#760: Robert Rodriguez and Susan Cain | The Tim Ferriss Show

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The Tim Ferriss Show.

Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world -class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

This episode is a two -for -one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade i could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and at rodriguez how do you use journaling i started you know with the word processing way back you know when i first started filmmaking the first when i sold del mariachi and columbia hired me the first thing i asked for was an apple laptop computer which was the very first one that came out they know what it was i was the only one on of the plane with one I was writing my screenplays in and I would continue

my journal which I'd started by handwriting it it really started I think in college my dad gave me a day planner one of those day planners and I started using it and I would write the things you're going to do on the left side and then you would write what you ended up doing that day on the right and even though I was in college I would try to push myself pretty hard I would look and I'd go wow I didn't have very much to write about myself at the end of that day I'm gonna have to give myself more more things on the left, so I have more to write stuff on the right.

It really made you reflect on your day and realize I didn't do much today.

And so those got really full and I became a filmmaker right away.

El Mariachi got made.

And then during the process of El Mariachi, I remember keeping a really dense journal because it was an experiment.

It was really a test film.

And that was during all parts of the process?

For all parts of the process.

Because I thought if I'm going to go take on this endeavor, I know a lot of things aren't going to work out.

It's my first feature film.

No one's intended to see it.

it's really a learning experience.

I'm just going to go make it and I'm going to be able to look back on my journal and see where I messed up.

It was really going to be a document.

So I wouldn't make that mistake again.

I could go back and track why did the exposure not work and I'd be able to go back and go, oh, I didn't do this and I didn't do that.

It was really going to be a record of failure rather than a document of success in any way.

It was really about recording the methodology for a project, a specific project.

And as the process went on, right away as I started editing it.

I kept track of that.

I sold it pretty quickly.

And then I was in Hollywood and I was like, now I really got something to write about.

I was writing down all the weird stuff that was happening.

Finally, I decided to put out a book on just the making of El Mariachi.

And I kept journaling from then on everything.

Which was Rebel Without a Crew.

Rebel Without a Crew.

And I would find that you meet the same people over and over again.

Like I wrote down very specifics of people that I would meet casually in Hollywood, knowing we would run into each other again.

And they ended up being great collaborators 10 years later, you know, are showing up in things and I'd be able to go back and read them stuff from the early days and I would blow them away so when you write these down for instance I'll go in the computer so I can find them and I do it my year so do you do it by hand and then input it into a computer no I do them all on the computer so I have a little alarm that goes off at midnight to make sure because around midnight's usually a good time and I'll write something down because I found that even when I just wrote some items down I could go back and fill

them in later because you would remember and what always would shock me what kept it going is when I would go go back and review the journals and how many life -changing things happen like within a weekend or things that you thought were spread out over two years were actually Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and that Monday.

I mean, so many occurrences happen in chunks that blow you away, things that kind of define you.

And do you use a word?

Do you use a different application?

How do you I always just used word because that was the first thing I had on my Apple laptop.

There are about a thousand, sometimes a thousand, 2000 pages per year of journals, a few days, or I'm sorry, a few pages per night on average.

Yeah. A few pages per hour.

Sometimes some, some hardly anything, some things are bigger and sometimes it's a cheek.

Sometimes I'll clip like reviews or conversations I had that have been written down somewhere else and I'll put all them in there too.

Everything goes right in the, in the right date.

And so I could search by date and I can kind of cross reference stuff, which is, I would just say for anyone who's a parent, it's a must. It's a a must because your children and you forget everything you know within a few years they'll forget things that you think they should remember for the rest of their lives they'll only remember it if it's reinforced and i'm a real family man so i really love every birthday i'll go tell my kids again because they forget by the next year what their first years were like because i'll just read those journal entries and it blows them away you know or they'll

say hey we should go camping again i go camping oh yeah remember that time we went camping and i put the tent in the the backyard and it had electricity going through.

We had fans, we're watching Johnny Quest and we're playing.

I must have journal on that and I must have video.

So I would go year by year.

I just searched camping, camping, camping.

Oh, May 4th, 1999, we went camping.

Oh, it's on tape 25 of this particular tape.

I'd go find the tape and show it to them.

I tried to show them the tape.

They didn't have to go camping again.

They just relived it.

They relived it and it was better than we even been remembered so capsulating stuff like that was just really important it reminds me of something i don't think i've ever talked about but my mom when i was 15 i spent a year abroad in japan it was my first time overseas and i was in a japanese school it's the only you know where's waldo american kid in the entire you know i think it was 5 000 students school japanese family and of course i assumed at the time i was going to remember everything that happened but my mom to her credit every time we had a phone call would get off the phone and write

down what i had said and so she has this record of my experience in Japan that I have no record of and of course I don't remember any of it without that kind of cueing yeah I think part of that came from I read a diary my mom tried to keep when we were really little and it had very few entries but one of the most defining moments when she pushed me into a pool because I wouldn't go jump in she knew I just needed to push and I felt totally betrayed and totally angry with it it was in there but it had her side of the story and of course it was correct but I wish she had written more So I thought,

I'm going to make sure I write.

And now it's become an addiction, and it's just so necessary.

I mean, you ask a girlfriend or your wife, what did we do last year on your birthday?

They won't remember.

A year goes by, you will not remember the details.

You go back and you see the journals.

It's even better the second time you lived it again, and you realize the importance of it.

And when you meet someone you think might be a recurring figure in your life, or you meet someone who ends up being a teacher of some type, how often do you go back and review the notes?

Is it really just -in -time information, not just -in -case?

So when you realize, oh my God, I'm going to be meeting, say, Francis Ford Coppola for the second time, you should probably go back and look at what happened in the first meeting.

Or is it something that you proactively review?

It's something I need to know because there's so many things.

I tell myself I want to be the guy looking through the windshield, not the rearview mirror.

But sometimes you can see better through the windshield if you look through the rearview mirror and look at some of this stuff that's gone on and make sense of where you're relationships are going or what you've learned.

And it blows me away sometimes.

I'll just go ahead and look somebody up, you know, that I'm about to meet with.

I just met with Jim Cameron.

We always talked like four hours.

We hadn't seen him for being very demanding, not in a bad way, but I thought that shirt was just, it spoke volumes.

I think in so many different ways about sort of his process, his mentality.

How do you keep morale high when you're working with a crew?

And maybe, like you said, you're doing like an exterior shot in Austin and people are just suffering and sweating and fatigued.

Do you have any tricks or approaches that you use over and over again to keep kind of morale high and get the best out of people?

I've worked with the same crew for some of them for 20 years.

And so they kind of know already the philosophy I tend to have. And I've learned this not through filmmaking, but through other disciplines, sometimes working with painters and with sculptors and musician friends.

Cause what I found is kind of why I do so many many different jobs because creativity is in job specific.

I mean, if you know how to be creative, you can literally jump from job to job with no training and do them pretty well because the technical part of any job is 10%.

90 % of that is creativity.

If you already know how to be creative, you've kind of got the battle, you know, half beat, which is you don't need to know.

You don't need to know what notes specifically you're going to play when you get on stage and do your solo.

Everybody will go, what did you just play?

And you're going to go, I don't know.

Yes, I just Jimmy Von that.

How do you know what you're playing just now?

I don't even know what hey played i said well it was fantastic anybody tape it no that's another one it was never you the best you can be is to get out of the way so it comes through so when an actor comes to me or crew member he goes i'm not sure i know how to play this part or i'm not sure i know because that's beautiful because the other half is going to show up over there they say knowing's half the battle i think the most important part is the other half not knowing not knowing what's going to happen but you trust that it'll be there when you put the brush up to the canvas it's going to of know

where to go. And the further you're out of the way of it, it'll just happen.

So the trust comes first and trust comes first. You have to trust first and then it'll happen.

And I always point it out when it does.

I point it out. You'll see it and I'll point it out when it's going to fall on your lap or I'll just call upon you to come up with something and you will.

And I'm going to point out because that's the magic.

You're just going to be open to it.

It's all attitude. There's nothing wrong that could ever happen.

I remember from Dust Till Dawn, the film, the special effects guys put too much fire in the explosion and the actors come running out out of the building and it's in the movie you see the building blow up the bar at the end and the fireball if you were to continue but i cut away it just kept going and engulfed the whole set and that was the first shot we still needed lots of other stuff to shoot with it and we're like okay everyone else is freaking out the production designers cry that was all their work and uh me and my assistant director he came over and he goes you think what i'm thinking yeah this it

looks good the way it is it's all charred let's just keep shooting and we'll do the repair, you know, a little repair that needs to be done for next week.

