Another one turned out to be this phrase, the Norwegian secret for enjoying a long winter. So take that as you will, but I've been writing a novel with that as a title now.
In this episode, you'll get to know Laura Vander kam the productivity ringmaster, and you'll hear the story of how she became one of the most prolific writers in the world, while still successfully juggling a family of five children. I'm Dave Crenshaw, and this is my success Show. Welcome back friends to the Dave Crenshaw Success Show. This is where I speak to some of the most successful people I've met
in my life's journey. And I share their story while looking for universal principles of success that can help you succeed. In case it's your first time here. I'm a best selling author, I speak to Fortune 500 companies around the world. And I've taught millions of people how to be successful through my online courses I created this show is something different. The idea behind it was originally to help my family succeed, my children succeed, but I thought you'd like to enjoy learning
along with them. So as I interview people, I'm looking for those who have multifaceted success, people who haven't just had financial or career success, but also have fun and enjoy their life and their family. As you listen to today's episode, I want you to do one thing, I want you to look for something you can do, and the action you can take not a year from now or a month from now. But something you can do today this week. And that will help you make my guests success story, a part of
your success story. And today's guest is really special. Laura Vander cam is the author of multiple time management and productivity books, including the new tranquillity by Tuesday along with many other books. Her work has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and fortune. She's the host of two highly successful podcasts, best of both worlds. And before breakfast. Laura lives outside Philadelphia with her husband
and five children. And you can find her blog at Laura Vander cam.com. Laura, thank you so much for being on the show.
Well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. So
we first came in contact. Gosh, several years back when your first book came out 168 hours. When was that that released a
long time ago? Yeah. 2010? I want to say so many, many years ago. Yeah.
My first book with the multitasking came out 2008. So I think we both kind of got started in the whole productivity thing. Right around the same time. We've been around for a while. Yeah, I remember you reached out and I read part of the book. And I was happy to give an endorsement for it. Because I think in that context, we have so many similar perspectives on time management, definitely. So that's part of the reason why I was excited to interview. First of all, where are you located today?
So I live right outside Philadelphia and one of the suburbs of that study.
And you have five children? I
do I have five kids. They range in age from 16 to four. So running the whole gamut of high school to preschool. It's quite the mix. But I really enjoy seeing kids at different stages and seeing the relationships between big kids and little kids. Yeah, well,
I think from a career standpoint, that adds a lot of credibility to what you're saying. Right? I mean, that's a lot to juggle on top of your career. Yeah.
Well, it's funny. I mean, I didn't have five children as a personal branding exercise, but it has, in fact been helpful. I know people be like, and here's Laura. She's the time management expert. And people like Oh Allah, Allah, Allah, and she has five kids, and people go, Ooh, it helps with it. I guess that's how I would put it.
I only have three children. So that's not even close to the same. I think it was Jim Gaffigan. Who said, What's it like to have five children? Imagine you're drowning, and then someone hands you a baby?
There's an element of that, although the good news with us is they are spread out far enough and age that at least by the time the fifth one came the oldest are getting a little bit more self sufficient. I mean, I've definitely talked to people who have say, five kids under the age of eight, and that's when the true chaos starts to rain. Yeah.
Well, we're going to cover your story of your entire career. And so we're going to come back to this issue of being a mom while being a successful author and a speaker. What I like to do is start at the beginning with the fun question that we're all All I asked when we were young, which is what did you want to be when you grew up? And I'm talking about your teenage years, once you really started to form an idea of what practical career was? Where were you thinking you were going to go?
Yeah, so the answer can't be princess or witch or something like that, right? Yeah, no, no, no, not
the five year old car driver. President. Tena,
there were a lot of good ones. Yeah, well, I did not necessarily want to be a time management expert, I think that would have been a very odd thing for a child to grow up wanting to be. But I did want to write, I knew very much that I wanted to be a writer. That was something I had done. All through childhood, we have collections of my old stories, I attempted my first novel in fifth grade, it was terrible, as one might imagine, but it was
long. So I guess that's good. At least I had the idea of getting a lot of words out there going.
That's powerful. Just the habit of cranking out the words for a writer. Yeah, you better love it, or you shouldn't be doing it.
I have been cranking out a lot of words over the course of my life and continue to do so. But it's sort of funny looking at my life now, because there were other things that I wanted to do as well. And I'm not sure that I would have seen that they could combine as easily with writing. So I'm also extremely interested in math, that has always been something that I have been drawn to I did a lot of math competitions when I was little and enjoyed that.
And it turns out that time is math with denominators of 168, or 8760, or 24, all these different numbers of hours or minutes, or whatever. And yeah, so I've really enjoyed being able to write about those topics, I loved the idea of being maybe a professor or something, doing research and have been able to do my own research projects now that have become my books. And one sort of random thing was I was always
into performing. I did a lot of singing and dancing when I was growing up, and I loved being on stage. And it turns out now that speaking is a great way to get yourself back up on stage. And the way I tend to speak in most circumstances, I'm not really, you know, doing the big PowerPoint thing. It's more of a one woman show, right? And so you know, it's fun to be able to incorporate those aspects into my career as it is, you know, so I'm writing that is what I
wanted to do. But I'm doing a lot of other things, too.
