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Hell Yeah or No: What's Worth Doing, by Derek Sivers
How to find the intersection of what makes you happy, what's smart, and what's useful to others
Matt Karamazov
March 29, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 20 minutes
Hey everyone!
Tonight I’m sharing my complete breakdown of Derek Sivers’ book, Hell Yeah or No: What’s Worth Doing.
Totally free, and ready for you to read right now.
It’s about 8,500 words covering the key ideas and takeaways, and you can finish reading my breakdown in about 33 minutes.
The book itself isn’t even all that long - you could read it in a few hours - but I and many other people have been so impressed with the quality and depth of Derek’s thinking…you’re going to love this one.
It’s all about stepping back from the craziness and critically evaluating how you actually want your true life to unfold.
I’ve also read How to Live, and Anything You Want, also by him, and can highly recommend both.
You can read the full breakdown here, but I’ll give you a little preview in this email so you can decide whether to check it out.
Again, totally free.
I’m also opening up a few more spots for 1:1 consultations with me, which you can find out more about right here.
You’ll get to work directly with me and benefit from my years of experience reading more than a thousand books, building two businesses, working as a fitness model, strengthening my mind and my body, etc.
Bring a pen and paper, and spend as much time as you want with me talking about high-performance habits, mental toughness, business strategy, books, fitness and health - we'll cover everything.
You'll leave with dozens of new ideas and updated beliefs that will change the entire course of your life and business.
There’s also an option for a weekly video call and daily texting for extreme accountability.
This is for people who want my personal help tackling their biggest challenges and achieving their highest goals.
We'll smash through mental blocks and optimize your entire life for extreme success, achievement, and happiness.
Working with me is the best option for people who have specific goals they wish to accomplish, and want to gain massive clarity on the best path forward.
That’s all I’m going to say about it tonight, but you can find out more on this page here.
Now, let’s get into Hell Yeah or No!
This Book is For:
*Deep thinkers who tend to reject the standard answers given by society to life's most urgent questions, and who want to build a life that's truly their own.
*Young people, especially those thinking of investing large sums of money into their education, who are open to receiving generous, well-intentioned advice from someone who has faced the same challenges as they have and come out the other side happy and free.
*Everyone who sees the value in holding two contradictory ideas in their head at the exact same time, believing aspects of both, and acting intelligently in spite of that contradiction.
*Artists and creatives who want to devote their lives to their art, but who don't feel like starving while they master their craft.
Summary:
"When life or a plan feels ultimately unsatisfying, I find it's because I've forgotten to find the intersection of all three: what makes me happy, what's smart, and what's useful to others."
Certain authors just become associated with particular ideas over time, and one that I continue to profit from handsomely – year after year after year – is Derek Sivers’ insight that when making a decision, it’s either a “Hell yeah!” or it’s a “No.”
Either you’re consumed with interest by what you’ve decided to do - it’s just so completely obvious that this is the thing you should be doing/want to do - or you’re better off not doing it at all.
Hell Yeah or No is a fairly quick read, full of exceptionally useful frameworks for thinking, and I ended up with dozens of book notes and brilliant ideas to think about later. The interesting thing, though, is that many of Sivers' conclusions contradict each other!
Derek is a special thinker in that way. He can calmly and wisely approach big, intimidating questions, and he can disagree with himself multiple times (sometimes even in the same essay), all while getting closer and closer to a tentative answer that he then rigorously tests in the lab of his own life.
He's no armchair philosopher either! I'd even say that he's one of the most interesting people alive today. The dude sold his company, CD Baby, for millions of dollars, enabling him to forget about earning more money (he doesn’t need it or want it), and letting him put every single creative neuron in his brain into his creative work and, you know, living his actual life. And what a life!
In the past, he’s been a musician, a producer, a circus performer, an entrepreneur, a TED speaker, and a book publisher, but here in this book, he’s just your friend Derek.
Another really cool thing is that after the first 5000 limited edition hardcover copies he printed were sold out - raising $250,000 in 6 weeks - he donated the entire amount to help others. In his words:
Pretty damn cool if you ask me! Which you didn't haha. But still!