And we'll shoot that exterior next week, but let's just shoot.

Let's just keep shooting.

Sometimes you use those gifts because nothing ever goes according to plan.

And sometimes when I hear, you know, new filmmakers talk, they talk all down about their film.

Oh, well, nothing worked.

And it was a disappointment.

It's like, oh, they don't realize it.

That's the job. The job is that nothing is going to work at all.

And you go, well, how can I turn that in a way to turn it into a positive?

And I get something something much better than if I had all the time and money in the world yeah and I love those experiences so much that I would purposely and I talked to Michael Mann about this and Michael Mann director's chair because we talked about Manhunter once years ago and he re -tell me the story and he didn't have any money he'd fired the effects crew it's some of the really cool staccato editing was really to cover up the fact that they didn't have effects and I didn't know that I always thought it it was a stylistic choice.

He goes, no, because we didn't have any money or talk to it.

Sometimes art is, should be imperfect in a way.

The point you made just a minute ago about creativity transferring from one area to the next to seemingly unrelated skills and areas, I think is really important.

And I cannot recommend highly enough that people check out the director's chair.

And one of the terms that jumped out, which you kind of mentioned in your last example was the gremlins, right?

And the gremlins that How do you embrace the gremlins and turn them to your advantage?

And the example of the ending of Back to the Future and how like the church tower and all of that was because the studios just refused to finance this more kind of spectacular ending.

Things that you would think that planned for years were created at the last moment.

And I couldn't believe that myself.

That's why I enjoy doing those interviews.

I truly want to know these things because they still blow me away.

The creative process blows me away.

and it applies to so much that even if you're not a director or a filmmaker, you watch that and you see people talking about the creativity and creative process and you see how it applies to anything that you do, how you raise your children, how you cook food, how you run a business, you know, creativity is so much a part of that.

And when people say, oh, you do so many things, you're a musician, you're a painter, you edit, you're a composer, you're a cinematographer, you're the editor, you do so many different things.

No, I only do one thing.

I live a creative life.

When you put creativity in everything, everything becomes available to you.

Anything that has creative aspect is suddenly yours to go and do.

And there's no separation between work and play.

I mean, I work, quote unquote, in my house.

I mean, that's why I write my scripts, come up with my ideas while I'm playing with my kids, while I'm cooking them a meal, which is a creative exercise art you can eat in itself.

Then you go upstairs and do some editing.

Yet it has seen you.

I can already hear the kind of music for I'll walk over to this room and I'll do music for it.

I mean, then you go, I'm not sure how that's character.

I'm going to get into this character, maybe I'll paint him first, and kind of see visually what he looks like or musically what he sounds like.

And you can work completely non -linear that way because you realize, I can do anything I want because everything can be creative.

Even a business call.

Suddenly you go, this is kind of out of my league, but maybe add my creativity to it and maybe that'll solve something no one else will be able to solve.

And sure enough, you can always rely on creativity to sort of win the day in a lot of areas.

And with, say, El Mariachi, I've heard a couple of different versions of this financing, but I'd love to know how you financed it.

Because I've heard experimental medical procedures, I've heard selling your sort of body to science.

How was that financed?

Yeah, that's one of the strangest things.

The legend kept growing around El Mariachi.

And it's one of the few times you'll hear a legend where it was all literally true.

I mean, it was, it was as crazy as it sounded.

But back then, you know, I mean, I was from a family of 10 kids.

There was no borrowing from mom and dad to go make a movie.

That was on me. I was already paying my way through school and I already had two jobs.

I had a job as a cartoonist. I had a job working at the university and barely making rent and tuition.

So to go make a movie, even though people would say, oh, 7 ,000, that's so cheap for a 16 -millimeter movie.

Oh, yeah, you got $7 ,000 sticking out of your pocket?

Who has that? So you had to kind of take down a score.

And the only way you could actually go do a big number was to go to this.

It was one of the biggest universities in the country at the time.

They had this thing called Pharmaco, which was a medical research facility.

And it's only like a fourth stage where it's already been tested many times.

And who took a chance on you or how did you increase the odds of that happening?

Because I guess it was Sundance.

Was that the trigger?

No, it was already bought by Sundance.

It was already bought by Sundance.

So how did that happen?

I had this crazy idea.

I'd made this short film by myself.

It was a wind -up camera.

It was eight minutes long.

It was called Bedhead.

Bedhead's online. And I utilized it to use slow motion and all kinds of things that I couldn't use on a video camera.

I really wanted to show off what I could do with that little camera.

It was a World War II camera, the little wind -up ones.

I mean, a piece of junk.

but it could do stuff it couldn't do a video shot that put it in festivals won a bunch of festivals and I was like wow I did that all by myself with eight hundred dollars it's eight minutes if I did that times 10 I could do an 80 minute movie for eight thousand dollars or less because it would be dialogue scenes it wouldn't be wall -to -wall action like that short film I could pad it out for five grand I felt like I was getting away with something coming up with this idea thinking how come no one's ever done this before let me go try it this summer let me try for the Spanish video market because they

make them for like 30 grand but i'll guarantee no one sees it i'll call it a mariachi which is basically if you're going to the action section you won't buy a movie call or rent a movie called the guitar player that promises no action at all but i just thought you know i had a sense of humor and i thought let me make it kind of don't really want people to see it i just want to be able to test out these ideas and see if it's possible shot shot shot cut it cut it cut it went to sell it in la because that's where the distributors were for those u .s distributed spanish language movies because i cut

it i know people can and watched the whole thing so I was I'm a pretty good editor I cut this really snazzy trailer that just made you want to watch the movie and he said how much did it cost again I said 7 ,000 well that's pretty good most trailers cost 20 or 30 no no the whole film cost 7 ,000 I said oh come on I said no the whole thing I shot it I shot it really low budget but I'm gonna can I come up and talk to you so he had me come up and I told him I plan on making two or three of these like a trilogy of these guy with a guitar case as just a test and I'm wondering what else I should put on my

demo tape because Because my award -winning short film has been doing well.

I think it's kind of like a dollar's trilogy.

And I can get you work right now off of this.

I said, really? He goes, yeah, I'd send this to the studios.

Just put subtitles on it and I'll send it to him.

So I subtitled it, sent it.

He got me a two -year deal right away at Columbia Pictures.

Not to even release Mariachi.

Mariachi was just a calling card. But it happened to so quick.

I mean, I was really young.

I was, what, 22, 23.

I really thought I was going to make some test films first and have a chance to come up with what my big idea was.

That was in no rush.

gosh, I really wanted to be prepared.

I really wanted to learn every job and really know what I was doing.

So this suddenly caught me by surprise because now they're asking, well, you're a filmmaker now.

And he even wrote me down as a writer director.

And I guess a writer director, I guess I wrote the script.

So yeah, I guess I'm a writer director.

I really thought of myself that way.

And I was suddenly, this young kid plunged into this world and I suddenly had to come up with a bunch of original ideas because this was my shot.

It was too quick. I was not prepared.

So I thought, well, look, you guys liked El Mariachi.

Why don't we just remake that?

remake it with like antonio banderas in spain and we'll just cast it up and just remain they said okay that's a good idea but we want to test screen on mariachi first to make sure people aren't think that's a downer ending when the girl gets killed so they made a film print they tested it people liked it the way it was they decided to take it to festivals and i completely protested it's like this is my practice film no one was ever supposed to see this give me two thousand dollars this is my debut baton ball don't put this out for the world to see this out if i knew people were going gonna see

give me two thousand dollars i'll go reshoot half of it just knowing people were gonna see it as my first film and they said no you don't know what you have here it's very special and they took it out and they went to telluride toronto and uh the the head of sundance came to me at toronto and said don't show it at any more festivals and you can bring it to sundance and put it in competition because you know he knew it would do really well there and it wasn't and i was already bought by columbia so i was one of the few films usually that's already had a distributor and we took it and um i had a great little

talk i would do before to set it up because i had to disclaim why it was the way it was.

And I said, well, when you see the Columbia logo come on in the front, the logo probably costs more than the whole movie.

So everything you watch after that, just know that I, how I did it.

I wanted people to know how I did it.

I really wanted to deconstruct how I was done because I would have wanted to know that as a film student who felt coming from a family of 10 kids living in Texas, people constantly saying, you want to be a filmmaker?

Oh, you need to move to LA.

That you could stay where you are and come up with something that could be sold.

hold, I just wanted to get on top of a mountain and tell everybody.

So that's why I put out a book.