Yeah. When you're presenting, you're walking a tightrope in front of the audience. And I know you like the circus analogies with some of the things that you do. But that really was what it feels like to me. When you're speaking, you're walking the tightrope, with no net, no one is going to rescue you. If you mess up. It's 100%. On you. I also show that as a past experience being in plays, being in musicals, that kind of thing. And it comes in handy in our career. No, yeah. Well, just
the idea that you can get up in front of people. And it might be exciting, as opposed to utterly and completely terrifying, which is another way to look at it. Right?
Yeah. So you went to Princeton? Correct? I did. By the way, that's a pretty amazing accomplishment in and of itself,
say don't hold it against me.
What were you studying at Princeton? What did you graduate in?
So my degree is from their school of Public and International Affairs. It was a major that I was vaguely interested in, and kind of took people from lots of different backgrounds. I didn't have one particular other thing I wanted to do. I kind of spent a lot of my time in college writing for
various places. And so I was freelancing for area publications to make money I wrote for a bunch of different student publications, I actually wound up doing this is crazy enough when I say this, but I wrote two senior theses because I had to write one in the public policy department. And then I also applied to the creative writing department to do a thesis through there. And there was really no way you could combine them, it would have been terrible, like a public policy
novel. That sounds really awful. So I just wrote a novel and wrote a public policy thesis and really enjoyed that. I guess. I've never minded writing a lot of stuff. And I guess that was one of my first indications that that might be the case.
Yeah, I really want to emphasize that part of what we're doing here. Laura, is as we're going through your story, we're looking for universal principles of success. I started this initially to help my kids learn principles of success. And one of the things that I teach, especially when it comes to careers is you must love what you do. It's not necessarily true that if you do what you love, money will follow. You also have to be good
at it. But loving what you do, especially with writing, where it is so much of sitting down and cranking out the word count and refusing to allow writer's block to exist. That comes from love that comes from passion. And I can see that with I was looking at the number of books You create an AI. I've written a lot of books, but wow, I'm not keeping up with Laura at all, with how prolific you are.
Yeah, there's something to that. I do love it. I absolutely love it. And you know, sometimes people like, well, what would you do if you didn't have to work? I'm like the exact same thing I'm doing now. So it's just like not really a relevant if you retired, what would you do? Oh, I do this. So I mean, it's not a particular burden to write a
lot. But I do see that because, you know, we're in the business of content creation, I guess it's a good saying that, you know, a lot of people will probably come to you for advice of like, how do I build a platform? How do I get readers and all that. And, you know, one of the things I was always telling people back in the day is like, well start a website
and start a blog, right? Because if you've got writing out there, write a newsletter or something that people will start reading and get used to reading your writing. And I could tell people that weren't really into it, they would like grudgingly put up one post a week, right? It's like, always on Tuesday, because it's like Tuesday's the day, they said, Okay, I have to do it on Tuesday, and then I'll make myself do it. And I'll put up
one post a week. And that's never gonna get you anywhere, like, you know, it's like, you can tell they don't want to do it, they're doing it only because they have to do it. Whereas the bloggers I've loved reading for, you know, a decade plus now. They're posting all the time. They're posting multiple times per week. They don't have to, it's just that they like it. Yeah, they do it. It's their hobby. It's what they're doing for fun. It's their equivalent of watching
their favorite show. And, you know, that's kind of how you have to approach it. Because otherwise, you will never put in the time that is necessary to get better at it and get any sort of following.
Yeah, I had a conversation with a guy who's young in his career, he's just getting started. And he was like, you know, I want to be a speaker. And I'm like, so what's your philosophy? What do you mean most? What's my philosophy? I'm like, Are you writing things? Are you creating things? Are you putting them up about what your perspective is on success? Or whatever it is? And he hadn't done it? He hadn't done any of it. And that is part of that process? Yeah. What was
he gonna speak about? Like, I'm gonna be a speaker, I'm gonna get up on stage and I guess, say something. Yeah. And he
had an idea about what he wanted to talk about, but he wasn't creating content around it. And how do you create a speech? How do you create a platform if you're not taking the time? So I completely agree with you. Just briefly, let's talk about that time. Was there a mentor? Was there someone who had an influence in your future career that you came across while at Princeton? Well,
I've worked with a lot of really great people. I mean, I had a lot of amazing professors. One I particularly enjoyed studying from is John McPhee, who is a very prolific nonfiction writer, he wrote for The New Yorker for years and has written dozens of books, well known for a few like his biography of Bill Bradley. He's written about all sorts of topics. I mean, he wrote like a whole book on oranges, he wrote a book on the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, he wrote a book on
geology along i 80. I mean, you know, it's just like, take any topic and make it fascinating. And he very generously has taught a class on the craft of writing for decades, and a lot of people who are out there who are in the writing or media business, who went to Princeton studied from him. So that was impressive. Is
there a principle or nugget of wisdom that you still reflect on the John McPhee shared with you?
Well, he's shared this one in his writings, like all over the place, and I still find it useful, which is that if you're going through and trying to find a good word for something, like a better word, you know, you're polishing this piece of work, and you need a better word. Yeah. A lot of people go to the thesaurus, don't do that. The thesaurus is gonna lead you astray. Because it's words that are similar, but
not really the same. Whereas if you look the word up in the dictionary, one of those words that's going to be in the definition will probably strike you as being similar both in connotation and exactly what you're going for. So yeah, this whole bit about how the Thesaurus leads you astray, the dictionary is the way you want to go. And I found that to be true. So I'm always going to my dictionary, if I'm trying to find a better word for something. That's
interesting. Yep. I'm gonna take that one. Because I do that's what I do is go to the Soros. A lot of times for that's a great tip. Okay, so let's talk about between graduating from Princeton and your first book, which, as we established came out in 2010. Talk to me about that nine year stretch, what was your career like? What were you doing?
