Love Your Work

Sometimes, to make a breakthrough, you have to partner up with "the man." Sometimes it's worth it. But, don't jump at every chance you get. I recently had an opportunity to join a podcast network . In fact, it was a very good podcast network. But, I turned it down. Since writing this article, I've watched this podcast network do very well. Meanwhile, I've struggled to grow this podcast. In fact, m...

May 5th, 1979. It was a jovial atmosphere. A new person was coming into the world. But as soon as the child was born, the room went quiet. The doctors predicted the baby wouldn't make it through the next 24 hours. Now, over 35 years later, as that baby, now an adult, would joke in his TEDx talk  – all of those doctors are dead. And Sean Stephenson @theseantourage  is the only doctor that remains....

Routines can reduce cognitive friction and boost your productivity. But do you really want to do the same thing every day? You know I think productivity is all about mind management, not time management. Routines are useful for managing your mind. On this episode, I'll tell you how having a weekly routine can help you boost productivity and be more creative, without boring yourself to death. This...

Ned Scott ( @certainassets , Steemit: @ned is trying to reinvent the way content gets made. He wants you to get paid in the process. Ned is the co-founder of a cryptocurrency called STEEM, and he's CEO of a website that runs on STEEM, called Steemit . Basically all of the actions that you would normally take on a site such as Reddit – writing posts, upvoting, or commenting, mines the STEEM – that'...

Warren Buffett (@WarrenBuffett) and I were neighbors. He lived in his famously modest house on Farnam. I lived in a $535-a-month 1-bedroom, in a basement with moldy carpet, several blocks down, on 49th. I used to live down the street from the famous mega billionaire, Warren Buffett. I never even saw him, but his presence taught me a lot. This article originally appeared on Medium . Sponsors http:/...

Jorge and Tanja wanted to travel the world, dance and party. It turns out, they were able to do that and make more money than they ever imagined they would. Jorge and Tanja wanted to make it as a professional Salsa dancing couple. They aspired to travel the Salsa circuit, to perform in competitions, and they figured they could make ends meet teaching classes in their home city. But the Salsa world...

I take focus seriously. The way I see it, being productive is not about time management. It's about mind management. If you're fully-focused on the task at hand, you can have way more creative output. So, I experiment a lot with ways to deepen my focus. Some of the methods I've settled into are unconventional. I'm going to share them with you today. This article originally appeared on Medium . Spo...

Ryan Hoover (@rrhoover) loves software products. He wanted to share new software products with other people who love software products. So, he started a little email list. There were a few dozen people on the list. They were submitting products to the email list, so Ryan got to learn about new products every day. But the email list grew rapidly. Once it got to a few hundred subscribers, Ryan decid...

Learn how to hijack habits you don't want, and replace them with habits you do want. I'll specifically be talking about how to replace a Facebook habit with a book-reading habit. That's what I did, and that's what worked for me. But, you can try this with any habits you want to hijack. This article originally appeared on Medium. You can follow me at kadavy.net/medium Don't forget to take the Love...

One day, Joanna Wiebe (@copyhackers) was hanging out on a web forum, helping a few startup founders with their copy. The next thing she knew, she had an inbox filled with requests for her help. So many people needed her copy help, that she couldn't help them all, so Joanna released some ebooks, under the name Copy Hackers, and made about $30,000 right away. Since then, Joanna has helped hundreds o...

How do you feel first thing in the morning? If you're human, you're probably at least a little bit groggy. You aren't thinking straight, you can't focus. You're a wasted morning just waiting to happen. So, the first thing you do is reach for the coffee. I have a suggestion that may help you get more out of your mornings. Are you ready for this? I think you'll hate me for it. Well, I think you shou...

Peter Bragiel wanted his own travel show. So, he got a camera and started traveling. At first, not much happened. Peter Bragiel just kept stowing the tapes away in a box. But, eventually, his adventures got bigger, and his videos got better. He's travelled the entire trans-Siberian railway, he's canoed the entire Mississippi river, and he even rode a tiny scooter, with a maximum speed of 29 miles-...

