psychology of disproportionate results - derek sivers transcript

2011:yearof thehustle

HUSTLE YOUR WAYTO THE TOP

BY RAMIT SETHI

Psychology of Disproportionate Results

Master Class with Derek Sivers

Transcript



BY RAMIT SETHI



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S I V E R S I N T E R V I E W T R A N S C R I P T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com

2$100 MILLION IN SALESRamit Sethi: Hi, everybody. This is Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach You to Be Rich and Earn 1k.

Today I’m thrilled to have my friend, Derek Siv-ers—a very illustrious guy. I’d like to tell you a little bit about him. Derek Sivers founded CD Baby, the largest seller of independent music on the Web, and drove it over $100 million in sales, and for selling it to focus on helping musicians. Esquire Magazine said: “Derek Sivers is changing the way music is bought and sold—a musician’s savior; one of the last music business folk heroes.” And I’m delighted to have him here on the call with us.

Welcome, Derek.

Derek Sivers: On the Internet no one can see you blush.

Ramit Sethi: [LAUGHS] Derek, I want to just talk about the first time we actually met, because I thought it was pretty illustrative of just your per-sonality. We got introduced by somebody, I don’t even remember who it was, and I got your phone number and I was just texting you because I had just gotten to New York, and I was saying; hey, why don’t we meet up and we can grab co!ee, or something; and you actually said: hey, are you hungry? If so we can eat. Otherwise why don’t you just come up to my place and we can have tea.

And so, for the first time I met you I actually went up to your apartment; and I thought it was a pretty intimate gesture, actually, because in this day and age, people don’t usually invite other people up to their apartments. So that was the first time I met you, and I thought it was just a very nice gesture that you made.

Derek Sivers: [LAUGHS] You know what—it was

actually very practical, both when I was living in L.A. and when I moved to New York—in both plac-es I had a really nice place. Like I’m quite a mini-malist, I don’t own a lot of stu!, but I really like to live in a place that makes me happy. So the funny thing is, I was living in a great place, and I would often meet people out at Starbucks or something. And then I thought: what am I doing. Like the reason you kind of splurge on a place that you love, is because you love it, so why not just have people over. I’ve got the best co!eehouse in the world, right here, at home. So cook, I’m glad you liked that. Now you’re living there, the same place I invited you to,; and that’s where you live now.

Ramit Sethi: Exactly! No, I couldn’t resist, it was such a nice place. The other thing, by the way, that I noticed which I loved was, on your table you didn’t have too much except you had old journal issues of—I believe it was the Journal of Social Psychology—is that correct?

Derek Sivers: Yeah—I think it might be called Psy-chological Science, but yes, something like at.

Ramit Sethi: And you told me that after you sold your company, which we will get to in a second. That you just realized you loved the stu! and you wanted to stay up-to-date, so you may be the only non-academic I know who actually subscribe to that journal and got it delivered every month.

Derek Sivers: Yeah, I loved it, and it was damn expensive too, it was like $295, I think for a one-year subscription, but it was like: uh, if I come up with even just a few great ideas from this it’s worth it, and it was—it was wonderful.

Ramit Sethi: Yes, so you and I share a love of both understanding social psychology and also under-standing human behavior, and we apply it in very di!erent ways, but today I thought it would be



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3fascinating to kind of go through four or five major areas. And the first one that I wanted to ask you about is your CD Baby story. It’s one of the most interesting stories of business anywhere online, and particularly of music. So I wonder if you can walk us back to 1998 and tell us the story of what CD Baby was and what it became.

Derek Sivers: Sure. Well a little context first, that last time I had a job was 1992, so I was already a fulltime musician, and I decided at 14 years old that I want to be a musician and that was just all I wanted to do. So even as I had a job for just two years from 1990 to 1992, that was just what mu-sicians call a ‘day job’ it was a thing I had to do to pay the rent while I was really working on my music.

And in 1992 I had saved up enough money and had enough musical income to quit my last job. So I was making a fulltime living as a musician, and I put out my own CD in 1996, and 1997 I had sold about 1,500 copies of it just o! the stage. And I was trying to get it up and selling online, even though most people didn’t do this at that time.

Amazon was still just a bookstore, the only big online music stores at the time were CD Now, Mu-sic Boulevard and Tunes.Com and I loved the fact that they are all gone now. [LAUGHS]

So I wanted to get it selling online, so I called up each of those three companies and said: Hi, I would like to sell my CD with you, I’ve already sold 1,500 copies on my own. I know there are people around the world that want to buy it, so how do I get it selling with you? And they all said: who is your distributor. And I said: I don’t have a distributor, can’t I just send you a box of CDs and you sell it and pay me? And they just said: sorry, kid, it doesn’t work that way. Look, our website is really just a front-end to the major distributors, so

the only way to get into our website is basically to go get a record deal, and get into the major labels distribution and that will get you on our website.

And I said: well, can’t I just be my own distributor? How about I just makeup a company name and I’ll be a distributor that you sign up into your system? And they said: no, it doesn’t work that way.

And I thought: damn, you know, how hard can it be? I mean, it’s a credit card merchant account and a shopping cart—and damn it. So I thought fuck it, I’ll do it myself. [LAUGHS] So you’ve got to understand the context though—in 1997 when I was doing this PayPal didn’t exist yet. Amazon was just a bookstore, and there was not a single business anywhere on the Internet that would sell your music if you were an independent musician without a record deal.

So, I went to go get a credit card merchant ac-count, and back then it was hard. It was like $1,000 in set up fees. They actually had to send an inspector to my location, and made me incor-porate, set up a separate bank account. It was about three months of paperwork.

But after three months of hard work I had a credit card merchant account and then I had to figure out how to build a shopping cart. Which, again, it’s easier these days, but back then you had to buy a book and copy down some CGI-BIN, Perl Scripts, and a lot of work to get a shopping cart work. So, again, it’s like after three months of hard work, I had it. I had a Buy Now button on my website. I was so proud and it was so cool, like I told some of my friends around New York and most of my musician friends said the thing.

It was like: hey, could you sell my CD through that thing. And I went: oh, yes, I guess so—sure. So what I did was just literally on my band’s website I



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4had a little section which was like a big: Click here to buy my CD. And then below it, it said: Or, some of my friends’.

Ramit Sethi: Nice.

Derek Sivers: And it had a little picture feature there, and pretty soon, I started getting calls from strangers saying: hey, man, my friend, Dave, said you could sell my CD. And I’m like: Yeah, sure—here’s my address, send it on in and I’ll take care of it. And I was doing this as a favor to friends—right.

So after a few months I realized that this was start-ing to take over my life, and I’d better start charg-ing some money to do this. I think I’ve accidentally started a little business. But you have to under-stand this context, that I was living the musician’s dream. In fact, I was living in Woodstock, New York at the time. I bought a house with the money I made touring and producing people’s records and playing on people’s records. Like, I was living the musician’s dream, so the last thing I wanted was for some business to distract me from that dream—right?

Ramit Sethi: Mm-hmm.

