Love Your Work

Ryan Evans (@ryanevans) wanted to make easy money. Growing up on a pig farm, Ryan was used to making little money for lots of hard work. But Ryan would soon learn an important lesson about the dangers of easy money. This is, in my opinion, the most powerful conversation I've had on the show yet. In it, we'll talk about: Are there good ways to make money, and bad ways to make money? Ryan's hard les...

You may have heard that you should assign yourself an "aspirational hourly rate." That you should tell yourself you're worth, say, $300 an hour; and if you can spend $300 to save yourself an hour, you should do so. That's a powerful idea for making the most of your time and energy, but is all of your time equally valuable? In this week's essay , I propose a variable money value for your time. Imag...

Rob Wiblin (@robertwiblin) is the Director of Research at an organization called 80,000 Hours , and host of the 80,000 Hours Podcast . 80,000 hours being the amount of hours you will spend working in a typical career. 80,000 Hours is dedicated to finding out just how effective various careers are, and who is suited for those careers. We all want the work we do to matter. But how do we really know...

We're so accustomed to operating in a time management world, we can't imagine it being any different. We all have our calendars full, and even then we can't seem to manage it all. Believe it or not, it wasn't always this way, and if you want to stay relevant in the coming years, I think you'll have to learn to operate under a completely different paradigm. We need to stop thinking so much about ho...

Dr. Robert Maurer (@Dr_RobertMaurer) is author of One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way . He's also Director of Behavioral Sciences for the Family Practice Residency Program at Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center and a faculty member with the UCLA School of Medicine. In One Small Step , Dr. Maurer shows you how to make really big changes with ridiculously small steps. I first discovered...

Breaking through resistance to be creative is a battle with your own mind. We learned last week from Dr. Robert Lustig about how commerce is set up to hack your mind into a state of constant wanting, wanting, wanting. But the more you seek satisfaction from the outside world, the harder time you'll have finding it. That's why I think you should shut off the consumer mind, and fire up the creator m...

Dr. Robert Lustig (@RobertLustigMD) is Professor emeritus of Pediatrics, Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he specializes in the field of neuroendocrinology – in other words, how the brain regulates hormonal activity in the body. His research and clinical practice has focused on childhood obesity and diabetes. Dr. Lustig believes the food busine...

Curiosity is powerful fuel. If you want to make it as a creative, you need to follow things you're curious about. It's your best shot at being able to put in the work necessary to succeed. But curiosity can be so powerful, it can take you off track. In this week's article , learn how to use curiosity strategically. You can harness the fuel of curiosity while driving toward your goals. Image by Ste...

We're living in a time of exciting technological innovation. But just because technology can do something for us, doesn't mean that it should. Cal Newport is author of the new book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World . Digital Minimalism is a philosophy of using the power of technology only in the ways it serves us best, while eliminating use of technology in ways it harms...

If you want to be a master of your craft, you need to be able to see your skills and accomplishments objectively. You need to always be on the lookout for ways you might fool yourself – for ways you might cause yourself to feel as if you have accomplished something, when in fact you have accomplished nothing. One of the ways you can distort your vision of the truth is by identifying too strongly w...

Eric Zimmer (@etzimmer) was living in a van. He had Hepatitis C and weighed 100 pounds. Then he got arrested and lost his job. He was facing up to forty years in jail time. He had a $300-a-day addiction to heroin. Today, Eric is host of the popular podcast, The One You Feed , which was named one of the best podcasts on iTunes in 2014, and has more than 10 million downloads. The One You Feed is bas...

I often have listeners write to me, lamenting that they have "too many interests," or that they "lack focus." They've been taught to feel ashamed of their curiosity. It's interesting, the personality types of "introvert" and "extrovert" get a lot of attention. But I think equally as important is the difference between " perceiver" and "judger. " What is that? Well those hopelessly curious people,...

Srdja Popovic (@SrdjaPopovic) is a revolutionary. He played a big part in overthrowing Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. He now coaches activists around the world in non-violent resistance techniques, through CANVAS (Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies). This may seem out of left field to have a political activist on the show. It's not meant to be some thinly-veiled political s...

We live in a world rich with information, and algorithms help us find the things that fit us. Algorithms help us decide what books to buy, what music to listen to, and even who to date. But are algorithms always a good thing? If they aren't, how can you be " anti algorithm. " I talked about this concept a little bit with Tyler Cowen back on episode 155. Now I'll expand on it. What should be our ne...

How do you market something when you don't know what it is, or who it's for? If you're anything like me, you feel driven to create, but it's only through the process of creation that your vision takes form. It's only through putting that creation out into the world that you begin to realize what it means. This makes it a challenge to market your creations. If you don't know what it is, you don't k...

I'm launching a new email series. Summer of Starting will help you get out of your own way, stop procrastinating, and start creating. Sign up before May 24th at summerofstarting.com

Big creative projects are daunting. It's easy to burn out, and procrastinate. The problem is, creative problems don't get solved in one go. In medicine, there's a concept of the "minimum effective dose." It's the minimum dose at which the medication will elicit a response. If you follow Tim Ferriss, you hear him mention minimum effective dose often. You heard about the minimum effective dose of we...

Vincent Van Gogh was a loser and a failure. He failed as an art dealer, and as a preacher. He even got fired and banned from his own family's business. On top of it, Van Gogh had terrible health problems. His gums were sore, he was losing weight, and he had a hacking cough. He was also prone to psychotic episodes, during which he was institutionalized for months at a time. Vincent never really fou...

Do you want to love Mondays? If you already love Mondays, do you want to keep loving Mondays? I'm launching a new newsletter that will help you do just that. It's called Love Mondays , and it's a weekly boost of inspiration to help you find the mindset to make it as a creative entrepreneur. If you're already on my email list, you've already been enjoying these. Many of them include one of the more...

Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) woke up one day and realized two things: The world seemed to be filled with more and more anger and distraction every day, and – to make matters worse – consistently doing creative work wasn't getting any easier. Austin had already written three New York Times bestselling illustrated books. Millions have already learned to Steal Like an Artist – the title of his first b...

If you do particular actions on a regular basis, you'll change your identity. For example, if you make it a habit to write every day, you'll eventually see yourself as a writer. But it can work the other way around, too. If you change your appearance, you can change your identity. If you change your identity, you can change your actions. In this week's episode , I share my own experience of changi...

David Allen (@gtdguy) has built a legacy. He's created a system that helps millions of people get more of what they want out of life. Getting Things Done , the book, has sold millions of copies. And there's an entire cottage industry of GTD apps and consultants, all over the world. Even if you've never read or heard of GTD, you or someone you work with probably operates with "next actions," and "c...

Lots of people want to build a "legacy." They want to be remembered when they're gone. It's a natural product of our fear of death. But is it realistic to want to build a legacy? Is it realistic to believe you can control whether or not you're remembered? And might aiming to build a legacy prevent you from doing the type of work that builds legacies in the first place? I examine these questions in...

To me, Andrew Warner's (@andrewwarner) Mixergy podcast created the entire category of entrepreneur interview podcasts – a category this podcast here falls within. I started listening to Mixergy something like ten years ago, and it was one of the main podcasts that got my gears turning to eventually start this podcast – after putting it off for years, of course. Andrew has created over 1,700 interv...

To optimize your creative output, you need a creative productivity system. If you can identify the building blocks of your daily work, you can construct a system that works for you. One of those building blocks is what I call "task transitions." Task transitions are those little spaces between finishing one task, and starting another. Each transition is a critical moment. It's when you decide whet...