How to Generate Creative States of Mind with David Kadavy
David Kadavy is the bestselling author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start, How to Write a Book, and Design for Hackers. David hosts a weekly podcast, “Love Your Work,” at the intersection of creativity and productivity and is a self-publishing coach supporting writers in getting their work in the hands of readers.
David joined Chris to discuss how to generate creative states of mind and why different stages of a creative require different approaches. They covered:
How creativity emerges through external conditions
Why different stages of creativity require different approaches
Structuring your days for maximum output
Generating creative states of mind on demand
Essential routines, techniques, and tools for accelerating creative projects.
See below for the audio recording, resources mentioned, topics, and conversation transcript.
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Links and resources we mentioned during our conversation:
David's Blog Posts:
Additional Forcing Function links:
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook, free download)
Performance Assessment (quiz to reveal your greatest opportunity for growth)
To check out our previous Forcing Function Hour episodes, click here.
Topics:
(08:14) Adapting for productivity in creative pursuits
(14:15) Creativity is contextual
(23:44) The Art of Learning example
(38:24) “Go with the river”
(41:25) Optimizing creative systems
(52:04) Q&A
Conversation Transcript
Note: transcript is slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:05): Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
Hello, hello. Welcome, everyone, to the thirteenth edition of Lunch Hour. My name is Chris Sparks, and I'm the founder of Forcing Function, and I am your host for today. Lunch Hour is our conversation series exploring the boundaries of high performance. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We train a select group of twelve leaders at a time, teaching them how to multiply their creative output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose.
My cohost for today is David Kadavy. I've been a fan of David's for a very long time, and David and I are going to be discussing how to maximize your creative output. David and I connected when we were both living in Medellín, Columbia. David's been a pioneer and an inspiration for me in several areas, really, including self-publishing, interviewing, and digital nomadism. So very thankful and honored to have him here with us today. David's the best-selling author of Design For Hackers, The Heart To Start, How To Write A Book, and Mind Management, Not Time Management. His latest book, Mind Management, Not Time Management, had a massive impact on my own creative process and is the inspiration for today's conversation.
David also hosts a weekly podcast called "Love Your Work," which rests at the intersection of creativity and productivity, and David's a self-publishing coach supporting writers and getting their work in the hands of readers.
Welcome. Thank you for being here, David. Lovely to see you again. Very excited to dig in today.
David (01:52): Chris, it's good to see you again. Thank you so much for having me.
Chris (01:56): So, let's kick things off with why time management is wrong, shall we? Let's just rip the bandaid off. One of my biggest takeaways from Mind Management was that optimizing your time can be a creativity killer. Why do you find this to be the case?
David (02:12): Yeah. So time management, this paradigm of time management that many of us really work on, that we think about how to get more out of our time, it's sort of a relic of the Industrial Age. You know, it's—Frederick Taylor or Henry Ford, Frederick Taylor standing there with a stopwatch measuring the exact amount of time that various motions took to produce some sort of thing, and then prescribing—almost like programming a computer, programming humans—"Do this. It should take this long. You know, hold this in this way, move in this way, and follow that process, and if you follow that process we can get the most possible output out of the time that we have." And before that, people weren't thinking so much about time. You didn't even know what time it was a lot of the time. There would be a clock tower in the village maybe, but if you're working on a farm you're just looking at, "Is the sun going up? Is the sun going down? What season is it?" et cetera.
And so it was revolutionary to start to look at time as this resource that could be optimized, that you could get the output for the input that you put in. Put in more time, get more output. Put in more actions within that amount of time, get more output. But the world is changing to where it's not so much about what sort of output can you have, but it's the quality of your ideas, the quality of your decisions, your ability to learn things, the ability to make things happen in your mind that aren't just a procedural step-by-step process. And so that's kind of the first reason that time management is wrong for creativity.
And then there's other reasons. Those other reasons kinda have to do with basically just thinking about a target. Thinking about there being a deadline, and watching the clock, and trying to make certain things happen by a certain time. We as Americans are in a culture—I'm not even in the United States, I'm in Columbia. But in the United States, the culture is a clock-time-based culture. We think about time-based on what time it is, and it's hard to even imagine what it's like to think differently, but there is sort of an event-time way that people think, where instead of, "How can I get this done in this amount of time?", they think, "Well, I wanna do this thing and then I'm gonna do this thing and then I'll do this thing." They're just gonna go in a certain order, and really do a good job at it.
And one thing that researchers have found when they see people who think according to clock-time instead of event-time is they're less able to learn. They can't take in information and integrate it into their understanding of the world. They're less able to savor positive emotions, and they're less open to new opportunities. And these are all things that you have to do when you're being creative, because creativity—there's a certain element of randomness to it. You are riding randomness, you're harnessing randomness, you never know when that great idea's going to come. Obviously, you want to optimize things so that those great ideas will come at a greater rate, but you kinda have to be open to new opportunities, you have to be learning things so that you can connect them to make new ideas. And as far as positive emotions go, research shows over and over again that if you want to be creative you want to be in a relaxed state of mind, you want to be in a positive state of mind. If you are vigilant, anxious, watching the clock, then you're getting tight. You're getting the opposite of creative, you're getting a little bit more focused. Like, focus is kind of the opposite of creativity, depending upon the stage of the creative process.
So those are just kind of an overview of the reasons why this paradigm of time management that we have relied upon for the last century and a half for so is really not something that is going to help us moving into the future as ideas are more important than being able to follow a series of steps.
Chris (07:06): I feel like I could just dig in on each of those and spend the whole time there. That was an excellent, excellent introduction. Thank you so much. What stood out to me first is we tend to track our output as if everything we do has equal value. Right? That all hours in the day are created equal, everything that we do has some equal expected value in the future. And particularly with creativity, which is such a power-law field where most of the things you do no one sees, and occasionally there's a breakthrough which can't quite be predicted and you blow up, and it seems like there's a big function of making lots of pots. I'm referring to they had the course where you could—the best pot—one pot at the end of the quarter determined your entire grade. And so one group made lots and lots of pots, and one group spent the entire quarter making one point, and the more pots you make the better.
David (08:11): The ceramics class.
Chris (08:12): Exactly.
David (08:13): Yeah.
Chris (08:14): So understanding that it's not the level of your output, how many things that you complete, but the overall quality at the end, what implications does that have for a creative? How do we need to adapt our traditional ways of thinking about, "Am I being productive in creative pursuits?"
David (08:41): Yeah. I want to clarify about that, you were talking about the pots. Was that the study where they basically found those who went for volume—
Chris (08:51): Exactly.
