Dan Koe
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
The work was just something I did in between. And what that made me have to do while I didn't get it right the first time around, because that's very difficult to do is that I would at least have to think about what are the one to two things that really move the lever here. And when you're doing something creative, creative work has a very, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
it has a lot more opportunity to find and leverage those high priority things where let's take a social post for an example. If you're an author, you're a musician, you don't have to be a quote unquote content creator. If you have any kind of work that you want to spread, social media is a decent way to do that. And with social media, if you post one thing and it is very good and
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
then that post can do better than a thousand other people's posts that went out today. And you can do quite well with that thing. So that's the first thing is, um, try to adopt a mindset that allows you to at least search for those higher leverage things. Because while you're doing the work, then you'll be able to identify them.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Because if you aren't necessarily looking for them, they may just pass you by and you may not realize that this could lead to an exponential event of a lot of progress in that specific amount of time. When it really came to me is when I started to remove a lot of what I would call my bad habits, which were the video games, which were the Netflix, which were... quite a few things, the junk food.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
I just remember sophomore year of college, living in the dorms, terrible time, quit the gym, just was not productive, very low period of my life. And after COVID specifically, I started going on walks because the COVID-15 or whatever they call it, I couldn't go to the gym. I was... gaining a decent amount of weight. I just felt like the Pillsbury Doughboy and I'm tall.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So it wasn't that bad, but in my face, you could see like it's all puffy then didn't like that. So started going on walks and I would listen to audio books during that time and started to notice like all of these ideas were starting to pop into my head that never had before. It was just a weird realization of like, wow, I actually have the ability to generate good ideas that sound unique to me.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And with those ideas, I've realized the power of them later is that those can fuel different aspects of your creative work. So that's all to say and to wrap around. That I believe productivity is highly dependent on creativity and that when you separate them, both of them lose their impact to quite some degree.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Where, to give an example, if I'm writing a book or I'm creating any kind of a project, it doesn't matter what kind of a project is. That project, my mind expands to fill the context of that project.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
I had worked part-time jobs for quite a while, but I was freelance pretty quickly out of a job.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So when I'm on a walk or I'm making time for creativity or when the default mode network in my brain is activated where you're at rest, you're not focused on work, that's like shower thoughts when ideas just pop into your subconscious or into your conscious. Those ideas that happen during the creative period,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
are usually the things that are higher leverage and apply directly to the project that you were building during your productivity periods.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And what I started to realize is that when you progress through freelance work, and then I got introduced to social media and digital products, physical products, other things that I just wasn't aware of at the time, it was very interesting how I could make so much more without increasing the amount of work that I did.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Lots of walks, Ben. Quite a few walks where I try to bake things in and try to blur the lines as much as I can between creativity, productivity, health, whatever my goals are. They do kind of all blend together. So in the morning, I wake up and go on a walk, the fresh morning sunlight in your eyes like everyone wants you to get.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
After that, shower, hygiene, et cetera, get straight into some kind of building. I like to separate my days as much as I can and lump them into two categories where it's releasing or constraining entropy and releasing entropy, where in the morning, don't touch your phone, don't do anything that would cause a rogue thought to pop into your head and just cloud your mind for the rest of the day.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So the morning on my walk is just sole intention focused on, okay, what am I writing about today? Can I find a starting point for when I get back? And then the first project that I'm working on is Usually something that is novel that needs to be done first thing in the morning. This is something like a book or a longer term project that takes that extra effort to build.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Then after that, I get into my main levers. which is writing for me. So that's newsletter, social posts, and those are the main things because those pull traffic, right? If I'm not building a product or a project, then my main focus is on getting traffic to those specific things. And then after that, I take a walk to kind of
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
create that segment where it's like, okay, now I can start letting more people into my day and start taking on more conversations. And When I get back, that's usually when I'll check email, when I'll check Slack, when I'll check Telegram, let other things come into play. Do a lot of the maintenance or admin work where it's not really creative.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It doesn't require a lot of focused attention on that thing. And then after that block, I'll go to the gym And then that's kind of like a hard separation where the rest of the day, it's kind of like reading, writing, dabbling. It's just free flow, right? If I have priority things that I need to do, I'll sit down and do them. If I don't, I'll maybe read a bit, go to my computer, walk around.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It's kind of like a pacing balance of productivity and creativity.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
