Love Your Work

Here's an essay from a few years ago. It helps explain why David likes to step back from his work during the final weeks of the year. Puny humans.

Also, for the first time ever, hear David Kadavy's voice double, created using Descript's "Overdub".

Image: Pere Magloire on the Road to Saint-Clair, Etretat, Gustave Caillebotte

Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondaysss

David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/see-you-next-year-bestof/

I decided last December that I would be taking this December off. I like to give myself some space toward the end of the year so I can recharge, and come into the New Year with a fresh perspective.

So, I'm reaching into the vault of more than 200 episodes, and pulling out some of my favorites – especially ones that are good for this time of year.

This is a fantastic conversation with Sean Stephenson, and it takes on special significance this time around.

Though what you're going to hear is the only conversation I ever had with Sean Stephenson, I always felt a special connection with him. So when I discovered that he was born exactly one day after me, it seemed fitting.

When this episode debuted, my mother sent me a text message. She said, "Listening to interview with Sean Stephenson on my walk. Very good. I was struck at the very beginning that he was born the day after you, and what a different experience his parents were thrust into."

When Sean Stephenson was born, he wasn't expected to make it through the night. He was born with brittle bone disorder. Throughout his life, he suffered hundreds of bone fractures. Even as an adult, his limbs were twisted, he never grew larger than three feet tall, and he was confined to a wheelchair.

In July, I rushed from Medellin to Scottsdale to be by my mother's bedside. She had suffered a brain hemorrhage, and – as you may have heard on other episodes – she later died.

About a month and a half later on August 29th, I was still in Scottsdale – where, it happens, Sean Stephenson also lived. I was sitting in a cafe, and I took a break from writing to open up Instagram. And I was instantly saddened more than I was already. The first photo in my feed was of Sean, and it said "in memoriam, Sean Stephenson 1979–2019". His wife, Mindy, had posted it that morning.

When Sean Stephenson was born, he wasn't expected to make it through the night. But he made it through forty years.

In those years, through his work as a therapist and through his writing and public speaking, Sean inspired a ton of people.

I was one of them, and when I returned to my parents house, from the cafe, I saw one of Sean's books sitting on the shelf. Get off Your "But". My mother had bought it after hearing Sean on the show, so I guess he inspired her, too.

Listening to this conversation in preparation for writing this intro was even more powerful than it was the first time around. I always try to get a superpower from my guests, and listening again helped me realize that I had internalized some of the lessons I learned from Sean.

Mostly that Sean has a way of helping you realize the limiting beliefs you put on yourself. The ways that you tell yourself you're the victim. The scapegoats you create, on whom you can blame your shortcomings and failures.

I always felt there was something messed up about that: Sean was dealt a tough hand in life, and so now I feel better about my own situation? That does sound messed up, but it works.

And now that Sean is gone, this conversation serves as another reminder. A reminder to make the most of each day you're here on this earth. Sean did that. I'm trying.

One fun thing I didn't realize until I listened to this conversation again: In this conversation, Sean recommends the book One Small Step. One Small Step is of course the book by Dr. Rober Maurer, who you heard on episode 187. That episode is a hit. It's worth listening to.

I had discovered Dr. Maurer's work through another channel. It made me realize there's so much valuable knowledge in the Love Your Work catalog. Even listening to each of these conversations several times, there's always something new to discover.

So if you're craving new episodes, try re-listening to some of your old favorites, as we head into the new year.

Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondayss

David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Sponsors

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/sean-stephenson-memory/

In the 1840's Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis noticed a pattern. He noticed that too many new mothers were dying of a fever. And it didn't seem like a coincidence to him that many of these women who were dying shortly after childbirth had something in common. The doctors who delivered their babies had just performed autopsies.

The death rate – by this fever – of new mothers, whose babies were delivered by doctors who had just handled dead bodies, was sometimes over thirty percent! That's incredibly high, even by the standards of the 1840's.

The death rate of this clinic, where doctors performed autopsies and delivered babies, was so high that some women gave birth on the street, rather than go to this clinic.

So Dr. Semmelweis performed an experiment. He tried one simple thing. This one simple thing dropped the death rate from this fever from the double digits to the single digits. Some months the death rate was zero!

The one simple thing Dr. Semmelweis did: After doctors were done performing autopsies, before they delivered babies – he had them wash their hands.

Today, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis is recognized as a pioneer in antiseptic procedures. I wish I could tell you the same was true during his lifetime.

Instead, he was ridiculed. He lost his job. He eventually moved away.

