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What if your smartphone didn’t distract you? What if your focus couldn’t be shaken by social media, by the latest news story, or even by your coworkers? What if you could be indistractable? Imagine what you could accomplish. Nir Eyal's (@nireyal) new book will help you do just that. Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life will lead you away from dis-traction, so you can get traction. You may remember Nir being on Love Your Work a couple of times before. We talked about the societal implications of distracting technology more than three years ago, on episode 21. And now he’s back to show you how to fight back distractions – whatever the source. In this conversation, you’ll learn: Nir wrote the Bible on building habit-forming products: Hooked is a Wall Street Journal best-seller. So why would he also write the book on how to avoid being distracted by these products? How can you reimagine distraction to short-circuit it at its source? Nir helps you redesign your triggers, your task,

To make it as a creative, you need to make the most of very limited resources. Your most valuable resource as a creative is your creative energy. You only have so much creative energy, but if you use that energy wisely, you can be leaps and bounds more productive than you could be otherwise. To manage your creative energy well, be intentional about how you use it. One way to be intentional about how you use your creative energy is to categorize and label different types of creative energy. Today, I introduce two types of creative energy. “Front burner” creativity, and “back burner” creativity. If you think of your creative energy in terms of “front burner” and “back burner,” you can have more creative output on your smaller projects, while still tackling those bigger projects – all without procrastinating or burning out. I’ll tell you more in this week’s episode. Image: Guitar and Music Paper, Juan Gris New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as

Robbie Abed (@robbieab) is author of Fire Me I Beg You: Quit Your Miserable Job (Without Risking it All). Robbie is also one of the early influencers on LinkedIn's publishing platform, he’s had over 500 coffee meetings, and he's one of the key catalysts – along with James Altucher – behind why this podcast exists at all. (You’ll hear the story.) How would you feel if you got fired today? If the answer is “relieved,” you should re-think your job. I took a short visit to Chicago, and sat down with longtime friend Robbie Abed. In this conversation, you’ll learn; Thinking about quitting your job? What’s one question you should ask yourself to know if you should pull the trigger? How do you quit your job without committing career suicide? Robbie says “Never lie on your resume, but lie like hell in your exit interview.” Find out why. New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy Dav

Have you ever wondered to yourself: How the the hell did I end up in this situation? I asked myself this question once. I was changing my clothes in the bathroom of a filthy Fuck My Life laundromat in Chicago. It was a terrible situation. But I learned an important lesson. I’ll tell you about it in this week’s episode. Image from: A Bar at the Foiles-Bergére, Edouard Manet New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays Listener Showcase This week, we’re featuring Luke Freeman of positly.com. Positly.com is a platform for recruiting and managing research participants. Sign up to be featured at kadavy.net/showcase About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Yo

Ryan Evans (@ryanevans) wanted to make easy money. Growing up on a pig farm, Ryan was used to making little money for lots of hard work. But Ryan would soon learn an important lesson about the dangers of easy money. This is, in my opinion, the most powerful conversation I’ve had on the show yet. In it, we’ll talk about: Are there good ways to make money, and bad ways to make money? Ryan’s hard lesson gives him a unique perspective that few people have. Hear the story of what it’s like to get investigated by the SEC for insider trading. What’s it like to serve hard time for making easy money? If you’ve ever wondered what federal prison was like, Ryan will tell you. I had to cut a third of this conversation out, in order to fit our production budget. We pay by the minute for editing, so there isn’t room for the whole thing. Patreon supporters got access to the raw uncut conversation weeks ago, delivered straight to their favorite podcast apps. Support Love Your Work on Patreon to hear the whole thing, and get

You may have heard that you should assign yourself an “aspirational hourly rate.” That you should tell yourself you’re worth, say, $300 an hour; and if you can spend $300 to save yourself an hour, you should do so. That’s a powerful idea for making the most of your time and energy, but is all of your time equally valuable? In this week’s essay, I propose a variable money value for your time. Image: Glass and Checkerboard, Juan Gris Thanks for sharing my work! On Twitter, @EvryLovelyThing and @tchassakamga. On Instagram, tomjepsoncreative of The Sideman Designer podcast. New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Lov

