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one drink a1.com Tim last time drink a1.com Tim check it out optimal this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hand start shaking can I ask you a personal question now in the Bing time what if I the I'm a cybernetic organism living
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dissue over metal endoskeleton hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is Tim Ferris welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to sit down with worldclass performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits routines
6:18
favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives this episode is a two for one and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary which is in anane to think about and past 1 billion downloads to celebrate I've curated some
6:35
of the best of the best some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to
6:50
yes enjoy the household names the super famous folks but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider Stars these are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle perhaps you
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missed an episode just trust me on this one we went to Great pains to put these pairings together and for the bios of all guests you can find that and more at tim. blog combo and now without further Ado please enjoy and thank you for listening first up Robert Rodriguez
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screenwriter producer and director of Desperado From Dusk till Dawn the Spy Kids franchise Once Upon a Time in Mexico Frank Miller's Sin City machete and we can be heroes and founder of lray network you can find Robert on Twitter and Instagram
7:53
Rodriguez how do you use journaling I started you know with the word processing way back you know when I first started film making the first when I sold El Mariachi in Columbia hired me the first thing I asked for was an Apple laptop computer which was the very first
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one that came out they had no idea what it was I was the only one on the plane with one I was riding my screenplays in and I would continue my journal which I started by handwriting it it really started I think in college my dad gave me a day planner one of those day
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planners and I started using it and I would write the things you're going to do on the left side and then you would write what you ended up doing that day on the right and even though I was in college I would try to push myself pretty hard I would look and I'd go wow
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I didn't have very much to write about myself at the end of that day I'm G to have to give myself more things on the left so I have more to write stuff on the right it really made you reflect on your day and realize I didn't I didn't
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do much today and so those got really full and I became a filmmaker right away El Mariachi got made and during the process of El Mariachi I remember keeping a really dense Journal because it was an experiment it was really a test film film and that was during all
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parts of the process for all all parts of the process because I thought if I'm going to go take on this endeavor I know a lot of things aren't going to work out it's my first feature film no one's intended to see it it's really a learning experience I'm just going to go
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make it and I'm going to be able to look back on my journal and see where I messed up it it's really going to be a document so I wouldn't make that mistake again I could go back and track why did the exposure not work and I'd be able to
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go back and go oh I didn't do this and I didn't do that it was really going to be a record of failure rather than a document of success in any way it was really about recording a methodology for a project a specific project and as the process went on right away as I started
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editing it I kept track of that I sold it pretty quickly and then I was in Hollywood and I was like now I really got something to write up I was writing down all the weird stuff that was happening finally I decided to put out a book on just the making of Omarian and I
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kept journaling from then on everything which was Rebel Without a crew Rebel Without a crew and I would find that you meet the same people over and over again like I wrote down very specifics of people that I would meet casually in would knowing we would run into each
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other again and they end up being great collaborators 10 years later you know or showing up in things and I'd be able to go back and read them stuff from the early days and I would blow them away so when you write these down for instance
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I'll go on a computer so I can find them and I do my year so do you do it by hand and then input it into a computer no I do them all on the computer so I have a little alarm that goes off at midnight to make sure cuz around Midnight's usually a good time and I'll write
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something down cuz I found that even when I just wrote some items down I could go back and fill them in later cuz you would remember and would always would shocked me what kept it going is when I would go back and review the journals at how many lifechanging things
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happen like within a weekend or things that you thought were spread out over two years were actually Friday Saturday Sunday and that Monday I mean so many occurrences happen in chunks that blow you away things that kind of Define you and do you use word do you use a
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different application how do you C I always just used word cuz that was the first thing I had on my Apple laptop they're about a thousand sometimes a thousand to 2,000 pages per year wow of journals do few a few days or I'm sorry a few pages per night on average yeah
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few pages per Sometimes some some hardly anything some things are bigger and sometimes it's a che sometimes I'll clip like reviews or conversations I had that have been written down somewhere else and I'll throw them in there too everything goes right in the in the
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right date and so I could search by date and I can kind of cross reference stuff which is I just say for anyone who's a parent it's a must it's a must cuz your children and you forget everything you know within a few years they'll forget
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things that you think they should remember for the rest of their lives they'll only remember it if it's reinforced and I'm I'm a real family man so I really love every birthday I'll go tell my kids again because they forget by the next year what their first years
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were like cuz I'll just read those journal entries and it blows them away you know or they'll say hey we should go camping again I go camping oh yeah remember that time we went camping and I put the tent in the back yard and it had
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electricity going through we had fans we're watching Johnny Quest and we're were playing I must have journal on that and I must have video so I would go year by year I just search camping camping camping oh May 4th 1999 we went camping oh it's on tape 25 of this particular
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tape I'd go find the tape and show it to them after I'd show them the tape they didn't have to go camping again they just relived it reled they relived it and it was better than we even remembered so encapsulating stuff like that was just really important that
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reminds me of uh something I don't think I've ever talked about but my mom when I was 15 I spent a year abroad in Japan it was my first time overseas and I was in a Japanese school it's the only you know where's Waldo American kid in the entire
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you I think it was 5,000 students School Japanese family and of course I assumed at the time I was going to remember everything that happened but my mom to her credit every time we had a phone call would get off the phone and write down what I had said wow and so she has
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this record of my experience in Japan that I have no record of and of course I don't remember any of it without that kind of queuing yeah I think part of that came through I read a diary my mom tried to keep of when we were really little and it had
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very few entries but one of the most defining moments when she pushed me into a pool cuz I wouldn't go jump in she knew I just needed a push and I felt totally betrayed and totally angry with her it was in there but it had her side of the story and of course it was
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correct but I wish she had written more so I thought I'm going to make sure I write and now it's become an addiction and I and it's just so necessary I mean you ask your girlfriend or your wife what did we do last year on your birthday they won't remember a year goes
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by you will not remember the details you go back and you see the journals it's even better the second time you lived it again and you realize the importance of it and when you meet someone you think might be a recurring figure in your life
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or you meet someone who ends up being a teacher of some type how often do you go back and review the notes or do you is it really just in time information not just in case so when you when you realize oh my God I'm going to be meeting say Francis for Copa for the
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second time should probably go back and look at what happened in the first meeting or is it something that you ly review it's only going to need to know because there's so many things you mean you're you're really I tell myself I want to be the guy looking through the
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windshield not the rearview mirror but sometimes you can see better through the windshield if you look through the rearview mirror and look at some of this stuff that's gone on and seen kind of make sense of where your relationships are going or what you've learned and it
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blows me away sometimes I'll just go ahead and and look somebody up you know that I'm about to meet with I just met with Jim Cameron we H out always talked like four hours we hadn't seen each other in a few years and I looked up old stuff and I was like oh my god do you
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remember when we did this this I met him 20 years ago and we've been friends over the years and he totally forgot when I went and showed him Desperado for the first time before it came out just to see what he thought he was watched it in his screening room and he gave me two
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little manuscripts here well while I watch your movie you go read a couple of my treatments one of them was for Spider-Man and one of them was for Avatar this was in 1994 wow that's how long ago he had that and how much that was going in his head
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and I thought wow to keep something that was that vision are in your head that long waiting for the technology to come those kind of things made you realize some of these projects I've had for 10 years I should go re bring him back up I wonder and I have I have since then
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dusted off something that I'd had 15 years and sold it and uh now I've just finish a screenplay for it so you mentioned Jim Cameron I had an opportunity to I met him very briefly through the X prize and Peter D mandis and those guys and as part of the
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experience it was a fundraiser for the X prise we got staff or crew shirts from Avatar right and the shirts said it said something along the lines of Hope is not a strategy failure is not an option luck is not a factor and Jim is is known for
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being very demanding not in a bad way but I thought that shirt was just it spoke volumes I think in so many different ways about sort of his process his mentality how do you keep morale High when you're working with a crew and maybe like you said doing like an
15:59
exterior shot in Austin and people are just suffering and sweating anding fatigued do you have any tricks or approaches that you use over and over again to keep kind of morale high and get the best out of people I've worked with the same crew for some of them for
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20 years and so they kind of know already the philosophy I tend to have and I've learned this not through film making but through other disciplines sometimes working with painters and with sculptors and musician friends cuz uh what I found it's kind of why do so many
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different jobs is because creativity is in job specific I mean if you know how to be creative you can literally jump from job to job with no training and do them pretty well because the technical part of any job is 10% 90% of that is
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creativity if you already know how to be creative you've kind of got the battle you know half B which is you don't need to know you don't need to know what notes specifically you're going to play when you get on stage and do your solo everybody will go what did you just play
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and you're going to go I don't know yes yes ask Jimmy Von that how do you know what you're playing just now I don't even know what I played it's like well it was Fant fastic did anybody tape it no that's another one that goes off into the air you know ask ask any of the
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greats you know painters I studied under a painter Sebastian Krueger I went all the way to Germany to watch him paint to figure out his trick how does he do it because I tried to do what he did and it looked like garbage so he must have a
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special brush must have special paint and a special technique and I'm going no he's just doing starts with a midtone starts knocking in some highlights a little bit on the chin and he goes to the eye and how do you know where to go next he goes oh I never know it's
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different every time that drives me Bonker what do you mean so how come I can't do that and i' go sit down and suddenly I could do it it blows you away so I take those lessons back and I teach my actors that I teach my crew that so just to you don't need to know yeah
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sorry to pause but this is so fascinating to me so what clicked what was the realization when you sat down and so you get in your own way thinking that you needed to know something a trick or a process before it would flow if you got out of the way it would just
