David Kadavy: The Heart to Start and the host of the Love Your Work Podcast

Transcript

[0:00:34] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with David Kadavy, author of The Heart to Start and the host of the Love Your Work Podcast. In this episode, David shares some of the unique ways he’s earning a full time income as an author. For instance, he’s earned several thousand dollars with his writing on the blockchain by using a network called Steemit. We also talk about the future of publishing, how to admit to ourselves what we really want to do in our careers and what David has learned about doing work you love. Now, here is our conversation with David Kadavy.

[0:01:31] David Kadavy: There is this group of people that I have, gone on several retreats with, the first time that we went one on one, it was in Costa Rica, we went on Nicaragua and then a couple of years ago, we went on one in Mexico. It’s like a really deep kind of soul searching trip for all of us, where we have very organized conversations throughout the week with lunch or with dinner or throughout activities that we’re doing, about what direction are we going, where is our life right now, what’s important to us, how can we cut out the noise and make sure that we’re doing the things that we want to do. I went on that a trip a couple of years ago, in Mexico and I was doing that soul searching and I was really concerned with the state of media I guess. I worked in Silicon Valley as a product designer so had gotten to understand what shapes technology products and I just really saw that the way the economics were set up that technology products were just going to continue causing distraction and continue inciting people’s worst emotions and the way the economics were setup, there wasn’t really – everything was like attract eyeballs, sell eyeballs for, as advertising. I was really concerned about that and I wasn’t really sure of like a good way around that but at that time I was still doing a pretty similar to what I’m doing right now, I’ve got one book designed for hackers, I had courses already at the moment and I still do sell those courses but my whole process, my whole business for the last 10 years, I’ve been on my own, it’s really just been to follow my curiosity and then try to figure out ways to make money based on that curiosity. This was after, I don’t know, eight years of being on my own and really getting a taste for a lot of different things and so that was, it takes that long for me to decide, I actually really enjoy the process of writing books, of having the podcast conversations, of learning about the world and then trying to synthesize that into something that helps people with something, something like a book or a podcast. It wasn’t that I was naturally doing something that different, it was just that I was doubling down on the things that were important to me, part of that was a little bit of a pivot in terms of personal brand. Like a lot of people, if somebody is aware of me, it’s because of the first book that I wrote, Design for Hackers, I had a reputation as a designer. I don’t really design a lot anymore, I design my own books now. Part of it was, well, what else is important to me, what else, what other sort of change do I want to affect in people and you know, initially, you, coming out of that conversation or that whole week of soul searching, it was almost like, difficult to admit to myself when somebody was like, “What if you didn’t have to worry about money at all, what would you do?” I’m thinking like. Well, I would just – it was hard to admit it to myself, I would just read books all day and I would learn about things and then I would synthesize what I learned and write about it and try to teach people what I was learning, as I was learning those things. Coming to that realization was that was the turning point in this process and so initially, I was very concerned about technology, I was very concerned about distraction, I was very concerned about the way that technology and media shape people’s behavior in bad ways, which I think that people are really starting to wake up to is just getting addicted to social media and the way that it’s influencing their mood. People are really starting to pick up.

[0:05:22] Charlie Hoehn: I’ve been – just by the way, I’ve been off of Facebook and Instagram for the last two months.

[0:05:29] David Kadavy: Wow.

[0:05:30] Charlie Hoehn: Because of what you’re talking about, I saw an interview with one of the former executives of Facebook, basically talking about how much he regrets what he created and the effect that it’s had on people in that regard of how addictive it is and how they intentionally engineered it that way.

[0:05:52] David Kadavy: Yeah, I left silicon valley in 2008 and a lot of it was, that kind of saw – I’d like to think I kind of saw where things were going. It was at least looking at what I had done during the day and thinking like, you know, “Did I make the world better in some way?” I didn’t see a clear answer there, I really wanted to explore what was in my own brain and this was when I started on my own, 10 years ago and that’s when I started this model of follow my curiosity, try to figure out ways to make money based on that, using that as my main compass.

[0:06:26] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, what I’m curious about David is why did you have that inner reservation to admit that? I mean, that’s a very common thing and I’m sure a lot of people listening have that secret desire but as soon as you voice that to others where they’re like, “Well, that’s crazy, that’s ridiculous,” or were they like, “Yes, you need to do that.”

[0:06:48] David Kadavy: No, I don’t think that anybody thought I was crazy, I think that I was afraid of it because of what I knew about technology and what I knew about the economics of media, I didn’t really see a clear path to having success and living a comfortable life with that plan in mind. I think that’s why I was reluctant but it was one of these things where I know, people have different ways of discovering things about themselves but it’s one of these things where as I said it, I could feel this change in my physiology of like “Oh crap. Like, now that I’ve said it, I have to do this.”