Rob Wiblin (@robertwiblin) is the Director of Research at an organization called 80,000 Hours, and host of the 80,000 Hours Podcast. 80,000 hours being the amount of hours you will spend working in a typical career. 80,000 Hours is dedicated to finding out just how effective various careers are, and who is suited for those careers. We all want the work we do to matter. But how do we really know whether the work we do does matter? The foundation of 80,000 Hours is a philosophy called Effective Altruism. The EA community asks tough questions about what are the most important issues facing humanity, and how best to address those issues. EA tends to come up with counterintuitive conclusions that go against most people’s first instincts. You’re going to hear some of those counterintuitive conclusions. You’re also going to learn: Why did Rob insist on having a much longer conversation than the typical one-hour conversation you hear here on Love Your Work? He has data to back up his suggestion. Why should you stop

We’re so accustomed to operating in a time management world, we can’t imagine it being any different. We all have our calendars full, and even then we can’t seem to manage it all. Believe it or not, it wasn’t always this way, and if you want to stay relevant in the coming years, I think you’ll have to learn to operate under a completely different paradigm. We need to stop thinking so much about how to better manage our time, and start thinking about how to better manage our minds. I’ll tell you more in this week’s episode. Photo by milan degraeve on Unsplash. New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays Listener Showcase Vidas Pinkevicius is not only one of our top-contributing Patreon backers, he’s also an organist who draws. Vidas is author of Pinky and Spiky comics. You can check out his work on Steemit. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hacker

Dr. Robert Maurer (@Dr_RobertMaurer) is author of One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. He’s also Director of Behavioral Sciences for the Family Practice Residency Program at Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center and a faculty member with the UCLA School of Medicine. In One Small Step, Dr. Maurer shows you how to make really big changes with ridiculously small steps. I first discovered One Small Step on the Amazon page for my own book, The Heart to Start. Amazon kept showing me that people who bought my book were also buying Robert’s book. After it had been sitting there for week after week, I thought to myself, I’ve gotta see what this is about. You’ve heard me talk about taking small steps on this podcast, including my episode on how to build good habits with B.J. Fogg. It turns out there’s a name for this practice. The Japanese call it Kaizen. In this conversation, you’ll learn about: How do large goals put us into fear mode? Learn about the neuroscience of why we don’t take actions. How can you

Breaking through resistance to be creative is a battle with your own mind. We learned last week from Dr. Robert Lustig about how commerce is set up to hack your mind into a state of constant wanting, wanting, wanting. But the more you seek satisfaction from the outside world, the harder time you’ll have finding it. That’s why I think you should shut off the consumer mind, and fire up the creator mind. Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash Thanks for sharing my work! On Instagram, tammylynnmcnabb, and tomjepsoncreative of The Sideman Designer podcast. New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Pod

Dr. Robert Lustig (@RobertLustigMD) is Professor emeritus of Pediatrics, Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he specializes in the field of neuroendocrinology – in other words, how the brain regulates hormonal activity in the body. His research and clinical practice has focused on childhood obesity and diabetes. Dr. Lustig believes the food business has hacked our bodies and minds to pursue pleasure instead of happiness, by pushing processed food loaded with sugar. As you’ll see, the way sugar triggers our brain chemistry isn’t a whole lot different from the way technology triggers our brain chemistry, which is relevant to prior discussions I’ve had on the podcast about how technology shapes behavior. Dr. Lustig points to this confusion between pleasure and happiness as having fostered today’s epidemics of addiction and depression. Getting your creative work out into the world, and finding a way to love your work, both require that you have a healthy relation

Curiosity is powerful fuel. If you want to make it as a creative, you need to follow things you’re curious about. It’s your best shot at being able to put in the work necessary to succeed. But curiosity can be so powerful, it can take you off track. In this week’s article, learn how to use curiosity strategically. You can harness the fuel of curiosity while driving toward your goals. Image by Steve Johnson New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays Listener Showcase Frafri makes “music for entrepreneurs.” Visit frafri.com to find all of the places you can listen. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitch

We’re living in a time of exciting technological innovation. But just because technology can do something for us, doesn’t mean that it should. Cal Newport is author of the new book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Digital Minimalism is a philosophy of using the power of technology only in the ways it serves us best, while eliminating use of technology in ways it harms us, or even in ways it only has a marginal benefit. Aside from Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport is an extremely prolific author. He’s written books such as So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Deep Work, and How to Become a Straight-A Student. He’s a tenured computer science professor at Georgetown University. Cal has accomplished all of this in spite of – or maybe because – he’s never had a single social media account. This is a fantastic conversation with Cal. He and I overlap a lot in our interests, so I was very eager to discuss with him the implications of technology usage, and also to dig deeper into his relationship