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flow what gives you permission to let it flow sometimes if you take four years of schooling or you study under somebody then you've suddenly given your permission to let it flow and I know you're a guy who likes to take a shortcut in here's the shortcut just get
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out of your own way right you're just opening up the pipe and that creativity flows through and as soon as your ego gets in the way and you go oh but I don't know if I know what to do next you've already put eye in front of it and you've already blocked it a little
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bit I did it once but I don't know if I can do it again it was never you the best you can be is just to get out of the way so it comes through so when an actor comes to me or crew member goes I'm not sure I know how to play this
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part or I'm not sure I know go that's beautiful cuz the other half is going to show up over there they say knowing's half the battle I think the most important part is the other half not knowing not knowing what's going to happen but you trust that it'll be there
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when you put the brush up to the canvas it's going to know where to go and the further you're out of the way of it it'll just happen so the trust comes first the trust comes first you have to trust first and then it'll happen and I always point it out when it does I point
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it out you'll see and I'll point it out when it's just going to fall on your lap or I'll just call upon you to come up with something and you will no I'm going to point out cuz that's the magic you're just going to be open to it it's all
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attitude there's nothing wrong that could ever happen I remember on from D Dawn the film the special effects guys put too much fire in the explosion and the actors come running out of the building and it's in the movie you see the building blow up the bar at the end
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and the fireball if you were to continue but I cut away it just kept going and engulfed the whole set and that was the first shot we still needed lots of other stuff to shoot with it and we're like okay everyone else was freaking out the production designer was crying that was
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all their work and uh me and my assistant director came over and he goes you thinking what I'm thinking yeah this it looks good the way it is it's all charred let's just keep shooting and we'll do the repair you know little repair needs to be done for next week
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and we'll shoot that exterior next week but let's just shoot let's just keep shooting sometimes you use those gifts cuz nothing ever goes according to plan and sometimes when I hear you know new filmmakers talk they talk all down about
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their film oh well nothing worked and it was a disappointment it's like oh they don't realize it that's the job the job is that nothing is going to work at all and you go how can I turn that in a way to turn it into a positive and I get something much better than if I had all
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the time and money in the world yeah and I loved those experiences so much that I would purposely and I talked to Michael man about this and the Michael man director's chair because we talked about Manhunter once years ago and he retell
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me the story and he didn't have any money he fired the effects crew it some of the really cool staccato editing was really to cover up the fact that they didn't have effects and I didn't know that I always thought it was a stylistic choice he goes no cuz we didn't have any
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money or time and I had to I was cut it in myself and I was throwing ketchup on the guy in between and I put edit like oh my God I thought that was brilliant stylistic choice no I said I'm going to do that for all my movies now I want all
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of them to not have enough money not enough time so that we're forced to be more creative because that's going to give it something a spark that you can't manufacture and people will tap in it or they go I don't know why I like this movie it's kind of a weird movie but
20:54
there's something about it that makes me want to watch it again and again because it's got a life to it sometimes art it should be imperfect in a way the point you made just a minute ago about creativity transferring from one area to
21:08
the next to seemingly unrelated skills and areas I think is really important and I cannot recommend highly enough to people check out the director's chair and one of the one of the terms that jumped out which you kind of mentioned in your last example was the Gremlins
21:22
right and the Gremlins that you kind of turn to how do you embrace the Gremlins right and turn them to your advantage and the you know the example of the ending of Back to the Future and how like the church Tower and all of that was because the studios just refused to
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finance this more kind of spectacular ending things that you would think that planned for for years were created at the last moment and you I couldn't believe that myself that's why I enjoyed doing those interviews I truly want to know these things because they still
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Blow Me Away the creative process blows me away and it applies to so much that even if you're not a director or a filmmaker you watch that and you see people talking about the creativity and creative process and you see how it applies to anything that you do how you raise
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your children how you cook food how you run a business you know creativity is so much a part of that and when people say oh you do so many things you you're a musician you're a painter you you know you edit you're the composer you're the
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cinematographer you're the editor say you do so many different things go no I I only do one thing I live a creative life when you put creativity in everything everything becomes available to you anything that has creative aspect is suddenly yours to go and do there's
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no separation between work and play I mean I work quote unquote in my house I mean that's why I write my scripts come up with my ideas while I'm playing with my kids while I'm cooking them at Meal which is a creative exercise art you can eat in itself and you go upstairs and do
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some editing you edit a scene you I can already hear the kind of the music for I'll walk over to this room and I'll do music for it and then you go I'm not sure how this character I'm going to get into this character said maybe I'll paint him first and kind of see visually
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what he looks like or musically what he sounds like and you can work completely nonlinear that way because you realize I can do anything I want because everything can be creative even the business call suddenly you go this is kind of out of my league but let me add
23:06
my creativity to it and maybe that'll solve something no one else will be able to solve and sure enough you can always rely on creativity to sort of win the day in a lot of areas and with say El Mariachi I've heard a couple of different versions of this financing but
23:21
I'd love to know how you financed it because I've heard experimental medical procedures I've heard selling your sort of body to science how was that financed yeah that's one of the strangest things the legend kept growing around Mariachi
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and it's one of the few times you'll hear a legend where it was all literally true I mean it was uh it was as crazy as it sounded but back then you know I mean I was from a family of 10 kids there was no borrowing from Mom and Dad to go make
23:49
a movie that was on me I was already paying my way through school and I already had two jobs I had a job as a Cartoonist and I had a job working at the University and and barely making rent and tuition so to go make a movie even though you know people would say oh
24:04
7,000 that's so cheap for a 16 mm movie oh yeah you got $7,000 sticking out of your pocket who has that so you had to kind of take down a score and the only way you could actually go do a big number was to go to this uh it was one of the biggest universities in the
24:18
country at the time they had this thing called phaco which was a medical research facility and it's only like a fourth stage where it's already been tested many times and this is the final before they get FDA they're not they're not like you know
24:30
mixing a couple things together and giving it to you and saying okay let's see if it works they're really kind of seeing but they need healthy young specimens between the ages of 18 and 24 and so that's college students and they all need money so you go in for a
24:41
weekend and make 500 bucks but you become a pig and cushion I would go in there for the longer ones that were like a month where you would be uh paid for your time rather than your pain and I would write scripts while I was in there and you make 2,000
24:53
$3,000 in a month real money when you're not having to pay for food and rent anything now you have to eat oh so you were hous there you're a hous there yeah you're house there and you can't leave and you got to eat and and pee at a time guess that's another benefit though
25:04
right because you're they're covering some of your what would otherwise be expensive M it was a great deal and so I did a couple of those and one of them was a drug that's on the market lipor cholesterol lower in Dr that's the one I was on so I got to eat bacon and all
25:17
kinds of stuff I got to eat a you know high cholesterol diet I use that money to go and make the film because I I had an idea we could sell it for at least double of what we made it if we kept the budget really low I didn't know so I I
25:29
had to just make it for as little as possible most of that money went to just the film stock and I really didn't think anyone was going to see it it was really just a test film that's why I did it in Spanish I did it for the Spanish Market I was already had a bunch of
25:41
award-winning short films but I needed to practice telling features so I thought let me just make a bunch of features for the Spanish Market just to get some seasoning do all the jobs myself cuz I couldn't afford a crew and that way I'll learn them all if I can
25:52
sell it for twice of what I put in that's like the best film school I'll learn every job I'll do like two or three of these things cut them all together take out the best portions and use it on my demo real and then use the money that I make to go make a real
26:04
first film English Language American and independent film the first one got released by Columbia Pictures and I was shocked how did that happen and who took a chance on you or how did you increase the odds of that happening because I
26:18
guess it was Sundance is that was that the trigger no it was already bought by Sundance it was already bought by Sund so how did that happen I had this crazy idea I had made this short film by myself was a wind up C was 8 minutes long it was called bedhead it's online
26:31
and I utilized it to use slow motion and all kinds of things that I couldn't use on a video camera I really wanted to show off what I could do with that little camera it's a world World War II camera the little windup ones I mean a piece of junk but it could do stuff it
26:43
couldn't do with video shot that put it in festivals and won a bunch of festivals and I was like wow I did that all by myself with $800 it's 8 minutes if I did that times 10 I could do an 80-minute movie for $8,000 or less because it would be dialogue scenes it
26:57
wouldn't be walw action like that short film I could Pat it out I could probably do it for five grand I felt like I was getting away with something coming up with this idea thinking how come no one's ever done this before let me go try it this summer I me try it for the
27:08
Spanish video Market cuz they make them for like 30 grand but I'll guarantee no one sees it I'll call it am Mariachi which is basically if you're going to the action section you won't buy a movie call or rent a movie called the guitar
27:19
player that promises no action at all but I just thought you know I had a sense of humor and I thought let me make it kind of don't really want people to see it I just want to be able to test out these ideas and see if it's possible shot shot shot cut it cut it cut it went
27:31
to sell it in LA cuz that's where the Distributors were for those us distributed Spanish language movies because you would just look at the video box and all the companies were like on Wilshire Boulevard so I drove up here with my friend Carlos and the in I had
27:44
was there was going to be a 25th anniversary of the Texas film Commission in Austin and a bunch of people from Hollywood that Governor an Richards was trying to invite in and I saw the list of people one of the agents from ICM called Robert Newman was going to be
27:56
there and I thought maybe I can try and slip in my short films well the whole thing got cancelled and fell apart so when I was in LA I called ICM up cold I looked him up in the phone book called him up this was in 1992 and asked for Robert Newman's office and they put me
28:09
right through he was a new agent there he didn't have any directors yet I called up his assistant and I said hey can I talk to Robert Newman who was going to come down to this 25th anniversary thing and they said oh I hooked up on the phone with him said
28:20
yeah what happened with that I was ready to come down go W I don't know but I was going to show you my film and I'm here in town I wanted to drop off my award-winning short film in a trailer for movie I made for $7,000 okay drop it off I couldn't
28:30
believe it dropped it off he called me back up the next day hey the machine ate my tape he actually watched I couldn't believe I went made another tape gave it to him waited over the weekend and uh he got the call and he says I love the
28:43
short film but I love the trailer the trailer for this movie the Mariachi movie I mean it's like a world-class trailer because I cut it I knew people could watch the whole thing so I was I'm a pretty good editor I cut this really snazzy trailer that just made you want
28:56
to watch the movie and he said how much did it cost again I said 7,000 well that's pretty good most trailers cost 20 or 30 no no the whole film cost 7,000 said oh come on I said no the whole thing I shot it I shot a really L bud but I'm goingon to can I come up and
29:09
talk to you so he had me come up and I told him I plan on making two or three of these like a Trilogy of these guy with a guitar case as just a test and I'm wondering what else I should put on my demo tape because you know my War winning short film has been doing well I
29:23
think go oh kind of like a dollar's Trilogy I could get you work right now off of this like really he go yeah I send this to the studios just put subtitles on it and I'll send it to him so I subtitled it send it he got me a two-year deal right away at Columbia
29:36
