Ground Up 033 - The Important Things w/ The Minimalists

I in a weird way ended up sitting in the passenger seat of my own life because I had said yes all these other things all of a sudden I wasn't in control anymore like someone else was driving you get all these accolades and you win these President's Club awards and they send you off on trips to Hawaii or London or whatever and and then they give you these promotions and you start climbing this corporate ladder and you get to this point where it gets scary to look down so you just keep climbing up my two very close friends Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus better known as the minimalists on the podcast today nearly four years ago I got an email from Josh the subject line was simply idea he wanted to make a documentary about something he was passionate about my answer was pretty simple as well hell yes we set off around the country interviewing with dozens of people who called themselves minimalists today we reflect on the film how they made the leap from their corporate careers to becoming the minimalist full-time and we discussed their early struggles as entrepreneurs you're listening to the ground-up show a podcast that inspires creatives to make meaningful content and pursue their passions my name is Matty Avella and I'm a filmmaker best known for the Netflix documentary minimalism and I'm sitting down with creators to talk about their process the lessons they've learned and how to make an impact [Music] so as you guys know in this podcast I talk with guests about their stories their ground-up stories how they built something from nothing how they turn their lives around and it's kind of interesting because we made a documentary together called minimalism and that's like our ground-up show basically it's it's your story of starting with nothing and kind of going the suit-and-tie corporate guy nine-to-five route and then becoming the minimalist so we can just transition to the seventy-nine minutes of audio from the documentary I'm just gonna cut out Sam Harris and Dan Harris and then there's nothing that you guys in it I gotta tell you man I'm still upset that you named this podcast the ground up show as opposed to the initial accidental title that you had when you first emailed me you so I think about doing this podcast and you're just looking to see some of our best practices or whatever and and you said because everybody because the world needs another podcast I'm like that's the perfect title that is a good line cast one and I'm someone's listen to this now they're already like it's gone I gotta get that domain name yeah I know alright I think it's a funny idea and I've been using it as a tagline in some of my videos right but I'm just not sure if I want to commit to that as like forever you know to me because when you build something you kind of have to stick to that name necessarily it's like pod castles - Joe Budden's podcast and it used to be called I'll name this podcast later and I think it was like the first 120 episodes it was called I'll name this podcast later and now that's just the book Joe Budden podcast but so he did reach a change he eventually changed it but I love the first name I'll name this podcast later was perfect or because the world needs another podcast was was perfect so welcome to everyone - episode number one of the world needs another pot that's it that's it this is the kind of mentoring that I need right now so I don't want to like cover everything that we talked about in the documentary and everything that you guys have covered already though there's gonna be a lot of overlap but I do want to talk about entrepreneurship like how you guys started the minimalist and how you were able to turn that into something you you do full time which is pretty incredible and which I think what a lot of people would love to be able to do it's not it's not like the only route the only recipe that to kind of create your own audience and build your own business but it's certainly one that I think is attractive to a lot of people so I do want to cover that but before we get into it can you guys as like a business as the minimalist comm how do you guys split up your duties and what do you do like on a day to day basis I guess both the the macro and the micro yeah I everything is is 50/50 to some extent but when you look at sort of the the division of responsibilities but that might mean some things like I was just talking to backs my partner yesterday and we just announced this Australian tour and so we're headed to four cities in Australia and New Zealand and she's like I said I gotta stop I gotta stop the car and we need to I neither like respond to some email so ever some issues with the ticket links or whatever and because I manage our relationship with our booking agent and then Ryan you will manage other relationships so I think the plan for us is quite often we work together at least ostensibly or pub when we're public-facing but a lot of the background stuff is like oh you take this I'll take this you know or Shaun takes it or Jess will take it or we have you do stuff I mean we have a whole team of people who we kind of yeah utilize and delegate and kind of split responsibilities but I mean if you look like if you look at Shaun Harding who I mean he's kind of he was our first official employee you look at his job title and it depends on which day you look at it I mean one day he could be our tour manager another day he could be our Director of Operations the next day he's our book editor the day after that he's our website editor it's just good to have a team of people who can who were very versatile and could do a lot of things and then we just kind of yeah throw stuff each other's way and pick up stuff and yeah there's no specific title or duties that I could like list off right and I think the like what you touched on is there's a difference between work that you do with others like the collaborating coming up with ideas deciding on whether to do a documentary or start a podcast versus sitting down doing the writing doing the work mentoring and there's a lot of stuff that you know it's difficult to do as two people yeah I think through the writing thing is a good example of that I mean we've written a lot of stuff together but it's usually we're not like in the same room together when we do it like Ryan will come up with an idea and I'll try to shape that into something or I will write something and say hey what are your thoughts on this or we'll have a discussion about a topic and that will manifest in a writing six months eight months later because that that idea often needs sort of like a gestation period and so writing is something that is often a very solo act it requires solitude it requires for me it requires early mornings it requires a willingness to to sit down and put in the work because for me writing is really difficult and and it always cracks me up if someone comes I've got this great idea for an essay I want you to write I'm like well you're just asked for 12 hours of my time basically right and and so it takes me a long time to do something like that but it's also the thing that I enjoy most once I once I get it going you know Ryan and I over the years have accidentally sort of piled on these things you know it's not actual accident but like we didn't plan it this way we've done it very intentionally we've decided to say yes to certain things but it started off as a website where we were just writing stuff and then eventually was like hey let's write a book because people kept asking like hey when you gonna come out with your book right you're like what were the minimalist so let's put out a book and we've done three books together now and after that we started touring that was that became another thing that we started focusing on or we started focusing on doing the podcast a couple years ago and now that was just when the documentary was coming out oh hey this would be a great way to start talking about a documentary get people excited about it but also answers people questions and then it turned into this whole other thing and we're over a hundred episodes now of basically answering people's questions we do live podcasts in front of crowds and that was something we didn't expect the very beginning I fact I didn't even like podcasts at the very beginning but then I started to fall in love with them a few years ago and realize like oh like I'm not very good at this but maybe I could yeah I'm a fairly competent writer but when we first started podcasting compared to where we are now it's a day and night difference I'm sure you've seen this you yeah and yours is an extra layer because you interview people we don't really interview people because well it's terrifying for me to think about sitting down and and you get to that point I remember we were going out interviewing people for the documentary and quite often like we'd sit down with some well I Patrick Rowan I think we sat down for five and a half hours three hours in I heard his stomach grumbling through my headphones I was like maybe we should get Patrick some food and so I think you can do that for a documentary you can sit there for five hours and you know you're gonna get 30 great seconds out of that and it makes for a really compelling documentary because they don't see the hundreds if not thousands of hours of mostly sunrise sunset compilations that hit the cutting room floor and with a podcast you can't really do that you're not going to sit here with us for five hours and then put out a 30-second video on whatever the platform would be it it doesn't make as much sense so you actually have to be you have to have compelling enough questions but but also you have to be able to anticipate where the other person is going and how do you make that interesting considering the audience and and all these other things and so Ryan and I have a good dynamic and in by the way I think it's part of the reason that our our show is different from a lot of others as we don't we haven't really done interviews up to this point and but we listen a lot we listen to what you know the audience is saying we get to interact with them whether it's live or it is like just they call in and they leave us a voicemail we both kind of started our podcast in a very similar way and that we didn't think it through we didn't say all right 20 episodes in this is probably what it's going to look like you you didn't have a game plan it was like hey this this is like a new medium to get our message across let's just start it's not it's not a game plan not having an expectation no expectations yeah yeah so I think you can plan a little bit but there's two ways that you could go you could just over plan to the point where you just make so many excuses that you never start it that you're like well I need to record 10 episodes first that way you have a little bit of leeway and I can build into it and I don't have to feel stressed out and that's great advice if you're actually gonna follow through with it for me it was I just need to make one episode talk about my story about like the dumbest thing I ever did as a filmmaker the biggest mistake I ever had which was quite simply just not pressing record on a reality TV show that I shot and I was like I think somebody might be able to like get a little bit of get some advice from this and actually learned from the mistakes that I've made and I'm like maybe I can continue along with this and hear from other people and it just evolved slowly but I'm really glad that I just I didn't that I just started and it didn't wait until everything was perfect the timing was perfect yeah okay I'm glad we did that too I mean you know when Josh and I started to talk about doing a podcast that's all it was hey let's start doing a podcast let's make sure that we set our standards really really high let's make sure that we have you know good equipment and and that we have you know Shawn there to help record it and to produce it and let's put out the best podcast that we can but there was no expectation on how many downloads or where we would be by episode 10 or 20 I mean we had the same approach where it was yeah just one episode at a time so I guess like entrepreneurial tip number one is have lower your expectations but raise your standards because what that means is if you're putting out your best work then someone will will enjoy it it doesn't mean that you know you're gonna have a million followers