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

Most people's lives are determined by how they choose to cure their boredom.

What's that mean?

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 Bored, like, you know, 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.
And so I ideated that with him for a decent amount of time because the reason he wanted to start that specifically was to help people create a project that they could work on that would help cure their boredom. And so that 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 giving the opportunity for entropy to take hold.
You'll know Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time given to it. This almost feels like it could be Coe's law, which would be life expands to fill the boredom given to it.
What's funny is that I have a Coe's law, but 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 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 but I was freelance pretty quickly out of a job.
And 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. Yeah, that is interesting.
So just to round out the boredom thing, it kind of 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? Absolutely.
Yeah, interesting. Okay, what about hard work? Do you think there's a delusion around hard work? 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.

Right. And so since we, most of us, or quite a few of us, we go to school, we get a job and we, that, 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.
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 know, 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, you know, I understand why, and maybe it was right, you know, 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 uh in the short term results are determined by your intensity in the long term results are determined by. If you trade the latter for the former, you end up being kicked out of the game quite early.
What would be another one? For instance, saying that working harder results in better outcomes in life, which means that focusing on working hard and building up discipline is the only thing that matters when creativity are step functions that can increase whatever it is that you're trying to achieve by, you know, sort of massive amounts. So yeah, all this to say, as a person who works really fucking hard, like I love it, but I kind of need to remind myself that it's not a panacea.
It's not a one size fits all solution to all problems. There are very

few problems that won't get better by working harder, but there are significantly better solutions than just working harder a lot of the time. And being able to hold those two thoughts in your mind at the same time is tough.
It's difficult. Yeah.
I think it comes down to context in pain points quite often where if you don't have the pain point of not getting results out of your hard work, then maybe you don't need to not work harder, right? It's completely dependent on the person's situation where a lot of the people who are discouraged by working so hard and not getting anywhere with it, they're not realizing that that within itself is a pain point that has to be solved. And so then they don't have a new direction to work.
So they're not registering their hard work leading to a lack of results as a problem where you can create a solution and start working on that thing. So then when you come back to the hard work or whatever it is, you're moving from a higher vantage point so you can make better decisions toward that thing.
Yeah. Yeah.
Talk to me about sort of handling the trade-offs between growth and maintaining simplicity, because those two things I think often end up coming at the cost of each other. Yeah.
It's dependent on what you're building and your goals. For me, I can just speak from experience where in my life, I've noticed maybe three or four different macro periods of productivity or creativity where there's typically seasons where I feel lost and those seasons of feeling lost or just not knowing what to work on next usually come after hitting some kind of goal that I've been pursuing for a long time.
So all of these are cyclical. They're not exact, kind of like chapters in a book where each one resets, they each have their own goal.
They each have their own highs and lows. That's how I like to view life from a bigger picture.

but starts out as feeling lost. And then if you don't get distracted there, or you don't get bored, or you fill your time with the default activities that come after being bored,

then you start to move into this phase of curiosity. So first phase, feeling lost.
Second phase, curiosity. You start to pursue new interests or go down a new rabbit hole or study something, whatever it may be.
And you're trying to find, you're trying to experiment with different things until you find that one thing that you can't pull yourself away from. And then at that point, you kind of get pulled naturally into the season of intensity.
And that's where you make a lot of the progress. For me, those are where the long 12-hour work days come into play.
and that's when I build a new project, new product, new software, as I'm doing right now, completely new, right? Novel, new, feels very good. Challenge is high.
That's when fulfillment is also very high. And then once that reaches, there's like two options, right? You can fly too high and touch the sun and get burned a bit and you learn a lot from that.
Or you stay aware during it and you realize, okay, I'm reaching this peak. I need to figure out how to sustain a higher baseline from this.
And for me, it's when I hit some kind of new monthly high. In the gym, that could be a new weight.
In business, that could be a certain amount of followers in a month or whatever it may be, money in a month, who knows? But it's a spike. For me, I know that's not sustainable.
So along the way, I have to be thinking how I'm going to be consistent at this thing. And that's kind of the fourth phase is the consistency phase where what system can I build to maintain a higher baseline of the progress that I've made with this thing while not trying to sustain this peak that I know is ultimately unsustainable if I want to do different things in my life.
Talk to me about the emotion that comes up when you reach that new base or that new highest peak and then you're

coming back yes it sounds great to think well okay every every stock hits 80 h's and then we come back and we go okay this is the new base right but as you feel the trajectory begin to reverse despite the fact it's just gone in the other direction uh that feels like an emotional problem not just an operational problem.

Yeah.

That's kind of why it's cyclical. in the other direction, that feels like an emotional problem, not just an operational problem.

