This episode is brought to you by One Password. I have been using One Password for more than a decade. It is one of my favorite products. I met the founding team early on, love those guys, and I have made this product a requirement for everyone on my team. Data breaches affect everyone. They can be catastrophic, and my feeling is, since that is the case, you need One Password. One Password combines industry-leading security with award-winning design to bring private, secure, and user-friendly password management
to everyone. I use this dozens of times a day. It is an award-winning password manager trusted by millions of users, and more than 100,000 businesses from IBM to Slack, even including my little team. It beat out 40 other options to become Wirecutter's top pick for password managers. One Password lets you securely switch between iPhone, Android, Mac, and PC with convenient features like Autofill for quick sign-ins. All you have to remember is the one strong account password that protects every single user.
Your logins, your credit card, secure notes, or the Office Wi-Fi password. One Password creates as many strong, unique passwords as you need, and securely stores them in an encrypted vault that only you have access to. You can also use it for one time passwords, where you scan the QR code, and it gives you two-factor authentication with the countdown with unique numbers. That type of thing. So instead of using a separate app for those types of authenticator type functions, you can use One Password.
Plus, regular third-party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. Keep one password at the forefront of security. And right now, my dear listeners, you get a free two-week trial at onepassword.com slash Tim. That's two free weeks by typing the number one, then password.com slash Tim. One, the number one, one password.com slash Tim.
This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and seat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device. It was recommended to me by friends called the pod cover by 8Sleep. The pod cover fits on any mattress, and it allows you to adjust the
temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night sleep. With the pod covers dual zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side, and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting this helps.
Based on your biometrics, environment, and sleep stages, the pod cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wakeups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best in class temperature regulation, the pod cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable.
Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your perfect temperature. Many of my listeners in colder areas, sometimes that's me enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. And if you have a partner, great, you can split the zones and you can sleep at your own ideal temperatures. It's easy. So go to 8Sleep.com slash Tim spelled out 8Sleep.com slash Tim and save $200 on the pod cover by 8Sleep this winter.
8Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK select countries in the EU and Australia. Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show. And this is one of my favorite types of episodes. Of course, I'm speaking to world class performers of all different disciplines all the time.
But one of my favorite people to ask for advice is Seth Godin and this is a walk in talk, which means Seth and I were walking and talking while we recorded this. And I had many burning questions I wanted to ask. He did not fail to deliver a lot of sage advice, tactical, practical wisdom.
And what more can I say the guys of Jim he delivers every time who is Seth Godin you might ask Seth Godin is the author of 21 International Best Sellers that have changed the way people think about work. His books have been translated into 38 languages and sets books include tribes, purple cow, linchpin the dip and this is marketing.
Seth writes one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world, 8500, 8500 plus daily blog posts just to put that into perspective. And two of his TED talks are among the most popular of all time. He is the founder of the Alt MBA, the social media pioneer, Squidoo and Yoyo Dine, one of the first internet companies. His latest book is the song of significance.
It's a new manifesto for teams. You can find him at Seth Godin.com and you can find Seth's blog at sets.blog. So you can go to both of those for a lot of resources. And I'm going to just reiterate why we did this format the way we did it because there's too much sitting in the world. It's not good for you. We weren't evolved to do it.
And I am trying to counteract the trend, the impulse, all of the incentives to do podcasts in a fixed location. This isn't good for my health and it's certainly not good for your health to force you to consume it that way. So I'm at least experimenting with being out and about doing something that we are designed to do and that is walk. So without further ado, please enjoy my wider engine conversation. We're asked for a lot of help from Seth Godin.
All right, here we are. So thank you again for taking the time and the subject, supposed relates to time, attention, all these good things, which is how to make Tim Ferriss's incredibly long form writing shorter or how those two things fundamentally are different in terms of long and short.