on that first podcast but if you can put out good work and consistently so tip number two is be consistent and you can be consistent with that high quality at work like that is where more people will come and they will come back because they know what to expect they know it's a good quality show and I mean that's that's kind of been Josh and i's approach for everything not just the podcast but i mean even with the minimalists comm 52 people showed up that first month 52 and you know Josh now we were pretty excited like great like 52 people came to our website we got an email and it was great to be able to add value to other people's lives and then 50 to turn into 500 500 turn into 5000 and now you know we're able to tell her story to millions of people every year but it was with that same approach of you know our expectations were very low but our standards were super high so let's let's go back to some of those very early days and I want to even start before you started the minimalist and you know you're at that lonely lunch table senior year high school trying to figure out what you want to do with your life decide to go down this corporate path and and set your eyes on making your first fifty thousand dollars you know was the corporate path the only path that you guys saw at that point in your life and I'm also curious what success looked like for you as young fresh green 18 year olds but for me like I grew up with my dad owning his own business painting and hanging wallpaper and he got by but it was just he was just barely getting by and I remember when I graduated high and I worked I worked for him during high school during the summers but when I graduated like my plan was to work for him and then eventually take over the business but then I like started to realize at like 18 19 years old like wait a minute like I am putting in like 40 50 hours a week and hardly getting by myself I don't want to take this business over and your dad was always having money problems always while he owned the business one day when he was paying his taxes he wrote a letter to put in this taxes he's like hey I'm sorry that my taxes are short Ida feed my family and like just send in a short check holy cow I know I'm it and it's but the government never got back to him either like I don't know if they let it slide or what but that's amazing that he brought them a letter he wrote it was don't pay he's like here's what I here's what I have like sorry I defeat my family but you know when when I graduated high school college wasn't an option being raised as one of Jehovah's Witnesses they do not encourage college at the end of the world is going to be here so why would you go to college that's a good point how dangerous that mind so like growing up as a kid you were basically told like hey I don't worry about it go in the debt forget about college because you know we're all going to see the end of the world with the next 10 years I mean there's a lot of I mean this is totally an aside but there are a lot of cases like in the late eighties or maybe early eighties only we'll just say the 80s know where it was the mid that organization specifically had this huge wave of bankruptcies in their organization because that's exactly yeah I mean they took out loans more than what they could afford thinking that well I'm not going to pay back this loan I'll just you know go ahead and do this and Jesus will come and save everything and fix everything but anyway so so College was not an option I certainly couldn't afford it I never save for it I had no idea I had no idea how to even approach going to college I remember like when I when I actually did go to college I started when I was 25 years old and I was talking to my boss and she this was in the corporate world because the corporation paid for a hundred percent of it so I was like well I might as well go to school they're gonna pay for it and what's my boss and like hey can you help me figure out how to go to college and the look on her face was like she's like did no one ever sit you down like when you graduated high school and show you like how to apply I'm like no like I got out of high school I started working for my dad and realize you know two years into it this sucks I remember telling my dad I'm like dad you work this much some days he come ended and he's got this stress dot above his like right between his eyes and if you see that dot you just don't talk to him cuz he's so stressed to help like blah to you red skin kind of yeah and it's only at this one spot it's really weird right between his life but but my point is is I remember like seeing that dot one day and I'm like dad you make X amount of dollars and you work X amount hours a week this doesn't make sense to me but there's got to be something else out there that we can do or that I can do and you know eventually I was talking to Josh about what he was doing and I remember him telling me he was like I'm selling cellphones I'm like sweet I'm like how much money do you make selling cellphones he's like I don't know I think this this this month I made like 6,500 bucks 7,000 bucks this is back in 2001 and he was in Ohio yeah and he was and he's you know 20 years old 21 and I'm like I thought he was lying I'm like dude no way I blew it off for months and months maybe even a year so I just remember I was in Josh's wedding and we got to you know we were talking more and more about me doing something different I hated what I was doing at the time and finally I was like all right dude I'll try it out and yeah like that first month I rep made like actually that's not true remember the first couple months it was like the slow yeah it was just it was just a really weird time but that first Commission check I got it was a couple months later and it was like 4500 bucks the first thing I did is I went and bought a new truck I was like sweet man I could I can afford a down payment yeah yeah yeah yeah but uh no it was it wasn't interesting uh it was an interesting start to to a new career I mean I was really excited and you know for all intensive purposes man I loved it for the first you know a couple few years but you know it gets it wears on you after a while what was the question again I I tried to drop out of high school and it's my my Kent the counselor you know the the high school counselor you basically go to him and talk to him about why you want to drop out and part of the reason was like all the friends and my neighborhood had already dropped out at least most of them and it was my senior year and I was just like so done and I wanted I knew I wanted to do something in business but but I also knew that that I I wasn't going to college route and I'm like this high school thing is it doesn't make any sense I'm I was already like 17 at the time and I wanted to just move on and he he got to the point where he he wouldn't let me drop out of high school but I got he was able to convince me that basically stacked my whole schedule with a bunch of study halls and I'd take two or three classes to graduate and he let me take off the entire second semester of my senior year of high school because otherwise he knew I was done but I wasn't gonna go to college and so I went out and got a full-time job sales job and that's when I started climbing the corporate ladder and it was weird I just said yes to this thing because of money that was the primary driver we all need to make money and I said well here's the best opportunity to make money but I didn't really know what I was going to do with the money I thought I was so unhappy growing up because we didn't have any money really poor or food stamps government assistance and and money would obviously solve all of my problems if I could just have enough money then then I would be happy and then of course I by age 19 I was making more money than I ever saw my parents make we're not when I was growing up my dad wasn't around it was just my mom raising me and so I had debt for the first time it's not like I was making great money I I was more broke than I was a year prior because I had these credit cards that showed up in the mail and then I started renting out a nicer apartment and realized like I was saying yes to everything that looked appetizing to my life right it was it was appealing at the time and so I in a weird way ended up sitting in the passenger seat of my own life where because I had said yes all these other things like all of a sudden I wasn't in control anymore like someone else was driving it was the credit cards the job that I started working I was working 80 hours a week and I was really good at it too and that was another problem you get all these accolades and you win these President's Club Awards and they send you off on trips to Hawaii or London or whatever and and then they give you these promotions and you start climbing this corporate ladder and you get to this point where it gets scary to look down so you just keep climbing up and I was the youngest director in my company's history by age 27 140 year old telecom company and I got really close the guys I aspired to be like I had a whole plan in place I was going to be a vice president by age 30 which is really young now I was gonna be senior vice president by age 35 a c-level executive by age 40 like that was my plan as I as I was climbing but it all started when I was 18 and decided I'm gonna go this path it wasn't a deliberate path it was just a I'll say yes to this I guess and I think that's okay especially when you're young to say yes to a bunch of things early on but keep questioning those things and that's where I ran astray I wasn't question any of it well this is the path supposed to take I've already gotten this far and so I'll keep climbing and but as I got closer to those guys I really aspired to be like like I really want to be the CFO one day or CEO o is what I really wanted to be and but as I got closer to some of these guys I mean they were miserable heart attacks and third divorces and and huge money problems even though they were making seven figures some of them we're really close to it and then I realized that well if I follow that same path I'm gonna end up in the same place I think we all tell ourselves like well I'll be different why if you if you follow the same recipe you're gonna bake the same cake as someone else and so that's kind of where we're where I ended up in this place of not true discontent but of a place of dissatisfaction and and it lacked anything meaningful to me and so of course I try to pacify myself with with pleasure basically it sounds like minimalism came at the perfect time for you because given the choice at 18 years old where it's like hey do you want all this money right or do you want minimalism right like I don't think you would have chosen minimalism at that point in your life but you've gone through a lot of experience and you saw for yourself what worked and what didn't work was it that you you knew that you were discontent or was it minimalism that helped pull you out of that and realize that this wasn't for you well there's nothing wrong with money first off like I think money can be great it allows you to accomplish a lot if you use it deliberately the problem that I had throughout my 20s is you I grew up poor and I thought the reason we were discontented is we didn't have money the reason we were actually discontented is we made repeated bad decisions with the money that we did have and I just carried those decisions forward into my 20s had I made good decisions with that money there was a point in my career I was make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and in Dayton Ohio which we're out in Los Angeles now I don't can't even imagine what that would be like like here you its orders of magnitude different but but the point being is if I would have made better decisions with that money then I think I still could have led a meaningful life you can be a rich person and live a meaningful life you can be a poor person and live a meaningful life I've seen both sides of of the spectrum minimalism showed up at the time for me where it felt like I got into those two car crashes you know my my marriage ended my mother died both in the same month and and and you know it feels like you get just t-boned at a light and then someone else rams into you right after that but then there was almost like this after the accident someone Randall over my foot because I realized like no I wasn't very contented with with what I