Rejection hurts. Sometimes it hurts a little more than other times, but it still does hurt. But, rejection is a part of life. If you never get rejected, you're not really trying. In 2016, I quadrupled my creative output. But, I got rejected harder and more frequently than any year before. I'm hoping for bigger and better rejections in 2017. I reviewed my 2016 rejections, and it didn't feel good. I...

Hugh MacLeod (@hughcards) is a hero of mine, who helped me find my own path. It was 2004, I was sitting in a gray cubicle in Nebraska. And I discovered a PDF on the Internet called "How to be creative." I read it, and it was one of the most moving and inspiring things I had ever read. You know how sometimes you read something and you're like "yes! That's exactly what I was thinking! Except I didn'...

I talked about minimalism with some of my guests. I talked about it with Craig Benzine on episode 39, and with James Altucher on episode 53. I'm not an extreme minimalist. I don't count the number of things that I own, trying to keep the number down. I consider myself to be a practical minimalist. I have just enough things to improve my focus, but I don't have so many things that it hurts my focus...

Vinnie Lauria found his calling after backpacking around Asia. He had just sold a company. He had just gotten married. He feared that if he spent a year traveling, he'd run out of money, and he'd run out of momentum. He worried it would be career suicide. But his wife, Kristine, pushed him to seize the day. They sold everything, gave up their apartment in The Mission and hopped on a one way flight...

We're well into 2017 now, and I've been reflecting on 2016. It was a great year. In fact, I more than quadrupled my creative output.   I'm just talking about words published here. I'm not even talking about the weekly episodes I published here on Love Your Work. Almost every episode of Love Your Work so far has been in 2016.   I spent much of 2016 experimenting with some methods of optimizing my c...

Noah Kagan first appeared on Love Your Work back on episode 41. On that episode, we talked about why discomfort is your compass, and learned that Noah even makes his bed in hotel rooms. I asked Noah to come back on the show because he had a blog post awhile back that I wanted to ask him about. It's called "my organization system," over on his blog, Okdork.com, and he talks pretty in-depth about ho...

Over the past year, pretty much every week, I've released a new episode of Love Your Work. This will be my last episode this year. I'll be taking a break for a few weeks. We've come so far since exactly one year ago, when the first batch of episodes debuted. The show has now been downloaded over 200,000 times! If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you may have seen some of the growth charts. Th...

There's this sort of productivity meme going around that you should make your bed. But, isn't making your bed kind of a waste? And isn't making your bed especially wasteful if you're busy? Here on Love Your Work, I've spent the past year interviewing some of the most successful entrepreneurs and creators. People like James Altucher, Jason Fried, Ryan Holiday, Laura Roeder, billionaire Steve Case,...

One of the best ways to impact others, while making money, is through building online courses. And, if you're considering writing a book, developing an online course is a great way to validate your idea, and see if your advice works. But, building online courses can be totally overwhelming. It seems there's so much you need to know about developing it, and marketing it. Then, there's all of the te...

James Altucher doesn't need an introduction for many of you. But for the rest, James is currently best known for his book, Choose Yourself, which is a National Bestseller, and which USA Today named in the top 12 business books of all time. You can buy Choose Yourself at kadavy.net/choose   He also has a very popular podcast. The James Altucher show has featured guests such as Tim Ferriss, Dan Arie...

One of the more subtle underlying themes of this show is that you should invest in yourself. There's a lot of noise out there you'll hear from others who want you to spend your money in ways that will benefit them. Ultimately, you have to be mindful in your decisions so that you're sure you're really investing in yourself.   I'll be talking about that a bit more in my conversation next week with J...

Dan Ariely is a researcher on the forefront of behavioral science. He specializes in understanding irrational behavior, for example, why do people take less candy if you give it out for free, than if you charge a penny for all the candy you want?   Dan actively works to find ways to change behavior for the better using this knowledge. Dan is a professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Du...

The current productivity wisdom is all about getting things done. Now, productivity is about making creative breakthroughs happen. Getting Things Done brought us beyond todo lists and priorities, and made us think about breaking projects into actions, and giving those actions contexts. By considering the context of our todos, and by giving ourselves a place for the "someday maybes," we freed up ou...