Finding Your Peak of Productivity: Ultraworking with Sebastian Marshall
Interested in reaching your peak performance? Sebastian Marshall, the co-founder of Ultraworking, can help get you there.
Sebastian is an interesting guy. He’s had a variety of careers. He’s done a ton of writing. He’s lived all over the world. And he’s channeled his obsession for maximizing output into Ultraworking, a company that offers performance-enhancing software to help people perform at their best.
If you are looking to be better, to increase your output, to maximize your performance, Sebastian is the guy to turn to. He’s done all sorts of personal experiments to see what works best. During the episode, he shares a ton of ideas and advice on being more effective in all areas of life.
Here’s what I learned from the episode:
Sebastian provides a definition of heroes based on Thomas Carlyle’s (a Victorian Scottish author) work. He says heroes as persons that create a system of thought for a group of people. Being a hero doesn’t necessarily make you good.
Four fields offer universal lessons: the military and war, competitive sports, finance, and pro level video games. They have objective measures and a basis of results. They are not subjective.
Sometimes ruthless optimization can get you a win. But that’s not always the key factor to winning.
What most people feel like is 100% effort is actually only 40-60% of the max possible effort. 100% is at the point where you give out and die.
It’s important to recognize when you need to implement the maximum sustainable pace or the maximum possible pace. Max possible is the absolute most you are capable of in a shorter period. It is not sustainable. Max sustainable is geared to productivity over the long term.
It’s important to recognize the difference between process-based targets and outcome-based targets. As well as if you are scoping to time or scoping to quality.
There are little switches you can flip or small things you can implement that can lead to magnitudes of difference. It's both inspiring and scary.
Magic comes from the qualitative. And the quantitative makes things happen reliably and to a high standard.
Learn more about Sebastian Marshall:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Intellectual Openness & Mental Models for Success with David Perell
Black Swans, The End of Jobs, and Long Volatility with Taylor Pearson of Mutiny Fund
Episode Transcript:
Sebastian Marshall: If I had to choose between all my quantitative skills and qualitative skills, I’d choose the qualitative skills. You know what I mean? It's like where do I think the world's going? What do people need? How do we do something really special? You can put rubrics and frameworks and stuff around these a little bit to help you think about them. But at the end of the day, it's very qualitative.
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, my friends, and welcome. This show explores technology, investing, entrepreneurship, and personal growth to help you create a more abundant future. This podcast is one of a few projects I work on. To read my book, blog, newsletter, or invest alongside us in early-stage tech companies, please visit ejorgenson.com. Today, my guest is Sebastian Marshall, the founder of Ultraworking. I've been using Ultraworking for a few years. I've been very excited to talk to Sebastian. I've been reading his stuff for a very long time. He's a very interesting dude. He's lived all over the world. He's had a variety of careers. But most of all, he is obsessed with peak performance in work, outside work. And he's here to share everything that he's learned about how we can work sort of near our peak productivity for as long as possible, maximize output. He's run a bunch of personal experiments, and he brings the most successful into his company Ultraworking, the platform, the product that I've used for a while and I think is really interesting. We talk through many of his ideas and practices here today. And I think you'll hear some of the curious extreme cases that fascinate me about him in our conversation. Please enjoy the conversation arriving at your ears in three, two, one.
One of my favorite questions to get to know somebody and their worldview a little bit is to start with who your heroes are.
Sebastian Marshall: Oh, man, I have a lot of heroes to be honest.
Eric Jorgenson: Good. That must account for your interesting, eclectic nature.
Sebastian Marshall: Oh, thank you, I think. There's a lot of people that I count as heroes. I think people that are able to single mindedly devote themselves to something and make a lot of contributions, like Paul Erdos, the mathematician, is definitely a hero of mine. There's a whole class of people I really like, which are people that go from one field, that they get really good in one field, and they go into a completely unrelated field and bring all the stuff from their first field to the second one to make big contributions. So that's like Eli Goldratt doing that for industrial engineering. The Goal is an excellent book, if you haven't read it. You would absolutely love it. Have you read The Goal by Goldratt?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I like it a lot.
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, that's a burner. That's everybody, everybody in business should read that, and a lot of people not in business should read that one. So, I like people like that. And then, what's your definition of a hero? I got something fun for you. What's your definition of a hero?
Eric Jorgenson: To me, they are people who I respect and would like to emulate some piece of. It does not have to be- I think you can be very selective about traits or attributes of heroes, though I also am drawn to people who I think have figured out a bunch of stuff at once, who don't have a zero variable in their life. Some of those people are some of my heroes in how they combine and live a wholesome life, but I don't think that's a necessary piece of the definition for everybody.
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, probably a top five influential book on me in my life was with Thomas Carlyle, a Victorian Scottish writer on heroes, Hero-Worship & the Heroic in History. So, you got to muck around through some old English. But to really paraphrase his argument, really quickly, he said that, this is one of my favorite quotes, “It is well said in every sense that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man or a nation of men. By religion, I do not mean here the church creed he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign awards or otherwise assert. Not this holy, in many cases, not this at all. We see men of all types of creeds and religions get to all levels. This is not what I call religion. What a man does practically believe, and often without asserting it even to himself, the thing a man does practically lay to heart and know for certain concerning his vital relations to this mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is, in all cases, the primary thing for him and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion.” So, he goes through that argument and he says, where's that come from? Like, why are we in the universe? What is the point of being here? And the word religion has shifted kind of meanings over time. I use the Latin word religio, just for personal religion, not organized religion. Carlyle says, hey, where does that come from? Like what we should do in the universe, where does that come from? And his argument is that there's people that create systems of thought, largely a first person that comes up with it, and he calls them heroes. And so, it's like heroes create a system of thought for a group of people. And so, Confucius would be a hero. Benjamin Franklin would be a hero. Hero doesn't make you good. You know what I mean? Stalin and Hitler were heroes for their time and place and their groups and to great detriment, they created systems of thought. But yeah, so that was Carlyle’s definition of a hero. So, it's kind of like you can look up what schools of thought you want to subscribe to, what moral philosophies, what technical schools of thought, and then the founders of those schools of thought and the major contributors to them and then kind of look to emulate those. So, I found that pretty fun, and that book was quite influential on me.
Eric Jorgenson: Did you find anybody new, any new schools of thought to adopt from that?
Sebastian Marshall: Oh, tremendously. I love history. I'm a pretty ferocious amateur historian. And there's all kinds of eras and people that we never get exposure to. It's really interesting. An unfortunate thing I think about the modern education system is everybody studies the exact same stuff. So, everybody in the United States learns about the American Civil War and the American Revolution or whatever. And it'd be, in theory, much better if there was some random assignment of countries because then we could share knowledge with each other. So, the Turkish War of Independence, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and then Mustafa Kemal – he's a hero of mine – Mustafa Kemal was the commander at Gallipoli, which were the Turks who were way less technologically sophisticated than the British who they were fighting, held off a British amphibious invasion. Then eventually the Allies won World War I. Turkey was getting dismembered, and they were going to get treated real rough. Mustafa Kemal started the Turkish War of Independence and fought like crazy to kind of emancipate Turkey and make it not a puppet state and succeeded. So, you come across people like that. And you come across people from much, much older eras of history that are completely invisible and unknown to us. And you can learn a lot from people like that. Someone like Scipio Africanus, who defeated the Carthaginians in the Roman Carthage wars, amazing, amazing guy, great book about him, B. H. Liddell Hart, Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon. So, his maneuver warfare, his diplomacy, his moving fast, his operations, his leadership. And you can kind of absorb those lessons into how you think. They're not like a playbook that you can just implement. They're not like a plug and play. But it can kind of refine your wisdom and your ability when you see a situation to be like, oh, this is kind of like that, or maybe this principle applies here to that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I can see the passion for history, and it seems like military history, in particular, in a bunch of your writing. One of the first times you had a big impact on me I think was the series, the blog series you wrote on the nature of operations. And I thought that was incredible. And I pulled some quotes from it. We can kind of talk through that because I think that is one of those things that is the most live or die and the highest performing operational sort of organizations in the world are probably militaries. But there's so much to learn and pretty much can almost directly apply to businesses, whether it's an independent, one person business or a very big company. So, I learned a lot from that series. And I'm sure you have applied a lot of that to your own company too.
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, totally, 100%. And I do want to clarify, though, I like military history. I don't have a special affinity for military history, per se. Like, I really like artists. I think you'd spent a lot with DaVinci and how he worked on the theory of perspective and studied anatomy and the amount of hard work he did and his cross disciplinary nature and whatever. But the thing I like about military, military history is in the military, you kind of know, you pretty much know who won or lost a conflict. And outside of some kind of very asymmetrical conflicts with a very technical society. With a non-technical society, usually militaries have somewhat similar technical sophistication in a given era when they're fighting each other. Yeah, one side’s got better hardware usually, but not so much. So actually, when I looked into it, I found four fields that I think you can really take away a lot of universal lessons from. The military and war is one of them. But I also think competitive sports, which I've spent a lot of time doing. So, in the NFL or the NBA, the professional sports leagues, they have the same resources, they're playing the same game, they're doing the same thing. So, the coaches that consistently win and the organizations like San Antonio Spurs and the New England Patriots that are outperforming, they're all playing the same game with the same rules. So, you can learn a lot from them. There's a universality. I think finance is the same way because there's an objective quality to the returns. So, there's relatively objective qualities in these three fields as opposed to art where we can argue, clearly, Picasso was prolific. Clearly Picasso was an innovator. Clearly, he got lionized reviews. Clearly, he's very successful. I happen to think his art’s really ugly. I hate Cubism. I think it's awful. You know what I mean? But we could argue about that. You know what I mean? Like we could, whatever, but there's a subjective nature to that. Whereas if the San Antonio Spurs win the championship, they won the championship and you can't really argue about that. A fourth field, actually, that's emerging, it's not, quote unquote, cool. There's another one that I think is probably going to be increasingly worth studying, which are pro level video game players and how they train and some of the Korean players. And I don't really play very much video games. I have a lot of- I think it's great, but it can suck infinite time. You got to be really careful with it. It's like drinking – you start doing a little bit and then suddenly, you're waking up with a headache. Like the Korean players where they're training their fingers and their wrists to get the optimal commands and thinking about- or the pro level Counter Strike players where they're rederiving how police SWAT teams talk to each other in matches and stuff like that. I find that very interesting. So those four fields have some objective measure and basis of the results, as opposed to subjective. And they're also a little bit less locally constrained where if you're in Silicon Valley 30 years ago, you were going to probably just do much better technologically than if you were in Siberia. And that doesn't mean necessarily the people in Silicon Valley were doing things better themselves, but there was network effects and colleagues and whatnot. Whereas a sports match that's evenly weighted or two evenly weighted militaries or finance where people are participating in the same markets or video games, you can kind of see who the winners and losers are and kind of extract and learn the lessons. So that's why I like the military history. But I like these other fields. The subjective stuff is okay too. But when there's data on the winners and losers, and you can’t argue about whether- like, Matisse was a colleague of Picasso, and he's like, “This is ugly, it looks like a bad joke” about the famous Demoiselles painting. And I'm like, I agree with Matisse. With sports, you know who won the championship. With wars, what the treaties look like at the end and such. So that universal basis and that kind of quantitative basis to let you evaluate, I think, is very helpful.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think there's something to studying zero sum games in order to discover sort of tactics or habits or training methods, or mindsets. I don't like to play them, personally. I have a number of times in life. But I would much rather choose industries or games or products or companies that are much more positive sum. And I get the same impression from you. So how do you sort of translate, take lessons that you've learned from one of these areas and sort of apply it to entrepreneurship?