was doing for my corporate career and it's not that I hated it but it was comfortable it was a six out of ten and that was actually part of the problem is like it it got in the way of everything meaningful in my life my health my relationships I wasn't writing like I wanted to write it I wasn't creating how I wanted to create I certainly wasn't contributing in a meaningful way but I was making a good income I had a nice house I had several Lexuses and I realized like the Lexus Alexa yeah it's a good question I don't know Shawn's not here to look it up for us but uh and so you get you get to this point where you are are comfortable and you're afraid to lose that comfort and minimalism was a way for me to realize that that comfort was a bit of a facade and I comfort was getting in the way of what I consider to be meaningful about your transition out of the the corporate world what was that decision like for you and I think back to when I started as a freelancer and it sounds similar to you guys where you say you had fifth the followers come to your site 50 people come to your site to read what you had to say right I had $100 project every once in a while every two weeks not enough right 50 people is likely not enough now if you're trying to to spread your message and make a sustainable looking yeah to make a syst yeah to to uh to have people to support you yeah yeah absolutely okay and we never had a number in our heads on like how many people I mean in fact if you were to ask me not like so what's the number to have a sustainable audience that can support support you on a consistent basis like I wouldn't even be able to tell you and it's probably different for everyone cuz ya know people with f50 if you're a a really well-known artist and you have 50 really good buyers you might be a multi-millionaire yeah or if you know Kevin Kelly says you know thousand true fans or whatever I think Ryan early on you and I we weren't it wasn't a business though like it literally it legitimately wasn't a business like we we had a domain but we didn't have you know the LLC or any hopes to have like a team of people that we work with and that's why Ryan earlier was talking about Shonda is our employee like we don't think people into those terms like we're all on the same team right and and and and I think that early on it was just like wow this is pretty cool like some people are getting something from this and then we learned like hey maybe we can't make some money yeah well we didn't I mean we didn't we didn't charge for anything on our website for the first year that we had it I mean it was just us putting up our essays and it wasn't until yeah people kept asking what are you gonna come out with your book and I'm like well yeah that makes sense and Josh is like yeah we're the minimalist we should write a book on on minimalism so I mean that was really the first thing we charged for that book we wrote in I think he came out to summer 2011 is that correct yeah um the best sales month that it ever had it was December 2012 13 13 starts there's two years later yeah and that and so you know just to the point of like there is no there is no magic recipe I guess how do you approach risk because it seems to me that that's a huge risk you have these jobs where your call or you make a lot of money and but the transition question yeah yeah so how do you deal with that risk when I set Josh down and asked him why the hell are you so happy and he told me about this thing called minimalism and introduced me to an entire community of people who were minimalist what I saw was some very common-sense things like oh if I don't have a six-figure mortgage hanging over my head if I don't buy a new car every couple of years if I stop racking up all this credit card debt maybe I won't have to work 6070 sometimes 80 hours a week so for me minimalism the why behind it it was you know why did I want to become a minimalist when I asked myself that question how my my life be better with less like the one thing that really stood out to me was was my time I could I could reclaim some of my time so minimalism I wasn't like diving into it to be this you know uh I'm going to live in a box from now I'm gonna be a freegan and I'm gonna go live in a box and you know live live with as little money as possible I mean it wasn't about doing it for the sake of look at me look how uh you know altruistic I am like Here I am giving up everything it was more about hey look here is what I have on my plate now and if I could find a way to give this up then I can reclaim some of my time and maybe start on a better path so it took me about honestly about a year year and a half of paying off debt of budgeting eating ramen noodles and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches which I really wish I would have done something different back then it's not the healthiest diet but it was cheap better than carrot juice I'm pretty sure that this is gonna be a big fad now the carrot juice is gonna take over yeah yeah so so you know we didn't just quit our jobs and start a blog that's the worst advice anyone can give you it was a very slow transition in fact I got laid off it wasn't even I didn't really have the choice to be like okay now I have all my ducks in a row I'm gonna go ahead and quit now I'm actually grateful I got laid off because I don't know if I ever would have got to that point where I would have actually walked away I mean probably would have but it would have been much later than when I got laid off in September 2012 is that right yeah yeah yeah it sounds like it's it's about calculated risk so everybody should take risks and you're gonna have to take risks in life if you're gonna do anything worth doing yeah absolutely I don't think there's anything wrong with risk as long as you're making like you said a calculated risk so when I got laid off thank God that I had been going down this minimalist path because at that point I did have six months worth of bills saved up I had paid off a lot of my debt I get rid of my car payment I had prepared because eventually the plan was to quit move out of your big house and yeah and rented it out to someone because you couldn't sell it exactly so it's so when when I got laid off yeah I mean it was that wasn't really taking a risk because I got laid off risk is kind of risk is what you can stomach though right it's like everybody has a different threshold of him what they can stomach as well I will tell you though that like the month before I got laid off I went to my boss and I because I had got to a point where I felt like okay if I got late if I lost my job tomorrow I can survive for at least the next six months and try and figure out some things to do so I went to my boss the month before I got laid off and I asked and I asked him like hey man if I ever decide to leave who would you fill my role with who would you replace me with and we were talking and eventually he's like you know what man he's like this this program is working really well I don't know if I would if I would replace you and I'm like huh that's a really interesting thought isn't it and then a month later and you know I get the text of hey Ryann meet me in this conference room where we've laid off dozens of people before so I mean you know when I got the text I knew what was coming but yeah I mean they basically hire you know hired me to build a program in the company I did that it was it was running well they didn't need my role anymore but I would not have had that conversation with him if I didn't already if I had been working a plan for the last year and a half so I think that's where risk is okay to take like as long as you have a plan behind it and it is a bit calculated what I've learned in my life is that I'm never gonna just fall completely flat on my face as long as I I do the pre-work before taking that risk I think some risks are really dangerous the problem is we think we think most things that are risks we treat most things like oh my god my 401k slipped by 1/10 of 1% this month like we have the same reaction to that well my god like so as we do you know I was last night we saw a coyote walking around like that is a much bigger risk to me than my my 401k if that thing was rabid and decides to attack me I have to trip trip backs and run faster no I I think that that's the problem with with risk is we all were often treating it like like if something is dangerous for me it was riskier to stay because I saw what the outcome was when I was those guys I aspired to be like that's real risk that going down that route you know being fat overweight and and just unhealthy in general but also being unhappy that's that's pretty risky too being dissatisfied with the life you're living like how long you're gonna hell are you gonna do that before you start to look back and regret the life that you lived and I could see that right then like I don't regret spending that time in my 20s learning what I learned and that was I've learned a whole lot that I was able to tweeze out and pull forward but I know if I were to continue down that path much longer I I wouldn't have been living the life that I wanted to live and it's not a perfect life I still feel stress and anxiety and and and there are times where it's really difficult in fact there are times it's so difficult where I'm like man it'd be easier to just go back and work for someone I don't have to make all the damn decisions and and the truth is that when you look at the aggregate it's so much better and it's actually less risky now than what it was before by the way like staying with where I was ultimately would have been the biggest risk because they're required by another company but by a larger telecom company that ate them up and and and then you know very likely I would have been gone in that transition back in 2014 or whatever and then if I wouldn't have prepared for it you know I would have been scrambling to try to find a similar telecom job and Providence Rhode Island or something like just trying to like find whatever I can get to pay the bills and because I was still attached to that lifestyle and that's a real risk it seems like the the smartest thing that you can do is to develop and learn skills that aren't going out of style anytime soon so if you develop becoming a better writer or if you learn how to become a filmmaker or a photographer these are all things that aren't gonna go away very soon right and it's something that if you can build something on your own and learn how to pick up some freelance jobs even if the economy is doing that even if there aren't many jobs you can probably still pick up some work when you press record for the first time on a camera you it's not like well I'm getting paid to do this it had to do with something you're interested in something that may be aligned with what you wanted to do in the future but but it wasn't about money first and and I think a lot of these things for for them to to work out well for us long term is you want to be able to do it even if it's not sustainable monetarily but then you can also look to see does anyone make money doing this is there anyone who makes money as a filmmaker is there anyone who makes money as a writer and the answer is of course yes and and I mean you can find someone who is you know a clown who I mean literally dresses up like clowns and makes money that's what you're passionate about then great if you're passionate about teaching horse horseback riding you can find a way to make a living from that from from that passion or at least somewhere that's adjacent to that passion for me it was a jaitley I wrote fiction and that was the thing I always wanted to do and now I write a lot less fiction because we had this whole beautiful nonfiction round it was adjacent to what I was already doing and and for you I mean you started out you were doing wedding videography farm it I would do it I was just looking at some of the old Bar Mitzvah intro videos I made it's all over the battle on fire wasn't that like incredible I'm like but you know what actually I learned and relearn about how I approach those projects back in the day is that was a Bar Mitzvah video there weren't high expectations but like I use it as an opportunity to practice color grading to learn after effects and how to track fire on to a baseball bat like I was like holy cow I probably learned a lot from that project but you can't just say oh it's this is just something that's temporary I feel like