David (08:52):—had a better grade?
Chris (08:53): Exactly, yes.
David (08:54): And did more, created—versus those who went for quality. So yeah, there is that paradigm in creativity, that those who ship a lot tend to improve. And that's kind of like a—that's a whole other paradigm. That's sort of a perfectionism paradigm. Kind of like what I talked about in the book The Heart To Start, this idea of giving yourself permission to suck, of getting out of your own way and getting yourself to produce. So that's one way to look at things, is just can you crank the things out. But as you start to try to make those ideas better, then that's where you start to need a little bit more space. That's where—and if you want to—really, it doesn't take that long to crank a lot of things out. Like, how long does it take to type things? You know, you can type fifty thousand random words in a day, and a computer can generate those fifty thousand random words faster than you can think. Well, what's the difference? The difference is that if you spend a month on NaNoWriMo, and allow yourself to think about the ideas and to create a novel, then you can create a good solid novel, and that computer can't do it at all.
And writing a novel in a month is pretty quick, but what's the bottleneck there? Right? The bottleneck isn't, "How fast can I type?" The bottleneck there is just kind of getting out of your own way.
And that's kind of—I feel like that's kind of a separate conversation or approach. But the way that I think about things as I present them in Mind Management, Not Time Management is just getting yourself into that state. I think everybody's had that experience before where there's something that maybe they work on often—well, I was working on my newsletter the other day, and you know, I usually take a few different sessions to work on them and allow things to incubate. And I batch them, I do you know, four or five at a time depending on the length of the month. But there was just one day where I sit down and, boom, all of 'em just come out perfectly in like an hour-long session and I hardly needed to edit them.
And that's where you ask yourself, "Okay, well what happened there?" Constantin Brancusi, the famous sculptor, had this great quote. I'm paraphrasing here, but it was basically, "Things are not difficult to make. What is difficult is getting yourself into the state of mind to make them." And so while there is this "get out of your own way" element, "ship a lot," and that's where things like creative systems and understanding the four stages of creativity and seeing where those sticking points are so that you can create a repeatable process to continue to crank things out in a way that you're using your creative energies most efficiently, those are some things that are like a little deeper into the concept. Later in the book, I do talk about those sort of things. Those things are important, But there's also just identifying like, "Where is the good wind that you can get into your sails?" And trying to get yourself into a position so that when you're doing that work to crank out creative work, that you're actually going to be efficient. That you're actually going to be able to sit down and do it.
I remember when I wrote my first book, Design For Hackers. Had no experience writing a book, really. And I thought, well, I was experienced as a designer, that's a creative pursuit, I should be able to handle this sort of thing. And what I found was I was just banging my head against the wall twelve hours a day. And then all of a sudden, I would just hit flow. And for like fifteen minutes I would be writing and it would be almost perfectly edited and I would get an entire draft of a chapter done just in one sitting. And that's where when the smoke cleared on that process, I started to ask myself, "Well, why couldn't I just sit down and do that fifteen minutes of writing and get on with the rest of my day?" And so that really started that journey—Yeah. I mean, yeah. And that really started that journey that resulted in Mind Management, Not Time Management, roughly a decade later. And now I can say that I do have—
Chris (13:39): Lots of incubation.
David (13:40): Yeah. I do have a good enough—Exactly. Lots of incubation, lots of—You know, it wasn't all just writing, it was also just trying to do the research and figuring out where I could find those handholds to start to master my own creative energy. And I can say that, now, that yeah. I can, if I adjust things right, sit down, do fifteen minutes of writing, crank out two hundred fifty, five hundred words, and just do that every day and you pretty much have yourself a book.
Chris (14:15): Let's pull the curtain back on that, 'cause I think that that is one of the best ideas. There's many really good ones. One of the best ideas in Mind Management, Not Time Management is that creativity is contextual. That you create the conditions in which creativity is supported, particularly the state of mind that you bring to the task at hand. Right? Sitting down at these different stages of a creative project, that that state of mind that you need to match is going to be different. I would love to hear about some of the things that you've discovered that work really, really well for yourself or others on intentionally generating the state of mind that you need.
David (15:05): Okay. So, for getting into that state of mind. Well, I would preface that with there's a couple kind of prerequisites for being in that state of mind—that we like to think that, you know, we'll just be able to have a muse come down and whisper these wonderful insights into our ears, or whatever it is that we're trying to create, but it really helps to be prepared first. To first be in that state of mind. So for example, if I'm writing an article, have I—There's going to be all these different facts and figures and elements of the article, maybe the flow of the article that I'm gonna want to have as I write it. And yeah, you can sit down and free-write. But that's not what most people do. Most people just sit down, and they're like, "Oh, I'm going to write this article." And then they're like, "Is it happening, or is it not?" And usually, it's not. Right?
Every once in a while it just happens. And that's just—the stars align, and everything works fine that way. And most of the time it doesn't. And so one of the prerequisites of being in the right state of mind is to at least make sure that your mind is full of the sort of raw materials that you need in order to have the insights that you want to have. And that is sort of an art in itself, is that, yeah, you have to do the research, but like can you do the research right before you start writing it, or is it something that—I personally like to use incubation for, which is depending upon the complexity of the problem I'm trying to solve, to actually take separate time, where all I'm doing is just mindlessly maybe writing the initial pieces of information that are going to go into that thing. And there's, you know, note-taking is really taking off. I've really gotten into Zettelkasten recently. And that's what things like that really help with, is you're just almost mindlessly just writing the most obvious things that you can think of, and you're getting that stuff into your head.
And again, depending upon the complexity of the problem, you want to be careful with how much time you're giving yourself between that and actually sitting down and trying to make it all work. And that could be note-taking, mindlessly writing, or that could be free writing. But that free writing, one of the important things there is that a lot of people don't give themselves that permission to sit down and write things that seriously do not make sense, are not complete sentences, there's things in brackets, there's parts where you're like—where you're literally typing—"This is the part where I should say something about this." Where you're kind of talking from a different level about the thing, not the level that you're going to be writing in.
I'm speaking about writing here, but clearer writing is clearer thinking. I can't imagine being a clearer thinker without being a clearer writer, and so that's what I tend to talk about. And so having that raw material in your mind and ready to go, that's the first thing. And that's important. Or whether maybe you're getting yourself into the state of mind to be in a meeting where you need to make decisions on the fly and you know that's gonna be the case. Well, you want to review that stuff like not five minutes before the meeting. You know, maybe if you have a week before. Or, or like doing interviews. On my podcast, I've done a lot of interviews. So I have a process there where I'm reviewing it like a couple weeks before, I'm reviewing it a week before, I'm reviewing it the day before, I'm reviewing it ten minutes before. And it's amazing how your mind just sort of takes—just climbs the patterns.
