333. Thriving as a Company of One: An Interview with Paul Jarvis

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello there, Happy New Year, and welcome to episode number 333 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. With me today is Paul Jarvis. This episode is called “Thriving as a Company of One.” Paul Jarvis is a writer, designer, consultant, podcaster, and author whose latest book Company of One is out on January 15th. Now, I subscribe to his newsletter, and I find it to be one of the most interesting and useful email messages that arrive in my inbox each week. His specialty is reframing how we perceive success, productivity, and, in this case, thriving as a business. Company of One is about deliberately staying small and specialized, and since I know many of you are small business owners and operators, whether as your primary job or as a secondary job, I think this conversation will be interesting and useful. I hope so, anyway. I was very excited to do this interview, and I tried very hard to keep my inner thirteen-year-old under control. It’s really exciting for me when I get to talk to someone who is outside of the romance community but who works in a way that is applicable to what we do.

Among the key ideas in this episode:

• The byproduct of success doesn’t have to be growth
• We all have wishes for our dental adulthood
• How to solve for enough and how important it is to identify your personal version of enough
• There is no one right way to do something
• Trying to be the best client for any freelancer you hire, which is excellent advice, I think
• And knowing how, as a writer, you interact with deadlines and what kind of space and time you need to think creatively

My favorite piece of advice from this episode: think about the life that you want and work backwards from there. And also solve for enough. That whole idea changed a lot of the way I perceive my business and my life. If you are an entrepreneur or a builder of a secondary career or passion projects, I hope this conversation inspires you as much as it does me.

So what are your resolutions about your own creative projects this year? You want to tell me about it? I would love to hear all the details! You can email me at [email protected], or you can leave a message at 1-201-371-3272. Tell me what you’re thinking, tell me what your goals are, ask me questions, tell me a bad joke – you know I love those. I do love hearing from you, so please feel free.

This podcast episode is brought to you by everyone who has supported our podcast Patreon! Thank you! If you have supported the show with a monthly pledge of any amount, thank you very, very much. You are helping me ensure that each episode is transcribed, and you keep the show going every week. You’re making every episode accessible to everyone, which is very important to me and the people who listen and read each week, so thank you.

If you would like to join the Patreon community, it would be totally awesome if you did. Have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Monthly pledges start at one dollar a month, and you will be part of the group who helps me develop questions for upcoming interviews and suggests guests for the show as well. You can have a look at all of the tiers and the rewards at patreon.com/SmartBitches.

The transcript for this episode is brought to you by all of the new options for sponsoring this podcast. For 2019, I have increased the number of options to sponsor an episode or a month of episodes or just the intro or just the outro, so if you have something that you want to tell the audience of this podcast about, please let me know! You can email me at Sarah, S-A-R-A-H at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books dot com [[email protected]]. Your support helps keep the show going and helps keep the site going, and I am deeply, deeply grateful that we are all hanging out together talking about romance fiction every day. Thank you for that.

Are there other ways to support the podcasts that you love? Of course there are! Leave a review however you listen; tell a friend; subscribe; yell out the window about how great the show is. I would be very pleased if I overheard somebody doing that. [Laughs] If you are listening, thank you, thank you, thank you. You have a lot of podcasts to choose from, and I’m really honored that you picked this one!

I do have a compliment this week, which utterly makes my day.

To Nala H.: If there were an animal café inspired by you, there would be six of every adorable animal, and they would all regularly fall asleep spelling your name with a series of hearts.

If you would like a compliment of your very own, they are part of the Patreon, so have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches, and thank you, Nala, for supporting the show.

At the end of the episode, I will have information about what is coming up on Smart Bitches, plus information about the music you’re listening to, and, of course, a truly awful joke, because you’ve started sending them to me, and they’re amazing!

But now, without any further delay, let’s move on with the episode and my interview with Paul Jarvis.

[music]

Paul Jarvis: My name is Paul Jarvis, and I’m a writer, designer, entrepreneur-type person.

Sarah: So you have a new book coming out in January, and I got to read it early. Thank you! That was super cool. I want to ask you the most terrible question to ask an author, and I do this all the time, and every time I feel guilty. Could you tell me about your book and what it is and what its goal is?

Paul: Yeah, so the goal of the book is to make people consider that there’s another way to run a business, and that’s that the byproduct of success doesn’t have to be growth. It doesn’t have to be, hey, I do really well! Now I can hire a hundred people or a thousand people or –

Sarah: Ugh!

Paul: – have offices in every state or province. So that’s kind of the idea is that growth isn’t required for business success or isn’t the byproduct of business success, and I think while I’m saying the word success a whole bunch of times – [laughs] – it feels kind of weird, but also I think that success is very much a personal thing. So my version of success isn’t your version of success; our versions of success aren’t the same as, say, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or Oprah. So I think that if we can figure out what success is to each of us and it, since it’s wholly personal and individualized, then we can work towards building a business that is successful on our terms, not on the terms of somebody else.

Sarah: That makes a lot of sense, especially because I know a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are authors who, by default, start as a company of one.

Paul: Yes.

Sarah: Plus, you know, whatever characters are living in their imagination at that moment. Maybe there’s two, maybe sometimes there’s a team, but I’ve found that, specifically in the romance genre, which is where I work and live most of the time, authors that have a team are pretty rare. It’s usually a one- or two-person company, but even then the pressure is still there to get bigger and bigger and grow and grow and grow, and what I appreciate about the message of your, of your book Company of One is that you don’t necessarily have to look at growth as the default option.

Paul: Yeah. And I think that’s kind of what we’re sold in, like, I guess, business school, maybe? I didn’t go, so I don’t know. But then –

Sarah: I didn’t either.

[Laughter]

Paul: Especially, I didn’t even get any kind of degree? That’s another story.

Sarah: Yeah, so we’re both eminently qualified to give business advice and run businesses. Let’s do it! [Laughs]

Paul: Yeah! But I mean, I have run a business for twenty years, which, it’s funny, ‘cause, like, looking at some of the research from the book, the average lifespan of a publicly traded company on the S&P 500 is fifteen years, and I’m winning by five extra years – [laughs] – so I feel like –

Sarah: Oh dude! [Laughs]

Paul: – that’s actually pretty cool!

Sarah: That’s brilliant! I have been running Smart Bitches, my blog, as my business since 2010, and it was founded in twenty, 2005, so I have a –

Paul: Nice!

Sarah: – thirteen-year-old weblog, which is, like, Paleolithic era of the internet, two thousand –

Paul: Yeah. I mean, your weblog is in high school I guess at this point?

Sarah: Yeah! I, it had its –

Paul: Is it in its teenage –

Sarah: – had its bat, bat mitzvah last year, or no, earlier this year, so next year it’s fourteen. Soon it’ll get its driver’s license; that’ll be very exciting.

Paul: Yeah.

Sarah: And it’s very strange to look at how much businesses, specifically on the web, have changed in thirteen or eighteen or twenty-plus years. I mean, there’re massive differences.

Paul: Yeah, I mean, even like, when I started people didn’t get it that I worked for myself. [Laughs] People were like, well, no, well, what’s your job? And I’m like, well, no, working for myself is my job. Like, yes, I sit in my underpants –

Sarah: Yeah! [Laughs]

Paul: – at my computer at my house, but I’m still working –

Sarah: Oh yeah!