In the book itself, he prescribes the lifestyle of the happiest people that he knows: Having a well-paying job, while seriously pursuing their art for love, not money.
He writes that we all have a need for stability and adventure, certainty and uncertainty, money, and expression, and when we're out of balance, we need to step back a bit into solitude and silence, and really think through these problems for ourselves.
The book is just full of useful wisdom like this, and he lays out numerous simple though profound mental models to help guide our decision-making. He discusses things like:
*Leaving space and time in our lives so that we can throw ourselves completely into the few things that matter most.
*How good goals shape our actions in the present, not in the future.
*Why it's actually good to be a slow thinker and to change your mind often.
*How to relieve overwhelm by saying no to almost everything.
*Finding the intersection of what's smart, what makes you happy, and what's useful to others.
*The best way to sift through the advice (often unsolicited) that you'll often receive from others who think they know more about how you should live your life than you do.
*Why you should do everything that scares you.
*And a lot more....
Throughout the book, Derek Sivers makes a clear, concise, cogent case for the indisputably true assertion that this one life is your own, and you have to live it in a way that makes sense for you.
No one else on the planet has more at stake when it comes to your life than you do. Making good decisions and living fearlessly according to what you've decided takes astounding courage, but no one is more capable of doing it than you are.
Key Ideas:
#1: If It's Not a Hell Yeah!, It's a No
Every single thing that you've said "yes" to in the past is yet another link in the chain, holding you hostage in the present.
When you think about it this way, you'll be a lot less inclined to start shackling yourself to additional chains, many of which represent commitments that don't even serve the person you've since become.
Maybe I'm being a little overly dramatic here, but the point still stands: "No" is a complete sentence, and it's your shield against a life of trivia, distraction, and unfulfilled potential.
I don't mean that saying "Yes" to being a parent, or starting a charity, or developing a skill is the same thing as being a slave, but it's important to realize how hard it is to make significant changes in your life if you're burdened by the weight of decisions you've made in the past.
So whenever you're tempted to add an extra time commitment to your already packed schedule, you may want to consider thinking about it in terms of its cost to your time and possibilities in the future, and how it will prevent you from being able to say yes to other things that you may find more important when that future inevitably becomes the present.
A few things to say here before we move on:
By all means, be nice to people when you're turning down their requests for pieces of your time and attention!
There's no need to rudely brush people off, or wail theatrically about the unfairness of the finitude of human existence, but your life is your life. No one owns it but you, and you need to be extremely intentional about how you live it, or the outside world will attempt to tell you exactly what to do with it, and that may not exactly be in your best interests.
Lastly, protecting your time and your attention gives you resources - literally makes you resourceful - and then, once you do find something you want to dedicate yourself to wholeheartedly, you'll have the mental bandwidth, and the time, to fully pursue it. To go all-in on what you actually want to do with your life.
As they say, it's virtually impossible to overstate the unimportance of nearly everything, and so Derek's filter is an excellent one to employ:
If, when presented with an opportunity, you're not jumping at the chance, saying "Hell yeah!" either out loud to yourself, then just say no. Wait for your moment. Wait for your opportunity. And then give it everything you've got.
#2: What If You Didn't Need Money or Attention?
Who would you be if no one told you who you are?
Who would you be if you didn’t do those things that so many of us normally spend our days doing: coveting praise, chasing money, and seeking validation?
As I've said many times, there's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to make more money - plus, everyone loves to feel good about themselves. And why shouldn't they?
Wanting to be seen in a positive light by others isn't "bad" in itself. But when it consumes the energy and focus of our entire waking lives, we're robbing ourselves of priceless, productive energy that we could direct instead toward something much more meaningful.
These vain pursuits handcuff us to the actions we've already chosen in the present, and it's even worse if your identity happens to be tied up in how others see you and what you're "worth" economically.
Anything that limits your freedom in this way is limiting your ability to maneuver, to choose a different path.
So why do people waste so much time doing these things, even though, if you were to ask them directly, they'd probably concede that those things aren't all that important?
Well, if you want to understand virtually anything, it's always a good idea to look at the incentives. Who stands to gain from me taking this or that action? Believing this or that idea? Who does it serve? What course of action is incentivized?