anytime you're developing your skill in your craft you have to put yourself into it yeah I think we all we are well born with some sort of talents but but we often mistake those talents for skills a skill was actually developed and you have to spend time you see so you might have a natural eye to see lighting or you know the way that you focus a camera or the way that you you are filming a particular scene you might have a natural eye for that but what makes it beautiful is the skill of figuring out how to do it most effectively I think it's the same with with anything else any other creative endeavor not even creative endeavors like being in the business world like I learned how to run a business not by going to some class and reading about business theory but by opening dozens of retail stores and managing hundreds of employees over many years I messed up a lot I had mentors of my own but it was on-the-job training it was much more effective than just going to a class and and trying to sort of learn via osmosis or just you can't just read what's on your page here and then all of a sudden say well now I know how to direct a film who doesn't work that way and it's the same with writing a book it's the same with with pretty much any endeavor creative or not yeah there are only so many entrepreneurial books you can read before you have to just put them down and actually try to start a business and you can get some good sort of best practices from those but you still have to implement that in your everyday life otherwise it's useless yeah I think it's like you get the the guiding wisdom and and good mentoring from that so say if you don't have mentors in your life that can guide you in the right way and say hey it's just it's not always about the bottom line it's very easy to get caught up in the rat race of the nine-to-five corporate world but there is still a rat race beyond that in the entrepreneurial world and somebody running their own business because it can very quickly become about likes about how many followers you have about how big your audience is how well we did this quarter compared to next quarter how did you guys from the onset make sure you didn't fall back into that trap my number one secret is I spend less money than what I make so like Josh and I are never comparing last quarter versus this quarter or last year versus this year I mean we have an idea cuz you know we do our taxes but we don't ever sit down and we're like oh man you know we made ten thousand bucks less this year how can we how can we make that Delta back up this year yeah push more books right yeah and it's funny Jessica came to so Jessica Jessica Lynne Williams she runs our social media we're really fortunate enough to have her she curates everything so we still interact on social media but she curates a lot of the posts and stuff that we yeah we also bring her on the road to to share some of our pithy answers when we're doing live podcasts on stage she live tweets and stuff and and she came to me early on in the tour this year he said you know you guys have just never asked me like about engagement and clicks and likes you just like how am I supposed to know if I'm doing well I'm why are you doing well and she's like yeah but I think I can approve this I can prove this and this I said okay but none of those things have to do with likes how much of a influence you have has very little to do with the counts it's one of the nice things about Netflix we went to go meet with Netflix a few months ago and their lay secretly would love to know how many people saw the film you know it's in the tens of millions at this point just based on on the amount of traffic that that has cascaded our way but you'd love to know like how how's the film doing while other fill a you want to get the stats on it right because mainly because they don't share it with you in fact the lady said you we don't even share the numbers with Kevin Spacey mm-hmm you think we're gonna share with you and a good point but but in a weird way that was freeing and and because we actually run the rest of our business if you want to call it that the same way we'll look at our traffic stats once a year to give to our publicist so they can say well if they're if they're reaching out to someone here's what they get but I'm not looking at the numbers the Downloads all this other stuff because you you start to let that influence the way that you are are creating if I could just have a more creative thumbnail and and for this video or if I could just have a better title for this and that's why you see all these vapid click baby listicles or or you must do this the secret to this the 67 ways to blank and you're like does anyone really walk away from that feeling like like they were that they're a better person after reading it or do they just feel like oh [ __ ] I just wasted the last 90 seconds I'm a numbers guy I love numbers I probably look at the numbers more than Josh but for me it's it's numbers are fun so that's one thing I write I like I like looking at them I mean I partly play fantasy football because I love the numbers man I love researching and and doing all the calculations and figuring out who I should start and you know so forth and so on um but those numbers are not the driver like it is if anything it might be an indicator so you know might be um you know if I look at it if I look at a dip in traffic and you know Josh and I hadn't put an essay out and you know in a week or two which I don't think we have around two weeks without putting out an essay but but that is an indicator right oh ok greatly yeah people aren't just coming back to our site like they do want some fresh content but again like that's to me it's it's like it's like when I feel stress I don't just like sit there and react to the stress it's more like what is this what is this telling me is it telling me anything or like what do I need to focus on so like I look at numbers that way but I'll tell you man like you know when I've got to 10,000 Twitter followers versus thirty thousand Twitter followers it doesn't feel any different it wasn't the key to happiness damn you didn't find it it's fifty thousand Twitter followers I remember Josh we had a conversation early on I was asking it for advice it was around the same time we were talking about what to name my podcast and I was like by the way for those of you listen to this on the minimalist podcast he it's called the ground up show you can find it on Apple podcast or wherever and you should check it out if you enjoy podcast because it is a good podcast so there's the plug for thank you sir appreciate video if you want to see me and Ryan this is all on video right now as well we'll probably put this up on our YouTube page as well but he has a whole Matt and that has a whole YouTube page with all that stuff so yeah ground up show you can find it yeah so we have this early conversation and I was just trying to pick your brain get some advice about how what can I do because this is really a time when I was starting to make original content for the first time we just put out minimalism and this was I did freelance film work for a very long time I loved it it was great but minimalism was a chance for me to to get something put something out that I really cared about right this was at the top of my bucket list make a document like literally four months before we started the documentary before Josh emailed me about it it was on my bucket list I wrote make a documentary about something I care about something I'm passionate about and then that email comes in I'm like oh [ __ ] my email that goes to the thing Ryan was talking about earlier with with high standards and low expectations because we went into making that documentary with high standards and we all had let's say heavy opinions about the direction and where we wanted it to go we went back and forth and the final version that ended up in theaters on flix was like the ninth version and it had gone through a bunch of iterations there was a dip there in the middle with the Fargo and today we won I need to go into the Fargo in today yeah that was we thought that Matt just just to recap rook what we thought Matt was like punking us like it was an early April Fool's joke or something but yeah he sent us a cut of the documentary that actually ended up shaping the direction of the documentary to be much better yeah but what he sent us was terrifyingly bad it was avant-garde I saw what you were trying to do with it man so I told her it's what you're going but yeah but talking about that process how many times did you Josh and I like how often did we talk about where the documentary was going as far as distribution and what our expectations were for we literally like it was in the very beginning we might I said oh yeah I mean I just release it through Vimeo put it like say give it to our audience and yeah yeah we didn't have a specific expectation is really at the point well but there was no document floating around that was like we need to get to movie theaters we need to get with Netflix we had I mean and we must and we were putting money into it too so but like we didn't honestly it was like yeah if we make our money back that'd be cool right I don't care I was I just want to make this movie I just want to put it out there this is a chance for me to actually direct a feature-length documentary it was more about climbing the mountain than it was about you know trying to make money you were trying to reach a certain amount of people well we continue to continue that that metaphor was more about climbing the mountain than reaching the summit yeah and I think that it was about enjoying the climb because going through it and it took the better part of three years from the very first frame to being out on on Netflix it was quite the journey and in that whole time it wasn't because if we would have had the expectations like well we want to be in the Toronto Film Festival and this and this and like we did submit to a bunch of film festivals and learned that is a total racket and a waste of money and we had this great film that didn't get accepted by a lot of film festivals but it got by the most important type of acceptance which is having an actual audience who enjoys it and finds that film transformative and we didn't it wasn't our expectation to get it on the Netflix it was our high standards that ended up getting it on there in the long run in fact they even said no to the documentary a couple times and we had to go through you know sort of third party and and work that out but it it wasn't like well this is a failure if it doesn't if XY and Z hat doesn't happen no it's a success as long as your standards high and I think it's yeah get ready for a lot of knows because we like you said we got rejected from a lot of film festivals a lot of people we asked that we wanted to interview in the film said no who are you guys a lot of like you said Netflix said no in the beginning you can't let those stop you from from moving forward so we put out minimalism and this is you know my first time putting an original work out there and I was like this is cool like I wanted to keep doing this like this is a lot of fun I really enjoyed it so that's why I started the podcast and also I had a lot of filmmakers asking me for advice about how we put it together and I think a lot of people had this expectation that it's a Netflix documentary there was 20 people in the background orchestrating everything everything was like it was Matt with that camera right there legitimately it wasn't even the camera that's nice as that camera yeah yeah it was a just running around with a camera and like a lighting kit that filled up about half of the car we got a photo actually when I left on tour with you guys with you posing next to me to like it though I think yeah yeah they let it go so it was you know I was like all right how do I do this Josh like what are some pointers and advice like I know I need to make consistent content that's like number one I just gotta keep putting content out there oh and then you just stopped me you're like mm I just just wait a minute like you have to make meaningful content it's not about the amount of content you put out there being consistent important but you have to consistently make meaningful content yeah and in fact I I I try to stop using that word altogether because for me it has a negative connotation now I realize it doesn't have to have a negative