through uh discipline but primarily saying no in order to then allow the creativity to come out yeah i think of it as a uh creativity still has constraints and it still thrives within constraints i feel like with productivity it's more of a narrow block you're just hyper focused on one thing with creativity you're not letting your mind just be exposed to the
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
absolute chaos and like drowning in that that's what leads to the boredom anxiety overwhelm other things that come from kind of leaving that skill challenge match where Creativity, at least in my lens, is when my mind is operating within a specific set of constraints, usually a project, right?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So if it's a book or it's a newsletter, that's why I love writing a weekly newsletter specifically is because there's never an idea that I can't utilize, right? I can listen to, I don't know if you've experienced this, but when you have a project and You can listen like you're on a walk.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You listen to an audio book or a YouTube lecture completely different from what the topic of that thing you're working on is, and it will still give you ideas for the project.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Where it's environment design and... just that making it difficult to be undisciplined. So if you have trouble with your phone in the morning, then put it in another room. I've never really done that or had to do that, but I know it's a common piece of advice and I'm, it probably works for that exact reason, right? At least you get up and then you realize, Hey, I don't do this.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Same thing with putting, uh, unhealthy foods in your pantry or just buying them in general.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, So yes, that's the main thing is environment design for that tweet.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
That kind of contradicts what we said about creativity thriving within constraints.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
what I mean by that is the progressive overload of uncertainty and responsibility where if you just throw yourself into the middle of the ocean, you can maybe learn to swim, but you probably won't if you don't know how to swim before and it's not going to be a very good time and you're definitely not going to quote unquote reach your potential there. But, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
What I mean by that is now if you were to look back on what was uncertain previously in your life, it no longer is. So what I mean by that is you're gradually expanding what is known to you into the unknown. You're taking those steps into the unknown, allowing your mind to sit and marinate in that thing, in that slight amount of uncertainty that is kind of more empowering than it is the opposite.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
By delusion, I would say misconception or poorly fabricated expectations in your head, where if you work hard on one thing for a specific amount of time, you don't deserve something that someone else has gotten by doing that specific thing. So as an example, if you spend one year writing a book and
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And that's when your mind can grow the most. Think of that as we'll call it your edge, right? Living at your edge. pushing into the unknown in the gym, that's representative of pushing close to or near failure or to failure. When you're lean bulking, it's eating 200 calories over.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It's very difficult to stay at that specific place and not put on the extra weight because you want to ego lift or not eat over because you're just hungry or can't control yourself, right? That's where you're making the most progress that what is the most fulfilling, but that's a difficult place to be.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And the way you can kind of filter for that is boredom or anxiety or, uh, boredom and uncertainty, where if you feel yourself getting anxious, that usually means that you're punching above your weight. In a sense, the task is too challenging for you and you don't have the knowledge, skill, or clarity to make sense of the path to get there. So when people set these, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
high and hard goals, but they don't have any of the puzzle pieces to make sense of that with their mind, then it's extremely uncertain to them. But once they reach that goal, looping back to the quote, they've kind of been able to umbrella that or make sense of that picture so they can hold more uncertainty in their minds. Because one last thing with that is the more you do this, the less...
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
The more experience you have, let's say you're at level 50 or let's say you're at level one. When you're at level one, you wouldn't face a level 10, right? You're probably going to get one shotted. But if you are a level 50, you can probably hold your own against the level 60. Like the decrease in challenge as you're going more and more becomes ever so slight.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
I like to think of it in terms of solving an infinite string of problems in your life, where there is a most pressing problem in your life right now. And by solving that, you at least start to gain some kind of footing. If we were to extrapolate that out and see what that picture looked like over a long enough timescale, right now, I feel slow. I feel sluggish. It's impacting my relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It's impacting my ability to focus at work. I should do something about that first, right? I should focus on solving that problem. A problem implies that there is a goal. You don't necessarily need to create a goal, but there is a goal there. And at least you start moving in a better direction. As you move forward with that, more meaningful, challenging, and deeper problems start to uncover.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It's like when you start in the gym for vanity, but then you stay for the therapy, in a sense, where you start going to the gym because you want to look good, and someone in high school broke up with you or something like that, and you want to get back at them. But then as you get into it, two, three years...