Derek Sivers: So all of this was done really reluc-tantly. It was like a hobby. I wasn’t trying to make money, and you will see that this will, of course, play later into the story, but there was just one key night when I realized that—okay, like it or not I’ve accidentally started a business. I mean, people are contacting me every day wanting me to sell their CD. So what am going to do?

I thought—okay, well if this is going to be a busi-ness anyway, I really want to make it like a utopian kind of musician’s dream come true scenario, be-cause I don’t think that will make a lot of money,

and I don’t think it will work out really well, but at least it will make me happy.

So what is my musician’s dream-come-true sce-nario? It’s like: number one-as a musician I would want to be paid every week. Number two—I wanted to know the full name and address of everybody who buys our music. Number three—you’d never kick me out of the system for not selling enough, and number four—there would never be any paid placement, because I hated in those situations where like, the big boys with the deep pockets get to, like, buy up all the front page space and those of us without...you know, it’s never fair those who can’t a!ord it.

So that was like my very utopian idealistic idea of what I was doing here, and honestly, the reason I tell you that is because I’m really proud. Like those same [few 08:44] musicians really just fu-eled the entire company and stayed all the way to the end, like stayed through to its original mission.

So anyway—I started this thing, and for the first year it was me in my living room in Woodstock, doing this in my spare time. Then I was doing it in my fulltime, and then after a whole year I hired one person to help me, and after a whole other year I hired a second person, so it was growing really, really slowly. You know, sometimes I think a lot of people these days, they start a company and they are upset if it isn’t going gangbusters by month-three or something. But you’ve got to understand, like I was just doing it for two years. I had no investors, I started it with 500 bucks, just did everything myself, it didn’t cost any money.

And it really wasn’t until like four years into it that it really started taking o! around 2002, that’s when I had about eight employees and then 20, and 30 and 50 and then it just kind of ran out of control. And still the whole time I was just doing



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5what I originally set out to do, it was selling the al-bums of independent musicians, kind of in the last few years out of that, after the ITunes Music Store launched, we became a digital distributor, kind of distributing music to Apple, iTunes and the rest, and then selling [to industries 9:52] but really just stayed true to its original mission.

And I don’t know—do you want me to the end of my CD Baby story?

Ramit Sethi: Yes, let’s get to the meat. Tell us what happened.

Derek Sivers: [LAUGHS] Okay, well everything was just cruising along and a lot of your readers are money focused, so what’s interesting, that I try to explain to friends—is this weird, surreal situa-tion of becoming rich. That I didn’t set out to do that, but I was really just doing what I loved. I was just focusing on CD Baby, I absolutely loved doing it. I loved helping musicians, building the system, constantly working on it, like just trying to figure out how to make the store better, more e!ective, how to call more attention to my friends’ music.

And by this time we had like 200,000 musicians using the system, and two million customers buy-ing music.

Ramit Sethi: Wow!

Derek Sivers: But what was interesting is like, I really wasn’t focused on the money. In fact, here—there’s a story I’ve got to tell you.

Ten years ago I was in Las Vegas for a confer-ence, and took a taxi to my hotel, and I was just chatting with the cab driver, and I said: so, how long have you been here. And he said: I’ve been here since 1976. And is aid: wow, I bet the place has changed a lot since then, uh? And he said:

yeah—and I miss mob.

Ramit Sethi: [LAUGHS]

Derek Sivers: I said: what! He said; I miss the mob; and I said: okay, why? And he said: you know when the mob was around this town, it was fun. He said: there were only two numbers that mattered—how much money is coming in and how much is going out, and as long as more was coming in than going out, everybody is happy.

He said: now, the goddamn multinational cor-porations come in and they try to maximize the profitability of every square foot of floor space, and now the hot dog stand charges me an extra 20 cents for ketchup, and now every square foot of floor space in this entire city is maximized for profit. It sucked all the fun out of this town.

And I really took his point to heart, because there are so many ways, when you’re running your busi-ness you can try to absolutely maximize every bit of profitability out of your business, or you can just kind of relax a bit and remember like what’s the real point that you’re doing this.

So often people would come to us and kind of say: where is your terms of conditions, where is your privacy policy, where is your legalize on the website. And I’m like: I don’t have it and I don’t want it. And they’re like: what if somebody sues you some day? I’m like: well, they haven’t—so I’m fine.

Ramit Sethi: Yes.

Derek Sivers: And then people would me like: what’s your o"cial policy on this. And I started telling my employees like: look, this place has all of the formality of Doug’s and Bob’s Tackle Shop in Key West. Like, just think along those terms.



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6Like things don’t need to be hyper-e"cient and maximized, and I’m not trying to get rich.

So anyway, with that said—as I was just doing this and doing what I love, I would just look at the bank every now and then. Like I really had this—like the taxi driver said, I just had this mentality, like I really didn’t pay that attention to the money, but the numbers just kept going up. And one day I noticed that my bank account—or I should say rather—like the company’s bank account, but I was the sole owner. The company bank account had $100,000. And then one day it had $200,000 then I noticed it had $300,000 and then it hit $500,000 and then it hit one million, and then it was like $1.5 million then it hit $2 million—it was just so surreal, and it really didn’t change anything about my life. I got a little comfortable sense of knowing that I’d be fine no matter what.

So like even if all of my customers went away tomorrow for the rest of my life I knew that, like, I had enough money in the bank, that I would be okay and wouldn’t be desperate. But other than that it didn’t change anything in my life. It’s not like I bought something that I didn’t want before because there was a good reason I didn’t want it before, you know—why want it now.

So anyway, let’s just now go to the end. Then around...after I had been doing it for ten years, I had just recently rewritten a software from the ground up, and it worked, and it was beautiful—it was, honestly, one of my proudest accomplish-ments to date. Like a rewritten version of CD Baby I did in 2007. It was kind of the culmination of everything I had ever learned about programming and marketing and site design. It was perfect and I was so proud of it. We had a great Christmas sea-son, and then at the beginning of 2008 I just real-ized I was done. It really kind of felt like the way that a—I don’t know—a painter or a sculptor feels

when you’ve finished an artwork and you have the final brushstroke and you look at it, and you step back and you go—Yeah, that’s it! I’m done—that’s everything I ever wanted to do. I had no future vi-sion about it anymore.

Ramit Sethi: So what did you do?

Derek Sivers: So, although I had vowed that I would never sell the company, and I really meant it for the ten years that I said it, all of a sudden I was realizing, well, if I’m done, then that means I’m actually doing a disservice to my customers by staying at the helm because I’m anti-ambitious about it at this point, I would actually rather it be smaller not bigger.

So I decided I was doing clients a disservice because they wanted their careers to grow not shrink, so I decided to sell it, and it was just coin-cidental actually—like about the time when I was feeling done, I got three phone calls in one week from three di!erent companies o!ering to buy CD Baby, but I had actually been receiving these calls all along for ten years. And so for ten years I had been telling them no, and so this one week where I got three calls in one week I told them all no. But that weekend I kind of stopped to think, like—take a hint. I’m feeling done; three people are willing to buy it in one week.

Ramit Sethi: Yeah.