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, hey, that's brilliantly said. That was brilliantly said. You just- I'm having a little epiphany moment there. You're right, there is something of a zero-sum nature to all of these things. Maybe there's positive externalities in some of these things, certainly, a very disciplined military that benevolently handles a place, the Marshall Plan after World War II, whatever. So maybe it's not totally zero sum, but I see what you mean. And that's really insightful. Yeah, actually, now that you mention it, those are pretty close to zero sum games. And I think with a zero-sum game, every fraction of a percentage point of edge matters a lot. You know what I mean? You look at basketball, it’s like we're talking about one tricky way to dribble or set a pick that's unexpected or whatever, gets an open shot that's 20% more likely to go in, you get five or six of those in the game, and then you win the game by one point at the end. Do you know what I mean? Basketball games, once the teams are pretty good, tend to be pretty close.
Eric Jorgenson: All right. So, talk to me about this, I like this observation of we study zero sum games because they're so optimized, like every player at a very top level, they're winning by fractions of a percent, they're taking edge wherever they can. I see you as one of those people, at least from the outside, like I see you, for lack of a better word, optimizing life. I know that you are a person who measures every minute of your life and has for a long time and is just sort of always working with high intention towards something. I think there's no amount of unpacking that that's not interesting. So, I'd love to dive into how you started that, how you manage it, what do you get out of it, why do you do it? That sort of maximum intention quantification sort of mindset is really interesting.
Sebastian Marshall: Well, I think in business or if you're building a social organization like a nonprofit or university, you're actually not going to win by optimizing around the edges. You're going to get one, two, three core advantages that are very, very, very special, and that's where your success is going to come from. There are fields where people get in and they win through ruthless optimization. There’re some people who do that in real estate. You can do that in a lot of very commodity-based fields of just ruthlessly eliminating costs and optimizing everything operationally. You can get there. Yeah, retail, I presume, is the same way. I don't really know much about retail, but yeah, sounds like it's probably that. Walmart, I do know Walmart really focused on the turnover of their shelf space super aggressively, and they built logistics systems and predictive systems and whatnot. So, when you're doing business, it's not the ruthless optimizations that are going to get you there. I do it largely because I like it. And it's also, the field that I'm in benefits from that. So, it also helps with product development. it helps with connecting with people. And so, it's what my field is. You know what I mean? David Perell on your show, he's a writer, someone who does research on better writing and aesthetics and stylistics and poetics. It isn't just for his own enjoyment or a side thing. It makes him better at what he does. So, for me, the ruthless optimization stuff. I don't know why I keep calling it ruthless. We talked about zero sum games a second ago. The very intensive optimization stuff helps. But I don't think that's what people need in the beginning. If you're going into business, you really want to find the core of something that's really special and get the theory behind that, and you really want to figure out who you're going to serve and how to do a really good job and ideally a really special job in doing that. And then optimizing around the edges can make a big difference, for sure. But yes, I optimize like crazy. I get a big kick out of it. So, I'm not necessarily recommending it. I feel like a lot of people take their own hobbies and interests and they recommend it fanatically to everyone. But yeah, you're right. For about two years in a row, I tracked down to the 5-minute block every single day. And I could tell you, if you want to know what I was doing in 2018 on May 13 at 3:13pm, I could go dig out my old records and tell you. I could tell you what my stats were that week of how much time I put into different categories and whatnot. And I've learned a heck of a lot from doing it. People say they don't have time, the first time I started doing time tracking, it's make it real grounded, not so abstract, the first time I started doing time tracking, I chose what my MIW, most important work, was. I chose; I picked something. And a week later, a week later, I felt like I was busy all week, I was doing a lot of stuff. It was the first time I ever did this. A week later, I only put in about four and a half hours on what I had defined as my most important. And I said it was my most important, and nobody- I didn’t have a gun to my head. A hurricane didn't hit my city that week. There was no real good reason why I was doing this. That was one three hour session. And then like 30 minutes here and there, maybe like an hour once and 30 minutes once, something along those lines. I'm like, well, okay, not surprising that the big things aren't moving when you only put four and a half hours into them. So if you put four and a half hours into your most important work in the morning, on the first day of the week, and then after a little lunch and a little admin, you do it again, you know what I mean, you could see that it's very possible to have double the throughput in one day that people that normally work at that pace do one week. And I think we've all experienced this when a college term paper is due the next day and suddenly you become like the Tasmanian devil, and you do it all in one day. In theory, I'm just throwing this out there. I'm just throwing this out there. In theory, you can do that the day after the paper got assigned. This was a fun thing. I want to say this again. I want to say this again. That's cute idea. I don't know. I'm serious. In theory, you could Tasmanian devil your way through something just like you would when the final deadline is coming. And you could emulate all the conditions. You could put yourself into a high stress state. You could get a bunch of Red Bull. Whatever you do when you're on the wire, you could, in theory, do on any given Tuesday and get a bunch of stuff done. You could do it. And so that was very intriguing to me. So, I started trying to do that. And then sometimes I would, and it was great. And I really enjoyed it. Now you don't want to do that all the time. You can kind of burn yourself out. But yeah, optimizing around the edges is great. But I mean, when I first started tracking it, I thought, oh, maybe I'll automate my email down three minutes or whatever. And I'm like, yo, there's 168 hours a week, I only put four of them into the thing that I wanted to do. You don't need to be an astrophysicist to figure out how to improve this system a little bit.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I feel like there's an interesting conversation to have with you about productivity because I tend to check out of most productivity conversations. I wonder, actually, if you have a more nuanced way to describe what you do then just productivity. What is like that hobby or that optimization?
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, the problem with the word productivity, which we try to kind of avoid when we can, the problem with it is there's just been a lot of over promising and under delivering, especially in high tech and information technology. And so Slack is like where work happens. It's like, no, no, it's not. That's their motto. And it's like, no, no, it's not. It's a really elegant chat. That's valuable. Your communications are going to be more enjoyable, more pleasant, more smooth, more modern, there's integrations. That's really nice. It's not where work happens. It's a chat app. Evernote, similarly, had some – your place for all your work. It's like no, it's not. It's a note taking app. It's a place to write down and scratch some notes out. In the day, it was first class at what it did, really good syncing. So, you get all these companies that do one kind of narrow function and do a good job on it. And then they over promise that they're the total productivity. So, people kind of start to tune out on it when they kind of zoom out. And like I was saying earlier, a lot of the people that ruthlessly track and optimize really just do it out of a personal interest. And so, then you take a look at them and they're people that do it as a hobby and do it as a theory. And that's how I started doing it, and I'm not claiming it's the greatest thing ever for everyone. So, you need a core of something really, really special. You need to be really, really good with people. You need to understand people. You need to understand psychology, and you need to hone your own judgment and your wisdom and stuff like that if you want to be successful. Then as for productivity, I think the other thing too is there's an anti-signaling effect. The people that are searching for productivity are people that are unproductive. So, somebody goes into Google and types in “How do I be productive?” And they're not being productive. So, the way to monetize and to sell to that and to get Google AdWords and put them to a landing page and sell, it's like, are you feeling like a freaking loser that bla bla bla bla, and you're not productive, and bla bla bla bla. So, when you google it, all the Google search results on productivity are polluted. What you should be having come up when you search productivity, if it was not based on the links thing and SEO and PageRank, if it was based on actually the real shit is like, you should pull up Richard Hamming, like You and Your Research, if it's a young person, which is just a beautiful, beautiful essay from the guy that is at Bell Labs where they invented like half of modern computing. You know what I mean? Richard Feynman should come up when you search for productivity. I don't like Pablo Picasso, but a little bit about Pablo Picasso, the dude was prolific. He did thousands and thousands of pieces. It's not my cup of tea, but he was very productive. Davinci, how he really deeply studied anatomy and whatnot. Or things about how the San Antonio Spurs front office works, or how Bill Belichick does it in football and breakdowns around that. But what typically comes up in the AdWords and the SEO and whatnot is garbage that is like, it's not your fault. Here's what you need to do. Start by- And it's garbage. Or a course or book or whatever. And it's garbage. And what we try to do is we try to create edge for really top performers in really demanding fields for people that are very analytical and ambitious. And we don't- we're not remedial at all. We're not trying to fix you. If you're really good, we're wanting to make you better. So, we got Headquarters, our desktop app, it's got some really good tools in it and some interfaces for getting a lot of work done. And like we can fully, if you are in the United States or Canada, we can fully automate your nutrition, where hot meals will just show up at your door with the exact macro micronutrient mix you want for if you're lifting weights, we will give you more protein and more carbs on the days you lift, timed to that, and then we'll put you on a deficit if you want to cycle the calories on non-lifting days to re-composition. And then we build stuff like work cycles in Pentathlon and stuff like that. And those are all for people that are already performing at a pretty high level. Now there are some fundamentals, and I'm empathetic to the fact that sometimes people need to get the fundamentals and we're happy to do that. But that's not our- that's not like what we're doing in business. We say peak performance to kind of skirt around the productivity word. Cognitive and affective, blah, blah, blah. I don't know; I'm still looking for great word. If you get a better word for it than me, I'm all ears. I’ll send a little bonus your way or something if you could get some better word than productivity for us.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that's- productivity always struck me as painful just because- I always frame my efforts towards this as leverage is one of the main mental models that I go back to because it's about increasing impact, not about squeezing the last drop out of the fruit when the fruit is you. That's what productivity feels like to me. It's kind of like how do I flog myself and extract the most possible for myself, and I'm like, it sounds badass sometimes. You want to believe that you can do that and operate at your limit or whatever. It's fun. But it's also like you don't want to actually live that way most of the time, at least most people don't. And I think actually also Ultraworking does a very good job of introducing a bunch of this sort of mindset, like it's really about increasing your impact and your output. And there's a bunch of creative ways to do that that are not just squeezing yourself harder and pushing yourself harder and working another hour.