Paul: – and I’m still making money. Sometimes it’s Costco sweatpants; it’s, it oscillates based on whatever the temperature is. But, like –

Sarah: Of course.

Paul: – people didn’t understand that it was a, that working for yourself could be a job, and then nowadays it’s kind of, people kind of understand that, but people also, there’s also this, I feel like there’s also this kind of like ego thing. Like, if you’re at a dinner par-, like in my mind there’s this, like, narrative happening where it’s like I could be at a dinner party, and somebody asks what I do, and I immediately just want to, like, slink out of the room? Or, like, just make nonverbal noises and leave, because it feels like, I don’t know, there’s this, like, pressure to have, like, a legitimate business, and like, what, what is a legitimate business? But also, like, I feel like we need ego to start our own business, or we need ego to, to start writing, I think, a little bit –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – ‘cause we think that we can tell a great story, or we think that we can do something better than what exists in the market, but then there’s also this, like, push of our ego which isn’t good, which is like, well, maybe we should have more to be legitimate, or maybe we need more to be, like, a real business, and it’s like, I know that I make decent money sitting in my underwear in my house at my computer. Like, I don’t need to have a staff of, of people, and I also don’t want to go to a dinner party where I’m judged based solely on how many employees I have.

Sarah: No, thank you.

Paul: I’d rather go to a dinner party where we don’t have to talk about work. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah, I don’t want to go to a dinner party at all! [Laughs]

Paul: Well, there’s, there’s also that, and I mean I live in the woods on an island in the middle of nowhere so I don’t have to do things like that. [Laughs] So.

Sarah: I fully identify with what you are saying, because when I try to explain to people what I do, and I explain I run a website community about romance fiction, I get this look where all of the words make no sense?

[Laughter]

Sarah: People are like, wait, you, you run a, you, about romance, and then it’s like they’re not sure which part to ask about first. Is it the romance part or the weblog part? Both parts make no sense, so clearly I must be making this up.

Paul: Yeah, I mean – [sighs] – so, yeah, I have such a, because I do a whole bunch of different things too? Like –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Paul: – I also have a blog and a pod-, couple podcasts, and I write books, and I have software companies and – I don’t know. For a while I was just telling people I make the internet, and that, that was enough and vague enough and weird enough where they, they also were like, I don’t even know what question to ask. Like, what’s the follow-up to that? There isn’t one.

Sarah: [Laughs] If you told me that the internet was run by a guy in his underwear – or Costco sweatpants – on an island in the middle of nowhere, I would not question that. Like, not at all.

Paul: It’s legit.

Sarah: It seems completely plausible!

[Laughter]

Sarah: So I have subscribed to your newsletter for a number of years, and it’s actually been very inspiring to me, because not only do I receive a message of you have to do more, you have to build, you have to scale, somewhere you have to work in the word leverage, but you also, you can’t stop. You have to do more frequently, more in terms of time and more in terms of amount, and one of the things that I realized that I had a lot of respect for in your newsletter was when you were like, okay, so I’m taking time off; you will not hear from me until this date. Thanks very much! And I was like, wait, you can do that?!

Paul: [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh my God! Whoa! The other thing I appreciate about your newsletter is that you are making a constant effort to reframe the sort of conventional wisdom about what a business is and how it runs and how it grows, and the book seems to be sort of a larger-scale, more evidence- and supported-stories-backed version of that reframing. Is that, is that the case?

Paul: Yeah, I mean, I’m kind of a lazy writer, so, like, my newsletter is mostly personal stories or personal ideas, ‘cause those are faster and easier to write, to be honest. But I also think that those kind of are the starting point for my, I think for a lot of writers. Like, we think about what we know, and then we expand on it and build on it from there, so I think about ideas I have, and then I’ll write it into an article and share it with my mailing list, and then if it resonates with them I’ll hear about it. I’ll hear about it if it doesn’t resonate with them as well, but that kind of leads to, like, okay, I think I might be on to something, and then I’ll start to do research and look elsewhere and start to do interviews and start to look for, like, studies or research that kind of illustrate a bigger – and that’s really what happened with the book. I think I wrote one article for my newsletter that was like, I don’t care about growth, ‘cause I felt like, eh, I’m like a, the weirdo in business who feels this way, who doesn’t care about growing a big business or an empire or anything like that, so I wrote an article about how, how I, how I felt about it, ‘cause I felt I was the only one who felt that way, and then I heard from a gazillion people saying that, hey, I thought I was the only one who felt this way!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: And then I was like, maybe there’s this, like, trend, or maybe there’s this, like, a group of people who kind of question growth the way that I do, and then when I started to look into it I was like, oh shit, there’s actually studies – this – [laughs] – it’s funny – science actually backs not growing or questioning growth more than it backs kind of the rapid or unquestioned growth that we see in business or in business parable or in, like, business articles? Like, the, the, the facts and the data don’t really back up what exists on, like, business news publications, which I think is kind of interesting, but also the, a lot of stuff on there that doesn’t really, it doesn’t really, that doesn’t hold up to, to what truth is? This – [laughs] –

Sarah: What?!

Paul: Yeah!

Sarah: The devil you say! I hadn’t noticed. So what do you hope that this book will accomplish for people who read it?

Paul: I think I’m different than a lot of other business authors, where –

Sarah: Yeah!

Paul: – I j- – yeah, a little bit. But, so I think what I want people to get out of the book is just that here’s something that is counter to what everybody else is saying, and maybe it’s right. And you don’t know if it’s right until you kind of internalize it and think about it for yourself, which I always think, like, I think thinking about things before acting on them makes a lot of sense in b-, it makes a lot of sense in life, but it also makes a lot of sense in business, where if nobody’s questioning things and just doing things ‘cause they think that’s the way it’s supposed to be done, then it can lead to problems? Then it can lead to – even problems insomuch as if you’re chasing somebody else’s version of success, then one of two things will happen: either you win at doing that and you end up with a version of success that may not be what you actually want, so you win and lose at the same time, or you don’t achieve that, which is entirely possible as well, ‘cause business is mostly like rolling the dice or asking Zoltar, and you end up –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: – not winning at achieving somebody else’s version of success, and then you feel bad about not achieving something you probably didn’t want in the first place.

Sarah: Yep.

Paul: So to me it seems like a lose/lose, unless you think about, like, okay, if this is my business, what do I actually want? What is success for me? And it’s probably different than everything I read in business articles. There’s a bit – I was at the dentist; like, I can’t get away from this, ‘cause it’s all I think about –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: – and I was at the dentist the other day getting a crown, and –

Sarah: Oh, I’m in that same position! You have my deepest sympathy!

Paul: Oh, it’s so much better once you’ve got the crown. [Laughs]

Sarah: It is, but going through it is hell! Oh man.

Paul: Oh, hundred percent! Getting older in any way is awful. I wish we just kept – you know how you get baby teeth and then you get adult teeth?

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: I wish every ten years you would just get new adult teeth, so you –

Sarah: Oh, like a shark!

Paul: Yeah, exactly!

Sarah: I think that’s brilliant. I also want the crown to be the much more fun kind of crown? Like the kind that you wear, and the dentist still has not delivered on that.

Paul: Yeah, that would be cool.

Sarah: Not fair. [Laughs]

Paul: It’s not even a – oh yeah, so there’s a busin-, there’s a business magazine in the, in the dentist’s office –

Sarah: Of course there is.