Derek Sivers: I think this is what’s called a seller’s market, and I should just take a hint and go for it, and I had to do a lot of soul searching to real-ize like: am I really, truly done with this—and the answer is, yes. So I sold it.

Ramit Sethi: And you sold it for a pretty good amount. I don’t know how comfortable you are revealing whatever the ballpark was...



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7

Derek Sivers: [LAUGHS] Well I’ll tell you—you know I was never ever going to tell anybody, and then one friend asked me once a few years ago and I answered him and I thought it was confiden-tial, and then he went and [blogged/blabbed 16:14] about it, so...

Ramit Sethi: Wow!

Derek Sivers: So it’s public, so anybody can find out now, so I just decided to...oh, well, so yes, I sold it for $22 million U.S. and I was the sole own-er and it was an all-cash deal so, yeah, I got out.

Ramit Sethi: Terrific! Now you told us how your life changed after $100,000 and $200,000 it wasn’t much. How have things changed after $22 million?

Derek Sivers: Not at all. It’s really...I think once I hit that point, maybe it really was like this change around 100,000 bucks, where it’s like I’m not broke anymore, I can a!ord what I want to do, but then you really have to get philosophical like—don’t make yourself want things that you didn’t want before just because you can want them now. Like you’ve got to, kind of...if you don’t cure insa-tiability, you will never be happy.

Ramit Sethi: Yeah.

Derek Sivers: So I never fell into that trap of insa-tiability, so I’m still just, you know, in this little one bedroom apartment with no stu! in it, it’s what makes me happy, so still just living the same life but it’s just—it’s just nice to know there’s a safety net, I guess that’s the only di!erence. And that was, you know—that safety net, I was feeling that after a couple hundred thousand, and at twenty million it doesn’t make any di!erence.

Ramit Sethi: You know it’s funny; I get this ques-tion a lot, especially when I’m talking to the media and they go—are you rich? Like very antagonisti-cally...

Derek Sivers: [LAUGHS]

Ramit Sethi: And so of course I would test re-sponses, because I love testing everything. And so I tested: well, rich is not...just a number, but their eyes kind of glaze over. So I started going: yes. And what happened was they would actually be startled, and almost step backwards, and then I would say: notice how that conversation just kind of ended, because rich isn’t really just a number. For example, is having a million dollars the same in Kansas as it is in Manhattan? Or is it the same at age 28 versus 58? It’s very di!erent, so I think we both have come to understand that rich is not about some number. And in fact, the journey is also about what are your values. And if you love, as you said, living in a nice place, you can do that. But it’s not really about some number. It’s not a finality of the number—that’s what I’ve found at least.

Derek Sivers: That is so well put, and you’re right. What feels rich to me at 28, it might...for example, my lawyer who is actually more of a friend than a lawyer at this point, he has been kind of living high for 20 years, and so when I mentioned the number to him he said: honestly, that’s not that much money. [LAUGHS]


Derek Sivers: Because in his life—it’s like he pictures a life where life costs one to two million dollars a year—that’s his life, and so for him, 20 million, well that will last a decade, but then what?

Ramit Sethi: I love that.



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8

Derek Sivers: So to me, I make a life that costs $100,000 a year, and then it’s infinite because I’m living on less than the interest is generating. So that’s my general rule with the money, is like I just don’t touch the principal, I just live o! the interest for life now.

Ramit Sethi: I love that. After you had this success and after you lived in New York for a while, which I know you wanted to do—now you’ve basically taken upon and you started traveling the world, which I thought was a really cool thing to do. Just like, I can do this now and I’m going to do it.

Derek Sivers: Thanks. Yeah, that was something I’ve been wanting to do anyway. You know, it’s funny, all along in this kind of 20-year journey and ever since I got out of high school, I guess, I’ve always been making every decision with the com-pass...with freedom as the compass.

Ramit Sethi: Hmm?

Derek Sivers: It’s which decision would give me more freedom? So that’s why I don’t own many things, it’s because everything you own is kind of one little weight that’s restricting your freedom. And so I made this kind of laptop life for myself, where I didn’t have to be at the o"ce, and made sure that my business was set up in such a way that I could be anywhere and all this kind of stu!.

What’s funny is around 2007 or so; I hit this point where I was absolutely, totally, completely free. Like my business didn’t even need me anymore, they didn’t even know where I was living—they didn’t even know what country I was in, and I real-ized like every morning I would wake up with this feeling of like: wow—today I could do anything and I don’t have to do anything.

Ramit Sethi: Mm-hmm.

Derek Sivers: And I could be anywhere and I don’t have to be anywhere. It’s almost too much freedom, that we are not used to like that much of a blank slate every day of your life. We are used to living within certain restrictions, so yeah. But anyway—so around that time I just decided like: I was born in California, I’ve lived my whole life in the U.S. it’s a big world out there, and I don’t to just go visit and snap a picture and come back to California, I want to live in that world, and really immerse myself and understand, like living with this grand plan of understanding the world—like I want to know what it is to live in China and speak Mandarin, at least conversationally, and really get to...you know, where my circle of friends were all born and raised there, and I really started to understand what it’s like to grow up in China, and live there long enough—to the point where I get it and it feels comfortable, and it feels like home.

And then once that happens, then go somewhere else. Then you go to Brazil, and you learn Portu-guese, and you surround yourself with all your friends who are from Brazil, and you really start to understand what it’s like to be born and raised and grow up in Brazil, and you understand that mindset, and you live there long enough until it feels really comfortable, and it feels like home.

Ramit Sethi: Yeah.

Derek Sivers: And then you move to Berlin and you do it again.

Ramit Sethi: Yeah!

Derek Sivers: You know, it’s like I just have this vision of life that when I’m 90 years old, 100 or something, I want to be looking at the globe and there will be no part of it that feels too foreign, like



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9it all feels...like I’ve seen...like I know people from every corner. Which gets you very, kind of, anti-territorial, and anti-patriotic, you know. There’s a funny thing, that the ones who shout: my country is number one—the loudest, are the people who have never left.

Ramit Sethi: Mm-hmm! So let’s talk about how you do that.

Derek Sivers: Okay, yes.

Ramit Sethi: So we’ve got...I have four major things I want to ask you about, and the first one is not about tricks on how to do it, it’s actually quite the contrary, because you and I both have a love for working harder than anyone else, but working on the right things to get disproportionate results. So, I Will Teach You to Be Rich readers, I call this hustling, in a positive sense of the word. But I’ll just give you an example, where you think about anyone who really studied hard for their SATs or their GMATs or whatever. I mean, some people put in hundreds of hours, and maybe they get a terrific score.

Five years later they look back, they don’t remem-ber how hard they studied but they’re still getting residuals from really crushing that test and get-ting into the best schools or whatever it may be. The same thing is true of working hard to get into a great job, or even working hard to find...being open enough to find a great partner, or whatever it may be.

I want to ask you about a story I read of yours about Kimo Williams and you have this line, it’s actually in a di!erent part of your site, where you say: you don’t get extreme results without ex-treme work. I wonder if you could talk about that.