I texted you asking if there's any secret sauce any tips or tricks for writing short blog posts, I consider you the undisputed king of consistently good short blog posts and that kind of unquirked all of this. So here we are. I suppose where I might want to start with our initial text thread and one of the points that at least as I read it seemed to resonate was treating blog posts more as a question than an answer or a provocation rather than a prescription.
Could you expand on that a little bit because I think it relates also to the post that you so kindly proofread where I may have misinterpreted how best to think about that. I would be delighted to dive in there's so many places to start I'm going to start with this you are a gifted and generous writer and you have been since I began tracking what you do and blogging is inherently a generous act because it's hard in 2024 to justify it as a financial endeavor you're doing it to illuminate.
And what does it mean to write in this form a short story attributed to any time away probably not for sale baby shoes never worn six words it's perfect in six words your heart breaks.
That's not scalable practical repeatable you can't sign up to write six words short stories that break people's hearts every day because that level of condensing that level of being able to get at the heart none of the words had more than seven letters none of the words have more than two syllables that's magic right we can't repeatedly do that so when we look at the form.
We say well you know sets blog post have a hundred thousand words in them all I have to do is take my idea and make it shorter and when we try to do that resistance kicks in press fields resistance and we say both I need to clarify this sentence and add a parenthetical to that sentence or else I will be misunderstood so this first sentence in this paragraph which is rich and detailed and recursive and layered goes like this.
Growth agents have a place in medicine parentheses some types of hypopipalyticarianism wasting syndrome diseases surgical care etc and some sports effectively require them at higher levels but there are always trade-offs when you turn on the dials on complex hormonal cascades and feedback loops.
Everything in that is true and someone could study that sentence in college for a month because there's layers below layers below layers and unfortunately the blog reader in general is not ready to consume that level of condensation and so we shouldn't even try because that's not what a blog is good at. What a blog is good at is what Scott McLeod taught us about comics Scott McLeod's book about comics which is a must read. I have read it or understanding comics is more than I read it.
Yes, understanding comics. Thank you. Yes. The key lesson is this comics work because something happens between the panels. Right. In panel one Superman sees a problem in panel two Superman is with the villain we don't see how Superman got from panel one to panel two that happened in our brain. So the reason bad comics and bad graphic novels are bad is because the creator didn't understand that they didn't let our brain do the leaping.
They just decided to add a lot of pictures to a story that would be better in words. So what a blog post does is it says here's a sketch over here and now I'm over there. You figure out how I got from here to there and by you figuring it out the reader you will grow you will explore you will be a voice in this dialogue. It is not just me talking.
So when you ask me to review your writing some people are tempted to proofread and they don't really mean proofread they mean copy edit and copy editing means fix the errors. And what I'm trying to do when I'm editing a friend's work is say are they even asking the right question because they can fix their own errors they don't need my help to do that.
And so here what I'm trying to say is what is this post for and what it's for I think is to help someone who's not paying attention to realize that there are seven things they might want to think about. And seven is a lot. So what I pitched back to is this is actually seven blog posts in a series and what the first one says is you know there's some things you're not thinking about that you might want to think about here's one of them.
And the idea if I just say to somebody biceps or temporary baseball helmet sizes are forever they visualize that immediately. And then they're like what and then they want to think about what you meant by that it's a high coup it's a puzzle it's a shadow wears the light and what is being reflected. So now you've gotten permission to tell me in a paragraph or two what you meant and then I can you get to see a ta ta ta na na na and I say ta ta.
And that is the form that is what blogs are good at but and I'm going to end my rant now that it's downside is you will be misunderstood. And that is why there are no comments on my blog because people who misunderstood a post would then respond by making me feel bad.
So I would overwrite and overwrite so they wouldn't do that anymore and then it wasn't blog anymore so I had to stop. And basically what I'm saying is if you don't get it ask a friend and if they don't get it either come back tomorrow and we can discuss a new thing. And I think the king of this is actually the magic of x k cd which is a blog in graphic form.