Paul: – and the, the headline was, like, how to achieve 738% growth in your business next year.

Sarah: AHHHH!

Paul: One, how the – [laughs] – how did, how did you come up with this number? Like, where did this 738%, like, where’s that number even from? And I’m like, what if you don’t want that? Like, to me, I think about how I want to spend my day, right? Like –

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: – I like writing! I like designing; I like making. I like making things on the internet or making the internet, whatever you hear from me if we’re at a dinner party together, which probably isn’t even going to happen.

[Laughter]

Sarah: We’re too introverted!

Paul: Yes. But, like, it just doesn’t, like, it doesn’t make sense to, it doesn’t make sense to me, if, if we’re not questioning these kind of things.

Sarah: I completely, I completely agree. One of my favorite things that you’ve said in your newsletter which I still think about was the idea of solving for enough, which I know you’ve expanded in, in the book. That you have to figure out what your personal enough is in order to identify it. One of the things I love about the idea of solve for enough is that it is intensely personal, and I have to tell you, I took a slightly different spin on it. I’m, my personal version is actually solve for contentment, because I have a favorite Stoic philosopher – his name is Epictetus, ‘cause his name is Epictetus and I run a romance blog –

Paul: Nice.

Sarah: – and that’s hilarious, but – [laughs] – he also said, fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress. I actually have a ring on my hand that I wear on my index finger of my dominant hand that says Contentment, sort of to remind myself to point my life in that direction, to constantly solve for contentment, so (a) thank you for that, but how did you identify the idea? What was the origin of that advice?

Paul: For me it’s neurosis?

Sarah: Yeah! [Laughs]

Paul: And, and, and aversion to stress. So I feel like there’s, there’s a, a middle place in my business where I have enough where I’m not stressed out about money or deadlines or customers or anything like that, but then there’s an upper bounds where if I kept growing then I would be responsible for more people, I would have more expenses, I would just have more, and I would, that weight of responsibility would be far too much for my kind of Peter Pan mentality about how I want to live my life. Like, I don’t want to have more so I’m respons-, like, I wouldn’t want to be responsible for employees. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for managing other people. Like, that, to me, (1) I’m awful at managing. I do most of the cooking in the house, and if my wife asks, hey, can I help with dinner? I’m like, sure! And then I just kind of trail off ‘cause I don’t know, like, I, I don’t know how to delegate, so that’s not really a skill –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: – that I, I’m good at in the kitchen or in business. I think some people are really good at managing, some people aren’t, but I don’t want to promote myself out of the job that I like doing, so I think for me, like, it comes down, like I said, it comes down to an aversion to, to stress? So I, I don’t want to stress out about things not being enough, and I don’t want to stress out about there being too much of, of things like responsibility, and I think this is the, like, this is the gotcha, I think, that a lot of us fall victim to, and I mean I have as well, where we all start with, we all start at zero.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: So, like, we all start needing to make more or needing to have more or needing to do more to make a business sustainable. Like, we all don’t start with, like, massive income. We all start with needing more, so we have to adopt a growth mindset at the onset, because that’s just the nature of starting something. You start at zero –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – and you work and progress. But where I think the, the problem lies and where the, the gotcha is that I mention is that we don’t stop to consider what could change if we’ve reached what we need.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: And I think that things definitely can change, because if you’re growing, you’re focused on getting more. If you have enough, then you’re not focused on getting more, you’re focused on optimizing for what you’ve got. So if I know, for example, like, how much I need to make a year so I’m not stressed out about money every second of every day, then I can optimize for making that amount, and I know – and I don’t have to worry, and I don’t have to stress about making more, because more will mean I probably need to spend more; more will mean I’ll probably need to bring on employees; more will mean a whole bunch of things that I don’t actually want, and then it becomes easier to make decisions or to, say, turn down opportunities because I know – [clears throat] – excuse me – I know what I need to be content, and I know – what was the quote, something about, all I remember is impenetrable fortress.

Sarah: Yeah, impregnable fortress is pretty memorable.

Paul: Impregnable fortress!

Sarah: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Paul: Yeah. I mean, I also think it’s probably easier to be content than it is to be happy?

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: Like, I don’t know how to be happy, but I know how to be content in what I’ve got or in the progress that I’m making. Feels like that’s easier. Maybe, maybe it’s not, but at least to me it seems like it’s – [laughs] – it’s possibly easier to be content than happy?

Sarah: I think it, I think you’re right, not just because in the romance genre the end, the ending of most romance novels is already known.

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: People who are in the story are going to have a happy ending, but as I have said in other interviews and have, authors have said to me, happiness is messy and difficult, and it takes work, and you don’t just sort of get married and then that’s the end? Like, sustaining a happy marriage, sustaining a happy partnership, sustaining a happy business takes work, and sometimes you don’t always get to the happy part, but contentment I think you can establish on a much more immediate level, even if it’s just for a few minutes. Like, I’m super content when I take fifteen minutes and play Stardew Valley. May not be the happiest, but I feel real good when I’m done, and I’m content at that moment. I think you’re right that contentment can be more accessible than happiness at some points.

One of the elements of Company of One that I noticed is the idea of examining what it is that you do in your business and placing your attention and your energy on your essentials, which I think is really good advice because I’m constantly asking myself that question. This may surprise you, but there are not a lot of models for I Run a Romance Blog as My Job in terms of, you know, people who I can ask questions to. There are not many, so I usually am like, all right, what am I doing and how am I doing it, and got lots of miles on Seat of Your Pants Airlines. What is your advice for identifying your essentials and identifying what matters most in one’s own business? How do you identify those essentials?

Paul: I think the term lifestyle business gets a bum rap, because I think that every business, to a huge degree, is a lifestyle business. Like, friends of mine in Silicon Valley that have venture-based startups have a very definitive lifestyle. Like, their lives are basically taken up trying to keep their investors happy and to, and to grow, because in-, investors need to see return on investment. People that run big companies that I know have a very specific lifestyle, and I think that, like, the internet has ruined the term lifestyle entrepreneur to mean, like, you do something and, like, write, like, you have a laptop and a beach and, like, a Mai Tai in another hand, which I don’t even, it doesn’t even make sense, because, like, laptops and sand are the worst combination in the entire world.

Sarah: To say nothing of sticky drinks.

Paul: Yeah, exactly! Like, it just, it doesn’t make sense, but I think every business has its own specific lifestyle associated with it, so I don’t think it’s bad when we’re thinking about the type of business we want to have or what a business looks like and think about the life that we want. Like, I think it’s okay to, to kind of work backwards from, this is kind of how I want to spend my day. Like, yeah, my business seems to be profitable – otherwise, it’s not a business – but, like, what do I want my day to be filled with? And how do I build a business that accomplishes that task? As opposed to I’m going to build a business, not think about my daily life, and then whatever daily life I’m left with, I’m going to have to be okay with. Hopefully I’m content with it; maybe I’m, maybe that won’t happen. So I think we kind of have to work in the opposite way that a lot of people who, like, make companies for themselves, work for themselves kind of think?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: And I think that that’s probably a good thing, because a lot of us don’t work for somebody else or for a big company because we don’t like the lifestyle that that affords us, and then we work for ourselves and end up making kind of similar decisions, and it’s like, what?