Pictures not to even release Mariachi Mariachi was just a calling card but it happened to so quick I mean I was really young I was what 22 23 I really thought I was going to make some test films first and have a chance to come up with what my big idea was I mean I was in no
29:50
rush I really wanted to be prepared I really wanted to learn every job and really know what I was doing so this suddenly caught me by surprise cuz now they're asking well you're a filmmaker now and he even wrote me down as a writer director and I guess a writer
30:01
director I guess I wrote the script yeah I guess I'm a writer director never really thought of myself that way and I was suddenly this young kid plunged into this world and I suddenly had to come up with a bunch of original ideas because
30:12
this was my shot it was too quick yeah I was not prepared so I thought well look you guys like om Mariachi why don't we just remake that remake it with like Antonio Banderas and Spain and we'll just cast it up and just and they said okay that's a good idea but we want to
30:25
test screen El Mariachi first to make sure people aren't think it's a downer ending when the girl gets killed so they made a film print they tested it people liked it the way it was they decided to take it to festivals and I completely
30:36
protested I was like this is my practice film no one was ever supposed to see this give me $2,000 my w ball don't put this out for the put this out if I knew people were going to see give me $2,000 I'll go reshoot half of it just knowing people were going to see it as my first
30:50
film and they said no you don't know what you have here it's very special and they took it out and it went to tell Ride Toronto and the the head of sun dance came to me at Toronto and said don't show it at any more festivals and you can bring it to Sundance and put it
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in competition cuz you know he knew it would do really well there and it w and I so I was already bought by Columbia so I was one of the few films usually that that's already had a distributor and we took it and um I had a great little talk
31:13
I would do before to set it up because I had to disclaim why it was the way it was I say when you see the Columbia logo come on in the front logo probably cost more than the whole movie when everything you watch after that just know that I how I did it I wanted people
31:28
to know how I did it I really wanted to deconstruct how I was done cuz I would have wanted to know that as a film student who felt coming from a family of 10 kids living in Texas people constantly saying you want to be a filmmaker oh you need to move to LA that
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you could stay where you are and come up with something that could be sold I wanted other I just wanted to get on top of a mountain and tell everybody so that's why I put out a book and that's why even before each screening I would explain how it was even possible cuz I
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knew they would be wondering cuz nobody had really ever done it it wasn't that it was impossible just nobody had done it before no one ever thought that way people kind of forgot that that's how movies really started it was always like a couple guys with a windup camera and
32:03
Buster Keaton in front it wasn't a business yet when it became a business suddenly everyone had a job and you needed 200 people because it was now an industry that's not what the art form was originally it was just the manipulation of moving images and you
32:14
can do that with two people one person that was a breakthrough idea and so by would tell them I just took stock in what I had my friend Carlos he's got a ranch in Mexico okay that'll be who the bad gu's at his cousin owns a bar the bars where's going to be the first
32:28
initial shootouts we going to be all the bad guys hang out his other cousin owns a bus line okay there'll be an action scene with a bus at some point there a big action scene in the middle of the movie with a bus he's got a pitbull okay
32:38
he's in the movie his other friend had a turtle he found okay the turtle is in the movie because people will think we had an animal rangler and that'll suddenly raise production value so you I wrote everything around what we had so
32:49
you never had to go search and you never had to spend anything on the movie the movie cost really nothing it was really just the the fact that I wanted to shoot it on film instead of video so that it would look more expensive and try and tell people you know I made it for
33:00
$70,000 try to sell it for like 70,000 instead it ended up going to Columbia getting released and that story really when we won Sundance the audience award my acceptance speech said you're going to get a lot more entries next year when people find out that this is the one
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that won a movie made with no money no crew everyone's going to pick up a camera and start making their own movies and it's been flooded with entry since then it was really a real change in the Paradigm and it was only at a necessity it was n my big idea that it could be
33:29
done I really just thought I I don't want to take anyone with me even my best friend wanted to come help on my movie shoot for mariachi I said no CU I got to go to Mexico and this camera I borrow you know it's probably going to break
33:39
down the first day I wonder I'll jinx it if I start bringing too many people down and I don't mind failing I just don't like failing in a bunch of other in front of a bunch of other people so where they go back and they say Robert tried to make a movie for no money
33:50
you're idiot and stred got stranded in Mexico so I really didn't think it would work and I was surprised and that's the best I tell people is just be naive stay naive throw it away don't overthink it I didn't overthink it at all cuz I would
34:05
have treated it completely differently had I thought I would ever even show it to anybody had I thought I would go to a festival and I would submitt it I would have spent 10 times as much I would have gone and borrow money and done all instead it was like one take one take
34:16
one take everything was one take even if it didn't work cuz I the film's so expensive so I would go and it was a noisy camera it was a soundless camera I mean it would make so much noise you couldn't record sound so I had to record
34:27
sound the way you're doing right now right so I would shoot a take put the camera away get the sound out put the mic up close so for those people yeah we we have two mics attached to a little recording device I would put the mic as close as you have it so I got great
34:39
sound but it was out of sync but you kind of talk in your own Rhythm so if you say hi my name is you know Robert put the camera away you okay now do the audio hi my name is Robert it kind com you can pretty much get it the sink because I don't like rubbery lips if you
34:52
look at Mariachi it's all in syn except where it started to get out of sink I cut away to the dog or I cut way to a closeup and it created this really Snappy editing style but it was really just to get it back in syn cuz I couldn't stand that but that was the
35:04
whole idea you know was like let me just try and do all these things myself and and see if we can put it together it reminds me of Jack Ma I mean it's very consistent among these people who seem to come out of nowhere and build something very big of course there are
35:17
exceptions but Jack ma of Alibaba he said you know we had a couple of advantages when we started we had no experience no money and no plan and so every dollar we spent we had to consider very very very carefully my plan was I had a really good plan this was the plan
35:30
was I'm going to go shoot one take of everything because a film is the most expensive item if I just shoot two takes you know one just in case I've just doubled my budget so one take I'll cut it together the stuff that I need to come re-shoot we'll only re-shoot that
35:46
we'll only get those shots you never come back and re-shoot by the time you get back up there back to Austin you figure out a way to cut around things that were like not done right or a little slow or and I never came came back and reshot anything you end up just
35:59
working with what you got but it left me off got me off the hook from being too precious is by knowing I had that safety net which I never ended up using so if you can do that for yourself you know in any area that you're in try to just go
36:11
free with a Bandon and sometimes you know they say that for writing a book or writing a script just write don't keep rereading each page and going oh it's not good enough and then tear it up and throw it in the trash can you'll never get anywhere you got to just get
36:21
momentum get it down and keep going and then come back later with fresh eyes and look at it again now that you have access to so many resour ources what are practices you have or principles for maintaining that Scrappy creative mindset right because if you you don't
36:36
have to have many constraints if you don't want to yeah at this point are there ways that you try to simulate that or there's a couple things with that this is freedom of limitations you know there's almost more freeing to know I got to use only these items Turtle bar
36:50
Ranch you're almost completely free within that you know you almost can do not anything because that would be almost too many options but you're just put into a box that one of my favorite movies I did with Quinton was called four rooms where they said we're all
37:04
doing short films we're all have the same criteria has to be set in one room has to be New Year's Eve and you have to use the Bell hop the freedom of limitations was enormous I mean you watch that short and it's goes all over the room by the end
37:17
we burn down the room I mean it's almost was more exciting to know that you were in a box and you could be creative within that box so now that so many things are available to you you want to limit yourself in a way so I try to limit time I try to limit money so that
37:32
we can really get still keep that essence of creativity and deliver on the screen something that just looks much bigger so that you can retain your freedom creative freedom because if you start spending more money suddenly the finance years rightfully so the studios
37:47
or you know the executives will be over your shoulder constantly questioning every move you make because they want their money back but if you keep the budget low it's a win-win situation if the movie does great it's a great success if the movie doesn't do great
38:01
it's still a success cuz it didn't cost very much and it'll make back its money over time that's kind of where I've kind of lived and breathed I'm about to jump out of the box a little bit more and do some things that are a little bigger
38:10
just to learn more because you just learn more when you go and do other kind of assignments but where it's really the most fun and that's why you ask how do you keep the morale High the morale is always high on the set because they know we're just being creative that's the
38:22
name of the game it's not looking for a result it's like how can we just keep keep ourselves jazzed about this 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 element spelled l m NT what on Earth is
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element it is a delicious sugar-free electrolyte drink mix element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto low carb or paleo diet so if you're on a low carb diet or fasting electrolytes play a key
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free sample pack with any element purchase at drink L mn.com Tim be sure to also try the new element sparkling a bold 16 o can of sparkling electrolite water again check it all out drink element.com Tim drinkel mn.com Tim and now Susan K number one New York
39:52
Times best-selling author of quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking which spent 8 years on the New York Times bestsellers list and Bittersweet how sorrow and longing make us whole and award-winning speaker whose TED Talks have garnered more than
40:10
46 million views you can find Susan on Instagram Susan author Susan welcome to the show thank you so much for having me I have been looking forward to having you on the show for some time and and we have a lot of terrain to possibly cover so we may
40:31
end up having a part two and three but I don't want to get ahead of myself I thought that we could look at public speaking just for a second because many people will associate you with this Blockbuster Mega hit of a TED Talk and rumor has it that you straight in the
40:51
delivery room from the get-go were a Natural Born Killer on stage this is true were you born a spectacular public speaker oh my gosh okay well everybody listening you can't see Tim right now but he has a very devilish smile on his face because
41:08
of course the answer is the complete opposite so I had a lifelong well dating back to middle school I know exactly when it started I had an almost lifelong fear of public speaking and a lot of people say they're afraid of public speaking and you know they're telling
41:24
the truth but like they didn't have a fear the way I had a fear of it it was so extreme what was the triggering event oh okay the triggering event was I had recently switched to a new middle school and I was in an English literature class
41:40
and I probably appeared to the teacher in that class to be not a shy person at all because I love English so I was always participating anyway she called me up to the front of the room we were doing MC Beth and she called me up with a friend of mine and she said okay
41:53
you're going to play Lady MCB Beth and your friend Rob is going to play MC Beth and just improvise this scene and for me as a shy person in a new school this was like total cryptonight and I couldn't say anything I just completely blanked out and just stood there dumbly at the
42:13
front of the class and finally just had to kind of sit back down red-faced not having said a word that sounds terrible making my Palms sweat just listening to it yeah yeah you know and I and I know that now now that i' I've studied all this stuff that if you have an
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experience like that it gets encoded into your amydala which is the part of your brain that registers all your fears and then the amydala for the rest of your life is doing its job by saying oh you know I'm going to steer you clear of any situation ever approximating
42:44
anything like that literature class ever again so after that anytime I had to give a speech and I did it you know I used to be a lawyer and on Wall Street and stuff anytime I would do it I would just sort of suffer my way through and I
42:58
would always lose 5 lbs because I couldn't eat before like for a week before then I started writing this book quiet after I had left law and I really really really cared about it you know it was my dream come true to be a writer and I cared so much about the ideas in
43:16
the book and I didn't want my fear to stand in my way and I was giving this Ted talk so I had to overcome it how did the opportunity for the Ted Talk come about so I had a friend who worked at Ted told him about the book and he kind
43:32
of passed on the idea to the curators at the time and I think that they understood that most of the Ted audience is really introverted and so they knew that it would relate with their audience and I think that that was probably why they invited me in and I mean I'll come
43:48
back to how I overcame my fear in a minute but I will tell you they turned out to be so accurate that after I gave the talk you know I came down off the stage and I was absolutely mobbed for the whole rest of the week by every single other audience member who are all
