Making Decisions, Achieving Excellence & Finding Meaning - Derek Sivers - #150

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, people of Podcastland. Welcome back. My guest today is none other than Derek Sivers. Writer, entrepreneur, programmer, fascinating human. He is one of the best guests I've ever heard on Tim Ferriss' show. So I'm very fortunate to have got ahold of him and sit him down on the big stage, obviously, Modern Wisdom. So yeah, had a long list of questions to go through today, including what have you been working on recently? You get to find out where Derek's been spending his time. When are you going to finally release the now three books that he's been sat on? Excellence in life and how he perceives it. Why nuance is where truth lies rather than in a simple and succinct answer. Values and how they can both guide and restrict the way that we operate. Why it doesn't matter that we only live for a short period of time and in 50 years, no one may even remember our names. Oh, it was so good. Derek, man, thank you so much for coming on. It was phenomenal. I already want to do another one. In other news, if you are new here, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. You will receive one episode every Monday and every Thursday with the world's most fascinating humans delivered directly to your listening device of choice. But for now, please welcome the wise and wonderful Derek Sivers.
Derek Sivers in the building. How are you, man?

**Derek Sivers** (1:51)
Any particular building will do. Yes, I am in a building.

**Chris Williamson** (1:54)
You are in the building. You are in our building today.

**Derek Sivers** (1:57)
That's true, I'm in our audio building. Thank you for having me to your audio home.

**Chris Williamson** (2:02)
Thank you very much for joining us. So as a man who says no to a lot, very glad that you said yes to coming on this podcast. It's been a while since I've heard you put out an audio podcast. I'm very honored to be the guy that we've re-entered 2012 with.

**Derek Sivers** (2:16)
Well, it's 2012

**Chris Williamson** (2:18)
2012, 2020, you can tell it's been a long day.

**Derek Sivers** (2:23)
Yeah, I really, really like what you're doing with Modern Wisdom and I really like your topics of conversation. So these days when somebody asks me to do an interview, you know, I've got nothing I'm promoting or pitching. So it's all about the quality of conversation. And you sent me some really interesting topics of conversation.

**Chris Williamson** (2:43)
Thank you. Yeah, there's two types of guests I've found doing the podcast. One are guests who do their due diligence and then jump in. And then there's another type who like to really go deep before we begin about what we're going to be talking about. And both of them, I find, have their merits. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to today. To the listeners, I've been going back with Derek since November time.
Before I went to Bali, before I went to Greece, and I've been thinking about all of these different questions. So we've got a big breadcrumb trail of stuff that we've been thinking about. But first question that I've got for you is, what have you been working on recently? If you were to update your Now page today, what would it say?

**Derek Sivers** (3:33)
I have been programming.
Up until Christmas, I was working maniacally on my next book, which is called How to Live, which I'm so fucking excited about. And I was seriously doing like 15 hour days of writing, which I think you're not supposed to do for health reasons, but I would just get out of bed at 6 a.m. and I would just write and write and write and write and write. You know, I'd stopped for lunch and I'd just write until I would drop at midnight. And I was doing that for months on end and I was so into it. But then around Christmas time, my assistant reminded me that some other things having to do with my first and second book are on hold because they're waiting for me to program some things for the translators and the store. So ever since Christmas, I paused. So what would it be now? March something? So two and a half months for two and a half months. I've been doing nothing but programming every day, programming the store where I'm going to sell the books directly from my site, programming a translation system to manage all the translations of my books, and stuff like that. I've just been in programmer head, which is fun.

**Chris Williamson** (4:46)
That's cool. I had Steven Wolfram on the podcast a while ago. You know Steven?