It seems pointless, this sort of preparation for that moment when you have to shine, but the mind is really magical that way. I mean, I remind myself of—one of the things that I do learning Spanish here in Columbia, one of the first things that I did to learn Spanish was I just turned on the first twenty minutes of a movie during breakfast every day. And I didn't—that was it. I didn't have to pay attention, I didn't have to do anything. And at first, it was just like—What's the point? It doesn't make—It's just, mindless—just, pointless gibberish is what I'm hearing. But because there's the same patterns, it just happens. And we so rarely actually take advantage of that. We know that, "Oh, you know, if you're going to make a tough decision you better sleep on it." Or whatever. But how often do we actually say like, "Oh, this thing's coming up where I'm gonna want to perform at this level, and what can I do to sort of gently get that information into my mind?"
Usually what we'll do is say like—say that we're preparing for a talk. "Well, I'm gonna have to rehearse the talk." And then you just don't do it, 'cause rehearsing a talk is kind of boring to do. But what about the easier things you can do, which is just to write it out, actually word for word, or write it out and just sort of start reading it, and then you start reading it more, and then you actually are practicing the talk. Things like that. What sort of things can you do in advance to actually be able to be in that state of mind.
So that's just—that's the first thing. The other thing is that to also avoid (if you can, we can't always) to try to avoid the situations where you have to put yourself into a state of mind, and to instead learn your sort of patterns and cycles of energy, so that you realize that there's certain types of thinking, certain types of energy that you have during certain times of the day or periods of the week or periods of the month or periods of the year. And when you start to master that sort of thing, then you really just have—you're like a clock that's a series of gears, that this little gear moves this way, and that makes the bigger gear move, and then all that stuff makes the second hand just move nice and smooth.
Chris (22:07): Yes.
David (22:08): And so getting to understand those things is helpful.
Now, let's say you are in a situation where you do need to get into state, or at least if it's a situation that you find yourself needing to get into state regularly—There was a great story in Josh Waitzkin's—
Chris (22:30): Art of Learning?
David (22:31):—Art of Learning—Yeah.
Chris (22:32): Big fan.
David (22:33): Where he was talking about the executive who wanted to be in a certain state, and he asked himself, "Okay, well, when am I in that state? I'm in that state when I play catch with my son." So he trained himself to do these stretches, eat this snack, listen to this song, play catch with his son. You know, do that over and over again and then you're just, "Okay, before my meetings I'm going to eat this snack, do these stretches, listen to this song," and then gradually taking pieces out. And that's where you can start to get into the right state on command.
And if you practice that enough, then you can finally find yourself in those cases where maybe you are in a situation where you need to get into a certain state and you can just will yourself to it. But it's something you have to practice. Just like the first time you ever tried to play guitar, and you put your fingers on there, and you're just like, "This is not possible for my fingers to do that." And then the next thing you know you're switching chords no problem.
Chris (23:44): Two things in that. That excellent example from Art of Learning that I want to highlight that I see all the time with my clients. First, I call this the coaching cheat code, is you ask someone, "Hey, when you're feeling most creative"—or insert adjective here. Most happy, most fulfilled, most productive—"what's going on? What correlates with that? What are you doing? Where are you?" Classic habit triggers. Like, what time of day is it, this type of stuff. And someone says, "Oh, well I notice when I sleep eight hours," or, "When I have spent quality time with my kids and partner," or, "When I eat really healthy." And all these things. It's like, "Okay, so why don't you do that?" Right? There's these things, that everyone wants the secret, but usually, we know the things that work for us, the conditions that allow our best selves to show up, and if we can incorporate these things into some sort of routine or ritual, that can allow us to get back into these states, because of these neural pathway patterns that have been established.
And as you said, you can take away some of these elements and still get the benefits, because as we've seen with any routine or ritual, it's not the content of the routine or ritual that matters, right? All these things on, "Okay, I need to have a coffee and I stir it six times and I have seven perfectly-sharpened pencils." The content doesn't matter, it's that you have something that you do that signals to yourself: "What I'm about to do is important. It's worth taking seriously." And that—What you said before about this slippery concept of quality, understanding that the quality of our ideas, the quality of our output, not the absolute quantity, is what matters.
But the paradox here being we can't judge what we're doing. That getting in this judgmental state of mind—as you put it, "Is it happening right now?"—makes sure that it doesn't happen. That we need to trust ourselves to give ourselves permission to just harvest our subconscious. And I love that you said even though it's hard and we hate doing it, approaching our work in these intermediate packets of, "I'm just going to do enough to plant this seed in my subconscious that I can work on this problem while I go on a walk around the block, while I have a conversation with a friend, while I do these other things that are completely unrelated and trust that these ideas will coalesce, that I'll find some intersection, that something will emerge that could not have been predicted, and that this trust, this permission is what allows this quality to occur."
David (26:52): Yeah, I actually call that, "The minimum creative dose." You know, there's the minimum effective dose in medicine where minimum amount of this drug or whatever will create some kind of a reaction. The minimum creative dose is a very useful concept in just planting that seed, like you said. Where maybe there's an article that you're working on and you are waiting at the dentist's office. Well, what you're normally gonna do is you're just gonna open up Twitter or Facebook and just kind of scroll until they call you and you don't know if it's gonna be in five minutes or if it's gonna be in ten minutes or it's gonna be in two minutes. And we very often don't make very good use of that sort of liminal time. But when you think of it in a minimum creative dose standpoint, you can just open up the drafts app and just type bullet point thoughts there. And it's really amazing how you just get that going, and the subconscious takes over.
But then also while you're in the dentist's chair, like you're thinking about the thing, because as you tried to sit and write those bullet point thoughts, you ran into the things where you had questions that you wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't made the effort to get a little bit far. But giving yourself permission to only plant the seed, not try to complete the project, is a very difficult thing and very worthwhile.
Chris (28:24): Related is you talk about this natural cyclicality to creative work. It's something that I very humbly discovered in myself in the last couple years, that nature operates in seasons. Right? We have the seasons of the year. I find that we have fat or thin cycles, like cycles—portions in our lives where we're very exploratory, we're traveling, we're trying a bunch of stuff, and then the cycle is that we're very exploitative, we have one singular focus and that takes all of our time and attention. We see this in the context of a day or a week where sometimes we're super amped up and energized and other times we're a little bit more relaxed and reflective. So, you know, understanding that these cycles are natural, what is your advice on how to work within these cycles to maximize your creativity?