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: Like, what are, why do we have to work from nine to five on Monday to Friday? Like, I don’t under-, like, who decided that? I mean, Henry Ford kind of decided on the eight-hour day so his employees would have more time to be consumers, but, like, why not challenge that just a little bit? Like, it just, it, I just think that, like, there’s all this, like, business parable and business advice that’s just garbage because nobody questions it. It’s just like you’ve got to spend more to make more.

Sarah: Yes. No!

Paul: Who fucking came up with this? Sorry, I don’t know if I’m allowed to swear or not.

Sarah: Uhhh, yes. My, my website is called Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, so you can bring it; it’s fine. [Laughs]

Paul: Whew. All right, but, like, it doesn’t, yeah, like, spending more to make more, it doesn’t – like, people are so obsessed with the, the gross number, not the net number, it’s ridiculous. Like, I would rather make less but spend considerably less than make more by spending a lot more. Like, it just seems like it’s more work to make a higher gross with a smaller margin than it is to make a decent gross with a ridiculously small margin, but that’s not sexy? Like, that’s not, like, you don’t get articles published in entrepreneur.com or inc.com –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – with, like, talking about how much you saved in your business to result in this much profit versus, like, oh, my business made this much gross. It’s like, I don’t care what, what gross you have. It doesn’t matter, because it, if you have to spend nine hundred thousand dollars to make a million, you’ve not really made a million dollars, you’ve made a hundred thousand dollars, and that’s cool, but you didn’t make a million dollars.

Sarah: One of my biggest aversions as an entrepreneur who is making shit up as she goes is the idea, well, this is what we’ve always done. Well, so? And I, and I agree with you that when you start to question, wait, why do we do this? This, this is strange; this doesn’t make any sense? You end up making changes that work better for what it is that you need out of your business, and I love the idea that what you do when you work as a company of one, either within a business or for yourself, is that you can customize what it is that your business does for you, and you can tailor it very personally, which is, like you said, it goes against a lot of the business journalism news, which I don’t read because very little of it applies to me? [Laughs]

Paul: Yeah, same. And I mean, this is what I do for a living, and it still does not –

Sarah: Right!

Paul: – apply. Yeah, I think, I think that that’s, that’s a really good point, because, like, bus-, like, business is a lot of guesswork, business is a lot of giving up control, and in a lot –

Sarah: Run it up the flagpole! See who salutes!

Paul: Exactly! Like, it really –

Sarah: Yeah!

Paul: – like, there’s definitely things we can do to stack the deck and increase our likelihood of getting what we want, but at the end of the day it’s a, a, it’s giving up control and hoping that things work out, because there’s so many variables involved. Like, even, like, authors that want to, say, get on the New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestseller list, there’s things you can do to stack the deck in your favor, like, say, have, like, build a, a massive audience that buys a lot of books, but, like –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – you’re, there’s, there’s never, you’re never guaranteed that. Some bigger author could release a book, or four bigger authors could release a book that same week, and then the great numbers that you have that could be any other week a guaranteed number one spot will put you to number six or number fifteen, and there’s so many, like, there’s so many variables that go into almost everything in business, like, anybody that says they has the, that, that says they have the answers or that, like, they have the blueprint are lying because they’re trying to sell you something. Like, that’s pretty much how business works. Like, there is no one right way to do it. We’re just sold this bill of goods on here’s, this is the right way to do it because somebody’s trying to sell us something! I mean, good for them for trying to sell us something, but, like, it doesn’t have to be that way, and I mean, even, like, I even pushed back with my publisher a little bit ‘cause they’re like, well, be a bit more prescriptive, and I’m like, but it doesn’t work that way! Like, I would rather be – and even, like, at the end of every chapter, right, there’s questions, and my editor was like, well, why don’t we make these, like, prescriptive tenets for, like, these are the things you should do, and I’m like, but it doesn’t work that way. How ‘bout we do questions? And then he was like, yeah, okay, that makes sense too. I’m like, okay, good.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: Because, like, there’s no, like, I don’t, there’s no real business advice that holds up in all scenarios or for, for every business, and I think instead we should start to think about how we can internalize the things that we learn and either apply them or not apply them to what we actually want.

Sarah: Have you test-driven a lot of the questions in your book?

Paul: Insomuch as they’re questions that I ask myself all the time –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: – I’m fairly neurotic about my business. So, yeah, I mean, they’re all things that either I’ve asked myself or that I pondered in writing that I’ve done or that I’ve heard other people – like, I teach a class for, for people that work for themselves, so I’ve heard a lot of questions that they have. So, yeah, a lot of it’s just, like, from, from those sources where it’s like, I don’t have the answers, but maybe here’s some things you should think about so you can come to the answer on, on your own terms.

Sarah: That makes a lot of sense. Like, like you said, everyone’s answers are going to be different, depending on their business, ‘cause the, the other thing is, you know, since you started and since I started, the idea of building your own business in what’s called the gig economy is more and more within reach for people, and there’s a lot of people I’ve met who are younger than I am – I’m forty-three, so I, my, my youngest sister-in-law is ten years younger than me, and then her friends are younger, so I’m watching these people graduate and come into the workforce and being like, yeah, this, this whole corporate structure thing is not for me; I’m going to build my own business. I’m going to work my, I’m going to work all of the things that I do into my own business. That seems much more common from where, from where I am collecting anecdata anyway.

Paul: Yeah, I mean even, like, the stats show that half of the, the workforce, almost half of the workforce is freelance, from a study done, I think it was two years ago, by –

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: – Freelancers Union in New York and Elance. So, I mean, the, the tables are turning, like, a ton, because people want to have more autonomy and control over, over how they work and, and why they work a lot of times too.

Sarah: Yeah. When you were doing research – I know you’ve collected a lot of studies and a lot of information and done a lot of interviews – was there anything that you found that really surprised you?

Paul: Yeah. I mean, my favorite study was one that was done by – and I don’t, I don’t remember all of them; that would be –

Sarah: There’s a lot. I would be shocked if you did! [Laughs]

Paul: Yeah, that would be ridiculously impressive if I did, but the one that I remember the most is that Coffman Industry and Inc. did a study for the list that Inc. creates, the Inc. 5000, and it’s the Inc. 5000 –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Paul: – fastest growing, best companies in the world, or maybe it’s America, but America thinks it’s the world anyway, so it’s one of the two; I don’t remember which.

[Laughter]

Paul: But they did a, they did a s-, they did a study on the companies that were ranked on this, like, the, the list of lists for, for businesses five to eight years later, and they found that more than two-thirds of them had gone out of business.

Sarah: Oy.

Paul: And these, well, like, five to eight years before that, these were lauded as, like, the best companies in, in the world to look at or to invest in or to work for, and two-thirds were out of business five to eight years later –

Sarah: Ouch.

Paul: – and not because of, and not because of, like, too much competition or market shifts, but because of growth.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: Because they grew too quickly, and they needed to have more and more resources to sustain themselves every day, and their burn rate just kept increasing because they just had more people, and they were trying to please their investors, and they hired more people, and they were, they were making bets against potential profit instead of actual profit?

Sarah: Right.

Paul: And most of them went out of business, or they were sold off for, for pennies on the dollar. And I’m like, this is the book! Like, this is the, like, if I was just sum-, summarizing the book in a single study, that’s it!

Sarah: That’s it.