Yes outstanding I agree on that and as you're talking if you think something might for me and maybe as a backdrop the impetus for a lot of this for me at least is number one to get back into writing and to experiment with the new form a new style and approach to writing. And number two is to explore ideas to explore ideas in various ways to clarify my own thinking which ended up happening in this short piece the no biological free lunch piece that you.
Proofread I suppose my question not copy edited which is certainly a very different thing in this particular case if you were writing this would you be inclined to make it a series or would you make each of these a standalone piece in other words of the seven bullets.
As you're thinking through not just the word count right this is my mistake right basically said okay instead of writing a 5,000 word blog post i'm going to make it less than a thousand but i'm going to try to still somehow get all of the concepts into this shorter form seems like there's a conceptual constraint that makes things powerful but would you take those seven make them into an interrelated series.
Would you make them all kind of independent after you introduce them in this one piece how would you think about. Divying this up conceptually for yourself and I should also just add one more thing which is yeah fundamental to all of these observations and questions and goals and dreams of mine is how do I make this sustainable for me.
Which is part of the feedback you give in the comments on the draft of this block was a paraphrasing but if you try to just make the 5,000 word thing a thousand words it's going to be exhausting for you and most likely also exhausting for your. Which I agree with is about genre so my blog is a long running series it has been a series of 8,500 daily posts so if I was starting today I have to feel what is the genre of my work if you think about David Letterman's TV show.
He needed to have a series called stupid petrics because the show wasn't stupid petrics but there was a regular recurring stupid pet trick the show was a series of David Letterman shows. So if you are genre as you re enter blogging is there is a post from Tim on a regular basis and all of them are about the things we put into our body and performance then you're fine.
If that's not the case then the question is when the reader shows up do you need to do a lot of throat clearing to get them back on track for what you are writing about today and so since you're starting with largely a blank slate I said well if the first seven of these are in this series then you only have to clear your throat once on the 8th day and say okay now we're talking about this and you can do one of those or six of those are 12 of those.
But people do better if they understand that they're going to see do not read the power broker those are different genres and you need to give them a hint as to what they're going to get. I like the idea of recognizing that my tendency is to how should I be generous with myself be comprehensive it's going to say over complicate but let's be nice try to be comprehensive.
I would rather as we talked about earlier I'm walking by tennis courts right now and I remember taking a tennis lesson and I kept hitting the ball into the net and the coach said to me he's like you can do anything now next step you can hit the ball straight up in the air you can hit a home run the one thing you cannot do is hit it into the net and I was like okay I got it and I kind of feel like I need to give myself some marching orders like that for writing to counter balance some of my tendencies so I like the idea of writing.
Self sustaining independent pieces to restrict myself from the desire to say you know what I'm not going to overwrite this but it's going to be part one and a 12 parts here which is maybe a work around for tricking myself I'm going to interrupt you for a little bit.
You are extraordinarily skilled at not over complicating your writing or your narratives that's how you got this far that there's very little that you have published where you were the primary researcher and the breakthrough creator of the original science what you've done is helped people simplify understand what's happening here is resistance you are adding parenthetical to the world.
Adding parentheticals to protect yourself 100% so what I'm pushing you to do is to come up with boundaries so that you can say I did a good job and ship the work now that could involve having very like the rules of high coup very significant rules where you must have a tagline a come online that's less than 18 words and you're allowed to have two foot
note links but the rest of it has to be a narrative that you would say to somebody on the telephone and instead of typing them you are just recording each one and letting someone on your team type them if that would be the model you would have to let go of it because you only have a five minute phone call you're going to say it as clearly as you can you can add two links when you're done and it's done you got to ship it right.