44:03
coming to tell me you know that's my story too and I'm going around pretending to be this very confident extroverted person and that's not really who I am so amazing yeah present company included right oh yeah absolutely I will steer us back and you'll also bring us
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back to what we were just talking about but last night at a group dinner which I helped organize keep in mind at a wonderful restaurant here in New York City called a lily it's a Lebanese place I had to take four or five bathroom breaks which were not to use the
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bathroom it was that is what I do at any dinner of more than one or two people I have to exit not just the conversations but the environment to just recharge my batteries and gather my bearings for a few minutes and then go back on it's it's like a you're feeling a kind of
44:53
over stimulation over stimulation yeah I mean so interesting because I've heard you talk before about moving to Austin and having these group dinners and I thought oh that's so interesting that that's what Tim wants to do because I would
45:06
never choose to socialize that way I always love to socialize one-on-one almost the way we're doing right now you know sitting here just talking there's a kind of boiling point for me in terms of size like four to six I can handle it depends for me also on the environment I
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think more so than the number of people so when I do these group dinners I will host them at home or have them at one of my friends homes not in a popular restaurant like I did last night so I'm just going to say what's interesting about that is how strategic you are
45:40
about it and I've really noticed this with people so we were just talking about Ted I was just talking to Chris Anderson who runs Ted about this whole phenomenon and he describes himself as an introvert too and he said he loves group dinners if there's a specific
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topic that everybody has gathered there to discuss and he knows it's going to be something really substantive then he's in his comfort zone you know but if it's just kind of this amorphous socializing he wants to leave so just on the Tactical practical side I also tend to
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very frequently cook the meal for the group so that I have a task while people are arriving and talking also deliberate because I'm often inviting people who don't know one another so I want them to have a chance to chat without having me
46:27
as a mutual crutch if that makes sense y but in any case we could talk about that for time no and that's a really common strategy I hear that from many people I can play extrovert I'm good at playing extrovert but up until say 6th grade I wouldn't even go out to recess I
46:44
would sit on a step and read usually books about sharks and fish because I wanted to be a marine biologist but I wouldn't even go out to recess wow so a lot of what you talk about and have written about certainly strikes a chord now I feel like I want to ask you so
46:57
many questions about this like I'm really curious if we talked about if we could go back and talk to sixth grade you right this minute like would sixth grade you have any idea that you would have the life path that yours has taken that's so public absolutely not no
47:14
definitely not I mean what happened in sixth grade also just for people who might be wondering well what happened in sixth grade if it's up until 6th grade what happened in sixth grade or I should say more accurately the summer of fifth
47:25
grade is that I had a huge growth spurt and I had been bullied really badly I was born premature and very small and I was bullied really really badly up until the end of fifth grade then I left to a summer camp and gained about 30 lbs of
47:39
muscle and grew four to 5 Ines over the summer came back and then it's like a Captain America narrative yeah exactly and then the bullies who had been accustomed to bullying me tried their usual Playbook and I just went on this vigilante spree like The Punisher and
47:55
that changed the Dynam social Dynamic so I was able to actually go outside and do things that I wanted to do at recess from that point on so it didn't mean that I socialized a lot more but I had more Mobility so that is that is what happened but like you and this is part
48:14
of the reason why I wanted to start with this question about overcoming a fear of public speaking is that it's when people see the finished product it's easy to assume that it comes from an attribute as opposed to a skill yes and in fact a
48:33
lot of what appears to be natural appears only to be natural because it started off very very unnatural and someone has worked at shipping away at it over time I think that's true I think so often when you see someone who's really good at almost anything it's
48:49
because they actually started out exactly the opposite and then they cared so much about fixing that problem yeah but in terms of how overcame that fear and I I have this kind of Evangelical desire to share it because it was so extreme I feel like if I could do it
49:05
then I know anyone can overcome any fear um so first of all I spent years sitting in therapist's offices kind of cozily discussing well what might be the sources of this fear and you know what do I trace it back to and and that does no good at all I'm actually a big
49:20
believer in therapy but not for this type of issue so what really does it if you're afraid of something you have to expose yourself very slowly to the thing that you fear in really manageable doses so you can't start off by giving the Ted
49:35
talk so in my case I signed up for the seminar in it was a seminar for people with public speaking anxiety here in New York and uh you know you'd get there and on the very first day all you had to do was stand up say your name sit back down declare Victory you're finished and
49:55
that's it what was the organization oh gosh is it Toast Masters or something no and I am a big fan of Toast Masters but this was almost like more remedial than Toast Master Toast Masters light yeah this is like pre- Toast Masters yeah so the guy's name he's amazing his
50:10
name is Charles dagno and you can find his organization it's speak easy.com and I think it's spelled with three e perfect and I'll put a link in the show notes for people as well yeah yeah CU I really recommend him yeah and so you know you'd come back
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the next week and maybe you'd stand up and he would do these things like he'd have people stand on either side of you so you didn't feel all all alone up there on stage it brilliant yeah yeah and then the audience would ask you questions like where are you from and
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where do you go to college you know so really easy stuff you answer the questions and you're done and it's like if you do that little by little by little you actually really can overcome it it's kind of crazy but true but I I will say having said all this still you
50:53
know there's something about a TED Talk that's on some whole crazy other realm of public speaking nerves and even if the setting is exactly the same there is a performance anxiety associated with that three-letter acronym for sure yeah
51:10
we were talking about this before we started Taping that so many of the speakers are really practiced on stage and yet you see them minutes before they go out and they're sweating bullets and they're they're all losing it yeah we were chatting for a second about and
51:25
Chris Anderson could certainly correct me I'm blanking the exact term but there's some space right next to the stage behind the curtain called the Zen room or the relaxation Cube there's some very pleasant sounding name for this space and it's intended to be the next
51:42
up batting cage for the two or three speakers to come and I remember it's probably 15 or 20 minutes before I was supposed to go live or no it couldn't have been that it was probably an hour before and I really didn't want to be around a lot of people and in the Green
51:56
Room there all sorts of staff and lots of people Milling around and working on production and I thought to myself I need to go to the the Zen room we'll just call the Zen room and so I walk out to the Zen room and I won't mention
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names but there are like three just Killers these are consumate professionals who have done this type of thing thousands of times people I look up to and would love to someday have a coffee with and they are freaking the out and I was like not helping not
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helping I need to leave the Zen room right now so yes it's a different Beast so how do you go from talking about your favorite color on stage with two people next to you to Ted then okay so I graduated from that to Toast Masters which I also completely recommend and should I
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describe what that is yes please yeah okay so Toast Masters it's a worldwide organization you can absolutely find one near you because they're everywhere and it's basically this non-for-profit thing where you sign up for a a group that
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meets near you and once every two weeks you get together and you practice public speaking together and they have this ritualized way of doing it and some of the time you're practicing speaking off the top of your head and sometimes it's a prepared speech and it's just kind of
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giving you that exposure therapy of you know putting you in the Beast of the thing that most frightens you you have to show up every two weeks and do it so I did that but then the next stage after that and it was my husband's idea I hired a coach for the full week before
53:26
the Ted Talk this really amazing guy named Jim fi who I also completely recommend and and since then he has coached many other Ted speakers so I worked with him morning till night for a full week before the talk good for you yeah and what did the working with him
53:43
look like okay so he he did a really brilliant thing he was very psychologically attuned and I said to him you know I'm really comfortable in general talking to people people oneon-one and kind of like cozily sitting on a couch and talking about
53:59
life I love that for me at that point though getting up on a stage and holding forth was the hard thing so he said okay let's practice your talk sitting on the couch and just talk to me about it and we did that for like two days and it was only after that that we then moved to
54:17
the stage and started getting into kind of the theatrics of it that kind of transition was so helpful I just want to note that this is is I spend so much time with and I'm so obsessed with good teachers yeah good coaches this is very common where they
54:34
will effectively say let's start from where you are right now right they will always return if they sense any type of overwhelm or fear to bring you back to a point of familiarity or Comfort yeah and then Edge into sort of the next concentric circle of that is your limit
54:51
of comfort yeah and I think they also have to show a lot of non-judgment because I had some dark moments during that week you know for me this was the abyss and I was just hanging out in the abyss for a week and so he saw me you know I had only just met him and he saw
55:06
me not in the most flattering circumstances and yet I didn't feel embarrassed by that there was something about anything in the beginning to assess you or establish a baseline or was it more of an interview that he used like an intake do you remember what it
55:21
wasn't really formal like that you know he's such a human guy it was just like we were just talking you know we were just yeah yeah disguised his intake smart fell yeah and then so the amazing thing to me now is I now super ironically have a career as a public
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speaker like I travel the world going and giving talks to all different companies and conferences all over the place like I asked you well if we could tell sixth grade Tim where he would be what would he say and I say that to myself too like if you could have even
55:54
told me 8 years ago that this would be life I would have been so shocked by it and now I've come to like it so do you have any particular pregame ritual or any that you did in the hours leading up to your talk that helped or that you didn't do I
56:12
have things now back then I just suffered but what what do you have now now I have a few things I mean I do deep breathing just like everyone else I'm sure you've heard that a million times but it's got to be real deep breathing you know where you really feel your
56:27
belly and your diaphragm filling up but for me what I also do is I usually think to myself and I do this especially when I'm speaking to an audience that I find more intimidating you know like a group of Finance people at an investment bank
56:42
or something right I will say to myself there I am sure is one person in this audience who has a child who is shy or introverted and if that child has a better life because of one tidbit that that person hears today then it's all good and that pulls me out of myself
57:01
instantly yeah it gives you also a hurdle that you can clear for winning the presentation so to speak a man right it's a manageable goal but I think it's it feels deeper than that to me it feels also like I think when people get nervous about speaking
57:19
obviously they're really nervous about being judged right but this completely shifts the energy where it's not any longer about how anybody judges me it's about can I help that kid out there I want to say also that part of the reason I am more than happy actually excited to
57:38
spend so much time talking about this is that it is not specific to public speaking right this just happens to be a very common fear and perceived weakness of many many many people also as a side note what Warren Buffett says is his
57:54
greatest ever investment mhm put more specifically a Dale Carnegie course that he took in public speaking right because it magnified his ability to do almost everything else to communicate effectively both in spoken word but also in the written word in in some respects
58:11
yeah I've never I don't think I've ever I've ever spoken about this but I also did Toast Masters and uh if you have trouble finding it often times there are large companies that will have within their HQ or any large location their own Toast
58:29
Masters group and that's actually how I found it in San Jose initially it was at Adobe so I would go in and I would do this Toast Masters and your description of having this very logical progression of small winds layered upon small winds getting up on stage and then getting off
58:45
stage right getting up on stage having two people next to you and answering a few questions and getting off stage is so incredibly effective and I'm laughing right now because I remember when I Was preparing for my first presentation at South by
59:03
Southwest so this is a very large festival and Conference in Austin Texas and the timing was 2007 it it's about a I want to say a month month and a half before my book is going to come out my first book which I'm very nervous about there had been no speaking slots but I
59:21
had pitched Hugh Forest at the time who i' had been introduced to that I would take anything available corner of a room hallway if there were any cancellations I would really appreciate the the opportunity to speak at the event and lo and behold there was a last
59:39