And that's why even before each screening, I would explain how it was even possible because I knew they would be wondering because nobody had really ever done it.

It wasn't that it was impossible.

Just nobody had done it before.

No one ever thought that way.

People kind of forgot that that's how movies really started.

It was always like a couple of guys with a windup camera and Buster Keaton in front.

It wasn't a business yet.

When it became a business, suddenly everyone had a job and you needed 200 people because it was now an industry.

That's not what the art form was originally.

It was just the manipulation of moving images, and you can do that with two people, one person.

That was a breakthrough idea, and so Bahamian would tell them, I just took stock in what I had.

My friend Carlos, he's got a ranch in Mexico.

Okay, that'll be where the bad guy's at. His cousin owns a bar.

The bar's where it's going to be the first initial shootouts where it'll be all the bad guys hang out.

His other cousin owns a bus line.

Okay, there'll be an action scene with a bus at some point.

There's a big action scene in the middle of the movie with a bus.

He's got a pit bull.

Okay, he's in the movie.

His other friend had a turtle he found okay the turtle is in the movie because people will think we had an animal wrangler and that'll suddenly raise production value so you i wrote everything around what we had so you never had to go search and you never had to spend anything on the movie the movie cost really nothing it was really just the fact that i wanted to shoot it on film instead of video so that it would look more expensive and try and tell people you know i made it for 70 000 try to sell it for like 70 000 said it ended up going to columbia and getting released And that story really,

when we won Sundance, the audience award, my acceptance speech said, you're going to get a lot more entries next year.

When people find out that this is the one that won, a movie made with no money, no crew, everyone's going to pick up a camera and start making their own movies.

And it's been flooded with entries since then.

It was really a real change in the paradigm.

And it was only out of necessity.

It wasn't my big idea that it could be done.

I really just thought, I don't want to take anyone with me.

Even my best friend wanted wanted to come help on my movie shoot from mariachi i said no because i gotta go to mexico and this camera i borrowed you know it's probably gonna break down the first day i don't want to i'll jinx it if i start bringing too many people down i don't mind failing i just don't like failing at a bunch of other in front of a bunch of other people so when they go back and they say probably trying to make a movie for no money idiot he got stranded in mexico i really didn't think it would work and i was surprised and that's the best i tell people is just be naive stay naive

save, throw it away, don't overthink it.

I didn't overthink it at all because I would have treated it completely differently had I thought I would ever even show it to anybody.

Had I thought I would go to a festival and I would have submitted, I would have spent 10 times as much. I would have gone and borrowed money and done all.

Instead, it was like one take, one take, one take.

Everything was one take, even if it didn't work because I had the film so expensive.

So I would go and it was a noisy camera and it was a soundless camera.

I mean, it would make so much noise, you couldn't record sound.

So I had to record sound the way you're doing right now.

So I would shoot a take put the camera away get the sound out put the mic up close so for those people yeah we have two mics attached to a little recording device I would put the mic as close as you have it so I got great sound but it was out of sync but you kind of talk in your own rhythm so if you say hi my name is you know Robert put the camera away you can't do the audio hi my name is Robert it kind of comes you can pretty much get it because I don't like rubbery lips so you look at mariachi it's all in sync except where it started to get out of sync I cut away to the dog or I cut away to

a close -up and it created this really snappy editing style but it was really just to get it back in sync because i couldn't stand that but that was the whole idea you know it's like let me just try and do all these things myself and see if we can put it together it reminds me of jack ma i mean it's very consistent among these people who seem to come out of nowhere and build something very big of course there are exceptions but jack ma of alibaba i said you know we had a couple of advantages when we started we had no experience no money and no plan and so every dollar we spent we had to consider

very very very carefully my plan was i had a really good plan this was the plan was i'm gonna go shoot one take of everything because the film is the most expensive item if i just shoot two takes there's a couple things with that this is freedom of limitations you know there's almost more freeing to know i gotta use only these items turtle bar ranch you almost completely free within that you know you almost can do not anything because that would be almost too many options but you're just put into a box one of my favorite movies i did with quentin was called four rooms where they said we're all

doing short films we all have the same criteria has to be set in one room has to be new year's eve and you have to use the bellhop the freedom of limitations was enormous i mean you watch that short and it goes all over the room by the end we burn down the room i mean it's it's almost some more exciting to know that you were in in a box and you could be creative within that box so now that so many things are available to you you want to limit yourself in a way so i try to limit time i try to limit money so that we can really get still keep that essence of creativity and deliver on the screen something

that just looks much bigger so that you can retain your freedom creative freedom because if you start spending more money suddenly the financiers rightfully so the studios or you know the the executives will be over your shoulder constantly questioning every move you make because they want their money back.

But if you keep the budget low, it's a win -win situation.

If the movie does great, it's a great success.

If the movie doesn't do great, it's still a success because it didn't cost very much and it'll make back its money over time.

That's kind of where I've kind of lived and breathed.

I'm about to jump out of the box a little bit more and do some things that are a little bigger just to learn more because you just learn more when you go and do other kinds of assignments, but where it's really the most fun.

And that's why you asked, how do you keep the morale high?

The morale is always high on the set because they know subscriptions.

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and now susan kane number one new york times best -selling author of quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking which spent eight years on the new york times bestsellers list and bittersweet how sorrow and longing make us whole and award -winning speaker whose ted talks have garnered more than 46 million views you can find susan on instagram Instagram at Susan Cain Author.

Susan, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

I have been looking forward to having you on the show for some time.

And we have a lot of terrain to possibly cover.

So we may end up having a part two and three, but I don't want to get ahead of myself.

I thought that we could look at public speaking just for a second because many people will will associate you with this blockbuster mega hit of a TED Talk.

And rumor has it that you straight in the delivery room from the get go were a natural born killer on stage.

This is true. Were you born a spectacular public speaker?

Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, everybody listening, you can't see Tim right now, but he has a very devilish smile on his face because of course, the answer is the complete opposite so I had a lifelong while dating back to middle school I know exactly when it started I had an almost lifelong fear of public speaking and a lot of people say they're afraid of public speaking and you know they're telling the truth but like they didn't have a fear the way I had a fear of it it was so extreme what was the triggering event event.

Oh, okay. The triggering event was I had recently switched to a new middle school and I was in an English literature class.

And I probably appeared to the teacher in that class to be not a shy person at all because I love English.

So I was always participating.

Anyway, she called me up to the front of the room.

We were doing Macbeth.

And she called me up with a friend of mine and she said, okay, you're going to play Lady Macbeth and your friend Rob is going going to play a Macbeth and just improvise this scene and for me as a shy person in a new school this was like total kryptonite and I couldn't say anything I just completely blanked out and just stood there dumbly at the front of the class and finally just had to kind of sit back down red -faced not having said a word that sounds terrible my god it's making my palms sweat but just listening to it.

Yeah, yeah. You know, and I know this now, now that I've studied all this stuff, that if you have an experience like that, it gets encoded into your amygdala, which is the part of your brain that registers all your fears.

And then the amygdala for the rest of your life is doing its job by saying, oh, you know, I'm gonna steer you clear of any situation ever approximating anything like that literature class ever again.

So after that, anytime I had to give a speech and I did it, you know, I used to be a lawyer and on Wall Street and stuff, anytime I would do it, I would just sort of suffer my way through.

It was the bathroom.

That is what I do at any dinner of more than one or two people.

I have to exit not just the conversations, but the environment to just recharge my batteries and gather my bearings for a few minutes and then go back out.

It's like you're feeling a kind of overstimulation in the setting.

Overstimulation, yeah.

I mean, that's so interesting because I've heard you talk before about moving to Austin and having these group dinners.

And I thought, oh, that's so interesting that that's what Tim wants to do, because I would never choose to socialize that way.

I always love to socialize one -on -one, almost the way we're doing right now, you know, sitting here just talking.

There's a kind of boiling point for me in terms of size, like four to six I can handle.

It depends for me also on the environment, I think more so than the number of people.

So when I do these these group dinners, I will generally host them at home or have them at one of my friend's homes, not in a popular restaurant like I did last night.

I'm just going to say what's interesting about that is how strategic you are about it.

And I've really noticed this with people.

So we were just talking about Ted.

I was just talking to Chris Anderson who runs Ted about this whole phenomenon and he describes himself as an introvert too.

And he said he loves group dinners if there's a specific topic that everybody is gathered there to discuss and he knows it's going to be something really substantive, then he's in his comfort zone, you know, but if it's just kind of this amorphous socializing, he wants to leave. So just on the tactical practical side, I also tend to very frequently cook the meal for the group so that I have a task while people are arriving and talking.

