lifeshifting interview with CD Baby's Derek Sivers

Derek Sivers is the founder of the hugely successful company CD Baby, but he has also been a musician and studied to be a clown. He very kindly answered some questions I asked him which I think are not only fascinating but also very useful for potential lifeshifters and polymaths.

1.    Can you recall breakthrough moments when you realised something was possible after all? Or maybe a new thing you’d never considered? What brought on that moment?

I have this realization all the time.  It's almost like I never learn it, since I keep realizing it over and over again. My self-identity of what I'm capable of doing keeps growing.

When I was 17, a teacher told me I could graduate college in two years.  He showed me how, and I did it.  He taught me that there is no speed limit.  When the world tells you how something is supposed to work, that just means it's the lowest common denominator.  Anyone with ambition can do much more, much faster. Read the full story at http://sivers.org/kimo

When I was 22, I was working a regular day job and was buying the normal line that this is something we all need to do.  But two things changed my mind:  (1) My girlfriend's hippy parents.  Neither of them had jobs, yet they had a cute house in the country and put their daughter through college doing random work.  (2) The book "Island" by Aldous Huxley.  In the utopia he imagined, nobody is allowed to do something for more than two years.  After two years, it's healthier to switch it up and change jobs to something radically different.  (A physics professor becomes a rock-climbing instructor.  A gardener becomes a judge.)  These two things combined made me quit my job, and vow to make a living by making music.  That was 1992.  I haven't had a job since.

When I was 28, I was helping some musician friends sell their CDs online, but it kept growing and growing until it was the largest seller of independent music online.  150,000 musicians, 2 million customers, $100M in sales, 85 employees, and a 30,000 square foot warehouse.  Looking at this big monster of a business I'd created made me re-assess what's possible for me to create.

When I was 38, I sold CD Baby for $22 million.  Among my close friends, it's the subject of jokes.  I find myself looking at two cans of beans on the grocery shelf, and choosing the one that's 50 cents cheaper.  My friend will say, "Yep.  Lifestyles of the rich and famous."  But it makes you look at other people who may be glorified on the cover of a magazine, and realize they're not super-human.  Just had a string of success.

But still, after all that, I find myself looking at something like a tropical resort thinking, "I could never do that!" Then I have to stop and question that.  I still find my self-image is pretty limited to what has come before.  It still takes work to expand it.

2. What is the most powerful motivator for you?

The death-bed regret.  If you were to get hit by a bus today, realized you were going to die in a few minutes, but had a few minutes to stop and ponder the things you never did, what would you regret most?

I'm hugely motivated to do those things ASAP.  It's a very short list, luckily

3.    What gets you up in the morning now- in the past? ?

Getting rid of my deathbed-regrets.  I'm acting as if I'm going to die in a year or two.

4.    Can you tell us any mantras, phrases, wise saws, you repeat to yourself when the going gets tough?

These are my two big ones:

Whatever scares you, go do it.  You can use this in so many ways, from huge plans to small moment-to-moment decisions, like saying hi to someone that intimidates you.

It's either "HELL YEAH!" or no.  If you're not feeling 100% psyched-as-hell to do something, say no.  Leave room in your life for those few things you're psyched about.

5.    Did you have any habits you had to overcome that held you back from achieving what you wanted to achieve?

Procrastination, like anyone.  Doing the timid things like surfing the web or hanging with friends, instead of the daring things like forcing yourself through a creative block or difficult challenge.

But then you find that the greater reward is that priceless feeling of accomplishment when you do the difficult things.

6.    How supportive were friends and family of your lifeshifts from musician, to clown and entrepeneur?

I don't know, and it didn't matter.  When I announced at 14 that I was going to be a musician for life, of course nobody was supportive of that decision.  So I got used to doing what I want despite the disapproval of others.  I still don't care what anyone thinks.  I still make decisions that everybody I know is totally against, but I know it's the best for me, so I don't let it bother me at all.

7.    How did your polymathic background feed into success as an entrepeneur? Anything specific?

Most people have a very pre-set notion of what it means to be an entrepreneur.  They think Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerburg, or whatever heroes they admire.  But because I never meant to be an entrepreneur, I had no pre-set concept of what my life should look like.  I was just doing what makes me happy, and trying to be as helpful as possible.

What's funny is when you use that simple mission - doing what makes me happy, and trying to be as helpful as possible - to make little decisions like whether to put advertising on your website.  Does it make you happy? No.  Is it helpful to others?  No.  Then don't.

And yeah - my music background probably gave me some different insights into running a business.  It's always healthy to pull in expertise from outside the field you're in.  I'm sure a rancher and seamstress could bring in metaphorical lessons from their backgrounds, too.