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, so by the way, I would make a distinction there on the squeeze the every drop out of the fruit. First off, I think anyone that wants to be a top, top, top performer, so first off you need to make a distinction between people that want to be top performers and people that want to have reasonably balanced lives. Right away, if somebody's listening, maybe there's some young people that aren't sure that could go either way. But there's some people that are like, I want to be the best in my field, or I want to be really exceptional and outperforming. You know what I mean? There's people that genuinely aspire to the US presidency and are building the connections and participating in party politics and stuff to try to get elected assembly person, and then they're going to make a run at governor and then they're going to make a run at President. And they genuinely want to, and they're going to need to sell out everything they have to get there because other people are. So those extremely competitive, we're talking about zero sum games earlier. So, you need to ask yourself whether you want to be that person or not. But if you don't, but you're moderately ambitious, I do think going all in for a week or two, occasionally, is really good. My friend Nick Winter, he runs a tech company out in San Francisco, used to do these things called maniac weeks, where he optimized everything away, got all his food lined up and talked with his wife in advance, got a standing desk and everything to see how many hours were the most he could program in a week. And he would preset up all the problems he's going to work on in programming, and he would put in 100, 120, 130 hours or something in a week, just to see if he could do it. And then he'd be smoked the next week. And so, his net productivity across those two weeks would be not great, maybe good but not outstanding. But that shows you the top end of what you're capable of, and it kind of lets you take a watermark of what you could do if you need to in a crisis in a week. I think that's cool. And I think everybody should consider doing that. Now, whatever, if somebody has a mental health challenge or health challenge or they have a family and the family is not accommodating. Don't be stupid. I'm very against being stupid. You know what I mean? But if you're a young person, you're really quite healthy, you got a support network and stuff, I think it's really cool to do this from time to time. And sometimes I do this for a week to a month. It's great. You just feel really great doing it. But you're right. In the big picture, yeah. I think there are different elements to it. I think everybody learns eventually that systems and people eventually become more important than your individual productivity. I think I learned this pretty early on, when you're managing people, when you're a boss. You can like I killed it this week, you did all this stuff. And you take a look at one of your staff’s work, and they didn't do anything that week. And maybe they finished some stuff on Wednesday, and you didn't give them anything new to do. And they didn't ask. And then they did nothing for three days. And it was like, man, if I could have stepped back and been paying a little more attention for half an hour or an hour, this lady over here, she wanted to do great work. She's great at it. And she wanted to do something but she had nothing to do so she just did whatever for a few days. You kind of start to learn that lesson. Systems are really important. One thing that might be interesting, probably would be interesting to you, do you know Zack Canter who runs STDI?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I’m hoping to have him on the podcast too. I think he is really quite clever about a lot of these ideas.
Sebastian Marshall: He's a genius. Did you see the recent excerpt from the STDI annual letter to investors?
Eric Jorgenson: No.
Sebastian Marshall: Okay, so STDI letter, he's talking about operational excellence. And one aspect of operational excellence that they focus on is reducing toil, and they use the Google SRE definition of toil. We could pull this up if we want. I'm a little bit gun shy about using my browser now when I'm recording here, but toil from the Google SRE book definition, the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows. So aggressive elimination of toil is a great idea.
Eric Jorgenson: That seems like it fits with you wrote quite a bit about the Toyota production system. It fits in their kind of category of non-value producing work.
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, they had three categories: Value producing work, which they're extremely strict about. That's like literally screwing the tire on to the car. It's like literally direct customer production. Non-value producing work, which they actually refer to as stuff like payroll and security and stuff like that. And then waste. Waste is everything else. And so actually, they're really hardcore about it. They classify any movement of parts or materials as waste. So, if you’ve got to get up from your workstation, walk five feet to pick up a tool and walk back, they consider that five feet of walking waste. So, really optimizing your environment so that that's minimized. Because going and getting a tool is actually not creating value. It's a necessary step. But if the tool is already in the right spot, then there you go. So, getting rid of stuff like that, and optimizing that, that's a great idea to optimize on a systems level where you're not squeezing every drop of juice out of yourself, but you're making your job and your team's job easier over time.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, reducing toil, reducing waste, eliminating or reducing nonvalue producing work. Going back to your or I guess to tie this into your kind of experiment around extreme measurement, do you feel like going through those, whether it's a maniac week or two years of measuring your time, do you find that you have a new higher sort of baseline of productivity or awareness or something coming out of one of those things? Where do they accumulate long term versus just sort of that was an interesting experiment, but I'm pretty much where I started?
Sebastian Marshall: I mean, so there's two kind of confounding factors. One is that COVID hit which destroyed my beautiful circuit. I had the most beautiful setup with my gym and my swimming pool and the co-working space, a section of it was ours, and the healthy food restaurant and stuff. So, COVID just absolutely wrecked it up. So immediately after the sample was the COVID era where socializing and travel and stuff was gone. So, there's that. So, it's really quite hard to say. Because I used to- you know how people play multiple chess games at the same time? Like the grandmasters will play on five boards. I used to sometimes do synchronous meetings. So if you have junior team members, if you have junior team members, give somebody 20 minutes of work to do, like if they're learning a problem, give them 20 minutes to work to do, go check in with someone for 10 minutes, somebody else for 10 minutes, give them 20 minutes of stuff, check in with the next person for 10 minutes. So, it's like reps. So, you can have like a rolling meeting. It was so much fun. And if you set it up correctly- and it's not- there's like probably if you imagine, there's a really rude, horrible way and there's a cool, fun way. It's the cool fun way if anyone's having a hard time imagining it. It's fun. And it's not like stations. It's like we're all posted up in a big- there is a co-working space that like one of the rooms tend to be pretty empty and it was big and luxurious. And I would just kind of cycle through and be like, hey, I can check with you for 10 minutes, and then I'll see you in 20 more. So, we just start every 30 minutes. And then I'm going to check in with you for two to seven minutes, give you feedback on your work, you can jam a little bit, and then I’ll be back and just kind of circle through. So those types of things went away. And then we started to have to get on more remote work norms and build remote work systems. And it's a bit of a different game. As a CEO, it's very hard to calibrate because your job is always changing. So, am I doing a good job at my job? The minute that you do a really, really good job at something, you tend to establish a new baseline, new capabilities, new product, new team members, new ops, and then, it's interesting, it's the paradox of being a CEO. When you do a really, really, really bang up job, then you've immediately put yourself into a, I'm on to a new thing with new capabilities that I'm at 0% on and maybe bad at. You cause new problems with success. You really grow over on one side, which creates scaling problems on this other side. Now you need to hire for a role you don't know as much, and so on and so forth. So, CEO, there's a bit of a thing that doesn't apply to everybody else, which is when you do a really good job, typically your job changes or can change. And then obviously, the macro conditions, I think sometimes people are a little too sensitive to those in small companies – like, oh, the economy's down, it's like, yeah, usually doesn't matter that much. But it does matter a little bit. And sometimes if you're in a field, it might matter a lot, if you're in like a travel related field or something and COVID hits. So, the landscape is always changing, consumer preferences are always changing. I think, this is the first time I’ve talked about this publicly, I think there's going to be a big, big, big shift sometime the next one to two years. I actually don't know what it is, but I think we're in a very unstable equilibrium right now societally around consumption and demand and how people relate to organizations and employment. I think something's going to change. I don't know, it's like a vague, vague thought. I don't- I'm not being a pundit on TV that's making like an unfalsifiable prediction. I'm just talking about a sense that I have. I'm not- but I think there's going to be a pretty big shift in some way. I'm seeing, I don't know- This is one of nice things about studying history is you eventually start to get a sense of when the conditions are right for shifts. Do you know what I mean? And I'm seeing a number of factors that would seem to indicate that there could be- just to riff on this for a second more. I've been exploring this, and it's not super well honed, but how do I put this? People tend not to investigate and reevaluate and tend not to be open to certain types of new different ways of doing things when things are pretty good or going up. And when things get a little bit bad and it seems temporary, like COVID, people are just holding out for things to get back. I think now in 2022, people aren't looking at like I want the world to be like it was in 2018. They're kind of like, I feel like a lot of the general public, which probably a lot of listeners of the show that are in business are probably insulated from a lot of the problems normal people have. We're very fortunate in many ways that we have a lot of control over our lives and resources and whatnot. So, maybe people aren't noticing it, but I think a lot of people in the general public are hurting pretty hard right now. And I think it's kind of crossed over in the general public into almost despair. I would really not be surprised if sometime in the next two years something kind of catches wildfire. I think probably people are going to want very intense experiences that don't feel threatening or scary or difficult or expensive to opt into. And I don't know if we'll see political upheaval or not. I'm actually thinking maybe not political but more social. And I don't know what that looks like. That might be like somebody going to dig- they're like, oh, there's garbage. We're going to clean up the garbage. And one person just says, I'm going to go clean up the garbage. And then, a bunch of people come out and then, suddenly everybody in the whole city is cleaning up the garbage. It's like the big everyone cleans up the garbage in America movement. I don't know, like that kind of thing. Probably not that. But anyways, I'm digressing a little bit, but you asked me about you’re own performance. It's hard to measure. It's hard to calibrate. Because the world is always changing. And as CEO, your job is always changing. And I think we live in really, really weird times that are going to be really, really weird. So, I'm trying to get a beat on where the world's going to go and anticipate it so that we're ahead of the curve, not behind the curve and getting caught flat footed. That's why I digressed into that subject is because that’s something about my performance lately.