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
The progress starts to slow down and you need to solve a newer problem of like, okay, where did my fulfillment in that specific thing come from? And you have to start to develop some kind of philosophical sense of mastery around the gym in and of itself. That's kind of the progression. answer the question that always comes up there with, okay, well, I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
First, I don't know what problem to solve. And two, I'm still not motivated to solve that problem because my mind isn't in the place where that is important to me yet. It's not an automatic decision to go and do that thing or create that new habit or whatever it may be. To that,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
We need to create a frame for your mind to operate within, kind of like a worldview, your own little world that you can start to piece together the map of. So what I like to do there, and this is a practice where you're going to take 10, 20, 30 minutes, however long it takes, to create an anti-vision for your future. And This isn't set in stone.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
This is like a minimum viable anti-vision right now. It's something that you just want to, you want to plant a flag on the ground and you want to come back to it to add to and refine to it. In order to do this, you're just trying to contemplate and think of experiences that you never want to experience again.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
That is a lot of hard work, but that doesn't mean that you deserve $100,000 a year for doing that specific thing, right? And so since we... Most of us, or quite a few of us, we go to school, we get a job, and we... That frames our mind in quite a few different ways.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You're trying to reflect on the things that you may have passed over and you probably did pass over in your past that were rather painful, but as you kind of just let time go on, that pain equalized and now it's no longer painful to you. So first, reflect on those things. What do you not want? What is your anti-ideal future? Write all of those things down, just anything. Write it all down.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
There's no specific way to do that. Come back to it when you need to. After that, create the opposite side of the frame, so the vision. What are the things that you want? What are the things that you want to experience again? Again, the first iteration of this is probably just going to be some delusion. In a year, you're going to be like, what was I thinking?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
But that's the purpose of iterating, refining, evolving. Right now, the only purpose of this frame is to reorient your mind to perceive new opportunities and ideas, where if you weren't aware of it previously,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
or if you didn't previously have a conscious top of mind goal of making, let's use a fitness exam of, of getting a six pack and avoiding getting a six pack for your vision and avoiding feeling sluggish, overweight, just not liking how you look in the mirror. That's kind of like a push pull between the two. Now with that on your mind,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
you're at least able to pick apart more things in your everyday experience. When you're scrolling on social media, now you're going to see that post of some useful piece of fitness information that you would have scrolled past before. You're going to follow that person. The algorithm is going to start to cater toward that specific interest. You're going to be recommended a book.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You're going to purchase that book. You'll probably read a chapter, but then you'll go down this other rabbit hole of Mike Isertel on YouTube. Don't do that, dear God. Yeah. But then you really get into it and then you start to develop this love for this one specific thing. And when you start to repeat that for the different domains of your life over years,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
of health, wealth, relationships, happiness, whatever it may be, then you can really start to make sense of this bigger picture and refine that frame over time. So it's less about here's a specific path to take and more about here's the direction you don't want to move in. Here's the direction you kind of want to move in.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Now let's just start solving problems along the way and see where trial and error takes us. Because you're probably not going to end up in a bad spot if you are doing that. And even now, it's like I still don't necessarily know what I want out of life. I have a very good idea that I hold high conviction in and I'm going to pursue, but I'm also open to that changing.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
One being that we tie a specific amount of work or a specific amount of hours of work each week to a specific number on a paycheck when that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. And the thing that can trip you up there is you bring that mindset over into your creative work or building your own thing.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So that may be another piece of the puzzle is just Don't have these high expectations like you need to know what you need to do.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Hmm. I have a question for you there is, um, I know it's hard to create some kind of blanket statement for this, but in your eyes, are there those foundational habits that every single person should do? And then the fulfillment and creativity comes from kind of dancing between those and doing their own thing? Or is there leeway there?