Paul: Yeah!

Sarah: This is what I’m trying to say here, people.

Paul: [Laughs]

Sarah: Have you had any conversations with people who have argued with you, nonono, you have to grow! You have to grow! If you don’t grow you’ll fail! Like, is there anyone that you’ve been unable to convince? The thing I like about your book for me, personally speaking, was it was, like, page after page of confirmation bias? Ah, whew, I’m not alone! Okay, good. Oh, this is great! Thank you so much! Like, it’s very reassuring; thank you very much!

Paul: Yeah, that’s all – hey, you’re welcome, but that’s also how you write –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: – a nonfiction book, is you just find the studies that confirm the hypothesis and theories that you have and hope that there’s more of those than ones that show the other side. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: But, like, I have argued with a bunch of people! Like, I mean, I, I, I basically exist primarily in, in the tech startup world.

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: I’m a nerd, and, like, most of my friends are nerds, and a lot of them have, like, venture-capital-based businesses, or a lot of them have businesses that are growing, and I mean, I think – and even talking to them, some of them, like, their version, and they’re smart – I probably wouldn’t be friends with them otherwise, and I, I like that I have friends that have varying opinions. I mean, it keeps me, keeps my worldview less insular as, like, social –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – than, like, social media or something like that – and a lot of them have kind of thought about this thing too, and, like, they want to make a much bigger impact on the world than I do, and they’re also really good at managing, and, like, their superpower is managing, whereas I just like to do the work, and I don’t like managing, so I think it makes se-, like, some companies need to be big. Like, Airbnb –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – if they had three properties –

Sarah: That’d be a problem.

Paul: – it wouldn’t work. Like, it’s just problematic. So I think that they’re, like, companies all have an organic size that they should grow to and then not more.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: And even in the book, like, I, I showcase a bunch of other tech companies like Basecamp and, and Buffer, and they have, like, fifty, sixty employees each, and they’ve grown up to that point, but now both of them aren’t hiring. Like, they both, they’re like, we don’t need to hire anybody. When we do, we will, but right now –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – we, we don’t, and I mean, I think that that makes sense. And I mean, I would definitely, like, if I was in a room with, like, Gary V, I’m sure we would disagree with, with a lot of things. Like –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – I don’t believe in the, the hustle mentality that he really likes or –

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: – the fact that he has a, a big company and he’s done a lot of things by virtue of the fact that he has a massive audience, so all of his things are going to be successful because he already has – like, it’s easier for him because he has a massive, salivating audience of people that like what he has to say. And I mean, I’m just another, I’m just a differing voice to that and to people –

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: – who kind of have that growth mindset. I wouldn’t be popular if I, like, was in Silicon Valley and gave a talk at, like, Growth Con. I don’t –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: That may not be a thing. It probably –

Sarah: It is now!

Paul: It, it probably is a conference, but, like, it depends on who’s paying attention. I mean, like, I don’t think I reach those people that, that, where growth at all costs is what they specifically want. I don’t think I reach those people; I don’t think those people are going to read the book or care enough to find out about me to disagree with me.

Sarah: Another aspect that I enjoyed about Company of One was the idea that when you, when you both organize the structure of what you do and identify the essentials of what you do, you recognize actually how many human bodies you need to do those things.

Paul: Like, even myself, like, I’m not literally a one-person business. Like, I have five or six people that I work with.

Sarah: Right.

Paul: All of them require no management, because I would rather pay more for somebody to work with me who is an A player, who just knows how to do their job, doesn’t need babysitting, micromanaging anything? I can just say, like, this is what I need, tell me when you’re done or tell me if there’s an issue, and that’s it.

Sarah: Yep.

Paul: And so, like, I, like, even my, my editor and I communicate in fucking emojis with each other, like one emoji each.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: So I have a shared Google Doc or Google Drive folder. I’ll upload an article, he’ll send me the thumbs up, and then when he’s done he’ll send me, like, the pencil emoji. And he knows kind of what I’m after in terms of voice; he knows where all my shortcomings as a writer are. He just goes and fixes them, and I pay him a ton more than I would pay somebody on, like, Fiverr or Upwork or something like that, but to, to me it’s worth it.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Paul: Because he just, he knows how to do his job. He knows how to edit my crappy writing really well and make it still sound like me, but better. And so even, like, my, my podcast editor is the same. I just upload a folder to him, he knows what needs to happen, and he sends it back to me. The partners that I have all send an idea for an article to, say, my partner for a creative class, and she’ll write, like, an automation sequence from, like, hey, do you think this is a good idea? She’ll be like, yeah, sure, I’ll write that sequence for the course, and I’ll be like, thumbs-up emoji.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: And so I think that or-, organically, for the business that I have, which is primarily writing and making stuff, it doesn’t need to be bigger than it is. Like, it’s a handful of freelancers and, and a couple partners that I work with, and that’s it. And that’s perfect, and that is so little responsibility on my end, and I pay for that lack of responsibility, but it’s worth it. So I spent so many years doing client work, I try to pay –

Sarah: Yes, similar.

Paul: Yeah, I try, I want to be the best client that all of my freelancers have ever had, so I try to –

Sarah: Yes, thank you!

Paul: [Laughs] I try to – so, one, I look for the, the best people for the job, because I feel like that’s kind of what I preach when I’m teaching freelancers. I try to pay them within seconds or minutes of getting their invoice. Like, when I kind of know when they’re sending the invoice, I’ll turn off my email punter –

Sarah: Uh-huh.

Paul: – so I get emails right away instead of every couple hours –

Sarah: Yep.

Paul: – because I want to pay them immediately. Even my assistant, like, I told her, like, these are specifically the things I need from you, and in these speci-, in these areas, you’re the boss of me. You tell me exactly what you need to make your life and your job easier for this stuff –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – and manage me. Tell me exactly what you need from me, and I will get it done for you. You are the boss of me.

Sarah: Yep.

Paul: Because I don’t know how to be the boss of other people, so I’m just like, if this is what you’re helping me with as a, as an executive assistant, you’re the boss of me for this. Just like my calendar is the boss of me for –

Sarah: Oh, my calendar!

Paul: – for doing stuff. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh, my boss! I don’t know what year it is right now! [Laughs]

Paul: Exactly, yeah. I don’t know what – and because I turned off – we were talking about this before we started recording – I never know when holidays are because I turned off Holidays on my calendar, ‘cause I’m like, I don’t care about holidays, but then I always forget when there’s holidays, because my calendar’s not telling me, ‘cause my calendar’s the boss of my time.

Sarah: [Laughs] I actually created a very small side hustle called Organization Academy, which is about hacking your life using Google Calendar?

Paul: [Laughs]

Sarah: Basically, it was, here’s, here’s how I have solved the fact that I don’t know what time it is, I don’t know what day it is, I don’t know what year it is. I manage myself; I have two children; I run a business. Everything has a calendar. Everything is on the calendar, and if I need to get it done it goes on the calendar. If it’s on the calendar it gets done, and, like, my kids are now very fluent in, did you put it on the calendar? Yes, I did, thank you! Because I don’t know –

Paul: So you have a shared family calendar with them?

Sarah: They have their own, and I make sure that anything I put on mine is copied to them –

Paul: Ah, got it.

