(2021-04-21) Kadavy I Took A Week Off Three Years Later I Sold To Google

David Kadavy: I Took a Week Off. Three Years Later, I Sold to Google. Three years prior, I cleared my schedule and declared what I call a “Week of Want.” I gave myself an entire week to work on whatever I wanted. I had no plan at the time — that was the point of my Week of Want. Three years later, here I was getting a surprise paycheck, thanks to that Week of Want.

Creative work happens in Extremistan.

Other kinds of work happens in the opposite of Extremistan — what Nassim Taleb calls Mediocristan. Mediocristan is a world that’s stable and predictable.

When your line of work is thinking of ideas and bringing those ideas into the world, you can’t get paid by the hour.

When you’re working in a pure Mediocristan, you don’t even need priorities. You know exactly what needs to be done, and you do it.

When you’re working in Extremistan, you do need clear priorities. There are a million things you could do — a million things that might work — so you have to be ruthless with your priorities.

clear priorities have a dark side. It’s that when you have clear priorities, you only put your money on the sure bets. (Thinking in Bets)

you aren’t even gambling anymore. You’ve moved yourself from Extremistan to Mediocristan. You can keep steady paychecks coming, but you’ll never hit the jackpot.

*You need to spend some time in Extremistan.

Taleb calls it “The Barbell Strategy”*

What you’re avoiding is the stuff in the middle. Don’t make big bets where you can lose your shirt, and avoid the seemingly-conservative investments in which you can actually lose a lot.

One way I spend time in Extremistan is by giving myself a “Week of Want.” In a week of want, I clear as much as I can from my schedule for a whole week, and I let myself explore whatever is interesting to me.

In 2012, after publishing my first book, I gave myself a Week of Want. I spent most of my week reflecting on the experience of writing that first book. Why did it seem nothing I had learned about productivity had prepared me to write that book?

I shared my thoughts in a blog post, called Mind Management (Not Time Management).

year and a half later, I got an email. The renowned behavioral scientist, Dan Ariely, had read my blog post, and wondered if I’d like to help him with a productivity app he was building.

Another year and a half after that, I got a surprise payday from Google. Google bought that productivity app.

The Week of Want is a way of “gambling with your time.”

The Week of Want exposes you to “asymmetric opportunities.”

it has another valuable purpose, and that purpose lies in the idea of “want.”

remember that creative work is unpredictable. Even when we think really hard about what we should do, a lot of the time we’re going to be wrong.

the things we want to be doing are powerful. The things we want to be doing are the things we’re curious about. And curiosity is powerful in two ways.

One: Curiosity is motivational fuel.

Two: Curiosity is a path to originality.

Why a week?

*I’ve heard some people say that they spend one day a week on a side-project. Hey, that’s a good use of the barbell strategy, and it will expose you to positive Black Swans more than not working on a side project at all.

But there’s something special about spending an entire week doing whatever you want. Working on what you want to work on, and doing so for an entire week, takes you further and further from the norm*

One: Doing what you want improves your mood, which leads to better ideas

Two: Taking a whole week puts you in a deeper state of creativity.

Approach the Week of Want with no expectations as to what you’ll discover during that week. The goal of the Week of Want is much less about actually finding great ideas. It’s more about reconnecting with the feeling of wanting in the first place.