connotation but for me in my mind it does because it's it's so just right when I hear like yeah it's really about you've got to put more content out there and in and that's the internet culture and putting more content and I try to eschew content and and instead produce meaningful creations and so to me it's about producing meaningful creations not content creation and I think if you can delineate the two the question is well what is meaningful to you and doesn't mean that's gonna be meaningful for everyone you're still gonna get one star reviews and thumbs down or whatever else and and that just means that someone else was like hey this wasn't for me and that's okay in fact we have an essay on our website called this probably isn't for you and when someone whenever someone leaves like a terrible comment or whatever Jessica will just send them the link to that essay this probably isn't for you and that's okay and realizing that is really freeing because you realize you're not making something for everyone it's not vanilla ice cream you want you want something with your own flavor to it and not everyone is going to enjoy the taste of what you're making and I think that's okay but if you find a meaningful there's a good chance that other people will because there's a lot of other people who are a lot like you not demographically like you but like minded and open-minded and and are asking some of the same questions that you're asking if you can produce something meaningful instead of just trying to produce something for the sake of producing producing something because well it is another Wednesday and I have to put out another vlog today or its everyday vlog thing uh-huh and and to me so there are some people who can do that really well they can do a daily vlog and it's really good the vast majority of the time just like Seth Godin can write a blog post every day and he is we were at a conference once and a gal there Amanda I think her name was of a misfit she was talking about how she interned for Seth Godin for a while and she said and it was like the best moment my life because Seth Godin is my Beyonce and I'm like I kind of feel that way too like in terms of blogging like not writing in general they're people that are much better writers than Seth Godin there is I can't name another person who's even as good close to being as good at blogging a Seth Godin and he's able to do it every day and and here's the key it's meaningful what he produces are meaningful creations he's not posting every day for the sake of content creation I think if he ever got there he'd walk away from it how do you how do you keep up that consistency and how do you consistently be good like that seems to be really challenging to create you know a lot of his stuff will have some overlap same with you guys you're talking about simple living there's only so much that you can touch on how do you can continue to make consistently meaningful and good quality essays that's kind of the answer to the question like you have to consistently write because you're actually consistently getting better when you when you put forth the effort yes it's not II was consistently good it's consistently getting better yeah it's good for me man I feel that that you even with the podcast there are some episodes very recently back in the mid 90s we did the mid 90s ISM our we're on 100th episode I was like you guys are ahead we've gained podcasting since the mid 90s great of you who started this podcast in high school oh man still running twenty something years when he's been 20 years and man yeah kids out there start a podcast and keep it going for 20 years yes seriously and if I we were at the academy of podcasters convention recently Ryan is now an academy and not a nominated Academy Award nominee Academy Award is it for the nomination yeah when the our podcast got not we lost the the world do we really nominated it is winning Josh yeah yeah but we were on the list with Lake Dan Savage and yeah just prolific yeah dr. Seuss yeah I'm like I don't even know how we ended up on that list we join fellow losers like Joe Rogan right and Tim Ferriss Sam Harris anyway anyway I find that consistently do it but also being will okay so here's a better answer for you being willing to throw a whale and remember especially early on for every initially probably every five podcast we recorded we published one and over time it was three and then it was like two and now even now it's like we recorded a podcast in Philadelphia recently and I don't know that if that one will ever see the light of day or maybe our patreon supporters will get to hear it we'll put it out eventually later but it wasn't something that I walked out of there happy with at all and that was happening a lot early on especially with the writing so we've published three books together I published one novel that novel was nine hundred pages that it's bloated zenith and and it's 200 pages now and the point was there's a whole lot that has to hit the cutting room floor and you you showed this with the documentary man can you imagine you have 2,000 hours of footage from all everything that we did again most of it being sunsets in Santa Fe New Mexico yes messed up sunsets I forget those sunsets we watch together anyway if you had to if you just published all 2000 hours it would be the worst documentary of all time that's the Fargo cut Exit Through the Gift Shop the the first kind of documentary that that dude made for Banksy that's so it was so bad it was good right yeah it was in the context of one of the best documentaries of all time access to the gift shop and I feel that that's the same thing with anything we do people see the end product and they're like how hard could it be to make a 79 minute documentary it's not a 79 minute documentary initially it's thousands of hours of footage and you have to figure out the right bits to curate and I think it's the same with anything else that you're doing now different mediums lend themselves to different types of communication with our podcast it's we don't you're not gonna do 479 minute an interview you're not gonna do 2,000 hours of interviewing but it may mean that you throw away some podcast it just didn't work out you rerecord that that's a ride and I quite often early on we because with most of our podcasts are on about a particular topic so we have a topic budgeting we'd sit there and record to our podcast and we'd look at each other afternoon where it's like that was crap wasn't it yeah I didn't like it All Right see you tomorrow we'll come back answer the same exact questions again and hopefully it'll be better tomorrow and if it's not we'll do it again or maybe we'll set it aside I have a list of maybe 200 essays that I've started and are in some various stage of completion that may never get completed or that they they may get completed someday there might be an idea that was great seven years ago in fact I was talking to Andrew Bell about this so we did that Andrew Bell on our podcast he's like our favorite musician he was on our Indianapolis podcast which was truly great he performed a live song on there and his new new album it took four years to put together and he said the first song that the first song he wrote for it he wrote seven years ago and he just couldn't find a way to make it work until the last year and when you asked him how many how many how many songs did not make the records only ten songs or there's 11 songs in the sub it's his longest album 11 songs on and and he's like nothing everything from my last four years is is here but it took me it took me sometimes seven years to get the song right so the way he does it is he'll put as many years into something as he needs to make it right not perfect but make it the best given the circumstances and the resources that he has I was just noticing this as I was working on this project this video we're working on right now and I'm watching it back and it always the first cut it's gonna be a little bit longer it's gonna be have some extra stuff but you don't realize it even if you do ten passes through you don't realize all the extra stuff that you don't need in it how you could shape it down and I was kind of it's a lot of it's based on your gut right and your intuition where if you're looking at a page and you're reading through it you're like that kind of that part doesn't really feel right it doesn't sound right and then what is it about the process the creative process where you start to figure out what's working and what's not I teach a writing class and one of the things I have to communicate with students is you are simultaneously more interesting and less interesting than you think and I think it's a problem we have this fear in our lives like you're the the video you're talking about the trailer for we're doing this physical first physical good we've ever we've ever done right and so it's a bag and and what what you're going through there when you have that four-minute seven-minute video that you're starting to whittle down is we get so married to a particular scene or a particular line and we said I can't I can't divorce myself from that it's and who is a Fitzgerald who said kill your darlings with respect to writing and I think quite often we have to be willing to let go of anything that doesn't really move it forward and make it better and and part of that has to do with emotional detachment from from the creation that and that comes during the editing process you want to have plenty of emotional attachment up front to make that thing as interesting as possible but then they call it down to what its essence is to make it the most beautiful brevity is the soul of wit to get down to that you can't remove yourself from and say I'm willing to delete anything from this one of the tips that I teach writing students is one of the things you want to do is delete your first two paragraphs and anything you write see if it makes it better and quite often it does because we we have too much throat clearing at the beginning of our writing and that will happen with any creative endeavor mmm that's a really good point yeah I'm thinking like two of my most favorite books is uh one of them is the flinch yeah Julian Smith yeah by Julian Smith it's an awesome book was that like 80 something pages it's 30 pages yeah I read it in a day did you take the cold shower in it yeah yeah that's great yeah but but like that was one that was a very impactful impactful book I read it in a cold show Josh is always gonna one-up everyone yeah and then the other one is uh oh no it's it's everything you want or anything you want any Derek severs yeah but Silver's yeah and like that one is like every line is tweetable yeah eight pages yeah it's it's it's a weird thing because I agree that in terms of like sort of nonfiction books that's certainly one of my favorite because it's it's like full of these little Zen Maxim's almost so that that like you said they're all sort of tweetable right and then there are other people like David Foster Wallace yeah probably the most impressive book I've ever read and it's just impressive by the fact that you can if you read a book like this but then you think about the guy writing it is Infinite Jest and it's it's 1100 pages is like nine point font it's super dense paragraphs and sentences go on for pages and every sentence is beautiful it looks like every sentence is sculpted and when you realize that he wrote the book within three years how how and he was younger than we are now oh he's older than you are Matt you're still in your 20s or lady that's right I'm not exactly knocking on 40s door yet but I'm walking down the path toward toward the screen door at least anyway you you read something like that and you realize like what is possible and it's possible also challenge the audience so so reading books like whether it's a flinch or Infinite Jest and in realizing lay oh oh there is something else it's possible I'm not I'm not capable of doing that but what can I get from it and what I learn from a book like Infinite Jest is there's a great payoff at the end but you have to literally read all 1,100 pages and it takes six months to read this book but but you can require hard work of your audience and if if you do so in a in the flinch is the same way Julia Smith is a guy who will shake the hell out of you and you'll thank him afterward for shaking you most people come to me and shake me I want to fight them but but enjoying for something