you might want to check this out because we talked about you a little bit. And I'd love to have you back on. And you said basically, you're going to go on a sabbatical from doing podcast, but, Hell, yeah, let's do it. And you have this thing that has not been copied, I think, by tons of people of basically, Hell, yeah or no. So either I'm going to go do it 100 %, give everything I got, or it's going to be zero. I'm not going to do it. Can you go deeper on that, Hell, yeah, or no? That's also the title of the book. But that mentality of how you approach projects, how you approach life in general.

We've all felt the pain from saying yes to too many things so that you're spread too thin. I did this like everyone else. At a certain point, I realized that if I were to say no to almost everything, what it would give for me is the space and the time so that when that occasional thing comes up that I'm actually really excited about, well, now I can just fucking smash it. I can throw myself into it entirely and do something like the hundred closed-eye practices of a speech or an entire year editing a rough draft down to 100 pages. I have the time to do something like that because I've said no to almost everything else. It's about leaving space instead of filling your space. It's leaving the space so that when that opportunity comes up, you can say, yes, Absolutely. I can start right now, and I can throw myself into this entirely because I said no to almost everything else.

What's the response to that book and to that mentality from people? I'm more curious I'm not sure about the negatives because- Yes, I'm glad you brought that up. I personally had borrowed this from you, stolen it from you, share it with leaders I work with who have the calendars that you've probably seen them back to back to back to back. That's every day. That's five. Sometimes They meet on Sunday. And I'm like, Dude, you got to. Are these all hell yeses? Like, all of them? Every single one of those? Every one of them? Well, they're pretty important, man. I got to do this stuff. I have a lot of people who report to me. And I'm like, Wow, I don't know. I don't know. So I'm just curious to the response How did you get to that?

Well, two things. For one, it's cute when people contact me out of the blue and say, Well, I'm sure you're very busy, but... And I said, No, I'm not busy. Because busy to me implies out of control. You're busy if you've let other people shove shit into your schedule. If you leave space, then to me, it leaves time to think. Part of the reason people buy my books and want to hear my thoughts is because I'm this weirdo that spends a lot of time thinking. I don't spend a lot of time doing. I don't have a full schedule. Because of that, I'm able to sit around and think for 6 hours about the impact of language on our approach to life or something like that, that most people don't have the time to do. But I do because I sold my company and retired and I spend my time thinking. If you tune into my thoughts, ideally, you're going to hear something you haven't heard before because I just spend more time thinking about the stuff that most people don't have the time to think about. That's why you outsource it to me. Okay, so that's one, hell, yeah or no aspect.

But where I thought where you were going with this when you said the negatives, are that I get emails from people that are right out of college saying, Hey, I saw this, Hell, yeah or no, book of yours, and I'm applying this to everything now. I'm not taking any jobs unless it's really a, Hell, yeah. And I say, No, look, it's one tool in the toolbox. You don't use the monkey wrench as a hammer. You don't use the monkey wrench as a toothpick. It's a monkey wrench. It's meant for a certain situation. So, Hell, yeah or no, is a tool for when you're overwhelmed with options. It's time to raise the bar all the way. It's the wrong strategy to be using straight out of college when you'd be smarter to say yes to everything because opportunities are like lottery tickets at that point. The more, the better. Sleep less, work 21 hours a day, say yes to nine jobs at once, if that's what it takes, to open those lottery tickets. Then once something's rewarding you and pays off, then you say no to these other things, you double your efforts and raise the bar all the way.

But, Hell, yeah or no, is a specific tool for a specific situation.

Okay. I like that clarification because I think, yes, sometimes people just hear the part they want to hear And then, yeah, you're 23. And you're like, I don't know. I'm like, dude, the job you get when you're 23, for most of us, I don't mind cubicle, pounding the phones, 60 cold calls a day. Sometimes you go over 60 in a sales job. Great Great job, though. It was hard. I didn't love it most days, but I grew to get good at it, and I grew to develop skills that have helped me for the rest of my life. If you would have said, well, is that a hell yeah? Or do you love that job? No. Are you kidding me? When I got done with college, that's what I thought I was going to be doing. Of course not. But I'm so grateful for that experience and that opportunity that it's maybe better and all other things. Now, I want to shift, Eric, to I think this is a leadership thing. You may view it as a creativity thing. So When you were running CD Baby, so this is your company that you already mentioned that you have sold.