Sarah: – and anything they put on theirs that involves me – ‘cause I’m still transportation – they, they copy to me. So –

Paul: Yeah, that’s smarter. That, I should do that. Like, my wife and I don’t have a shared calendar, but she kind of puts the social things on hers, ‘cause I don’t like social things, so I just won’t put them on my calendar and hope I forget.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: She puts them on her calendar and then just reminds me of social obligations we have, and I remind her of, like, what days I can hang out during the day and what days I have, like, calls or something all day –

Sarah: Yep.

Paul: – but we should have a shared calendar.

Sarah: I find that the flexibility of Google Calendar and the fact that it’s free –

Paul: Yeah.

Sarah: – is wonderful for managing a, a, a household of multiple humans. And –

Paul: Yeah. And I even hate Google as a company, but for Google Calendar and Google Docs, they’re, they’re perfect free products.

Sarah: They really are great products that are free. Like, they’re really wonderful!

Paul: Yeah.

Sarah: What is your writing process like for your, for your newsletter? The foundation of your business is your newsletter; am I right in that one?

Paul: Hundred percent, yep.

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah, so the way that it works is, as, as I’ve, as we’ve covered, I’m slightly neurotic, and I have an aversion to stress, so it’s, my newsletter’s called the Sunday Dispatches, so if I was writing in on Saturday night, I, it would be garbage.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: And, and my – so it would be garbage for two reasons: I’d be stressed out and I wouldn’t be able to write something great, but I also wouldn’t have enough time for my editor to go through it and make me sound good, which I think is the job, the very important of job an editor.

Sarah: Yes.

Paul: [Laughs] I suggest editors to, to pretty much all writers. I don’t have that skill set of being able to make my writing technically perfect. I just have the, the skill set of being able to come up with slightly compelling or slightly interesting ideas and put them down into words. So I try to write my newsletter – I think for me, it’s funny, ‘cause, like, I, I balance it against my own neuroses, so I know that I’m not going to stress about it if I’ve written at least four weeks ahead of my schedule I’m not going to worry about it, so I always try to write four weeks ahead of my schedule. Same with writing the book; like, I knew I had a deadline from my publisher, but I knew that if I was, like, backed up right against that deadline I would be stressed out, so I wrote the book early –

Sarah: Yes.

Paul: – because I wanted to just think about writing and not think about writing and, oh fuck, it’s due, and, like, this chapter’s due in a week.

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: Like, that, to me, would be hard to, I don’t know how to manage that in my brain? I know how to be creative when I have the space to be creative. I don’t know how to be creative when I don’t. So I know some creative people do, and I, I applaud them for being able to, to multitask stress and creativity. I just can’t do that.

Sarah: No, I am exactly like you. I need a lot of advance lead time to be creative and to think without the pressure of a deadline, and if I get close to a deadline, then I know it is not my creative best, because it hasn’t had, it hasn’t had time in what I think of as the Crockpot in the back of my brain?

Paul: Yeah, it needs to marinate.

Sarah: Yeah, things need to percolate back there for a little while, and then it’s like, oh!

Paul: I think it was in one of Brené Brown’s TED Talks, she talks about a poet who’d be, like, outside in the garden and, like, the, the muse would, like, float past her and she would grab it by the tail and she would write her poems backwards because she, as she was pulling it in she was writing the words for the poem –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – so it would go from bottom to top because she was pulling it from its tail to its head.

Sarah: Yep.

Paul: Like, that –

Sarah: That makes perfect sense to me.

Paul: – that sounds right, yeah! I mean, that, that definitely, that definitely sounds legit.

Sarah: Do you write out of order and then rearrange things?

Paul: I write outlines completely out of order, but then I arrange them and start, like, actual drafts in order, because I feel like I need that, that kind of structure to know – otherwise I bring up the most important, or the, the points that I’m most excited about, right in the beginning, and that doesn’t make for a great story, or it doesn’t make for a great long story. It’d make for –

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: – a really great first chapter, and then –

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: – garbage for the rest. So I try to map, like, I have all of the ideas, and then I kind of map them out and put them –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – in an order that I think makes sense, and then I start chunking it out and writing, like, ‘kay, chapter one, this is what I’m going to cover. I’ll reference chapter six, but I won’t talk about, I won’t talk about all the ideas –

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: – from chapter six yet, so.

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: ‘Cause there’s got to be an arc. Even with nonfiction, there has to be an arc; otherwise it’s boring.

Sarah: Yes.

Paul: So many boring business books; I didn’t want to write another – [laughs] – I didn’t want to write another boring business book.

Sarah: Well, that’s one of the foundation elements of your, of your, of your brand, that everything is a story, right?

Paul: Yeah. ‘Cause stories are compelling; stories are interesting. I could just sit here and list off –

Sarah: The devil you say!

[Laughter]

Paul: I could just sit here and list off facts and figures, and they might be accurate, but they’re boring.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: So I think that even nonfiction authors have to have that kind of spark of creativity and spark of wanting to leave the audience wanting more through the whole thing. Otherwise, like, I’ve read so many boring, like, I don’t read that many business books, ‘cause I find most of them boring, ‘cause I feel like they haven’t, they’ve applied their wisdom to giving you the information you need, and, like, I don’t, like, like I said, I remember one study from the book. I remember all of the stories from the book from interviews –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – I did with human beings, because our brains are wired to remember stories. This is how we passed information along for longer than we’ve had the written word –

Sarah: Yep.

Paul: – is, information was passed through stories. We are fundamentally wired to resonate with and understand and remember stories, so it would be such a disservice to write anything that wasn’t a story.

Sarah: Right. Another aspect of identifying your essentials and your priorities and, and constructing your business of one or your company of one was that you, in a lot of cases, are then able to set up your daily routine or your schedule in a way that focuses on the things you most value and discards the things that aren’t applicable, and I know you tweeted recently that you noticed how busy you are because it’s not your preferred or default state, and I think anyone who’s been through a book launch is like, yep, yep, been there! I know that, that feeling of, oh my gosh, I’m so busy, I know that feeling very well, and I know you talk at length about how busyness has become a sort of, a, a bragging right or a status symbol or, or a –

Paul: Yeah, it’s a badge of honor.

Sarah: Yes, thank you, that’s the word I was look-, reaching for. Yeah, it’s –

Paul: In my brain it’s always badger of honor, and that’s not right. Badge of honor.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Now I’m, oh gosh, now I’m picturing a bunch of very busy Hufflepuffs with badger badges –

Paul: [Laughs]

Sarah: – like, we’re so busy right now! Why? Why are we like this? So how do set up your daily routine and schedule that includes the things that you most value?

Paul: Yeah, so I try to be, I, I try to make sure that I’m as nonreactive as possible with work, and it seems like, and I, I’ve got pushback against this from people when they’re, and they say, like, that’s fine for you ‘cause you’re doing the thing that you want to do and you’ve been doing this for a while, but I’m just starting; I don’t know how to do that. And I think to some degree it may be true if you’re in, like, the pre-enough phase of your business, but I also think that if you set yourself up to always be busy, then that’s kind of like, the stories we tell ourselves tend to be true because we make them true.