Derek Sivers: Sure, yes. Part of the reason at the

beginning of this call, that I kind of took longer than usual to kind of tell you some background context things about me, is because I knew we were going to talk about these things. So at 14 when I decided I wanted to be a musician for life, knowing that you want to be a musician is—under-standing your life is going to be hard. You know, deciding you want to be a musician means: I’m never going to have insurance, I’m never going to have a job, I’m never going to have a steady income. Every dollar for the rest of my life, I’m go-ing to have to fight hard for, and I’m fighting for a dream that a million people want and only a few get, so I’m going to have to work as hard as an Olympic athlete works to win a gold medal.

That was just my outlook on life at 14, so I just became...I found what I loved, like I had found my calling and I just threw myself into it completely. So in college, for example, I went to Berklee School of Music, and my nickname in school was The Robot, because nobody ever saw me sleep or drink or relax or party. I would wake up at 6:00 a.m. and I would go running and I would practice all day and I’d write and I’d be in the practice rooms, and even at meal times, everybody else would like hang out in the cafeteria for a couple hours. I would dash through—slap together a peanut butter sandwich and head straight to the practice rooms.

And everybody would head to bed at midnight, and I’d be up until 2:00 a.m. practicing and I’d sleep for four hours and do it again. That was my college experience.

But Kimo Williams, the guy that you mentioned, was a real turning point in my life because I have this passion already but I didn’t have a role model who had set my expectations high enough, really. Like I still kind of thought that maybe I’d spend my life being a music teacher or something. Like



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10I though that...I knew I wanted to be in music, but I didn’t...I don’t know, he just kind of set a new model for me.

Let me explain what happened. He was a music teacher in Chicago that I met just a couple months before I left to go to Berklee School of Music, and when I told him I was going he said: Berklee School of Music, eh. He said: well—why don’t you come by my studio. He said: I used t teach at Berklee, I think I can show you a few things.

Ramit Sethi: Right.

Derek Sivers: So I went to his studio and he said: look, here’s the deal— Berkelee School of Music, like most colleges, it moves at the pace of the lowest common denominator. They have to make sure that every student in the class understands, so therefore they go at the pace of the slowest student...

Ramit Sethi: Ah—interesting!

Derek Sivers: He said, if you’re bright, like you are, and if you’re driven, like you are—you can graduate college in two years. You don’t have to accept the standard pace. And in fact he said another line that really stuck with me. He said: the standard pace is for chumps. That’s like, whenev-er you hear somebody telling you this is how long it takes to get a degree, this is how long it takes to be an accredited counselor, whatever it is you’re setting out to do in life, that’s the standard pace they’re telling you, and that’s for chumps, that’s like for the lowest common denominator.

If you know what you want, like what you call the hustle, you can go for it, and not even by cheat-ing. You can—just by not accepting the standard pace that you’re given, you can find a way to do it faster. So here I am at 17 years old and this guy is

telling me: I think you can graduate college in two years and here is how. And what he did; he said: okay, sit down at the piano, open up his book. And he gave me this intensive music harmony les-son.

He was like—okay, what’s a major scale, how is built. Okay, this and that—so play for me in C-major scale; now if you build a scale; if you build a triad—do you know what a triad is? Okay, good, you build a triad starting on the E, what’s that called? If you built it o! the B what’s that called. Okay, this, now if you were to place this note with that note, what’s that called? Come on, come on, you can do this—go!

And it was like that kind of pace, you know, it was a little bit like that scene in The Matrix where—what’s his name—Morpheus is showing Neo how to fight in that assimilated karate thing. Come on, you can do this! He said: let go of those limita-tions, you can do this.

So that was my music harmony lesson, and in only two 3-hour lessons, Kimo taught me four semes-ters of harmony.

Ramit Sethi: Wow!

Derek Sivers: And then in two more 3-hour les-sons, he taught me four semesters of arranging. So by the time I went to Berklee only two months later, I took the entrance exams and I tested out of like 12 classes already. Like I basically just passed the exam, and then he told me: for all those re-quired classes that you’re not to [psyched 28:32], he said, just go to the head of the department—he said: buy the books, do all the homework yourself in your spare time and then go to the head of the department and take the final exam. You don’t have to attend the class, just take the final exam.



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11So I said: really? He said: yeah, trust me. So I went there and did it. So I bought all the books for all the classes that I was not signed up for, did all the homework and just went there and took the final exam and passed. So, yes, I graduated college in two years plus one summer semester.

Ramit Sethi: I loved that you highlighted the fact that most organizations are built for the lowest common denominator. I mean, and you can see this everywhere. When you think about, some-times by law, the way the ballots are made, or the way that when you go into the DMV, things have to be accessible to everyone...

Derek Sivers: Yes.

Ramit Sethi: But then when you go into compa-nies they—or organizations like schools—they do cater to the lowest common denominator. So what you said just makes a lot of sense—right. If you’re smart and you’re motivated and driven, you can sort of leapfrog others. But I guess my question is—why don’t more people do that?

Derek Sivers: I think, you know, I might not have if I hadn’t have run into Kimo. I wouldn’t have known. It takes somebody to show you that you can. I mean, I love what—in your book—what you do. Showing people: look, just call your credit card and say this. And they hang up the phone going: oh, my god, I did it. I can’t believe I just did that, and it’s showing people that they can—it’s crucial.

Ramit Sethi: Yes, sometimes we don’t even know the boxes that we live in...

Derek Sivers: Exactly!

Ramit Sethi: Until we see someone who’s stepped outside it. And I remember, my sister, for example, who talked about a negotiator. She is

one of the top negotiators I’ve ever met, and she would be like...she would see these guys who were, like, building porches and stu!, and the next door neighbor they bought some guys in to build a porch, and she needed some work done on the back porch. And she would just say: Hey, can you guys come over, would you be interested in help-ing out a little bit and I can bake you some Indian food... or make you some Indian food. And she got like $1,000 worth of work done for one plate of saag paneer.


Ramit Sethi: And I’m like—what! You could do that. I didn’t even know that. And sometimes it’s seeing someone who is just taking it to the next level, or they have sidestepped, or they’ve been taught by someone, and it makes us realize our own self-imposed limitations.

Derek Sivers: Yeah, I mean...if you don’t mind, here, let’s just throw in one other...

Ramit Sethi: Yeah.

Derek Sivers: Example of this—that once you’re in that mindset, you look at the world in a whole new way. Like there are musicians, for example, I’ll just keep using this musician example because it’s what I know best—who kind of like bitch about the system. They’re like: man, radio stations suck, they don’t play any good music, it’s all controlled by the corporations, man. And they will just like sit around and bitch about it. I just imagine the typical musician just kind of going like: whoosh, whoosh...


Derek Sivers: Yeah, man—that’s fuck man; it’s bullshit. And they’re just sitting there bitching about it, not doing anything. But then once you



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12start to look at the world in this way, you think, well—then let’s make a radio station. Or if you don’t like the radio stations, make a radio station. If you don’t like the distribution out there, make your own distribution. I mean, even when I look back at what I did with CD Baby, I wasn’t really looking at it through that lens at the time, but basi-cally I was dissatisfied with the state of distribu-tions, so I started a new distributor.