Yeah. That's kind of why it's cyclical, because you start to feel lost in a sense, where you can work hard and try to push through it.
And maybe there are some situations where you can sustain a very high baseline, and that's the singular thing that you do. But for me, I tend to desire to drop back down to some kind of lifestyle that I can maintain while not pushing too hard, but also it's like adding muscle mass, right? The intensity phase is for building muscle.
The consistency phase is for cutting fat and revealing what you built underneath. And when you do that enough over time, you're kind of surprised with where you end up after doing those things.
But in terms of the emotions, you can kind of think of how it is when you feel after a bulk, if you do some kind of a dirty bulk, I don't really do that. Yeah.
If you do an epic dirty bulk, then you

usually feel pretty shitty. You feel sluggish.
You feel tired. You want to train because it's

really enjoyable, but every other area of your life took a backseat or it is taking a backseat

now. And so you feel that for a bit.
You just feel sluggish. You feel tired.
You don't have

the same motivation that you did at the very beginning of that intensity phase. And it starts to round out a lot more.
It normalizes like a wave. maintaining simplicity uh i think reducing down complexity is something that a lot of people

struggle with uh you know there's an unlimited number of things that we can choose to do with

a lot of people struggle with. You know, there's an unlimited number of things that we can choose to do with our time.
A lot of options. Even within one project, you know, little hobbies and maybe I'm going to take up CrossFit.
I've always wanted to learn Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or, you know, maybe I should start doing improv on a nighttime or whatever it might be. For the people who are competent and like to sort of acquire skills, like to feel like they're making progress, how do you come to think about ensuring that simplicity is prioritized so that you don't sort of dilute down your attention across too many things, both professionally, personally, socially, etc.? Yeah.
For me, it comes with time where in the past, I mean, I still do. I try things.
If I have a very strong desire, I allow myself to try them at least once. I'm also very aware that if I don't invest energy into that thing, then I'm probably not going to enjoy it as much as if I just did it one time.
So for something like jujitsu, I never really tried that one

specific thing, but I would try it. I'd take a few classes and then if I didn't like it or I didn't see it fitting inside of my lifestyle, then I'd be quick to quit that thing.
What does not fitting inside of your lifestyle mean? if it impacts or takes away from my higher priority goals.

So for me, training, lifting weights in the gym, that's always just been a top priority. When I would get into running, that's something that I did for a decent amount of time, and I did enjoy it.
But I couldn't find the balance of running with training with work with social time I could fit it in the in the morning but it just there's a lot of moving pieces when you decide to fit something new into your day and nutrition training all of the things that you already have inside of there if you are are a curious person that likes to acquire these skills, it's very useful to do because you can pull some kind of principle or lever or lesson out of it to apply to other domains of your life to kind of fill it from the thing that it was missing that was making you want to run or do jujitsu in the first place and get that out of your system. But right when you asked that question, what I said was that it takes some time because the more you try and experiment with these things, the more you realize, the more you can approach those new desires with a better perspective.
and shiny object syndrome to me isn't something that is bad at all you just have to be able to refocus during that or you need to be able to paint maintain your priorities during that so you mentioned before uh attention that i kind of ignored for quite a while i think uh maybe like a a hammer that sees everything as a nail. I just assumed that basically all problems in my life could be fixed by more hard work, more discipline, more focus, more productivity, somewhere in between those four things, which is essentially sort of gripping more tightly, paying more attention, becoming distracted less.
But especially this this year i've realized that the creativity part um results in changes sort of step changes of insight about your own life progress professionally or personally or whatever it is doing something that's new and effective in a different sort of a way or coming up with a different kind of an idea and then you can still iterate on that but that i basically prioritize zero time for creativity in the past i was very much sort of a blunt blunt force trauma uh hard work type person and um this tension between creativity and productivity i think is still even with the rick rubens of the world and the dan coes of the world uh i think it's still very much overlooked i really want you to sort of break that apart yeah i'll start off by saying that i was the complete opposite when i was first starting out i always wanted to i was very lazy or whatever definition of lazy you can give where it's like productive procrastination in a sense where I would be playing video games and I would just try to fit in some work that would lead to something better, right? The priority was the video games. The work was just something I did in between.
And what that made me have to do, while I didn't get it right the first time around because that's very difficult to do, is that I would at least have to think about what are the one to two things that really move the lever here. And when you're doing something creative, creative work has a very, it has a lot more opportunity to find and leverage those high priority things where let's let's take a social post for an example if you're an author you're a musician you don't have to be a quote-unquote content creator if you have any kind of work that you want to spread social media is a decent way to do that and with social media if you post one thing and it is very good, then that post can do better than a thousand other people's posts that went out today.
And you can do quite well with that thing. So that's the first thing is try to adopt a mindset that allows you to at least search for those higher leverage things.
Because while you're doing the work, then you'll be able to identify them. Because if you aren't necessarily looking for them, they may just pass you by and you may not realize that this could lead to an exponential event of a lot of progress in that specific amount of time.
When it really came to me is when I started to remove a lot of what I would call my bad habits, which were the video games, which were the Netflix, which were quite a few things, the junk food. I just remember sophomore year of college, living in the dorms, terrible time, quit the gym, just was not productive, very low period of my life.
And after COVID specifically, I started going on walks because the COVID-15 or whatever they call it, I couldn't go to the gym. I was gaining a decent amount of weight.
I just felt like the Pillsbury Doughboy and I'm tall. So it wasn't that bad, but in my face, you could see like it's all puffy then didn't like that.
So started going on walks and I would listen to audio books during that time and started to notice like all of these ideas were starting to pop into my head that never had before. It was just a weird realization of like, wow, I actually have the ability to generate good ideas that sound unique to me.
And with those ideas, I've realized the power of them later, is that those can fuel different aspects of your creative work. So that's all to say and to wrap around that I believe productivity is highly dependent on creativity and that when you separate them, both of them lose their impact to quite some degree.
where, to give an example, if I'm writing a book or I'm creating any kind of a project, it doesn't matter what kind of a project is, that project, my mind expands to fill the context of that project. So when I'm on a walk or I'm making time for creativity or when the default mode network in my brain is activated, where you're at rest, you're not focused on work, that's like shower thoughts when ideas just pop into your subconscious or into your conscious.
Those ideas that happen during the creative period are usually the things that are higher leverage and apply directly to the project that you were building during your productivity periods. This episode is brought to you by Kettle and Fire.
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That's kettleandfire.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Isn't it strange we get, even though when we're working on the problem, we're kind of blinded in this way.
You're on a set of train tracks, but maybe they're not quite the right ones. And you've sort of got this weird momentum thing that's carrying you forward.
And you think, well, I'm doing the thing. This is what was on the to-do list for today, but you never actually step back and fully get up and above and look at the territory.
Yeah. Let's say that there's somebody listening who identifies with me as a recovering productivity addict.
How do you design your lifestyle for peak creativity?