Also deliberate because I'm often inviting people don't know one another so I want them to have a chance to chat without having me as a mutual crutch if that makes sense yep but in any case we could talk about that yeah no and that's a really common strategy I hear that from many people yeah but it's uh I can play extrovert I'm good at playing extrovert but up until say sixth grade I wouldn't even go out to recess I would sit on a step and read usually books about sharks and fish because I wanted to be a marine biologist, but I wouldn't even go out to recess.

Wow. So a lot of what you talk about and have written about certainly strikes a chord. Now I feel like I want to ask you so many questions about this.

Like I'm really curious if we talked about, if we could go back and talk to sixth grade you right this minute, like would sixth grade you have any idea that you would have the life path that yours has taken that's so public?

Absolutely not. No, definitely not.

I mean, what happened in sixth grade also just for people who might be wondering, well, what happened in sixth grade.

If it's up until sixth grade, what happened in sixth grade, or I should say more accurately, the summer of fifth grade is that I had a huge growth spurt and I had been bullied really badly.

I was born premature and very small and I was bullied really, really badly up until the end of fifth grade.

Then I left to a summer camp and gained about 30 pounds of muscle and grew four to five inches over the summer, came back.

And then - It's like a Captain America narrative.

Yeah, exactly. And then the bullies who had been accustomed to bullying me tried their usual playbook and I just went on this vigilante spree like the Punisher and that changed the social dynamics so I was able to actually go outside and do things that I wanted to do at recess from that point on.

So it didn't mean that I socialized a lot more, but I had more mobility.

So that is what happened.

But like you, and this is part of the reason why I wanted to start with this question about overcoming a fear of public speaking, is that it's when people see the finished product, it's easy to assume that it comes from an attribute as opposed to a skill.

Yes. And in fact, a lot of what appears to be natural appears only to be natural because it started off very, very unnatural.

And someone has worked at chipping away at it over time.

I think that's true.

I think so often when you see someone who's really good at almost anything, it's because they actually started out exactly the opposite and then they cared so much about fixing that problem.

Yeah. But in terms of how I overcame that fear, and I have this kind of evangelical desire to share it because it was so extreme.

I feel like if I could do it, then I know anyone can overcome any fear.

So first of all, I spent years sitting in therapists' offices kind of cozily discussing, well, what might be the sources of this fear?

And, you know, what do I trace it back to?

And that does no good at all.

I'm actually a big believer in therapy, but not for this type of issue.

you. So what really does it, if you're afraid of something, you have to expose yourself very slowly to the thing that you fear in really manageable doses.

So you can't start off by giving the TED Talk.

So in my case, I signed up for the seminar, and it was a seminar for people with public speaking anxiety here in New York.

And you'd get there, and on the very first day, all you had to do was stand up, say your name, sit back down, declare victory, you're finished.

And that's it. What was the organization?

Oh gosh. Was it Toastmasters or something else?

No. And I am a big fan of Toastmasters, but this was almost like more remedial than Toastmasters.

Toastmasters light.

Yeah. This was like pre -Toastmasters.

Yeah. So the guy's name, he's amazing.

His name is Charles Charles DiCagno. And you can find his organization.

It's speakeasy .com.

And I think it's spelled with three E's.

Perfect. And I'll put a link in the show notes for people as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Cause I really recommend him.

Yeah. And so, you know, you'd come back the next week and maybe you'd stand up and he would do these things.

Like he'd have people stand on either side of you.

So you didn't feel all alone up there on stage.

It's brilliant. Yeah.

Yeah. And then the audience would ask you questions like, where are you from and where'd you go to college?

So really easy stuff.

You answer the questions and you're done.

And it's like, if you do that little by little by little, you actually really can overcome it.

It's kind of crazy, but true.

But I will say. I know.

So yes, it's a different beast. So how do you go from talking about your favorite color on stage with two people next to you to Ted then?

then okay so i graduated from that to toastmasters which i also completely recommend and should i describe what that is yes please yeah okay so toastmasters it's a worldwide organization you can absolutely find one near you because they're everywhere and it's basically this non -for -profit thing where you sign up for a group that meets near you and once every two weeks you get together and you practice public speaking together and they have this ritualized way of doing it and And some of the time you're practicing speaking off the top of your head, and sometimes it's a prepared speech. And it's

just kind of giving you that exposure therapy of putting you in the beast of the thing that most frightens you.

You have to show up every two weeks and do it.

So I did that. But then the next stage after that, and it was my husband's idea, I hired a coach for the full week before the TED Talk.

It was a really amazing guy named Jim Fife, who I also completely recommend.

mend. And since then he has coached many other Ted speakers.

So I worked with him morning till night for a full week before the talk.

And for you. Yeah. And what did the working with him look like?

Okay. So he, he did a really brilliant thing.

He was very psychologically attuned.

And I said to him, you know, I'm really comfortable in general talking to people one -on -one and kind of like cozily sitting on a couch and talking about life.

I love that. For me at that point though, getting up on a stage and holding forth was the hard thing.

So he said, okay, let's practice your talk sitting on the couch and just talk to me about it.

And we did that for like two days.

And it was only after that, that we then moved to the stage and started getting into kind of the theatrics of it.

That kind of transition was so helpful.

I just want to note that this is I spend so much time with and i'm so obsessed with Good teachers.

Yeah Good coaches. This is very common where they will effectively say let's start from where you are right now Right, they will always return if they sense any type of overwhelm or fear to bring you back to it So he saw me, you know I had only just met him and he saw me not in the most flattering circumstances circumstances and yet I didn't feel embarrassed by that.

Did he do anything in the beginning to assess you or establish a baseline or was it more of an interview that he used like an intake?

Do you remember? It wasn't really formal like that.

You know, he's such a human guy.

It was just like we were just talking, you know, we were just, yeah.

Disguised as intake, smart fella.

Yeah. Yeah. And then so the amazing thing to me now is I now super ironically have a career as a public speaker.

Like I travel the world going and giving talks to all different companies and conferences all over the place.

Like I asked you, well, if we could tell sixth grade Tim where he would be, what would he say?

And I say that to myself too.

Like if you could have even told me eight years ago that this would be my life, I would have been so shocked by it.

And now I've come to like it.

Did you have any particular pregame ritual or anything that you did in the hours leading up to your talk that helped or that you didn't do?

I have things now. Back then, I just suffered.

What do you have now?

Now, I have a few things.

I mean, I do deep breathing, just like everyone else.

I'm sure you've heard that a million times, but it's got to be real deep breathing, you know, where you really feel your belly and your diaphragm filling up.

But for me, what I also do is I usually think to myself, and I do this especially when I'm speaking to an audience that I find more intimidating, you know, like a group of finance people at an investment bank or something.

Right. I will say to myself, there, I am sure, is one person in this audience who has a child who is shy or introverted.

And if that child has a better life because of one tidbit that that person hears years today, then it's all good.

And that pulls me out of myself instantly.

Yeah. It gives you also a hurdle that you can clear for winning the presentation, so to speak.

Yeah. Right. It's a manageable goal, but I think it's, it feels deeper than that to me.

It feels also like, I think when people get nervous about speaking, obviously they're really nervous about being judged, right?

But this completely shifts the energy where it's not any longer about how how anybody judges me it's about can i help that kid out there i want to say also that part of the reason i am more than happy actually excited to spend so much time talking about this is that it is not specific to public speaking right this just happens to be a very common fear and perceived weakness of many many many people also yeah as a side note what warren buffett says is his greatest Ever Investment, but more specifically, a Dale Carnegie course that he took in public speaking, because it magnified his ability to

do almost everything else, to communicate effectively, both in spoken word, but also in the written word in some respects.

I've never, I don't think I've ever, I've ever spoken about this, but I also did Toastmasters.

And if you have trouble finding it, And oftentimes there are large companies that will have within their HQ or any large location their own Toastmasters group.

And that's actually how I found it in San Jose initially.

It was at Adobe. So I would go in and I would do this Toastmasters.

And your description of having this very logical progression of small wins layered upon small wins, getting up on stage and then getting off stage.

Getting up on stage, having two people next to you and answering a few questions and getting off stage.

is so incredibly effective.

And I'm laughing right now where my friend's wife was.

And I gave my presentation.

I felt reasonably confident about the content, but I wasn't comfortable with any of the performance aspects of trying to keep attention.

So I gave my draft of this talk over and over again until I could get the dogs to sit and stare at me, somewhat bewildered, but to hold their attention.

That was the litmus test for me to graduate to giving a rough draft in front of humans for those people out there who are wondering whether this all comes naturally to me.