Actually, there were a lot of books that were before that, Oh, okay. But they're not on time management, or they're not under my own name. So you know, it takes time to build a career in anything I knew I wanted to write I very quickly began like co authoring and ghost writing books for people as a way to make money and take advantage of the fact that I don't mind writing a lot of words, alright,
for those not familiar with it, what is ghost writing?
So if you see a book that is written I like a business leader, or an entrepreneur or a celebrity or somebody who might be an expert in something. But they're not a writer, it's actually really hard to write a book. And yet we have this fiction that sort of anyone can do it, because there's all these books written by people who are not writers who are other things. But in many cases, those people had
helped with it. Sometimes the help is acknowledged, like it says, with Laura Vander cam or with whoever right is the bottom. And then other times, it's not it's ghostwritten completely, I mean, sometimes, you know, the person will be thanked in the acknowledgments or something, but you know, you get hired to write a book. So I was doing a lot of that, I wrote a career book for 20 Somethings during there that came out through McGraw Hill, it didn't
sell particularly well. So by my late 20s, I was kind of casting around for like, I do want to write a book, but what's the topic gonna be? And that's what I had always been interested in productivity and time management, and just with structuring my own life, and particularly, you know, when I had my first kid and my 20s, you just become more accountable for
your time, right? You'd be come needing to think about like, well, if I'm going to put this time into my work, and I want to have this time with my kid, and I still need to sleep, and I want to do all the other things. It can't just happen. I mean, some people maybe but I feel like life would be chaotic, and things might just not happen, right? So I got very into organizing my time and figuring out how to structure things. So I could still do everything that
I wanted to do. And so I started writing a little bit on the side about that. And then at some point, you know, and like, it was late 2008, early 2009, I got an email from somebody who worked at Penguin. He thanked me for writing a review, he had read of another of his authors books, and said, if you're not under contract somewhere, would you like to come discuss book ideas? And I'm like, sure, yeah, that sounds great. And so we hashed out what became 168 hours together. Okay,
so you were doing all this ghost writing for other people. You were also writing? What books were you writing? Were you writing fiction, nonfiction for your own stuff? Well, I
was writing fiction. On the side, I wrote a career book in my 20s. That was about the rise in self employment among young people. So that was an experience of putting together a whole book and seeing it come out into the world. I was writing for different places. I was a contributing editor at Reader's Digest for a while. I was writing columns for USA Today fairly regularly that you through my 20s. So yeah, always in writing.
Was it always freelance that you were doing all this? Were you ever working for anyone during this period? Yeah,
I've managed to avoid having a real job pretty much my entire life. I worked for a year after I graduated from college at USA Today. So I got a postgraduate internship at USA Today. And that was a really great experience. I learned a lot from my editors there. I worked on the opinion page. And it was job in the sense of like, I commuted to work every day and did the various things I had to do there. But while I was doing my various editorial assistant type duties, I decided to try my
hand at writing columns. I mean, I was working on the opinion page, so why not, and they were gracious enough to accept some of them. And so I began writing for them fairly regularly while I was there.
So you mentioned that you learned some things. What's the lesson that you still reflect on now, as you think about that time that you think still serves you in your career today.
So USA Today is kind of known for its brevity, you have a smaller news space than you do in a lot of other newspapers. And they also very much didn't like the idea of things running on forever, right? Like things had to be shorter. And, you know, part of that is you need to write extremely tightly. And so one of my editors there, she gave me
two great ideas. I mean, one is that when people are reading what you write, they are saying it in their heads, like even when they're reading silently, they are saying it in their heads. So you always want to write for the ear. So it kind of helps to anytime you write something, read it out loud, interesting, because if you're stumbling over it, or it doesn't sound right, it's gonna be hard for people to read and enjoy in their heads. And part of that has to do with even how you end
each sentence. Ending a sentence on kind of a strong and often single syllable type word tends to make it sound better. And if anyone wants to analyze like what a really good preacher does, like how they talk, there's a certain cadence of sentence structure has to like be the same and then be slightly different. They end sentences often on a single syllable word.
You know, there's a whole lot of stuff that goes into it, but it's right for the ear and it will read better you And if people are not reading it out loud. But the second thing is that if you have anything that is print, if you have a little bit on the last line of a paragraph, in newspaper parlance, that's called a widow, right? So if you have like, two
words leftover at the end. And so at USA Today, we were always trying to get rid of widows, because then you could buy yourself more lines, if all of the paragraphs went most of the way to the end of the line right before you started the next one. And so by doing that, you can edit yourself to get rid of about five to 10% of every single paragraph in order to get
rid of the widow. And your writing is going to be better if you get rid of five to 10% of it sort of inevitably, so I'm still doing that every time I've got something on a page and I see that I only have like two words on a line or three words on a line, I'll go back and find some way to make it not be a widow. It just, every time I see a win, I'm like, ooh, gotta get rid of it.
