How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity - Dan Koe - #894

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Most people's lives are determined by how they choose to cure their boredom. What's that mean?

**Dan Koe** (0:08)
Oh man. The story of that came from my friend, my YouTube editor. We were out getting dinner one night, and he said he wanted to start a company called Board, like just a little passion project. And it was because he had been bored for so long in his life that the only options that he saw were to do the typical things that you do when you're bored. You scroll on your phone, maybe you watch Netflix, you hang out with friends, there isn't really something to build towards. So I ideated that with him for a decent amount of time, because the reason he wanted to start that specifically was to give people, help people create a project that they could work on that would help cure their boredom. And so that kind of ties into another tweet I wrote, where if you're bored, build. So build your body, build your business, build anything, really. Just focus that boredom towards something that isn't, it isn't giving the opportunity for entropy to take hold.

**Chris Williamson** (1:21)
You'll know Parkinson's Law, work expands to fill the time given to it. This almost feels like it could be Koe's Law, which would be life expands to fill the boredom given to it.

**Dan Koe** (1:32)
What's funny is that I have a Koe's Law, but it was for-

**Chris Williamson** (1:35)
The second one.

**Dan Koe** (1:36)
Yeah, it was for creative work.
So man, what was it? It was something along the lines of the same thing, where it's creative work, the work expands, the results expand to fit the time allotted for completion, where my whole thing with that is since I didn't have a job for too long, I had worked part-time jobs for quite a while, but I was freelance pretty quickly out of a job. What I started to realize is that when you progress through freelance work and then I got introduced to social media and digital products, physical products, other things that I just wasn't aware of at the time, it was very interesting how I could make so much more without increasing the amount of work that I did.

**Chris Williamson** (2:29)
Yeah, that is interesting. Just to round out the boredom thing, it feels to me like if you don't have something to take up your time, your habits and your behavior will sort of default to the path of least resistance. Is that fair to say?

**Dan Koe** (2:45)
Absolutely.

**Chris Williamson** (2:47)
Yeah, interesting. Okay. What about hard work? Do you think there's a delusion around hard work?

**Dan Koe** (2:55)
By delusion, I would say misconception or poorly fabricated expectations in your head, where if you work hard on one thing for a specific amount of time, you don't deserve something that someone else has gotten by doing that specific thing. So as an example, if you spend one year writing a book, that is a lot of hard work, but that doesn't mean that you deserve $100,000 a year for doing that specific thing. And so since we, most of us, or quite a few of us, we go to school, we get a job, and that frames our mind in quite a few different ways. One being that we tie a specific amount of work or a specific amount of hours of work each week to a specific number on a paycheck, when that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. And the thing that can trip you up there is you bring that mindset over into your creative work or building your own thing. And you work very hard, but then you get discouraged when you don't get the same amount of results or you get substantially less until you pull the levers that allow you to make substantially more.

**Chris Williamson** (4:18)
Yeah, it's a ruthless realization that hard work doesn't fix all of your problems and that what you work on is significantly more important than how hard you work. And I've been sort of fascinated by this idea of telling people to work harder that already work quite hard, or telling people that already chill out, that they need to learn how to relax. But you need to target the particular vaccine or the particular modality for the person that you're speaking to. And yeah, the hard work thing, I understand why, and maybe it was right, the last sort of 10 years have really been dominated by discussions around gritting your teeth, avoiding a victimhood mentality, discipline, motivation, stuff like that. And on average, for most people, I think that's right. But it does a lot of the time forget some other real high points of leverage. What are you choosing to work on? How easy are you finding it? What are you sacrificing over the long term in order to be able to achieve these results in the short term? If you say, in the short term, results are determined by your intensity, in the long term, results are determined by your consistency. If you trade the latter for the former, you end up being kicked out of the game quite early.