lots of walks ben quite a few walks where i try to bake things in and try to blur the lines as much as I can between creativity, productivity, health, whatever my goals are.

They do kind of all blend together.

So in the morning, I wake up and go on a walk, you know, the fresh morning sunlight in your eyes like everyone wants you to get.

After that, shower, hygiene, et cetera, Get straight into some kind of building, right? I like to separate my days as much as I can and lump them into two categories where it's releasing or constraining entropy and releasing entropy, where in the morning, don't touch your phone, don't do anything that would cause a rogue thought to pop into your head and just cloud your mind for the rest of the day. So the morning on my walk is just sole intention, focused on, okay, what am I writing about today? Can I find a starting point for when I get back? And then the first project that I'm working on is usually something that is novel that needs to be done first thing in the morning.
This is

something like a book or a longer-term project that takes that extra effort to build. Then after

that, I get into my main levers, which is writing for me. So that's newsletter, social posts,

and those are the main things because those pull traffic, right? If I'm not building a product or a project, then my main focus is on getting traffic to those specific things. And then after that, I take a walk to kind of create that segment where it's like, okay, now I can start letting more people into my day and start taking on more

conversations. And when I get back, that's usually when I'll check email, when I'll check Slack, when I'll check Telegram, let other things come into play, do a lot of the maintenance or admin work where it's not really creative.
It doesn't require a lot of focused attention on that thing. And then after that block, I'll go to the gym.
And then that's kind of like a hard separation where the rest of the day, it's kind of like reading, writing, dabbling. It's just free flow, right? If I have priority things that I need to do, I'll sit down and do them.
If I don't, I'll maybe read a bit, go to my computer, walk around. It's kind of like a pacing balance of productivity and creativity.
Interesting that in order to be able to get the creativity thing, even when you're in just letting the ideas come to me, I'm writing, I'm doing the social posts, I'm doing whatever I need. You still need to apply discipline because if you didn't apply the the discipline, you'd have already checked Slack, and that would have distracted you on the morning.
And that one email, and that guy, fuck, I got to have that call with that guy later on, and I put it off twice already, and so on and so forth. So there still is an importance of discipline within the act of being creative.
You need to fortify yourself through discipline, but primarily saying no, in order to then allow the creativity to come out. Yeah.
I think of it as a... Creativity still has constraints, and it still thrives within constraints.
I feel like with productivity, it's more of a narrow block. You're just hyper-focused on one thing.
With creativity, you're not letting your mind just be exposed to absolute chaos and drowning in that. That's what leads to the boredom, anxiety, overwhelm, other things that come from leaving that skill challenge match where creativity, at least in my lens, is when my mind is operating within a specific set of constraints, usually a project, right? So if it's a book or it's a newsletter, that's why I love writing a weekly newsletter specifically, is because there's never an idea that I can't utilize, right? I can listen to, I don't know if you've experienced this, but when you have a project, you can listen, like you're on a walk, you listen to an audiobook or a YouTube lecture completely different from what the topic of that thing you're working on is, and it will still give you ideas for the project.
yeah it's always pulling back across whatever your focus is captured by whether it was an