But that's not letting the reader down because you've announced to them that that's what this is the genre matter. I asked you one question related to how you know when you're done and I'd love for you to answer that again because I suspect I'll have some follow questions and either before or after that I would love to know for yourself what type of rules you have imposed or constraints slash boundaries when you have had your better
streaks of writing let's just say I will do the first part first because it's easier you asked how do you decide or know when a post is done and I texted back I don't know that's the point and then I wrote imagine how hard it would be to have a conversation or even a text threat if we had to think through whether our turn to talk was over before we stop talking right so my model my ritual is I write blog posts in advance and then the
night before I review them I rewrite them I delete them so if I get the stomach flu there's still going to be a blog post tomorrow and when I rewrite a blog post the rule is you wait get points if you make it shorter you don't get points if you make it longer and if I can't boil it down more than it already is and it's not deliberately deceptive it's done because the purpose is tell people something they already sort of know in a way that they
would be grateful for the chance to forward to other people do you say that one more times that seems important if I can show up with something in your bones you know to be true or interesting or worth thinking about but I can say it in a way that would benefit you if you could share it with your friends and colleagues that's a great
blog post benefit you in what possible senses I will give you a trivial one first which is more than once I have blogged about how stupid it is that there's a pull down menu when you're checking out of a shop and there's all 50 states listed that isn't helping anybody we have AI that can speak English it knows how to turn NY into New York and we do this because 40 years ago or whenever the web was young to 25 years ago it was a hack that made
it's life slightly easier for certain programmers and it's just been sticking around ever since there are people like me it really vaccines and if I say this and you are one of those vexing people now you can forward it to your webmaster and say see see I said we shouldn't do this and so I just gave you a useful thing to share that's trivial but that sort of the idea is that if you have a brother or son or colleague or daughter or
sister who would benefit from the insight that you think I'm on to you're going to forward to them and you're going to have a connection with them because I open the door and made it possible for you to do every once in a while I do post something about Claude AI that you didn't know about and all you go all great I use Claude thank you very much but that's not really the service my blog offer the service my blog
offers is not I'm breaking news it's I am trying to illuminate things that already resonate with people not to add to any parenthetical to this conversation but what is Claude AI Claude dot AI I can't believe I know something you don't know Claude dot AI is significantly better than chat GPT at certain functions and I think part of it is because it doesn't read the webber it says it doesn't read the
web so it's not easily distracted but I'm launching a software project in six weeks in the business plan took more than a year and a whole bunch of contributors it's 40 pages long and I uploaded the business plan to Claude and I said please review this highlight contradictions paradoxes and obvious errors and in less than 10 seconds it wrote me a page and a half MBA quality memo that nailed it it just nailed it nailed it nailed it and I was like okay you got me that's great that's
great so I use Claude AI every day to read other people's writing my writing critique it give me insight you could send your post to Claude and it might not have the inside I had but it would definitely be something to say incredible all right and parentheses what are some other elements or practices or constraints or film the blank that have helped you with consistency in terms of
blog writing because I have attempted and failed a number of times to build up momentum writing shorter posts and I think a lot of what we've already discussed will help is there anything else that you add to the it helps my consistency streak categories well I would say two things first I think your time back consistency in terms of
showing up at the ballpark every day cadence yeah exactly yeah so I'll do that one second the first one I have never met Larry David but I'm guessing that there are some days that Larry David is actually a nice thoughtful person and there is a character named Larry David as well so the person who writes my blog is a character named Seth
Godin and I am the only person who has ever written my blog I'm the only person who ever will write my blog but when I am doing it I am playing the character name Seth Godin so if it doesn't sound like me if it's just me authentically being tired or annoyed I don't publish those because that's not what my character would do it's this is not me exposing some mystical
seth go into the world it's me portraying the character Seth Godin because it's a service and then the second thing is streaks are usually used against us by software and if they make you feel bad it's not a helpful thing but I might block post every single day whether I use them or not and I learned that from Isaac as a mom when I worked with him all those years ago if you know that tomorrow morning you have to start typing
tonight when you go to sleep or today when you're walking around you will be noticing things so that you have something to type and you know I have enough in reserve that I don't have to do it every day but I do it every day because I eat lunch every day and because I take a shower every day
so you follow up so the first is related to the playing the character of Seth Godin it sounds like if I heard you correctly you're saying you're writing should reflect how you feel in the world at the time that you're writing my hearing that correctly no it's the opposite of that see opposite
there's no should here first of all if someone wants to write a blog that's just the unvarnished version of them in the moment go for it I don't care I'm not a blog please what I'm saying is I can read a blog post I wrote 14 years ago