David (29:25): Yeah, I think of them a lot like—I think of cycles a lot like being on a bi-cycle. Bicycle. Where if you're pedaling up a hill, and you're in a Fixie, don't have gears or whatever, you're not going to be applying the same pressure to all points of the cycle. If you're on a really crappy bike, anyway. You know, you get up on the pedals, and you push at the top, at the apex. Just past the apex. You're not like trying to push really hard when it's down at the bottom. You're pushing at the parts that are going to get you the results that you want. And you're going to change that approach depending upon the terrain. And it's similar with mental work, where you want to change your approach depending upon the terrain.
And a lot of people think about their daily routine. I think that the weekly routine is a highly underrated thing to use, because it really fits well the nature of creative work, in that sort of incubation that I was talking about, where sometimes you need like a good night's sleep, or a weekend, or sometimes even longer to like let things incubate. You know, I noticed something—I was just recently in the United States for a couple weeks. And this doesn't make any sense to me. I go to the United States, and I speak English, and I come back, and almost every time I go there and then come back, I speak Spanish better when I come back. You know, it's like I've gotten the rest. When I'm living here, I'm constantly struggling in certain situations, even though my Spanish has gotten pretty good. But when you take that rest, your mind gets a chance to start to consolidate those memories and that knowledge in there. And that's over the course of like a week or a couple weeks, you know? That doesn't happen when I'm living here.
So, I try to design my cycles creatively so that I take advantage of rest throughout my week, and I take advantage of the four stages of creativity. So for myself, Monday and Tuesday mornings are really my best creative time. Mornings are best creative time for a lot of people, in that your creative time tends to be not your peak time. It tends to be when your prefrontal cortex, your executive thinking center, is a little bit out to lunch or maybe still asleep or a little groggy 'cause it's not there to spoil all the fun, because creativity is all about making connections between various parts of the brain. And then, you know, Monday and Tuesday I've had the weekend to sort of clean the slate, clean my mind of all the bad ideas or whatever dead-end thoughts I was going down, and so that's when Monday and Tuesday I really wanna take the time to explore pretty widely, if I can, whatever it is that I'm working on. But then as I get into midweek, maybe there's some things from those Monday and Tuesday sessions that I can start to polish and make a little better.
But then when I get to Friday, well, that's where I put certain types of work that doesn't require my best creative energy so much. So if my accountant sends me an email and is like, "Hey, can you review these financial statements and sign these forms," or whatever? Say it arrives on a Monday. I'm gonna use Boomerang, that's gonna come back to me on Friday afternoon. It's out of my mind, I don't want to think about it all.
And this is why I also don't do meetings on Mondays and Tuesdays. Because I want to be on event time. I don't want to be looking at the clock and anxious about, "Am I gonna be able to get to where I wanna go in this project that I'm working on before this thing starts?" "Oh, is there something on my calendar that I'm gonna miss that I forgot about?" Or, "I need to be paying attention to my phone so I get the notification to tell me to go to the thing, but then because my phone is close to me now I get on Twitter, and then I ruin my entire day." I don't want those things going on. And so that's why I had that protective time where I'm doing that creative exploration, I polish things a little bit more later on in the week, and then at the very end of the week that's when I kinda take care of the loose ends that need to get taken care of. And then I have the weekend, and that helps me recuperate and kinda do it all over again.
And we already kinda have naturally some of these cycles. People get a case of the Mondays. Tuesday is a big day for marketing on the internet. Wednesday is Hump Day, by Thursday you're thirsty, by Friday you're like, "Thank God it's Friday." You've got Saturday Night Fever, and then it's easy like Sunday morning. So we already culturally have these cues going on with the routine, but very few of us actually look at that and say, "Well, given what I want to accomplish, how would I best use those sort of natural cycles to make these things happen?"
And then for me, I've gotten that to where it extends beyond the weekly routines where I have sort of monthly cycles for how I produce my podcast, how I produce my weekly newsletter, and then seasonal cycles, where you have certain interruptions, like the holidays in December. You know, Medellín it's always the same weather, but there's still—you can feel it. People kinda take off work. And so I try to use that time to get myself into as wide of a thinking state as I can to really look at things from a thirty thousand foot view, because what happens every year? Every year at the beginning of the year people say, "Oh, I'm gonna do this this year. I'm gonna do that thing this year. I'm gonna do this thing." And people are really strict with their schedules, and they're going towards their goals, and that lasts about a few months, and then entropy takes over and they're just not really doing the things that they would do if they had been thinking with the same clarity that they had after that sort of break, that holiday break.
Now, this is also something that I try to pay attention to when there's just things going on that you can't control that change your state. So, for example, recently I've had to do with a lot of things where I'm like filling out a lot of forms and doing, like, a lot of financial things, I'm in more of a—I've been in more of a vigilant mind state, there. And so that then makes me think, "Well, okay, I'm having trouble being creative because I'm in that mind state. So I'm gonna do a little bit less of those things." And I'm gonna think, "Well, okay, what are the things that I could do to take advantage of this mind state?" So that's where I might start doing more deals or selling foreign rights deals or doing contract sort of things, that are things that I wouldn't want to do if I were trying to be in a really creative mind state.
And then, recently I was traveling. So I'm out of my normal environment, I can't necessarily keep all my routines up. You know, you fight and you try to make some of those things work, but then you can also say, "Well, you know, I'm just going to take advantage of that fact and do some higher-level brainstorming that maybe isn't gonna turn into something right now, but that eventually does." And so there's all these different ways—I think of it almost like a flex and release. If you just think of those two sort of separate states, of flexing a muscle or relaxing a muscle, creativity kind of could be broken down kind of into those two things. Are you trying to think wide, or are you trying to polish and execute, and what does whatever is going on in your life or your work or in culture, how is that influencing that? And instead of fighting it sometimes, you just go with it.
Is that like a Taoist thing? "Go with the river," I think.
Chris (38:24): Mm-hmm.
David (38:25): So that's the way that I think about cycles and working with the changes that are already happening to your mind-state because of your environment and your life that you live in.
