Love Your Work

On July 4th of this year, I was finally hitting my stride. After a year of visa troubles, I had secured a three-year visa. I was finally back in the writing rhythm I had been in before my visa troubles started. Things had been fucked, and they had become unfucked. Little did I know, everything was about to get even more fucked than it was before. One thing that got me through the fuckedness that ensued – you’ll hear about it in this conversation – was that I had read Everything is F*cked, by Mark Manson (@iammarkmanson). In this conversation, you’ll learn: How can a book called Everything is F*cked possibly be, as the subtitle promises, A Book About Hope? Everything being fucked doesn’t require hope. Hope requires everything to be fucked. I’ve talked before on the show about living an “antifragile” life. Learn how to avoid having what Mark calls “fragile values." Mark says “if there’s no reason to live, then there’s no reason to not live.” How can what Mark calls “the uncomfortable truth,” be liberating, instead of deflating? Photo by Maria Midoes Listener Showcase Palle Schmidt has a new book, SOLO - Survival Guide for Creative Freelancers. Palle is giving it away to Love Your Work listeners, for a limited time. Check it out at http://bit.ly/kadavy Our Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Facebook Messenger Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »      Sponsors https://offgridmindfulness.com http://linkedin.com/loveyourwork Show Notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/mark-manson-everything-fucked/

You are what you surround yourself with. When your environment changes, your mind changes with it. We recently talked about how your environment can put you in a creative mental state, when we talked to Donald M. Rattner, on episode 201. But what about the objects you surround yourself with? They’re a part of your environment, too. The devices we use are a part of our environment, and the devices we use affect our mental state, too. We’re already pretty intentional about how we change our environment for the exact activities we’re doing. You cook in your kitchen, and you sleep in your bed. You wouldn’t sleep in your kitchen, so why do you meditate with your smartphone? Image: View Across the Bay, Juan Gris Thanks for sharing my work! Thanks to the 80,000 Hours podcast for syndicating my conversation with Rob Wiblin to their podcast. Thanks to the Traction Growth & Income podcast for interviewing me. Thanks to the Big Gay Author podcast for mentioning my interview with Robbie Abed. On Twitter, thank you to @mrlacey, @giftedguru, @LWCvL, @dbarrant, @kierantie, and @thepixelgrid. On Facebook, thank you to Sean Corbett. On Instagram, thank you to @jamesonbairesq, and @realba88. Our Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Facebook Messenger Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Sponsors https://offgridmindfulness.com Show Notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/dont-meditate-smartphone/

Dan Ariely (@danariely) has more opportunities than he knows what to do with. As a James B. Duke professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and author of New York Times best-selling books, such as Predictably Irrational, he has lots of demands on his time. Dan has to say “no” to a lot of opportunities that don’t have a clear payoff. But, surprisingly, he also says “no” to a lot of opportunities that do have a clear payoff. That’s because, as Dan tells us in this conversation, he gambles with his time. He intentionally does some small amount of things that don’t have a clear payoff. In order to have the space and time for those gambles, he needs to say “no” to some sure bets. In this episode, we’ll learn more about how Dan gambles with his time. We’ll also learn: How did “gambling” with his time lead Dan to publish his exciting new graphic novel, Amazing Decisions: The Illustrated Guide to Improving Business Deals and Family Meals? The creative process for Dan’s new graphic novel is a big departure from that of his research papers and books. How did he navigate the uncertainty when collaborating with an artist? With everything Dan knows about human behavior, how does he design his habits, rituals and routines to optimize creative output and spark motivation? This isn’t the typical conversation with the living legend of behavioral science, Dan Ariely. If you want to know more about his groundbreaking work on irrationality, check out our first conversation on episode 51. A quick note here: Dan and I talk about “Timeful” a number of times throughout this conversation. If you’re not familiar, Timeful was a productivity app that Dan and I collaborated on. It later sold to Google and some of the Timeful features are integrated into Google Calendar. Our Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondayss About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Facebook Messenger Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Sponsors https://offgridmindfulness.com https://honeybook.com/loveyourwork Show Notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/dan-ariely/

Over the past four years, I’ve been trying to “make it” as a creator. Yes, I was on my own for another eight years before that, but this past four years has been when I really doubled down on creating. To make the things I create not just a marketing tactic for some other thing. For the creations themselves to be the thing. Each month for the past two years of this journey, I’ve been reporting my income on my blog, kadavy.net. Sometimes, it’s been pretty embarrassing. These aren’t your usual income reports, where someone reports making six or seven figures in a single month. These are the income reports of a creator struggling to make it. This week, I’d like to give you a preview. This is a preview of something you get at some levels of Patreon backing. An audio version of my income report, delivered right to your favorite podcast app through your own private RSS feed. These income reports are where I think out loud about why I do one thing, or why I don’t do another thing. Hear how I build this business. Hear the exact thinking behind my decision-making, as it happens. This is the income report for August of this year. By the time you hear this, the income report for September will be out, too. If you’d like to hear it, just go to patreon.com/kadavy, and look for the proper backing level. I would appreciate your support so much. New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Facebook Messenger Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/income-report-patreon-preview/ 