8.    What is the main thing you notice in young people you think the current culture is neglecting?

The importance of solitude.  Most creative output, deep thought, and unique insight comes from solitude.  But our current trend is for every aspect of life to be "social".  I'm not social.  I don't want to be on top of things.  I want to get to the bottom of things.

9.    What did you have to sacrifice to do the things you have achieved??

I haven't had a TV since I was 18.  Apparently the world has watched millions of hours of TV, and spends millions more talking about it, but I've missed out on all that.

A lot of people seem to go "hang out", and just drink and shout at eachother in noisy bars.  I've never tried that, so I don't know if I'm missing out, but time spent on that doesn't seem to be contributing to anyone's life-goals (except maybe the nightclub owner.)

In short: nothing.  No sacrifice.  I'm always doing exactly what I want.  I wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

There is more on Derek's great blog- http://sivers.org/blog

the polymathic principle #2

The polymathic principle is all about realising the importance of polymathy in our lives, especially in any area that requires creativity. Being creative is about borrowing or stealing ideas from other arenas. It's about cross-fertilisation of ideas from perhaps wildly differing sources. When Richard Feynman came up with the maths for quantum electro dynamics he was spinning a plate on his finger and just wondering if he could describe its wobbles mathematically. He was cross- fertilising between a physical fun activity and the hyper intellectual activity of maths. Just getting outside your claustrophobic little area is sometimes all you need. The polymathic principle states that the greater the distance between the source areas of an idea the more potent it is likely to be. A polymath should have physical, artistic, intellectual areas of interest- ensuring a well stocked source for new ideas to cross-fertilise.

Timeshifting #2

One of the conclusions of both Edgar Allan Poe’s strange mystical essay “Eureka” and Einstein’s musings on the Universe is that both came to believe that Time is Space. The technical side of this insight does not involve us- but the metaphorical truth implied does. In psychological terms time really is space- inner space and outer space.

The feeling that we ‘don’t have enough time’ is bound up with feeling really cramped, restricted, bombarded and most importantly NOT OPEN. We are looking for reasons to say no, clear the desk, get away from it. We are perpetually involved in flight rather than curiosity, which is a necessary precursor to the survival of any kind of animal- it must after all be curious enough to find new food. This lack of openness also connects to the inability to learn. But also, the sense of being cramped and lacking space makes us feel time’s arrow is flying by. But travel out into the wilderness, and the desert is the best place for this, and you discover that all that endless space causes a kind of vacuum in your head. Your problems seem to diminish, get lost in the vastness. And because there is so little to see in the desert, every rock and every dune becomes a focus for your attention. You are suddenly OPEN again, searching out things to look at, greedily almost.

The inner space in your head, that follows the exposure to vast empty outer spaces, experiences a sudden and dramatic drop in the feeling of time moving by very quickly. You arrive at the present. You get to the present- and when you arrive it is as if time is almost standing still- even though you can see the clockhands turn it has no MEANING. You no longer feel anxious.

My dayjob for a while was taking harassed top executives out into the Egyptian Sahara Desert and getting them to experience this vast opening of outer and inner space. I have seen a, formerly ultra serious and, rather worried sales director, dance and sing after a mere 24 hours in this environment, people run up and down sand dunes, others announce it has been a turning point in their life. After seeing the effect such empty spaces can have (doesn't always happen) I feel it is no coincidence that the mono-theistic religions, started in similar places; and that early monasticism began with men and women retreating from the hurley burley of Roman life with its society clubs, circuses and busy life. The Roman Empire is long gone but the desert remains the same.  As a starting place for weakening the merciless hold that time can have on you try to find some empty space in your life.

Timeshifting #1

I read David Allen’s excellent ‘Getting things done’, and indeed picked up some good tips, such as filing or replying to each email as it comes, thus clearing the dead weight of an inbox, and making filing as fun as possible, but something about the basic premise of the whole idea of time management got me thinking.

The bottomline is that in the modern fast-moving highly stimulating developed countries of the world we all feel we don’t have enough time. It almost feels palpable- this lack of time. Everyone I know seems to be juggling this most precious of resources like a desert sheik managing his scant water resources. In some cases it really seems like time is running out…We have busy families where both parents work hard, dash home to be home with their kids, go out as often as they can, fill up the weekends with sports and driving children around and being charitable. The side effect can be exhaustion (but some of these people are very fit, very competent people and they take it as a challenge); what NO ONE escapes is, though, is the sense that there just isn’t enough time available.

In this sequence of articles called TIMESHIFTING I want to look in detail at how it may be possible to rewire that sense of time scarcity and replace it with a sense of time abundance.