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: So for me, I don’t want to be, I don’t want to have a busy business; I want to have a boring business. I want to have a business that –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: – because it’s more sustainable. Like, I feel like if I’m hustling all the time, I’m going to burn out. I know because I tried to do that in my twenties when I was an idiot for every reason, where I was just like, okay, if I just do more – like, my, my thinking was this: I make, when I do work I get paid. What if I do more work and get paid more? Let’s just do that. And it doesn’t work past a certain point. Like, there’s a, a, Pew Research study that showed that no person, worker can really be productive for more than about fifty-five hours a week, and even that is pushing it.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: And so I want to be as nonreactive as possible, figure out my schedule, like we were talking about, and get as far ahead of it as possible. I also want to get, I want to establish really clear boundaries with myself and with other people, and even if somebody gives me – I always like to give a deadline that’s past how long I know something will take –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – so when I was doing client work, if I knew something would take me a day I would say, well, I’ll deliver it in three days. That way I know if life shits on my face and something comes up, I’m still going to be able to deal with it?

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes, I’ve had days like that!

Paul: There’s probably a better, there’s a better way to say that, I’m sure, but I don’t know how. I don’t know what that better way to say it is. Because things come up all the time, right?

Sarah: Yes.

Paul: And then the other thing is, sometimes it’s hard to just be, like, I really work hard at being creative on demand, but it doesn’t always, like, I can’t be creative and good on demand.

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: Like, I can sit down and write, whether I want to or not. I’m a writer; that’s what I do.

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: It doesn’t mean I’m going to sit down and write masterpieces every time I sit down or any time I sit down, but it just means that I’m going to sit down and start writing, and what’s probably going to happen after twenty minutes of flailing and sweating and all sorts of other garbage, I’m just going to get into the flow anyway, even if I thought I wouldn’t. So I try to be, like, even if a publisher or an editor at a magazine is like, well, I need this piece, I’m like, okay, it’s going to take me a day to write this piece well. I’ll say I’ll get it to you at the end of the week if it’s Monday or Tuesday, because then I have time to (1) not stress about it, and (2) if some, if a good first draft isn’t coming at the first day, I’m not like, shit, I’m late.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: ‘Cause I hate being, I hate being late on anything, especially with business. Like, every time we say we’re going to do something to anybody, we’ve entered into a social contract with them.

Sarah: Yes!

Paul: Or a legitimate contract, if it’s a publisher or a publication. [Laughs] Like, there’s a legitimate legal document that you signed that’s scarier than any one person should have to deal with.

Sarah: The minute you write your name in ink, you’ve got to take things seriously.

Paul: Yeah! So I think we need to get real about how much we can, like, legitimately accomplish on any given date, given the fact that life also needs to happen during that day –

Sarah: Yes.

Paul: – because if, if we’re always playing catch up or we’re always being busy or always burning the candle at both ends, like working twelve, sixteen hours a day, we’re not going to be able to sustain that. Like, I also feel like if I take care of my body, my mind is going to take care of me and give me what I need when I need it. Like I’m going to be able to write if I also take breaks and eat well and go to the gym and just, like, sit and watch Netflix or whatever with my wife for hours at a time sometimes to just decompress.

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: I feel like I can be more productive, and it seems counterintuitive to, like, take breaks to be productive, but I think it’s true. Like, we aren’t machines.

Sarah: Nope.

Paul: Like, we aren’t writing machines. [Laughs]

Sarah: Science has backed up that, that, that idea, too.

Paul: Yes, exactly! So I think that the more that we can kind of take care of ourselves, the more we can be creative, and the more that we can be able to get our work done at a realistic pace. And so sometimes it’s pushing back against boundaries, ‘cause sometimes, like, if we don’t set boundaries for ourselves with other people, they’re going to set them for us, and we may not like where that line is?

Sarah: Yes.

Paul: So even, like, if it’s a client saying, like, oh, I need this by a certain date, and I, I would tell them, like, look, this is how long it’s going to take. I’m not going to be late, and you’re going to get it, and you’re going to get a good product, you’re going to get a good –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: – deliverable for this date, so let’s just work towards this date. And most of the time people, I’d be scared to, like, bring that up, and then most of the time people would be like, yeah, okay, whatever.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Paul: Like, they just picked a date out of their ass, so me picking a date –

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: – that actually makes more logical sense is no big deal.

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Sarah: And those dates are slidable. I installed –

Paul: Right.

Sarah: Yeah, I installed RescueTime on my laptop and my desktop when I first started, like, working for myself, and I remember getting these reports like you worked sixty-five hours this week! And I was like, wow, that’s amazing! Wonder if I can work more?! And then I had to take a moment and stop and go, wait, why? What am I missing out on? Like, there’s a, there’s a, I think it’s Miles Davis who says time isn’t just a thing, it’s the only thing? Like, time is really the only thing that matters? And I was like –

Paul: Yeah.

Sarah: – but this, that’s a lot of time I could be doing other things with, like –

Paul: Yeah!

Sarah: Yikes!

Paul: Yeah, I mean –

Sarah: Now I get really excited if I’m under thirty a week, because that means I’ve been productive, and I’ve done all the other things I like doing.

Paul: Yeah, and I think for a lot of people, if, if we set an upper bound to that limit, we are getting –

Sarah: Yes!

Paul: – more productive. Like, I feel like if I give myself eight hours to work, I’m not going to work eight hours. I’m going to be watching videos of tapirs on Google for some of that time or on Twitter –

Sarah: Obviously!

Paul: – [laughs] – on Twitter some of that time. My wife sent me this just ridiculous video about tapirs. She’s like, do you know what a tapir is? And I’m like –

Sarah: Ohhh.

Paul: – yes? I totally know, and I –

Sarah: That’s a rabbit hole! [Laughs]

Paul: – and I know the, I know the one defining trait of them! And so I think that if we give ourselves more time, we’re going to fill it, and that’s kind of how productivity works, is if we give ourselves, we’re going to fill the amount of time we give ourselves. So if we ex-, if we instead work towards, like, can I give myself less time and still accomplish it? Like, I find that I get as much work done in thirty hours a week as I do in fifty hours a week.

Sarah: Yep.

Paul: So why sit and try to work for fifty hours a week? I mean, some weeks that, that literally, I literally, I’m required to do that, but some weeks I’m not, and I, I don’t want to feel bad about not doing that. I don’t want to feel unproductive, ‘cause I’ve been even more productive if I’ve got my work done in less time.

Sarah: Yes.

Paul: Yeah.

Sarah: And you have, and you have more, as you said, your body is better able to take care of you, and your brain is better able to create if you take care of it by not working all the time.

Paul: Yeah! And I mean, in my twenties I didn’t believe that. In my forties –

Sarah: Yeah.

Paul: – when I do need to, like, take care of my back and get a good night’s sleep and, and build a bit of muscle mass so it doesn’t deteriorate –

Sarah: [Laughs] Yeah.

Paul: – like, those things are definitely more important –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Paul: – as I get older.

Sarah: Every time one of my sons is invited to a sleepover I, I’m always talking to the parents, and I’m like, it’s so funny that they get so excited to do this, and if you invited me over to stay up all night and sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag, I would be like, why don’t you like me? What did I do to you? I’m so sorry! [Laughs]

Paul: Yep. Why do you hate me? I am the same. Like, if I have any social obligation that goes past 9 p.m., I’m like –

Sarah: Oh no!

Paul: – do we really need to do this?

Sarah: Oh no. I am the bedtime commander, and I command everyone in this house. My children will not tell their friends their bedtime, and yet they are all human and functional because we all get enough sleep?