When somebody makes a purchase of something, you usually get a canned email. Hey, you ordered these socks, and they're going to get there in three days from Amazon or whatever. And you had that same thing initially when people would order a CD, but you changed it. So can you tell me how you changed the, Hey, you bought this CD, email?

I love that you said, Socks, and we'll come back to that in a minute.

Okay.

But imagine this. It was 1998. I had just started my little online record store in my living room. No employees, just me. A little tiny website I made myself that had 100 musicians selling their music through me. The default shipping notice was the default. It said, Your order has been shipped. It's on its way. Thank you. I just looked at that and thought, I can do better than that. Why be normal? I think this is a lesson that every musician learns, is you don't want to write a song that somebody else has written. You want to write something that nobody's done before. Say the lyrics that's never been said before. And so same in business. Don't just do the same thing that everybody else is doing. Ask yourself constantly, what has nobody done before? What would Add something to the universe and make the world a better place. Surprise somebody. Make eyebrows go up, not down. In 10 minutes, I wrote this silly little thing saying, Your CD has been placed onto a satin pillow and a hush fell across the crowd as we lit a candle and put your CD into a gold-lined mailer and onto our private jet, which is on its way to you in Dayton, Ohio.

On this day, Friday, August 13th, we hope you had a good time shopping at CD Baby. We're all exhausted and your picture is now on the wall as customer of the year. We can't wait to hear from you again, et cetera. That's it. I wrote it in 10 minutes. It was a bit of silliness. It became the default shipping notice. I just said it to automatically send that to everyone that bought something. But because it was so weird and different, people started forwarding it to their friends and then blogging about it and then talking about it. Seth Godin had a chapter about it, I think, in the Purple Cow or a mention of it somewhere in Purple Cow. Other business books mentioned that particular email as one of the most viral shipping confirmation emails ever. Then just two years ago, here in Wellington, New Zealand, I heard about compression socks because I was flying a lot. Somebody said, You should look into having compression socks if you're sitting on planes a lot. I thought, I don't know what compression socks are. But I went online, typed New Zealand compression socks, found a seller, ordered two pairs.

The next day, I got an email that said, Your socks have been placed onto a satin pillow. A hush fell across the crowd as we lit a candle, and your socks are now on our private on their way to the... And your picture's on our wall as customer of the year. I said, Wait a second. Are you doing this because you saw my name in the shipping notice? And the woman running the shop said, What? Sorry, no. What are you talking about? I said, I wrote that 25 years ago. I wrote that. And yes, she had no idea. She just copied it out of a book.

Oh, my God. That is awesome. Again, though, you're thinking differently, and anybody can do this. Anybody can think differently about how you do it. And it's hard to quantify what that did for your business, but the virality of it, how creative it was caused it to spread and then ultimately had to have had an impact on your business. I had to. Oh, yeah.

Like, literally hundreds of customers that I knew about that mentioned it said, I heard of you from this blog post about your shipping confirmation. I heard of you because of this book mentioned your shipping confirmation. So a lot of people heard of me because of that silly email I wrote in 10 minutes. But you're right, the bigger deal is not looking to the outside world to see what we can imitate, but to look at what's been done already and see how you can try something different.

It's harder, but I bet part of why this happened is because you were writing a lot. You were getting your thoughts out of your head onto the page regularly. You published a lot of them, maybe some of them you didn't. But I think that is the ultimate tool for clarity. It's the ultimate tool for teaching. And I think teaching is the ultimate tool for learning. This show is called The Learning Leader Show. I'm very focused and fascinated by people who are chasing down their curiosity with great rigor and trying to learn to grow to get better and hopefully, positively impact the world and other people. Can you talk more about the importance of being a regular writer, of getting those thoughts it's out of your head onto the page?

For me, it's healthy doubt, skepticism. It's questioning the defaults. If you jot down your thoughts, ideally, you occasionally question them. If you say, That person wronged me, ideally, then you add a question mark. That person wronged me? Maybe. Maybe not. How can I look at that situation through another light? We need to adopt AI. Let's add a question mark. We need to adopt AI? Everybody says it's the greatest thing. Is it necessary? Do we have to do this? It gives you time to question assumptions and to not just stick with your first impression. Our first thought is an obstacle. We should not be honoring the thought that came to us first. Like a brainstorming session, you need to acknowledge that that's the first idea. Okay, what else? Give me another one. Then don't stop at two. Don't stop at three. Make yourself come up with a bunch of different perspectives. Sometimes Sometimes the silly ones can help seed a really great idea that you never would have thought of if you didn't have the silly step in between. But all of this is taking the time to go past your first thought, past that obstacle, on to the more interesting perspectives, just by taking the time to think through it.