It does not at all.

Have you talked about that before or is this the first time you've been doing that?

Certainly, I don't think I've talked about it on the podcast. and for the TED Talk also, something I did which I did not do for the South By talk which I thought really made a difference was I practiced giving the talk in front of small groups of strangers once I had a reasonably polished version and I asked friends of mine...

I talked to my friend Adam Grant who is a very dear friend and a really good speaker and who also started out as a very nervous and by his description a terrible public speaker he says he used to get like terrible reviews from his students and he just worked and worked and worked at it and now he's the most popular professor at Wharton but okay so I was talking to Adam about all this and so he said so I'm leaving for TED on Sunday morning right to fly out to California which is where it was at that time and he says oh I'm going to pull together a group of friends and you can practice your talk

in front of them and so this is Friday night and I'm leaving Sunday morning and so i show up at this apartment full of adam and his friends and i think that i'm pretty well done with the talk and this is the first time that i'm giving it in front of any kind of group because i didn't have the foresight of what you just described and not only was i so nervous but i realized from the feedback that a lot of the content was all wrong and it's friday night and i'm leaving you know like the next day basically or the day after the next day so i went home and I just spent the whole entire night rewriting

the whole final third of the talk.

And then I'm like on the plane going out to TED trying to memorize the new talk.

I don't recommend that kind of approach. You need to get real people in front of you.

This is just like entrepreneurship and people try to get the product perfect before exposing it to any prospective clients.

You really need to get into the messy reality of what a live audience is.

or a real customer looks like.

And the same was true for me.

I made a lot of changes in the last few days, which I thought were just going to be fine -tuned.

And I was like, oh, actually, I really need to completely change by 30 % of this.

And I was very, very nervous before the TED Talk.

And I came off stage and I did not think that I, I didn't think that I blew it, but I didn't think that I did a great job.

I came off stage thinking that there were definitely bits and pieces I could have done better.

but seems to have worked out okay wait but i want to come back to one thing that you said for the benefit of people who are listening now so you said that you still are really nervous when you give a talk but are you really as nervous as you used to be because i i really want people to understand that you can get to a point you might still have butterflies it's not like the nerves completely disappear but they get to i in my experience and from all the literature that I've studied on this, they really do get to a point where you can manage them.

And the difference between manageable and non -manageable is gigantic in terms of its effect on your life and your career and everything.

So I just want to make sure that people know that.

Yeah, I can clarify.

So it depends a lot on the event.

Right. So if it's, we're going to do a Q &A and it's a friend of mine interviewing me on stage, that's not, from my perspective, of really public speaking.

I mean, it is, but at this point, I could do that with zero preparation.

If it's anything resembling a keynote, if it is Tim on stage talking to an audience and they expect something that has been well rehearsed, my physiological response is still very strong.

I get really sweaty hands.

I pace. I have very minimal contact with anyone beforehand.

hand. But let me mention a few things.

Number one, both Mike Tyson and Dean Martin used to vomit before nearly every performance.

But the way that they psychologically contended with that evolved over time.

And since I mentioned Mike Tyson, Customato, who was the trainer who really, in a lot of respects, I think boxing scholars or boxing fans would agree, made Tyson into what Tyson was at his prime as an athlete, used to say something along the following, that the hero and the coward feel the same thing.

It's how they respond.

Yes. Oh, I so believe that.

Yeah. And I mean, there is no courage without the presence of fear.

And for me, I have come to see those those physiological symptoms that used to make me panic, that used to make me feel like I was doing something wrong, that used to make me feel like I was unprepared, as simple precursors to a performance.

The way that I frame them for myself is completely different.

And I've learned to view it as this energetic asset that I can use.

And that has made all the difference.

It has has decreased in some circumstances, but certainly before TED.

I mean, I'd given hundreds of different presentations, and it was like I was getting on stage for the first time.

In part also, for people who don't know, they are very, as they should be, strict about many things at TED, including running over.

If running over, and I want to say, and this is exactly what they should say, but in effect, they say, if you run over, you should not run over.

Number one, do not run over.

If you run over, if you get to the point where you're like 30 seconds over, we will come up and remove you from stage.

And while I'm preparing and while I'm rehearsing, one of the things that made me most stressed out is that my finish times were really variable.

And I would say like 30, 40 % of the time I ran over.

Then other times I would run two minutes under, but miss something really, really important because I was rushing.

And I was like, good Good God, this is just a crapshoot.

Like, I am at the craps table with my timing, and that really was a concern for me.

So that was another element that made Ted unique for me, was that degree of cutoff.

Yeah, I felt that way too.

And I did end up going over it by over a minute.

Oh, good for you. And there it is.

And they were just like, we cannot stop this performance.

I don't know about that.

But I want to say also for anybody who is listening and who is right now in the grip of this kind of fear and isn't sure whether they can really get past it.

Also, like what is waiting for you on the other side of it is so gigantic because there's just there's something weird about public speaking where it has such disproportionate value to, in a way, what you're investing in it.

You know, like you're going up on stage for 18 minutes or 40 minutes or whatever, or maybe within your own workplace, you know, even giving a two minute talk, suddenly everybody is regarding you as a leader and as someone who they can turn to in a new way from if you hadn't been willing to put yourself forward in that way.

Definitely. I mean, there's public speaking as the force multiplier for the value of your other skills, which is absolutely true.

and then public speaking in a way is also a wonderful diagnostic tool.

And what I mean by that is I remember talking to a friend of mine who is a wealth manager for a lot of muckety mucks who you would recognize.

And he said, I know them generally better than therapists they've been seeing for a decade within the first few hours because money brings up everything.

Talking about money brings up the full spectrum of someone's insecurities, fears, desires, neuroses.

Sex also, true. And public speaking, I think, if it makes you remotely nervous when you start to learn public speaking, at least for me, it kind of brings up all your stuff.

So if you were simply interested in personal growth, growth it brings to the surface many different pieces of your personality and psyche that you can then work on in a way that transfers to other areas so that to me was my experience and I find really interesting it's like okay well maybe you don't have to play hide and go seek with talk therapy for 20 years to find all of the bits and pieces when if rather than following these different ginger bit trails.

You can use certain fearful circumstances to just bring it all right, or a lot of it to the surface.

That was my experience.

I'm not saying it's true for everybody, but it was one of those things like talking about money, talking about sex or public speaking.

It's like, okay, now we just bring everything to the forefront.

So for me, that was also, even if I had not had any interest in getting on stage and giving presentations, it would have been valuable in and of itself.

Yeah, no, that makes complete sense.

Are there other things that you're fearful of or have been afraid of that you've overcome?

No, I mean, that was really the big one for me.

But yeah, we were talking about this before, I guess.

You know, my bugaboo in general is that I just tend to be a worrier.

So other than the experiences I had with public speaking, it's not like I have full on panic or anything like that.

It's more like it's a very familiar companion for me.

So I've had to just come up with various hacks around it.

it. What are some of your hacks?

This is going to get us into another big topic.

And you kind of alluded to it, but does that mean that suddenly your rent is dependent on writing?

Right. Okay. So I had wanted to be a writer from the time I was four.

And then for a whole bunch of reasons and like so many people, I took some creative writing classes in college and I decided, you know, I'm not actually that good at this and I need to make a living.

And I also kind of had a a desire, I think, to show myself that I could be out there as a kind of alpha person out in the world of finance or something.

So I went to law school and I practiced law, Wall Street law for almost a decade.

And during that time that I was practicing law, it was so all consuming that I completely forgot about the fact that I had wanted to be a writer.

It wasn't like, you know, I was walking around conscious of this broken dream or something.

I'd completely forgotten.

And the first few years of practicing law, I really loved it.

It was just this kind of crazy adventure that I was on.

And as the years went by, it started to get really tough for me.

You know, I'm not a very natural lawyer in a million different ways, but I was on this partner track and I was committed to it.

And then came the day, and I think I may have told you about this in an earlier correspondence, but then came the day when a senior partner in my firm walked in and said, I was supposed to be up for partner that year.

And he said, well, we're not going to be putting you up.

And the funny thing is to this day, I don't really know if he meant we're not putting you up ever for partner or just not anytime soon.

I don't really know what it meant.

All I knew was number one, I burst into tears.

And number two, here was my get out of jail.

And not to spoil it with the pressures of paying the rent and all those other things, or the pressures of needing needing to derive professional status from it.

So I set up a little side business teaching people negotiation skills and that was how I was paying the rent but the thing I was really doing in my heart was this beloved hobby of writing.