argument with your mom yesterday or whatever it's weird weird. You are right.
It's like a, I don't know, a shape-shifting poltergeist or something that creates, it moves into the form. It fills the size of the bottle of whatever it is that you're doing.
You've got a tweet about discipline saying you aren't disciplined because you keep putting yourself in environments that give you a chance to be undisciplined. Is this about environment design? Yes, to an extent.
Where it's environment design and just that, making it difficult to be undisciplined. So if you have trouble with your phone in the morning, then put it in another room.
I've never really done that or had to do that, but I know it's a common piece of advice and it probably works for that exact reason, right? At least you get up and then you realize, hey, I don't do this. Same thing with putting unhealthy foods in your pantry or just buying them in general.
You can't eat the foods that you don't have in the house. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. So yes, that's the main thing is environment design for that tweet.

You had another one as well, which kind of feels a little similar as we start to talk about

direction in life and stuff. Your potential is determined by how much uncertainty you're

willing to embrace. Why?

Oh, that kind of contradicts what we said about creativity thriving within constraints. What I mean by that is the progressive overload of uncertainty and responsibility, where if you just throw yourself into the middle of the ocean, you can maybe learn to swim, but you probably won't if you don't know how to swim before.
And it's not going to be a very good time and you're definitely not going to quote unquote reach your potential there. But what I mean by that is now if you were to look back on what was uncertain previously in your life, it no longer is.
So what I mean by that is you're gradually expanding what is known to you into the unknown. You're taking those steps into the unknown, allowing your mind to sit and marinate in that thing, in that slight amount of uncertainty that is kind of more empowering than it is the opposite.
And that's when your mind can grow the most. Think of that as we'll call it your edge, right? Living at your edge, pushing into the unknown in the gym that's representative of pushing close to or near failure or to failure.
It's when you're lean bulking, it's eating 200 calories over. It's very difficult to stay at that specific place and not put on the extra weight because you want to ego lift or not eat over because you're just hungry or can't control yourself, right? That's where you're making the most progress, that what is the most fulfilling, but that's a difficult place to be.
And the way you can kind of filter for that is boredom or anxiety or boredom and uncertainty, where if you feel yourself getting anxious, that usually means that you're punching above your weight in a sense. The task is too challenging for you and you don't have the knowledge, skill, or clarity to make sense of the path to get there.

So when people set these high and hard goals,

but they don't have any of the puzzle pieces to make sense of that with their mind,

then it's extremely uncertain to them. But once they reach that goal, looping back to the quote,

they've kind of been able to umbrella that or make sense of that picture so they can

hold more uncertainty in their minds. Because one last thing with that is the more you do this, the less, the more experience you have, let's say you're at level 50 or let's say you're at level one.
When you're at level one, you wouldn't face a level 10, right? You're probably going to get one-shotted. But if you are a level 50, you can probably hold your own against the level 60.
The decrease in challenge as you're going more and more becomes ever so slight. How should people figure out what they want out of life? know we have insights about oh you know they can

live with this uncertainty but i don't really know but there is a literal unlimited amount of

optionality for everybody to choose the direction and that's only getting more uh what's your

advice for people who want to figure out where they want to go? Yeah.

Oh.

I like to think of it in terms of solving an infinite string of problems in your life,

where there is a most pressing problem in your life right now.

And by solving that, you at least start to gain some kind of footing.

Thank you. most pressing problem in your life right now.
And by solving that, you at least start to gain some kind of footing. If we were to extrapolate that out and see what that picture looked like over a long enough timescale, right now, I feel slow.
I feel sluggish. It's impacting my relationships.
It's impacting my ability to focus at work. I should do something about that first.
I should focus on solving that problem. A problem implies that there is a goal.
You don't necessarily need to create a goal, but there is a goal there, and at least you start moving in a better direction. As you move forward with that, more meaningful, challenging, and deeper problems start to uncover.
It's like when you start in the gym for vanity, but then you stay for the therapy in a sense, where you start going to the gym because you want to look good and someone in high school broke up with you or something like that, and you want to get back at them. But then as you get into it, two, three years, the progress starts to slow down and you need to solve a newer problem of like, okay, where did my fulfillment in that specific thing come from? And you have to start to develop some kind of philosophical sense of mastery around the gym in and of itself.
That's kind of the progression. To answer the question that always comes up there with, okay, well, I don't know.
First, I don't know what problem to solve. And two, I'm still not motivated to solve that problem because my mind isn't in the place where that is important to me yet.
It's not an automatic decision to go and do that thing or create that new habit or whatever it may be. To that, we need to create a frame for your mind to operate within kind of like a worldview your own little