[0:07:27] Charlie Hoehn: Dang, yeah. I think a lot of people end up having that moment or if they do have that moment, they shy away from that, I mean, I could admit to having that moment myself and still shying away from it. I know my friend Ally who is now a successful musician who travels around the world, she had that moment and she ended up doubling down and she made it happen. But people who want to be creative, they struggle with it because it feels like there’s not a clear path, right? This is a – I take why you wrote the Heart to Start of winning the inner war. You can let your art shine. How did you overcome the inner war?

[0:08:10] David Kadavy: I think that you’re right, that a lot of people, feel deep down inside, they want to be creative and then they’re not really able to find the courage to pursue it and I think that there’s no question why. I mean, look at the way that the world is setup, you go to school for however many years, you take how ever many standardized test, everything is about following these instructions. Obey these instructions, take this path, you’ll get a job and it will be secure and you’ll have health insurance and there will be a retirement plan everything and everything will work out well. One, the world doesn’t work that way anymore.

[0:08:45] Charlie Hoehn: Right. By the way, do all the work yourself, never delegate it to anybody else, don’t cheat, AKA don’t work with other people, I’m like, the way school is structured, like you said, it’s nothing like the real world if you want to be successful on the real world.

[0:09:01] David Kadavy: Yeah, don’t fail and actually, you know, I was just at a family member’s house for the holidays recently and in the children’s play room, there was one of these pictures that you put up that has words on it like has different life philosophies on it to guide the children who are playing in the play room and it had all these things like share and play and be nice and one of the things that said was, “Share everything except bad ideas.” I just thought, that’s terrible, it made me realize, that’s the environment that I grew up in, I grew up in the cul-de-sac in Omaha Nebraska, people around me weren’t authors, they weren’t entrepreneurs, they weren’t doing their own thing, they were just living their secure middle class lifestyle, you know, working at the insurance company or starting a business, removing snow or what have you. You know, it was like, the books that I was reading, the movies I was watching, the video games I was playing, it didn’t occur to me that people made those. It was like, those might as well just be like fruit growing on the tree in the backyard or something, they’re just part of the natural environment. It didn’t occur to me like people make those things and those people have to have a certain type of attribute. I think there’s lot of people who grow up in that kind of life where there is that structure and there isn’t that respect or understanding of what it really takes to create something and then as a result, they have all these false beliefs like don’t share bad ideas. The idea that you could have a good idea without first having a bad idea is insane. That’s now how it works, anybody who creates anything knows that it’s not how it works. I think that a lot of people in your standard, mainstream lifestyle, they picture that there’s just a magic wand that you go down to the career center in your high school and you say, “Yeah, I want to be a professional basketball player,” and they’re like, “Okay, fill out this application and you know, there’s this class, it’s going to teach you how to be a professional basketball player,” and you know, you go to that school for four years and then the next thing you know, you’re a professional basketball player. It doesn’t work that way, you got to figure things out for yourself and I think as our world is changing, it’s becoming more and more important for us to be able to connect with our humanity, connect with the thing that only we can do and that’s part of what I wanted to put into The Heart to Start. Not just for other people but also to remind myself the things that I need to stick to, to keep going down the path that I’m going on because it’s a constant fight, deprogramming, the decades and decades and lifetime of programming of thinking that things work some other way when they don’t work that way.

[0:11:56] Charlie Hoehn: The Heart to Start has 73 reviews on amazon, basically all five stars, people love this book, what are the parts of the book that seem to resonate the most with your readers? What are the things that they’re like, this book is amazing?

[0:12:12] David Kadavy: I’m trying to think of the most popular highlights there in the book. I think one of them is form Jon Bokencamp who is the creator of the NBC’s hit series called The Black List which James Spader plays this jet setting professional criminal and he’s basically talking about, like, you have to find your own voice and even if it’s weird, that’s like the one thing that you have that nobody else has. When you said that on my podcast, I was thinking like that is absolute gold and of course I put it in the book and it became one of the most popular highlights in the book. That’s what I want to drive home, not just with The Heart to Start but with my work in general is to understand that you have something that nobody else has and I think that’s something, if I look at the Amazon reviews, I’ve been very pleased by them. I, of course sent a review request to people who are on my list but I just never expected it to be that heavily five star reviews. Not only that but the reviews are very specific. People are talking about very specific ways that the book helped them, that maybe they were a little depressed because they just weren’t creatively fulfilled. And that somehow my work helped them connect with that and make it a bigger part of their lives and now they’re pursuing their creative endeavors and they’re finding more satisfaction in their life. That’s what I hope is why people were likening it so much and looking at the reviews, I think that that is probably the reason. And that’s fantastic because that’s exactly what I wanted from the book, you know? I’m thinking of my 25 year old self and what I wish I could have told him.

[0:14:00] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, remembering that you have something unique, you have a voice to offer, the way I like to remind myself in that is no one steps up to a blank canvas and says, “Every landscape has been done already, what do I have to offer?” You know, they just get up there and paint. We can all create stuff from our perspective and it comes from you. Therefore, it’s unique.