Whether that's in writing or just make sure that just in case somebody is averse or allergic to writing, It can also just be talking into a voice recorder. It could be talking to your cat or talking to a friend. It could be journaling into a paper notebook. It could be typing into a text file. Just some way of collecting your thoughts and just giving yourself the time to reflect and think.

Well, I think part of it, this comes from your book, Useful, Not True, is that we just make these assumptions that our beliefs are true. I like this part. You said for hundreds of years, people worship Zus, and Athena, and others. And now, this was crazy, now we call that mythology. Those are myths. But now when it comes to our beliefs, no, no, no, those are just true. Other people's beliefs, those are superstitions or those are myths. But my beliefs, they're true. That part really spoke to me because I think as a learning leader, as someone who's chasing down my curiosity really, really hard, I'm always questioning, maybe there's a better way. Maybe Maybe there's something I don't know. Maybe what I currently think is wrong. And if I find that, I get pumped. I'm happy. I found a better way. This is great. So bringing in this like, Hey, people used to worship these gods. I think that's why it's worth it for us to question our own beliefs, because that could be our beliefs. I don't know. What do you think?

I went to China for my first time last year, only because my boy had watched Kang fu Panda enough that for his school holiday, he asked if we could please go to China. I thought as part of his education, I should take him to China. But I expected it to be awful. You hear American news stories about this awful place. It's always spun negative with the dystopian government and the oppressed people and the ghost towns from the stupid real estate developers that built skyscrapers that nobody wanted. You only hear the negative. But if you go there, it's wonderful. The cities are amazing. The people are happy. Just forget every other measure. Just sit and observe all the smiles you see in the middle of the major cities. People are happy. They're thriving, they're productive. The cities are clean, and the people are entrepreneurial and driven and optimistic about the future. It's amazing. I've been back four times in the past year. More than anything, really surprised how pleasant this place is that I've always been told was part of the evil empire. Then you think about how many other things we've been warned against are not actually bad.

It's just that maybe the two governments or even the two corporations have something against each other, and so they tell us to agree with them. But there's so many different perspectives to be had out there.

It's worth it to go experience them, to go try to gain your own perspective and approach it with curiosity instead of judgment. There's this spectrum.

Yes. Now I even use this as a compass that if I I'm prejudiced against something, that makes me want to go into it to find out more about it. Let's give a non-political example. To me, Burning Man sounds awful.

Me too.

It sounds like the last place I'd want to be in a desert for a week with no food and water except what I bring in myself, and everybody's on drugs, and it's all crazy. It sounds terrible. Therefore, I should probably go. What's another Insane Clown Pussy? I don't know their music. I've heard maybe one song once, but I think the fans of Insane Clown Pussy paint their face black and white, and they call themselves Juggaboo or something like that. Then once a year, somewhere in Indiana, I think, they have the annual Juggaboo Festival where all the fans of Insane Clown Pussy get together for this crazy festival. Somebody passed a little YouTube clip of it and I thought, That sounds awful. I should go because I'm full of prejudice against it. Therefore, I should steer into it.

It's like the Lincoln quote, right? I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.

I never heard that. Really? That's Abraham Lincoln?

I think so. From what I read on the internet, that might not be true. But from what I read, yeah, I don't like that man. I must get to know him better. I think that is a broader way of... You know what's funny is, usually when you do meet those people, at times I've seen people on the internet where maybe I cringe a little bit, and then I'll be at a conference or something and we're both there. I'm like, Good dude. He's a good guy. Yeah, he was great. He was great. We had fun. Maybe we shared a meal or something. It's like, Yeah, good guy. There's one thing, too, Derek, about, and you were not true, about leadership and exploring. I wanted to touch on this because you've openly talked about you not being a good leader. And not many people do that, especially on a leadership podcast where they admit like, No, I'm not really that good of a leader. Yet you create this business and it grows and you sell it, make a bunch of money, and now you do whatever you want. And you have for a while now. But can you talk to me about the difference between explorers and leaders?