Eric Jorgenson: And I think other people are making that same observation. As I'm working on the book about Balaji, he observes a period of unrest due to some of the same sort of historical factors, I think, that you and he have seen looking at the long arcs of history. I'm curious. You had a great quote in a different podcast I was listening to you on that pertains to this sort of where is your limit, how do you know, how fun is it to push yourself – when most people when they think they're giving 100%, are only giving 40 to 60% of their max effort. That's why we say stuff like give 110% to just try to get people over the like mediocrity. So, one, I think that's an interesting idea. It almost seems to me the core of Ultraworking and what really excites you about it. But I'm also curious now, it's so much easier to imagine that as an individual contributor than as a CEO. And I wonder what it's like as somebody who loves to try to give 100%. How do you do that as a CEO? And how different does it feel from when you were just starting this company out?
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, the quote that you're referring to is not my own. That was from Stan Beecham who wrote a pretty good book. It's not my favorite book in the space; it's okay. If you've already read everything else, you can read it. But there's other books that I'd read first. It’s called Elite Minds. And he coached top level athletes, Olympic athletes. And I believe the example that he uses, he would ask people, hey, if you just started jogging at a very slow pace, and you're going to get a little bit of water and snacks handed to you while you jog, how long could you go? And then someone's like, I don't know, three hours, four hours. And he's like, actually, you could jog for three days straight, or something like that. You know what I mean? Something crazy. Now, you wouldn't want to. You’d be in bad shape at the end of it. So, he said that what most people feel like is 100% is 40, 60, whatever. And so, you feel like you're dying when you go above that limit. Your body starts to break apart and howl at you. And what Beecham said says is to be an Olympic athlete, you have to have certain prerequisites. If you want to be a real competitive in the Olympics, you need to have a swimmer’s type body if you're swimming, and you need to be sufficiently tall if you're playing basketball, and so on. But assuming you've met those prerequisites, if you can give 80% of your theoretical maximum and target doing that, basically, every single day, with appropriate rest days, and you'll screw it up three or four times a month, it's also okay to screw it up and have a bad day three or four times a month. So, if you're hitting 80% of your training ability 26 times a month, that's Olympic level performance. And 100% is, I'm forgetting if this is exactly how Beecham put it, but a 100% is like you die. So, you don't want to give 100%. 100% is- there's no 110. 100% is like your cellular whatever disintegrated and you're dead. So, there's a model that I think is really, really useful. Kai Zau, who founded Ultraworking with me, he has since moved on, but we’re still really, really good friends. Kai Zau and I put together a model, we were really discussing and arguing this topic extensively. There's a difference between what we call the MSP and the MPP, the maximum sustainable pace and the maximum possible pace. And it's really, really worthwhile to know which one of those you're going for when you're going for maximum. So maximum sustainable. Max possible is what I talked about with Nick Winter, maniac week. Max possible is, unfortunately, it was not lined up this way, but I unfortunately had to have a 21 hour in a row day. And the only break that I had was having yoga and I was taking meals while on calls and such like that. So, I had one of those days where I had to work 21 hours straight. I stopped, it screw me up a little bit. It's just one of those days where that was called for. You can do that. You shouldn't do that. That's possible. It's absolutely possible. So, I think sometimes people don't draw a distinction between max sustainable and max possible. And there's also different strategies. Sometimes people will try to get everybody going in the same direction for a max possible or approaching max possible sprint for a short period of time, like when a product release is coming out. Or sometimes it just really is the case that your company exhibits at a trade show, there's a ton of opportunities, and you want to run at the max possible pace for two to three weeks afterwards to follow up and capitalize on all the gains, followed by some sort of rest period and recovery period. So yeah, there's a big difference between going from max possible pace and having those tools in the toolbox when they're called for when you're in a window of opportunity or in a crisis where really extremely maximum performance is called for or trying to set up max sustainable pace where you’ve got your yoga and you got your morning routine and then you got your healthy diet and you got your meal system dialed in, you got your bed with the blackout curtains and all that jazz. So yeah, I think that's a useful distinction. I sometimes try to run at the max sustainable pace and sometimes try to run at the max possible pace. And I try to be clear on which one I'm doing in any given week. As you get more senior and have more team and more systems, increasingly, the job of an executive is about having good judgment. So that's really tricky and it's really nebulous. It's about having good judgment, not about, as you said, individual contributors sitting down or whatever. And how do you know you're having good judgment? It's like, well, things are going in the direction you want. The predictions you're making are happening, are being outperformed, people seem to be happy, and the winds are coming. So, it's quite difficult to evaluate performance. Did the CEO of Delta Airlines do a good job during the pandemic? Who knows. Obviously, they went down, but they were going to go down. Do you know what I mean? Did they go down as little as possible? is the question. Very tricky.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. We joked earlier when we were getting started about optimizing for fun. And I think that's both a joke and a reality and something that as you shift from kind of hardcore individual contributor mode to just being in a different chapter of life or a slightly more comfortable place or trying to set up a family or whatever, like these transitions that I think a lot of the- and I was certainly here, I imagine you are to, of the very hard charging ambitious, max sustainable pace almost all the time kind of 20-something goes into, oh, I actually don't have to sprint to survive anymore. But I also have been sprinting long enough that I kind of have a hard time not- I have to almost work as hard to build in the chill or the fun, or I have to structure the unstructured time. Is that something you have gone through or will go through or don't think about at all yet? Do you chill? And if so, how do you set that up? Are you as structured about that as you are with the working stuff?
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, I think it's really critical to know yourself and to know your personality. And I don't recommend what I do to anybody. I go crazy with pointless relaxation. And I know that this bothers people. So, I don't want to ruin anyone's fun. I can make an appearance at a party and be really sociable and pleasant. And I can come in and give face time and give respect to some people and come in and like have a good time for like 30, 40 minutes and then bounce. But I like to show up at a party early and help the host set up or show up right at the end and help them clean up. I like to be doing stuff. Do you know what I mean? Just experiencing. I've learned the hard way. And I'm not- Sometimes I say this and people are like, oh, this guy's a jerk, he thinks he is better than people. No, no, not at all. It's just how I'm wired. I like to do things. Every now and then, so I like to play cooperative board games with people. But I like to play really hard cooperative board games where the default is that you lose the game. Do you know what I mean? Sometimes we'll go play team shooter games. And I find people that want to play the same way where we do deliberate practice. So, we'll put some rounds, some unranked rounds on, and we will just go and pick a point on the wall and try to strafe and jump around and hit that point as much as we can to practice aiming. It's amazing when people play video games, they don't practice. Like with in real life firearms and marksmanship, you go to the range and you practice. You can do this in shooter games. You know what I mean? And you'll be better at them. And you can see the spread patterns on shotguns and shoot them at the wall and stuff and like look at the targets. Then we work on our verbal commands and our movement, flanking people and stuff like that. And just the joy of doing something to the best of the possible ability and executing as well as possible and as good as possible. Ideally, this is productive activity. Most of the time it makes the world a better place or builds my life up. But I just don't really like to chill, man. I don't know. I'm weird. I'm wired weird. I don't recommend it for other people. If you are not wired that way, don't try it.
Eric Jorgenson: Is there stuff that's not productive, I guess, quote unquote, that you do that recharges you?
Sebastian Marshall: Massages are really good, but I think they're productive. I don’t know.
Eric Jorgenson: That's value producing work, or it's not value producing work, but it's not waste.
Sebastian Marshall: No, then a bazillion things. Then a bazillion things. No, no, then a bazillion things. I think there's a whole class of stuff that's rejuvenating. Or I think things that give you new inputs and more novelty. Like inputs and novelty good. I love museums. I love going to look at art. I love reading. I love having conversations like the conversation we’re- this is like a normal conversation that I have with people, a little more powerful podcast voice, but this is like a normal conversation I'd have with somebody. This sort of stuff I really like.
Eric Jorgenson: Just more technical issues.
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah. But just like, I don't know, I remember when we were kids in high school, we'd hang out, get a Dr. Pepper, and sit on the couch and just chill. And I don't know, that doesn't really do anything for me. Do you know what I mean? I like to have some stimulation and some novelty and something to experience. And honestly, I just like doing things. You know what I mean? So, if somebody's gardening, going and gardening with them and seeing how that works. It's really cool to see how plants grow and stuff, you help them out. I don't know, it's kind of stuff that I like doing stuff. But I'm wired weird. I also like to work seven days a week. I get thrown off if I don't work. If I don't do my morning routines and stuff, it screws me up. So even if I want to take days off, I put in like one to three hours in the morning and then take the rest of the day off. And that's typically what I do on vacation. I've tried to unplug. It screws me up. It's deleterious. It's like unhealthy for me. Do you know what I mean? I like the routine of waking up and starting the day strong, getting some stuff done, and being calibrated. But not everyone's like that. Some people do way better on six days a week. Some people do better on five. Some people, I presume, maybe do better on four, even if you wanted to get throughput. Certainly, throughput divided by time, maybe. Raw throughput, I don't know. But yeah, I'm a seven days a week kind of guy, but people need to know themselves. And that's a very personal exploration to figure out one's preferences and what works for you.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's super interesting. I realize this far into the conversation, I don't actually have a good sense of where Ultraworking is as an organization. Can you, whatever you're comfortable with, give us a scale of community size or team size or whatever to kind of help me wrap my head around what your day to day job actually is these days?