[0:14:28] David Kadavy: Knowing me, I would step up to that canvas and think, “All the land scapes have been painted,” but you know, this is something that happens when I’m writing as well is you have to trust in yourself. Actually, there was a feeling that I had when I was writing this book and releasing this book and it was very familiar to a story that I had heard. I heard a story about who is the abstract expressionless painter who did all the drip paste, Jackson Pollock, right? Jackson Pollock, there’s this story, he was working on a painting, he’s standing in front of the painting and he turns to his wife and he asks, “Is this a painting?” He didn’t want to know if it was a good painting, he wanted to know, is this a painting. He had, I guess, gone through all these experimentation and kind of come up with his own way of doing things and he was wondering, is this a painting. That’s something that I found in the process of writing a book was that, before writing The Heart to Start, I had made a couple of attempts at doing the traditionally published thing where you do a book proposal, you approach a few agents and stuff. Something about it just felt really off to me. I felt like I kind of – wasn’t good enough for it in a way or that – Really, it turned out that I think I just had different values. I kept feeling this pressure to say that I was a professor at Stanford University or that I worked for this Fortune 500 company and I’m a journalist at this big newspaper but I guess it took me a while to realize like, not only have I not done those things, those aren’t important to me at all. They aren’t signals to me, I mean, those are great accomplishments but with what I value, those aren’t signals to me of accomplishment really, like the things that I want to accomplish. So, I eventually let go of all of that and really just tried to write the book that felt very natural and that was The Heart to Start. You know, I was very nervous putting the book out because I’m thinking, you know, that was so natural to me. Is it, does it even makes sense, is it just gibberish, I don’t even know. This is with – I had been sharing the book with my followers for months, I have it writing and they read the first draft for free while I was writing it and everything. Had decent feedback. I’m thinking like, is this a book? I don’t even know but then you know, I put it out there and then the Amazon reviews came in and something like, “Okay, this is a book. Cool.” That was you know, way less painful than my first book. It was a nice feeling.

[0:17:09] Charlie Hoehn: Totally, I’m with you on the whole making a proposal thing and auditioning basically by embellishing your past accomplishments. First of all, I’ve never been a big fan of those titles and listing past accomplishments because it kind of constrains your future in this weird way. You’re like, “I did this thing in the past therefore I must continue doing this thing because people seem to really be liking it.” No. Break out, you can be an artist, you can create new things.

[0:17:39] David Kadavy: You know, it’s interesting. I hope that that’s crumbling, the authority triggers that have been so tried and true for the last several decades, I think those are starting to go away where one, people are becoming increasingly more skeptical of the establishment of, “Okay, you are a professor at this Ivy League university or you work for this big newspaper or you’ve worked for these big companies,” I think there’s increasingly more people who are maybe skeptical of that where that’s not a trigger of that’s somebody I want to be like. I mean, Good case and point might be the success of Mark Manson and his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. His bio is basically, he’s a star blogger, he has millions of readers but he’s a blogger, he’s a guy who liked travel around, he learned some stuff, he wrote a fantastic book about it, he sold more than two million copies.

[0:18:34] Charlie Hoehn: In like a year.

[0:18:37] David Kadavy: Yeah, incredible.

[0:18:38] Charlie Hoehn: He’s truly an anomaly, like in the best sense of the word, I don’t mean that as diminishing at all because he’s like, one of what a handful of the hundreds of thousands of books that get published that just exploded in a way that was just breathtaking and I tell this story, I think I’ve told this story on a podcast before but I remember, this was years ago, I reached out to Mark after he wrote this great post. I think it was on India on what he learned in India, I just thought it was beautiful and I reached out to him, I had never met him or interacted with him and I just said, “Hey man, I love the post and he responded and he asked me a question about you know, he was thinking at that time, making the shift into the traditional publishing world and I’m an arrogant kid in my mid-20s or I guess an adult in my mid-20s. I responded back with like you know, because my experience wit traditional publishers at that time, I was not impressed, I was working alongside Tim Ferris and seeing how they were kind of interacting with them, I was like, “This is not what you would think it would be from the top publishers,” and so I kind of wrote him back like, “Look dude,” in retrospect, I feel like I was kind of pointing him down another path or kind of dismissing what he was saying and he responded like “I’m in it for the long haul, I want to do this,” and man, I’ve never been proven more wrong by anybody. He made the best decision because he just crushed it. Anyway.

[0:20:21] David Kadavy: Kudos to Harper Collins for letting him write the book that – I mean, I talked to him a little bit about it after I interviewed him on my podcast and you know, from what he said, they were great to work with, they didn’t try to change his book and they published a book with the F-word in it.

[0:20:42] Charlie Hoehn: In the title, yeah.

[0:20:44] David Kadavy: Which is amazing because I think that part of, I think there’s a lot of old ideas of what a book is and what a book should be and a lot of that is created by past economics of publishing books and a lot of it just stays in place, especially with the traditional publishers and the fact that they were willing to take a chance that was is really impressive.

