English transcript

This is related to another insight of yours, the less you want something, the less you're thinking about it, the less you're obsessing over it, the more you're going to do it in a natural way.

The more you're going to do it for yourself, you're going to do it in a way that you're good at, and you're going to stick with it, the people around you will see the quality of your work is higher.

This seems like a difficult tension to navigate because an obsessive attention to detail is a competitive advantage of your work as well.

So you have these two things sort of conflicting with each other.

No one is going to beat you at being you.

One of the things I like to say is find what feels like play to you, but looks like work to others.

So it looks like work to them, but to you it feels like play, it's not work.

So you're going to outcompete them because you're doing it effortlessly, you're doing it for fun, they're doing it for work, they're doing it for some byproduct.

To you it's art, it's beauty, it's joy, it's flow, it's fulfilling.

You must enjoy podcasting.

If you didn't, you wouldn't be good at it.

Right.

If you decided that the right way to get ahead in life was to go write books, nobody would have heard of you.

Chris Williamson's book would be a complete flop.

That's not who you are.

You're a podcaster.

You enjoy talking to people.

You enjoy interviewing them.

The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have.

You escape competition through authenticity, by being your own self.

If I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two words, I would just say productize yourself.

That's it.

Just figure out what it is that you naturally do, that the world might want, that you can scale up and turn into a product.

And it'll eventually be effortless for you.

Yes, there's always work required, but it won't even feel like work to you.

It'll feel like play to you.

And modern society gives us that opportunity.

If you were 2,000 years ago, you're born on a farm, your choices are very limited.

You're going to do stuff on that farm.

Now you can literally wake up and you can move to a different city.

You can switch careers.

You can switch jobs.

You can change the people that you're with.

You can change so many things about who you are and who you're with and what you're doing,

that there is infinite opportunity out there for you, literally infinite.

And so it's much better to treat this like a search function, to find the people who need you the most,

to find the work that needs you the most, to find the place you're best suited to be at.

And it's worthwhile to spend time in that exploration before diving into exploitation.

The biggest mistake in a world with so many choices is premature commitment.

If you prematurely commit to being a lawyer or a doctor and now you've got like, you know,

five years invested into that, you might have just completely missed.

You might just end up in the wrong profession, the wrong place, the wrong people

for 30 years of your life grinding away.

And yes, the best time to figure that out was before, but the second best time is now.

So just change it.

And also presumably kill things that aren't working very quickly.

By default, you should kill everything.

You know, if you can't decide, the answer is no.

And most things you should just be saying no to.

The part of my keeping my calendar free is just by default saying no to everything.

Do I want to create a calendar just to add your event, right, or to add your need or your desire?

One of the other things about, you know, early on in life, you're looking for opportunities.

So you're saying yes to everything.

And that is a phase that you go through.

That is the exploration phase.

Later, when you found the thing you want to work on, you're in the exploitation phase.

You have to say no to everything by default.

And if you don't say no to everything by default, if you have to even explicitly go out of your way

to say no to something, that will take up time.

For example, you know, there are a lot of people out there who are into hustle culture.

And a big piece of hustle culture is like, well, you're not going to get something if you don't ask for it.

So they'll hustle people.

They'll always be sending you requests, messages.

Yeah, this is a famous person problem, but I have it.

And people are always asking me for things.

And I kind of squirm when I get these messages.

And I'm sure you get these two text messages, emails saying,

hey, Chris, my friend so-and-so should really be on your podcast.

Or you should come to my event.

You should write a foreword for my book.

And you kind of squirm when you get this, right?

And you have to figure out how to say no.

And one of the things I learned along the way is that if you wouldn't ask somebody else to do it,

and then you get that request yourself, you can just dismiss it.

You don't have to respond.

You don't even let it enter your brain.

You have to be able to delete emails and text messages without flinching if you want to scale.

And scaling is very important.

Scaling your time is really important.

Every interruption will take you out of flow.

So the only way you can remain in flow is if you get either very good at ignoring these things by default

or closing yourself off like a hermit, like our mutual friend Tim Ferriss does,

or you just become emotionally capable of not registering these as something that causes turbulence inside of you.

That not registering it emotionally thing, is that a...

It's fundamental.

It's so fundamental to so many things in life.

Okay.