Derek Sivers on an Un-Optimized Life

Tim Ferriss

Where the hell was the boyfriend? I don't know. But he took her away.

Derek Sivers

You're on your own, babe. I'm out of here. I've accidentally missed one step in the storytelling of this that I should have included. The night in between those two days, I went home that night thinking, what the fuck? I think I just had a panic attack. I'm not one of those people. Like, I have no respect for people who have panic attacks. Because usually, panic attacks, to me, I think of like people who are just like, oh no, like my cake is late. I'm going to die. And they freak out over shallow little things. And it seems to me like they have no perspective on life. So then I have no respect for that kind of silly panic. But I had just panicked and it was involuntary. It's like that night I had this moment. It's like, wow, what does that mean? Am I a panic attack person now? Have I changed categories from a not panic attack person to a panic attack person? I just kind of fell asleep with no answers to that. So then, yeah, then the next day had this thing happen with a German couple. And I feel like that experience taught me two kinds of empathy. That we categorize people, like I just said, the type of person who has a panic attack. And we think of a category of person that's, say, like, depressed, fat, homeless, divorced, bankrupt.

Tim Ferriss

You are susceptible to the whim of chance in a way that I think is not particularly resilient. If suddenly your circumstances change and you find yourself in a different category, it can be really upsetting. And how do you think about what you call or don't call yourself? We were talking a little bit about this at lunch before we recorded, right? There are people that are like, I have read stoicism and now I am a stoic. And there's this identity that's assumed and these labels that are applied. And as much as I love stoicism, even though I invoke that name, I do think that you have to be careful with labels. So how do you think about that for yourself? Well-timed for a sip of scotch.

Derek Sivers

Well, young men, sit down. You sit down. By the way, audience, the hardest thing about hitting record on this is that Tim and I have these crazy all-over conversations in the forest and whatnot, that it's hard to remember that We need to close tangents today. Yeah, that's true. Usually we open a tangent and close it two days later.

Tim Ferriss

Yep, that's very true. We have to close tangents today.

Derek Sivers

Okay. So do you want me to go on my anti-ism tangent? Well, let's see. Is there some unfinished business that we need to tidy up first? There's a tiny idea around the identity, which is to just admit that whatever you are is now, and whatever your preference is now. So like when my kid says, I hate tomatoes, I say, today. And he goes, oh, right. I hate tomatoes today. Because it's leaving open the possibility that you might change your mind tomorrow. And he did.

Derek Sivers

All right. So, Dr. Sivers, please hold court. So, audience, I prepared. I took notes because although I love Tim's podcast, I love it most when people come and give us like an intense data dump. Yeah. Know this. Know this. So, all right, guys, I prepared a couple hours and here you go. So I'm going to unapologetically read from my notes to give you the best bang per buck of your time listening. So tech independence is all about the fact that I think the main sales pitch of the cloud is now don't worry your little head about that. Let us take care of it. We'll keep all of your data.

Derek Sivers

First, let me just say, the first thing you need is to get your own server, which is as simple as $5 a month. If you go to, there's a company I recommend called Vulture.com, but it's spelled V-U I could use some branding help, but yeah. So they have something called Cloud Compute for $5 a month, where basically that's setting up a private slice that's just yours, but on a shared computer. Okay, so it's like a virtual private server. A virtual private server, exactly. I was trying to not get technical.

Tim Ferriss

And a server, for people who don't know, I know this is going to be old news for a lot of folks. What is a server? Sounds super complicated and technical.

Derek Sivers

It's just a computer that's always online. That's it. Publicly accessible, always online. Doesn't even necessarily need to be public. We'll get to that. Because I think for setting up your server, there are three options. Either the $5 a month, vulture.com, cloud compute. Number two, search the web for a cheap dedicated server. So now a dedicated server is an actual piece of hardware that is only yours, not shared with anybody else. So if you want more privacy, just spend a little extra money and get a dedicated server. Which means, yeah, this physical hardware, you're the only person that has, they have physical access to it but you have the only root password and it's going to be an encrypted hard Drive we'll get to that the

Tim Ferriss

I had no idea you're going to bring this up. This is great. Yeah. Yeah.

Derek Sivers

That maximizers have been found to feel worse about the decisions they make. They look into every possible option. They try to make the best possible choice, but studies show that they feel worse about the choice they make. Whereas satisficers may not make the absolute best possible choice, but they feel much better about the choices they make. Yeah, I think a lot of who I am is because of satisficing. And if I seem like I make weird decisions in life, for example, like not even continuing to pursue making money, it's because I'm satisficing. Like I really took that lesson to heart and have shaped my life around it.