some somehow he's able to approach it you're like wow I needed that thanks and so sometimes it's about challenging the audience Rob Bell says you want to stay one half step ahead of the audience you don't want to be a step or two ahead because you're too far and your ideas are way too out there but if you're half step ahead of someone it allows them to want to follow and catch up there's something beautiful about being inspired by somebody like say David Foster Wallace where you will look at that book and you're like man like I need to step my game up I need to set my [ __ ] up but then there's also people that I would see that I'm like well if they can do it I can do it that's kind of why it's sort of the podcast I was like I could do this other people are in a podcast I could do it I think you need to be motivated in both ways to see what's possible and also to push yourself where you didn't think you could go yeah I tend not to compare myself with others just because I will you know find the people who I really look up to and it makes me feel like I have to step my game up and then you know it'll like make me force something that I should not have forced right but yeah but it is good to know where you're at I mean just as far as talent and you know honestly that whole community of people of minimalist said Josh and introduced me to like they've been a huge inspiration for you know the last seven years so you certainly do need to like read other people's work and you know if you're a filmmaker then you should watch a lot of movies and and see what styles you like and look at other people's recipes and see if there's any ingredients that you can apply to yourself we were talking about this a couple days ago about self-reliance and how it's it's changed over time and how self-reliance used to be starting a fire building shelter and maybe being able to fix your car or change a light bulb and today it's it's changed pretty dramatically especially in our digital age it's it can be about growing an audience about having a creating a brand which would be almost like presenting yourself online how do people perceive you I'm curious so I want to try to help and give people advice that are really starting out on this I say somebody starting out with zero followers or they don't have any presence online and they want to be able to put themselves out there imagine you guys like there was some crazy incident somebody hacked into all your files your website crashed and then somebody went through like your computers and burned them and then all your hard drives were destroyed and you guys the minimalist were gone this sort of happened recently yeah thankfully Jeff was around we so we had a malicious attack on our website and someone deleted everything yeah it was it was terrifying but like which of the tour page I'm like what does it look like the tour page is deleted yeah and then it looked like everything was delete and someone went in deleted everything like holy cow and like we just thought it was gone like and and thankfully Jeff who's our very talented web developer over at spire he was able to recover and work for several days straight to to fix everything and man it was so shout out to spire media for a day we had some kind of tickets go on sale for it was like the first leg of our tour we had just announced yeah our tour yes hey hey go to lessons now calm and which is forwards to our tour page basically at the minimalists and people go there and was just nothing there yeah and it was like the worst possible time for that man I tell you I'm so grateful for going because I've had a lot of shitty stuff happen over the last few years and it's allowed me to deal with those things a lot better and it could all blow up tomorrow and know that I know that I'd be completely fine and I wouldn't even have the same reaction I would have had seven years ago or I'd be throwing stuff across the room and I mean I'll still get angry but I think it would be appropriate it would be appropriate response you know I'm not gonna be the psychopath who just who has no emotional reaction to it but it's a more sort of tempered reaction to to the the negative news but what I would tell someone who's just starting out is zero followers you're starting the same place I did you're sort of the same place everyone else does as well and it gets man I know early on especially the first year you get really caught up and oh my god I got to a thousand Twitter followers or a hundred thousand Instagram or whatever and it doesn't mean anything at the end of the day Ryan said it earlier like ten thousand followers isn't gonna make you happy those metrics mean very little if you're not creating what you want to create cuz here's the thing what if what if you did get to a million followers but you were doing something that was awful well you just didn't enjoy doing now you now you're in a different kind of trapped you walked away from one you got out of one cage and you walked into another cage and and and even if it's a prettier cage it's then you enjoy the cage a little bit more it's still a cage and and if you're trapped by what you're you're the size of your audiences I mean Freud would have a lot to say about that I do I completely agree with you on all fronts what's difficult and challenging as a creator is that when you you build an audience and obviously like I don't think just looking at the numbers like we said is an unhealthy thing to do and it's not it shouldn't be the end goal period I don't yeah I'm having but also but having an an audience and having say 10,000 20,000 Twitter followers whatever it is in a way it is clout and and so if I could develop a bigger audience I could get bigger guests on my show I could get interesting people on my show wouldn't be as challenging to find new guests so there are doors that open when you to have a following and I think that's what's tough is that that that balancing act between not caring about how many followers you have because you really want to focus on what you want to make and you're doing it because you really love it and also knowing that it will be and could be beneficial to grow this audience and to also impact more people and change lives yeah if you've got a million Twitter followers and you go to you know someone and say hey we do want to be on my podcast yes like they're more of a more likely to look at your follower follower is like oh you've got a million Twitter followers true I would love to be introduced to your audience so yeah I think that is certainly certainly true where it does open doors but like you said it is I don't think it's necessarily unhealthy to look at numbers but it can certainly be unhealthy to look at those numbers because if you start working for the numbers well you're not working for yourself anymore mm-hmm and that is a really it's a really fast way to kill anybody any passion I feel like a lot of times you try to think about the big picture and where you want to go with something but at the end of the day it's just you on the desk writing or editing or making that video or or producing what you really enjoy so it's like yeah you can look at that and you can stress out about it if you want but you looking at it and paying attention to it and say if it's a I'll blown that you don't have a lot of followers it's actually not gonna help anything no well and so if you were to take a photo of rainbow in black and white that's kind of like looking at the number if that's all you do is look at the numbers and that that's how how you steer it's like trying to look at a rainbow in greyscale but you're missing out on all the other things that make make the creation beautiful and you're right it may be easier you know Ryan was saying if you have a million Twitter followers you can get an interview with you know you might be able to get the rock get it bring that up I don't know if the cameras could totally see it so Matt really wants to get the rock on his podcast here's the thing I don't know if you had a million Twitter followers that would even matter to him at all so here it may even turn him away it may it may turn him all from layouts another big podcast who cares but here's the thing we turned down interviews all the time of people who have tons of followers online just because we have to say no to a lot of swings say yes to the most important things however there are occasionally people who come to me and and you know it's like well I'm working on this PhD dissertation on minimalism and here's why it would be really important to have you involved in this and they don't have any Twitter followers and if it but there's a compelling case to make and I think the point is that yes it may it may remove some friction to have to have more of those followers I'm worried less about removing friction I'm worried more about gaining traction and and what you so you need a little bit of friction to create that traction so you talked about having those challenges yes some of those challenges are what makes the thing interesting yeah I think limitations breed creativity it's one of the reasons I think the documentary turned out so well and if we would had a 20 million dollar budget to make the document or a healthy one had a 1 million dollar budget to make the documentary we I don't know that we would have made as good of a final product we may have we may have not because it wouldn't have been the same sort of bootstrap thing that it was it made and I had the same essence it may have looked you know amazing and you may I don't know you had some flaming baseball bats in it or something yeah yeah but but it it may have may have lost what made it what made it beautiful yeah and I'm glad that you brought up the rock because this this to me is is it's kind of just a crazy unrealistic goal look why would the rock want to come on my podcast you guys seem to do a pretty good job of getting your message out there and and sharing it and in what way do you think I could get the rock on this podcast I come over to my apartment and like literally it's just been me and him and have a conversation about how he built his so you know I think for Josh and I um you know thinking about the documentary and how we were able to get people like you know Sam Harris and Dan Harris to be on the in the documentary it's because like we had something to offer them it wasn't just hey will you be on my show to help my show be you know but to have more clout or so I can get more listeners it was hey we have an audience this is our first feature-length documentary you know we have high standards we don't really have any expectations but but it's gonna be a great film would you like to be part of this we'd love to introduce you to our audience so I don't think there's anything wrong with asking but it's kind of the problem with you Millennials man you think you can just ask for it yeah in part of the thing is like the the Ryan left out there is that you add value first and so giving examples with sam harris and dan harris in particular they both have books come out in 2014 and i said i reached out to both of them said hey we we would love to review your book for you and and give you a given honest review i'd love to do an interview with you about it as well and don't want anything in return just want to be able to give this to it to our audience because i've found value in both of your books waking up and 10% happier and and it's a great and then they saw that it got a good response and then it made them more willing to to do something like the duck you like the documentary and now by the way the documentary has done so well for them you know dan harris we were with him in new york couple weeks ago and he said i've never recognized from more from one media thing in mind and he's a guy was on TV five six days a week yes and he said I've never been recognized more from one thing he goes I was talking to Sam about this and Sam said the same thing yeah yeah and Sam that's amazing Sam emailed me last month he's like hey can I get a copy of your writer for the torso I'd like to make sure I'm doing the story I'm doing correctly and so like it's about adding value but here's here's here's the key without any expectation of getting something back it's not quid pro quo because here's the other thing that's a secret Minh be able to add value to someone's someone's life and realize that you may not get the same amount of value back but but you may like for me like the David Foster