minute cancellation not by a keynote speaker but by a sponsor who is going to have a stage to pitch their products from in in this makeshift Cafe and I was like I'm in I'm in but I was so incredibly nervous about this that in the beginning in particular I was and
59:57
this is true today too nervous to practice my rough rough draft of the presentation in front of people yeah I gu and so what I did I was staying in a guest bedroom at a friend's house he had three Chihuahua and I went outside I was playing with the Chihuahua and they
1:00:14
followed me into the garage I was I practiced in the garage I didn't want to practice in the house where my friend's wife was and I gave my presentation I felt reasonably confident about the content but I was n comfortable with any of the performance aspects of trying to
1:00:28
keep attention so I gave my draft of this talk over and over again until I could get the dogs to sit and stare at me somewhat bewildered but to hold their attention that was the lias test for me wow to graduate to giving a rough draft
1:00:46
in front of humans for those people out there who are wondering whether this all comes naturally to me it does not at all have you talked about that before or is this the first time I don't think I've talked about that certainly I don't think I've talked about it on the
1:01:03
podcast and for the Ted Talk also something I did which I did not do for the South by talk which I thought really made a difference was I practiced giving the talk in front of small groups of strangers once I had a reasonably polished version and I asked friends of
1:01:21
mine who worked at larger companies who had teams during lunch hour if there was if there happened to be an empty conference room could they invite people to hear a rough draft of a TED talk and then I would ask them for feedback and usually there was enough time that I
1:01:35
could give it two or three times so I could actually incorporate their feedback give another version and and once i' given the second version there are a lot more people in the room who are willing to be critical the the first round you get one or two yes that's so
1:01:49
true and this is just something I've thought about a lot because I I've been so nervous about public speaking for so long long and it by the way doesn't really go away like I at least for me I still have those nerves but with Ted very specifically I assumed and this
1:02:03
came from sports but I'd never applied it that I was going to be my heart rate was probably going to be 30 beats per minute higher than normal and that it was not just important for me to practice the content but to practice under the physiological stress that I
1:02:20
would probably experience when trying to deliver the content so I would do a bunch of push-ups in another room and drink go two double espressos and wait for it to hit and then go in and give my dress rehearsal to see if I could handle that
1:02:36
stimulation that was so so smart and you know listening to that story is reminding me of this crucial step that I left out in in a lot of ways a kind of mistake that I made which is you know I told you I worked with that guy uh Jim for a week who was amazing and I thought
1:02:53
I was pretty well ready at that point so I talked to my friend Adam Grant who's a very dear friend very good speaker too and a really good speaker and who also started out as a very nervous and by his description a terrible public speaker he
1:03:08
says he used to get like terrible reviews from his students and he just worked and worked and worked at it and now he's the most popular professor at Wharton but okay so I was talking to Adam about all this and so he said so I'm leaving for Ted on Sunday morning
1:03:22
right to fly out to California which is where it was at that time and says oh I'm going to pull together a group of friends and you can practice your talk in front of them and so this is Friday night and I'm leaving Sunday morning and so I show up at this apartment full of
1:03:35
Adam and his friends and I think that I'm pretty well done with the talk and this is the first time that I'm giving it in front of any kind of group because I didn't have the foresight of what you just described and Not only was I so nervous but I realized from the feedback
1:03:51
that a lot of the content was all wrong and it's Friday night and I'm leing you know like the next day basically or the day after the next day so I went home and I just spent the whole entire night rewriting the whole final third of the
1:04:06
talk and then I'm like on the plane going out to Ted trying to memorize the new talk I don't recommend that kind of approach but you need to get real people in front of you this is just like entrepreneurship and people try to get the product perfect before exposing it
1:04:23
to any prospective clients like you really need to get into the messy reality of what a live audience or a real customer looks like and the same was true for me I made a lot of changes in the last few days which I thought were just going to be fine tune right
1:04:41
and then tuning and I was like oh actually I really need to completely change prob 30% of this yeah and I was very very nervous before the Ted Talk and I came off stage and I did not think that I I didn't think that I blew it but I didn't think that I did a great job I
1:04:57
came off stage thinking that there were definitely bits and pieces I could have done better but seems to have worked out okay wait but I want to come back to one thing that you said for the benefit of people who are listening now so you said
1:05:10
that you still are really nervous when you give a talk but are you really as nervous as you used to be because I I I really want people to understand that you can get to a point you might still have butterflies it's not like the nerves completely disappear but they get
1:05:25
to I in in my experience and from all the literature that I've studied on this they really do get to a point where you can manage them and the difference between manageable and non- manageable is gigantic in terms of its effect on your life and your career and everything
1:05:38
so I just want to make sure know I I can clarify so I it depends a lot on the event right so if it's we're going to do a Q&A and it's a friend of mine interviewing me on stage that's not from my perspective really public speaking I
1:05:54
mean it is but at this point I could do that with zero preparation if it's anything resembling a keynote if it is Tim on stage talking to an audience and they expect something that has been well rehearsed my physiological response is still very strong I get really sweaty
1:06:15
hands I Pace I have very minimal contact with anyone beforehand but let me mention a few things number one then the both Mike Tyson and Dean Martin used to vomit before nearly every performance but the way that they psychologically contended with that evolved over time
1:06:40
and since I mentioned Mike Tyson custado who was the trainer who really in a lot of respects I think boxing Scholars or boxing fans would agree made Tyson into what Tyson was at his prime as an athlete you to say something along the following that the hero and the coward
1:06:58
feel the same thing it's how they responded Yes oh I so believe that yeah and I mean there is no courage without the presence of fear MH and for me I have come to see those physiological symptoms that used to make me panic that used to make me feel like I was doing
1:07:17
something wrong that used to make me feel like I was unprepared as simple precursors to a performance mhm mhm the way that I frame them for myself is completely different and I've learned to view it as this energetic asset that I can use yeah and that has made all the
1:07:39
difference it has decreased in some circumstances but certainly before Ted I mean I had given hundreds of different presentations and it was like I was getting on stage for the first time in part also for people who don't know they are very as they should be strict about
1:07:58
many things at Ted including running over oh yes if running over I I want to say and this is exactly what they should say but in effect they say if you run over by you should not run over number one do not run over if you run over if
1:08:12
you get to the point where you're like 30 seconds over we will come up and remove you from stage and while I'm preparing and while I'm rehearsing one of the things that made me most stressed out is that my finish times were really variable
1:08:26
and I say like 30 40% of the time I ran over then other times I would run 2 minutes under but miss something really really important CU I was rushing and I was like good God this is just a crapshoot like I am at the craps table with my timing and that really was a
1:08:44
concern for me so that was another element that made Ted unique for me was that degree of cut off yeah I felt felt that way too and I did end up going over by over a minute oh good for you and there it is and they were just like we cannot stop this performance I don't
1:09:04
know about that but but I want to say also for anybody who is listening and who is right now in the grip of this kind of fear and isn't sure whether they can really get past it um also like what is waiting for you on the other side of it is so gigantic
1:09:21
because there's just there's something weird about public speaking where it has such disproportionate value to in a way what you're investing in it you know like you're going up on stage for 18 minutes or 40 minutes or whatever or or maybe within your own workplace you know
1:09:37
even giving a two-minute talk suddenly everybody is regarding you as a leader and as someone who they can turn to in a new way from if you hadn't been willing to put yourself forward in that way definitely I mean there's there's public
1:09:51
speaking as the force multiplier for the value of your other skills which is absolutely true and then public speaking in a way is also a wonderful diagnostic tool and what I mean by that is I I remember talking to a friend of mine who he's a wealth
1:10:11
manager for a lot of muckety mucks who you would recognize and he said I know them generally better than therapists they've been seeing for a decade within the first few hours because money brings up everything talking about money brings up the full spectrum of someone's
1:10:34
insecurities fears desires neuroses sex also true and public speaking I think if it makes you remotely nervous when you start to learn public speaking like it at least for me it kind of brings up all your stuff so if you simply interested
1:10:50
in personal growth it brings to the surface many different pieces of your personality and psyche that you can then work on in a way that transfers to other areas so that to me was my experience and I find really interesting it's like okay well maybe you don't have to play
1:11:09
kind of hide and go seek with talk therapy for 20 years to find all of the bits and pieces when if rather than following these different gingerbread Trails you can use certain fearful circumstances to just bring it all right or a lot of it to the surface that was
1:11:27
my experience I'm not saying it's true for everybody but it was one of those things like talking about money talking about sex or public speaking it's like okay now we just bring everything to the Forefront so for me that was also uh even if I had not had any interest in
1:11:40
getting on stage in giving presentations it would have been valuable in and of itself yeah know that makes complete sense are there other things that you're fearful of or have been afraid of that you've overcome no I mean that was really the big one for me but yeah we
1:11:54
were talking about this before I guess you know my Bugaboo in general is that I just tend to be a warrior so other than the experiences I had with public speaking it's not like I have full-on Panic or anything like that it's more like it's a a very familiar companion
1:12:12
for me so I've had to just come up with various hacks around it what what are some of your hacks this is going to get us into another big topic but why not so for example when I stopped practicing corporate law and I decided that I wanted to be a writer I told myself that
1:12:30
it's really hard to make a living as a writer and I said okay the goal is to publish something by the time you're 75 and at the time I was 33 at the time that I said that and I kind of did that instinctively because I was always doing
1:12:43
these hacks of like just wanting to completely take the pressure off of something that I otherwise loved so deeply and like I I just knew that if I turned this thing that I deeply loved into a source of like this has to be the
1:12:58
place where I make my living this has to be the place where I derive some kind of professional stature it was going to soak a lot of the joy out of it and so that's the kind of hack that I just naturally do on a very related note could you give us a little bit of
1:13:16
context around the leaving law like why you left law and then you decide you want to be a writer and you kind of alluded to it but does that mean that suddenly your rent is dependent on writing right okay so I had wanted to be a writer from the time I
1:13:34
was four and then for a whole bunch of reasons and like so many people I took some creative writing classes in college and I decided you know I'm not actually that good at this and I need to make a living and I also kind of had a desire I think to show myself that I could be out
1:13:51
there as a kind of alpha person out in the world of Finance or something so I went to law school and and I practiced law Wall Street law for almost a decade and during that time that I was practicing law it was so all consuming that I completely forgot about the fact
1:14:09
that I had wanted to be a writer it wasn't like you know I was walking around conscious of this broken dream or something like I had completely forgotten and the first few years of practicing law I really loved it it was just this kind of crazy adventure that I
1:14:22
was on and as the years went by it started to get really tough for me you know I'm not a very natural lawyer in a million different ways but I was on this partner track and I was committed to it and then came the day and I think I may
1:14:37
have told you about this in an earlier correspondence but then came the day when a senior partner in my firm walked in and said I was supposed to be up for partner that year and he said well we're not going to be putting you up and the funny thing is to this day I don't
1:14:51
really know if he meant we're not putting you up ever for partner or just not anytime soon I I don't really know what it meant all I knew was like number one I burst into tears and number two here was my get out of jail free card so 3 hours later I had left the firm like I
1:15:09
was gone I took a leave of absence and I just started bicycling around Central Park like I didn't know what I was going to do next but as soon as that space opened up that I now had free time for the first time in like 10 years I started WR
1:15:25
and I had no idea that was going to happen it was almost like in a movie that's cool yeah it's just been waiting for you yeah I mean literally like I remember that night you know like kind of curled up on my sofa in my apartment and I just started writing on my laptop
1:15:40
and and then a week later I signed up for a class in Creative non-fiction at NYU and I just had this complete feeling of certainty that this was what I wanted to be doing and zero expectation that I would make a living out of it so and this this is a really important thing I
1:15:56
think I think if you have that kind of a creative dream and a creative love you have to do everything you can not to spoil it with the pressures of paying the rent and all those other things or the pressures of needing to derive professional status from