But before we go in detail and attempt to rebuild our sense of time we should re-examine how we think about time in our everyday lives. Here are a few different ways of seeing time:

a)     ‘chess time’- where you rush against the clock to make your move and then have all the time your opponent takes to think about the next move- the ‘up time’ is experienced differently from the ‘downtime’- one is in your control the other isn’t.

b)    Then there is ‘bought time’- for example you buy a taxi ride that takes twenty minutes rather than walk for two hours. What you do with the extra time is up to you.

c)     There is ‘prime time’ when you feel at your most productive and ‘slowtime’ when everything seems to take you twice as long as usual.

d)    Thinking about ‘not wasting time’ rather than ‘investing time’- it’s a switch from a negative worldview to a pro-active positive one.

e)    People almost always undervalue what they can do in five years and over value what they can do in one year. We are bad at imagining the passing of time- hence over runs and being late which gives way to a general vagueness for longer time periods.

Time, as you can see, is the ultimate subjective experience.

When I was 19 I was very keen on rockclimbing. Every opportunity I got I used to either train on boulders or travel to the mountains looking for routes to climb. I also, for an increased thrill factor, from time to time climbed solo without a rope. Climbing on the Scottish mountain of Ben Nevis I fell unroped off a rock face, about 35 feet onto a ledge, luckily, where I fractured two vertebrae. In the approximately 1.4 seconds that I fell I seriously felt time passing slowly- and of course in retrospect I can dwell on that 1.4 second stretch as if it were a month or more. The shock of the experience switched me fully on- and time expanded far beyond the usual experience.

Another climbing experience- doing a long route on the Island of Skye and being convinced I’ve been going for two hours and now it is about twelve O’clock- only  to retrieve my watch from the rucksack and discover I’ve been climbing for not two hours but six and it’s now four O’clock in the afternoon. I can still recall that sense of missing time- where did those four hours go?

An event last year. I went with three friends 4x4 camping in the desert. It was new to them and through their eyes it all seemed new to me. When we returned 24 hours later we all kept saying- it seems like we’ve been away forever.

Because we are conditioned by clocktime- from the flashing time on your computer screen to your mobile phone to your wristwatch and your car dashboard- we are lead to believe that the reality of time is mechanical, that any piece of time is equal to any other- yet even a moment’s reflection reveals the falseness of this position- if you wake up at 3 am and decide to stay awake until everyone else gets up even an hour drags so slowly- but the lunchhour between 1 and 2 in the afternoon just whizzes by.

The subjective experience of time is controlled by context and activity. Change the context or change the activity and you can bend time to suit your will.

Does Time use you?

Do you feel pressured, stressed, under time’s thumb; and yet seem to be getting nowhere in particular? Or relaxed and easy, yet able to pack a huge amount into a short piece of ‘clock time’? Do you use time or does time use you? One way you can use time is to set aside two hours in which to do nothing. Just sit. It's not that easy. But it will give you new insights into how you use time and what an uncluttered headspace feels like.

I was sitting in a bar in Tokyo with writer Tahir Shah waiting for someone to arrive who I had said I would introduce him to. But they didn’t turn up. I apologized for wasting his time. Tahir replied, and I have never forgotten, “wasting time is not a concept I subscribe to”.

Wow. This was the first time I had heard of such a generally accepted idea just rejected, tossed out, shorn of its potent negativity. And when I started to think I saw that it was impossible to waste time just as it is impossible to ‘kill time’. Time passes. What we do with it is our choice- and is always our choice- even if our expectations aren’t met. When we waste time what we are saying is that something we expected would happen didn’t so we were kept in a state of waiting when we weren’t living as fully as we felt was our due. Who’s stopping you? Only your expectations stop you from fully experiencing any moment you care to.

Wasting time assumes that one learnt nothing from an experience- yet we can never accurately tell which experiences were and were not crucial for learning. While studying aikido in Japan I found that I would do the same technique wrong about a hundred times before I suddenly did it right. I noticed that the top teacher Chida Sensei did not correct me straight away. He said, “You have to do something wrong a few times so that you really appreciate it when you do it right- if the teacher tells you too soon they cheat you of feeling the difference and you don’t learn the technique so well. You have to value what you learn.”

So even frustrating times can be validated later on – no one can really say one time is more useful or crucial than another- not without the possession of clairvoyance. What we can say, though, in a broader macro sense you can spend time not learning anything new and you can spend time on a steep learning curve- the choice is yours. If you arrange your life around learning nothing new, of never being surprised, of making each day the same- then don’t be surprised if your life seems to flash by. Maybe the only waste of time is dedicating a life to not learning.

Introduction to timeshifting

Timeshifting is about slowing the feeling of time rushing by.

It's about feeling you have more time.

It's about getting control of your time.

It's about not feeling busy all the time.

You will end up getting more done- but that isn't the aim. If that's the aim you just end up feeling stressed and battered.

With timeshifting you shift your perception of time. You slow time down. That way you get more done and you feel less stressed.

The key to it all is learning.

When we learn, actively, time slows down. It's as simple as that.

As we get older we tend to occupy and enjoy positions where we don't need to learn anything.