Donald M. Rattner (@donaldrattner) is an architect, and author of My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation. I’ve talked a lot on this podcast about matching your work to your mental state. If you’re in the mood to do the work you’re doing, everything is going to be easier. But you can also match your mental state to the work. You can change your mental state so the work you need to be doing gets done. One powerful way to change your mental state is to change your surroundings. If you design your space to think more creatively, for example, you’ll do better creative work. In My Creative Space, Donald draws upon mountains of research from the field of environmental psychology, to show you how to change your space to change your creativity. In this conversation, you’ll learn: How has the field of environmental psychology shown how the spaces where you work can change everything from your thinking to your physiology? Research shows that the optimal light level for creativity is 150 lux, and the optimal noise level for creativity is 70 dB. Just how bright and loud is that, and why does it work? Travel posters – especially vintage travel posters – may help you think more creatively. Donald explains why – when it comes to creativity – “construal level theory” (something you might remember from my conversation with David Rock) favors things far away in distance and time. This conversation is packed with knowledge, and so is Donald’s book. Image: The Moneylender and His Wife, Quentin Massy New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Facebook Messenger Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Sponsors https://kadavy.net/motivation Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/donald-m-rattner/

If you had asked me when I first started Love Your Work why I was doing it, I don’t think I could have given you a straight answer. I simply felt compelled to create a podcast. Sometimes it’s through the act of creation that we discover what it is that we’re creating. This is a special 200th episode of Love Your Work. Over the past four years, I’ve been on my own creative journey in making this show. Today I want to reflect on that journey – share what I’ve learned along the way, and hopefully that will reflect some of what you’ve learned. I didn’t know for sure why I was starting Love Your Work when I first started, but if you were to ask me NOW why I started Love Your Work, I’d tell you that it’s because I was struggling with a conflict. It’s a conflict that you might struggle with yourself. On one side of the conflict is who you are expected to be. On the other side of the conflict is who you really are. The process of self-actualization – the process of “making it”, is a process of becoming that person who you really are, through your creative work. Image: The Nap, Gustave Caillebotte Music in this episode by MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License: "Perspectives", "Nowhere Land", "Satiate Strings", "Inspired", "Immersed", and "Prelude and Action". New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Facebook Messenger Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/200th-episode/

Scott H. Young (@scotthyoung) is best known for learning the entire MIT Computer Science curriculum, on his own, in only a year. He did it through “ultralearning” It’s a way of organizing your learning so each moment you spend learning is much more effective than it would be otherwise. If you’re like me, you love to learn new things. If you’re like me, you’d also like to learn more in a shorter amount of time. In Ultralearning, Scott shares how to break down learning projects into their component parts, and how to choose the most effective ways of learning each of those individual parts. In this conversation, you’ll learn about: How can “meta learning” – or planning your learning projects – make the process more enjoyable, and prevent burnout and procrastination? Learn why when you feel like you’re learning more, you may actually be learning less. Which is right for you? Free recall, or repeated review? If you’re like me, the term “ultralearning” may sound a little exhausting. Learn how you can apply ultralearning principles to even the most casual learning projects. You can use ultralearning principles to learn a new language, learn to dance, or to get more bang for your career-building buck. Thanks for sharing my work! On Twitter, @martinstellar, @DaveCohencomedy, @kosherjellyfish, @mischievousmali. On Instagram, @alexandbooks_, @icoknick, @nathan.guitar. Elsewhere, thank you to Al Chen for building the todos by mental state Coda template, and Mavericks Thoughts for including me in the article, How 10 Top Writers on Medium Start Their Day. New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Facebook Messenger Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Sponsors http://linkedin.com/loveyourwork https://kadavy.net/motivation Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/scott-h-young/

  If you’re going to get an edge, you have to be aware that the prevailing wisdom is almost always wrong. You have to know when to go against that wisdom. One place I’m glad that I went against the prevailing wisdom is in my decision to not buy a house – especially when I was in my early twenties. The prevailing wisdom was that a house was “the best investment you can make.” Instead, I decided to invest in myself. This post is from more than ten years ago, and it’s talking about decisions I made fifteen years ago, which makes this a fun episode for two reasons. One, I wish I would have had more confidence in my point of view earlier on. I was definitely onto something. I’m always struggling to trust my instincts, and this is a good reminder that my instincts have been right at least one time in the past. Two, I’m reading this as it was written ten years ago. Notice that my writing style has gotten much better – my writing was definitely not as audio-friendly, but I’ll be reading it as it was written. I wasn’t a good “prompt talker” as I call it. Lots more ten-cent words in this one. Image: The Open Window, Juan Gris New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Facebook Messenger Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/self-investment-podcast/

When something bad happens, it’s tempting to think that you made a bad decision. But the quality of your decision making doesn’t always align with the quality of your outcomes. Sometimes you make a good decision, and you have a bad outcome. Even more dangerous, sometimes you make a bad decision, and have a good outcome (you'll learn why). Annie Duke (@AnnieDuke) is a former professional poker player, and a decision strategist. She's dedicated to improving decision-making skills around the world amongst adults and children. She’s author of Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts. In this conversation, you’ll learn: We often think of life as like a game of chess. Why is it actually more like a game of poker? How do we separate luck from skill? Learn the most common mental error people make that holds them back from ever learning to make better decisions. Why do strong opinions make you dumber? Learn how to overcome “motivated reasoning” to make more accurate predictions, and better decisions. New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Facebook Messenger Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »      Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/annie-duke/

We hate to lose. But if we don’t take risks in life, we never win. The more we protect ourselves from loss, the more we stagnate. Like economist Tyler Cowen told me, if you want to be “dynamic,” you have to develop a thick skin. I’ve been thinking more and more lately about the importance of having a thick skin. The importance of being – Antifragile. I’ll tell you more about it in this week’s episode. Image from: Head of a skeleton with a burning cigarette, Vincent Van Gogh New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Facebook Messenger Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/antifragile-life-podcast/