Wallace thing we talked about earlier there's literally no way I can pay him back he's no longer alive and by the way even if he was alive you know Mary Karr is another writer who I really look up to I think her work is phenomenal think she's the best memoirs to ever live and and I look at her writing there's nothing I could do that would add more value to her life then then she's added to my life in terms of shaping my writing and so the only thing I can do is try to add value to other people's lives instead yeah so so like when it comes to the rock the the question isn't like how can I come up with this hashtag campaign yeah to get the rocks attention like the best way to get someone's attention is to add value to their lives yeah and there is a hashtag though it's called get the rock on that spot same website get the rock on Matt's podcast calm but I actually did buy it 20 hours I ever spent it so but I think you I actually I got a really good idea I think from just this conversation and and my takeaway is make the rock smile and that's like my bare minimum is like I want to touch the rock not literally video I keep doing this I keep like I get I gotta watch out for the sound bites they'll get ya so you left off it you wanted to touch the rock I wanted to touch the rock emotionally but like so if I can make a video in some way that he sees that makes him smile that makes him laugh because like what like I I'm not gonna do anything you know his career isn't gonna be made when he comes on my podcast like there's not I don't have that value to add but there's maybe something else that I can give him yeah what may come first yeah making somebody laugh like that is totally adding value I mean that's that is one step closer than just my brother my brother suggested that I interview an actual codfish cuz I know if you guys know but he eats like eight pounds of cod fish every day just like maybe I could do that like understand the enemy there's just there's a lot of ideas I'm pretty excited but you guys have really figured out a way which I'm still learning to balance creating meaningful work and also having really healthy productive habits in your personal lives and and like it seems like there's a really beautiful blend between your personal work lives where it's almost like you couldn't even draw the line what are some of the the I guess most helpful habits you guys have developed I think work-life balance is sort of overrated in many ways because it presupposes that you have like two different selves and they're sitting in separate offices or something like well here is my and and that was actually a big problem for me when I was in my 20s I had professional jfm and then personal jfm and for me it was like the personal side I wanted to I wanted to be a writer I won the right and I did that whenever I had spare time but of course you wouldn't talk about that in the corporate world because in a weird way they almost discouraged that kind of creativity like well why are you doing that seems like a waste of time why don't you spend more time networking or whatever and and what I realized like that was unhealthy for me to have these two separate selves and so now it's more about being integrated so you can call it work-life balance or whatever but the use the word habits earlier and and I agree that I have some some pretty good habits but I think it goes back to Orion was just saying is a lot of it just has who was saying managing your time and so for me that just means saying no to virtually everything usually we do only we'll do only like one sort of media thing a week we're doing we're actually doing three this week I we said yes the three which is a very rare thing we spoke at Google yesterday and we're doing Today Show later this afternoon for the Australian tour so Australia today's show and then we're doing the ground up podcast yeah it's an up-and-coming podcast I've heard about it is you hear that the rock at the ground up show you got to do Matt's podcast anyway anyway so so I'll say no it's a whole lot because I know what I'm saying yes to and if I think it really clear on what you're saying yes to it by the way I still screw up all the time I accidentally say yes to the things I should have said no to and even though I'll say yes to something and it like we'll do an interview somewhere and I'm like how that was supposed to be way different from what it how it was pitched to us and had I had all the relevant data I would have said no to this thing but you lesson learned and you you move on and try to incorporate that lesson going forward but what questions to ask the next time you know we've certainly had that happen so I think it's weird like so when we first started we said yes to virtually everything I think it's about saying until you reach this Delta where you have to start saying no and so it was yes yes anyone if someone had two Twitter followers want to interview me like yeah yeah someone want to listen to me great yes yes yes yes yes I'll say yes as much as I can because I'm growing I'm learning from that from that experience but eventually you get to a point where you have to start saying no and then you figure out what you're saying yes to what are the most important things first it's important to say yes as much as you can just to sort of build up that that that creative ability to I mean if you're doing a podcast you want to be able to interview other people so it's a yes yes yes until you get good at that aesthetic you one day you know Charlie Rose didn't become Charlie Rose overnight and now he has to be selective who he says yes to because it can negatively impact his show if he's saying yes to anyone who just on the street who wants to be interviewed yeah III think I don't know if this is a habit as much as it is a tool but do my calendar is like that's my Bible I mean at the beginning of every week mark Mariah and I we will look at our week and be like okay let's plan on our week and then every night before I go to bed I am looking at that and if I don't use my calendar I will double booked myself I will be late to stuff I won't even show up to stuff mm-hmm I mean I had to learn that lesson that hard lesson many times before I finally started treating me Islander like my Bible yeah that's like one of those the very unsexy things about entrepreneurship and running your own business and I mean even if you're trying to keep track of your personal life you gotta have a calendar and I recently did it where I had different Google accounts I have my personal my business and I had like a separate one like another my personal website and was like all three of these and my calendars were different on each and then I just took an entire day where I'm like I need to get this [ __ ] straight I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna combine all this things I'm gonna set forwarding filters so if somebody emails my business it still comes into my main inbox but it comes into a separate folder and it's organized nice nice and neat away I do the same thing with my calendars and let the peace of mind I have now to know that I'm not confused with what I'm doing this week what I'm doing later today is super helpful it takes away it takes away a lot of stress it it makes room for other good stresses I guess but yeah like the actual creative pursuits you're trying to do no I think talking about the banality of being an entrepreneur that was really really important because you know you set the beginning of this podcast you know I'm sure people want to do what you do and I have you mentoring students who will say man I just teach me to do what you do and I'm like I don't know if you want to do what I do because you know what what most people see is or hear they'll hear this recording they'll see the video the watch the documentary they they don't understand all of the banal things that have to be done in order to make all that happen something as simple as making sure that your calendar is straight and that you are committing to it and using that calendar to enter in every single appointment whether it's business or whether it's going to two I mean there was a point where I literally I'm gonna work out I'm going to read I'm going to write I'm going to you know have a mentoring client I don't I'm not as militant with it now meaning like I if I have a free block I there are three things and I'm gonna do with the free block I'm gonna read I'm gonna write or I'm gonna go work out so I just you know I will keep that keep those blocks open during the week but my point is is that Josh and I we still work some some weeks will still work 6070 hours and it's really really tough like we're living the dream but to catch with living the dream is you have to work your ass off and those banal things are are part of that on that note let's get two quick questions it's the one and only segment of this podcast where I ask questions quickly and you guys just answer them however you want I haven't I got to really come up with a good catchphrase to introduce it but that's basically how it goes we call it the lightning round on our podcast so since we're cross publishing this we'll call this the hashtag ask the minimalist lightning round this is where we answer questions from social media we're at the minimalists on Twitter Facebook and Instagram fantastic see you guys you guys have been doing this over 100 episodes I'm only about thirty in right now by the way we call these minimal Maxim's just set up a website called minimal Maxim's com so all of our pithy answers they're less 140 characters you can find them all right there as well that's great let's do that will keep it pithy come on these quick questions question number one what's the simplest advice that's the most important to follow you can't change the people around you but you can change the people around you dude if there's one message that Josh and I are really trying to get people to understand it would be this love people and use things because the opposite never works let's say somebody stuck in a career that they they're really not happy with they're not fulfilled we're talking to that person what can they do today to turn their life around to start in the right direction the most important thing for that person they probably know what they need to do they need to do it I mean a lot of my mentoring students you know when they when they come to me they're like oh I want to I want to paint and I want to finish this book but I'm also working full-time and then like I will talk through to them pick one thing to focus on and actually put in the work and if I was just a pin that a little bit I would say don't just know what you want to know what you want to do know why you want to do it and and quite often we think we want to do something we don't realize the why behind it and that is and therefore we lose the leverage long-term if we if we if we don't know why we're doing what we're doing we'll keep doing it for a while but like I said earlier you end up in the passenger seat of your own life and all of a sudden you're like well wait a minute I'm not in control of this thing I'm doing this thing I thought I was supposed to do but I don't even know why I'm doing this so get clear on the why yeah I just realized that for myself and it came with a simple habit as waking up early so waking up early is one of those things that I've struggled with my entire life especially as a filmmaker a freelance filmmaker I always wanted to be the person to wake up early and when I did I loved it waking up at 5:00 6:00 a.m. was just I felt so productive I got more done by 11:00 a.m. that I did most days most weeks combined I wish I could sleep in until 6:00 a.m. but then recently the past two months I've been waking up at 5:00 5:30 a.m. every single day without fail and it's because I got clear on the why it was because I was I had work to do every day that I was passionate about because I wake up thinking about that I wake up I'm like oh I want to sit down at my desk and start working on it yeah and then honestly that's the biggest thing before I didn't have anything I wake up and I would have no work to do I'd have nothing that I was passionate about and I would just hit the snooze button and eventually go back to bed there was nothing compelling enough to to make you get there so that's the other thing find something compelling and that's usually within the why whoo that's pithy that's good write that down podcast Sean