Yeah, that's exactly the kind of lesson or story that I'm looking for is when someone is in their career journey, and they're trying to be successful. The lessons that you learn early on, even in jobs that maybe that isn't what you want longterm. Uh, clearly, you wanted more than that. But it's still has such a powerful influence on the writing that you have today. And your awareness of those lessons set you up for later success. Oh, absolutely. I
mean, I use those writing techniques daily. So it was good to learn them.
Yeah, exactly. So when did your journey on being a productivity expert and author start. So
I'd always been interested in productivity and time management just for managing my own life, right, and trying to make everything work that I wanted to get done. And that became particularly important to me, when I had my first child in my late 20s. Because as anyone who's been through that transition knows, you know, parenthood affects how you spend your time, you are suddenly more accountable for your time in a way that you
probably weren't before. I mean, you, you know, may still have your work that you're trying to do, but you're also trying to spend time with your kid and you still want to sleep and maybe you want to do other things like exercise or see friends and, you know, you have this 24/7 responsibilities. So you're always trying to make sure that your hours are, you know, allocated to what you want them to be allocated to. And so I really found that I was kind of
learning a lot from this. And I was talking to people who were doing this and learning a lot from them. And I began writing a few things about the topic, and was casting about for how I might write a book incorporated all this because of course, I always love to write books. And at some point, after I'd really been trying for a long time, I mean, you know, 18 months of trying to figure out the right angle of writing about this
topic, different places. I got an email somewhat out of the blue, from somebody who worked at Penguin, who thanked me for writing a review of another of his author's books. He had read a book review, I'd written somewhere. And then he said, if you're not under contract anywhere, would you like to come discuss book ideas? I was like, Well, sure. I'd love to come
discuss book ideas. And so we went in and turned up my time management literature, I had the number 168 in there somewhere, like I'm talking about there being 168 hours in a week. And he's like, that's a good title. So I was like, okay, so I morphed it all into a title proposal with 168 hours as the title and then wrote that book, and it came out in 2010.
That's fascinating that the work that you did elsewhere, opened the door, and you didn't even think that that was going to happen, that wasn't even in your mind. Yeah.
And people sometimes are like, well, that must have been a really fantastic book review. It wasn't just a book review. But I mean, I had written 300 things in six months, right? You know, somebody's gonna see something. Right. And that has always been, my approach to life is kind of, if you put a lot of stuff out there, you don't know which thing it will be. But something will lead to something. And, you know, that's what you're aiming for. Yeah,
both being prolific. And but I would also say, doing high quality work, right? Nothing that you've ever done. Based on my brief experience with you, Laura is nothing you do is half baked, you always try to do a good job. So you're cranking out 300 different things. But you're always trying to give your best quality with those things. As
good as I can. I mean, you know, some stuff is obviously more polished than others. By the time a book comes out, it's more polished or you know, a magazine story that you've been working on for six months is inevitably more polished than a newspaper story that has to come out tomorrow. I mean, that's just the way it works. But yeah, you know, you do try to do your best on everything that you can within the time you have But
we never quite know what's going to work. I know, as a writer with books I've written, I've had ones where I think this is gonna be awesome. Everyone's gonna love it right? And then it releases and it's crickets, no one really cares. And then the ones where I don't think I'm creating something meaningful are the ones that turn into something that other people feel is meaningful. Is that something you've experienced in your career? Yeah, I would
say I mean, there's just an element of randomness, or luck, or whatever, in whatever becomes successful. And I think you can do your best to capitalize on that, of all my books, the one that is probably sold the best has the title of what the most successful people do before breakfast, which turns out to be an incredibly clickable title. And I knew that, because I had wound up using it as a title of
just an article I wrote. And, you know, you could write 100 articles for a place and some get regular traffic of people who are always reading you. And then you put a title like that on it. And traffic goes through the roof. I mean, like traffic is crashing the server of the publication with that title at first. It just, it's ridiculous. For whatever reason, people can't help themselves, they click on it. And so when I saw that, I'm like, well, let's just not let that title be. Let's use
it again. Right. And so I called a book that and that got a lot of attention when it came out, and you don't know what it's gonna be. But you can also seize on stuff when you do see what is going to make the running easy. Yeah,
I think of it as experiments, experiments, yeah. All these different ideas that I have there different experiments that I'm testing. And in the past, I used to get upset that these ideas that I thought were great, didn't turn out to be great. But now I view all of it as I'm just trying things out. I'm just experimenting. And I don't quite know, what particular combination of words or phrases or concepts our people are going to latch on to. And so when they succeed, I'm
pleasantly surprised. Yeah,
I think that's a good way to put it just to be pleasantly surprised when stuff does get clicked. You know, if anyone wants to know that this are the things that turn out to be highly clickable, what the most successful people do before breakfast, another one turned out to be this phrase, the Norwegian secret for enjoying a long winter. So take that as you
will. But I've been writing a novel with that as a title now after I entitled A article that at one point, and it got ridiculous amounts of traffic. So who knew?
Yeah, that's great. I love it. And there's the element to have just the headline of things, how important the headline is, you can write this great article. But if you don't have a fantastic headline, nobody's going to read it.