and I might not write the same one today but it rhymes with the one I would write today because there's a voice that this character has that I am very comfortable with and I did the first thing that all writers do when I got chachi PT which is I asked it to write like me
and I was pleased to discover it was a parody of me and being able to be parodied is a really good sign and that's what it is to have this voice is to say I could exaggerate it in six different directions and people could tell I would be parodying it but like you know the peanuts comic strip Charles Schultz did it every single day and it's very hard to tell which decade a peanut strip is from
totally and that's that's what I'm after so just to unpack that a little bit more I know we've talked before or I should say I've asked and listened to you discuss how the authenticity fetishizing it goes on is often not always but often very misplaced and just kind of over values this over sharing what are the things that make Seth the character set the character is it 80% voice that you've developed such that chachi PT can imitate you and parody you
what are the other ingredients that make set the character who writes on sets blog you know I've not ever pushed myself to name them because seeing is forgetting the name of what one sees but yeah I guess I'd highlight a couple things the first one is I try to begin from a place of the benefit of the doubt of there probably aren't bad people there's just situations that cause people to do things that are troubling
and a level of optimism to go with it I try to reduce ideas to their essence without becoming hyperbolic because the voices of social media amped up the hyperbolic part that's not a simplification that's an exaggeration I try to eliminate parentheticals unless I really have no choice so I will avoid saying something like all tall people are very brave because that's ridiculous but I will not
right tall people are brave parentheses except for this person this person this person in this person because now it's not worth reading right so there's an assertion at the beginning that creates attention and then a release of that
attention that lands an idea so the shortest blog post ever wrote which I'm really proud of is first line is you don't need more time so that's an assertion it's controversial people who feel overwhelmed want to challenge it and then the delivery is you just need to decide
so that flips it upside down takes the blame off the system and the people who are making you busy and puts it right back on you giving you agency and authority and responsibility to simply decide and then get back to what needs to get done
and so in just a few words that's an example of a short set of golden blog post and a longer one is one where I will try to teach somebody details about something they didn't know but frame it in a way that they're comfortable with because that's how they might have framed it as well
let me ask a quick question and maybe that I've cut back on my caffeine to significantly but you don't need more time you just need to decide what are people deciding well folks who say I'm going to figure out which college I want to apply too soon I just need to do more research I just need to think about I got it right close the open lips get it done make it exactly
that makes a lot of sense just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs when you're hiring for your small business just like mine you obviously want to find quality professionals that are right for the role mistakes
or expensive things can be complicated you want a simple solution LinkedIn jobs has the tools to help you find the right professionals for your team faster and for free LinkedIn is not just another job board LinkedIn has a vast network of more than a billion professionals it gives you access to professionals you cannot find anywhere else and it does all that while making the process easy and intuitive so easy in fact that 86% of small businesses get a qualified candidate within the first 24 hours
and they just launched a feature that helps you write job descriptions making the process even easier and faster so join the 2.5 million small businesses that use LinkedIn for hiring and post your job for free at LinkedIn dot com slash Tim that's LinkedIn dot com slash Tim to post your job for free terms and conditions apply
All right the other bookmarks follow up I had and I'm sure I've asked you this I apologize but I can't remember the answer if we have discussed it what are some other things you picked up from Isaac as I'm off me this guy's a demigod
and he's a lot of people we consider him one what are other things you absorbed or observed with Isaac Isaac was in his 70s I was 24 and a half maybe 25 it was one of my first projects it was one of his last ones and we would hang out at his apartment near Lincoln Center and I got to spend time with his wife the thing about Isaac as a mob is the character of Isaac as a mob was a note all Ego maniac
for the time today he would be seen as humble but he published 400 books he invented the modern conception of a robot he wrote seminal work on an enormous number of topics a definitive book about the Bible I mean all over the place
but in person he was humble and funny and as a project partner he was completely hands off he spent time with me to make sure I understood the boundaries of what an Isaac as a mob project was and then he said go for it and he didn't micromanage a thing because he trusted me and my understanding of my
understanding of where the robots universe could go and it spoiled me because I thought that was going to happen again and again and you know I got Stanley Kaplan into the test prep book business and it took seven years and by the time we published the book Stanley was long gone from the project because he had sold the company but talk about micromanaging with a well known name so I'm one end of the spectrum was Isaac as a mob and the other end was Stanley Kaplan go figure
you're starting that asmol makes you think a little bit of Rick Rubin where right out of the gate a little cool JBC poise he's like oh this is easy this is how it works fantastic what was the project that you're working with eyes and the con okay so before DVDs lots of people at vcrs and I remember a company called Parker brothers took their board game clue and they made it into a vcr game and it was dumb and it sold more than a million copies at $40.