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, sure. So, we've grown 50% a year the last couple of years. Actually, we did no marketing. So, it's pretty cool. It's all word of mouth. It's about a quarter million dollars of revenue last year. And then for team, we are just going through a hiring cycle. So, I think we're probably going to- the target will be to be at, let's see, maybe 12 people. We're hanging right now with 6, 7, 8. Right now, depending on some people that are kind of part time or whatever. And we're also exploring- So I'm actually headed out, this is my first time or my second time during the pandemic traveling internationally. So, I'm actually going to head over to the Philippines and Chris Natterer, who's an engineer on our team, who's in Europe, he's from Germany, he's going to come out there. And Andrea, who came on and started working with us, is out in the Philippines. And she's doing really well and doing really great. So, I'll be able to link up in person. And this is, actually, the first time we've been able to link up in person since the stupid pandemic started. So, we're about to go get a big jam on there. The biggest thing we've been focusing on recently is we've been on a big operational excellence kick. In a full disclosure sort of way, almost all of our success came from breakthrough wins and inventing and intense service focus, like obsession with the customer and intense service focus and occasional blockbuster wins. But we would do something that works really well, and then we would just do it erratically. We wouldn't do it every month. So, there's types of marketing, types of events, types of cool things that we would just do erratically. And we also were very much like people could do whatever they want as long as it's on the mission sort of company. Seriously, we were very liberal. Yeah, at some point, you need to also just do everything you say you're going to do. So recently, we've been building that. Actually, what we've been working on in August, which is really, really cool, we built an internal agreements tracker, where anytime somebody says they're going to do something for anybody else, they write it down. There's a definition of done in there, what day they're going to do it by, who they're accountable to. And we're aiming for a 100% unbroken agreements rate. Unbroken doesn't mean shipped because you can renegotiate, things go long. But what happens is, it can't be the day of, you're like, oh no, it's not going to happen. You have to be like two days out, you have to be like, I'm going to renegotiate this; this project that we're doing is not going to come out on Friday. You know what I mean? It's Wednesday, it's not coming out on Friday. It's going to take at least another week. Do you know what I mean? And market is renegotiated instead of just letting Friday, pass like, oh, we missed the target. So just proactively renegotiating commitments if they can't be shipped, otherwise hitting them all, never failing silently. And it took a lot of work to install this and a culture of this, and having people detect when everyone is like, hey, I'm going to do that thing for you; oh, shoot, I forgot. We're not doing that anymore. So yeah, we're going for 100% unbroken agreements in August. We're halfway through August, as of our recording date, August 15. It's been a game changer, man. It's been so, so, so good. Then yeah, we're doing areas of responsibility, exactly what people's jobs are and the processes and then be 100% unbroken on those. And then it's just if everyone does exactly what they say they're going to do, and renegotiates when we estimate wrong or whatever, then it's your analysis and your target selection is how far you go, not execution risk. So, we're getting really, really, really tight on execution operations. Because if everyone does what they say they're going to do, and we've got the right resources, the right team and whatnot, then it's your analysis and your target selection that determines how far you go, not do you execute or not? So yeah, that's where we're at. It's been super exciting.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think Ultraworking is in a really interesting spot for the sort of big trends that are changing around both remote work and sort of increasing independence of work, people being their own contractors or setting up individual companies or being creators or whatever. All of that is really, I feel like, will shuffle more people towards some of the tools and systems that you have set up. I started using Ultrawork, at least a few of the tools, when I still had a day job. And I just didn't have, I didn't have some strict timetable like management that was giving me or manager that was giving me very clear timetables and tasks and charts and stuff like that. So, I just kind of went looking for a system that would let me do it for myself and Ultrawork became that through the monthly planning cycles, and I just really liked it and sort of went down the rabbit hole from there into a bunch of the other tools. So, I use Headquarters every week, if not every day. And I've been doing monthly planning for almost two years now, which is really cool.
Sebastian Marshall: That's awesome. That's the goal right there. I love it, man. I'm not paying you to say this. Thank you.
Eric Jorgenson: Sometimes my to do list is just put X number of cycles into Y project because, for lack of a better clear outcome, it's just time in the saddle. I know sometimes that's the solution to certain sorts of problems or workloads. So, I'm curious, actually, I know I've read most of Gateless I think back when you originally wrote that. But you went through this chapter in your life where you just like were cranking out books, and you were a writing machine. And I'm curious about that chapter in your life. What did you learn or become or manifest or unpack when you were kind of doing all that writing and all those books, what looked like in really pretty rapid-
Sebastian Marshall: So, let's come back to that. Let's come back to that because I have very useful short thing for people based on the thing you said about how you put time in the saddle, really, really useful, just like little phrases that are game changers for people. So, when you're shipping a project, basically, what you just said is you put in a process-based target – not I'm going to make three sales, but I'm going to make ten calls. I'm going to make ten calls, I’m going to do them as good as I can, whatever. Or I'm going to put in half an hour, I'm going to edit this piece of creative writing I did for half an hour. And I'm not even necessarily going to ship it at the end. Process based target versus outcome-based target and knowing when to set one or the other is very key. That ties in with another thing about what is good enough for a project, and this is a game changer for people. And I think a lot of times people don't know what they're doing in terms of this dichotomy, scope to time or scope to quality. Scope to time is we're going to ship this feature on Friday. I don't care how good it is, we're putting something out on Friday; we have to put this out on Friday. And scope to quality is we're going to put this out when it's sufficiently good and does these three things really well. So, you can look at some movie makers, some art makers, some video game makers, some of them scope to time and some of them scope to quality, and you can kind of tell the difference. So, the video game company Blizzard and the movie studio Pixar both scope to quality. Pixar had done almost all of Toy Story 2. It was like almost done; it was like 80% done. And they were like this isn't good enough. So, they like threw it away and redid it. You know what I mean? Because they were scoping to quality. Blizzard did a full game, a first person shooter based on StarCraft, they never released because it wasn't fun enough. And they'll make a game take as long as it needs. And both Pixar and Blizzard will spend really a very long time on it. Whereas Electronic Arts make those sports games, NFL game, NBA game, I don't know, I don't play them. But they make those. They come out every single year right before the season's going to start with the new player rosters. And it's coming out no matter what on that day. So, I think it's very, very useful for people to decide are they scoping to time or are they scoping to quality? Are they going to put this feature out when it's perfect, or are they going to put this feature out on Friday? So paradoxically and counterintuitively, when you're scoping to quality, processed based targets of putting in time is very helpful. Paradoxically, when you're scoping to quality, I will put this out when it's done, then putting time in the saddle is usually the correct way to do it. If you're scoping to time, where I need to put this thing out, then you want to put the deliverables, like hey, it's Tuesday, we're putting the thing out on Friday. We need to put out 1/3 of it tomorrow, 1/3 of it on Thursday, and then finish it on Friday. So, you need to scope to the outcomes in a work session to hit the time. When it's just quality, I'm going to put this out when it's excellent, that's saying I'm going to put in six cycles, six work cycles on this. I'm just going to put in four hours on this, whatever.
Eric Jorgenson: That's definitely how I think about the books. I mean, scope to quality is not a phrase I had used, but I thought of it like craftsmanship comes from ample time. Time is irrelevant. It takes the time that it takes to reach a certain level of quality of excellence, especially for things that you publish, like a book that just basically live on forever in their shipped state of quality. It is very different than a course or a piece of software or something like that. I think that's awesome. And I definitely shift even in sub projects sort of between scope to time or scope to quality. But when you're- Yeah, it is helpful to have those chunks of time and know, especially if it's a really big scope to quality project, that you can watch yourself make progress through numbers of hours and give yourself the dopamine for finishing the days to do even though you're only 1% more through the task as a result of that day.
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, the project management and the setup on scope to quality and scope to time projects, it doesn't look radically different. You're going to put things in an order and watch them and make sure they're moving along. But they actually are quite different. A lot of times with scope to quality, you're searching for an aesthetic or a theory that is capable of being the highest caliber and quality early, and that's a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and a lot of discussions and a lot of experimentation. And it's like if you're making a really- think about Tesla, they put out the cybertruck, like what a weird, cool thing. You’ve seen the cybertruck? Like, it is this crazy futuristic- this thing’s nuts. I guarantee that wasn't the first rendition they did in the drawing pad. You know what I mean? They must have been looking at all kinds of sci fi and spaceships and all kinds of stuff and drawing all kinds of stuff. And so, their deliverable wasn't presumably drawing by Friday, but it's like we're not going to consider making a truck unless it's really uniquely badass and special and captures our ethos and captures a segment of the market and captures people's imagination that it otherwise wouldn't. And I would guess, you can say, “And we want to roll that out nine months from now or at the next conference” or whatever. Do you know what I mean? You can have a time component on quality things as like an outer bound. Sure. It's not like they're exclusive. But they wouldn't just put out any truck. If they had a garbage Chevy truck looking, very generic truck, but it's electric, they wouldn't have put it out at all.
Eric Jorgenson: And actually, now that you mention it, that's an interesting comparison. Also in the Blizzard EA comparison, like Ford was EA and Tesla was Blizzard. Ford put out a new model a year, every year with some minor changes. And Tesla’s like, we just shipped the best car we can, and whenever we can update it and make it better, we do. So that's another interesting comparison. Okay, so you have, changing tack a little bit, you've lived all over the world, right? I feel like last time we told you were somewhere in the Pacific?
Sebastian Marshall: I don't know when the last time we talked was, but sure. Yes, sure. When I was 19, one of my dreams was to go to every country in the world. And this was like a different- People are probably listening to this now like I was so hokey. Like, this was really cool. This was really cool two decades ago, everybody. This is like- two decades ago, it was still kind of hard to do.
Eric Jorgenson: It was before Instagram travel blogs.