And that's challenging, because in many traditional media outlets, you don't get to control what the headline is, there are people who are headline writers, and one of the things I did at USA Today was writing headlines. So I learned a little bit about that from doing that. But yeah, you don't control it necessarily as the writer and so you've always just got to hope. But in this day and age of the digital world, sometimes what happens is
the title will change. Because they put one out and it sees it's not getting a whole lot of traffic. And so then the editor is like, well, I'll change it, they put something else and all of a sudden, it's the top story. And, you know, I'm sure there's a whole science to it. We're learning over time. But
yeah, and yet, even with science, it's still an experiment. Right? We still don't know until we try it. Okay, so the first book came out in 2010 168 hours, did that book immediately get you the kind of momentum that you needed to get to be successful as a productivity expert?
Absolutely not.
Okay. Okay. So how did you generate that? How did you move to that place? Well,
it was an interesting discovery for me, because so many things went so wonderfully with that. I mean, it got reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, I was on the Today Show, like I could not have asked for better publicity about the book. And, you know, it would sell in bits and pieces, but not at sort of the velocity that I was kind of hoping it would, right. Is
that because you have the expectations of novel level of sales? Because I think a lot of people don't understand that business books, productivity books don't sell at the same level as a murder mystery. Well,
that may be true. Yeah. Although there are plenty of murder mysteries that don't sell either. I mean, there's just so many of them that you know, is, yeah, I think I may have had some, you know, unrealistic expectations, perhaps we always hope you'll get lucky, especially with a big book coming out like that. And the good news is it kept selling like it never stopped. And in fact, it's still sells as many copies per week now as like a couple months after it came out back in 2010. So that's a
fortunate thing. With that, but because it had not, you know, immediately out of the gate been huge, it wasn't apparent what I should do. And so it's like, well, maybe productivity isn't the right thing. And so I decided in consultation with the publisher of 168 hours that we were going to try a personal finance book next. And so I was going to do for money, what I'd done with time and 168 hours.
And so I wrote a book that is called all the money in the world, what the happiest people know about getting in spending. And that came out in early 2012. I want to say, and, again, I think my heart was not as in it as much I'm not quite as drawn to the topic of money as I am to the topic of time.
Yeah, that was my question. When you said that, as you describe that it sounded like you were filling a need that you thought existed rather than actually writing to what you were passionate about.
Yeah. And I've reread the book. And I actually, like it. Like, I think it's a good book, if anyone's looking for a very quirky personal finance book to check out. I mean, there's a chapter about like, people raising backyard chickens and foraging there's, you know, a chapter about like, the marginal cost of children. It's just all over the place, right? There's a chapter where I go look at some of the entrepreneurship scene in Detroit. I enjoyed it. It's a good book. Well,
we've already established that you create high quality work. So it doesn't surprise me that it's well written, yet your heart wasn't in it to the same degree.
And it turns out, it wasn't necessarily what people wanted to read for me either. And I found this out very quickly, because so it came out. But in the meantime, the fall before it had come out in fall of 2011, I had found out that this title, what the most successful people do before breakfast was a very clickable title and a column I had written for someplace. So this was in the age where publishers were
experimenting with eBooks. And like, they were calling them like Kindle singles for a while or whatever, you know, the idea is a shorter digital only book. So my publisher was like, well, we could try that with that title. And you know, you can write a short ebook with the title, what the most successful people do before breakfast. And so I did and you know, the money
book came out. And then we were scheduling this ebook, just a couple months later, it was like the beginning of June or something when that came out. And it was just a totally different experience in terms of quick sales out of the gate in like getting people to talk about it. I went back on the Today Show, that was kind of fun. Oh, but it got excerpted on Fast Company's website. And it became one of their most clicked on articles ever. And they had a link to Amazon. And so people
went and bought it. And so it went up to like, number three for nonfiction on Amazon. And then I recorded the audio book. And that went to like, number one for audio books, again, probably because it was cheaper than everything else, because it was shorter. But whatever, you know, I'll take it. So yeah, that was then like, Okay, time, it's time, it's scheduled productivity. That's what people want from you go from there.
Talk to me a little bit about the length of things. I've had some different debates with different people who are in the publishing industry. My perspective has been that shorter books are better these days, that people don't want to take the time to read a 300 page nonfiction book. What's your perspective on that?
So I think it depends, it depends what it is like, I would totally read a 300 page nonfiction book from like Doris Kearns Goodwin, I would read a 600 page or 1000 page book, right, you know, on some, like historical topic that she's gone deeply into what I read a 300 page business book, usually not because there are very few topics that justify that length, I think the book needs to be the right length for the subject you
are writing about. Okay, so if your point is more of a straightforward, here's my argument, and here are the points for it. Often, that is a very short book, right? Now, if you're doing something more like narrative, right, you're telling lots of different stories, you're gonna go to lots of different places, right at different angles of something, well, that book could be longer, because that's getting at more of like, a fiction arc, right. And so that can be a different
length. I think what a lot of people see with nonfiction, there's a lot of nonfiction books that should never have been books in the first place. Like, there was no reason to turn it into a 250 page. entity. It's just that that's the length we print books at. So it should have been in some other format
to get this point across. And, you know, I wish it was obvious what that would be that would advance the author's career in a smaller format, because I think a lot of people would do that and it would serve a lot of ideas better to be in that format.