And there are people who...My friend, Gary Jules—check out this story—he was a musician in L.A. who was dissatisfied with the venues. All his friends were just bitching: man, you know all these places you can play in L.A. they are all people posturing, trying to get a record deal. Nobody is just playing just to actually listen to the music any more. And all the people that come to clubs, they are like seensters, they just want to be seen, and it’s all about how you look. And why isn’t there a venue where people can play music that people want to hear and people who want to hear music go there to just listen to music? Why doesn’t that exist?

So while the rest of his friends were just bitching about it, Gary kind of was walking around Hol-lywood and just took a very determined stroll through all the streets in the county...central neighborhoods of Hollywood, and he found this one little co!ee shop called Hotel Café, and it was just kind there in a prime location, but really not doing anything except croissants during the day. And they had a wonderful little area by the window that would make a great stage, and they were closed at night.

So he went to them and said: look , why don’t you let me run like a singer, song-writer acoustic night here on Tuesday nights? And they said, no, no, no—that’s not our thing, we are just a co!ee shop.

He said: look, you don’t have to do anything. I’ll provide the sound system, I’ll book my friends, I’ll promote it; just let me use your space. And so they said—okay, tentatively. And so he did it on Tuesday nights and it got more and more popular, and then they started doing it like every Tuesday and Thursday; then it was seven nights a week, there was music there and he was taking care of everything. And now Hotel Café is like the hottest club in L.A. the most desirable place to play and all that. And he made that venue exist, and I just love that mentality.

Like if you start to feel powerful in this world, you realize, you don’t have to just stand in line and just do what everybody else is doing, that anything that you’re dissatisfied about, you can change it. It’s almost like—there’s this idea of the...you know this saying: when you’ve been given a shitty end of the stick in any deal. So I just figure, you can flip the stick around. If somebody is saying like: man all these banks are ripping me o! man, banks suck. Well, start a bank you know.

Ramit Sethi: Yeah.

Derek Sivers: Why not, somebody did, why not you?

Ramit Sethi: You and I have such a similarity in our blogs and in our whole outlook, which is—you don’t have to be a genius to change the way that you interact with the world. In fact, there are some small, simple tweaks you can take, and those first tweaks really are just designed to show you that the world is actually way di!erent than you think. As Steve Blank said; there’s a whole game going on around you and you don’t even know that it’s being played. And I find that if you can get like those scripts, for example, in my book, those are carefully designed to be in the first chapter of my book, because what happens is people pick up



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13the book. It already looks like a scam. I Will Teach You to Be Rich sounds like—who is this dude? And then if they, if they kind of read through the first few pages, they say: hey, let me try this script, I’ve never seen a script like this.

And they use it, and it works, and all of a sudden they say—whoa, I don’t have to just take this bank that’s been gouging me for the last four years. Now, number one—maybe I’ll take this guy’s ad-vice and read the rest of his book, so that’s kind of my own selfish purpose, because now it works for them. But more importantly after doing all these things, they say like—wait a minute—I can actually have a totally di!erent relationship with the com-panies that I deal with; with my friends.

In some of the stu! that we’ve done on I Will Teach You to Be Rich, we tell people, just take somebody interesting out to co!ee. It’s 20 bucks; it’s the best 20 bucks you’ll ever spend. And when people do that for the first time it’s scary and nerve wracking, and then they realize like: wait a minute, I just learned so much form this guy and most people...and I’m sure this has been the case with you—with me as well—most people are happy to give advice. They love doing it because it makes them feel good and they’ve been given advice too.

So your whole story, the one you just told I love, because it’s really about standing out from the crowd.

Derek Sivers: Yes.

Ramit Sethi: And it doesn’t take you being genius, it just takes you o! into taking some initiative.

Derek Sivers: You know, I’ve got to admit that I still kind of think this mindset was partially formed, or mostly formed by me deciding I wanted to be

a musician. You see, there are a lot of cultures where the big ambition in life is to get a job at a multinational corporation. Like that’s the goal of a lot of people going to engineering school, and whatever, is to just get some job. And with that mindset then maybe like, fitting in, is what they’ve been told will get them hired, and not fired.

Ramit Sethi: Hmm!

Derek Sivers: But you’ve got this kind of mind-set of being a mover and a shaker, then yeah, the name of the game is to stand out, whatever you’re doing, so just look at what everybody else is doing and do the opposite. Or even whatever...Warren Bu!et talks about that from an investor point of view; but from a career point of view or just...what is everybody else who wants what you want doing? So find a way to do the opposite in a better way.

Ramit Sethi: Yeah. I look at people...I have this thing I call the 10-year savings strategy, but it’s also just a 10-year strategy, and that is: look at people 10 years older than you, and say, do I like who they are and what they’re doing.


Ramit Sethi: And the funny thing about us—espe-cially in America—we love to believe that we are di!erent, that we are highly individualistic, and I have agency—but the truth is, you know, we live in a system, and odds are that we are like everyone else. We have a job, we go to it, we are going to have kids, we are going to have a house. I mean, we are creatures of habit. And so if you look at someone in your field or who is doing what you’re doing, and you see what they’re doing ten years ahead of you—they’re ten years older than you; if it’s a lawyer and that lawyer is working say 60, 70 hours a week, or 80 hours a week as a partner—



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14chances are that you are going to be doing just that.

Do you like that? If so, great, now you know what to work towards. If you don’t, how can you change to do something a little di!erent? I think that’s very important for people to look and realize they’re not that di!erent than others. Chances they are going to be the same, so use that information to inform your decisions today.

Derek Sivers: Yeah, although...let me add one thing to that though, it’s not just look at the ‘what’ but the ‘why’. What I mean is, imagine four people, two of them are doctors, two of them are lawyers. If you’re just looking at the what, you would think that the doctors have more in common and the lawyers have more in common with each other than they do with the other doctor lawyer. But you get to talk to them and you ask about the why, and one doctor is a doctor because their mother died of leukemia and they want to make sure that no one dies of leukemia ever again. And the other doctor just had kind driven it into them that you need to be a doctor so that you can support your family. It’s about money go for it.

And then you meet the other lawyer, and one lawyer says, if you ask why that person is a lawyer, their family drove that into them that they need to be a lawyer to support their family. And then the other lawyer is a lawyer because his dad was wrongly jailed and he is like passionate this and wants to make sure that nobody ever has to have that injustice again. So in way it’s like doctor-1 and lawyer-4, have more in common than...

Ramit Sethi: Right!

Derek Sivers: So make sure...so I’ve found that, for example, the reason a lot of people are start-ing their own business, are entrepreneurs or

whatever is because they want money. And that’s not my case, so if I look at somebody like Richard Branson, for example, is a role model to me in some ways, but his kind of insatiable appetite for like, what makes somebody not stop when they hit $20 million or $100 million but be driven to make $1 billion then $10 billion then $500 billion and still be driven that person wants something di!erent out of life than those who might just hit a certain point where you’re cool, and then focus on reading books or something—you know.