Wow good for them and so Peter Alaka the greatest game designer of his generation and I invented a murder mystery game you could play on your vcr so there was a movie shot with real union actors in a set New York city it lasted 38 minutes and took place on another planet about robots and murder and detectives and six times during the short film a screen came up
and said hit the pause button and play a card so you would hit pause and you had a stack of six cards and each card had two sides and you would throw a card down and it would be a clue like there are no fingerprints on the gun which might mean it was a robot because robots
don't have fingerprints right and on the other side of the card said there were fingerprints on the gun so now you know it's not a robot so it turned out that two to the power of six is 150 six or whatever and if you added up the code numbers on the top of each card you played it told you which page in the answer booklet had the answer to that thread through the game
so you could play the game hundreds of times and it would be a different outcome each time and we sold the rights to codec and cisco and ebert gave it two thumbs up and advertised it on the Olympics like the full thing it was fascinating
while where were you in your career that that opportunity presented itself where you found that opportunity when it led up to that outside of what you just described so before I did that I had only one real job and my job was it's been a croc software we invented educational computer games and I built the first brand of illustrated computer adventure games I worked with Arthur C Clark and Ray Bradbury and Michael Criten I got rights to games I worked with biren price he had a t-shirt
and price he had a team of programmers and I had a team of programmers we did the Wizard of Oz and I loved it I could still be doing it to this day but the world changed and I was out on my own after a couple years as a book packageer but Peter and I knew each other and the momentum from the interactive game thing led me to Isaac's editor and no one had ever asked for the rights the rights were inexpensive
and then once I had the rights I found codec and codec was able to put up the money so we could build this thing and own part of the back end.
So if I zoom out I have a macro level question for you which has been on my mind a lot if you don't mind which is a question of how you choose next chapters or projects because I'm coming up on the 10th anniversary of the podcast next April so in a few months and figured out be a good time is any to pause and reflect on things and think about where I want to go.
Love doing the podcast don't plan on stopping it but there are a lot of trends driving it towards effectively turning podcasts into fixed location television shows and I don't have much desire to do that.
I don't want to be contrary and just for the sake of in contrarian that's its own trap or set of traps but I know you've been very deliberate for instance in choosing not to start a dozen startups and in favor of choosing to spend your time on other things how do you choose or think about kind of next chapters or how what advice might you give me as I contemplate but what's next type of question.
You know I think it's very kind of you to say I'm very good at it I don't think I'm good at it but because I'm sort of in public and I do it in a certain way it's noted you know I did five years of a kimbo was in the top one percent of all podcasts and then I just stopped and I stopped not because I didn't love it I did love it I stopped because if I kept doing it there's something else I wouldn't do instead.