Interesting. Talk to me about some adversity that you experienced during that time. What didn't work? Or what were you struggling with, throughout these years, you know, in the 2010s, where you're starting to find your footing as a popular best selling author. Oh, it's just,
you know, your last book never writes your next one. So it's always like, well, what am I going to write about next? And I've not had any real adversity in my life. Thank goodness, I feel very fortunate that way. So I joke about that with writing self improvement, that I don't have some rock bottom moments that I'm crawling up from, and then want to share my journey with everyone. I'm incredibly boring.
So what are the boring things that you struggle with? Because to be human is to struggle? So what are the annoyances, the difficulties, the little things that you keep working on, and you feel like you're still struggling to master?
Well, it's challenging to make time work. And the more sort of personal responsibilities you have, the more challenging it is to make sure that you still have time for, say, idea generation, and thinking things through deeper and longer and coming back to them again, and again. And, you know, I see this all the time with people I write about as well, it's just, you know, you have so much going on, what are you going to spend an hour
doing? Well, I could write this article that I know will see the light of day, I could go do something for my family, or I could, you know, even organize something for my house, or I could go for a run or whatever. I mean, there's all sorts of things you could do. So the motivation to spend that hour thinking about a topic that may or may not work, that won't see the light of day for three years, it's hard to get your
head around it. So I keep pushing myself to do it, I tend to decide that it's going to be a goal for the year. And then, like, sometimes I like to write fiction. And you know, that's not what people come to me for, they want to see time management. But the upside is that, over the years, people become your audience, and will read anything, like certain people will just read anything.
And so I don't get the sense anymore, that I'm totally writing something out into the void, I can always find an audience for something, which is not the case when I was first starting out. So then it felt a little bit more like writing into the void. But the good news is when you're younger, you have more energy. So I guess it all evens out. Yeah,
that's true. As you're talking about that, I'll just share one principle that I teach, because there's that element of risk with your time. All right, should I sit down and spend time doing this thing that I don't even know is going to work out. I call it the Las Vegas time principle. And the idea is you don't go into a casino without a limit. I'm not actually a gambler, but I understand the concept of it.
And so it's the same thing. If you as this venture that you're thinking of doing and you haven't tried, you ask yourself, how much time am I willing to gamble with? How much time can I invest and be okay with this not working out. And I find that that works well for me is I can say, Okay, I'm only going to invest 40 hours of time or whatever, I'm going to invest a month to try and make this project work. And then I'll reassess it. If it didn't pay
off. I just let it go. But if it did pay off, I made that risk assessment. And I gambled and it paid off.
And you don't worry that the 41st hour would have been when the major breakthrough happened?
Well, I mean, you gotta cut off and step away from the table at some point, right?
I guess. So although I've heard from some gamblers that actually you need to go in being that you're willing to go up to say 20x table stakes, or some multiple of table stakes is not how much you're willing to lose. I don't know, I go back and forth on this. There we go. It's a good analogy. It's a really good analogy. Sometimes I have to work on myself to be patient. Right? Because I believe there are certain things that take as
long as they take. And I have one novel that I wrote that's called the Courtland boys, if anyone wants to go pick up a copy, but it was written over literally two times, like 10 years apart. So I wrote an initial draft. It was fine. I put it away. About seven years later, I started thinking about it. And I was like, you know, I wonder if there's more to that story. And so I came back to it, I wrote more on it. I did more I like wrote an entire second half
of the novel. Then I spent another year putting them together to make it coherent as a novel with these two parts written 10 years apart. And I really liked how it turned out. I read it again this year. I hadn't read it in six years. And I read it again this year. And I was like, oh, you know, it's almost like I hadn't read it before because it was you know, so far in my past of writing it and I was you know, enjoying it.
So it was like, I think you know sometimes stuff just takes as long as it takes and I can I get upset with myself that was like, I should have had a book proposal done by now. Like, why do I not have a book proposal, but it would be better to have something I truly want to write, and have it take longer than have something that I don't want to write. But I'm like, I just need to feed the beast, I need another book two to three years, they gotta keep coming out. So I'm working on it. Yeah,
I think what I'm taking from that is, there's a difference when you're having fun. That's, there's a difference when you're loving it. So yes, I think things take as long as they need to take. But if you're enjoying it, you're willing to risk more. Right? And
with this, I mean, because people can go the total opposite direction with this, too. I mean, there are people who never ship anything, because it's like, well, I'm still playing around with it, I'm still working on this. And it's like, Well, okay, if you're gonna write to create any sort of content professionally, eventually, you do need to get it out in the world, right? Like, you can't be a writer who's never written anything. It just doesn't work. Right? It's
always a balance. It's always a balance.
So at the beginning, we talked about your family, your five children, and we're talking to a productivity time management expert, can you give us a peek into a week in the life of your family and how you make sure that you're making time for them, in addition to all the amazing things you're doing with your career.
So on a practical level, what I think of the moment where I'm figuring things out, it is a weekly cycle. So every week, usually Thursday or Friday, I sit down, I look at my planner and my calendar, I think about what is going on, I think about what I need to do, and what I want to do in three different spheres of life. So career relationships, so that's family, friends, and self. And you know, if you want to think of this as like a three ring circus life is a three ring
circus. And people often talk about circuses, as like when they say life is a circus, they mean it's chaotic, right? They mean, like, everything's out of control. Because if you've ever been to a circus, that is not the case at all, a circus is complex, but it is absolutely orderly, like, no one is getting shot out of a cannon at the wrong time. Right? People are going where they need to go, like the three acts are maybe going in different sequences, but everyone's getting into the
place that they need to be. If something goes wrong, like one act is taking a little longer. I don't know the Tigers didn't get in place at the right time. The clown can do another magic trick over here. And it's all organized, right? Like you've thought through what needs to happen when what can go wrong,
you've got to plan for it. And so that is always my goal is to make the three ring circus of my life function like that, that I'm the ringmaster and figuring out what needs to happen, what wants to happen, create the marching orders for the next week, in consultation with anyone else that you know, needs to be part of it. But yeah, that's really where it happens.