Yeah, I learned this lesson in hindsight. Hard lesson learned. While I was running my company, I was actually a pretty bad leader, as proven by how frustrated my employees were that I loved changing changing my mind. I loved changing my mind for the reasons that we've talked about right here, introspection, reflection, considering other approaches. I'm always hoping to change my mind. That's one of my favorite things to do in life is to change my mind. It's great when I find a new perspective that changes my mind. But my employees were so frustrated by this that only years later, in hindsight, looking back, I can see now know why I was such a bad leader. It's because, let's use the archetype of the 1800s Explorer from England that gets on a boat for six months to go to the unexplored jungle, machete in hand with a pith helmet, a few workers carrying the baggage. But for the most part, it's an explorer going into uncharded lands to hack around and see what's there, to go where nobody else has gone, maybe go up that hill. There's nothing up that hill. Let's go into this outlet. There's nothing in that inland.

What about this outlet? Oh, my God, there's a gorgeous bay. Look at this amazing Paradise Bay in this inland. Nobody's ever been here before. This is a great harbor. This would be a great port. Then the explorer sends a message back to the queen saying, I've found this great Harbor. Then the queen appoints a leader. Now, this is very different than the Explorer who's trying everything. A leader is someone that goes in a straight line that says, We're going to this harbor We're going to set up a city here. These are the benefits. This is how you will gain by doing this. Follow me. And the leader goes in a straight line. And if halfway there somebody were to say to the leader, Hey, what do you think about going to a different direction instead? The leader would say, Shut up. Lock that man in the jail. We're going straight ahead. I'm not changing my mind. And the leader goes in a straight line to the destination with a clear mission undeterred. That's a great leader because that person is easy to follow. It's clear where we're going. Even if you're in the back of the crowd and you can't hear what the leader is saying, it's easy to see where we're going, what we're doing.

In hindsight, I see then the difference between the explorer and the leader and how I was just an explorer, which made me a really bad leader. But next time, if I were to do it again and I wanted people to follow me, I would pause my explorations, declare a certain harbor to be the destination, and I would set that project as having a clear unwavering mission. Even if I personally might go explore some other things, I would declare this project to have a clear mission, straight line, easy to follow.

Is that distinction too black and white? In the real world, leadership is a little bit more messy than that. I think it's a little bit more gray, whereas you can have some exploration and some set the vision and the objectives and let's go. No deviations. Follow me. We're going. But the great ones, I feel like, also are curious enough and humble enough to listen to people on their team, even if those people work for them when they say, Boss or leader, dude, this part of the plan is actually not right. This part needs to be tweaked a little bit. And a good leader say, hold on, let me think about that. You're right. We still have the same vision. We're still heading in the same direction. But yeah, what you're telling me, I missed on that part. Let me adjust. So it seems like there is a little bit of gray in there, whereas the Explorer versus leader thing seems more black and white.

Two thoughts. Black and white examples are made intentionally purified for the sake of clarification so that we can see what we're talking about.

Good call.

But even in that metaphor of the leader going on the boat to the harbor across the world somewhere. Yeah, you're right. That ideally, if there was a storm in the way, a good leader would not go through the storm. He'd go around the storm. The destination hasn't changed, but maybe the path changed. Or In that metaphor, you're right. If somebody looked at the map and said, Hey, boss, by the way, I love how you said, Boss, leader, dude. Hey, boss, leader, dude. We could actually get there better or faster if we were to take It's this alternate route, which you had not planned, but it actually gets us to the destination better. I think anybody listening to this, you get the metaphor for your own situation. But it's good to realize that some of us have started businesses for our own satisfaction in exploring. You should be wary. If you notice that you are more of an explorer, but you're calling yourself a leader, you might need to take a different approach or keep your explorations personal and keep your business in a straight line, even if your personal interests are keeping you astray.

What would you do? Would you get help from other great leaders? Would you ask them questions? Would you read their books? Which you read tons of books, I know. What would be your approach to be a better leader next time?

I would just define it as a project, like how we incorporate a company. You set up an LLC and you say, For this project, this project has this goal, clearly stated, straight straight line, this is what this project is doing. Follow me to this destination that this project is out to pursue. We're aiming to discover this technology. We're aiming to solve this problem, and just set it as a clear defined project so that then even if you hand that off to a different leader, that person also knows the clear aims of this. It's easier to communicate, your marketing is easier, you're able to more clearly see exactly what this is, what it solves, how it will help, where it's going. Yeah, leave that as an individual project that goes in a straight line.

I think my dad was so, and he still talks about this, being so good at being vividly clear in the message and narrating the journey and making sure we knew how we played a role in helping us get to whatever that thing is. And we're like, okay, I got it now. I can go execute on this thing. That's the job of leader, though. It's like the rally the people and make sure you're clear enough as a communicator that they know where we're going, why we're going that way, and how you specifically help us achieve this big thing, then you can get on board. Derek, I got one more question, man, before we run. This is awesome. I appreciate you getting up early over there in New Zealand. It's cool that this technology exists that I'm here in Ohio, you're in New Zealand, we can talk like we're just hanging out. But let's say you're meeting with one of those. We mentioned the early college grad when, hell yes or no, might not always work for them. But let's say they're like, Hey, man, I want to leave a positive dent in the world. I really do, like you have.

But I'm not really sure yet how or what I'm going to do. What are some general pieces of life/ career advice you give to that person?

If you see yourself from the outside, like we talked about earlier with the starving artist, it's almost impossible to predict what the world will want from you. You can read the stories of successful people that maybe moved to California to take a job in insurance, but then suddenly, randomly got a job as an actor because somebody saw them in a restaurant and thought they fit the part of a haggard army general. They took that job and it ended up being their biggest success. You never know what the world wants from you. Therefore, it helps to try lots of things and not get too hung up on one thing that you're guessing is going to be your contribution to the world, but might not be. I'm going to use a music metaphor here. In my years in the music business, I'd occasionally run across somebody who had written a song, one particular song that meant the world to them, and they kept trying to push that song onto everybody, but people just didn't like that song. But it was frustrating for them because they said, No, this is the song. This song has great value. Listen again.

Maybe you'll like it the second time. They were trying to push this thing that people didn't want. Then I see that in business, too. Somebody that has an idea that they're just sure that the world is going to want this, but the world doesn't want that. It's unwise of you to keep persistently pushing without changing. You need to persistently consistently keep trying variations until you find the thing that the world clearly tells you, Yes, we want this from you. That's what happened when I started Seedy Baby. I had done many, many, many things. I had a booking agency, a record label, a recording studio. I had my own music. None of it went well. It was just failure, failure, failure, failure. Then this silly, whimsicle little thing I did on the side to help a few friends. That's the thing that took off and could feel such a difference. Suddenly, all the doors that had been locked were suddenly opened to me. Everybody that had been booting me out suddenly was inviting me in. I never could have predicted that it was that one thing that would have been the big success. Do lots of stuff, try many things, keep yourself out there, and listen closely to what the world is telling you it wants from you.

Yeah, you never know, but you got to keep chopping, keep going, keep trying to add value to other people's lives. And eventually, it seems like things find a way of working themselves out. Derek, part of the reason I love your approach just in general to life is your dedication to excellence, is your willingness to do a lot of the hard work that nobody sees to edit down these massive massive books down to small ones where there is literally not a single wasted word. I even read the transcripts that you've published of podcasts you've been on, including this podcast. And even the transcripts are edited beautifully I know I don't speak as well as what it looks like in those transcripts. And so I'm thinking, was I really that good? I'm like, no, obviously I wasn't. Derek edits them because he cares about even the transcripts that he puts out. So this dedication to excellence on these high standards, that is inspiring to me. And so I just want to make sure you know that I appreciate that. And I would love to continue our dialog as we both progress, man.

Thanks, Ryan. I really appreciate it.

So good. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, rian@learningleader. Com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Derek Sivers. A few takeaways from my notes. The standard pace is for chumps. Most things are paced so the slowest person can keep up. You don't have to go that slow. In fact, you probably shouldn't. Think of ways you can increase your pace, much like Derek did, by graduating from college in two years instead of four. The standard pace is for chumps. Next, we should question our beliefs. Beliefs. For hundreds of years, people worshiped Jesús, Athena, and others. Now, we call that mythology. They're myths. But when it comes to our own beliefs, those, no, no, those are just true. Only others believe Our beliefs are myths and/or superstitions. We should question our beliefs, too. We should get excited when we find that something we had originally thought to be true turns out not to be. I love that. Then the shipping email he wrote for his customers at CD Baby. Initially, he was like everybody else.

When the CD was actually shipped, the first note was just normal. Hey, your order has shipped today. Please let us know if it doesn't arrive. Thank you for your business. Then he changed it to a variety of fun creative things. One of them being, your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized, contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. The whole point is to be yourself, be different. You don't have to do like others do. In fact, you probably shouldn't. Be creative, be creative. Be funny. Enjoy it. Create something that might make somebody forward it to their friends or write about it in a book or want to spread a cool story. We all can do that. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Derek Sivers. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. Because you to do that, and you also go to Spotify and Apple podcast and write a thoughtful review and rate the show, hopefully five stars, and subscribe to it.

Doing all of that helps me continue to do what I love on a daily basis. For that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.