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And you work very hard, but then you get discouraged when you don't get the same amount of results or you get substantially less until you pull the levers that allow you to make substantially more.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah, I agree. And I think it goes for the other end too, where right now building software, a lot of the team has those habits, but in the opposite direction where like not even by my design or encouragement of it, I actively encourage the opposite, but they're like the cracked startup engineers that you'll see on Twitter where they're just working till 3 a.m.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
because that's what they love to do. They love to code and they love to just work together and be friends. And I've also noticed that in my life where When you are working on that one thing and you're going all in on it, it's that intensity phase. Other areas of your life do kind of have to peel back.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
I think the wisdom there is not letting them completely fall off or finding a lower baseline that you can maintain of those things.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah, it's fun when that happens because you... I don't know. You kind of prove yourself wrong in a lot of ways where...
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
The most progress that I've made in the gym was actually like two years ago rather than 10 when I first started simply because I just re-found an obsession with that one thing, focused on it for six months and surprised myself with a lot of progress just because I was so meticulous about that one thing. But then everything else took a backseat.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And another even further thing with that is if you get into the habit of doing that, it's a lot harder to pick steam back up in something like work if that took a backseat.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
If we draw a person's life out as a book or let's say a song, what people like to do is they like to focus on one specific lyric or word of the song and act like that's the entire person in and of themselves or an image. They like to zoom in on the pixel of an image and act like that makes up the entirety of their being. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
But the thing about a song specifically is that it continuously evolves. It's, Another example of that would be an index fund, right? One stock can be down, but the index fund can be up. And the people love to focus on the stock being down.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And that's all they can see rather than zooming out and seeing, okay, in the big picture, in the actual story of this thing, if I'm trying to think in stories instead of just...
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
words or phrases that this person has said at one point in their life, then it makes a lot more sense and I can see their growth and development and I can actually pull something from this and potentially change my own beliefs.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
But that's the problem in and of itself is that you don't want to and those beliefs are causing you to narrow your attention on that one tiny little thing that when you actually think about it, it doesn't matter in the slightest. And you're going to forget about it in 10 minutes. And your anger was for nothing.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It is extremely important because when you think of writing, when people hear the word writing just now, they're going to think, oh, they're not explicitly going to think this, but words are going to come to their mind of, okay, English degrees, academic writing, grammar, punctuation, grammar Nazis, all of these different things when that's not what writing is. Writing is writing.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Just think of texting your friend. You text your friends every day. Maybe if you have friends, you write in some way, you write emails, whatever it may be. I want you to think of that and things like journaling as a way to practice thinking. Specifically, because writing is thinking on paper. It's organized thinking that you can break apart, you can redo, you can be very intentional with it.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
In your mind, it's not an actual canvas. It's just something you're swimming through, and it's very difficult to find one coherent line of thought or create one long coherent line of thought. There's absolutely no way that you're going to write a book in your head.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So by putting your words on paper and starting to understand how you think, and then starting to, you could say, reprogram that, you are doing just that in your head. You're reprogramming the way that you think in hopefully a way that is beneficial toward ideal outcomes. So that's reason number one. The second reason is that I see writing
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
personally as a skill that amplifies any other skill that you could acquire. Therefore, I see it as a very good first thing to learn because it requires you to learn very fundamental skills of human nature, psychology, persuasion, potentially marketing, depending on the medium of the writing. sales in many cases for copywriting, different types of writing. It's communication.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Anything that you want to get out of life, you're probably going to be communicating, persuading, offering value, exchanging value with another person. And the written word is the base form of media that allows you to do that thing. So by practicing it and stacking skills on top of it, it can be extremely powerful while also being a way to reshape your entire mind