Sebastian Marshall: Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I'm 38 now. So, you know something I realized, by the way, it's a wild thing. I'm from the last generation of people that traveled without always on 3G International. Last. It'll never happen again. Even if you decide not to bring your phone, your bus driver from the Cambodian border to the town is going to have a smartphone with 3G internet. Do you know what I mean? I'm the last generation of people that had paper maps and didn't know where the hell you were going. If you get lost, you just figure it out. It's kind of dangerous. Like the last generation, not me but everybody that did that. So, the internet was just good enough that you could look up all this stuff. So you got Google Maps, but you didn't have Google Maps on your phone. So that was the last generation. So, there was a certain mystery and a novelty to it. Yeah, as I got a little older, I realized that every country in the world kind of doesn't matter. This was like a vein kind of arbitrary thing, like passport stamps. There are different provinces of China, heck, there's different parts of the United States, I would say, that are more different than Belgium and France. Do you know what I mean? But they happen to be different countries because there's a line there and whatever. So yeah, and I wasn't interested in passport stamps. I really liked seeing how people live in different places and really just immersing myself in different cultures. So I was somewhere where like I didn't really think it was worth going somewhere for less than a few weeks usually. You know what I mean? And ideally, two or three months and just kind of slowly rotating through. I’d swing through somewhere on the way to somewhere else and check it out, sure. By and large, I'd like to post up in a usually a middle class, often a lower middle class and safe places neighborhood. Wealthy, fancy places are like the same everywhere. You know what I mean? They have a little bit of local flavor. If you're in a wealthy place in the Middle East, they'll serve dates, and if you're in a wealthy place in an East Asian country, they’ll have pouerti, but it's like the same. Wealthy, high end design’s the same everywhere. So it's a monoculture of sorts. Whereas the lower middle class neighborhoods in different places, lower middle class Turkish neighborhood and a lower middle class Mongolian neighborhood are quite different. And people live quite differently. And it's quite interesting to see how people live.
Eric Jorgenson: Awesome. Were you working the whole time? Or were you just kind of traveling and seeing the world and being present where you were?
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, I was lucky. I've been a high earner during various years of my life and did very well for myself. And I was always super frugal. Just spending money never really appealed to me on a personal level. I like having money so I could do projects. And now it's like, at Ultraworking, I was talking with our CTO the other day, if I had x millions of dollars in my personal bank that I couldn't put into the company, and I couldn't secondary stuff like hire more personal assistants and stuff like that, just personal consumption, I wouldn't live any differently. Do you know what I mean? I would do whatever, more advanced expensive medicine stuff. Besides that, I need clean food, a place that’s not too loud, good internet, good tools. That's all I need. So, I was able to be doing high earning periods and then just kind of mess around and do whatever. I'd been working in consulting, and I was a put a lot of hours in guy when I'm not in a put in no hours sort of thing. I'd been like doing, I don't know, 60, 70 hours of consulting every week. And I realized, I'm like, yeah, I was tightening the screws on stuff that already existed. I was coming in and optimizing stuff that already existed. And it was great. I like the people I worked with. I like the work that I did. It was totally fine. But I was kind of like the world's not going to be any different as a result of me doing this. You come in, you check out some process or whatever. And like, why don't we turn this up here and here and here and here. And like it does, it's more efficient, whatever. That's great work. And I think I did good work. But I said I really want to make a difference and make the world run just a little bit better because I was here. So, I soft limited my consulting to 20 hours a week. Soft limited because I didn't bill hourly, I billed by projects. So, I had to kind of estimate. I self-limited I'm only going to do 20 hours of consulting a week. And that's when I started doing writing projects and charity stuff. I was nonprofit executive director, volunteer executive director of a nonprofit for a number of years, education projects, science projects, collaborations with people, really cool stuff. But you know what the crazy thing is? When you artificially limit the amount of hours you put in, my income went down but not as much as I expected. So, somebody would be like, “Hey, Sebastian, I heard from so and so that you did a good job on this and that. Would you do that?” I'm like, “Yeah, sorry, I'm not available right now. You're probably going to need that before March. And I think I'm booked up to March.” It's like, “Yeah, what if we triple your rates?” And I'm like, shit, I wasn't charging enough. So, my rates just went up really quickly. Just by reducing supply and if the demand was the same, yeah, I guess basic economics predicts this, but I didn't anticipate this in advance. So, my rates went up. And I earned a little bit less, but not much less. And I had all this time to spend on these things that were really meaningful to me, and eventually I went and started Ultrawork and that's what I do now.
Eric Jorgenson: What year was that that you started Ultraworking?
Sebastian Marshall: This is a surprisingly interesting question. Because we grabbed the URL and said we should do something in this space I want to say in something like December 2016. But we didn't start-start until like 2018. At the end of 2018. Kai and I had other jobs and other things going on.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it seems like, well, it seemed a little bit like it emerged from this epic writing sprint that you did. And I want to kind of go back to that question of what were you like going into and coming out of that sort of big writing thing? Did that help you codify ideas? Did it change things? Did it enlighten you? That feels like a really interesting experiment. I'm just curious sort of how that felt from the inside.
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah, I went through two primary, probably other ones, but let's say two primary writing eras in my life. The first one was, I remember one day, I said, I really like writing and I'd like to do it. And this is back when blogging was cool, and the internet was cool and social media wasn't a thing yet. Or maybe proto early social media but as a modern- wasn't a thing. So back then, blogs were really cool. And there's like the blogosphere, and people had blog roles, blog link each other, and whatever, it's like a different world. There's maybe some young guy, some young gal listening to this, who's like, what are they talking about? I've got my TikTok thing where it's just beaming insanity into my eyes and just destroying my neocortex. I don't know, these blogosphere blogs. But back then, yeah, it was a little bit different. But I blogged. I wrote a blog post every single day for, I don't know, two, three years in a row, something like that. So, I just did a few years in a row, I'm going to write something every single day, and some of them were good. And so, you just get some incremental improvement. There's no targeted direction. There was nothing to it. There was no whatever. And I think a lot of the quality was more miss than hit in retrospect, but it hit enough, and it was always decent. I was trying to make interesting stuff. Well, okay, so I said, I did enough of that. Let me think about this. Took some time away from it. And I said, what would me as a really, really good writer look like? And I really, really, really sat and thought about it. Like what would me as a leveled-up writer look like where I was doing really, really, really special, really, really good work. And I went and I studied great writing. And I went and I looked at really some of the classics in writing. My favorite book of literary criticism is On the Sublime by Longinus, 300 AD work, looking at what great writing is. And there's modern versions of that and reading a lot of authors. I also studied the mechanics of writing a lot. There's a great chapter in a book – I hate the title – the title is Extreme Productivity by Bob Posen. He's a Harvard professor and a finance guy and a lawyer and does a bunch of stuff. Yeah, he has a chapter on writing and writing mechanics. It's extremely valuable, extremely, extremely valuable, where he says to break writing into different stages of brainstorming, outlining, writing, and editing as separate stages. I also had research, so I had a fifth stage, and you don't separate them. So, I always recommend that chapter, it is like chapter six or seven of that book, to people that want to become a mechanic's writer that don't rely on inspiration. So, I retrained myself to write in that style from an inspiration writer, and I also studied the poetics and really tried to level up on it. After that, I committed to writing an approximately 6000 word essay, some of them are shorter, some of them are longer, every single week. And I did this, again, every single week for two or three years, which was about right for me. And what I did before I started on this, and this is something I definitely recommend to any person that's already busy with creative- that wants to get a creative project thing going in their life. If someone's really young, if there's any 18-year-olds listening, maybe just get going, because just put something out there and see what happens. But someone's got established, their own business, they got a career, whatever. I built a backlog of I forget whether it was six issues or ten issues. I had a backlog of six essays before I put the first one out. So that meant that I didn't have to write one a week to publish one a week. I had to write six in six weeks before the backlog ran out. And I tried to do one a week, but, hey, if there's a great opportunity or something happens, and then my backlog gets down to four, and I would just try to fill it back up to six and sometimes even a little more to get even more ahead of schedule. And so, I was always six weeks ahead of schedule. I had a friend that worked at Apple, and at least some years ago, I think they were on the Apple iPhone 3 maybe. He said in the lab right now, they have the iPhone 5. So Apple is always multiple iPhones ahead. You know what I mean? They're not like two months away from the next iPhone version number, like oh, what are we going to do guys? We got to move. So having a backlog if you want to be on a production schedule-
Eric Jorgenson: This is back to that example you gave about the term paper.
Sebastian Marshall: Well, I mean, so you avoid that. But I mean, here's the thing, the term paper thing is fine to do acutely, but not chronically. Chronically that will ruin your life. You know what I mean? So, the term paper thing, let's put ourselves under massive stress to ship something, that's a great idea. That's a great idea to do occasionally to learn about yourself or because a big opportunity comes up or hey, it's a crisis, just sack up and deal with it. But you don't want to acutely be in a crisis every freaking Thursday when your essay is coming out. So, yeah, I built the backlog. To the question of how did it affect me and influence me, reality’s really interesting, and it's really complex. I think that's the biggest thing I got from it. I know that's not going to be very useful for anybody else listening. But just getting an appreciation for all the nuances and depth and intensity of reality and kind of clarifying where you stand on some things, as well. So, you asked about that, and it certainly did. But as well as just getting an understanding because when you try to explain why something happens, like why did World War I happen? You know what I mean? You actually try to write it out, not give the well, nationalism and blah, blah, blah. And then there was the Belgium, then the Treaty and the mobilization. It's really, really complex. It's really, really complex why World War I started. And why did it start then and not earlier or later? Do you know what I mean? And why did it go the full intensity it did? And why did Turkey get in? Winston Churchill, by the way, the reason Turkey got in is Winston Churchill, who was the Lord of the Admiralty, he confiscated two Turkish battleships that they had paid England and fully paid. These battleships, World War I broke out, they said, we need them in the war effort. They confiscated them. And they really insulted the Turks as well. He didn't say we'll pay for them. We're so sorry, whatever. He's like, we don't know if we'll pay you. Her Majesty's Government will follow up with you. Then they declared war on England. And then that brought down the Ottoman Empire. So not a good move. But super, super complex. And you look at that, and the person, the person like Churchill and the Turkish envoys, the different factions in Turkey, and blah, blah, blah. So, getting an appreciation for the complexity and the kind of hidden levers of reality. When people try to transmit lessons, they try to transmit simple, timeless lessons because those can be transmitted. You could like, okay, here's how to focus on something, here's how to do service, here's what great operations look like. But when you actually get into it in any sort of business, there's thousands of levers. We were analyzing recently, we think there's probably something like 7000 nodes. If we were to graph everything happens in Ultrawork, it's probably like 7000 nodes on a graph of interactions. We’ve been doing some systems maps and stuff internally to improve some stuff. There's probably like 7000 little individual interactions of this API call at this time or this analytics getting stored there and such like that, to that granular level. And reality has a lot of depth and a lot of nuance. And I feel like a lot of people don't engage with that. I feel like CEOs engage with that. But I think the writing was really me engaging with and getting exposure to the nuances of whatever, like the Russian Civil War, like George Washington on Braddock's expedition and why they got the hell kicked out of them. I feel like that's the biggest thing is it gave me an appreciation for all the complexity and depth of reality.