1:16:10
it so I set up a little side business teaching people negotiation skills and that was how I was paying the rent but the thing I was really doing in my heart was this beloved hobby of writing this is super super super super super important and there are I think it's
1:16:27
true in Creative fields which is pretty much every field but just for the the sake of illustration writing music Etc that also in entrepreneurship you hear these stories of desperation where a necessity is the mother of invention and you know bada bing bada
1:16:45
boom magic wand and then there's a billion dollar company or there's JK Rowling or whatever it is but those are in my experience the outl ERS those they make for great cover stories and magazines but the fact of the matter is that from what I've seen certainly with
1:17:04
the guests on this podcast is that for instance s Shani who has a number of Mega successful novels but he had a SAT prep counseling service that he offered well past the point that his first book was successful because he wanted to
1:17:22
always feel like he had a safety net yes so that the writing would not be tainted or even subconsciously influenced to match the market or whatever the the lens might become by this pressure yeah and that is something that whenever possible has come up as a really
1:17:41
valuable I suppose on one hand Financial sort of survival mechanism but even more so a psychological of freeing device yeah yeah and you know I think we're so addicted to having a really glamorous narrative for things and the glamorous narrative is you know you you had so
1:17:57
much courage you took the risk you know you you were dependent on this company or this book or whatever and if it didn't work it was going to be a disaster but you know you you you were the one who beat the odds like we love that narrative and for most people
1:18:10
that's a really bankrupt narrative and there's a kind of deeper glamour actually in the kind of story that you just told because the glamour comes from you're you're doing everything that you can to deeply protect the thing that you love most definitely
1:18:25
now the book itself people may not know backstory I'm sure a lot of people don't how long did it take to get that book done okay so I'm laughing because it took a really really long time especially by Tim Ferris standards I like I listen to you and
1:18:46
like look at your life trajectory I'm like how does he do that but lots of cheating with format is the short answer but I don't want to take us off track so yeah it took from start to finish it was about 7 years I will say in my defense that during those seven years I
1:19:04
also had two children and was raising them so that was part of it but I also just think I'm kind of a slow writer like I I like to really really think about everything super deeply and what I think is pro people might not know I had a deadline as all writers do and I
1:19:22
turned in some sort of draft upon my deadline coming to you you know after 18 months or two years right and my editor basically read it and said this is terrible and she said you know go back and completely throw that out start from scratch and take all the time that you
1:19:39
need and you might think that when that happened that I would have been really bummed but I was actually elated because I knew that it was terrible and I knew that I needed much more time and I had no idea what I was doing I had never written anything before so so yeah I was
1:19:55
just really happy to have that time and it's actually really unusual like usually in publishing they had given me a big advance for the book and usually they want their Advance back and they're not willing to delay like that MH so that was huge very understanding editor
1:20:10
yeah she is brilliant and I'm working with her again on my next book it's also Smart in the sense that a mediocre book is more of a liability than no book at all yes right yeah for everyone involved for everyone involved yeah and because
1:20:23
you know I have this philosophy about writing that it's the deep love that has to be protected at all costs because of that I don't care how much time it takes you know like I'm just interested in doing it as well as I can what does your
1:20:36
writing process at this point look like you had your experience with that book and now when you are writing do you have a daily practice does it go through phases of research period Then organizing then putting all of that into Pros through synthesis what are your
1:20:56
writing routines or how do you think about writing these days so for me I take whatever thesis I'm working with and then I spend a year or two just walking around the world looking at everything through the lens of that thesis you know so it used to be
1:21:11
introverts and now it's onto a new topic and I'm taking crazy notes through that period you so every conversation that I have every book I read it's all going in how do you take and organize your notes do you do notebooks do you do it digitally what are the I know this is
1:21:27
nerdy but I like notd I'm into it because a lot of Writers Do it differently the reason I'm laughing is I'm thinking when you hear my answer you're going to know that I need a consultation with you for the next book because I I don't do it in a super
1:21:42
systemic way I basically all those conversations all those ideas and notes and thoughts I'm having I stick them all into one word document and that document becomes about seven or 800 Pages by the time I'm done and then I go through that document and I'm kind of tagging as I go
1:21:58
along and then I'm separating everything out by topic so I end up with like eight or nine loose leaf binders that are organized by topic but in each of those binders it's just like one big one big mass of notes and then I think about where do I want everything whenever I'm
1:22:13
emotionally moved by one of the ideas that I'm taking notes on I try to write out the riff around that idea right then and there because you don't know if that emotion's going to come back so you have to capture it when it happens I think
1:22:25
it's perfectly fine system uh so you I feel like technology must have come up with something better like I do it in Microsoft Word there are probably better tools available but I would say also that a lot of people confuse new tools for better content
1:22:43
it's very easy at least let's speak for myself for a second when I'm writing I have to disallow myself from thinking about say marketing because marketing is fun and exciting and to you easy for me yeah because I whatever had insomnia as a kid and watched many infomercials or
1:23:02
something in any case it's a way to procrastinate doing the harder piece which is the actual research and digging in Pros that's the hard part for me always has been but it's the most important part and I think similarly a lot of folks can become consumed by
1:23:19
upgrading their tools multiplying their tools versus just the word you got to put the words in and I have some questions about this word doc though so when you're going through and adding things to the word doc and you come in and you're tagging things so you can
1:23:33
separate them and you mention binders so you're printing the stuff out and then separating them does that mean that when you put in a new note in the word doc you go to a new page if it's tagged differently so you can separate them more easily later does that make sense
1:23:48
as opposed to each time you add a note then hit return twice and then add a new note if they're tagged different L it would seem like you'd have to cut up the page into multiple pieces so do you start a new page are there any particular ways that you tag for
1:24:02
instance would it be a chapter name or would it be a theme what would a tag L question be a topic or a theme and yeah so every time I'm adding a new note if I know that it relates to something I've already done then I'll search for the
1:24:16
thing I've already done so I can add it to that section to make it easier later makes sense but you know sometimes I don't or I can't think of it and then I'll just add it to the end the document yeah which contr F right word good to go yeah simple simple Works Robert
1:24:31
Rodriguez the filmmaker keeps a journal I think he does puts it in almost every day at midnight and it's word doc word docks yep it works yeah yeah I actually I will say I tried for this next book I spent a few days reading the instructions for scrier one of these
1:24:47
programs scers and I just ended up thinking you know this isn't for me it looks great but SC well some other time we can sit down that is one tool that if you set it up really simply and you don't use 98% of the features I find really useful
1:25:05
just because you can create a view by which you see all of your separate documents or actually I should say rather you see your tentative table of contents on the left side in a vertical Pane and then you can look at what you're on the right hand side then I
1:25:22
would have it set up so that I have two split windows so left hand side you see your table of contents and then there's a research and you have whatever research you want that way you can be working on a document in the upper right hand pane while you have your research
1:25:34
that you're working off of in the bottom right and if you decide to move docs around to see how it affects flow it's just drag and drop it's actually quite wonderful they did have some issues with footnotes or maybe I was just too
1:25:45
technically incompetent at one point when you then had to export when the publisher insists on say word which maybe that'll change at some point but getting a little geeked out but scrier I've used scrier for almost all of my books there may be one exception I think
1:26:01
for our Chef because of how visually intensive it was was done outside of that and in terms of routine or ritual you spend a year Gathering these notes so then you have yeah maybe more yeah or more so you have 700 to 800 Pages it's a big word dock yeah and then what happens
1:26:20
yeah so then I spend the time sorting them out so I get to the point where I've got my eight or nine loose leaf binders that are more or less organized by what the chapters are going to be yeah and then comes the time to write during which I'm still doing more
1:26:32
research but I'm starting to write for me the writing like the sitting down with my laptop and thinking about it all that's like I want to say it's my happy place but that's not really the best description it feels like it's this place that I go deep in my mind and I
1:26:51
really love being there and it's like no matter what happens to be going on in my outside life I always have those few hours a day where I'm going to a cafe or a library or whatever and I'm sitting with my laptop and my cappuccino and I'm
1:27:08
just doing it like I'm stressing the emotional aspect because that's so huge for me and I feel like I train myself to associate writing with all of these pleasures of you know sitting around in cafes and things like that do you have a consistent time when you sit down with
1:27:24
your cappuccino and do this are you a morning writer or are you a catches catch can writer are you an evening writer I mean you also have kids you have other obligations so when do you tend to do your writing or do your best writing you can answer it however you
1:27:39
like well I mean there's what I do and there's what would be ideal but as you say I have kids so my routine is that I drop my kids off at school that's at around eight then I go and I either play tennis or do yoga every day and then after that I do my right
1:27:55
and that's a pretty good time for me but what time of day would that typically end up being yeah that probably ends up being around 10 or so that I'm starting yeah but if I had no other obligations the best times of day would be more like
1:28:10
either 7 in the morning and also super late at night so two time periods that I have no access to for this stage of life right and you start writing this is really interesting to me hopefully interesting to other people so you start let's say around 10 do you break for
1:28:26
lunch do you skip lunch do you have a standard type of lunch that you would have and the reason I ask is that I think part of the reason so many writers seem to work between the hours of say just make this up but 10 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. and they tend to either be
1:28:46
night owls like me or early risers is that there are fewer distractions and they get an relatively uninterrupted block of 3 to 5 hours but if you're starting at 10: then most people would have lunch scheduled shortly thereafter like 2
1:29:04
hours later right so do you break for lunch do you have something really small how do you handle that because for me just speaking personally it's like if I might have time of course I have time for a f minute phone call but if I do a five minute phone call about something
1:29:19
very mechanical or mundane like calendaring stuff or whatever and I'm juggling 15 pieces that were on paper in my head I kind of have to start over a lot of times like I drop all those balls Jing right right because of the task switching so I'd love to hear not that
1:29:36
that's true for everybody but it's true for me what does your schedule look like then once you sit down I'll just kind of go until I realize that I'm not concentrating well anymore and very often that happens after 2 or 3 hours and I just have to take a break I have a
1:29:51
lot of discipline if my brain would cooperate so I would happily sit there for 7 hours until my kids come home from school but at a certain point I'll notice that it's just not coming anymore and so then I'll take a break and I'll eat or something like that but you know
1:30:05
I would say like you were mentioning well people might work at night because it's when you get uninterrupted time and I think that that's one factor but I also think the reason that those hours tend to be so good so nighttime is when
1:30:18
your cortisol levels are really low you know which of course is your stress hormone and so I I know notic this in myself all the time that the ideas that I come up with late at night are different from the daytime ideas because they're completely unfettered by any
1:30:34
stress and so I'll just I don't know I just make different kinds of associative leaps and there's there's like a softness and an ease in my thinking and my feeling about the ideas so I think that's one advantage of late night writing and then in the morning you've
1:30:49
got the high cortisol but you also have the sort of acute attention yeah I can totally see that I can definitely see that I also find that writing late at night if I'm writing at 2:00 in the morning it's very hard for me I remember
1:31:01
I want to say it was aan Rand who wrote she had a book about the craft of non-fiction and there was some it wasn't a metaphor I think it was a real world example but in effect she's saying writers many writers will do almost anything to not write and there's the
1:31:17
story about the white tennis shoes like I have to clean my white tennis shoes before before I'm going to write because I'm going to out and and when it's 2 or 3 in the morning like I have to check email to make sure X is just not a viable excuse it also just removes a lot
1:31:33
of distraction that I would impose on myself to avoid doing what it is that I find hard I so relate to this like when so when I was writing quiet I suddenly developed this idea that I had to learn everything in the world about digital photography and and I I was
1:31:52
reading all these books about it the rule of thirds and all this stuff and I have never had any interest in photography before or since it was just these two weeks of mania where I didn't want to have to be looking at that manuscript over there are there any