Chris (38:39): Yeah. I love that Taoist philosophy of just going with the flow. And I found it very helpful to have this underlying belief that ideas find me at the right time. That everything that's happening right now is happening for a reason. The weather today, this conversation that I'm having, this random book that I found on the street. There's a magic that is unlocked. It's like the world is collaborating with me serendipitously to make these connections, that everything that I discover has a potential purpose and it's up to me to discover it. And not only can that be a self-fulfilling prophecy in that it gets out of this state of judgment, and, "Hey, is this good enough, is this important enough to talk about, et cetera?" Versus curiosity. What depth is waiting to be mined and discovered here? What is the purpose in meaning? How does this connect to other things that I'm looking at? And it touches so much on what you have described so eloquently, that you need to create a sense of ease, that the harder you are gripping on this desired outcome, the more it just slips through your fingers. And there needs to be this sense of "it will come" and trusting the process and exploration—
David (40:21): "Yes, and."
Chris (40:22): Yeah. Otherwise, it becomes like sand. It makes me think of systematization. Here at Forcing Function, we're really big on systems, and how do we optimize and dial in and have this repeatable process. But creativity is just notoriously fickle. It feels like there needs to be some middle path, as you can say. Right? A lot of creatives can be very resistant to having processes. They think like, "The messier my life is the more creative I will be." And other people fall on the other dichotomous extreme of, "I sit down at 11:25 every morning and I write exactly this many words and then I read my letters that have been delivered by carrier pigeon." Whatever it is. How do you find this middle path of having a creative system that allows you to have consistent output but still has this flexibility to allow for the natural emergence?
David (41:25): Yeah. So the way that I think about it and the way that I talk about it a lot in the book, it's a little bit like making a batch of cupcakes. If you're making a batch of cupcakes, all of your batter is going to go in the cupcake tin, and all the indentations are the same, and it's the same batter, and then you put 'em in the oven and they're all baked for the same amount of time and the same temperature and then you take them out and they all kind of look the same, but then you can put different frosting on them, you can put sprinkles on some of them, you can put actually put something in the batter of each of them and make them a little bit different. And through doing that you have these sort of fixed things that make each one the same in a way, but then you also have this area where you can play and be creative and see what happens there.
And this I have found, thinking of things this way, is a really great way to straddle that dichotomy between the quality and the quantity, is that you remove so much of the thinking and waffling—Because I used to be one of those people who was just like, "Oh, I only write blog posts when I'm feeling inspired." And now I've got a schedule. Like, there are blog posts coming out on these days, there is an email newsletter coming out every Monday. And the last couple podcast interviews that there were of me, they were sure to ask me about consistency. And it's funny, I don't think of it ask consistency that much, I just think of it as, "What are the activities that I like to do creatively, and what amount of output would be a match for how much of that stuff I want to do," kind of. And so I play around and match that sort of thing, match that stuff up.
And you've gotta make some sort of creative compromises here, where you have to be clear about what is important to you in what you're creating. So, for example with my podcast, I do my podcast episodes—I record all of them for the coming month on the second Thursday—actually, yeah. It's the second—today is the second Thursday before the end of the month, or it's two Thursdays from the end of—to the end. And so today I'm going to record. And then next Thursday I'm going to get all the other stuff ready and send it off to my production team. That's gonna be all my May episodes. So I already have that thing going on. And because of that, I can't really drop in a, "Oh, here's what I did today." Or like even, "Here's what I'm doing this week, I just got off a plane and—." I can't say those things in my podcast episodes, because of my production process that I've decided. Because of the creative compromises that I've decided.
Now, if I had a news broadcast, that would be a problem. But how creative would my news broadcast be, and you know, maybe I would make a different compromise, where I would say, "Well, I'm not gonna cover things that have this level of time sensitivity, where I've gotta release a podcast three times a day," or something like that. And so you just sorta have to decide what's important to you and where can you make those compromises, and you have to make the tough decision to make those compromises.
Now, when I say that, if I were to show you my spreadsheet and my processes and all these things, you would say, "Oh my god, I could never plan all that." My process sheets and all that. I mean, I know I could never sit down and plan that. Yet I have it. How do I have it? It's because it is this repeated process, where I do what I call a 'sloppy operating procedure' for any sort of process that I do for any creative thing. You know, there's this idea of SOPs, the 'Standard Operating Procedure,' that you follow these steps, you're gonna get this output. I don't think that that works very well for creative stuff. But I like to do what I call a sloppy operating procedure, where as I'm making the podcast I'm just taking sort of really sloppy notes. Like horrible, you know, incomplete sentences, misspellings, things in brackets. And I'm saying, "Okay, well, how would I formalize this process? If I did this I would have that outcome. If I did this I would make this compromise. If I had this I would make this other compromise." And I'm not making the decision right there, but the next time I do that process, I open up the sloppy operating procedure, and I review that stuff. And like, "Oh, yeah, it's totally clear that this is the right way to go." Okay. Let's put that on the checklist and formalize it.
And eventually, you have checklists. Before I did this interview with you, I have a checklist on Google Keep for doing a video interview in my office. And it has the checklist on there, "do these exact things." I don't have to think about anything, I'm not stressing myself out before our conversation to where I can't think creatively and be on the fly, I'm not second-guessing, "Did I get all this stuff wrong?" I do that with my—when I travel. Like, I have the checklist of everything that I packed for the last trip that I took, and how is this trip different? I just go down the checklist and use the template and all that. So I'm creating processes making sort of compromises that I can formalize, but then also being as sort of gentle as I can with the process, and allowing it to just improve a little bit each time.
I guess people say, "one percent better." Right? I don't think of it that way, but I just go try to mindlessly read what I wrote down and see if that makes me think of anything else, and if I think of anything else I write it, and then eventually I have this process to follow, and I mindlessly follow that process, but the creativity happens there in the in-between.
And there's that Gustave Flaubert quote that, you know, "Be neat and orderly in your life so that you can be violent and crazy in your work." Paraphrasing, again. So that's the way that I like to think about starting to create processes. And one of the things that I am sure to include in my processes is the incubation. Is the minimum creative dose and the incubation. Is, you know, for example, writing a podcast intro. Like, an intro to a guest, I've got parts of my process where I would listen to the conversation, like while not doing anything to actively listen, but while I'm cooking or whatever. And then there's another time I listen to it faster, and I'm doing other things and maybe I'm taking a quick note, and then later I like do the barf draft. And these are spaced out strategically so that I am doing the minimum amount of active work on these things, and that the incubation, what I call my 'passive genius,' is doing a lot of the work.
And I have that down to the point where if I go into Airtable for my podcast and I say, "Okay, I have a podcast episode coming out this date, I have a Zapier automation that creates all the Todoist tasks based upon that date, and all I have to do is look into Todoist and say, "Oh, okay, I need to brainstorm that for five minutes. Oh, I don't want to do that. But it says five minutes. All right, set the timer." Brainstorm for five minutes. Of course, I end up working on it for fifteen or half an hour or whatever. "Okay, I did that. Ugh. It went horrible." And then I can see the next task is to a week later revisit that. And when I revisit it, what do you know, like suddenly it's all clear.