Nearly twenty years after his experiment, Dr. Semmelweis still couldn't convince most of the medical community to wash their hands. He was committed to a mental institution, where he died fourteen days later, after being beaten by guards.

The guards didn't beat Dr. Semmelweis to death, though. You can't make up cruel irony like this. He died from an infection in his wounds – an infection which could have been prevented with antiseptic treatment. The antiseptic treatment for which he is now known as a pioneer.

Image: The Death of Marat, Jacques-Louis David

Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays

David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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https://offgridmindfulness.com

Show Notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/cell-phone-emfs/

On July 4th of this year, I was finally hitting my stride. After a year of visa troubles, I had secured a three-year visa. I was finally back in the writing rhythm I had been in before my visa troubles started.

Things had been fucked, and they had become unfucked. Little did I know, everything was about to get even more fucked than it was before.

One thing that got me through the fuckedness that ensued – you'll hear about it in this conversation – was that I had read Everything is F*cked, by Mark Manson (@iammarkmanson).

In this conversation, you'll learn:

• How can a book called Everything is F*cked possibly be, as the subtitle promises, A Book About Hope? Everything being fucked doesn't require hope. Hope requires everything to be fucked.
• I've talked before on the show about living an "antifragile" life. Learn how to avoid having what Mark calls "fragile values."
• Mark says "if there's no reason to live, then there's no reason to not live." How can what Mark calls "the uncomfortable truth," be liberating, instead of deflating?

Photo by Maria Midoes

Palle Schmidt has a new book, SOLO - Survival Guide for Creative Freelancers. Palle is giving it away to Love Your Work listeners, for a limited time. Check it out at http://bit.ly/kadavy

Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays

David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Sponsors

https://offgridmindfulness.com http://linkedin.com/loveyourwork

Show Notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/mark-manson-everything-fucked/

You are what you surround yourself with. When your environment changes, your mind changes with it. We recently talked about how your environment can put you in a creative mental state, when we talked to Donald M. Rattner, on episode 201.

But what about the objects you surround yourself with? They're a part of your environment, too. The devices we use are a part of our environment, and the devices we use affect our mental state, too.

We're already pretty intentional about how we change our environment for the exact activities we're doing. You cook in your kitchen, and you sleep in your bed.

You wouldn't sleep in your kitchen, so why do you meditate with your smartphone?

Image: View Across the Bay, Juan Gris

Thanks to the 80,000 Hours podcast for syndicating my conversation with Rob Wiblin to their podcast. Thanks to the Traction Growth & Income podcast for interviewing me. Thanks to the Big Gay Author podcast for mentioning my interview with Robbie Abed.

On Twitter, thank you to @mrlacey, @giftedguru, @LWCvL, @dbarrant, @kierantie, and @thepixelgrid.

On Facebook, thank you to Sean Corbett. On Instagram, thank you to @jamesonbairesq, and @realba88.

Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays

David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Sponsors

https://offgridmindfulness.com

Show Notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/dont-meditate-smartphone/

Dan Ariely (@danariely) has more opportunities than he knows what to do with. As a James B. Duke professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and author of New York Times best-selling books, such as Predictably Irrational, he has lots of demands on his time.

Dan has to say "no" to a lot of opportunities that don't have a clear payoff. But, surprisingly, he also says "no" to a lot of opportunities that do have a clear payoff.

That's because, as Dan tells us in this conversation, he gambles with his time. He intentionally does some small amount of things that don't have a clear payoff. In order to have the space and time for those gambles, he needs to say "no" to some sure bets.

In this episode, we'll learn more about how Dan gambles with his time. We'll also learn:

• How did "gambling" with his time lead Dan to publish his exciting new graphic novel, Amazing Decisions: The Illustrated Guide to Improving Business Deals and Family Meals?
• The creative process for Dan's new graphic novel is a big departure from that of his research papers and books. How did he navigate the uncertainty when collaborating with an artist?
• With everything Dan knows about human behavior, how does he design his habits, rituals and routines to optimize creative output and spark motivation?

This isn't the typical conversation with the living legend of behavioral science, Dan Ariely. If you want to know more about his groundbreaking work on irrationality, check out our first conversation on episode 51.

A quick note here: Dan and I talk about "Timeful" a number of times throughout this conversation. If you're not familiar, Timeful was a productivity app that Dan and I collaborated on. It later sold to Google and some of the Timeful features are integrated into Google Calendar.

Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondayss

David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Sponsors

https://offgridmindfulness.com https://honeybook.com/loveyourwork

Show Notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/dan-ariely/

Over the past four years, I've been trying to "make it" as a creator. Yes, I was on my own for another eight years before that, but this past four years has been when I really doubled down on creating. To make the things I create not just a marketing tactic for some other thing. For the creations themselves to be the thing.

Each month for the past two years of this journey, I've been reporting my income on my blog, kadavy.net. Sometimes, it's been pretty embarrassing. These aren't your usual income reports, where someone reports making six or seven figures in a single month. These are the income reports of a creator struggling to make it.

This week, I'd like to give you a preview. This is a preview of something you get at some levels of Patreon backing. An audio version of my income report, delivered right to your favorite podcast app through your own private RSS feed.

These income reports are where I think out loud about why I do one thing, or why I don't do another thing. Hear how I build this business. Hear the exact thinking behind my decision-making, as it happens.

This is the income report for August of this year. By the time you hear this, the income report for September will be out, too. If you'd like to hear it, just go to patreon.com/kadavy, and look for the proper backing level. I would appreciate your support so much.

Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays

David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/income-report-patreon-preview/

Donald M. Rattner (@donaldrattner) is an architect, and author of My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation.

I've talked a lot on this podcast about matching your work to your mental state. If you're in the mood to do the work you're doing, everything is going to be easier. But you can also match your mental state to the work. You can change your mental state so the work you need to be doing gets done.

One powerful way to change your mental state is to change your surroundings. If you design your space to think more creatively, for example, you'll do better creative work.

In My Creative Space, Donald draws upon mountains of research from the field of environmental psychology, to show you how to change your space to change your creativity.

In this conversation, you'll learn:

• How has the field of environmental psychology shown how the spaces where you work can change everything from your thinking to your physiology?
• Research shows that the optimal light level for creativity is 150 lux, and the optimal noise level for creativity is 70 dB. Just how bright and loud is that, and why does it work?
• Travel posters – especially vintage travel posters – may help you think more creatively. Donald explains why – when it comes to creativity – "construal level theory" (something you might remember from my conversation with David Rock) favors things far away in distance and time.

This conversation is packed with knowledge, and so is Donald's book.

Image: The Moneylender and His Wife, Quentin Massy

Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays

David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Sponsors

https://kadavy.net/motivation

Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/donald-m-rattner/

If you had asked me when I first started Love Your Work why I was doing it, I don't think I could have given you a straight answer. I simply felt compelled to create a podcast. Sometimes it's through the act of creation that we discover what it is that we're creating.

This is a special 200th episode of Love Your Work. Over the past four years, I've been on my own creative journey in making this show. Today I want to reflect on that journey – share what I've learned along the way, and hopefully that will reflect some of what you've learned.

I didn't know for sure why I was starting Love Your Work when I first started, but if you were to ask me NOW why I started Love Your Work, I'd tell you that it's because I was struggling with a conflict. It's a conflict that you might struggle with yourself.

On one side of the conflict is who you are expected to be. On the other side of the conflict is who you really are. The process of self-actualization – the process of "making it", is a process of becoming that person who you really are, through your creative work.

Image: The Nap, Gustave Caillebotte

Music in this episode by MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License: "Perspectives", "Nowhere Land", "Satiate Strings", "Inspired", "Immersed", and "Prelude and Action".

Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays

David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/200th-episode/

Scott H. Young (@scotthyoung) is best known for learning the entire MIT Computer Science curriculum, on his own, in only a year. He did it through "ultralearning" It's a way of organizing your learning so each moment you spend learning is much more effective than it would be otherwise.

If you're like me, you love to learn new things. If you're like me, you'd also like to learn more in a shorter amount of time. In Ultralearning, Scott shares how to break down learning projects into their component parts, and how to choose the most effective ways of learning each of those individual parts.

In this conversation, you'll learn about:

• How can "meta learning" – or planning your learning projects – make the process more enjoyable, and prevent burnout and procrastination?
• Learn why when you feel like you're learning more, you may actually be learning less. Which is right for you? Free recall, or repeated review?
• If you're like me, the term "ultralearning" may sound a little exhausting. Learn how you can apply ultralearning principles to even the most casual learning projects.

You can use ultralearning principles to learn a new language, learn to dance, or to get more bang for your career-building buck.

On Twitter, @martinstellar, @DaveCohencomedy, @kosherjellyfish, @mischievousmali. On Instagram, @alexandbooks_, @icoknick, @nathan.guitar. Elsewhere, thank you to Al Chen for building the todos by mental state Coda template, and Mavericks Thoughts for including me in the article, How 10 Top Writers on Medium Start Their Day.

Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays

David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

• Twitter
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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Sponsors

http://linkedin.com/loveyourwork https://kadavy.net/motivation

Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/scott-h-young/