Making you feel like you're not "enough" is literally a multibillion dollar industry, made up of car companies, jewelry companies, news and media companies, and so on.
Individually, they're just trying to make a fair profit, and there's nothing "evil" about making people want to buy shiny rocks or fast cars. But collectively, they're robbing all of us of our mental freedom to figure out who we are, what we value, and what we want our one and only lives to be about.
But you don't have to get all tangled up in this.
You can slip out of the handcuffs and begin to ask yourself the deeper questions. Questions like, "Who am I?" That's a great one to start with! And you'll never fully answer that question, not for as long as you live. It's always changing, always evolving, the answer forever moving away from you, calling you to keep asking the question.
So let's return to Derek's question. Say you had all the money and attention and praise that you wanted. What do you do now? Where do you go from here? What's important and real?
#3: Fill Empty Time with Great Things
How's this for an "obvious" truth that most people ignore for basically their entire lives: time is infinitely valuable, terribly finite, and once it slips through your fingers, it's gone forever and ever and will never, ever return.
You could remind yourself of this eternal truth literally hundreds of times a day, and in my opinion, it still wouldn't be enough. I like to keep bringing that obvious truth back to consciousness again and again and again, every single day of my life.
In one of my favorite time management books of all time, Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman, he writes:
It leads one to ask, "Did I really find myself on this gorgeous planet, full of fascinating and wonderful people, only to passively scroll TikToks and respond to angry Facebook comments all day long?"
Sure, it's probably one of the "easiest" things to do with your time, and it's certainly what nearly everyone else is doing with their precious gift of life, but do you really want to be "everyone"?
Assuming you live to be 80 years old (and modern medicine is getting goddamn futuristic lately, so many people reading this will probably live far longer than that), you'll have had about four thousand weeks to be alive, active, and conscious.
You can spend this time any way you choose! That's your gift!
You can best honor this precious gift by choosing to fill this time with great things, not small ones. Fill it with love, energy, creativity, generosity, and more life.
Action Steps:
So you've finished reading. What do you do now?
Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!
Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.
Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...
#1: Create a "Possible Futures" Folder
There are just way too many paths available to us in life to be able to choose all of them. Perhaps that's obvious, but what Derek suggests is filing these alternate futures away for a while where we can find them later.
This encourages us to daydream just for the sake of it. Then, when we're feeling a little bit lost, or simply want to choose our next adventure, we can consult the list and shake things up a bit.
To do this, simply create a Word file on your computer labeled "Possible Futures" - or something similar - and write down as many plans for alternate futures for yourself as you want.
Each plan is one of many possible futures that might happen or not. There's one in which you go back to university for some creative writing courses. There's another one where you enlist in the Army. A third where you start that consulting business for sports trainers, etc.
Your future is wide open, and you'll never be able to live all of these lives, but all your possible lives will now be in one place so you can start living them whenever you want.
#2: Do Something Useless
Not everything you do needs to have a purpose. I know, I know, the rest of society is screaming at us to increase our "productivity" - but we don't have to listen.
We can just do stuff for the sake of it, and you know, enjoy ourselves for a bit while we accomplish exactly nothing.
Step outside your front door and keep putting one foot in front of the other until you decide to turn around and go home. Buy tickets to a show that you have absolutely no interest in, or wouldn't usually go to. It doesn't matter, and it's completely up to you. All that does matter is that you break free of the idea that you have to "become" something.
"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."
-Tony Robbins
About the Author:
Derek Sivers in 10 Seconds...
For Derek Sivers in 10 minutes, see his About page. You won't regret it!
Here's what he's doing Now.
Additional Resources:
This Book on Amazon:
If You Liked This Book:
Ok, that’s it for now!
Again, the rest of the above breakdown is absolutely free, and you can find it right here.
What you see in this email is less than half of what you get at the Stairway to Wisdom. I left out the Book Notes, Questions to Stimulate Your Thinking, several of the Key Ideas, etc. There’s lots more for you to read if you enjoyed what you read in this email!
You can also apply to work with me directly on this page right here.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you apply the wisdom found in the greatest books ever written to your life:
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