Ramit Sethi: Right.

Derek Sivers: You want a di!erent thing out of life. So just make sure that when you’re looking at these people that are ten years ahead of you that you’ve found people that match not just the ‘what’ that you want but also the ‘why’ you want it.

Ramit Sethi: I love that. Incidentally, speaking of books, you read a lot of books and then you turn around and write up some of the best book reviews that I’ve read anywhere on line non your blog www.sivers.org. Why do you do that? You don’t have to do it, why do you do it?

Derek Sivers: [LAUGHS] Well, actually I’ve been doing it for years just privately, just keeping it on my hard drive only. The idea was that being a min-imalist type of nomadic, traveling guy, I don’t want to bring my books with me everywhere, so very often I would read a book and go: God, that was brilliant, that was amazing, that was wonderful. And then I’d have this fear that I’m going to forget everything I learned three years form now, and I don’t want to bring the book with me everywhere I travel and then reread, so instead, what I started doing is, as I’m reading a book I’m underlying and circling my favorite bits, and then when I’m done with the book, and then I write down those bits and I open up a blank text file and I type up those



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15bits into a text file named with the name of the book, so that I just have this directory on my hard drive just called books with the text file notes of every book I’ve read for the last, I don’t know—five years at this point.

And then when I’m just researching, like anytime I’m like: what was that book that mentioned that Italian word ‘sprezzatura’ what was that? Then I can just grab sprezzatura—there it is—oh, yeah, okay. Wow, I forgot about this book, and I can reread my notes and remind myself of my favorite bits.

So I’ve been doing that for a few years anyway, and then I realized, I guess maybe I should share these with people. So I put them up online. I’m always, kind of, wincing a little bit, like some day a publisher might tell me, you know, to take it down or something. But on the other hand, I look at my little Amazon a"liate sales and I’ve generated a lot of book sales for people.

Ramit Sethi: Yeah.

Derek Sivers: So maybe it’s all good, but I mostly do that just for me.

Ramit Sethi: To me the reason you do that em-bodies two things, I think, that are just powerful for people to know. Number one—is to build a portfolio, and I learned this from one of my men-tors—and he taught me this in college, he said: build a portfolio and the first thing I though was like: Hey, I’m not like an artist, I don’t have a port-folio. And he said: no, no, like the projects that you work in class. Build a portfolio, meaning just sketch, or glue, or whatever it is, what you were thinking as you developed that project.

Why? Because when you go to get a job, other people are going to walk in there and talk, they’re

going to tell how good they are, you are just going to plop down this portfolio and say—look, I’m go-ing to show you. and that was one of the reasons that I was the only weirdo student in my school, that I know of, that used to take my essays I wrote for class and post them on my website. Like I did one about Stockholm syndrome, and this like when I’m some 20-year-old cocky kid. And all of a sudden I get someone from Scotland saying: we are doing a law enforcement conference and we would like to use your research in our conference.


Ramit Sethi: And I’m like this 20-year-old kid. And I’m like—go for it. And by the way can you fly me out there too? And then the other thing of building a portfolio is so important—and the other thing is giving to others. And one of the things I think about when it comes to expertise and get-ting good at something is—that’s just a first step. The second step is turning around and making that useful to other people. Otherwise what’s the point?

Derek Sivers: Yes.

Ramit Sethi: So if you’re a musician you can learn it all. But then you play, and if you are good at building a blog, or investing, or whatever it might be, you give that away too, because that actu-ally encourages more people to come to you, but more importantly they get good and I think in this world we are looking for people who can guide us along. So I’m struck by your story, even though it’s just book reviews—it’s not really just book reviews.

So a couple more questions for you, Derek, one is passion. And then we will talk about low value and high value activities. This question I get a million times and a lot of people just love talking



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16about their passion, I haven’t found my passion, what’s my passion? This is such a large area. Any thoughts, it’s seems you have a unique perspec-tive on some of this. What would you suggest?

Derek Sivers: [LAUGHS] I also...it’s funny, we must get the same people email us. I get a lot of people who ask that: like, I don’t know—I love how you’re just so passionate, but I haven’t found my thing yet...

Ramit Sethi: Yes, yes—oh, my god, I get similar emails.

Derek Sivers: I don’t know what my...

Ramit Sethi: Yes.

Derek Sivers: And so I thought about this for a long time, and I realized that the problem is that people who say that are expecting it to be like this massive thunderbolt flash of lightening like—yes! I’m going to cure malaria—ta-dah...And they’re go-ing to get this giant passion and purpose in their life, and I think the media, storytelling books, or movies, or whatever they kind of build it up so we think it has to be this big, magic thing. And then I realized it’s a lot like Romeo and Juliet...

Ramit Sethi: Yes.

Derek Sivers: But if you read too many love stories or watch too many movies, or whatever—you’d think that love needs to look like Romeo and Juliet. That it has to be this anguished, pas-sionate, driven—the moment they saw each other they couldn’t stop. They did this, and it’s intense and it’s burning—and you must die—otherwise if it’s anything short of that it was not true love. And I think people kind of expect that their passion needs to feel like that. But, instead, like if you just notice what excites you and what scares you on a

small moment-to-moment level, that’s your pas-sion.

So it’s like, if you find yourself—say you’re dab-bling with something online, like you play with PhotoShop and you will play with PhotoShop for hours into the night, then just go for it, maybe that’s actually your new calling. And I like the idea of what scares you too. So if there’s something that you notice that every time you think about it, it feels kind of terrifying, like you get kind of but-terflies in your stomach thinking about it. Maybe you actually would love to be a Hollywood screen-writer. Like actually write major blockbuster mov-ies, but just me saying that makes me go like: oh, oh, oh—no way—I can’t do that. I don’t know who those geniuses are that write those things, but it’s not me.

Ramit Sethi: Hmm!

Derek Sivers: Even if you’re just feeling that kind of nervous terrified feeling that means it’s prob-ably a worthy endeavor for you. I think you just go. Any time you just do whatever—it excites you, whatever interests you and whatever scares you, you are on the right track and that is your passion and it’s just maybe people like you and me who just share it a little louder than others, it makes it look like it’s some big, giant, burning passion. But really it’s just following whatever interests you.

Ramit Sethi: I like that. My friend Ben Casnocha says: Think about doing more of what you do on a Saturday afternoon.

Derek Sivers: Mm-hmm.

Ramit Sethi: You know, when nobody is around, when you’re reading that book on fashion, and you’re just sitting in your apartment, maybe that’s a route that you could take. Nobody is forcing you



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17to read it. Think about what is it that excites you; and I’d like to deconstruct it. So I think two things. One is—if you’re reading a fashion magazine, sometimes people will jump to a very tactical con-clusion. They’ll say: I want to create my own fash-ion magazine. Well maybe, or maybe you might want to be a fashion reviewer, or maybe you just want to be a fashion photographer.

First, is to understand the whole universe of op-tions when it comes to what excites you and what makes you scared. So if you talk about screen-writing, there are all kinds of di!erent writing and screenwriting and things in Hollywood.