world that you can start to piece together the map of so what i like to do there and this is a practice where you're going to take 10 20 30 minutes however long it takes to create an anti-vision for your future. And this isn't set in stone.
This is like a minimum viable anti-vision right now. It's something that you just want to, you want to plant a flag in the ground and you want to come back to it to add to and refine to it.
In order to do this, you're just trying to contemplate and think of experiences that you never want to experience again. You're trying to reflect on the things that you may have passed over and you probably did pass over in your past that were rather painful, but as you kind of just let time go on, that pain equalized and now it's no longer painful to you.
So first, reflect on those things. What do you not want? What is your anti-ideal future? Write all of those things down, just anything.
Write it all down. There's no specific way to do that.
Come back to it when you need to. After that, create the opposite side of the frame, so the vision.
What are the things that you want? What are the things that you want to experience again? Again, the first iteration of this is probably just going to be some kind of delusion. In a year, you're going to be like, what was I thinking? But that's the purpose of iterating, refining, evolving.
Right now, the only purpose of this frame is to reorient your mind to perceive new opportunities and ideas, where if you weren't aware of it previously, or if you didn't previously have a conscious top of mind goal of making, let's use a fitness example of, of getting a six pack and avoiding getting a six pack for your vision and avoiding feeling sluggish overweight overweight, just not liking how you look in the mirror. That's kind of like a push pull between the two.
Now, with that on your mind, you're at least able to pick apart more things in your everyday experience. When you're scrolling on social media, now you're going to see that post of some useful piece of fitness information that you would have scrolled past before.
You're going to follow that person. The algorithm is going to start to cater toward that specific interest.
You're going to be recommended a book. You're going to purchase that book.
You'll probably read a chapter, but then you'll go down this other rabbit hole of Mike Isertel on YouTube. Don't do that.
Dear God. Yeah.
But then you really get into it, and then you start to develop this love for this one specific thing. And when you start to repeat that for the different domains of your life over years of health, wealth, relationships, happiness, whatever it may be, then you can really start to make sense of