This is super, super, super, super, super important and there are, I think it's true in creative fields which is pretty much every field but just for the sake of illustration, writing, music, et cetera that also in entrepreneurship, you hear these stories of desperation, where necessity is the mother of invention.

And, you know, bada bing, bada boom, magic wand, and then there's a billion dollar company, or there's JK Rowling, or whatever it is.

But those are, in my experience, the outliers.

They make for great cover stories in magazines.

But the fact of the matter is that From what I've seen, certainly with guests on this podcast, is that, for instance, Soman Chainani, who has a number of mega successful novels, but he had a SAT prep counseling service that he offered well past the point that his first book was successful because he wanted to always feel like he had a safety net.

Yes, really long time, especially by Tim Ferriss standards.

standards I listen to you and like look at your life trajectory I'm like how does he do that but lots of cheating with format is the short answer but I don't want to take us off track so yeah it took from start to finish it was about seven years I will say in my defense that during those seven years I also had two children and was raising them so that was part of it but I also just think I'm kind of a slow writer.

Like I like to really, really think about everything super deeply.

And what I think is probably people might not know, I had a deadline as all writers do.

And I turned in some sort of draft upon my deadline coming due, you know, after 18 months or two years.

And my editor basically read it and said, this is terrible.

And she said, you know, go back and completely throw that out, start from scratch and take all the time that you need.

And you might think that when that happened, that I would have been really bummed, but I was actually elated because I knew that it was terrible and I knew that I needed much more time and I had no idea what I was doing.

I'd never written anything before.

So yeah, I was just really happy to have that time.

And it's actually really unusual.

Like usually in publishing, they'd given me a big advance for the book and usually they want their advance back and they're not willing to delay like that.

So that was huge. A very understanding editor.

Yeah, she's brilliant.

And I'm working with her again on my next book.

It's also smart in the sense that a mediocre book is more of a liability than no book at all.

Yes, yeah. For everyone involved.

For everyone involved.

Yeah. And because I have this philosophy about writing that it's the deep love that has to be protected at all costs, because of that, I don't care how much time it takes.

I'm just interested in doing it as well as I can.

What does your writing process at this point look like?

You had your experience with that book.

And now when you are writing, do you have a daily practice?

Does it go through phases of research period, then organizing, then putting all of that into prose through synthesis?

What are your writing routines?

Or how do you think about writing these days?

So for me, I take whatever thesis I'm working with, and then I spend a year or two just walking around the world, looking at everything through the lens of that thesis.

So it used to be introverts, and now it's onto a new topic.

And I'm taking crazy notes through that period.

So every conversation that I have, every book I read, it's all going in.

How do you take and organize your notes?

Do you do it in notebooks?

Do you do it digitally?

I know this is nerdy, but...

No, it's not nerdy at all.

I'm into it because a lot of writers do it differently.

The reason I'm laughing is I'm thinking when you hear my answer, you're going to know that I need a consultation with you for the next book because I don't do it in a super systemic way.

Basically, all those conversations, all those ideas and notes and thoughts I'm having, I stick them all into one Word document.

And that document becomes about 700 or 800 pages by the time I'm done.

And then I go through that document.

And I'm kind of tagging as I go along.

and then I'm separating everything out by topic so I end up with like eight or nine loose leaf binders that are organized by topic but in each of those binders it's just like one big one big massive notes and then I think about where do I want everything.

Whenever I'm emotionally moved by one of the ideas that I'm taking notes on I try to write out the riff around that idea right then and there because you don't know if that emotion is going to come back so you have You have to capture it when it happens.

I think it's a perfectly fine system.

I feel like technology must have come up with something better.

I do it in Microsoft Word. There are probably better tools available, but I would say also that a lot of people confuse new tools for better content.

It's very easy, at least let's speak for myself for a second.

When I'm writing, I have to disallow myself from thinking about, say, marketing.

because marketing is fun and exciting and easy for me because I've had insomnia as a kid and watched too many infomercials or something.

In any case, it's a way to procrastinate doing the harder piece, which is the actual research and digging and prose.

That's the hard part for me.

It always has been, but it's the most important part.

And I think similarly, a lot of folks can become consumed by upgrading their tools, multiplying their tools versus just the words.

You got to put the words in.

And I have some questions about this Word doc, though.

So when you're going through and adding things to the Word doc, and you come in and you're tagging things so you can separate them, and you mentioned binders, so you're printing this stuff out and then separating them, does that mean that when you put in a new note in the Word doc, you go to a new page if it's tagged differently so you can separate them, tag differently, it would seem like you would have to cut up the page into multiple pieces.

So do you start a new page?

Are there any particular ways that you tag?

For instance, would it be a chapter name?

Or would it be a theme?

What would a tag look like?

Yeah, it would just be a topic or a theme.

So every time I'm adding a new note, if I know that it relates to something I've already done, then I'll search for the thing I've already done so I can add it to that section to make it easier later.

But sometimes I don't or I can't think of it and then I'll just add it to the end of the document.

yeah which control f right word yeah yeah good to go yeah simple simple works robert rodriguez the filmmaker keeps a journal i think he does puts it in almost every day at midnight and it's word doc word docs yep it works yeah yeah i actually i will say i tried for this next book i spent a few days reading the instructions for scrivener one of these programs and i just ended I ended up thinking, you know, this isn't for me.

It looks great, but...

Scrivener, well, some other time we can sit down.

That is one tool that if you set it up really simply and you don't use 98 % of the features, I find really useful just because you can create a view by which you see all of your separate documents or actually I should say rather you see your tentative table of contents on the left side in a vertical pane, and then you can look at what you're on the right -hand side, then I would have it set up so that I have...

Which I'm still doing more research, but I'm starting to write.

For me, the writing, like the sitting down with my laptop and thinking about it all, that's like, I want to say it's my happy place, but that's not really the best description.

It feels like it's this place that I go deep in my mind.

And I really love being there.

and it's like no matter what happens to be going on in my outside life i always have those few hours a day where i'm going to a cafe or a library or whatever and i'm sitting with my laptop and my cappuccino and i'm just doing it like i'm stressing the emotional aspect because that's so huge for me and i feel like i train myself to associate writing with all of these pleasures of you know know sitting around in cafes and things like that.

Do you have a consistent time when you sit down with your cappuccino and do this are you a morning writer or are you a catch -as -catch -can writer are you an evening writer I mean you also have kids you have other obligations so when do you tend to do your writing or do your best writing you can answer it however you like.

Well I mean there's what I do and there's what would be ideal but as you say I have kids so my routine is that I drop my kids off at school that's at around eight then i go and i either play tennis or do yoga every day and then after that i do my writing and that's a pretty good time for me but what time of day would that typically end up being yeah that probably ends up being around 10 or so that i'm starting yeah but if i had no other obligations the best times of day would be more like either seven in the morning and also super late at night so two time periods that i have no access to for for this stage

of life. And you start writing.

This is really interesting to me, hopefully interesting to other people.

So you start, let's say, around 10.

Do you break for lunch?

Do you skip lunch? Do you have a standard type of lunch that you would have?

And the reason I ask is that I think part of the reason so many writers seem to work between the hours of, say, let's make this up, but 10 p .m. and 7 .30 a .m. and they tend to either be night owls like me or early risers is that there are fewer distractions and they get a relatively uninterrupted block of three to five hours.

But if you're starting at 10, then most people would have lunch scheduled shortly thereafter, like two hours later.

So do you break for lunch?

Do you have something really small?

How do you handle that?

Because for me, just speaking personally, I might have time, of course I have time for a five minute phone call but if I do a five minute phone call about something very mechanical or mundane like calendaring stuff or whatever and I'm juggling 15 pieces that were on paper in my head I kind of have to start over a lot of times like I drop all those balls that I'm juggling because of the task switching so I'd love to hear, not that that's true for everybody but it's true for me what does your schedule look like then once you sit down?

I'll just kind of go until I realize that I'm not concentrating well anymore.

And very often that happens after two or three hours and I just have to take a break.

I have a lot of discipline if my brain would cooperate.

So I would happily sit there for seven hours until my kids come home from school.

But at a certain point, I'll notice that it's just not coming anymore.

And so then I'll take a break and I'll eat or something like that.

Yeah. But, you know, I would say, like you were mentioning, well, people might work at night idea that I had to learn everything in the world about digital photography.

And I was reading all these books about it and the rule of thirds and all this stuff.

And I have never had any interest in photography before or since.

It was just these two weeks of mania where I didn't want to have to be looking at that manuscript over there.

Are there any particular, I mean, you are a student of the craft, right?