The second point I was going to make is—search. Do searches, investigate, talk to people. In about 10 to 15 hours you can become really, really smart on any given area, in general. So if you say, I really love fashion, or fashion magazines, that’s good. That’s not su"cient though, go deeper. Start searching, talk to people, go to a couple of meet ups, and you will be a lot smarter within just two weeks.

Derek Sivers: Nice, I like that. And then there’s this idea, like don’t be afraid to change. I think some people say—get into music, for example, because they love music, and they learn to play bass and they join a band, and now they’re tour-ing around the country, but they are often the one that’s actually booking the gigs, for example, and as time goes on they notice that they actually are more passionate about booking the gigs than they are just standing on the stage thumbing the E-string again. And so when you hit a situation like that, you just need to admit it to yourself.

Like, you know what, actually even though this isn’t what I had announced to all my friends and family...

Ramit Sethi: Hmm!

Derek Sivers: I think I’m actually more interested in this side than that. Don’t stick with something just because it’s what you set out to do, or just because it’s what you announced. Like keep true to your current interests.

Ramit Sethi: Do you find that being honest with yourself is di"cult? I find it increasingly di"cult. Like, for example, I’ll say things like: yeah, I really should sort that pile of papers that’s been sitting on my table for nine months.


Ramit Sethi: Well, if I’m honest with myself I’m not going to sort that pile of papers, and the reason I say pile of papers, is that every time I go home to my parents house, I would take this pile of pa-pers that I needed to sort and I would stick it in a plastic bag, and I would take it home. And I would say—yeah, I’m going to have a lot of free time when I’m at my parents’ house. And of course, what do I do during my free time there? I eat and I sleep. And it happened to me like ten times, where I would go back and never sort those pa-pers. Finally, I had to admit to myself this is not go-ing to get done. So either hire someone to do it, or just throw it out. And I find that pattern of being honest with myself very, very di"cult sometimes. Have you had that experience?

Derek Sivers: Yeah, the minimalist thing was kind of...that’s one stage I think of like what you’re talking about where I started looking at so many things in my life, like saying, I’m holding onto this because I told myself that I might need it some day just in case. Or, some day 20 years from now I might want to look at that. Then I just kind of do this cleansing thing of looking at it and going: you know what—fuck it. I haven’t looked at that in



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18one year, I’m not going to look at it in ten years. And so I just throw out everything. I mean, dude, I threw out my old diaries, my old love letters, my old photos, my old everything. Like I just realized, I don’t need it—I don’t need any of this stu!. So I just threw it all in a big dumpster and I gave every-thing away I couldn’t throw away. But the real one to me, that’s been harder to admit—it is what an introvert I am.

I think this world is getting more and more social, and especially now for those of us who live on-line so much, everything is more and more so-cial. Meet with your friends, for real, check in let your friends know where you are at all times. I’m like—ugh. It’s my nightmare, I don’t want people to reach me, I don’t want to be contacted...I like sit-ting alone. I like sitting alone for 5 to 12 hours at a time in total silence just thinking, writing, reading, that’s what I love. And meeting up with friends—yeah, maybe a couple hours a week [LAUGHS]—

But it’s funny like even, I got married this past year and so we’ve spent every hour together for the past year. She, a few months ago, said: you know, I think you are even less social than you admit to yourself. Or I think she might have said—you’re more antisocial than you admit yourself.


Derek Sivers: She goes: you really just want to be alone pretty much all the time. I’m like—yeah. It’s just a very unpopular opinion to have.

Ramit Sethi: Yeah.

Derek Sivers: Everybody expects you to be so-cial, be connected, meet up with everybody. And I’m like: no, I just like to be alone—thinking, writ-ing, reading, learning, creating. So it’s hard to kind of admit those things...

Ramit Sethi: Sometimes it’s just so close to you to force you to look at them. It’s not always bad, it’s not always good, but that’s interesting—okay. Can we talk about low value versus high value activi-ties?

Derek Sivers: Yeah.

Ramit Sethi: You are a guy that gets a lot of stu!...Okay, here is the thing. I just sent you an email a couple days ago by the way, I was like: hey, this is a nice article that you’ve put together—actually, I’ve sent you a few emails because I see your ar-ticles everywhere. Okay—like I’m on this website and it’s linked to you, I’m reading that blog and it’s linked to you, and I’m like—dude, this guy, I can-not escape Derek Sivers.


Ramit Sethi: And so, I want to just talk to you about how you think about what’s worth work-ing on? And, for me, I talk a lot about cost versus value, and I think sometimes people overly focus on the cost of something. Like, oh, my god, that course costs 500 bucks, or whatever it is, that’s too much, and really the value, if that course makes you $2,000 or it makes you happy, like lattes is a classic example where every personal finance expert in the world says: don’t spend money on lattes. But the truth is, first of all it doesn’t cost that much, and second of all the value is there. People love it and it makes them happy in the morning.

So how do you think about cost versus value? It’s obviously not just dollar related, and also can you maybe talk about what’s worth working on?

Derek Sivers: Yeah, I mean, I could talk about the stu! that I think has already been covered enough



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19by you and even people like Tim Ferriss, this idea that...look at what you’re working on and think: can somebody else be doing this? And if you can pay somebody else $15 an hour to do this and you consider your time to be worth than that, then what the hell are you doing, just let somebody else do it. So that’s one way of looking at it, and that’s an important point to get first. So let’s say that that’s the...make sure you understand that mindset first.

But then what’s interesting is you have to get kind of philosophical. Like you said a little bit about the latte; what makes me happy? Like truth, the most optimized life I could live may not have lattes in it. And the most money optimized life I could live would be me spending all my time just selling and doing the stu! that brings in $1,000-an-hour, and somebody else can do the other stu!.

But you do have to ask yourself: what do I love doing; because I’ve met a lot of miserable million-aires...

Ramit Sethi: Yeah.

Derek Sivers: They are a lot of people that are trapped and bitter...I’ll tell you what the biggest one was—it’s like when I finally kind of set up my business so that I was not required for the day-to-day operations of my company. Like it was hard work, and I think that’s the thing you’re talking about—it was an article I just wrote on my site just two days ago called: Delegate or Die...

Ramit Sethi: Yes.

Derek Sivers: And it was just my tale of how I realized that it’s kind of the self-employed trap. If you’ve been an employee, you dream of being self-employed. You think, oh finally, I won’t have an asshole boss; I will be my own boss. And so

then you become self-employed, where you’re earning money by stu! that you’re doing with your own two hands, and somebody is paying you to do it. And that’s great at first until you realize that you’re kind of trapped.

Meaning like, if you want to take a few months o!, like if you can just imagine some horrible that hap-pens in your life like you get hit by a car and break a bunch of bones or something, your income is going to dry up completely, if you’re not—if you’re two hands are not on the project. And that’s not real freedom to me. And I always make decisions in life based on what gives me more freedom, so I had to kind of go through the hard work of teach-ing everybody else at my little small business how to do everything I was doing. Every question they asked me I made sure that every...I wouldn’t just answer the question I would make sure ev-erybody heard my answer and understood the thought process behind it, so that they wouldn’t have to ask me this kind of question anymore. Made sure that it was clear to everybody—they could do it themselves.