And creating a vacuum is required so that I will do the hard work of filling the vacuum but if I just keep doing the thing then there is no vacuum and sometimes the technology changes that's why spinnaker went away that's why you couldn't keep making VCR games it's why my head start in the CD-ROM business was worthless because CD-ROMs went away I liked in every time I did this.
Every time I did this being a pioneer in a new media space because that's for me the fun is spot and then when the technology changes I got to move on but podcast technologies never going to change I mean you're noting there's a change in the production format and that is a change. In my case what I'm trying to do is not maximize my income per hour spent nor am I trying to maximize the size of my audience.
What I'm trying to maximize is are the people I'm serving glad that I did that I showed up to solve an interesting problem and two as I build the stack of things on the bookshelf behind me can I point to them and say that was interesting and generous and I'm glad I did it. And you know that's part of a limited attention span theater so it's not for everybody but my whole point of view is that life is projects it is not a job.
And when you stop the podcast and created that vacuum did you already have something. And I was kind of warming up in the batting cage that was pending that you need to create the vacuum for did you create the vacuum and then wait for something to get pulled it.
And sometimes when something so good came along I did it and then had to remove things so I could do it you know when a few of us started to do which was one of the first social networks I had a completely reorganized my life because we built the 40th biggest website in the US was only eight employees.
So we were busy this is not what I'm talking about I am talking about an actual uncomfortable vacuum where you feel like you're never going to work again where nothing can possibly be worth what you gave up. And that's hard to do. Yeah, it is hard to do just to put a microscope on that I have as means of backstory done this for periods of time and have found it deeply deeply uncomfortable sometimes fruitful oftentimes not terribly fruitful.
In part I think because when I create that vacuum I don't know if the best way to embrace the vacuum is to be as good to stare at the wall and watch paint dry or to do something else and my mind just kind of folds in on itself. You create the vacuum and then what are the next few weeks look like in terms of how you spend your time day to day or week to week.
I think a fundamental difference between you and me there are so many of them but one of them as I am here talking to what the world tango champion. Former World Record holder long time ago. Yes. Is the only thing I have a world record in is being part of the largest co author book signing in history in which me and 400 other people all signed our book at the same time because I am not a high performer.
I am interesting and being interesting is really important to me but I am not holding myself to the standard you hold yourself in so many ways and so I could imagine that the thing that gives me comfort might not make you happy. Right. For sure. I agree with all of that and how does that difference translate to what you would do in the weeks following creating the vacuum after say stopping the podcast.
I guess you have activities that you're still carrying forward it's not like you're completely idle you're writing so yeah presumably if someone looked at me from the outside. I think that they would see that my days aren't that different. I am not shipping public work because I don't ship junk but I am internally creating lots of mediocre work and basically creating straw people and I am not going to be a little bit more.
I am not going to be a little bit more than a straw people and saying what would this be like and then what would that be like and here's this thing and I sat with my 60 or 80 watt laser cutter and I cut this thing out what do I think of that and that invention cycle is joyful but I can't do it forever because I also need the satisfaction of shipping the work and not giving into resistance.
So what I'm doing when I was a book packageer we sold 120 books in 10 years a book a month but I had more than 800 books on my hard drive ready to go not finished but two page five page proposals because the only way to have a finished proposal for me is to have an unfinished one that you didn't ship.
What is it and this is probably a fundamental question I should have asked earlier but what do you get from writing and having written this consistently as you have and do what is the pay off like why do that.
Okay so the biggest payoff is simple not in terms of equity stock value but in terms of the noise in my head the biggest benefit is I will be writing tomorrow because it's Friday not because I've written the perfect blog post that every single day something gets published by me because I decided that 24 years ago not because I have reconsidered each day whether this one is good enough.
And even if no one read my blog I would still do it and I'm very fortunate that people give me the benefit of the doubt knowing that I am not guaranteeing this is the best thing I ever wrote and there's still willing to look at so that's lovely in terms of my professional practice again back to genre having a sinecure a platform where for a long time few type blog into Google I'm going to do it.