Tim Ferriss

So just for definition terms, right? Because people might think optimizing is trying to eke out every last iota of improvement, right? But I think what we're really talking about is...

Derek Sivers

Wait, sorry to interrupt. You know,

Derek Sivers

I haven't had a shower since yesterday. I was feeling greasy. It was distracting. But no, it's funny. I wasn't sure if you were going to say, so, as you were saying yesterday in the forest about sex.

Tim Ferriss

Oh, no, no, no, no. We'll leave that aside for scotch outside of recording. The unoptimized life, what effect has that had on you paying more attention to that? Leaving good enough alone? Because this is something I would like to do more of. And I've tried to focus with some success on making fast, especially reversible or trivial decisions, right? If it can be undone easily, this is also with money, right? Attention and money. I'm going to default to speed with a lot of things. If it's not that important or if it's pretty easy to reverse. I think that's been helpful.

Derek Sivers

Off the top of my head, I think how important it is to be done with something so that you can move on. Like, I don't want... Open loops.

Derek Sivers

I think about that with anything I post on my site, any of my books. It's like, all right, it's released. It's good enough. All right. I'm going to combine this, maybe another Siversism.

Tim Ferriss

It's not really Siversism, but in terms of how Professor Sivers operates in the world, useful, not true. We've been talking a bit about this. I wanted to save a lot of it for this conversation with the mics. Where should we start with this? All right. So, again, I'm addressing the audience for a second.

Derek Sivers

So, you know, I figure I'm coming on the podcast. This isn't just one of our random conversations. This is for the audience. There's a reason we're hitting record. It's for them. We can talk freely without hitting record. So I had to think, what's the most useful thing I could share with your audience that I've learned like in the last seven years since we last spoke? The thing that's made the biggest difference in my life, a superpower, a big, huge change. So to me, it's been, in short, skepticism. So if you wonder why I'm so happy, why I'm thriving, why I seem to be doing well, to me, it's a lot of my happiness comes from this worldview that is radical doubt. It's skepticism. And so I'm going to give this the shorthand of calling it useful, not true, but the visual for it is that moment at the end of the Matrix movie when Neo realizes like, those aren't bullets.

Tim Ferriss

So, again, I'm addressing the audience for a second.

Derek Sivers

So, you know, I figure I'm coming on the podcast. This isn't just one of our random conversations. This is for the audience. There's a reason we're hitting record. It's for them. We can talk freely without hitting record. So I had to think, what's the most useful thing I could share with your audience that I've learned like in the last seven years since we last spoke? The thing that's made the biggest difference in my life, a superpower, a big, huge change. So to me, it's been, in short, skepticism. So if you wonder why I'm so happy, why I'm thriving, why I seem to be doing well, to me, it's a lot of my happiness comes from this worldview that is radical doubt. It's skepticism. And so I'm going to give this the shorthand of calling it useful, not true, but the visual for it is that moment at the end of the Matrix movie when Neo realizes like, those aren't bullets. This is just code. Remember all the bullets coming away? He's like, oh wait, right. Like none of these rules apply to me. That's deep skepticism. It's empowering. It's liberating. So what I'm going to do for a few minutes, including a little stories, is to play Morpheus to help emancipate the listeners. So yes, I call this useful, not true. Preach. Preach. Yeah, there we go. Number one. So, okay, I'm going to tell you the four bits first, and we'll use that to kind of make sure that we come back to this. So number one, almost nothing is objectively true. Number two, beliefs are placebos. So you've got to believe whatever works for you now. Number

Derek Sivers

So since no beliefs are true, I think this is liberating to realize that you can just choose whatever belief works for you now that helps you be who you want to be. This is about personal empowerment. This is a little bit hacking yourself. If a certain belief will help you be who you want to be right now, you don't need to keep believing it tomorrow. You could believe it for three minutes or three days or, you know, the rest of your life. You're going to find what you look for. So if you choose to believe something, you'll find evidence to support your belief of anything. So the number three is that rules and norms are arbitrary games. So this is the one where I can't help but think of, you know, your introduction to the world and four-hour workweek giving so many wonderful examples of how you don't have to accept the World's norms. Yep, for sure. But it's funny how many times the rules of the world are stated as if they're absolutely true. Like, all applicants must submit their application through the usual channels and wait to hear from us. Or to be an expert in your field, you should have an advanced degree from a university. But someone made up these rules and most people follow those rules, but they're not true. They're just not absolutely true. So I think that realizing they're not true gives you an incredible advantage because you realize you can make up the rules. So this is that matrix moment where the bullets are flying out. And he goes, wait a minute, this is just code. Somebody made this up, but I don't need to run this program. But if you do that, people are going to be upset at you. So somebody's going to get mad at you and you have to know that even when they say you're a bad person for doing this, you have to know that that's not true either. And I have a cute story about that.