So anyway after about a year of doing this I had made myself unnecessary to the running of my company, and I moved down to L.A., really just because my girlfriend was down there at the time. So I moved to L.A. and everybody I met with—I was meeting some really successful people—I mean, really successful business owners and mul-timillionaires or whatever, and when they would see that I’m in L.A. and they will...how are you able to be here while your company is running? And I would tell them, and they would say: who is run-ning it then?

I’d say—well, I am. I’ve built a system that works. And they’d say—oh, man I could never do...I haven’t taken a vacation in 12 years man, I work my ass o!. And sometimes people are really



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20proud of telling you...

Ramit Sethi: Yeah.

Derek Sivers: How many years it’s been since they had a vacation. I’m like—it sounds like hell to me.


Derek Sivers: So you realize that there is a lot of, kind of, really successful people but, unfortunate-ly, got themselves tied up doing the stu! that they don’t really love. You see that they’re kind of suc-cessful but miserable. So I think it’s important to always notice that very, kind of, quiet voice in your gut. Like what excites you and what drains you. So if you’re doing something that’s draining your energy. Like you just noticed that every time you do this, you just feel like—uh, I hate doing this, but I have to do this—and just stop immediately. Just find a way to stop doing that.

Everything that bores you, there’s somebody somewhere that it excites them, so just let them do those things, and whatever you notice excites you—like you said—what are you doing on a Sat-urday afternoon. Or what is the thing that’s keep-ing you up until in the morning, in a good way. You can’t sleep because you’re so excited about this thing you’re doing, make sure you’re doing more of that.

And, again, it may be unconventional; so at CD Baby I had 85 employees, but I was the only tech person, I was the only programmer, and every-thing you saw on CDBaby.Com both front-end, backend, Internet, outside, inside—it was all me, I just did the whole thing myself. Because that’s what I loved and so everybody that would look at the company would say, why don’t you outsource that? What are you—nuts? Like come on you can

a!ord it. I’m like—yeah, I can a!ord but this is what makes me happy.

So, instead, I found the stu! that I didn’t like doing which was going to conferences and schmoozing and talking to other businesses and doing busi-ness deals, I hated all that stu!. I mean, I did it for a couple of years, and just every time I would leave feeling exhausted and drained. And I said: Why am I doing this? Because I think that I’m sup-posed to, I’m the business owner, I should be the one doing the big deals. And I was like, no, but I don’t care if that’s what most people do, I hate it. I like sitting there alone on my little UNIX Terminal, programming. That’s what makes happy.

So yeah—I outsourced everything else, I out-sourced the running of the company—even the business dealing, the hiring, the firing, all that was done by others so I could just sit there—alone—and programming, that’s what I love the best.

Ramit Sethi: I just want to make a point about all that automate and delegate or die story you made for the people listening. Not all of us have com-panies with 85 people. Not all of us can automate ourselves out of a job, and still keep making mon-ey, but the whole point of everything you’ve said, Derek, today, is you start small. I mean, the way that you were able to build that business and sell it so successfully, it didn’t start in 1998, it started so much before that.

When you talk about your mindset when you went to Kimo Williams; and you talk about how you be-came a guitarist when nobody else could do the job that you got. And all these great stories you’ve told us about tonight, and that you have on your blog, it’s about starting out small.

So for those of you listening who don’t have 85-person companies, there’s probably some-



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21thing at your job today, that you don’t like and you could find a way to have somebody else do, you could ask your boss. Maybe you could figure out a way to negotiate to work from home on Fridays. There are so many ways, and I think the whole point of what Derek and I are talking about tonight is, when you crack that code, when you unlock the fact that you are in control, even in the small-est way, then the whole world starts changing and you then say: hey, I can also be in control of this, and that, and this—and that is how opportunities unfold over the long term

Derek Sivers: Hell, yeah—well said.

Ramit Sethi: Okay, beautiful. Anything else, Derek, that we should cover? I want to give a link to your site, and I also want to tell people about this amazing PDF that you have, really quickly. You didn’t even know I was going to mention this tonight.

But Derek has this PDF on his site which is at www.sivers.org/PDF, and it’s a PDF you put to-gether for musicians on how to market them-selves, and how to market their music. It’s one of the best pieces of marketing that I’ve ever read, and particularly with musicians who are some of the most people to sort of change.


Ramit Sethi: Actually, I’m glad you’re a musician because, like you are probably the poster child for...You know what, even though you’re a musi-cian you can do marketing and it’s not evil to make money.

Derek Sivers: Right.

Ramit Sethi: You know what I mean, all the classic things. So you put together this beautiful PDF and

it’s free, so everyone should go and download that.

Derek, your blog: www.sivers.org/blog is that cor-rect?

Derek Sivers: Yes.

Ramit Sethi: Okay, and anything else people should know about?

Derek Sivers: No, that’s it. I mean, right now I’m in this...since selling CD Baby...I think, you go through di!erent phases in your life to distinguish-ing between, like, your head down and head up, so it’s like for 20 years of my life I was absolutely just head down, nose to the grindstone, just com-pletely focused on my work, and when I sold CD Baby I actually incorporated my next company. I immediately put my nose to the grindstone to do that one—and I said: hold on, what am I doing? If my life is ever going to change and improve, I need to actually make a change in my life, not jut keep doing the same thing.

Ramit Sethi: Hmm!

Derek Sivers: So I forced myself to stop, and so for the last two years, I’ve just been kind of very much like head up, like looking around at the world, doing a lot of writing, a lot of reading. I’ve been going to the Ted Conferences, and I spoke at Ted three times—oh, I think four times now—and so everything...I think sometimes people look at my Sivers.Org website and they kind of wonder like: what’s the motive, what’s the catch; like what are you trying to sell...

Ramit Sethi: Yeah.

Derek Sivers: But I’m actually not trying to sell anything. It’s just like, I’m enjoying just sharing



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22and the people that I’ve met through doing this are amazing. So if I’d just encourage if anybody...if you actually listened to this whole hour conversa-tion, please just feel free to click the email-me link and drop me a hello-email. It’s one of the lovely side e!ect of being head up right now, is people often start an email to me by saying: I know you’re incredibly busy.

I’m like—no, I’m not busy. I’m in control of my life, and I don’t do anything I don’t want to do, so I’m not busy, I’m happy to talk to people, so feel free to contact me—I’m glad to help.

Ramit Sethi: It’s a motto we can all live by—I’m in control of my life. Thank you, Derek. It’s always a pleasure and not just in a professional sense, of course, but since we’ve become friends over the last couple years, it’s been a great learning oppor-tunity for me, and every time we talk I learn some-thing ten times newer than I ever expected to.

Derek Sivers: Oh, thanks, man. You too, I love our conversations, so thanks a lot.

Ramit Sethi: Thank you, I’ll talk to you soon.

Derek Sivers: See you.

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