You've taken creative nonfiction courses.

Are there any particular books or resources or writers who have had a significant impact on how you view or practice writing?

Oh, gosh. I'm sure the answer is yes.

I can try to buy some time if helpful.

Draft number four by John McPhee, I think, is really—I was very fortunate to spend time with him when I was an undergrad in college because he was teaching a seminar.

Yeah, Princeton. That's where I took my creative writing classes.

Yeah, so the structure, thinking about structure in the way that, a few things about structure saved me because I thrive with some type of predetermined blueprint for structure.

It's very hard for me to just freehand flow of consciousness, let things take some emergent form.

It's very hard. I do know friends who do that really, really well.

That terrifies me. So I need the scaffolding.

Right. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

Oh, I love that book.

Yeah. Such a good book.

Bird by Bird, for people who don't know the book, I will say just before getting into a short description, has saved at least a half a dozen friends of mine from the precipice.

Meaning they were at the point of throwing in the towel and just quitting their books.

And they were all writers in this case.

They were at the point where they're like, like, I'm done.

I can't do this. It's too stressful.

I don't like this. I don't want to do this.

It's going to be terrible.

And they were going to, in some cases, return their advances and just walk.

And I want to say at least half of them read this book, went on to finish their books, and their books went on to become New York Times bestsellers.

So talk about an important window for making a decision.

And the gist of the book, the title, I should say, comes first from, I think it was her brother, Anne's brother.

Anne Lamont is a writer and her brother had this experience where he'd had something like an entire semester in, I'm making this up, but let's just call it fourth grade to prepare for this end of semester project.

And he was supposed to put together a term paper on birds or something like that.

And it was like the night before he hadn't done any preparation.

And this poor kid who granted kind of deserves it because because he didn't do any prep, but nonetheless is having this like nervous breakdown at the kitchen table with like 15 books about birds and he just is paralyzed.

And I want to say it was Anne's dad who came over and like put an arm on his shoulder and said, just take it bird by bird, buddy.

Bird by bird. Something like that.

And it's sort of a psychological life raft break glass in case of emergency kit for writers who are just hitting that point.

Like maybe you did with the photography if you were just like, I want to do anything other than look at that screen or that page.

I just, I can't handle it and I don't know what to do.

So for that reason, not necessarily for the nuts and bolts of the writing process itself, but for the psychological component, it's like if you had a, if you were a top athletic coach and you had your sports specific technical coach, and then you had a mental toughness coach who also doubled as a shrink, like the mental toughness coach who doubles as a shrink is the bird by bird. Yeah.

I'm remembering she also talks about shitty first drafts.

Yes. And just those three words are incredibly helpful because you know, when you're looking at your draft and it is always really shitty at the beginning.

And so just knowing, okay, that's what it's supposed to be.

Long career is a very successful editor.

And was also is just an eclectic guy.

Went to divinity school, plays in a jazz band and really like my kind of my kind of person yeah and then we went out to sell it and i always forget if it's like 26 or 27 but nonetheless it was something like somewhere between 26 and 28 publishers turned it down really yes wow and then the but you only need one that's the thing it's like you it's not about how many people don't get it yeah it's about having the right person or people who do get it and i mean which is so clear with your book right it's like you don't need all the people in the world to think it's a good idea.

You don't need half the people in the world to think it's a good idea.

You need the people who it resonates with to have it resonate.

Yeah, that's right.

And it does not need to be millions of people.

It could be, but it doesn't have to be.

And I had a note down also to just, and we don't have to necessarily spend a ton of time on this, but just to clarify the talk about introversion versus shyness.

I came across this when I was doing a bit of homework, which is people think of, say, Bill Gates, right?

As sort of maybe a one example of someone who could be useful in distinguishing between the two.

But could you clarify what an introvert is or how you define introvert and how it might differ from?

From somebody who's shy.

Yeah. Introversion is really about the preference for lower lower stimulation environments and you can trace it to your neurobiologies like introverts have nervous systems that react more to all the incoming stimuli and so that means that we're kind of at our most alive and happiest and switched on when things are a little more chill around us which is probably why when you're in those group dinners you're going to the restroom every so often because your nervous system wants to tone it down and extroverts have the opposite situation And the opposite, liability.

Because for an extrovert, you've got a nervous system that's reacting less to stimulation.

And that means when you're in an environment that you find too quiet, you start to get really listless and checked out.

So that's the liability there.

there. Shyness, and I always feel like my work has to do with both introversion and shyness, by the way, but shyness is much more about the fear of social judgment.

So you'll know if you're a shy person because when you encounter someone who has a neutral expression on their face, you will have a tendency to read disapproval in there and to react really strongly to the disapproval.

You feel kind of really unhorsed by it.

And it can take different forms. So it can, Or it could be a job interview or any kind of situation where you feel you might be evaluated.

So in reality, lots of introverts do tend to be shy and vice versa, but not necessarily at all.

I don't know Bill Gates personally, but my guess is that he's an introvert, but not especially shy.

And then somebody like an Eileen Fisher, who she's got this wonderful and I think it's been decades now, super successful fashion brand.

She describes herself as a shy extrovert.

So like she really wants to be around people all the time.

She wants to be connecting all the time.

You talk to her, she's constantly like setting up this workshop and that program.

And, you know, you look at her life and she's always surrounded by lots of people and things going on.

But she's often feeling intense discomfort and needing to work through that.

Yeah. I would certainly describe myself as an introvert.

And I never knew quite how to frame it until coming across your definition of preferring lower stimulation or environments with fewer stimuli.

Because ever since I was a little kid, I've been very sensitive.

I mean, my sight is very sensitive.

Right. my hearing is very sensitive yeah but I'm not shy in the sense that I don't I want to engage and ask questions and interact but if the volume is turned up too much or there are too many speakers metaphorically or physically I have a lot of difficulty parsing at all but you don't have like uh shyness would be like you know before you go into those group dinners are you feeling a kind of social anxiety.

No. Right. That's the difference.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There are so many questions that I want to explore, but let's, uh, because we have maybe 10 or 15 minutes more, let's ask a few of the questions that I, that I always like to ask.

Sure. Are there any books that you have given the most to others as a gift or any books you've gifted often to other people?

I think that the book, I've probably, for the last few years, been giving out the mopedic and a mystic or something.

You know, in the skeptical side of me, and it's a pretty deep skeptical side, it really needed somebody like Sam, who's such an extreme skeptic.

And then who very conveniently spent like, what, 28 years of his life or something investigating all these different spiritual tools and then reporting back on them.

And, you know, for me, that was a narrator I could really, I felt I could really rely on.

Fantastic book. You know, I just, I have to, because I think you'll, we were talking a bit about Sam before we started recording because we were both, you know, sort of fanboying and fangirling about this meditation app and a handful of other things.

But I haven't told you, and I don't know if I've even mentioned this publicly, but here we go.

So the first time I met Sam, this relates to Ted, went to Ted for the first time as as an attendee, which by the way, it was too much stimulation.

So I never went back.

Yeah. But I went to TED for the first time as an attendee and I was invited to one of these group dinners.

And so I go out to this group dinner and we're eating dinner and off to the side on a separate table, there's this tray of brownies and I love brownies.

It's one of my weaknesses.

It is an Achilles heel and I have zero portion control.

And these brownies are are large brownies and I sneak over kind of in between courses and I'm like, you know what, I'm going to skip one of the later courses and just substitute the brownies because I love brownies.

And so, I eat two of these brownies and about 20 minutes later, the host who I shall not name comes up to me and he goes, Tim, did you eat any of the brownies?

I go, yeah, I had two of them.

And he goes, okay, everything's going to be fine.

And I'm like, wait, what?

Everything's going to be fine?

What the hell are you talking about?

They were heavily dosed pod brownies.

And I am not a habitual pot user.

And so I suddenly, in the middle of dinner, just get hit by this tsunami of cannabis.

And you combine that with my discomfort with high stimulation environments, and I'm like, I need to get the hell out of here.

So I excuse myself to go to the restroom.

And by this point, I'm already a huge fan of Sam, but I've never had any contact with him.

So I run off to the bathroom to escape and I open the door and literally like at the sink run straight into Sam Harris in the men's room.

And I'm like, Sam Harris?

High off my rocker.

And that was my first interview.

And he looks at me kind of like, he's like, hi.

It's kind of sideways because I'm just beyond reality at that point.

And that was my first meeting with Sam.

That's hilarious. And did you tell him your brownie story?

I did. I did. I did.

I did tell him, which he appreciated because he does have some history with altered states.