How do you know when it's not working?
Well, you evaluate I mean, because if you're checking in every week, and you see that something was a disaster, or somebody's unhappy or whatever, it's generally because something didn't work. Right, right. And you can evaluate like, Was that an unreasonable expectation? Does there need to be more support? You know, do I need to figure out something different to try? So those are all questions you wind up asking? How
does that look in terms of your relationship with your husband? Is it a formal conversation? Is it informal? How do you make those kinds of assessments?
Well, we're always talking, you know, just in conversations about things we'd like to do or things we need to do, or, you know, is this child going to be in this activity? And what's that going to look like? Oh, they have upcoming events, and, you know, sharing back and forth things that are coming up lists of events or things we might like to do, or each of our travel schedules, for instance, that need to be coordinated. So all that gets put in the calendar.
And that is something I look at when I write a weekly schedule, but you know, I write a schedule for me, I actually write a schedule for the household to do that somewhat in consultation with my husband and my older children. And, you know, they tell me what they want to do. And I create marching orders for everyone. And it can change, it can absolutely change. It's always flexible. I have teenagers, they don't make their social plans till like, the day
of right. And generally in life, my goal is also to leave enough space and flexibility that I can accommodate any of that very important and, you know, sometimes they have to be a little bit flexible of it to like, you know, we're working with one fewer car right now
because one's in the shop. Like, one kid has a birthday party on Sunday, a little kid and my 16 year olds like, oh, well, I'm gonna go do this meet up at the library with my friends at that time, and I'm like, Okay, well, we can't drive you at that exact same time because we've got the birthday party somewhere else, but we could drive you earlier. You know, we could bring you like 30 minutes earlier. There's
a Starbucks nearby. You could go hang out there and it's like, okay, that works and You know, it's just, there's flexibility always and it can accommodate the things that people want to do. On the other hand, if there's something big, I'd like to know about it ahead of time, you know, somebody has a huge robotics tournament on, you know, Saturday, I probably should know about that a couple weeks ahead of time, so we can make sure that everyone gets where they're supposed to go.
briefly talk to me about the podcasts that you're involved in, what led you to start doing that?
So I had been intrigued by the whole podcasting universe, that seemed to be what a lot of people were doing. I was listening to a few of them, but just you know, a couple of authors I admired were getting into that space. And so in 2017, in the summer, a blogger that I had read for a long time, Sarah Hart Unger posted on her blog that she was thinking of starting a podcast.
And particularly, she wanted to look at the space of women who had professional careers and also had families, because there's a lot of stuff that was oriented more to like stay at home moms, for instance. But also a lot of the professional podcasts are maybe a little bit more masculine, there, people are not like thinking about some of the same things that women often are. So she said, she wanted to start something in that space. So I sent her a
note. I said, Would you be interested in doing one with me? Wow, I'd met her a few times. I was fascinated by her. I liked her content. And so I just decided to reach out.
Do you collaborate a lot in your work? That's something I don't typically do. And it didn't sound like it's something you've done a lot before. So the idea of just reaching out to someone out of the blue and say, let's do this together seems like a risk. It seems unusual,
I guess. So. I'm certainly open to the idea. I mean, certainly, I think I was more thinking with the podcasting thing. A lot of the people I knew had multiple hosts on a show, it seemed like something that naturally lend itself to collaboration, interest, partly because you can just make an episode out of the two of you talking, right? And so she and I produced a few episodes of what became best of both worlds. And we're both very similar in the sense that we stick with something pretty
easily. And so there has now been an episode of Best of both worlds, every Tuesday, since August of 2017. Wow, that has happened even though both of us have had additional babies since that time, like we kept cranking the episodes out. Yeah, it's been great. And so you know, that was about a year and change into that, when I got another email from the folks over at Penguin, who published all my time management books. But it was just basically titled something vague, like podcast.
So I looked at it, it was from somebody in corporate who were like, we want to talk with you about something. And I was like, okay, and I assumed it was that they wanted me to have various other penguin authors on my podcast, like I was being tapped to be like a good corporate citizen and have more of the authors on as a guest. And it turned out that they had some relationship with I hurt media, what became I hurt media that they were trying to create podcasts around different
authors. And so long story short, I wound up chatting with the folks that I hurt media, we came up with this idea of doing a short, every weekday morning productivity tip, knowing that before breakfast is a clickable title, we decided to call it before breakfast. And so every weekday morning, since early 2019, there has now been a new tip, about five minutes of me sharing something that will hopefully take your day from great to awesome. That's
fantastic. That's really exciting the success that you've had with the podcast in addition to the book, so it's
fun. Yeah, it's still words, it's words shared with an audience, it's just a little bit different.
Do you find that doing the words verbally is different for you than on paper or typing?