I'm going to do a blog into Google I was the first match because I just showed up more than just about anybody there's a lot of value to saying this is my lane and you can count on me in this lane and for someone who is as parapetetic as I in their creative pursuits having one of those turned out to be a really useful thing. You mentioned a word that I don't recognize but I love the sound of sinecure what is that yeah it's a safe haven a niche a place to hide a fortress.
What a great word yeah alright that will know to use sinecure. Well I don't take up a ton of time here so this is all incredibly incredibly helpful best part of my day and I know that you're not publishing this as written but I just want to say as for the people who were wondering what's in this magic. It includes the line like Patagonian toothfish has become Chilean sea bass on fashionable menus worldwide right there that's gold Jerry that's his goal.
And so you need to liberate these things and explain to people what that I know what you're talking about but the fact is that entire species are becoming extinct because somebody figured out a clever word. And they figured out a clever way to market an animal that we eat there's a lot to be said about that one little riff and you have 40 of them in one post.
Thanks man yeah the no biological freelance it's one of those things that I've said so many times to friends and conversation as falling like you know what if not for any other reason that I am tired of repeating this. Getty's burger dress speech to every wayward friend who calls me up about to consume really put these drugs. I have some of those if you go to set stop log and type advice for authors.
There are two posts with the same title because that's that I wasn't being clear that I wrote a year and a half apart and they have each like a dozen or 15 bullet points. And now I have a sick and super human that I can call up when someone sends me a note a friend or whatever I say I've already thought about this question here you go. I love it.
Hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday with you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter.
My super short newsletter called five bullet Friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles on reading books on reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast.
Guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you so if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about. If you'd like to try it out just go to tim.blog slash Friday type that into your browser tim.blog slash Friday drop in your email and you'll get the very next one thanks for listening.
This episode is brought to you by eight sleep temperatures one of the main causes of poor sleep and seat is my personal nemesis of suffered decades tossing and turning throwing blankets off pulling the back on putting one leg on top and repeating all that ad nauseam but now I am falling sleep in record time why because I'm using a device is recommended to me by friends called the pod cover by eat sleep.
The pod cover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night sleep with the pod covers dual zone temperature control you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees I think generally in my experience my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very very cool so stop fighting this helps based on your biometrics environment and sleep stages the pod cover.
The pod cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wakeups and increase your percentage of deep sleep in addition to its best in class temperature regulation the pod cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your perfect temperature many of my listeners in colder areas sometimes that's me enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day and if you have a partner great you can split the zones and you can sleep at your own ideal.
It's easy so go to 8 sleep dot com slash Tim spelled out 8 sleep dot com slash Tim and save $200 on the pod cover by 8 sleep this winter 8 sleep currently ships within the US Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australian. This episode is brought to you by one password I have been using one password for more than decade is one of my favorite products I met the founding team early on love those guys and I have made this product a requirement for everyone on my team.
Data breaches affect everyone they can be catastrophic and my feeling is since that is the case you need one password one password combines industry leading security with award winning design to bring private secure and user friendly password management to everyone I use this dozens of times a day it is an award winning password manager trusted by millions of users and more than 100,000 businesses from IBM to Slack even including my little team it beat out 40 other options
to become wire cutters top pick for password managers one password lets you securely switch between iPhone Android Mac and PC with convenient features like auto fill for quick sign-ins all you have to remember is the one strong account password that protects everything else your logins your credit card secure notes or the office Wi-Fi password one password creates as many strong
unique passwords as you need and securely stores them in an encrypted vault that only you have access to you can also use it for one time passwords where you scan the QR code and it gives you two factor authentication with the count down with unique numbers that type of things
so instead of using a separate app for those types of authenticator type functions you can use one password plus regular third party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty keep one password at the forefront of security and right now my dear listeners get a free two-week trial at one password dot com slash Tim that's two free weeks by typing the number one then password dot com slash Tim one the number one one password dot com slash slash Tim