So, those are a few of the ways that I think about creative systems and how to get the best creative output, the most volume out of the minimal pain and the minimal actual time spent actually working on a project.
Chris (50:12): As you describe that system, the phrase that comes to mind for me are "policies to trust yourself." That if you have these habits in place, the sloppy operating procedure—I love that so much. That, "Can I make this a tiny bit better every time that I touch it?" And the natural conclusion is every time I repeat this process it'll become naturally more dialed in. That, you know, 49ers coach Bill Walsh calls this, "The score takes care of itself." If you have this habit in place of continuous improvement, what policy you need to ensure that, it allows you to trust that all of those outcomes you seek will take care of themselves. And—
David (51:02): Well, here—
Chris (51:03): Yeah.
David (51:04): I wanna catch you on the continuous improvement part, because it just dawned on me, because there's always been this sort of—there's this meme of "get one percent better every day," and it's never really resonated with me. And I just realized that what's happening is continuous improvement, but my mindset is not on improvement. My mindset is just, "Write down what you can to document the process, follow the process mindlessly, but you just have ideas about how to do it better." And it gets dialed in, like you said. And the result is continuous improvement. The philosophy is just trusting the system.
Chris (51:47): Yes. Yes. It's a policy that allows you to trust yourself, right? Being able to look past outcomes, particularly in the short term. I want to hand things off to Q&A 'cause we got some really good questions coming in.
David (52:03): Cool.
Chris (52:04): And we'll do these semi-rapid-fire, so we can get through as many as we can. So, first question, coming in anonymous—I love the anonymous questions. "Tips to come up with more ideas quickly." Maybe you can touch on your Zettelkasten and how you've been using it recently.
David (52:22): More it is, quickly, I think it's permission to suck. Of the—try to make bad ideas, even. It's like, "How bad of an idea can I make?" And just go down the list and keep barfing them out. Now, the Zettelkasten is helpful as well, but it's just note-taking, which is—For example, read a book, I take highlights, I export the highlights, I mindlessly review the highlights, I copy the part—I bold the parts of the highlights that are nicer, that are interesting to me, and then I mindlessly rewrite them, and then ideas just happen as I do that. And I've got a whole Zettelkasten article on my blog, if anybody's interested in that.
Chris (53:09): Cool. Make sure to add that into the show notes. This question's from Tara Browne. "How do you recognize when a creative reboot is necessary because you're getting off course? Say, letting the cycle run its course. What's your favorite strategy for this reboot?"
David (53:29): Yeah. For me, the barometer is often how much I'm enjoying what I'm doing. Like if I am struggling to get motivated to work on something, if I am feeling a block creatively, those are often the times when I feel like there needs to be a reboot. And fortunately, I've set things up so that I can do that, mostly, when I want to. And the way that I do that is to try to—is, I'll do more less judgment kind of free writing things. Meditation. Like, long sixty-minute meditation sessions. There's a cabin up in the woods that I like to go to. And also trying to find things that I can just not do. Reminding myself that it's sometimes more productive to delete from the to-do list than it is to mark 'done.' That the more things you do the more complex things get, and the more complex things get the worse of a job you do the few things that you do, because we're not wired to see complexity.
It's a very unnatural thing for us. If I ask you how many people have to be in a room for there to be a fifty percent chance that two of them have the same birthday, most people are gonna say like a hundred eighty. Well, the actual answer is twenty-three, because the interrelationships between all the people in that room exponentiate, and the same thing happens with complexity in our lives and complexity in our work. As entropy takes over, we just take on way more than we should, and sometimes it's just about eliminating as much as you can and giving yourself that space and trying to reconnect with what it feels like to enjoy what you're doing. And that's where the best ideas come.
Chris (55:44): Next question comes from Max Hardy. "Any advice on publishing a book, particularly a children's book?"
David (55:53): Children's book, I don't know a whole lot about that, but there's certainly print on demand available through Amazon and through IngramSpark, because a children's book, I think the Kindle editions probably don't do super well on those, they're usually paper books, I think. But yeah, look at print on demand. A lot of people aren't aware that they—you know, I live in Columbia, I sell thousands of books, I have a few copies back here, but I don't touch them. People buy them from me on Amazon, Amazon prints them and ships them, people buy them all over the world, I don't touch them. A lot of people aren't aware of that print on demand. So instead of ordering five thousand copies and having them take up space in your garage and shipping them out each time somebody buys them, do the print on demand.
The margins on that are—You know, the margins are better if you buy a bunch, but don't do that unless you already have the audience, you know you can move the books. Do print on demand, Amazon KDP, kdp.amazon.com, or IngramSpark, ingramspark.com. And actually, I have shown my IngramSpark hardcover of The Heart To Start, which is just one format that IngramSpark does, and I have a blog post about that. If you search you'll find it.
Chris (57:20): Got another anonymous question for you. "How do you handle receiving criticism for your writing?" So, feedback on things that you might need to improve. "I know it's helping me grow, but it's hard to not feel defeated after receiving it."
David (57:39): Yeah. It's certainly hard. That first one-star, two-star review that you get, it screws you up for weeks. And now I get those and, you know, it's a little bothersome for a moment, but well, I've got plenty of five-star and four-star reviews. People buy my books, I don't really care. I'm able to write and do the things that I enjoy. And there's often—I find, actually, some of the most brutal, just mean feedback—like, once you get over it and look, there's usually something useful there. And the diplomatically-worded feedback, there's also something useful there.
I'm not perfect. I'm not totally resilient to criticism, but what I aspire to is what I heard Jerry Seinfeld say recently on the Tim Ferriss Show podcast, which was, "Every opinion the audience gives you is one hundred percent correct." And there's something about taking on that professional sort of mindset where—because we tend to want to take our creative work personally, because our creative work is personal.
I mean, like, that's where it comes from: it comes from our experiences and our pains and our talents and our heartbreaks, et cetera. Like, that's where it comes from if you're doing it right, but at the end of the day you're also a professional, and you're providing a service, and you are either doing a good job at providing that service, or you're not doing a good job, and a lot of the times, especially more recently, like—the bad reviews on Mind Management, Not Time Management, there's a few of them. I could, like—those are the reviews that I knew that I was gonna get. The criticisms they're making are criticisms of things that I intentionally—risks that I intentionally took to write the book that I wanted to write, because you can't make something for everyone. You have to make some sort of stand, put out some sort of point of view that people can agree or disagree with for it to be interesting. And so as a result, there's just going to be some people who don't like it.