1:32:07
particular I mean you are student of the craft right you've taken creative non-fiction courses are there any particular books or resources or writers who have had a significant impact on how you viewer practice writing oh gosh I'm sure the answer is yes I can try to buy
1:32:28
some time if helpful draft number four by John MC I think is is really I was very fortunate to spend time with him when I was in undergrad in college because he was teaching a seminar but the structure took my creative writing classes yeah so the structure thinking
1:32:43
about structure in the way that MC think about structure saved me because I thrive with some type of predetermined blueprint for it's very hard for me to just freehand flow of conscious let things take some emerg form it's very hard I do know friends
1:33:03
who who do that really really well that terrifies me so I need the scaffolding right Bird by Bird by an oh I love that book such a good book Bird by bird for people who don't know the book I will say just before getting into a short
1:33:18
description has saved at least a half a dozen friends of mine from the precipice meaning they were at the point of throwing in the towel and just quitting their books and they were all writers in this case they were at the point where they're like I'm done I can't do this
1:33:36
it's too stressful I don't like this I don't want to do this it's going to be terrible and they were going to in some cases return their advances and just walk and I want to say at least half of them read this book went on to finish their books and their books went on to become
1:33:52
New York Times bestsellers so talk about an important window for making a decision and the gist of the book the title I should say comes first from I think it was her brother Ann's brother an Lamont is a writer and her brother had this experience where he'd had
1:34:07
something like an entire semester in I'm making this up let's just call it fourth grade to prepare for this end of semester project and he was supposed to put together a term paper on birds or something like that and it was like the night before he hadn't done any
1:34:25
preparation and this poor kid who granted kind of deserves it because he didn't do any prep but nonetheless is having this like nervous breakdown at the kitchen table with like 15 books about birds and he just is paralyzed and I want to say it was an's Dad who came
1:34:39
over and like put an arm on his shoulder and said just take it Bird by bird buddy Bird by bird you know something something like that and it's sort of a psychological life raft break glass in case of emergency kit for ERS who are just hitting that point like maybe you
1:34:56
did with the photography where just like I want to do anything other than look at that screen or that page I just I can't handle it and I don't know what to do so for that reason not necessarily for the nuts and bolts of the writing process
1:35:10
itself but for the psychological component it's like if you had a if you were a top athletic coach and you had your sport specific technical coach and then you had a mental like toughness coach who also doubled as a shrink like the mental toughness coach who doubles
1:35:24
as a shrink is the bird by Bird yeah I'm remembering she also talks about shitty first drafts yes and just those three words are incredibly helpful because you know when you're looking at your draft and it is always really shitty at the
1:35:36
beginning and so just knowing okay that's what it's supposed to be yeah but yeah you know the other thing that's been really helpful to me so I told you I started taking that creative non-fiction class at NYU and all of us who took that class got along really
1:35:51
well so we formed a writer Group after the class was officially done and we stayed together for years and we would meet once every week every two weeks and read each other's stuff and especially at that stage that really really helped you know getting the feedback but also
1:36:08
having the kind of camaraderie and support system not feeling totally isolated yeah not feeling isolated and I actually met my literary agent from one of the people who was in that group who was a publishing lawyer and I I said you
1:36:22
know I have this idea for this book about introverts which at the time to me seemed like the most idiosyncratic project on Earth but she said when you're ready I know the right agent for that and that's a really serendipitous thing when I put together the proposal
1:36:37
for the book that became quiet I sent it out to that agent who she recommended and to four other super amazing agents two of whom I had connections to and every single one of the other ones passed and some of them said you know I like the writing but I think this topic
1:36:55
is not commercial enough and I just don't think it'll sell so could you come back with a different topic and Maya the guy who became my agent instantly saw what the potential was going to be and we've been together ever since and I feel like I owe him everything and I
1:37:09
love him and his name is Richard Pine if you're out there looking for an agent and I think about this story all the time not only because of bookwriting but because all these people these other agents these are experts and these are
1:37:21
the culturally anointed gate Gatekeepers and they know what they're doing and yet they didn't see this one particular thing and I think that that happens all the time totally so no I'm glad you shared that and I had a very similar experience I reached out to I want to
1:37:36
say it was four agents who were introduced by a very successful author who ID met something like seven years earlier by volunteering at a nonprofit which is a great way to meet people above your pay grade as a side note just like filling water glasses for
1:37:52
panelists works really well so I had the right introduction the writing I didn't think my writing was toll story or anything but it was it was passable and um complete rejection from three of the four was the four hour work the four hour work week two of them were
1:38:09
not we're pretty heavy-handed about it the one of the third I remember her name Jillian Manis a very good agent and she passed but she gave me a lot of really helpful feedback MH she didn't say this one work she just said I don't think this is the right f for me right and and
1:38:28
that wasn't fair enough which is totally fair but like here's a bunch of advice and one of the pieces of advice she gave me actually wow I haven't thought about this in Forever was think of each I was intimidated by the prospect of writing a
1:38:40
book i' never written a book before she said treat each chapter like a feature magazine article beginning middle and end mhm self-sufficient each chapter can live on its own and I've followed that advice ever since with which makes it easier to write also
1:38:56
because if you get stuck somewhere it's not like you have to cross that bridge to get to a chapter that sequentially should show up three chapters later you can treat it in a modular way right if you get really bogged down you can skip which also in some cases like the rest of my books
1:39:13
leads to a book that can be read non-sequentially in any case so three out of four turn it down finally sign with my current agent Steven Hans who I still work with to this day very similarly yeah and he had just become an agent wow he had just become an agent
1:39:33
but part of what attracted me to him was that he had a long career as a very successful editor and was also is just an Eclectic guy went to Divinity School plays in a jazz band mean really my like my kind of my kind of person yeah and
1:39:50
then we went out to sell it and I always forget if it's like 26 or 27 but nonetheless was something like somewhere between 26 and 28 Publishers turn it down really yes wow and then the but you only need one that's the thing it's like you it's not about how many people don't
1:40:05
get it yeah it's about having the right person or people who do get it and I mean which just so clear with your book right it's like you don't need all the people in the world to think it's a good idea you don't need half the people in the world think it's
1:40:20
a good idea you need the people who it resonates with to have it resonate that's it and it does not need to be does not need to be millions of people it could be but it doesn't have to be and I had a note down also to just and we don't have to necessarily spend a ton
1:40:35
of time on this but just to clarify the talk about introversion versus shyness I came across this when I was doing a bit of homework which is people think of say Bill Gates Right is sort of maybe a one example of someone who could be useful and distinguishing
1:40:52
between the two but could you clarify what an introvert is how you Define introvert and how it might differ from abely from somebody who's shy right yeah introversion is really about the preference for lower stimulation environments and you can trace it to our
1:41:10
neurobiology like introverts have nervous systems that react more to all the incoming stimuli and so that means that we're kind of at our most alive and happiest and switched on when things are a little more chill around us which is
1:41:24
probably why when you're in those group dinners you're going to the restroom every so often because your nervous system wants to tone it down yeah and extroverts have the opposite situation and the opposite liability because for an extrovert you've got a nervous system
1:41:37
that's reacting less to stimulation and that means when you're in an environment that you find too quiet you start to get really listless and checked out so that's the liability there shyness and I always feel like my work has to do with
1:41:52
both introversion and and shyness by the way but shyness is much more about the fear of social judgment so you'll know if you're a shy person because when you encounter someone who has a neutral expression on their face you will have a tendency to read disapproval in there
1:42:07
and to react really strongly to the disapproval you feel kind of really unhorsed by it and it can take different forms so it could be a fear of public speaking or it could be a job interview or any kind of situation where you feel you might be evaluated so in reality
1:42:23
lots of introverts do tend to be shy and vice versa but not necessarily at all I don't know Bill Gates personally but my guesses that he's an introvert but not espcially shy and then somebody like an eileene Fischer who she's got this
1:42:39
wonderful and I think it's been decades now um super successful fashion brand she describes herself as a shy extrovert so like she really wants to be around people all the time she wants to be connecting all the time you you talk to her she's constantly like setting up
1:42:56
this workshop and that program and you know you look at her life and she's always surrounded by lots of people and things going on but she's often feeling intense discomfort and needing to work through that wild yeah I would certainly describe myself as an introvert and I
1:43:12
never knew quite how to frame it until coming across your definition of preferring lower stimulation or environments or environments with fewer stimuli because I've ever since I was a little kid been very sensitive I mean my site is very sensitive right my hearing
1:43:32
is very sensitive yeah but I'm not shy in the sense that I don't I want to engage and ask questions and interact but if the volume is turned up too much or there are too many speakers metaphorically or or physically I I have a lot of difficulty parsing it all but
1:43:52
you don't have like uh shyness would be like you know before you go into those group dinners are you feeling a kind of social anxiety no right yeah that's the difference yeah yeah yeah there are so many questions that I want to explore but let's uh because we have maybe 10 or
1:44:10
15 minutes more let's ask a few of the questions that I that I always like to ask sure are there any books that you have given the most to others as a gift or any books you've gifted often to other people I think that the book I've probably for the last few years been
1:44:28
giving out the most is waking up by Sam Harris which yeah it's fantastic book it's such a fantastic book and it was really for me completely life-changing I think for probably the reasons it is for many people which is I hadn't really
1:44:44
known much about meditation before reading it and because I think by my uh my nature I'm sort of a cross between a skeptic an a Mystic or something yeah um you know in the skeptical side of me and it it's a pretty deep skeptical side
1:45:02
it really needed somebody like Sam who's such an extreme skeptic right you know and then who very conveniently spent like what 28 years of his life or something investigating all these different spiritual tools and then reporting back on them you know for me
1:45:16
that was a narrator I could really I felt I could really rely on fantastic book you know I just I have to I just because I think you'll we were talking a bit about Sam before we started recording because we were both you know sort of fanboying and fangirling about his
1:45:31
meditation app and handful of other things but I haven't told you and I don't know if I've even mentioned this publicly but here we go so the first time I met Sam this relates to Ted went to Ted for the first time as an attendee which by the way was too much
1:45:46
stimulation so I never went back interesting yeah but I went to Ted the first time as an attendee and I was inv to one of these group dinners right and so I go out to this group dinner and we're eating dinner and off to the side on a separate table there's this tray of
1:46:03
brownies and I love brownies it's one of my weaknesses it is an Achilles heel and I have zero portion control and these brownies are large brownies and I sneak over kind of in between courses and I'm like you know what I'm going to skip one
1:46:16
of the later courses and just substitute the brownies cuz I love brownies and so I eat two of these brownies and about 20 minutes later the host who I shall not name comes up to me and goes Tim did you eat any of the brownies I go yeah I had two of them and he goes okay
1:46:31
everything's going to be fine and I'm like wait what everything's going to be fine what the hell are you talking about they were heavily dos pot brownies hilarious and I am not a habitual pot user and so I suddenly in the middle of dinner just get hit by this tsunami of
1:46:51
cannabis and you combine that with my discomfort with high stimulation environments and I'm like I need to get the hell out of here so I excuse myself to go to the restroom and by this point I'm already a huge fan of Sam yeah but have never had any contact with him so I
1:47:09
run off to the bathroom to escape and I open the door and literally like at the sink run straight into Sam Harris in the men's room and I'm like Sam Harris high off my rock and that was my first inter and he looks at me kind of like he's like hi kind of
1:47:29
sideways cuz I'm just beyond reality at that point and that was my first meeting with Sam that's hilarious and did you tell him your brownie story I did I did I did tell him which he appreciated because he does have some history with
1:47:42
yes he does Altered States but yeah no I I found that book and the subsequent meditation app and all of it incredibly helpful and fantastic the one piece of it that I'm kind of trying to explore separately because I feel like he looks at much less is the whole tradition of
1:48:01
loving kindness meditation and all the meditations around that so that's really really of interest to me so I'm sort of charting a different course there and I'll tell you like even just last night I was interviewing on stage this guy hmon sunam I don't know if you've heard
