Derek Sivers podcast

Life can be improved by adding, or by subtracting. The world pushes us to add, because that benefits them. But the secret is to focus on subtracting. Imagine a number line, with 0 on the left and 20 on the right. Say I want to be in the middle, at 10. But I’m at 17. “What can I add to get to 10? I tried adding 8 but that didn’t work. Maybe 3 would help. I should go all out and add 50.” No amount o...

David grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, with five brothers and sisters. When he was 18, he got accepted to a very prestigious art school in Vienna. Vienna! This was his dream come true! He had wanted this so badly, but never thought he’d actually get accepted. This was an amazing once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But his mother was on her death bed. An undiagnosable illness seemed like it was goi...

Years ago, I was so confident and so naive. I was sure I was right and everyone else was wrong. After I sold my company , I felt ready to do something new, so I started to learn . But the more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew and how dumb-lucky I had been. I continued learning until I felt like an absolute idiot. By then I was paralyzed, unable to create anything new. I’d start to...

Things I learned in the past are now wrong. Times have changed. Beliefs that were true are now false. They were based on old limitations that are now gone. Ways that used to work don’t work anymore. The old road collapsed. There’s a tunnel through the mountain now. When the old map is wrong, we can’t just draw a new line on it — we need to get a new map or we’ll be following closed roads. Sometime...

Most of us have lives filled with mediocrity. We said yes to things that we felt half-hearted about. So we’re too busy to react when opportunities come our way. We miss out on the great because we’re busy with the mediocre. The solution is to say yes to less. If you’re not feeling “Hell yeah, that would be awesome!” about something, say no. It’s an easier decision. Say no to almost everything. Thi...

In my first book, Anything You Want , I told the story of how I started, grew, and sold my company. As part of selling the company, I signed a non-compete agreement that said I couldn’t do the one thing I’d been doing since I was twenty-seven years old. So I had to make a real change in my life. I thought a lot about what’s worth doing, fixing faulty thinking, and making things happen . For the ne...

You are the way you are because of what you’ve experienced. Your country, family, town, random circumstances, and friends have shaped the way you think. If you had grown up on the other side of the world, you would have a different set of values and thought patterns. But if you keep experiencing the same things, your mind keeps its same patterns. Same inputs, same responses. Your brain, which was...

There’s a fable of a man stuck in a flood. Convinced that God is going to save him, he says no to a passing canoe, boat, and helicopter that offer to help. He dies, and in heaven asks God why He didn’t save him. God says, “I sent you a canoe, a boat, and a helicopter!” We all have vivid imaginations. We get a goal in our mind and picture the path so clearly. Then it’s hard to stop focusing on that...

Everyone who is drawn to you before you’re famous is thinking the same thing: You might be famous soon! fans who want to help you professionals who want to meet you musicians who want to play with you companies that want to work with you They’re all hoping to be included in your glorious future. As you get more successful, share that success with those who helped you years ago. When you’re in the...

When I was promoting myself as a musician, I noticed an interesting pattern. If I had a good conversation with somebody in the music business, then quite often they would send an opportunity my way within a day or two. In other words, when I look back at the random opportunities that came my way, they often came from someone who I had just spoken with a day or two before. Yes I just said this twic...

This is both fun and considerate. When people say that a movie has a great character, they mean it was someone especially shocking, funny, or honest. To be a great entertainer, you need to be larger than life. Push your outer boundaries. Show your weirdness. Bring out all your quirks. The world needs that. Your public persona — the image you show the world — should be an extreme character. It can...

This is one of the most useful lessons I’ve learned in life. When you don’t know your next step… When you’re feeling unmotivated… When asking someone to help you… When you’re ready to make a dream come true… Get more specific about what’s needed. There are two ways to do it: #1: Write down every detail you know. Inside your head, there is more than you’ve said. Take the time to write it all down....