But yeah, I know. I found that book and the subsequent meditation app and all of it incredibly helpful and fantastic.

The one piece of it that I'm kind of trying to explore separately because I feel like he looks at much less is the whole tradition of loving kindness meditation and all the meditations around that.

So that's really, really of interest to me.

So I'm sort of charting a different course there.

And I'll tell you, like even just last night, I was interviewing on stage this guy, Hayman Sunim.

I don't know if you've heard of him, but he's a really renowned Zen Buddhist monk from Korea.

And his books are all number one bestsellers in Korea and lots of other countries, but here he's less well -known.

But anyway, he has a new book out.

So I was doing this interview and we're up on stage so you can see the audience.

And it happens to be a pretty formal audience.

so before we start the audience is kind of sitting there kind of still in their seats and then he opens by doing a loving kindness meditation and it was so amazing to see the transformation on their faces and he did this for maybe one or two or three minutes like it wasn't long yeah and you know suddenly they're totally smiling and they're open and they're happy it's remarkable yeah it's meditation, which I was introduced to not first by Jack Kornfield, although I did spend some time with him, who's sort of of the same cohort as Sharon Salzberg.

They're close friends, and Sharon's been on the podcast. But Meng, Chad Meng Tan of Google, actually, started this class within Google called, I think it's Search Within Yourself.

It was a course that included many tools, including mindfulness.

And he has a book called Joy on Demand, which is fantastic.

I thought it was a fantastic title.

I was like, I could use join demand.

Let's take a look at this.

And there's a very short part in that book, which I ended up excerpting for, I want to say, Tools of Titans about loving kindness meditation.

And he tells the story of this woman who, as an experiment guided or suggested by Meng, did a one minute loving kindness meditation on the hour, every hour for one workday.

And she would pick people who are walking out of the office.

So, and she came back and she said, that is the best day I've had at work in seven years.

And I think part of that is, at least for me, that I am very, historically have been very trapped in my head.

I'm very prefrontal.

And I come from a family of warriors, people who are - Warrior or worrier?

Warriors. Not the battle axe type, but the like Larry David type.

Yeah. And when you are consumed with worry or anxiety, and this is not my description, but it's been described to me as being trapped in the future.

Like depression is being trapped in the past, anxiety or worrying is being trapped in the future.

And it's also, at least for me, it's a focus on the self.

It's like me, me, me.

It's all things that might happen to me, things that I should do.

And the loving kindness meditation, which can be so short and have an impact, gets you, unlike most types of mindfulness practice that are popular or becoming popular in the West, it gets you out of yourself.

And I recall when I was writing Tools of Titans, I decided to take Meng's advice and I did loving kindness for literally two or three minutes That's every night I was at this hotel and they had a dry sauna and I'd go into the dry sauna really late because I was doing my writing really late and just do two to three minutes of thinking about a friend and wishing them happiness and seeing them smiling and giving them a hug and having them smile back at me and wishing me the same.

And it was transformative with regards to my mood.

It was really just incredible.

Low dose, really, really low dose.

And I'm curious, you mentioned that you were thinking about about love or meditating on loving kindness to your friend, did you also start with a traditional practice of wishing it to yourself or is that less comfortable for you?

This is a great question.

So I did not, it did not even occur to me to do this until years later when I went to my first seven day, might've been 10 day, silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock and Jack Kornfield was there.

And I went in, they check in with you to make sure you're not having a total psychotic break for a few minutes every other day.

And I had this meeting with Jack and one of his co -teachers for the event, and we were talking about loving -kindness, talking about loving -kindness.

And as I was leaving, the woman with Jack said, just out of curiosity, have you been doing any loving -kindness for yourself?

Of this, I don't know what it was, Nepalese or Bhutanese monk who came to the U .S. and he was in a car on the way to some event.

it was in the US and there were these people running, you know, jogging on the side of the street to get in shape, but they're just, they looked like they were dying.

I mean, they looked like they were running from hyenas.

And he was just like, are they okay?

What's wrong with them?

It was so foreign. My goodness.

So we have just a few minutes.

Let me ask you the billboard question.

So if you could put a message on a billboard this is metaphorically speaking to get a message a quote a question anything non -commercial out to millions or billions of people what might you put on that billboard I think I'd probably put this one aphorism that I've loved since high school I think which is only connect by EM Forster only connect only connect yeah like that at the end of the day that's all that really matters what does that mean to you it just means connecting Connecting on some really deep level with the people around you.

And that might sound like an ironic aphorism for someone who wrote a book about introversion, but to me, those are not contradictory things at all.

And so for me, connection, it can happen in person for sure, but it could also happen just by listening to music that's really touching you.

you and you feel completely connected to this musician who may not even be alive anymore, you know, or a writer who might not be alive anymore, but they're expressing something deep and unchanging about what it's like to be human.

So those, I think there's kind of nothing more important than that.

Only connect. Only connect.

Is there anything you've done that has helped you to more deeply or frequently experience those moments or any advice you might have for people who want to cultivate that so aside from meditation which i am a huge proponent of but i think you really do have to pay attention to what works for you and it really is so different for everybody you know so for me i love to have deep one -on -one conversations it happens through music it happens through literature and those that's how it happens um but I think it it really is a different answer for everyone for each person but I'll tell you and this is maybe

a different topic but the whole idea for my next book came out of one of these kinds of experiences which is I have always had a love of everything at sim .blog forward slash podcast and you just search Susan and it'll pop right up people can find you online presumably where are the best places to say hello, learn more about what you're up to?

Well, best thing is to sign up for my newsletter, which you can get to if you go to quietrev .com, which is for Quiet Revolution.

So you'll find it right there on the homepage.

There's a signup form and there's a newsletter that goes out every week.

So that's the absolute best. And then I'm also super active on LinkedIn and on Facebook.

Great. And is that simply Susan Cain?

Because I think I think Facebook, correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's author Susan Cain.

Oh, gosh, thank you for saying that.

Yeah, so on Facebook it's author Susan Cain.

And on LinkedIn, I actually don't remember, but it's part of the LinkedIn influencer.

If you put in LinkedIn influencer and my name, you'll get there.

It'll pop right up.

Yeah. And then Twitter may be less active.

Yeah, I am on Twitter, but a little less active.

But at Susan Cain. At Susan Cain.

Yep. And can't wait to see the next book and continue to follow your work.

Thank you for doing it.

Thank you so much. I will say the same to you.

What is the next book?

Well, you know, based on an episode that came out a few days ago, I think it's going to be this book that I have been waiting to give myself permission to write, which is about, it's not that, it'll be a close cousin to what you are thinking a lot about right right now it would be how to pay attention to the psycho -emotional undercurrents and components of life very closely and how to use tools both on the beaten path and off very very off the beaten path for finding resolution for problems or challenges or insecurities or trauma that are at least in current conventional practice considered very

difficult to treat or untreatable.

So that would be as far as I can tell, and I've been gathering notes for about five years now, that would be the thrust of it.

That's going to be your most important book.

I hope so. What's your timetable?

What's my timetable?

It's, well, who was it?

I think this is something I heard on a TV set once.

They didn't want people to rush, but the gist was people need to rush.

But they didn't want to say that and make people panic.

So they said, we need everyone to move with purpose.

So I think my answer is move with purpose, but not in haste.

Because I want to treat it with the depth and thought that it deserves.

I don't want to rush.

I will probably write it without signing before selling anything or signing any contracts.

Oh, you'll write the whole thing first. I'll probably do it on my own time.

Oh, interesting. But it is a top, if not the top priority.

Wow. So are you working on it every day right now?

I am in some fashion working on it every day, but it's going to be a while before I get to the composition prose stage.

age, but the vast majority of the work that I do on my books is the experimentation and the traveling for subjecting myself to all sorts of unusual things and the note taking and the organizing of said notes.

And I'm doing some piece of that almost every day.

Wow. Oh, I'm so glad you're doing this book.

So if I can help, you know, if you want an early reader or whatever, I would love to.

It's completely up my alley.

Well, likewise, likewise.

This has been so much fun.

And until next time, thank you so much. Thank you so much. And to everybody listening, same.

Until next time. Thank you for listening.

Hey guys, this is Tim again.

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[Creativity, Journaling, and Public Speaking: Insights from the Tim Ferriss Show]-[#760: Robert Rodriguez and Susan Cain]

📋 Summary

The Art of Living a Creative Life

The Discipline of Journaling

Overcoming the Fear of Public Speaking

Managing Overstimulation and Introversion

The Process of Writing and Deep Work

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript