Love Your Work

What is BookBub, and what is a BookBub Featured Deal?

BookBub is a gigantic email list that sends discounted or even free books to people. BookBub curates the deals they send to their subscribers. They send them "Featured Deals." A BookBub Featured Deal is a chance to get your book in front of hundreds of thousands of readers – or even a million+ readers – interested in your genre. You'll sell hundreds, maybe thousands, of copies, and you may even hit a bestseller list. However, a BookBub Featured Deal can be expensive. (It's not like a Kindle Daily Deal, which is pure gravy). My BookBub Featured Deal itself cost over $1,000. I sold over 2,500 books. (I hope to break down my full campaign results in a future article subscribe to blog post updates so you don't miss it).

A BookBub Featured Deal is not a BookBub Featured New Release, nor BookBub Ads

Note that BookBub has other ways of promoting books besides the Featured Deal. There are BookBub Ads, which are display ads you can run on BookBub's website or in their emails. BookBub does not curate these ads – any author can advertise their book with BookBub. BookBub also has the Featured New Release, for new books, which is curated but is generally not as competitive nor sought-after as the BookBub Featured Deal.

How do you get a deal on BookBub?

Landing a BookBub Featured Deal is highly competitive, but if you stick with it, you can one day get a deal on BookBub. My book, The Heart to Start: Stop Procrastinating & Start Creating was finally accepted after fourteen rejections, over the course of eighteen months. Here's my advice for finally getting accepted for a BookBub Featured Deal.

Go wide

Many self-published and indie authors only publish to Amazon. One reason they do this is that it's more simple. Amazon makes up about 90% of my revenue from book sales, and it has nearly that share of the entire ebook market.

BookBub (generally) only selects wide books

But, BookBub rarely selects for a Featured Deal a book that is only on Amazon (though I've heard of exceptions). BookBub has many subscribers who read on other platforms, such as Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble. So it's a waste of email real estate for them to bother with books that are only on Amazon.

By the way, what is "wide?"

Amazon is so dominant in the ebook market that to have your book available in places other than Amazon is to be "wide." Being wide is a lot of extra work: You have to upload and manage your book on a bunch of different platforms. This means any time you fix an error in your book, you have to re-upload it to all these places. Because Amazon matches the price of your book on other outlets, you also have to be careful not to have price discrepancies when you're wide (more on a hard pricing lesson I learned in a bit). When you consider all the different markets and currencies in which your book is available, this is a lot to keep track of!

BookBub is the best reason to be wide

BookBub Featured Deals have been one of my main motivations for bothering with all the extra work of being "wide" (That and trying to "fight the good fight" to give readers choices other than Amazon.) Because being wide is so much work, I publish direct to Amazon, and use an aggregator to publish to all other outlets. I've tried publishing direct to various outlets, and I've tried different aggregators, but I've settled on PublishDrive. They have easy reporting, which saves a lot of energy putting together my monthly author income reports. If you want a shot at the "big break" of a BookBub Featured Deal, start by going wide.

Rack up reviews (everywhere)

When BookBub chooses your book for a Featured Deal, they're putting their reputation on the line. Yes, they charge you money to feature your book, but they only have that privilege because readers trust them. Readers only trust them because readers know if BookBub has chosen to feature a book, it's not just because they're getting paid for it – it's also a quality book. BookBub can't go through the trouble of reading each book that applies for a Featured Deal. So how do they decide if your book is a quality book? Reviews! Work hard to get reviews for your book, not only on Amazon, but on other outlets as well. At the time The Heart to Start was accepted for a deal, it had about 275 ratings/reviews on Amazon (with a 4.8-star average), and a handful of reviews each on Apple Books, Kobo, and Google Play (If you check my book out, note that I've since lost some of those precious wide reviews because I switched to an aggregator. It's best to choose the right aggregator from the start.) I had and still have no reviews on Barnes & Noble.

Get reviews by asking or running other promotions

You can get reviews by sending an email to your audience and asking for it. Or, if you have a direct relationship with any of your readers who have reviewed your book on Amazon, ask them if they would kindly copy and paste their review to one of these other outlets. Any other promotions you can run before applying for a BookBub deal can also help rack up reviews. How did I get so many reviews for The Heart to Start? It helps that when I launched the book, it was free. I gave away more than 3,000 copies, which you bet drove some reviews.

You can't fake good reviews, so write a great book

Of course, it helps if these reviews are generally positive. Having gained hundreds of reviews for my books, I can tell you there's no point in trying to fake this. If there's ever been a friend who positively reviewed my book just to be nice, it's never been as powerful as the reviews by strangers who actually liked (or hated) the book. The takeaway underlying all this is write a great book. But that alone won't bring reviews – you have to work for them.

Keep trying

How often can you apply for a BookBub Featured Deal? Four weeks from your latest rejection. So, each time you get rejected, apply again four weeks later! Remember, I was rejected fourteen times. It took eighteen months from my first application to my first acceptance. Why not fourteen months? Because getting rejected over and over can be exhausting!

Put your application process on auto-pilot

Make the process of applying as automatic as possible. Each time I got a rejection email, I used a tool called Boomerang to return the email to my inbox four weeks later. That reminded me to apply again. I kept an Evernote file where I recorded the date I applied as well as the pricing and markets I chose, and comments I made in my application. I also kept links for each ebook store, ready to be copied and pasted into my application. Once you have notes like this, you could easily delegate this process to an assistant.

Mix up pricing

BookBub wants great deals for their subscribers, but they counterintuitively don't need the best possible deal for their subscribers. These days, most BookBub Featured Deals are $1.99. Sometimes books are selling for more than that, but there are also books on sale for 99¢ or even free. You might think that if you are BookBub, you want to offer as many free books as possible. But keep in mind BookBub makes money from authors and publishers paying for placement in their newsletter. The higher the price for your deal, the more BookBub charges for placement.

A higher price may give you a better shot (then again, maybe not!)

So, you might have a better shot at charging 99¢ for your book than offering it for free. You might have a better shot at charging $1.99 than 99¢. How do you know? There's no way to know for sure. These choices are up to the curators of BookBub, and their preferences change based on the activity they see amongst subscribers. Keep an eye on books listed on BookBub in your genre. Do you see a pattern in the list prices and sale prices of similar books?

Alternate prices in your auto-pilot process

If there's not a super clear pattern, mix up the pricing in your applications. I alternated between two prices: One month, I applied to offer my book for 99¢, the next month I applied to offer it for $1.99. ($1.99 was the price that eventually got accepted.)

Don't make yourself ineligible

There are various requirements to be eligible for a BookBub Featured Deal, but the easiest to mess up is pricing. Your proposed BookBub Featured Deal must be:

• Either free, or a discount of at least 50% (It's usually more like 70–85%)
• The best deal available in the past 30 days. (They also don't want you to offer it for less in the near future.)

I messed this up at one point. When I had an international deal (more on that in a bit), it turned out I had accidentally priced my book too low on the Google Play store in the UK. So, Amazon had been matching that price. The historical list price was too low for my sale price to meet the 50%-discount requirement. So, while I was paying full price for my deal, my deal was not sent to UK subscribers, because I had accidentally made myself ineligible in the UK. This is yet another reason I use PublishDrive to publish everywhere except Amazon. It makes it easier to avoid mis-pricing my books.

Try international first

Speaking of international deals, there's one caveat to my fourteen-rejection journey to a BookBub Featured Deal. My book was rejected fourteen times in a year-and-a-half for a U.S. deal. However, it was accepted for an international deal, after seven months and "only" three rejections. An international deal covers the UK, Canada, Australia, and India. (With each application, you can choose to apply for an international deal, a U.S. deal, or "All"). I did apply for "All" until I had my international deal, but BookBub accepted my book only for an international deal at that time.

An international deal is practice

The performance of my international deal was underwhelming, but I'm glad I got to try it before a "big" U.S. deal. (My international deal went to 140,000 subscribers, my U.S. deal – over one million). My international deal gave me a chance to learn and plan better for a bigger deal. I also learned that hard pricing lesson: paying the full price for an international deal, only to realize my carelessness in international pricing made my book ineligible in the UK.

Your international deal performance may prove your book to BookBub

BookBub probably watches the performance of these international deals to consider how a book will do in the U.S. Maybe the underwhelming performance of my book in my international deal was why BookBub didn't accept it for a U.S. deal for another year! On the other hand, if my book had done great, it may have increased my chances of being accepted. To learn the ropes and maybe even to prove your book's worth in a less-competitive arena, consider applying for an international deal first. At the very least, if you're accepted for an international deal, but not a U.S. deal, take it and learn.

Include editorial reviews or notable blurbs

On the application for a BookBub Featured Deal, there's a "Comments" section. Use this section to show BookBub curators how great people think your book is. At the advice of Craig Martelle in the 20Booksto50k Facebook Group, I included my book's review from Publisher's Weekly in the comments field of my application, starting with my twelfth application. It didn't magically get my book accepted, but within a few months, I had landed a BookBub, so it may have helped. Don't bother copy/pasting Amazon reviews into the comments section. But if you have any good editorial reviews or blurbs from famous authors, try including them in the comments field of your application.

Create your own luck (your day will come)

The more times you apply for a BookBub Featured Deal, the better your chances you'll one day be accepted. Readers' preferences change, the publishing market changes, the world changes, and so too do the preferences of BookBub's curators. Just because you were rejected last month doesn't mean you'll also be rejected this month. I think the coronavirus pandemic may have improved my chances of getting a BookBub Featured Deal. This is just a theory, but traditional publishers' projects were delayed, and I bet BookBub was getting fewer applications for traditional books. My business as an indie author, on the other hand, was not affected by the pandemic. It's likely I had more of a shot because there was less competition. The publishing business is a business of breeding "Black Swans", and you never know how the world will change to bring your "big break." You have nothing to lose by applying, and everything to gain, so create your own luck by giving yourself more chances to get lucky.

Some final tips

BookBub also has tips on their website. Besides similar points to what I discussed here, their tips include:

• Have a good cover
• Optimize your sales pages on retailers
• Be flexible with your promotion date

I'll add to these a couple honorable mentions that will probably help, and can't hurt:

• Spruce up your BookBub profile. Upload a photo, fill out your profile, invite your audience to follow you, and recommend some books from your genre. It signals to BookBub you're well-known amongst their subscribers, and that you're professional. (By the way, you can follow me on BookBub.)
• Run some BookBub Ads. It's good practice to learn how to use BookBub's ads, because they're useful for making your Featured Deal even more successful when you finally do get one. Plus, it can build your BookBub following, which might improve your chances of having a deal accepted.

Getting a BookBub Featured Deal is a breakthrough for a self-published author. It can feel like you'll never get accepted, but if you keep at it, it's possible – and worth the effort.

Mind Management, Not Time Management now available!

After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now!

My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays

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

About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/how-land-bookbub-featured-deal/

I recently saw a tweet storm by entrepreneur/investor/philosopher Naval Ravikant. He was challenging people to meditate sixty minutes a day for sixty consecutive days.

The view from the location of my 60th hour-long meditation session. Here's a quote from Naval about his meditation challenge, from The Naval Almanack:

Meditation isn't hard. All you have to do is sit there and do nothing. Just sit down. Close your eyes and say, "I'm just going to give myself a break for an hour. This is my hour off from life. This is the hour I'm not going to do anything. If thoughts come, thoughts come. I'm not going to fight them. I'm not going to embrace them. I'm not going to think harder about them. I'm not going to reject them. I'm just going to sit here for an hour with my eyes closed, and I'm going to do nothing."

An hour a day of doing nothing? I thought, "That's crazy!" So, I did it. It changed the way I think about productivity.

Who can give up an hour a day?

Giving up an hour a day for two months seemed impossible. But I knew if I didn't at least try it, I'd be a hypocrite. I had just finished writing a book called Mind Management, Not Time Management, after all. Taking on this challenge meant I'd be giving up an hour a day in the midst of launching a new book – which is always a busy time. But it also looked like the best possible test of my belief that time management is dead. I'd give up an hour a day of "doing" to just sit. I'd place less emphasis on time, and more emphasis on my mind. Here's how it went.

Meditation killed my motivation (in a good way)

The first couple weeks were the strangest. My mind was blank. I felt numb. I lost all motivation. But probably not in the way you think. Usually, when people say they've lost motivation, they feel bad about it. They feel they should be motivated, but they are not. Instead, I lost motivation in a good way. I didn't feel bad about my loss of motivation. I didn't think, "Oh no, I want to do things but can't find the motivation!" But I sensed my brain needed to discover new routes to motivation. What would that be like? I wanted to find out. So I kept going.

Do it, Delegate it, Defer it. How about Forget it!?

My lack of motivation didn't manifest itself as a lack of motivation to do things I otherwise wanted to get done. Instead, when I thought of something I might do, I'd say to myself, "Nah! That's not important!" I've long been a practitioner of Getting Things Done (which I summarized on episode 242). One of the keys to making GTD work is to write down everything you think of doing – big, small, unimportant, important – even things you might do, "Someday/Maybe." After you write something down, you either do it, delegate it, or defer it. Thanks to meditation, I discovered a fourth option: forget it. In other words, don't even write it down. Just let the thought pass. This is easier said than done. GTD works because it closes "open loops" in your mind. If you don't write the thing down – GTD wisdom states – you'll keep thinking about it. By meditating an hour a day, suddenly I was able to think of something I might do, decide it was unimportant, then forget about it completely! But as I decided not to do the things I would otherwise do, the things I wasn't going to do started bubbling to the surface.

Meditation sharpened focus on the things I did do

Setting aside an hour a day where I couldn't do anything but let thoughts flow had two effects.

1. It reduced the time I had to "do" the things I intended to do.
2. It increased the time I had to think about things I would do, "if only I had the time."

These effects had a symbiotic relationship: I didn't have as much time to "do" things I intended to do, so I had to be more efficient with things I did do. Doing begets more doing. Each time you do something, it reminds you of other things you could be doing. The more you do, the more entropy sets in and you make bad decisions. By meditating an hour a day, I had less time to do things, and more time to think about how I would do those things once I did them. So the things I did, I did better. It is more productive to delete from the to-do list than to mark done.

Meditation made room for "wildcards"

Setting aside an hour a day also gave me more time to think about things I would do, "if only I had the time" – those crazy ideas you normally let pass through your mind. You say to yourself, "I wish," "wouldn't that be nice," or "that would never work, anyway." By thinking more about the crazy ideas I wasn't likely to follow, those ideas started to take on more importance in my mind. As I thought more about these ideas, they started to seem doable. Things like taking a solo retreat to a cabin in the Colombian countryside. I still wasn't sure my crazy ideas were going to work, but I came to a realization about that, too.

We're bad at using our conscious attention anyway

I realized we're bad at consciously using our attention. Scientists have known this for a long time. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky coined it "the planning fallacy." You see the planning fallacy in action when you try to log into your bank account to pay a bill. You think it's going to take two minutes. But then your password manager malfunctions. Then you have to complete three pages of CAPTCHAs. Then you have to do two-factor authentication, so you grab your phone. But your phone has a text message on it. You know the drill. The planning fallacy compounds as complexity creep takes over (which I talked about on episode 237). This is why fewer than half of students complete their papers in less time than their worst-case projection This is why the Sydney Opera House took ten years longer and fifteen times the budget to build as expected. So if we're bad at using our conscious attention anyway, maybe we shouldn't put much trust in ourselves to use all our conscious attention getting things done?

We don't know what will work

We spend all our waking attention trying to do things. We think, If only we could do all the things we intend to do, we would finally achieve the success we deserve. The things we intend to do don't just take more time than expected. Nassim Taleb demonstrates in The Black Swan (which I summarized on episode 244) we also have no idea whether things we've decided to do are worth doing in the first place. In the "Extremistan" world of creative work, our biggest successes often come from trying to do one thing, then stumbling upon another. Europeans discovered the New World while searching for a route to India. The microwave was discovered when a radar experiment accidentally melted a chocolate bar. Penicillin was discovered when experimental samples got contaminated. I got my first book deal while trying to land a slot to speak at a conference. As William Goldman said, "Nobody knows anything." Goldman's not knowing anything didn't keep him from winning two Academy Awards for screenwriting.

Meditation is the "Barbell Strategy" for attention

If great discoveries come at random, what can you do? You have to be doing things that might not work, and you have to be ready when a great idea comes. As Louis Pasteur said, "Chance favors the prepared mind." To give yourself a chance at making great discoveries, Nassim Taleb recommends "the Barbell Strategy." Invest 85% of your resources on sure bets. Invest the remaining 15% of your resources on wildcards – those crazy ideas that probably won't lead to anything, but that have unlimited upside. (You can learn more about the Barbell Strategy in my The Black Swan book summary on episode 244). Meditating 60 hours in 60 days had more benefits than I could list. I slept better, I had more intense dreams, I became more patient. But here's the biggest thing I learned about productivity meditating 60 hours in 60 days: Meditation is the Barbell Strategy for your waking attention. If we're no good at using our conscious attention anyway, and if our best discoveries come at random, it makes perfect sense to surrender a portion of your conscious attention to randomness. If you invest one hour of your working day in meditation, you invest 12.5% of your working day in mental serendipity. That's enough time not only to think about the crazy ideas you otherwise wouldn't pursue, but also to think about the great discoveries happening right under your nose.

What about results?

When you're working in "Extremistan," you have to be weary of "results." Big wins are rare, and positive Black Swans take time to grow. In the more than 500 blog posts I've written in the past 16 years, I've had two that led to Black Swans (one, a book deal, the other, working with a company that sold to Google). But, I did have one big win during my meditation experiment. On the day I launched my new book, I had a winning tweet storm. The first tweet in the storm, alone, has over 100,000 organic impressions. I had over 150,000 impressions in one day. Previously, on a really good day, I might get 25,000 impressions. The end of that tweet storm brought 500 organic clicks to my book's Amazon page. This tweet storm took me several hours – over the course of weeks – to write, edit, and publish. Would I ever in a million years have bothered spending that much time on a tweet storm? No way, that's a crazy idea. But thanks to my hour a day of meditation, I couldn't let the idea go.

And now?

Meditating 60 hours in 60 days changed the way I think about productivity. So what did I do once I was done? I meditated the next day, and the next day, and the day after that. At this point, I've meditated an hour a day for more than 80 days in a row. It's a crazy idea, but this is just something I do now.

Mind Management, Not Time Management now available!

After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now!

My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays

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

About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

• Twitter
• Instagram
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• YouTube

Subscribe to Love Your Work

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Support the show on Patreon

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/naval-ravikant-meditation/

It's hard to predict the future, but you can be better at predicting the future.

All you need is a few delicious avocados.

Even the "experts" are bad at predicting the future

Wharton professor Phillip Tetlock wanted to make the future easier to predict. So he held "forecasting tournaments," in which experts from a variety of fields made millions of predictions about global events.

Tetlock found that experts are no better at predicting the future than dart-throwing chimps. In fact, the more high-profile experts – the ones who get invited onto news shows – were the worst at making predictions.

But, Tetlock found that some people are really great at telling the future. He calls them "Superforecasters", and regardless of their area of expertise, they consistently beat the field with their predictions.

Tetlock also found that with a little training, people can improve their forecasting skills. The superforecasters in Tetlock's Good Judgement Project – people from all backgrounds working with publicly-available information – make forecasts 30% better than intelligence officers with access to classified information.

Creative work is uncertain. Does it have to be?

As someone working in the "Extremistan" world of creative work, I'm always trying to improve my forecasting skills. If I publish a tweet, how many likes will it get? If I write a book, how many copies will it sell?

The chances of getting any of these predictions exactly right are so slim, it doesn't feel worth it to try to predict these things. But that doesn't mean I can't rate my predictions and make those predictions better.

Introducing the Avocado Challenge

If you would like to be better at predicting the future, I have a challenge for you. I call it the Avocado Challenge.

Elon Musk recently asked on Twitter "What can't we predict?" I answered "whether or not an avocado is ready to open." 12 likes. People agree with me.

https://twitter.com/kadavy/status/1309643017599569920

Here's how the Avocado Challenge works.

The next time you're about to open an avocado, make a prediction: How confident are you the avocado is ripe?

Choose a percentage of confidence, such as 50% or 20% – or if you're feeling lucky, 100%. To make it simple, you can rate your confidence on a scale of 0 to 10. State your prediction out loud or write it down.

Now, open the avocado. Is it ripe? Yes or no?

Scoring your avocado predictions

You now have two variables: Your prediction as stated in percentage confidence, and the outcome of avocado ripeness.

With these two variables, you can calculate what's called a Brier score. This tells you just how good your forecast was. The Brier score is what Phillip Tetlock uses to score his forecasting tournaments.

Two variables: confidence and outcome

It works like this: Translate your percentage confidence into a decimal between 0 and 1. So 50% would be 0.5, 20% would be 0.2, and 100% would just be 1.

Now, translate the avocado ripeness outcome into a binary number. If the avocado was not ripe, your outcome value is "0." If the avocado was ripe, your outcome value is "1." (You may wonder: How do I determine whether or not an avocado is ripe? I'll get to that in a minute. Let's pretend for a second it's easy.)

Calculating your Brier score

Once you have those two variables, there are two steps to follow to find out your Brier score:

1. Subtract the outcome value from your confidence value. If I was 50% confident the avocado would be ripe that confidence value is 0.5. If the avocado was in fact ripe I subtract the outcome value of 1 from 0.5 to get -0.5.
2. Square that number, or multiply it by itself. -0.5² = 0.25.

Our Brier score is 0.25. Is that good or bad?

The lower your Brier score, the better your prediction was. If you were 100% confident the avocado would be ripe and it was not, your Brier score would be 1 – the worst score possible. If you were 100% confident the avocado would be ripe and it was ripe, your Brier score would be 0 – the best score possible. So, 0.25 is pretty solid.

Predict your next 30 avocados

This is a fun exercise to try one time, but it doesn't tell you a whole lot about your forecasting skills overall, and it doesn't help you improve your forecasting skills. Where it gets interesting and useful is when you make a habit of the Avocado Challenge.

After you've tried the Avocado Challenge a couple times, make a habit out of it. For 30 consecutive avocados, tally your results. Calculate your Brier score, and find the average of your 30 predictions. If you regularly open avocados with a roommate or partner, make a competition out of it.

My partner and I predicted the ripeness of, then opened, 36 avocados over the course of several weeks. We recorded our predictions and outcomes on a notepad on the fridge – then tallied our results in a spreadsheet.

Our findings: 28% of avocados were ripe. Her Brier score was 0.22 – mine was 0.19. (I win!)

The Avocado Challenge teaches you to define your predictions

Most of us don't make predictions according to our percentage confidence. We say, "I think so and so is going to win the election," or "I think it might rain."

Phillip Tetlock even found this with political pundits – the ones who get lots of airtime on news shows. They'll say things like "there's a distinct possibility." That's not a forecast.

If so and so wins the election, you can say, "ha! I knew it!" If it didn't rain, you can remind your friend you said you thought it might rain. And what does a "distinct possibility" mean? You can be "right" either way.

And when it comes to getting airtime on news shows, the news show doesn't care if the political pundit gets their prediction right. All that matters is they can be exciting on camera, speak in sound bites, argue a clear point, and hold the viewer's attention a little longer so it can be sold to advertisers during the commercial break.

We normally don't make our predictions with a percentage confidence, because we aren't used to it. The Avocado Challenge gets you in the habit of rating the confidence of your predictions.

The Avocado Challenge helps you define reality

The Avocado Challenge also helps you define reality. This is something we're also bad at.

If you're on a walk with your friend and you say you think it's going to rain, how much rain equals rain? By what time is it going to rain? You're traveling on foot – is it going to rain where the walk started, or the place you'll be a half hour from now?

To rate your predictions and become a better forecaster, you need to make falsifiable claims.

It's hard to tell if an avocado is ripe before you open the avocado, but it's also hard to tell if an avocado is ripe after you open the avocado. You'll have to come up with criteria for determining whether or not an avocado should be defined as "ripe."

When we did the Avocado Challenge, we defined a "ripe" avocado as a "perfect" avocado: uniform green color, with the meat of the avocado sticking to no more than 5% of the pit.

The Avocado Challenge can improve your real-life predictions

A few weeks after we did the Avocado Challenge, my partner and I were at her family's finca – a rustic cabin in the Colombian countryside.

It was Sunday afternoon, and we were getting ready to head back to Medellín. I was eager to get home and get ready for my week. I asked my partner what time we would leave. She said about 3 p.m.

As I mentioned on episode 235, the Colombian sense of time takes some getting used to for me as an American. Even though my partner is a very prompt person, I'm also aware of "the planning fallacy." I know the Sydney Opera House opened ten years late and cost 15 times the projected budget to build.

So when I looked at the Mitsubishi Montero parked in the grass, and thought about how long it might take to pack in eight people, three dogs, and a little white rabbit, the chances of us leaving right at 3 p.m. seemed slim.

Fortunately, we had done the Avocado Challenge. I asked my partner, in Spanish, "what's your percentage confidence we'll leave before an hour after 3 p.m. – 4 p.m.?" She shifted into Avocado mode, thought a bit, and said sesenta por ciento. She was 60% sure we'd leave before 4 p.m.

That didn't seem super confident, so I asked for another forecast. I asked what her percentage confidence was that we'd leave before 5 p.m. – two hours after the target time. She said cien por ciento. She was 100% sure we'd leave before 5 p.m.

Now, instead of choosing between expecting to leave at exactly 3 p.m. – or leaving "whenever" – I now had a range. It was a range I could trust from someone with experience with similar situations – and training in forecasting.

The time we did leave: 3:30 p.m. My partner's Brier score for that first prediction: 0.16. Average Brier score for the two predictions: 0.08. Not bad.

Mind Management, Not Time Management now available!

After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now!

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About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/avocado-challenge

If you want to write a book, don't ask, "How much money does the average book make?" In this context, "average" is meaningless. You're in the world of Black Swans.

The Black Swan is a book by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and I have found the ideas in it critical to navigating my career as an author. Here – in my own words – is my summary of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. These are the ideas I think about when I'm considering writing a new book.

Where does the term "Black Swan" come from?

Imagine a world where you've only ever seen white swans. If someone asked you whether or not black swans existed, you might say no.

You've seen thousands of swans, and they've all been white. Therefore, black swans don't exist.

You've mistaken an absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Just because you haven't seen evidence of black swans, does not prove they don't exist.

What is a Black Swan?

A positive Black Swan: In 2010, I wrote a blog post. That blog post prompted a publisher to reach out to me. I got a book deal.

A negative Black Swan: A Las Vegas casino had an insurance policy. They protected against every cheating scenario they could imagine. They had the most popular show in Vegas, where magicians worked with giant live tigers. So they protected against the scenario of a tiger jumping into the audience. But they never imagined the tiger would maim one of the performers – Roy of Siegfried and Roy. Siegfried and Roy lost their careers. The casino lost $100 million.

Both of these incidents are Black Swans:

1. Black Swans are outliers: They're not what we expect. Nothing in the past predicts a Black Swan.
2. Black Swans have extreme impact: The impact could be positive, such as my book deal, or negative, such as the tiger attack, or the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
3. We backwards-rationalize Black Swans: After a Black Swan happens, it seems obvious. We look back and come up with explanations for how it happened. This gives us the illusion that Black Swans are explainable and predictable.

Note: COVID-19 is not a Black Swan. As Taleb has explained, global pandemics happen regularly. They're uncommon, but they're inevitable, and we know that.

The Black Swan Turkey

Imagine you're a Turkey. Every day, humans come and feed you. You think humans are pretty good and nice. Each day you get new information to confirm this belief.

A graph of your opinion of humans might look like this:

Notice the sharp drop-off at the end. That's the day before Thanksgiving. Things seemed good, until they weren't.

History does not always predict the future. Events come along that shatter all assumptions we've made based upon past information.

Mediocristan vs. Extremistan

Black Swans happen in a place Taleb calls "Extremistan." Extremistan is the opposite of "Mediocristan."

There's a joke I like, "Bill Gates walks into a bar. On average, everyone there is a millionaire." We're attracted to the "average" and the predictable. But oftentimes the concept of "average" is misleading.

Some things happen in Mediocristan and are predictable. The "average" is meaningful in Mediocristan. Other things happen in Extremistan and are unpredictable and extreme. The "average" is meaningless in Extremistan.

Mediocristan is about "the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted." Mediocristan is about risk spread out amongst many, to avoid surprises. An hourly-wage job at Starbucks is possible only in Mediocristan.

Extremistan is about "the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted." It's where the Black Swans happen: random events you never expected, caused by forces you'll never understand. Such as I experienced suddenly getting a book deal or working with a company that sold to Google.

Mediocristan is about variables that fall within a predictable range. In the history of humanity, there's never been a man 100 feet tall, or a woman 2,000 years old. Nobody has even come close to these extremes. Height and life expectancy follow a bell curve.

A bell curve. (Source: D Wells, Wikimedia Commons)

Distribution of height. (Source: Our World in Data)[/caption]

Extremistan is about variables that scale indefinitely. There's no known limit to how rich a person can be. The "average" net worth of a U.S. family is about $700,000. But to be richer than half of all Americans you need only $100,000. Still, Jeff Bezos has more than $100,000,000,000.

Wealth distribution, by percentile, in the U.S. Jeff Bezos is 10x as wealthy as the highest point in this chart. (Wikipedia)[/caption] Why are Black Swans important?

• Understanding Black Swans can prepare you for the unexpected. If you learn about the impact that unexpected and extreme events can have, you can avoid foolish choices that expose you to negative Black Swans.
• Exposing yourself to Black Swans can make you successful. As we'll talk about later, when you behave as if you're in Mediocristan, you miss out on the positive Black Swans you'd find Extremistan. Businesses that thrive on Black Swans include venture capital, scientific research, and publishing.

(Note: Another reason Black Swans are important is – as I talked about in Mind Management, Not Time Management – if it's predictable, it can be automated. Your edge as a human is not in Mediocristan where the robots are taking over. It's in Extremistan – in doing something nobody could expect.)

Black Swan barrier: Platonicity

One way we blind ourselves from Black Swans is through what Taleb calls "Platonicity." Named after the philosopher, Plato, "Platonicity" is our desire to define things, and to pay more attention to things that have been defined.

We create names for objects, we create terms (yes, such as "Platonicity"), and we invent nationalities.

Because we're so focused on things we define, we miss all the messier stuff that also matters. Taleb describes it as "[mistaking] the map for the territory." (I once wrote about a similar concept, and called it Stuff and Things.)

It's helpful to categorize things, but it becomes a problem when we see a category as definitive, and don't see the fuzzy boundaries between categories or revise them when we see new information that doesn't fit how we categorize things.

We've seen this in the gendered bathroom debate. We broke gender down into two categories. Based on that we made two bathrooms. But we're realizing it's not so simple.

To be Platonic is to be top-down, formulaic, and close-minded. To be a-Platonic is to be bottom-up, open-minded, skeptical, and empirical.

The Platonification of breast milk

Doctors in the 1960s replicated breast milk in a laboratory, by replicating the components they could see in the milk (the things they had "Platonified").

It seemed to make no practical sense for women to go through the inconvenience of breast feeding when you could just use bottles and lab-made formula.

There was an absence of evidence of what the benefits of breast milk were, and that was taken as evidence of absence of benefits. We didn't know the full benefits of breast milk, but we assumed the components we could see were the only important parts.

It turned out children who were not breast fed were later at an increased risk of some cancers. If the mothers themselves had breast fed, they would have had a reduced risk of breast cancer.

Black Swan barrier: The Triplet of Opacity

Another way we blind ourselves from Black Swans is through what Taleb calls "The Triplet of Opacity." Those are:

1. The Illusion of understanding. We think we understand what's going on, but the world is more complicated and random than we know.
2. The retrospective distortion. We assess things after the fact, so we backwards rationalize and come up with reasons why things happened.
3. The overvaluation of information. We place too much emphasis on facts – the things we can "Platonify" – which blinds us from stuff that isn't so easy to Platonify.

How to make Black Swans happen?

Since Platonification blinds us to Black Swans, and we suffer from the illusion of understanding and the retrospective distortion, it may seem silly to try to make Black Swans happen.

You can't engineer a Black Swan, but you can create the conditions for positive Black Swans to happen, as I talked about on episode 146.

Tinker

Top-down planning gives us the illusion of control, and keeps us in Mediocristan. Instead, tinker as much as possible, and learn to recognize opportunities when they present themselves.

Taleb says the reason free markets work is not because they give rewards or drive incentives. Rather, free markets work because they let people get lucky through trial and error. (Then we explain away the brilliant things we did to arrive at this wonderful discovery.)

Many discoveries come from searching for what you know, and finding what you didn't expect. Europeans first learned of the American continent while searching for a route to India. I got my first book deal when I was trying to get votes for my speech proposal for a conference.

Be patient

Negative Black Swans happen suddenly, but positive Black Swans happen slowly. "It is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build."

Black Swan discoveries take time to have an impact. The computer, the internet, and the laser all had a huge impacts, but were underappreciated after initial discovery.

Charles H. Townes was teased by his colleagues for inventing the laser, because they thought it was useless. It turned out to be important to eyesight correction, surgery, and data storage and retrieval.

Denarrate

The triplet of opacity feeds into the "narrative fallacy." We're wired to come up with stories of why things happen, but Black Swans happen for unknown reasons.

Taleb realized that as a stock trader, there was no way for him to get an informational edge. He realized any piece of news that came out would quickly be worked into the market price of any security. So, he stopped reading the news.

He recognized that reading the news as a stock trader would just support the narrative fallacy.

Taleb describes a study where sports bookmakers were given ten variables to predict horse races. When they were later given double the information, these bookmakers were no more accurate in their predictions – yet they were much more confident.

So Taleb decided that by reading the news he wouldn't get an edge and he would become overconfident.

The Barbell Strategy

The main method Taleb recommends for protecting against negative Black Swans while exposing oneself to positive Black Swans is what he calls the Barbell Strategy.

Think of a barbell, with weights on either side. On one side of the barbell is your sure bets – things where you have little chance of losing. On the other side of the barbell is your wildcards – things with unlimited upside.

The Barbell Strategy in investing

(Note: I'm not a finance expert and nothing I'm about to say is investment advice.)

In investing, the sure bets would be treasury bills, cash, and gold. Obviously Black Swans could come along and make these bets not so sure bets, but they're as sure as you can get.

The wildcards would be highly-leveraged option trading, angel investments, or cryptocurrency. You have a decent chance of losing your money, but there's almost no limit to how much you can gain.

In an investing context, Taleb recommends putting 85–90% of your assets into the safe investments, and the remaining 10–15% in the speculative investments.

What you're avoiding is the stuff in the middle. People think index funds are safe because they historically gain about 7% a year, but the entire stock market has lost up to 30% of its value very quickly. Since we're living in an increasingly complex world, there's no telling what kind of Black Swan could come in the future and cause an even bigger drop.

The Barbell Strategy in creative work

I hadn't realized before reading The Black Swan that I had used the Barbell Strategy to build my creative career.

When I was first starting out, I made sure to get just enough freelance work to pay my bills. I also spent a portion of my time building passive income streams. The rest of the time, I spent tinkering and exploring my own ideas. After three years, I randomly landed a book deal to write Design for Hackers.

Dan Ariely mentioned a Barbell Strategy in my latest podcast conversation with him. He says he "gambles with his time." He spends some portion of his time on things that don't make sense, such as collaborating with a mentalist on-stage in one of his speeches, or working with a cartoonist.

My own Barbell Strategy has benefitted from Dan's Barbell Strategy. A blog post I wrote as a "wildcard" – during one of my Weeks of Want – prompted Dan to reach out to me. I collaborated with him on a productivity app. We sold it to Google. That blog post also led to my third book, Mind Management, Not Time Management.

There's your The Black Swan summary!

I hope you've found this The Black Swan summary useful and clear. Taleb's writing can be confusing and even off-putting at first, but if you take the time to understand his ideas, they can help you navigate an uncertain world and find breakthrough opportunities.

I highly recommend The Black Swan. It's one of my favorite books.

Mind Management, Not Time Management now available!

After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now!

My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays

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

Listener Showcase

Abby Stoddard makes the Dunnit app – the "have-done lilst." It's a minimalist tool designed to motivate action and build healthy habits.

About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/black-swan-summary

Today is the day! My new book, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available everywhere!

Writing this book has been a long journey. Over the past ten years, I slowly discovered the things I share in the book, and I also scrapped several drafts, before I finally got it right.

I'm very excited to share with you a cohesive system for managing your energy, instead of your time – to be productive when creativity matters.

If you bought the Preview Edition of Mind Management, Not Time Management, I'll be sending you the First Edition. Otherwise, go buy it today. In five years of this podcast, this is the single biggest event – this is my single biggest ask – go buy this book! It's available wherever books are sold. Or go straight to Amazon.

I'm going to share with you a sample from the first chapter today.

Chapter 1: Mind Management, Not Time Management

"There's only twenty-four hours in a day." The natural conclusion we're supposed to draw from this common observation is: If there are only so many hours in a day, you should make the most of each of those precious hours. Time management, it seems, is critically important.

When you start managing your time, you find you really are getting more done. You're keeping a calendar, so you don't forget things. You're building routines, so you can get repeating tasks done faster. You're learning keyboard shortcuts for the apps you use every day. You may even start saying "no" to some opportunities, so you can make better use of your time.

But it becomes harder and harder to get more out of your time. Your calendar becomes jam-packed with a kaleidoscope of colored blocks. You start "speed reading," and listening to audiobooks and podcasts on 3x speed. You start cutting out all but the most essential activities that move you toward your goals. No more lunches with your friends – you'll eat at your desk.

Next, you figure, you can get more out of your time if you do two things at once. So you start multitasking. You're checking your email while brushing your teeth. You're holding conference calls while driving to work.

You start searching for extra bits of time, like loose change under couch cushions. You used to sleep eight hours a night, but now you'll sleep five. You can check emails at family dinners. You can steal a couple extra hours of work on your laptop after everyone in the house has gone to bed.

You're tired all the time. It seems there's not enough coffee in the world to keep you going. Your anxiety levels are sky-high, and you're becoming forgetful. You're always in a rush.

With each new tactic you learn, each new "life hack," each new shortcut, life gets more hectic. You would start outsourcing some of the load, but you're so busy and so exhausted, you can't even explain what's keeping you so busy. The harder you try to get more out of your time, it seems, the less time you have. Even if you did have the time, you still wouldn't have the energy.

Until one day you realize: "There's only twenty-four hours in a day." Maybe that doesn't mean what I thought it meant?

I thought it meant I should get the most done in the least amount of time possible.

What I'm learning is, if there's only twenty-four hours in a day, that means there's a limit.

I can only get so much out of my time. "Time management" is like squeezing blood from a stone.

This story is not too different from my own. For my entire adult life, I have been a productivity enthusiast, with time management as one of my key strategies for getting more done. It started in college. As a graphic design student, I learned all the keyboard shortcuts I could for Photoshop. I used training software to teach myself to type faster. When I graduated and got a job, I constantly experimented with different ways of keeping a to-do list and prioritizing my tasks. I pontificated with any colleague who would listen about how to cut down on the number of emails in my inbox. One thing I loved about working in Silicon Valley was that there was no shortage of tech geeks with whom I could swap tips on the latest productivity apps.

Eventually, I ran out of ways to get more done in less time, and my quest went on a detour. That led me to embark on the adventure I'm sharing in this book.

Four years ago, I found myself sitting on the bare hardwood floor of my apartment in Chicago, eating lunch from a takeout container with a plastic fork. I had no furniture, no plates, no silverware. I had sold my last chair to some guy from Craigslist fifteen minutes prior.

I was about to embark on my most audacious productivity experiment yet. As I looked around at the three suitcases which housed my final remaining possessions, and the painters erasing from the walls any trace that I had lived there for seven years, I was trying to wrap my head around one fact: That night, I would fall asleep in another country. For the foreseeable future, I would be a foreigner – an extranjero – in a land with a checkered history, where I barely spoke the language.

It all started, six years earlier, with an email. It was the kind of email that would trip up most spam filters. I wasn't being offered true love, millions of dollars from an offshore bank account, or improved performance in bed. I was being offered a book deal.

I had never thought of myself as a writer. In fact, I hated writing as a kid. As I considered accepting that book deal offer, every author I talked to warned me that writing a book is extremely hard work, with little chance of success. But I figured, How hard can it be?, and signed my first literary contract.

I didn't know how to write a book, but the most obvious method was: time management. I needed to make sure I had the time to write the book.

In an attempt to meet my tight deadline, I used every time management technique I could think of. I scheduled writing sessions on my calendar. I developed a morning routine to start writing as quickly as possible after waking up. I "time boxed," to limit the time I would spend on pieces of the project.

Still, I didn't have enough time. I fired my clients. I cancelled dates and turned down party invitations. I started outsourcing my grocery shopping, my meal preparation, even household chores. If there was anything I had to do myself, I made sure to "batch" it into blocks of time when I could do it all at once.

Writing the book became my one and only focus. I cleared away any time I could, and I dedicated it to writing.

But it still wasn't enough. I spent most of my day hunched over my keyboard, rocking back and forth in agony. I felt actual physical pain in my stomach and chest. My fingers felt as if they had been overtaken by rigor mortis. I struggled to write even a single sentence. I was spending plenty of time on my book, but I wasn't getting anything done.

My case of writer's block was so bad that, weeks after signing my contract, I accepted a last-minute invitation to go on a retreat to Costa Rica. Logically, it wasn't the best use of my time, but I desperately hoped that a change of scenery would work some kind of magic.

A few days into the trip, I was more worried than ever. According to my contract, if my manuscript wasn't twenty-five percent finished within a few weeks, the deal was off. Yet I still hadn't written a single word. Unless a miracle happened, I would write a check to the publisher to return my advance, and I would humiliatingly face my friends, family, and blog readers to tell them I had failed. Does that sound like a lot of pressure? It was.

I went for a walk, so I could feel sorry for myself, by myself. I was dragging my feet down the gravel road, head hung down and arms crossed over my chest. How could I be so foolish?, I wondered. Not only had I committed to writing a 50,000-word book – with detailed illustrations – despite having little writing experience beyond a few blog posts, but I had wasted time and money going on this retreat.

Then, I heard someone call out. I looked up, and on the next road over was a man waving and yelling, ¿¡Como estáááás!? I had briefly noticed the man moments before. His fists had been wrapped around the simple wires of a fence, his arms stretched out in front of him as he leaned back in ecstasy, singing to himself. I had felt vaguely embarrassed for him, assuming he didn't know someone else was around.

As the man motioned for someone to come to him, I hesitated. It looked as if he was motioning to me, but that seemed unlikely. Yet I looked around, and saw nobody.

I had just passed a fork in the road, and the fence the man stood behind was on the other side of the fork. I didn't want to backtrack, because I felt I should return to the house and try to write. But I felt rude for ignoring his friendly invitation. So, I reluctantly retraced my steps, and walked over to the man, still unsure of what he wanted.

What followed was the first conversation I ever had entirely in Spanish. Though, I'm using the word "conversation" loosely. The man – Diego was his name – taught me the words for the sun, the beach, the rain and the sea. It turned out Diego just wanted to chat.

My conversation with Diego was refreshing. I was used to everyone ignoring each other on the crowded streets of Chicago, but here was a man who wanted to talk to someone on the next road over about nothing in particular. I was suddenly in such a relaxed state of mind that, after bidding Diego farewell, it was several minutes before I noticed I was going the wrong way. I had continued down Diego's side of the fork in the road. When I realized this, I panicked at the prospect of getting lost in a foreign country, but then I shrugged it off and decided to keep going. It turned out I got back to the house just fine anyway.

Between the pep talk I got from my friend Noah Kagan – as described in my book, The Heart to Start – and my conversation with Diego, I felt as if I had turned over a new leaf. I set my laptop on a desk on the interior balcony of the house. There, looking out at the sapphire blue Pacific Ocean, I had my first breakthrough writing session. What once seemed impossible, now seemed easy. After an hour of writing, I had most of a chapter drafted. It suddenly seemed as if I might make my deadline after all.

That random conversation on a gravel road in Costa Rica became the seed of an idea that would eventually drive me to sell everything I owned and buy a one-way ticket to South America.

I had discovered that making progress on my first book wasn't so much about having the time to write. It was about being in the right state of mind to do the work at hand. I had discovered that today's productivity isn't so much about time management as it is about mind management.

Mind Management, Not Time Management now available!

After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now!

My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays

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

About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

• Twitter
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Subscribe to Love Your Work

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/buy-mind-management

When I first heard of Getting Things Done, I was skeptical. How could it possibly live up to the fanaticism of its cult following? But once I saw the power of the "next action," of "someday/maybes," and of organizing tasks by "context," I knew there was a good reason for the hype: "GTD" works.

More than fifteen years later, GTD still helps me stay productive and in control of all of the things going on in life and work. GTD has helped me write three books, build a business, and move to South America. I regularly re-read it, and I always find new ways to apply its principles and techniques.

Here's my Getting Things Done book summary – in my own words – after many years of practice and two podcast interviews with author David Allen.

The principles that make GTD work

These are not "principles" as expressed in the Getting Things Done book, but this is my summary of its most important ideas.

1. Trusted System: GTD is your "trusted system"

The most important idea behind GTD is to get everything out of your head and into a "trusted system."

What is a trusted system? A "trusted" system is a system in which you can "trust" that you will engage appropriately with everything in the system.

2. Appropriate Engagement: Your trusted system helps you "engage appropriately"

GTD handles a wider breadth of things than your typical to-do list/calendar combination. Because GTD helps you "engage appropriately" with everything.

What does it mean to "engage appropriately?" That means you're doing no more and no less than is necessary to achieve your goal.

You can trust your system will remind you to buy cat food only when you're physically capable of buying cat food, and before you run out of cat food.

You can also trust your system to hold ideas that you may or may not act upon. If you daydream about moving abroad, you can trust your system to hold that idea and remind you periodically, so you won't forget to do whatever you do or don't want to do about it.

So GTD handles everything from important tasks that must get done to fleeting thoughts that you merely might want to do something about.

3. Close Open Loops: GTD keeps your mind free of "open loops"

Build a trusted system that helps you engage appropriately with everything, and your mental energy will be free to handle whatever is going on in the moment.

This is because your trusted system keeps your mind free of open loops. If you can't trust that you'll buy cat food before you run out, you'll be thinking about it. If you can't trust that you'll revisit that idea about moving abroad, you'll be thinking about it. You'll have open loops in your mind.

These open loops use mental energy that you could use on other things.

These open loops also make you feel like a victim of the things you have to do. It's demoralizing to keep reminding yourself something needs to get done because you're also reminding yourself that you haven't followed through. If you trust it will get done, you don't have to remind yourself.

As David Allen says, "Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them."

4. Bottom-Up: GTD is a "bottom-up" approach to personal organization

By getting control of the ground-level things in your life, you have more energy to think about the higher-level things. By trusting that you'll buy cat food, you have more energy to think about how your idea to move abroad fits into your long-term goals and your life purpose.

One quick exercise to get a taste of GTD

One quick way to get a taste of GTD: Write down every single thing that's on your mind that either needs to get done, or that may need to get done. Don't worry about doing those things, just get them out of your head.

You may feel a little overwhelmed from writing all of those things down, but you probably also feel a lot lighter. You've just done the first of the five key steps to mastering GTD.

The five-step process of GTD

1. Capture: Capture everything. Anything you need to act on or might need to act on needs to be captured. Get it out of your head and into the system.
2. Clarify: With each thing, you're asking yourself Is this actionable? If it's not actionable, what should you do with it? If it is actionable, what's the "next action" (more on this soon).
3. Organize: Put the thing in the right place. If it's actionable, it's in your task management system. If you don't need it, it goes in the trash. If you might need it, you store it for reference.
4. Reflect: Review and think about the things in your system, regularly. How often? Often enough to keep them out of your mind, which helps you trust your "trusted system."
5. Engage: Do what you intended to do with the things. That might be taking action, that might be not taking action.

Whatever action you do take, that's the "next action."

Identify the "next action"

If you take away only one idea from this Getting Things Done book summary, it should be the "next action." The "next action" is what it sounds like: What is the next thing you can do about this thing you're thinking about?

I used to write vague items on my to-do list: I'd write "Mom," to remind me Mom's birthday was coming up, and that I needed to buy her a gift.

Look at how many steps removed "Mom" was from the next action!

You might think the next action was to buy Mom a gift, but it wasn't. Instead, the next action was "brainstorm gift ideas for Mom." That's easier to act upon than just "Mom."

You might not think it makes a difference. But – like closing open loops – identifying the next action saves mental energy. When you look at your to-do list you don't have to wonder what action to take.

And sometimes you don't need to take action at all.

Keep a "someday/maybes" list

If you take away only two ideas from this Getting Things Done book summary, it should be the "next action," and the "someday/maybes" list.

Why? Because these are the two ideas that free up the most energy. The next action makes it easier to act. Your someday/maybe list makes it easier to not act.

Before I knew about someday/maybe, I'd make one of two mistakes: I'd either write something down on my to-do list, not realizing I didn't really intend to do it, or I'd recognize that I didn't really intend to do it, and so not write it down, and thus keep thinking about it.

Both of these were the wrong way.

Your someday/maybes list lets you capture things you would like to do, only it's not the right time or you're not yet sure you want to do them.

Because the things you someday or maybe want to do are in your "trusted system" you close the loops, and you stop thinking about them.

But for your someday/maybe list to work, you have to review it regularly.

Do a "weekly review"

If you take only three ideas from this Getting Things Done book summary, it should be the "next action," the "someday/maybes" list, and the "weekly review."

Because the weekly review is what puts the "trusted" in "trusted system." Remember the five-step process behind GTD: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage.

Capturing, Clarifying, and Organizing help you identify what to do and be sure you'll do it. Reflecting – which you do in your weekly review – helps you feel confident nothing is falling through the cracks.

Find a time once a week where you consistently have the time and energy to Reflect on your life and work. Make sure you've Captured, Clarified, and Organized everything.

I do my weekly review on Sunday afternoons. Some people like Fridays. It is really a game-changing habit.

There's your Getting Things Done book summary! (some final ideas)

Those are the most important ideas behind GTD from my fifteen years of using it. There is of course a whole book's worth of ideas behind the system. I highly recommend you pick up the book. Honorable mention includes:

• Contexts: Assign a "context" to your tasks, such as "@home" or "@office." Some to-do items, you can only do in certain places.
• Projects: If you think it's a task, it's often a "project." (If it takes more than one task to achieve your desired outcome).
• Two-Minute Rule: If you're Clarifying, and you come across a next action that will take two minutes or less, do it right away.

Download your free "GTD toolkit"

I've been using GTD for more than fifteen years. It's helped me write three books, build a business, and travel the world.

Want to know which tools I count on to get things done? I'll instantly send you the tools I count on most if you sign up to my newsletter here.

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After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today!

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About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/getting-things-done/

In the game of golf, there's an expression: "Drive for show, putt for dough." What it means is: If you want to win tournaments, practice putting.

It makes sense. In a standard even-par round of golf, putts make up half of all strokes. You'll use your driver less than half the number of times you'll use your putter. There's more strokes to get rid of in the putting part of the game.

"Drive for show, putt for dough" makes sense – but it's wrong. Why? It can tell us a lot about other places in life and work with "raised floors."

Golf is a reality-distortion field

First, a little background on the game of golf, for those unfamiliar. You've got a roughly one-and-a-half-inch ball, you're trying to hit into a roughly four-inch hole. That hole is anywhere from one-hundred yards away to five-hundred yards away.

A one-hundred yard hole is a short par 3. A five-hundred yard hole is a long par 5. Meaning you have three strokes to get the ball in the hole for the par 3, and you have five strokes to get the ball in the hole on the par 5 – that is, to shoot even par. In between these distances are the more-common par 4s.

So you're hitting a tiny ball with a chunk of metal on the end of a long stick, and you're trying to get it into a tiny hole a few football fields away.

It's insanely difficult, and trying to accomplish this will challenge your perception of reality. So no wonder the common wisdom in golf is wrong: It's hard enough to make solid contact with the ball. It's even harder to look back on a round, or even a hole, and have a clear picture of what the hell happened and how you could do it better.

Golf is essentially a reality-distortion field. It's endlessly multivariate. It's full of hidden risks and difficult decisions. It's also frustrating and emotionally challenging, which makes it even harder to see reality and improve.

So, yes, golf is a good analog to life.

Seeing reality in Golf

Mark Broadie of Columbia University wanted to make it easier to see reality in the game of golf. So, he collected a ton of data. He got detailed data of more than 100,000 shots from 200 men and women of all ages and skill levels. He knew where each shot started, where each shot ended, whether the shot was from the sand or the fairway or tall grass – he even knew whether each putt was uphill or downhill, left-breaking or right-breaking.

This is a lot of data. At the time, if you were a stats-minded golfer, you were counting how many fairways you hit in your drives, how many greens you hit in regulation (A "green in regulation" is par minus-two, because the goal is to average only two putts on each hole.) Since you believed you were "putting for dough," you were also counting how many putts you had.

But this information stats-minded golfers were collecting didn't really help. Maybe you had only 28 putts instead of the standard 36 putts, but the reason you had so few putts was because you didn't hit any greens, so you were hitting the green from a shorter distance and thus your putts were shorter and easier to make.

It didn't help you see reality. If anything, it made reality harder to see.

The "strokes-gained" method of seeing reality

But Mark Broadie revolutionized golf stats. He developed a system called "strokes gained." Basically, for your skill level, where on the course are you gaining strokes and losing strokes?

Your average PGA Tour golfer hitting from the tee on a 400-yard hole – a par 4 – averages 3.99 strokes. From 8 feet, he averages 1.5 strokes.

So imagine a golfer who is better than other pros from 8 feet. Instead of 1.5 strokes on average, he takes 1.3 strokes. Yet this golfer still averages 3.99 strokes from 400 yards off the tee. He's better than other pros from 8 feet, but somehow just as good as other pros from 400 yards. That means somewhere between the tee and that 8-foot putt, he's losing a fraction of a stroke – 0.2 strokes to be exact.

It's almost like for every single shot on the course, the golfer is starting with a new "par" based upon the distance from the hole and the conditions of the shot. If you crunch all of that data, you can find exactly where your game needs work.

Why "putt for dough" is wrong

After crunching all this data, Mark Broadie discovered why "putt for dough" is wrong: Putts make up 50% of the strokes in a standard even-par round of golf. But Broadie found that putting performance only accounts for 15% of the strokes that separate the wheat from the chaff.

From Broadie's fascinating book, Every Shot Counts:

Between the best pros and average pros, between pros and amateurs, and between good amateurs and poor amateurs, the numbers show that putting contributes about 15% to the difference in scores. Tee-to-green shots explain the remaining 85% of score differences.

In fact, if you took a golfer who usually shoots 90, and you gave that golfer the putting skill of a pro – who usually shoots 20 or 25 strokes less – that amateur golfer's score would drop not by 20 or 25 strokes, but by four strokes.

Instead of shooting 90, this amateur golfer with the putting skills of a pro would shoot 86.

Golfers have been saying putting is the most important part of the game since the early 1800s. Mark Broadie's work didn't come around until the early 2000s. How could popular wisdom get it so wrong for so long?

"Raised floors" can't be lowered

This is what I call a "raised floor." It's an area where you have a standard of performance. Since that standard of performance seems to have lots of room for improvement, you think you can improve that performance.

But there's a floor. It's a raised floor, and you can't lower it.

We know no unassisted human will run a 10-second mile. We know there's a raised floor, and that if you want to run a mile in record time, it's a matter of shaving off fractions of a second.

Why golfers focus on "raised floors"

Yet golfers, for the longest time, thought it was putting that mattered most. Why?

If you know anything about perception, you can see a few ways putting would seem like the most important part of the game.

Putting is the action you're usually making when you reach your goal – when the ball finally goes in the hole. Putting is also where you miss the hole, sometimes by a hair.

When you reach the green in three strokes from 500 yards away, you have a ten-foot put for birdie, and you end up taking three more strokes to get in the hole – that's frustrating! Three strokes for 500 yards, three strokes for ten feet – it seems clear where you need improvement.

Because it's frustrating, because it causes golfers to feel an emotion, putting seems more relevant.

These examples are components of the "availability bias." That we remember things that are easy to remember – such as "lipping out" a put or three-putting from ten feet.

The availability bias is why people are often more worried about dying in plane crashes than in car crashes, despite the fact they're far more likely to die in a car crash.

Look out for "raised floors"

Raised floors are in other areas of your life and work, and they can waste your energy.

How many calories can you cut from your diet, really? How much can you cut your spending, really? How much time can you save, really?

Don't lower the floor. Raise the ceiling.

If putting isn't the biggest part of golf, what is? Among the top 40 PGA Tour golfers, putting accounted for 15% of the game, driving 28%, and shots from around the green 17%. The most important part of the game: approach shots – that is, shots to the green from long distances – these accounted for 40% of the game.

The greatest golfer ever, Tiger Woods, gets his advantage not from great putting, but from great approach shots. In the data Mark Broadie has analyzed, when hitting from the 150–200-yard range, Tiger Woods hit his shots three or four feet closer to the hole than other pros. Those approach shots alone gave Tiger a 1.3 stroke per round advantage. There's four rounds in a tournament. It only takes one stroke to win. 1.3 strokes per round is a lot.

So instead of getting good at the short game of golf, get good at the long game of golf.

Instead of cutting more calories from your diet – as we learned from the Body by Science book summary on episode 160 – build muscle that burns calories. Instead of struggling to cut your spending, make more money. Instead of stressing yourself out to save more time, manage your energy.

Don't lower the floor – raise the ceiling.

Image: In the Style of Kairouan, Paul Klee

Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order!

After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today!

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About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/raised-floors/

Each November, writers around the world make a commitment. They commit to writing a novel within a month. It's called NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writer's Month.

Since 2013, software developers have also been making a commitment. They've committed to generating a novel within a month. It's called NaNoGenMo – National Novel Generation Month.

The novels these programmers create – if you can call them novels – can tell us a lot about the future of work.

How well can AI write a novel? (Not at all, really.)

The novels that programmers generate are all over the board. One "novel" was just Moby Dick, written backwards. Another "novel" was called Paradissssse Lossssst. It was a reproduction of John Milton's epic poem, but with each "s" in the poem replaced with a varying number of other s's.

But, some programmers take the task a little more seriously. They train AI models and see what they come up with. One such model is called GPT-2. GPT-2 was once considered too dangerous to release to the public, because you could supposedly generate subversive content en-masse, and do some pretty nefarious things. Kind of like [Russia did with a farm of human-generated content around the 2016 election].

And what is this advanced AI model able to generate? So far, nothing impressive. Programmer and author of [aiweirdness.com] Janelle Shane tweeted, "Struggling with crafting the first sentence of your novel? Be comforted by the fact that AI is struggling even more."

The sentence this AI model generated for Janelle: "I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man." Not exactly Tolstoy.

The follow up to GPT-2 is now out, so we'll see this year what kind of novel GPT-3 can generate, but if Janelle Shane's experiments so far are any indication, humans will still have the edge. She asked GPT-3 how many eyes a horse had. It kept telling her: [four].

Your edge as a human lies in your creativity

According to Kai-Fu Lee, author of AI Superpowers, forty- to fifty-percent of jobs will be replaced by AI and automation within the next couple of decades. But humans won't be replaced across the board. It's the creativity- and strategy-based jobs that will be the most secure.

If your job is an "optimization-based" job, you might want to start reinventing yourself. If your primary work is maximizing a tax refund, calculating an insurance premium, or even diagnosing an illness, your job involves so-called "narrow tasks." These tasks are already being automated, or soon will be automated.

You could type out 50,000 nonsense words in about a day. A computer can generate 50,000 words faster than you can blink. But, you could write a novel in a month. A computer can't write a novel at all.

Which means your edge as a human is not in typing the words faster. Your edge as a human is in thinking the thoughts behind the words.

This doesn't just apply to writing novels. If you're an entrepreneur building a world-changing startup or a social worker helping a family navigate taking care of a sick loved-one, your creativity matters. No AI will be able to do what you do for a very long time – if ever.

So when a computer can do in the blink of an eye something that would take us all day, and when our creativity is the one thing keeping us relevant, that has powerful implications on how we get things done.

Time management isn't built for creative work

Remember from episode 226 when we learned about [Frederick Taylor]? How he stood next to a worker with a stopwatch and timed every action and broke down all of those actions into a series of steps? He optimized time as a "production unit."

But creativity doesn't work like stacking bricks or moving chunks of iron. Remember there are three big realities about creativity that make it incompatible with the "time management" paradigm:

1. Great ideas come in an instant
2. One idea can be infinitely more valuable than another idea
3. You can't connect inputs directly to outputs

In a world where creativity not only matters, it's arguably the only thing that matters, the ways that time management is incompatible with creativity are big problems.

They're especially big problems because the more you're watching the clock – the more you're a ["clock-time" person], like we talked about on episode 235, the less creative you're going to be.

So the things that used to make us more productive, now make us less productive. We can't try to do more things in less time. We can't multitask. We can't skip out on sleep or otherwise neglect our health.

If you want to kill creativity: Get five hours of sleep a night, fight traffic for two hours a day, and start each day with a piping hot thermos of a psychoactive drug. This is the unfortunate and inescapable reality of most Americans today.

Don't expect technology to be creative for you, use technology for you to be creative

Will an unassisted AI be winning the Nobel Prize in literature in the next ten years? Some might think so. I'm no AI expert, but I'm skeptical. Remember from Episode 237 that [the birthday problem] shows us how hard it is for us humans to understand how complex some things are.

GPT-3 is one-hundred times more powerful than GPT-2. But is it one-hundred times better at writing a novel? We'll see – I doubt it.

Does that make AI and other technologies useless in creative work? Far from it. We can use technology not only to lift us out of drudgery, but to assist us in being creative.

Here's just some of the ways I use technology to be more creative:

• I live in a cheaper country, where I can have more flexibility to do work with unpredictable success ([Extremistan] like we talked about in the previous episode).
• When I moved to South America, I mourned the loss of easy access to paper books. But now, five years later, I have many thousands of highlights of the most important ideas I've come across in my reading. This is because I've been forced to read almost everything on Kindle. I can quickly and easily search through those highlights. This makes writing new books much easier than it would be otherwise.
• I'm able to live in South America because of cheap air travel, access to massive amounts of knowledge through the internet, and global publishing power, communication, and electronic banking. Not to mention easy Spanish translation in the palm of my hand.
• Aside from those Kindle highlights, I can store, organize, and quickly retrieve relevant information I've previously consumed or taken notes on. I can quickly reference old ideas and connect them to make new ideas.
• I'm able to test out my ideas and get instant feedback on what's working or not through Twitter, and email, website, and podcast stats.
• Amazon's algorithms help relevant readers find my books, which earns me money so I can write more.

There are starting to be some glimmers of AI assisting us in creativity in some more direct ways. A new service called [Sudowrite] won't write a novel for you, but it uses GPT-3 to suggest characters or plot twists for your novel.

If you combine advances in AI models with the trends there are in studying the structure of stories, it's not hard to see a future where AI plays a big role in assisting writers in coming up with stories.

But for now, don't expect technology to be creative for you. Instead, use technology to help you be more creative.

New times call for new measures. When we're trying to define what it means to be more productive, we can't apply thinking from the industrial age when we're in the midst of the creative age.

Image: [Traverse Beams, by Patrick Henry Bruce]

Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order!

After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today!

My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays

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

About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/the-creative-age/

Subject: "IMMEDIATE Action Reqeusted [sic]"

They misspelled "requested," which had the unintended effect of highlighting that this email was urgent.

There were some documents attached to the email. They wanted me to review the documents and sign them. Then, I would get a wire of money to my bank account – from Google, Inc.

I had no idea this email was coming. It was a nice surprise, since it was my birthday. It was all thanks to a decision I made three years prior.

Three years prior, I cleared my schedule and declared what I call a "Week of Want." I gave myself an entire week to work on whatever I wanted. I had no plan at the time – that was the point of my Week of Want. Three years later, here I was getting a surprise paycheck, thanks to that Week of Want.

Creative work happens in "Extremistan"

What was happening was a [Black Swan]. A rare and unpredictable event – in this case, a positive one. If you made several copies of the universe, and repeated my decision from three years prior, in most of those parallel universes, I probably wouldn't end up getting money wired to my bank account from Google.

That's because creative work happens in Extremistan. Nassim Taleb introduced Extremistan in his book, [The Black Swan]. Extremistan is a world of Black Swans – rare and unpredictable events.

Creative work does not happen in "Mediocristan"

Other kinds of work happens in the opposite of Extremistan – what Taleb calls Mediocristan. Mediocristan is a world that's stable and predictable.

Serving coffee is a good example of work that happens Mediocristan. There's a steady supply of coffee, and a steady demand for coffee. If you get a job at Starbucks, they can more or less predict that supply and demand, as well as their overhead costs. So, they can pay you by the hour.

When your line of work is thinking of ideas and bringing those ideas into the world, you can't get paid by the hour. Beyoncé does not get paid by the hour to make her music, even though she's Beyoncé, and her next record is guaranteed to sell.

Much less is the world's next Beyoncé getting paid by the hour. Nobody knows she's the next Beyoncé. If you made copies of the universe, in many of those parallel universes, she wouldn't even become the next Beyoncé.

You need clear priorities in Extremistan

When you're working in a pure Mediocristan, you don't even need priorities. You know exactly what needs to be done, and you do it.

When you're working in Extremistan, you do need clear priorities. There are a million things you could do – a million things that might work – so you have to be ruthless with your priorities.

You have to be ruthless in what you say yes to and what you say no to, and in trying to find some way to objectively see what the results are so you can make better decisions in the future.

Clear priorities have a dark side

But clear priorities have a dark side. It's that when you have clear priorities, you only put your money on the sure bets.

And when all of your money is on sure bets, you aren't even gambling anymore. You've moved yourself from Extremistan to Mediocristan. You can keep steady paychecks coming, but you'll never hit the jackpot.

So employ the Barbell Strategy

So how do you give yourself the opportunity to hit it big, without going bust? You need to spend some time in Extremistan.

Taleb calls it "The Barbell Strategy": Imagine a barbell, with fat weights on the ends, and a thin bar in the middle. On one end of the barbell is your sure bets. If you're investing, that's treasury bills. On the other end of the barbell is your risky bets. If you're investing, that might be options, or cryptocurrencies.

What you're avoiding is the stuff in the middle. Don't make big bets where you can lose your shirt, and avoid the seemingly-conservative investments in which you can actually lose a lot.

Give yourself a "Week of Want"

One way I spend time in Extremistan is by giving myself a "Week of Want." In a week of want, I clear as much as I can from my schedule for a whole week, and I let myself explore whatever is interesting to me.

In 2012, after publishing my first book, I gave myself a Week of Want. I spent most of my week reflecting on the experience of writing that first book. Why did it seem nothing I had learned about productivity had prepared me to write that book?

I reflected on the grab-bag of rituals and routines I eventually developed to keep my writing process moving forward. I shared my thoughts in a blog post, called [Mind Management (Not Time Management)].

Nothing happened right away. That's the nature of creative work. There's often a delay before your bets pay off.

But another year and a half later, I got an email. The renowned behavioral scientist, Dan Ariely, had read my blog post, and wondered if I'd like to help him with a productivity app he was building.

Another year and a half after that, I got a surprise payday from Google. Google bought that productivity app.

The Week of Want is a way of "gambling with your time." [Dan Ariely] himself talked about gambling with his own time back on episode 203. He'll spend some amount of his time on things that don't make sense, such as working with a cartoonist, or inviting a mentalist to perform at one of his speeches.

The Week of Want exposes you to "asymmetric opportunities," like [Tynan] talked about on episode 145. Oftentimes we hold ourselves back from pursuing a silly idea. There's very little downside to pursuing the idea, but the potential upside is unlimited.

Why "want?"

The Week of Want is a great way to make sure you spend a little time in Extremistan. But it has another valuable purpose, and that purpose lies in the idea of "want."

When we're spending all of our energy on what we feel we should do, we soon forget what we want to do.

But remember that creative work is unpredictable. Even when we think really hard about what we should do, a lot of the time we're going to be wrong.