I was at a musicians’ gathering in Memphis. I met a lot of people complaining that their various forms of online distribution weren’t earning them as much as they’d hoped. Then I met a musician who sold 8000 copies of his album himself. No distributor. No website. Just by himself. I asked him how he did it. He said, “ I just slowly drove around the city every night, with the windows down, playing...

I was 20 years old. I had just moved to New York City. And I was working inside the music industry. I ran the music library at Warner/Chappell . It was a huge room, near the executives’ offices, and I had it all to myself. Rock stars would come into my room before or after their meetings, to wait or relax. Because I was just some nobody working in the library, they would often speak candidly. What...

One of the top music industry lawyers in Los Angeles was speaking at a conference. She’s an expert in copyright law, so someone asked her advice on a licensing problem. They had recorded their version of a famous song, but were unable to get the rights to sell it because they couldn’t get a response from the publisher. The lawyer shocked the audience when she said, “Sell it anyway. Don’t wait for...

Psychology experiments have shown that the more people pay for something, the more they value it. People given a placebo pill were twice as likely to have their pain disappear when they were told that the pill was expensive. People who paid more for tickets were more likely to attend the performance. When people want the best, they look to the price to tell them what’s great. They think the expens...

The way you communicate with people is part of your art. For people who have never heard your music, it’s the start of your art! If you make depressing music, send your fans a dark black announcement that’s depressing just to look at. If you are an “in-your-face country-metal-speedpunk” artist, have the guts to call a potential booking agent and scream, “Listen you crazy dirtbag! Book me or I expl...

You get a big long email from someone and think, “Ooof. I’ll come back to that later.” (Then you never do.) Someone tries to contact you using a technology you hate, like a surprising incoming video call. You have a dilemma and need a good conversation, so you reach out to someone who replies, “Can you make it quick?” You’re overwhelmed with work on a tight deadline, and a friend calls trying to h...

Before I got into the music industry, I had an idea of what it would look like: Some powerful manager or agent calling me into his office to discuss the business of my music. Then I moved to New York City and became friends with cool people who also did things in music. Sometimes these people were agents or managers, but that was secondary. Mostly we were just friends. Sometimes I’d send them clie...

I was a struggling musician, with big ambitions but not much success, when I went to a music industry conference in Las Vegas to promote my music. I was nervous, but doing everything I could to make connections with the managers at all the big music companies. I attended every panel of experts, noting everyone’s name, and approaching the stage afterwards to introduce myself. I had these people up...

I hate to admit this, but it’s true. One of the best things you can do for your career is to move to a big city — one of the major media centers — the places that broadcast to the entire world. Nothing less than New York, Los Angeles, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, or maybe San Francisco. (Nashville, Paris, Seoul, or Tokyo only count if you’re limiting yourself to those markets.) It’s the place where...

A database is just an organized collection of information. You could have a database of your music or your books. But I’m going to talk about a database of all the people you know. Your email app is a kind of database. It has an address book of everyone you’ve emailed, and a history of your emails with each person. So you’ve already done half of what I’m going to describe here. But I’m going to re...

Everyone has weird mental associations with money. They think the only way to make money is to take it away from others. They think that charging for your art means it was insincere, and only for profit. But after knowing thousands of musicians for over twenty years, I’ve learned this: The unhappiest musicians are the ones who avoided the subject of money, and are now broke or need a draining day...

For years I made a living playing at universities. One time a college far away in Ohio — about a 12-hour drive — asked what I would charge to do a two-hour show . I said, “$1500”. She said, “Oh, that’s a bit too much. What would you charge to do just a one-hour show ?” I said, “$2000”. She said, “No, wait, you’ll be performing less, not more!” I said, “Yeah! Exactly! What you’re paying me for is t...

Imagine you see a caged feather on a museum wall. The sign underneath says the artist is a political activist in jail. Imagine that same caged feather again. But instead the sign says the artist is a high school kid in Florida. Or imagine that the only way to see it is to crawl deep into a shrinking tunnel that opens into a room of mirrors, where the caged feather is suspended by a thread. Same fe...