We finished all that when we were in our 20s.

Travel is the only way many older people learn, because when you travel you can't fake it- you really don't know what is going on a lot of the time.

Ever noticed that the years when you travel the time didn't rush by? And in reflection, does it seem that you had more time then?

Because you were learning new things.

This is the essence of Timeshifting which I'll elaborate on and go around in the following articles.

lifeshifting #8 - growing your own committment

Commitment, dedication, passion, obsession- these all seem to be words bandied about the successful in any field, by high achievers and people prominent in any area you care to mention, from business to astrophysics. Yet who has not felt daunted when hearing about these super committed obsessional people? I mean, when do they get time to even read a book, let alone spend a few hours having a drink with friends in the pub? They seem so busy, so committed, so dedicated- just what’s going on? Are there two types- those destined to be averagely interested in things and those blessed with passion? No. All those ‘high achievers’ and successes started just as ordinary as anyone else. Not particularly keen or dedicated at all. What happened was that they found what they really wanted to do and then dedication flowered. You don’t have to feel 'dedicated'. You don’t have to fake passion like a fast-food employee doomed to get excited about some piece of processed beef. Dedication naturally follows from focusing on something that you like and want to do. It's not an emotion, it's an inclination that grows from a pattern of action. Which is our aim in the first place. Dedication flowers when distractions are weeded out, when you stop putting things in the way of what you want to do. It’s really strange, almost disconcerting to feel an powerful interest blooming. It feels so natural- because it is. There is no accident one feels in the derivation of the word enthusiasm from the Greek for divinely inspired. Suddenly you don’t want to watch TV movies- you’d rather be studying Spanish verbs, restaurant finance or modern dance. Momentum breeds momentum. Feedback in an area you like and self-chose, will be positive feedback- the more you do it the more you will want to do it. But you must apply the second principle of Lifeshifting: remove the barriers. If you constantly interrupt your obsession it will wither and die. Nurture it gently and it will grow into something monstrous…

Lifeshifting #7- beyond Meaning Mountain

Lifeshifting is about orientating your primetime- the best hours of each day of your life- to doing what you find most meaningful. If you're allocating your primetime to doing a job you find meaningless- get a night job instead and spend your days doing something more worthwhile. In my take on lifeshifting I've taken to calling this movement towards meaning, Meaning Mountain. But sometimes, even finding Meaning Mountain is hard.

Maybe you don’t even know what is meaningful to you. Sometimes we get so caught up in conventional ways of living, or problems, or other people’s lives that we lose the ability to even know what we find meaningful and what we know is meaningless.

If your job is so stressful that you need a few beers each night to wind down you may conclude that beer drinking is meaningful.

If you deal with what Viktor Frankl calls “Sunday neurosis” by going shopping rather than facing up to sense of futility then you may conclude that shopping is meaningful.

If calling in sick and watching TV rather than doing your job makes you feel better then you may conclude that being workshy is meaningful.

If you don’t know what you find meaningful you have to search for Meaning Mountain. And if you’re so cynical that even the words ‘meaning mountain’ sound meaningless then you have to search for the sign that will get you to meaning mountain.

the Search for the Sign

Life is full of micro-meaning. If you have a child and you help him to read or tie his laces you will know that is more meaningful than laughing at his inability to do these things. One of the great crimes of ignorance is the way academics propound theories that say 'Life is meaningless'. As Viktor Frankl wrote: "The gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maidenek were ultimately prepared in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."

Life is full of meaning. If you doubt this first find micro-meaning. Help people. Be a good friend. Work conscientiously. Be reliable. Keep your word. Do this and your life will acquire more meaning. Meaning is just the addition of lots of instances of micro-meaning.

Gather enough micro-meaning and you start to get glimpses of macro-meaning. You start to realize you could structure your life to maximize meaning.

This is the sign you follow to meaning mountain.

One of the most disheartening images I have is something I read in an account by a heroin addict, who was a father. He recounts locking himself in the toilet to shoot up as his ignored toddler son bangs on the door demanding attention- and the addict loathing himself shouts out, “Go and watch the fucking telly can’t you?”

Addiction and distraction are enemies of meaning. Maybe you have to outwit those problems first. But even in a life circumscribed by disaster, like the life Viktor Frankl lived in the concentration camps, offers chances to help others, inspire others, be generous with time and help.

Look for micro-meaning, look for the sign to Meaning Mountain.

Then What?

OK you’ve found micro meaning in your life, you’ve glimpsed that you could better structure your life around meaning. You’ve seen the sign to the mountain- so now what?

How do you discover what work is most meaningful  to you?

This is the key question of lifeshifting. When you know the answer you will feel confident to make the Lifeshift Decision, which is actually the hardest part of the whole process, the one that requires the most courage, but is, at the same time, paradoxically the one that requires the least effort.