And it's a much better feeling when you get the criticism that you know you were going to receive because of the decisions that you made. It's a little bit harder when you attempt to do something a certain way and you found that you failed to do it that way. And that's where you're just a professional. It's like, if people aren't laughing at the joke, especially the people that you wrote the joke for, then you need to go back to the drawing board and you just need to do it again. Be as professional about it as you can.
Chris (01:00:45): And it's different to say, "This joke isn't where it needs to be and I'm not where I need to be." That being a professional requires maintaining a separation between what you—your work and your identity. That you are not what you do. And that's something that I see often, that I find very helpful, is this is criticism of something that I have done. And treating that as a hundred percent true, but that is no reflection upon me in particular. And I find that much easier to incorporate.
David (01:01:28): Absolutely. I'd love to add to that, is I also—I just consider that I'm never good enough. I'm never good enough at what I do. Like, I could always be better at what I do, and if the things that I do don't perform the way that I expect them to, it's because I didn't do my job. I didn't do it good enough. Now, but the important thing is, the trick is you gotta figure out how to have that mindset that you're not, you're never good enough at what you do, but you are enough. You are enough as a person. It's not a reflection of who you are. Yeah.
And so, that's just a mindset to have as you approach trying to get so good they can't ignore you. Which is really what creativity is all about. Or maximum creative success is all about. You were talking earlier about kind of randomness and randomness of success. The ideas of black swans, positive black swans, is that you can't—your success as a creative isn't up and to the right, like if you were serving coffee at Starbucks and your lifetime earnings went up and to the right. Like, if you're taking risks it's gonna look like a poorly-shaved porcupine where there's just nothing happening and you're doing the work and nothing seems to be working, and then you have a hit. And then you go back to nothing working, and then you have a hit. And so it's important to also look at your work in that way, that there's that randomness there.
Chris (01:03:21): Yeah. I want to touch on that a bit, because I think being too fixated on randomness can lead to nihilism, that I just have no control over what happens. And the truth is that there is a multiplicative effect of luck and skill. And my favorite metaphor is a surfing metaphor, is that you can't control when that wave comes. I think so much of luck is timing. But what you can control is that you are in position and paddling and learning and getting—let's say getting the feel for those conditions, and the skill that happens to seize that wave when it comes and to surf it as best as you can. That you can use randomness as a weapon, as an advantage, if you are positioning yourself correctly, and when those conditions are ripe seizing them and making the most of them.
David (01:04:27): Yeah. That preparation is important. And I guess the way I like to think of it is just, I mentioned The Black Swan. If people aren't familiar with that book they should definitely read it. I actually have a summary on my website. But I think of it with the barbell strategy, is how I approach things. Did I have a barbell strategy thing? Yeah, I had one come out—oh no, that's—
Chris (01:04:47): There's a blog for that.
David (01:04:48): Yeah, I have one coming out next month specifically about the barbell strategy, I believe. Yeah.
Chris (01:04:49): Nice.
David (01:04:50): And that's just, you know, you have your sort of sure bets that you know are going to be somewhat successful and that you can actually kind of measure your judgment on, but then you also kinda have those things where you're like, "This is a wacky idea, I don't see why this would work, but I'm going to do it anyway." And let me tell you, I have written hundreds and hundreds of blog posts, I have been blogging since 2004. That's not a typo. That's seventeen years. And I've had maybe two that were I could say black swans. I got a book deal in 2010, that was my first book deal. That brought me from nobody to somebody, and changed my life from one blog post. And then there was another blog post that I wrote a couple years later, and then that, I ended up working with Dan Ariely, the Predictably Irrational author and behavioral scientist on a productivity app called "Timeful." We sold that to Google, I got a surprise payday from that, and then also that was Mind Management, Not Time Management, that became the topic of the book that I wrote.
So it's like, two out of hundreds and hundreds, but then also there's the little sure bets that you have going on in the background as well.
Chris (01:06:16): This next question's from Rod David, and I'm gonna add a little bit of an appendix to it. Rod says, "I noticed you're standing for this chat. What are your thoughts on sitting versus standing during the creative process?" And my addendum would be, I'm curious about different variables that you can play with in order generate or shift between states of mind. Things that you've seen contextually.
David (01:06:41): Yeah. I mean, I've seen research or whatever, that's in labs, and I don't know how much I would say it's something you should or shouldn't do based upon all that stuff. I go based upon state of mind and feeling. There's a lot of "I have to catch myself," where I'll be sitting and working on something for a while, and then I'm like, "Oh, I'm just like, what's wrong? I don't feel like standing up." But then I'll just make myself stand up. And then there's other times where I want to stand up. And it really—I think I prefer, a conversation like this I maybe prefer it. But then if I'm looking at a spreadsheet and trying to make a tough decision and trying to do math, like, I've gotta sit down. You know? And so I'll just, I've got a—it lowers, and I'll sit down.
And I'm always changing my body position and the tools that I use based upon what I'm trying to accomplish creatively in that moment. You can't use technology without technology using you. Marshall McLuhan would say that as technology extends it amputates. So when you are looking at a computer screen, that has become a huge portion of your mind and your thoughts. And so when you separate yourself—so that means part of your brain isn't yours any more. I separate myself from my computer. I use my computer very little, actually. I usually write on my iPad. I have a recliner here, I've got a—this is an overbed table which maybe I can lift up. This is an overbed table that I put over my recliner, and that way I can write in my recliner. I have these white boards that I keep around, and I'll just write things down on them. I have a typewriter back here, and that's not decoration. I use that typewriter to write drafts. I've got an AlphaSmart, which you can find out about on my blog, which is a portable word processor. They don't make them anymore. You can buy them on Amazon used for forty or fifty dollars.
I'm always changing. You know, I've got a hammock. I'll go lie in the hammock with a notebook or with one of these whiteboards. When I go for walks I'll take a quick note, or actually I have the Moleskine Volant, which is the smallest pocket notebook I could find, where if I'm on a walk and I think of something I write it down. I don't take out the phone to write it down, usually, 'cause I just don't want to be distracted by that. Don't have a—I don't have a treadmill desk. That's something that would be nice. But sometimes I will actually like walk and get my blood moving as I work, but it's not anything specific, it's something I play by feel. But I just always remember, I could be reclining, I could be standing up, I could be sitting, and laying down even. In the morning I take my word processor and write while I'm still in bed with my eyes closed with my sleep mask still on. So I'm always thinking about, "Is the way that I'm using my body, is the way that the tool interacts with my mind, are those things the gear that I want to be in on my bicycle as I try to tackle this terrain?"