this bigger picture and refine that frame over time. So it's less about here's a specific path to take and more about here's the direction you don't want to move in.
Here's the direction you kind of want to move in. Now let's just start solving problems along the way and see where trial and error takes us because you're probably not going to end up in a bad spot if you are doing that.
And even now, it's like I still don't necessarily know what I want out of life. I have a very good idea that I hold high conviction in and I'm going to pursue, but I'm also open to that changing.
So that may be another piece of the puzzle is just don't have these high expectations like you need to know what you need to do. This episode is brought to you by Nomadic.
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That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I love the idea of writing out what you don't want your life to be like.
George had this thought experiment years ago, which was, how do you make a miserable person happy? You're like, I'm not too sure. You're okay.
How do you make a happy person miserable? It's like, piece of piss. So I think, you know, inversion is just such a powerful tool with things like that everybody knows oh well i you know go through this little list of things disconnect them from their friends and remove them from any work that gives them a sense of meaning i'd mess with their sleep i'd mess with their food i wouldn't let them see any sunlight i wouldn't let them train do exercise you know okay those are the things that make a happy person miserable the very bare minimum like that okay there's there's the things that you need in order to...
So, you know, I had this insight about depression that basically if you're not covering those building blocks, how would you make a happy person miserable? You really shouldn't be looking at the serotonin balance that's inside of your brain and how much is this to do with being exposed to microplastics and so on and so forth it's like hey fucking dude like you need to form some foundation or else basically what you're doing is maybe laying at the feet of something far more complex a problem which is way more simple and significantly easier to fix uh but yeah uh i'd never thought about inverting it for where do you want your life to end up or not. I did this annual review, the template that I gave out for free.
And one of the questions is, what would I do to make 85-year-old me miserable? Oh, wow. And that's not too dissimilar.
That was good, yeah. What does 85-year-old me wish that I did more of? What does 85-year-old me wish that i did less of and uh that's not too dissimilar to what you're talking about here if i know what's that thing about uh tell me where i'm going to die so that i can never go there it's like tell me tell me the life that i don't want to lead so i can avoid doing it i have a question for you there is do you see i know it's hard to create some kind of blanket statement for this but in your eyes are there those foundational habits that every single person should do and then the fulfillment and creativity comes from kind of dancing between those and doing their own thing or is there there leeway there? It depends how rigidly you define what it is that you do.
You wouldn't let the person exercise. Well, there's a million different types of exercise.
For one person, it's dancing. For one person, it's doing yoga.
For another, it's lifting weights. Somebody wants to do it on their own.
Somebody wants to do it in a group. Someone wants to do it at night.
Someone wants to do it during the day. Someone wants to do it outside.
Someone wants to do it inside. You know, there's a lot of different ways to sort of slice and dice this.
And it ends up, as with most debates, just becoming a semantic game. Like, what do you actually specifically mean by exercise? And what do you actually mean by enough sleep? Who even says what enough is? But I think ultimately, if you're not sleeping enough, if you're eating poorly consistently, if you are not getting some form of exercise that makes you feel good, if you're not going outside and seeing at least a little bit of sunlight or daylight, if you live in Iceland or whatever, and if you're not working on something that gives you a sense of connection to the world, a sense of purpose, at least you're contributing to making the world a little bit of a better place.
And if you're doing all of it on your own, like Godspeed being able to get through that. So yes, I would say maybe there's a, basically for the more of those things that you're not taking off the box of, you need to become an increasing outlier on the tail end of not normal in order to be able to say that you are living a good life or in order to be able to be sufficiently resilient.
Most people, and especially the biggest chunk of most people in the middle of the bell curve, they need most or all of those. And you need to be a supremely unique individual to be able to say, yeah, man, you know, I just crush it.
I mean, I never see my friends and I, I eat Budweiser and Domino's and, you know, some days I sleep for 10 hours and some days I sleep for two and I don't really exercise at all. And I'm not that connected to my work, but life's good.
That you are a particularly unique individual if that's the way that you, the way that you show up. yeah i agree and i think it goes for the the other end too where right now building software a lot of the team has those habits but in the opposite direction where like not even by my design or encouragement of it i actively encourage the opposite but uh they're like the cracked startup engineers that you'll see on Twitter where they're just working till 3am because that's what they love to do.
They love to code and they love to just work together and be friends. And I've also noticed that in my life where when you are working on that one thing and you're going all in on it, it's that intensity phase.
Other areas of your life do kind of have to peel back. I think the wisdom there is not letting them completely fall off or finding a lower baseline that you can maintain of those things.
Oliver Berkman has got this prompt from 4,000 weeks where he says, decide in advance what you're going to suck at. And it's a really good one because if you focus all of your attention on one thing, you make more progress in that thing than if you spent three times the amount of time on that thing, but with only a third of the attention.
You sort of accumulate more. It's not a linear progression of more time on the thing and more focus equals the same amount it's spread with less focus over more time.
That's not the way it works. If you focus exclusively on health and the gym for six months, you make way more progress than 50% of that attention for a year.
And the same thing goes for businesses and skill acquisition and so on and so forth. There's this sort of weird compounding.
There's a kind of obsession that causes you to focus on the little minutiae that you might have missed. Typically, you're allowing it to sort of become part of your personality.
So the momentum is harder to slow down. After a while, it sort of keeps you going, it keeps you going.
It's a part of you. You feel like it's very personal to you.
And yeah, you end up in this place where so many of the results that you wanted to get over the long term can be achieved more quickly by focusing. But the problem is that you feel that fall away.
You feel the drop-off of, well, you know, I said I was going to work on my business this year, and I was going to get a promotion at work, or I was going to build a family, or get a girlfriend, or do whatever it is. But my body's looking a little bit off.
It's like, yeah, dude, you're doing 12 hour days at work, or you're going out three nights a week trying to socialize and find a partner or you're doing, you know, whatever it is that you're doing, there are, there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
And I think in advance, identifying to yourself, what are the trade-offs I'm prepared to trade? Like, I want to do this thing. I want to 2025.
I want to get a promotion at work. I want to move out of the house.
I want to move into a new place. Okay.
What are the things you need to do in order to be able to do that? You already thought about that. Okay.
And what are the things that you're going to need to pay a cost of? Well, maybe I'm not going to be able to go out as much. So maybe I'm going to feel a little bit more lonely.
Maybe some of my friends are going to stop hanging around with me because I can't pay them enough attention to sort of keep them feeling like we've got this connection going. Okay, well, am I prepared to pay that price? Because most people stop doing things, I think, because of the pain that's come along with the byproduct of them, not the lack of progress that they're making.
It's all of the other things that stop that it's like the most salient thing is the discomfort of other shit dropping off, as well as the discomfort of what you're trying to do now that requires a lot more attention. And you need to manage both of those worlds at the same time.
Absolutely. Yeah, it's fun.
When that happens, because you, I don't know, you kind of prove yourself wrong in a lot of ways where the most progress that I've made in the gym was actually like two years ago rather than 10 when I first started. simply because I just re-found an obsession with that one thing, focused on it for six months, and surprised myself with a lot of progress

just because I was so meticulous about that one thing. But then everything else took a backseat.
And another even further thing with that is if you get into the habit of doing that, it's a lot harder to pick steam back up in something like work if that took a backseat. Yeah, that is interesting.
You've got another tweet that I liked. If you never contradict yourself, you're probably too attached to a limiting belief and it's holding you back from reaching the next level.
People don't like contradicting themselves. The internet fucking hates hypocrisy.
You know, it's like catnip. Well, you once said this, but now you've said that uh and we also don't like it being called out in ourselves right it seems it's half a step away from being called a liar um so why should we be contradicting ourselves more if we draw a person's life out as a book or this's say a song, what people like to do is they like to

focus on one specific lyric or word of the song and act like that's the entire person in and of themselves or an image. They like to zoom in on the pixel of an image and act like that makes up the entirety of their being,