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And if your language that you use paves how far your thoughts can go, then that's extremely powerful in not only your decision-making, but in whatever potential you have in life.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You scroll on your phone, maybe you watch Netflix, you... hang out with friends, there isn't really something to build towards, right? And so I kind of ideated that with him for a decent amount of time because the reason he wanted to start that specifically was to give people, help people create a project that they could work on that would help cure their boredom.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
I find it quite interesting how everyone says that, where I think writing is important because it is a part of my identity, right? I'm going to talk about it a lot because it is. For you, it's podcasting or starting like a smaller version of the podcast. What's interesting to me is that for almost any creator, they would say the same thing in whatever medium they have.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So while it may be writing, while it may be speaking in some kind of fashion, I think Just creating something, being able to synthesize the ideas in your head, being able to take out some of the ideas that are stuck in your brain, organize them in some way that you think is beneficial to the world, and giving it to them solves a good amount of those not basic needs but meaning needs.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
by a long shot and there's so many different connected ideas there in in ways of doing that like you said there's uh 100 different ways to exercise are you going to do it inside outside are you going to do crossfit running walking jujitsu whatever it may be with creating you you do that with any interest that you have and that's what's so fun and fascinating about it is it's just uh
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
giving yourself permission to explore those interests and do something with them. It's less about reading just to read and you don't see any benefit out of it. Now you have something to do with it.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah. Naval put out a tweet recently and it said something along the lines of,
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It was, if there wasn't a reason to remember it, then you shouldn't want to remember it. Something of that line of thought where he was saying, If you needed to remember it, you would. And trying to memorize anything is kind of against the point.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah. That's changed how I view and read books, where I don't really sit and read entire books over the course of a few sessions, of course. I usually am hunting for ideas that I can utilize or write down or the ones that I will remember.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And I don't pay attention to too much else, where if I can use it as a portion of my writing, or I can weave it in somewhere here, or I can make sense of this abstract worldview that I was trying to integrate with my own, then perfect.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
But the other things in the book, me trying to study and memorize and be able to recite those things again, or like you said, so I can sound smart to someone else, it's kind of against the point.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah, just thedancoe.com. Everything's there. Dude, heck yeah. This was awesome. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah. I think it comes down to context and pain points quite often where if you don't have the pain point of not getting results out of your hard work, then maybe you don't need to not work harder.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
It's completely dependent on the person's situation where a lot of the people who are discouraged by working so hard and not getting anywhere with it, they're not realizing that that within itself is a pain point that has to be solved. And so then they don't have a new direction to work.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
So they're not registering their hard work leading to a lack of results as a problem where you can create a solution and start working on that thing. So then when you come back to the hard work or whatever it is, you're moving from a higher vantage point so you can make better decisions toward that thing.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah. It's dependent on what you're building and your goals. For me, I can just speak from experience where in my life, I've noticed maybe three or four different macro periods of productivity or creativity where there's typically seasons where I feel lost. And those seasons of feeling lost or just not knowing what to work on next usually come after
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
hitting some kind of goal that I've been pursuing for a long time. So all of these are cyclical. They're not exact, kind of like chapters in a book where each one resets. They each have their own goal. They each have their own highs and lows. That's how I like to view life from a bigger picture. But it starts out as feeling lost. And then if you don't get distracted there or you don't
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
What's that mean? Oh man. The story of that came from my friend, my YouTube editor. We were out... getting dinner one night, and he said he wanted to start a company called Bored, just a little passion project. And it was because he had been bored for so long in his life that the only options that he saw were to do the typical things that you do when you're bored.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
get bored or you fill your time with the default activities that come after being bored, then you start to move into this phase of curiosity. So first phase feeling lost, second phase curiosity, you start to Pursue new interests or go down a new rabbit hole or study something, whatever it may be.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And you're trying to experiment with different things until you find that one thing that you can't pull yourself away from. And then at that point, you kind of get pulled naturally into the season of intensity and And that's where you make a lot of the progress. For me, those are where the long 12-hour workdays come into play.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And that's when I build a new project, new product, new software, as I'm doing right now, completely new, right? Novel, new, feels very good, challenge is high. That's when fulfillment is also very high. And then once that reaches, there's like two options, right? You can fly too high and touch the sun.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