Chris (01:10:30): Ah, man, I love it. And the experimentation that allows is, "Let's try this new tool or new position and be curious what happens." And just trusting that something productive will come out of it. That's so beautiful. Do you have time for two more?
David (01:10:50): Yeah, sure.
Chris (01:10:51): This is so good, I just wanna keep going.
David (01:10:52): Yeah, let's do it.
Chris (01:10:53): One more from Tara Browne. "How can one cultivate an environment that nurtures creativity around a full-time job that at best does not require it and sometimes actively discourages it?" So if you're a part-time creative in time, how can you be a full-time creative in mind, via a supportive environment?
David (01:11:21): Yeah. Well, this is kinda part of that barbell strategy for some people. People like Anthony Trollope or Charles Bukowski worked at the post office, they had like the stable day job. I heard a comedian recently saying that he used to work as a janitor, and working as a janitor he was able to listen to bits and stuff and work on stuff while he was doing that. So I would say one thing would be paying attention to how that job affects your mental energy and affects the creative energy you have. If it's very high-stress, that can be hard, and you might wanna—I mean, I don't know how negotiable the job itself is. But trying to find when you have some creative energy, whether it was before work or after work or certain times of the week and just consistently.
I think this is one of those things where you—if you're really short on time, and you're short on energy, where it does help to take that sort of bricklayer mindset of, "I just have to write" whatever it is that you're doing, "I have to write this many words," or, "Every day I'm gonna do a completed piece. I'm gonna write a hundred word article, I'm gonna do a sketch that's this size." There was Stefan Bucher a long time ago, it was maybe 2004, 2005, was doing a monster every day. And it was just, "Every day I'm doing a monster. It's this size. I'm doing it this time." Having some sort of thing that you can—and aim low. So like, I've got an email course called, "100-Word Writing Habit." It's at 100wordwritinghabit.com. And people have been enjoying that course. Their habit is to write a hundred words a day. A lot of people report that when they started, they were like—"A hundred words a day? What's the point?" But I consistently hear, they keep going and they're just doing way more than they expected.
So aim low. What you want to shoot for is some kind of repeatable thing, hopefully on a daily basis, maybe on a weekly basis. If it's a few times a week, be very strict about which days and what time you're gonna do that. Do not deviate if you're gonna make it just a few times a week. Pick some sort of shippable thing that you're gonna do during that time and make it easier and simpler than you think that it should be, and just see if you can keep that up for a week. After you've done it for a week, see if you can keep it up for two weeks. After you've done it for two weeks, see if you can keep it up for a month. Keep doing that until it's just something that you do. And like a crack on the sidewalk, I'm telling you it will start to take over your mind, and even if the work you're not proud of in the beginning, you're gonna get really good at it.
Chris (01:14:22): Yeah. I like to say, "A castle is just a bunch of rocks stacked on top of each other over a long period of time." Last question coming from Noha, and then we're gonna wrap for today—This has been awesome. Thank you, David. Noha asks, "What is the fine line between pushing oneself to unlock and reach one’s full potential versus pushing oneself to burn out? How do you walk that tightrope personally? Any advice for winning the mental game?"
David (01:14:55): Yeah. So I used to push pretty hard, I used to burn myself out pretty hard. I wonder sometimes whether that was optional. My present self thinks it was optional, but part of me wonders if I'm wrong and I just needed to do things that way. I mean, if you're burning yourself out, you're not doing yourself any favors creatively. I think that it's worth doing an experiment. If you are somebody who burns yourself out, who burns themself out, it's worth doing an experiment in the other direction. And so I did an experiment where I meditated—Naval Ravikant, the investor/Twitter philosopher has this meditation. It's no-effort meditation. So, very different from any sort of meditation I did previously, where you're just sitting with your eyes closed for sixty minutes and there's no judgment of the thoughts that you're having. Sixty minutes a day for sixty days. And sixty minutes is so much better—is like, if half an hour is twice as good as fifteen minutes, sixty minutes is like 10x what half an hour is like, because that's having time that things change. That your body just starts to change, you get this whole other state.
So I did that for—It's the sixty-day challenge. I wrote about it on my blog, you can find it there, the Naval Ravikant meditation, Kadavy, if you search for that you'll find it. And I ended up going for eighty-nine days, actually, and it was really this amazing experience creatively, because I started to find that there were a lot of really valuable, risky, "This might not work" ideas that I was just kind of letting fly by me during the day, but because I made that decision to take sixty minutes where I'm gonna do nothing but think, those ideas started to take on a lot more presence. And the things that I did do, I reduced complexity. I wasn't getting caught up in minutiae that wasn't really helpful. I did a better job of the things that I was doing. But then those crazy ideas, those things that I normally might not have done, I ended up doing a lot of those things more. And so it was sort of a barbell strategy for attention.
And I do it—I still do an hour here and there occasionally, but when I do I think of it as—people say, "Well, you're working eight hours a day, you can't do that." If you have the freedom over your work, if you work for yourself, that hour that you're meditating isn't—it is part of your workday. And so if you view it as part of your workday, for a while, and experiment with that, I think that you might be surprised at the quality of the thinking and of the ideas that come out of that instead of driving hard and maybe not doing the right things that are actually going to be effective.
Chris (01:18:20): Thank you, David. I really appreciate you coming on today to share some of your hard-won wisdom on creation. I think anyone creating something, there was a lot to gain from today's conversation, so really appreciate that. Before we wrap, any final thoughts, any places you want to send people who are listening?
David (01:18:43): Well, if you're consuming media like this, you might enjoy my podcast, "Love Your Work." It's where I share a lot of my ideas, one of the first places I share a lot of my ideas. And my newsletter, which is "Love Mondays," that's at kadavy.net/mondays. Actually, easier, just type kdv.co, and you'll see the signup for that.
Chris (01:19:11): Fantastic. Thank you guys for being here live, thank you if you're viewing in via YouTube. You can check out this conversation as well as the twelve other Lunch Hours that we've had on our YouTube page, that's youtube.com/forcingfunction. You can also see the transcripts as well as the show notes, all of the articles, resources that have gone into the creation of these conversations if you'd like to do a deeper dive. Those are all free to view on our website, forcingfunction.com/lunch-hour.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you again so much, David. Thank you guys for being here. And we'll see you all next month for Lunch Hour Fourteen. See you guys.
Tasha (01:19:21): Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.