1:48:15
of him but he's a a really renowned Zen Buddhist monk from Korea and his books are all number one bestsellers in Korea and lots of other countries but here he's less wellknown but anyway he has a new book out so I I was doing this interview and we're up on stage so you
1:48:31
can see the audience and it happens to be a pretty formal audience so before we start the audience is kind of sitting there kind of still in their seats and then he opens by doing a loving kindness meditation and it was so amazing to see
1:48:47
the transformation on their faces and he did this for maybe one or two or 3 minutes like wasn't long yeah and you know suddenly they're totally smiling and they're open and they're happy it's remarkable yeah it's remarkable and I think it's so weird and dispiriting how in the
1:49:05
mainstream media and in corporate life I mean it's great that there's been this incredible Embrace of mindfulness meditation but I think there's a kind of allergy towards going too much in the loving kindness Direction um and I spoke
1:49:19
to Sharon salsburg about this who's one of the Great teachers and she said that people have this sense that it must be phony like that you couldn't possibly actually have those feelings and so it kind of gives them a sort of creepy feeling to do it totally but but I feel
1:49:35
like that all needs to get completely rethought loving kindness the label I think smells of kind of handwavy hippie associations and therefore people Veer away from it or if they have sensitivity to that stuff which I do and have for a very long time
1:49:55
but so did mindfulness for many years you ab and that's been recast but I mentioned that as a contrast to my then subsequent experience with loving kindness meditation also called meta mea meditation uh which I was introduced to not first by Jack cornfield though I did
1:50:13
spend some time with him who's sort of of the same cohort as Sharon Saltsburg I they're close friends and Sharon's been on the podcast but mang Chad M tan of Google actually who started this class within Google called I think it's search within yourself it was a course that
1:50:29
included many tools including mindfulness and he has a book called Joy on demand which is fantastic I thought it was a fantastic title I was like I could use Joy on demand let's take a look at this and there's a very short part in that book which I ended up
1:50:41
excerpting for I want to say tools of Titans about loving kindness meditation and he tells the story of this woman who as an experiment guided or suggested by mang did a one minute loving kindness meditation on the hour every hour for one workday and she would pick people
1:51:00
who are walking about the office or so and she came back and she said that is the best day I've had at work in 7 years and I think part of that is at least for me that I am very historically been very trapped in my head I'm very prefrontal
1:51:18
and I come from a family of Warriors people who are worrior or worrier worriors not not not the battle axe type but the Like Larry David type yeah from one of those too right and when you are consumed with worry or anxiety and this is not my description but it's been
1:51:40
described to me as being trapped in the future like depression is being trapped in the past anxiety or worrying is being trapped in the future and it's also at least for me it's a focus on the self it's like me me me it's all things that might happen to me things
1:51:54
that I should do and the loving kindness meditation which can be so short and have an impact gets you unlike most types of mindfulness practice that are popular or becoming popular in the west it gets you out of yourself yeah and I recall when I was writing tools of
1:52:13
Titans I decided to take mang's advice and I did loving kindness for literally 2 or 3 minutes every night I was at this hotel and they had a dry sauna and I go into the dry sauna really late because I was doing my writing really late right
1:52:27
and just do two to three minutes of thinking about a friend and wishing them happiness and seeing them smiling and giving them a hug and having them smile back at me and wishing me the same and it was transformative as regards with regards to my mood it was really just
1:52:43
incredible yes low dose really really low dose and I'm curious you mentioned that you were thinking about love or meditating on loving kindness to your friend did you also start with a traditional practice of wishing it to yourself or is that less comfortable for
1:52:58
you this is a great question so I did not it did not even occur to me to do this until years later when I went to my first 7day might have been 10day silent Meditation Retreat at Spirit Rock and Jack cornfield was there and I went in they check in with you to make sure
1:53:19
you're not having a total psychotic break for a few minutes every other day and I had this meeting with Jack and one of his co- teers for the event and we were talking about loving kindness talking about loving kindness and as I was leaving the woman
1:53:34
with Jack said just out of curiosity have you been doing any loving kindness for yourself and it struck I don't know how to describe this in a way it doesn't look make me look like an ass but it just struck me as such a silly question I was like no of
1:53:47
course I haven't been doing it for myself and then I realized how much that probably explained a lot of my problems and she goes yeah you might want to try that why don't you experiment with that and I remember Jack later saying you know and I'm paraphrasing but you know
1:54:03
if your compassion doesn't include yourself then it's incomplete yeah and that has become and you can't really give it to other people in a complete way either right so that has become probably I'm so glad you asked that one of the biggest changes in my I could
1:54:16
call it a mindfulness practice but my way of relating to the world and thinking about helping others has been actually taking time to show or think on self-compassion specifically for myself at a handful of younger ages yeah yeah
1:54:33
uh which I do at meal times and might talk about that more at some point but yeah that's should become really it's become a very very very very important ritual for me but I don't think you're alone I mean Sharon sburg mentioned to me that many people have trouble I mean
1:54:49
the traditional progression of the practice would be start with yourself and then you know move progressively outward to other people in your life and she said many people have trouble beginning with themselves and so I was really struck because last night this
1:55:02
monk hmon sunam who I love began in this meditation by directing it to ourselves and I asked him about that afterwards and he seemed kind of puzzled by the question which made me wonder if this is a uniquely American problem I don't
1:55:19
know reminds me of the story I heard of this I don't know what it was nepales or I know budines monk who came to the US and he he was in a car on the way to some event as was in the US and there were these people running you know jogging on the side of the street to get
1:55:36
in shape but they're just they looked like they were dying I mean they looked like they were running from hyenas and he was just like are they okay what's wrong with them just it was so foreign oh my goodness so we have just a few minutes let me ask you the billboard
1:55:55
question uh so if you could put a message on a billboard this is metaphorically speaking to get a message a quote a question anything non-commercial out to millions or billions of people what might you put on that billboard I think I'd probably put
1:56:11
this one aphorism that I've loved since high school I think which is only connect by em Forster um only connect only connect yeah like that at the end of the day that's that really matters what does that mean to you it just means connecting on some
1:56:29
really deep level with the people around you and that might sound like an ironic aphorism for someone who wrote a book about introversion but to me those are not contradictory things at all you know and so for me like connection it can happen in person for sure but it could
1:56:48
also happen just by listening to music that's really touching you and you feel completely connected to this musician who may not even be alive anymore you know or a writer who might not be alive anymore but they're expressing something
1:57:00
deep and unchanging about what it's like to be human so those I think there's kind of nothing more important than that only connect only connect is there anything you've done that has helped you to more deeply or frequently experience those moments or any advice you might
1:57:16
have for people who want to cultivate that so aside from meditation which I am a huge proponent of but I think you really do have to pay attention to what works for you and it really is so different for everybody you know so for me I love to have deep one-on-one
1:57:35
conversations it happens through music it happens through literature and those that's how it happens um but I think it it really is a different answer for everyone for each person but I'll tell you I this is maybe a different topic but the whole idea for my next book came
1:57:53
out of one of these kinds of experiences which is I have always had a love of Bittersweet and minor key music and and the book's not about music but I'm going to tell you the story anyway okay so when I was in law school I was listening
1:58:08
to music like that in my dorm and a friend came by and he was kind of a funny wise guy and he said why are you listening to this music to commit suicide too and you know and I I thought it was funny and I laughed but I thought about it for decades afterwards like I
1:58:23
was thinking well why is it first of all what is it about our culture that makes this music so suspect that you would make that kind of joke and also what is it about the music itself that for me is not suicide inducing at all it's like it's the opposite I feel when I hear
1:58:38
music like that completely connected to everything because it's like the composer is expressing some really deep truth about what it is to be human so I I've thought about this for decades and and the place that I'm going with this next book is I think that tuning into
1:58:56
the Sorrows of the world actually is a kind of secret superpower that we're not really allowed to access very often because of course we live in this culture that tells you don't go there and always wear the smiley face and and so on but if I can say like even look at
1:59:12
somebody like you even before you started being really open and upfront about some of the demons that you've struggled with which by the way all the honor youve for doing that it's amazingly Brave and generous but even before you did it and if you had never
1:59:27
done it I don't think you would have been touching all those people the way you have all these years if it weren't for those sorrows and I agree yeah yeah so all about that I'm excited to read your next book thank you I think it's a really
1:59:43
really really really important topic yeah I think it's really important I think we'll have to do round two in that case I would love that that would be awesome I just have to write a little faster I I will happily wait for your best work so no need to rush well Susan
2:00:00
this has been such a joy and I'm sure people can hear it but just to maybe underscore the point I mean you are a very present person when you're speaking with someone else I can I can feel that in the room and so you're you're walking
2:00:18
the talk which is always refreshing and not always the case so thank you for taking the time today thank you so much I really enjoyed it yeah great to hang out and I will link to everything in the show notes for folks including the the name of the Korean monk that I couldn't
2:00:33
spell to save my life at the moment but we will have links to everything at t. blog SLP podcast you can just search Susan uh and it'll pop right up people can find you online presumably where are the best places to say hello learn more about what you're up to well best thing
2:00:51
is to sign up for my newsletter which you can get to if you go to quiet rev.com which is for quiet Revolution so you'll find it right there on the homepage there's a a signup form and there's a newsletter that goes out every week so that's the absolute best and
2:01:05
then I'm also Super Active on LinkedIn and on Facebook great and is that simply Susan Kane looks I think Facebook correct me if I'm wrong I think is author Susan Kane oh gosh thank you for saying that yeah so on Facebook it's author Susan Kane and on LinkedIn I
2:01:21
actually don't remember but it's part of the LinkedIn influencer if you put in LinkedIn influencer and my name it pop right up and then Twitter may be less active yeah I am on Twitter a little less active Susan Kan yep and can't wait to see the next book and continue to follow
2:01:40
your work thank you for do so much I will say the same to you what is the next book what is the next book well you know based on the an episode that came out a few days ago I think it's going to be this book that I have been waiting to
2:01:52
give myself permission to write which is about it's not that it'll be a close cousin to what you are thinking a lot about right now it would be how to pay attention to these psychoemotional undercurrents and components of Life very closely and how to use tools both
2:02:18
on the beaten path and off very very very off the beaten path for finding resolution for problems or challenges or insecurities or trauma that are at least in current conventional practice considered very difficult to treat or untreatable so that would be as far as I
2:02:40
can tell and I've been Gathering notes for about five years now that would be the thrust of it that's going to be your most important book I hope so what's your timetable what's my time timetable it's well as who was it I think this this is something I heard on
2:02:57
a TV set once they didn't want people to rush but it was the gist was people need to rush and they said but they didn't want to say that and make people panic so they said we need everyone to move with purpose so I think my answer is move with
2:03:12
purpose but not in haste because I want to treat it with the depth and thought that it deserves I don't want to rush I will probably write it without signing before selling anything or signing any contracts I'll probably oh you'll write the whole thing I'll probably do it on
2:03:32
my own time oh interesting okay but it is a top if not the top priority wow so so are you like working on it every day right now I am in some fashion working on it every day but it's going to be a while before I get to the composition
2:03:46
Pros stage but the vast majority of the work that I do on my books is the experimentation and the traveling for subjecting myself to all sorts of unusual things and the note taking and the organizing of said notes and I'm doing some piece of that almost every
2:04:01
day wow yeah oh I'm so glad you're doing this book yeah so if I can help you know if you want an early reader or whatever I would love to awesome it's completely up my alley well likewise likewise this has been so much fun and until next time thank you so much thank you so much and
2:04:18
to everybody listening same until next time thank you for listening hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
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searching for this how about that and it suggests an alternative and I think to myself wait a second my internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser yeah I don't love it and a lot of you know I
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