[0:21:06] Charlie Hoehn: David, you seem to really care about the future of books, publishing, the state that things are going for creators and in the media and what’s cool is, you just actually published your income report from January 2018 on your site, kadavy.net. Talk to me about the state of publishing right now. What excites you? What do you think is on the up rise? What do you think is going away?

[0:21:38] David Kadavy: Yeah, as I mentioned, I either have been really concerned with the state of media and how media is funded, right? The idea is, get eyeballs so to get eyeballs, you got to get clicks so to get clicks, you can write whatever headline you want, once you have t hose eyeballs, you can sell them off to advertisers, it doesn’t matter if you upset the people who are reading, in fact, it might even be better because that makes them share it, that makes them pay more attention to it. I just have like a problem with that model. Now, I think that that’s going away and there’s a few different ways that will be going away. One is, block chain. I’m not going to try to use this just like a buzzword, I’m going to try to explain it as best I can because I’ve taken a lot of time myself trying to understand it but the idea is that, when you are using Facebook, you are working for Facebook. Facebook has no value without what you contribute to your comments, your posts, the relationship that you maintain on facebook, none of that has any value without the network effect, without everybody using it. Now, Facebook in order to fund the platform, then has to sell advertising, it’s not really easy for them to distribute or compensate you for your contribution besides what I call ego capital. Just that you are getting enjoyment out of the platform somehow and that is your payment. Block chain technology, you know, it is a irrefutable ledger and it can – it’s not a database that sits on Facebook’s server, it’s this sort of shared database that a bunch of computers around the world all kind of check with each other and okay, did this transaction happen? Okay, cool. It can’t really be tampered with. Because of that, you can distribute little bits of tokens, so it could be that this person published a blog post and then this person shared the blog post so that person who shared the blog post will get a little bit of any future rewards that that blog post gets, comments, can earn tokens. This happens on a network called Steemit. There’s one iteration of this idea. The most promising right now but hopefully there will be more. I’ve been writing on Steemit for about a year now. Just syndicate my content really to Steemit. I earn this Steem tokens for the writing that I do there and these tokens have value because one, they have value within the net worth, the more tokens you have, the more influence you have to earn more tokens. If you cash those tokens out, there is also this market of people who are trading these crypto tokens of Steem and they’ve assigned a value to those tokens. I’ve cashed out so far around $4,000 from my Steemit account and it is, my account’s currently worth around 8,000, $9,000. Again, I’m holding on to that because the more that I hold on to it, the more I can earn when I cash out. I take the money out but then I have less potential to earn when I cash out. That’s part of what gives the tokens value. That’s one really exciting – I guess I’ll give you a chance to comment on that unless you have any thoughts.

[0:24:54] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, with Steemit, I’m not familiar with Steemit. I was reading a little bit about it on your site before we started but – they’re paying you in bitcoin?

[0:25:04] David Kadavy: No, they have their own tokens, they’re called Steem tokens. Now, for me to cash those tokens out, currently, I still have to convert them to bitcoin first. What I do is I cash out the tokens, I convert them to bitcoin and then I convert the bitcoin into dollars, right away. It hits my bank account and it’s income.

[0:25:26] Charlie Hoehn: That’s real and it’s better than doing it otherwise which you wouldn’t get anything. Kind of explain a little bit because this is really interesting. Explain how it works, how many people are using this by the way? And how exactly are they paying you, do they click a little applause button like on Medium and you get tokens? It’s kind of confusing.

[0:25:50] David Kadavy: It’s extremely confusing. Anybody who is listening should know that it’s extremely confusing and that’s usually like the first dismissal of it is that it’s extremely confusing. Now, I think this is important to understand that humans, as a group have learned all sorts of complicated, confusing things such that they’re now second nature, right? If you watch an old video of the good morning America hosts trying to understand what the internet is from, I don’t know if it’s from 1992 or something like that. You will see, okay, humans can as a group learn to understand extremely complex things. With that in mind, how do they pay? I will post something on there, people will up vote it and when they up vote it, basically, it is tracking all these up votes and then at the end of say a week, it collects all the up votes and the amount of Steem power or how much influence there was of all the people who up voted it. There’s some people with a ton of influence, they’re called Whales, they have a ton of steam and so every time they up vote something, that person earns a lot of money. Then, they earn curation tokens as well. Part of what makes a network like Steemit or like Facebook valuable is because people up vote things and provide these signals of is this valuable content. Yeah, maybe at the end of that week, then it will split it up and I have a post where I broke it down, I don’t know if it’s like, maybe 75% of the earnings go to the author and then 25 to curators, I’m not exactly sure. But if you – say, if you up vote a post that ends up doing very well, I believe the earlier you up vote it, the more of the share you get. It’s kind of like, I haven’t looked into this much but I’ve heard stories about how tribes they would go hunting would divide up the meat of a kill and it’s based on you know, who made the shot, who had the assist and then maybe it’s by some other hierarchy within the tribe.

[0:28:10] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. So to kind of describe how this looks, steemit.com.

