Dan Koe is a writer, entrepreneur, and creator. Finding your creative spark is one of life’s greatest journeys. So, what are the tips and tricks to help you design a life that maximises your full creative and productive potential? Expect to learn if there is a delusion of hard work and why more hard work doesn’t make you rich, what the tension between creativity and productivity is, how to design your life for peak creative output, how to figure out what you want in life, how to get over imposter syndrome, the importance of writing as a practise and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 20% off the cleanest bone broth on the market at https://www.kettleandfire.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Join Whoop’s January Jumpstart Challenge and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: How can boredom be a catalyst for creativity?
Most people's lives are determined by how they choose to cure their boredom.
What's that mean? Oh man. The story of that came from my friend, my YouTube editor. We were out... getting dinner one night, and he said he wanted to start a company called Bored, just a little passion project. And it was because he had been bored for so long in his life that the only options that he saw were to do the typical things that you do when you're bored.
You scroll on your phone, maybe you watch Netflix, you... hang out with friends, there isn't really something to build towards, 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.
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.
You'll know Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time given to it. This almost feels like it could be Coe's law, which would be life expands to fill the boredom given to it.
What's funny is that I have a 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.
I had worked part-time jobs for quite a while, but I was freelance pretty quickly out of a job.
And what I started to realize is that when you progress through freelance work, and then I got introduced to social media and digital products, physical products, other things that I just wasn't aware of at the time, it was very interesting how I could make so much more without increasing the amount of work that I did.
Yeah, that is interesting. So just to round out the boredom thing, it kind of feels to me like if you don't have something to take up your time, your habits and your behavior will sort of default to the path of least resistance. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. Yeah, interesting. Okay, what about hard work? Do you think there's a delusion around hard work?
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Chapter 2: What is the misconception about hard work?
Somewhere in between those four things, which is essentially sort of gripping more tightly, paying more attention, becoming distracted less. But
especially this year, I've realized that the creativity part results in changes, sort of step changes of insight about your own life, progress professionally or personally or whatever it is, doing something that's new and effective in a different sort of a way or coming up with a different kind of an idea. And then you can still iterate on that, but that
I basically prioritized zero time for creativity in the past. I was very much sort of a blunt force trauma, hard work type person. And this tension between creativity and productivity, I think, is still, even with the Rick Rubens of the world and the Dan Coes of the world, I think it's still very much overlooked. So I really want you to sort of break that apart.
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.
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,
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
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.
Because if you aren't necessarily looking for them, they may just pass you by and you may not realize that this could lead to an exponential event of a lot of progress in that specific amount of time. When it really came to me is when I started to remove a lot of what I would call my bad habits, which were the video games, which were the Netflix, which were... quite a few things, the junk food.
I just remember sophomore year of college, living in the dorms, terrible time, quit the gym, just was not productive, very low period of my life. And after COVID specifically, I started going on walks because the COVID-15 or whatever they call it, I couldn't go to the gym. I was... gaining a decent amount of weight. I just felt like the Pillsbury Doughboy and I'm tall.
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Chapter 3: How do you design a lifestyle 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.
Oliver Berkman's got this prompt from 4,000 Weeks where he says, decide in advance what you're going to suck at. And it's a really good one because if you focus all of your attention on one thing, you make more progress in that thing than if you spent three times the amount of time on that thing, but with only a third of the attention. You sort of accumulate more.
It's not a linear progression of... more time on the thing and more focus equals the same amount it's spread with less focus over more time. That's not the way it works. If you focus exclusively on health and the gym for six months, you make way more progress than 50% of that attention for a year. And the same thing goes for businesses and skill acquisition and so on and so forth.
There's this sort of weird compounding. There's a kind of obsession that causes you to focus on the little minutiae that you might have missed. Typically, you're allowing it to sort of become part of your personality. So the momentum is harder to slow down. After a while, it sort of keeps you going. It keeps you going. It's a part of you. You feel like it's very personal to you.
And yeah, you end up in this place where... So, so many of the results that you wanted to get over the long term can be achieved more quickly by focusing. But the problem is that you feel that fall away.
You feel the drop off of, well, you know, I said I was going to work on my business this year and I was going to get a promotion at work or I was going to build a family or get a girlfriend or do whatever it is. But my body's looking a little bit off. It's like, yeah, dude, you're doing 12-hour days at work. Or you're going out three nights a week trying to socialize and find a partner.
Or whatever it is that you're doing, there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. And I think in advance, identifying to yourself, what are the trade-offs I'm prepared to trade? I want to do this thing. 2025, I want to get a promotion at work. I want to move out of the house. I want to move into a new place. Okay. What are the things you need to do in order to be able to do that?
You already thought about that. Okay, and what are the things that you're going to need to pay a cost of? Well, maybe I'm not going to be able to go out as much. So maybe I'm going to feel a little bit more lonely. Maybe some of my friends are going to stop hanging around with me because I can't pay them enough attention to sort of keep them feeling like we've got this connection going.
Okay, well, am I prepared to pay that price? Because... Most people stop doing things, I think, because of the pain that's come along with the byproduct of them, not the lack of progress that they're making. It's all of the other things that stop.
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