Eric Jorgenson: It's so funny, in my episode with Taylor Pearson, he said something very similar that has always stuck with me that I think is an original Taylorism. He always says, “Reality has a surprising amount of detail.” And that's like his path there was always through studying financial crises and the finance systems and why they're necessary, all of these things that you just keep unpacking nuance and nuance and nuance. And you find that if you really, really want to understand something, it requires understanding a shocking number of details of almost anything, and you can go down all those rabbit holes. That is an obvious but I think profound point that gives you empathy over anybody who's trying to accomplish anything because trying to accomplish anything is hard. And you have to really have a lot of mastery to do anything with high intention and have it be successful because of all those details.
Sebastian Marshall: What's crazy to me and what's terrifying to me – it's crazy, and it's terrifying. So I think almost all of the story I'm about to say is public knowledge. So, I'm not sharing no private knowledge. We launched Clockwork nutrition on Product Hunt. Product Hunt is a great website where you can discover new things, really cool. And Ryan Hoover is the founder of Product Hunt, a really admirable guy, really amazing guy. He commented on it, like, “Oh, hey, this looks really cool. This is neat,” something like that. And at first, we thought like, okay, it's his site, he's just going and commenting on things. We looked, he actually had only commented on like three things in the last like months. I mean, he hadn't been active. So I shot him an email, and I was like, “Hey, do you want to try out Clockwork nutrition? We'll do it on the house. No obligation. You can say you hate it. If you'd like it, I'd be delighted if you say like it. If you don't- You don't even have to do anything, really no strings attached. You are just a guy I like. I use Product Hunt. It’s been great for us, whatever.” So he did. We set him up. We hooked him up. It cost us the cost of goods sold on that. So cost us some hundreds of dollars. But he did it and then he tweeted out that he liked it. And that was really neat. It's kind of funny. When you see the world mathematically, you see the math behind everything, even if something's primarily like social and appreciative and stuff like that. So, it's like I just appreciate him, and I'm just so grateful to him. But also mathematically, tens of thousands of dollars- And I got to meet and socialize with this guy who's a really admirable guy, really amazing guy. Well, here's the thing. I might have not noticed that. That was one email, one one-hour call, one judgment call. And then I asked a couple of team members to set up the ops around that and to waive the fees and whatnot. And okay, that's a one off thing that, again, noticing something, which takes one second of noticing, following up, which takes an email, which took three minutes, then a one hour phone call and a one hour follow up, the team handled the rest of it. Well, here's what scares me. I think there's things like that all over the place, first. Second, I think there's operational and systemic things where you change from a push system to a pull system on something or you change a little bit how you do project management or a little bit about how you do design or maybe the whole magic behind Amazon was their press release style thing where they have to write a press release before product and how that subtly shapes the whole product development process. I'm nearly certain – I am certain – that in a lot of organizations, including ours, there are little things that you flip one switch, where you implement one thing, and the magnitudes are just so much higher. So, I'm trying to simultaneously do a really, really good job on the day to day and a really, really good job of keeping the big picture in mind and making amazing things for customers, getting great new people to hear about us and become customers and make the best team in the world and give them training development. And I'm also just trying to keep my eyes out for there's just random magic that on the same level of effort, we're going to get double to an order of magnitude more results, if we just flip this one switch or connect this one thing. And it's inspiring, but it's also terrifying. It's like, what are we missing? There must be more things like this. And how many of these are we overlooking? And how many of these do we flip? And history gives you a bunch of examples and analogs of people doing a very interesting thing. It used to be that in the military, you'd always have the rear of your military. And then you have the front. In the front, the vanguard was really good. And the rear guard was, sometimes the rear guard itself was okay, but sometimes not. The rear, mostly not. And your flanks, which were okay, but not the best. People right in the flanks were okay, and they tried to flank them. Well, Napoleon was like, hey, forget that, we're not going to have a front or back. Any of the four sides of our square like military can become the front. We could just change direction without having the front reorient around. That's one of the reasons they were so mobile. So, he put good enough troops that were vanguard quality on all four of the sides of every square of his military. So, they could just change direction without a long hike around and then reassembling. And you couldn't really flank them. You know what I mean? It wasn't that the good guys in the front aren’t there if you got on their flank. They’d just turn. And at the west, you're fighting the west side, it is now the front of the thing. And those guys are also really good. So, Napoleon redistributed his best guys from the front to a little bit on the side, a little bit the back and made it so that anybody who's comfortable communicating and leading of what's our orientation, direction on west, east, north, or south. And then it's like, okay, cool. When we're going north, you're in the vanguard. When we're going west, you're the flank. When we're going south, you’re the rear guard. Done. Huge maneuverability. And it's like you change that, that was one of the things that made them win so many of the battles in the Napoleonic Wars. Just that made them so much faster and so much better. And you couldn't really surprise them that badly and roll them up. And they could surprise you. They could just turn and start screwing you up even if you flanked them, like oh, we got an edge. No, you don't. So that little difference, which is kind of simple, but it was against 1000 years of military doctrine at that point.
Eric Jorgenson: That's amazing. That's such a simple thing. I haven't heard that story before. It sounds like my- a bunch of my pseudo military education was just like reading Ender's Game, because Orson Scott Card was pretty well read in that, and it is eerily similar. I know it's fiction, but it's just like one or two really simple, hey, I'm going to have a much more flexible, slightly differently subdivided army, and we're going to change our orientation. Very simple things well applied can be incredibly impactful on your business and your military, your life. I like the hunt for those too because those are cheap. They're hard to find.
Sebastian Marshall: Hard to find. The expense is in finding them. And then sometimes it's a lot of work to install them and get people, if they're counterintuitive, get people comfortable with a new way of doing things.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, social cost is probably the main-
Sebastian Marshall: That's right. And you got to give it more time than you think.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, yeah. And the bigger the organization, the more time. I have an idea to run by you that I would just kind of like your reaction on and just a closing question for you as we kind of wind down. Naval has this idea. I think he tweeted it. And it's definitely open to interpretation. I'm going to guess you have a different take, and I'm just kind of interested to hear your riff on it, but it always stuck with me. Self-measurement is self-punishment. Agree or disagree?
Sebastian Marshall: What's the context?
Eric Jorgenson: A tweet. So not a lot of context. But as somebody who has both self-measured and aggressively not, I think it's an interesting thing. I mean, you have done chapters, it sounds like, of both. I'm just curious.
Sebastian Marshall: Yeah. So, to get my linguistics hat on, you could mean measure a couple of different ways. Like, are you measuring yourself against a standard, or are you just taking data snapshots? And punishment sounds negative at first, but Nietzsche has this famous thing, whoever wants to jubilate up to the heavens must be prepared for grief unto death. Do you know what I mean? Because you will see that you fall short when you measure, and you will see all the places that you screwed up, and it will illuminate those. So, there might be a little bit of a hidden counterintuitive wisdom, where he's like, the self-punishment is not necessarily bad. I don't know exactly what he meant. I doubt that, but maybe. My favorite quote was written by the greatest swordsman in Japanese history, Miyamoto Musashi. He wrote his deathbed testimony, it's called the Dokkodo. And it's just a bunch of one sentence principles. I think it's number three and number four, it's my favorite quote of all time. “Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.” “Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.” So when I take measurements, this is something that I have to constantly remind myself of because I know I'm different than other people. And sometimes I ignore it to my own peril. I don't compare myself to other people. And I don't feel really bad when something doesn't go the way I want it to go if I just like did what I could. Sometimes somebody screws something up and they are like I hate myself. And I'm just kind of like, the question I always ask myself is at the skill level and knowledge level I had when I made those decisions and executed that way, could I have known better? If the answer was no, I don't feel bad at all, zero. And anything short of being really negligent, I'm like data, let's fix it. So, for me, it's kind of like if you track how much iron you're pumping in the gym, that measurement, it's not, oh, I'm a strong man. Oh, no, today, I'm a weak man. It's just like, okay, whatever. It's just data. Let's make those weights go up. And let's keep other data on, like make sure we're healthy and not get injured. So tentatively to a colloquial definition, I tend to disagree. But that worries me because Naval is such a smart guy. So, whenever somebody is so smart and says something that I don't agree with, I'm very willing to learn more and explore maybe he's onto something there, maybe he means something a little subtle.
Eric Jorgenson: He's got enough of a philosophical bend that sometimes he's very much optimizing for happiness or state of mind or something. And I imagine this to come from the sort of the philosophical with inner peace as much more the goal than an operating principle within a company. Though, to your point, there are times when that observation that I am or am not falling short and the need for a feedback loop is a really important. So, I just think it's interesting to drop that observation into the middle of a bunch of people who are obsessively measuring everything. I think it's pretty interesting. It is probably at least sometimes the basis for self-punishment. But it doesn't have to be, to your point. And I've heard you interviewed a bunch of times where you are really thoughtful, I think, about oh, that experiment did not go as intended, or I failed, but that's okay, and I'll try something different, or I'll try something again.