wherever you are right now where do you guys go when you're feeling doubt I can tell you I went recently like literally there's a physical place I wanted so we just moved out to - Los Angeles I've been have a lot of health issues the last couple years and we started running this apartment but I've been weird chemical sensitivities and so we can't stay there and I was all alone one week and I just went out to a museum Blacula down the street and just walked around and like like because you know it's it's you're not supposed to like have your phone out and all these other things and like it was like this place of intentional distraction but it allowed sort of my mind to wander in a way where it wasn't meditation but it was meditative in a way and sort of clear my thoughts when I was back in Ohio it was where I would I would just walk around there was a neighborhood that I would walk around all the time and and develop a pattern of sort of thinking and so I find for me that that you can't think your way out of problems but if you need to collect your thoughts first having going out for a long walk like five six eight mile walk allows me to collect those thoughts yeah I mean I had the type of mind that like when I leave here when we're done with this podcast he's a really good brain yeah you're the best words I'm gonna start yeah I'm gonna start in a roasting over it like now I'm gonna be like man I shoulda said this I ramble too much s and I said that oh man there's that one thing I I can kind of create my own reality in a way meaning if I walk away from here and I say this was a shitty interview or this that was a shitty podcaster I mean you really did a bad job guess what that's gonna be true if I walk away and I say hey you know what man maybe it wasn't the perfect podcast but there was some really good points from it and it was fun and we had a good time and you know what there's gonna be someone out there to get something out of it that's also true so what I've been able to do over the last like seven eight years is really learn how to control that muscle it started with like a rubberband type thing flicking myself on the wrists when I would get negative thoughts or there's this thing called the pavlok that'll like give you a little bit of a shock you know if you're trying to break a habit but I would I would literally catch myself in those thoughts and do something like that and then try to redirect what those thoughts are now what I'll also say is that anytime I do feel doubt I will acknowledge it I don't just pretend that Lake Ryan you shouldn't doubt yourself just think positive you're not lying tears right I'm not lying to myself it's about looking at that doubt and and being able to confront it head-on and either take something away learn something from it or be able to like look at that doubt and just kind of plow through and be like do this doubt is not serving me any purpose so where do I go I guess I just go to a rubber band I don't know why I think you brought up something that was important there when you're talking about don't lie to yourself like that I can I fight faced the same thing and sometimes those negative emotions are productive so it's not I don't lie to myself everything is positive everything I do is great every time my quill touches the page I write something that is legendary no the truth is most of stuff I write is garbage literally like I have to throw it away it reaches the trashcan and that's okay because it requires that sort of plethora of sediment if you're going to pan for gold there's going to be a lot of sediment before you find find the gold and that's that's pity it's that's tweetable right there and and so I think it's important not to lie to ourselves and say man everything is great great great but at the same time I think we lie to ourselves the other the other way too that was off everything so bad it was terrible no it wasn't awful the truth is it was okay and and what can I learn from the fact that it was okay let's not lie to ourselves on either side of it right what drives you why do you put in the work it's it's a net positive like that's but the work that I do will always be a net positive and you know what I mean is like it's it's rough being on tour it's rough going from one city do you know getting there a few hours before the show do a soundcheck go get dinner do the show go to bed at midnight get up at 6 a.m. rinse repeat for you know two three four days in a row but when we get there when we get on stage you know when we have the hug line and you can just see how how positive Josh and I have influenced people like for me like that is what makes it makes it worthwhile that is why I will put in the work now if Josh and I were putting in all this work and no one was showing up and even though we thought it was really meaningful work you know we had zero people attending like then it would be a net negative like okay this work that we're doing isn't doing anything but man yet for me it's about it's about the work that I put in each day I just want it to be a net positive and for me that means that ultimately what I do aligns with with my values and beliefs that all those short-term actions all those difficult the banal things that we have to do as entrepreneurs it all aligns with my long-term values and beliefs and like that for me is how I live a meaningful life I think I think the thing that drives me is it has those two things actually and they're contradictory one is is improving so improving whatever I'm doing so writing is one example like I was a pretty good writer in my 20s in fact their parts in the novel are oh it's called as a decade fades and I don't recommend people read it but it's there are parts in there that are better than anything I could write right now because it was a different mind frame and I spent many years like chiseling away certain paragraphs and pages and in there parts that are truly gorgeous that I'm just not in that mind frame anymore but as a writer overall I'm leaps and bounds better than that that bit of work that was created throughout my my mid-20s and and I've continued to improve so you can call it growth you can call personal development whatever I'll just call it improvement for the sake of this and wanting to improve wanting to get better not to get perfect but but but to to become better than what I was yesterday and whatever that creative endeavor is so podcasting was a low-hanging fruit because we weren't we were pretty bad at it at first we were good at answering questions and we had done a lot of interviews but when you become a broadcaster I'm just talking to Becks about this the other day like there are some people who were really great public speakers it doesn't translate well to podcasting because podcasting is a type of broadcasting and you need to have broadcasting chops and you turn these microphones on it becomes a totally different a different thing and it's not as solitary as writing requires this more direct one-on-one experience it's still communicative communicative to an audience but but it's different I want to get better at something like that we're on tour like getting better at public speaking that's one thing that terrified me for the longest time and it doesn't anymore but it was about getting better at that the other thing that drives me is service like being able to contribute to other people and and whether that's through our books or website or podcast or the live events it's it's about finding a way to contribute to other people I think it almost sounds like a truism the giving is living but but when you when you find the ways to contribute to other people you know we're doing some stuff with the hurricane relief efforts in Houston and then also donating personally to the Puerto Rico stuff and then what's going on in Vegas we're trying to set up a vent for that with everything that happened with the the the shooting the mass shooting in Vegas final ways to contribute like that - after tragedies but also just trying to contribute to people in general find ways to serve them and make make their lives better and we're able to death through our message and I'm grateful for that yeah let's say like in the corporate world the one thing I loved about my job it was it was the mentoring it was taking that that employee who was getting ready to get fired and then helping them turn it around were three months later they were getting Employee of the Month like helping someone to make a significant change in their lives like that is the one thing absolutely loved and that is pretty much my job now really I'm really impressed at what you guys have been able to do in the consistency of delivering an amazing and beautiful message of simple living and inspiring others to live more meaningful lives and I'm curious if you look back is there one skill that you guys have developed and locked in on that you think you've been able to cultivate in a way that others haven't I don't really look in the mirror and see any skill that I have that is you know above and beyond what anyone else has and like that's good news because you know I'm looking in the mirror and I'm going if I can do it anyone can do it mm-hmm and you know I think if there's if there's anything that you know like like a tip that I could give any entrepreneur out there it would be like surround yourself with people who you want to be like like when I think about the people that I spend most of my time with there are people who when I look at their life I'm like man that's a that's a really that's a really good life and that person's you know really smart at this they're really good at that and like there's some there's some way that I look up to them and don't necessarily want to be them but but there is an aspect to where I totally look up to them and and vice versa it's like I don't just you know I'm not just a succubus with all my friends like I will try to add as much value as much value as possible just so that I'm not just taking from these relationships but I gotta tell you man like looking at my 25 year old self I can't tell you how many people are hung out with and there's no way in hell I would ever want to live their life and like thinking back I'm like why would I ever hang out with if I'm hanging out with someone and I'm looking at them and thinking this is a life I never want to live your life looks miserable like why would I invest time and into developing a a long-term friendship with that person not saying that I should treat that person poorly but in order to help myself grow to get better at whatever skills I've got to surround myself with people who have the skills that I want to emulate and I look up to in a certain way that helps me to to grow but ultimately man for you or anyone else out there like if I can do it you can do it all right on that note thank you guys so much for being on the podcast fun man this really has been a dream come true for you yeah really adds this is gonna go in my memoir it's gonna be a page one but I'm gonna make sure to cut out the first two paragraphs yes yeah it once again thanks again for coming on one last thing I do with every guest where should people go to connect with you well we're on tour right now so if you want to come see us in all and New Zealand we just announced that lessons now calm is the tour page the minimalist stock column is always the best place to find our books podcasts essays and instagrams Twitter's all that fun stuff gift yak we on you yeah yeah thing dude I think I know I don't even know what your CAC is I just hear people say it and then I I say it anyway guys thank you alright thanks in thanks for listening to the ground up show if you like this podcast there's something you can do right now to help head on over to iTunes and leave a quick review I print out every single one and I put them up on my mood board above my bed okay that's not true but I still notice and appreciate every one for more on the ground up show including behind the scenes videos check out ground up show calm thanks for listening

Channel: Matt D'Avella

Views: 399,799

Rating: 4.8187513 out of 5

Keywords: the minimalists, minimalism, a documentary about the important things, minimalism documentary, the minimalists documentary, documentary, joshua fields millburn, ryan nicodemus, matt davella, ground up, the ground up show, a podcast, podcast

Id: WNAy8DAaHsY

Length: 98min 53sec (5933 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2017