[0:29:00] David Kadavy: Yeah, the E-E is important for people to know, yeah.

[0:29:03] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, it looks a lot like Reddit.

[0:29:06] David Kadavy: It looks a lot like Reddit, yeah and you know Reddit has karma points and some people think that karma points are very valuable. You know karma points have value even if they don’t have monetary value but also karma points live on Reddit’s server as far as I know. They live on Reddit’s server, Reddit could go in and say, “Okay, we’re just going to delete all this person’s karma points,” or something like that. Where are something like Steemit, the points that are there, first of all they are just not these binary up vote or down vote, it is you get an up vote and now you are a part of any future up votes like you are earning for your curation there and that is one way. It is different than the other way. It’s different, it is also the bid. Of course the block chain, the idea that and I might be botching this because I am not super technical but like I said, it is not a database on someone’s server. There are computers from all around the world that are consulting with one another whenever there is a transaction. Whether it is an up vote or somebody cashes something out or somebody gift’s somebody else some Steem and so these computers around the world are saying, “Okay did that person give that person four Steem? Okay, yes they did.” And then that becomes part of this collective database that can be reversed.

[0:30:24] Charlie Hoehn: And so when you click through to an article, it looks like Medium like it is a really nice blend. The interface is great for reading the actual article, this is really cool. I am going to give this a shot David, I am going to let you know how it goes. Do you recycle some of your old hit articles on here or do you only post new content?

[0:30:47] David Kadavy: This is something that I’ve just started doing a lot, I syndicate stuff like crazy now. I mean because when you think about it, content, people don’t really care where they are getting content. It’s not like – well I don’t know, there are people who like to read on Steemit, there’s people who are reading on Medium, there’s people who read through RSS, there’s people who read on Kindle and so I am just trying to do my best to syndicate my content through all of those platforms. So yeah, I have a process that I set up where I mostly write on Medium first and then I will use a tool to convert the Medium post to Markdown which is how you post on Steemit. It is a little cumbersome to post because you have to do the Markdown, you have to do a little bit of coding and then I will use a tool called Streemian to schedule posts. Now I know Streemian was not working for a little while so I don’t know it might be working then and I will schedule the post. So that there will be a steady stream of them going in that way. I’m not constantly having to update and look at it but yeah, it is extremely compelling. I mean when I use something like Facebook or Twitter, I really feel like, “Wow this is in the stone ages as far as the compensation and yes but –

[0:32:06] Charlie Hoehn: I even think of – sorry to cut you off but I even think that way with YouTube all the time because if you started this today and this was what you came up with, you’d be like, “This is totally screwing the creators and it is annoying as hell to the users to have to skip ads every single video,” why are we not able to pay the creators directly for the costliest form of media in existence basically apart from video games?

[0:32:35] David Kadavy: Yeah and there’s a platform called Lbry, I don’t remember if it’s dot IO or whatever but they are creating a platform that distributes tokens. There is actually several interesting experiments going on in this space. I mean none of them are like, “Oh this is just going to totally change everything. This is it.” but there are at least iterations of an idea that is going to be very, very big. Like I am saying when I say that Facebook is in the stone ages, I am not saying that Steemit is going to totally up end Facebook anytime soon. I am saying that if Facebook does not respond to this new technology and find some way to distribute compensation accordingly for the efforts for all the people in the network, things are going to change very, very, very fast at some point like the whole earth could fall from underneath them and since they are a publicly traded company, I don’t see how they could respond if something really picks up.

[0:33:32] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I mean you’re totally right and Facebook has so many issues like straight up copyright violation all the time. They reward - there users on Facebook who have huge accounts who are getting paid tens of thousands of dollars for some post in some instances now that they are experimenting with who straight up just plagiarized. They post other people’s content, other people’s video under their account, sometimes even editing it. So it has an intro clip for instance of the person who owns the account saying, “This is totally me on this day,” and then they edit in some other users proven video that’s gone viral on YouTube or something and they just steal it. So the block chain I think is going to solve all of those stuff and hopefully there is going to be a Facebook but good in the very near future.

[0:34:26] David Kadavy: Yeah, there is potential for it. I am really excited about the Steemit thing. Like I said, it is confusing, what I did for myself and this is something I do whenever I discover something new that I am excited about is I will just like pick a lock of time every week that is not my prime time. So for me it was like Sunday evenings and I would say, “Okay, we’ll spend an hour or two on Sunday evenings looking into this,” and then as time goes on, I get more and more interested in it. So I am investing more and more time and changing that time block to a Friday afternoon or something like that. Yeah, over time the more I have learned the more I have gotten very excited about Steemit and the block chain and all of the potential it has to completely change media.

[0:35:07] Charlie Hoehn: You know what man? This is getting me excited about it too so thank you, first of all for sharing that you are even doing this because you said eight, $9,000 total that you’ve made through Steemit?

[0:35:19] David Kadavy: Well I’ve cashed out $4,000 of US dollars. My account is currently worth and this is where we get to the even more confusing parts of it. So I don’t want to bore the listeners but yeah, my account is worth 8,000 to $9,000. I can’t cash that out right away. You have to do what’s called a power down, so it takes 13 weeks. You get a 13th of it every week for 13 weeks and then also, it decreases my network influence. So it all depends upon the price of Steem as well like when I’ve started, Steem was like 14 cents per token and now it has gotten as high as seven, I think it is around five right now, $5 so yeah.

[0:36:01] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, get in while you can. I mean I am looking at their number of accounts. I think this is right now maybe a little outdated because they have a total of about a 170,000 accounts over the last month, 26,000 of those accounts have been active which is here’s what’s crazy about this right? So you might think, “Okay 26,000 accounts active in a month. That is not a lot of users relative to a place like Facebook which has billions.” Do you know how many posts that I’ve done that have gotten hundreds of likes over the years and never made a cent? They’ve been free and they’ve added nothing to my bottom line and that’s writing the people genuinely value. So I mean –

[0:36:51] David Kadavy: Right and this gets into – I mean you really just triggered me on this other thing that I think is really interesting about it. You put in that effort, you made something that people genuinely enjoyed but to reap the benefits, this is one of the problems with the economics of being a creator and this is one of the things that I was thinking about and agonizing over during that trip to Mexico was, I call it the four dollar Tim Farris effect, okay? So I read the 4-Hour Work Week in 2007, it completely changed my life. I live in Colombia, I travel the world, I created passive income streams based upon the things I learned in that book. It made me hundreds of thousands of dollars from the things that I have learned in that book. I borrowed it from a friend. I have bought maybe one of Tim Farris’s other books. So knowing how publishing works, he got maybe three or four dollars from me over the course of 10 years and I’ve listened to his podcast a bunch, all of these stuff and this is huge, huge impact. Now, if someone were to have come up to me in 2007 and told me like, “Hey I’ve got this book for you, it’s going to re-architect your brain. You are never going to see the world in the same way. It is going to help you make hundreds of thousands of dollars.” I would have told them to fuck off and so, there’s this weird thing with creation and with books is that the impact is not commensurate with the pay for it because books, they take some work. And so what most creators do who have platforms online is they create online courses because online courses are a little more specific. It is a little more easier to say, “I’m going to teach you how to be a freelance designer and you are going to earn your money back in six months.” Or something like that or more common is, “I am going to sell you an online course teaching you how to create online courses to sell online,” and so it is creating a self-referential thing. I think it’s making fringe – it is making it harder for fringe ideas to really have a life and so this is where I see things like the block chain or I might be able to talk about Kindle or Patreon even. Creating more opportunities for creators to get creative, to get compensated for the value that they create in people’s lives.

[0:39:08] Charlie Hoehn: Man, well said. It’s funny because Tim, I think has created more millionaires than anybody I can think of or know. I mean I arguably probably Steve Jobs created the most wealth of anybody but yeah, it is really well said. I mean because books are an obstacle to the success that you are seeking and for a lot of people that obstacle is too great. Frankly, they just don’t want to put in the effort it takes to sit down and read a book which is crazy to me, crazy to you but it is the truth. Yeah, they don’t often get compensated. They don’t see the ROI that they actually deliver upon. So tell me about some of these other – I want to talk more about the economics of books in the future of it in the state of being an author going forward whether you are self-publishing or the vanishingly small traditionally published I think. What other platforms are getting you excited? You mentioned Patreon, Kindle, Medium I know that you use, what are the breakdowns of these for you in your economic situation as an author?

[0:40:20] David Kadavy: Well I have done some analysis. I still feel like I have to do online courses. It’s not like my online courses aren’t useful. It’s just that I personally don’t take many online courses. It is not something that I use. I read a ton of books, I like for more of my income to be books. So it is online courses are my main earner, books are my most important thing and then there is affiliate stuff as well like maybe referring people to email service providers, things like that but –

[0:40:52] Charlie Hoehn: It’s so crazy to me that people like I don’t know, Pat Flynn and John Lee Dumas makes so much money referring people to hosting. I’m like, “Who is going through their links to find out about how to buy a domain?” that’s the majority of people I guess and can you – so breakdown if you are comfortable, I assume you are, of how much you’re earning through courses versus your books and if you want to do percentages that’s fine.

[0:41:24] David Kadavy: If I take last year and again, I have the last two years I have been now hedging for myself, they can see my income report but the last which is just January but for the last two years, I have been pivoting, becoming an author. Last year, I don’t know, I made 22 or so thousand dollars off of online courses, book royalties was somewhere around like $3,000 or something, off of Design for Hackers, affiliate sales I want to say –

[0:41:54] Charlie Hoehn: Which Design for Hackers, remind of that – oh that was self-published, yeah.

[0:41:58] David Kadavy: No, design records was a traditionally published book.

[0:41:59] Charlie Hoehn: Oh okay, got it. So that’s pretty good, yeah and that book came out a long time ago.

[0:42:04] David Kadavy: Yeah, that’s funny. I mean it is a $40 book. So I mean I get what, $3 from that maybe, so it is still selling.

[0:42:12] Charlie Hoehn: Well it’s cool because I guess most of the authors who listen to this are mostly self-published. For a lot of traditionally published books, the case is the royalties kind of evaporate after a set period of time. So that is pretty solid that you are still earning.

[0:42:29] David Kadavy: Well yeah, if you have ever see royalties, you know I paid out the advance right away. So I mean that book did really well. I got so lucky I don’t know. It just like I just got a book deal and I wrote a book which was hell but then it did really well and so that is very cool. You know going forward this year, I am hoping that I will make around 10,000 profit or so from books like the Heart to Start. I’ve got another one I am working on. I am doing some experimentation with really, really short books. We’ll see what happens there. I mean I am messing with AMS ads and then Steem.

[0:43:06] Charlie Hoehn: Those are Amazon ads.

[0:43:07] David Kadavy: Amazon ads, right and then Steem it is so hard to tell but I am hoping to bring in, I don’t know $8,000 this coming year off of Steem. Medium, they have their partner program where they keep paying out. I don’t have a lot of confidence in that program but to be honest, they’ve raised a bunch of VC and they are handing out money. So I’ll go ahead and take some of it. I don’t know how much I will be writing on there but I hope to make four or $5,000 this year off of that. This is all just rough estimates. And so you know I will be promoting some of my courses a little bit more this year. I think I have come to the realization like, “Okay I still need to…” I have been really neglecting the courses like they’re just kind of on autopilot. I’ve got to keep selling them maybe make a new one and there’s things like I’ve been doing this self-publishing and learning so much along the way. So there is opportunities to teach people about that. If it is important to me to teach something to somebody then I think I can muster the will to create the course, to help them do so. You know my heart is in books. Because that’s what I love to read myself and that’s what I’m trying to concentrate on more but I mean, who knows?

[0:44:26] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, well I am excited to watch where you continue to go. It’s cool that you really seem to be at the forefront in terms of paying attention to how authors can make a living. So this is really valuable information. So at the very least, my encouragement goes to you to keep exploring and keep showing others the way because I know for a fact that people who listen to this who are writers and authors will really value this conversation. I want to talk a little bit and maybe I should have devoted more time to it if you’re good on time David.

[0:45:01] David Kadavy: I am good on time, I have plenty of time.

[0:45:03] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. So I’d like to talk a bit about your podcast, Love Your Work, you are a guy after my own heart with that kind of title. So tell me, why is it important to love your work? I mean it sounds maybe obvious but not many people do. Why does it matter so much to you to love your work?

[0:45:24] David Kadavy: I think it comes from my origin story is my upbringing. Being surrounded by those people who are going through the traditional template and working the nine to five and such which is totally fine. There is perfectly valid reasons to do that. You know my dad worked the same job for 37 years. He wasn’t somebody who was passionate about his work. He didn’t come home and talked about his work at all. So when it came time to go to college and start finding a career and people are telling me about different career directions, and they are talking about how much money this makes or how much money that makes and I am thinking like, “Well but you are going to do this thing all day, don’t you want to enjoy that?” I think it is such an important part of your life and also for myself, I just can’t be motivated to do something that I don’t enjoy doing. So when I did finally go on my own 10 years and I woke up that first morning, I just remember cowering under the covers because I am thinking: “Okay, I’ve wanted to be on my own for so long and now is my chance but I’m scared out of my mind because I have an entire day in front of me and that is just vastness that needs to be filled. And how can I fill that time with something that I enjoy so that I can actually won’t let go down the hallway and play guitar hero all day? Like I need to rediscover my curiosity,” because my connection with my own curiosity had been really afraid of years of working in jobs for other people and connect with that curiosity and use it as a motivator to propel me forward as I try to find opportunities that are actually marketable. And so when I started Love Your Work, I think it was really because that’s what I am looking for. I do get up every morning and I do love what I do and I look forward to doing all of it but I am still on that journey myself. I am still trying to figure it out. You know sometimes I wonder if it is even possible or if it is practical like maybe I should do something that just makes me a lot of money and that I don’t love so I still wonder that sometimes but that is the question, that’s the journey that I am on throughout the podcast interviewing people on there and pontificating about it through my articles and such.

[0:47:57] Charlie Hoehn: I am with you on everything that you just said. Similar, I landed on a similar philosophy about loving your work and I often wonder about it too but the way -

[0:48:10] David Kadavy: Yeah, you were struggling with the anxiety and such right?

[0:48:14] Charlie Hoehn: Well I mean I’ve just always, even before that I have always just held like if you are going to spend this much time of your life in a work - in developing your career, it’s got to be something that is enjoyable for you. You know something I have learned just being married and being in love with my wife is that you also have to love the struggle too. You have to be willing to go through challenging times and enjoy that process as well because there is no job, there is no work that is 100% honeymoon phase. You know I don’t think. There is always challenges no matter how fun your industry is in, no matter how delightful the people you are or delightful the people you’ve surrounded yourself with are, it’s always going to be challenging and I think if you can figure out the people that who you love to be around where work feels like play and you can love the struggle of the work itself, you are going to be in a position where you do genuinely love your work. It is not going to be all rainbows and sunshine.

[0:49:32] David Kadavy: Yeah, I totally agree with that and I want to also be clear that I am not one of these people who is like, “Follow your passion!” Because just like you said, when you love what you do then you are willing to go through the inevitable discomfort, the inevitable painful parts of making it work. I say passion is not a destination, it is a weapon in your arsenal.

[0:49:57] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, very true. Now for people who listen to this podcast, they want to go check out Love Your Work, what’s the episode they should start with?

[0:50:05] David Kadavy: I love the episode with Seth Godin. That is a huge one for people. I think it’s episode 77 and that conversation, you know I do this podcast very selfishly. I am looking to get super powers from my guest and that conversation with Seth Godin, you can actually probably hear me, coming to the realization that I need to rethink my approach to publishing because that was when Seth told me that basically if you want to write a book you’re going to have to be the head of marketing for your book anyway. So you should be self-publishing and he was saying you know, write a book on Kindle every week and then you learn about marketing and you learn about putting your book out there and it really got me to I just stop treating my writing and my work as if it were drops of liquid gold that had to be salvaged, you know? About being which ironically makes the work better is that you aren’t just holding onto it like it’s this caged bird that you just can’t let go. You have the attitude instead like, “Okay I am creating this thing and there is a lot more where that came from and I can keep going.” Snd so that was a great conversation with Seth Godin. Anybody who’s familiar with Jason Freed, I had a wonderful conversation with him. That was the first episode.

[0:51:29] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, you started off with a bang man. Jason Freed is number one?

[0:51:33] David Kadavy: That was the first episode, yeah. So there’s a lot of – yeah, James Altucher is another great one on there. Dan Ariely, the behavioral scientist and a former colleague of mine as well.

[0:51:47] Charlie Hoehn: David, do you have any success stories or listener emails that come to mind of people who have listened to Love Your Work and it has changed their life in some way?

[0:52:01] David Kadavy: Yeah, I do get those emails sometimes and I can’t even say I put my finger on it because sometimes I don’t really approach Love Your Work with the sense of “I am trying to do this specific thing for people,” and so I don’t –

[0:52:14] Charlie Hoehn: Right because it’s for you, yeah.

[0:52:15] David Kadavy: Yeah, well I mean it is for me but I wanted it to be useful for people and I try to make it useful but I don’t really necessarily have an exact result in mind because for me, it’s a process in itself. It’s not so much a product as it is a process in itself and so yeah, I get these emails of people saying that they were just filling very unfulfilled and unmotivated and they are wasting their time watching Netflix and scrolling through Facebook. But the idea of loving their work made them see things differently and so they started pursuing things that they were curious about this sort of reading more and taking pleasure in doing the things that, I mean maybe necessarily lead to an immediate economic gain but using that curiosity and using that passion as fuel to find engagement in their life and to move forward that way. So that seems to be the feedback that I hear the most. When somebody does message me to tell me that the podcast is really doing something for them and that is a fantastic feeling because that is something that I could use 15 years ago.

[0:53:23] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, well you are doing awesome work man. I want to wrap up with a challenge for our listeners, a lot of which are authors. Do you have a challenge that they can maybe do this week that can change their life in some way whether significant or small?

[0:53:40] David Kadavy: I have a challenge in mind but I am afraid that it is going to come off as too much of a noob challenge, it depends on how experienced people are but if you are somebody out there who does think about writing a book and you aren’t writing a whole bunch, I would say to start building a very small habit of writing. Now most people, when they say to build a habit of writing they say, “Oh you just write 500 words a day. Write a 1,000 words a day.” I am going to say write 50 words a day, write a 100 words a day. The same time every day, you sit down, you write that 100 words and you just keep that up because something magical starts to happen. This is the way that I ended up writing this last book. It was through a daily writing habit. Something magical starts to happen, you might for very many days in a row get up and dread doing your writing habit, dread getting started but then eventually it just gets easier and eventually, you magically get way better at it and it’s really an incredible thing and it takes time. So I would say just start with that or just try it for a week if you don’t already have some kind of writing habit and pick something well below your skill level.

[0:54:52] Charlie Hoehn: That’s good, I like it. So that’s a great challenge, let’s wrap up there. David, thank you so much for being on the show. This is super valuable.

[0:55:01] David Kadavy: Charlie, thanks so much for having me. I’ve been listening to your interviews, you’re fantastic, so it’s an honor to be a part of the show.

[0:55:10] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to David Kadavy for being on the show. You can buy his book, The Heart to Start on amazon.com and you can listen to his podcast, Love Your Work on iTunes. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.