Before breakfast is actually almost exactly like writing because it's a solo host show and it's scripted. So it's me reading the tip. So I write a 600 word script. And I practice it, and then I record it. And so it really is, it's just reading aloud something I have written that I think will be useful to the audience. So that's very similar to the writing best of both worlds is a little bit different, because it really is a conversation with my co host
or our guests. And so that's more about roughly shaping the ideas and then thinking about how we're going to convey them in a more conversational format.
Very interesting. Okay, so this is the point, Laura, where we start wrapping things up. One last question, then we're going to get into some action items. Okay. What do you see ahead for you over the next five years? Where are you going with your career?
Well, I certainly hope to be writing more books. I'm working on that. Now. I have an idea that I'm hoping to get out in the world in the next you know, two years or so. That's a book. I am still Doing my podcasts, I hope those will still be running. And I recently started something and you know, podcasts were the shiny thing and 2017. Now it's the newsletters. So I decided to start a every weekday morning short newsletter called Vander hacks.
I like it
good title, like Vander cam only Vander hacks. Yeah. And it's an every weekday morning tip, take your day from great to awesome. And I launched that at the end of November. And it's just been fun to see that grow and see that people who read me in some other contexts might be willing to come over and find me there. So certainly, in the next year or so I plan to grow that, you know, and then personally like my older kids, in five years, we'll be getting to really be young adults, and my oldest is
16. So presumably, he'll be off at school somewhere, the 14 year old might be two by that point, the 12 year old will be finishing up high school. So I definitely am looking forward to getting to know them as they become adult people and as they figure out their way in the world. So that's something I'm really looking forward to over the next few years.
I really admire that as a father of three, I think that's a wonderful goal to have. Teenagers
are awesome. I love teenagers. Yeah, they're great. Yeah,
they are great. Okay, so what I do with every episode, Laura is I like to summarize with concrete action items. So it's easy for someone to listen to this and go, Oh, that was a great story. But what I want them to do is move beyond just hearing your story to actually doing something about it, so that they make your success story a part of their success story. So what I like to do is I summarize a few action
items that popped up for me. And then I'd like you to share another action item that you think someone can do this week, that's really important, not a month from now, not two years from now, but something immediate. So here's what stood out to me. First of all, loving what you do, and being passionate about it. From the very beginning of the story, you knew that you wanted to write, and you've regularly sought out every opportunity that you can to write, and because of that
love and that passion. You've been prolific in everything that you do. And so I would suggest to someone listening to this to ask themselves, what is the thing that I want to do all the time. And in particular, something that is valuable that people will pay me for, and find more ways to do that, devote more of your time to do that, and feed what you're passionate about. The next one came from the lessons that you got from USA Today and being an editor, which is be more concise, trim
your writing. And I would say this isn't just about writing, trim your speaking, I'm not talking about censoring yourself, what I'm talking about is making everything you do a little bit stronger by saying things just a little bit briefer. So if you have a presentation coming up, if you have a sales opportunity coming up, think about how you can say the same thing, in less words and less words makes it more powerful. And then I just want to talk about the concept of
experiments. And this kind of goes along with being prolific, but also just the idea of always trying different things. I mean, because you were so prolific. And also because you were analyzing the results of things, you tapped on to some titles that candidly, Laura, I'm jealous of. As a writer, you know, what most successful people do before breakfast, my gosh, what a great title. And it leads into the podcast before
breakfast. But you wouldn't have gotten to that title without 100 200 other different experiments that you tested and compared. So if you're listening to this, don't expect perfection out of one thing that you try. Try lots of different things and measure the result. And then from those experiments, you'll be able to find the thing that works the best. So those are some action items for me, Laura, what else would you add as a possible action?
Yeah, those are good ones. I gotta keep doing those. So yeah, well, just one we were talking about, about doing that weekly planning, taking some designated check in time every week. Looking forward to the next week, asking what is most important to you in those three spheres, career relationships, self, asking what you need to do, what you want to do, looking forward to see if there's any conflicts or logistical challenges you need
to solve. Doesn't need to take hours like you can do this in like 2030 minutes, but then just commit to doing it again the next week because it's the commitment to doing this again and again. Again, that allows you to make sure that you're constantly making progress on things that are important to you. And if there are problems, you spot them early enough that you can solve them. So that's literally my biggest productivity tip for anyone who's managing a complex life.
That's a powerful tip. It's simple, yet so effective. Laura, what's the best place for people to continue to follow you engage with you? Where do you like to send people?
Well, you can come visit my website, which is just my name Laura Vander cam.com. As we talked about earlier, I blog like four times a week over there, because why not? So there's a blog you can read. But there you can also learn about my different books, newsletters, podcasts, etc. and would love to have people come visit me there. Fantastic.
Laura, thank you so much for your generosity and being here and sharing your wisdom with us.
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. And
thank you everyone for listening. Remember, it's not so much about what you heard, but about what you do. So make sure that you take one action, and you'll make Laura's success story, a part of your success story. Thank you for listening.
You've been listening to the Dave Crenshaw Success Show, hosted by my dad, Dave Crenshaw, and produced by invaluable incorporated research and assisted production by Victoria Bidez. Sand editing by Mark Lamorgese JC placed the route by me Darci Crenshaw, and the music is by Ryan Brady via con five licensing. Please subscribe to the Dave Crenshaw Success Project on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to get your podcasts.
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