222. Stop Listening To My Podcast

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03/19/20 • 11 min

Love Your Work

What are you doing?! Didn’t you read the title of this episode?

I’m begging you: Stop listening to my podcast.

You’re still here? Okay, I’ll see what I can do to persuade you to stop listening to my podcast.

I’ll admit it: It bums me the fuck out that there aren’t more people listening to my podcast. I’ve been delivering an episode every week for the past four years, and I haven’t seen any growth at all for the past three of those years. If anything, my stats tell me I get fewer downloads than I did three years ago.

Before I get to why I want you to stop listening to my podcast, I have to be clear: Sometimes it makes me sad that more people aren’t listening to my podcast. And it’s not that I want to be rich and famous.

I decided what I wanted when I made the decision, four years ago, to double down on being a writer and a podcaster. I told myself, “I want to make a living creating. I don’t want creating to be merely a marketing strategy for other things?”

So, I sold everything I owned, and moved to the “third world”. I knew I would struggle to make money for awhile, but I never knew the struggle would take this long. I never knew it would be this hard.

That’s the reason I wish more people listened to my podcast. I don’t need to make enough money to buy a Bentley, or even a Toyota. I just want to make enough money from my writing and podcasting that I can do more writing and podcasting.

I wrote my first book ten years ago. I moved to South America four years ago. I don’t want to write so I can make money, I want to make money so I can write. And that’s the only thing that makes it fucking heartbreaking about not having more people listening to my podcast.

What I learned on my media fast

But there’s no denying that people shouldn’t be listening to my podcast. At the beginning of this year, I tried an experiment. I went on a “media fast.“ I stopped listening to podcasts. I stopped checking Twitter. I even stopped reading books. I stopped multi-tasking, and I started uni-tasking.

At first, it was agonizing. I felt like I needed more stimulation. But I powered through it, and it was like rummaging through the junk piled up in your dead grandmother’s dusty attic. I was surprised what I discovered underneath all of that clutter: My own thoughts.

Instead of listening to a podcast while cooking and eating lunch, I simply focused on cooking and eating lunch. If I was chatting with a friend on WhatsApp, I wasn’t switching to Instagram between messages. I was only chatting with that friend. I watched the sunset almost every day, and I didn’t post pictures of those sunsets to Instagram. I just sat there and watched the colors change, like some enlightened Neanderthal.

Eventually, things started bubbling to the surface. After lunch, I would jot down ideas on a little whiteboard. While watching sunsets, ideas would come to me for my next book, or for podcast episodes like this one.

Creating is better than consuming

It was hard to admit it to myself: Creating is better than consuming. The more you consume, the less you can create.

Some people will protest: “If you aren’t consuming, where are you going to get inspiration!?” “Inspiration” is bullshit. You’ve seen enough things in your life, and you’ve had enough damn ideas -- you never did shit with most of them (neither did I). Your need for “inspiration” is a fear of your own thoughts. It’s a fear of doing the hard work of processing what’s in your head, breaking out of the bullshit scripts that society writes for you, and having an actual thought. A true, sometimes uncomfortable, original thought.

You don’t need inspiration. You need action.

I can’t deny, from my own experience of going on a “media fast,” that much of the time, when I was consuming, it was standing in my way of creating. And wasn’t “creating” what I wanted to do in the first place?

This was an uncomfortable realization. I even had a couple of friends point out that reading books is a form of procrastination. Sacrilege! But, they’re right. How many books have you read? Can you recite what you learned from those books? Have you truly taken action on what you learned, or did you just move on to the next book?

Everyone’s trying to get a piece of you

As you can see, for me, as someone who creates, as someone who writes books, and makes a podcast, this was a tough realization.

I had to search myself for why I create what I create.

I concluded that, more than anything, I create for my own self-developm...

What are you doing?! Didn’t you read the title of this episode?

I’m begging you: Stop listening to my podcast.

You’re still here? Okay, I’ll see what I can do to persuade you to stop listening to my podcast.

What I learned on my media fast

Creating is better than consuming

It was hard to admit it to myself: Creating is better than consuming. The more you consume, the less you can create.

You don’t need inspiration. You need action.

Everyone’s trying to get a piece of you

As you can see, for me, as someone who creates, as someone who writes books, and makes a podcast, this was a tough realization.

I had to search myself for why I create what I create.

I concluded that, more than anything, I create for my own self-developm...