If you want to be a master of your craft, you need to be able to see your skills and accomplishments objectively. You need to always be on the lookout for ways you might fool yourself – for ways you might cause yourself to feel as if you have accomplished something, when in fact you have accomplished nothing. One of the ways you can distort your vision of the truth is by identifying too strongly with the place you live. I talk about it in this week’s article. Thanks for sharing my work! Thank you to the Meshed Society Newsletter; to @LivC2012, @rhysbmorgan, and @wes_mister on Twitter; and to @Aliceswalsh and @Maxam1 on Instagram. New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative entrepreneur. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creativ

Eric Zimmer (@etzimmer) was living in a van. He had Hepatitis C and weighed 100 pounds. Then he got arrested and lost his job. He was facing up to forty years in jail time. He had a $300-a-day addiction to heroin. Today, Eric is host of the popular podcast, The One You Feed, which was named one of the best podcasts on iTunes in 2014, and has more than 10 million downloads. The One You Feed is based upon an old parable about a good wolf and a bad wolf at battle inside each of us. The one who wins is the one you feed. Eric straightened out his life and has overcome addiction. He helps others not only through The One You Feed, but also through behavioral coaching work. How did Eric go from a $300-a-day heroin addiction to 13 years clean and sober? We’ll find out today. We’ll also talk about: The delicate relationship between creative pursuit and self image. How can creativity become a scapegoat for self-destruction, or a vehicle for self improvement? How was Eric able to integrate friendship and his love for mu

I often have listeners write to me, lamenting that they have “too many interests,” or that they “lack focus.” They’ve been taught to feel ashamed of their curiosity. It’s interesting, the personality types of “introvert” and “extrovert” get a lot of attention. But I think equally as important is the difference between “perceiver” and “judger.” What is that? Well those hopelessly curious people, they would fall into the perceiver category, and they should stop feeling ashamed about it. I’ll tell you more in this week’s article. What should be our next Patreon goal? Take our survey at kadavy.net/goals. Start supporting Love Your Work at patreon.com/kadavy. New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative entrepreneur. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays Feedback? Questions? Comments? I love to hear anything and everything from you. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Tweet at me @kadavy, or email me david@kadavy.net.     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/

Srdja Popovic (@SrdjaPopovic) is a revolutionary. He played a big part in overthrowing Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. He now coaches activists around the world in non-violent resistance techniques, through CANVAS (Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies). This may seem out of left field to have a political activist on the show. It’s not meant to be some thinly-veiled political statement. Rather, I think anyone who is trying to get people on board with their message can learn a lot from the techniques of revolutionaries. I recently read Srdja’s book, Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World, and was blown away by the inventiveness and deft strategy of the techniques he shared. It’s a fascinating book whether you’re trying to overthrow a dictator, or you’re merely trying to get people to read your blog. In this conversation, you’ll learn: We think Rosa Parks’s courage

We live in a world rich with information, and algorithms help us find the things that fit us. Algorithms help us decide what books to buy, what music to listen to, and even who to date. But are algorithms always a good thing? If they aren’t, how can you be “anti algorithm.” I talked about this concept a little bit with Tyler Cowen back on episode 155. Now I’ll expand on it. What should be our next Patreon goal? Take our survey at kadavy.net/goals. New Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative entrepreneur. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays Feedback? Questions? Comments? I love to hear anything and everything from you. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Tweet at me @kadavy, or email me david@kadavy.net.     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/anti-algorithm-podcast/

How do you market something when you don’t know what it is, or who it’s for? If you’re anything like me, you feel driven to create, but it’s only through the process of creation that your vision takes form. It’s only through putting that creation out into the world that you begin to realize what it means. This makes it a challenge to market your creations. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t know how to sell it. If you don’t know who it’s for, you don’t know how to speak to those people. I’m honored to have the legendary Seth Godin back on the show. His first appearance was exactly one-hundred episodes ago, on episode 77. My first conversation with Seth proved to be a breakthrough moment for me. The things Seth said to me gave me the courage to self publish The Heart to Start, as well as other, shorter books. I’m still digesting this conversation, but I think it will prove to be another breakthrough. It helped me answer a lot of questions I had from reading Seth’s most recent book, the instant classic, Th

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