Sebastian Marshall: The other thing is I think there's sometimes in life, I'm a very big believer in this, where you want to do something for a qualitative or philosophical reason. You think it's the right thing to do. You're like, I'm doing this, and I don't care what the numbers show or the data shows, I'm like philosophically committed or aesthetically committed to this. And I'm very willing to do that. And sometimes be like, hey, let's track, and let's measure. I'm like, no, we're doing this the artistic way. And I'm very strong. You could force me to give my case and analysis and logic as to why it might pay off. But you can't talk me out of this. I'm doing it because it's really good. So, there's people that study all the industry trends in music and then make a song that sounds like all of them. And there's people that are like, I'm doing this weird thing, and people might not like it, and they persist for years, and they're the ones that create trends. So, I think there is something to be said about if you're doing something really unique or something special to you, that maybe you could use data to refine your approach, but maybe you don't want to and you want to be on more of a qualitative basis. And that might even be on just a feeling or an intuition. I'm not against perception and intuition. I'm actually very big believers in those as well. So, I think you need to know what's the right tool for the job, what's called for in the situation, and what you want.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's something I admire about you actually. I think you are definitely an outlier in the precision and sort of effort that you put into some of the quantitative measurements, but it does not blind you to the impact of intangibles or unmeasurables or whatever. That seems to almost get equal weight with you even though you take the quantitative to an extreme. And something else, I forgot about this until just now, that you stuck in my brain years ago, I can't even remember how long it was. I think you're talking about your monthly planning and like you pick a theme or a topic or a discipline, you have a tagline for a month or some period of time that you stick with. And I think for some of the particularly extreme ones, you even talked about altering your physical appearance or your environment to-
Sebastian Marshall: Sure, get a haircut or change your furniture around a little bit or put a painting up, absolutely.
Eric Jorgenson: To reinforce that theme. I think this one, the one that I remember, I think you were in a hardcore operational output mode and you like shaved your head. And you were like, every morning when I look in the mirror, oh, yeah, I'm in beast mode, here we go, no extraneous anything.
Sebastian Marshall: You could go get more ornamental clothing, or you could go dress a little more like old school mechanic in overalls style. Yeah, changing your physical appearance, you look different in the mirror, is a great way when you're doing a discontinuous break, and you want to have a bit of an identity shift or be deep on something. Yeah, it's really, really good and cheap to do that. So yeah, I'll do that. To the quantitative qualitative point, I mean, if I had to choose between all my quantitative skills and qualitative skills, I’d choose the qualitative skills. You know what I mean? It's like, where do I think the world's going? What do people need? How do we do something really special? You can put rubrics and frameworks and stuff around these a little bit to help you think about them. But at the end of the day, it's very qualitative. But then, around the edges, you put down some kind of- there's a reason they have timetables at train stations, and you know when the train’s going to leave, and the train doesn't leave when the conductor feels like it should leave. There's a reason they do that, which is that it works better. So, you do that stuff, too. So that- I have this beautiful idea, we'll put metal rails on the ground with wooden ties and steam engine machines to carry people and livestock and materials from city to city. And then it's like, okay, let's put together a timetable of how often this magical thing happens. Steam engine, it is amazing, and then the timetables and maintenance schedules and stuff like that. And the same ones for your personal stuff, monthly planning, habits and stuff, and maybe some time tracking if you want to optimize that so that you can make all the magic happen. But yeah, I mean, you couldn't have derived, I presume, the steam engine from a pure quantitative, certainly not at that time. You know what I mean? A lot of the magic comes from qualitative. But then yeah, you go quantitative objective and whatever to make things actually happen reliably and to a higher standard and magnitude.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that's a pattern over and over again, I think I was reading this in the beginning of Infinity, like the theory almost always, which in this analogy is qualitative, almost always predates, comes before the invention. And then the quantitative comes in to sort of either optimize or explain the invention that sprung from the theory that the tanker sort of made happen. So last question here, and take your time with it, what is the mental model or heuristic that you find yourself applying the most often?
Sebastian Marshall: The most often. I like to come back to service focus over and over and over and over again. And I try to really pleasantly, politely, lovingly drill this into our team. A lot of people when they do things, they're doing the thing because they said they're doing the thing or they're getting paid to do the thing or whatever. At the end of the day, this needs to serve people in some way. And that person might be yourself. So, some people, it's funny, if you're in a good workout practice, I do yoga twice a week one on one, virtually over the videoconferencing. I'm not like I have to do yoga. I'm like, okay, cool, it's yoga, I like it, it's part of my routine. But sometimes when you're first getting into something, you are like, oh, man, maybe I should make myself do yoga or whatever, maybe make myself go to the gym. Just reminding yourself, it's not like I have to go to the gym. It's like, hey, cool, I'm going, I'm building up my muscles, I'm building up my longevity, I'm going to feel good afterwards. And coming back to why you were doing things and then optimizing those things. Or optimizing – I don't think about optimizing all the time, it's just what we are talking about today. Doing things for that reason. Good writers versus bad writers, good writers are thinking about the audience. How do I make this useful for the audience? What does the audience need to know? People that write standard operating procedures, there's like two types of operating procedures. There's ones that are written by people that are really empathetic and thoughtful, that are like, all right, a new person is looking at this like, hey, and I'm going to show a little two minute explainer video on this one because it's really tricky. Like hey, this is tricky. Don't sweat it, but make sure you click this button, but not that button. You'll hit X and it'll clear all your work. It's like an all bank system. You know what I mean? There's really thoughtful, empathetic people that write SOPs, and they're great. And there's SOPs that are freaking garbage. You know what I mean? So, coming back over and over and over again, like I have to write an SOP for this thing. It's going to be terrible. If you're like another human is going to use this, and I'm trying to make their life easy, I'm trying to connect with them. I can put a couple little jokes in there. I can make it stylish a little bit. I could put a fun quote in there. When you remember that the vast majority of things you do you're doing for somebody else. Do you know what I mean? Or for yourself, there's a reason you're doing things and coming back to what is that reason and making sure I hit that reason, not do the stuff that's on the to do list. That's probably the most important one for me, service focus.
Eric Jorgenson: I like that a lot. And I had never considered it in the service of your future self. But I think that's super, super important. And I like it. Thank you for that answer and for taking your time with it.
Sebastian Marshall: What's yours? Maybe you've talked about it in a past podcast that I haven't heard. What's yours?
Eric Jorgenson: The thing, probably in this chapter of life, it is leverage. I'm, I think, making the transition from how do I squeeze my fruit the hardest to get the most juice out of it to how do I best sort of gather and apply the resources that I have around me to increase my impact and achieve the desired outcome for me and the people around me. And I think that also, it is an intense and hard work mode, but it is a really good mix to me of the judgment that we talked about, but the intensity of the sort of individual contributor work period. But it sets up this sort of life mode where you can still be really high impact without being incredibly optimized from a productivity perspective.
Sebastian Marshall: From the other meaning of productivity, I think.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I believe that after a chapter of this, I will be able to sort of have equivalent or increasing or ever-increasing sort of compounding impact and outcomes without having to scale effort linearly and continue to do that or even sustain it.
Sebastian Marshall: Well, because you can't. There's 168 hours a week, because yeah, once you- and it is super valuable. A lot of the things that we do are to help individuals scale up their performance. And that's really needed when you're in your 20s, and you're getting your game going. And then, increasingly we bring out stuff like Clockwork of like, hey, we'll just eliminate this whole area, all nutrition, all food prep, all planning. We roll out stuff like that. That's more senior people like that one.
Eric Jorgenson: Clockwork is an awesome idea. I was fiddling with this idea also because I had been through, the previous year, I had been through the like, all right, I'm going to hire a trainer who's going to program my meals down to the calorie and all the workouts and all the everything. I was like okay, I understand this architecture now. And so, I was doing it actually, the full stack, for a friend of mine who was obsessively down a rabbit hole about something else but was having some health challenges. And so, I was like, all right, I'll program your meals, I'll do all the shopping, I'll do all this stuff. I'm just going to get it delivered to your house. And I discovered that he would eat the food that was in his house. He would follow the path of least resistance. So, if you could get the right food into his house, he would eat healthy and be good and be happy and more productive. So, I was messing with how to productize this. And then I saw Clockwork nutrition come out with a very different approach. But it was so interesting. I was like this is brilliant.
Sebastian Marshall: Oh, it's the same. No, no, it's literally the same. It's just we just use meal delivery services instead of- which is only possible technologically recently.
Eric Jorgenson: Now, yeah. Which makes it an even better product. But yeah, I think I need to give it a try. I actually haven't had the right life circumstance to try it. Yeah, I think it's so cool.
Sebastian Marshall: Happy to have you on there. But I love where you're going because that is the iteration is you start by not maximizing but doing really well on your individual performance. Then when you have some resources, you get rid of some domains. Again, you get some help, whether that's a personal trainer or medical or an assistant or whatever. And then if you really want to have impact, it's teams and it's systems, and to some extent, it is a lot of qualitative and theory, and the job becomes a lot of thinking and good judgment and relationships and really thinking about and designing things. And it's very interesting how that shifts over time. So yeah, that's really cool. Hey, let's do this again some time. This was great. Thank you for running me down and saying Sebastian, you have to be on the show. This is amazing. So thank you. Thank you so much, Eric. This was great.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I'm like I said, I'm a big fan. I'm excited to sort of introduce you and Ultraworking to a bunch of other people that I hope get as much value out of it as I have, especially in the world of working indie, it really helps to have some rails and some frameworks, and you guys have put a ton of work into these. I've always found them really helpful. And it's good to get to know a little bit more about the mind behind the software.
Sebastian Marshall: Hey, much appreciated, man. Thank you so much. And the feeling is very mutual. We got to do it again some time. Appreciate it.
Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you for listening. If you've liked this episode, you will also love number 15 with David Perell, which we mentioned in that episode. I also mentioned episode number 42 with Taylor Pearson, a similar sort of approach, fascinating guy, a lot of interesting mental model overlap there. And number 38 with Robert Hayes and Chris Ho of Athena, also really about increasing your impact, increasing the output that you can have. All great episodes that I enjoy revisiting myself, as I learned a lot from them. For a free way to support the show, please leave a quick review or text this episode to a friend or coworker you think would enjoy it. As always, thank you for listening.