Additionally, the things we want to be doing are powerful. The things we want to be doing are the things we're curious about. And curiosity is powerful in two ways.

One: Curiosity is motivational fuel. You can work harder on something you're curious about.

Two: Curiosity is a path to originality. Your curiosity will lead you down multiple paths. When those paths converge, you'll be where no one else has been.

Why a week?

You may recognize elements of the Week of Want in Google's famous "twenty-percent time" strategy.

When Google was first starting out, they allowed their engineers to spend twenty percent of their time on whatever project they wanted. The strategy worked great. Some of Google's best products were created during twenty-percent time – including Gmail and AdSense.

I've heard some people say that they spend one day a week on a side-project. Hey, that's a good use of the barbell strategy, and it will expose you to positive Black Swans more than not working on a side project at all.

But there's something special about spending an entire week doing whatever you want. Working on what you want to work on, and doing so for an entire week, takes you further and further from the norm. It brings you deeper and deeper into the territory where you'll discover truly original ideas.

When I asked neuroscientist John Kounios – way back on [episode 8] – about the benefits of taking an entire week to do what I want, he said there were two potential ways that could improve creative thinking.

One: Doing what you want improves your mood, which leads to better ideas. He explained, "It gives you pleasure, puts you in a positive mood, and it's something you can sustain over the week – and then it can lead to creative insights."

Two: Taking a whole week puts you in a deeper state of creativity. Dr. Kounios said that the "insightful state of mind is very fragile.... It's easier to get into an analytical state of mind than it is to get into a creative, insightful, state of mind. So if you can create this whole block of time for a week, it allows you to really sink into that state."

Week of Want rules

To do your own week of want, clear away as much as you can for a week. Act like you're going on vacation. Set up the out-of-office autoresponder on your email.

Approach the Week of Want with no expectations as to what you'll discover during that week. The goal of the Week of Want is much less about actually finding great ideas. It's more about reconnecting with the feeling of wanting in the first place. We so regularly do the things we feel we should do, we soon forget what it feels like to want to do something at all.

Image: [Insula Dulcamara, by Paul Klee]

Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order!

After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today!

My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays

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

About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/week-want/

In New York City, sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century, a young art student sat for a portrait.

The artist who painted this portrait won a prestigious award for that portrait. The young woman who sat for the portrait suddenly became a sought-after model. She could actually earn money sitting for portraits.

She needed that money. Her family was poor, and art school -- especially art school in New York City -- was expensive.

But she decided to never model again.

The tough decision that made a good artist a great artist

This young artist later recalled the moment she decided to stop sitting for portraits. She drew a line down the middle of a sheet of paper, so that there were now two columns.

At the top of one column, she wrote "yes." At the top of the other column, she wrote "no." She said, "The essential question was always, if you do this, can you do that?"

Here's one thing that probably focused her attention on the question of whether or not she could keep modeling: She had skipped class to sit for that prize-winning portrait.

So, if she was going to model, could she go to class? If she was going to model, could she put in the work necessary to achieve her dream of becoming a great artist?

Her answer was, "no," she could not keep modeling. And art history should thank her for it. Her name was Georgia O'Keeffe, and she lived on to become one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. One of her paintings was sold at auction several years ago for more than forty million dollars.

The unearned can hurt more than it helps

I don't want to assume that because O'Keeffe is one of my favorite artists -- not just for her work but also for her contrarian personality -- that you, too know who I'm talking about. You've seen her work: abstract close-ups of flowers and cattle skulls, paintings of the desert landscape surrounding the New Mexico estate where she spent most of her time.

This story about quitting modeling has one good lesson in it: That if you want to be great at something, you sometimes have to quit something else that you're merely good at.

That's a valuable lesson. It's the obvious one. It's not the lesson I want to talk about.

I want to talk about the unearned. That when you accept something you didn't earn, it often hurts you more than it helps you.

Money you didn't earn will make you foolish with finances. Flattery you didn't earn will make you settle for mediocrity. Power you didn't earn will disconnect you from reality.

If you want to become great at what you do, you have to be on the lookout for the unearned. You have to shun the unearned.

The unearned is an easy path to mediocrity

When I tweeted about the dangers of the unearned, most people agreed. Some people were suspicious. "What about Universal Basic Income?," they'd say.

I don't have an opinion on Universal Basic Income. I haven't thought about it enough. But this is not about Universal Basic Income. As I understand it UBI would be about getting your basic needs met. Do you have a roof over your head, and food in your stomach?

Having a roof over your head and food in your stomach is a good thing, especially if you don't have to work for it. But beyond that, the unearned becomes dangerous.

When I'm talking about the dangers of the unearned, I'm not talking about the basics. When you have your basic needs met, it's an easy path to mediocrity. I don't mean that in a bad way. I happen to think it would be nice if we lived in a society where more people could get by being mediocre. That competition wouldn't be so fierce that you need to be the very best in your field to have a chance at survival.

But, this isn't about basic needs. This isn't about mediocrity. The unearned is an easy path to mediocrity, and that's fine. But if you want to be great, you need to be on the lookout for the unearned. The unearned is an easy path to mediocrity, but the unearned is an obstacle to mastery.

The great Georgia O'Keeffe shunned the unearned

Yes, Georgia O'Keeffe could have "earned" money sitting for portraits in the sense that she would be doing the work of sitting. But she didn't want it. Much of what she would have "earned" would have been unearned.

What Georgia didn't earn was being an attractive young woman, that people wanted to paint portraits of. That didn't get her much in the early 1900's. She couldn't even vote. She was a young woman, trying to make it as an artist in America. At the time, that was unheard of.

Georgia instinctively knew the dangers of what she could get being an attractive young woman, and she actively rejected those things. Even then she was already dressing daily in her trademark black frock. She sewed them herself, and they happened to have the effect of hiding her figure.

As Georgia grew into a famous artist, she consistently shunned the unearned when others tried to categorize her not just as an artist, but as a "woman artist." When Peggy Guggenheim invited Georgia to exhibit her work in a show of women painters, Georgia rejected the invitation and proclaimed, "I am not a woman painter!"

What would have been the harm of Georgia exhibiting in a collection of women artists? Certainly her achievements as an artist were more difficult because of her standing in society as a woman. But she still saw exhibitions like this as the unearned. It would cloud her judgement of what really mattered. What really mattered was not being a great "woman artist." What really mattered was being a great artist.

The artist whose work was forgotten

We normally don't think that someone in a marginalized class as getting much of anything unearned. So maybe the dangers of the unearned will be more clear if we look at the man who painted that prize-winning portrait of Georgia which launched her potential modeling career.

The painter of that portrait was a classmate of Georgia's. He also went on to become a successful painter. He studied in Paris, he won numerous awards, he rubbed shoulders with the great painters of his time. People like Robert Henri and Edward Hopper. He was regularly commissioned to paint portraits of famous actors. He was inducted into the National Academy of Design, which includes members such as architects Frank Ghery and Frank Lloyd Wright. At the height of his fame, Esquire magazine named him America's most important living artist.

His name was Eugene Speicher Ever heard of him? Me neither.

After a successful career as an artist in his lifetime, Speicher has been forgotten. His work used to be exhibited in New York's Museum of Modern Art, and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, most of his work has been sold off to smaller museums, or taken off display.

In 2014, as one of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings was being sold for more than forty million dollars, one museum in New York did hold a retrospective exhibition of Speicher's work. No, it wasn't the Met or the Guggenheim. It was a small museum, somewhere between Manhattan and Albany.

The big question behind this exhibition: How is it possible that Eugene Speicher was so successful and famous during his lifetime, only to be -- as one critic put it -- "virtually erased from the canon of American art history." In articles about the exhibition, critics threw about theories: Was it because he switched from portraiture to landscape painting? Was it the financial pressures of supporting a family?

It's funny, in terms of the impact of his art, Speicher didn't achieve mastery like Georgia did. You could say he achieved mediocrity.

He embraced the unearned and stayed mediocre

I have a theory why Speicher's work was forgotten: He never got really good. He didn't shun the unearned. Worse yet, Speicher embraced the unearned.

To say Eugene Speicher has been forgotten is an exaggeration. He does live on in art history for one incident. This incident supports my theory.

When Speicher asked Georgia to sit for what would become a prize-winning portrait, Georgia hesitated. She wasn't sure it was worth skipping class to sit for that portrait. And that's when Speicher showed his true colors.

Georgia later recalled what Speicher said: "It doesn't matter what you do, I'm going to be a great painter, and you will probably end up teaching painting in some girls' school."

Talk about not shunning the unearned. Speicher thought he could shovel the unearned into his coffers. He knew that just because he was a man, he had a better shot at making it as an artist than Georgia had.

The unearned: An easy path to mediocrity, an obstacle to mastery

Look at these two differing attitudes when it comes the unearned: Georgia didn't even want to sit for portraits. It may have helped pay for art school tuition, but it was going to take away from the work that mattered. The work of becoming a great artist.

Speicher thought that, because he was a man, he was entitled to a successful career as an artist. Speicher floated through his career, earning commissions, being invited to display his work in exhibitions. He was good enough to get a little further, with the help of the unearned.

Georgia didn't want a single thing she didn't earn. Because she didn't have money -- not even the money she could have made sitting for portraits -- she had to drop out of art school and leave New York. She supported herself through various jobs around the country.

It probably looked like Speicher was right, at least for a little while, one of those jobs was, indeed, teaching at some girls' school.

But, Georgia got the last laugh. Eugene Speicher -- well, the thing he's most famous for today -- is that he painted a portrait of one of the twentieth century's greatest artists.

Images: Revolution of the Viaduct, Paul Klee; [Georgia O'Keeffe ("Patsy"), Eugene Speicher]; [Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1*, Georgia O'Keeffe]

Thanks for sharing my work!

On Twitter, thank you to @jovvvian, @allenthird, @niceguylife2, and @coreyhainesco.

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David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/shun-the-unearned/