and get burned a bit and you learn a lot from that or you stay aware during it and you realize, okay, I'm reaching this peak. I need to figure out how to sustain a higher baseline from this. And for me, it's when I hit some kind of new monthly high. In the gym, that could be a new weight. In business, that could be a certain amount of followers in a month or whatever it may be.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And so that kind of ties into another tweet I wrote where if you're bored, build. So build your body, build your business, build... anything really, just focus that boredom towards something that isn't giving the opportunity for entropy to take hold.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Money in a month, who knows? But it's a spike. For me, I know that's not sustainable. So along the way... I have to be thinking how I'm going to be consistent at this thing.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
And that's kind of the fourth phase is the consistency phase where what system can I build to maintain a higher baseline of the progress that I've made with this thing while not trying to sustain this peak that I know is ultimately unsustainable if I want to do different things in my life.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
Yeah. That's kind of why it's cyclical, because you start to feel lost in a sense, where you can work hard and try to push through it. And maybe there are some situations where you can sustain a very high baseline, and that's the singular thing that you do. But for me, I tend to desire to drop back down to some kind of
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
lifestyle that I can maintain while not pushing too hard but also it's like adding muscle mass right the intensity phase is for building muscle the consistency phase is for cutting fat and revealing what you built underneath and when you do that enough over time you're kind of surprised with
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
where you end up after doing those things but in terms of the emotions you can kind of think of how it is when you feel uh after a bulk if you do some kind of a dirty bulk i don't really do that yeah if you do an epic dirty bulk then you usually feel pretty shitty you feel sluggish you feel tired you want to train because it's really enjoyable but every other area of your life it
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
took a backseat, or it is taking a backseat now. And so you feel that for a bit. You just feel sluggish. You feel tired. You don't have the same motivation that you did at the very beginning of that intensity phase. And it starts to round out a lot more. It normalizes like a wave.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
For me, it comes with time where in the past, I mean, I still do. I try things. If I have a very strong desire, I allow myself to try them at least once. I'm also very aware that if I don't invest energy into that thing, then I'm probably not going to enjoy it as much as if I just did it one time. So for something like jujitsu, I never really tried that one specific thing, but I would try it.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
I'd take a few classes and then if I didn't like it or I didn't see it fitting inside of my lifestyle, then I'd be quick to quit that thing. What does not fitting inside of your lifestyle mean? If it impacts or takes away from my higher priority goals. For me, training, lifting weights in the gym, that's always just been a top priority.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
When I would get into running, that's something that I did for a decent amount of time, and I did enjoy it, but I couldn't find the balance of running with training, with work, with social time. I could fit it in the morning, but it just...
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
There's a lot of moving pieces when you decide to fit something new into your day and nutrition, training, all of the things that you already have inside of there.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
If you are a curious person that likes to acquire these skills, it's very useful to do because you can pull some kind of principle or lever or lesson out of it to apply to other domains of your life to kind of fill it from the thing that it was missing that was making you want to run or do jujitsu in the first place and get that out of your system.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
But right when you asked that question, what I said was that it takes some time because the more you try and experiment with these things, the more you realize, the more you can approach those new desires with a better perspective. Yeah. Shiny object syndrome, to me, isn't something that is bad at all.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
You just have to be able to refocus during that or you need to be able to maintain your priorities during that.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
What's funny is that I have a Coase law, but it was for creative work. So, man, what was it? It was something along the lines of the same thing where it's creative work. The work expands. The results expand to fit the time allotted for completion, where my whole thing with that is since I... Didn't have a job for too long.
Modern Wisdom
#894 - Dan Koe - How To Design Your Life For Peak Creativity
I'll start off by saying that I was the complete opposite when I was first starting out. I was very lazy or whatever definition of lazy you can give where it's like productive procrastination in a sense where I would be playing video games and I would just try to fit in some work. that would lead to something better, right? The priority was the video games.