Previous Episode

221. How to Predict the Future: Dylan Evans

Dylan Evans (@evansd66) had an intense experience with uncertainty. He was fifty percent certain that civilization would collapse within several years.

So, he sold his house, gave up his job, and set out to learn how to survive the apocalypse. He tells the story in his book, The Utopia Experiment. He and a team of volunteers constructed yurts on the Scottish highlands, and started growing their own food and making their own clothes, trying to see if they could disconnect themselves from civilization.

Civilization didn’t collapse within the period of time that Dylan had predicted, and as he looked at what remained of his life, he started to ask himself, “where did I go wrong?”

This led Dylan to study what he calls Risk Intelligence – he now has written a book by that title. Risk Intelligence is the ability to navigate uncertainty. That is what we’ll be talking about today.

Navigating uncertainty matters in creative work

Imagine you serve coffee at Starbucks. Starbucks knows exactly how much to pay you each hour. They know exactly how much coffee you can make, they know exactly what that coffee costs them, they know exactly what profit margin they want.

Creative work is not serving coffee. You never know how long it takes for an idea to brew. When a breakthrough does come to you, the results can be unpredictable. Sometimes a project takes off, and sometimes it doesn’t. Some of that is due to skill, a lot of that is due to luck.

If you’re going to love your work, you need to know how to deal with uncertainty.

If you write this book, what are the chances it will sell? When you launch this product, how much money will it make? Questions like these help you choose: Amongst the countless actions you can take, what actions are worth it?

And when you do finally make a choice, and you look back at the results, do you really have a clear picture of whether you made the right decision? What can you learn from the decision you made which can make your future decisions wiser, more clear – better?

When you’re trying to love your work, you’re dealing with uncertainty. Part of dealing with uncertainty is knowing how to be at least a little more certain in an uncertain world. It’s as close as you can get to predicting the future.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

How can you make falsifiable forecasts on your creative projects? When you make falsifiable forecasts, you can start to score your ability to predict the future. If you improve your forecasting skills, you’ll make better predictions, and better decisions.
Dylan says, "The difference between a good decision maker and a poor decision maker...is that a good decision maker will rate the quality of his or her decision by the actual thought process going into the decision, not 'Did it turn out to be the correct decision?'” Well, how do you rate the quality of your decisions?
You may have fantasized yourself about unplugging from civilization. I was curious: What’s the one thing about civilization that Dylan realized he was taking for granted?

Thanks for sharing my work!

On Twitter, thank you to @CapeHornCHI and @analydiamonaco.

On Instagram, thank you to @sonny_enslen.

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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 helps you make it as a creative.

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Next Episode

223. How to Support the Grieving: Megan Devine

Megan Devine (@refugeingrief) is the author of It’s OK That You’re Not OK, and runs the Writing Your Grief workshop. It wasn’t until Megan, a therapist, experienced grief herself that she discovered how we as a culture utterly fail to support the grieving.

As loyal listeners know, I experienced a tragedy several months ago. My healthy, active, 69-year-old mother died suddenly. An abnormal blood vessel – which she was born with, but didn’t know she had – burst in her brain.

I lost my grandparents long ago, but losing my mother was by far my most profound experience with grief. For the first time, I found myself on the receiving end of attempts to acknowledge my own deep state of grief.

Some attempts – which you’ll hear in today’s conversation – made me feel supported. Other attempts – which you’ll also hear – not so much.

I also went to some grief support groups with my father, and was shocked at what I discovered: It was like a hidden underworld of grief. People who lost someone six months ago, or six years ago – all in pain, all struggling to feel supported by friends, coworkers, or even family.

It helped me realize how poorly I, myself, had handled other people’s grief. Which is okay. Grief is by definition impossible. But we can always do better.

If we’re going to love our work, we have to be kind to one another. And part of being kind is supporting others when they’re hurting.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

What are the top things to never say when trying to support the grieving? The list could get impossibly long, so Megan will share a quick shortcut.
You may have heard of five stages of grief. I won’t bother listing them, because these stages are horribly misunderstood. Learn why thinking of grief according to stages just makes things worse.
The #1 thing that’s broken about how we respond to grief is that we treat it like a problem to be fixed. There’s one simple mindset shift that can help us do better.

Chances are, you’ve had grieving people in your life. If you haven’t, you most certainly will. Now is the time to build these skills, so let’s get started.

Photo Credit: Stephanie Zito