Paul: Yeah!

Sarah: And they know not to cross me on that one.

Paul: Yeah. We even have, like, our, our favorite thing now is to have people over for lunch, ‘cause it’s –

Sarah: Oh, brilliant!

Paul: It’s like, I don’t want to have a dinner party! Like, people don’t leave!

Sarah: No! No, people don’t leave!

Paul: But if people stay a little bit longer, they’re going to get hungry again. I’m not going to give them more food at dinnertime. They will get the hint!

Sarah: Yeah! Yeah, at lunch it’s like, all right, we’ve got things to do.

Paul: Yeah!

Sarah: My favorite meeting at conferences is a breakfast meeting. If I’m at a conference, I get all kinds of crap done! (A) I’m caffeinating, and (b) we’ve got to go start the day! It’s great!

Paul: Yeah! Yeah!

Sarah: So I always ask at every podcast of every, every interview, what books are you reading or have you read that you would like to tell people about? This is the peril of having a podcast connected to a book blog. [Laughs]

Paul: That’s totally fine! And I mean, like I said, like, I’m not a huge fan of business books? I think the only business book that I would say is good is It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and DHH, the, the dudes who run Basecamp, because I think their philosophy and ethos really line up with kind of all the things that I believe to be true. I mean –

Sarah: I love interviews with them. Love it.

Paul: Yes, ‘cause they also give zero fucks! Like –

Sarah: Yeah! Oh yeah!

Paul: – it’s just fun to listen to them talk. Like, they even wrote, DHH wrote an open letter to Jeff Bezos, and Jeff Bezos is an investor in their company. I’m like –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Paul: – that’s pretty awesome. I mean, other, like The Punch Escrow was probably one of my favorites in the last couple months. It’s sci-fi. I’m a huge sci-fi nerd and a Star Trek nerd, and the way that he describes how teleportation would actually have to work just blew my, like, my mind is still actually blown about how teleportation would have to work for it to be legitimate science? Which makes me sound like I’m just going down a, I’m just digging further into the nerd hole, and it’s fine.

We Are Bob, We Are Legion, the trilogy, is the fun-est science fiction books I have ever read. They’re just, like, good, clean fun. Like, they’re not, it’s not the smartest book, and I, I feel like, I was also a book nerd for a super long time, and now I’m just like, I don’t give a shit. If the book is good and compelling, I do not care.

I think the only other thing I would say for books that I, like, I read a ton, and I really, I have always read a ton? Haruki Murakami is probably my favorite author, and, like, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or A Wild Sheep Chase are just, like, I can go back and read those over and over, and I have been reading them over and over again for, like, ten years, ‘cause they haven’t, they’re not new books. So I think all of his books, I just, I love the way that he sees the world. I love the way that he explains weird shit. It’s just good.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings me to the end of this episode. I want to thank Paul Jarvis for hanging out with me. Company of One comes out on January 15th, and I will have information about the book in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast. I will also have a link to his newsletters if you’d like to sign up and to his website so you can check out the other things that he has going on, plus I will have links to some of the other things that we talked about and, of course, the books that were mentioned.

This podcast was brought to you by everyone who has supported our Patreon. Thank you! If you have supported the show with a monthly pledge of any amount, you’re helping me keep the show going each week. You help make sure that every episode has a transcript and that every episode is accessible to everyone, which is very important to me and to the folks who read and listen each week. So thank you!

If you would like to join the Patreon community, it would be incredibly great if you did. You can have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. You can make a monthly pledge of one dollar a month, and every single dollar makes a deeply appreciated difference. You will also be part of a group who helps me develop questions and makes guest suggestions, so I would love to have you part of the Patreon community. Have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches.

Every episode has a transcript. Each transcript is hand-compiled by garlicknitter. Thank you, garlicknitter! [You’re welcome! – gk] And this week’s transcript is brought to you by all of the new options for sponsoring this podcast. You can sponsor a month, an episode, an intro, an outro – we have a lot of options and a lot of price ranges, and as I say in the information about advertising at Smart Bitches, I want our options to be accessible to everyone, so if you’re interested, for more information email me! Sarah, S-A-R-A-H at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books dot com [[email protected]]. Your support helps keep the show going and helps keep the site going, and I am deeply grateful that we are still hanging out, talking about romance every day. Thank you for that.

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater. This track is called “The Dragon’s Apprentice.” Now, I don’t know about you, but I would read the heck out of a story about an apprentice to a dragon. Would they be a dragon too, or does the apprenticeship come with potential dragon evolution? Like, you’d be like a Pokémon sort of? Or maybe the apprenticeship is only open to junior-level dragons and you have to level up your dragon skills? I don’t know, but dragon apprenticeship is now my favorite thing to ponder while I walk around and cook and walk my dogs. So – [laughs] – aside from my ramblings, this is bog, from the Peatbog Faeries. This is from their album Blackhouse, and you can find this album at Amazon or iTunes. If there is a book about apprentice dragons, I will find it and I will let you know.

Coming up on Smart Bitches: if you are listening to this before the 15th of January, 2019, there is still time to enter the absolutely mammoth sweepstakes for The Girl He Used to Know by Tracey Garvis Graves. Her publisher is giving away one thousand advanced reader copies – yes, one thousand – so head over to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books to enter.

In addition, next week, we have another recap of this season of Outlander and – drum roll, please – [drum roll on desk] – I don’t actually have a drum; that was just my desk, but I attempt sound effects because, hey, it makes it a multidimensional experience – this Monday we have – [drum roll on desk] – Cover Snark! Yay! It is really great to start the week off with Cover Snark; it’s one of my favorite things.

We will also have reviews and Help a Bitch Out and Books on Sale and the debut of our updated 2019 Reading Tracking Spreadsheet, which will help you, if you want, to track your reading for this year. I did this for 2018, and I’ll be talking about some of the things I learned about my reading over the past year. It was really illuminating and fun, as long as I remembered to update the spreadsheet, to see what I was reading and how fast I read. I read much faster than I thought I did.

So I hope you will stop by and hang out with us and perhaps grab your copy of the 2019 Reading Spreadsheet and enter the sweepstakes for the Girl He Used to Know by Tracey Garvis Graves.

Now, I always end episodes with a bad joke, and this is a terrible joke. This is so dumb, so of course I love it, and when I test-drove it on my husband, he groaned and rolled his eyes so very far I was quite impressed. So, you ready for a terrible joke? This is my favorite part of the outro. Okay, terrible joke time.

How does a butcher introduce his wife?

Give up? How does a butcher introduce his wife?

Meet Patty.

[Laughs] Meat Patty! [Laughs more] It’s so dumb! I love it so much, it’s so dumb! That is from heymalb on Reddit. Thank you for this terrible joke. Meet Patty. [Laughs some more] I hope you’re groaning, ‘cause it’s really the highlight of my doing the outro is thinking, okay, how badly is this going to make someone groan? All right, I’m going to stop laughing at my own stupid jokes because, well, it’s embarrassing, but gosh, I love that one! Meat Patty!

On behalf of Paul Jarvis and myself and everyone who is here, including my cats, we wish you the very best of reading, and if you need the additional encouragement, in the words of my favorite Epictetus quote, I hope you fortify yourself with contentment, because this is an impregnable fortress. Have a great weekend. We’ll see you back here next week.

[good music]