right? But the thing about a song specifically is that it continuously evolves. It's another example of that would be an index fund, right? One stock can be down, but the index fund can be up.
And the people love to focus on the stock being down. And that's all they can see rather than zooming out and saying, okay, in the big picture, in the actual story of this thing, if I'm trying to think in stories instead of just words or phrases that this person has said at one point in their life, then it makes a lot more sense.
And I can see their growth and development and I can actually pull something from this and potentially change my own beliefs. But that's the problem in and of itself is that you don't want to, and those beliefs are causing you to narrow your attention on that one tiny little thing that when you actually think about it, it doesn't matter in the slightest.
And you're going to forget about it in 10 minutes. And your anger was for nothing.
Yeah. How important is writing as a practice for you for sort of getting all of these realizations together? Obviously, it's something that you do professionally, but how important do you think those insights are even for people who don't have a blog that they need to be publishing to it is extremely important because i don't see i don't see when you think of writing when people hear the word writing just now they're going to think oh they're not explicitly going to think this but words are going to come to their mind of okay english degrees academic writing uh grammar punctuation grammar nazis all of these different things when that's not what writing is writing is writing just think of texting your friend you text your friends every day maybe if you have friends you write in some way you write emails whatever may be.
I want you to think of that and things like journaling as a way to practice thinking specifically because writing is thinking on paper. It's organized thinking that you can break apart.
You can redo. You can be very intentional with it in your mind..
In your mind, it's not an actual canvas.

It's just something you're swimming through. And it's very difficult to find

one coherent line of thought or create one long coherent line of thought. There's absolutely no way that you're going to write a book in your head.
So by putting your words on paper and starting to understand how you think, and then starting to, you could say, reprogram that, you are doing just that in your head. You're reprogramming the way that you think in hopefully a way that is beneficial toward ideal outcomes.
So that's reason number one. The second reason

is that I see writing personally as a skill that amplifies any other skill that you could acquire. Therefore, I see it as a very good first thing to learn because it requires you to learn very fundamental skills of human nature, psychology, persuasion, potentially marketing, depending on the medium of the writing, sales in many cases for copywriting, different types of writing.
It's communication. Anything that you want to get out of life, you're probably going to be communicating,

persuading, offering value, exchanging value with another person. And the written word is the base form of media that allows you to do that thing.
So by practicing it and stacking skills on top of it, it can be extremely powerful while also being a way to reshape your entire mind. And if your language that you use paves how far your thoughts can go, then that's extremely powerful in not only your decision-making, but in whatever potential you have in life.
This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I've worn Whoop for over five years now, since way before they were a partner on the show.
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That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I started this newsletter thing that I do four and a half years ago, I think.
And I think I've missed a week since then. So we're on whatever, edition 250, some shit like that.
And even as somebody that speaks a lot all the time uh to people that are way smarter than me the process of writing that newsletter has become better over time like it's reliably my favorite part of the week and i'm aware this is every guy with a fucking substack ever going like bro you gotta get on substack uh but the reason I think for me was I struggled so much to ever keeping up sort of a deep journaling practice beyond something that was very structured, like a six-minute journal, five-minute diary type thing, artist pages or morning pages by Julia Cameron or whatever, was just I really struggled with that. And I need a lot of social pressure to get myself to do hard things, especially new hard things.
So CrossFit was a great example. Started doing CrossFit.
You don't quit in the middle of the workout because there's 15 other people who are all doing it with you and they're going to look at you and they're going to look at you weird. So you use the social pressure.
You externalize and outsource your sense of motivation to the group.

And if you say it's called Three Minute Monday and Tuesday rolls around and there's been no email, well, what about all the people that are expecting email on a Monday?

So given that, it was the first time that I actually had a consistent writing practice.

And it's informed so much.

I think you're right as well.

You do a, you're going weekly too, right?

Once a week.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And for me, that cadence is really beautiful because I always have something to write about.

I never don't have something to write about.

And sometimes I have more to write about than I want to write about, but it never feels arduous.

I get to a Friday or a Saturday. I'm like, fuck, like I can't.
What have I got this week? I've got my note. And again, I can open my pants and show you what I've got lurking inside, which is just a huge, huge fuck off single note with random links and bits of insight.
It could be way more organized. I'm sure I could have a better system, but this one works and it's lightweight and I've used it for a quarter of a million words.
So sue me. And dude, I love it.
I love it. It's helped me personally.
It's helped me professionally. It gives me ideas and stories to talk about over dinner.
It's made me reflect on things from

my childhood. It gives me space to...
So yeah, I had this rule that I came up with about five years ago that everybody should have a podcast in that for half an hour a week, put your phone on the table, press the record button and talk to a friend about a topic that you care about. because very few people have a focused conversation on one topic.

And I think... press the record button and talk to a friend about a topic that you care about.
Because very few people have a focused conversation on one topic.