Tim Ferriss

This, I think, begs a number of questions living in a broader society about morally acceptable or reprehensible behavior,

Derek Sivers

Can choose your own.

Tim Ferriss

So there's a lot of this that I agree with. I also wonder how we avoid, maybe we don't, but sinking into a moral relativism where everything is okay on some level because nothing is objectively good or bad. Therefore, general mutilation of like 12-year girls or whatever it is, is totally fine in that culture because the culture is different. Therefore, I'm not going to object to anything like that. Yeah. Because I am not the arbiter of universal truth. Therefore, everything is okay in different cultures, different places, different households, because everything is relative. How do you think about that? I defer to Sam Harris. Okay.

Derek Sivers

Did he ever talk about the moral landscape on your show?

Tim Ferriss

I don't think we've discussed it explicitly. So why don't you, if you wouldn't mind elaborating. Probably the best elaboration is to tell people to go search for Sam Harris moral landscape.

Derek Sivers

The best TED talk I've ever seen. That is the one. Sam Harris, the moral landscape. So beautifully summarizes this

Derek Sivers

And he goes, this guy's full of himself. This book is trash.

Tim Ferriss

And I think about that all the time because... This is like... Was he a German guy? No, I don't know. I think, yeah, I've heard a bit of this before.

Derek Sivers

So it's like, because he found one thing...

Tim Ferriss

Not to slight the fine Germans. I should say outside of the US, Germany and Korea are my besties.

Derek Sivers

But he found one thing he didn't like about you, and therefore declared all 400 pages of this book to be trash. Right. And I think that's the problem with isms, is that if you're trying to buy into a system, yeah, it's all or nothing. And so if the leader of a movement says something you don't like on social media, well, now the bubble's popped. You know, it's a fly in my dish. It's a hair in the meal. It's a poo in the pool. The whole thing is ruined. Drain the pool.

Tim Ferriss

I think that's page four to seven in your Dr. Seuss. Right.

Derek Sivers

Oh yeah, we're back to that.

Tim Ferriss

The cat, the alien, and the octopus.

Derek Sivers

It's like the mindset that wants everything to be a religion. Yeah. You know, and I think that's deeply built into people.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, the reductionism. I mean, it simplifies reality. Yeah, simplifies reality. I like that. I mean, you do assume cognitive burden to take the harder path.

Derek Sivers

So on that note, back to my whole like useful, not true, my radical, what did I call it?

Tim Ferriss

Let's segue from personal growth to mentors. Because many people have had mentors. Many people seek mentors. Many people pine after mentors. And if they could only get a hold of person X and have a cup of tea or a coffee, pick the brain. Pick the brain, have a meal. Who would not want to have their brain picked? Yeah. So how would you suggest people ask mentors for help?

Derek Sivers

Here's what I do. I have three mentors. So anytime I had a little dilemma in my life, I write a really good description of my dilemma before I reach out to them. Because I don't want to waste their time, right? My mentors are VIPs. I don't want to waste a minute of their time. So first I write a really good description of the problem, and then I summarize it. I summarize the context, the problem. I summarize my options, and I summarize my thoughts. Because I've got to make this succinct. I don't want to send somebody a 20-page long email. So I have to make this as succinct as possible. What that in practice look like? A half-page page? Yeah, half-page. It's like bullet points for everything instead of paragraphs, right? As succinct as I can. And then before I send it to them, I try to predict what this person would say. So each of those three. Right, right. What anybody would say to this. But yeah, what this mentor would say, what that mentor would say, I know the way this guy thinks. I've read all his books.

Tim Ferriss

And I think a lot of people would agree with you. And for those people who might wonder, I actually do something very similar. Okay, can you tell? Yeah, absolutely. So I have, I try to spend time with people I admire and aspire to be more like in some capacity, right? Because I do think you become the people you spend the most time with. So to bring up a name that we've already brought up, I think actually a lot about Matt Mullen, because he's very calm in almost all circumstances. Not all. I know a handful of things that bother him, but he's very, very calm and measured and good at perspectival knowledge, taking alternative positions, taking the counter position on His own thoughts, his own opinions, his own goals. So I often think when I get dysregulated or upset about something, I'm getting wound up. I'm like, what would Matt do in this? What would Matt say to me? If Matt were in my shoes, what would Matt do? And I've also done that in writing exercises where I actually just sit down with my older self who has figured it out.