And I think it's therapeutic.

I found this kind of conversation when I started guesting on podcast eight years ago,

I found it really therapeutic in a way that was like being thirsty

without knowing that I needed a drink.

And writing is actually the same. So I haven't said it yet, but I'm slowly veering toward everybody should start the sub stack, even if they have no intention of sharing it.
Just because it's really, really good. If you're finding that your thoughts are messy, if you like ideas and you keep playing with them, but they're always up here.
I think you've got, I saw a tweet from you that was something to do with you're not making as much personal development progress as you want because all of your ideas for personal development are locked in your head as opposed to doing the one thing that could actually move you towards achieving your goals. And it's kind of the same with this.
You've got all of these ideas and they're just lurking around here. And until you've got it to be able to reference somewhere, what are you going to do? You're just going to keep thinking about it.
You know what it's like. I mean, this is the ruthless thing about missing persons, right? What do the family say? I just want to know.
We just want to know where they are. And your brain is saying, I just want to know where this fucking idea is.
Like, I just want to know. And you go, it's still in the brain.
You go, yeah, I know. So I need to keep reminding you of it in case you forget.
Once it's down on a piece of paper, you sort of liberated to think about new different ideas. Yeah.
I find it quite interesting how everyone says that, where I think writing is important because it is a part of my identity, right? I'm going to talk about it a lot because it is. For you, it's podcasting or starting a smaller version of the podcast.
What's interesting to me is that for almost any creator, they would say the same thing in whatever medium they have. So while it may be writing, while it may be speaking in some kind of fashion, I think just creating something, being able to synthesize the ideas in your head, being able to take out some of the ideas that are stuck in your brain, organize them in some way that you think is beneficial to the world, and giving it to them solves a good amount of those not basic needs but meaning needs by a long shot.
And there's so many different connected ideas there in ways of doing that. Like you said, there's a hundred different ways to exercise.
Are you going to do it inside, outside? Are you going to do CrossFit, running, walking, jujitsu, whatever it may be? With creating, you do that with any interest that you have. And that's what's so fun and fascinating about it is it's just giving yourself permission to explore those interests and do something with them.
It's less about reading just to read, and you don't see any benefit out of it. Now you have something to do with it.
I mean, one of the most common questions or insights that came from the live shows was something along the line of, how do I better remember the things that I learn and read?

And the problem is you don't have a reason to fucking remember them.

That's your issue.

Your issue is, why do you need to remember them other than trying to be more interesting at the water cooler or for some vague sense of personal development?

You have no outlet. There's no reason.
there's no pressure being applied to the system to constrain it or cause you to do it so if you don't have a reason to it's why should i get fit and go if you didn't know or if here's a good one if it wasn't the case that training in the gym had any bearing on health or well-being or the way that you felt or how attracted people were to you, how many people do you think would do it? Almost none, right? Because it's hard and it sucks and there's basically no benefit. So the benefit to you is way less salient when it's this vague idea of I will become a better, more mindful, more insightful, wisdomy person.
No, I've got to write a thousand words this weekend.

That'll apply some pressure to you.

Yeah.

Naval put out a tweet recently,

and it said something along the lines of,

if you don't, if you didn't, man, what was it?

It was, if you don't, if you didn't, man, what was it? It was if you didn't, if you don't, if there wasn't a reason to remember it, then you shouldn't want to remember it. Something of that line of thought where he was saying, you don't need to, if you needed to remember it, you would.
And trying to memorize anything is kind of against the point. Tim Ferriss has got an idea called The Good Shit Sticks.
And it's not too dissimilar, basically, that it's not your job to find a book interesting. It's the book's job to be interesting to you.
And if you read 200 pages of some book and you go, well, nothing stood out to me or I can't remember anything. You go, well, maybe nothing was sufficiently

impressive or interesting or resonant with you to warrant you remembering anything. That's not

a you problem. That's a book problem.
Yeah. That's changed how I view and read books where

I don't really sit and read entire books over the course of a few sessions, of course. I usually am hunting for ideas that I can utilize or write down or the ones that I will remember.
And I don't pay attention to too much else where if I can use it as a portion of my writing, or I can weave it in somewhere here, or I can make sense of this abstract worldview that I was trying to integrate with my own, then perfect. But the other things in the book, me trying to study and memorize and be able to recite those things again, or like you said, so I can sound smart to someone else, it's kind of against the point.
Heck yeah. Dan Coe, ladies and gentlemen.
Dan, dude, I really appreciate you. I think this blending of productivity, creativity, discipline with sort of freedom and simplicity is a, it's good.
It's a much needed redress. Where should people go? They want to check out the things you've written and the work you do.
Where should you send them?

Yeah, just thedanco.com.

Everything's there.

Dude, heck yeah.

This was awesome.

I really appreciate the opportunity.

No, my pleasure, dude.

Until next time.