DHH: The decisions in our control
The Basecamp and HEY co-founder, Le Mans champion, and Shopify board member explores craft, clarity, and contrarian thinking
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is one of the most influential technologists in internet history. People, globally, look to him as a role model.
In addition to his entrepreneurial accomplishments, he’s authored several books about calmer workplace cultures. You can learn more about the impact of his contributions on his website and read one of his most popular blog posts, Reconsider.
If you want to give your eyes a break from reading, you can listen to a high definition recording of the conversation on SoundCloud.
Ritika: You’ve lived life experiences that people can only think of in dreams.
You've driven 5,000 kilometers through France.
You've started one of the world's most notable companies that changed the way that people work online.
People learn from you.
I'd love to go back to the very beginning of it all, before any of this unfolded, before it manifested.
What was life like when you were first getting started?
David (DHH): I was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and I lived there until I was 25.
As I was growing up, I always liked computers, so that became a focal point of the hobbies that I had.
I loved video games.
I played a lot of video games.
I thought I was going to be a video game creator at some point.
I tried to learn programming to basically make computer games, and I failed a bunch of times.
I think it took four times, trying to learn programming over the years until it finally clicked for me.
The real opening for me was the internet. Just as I was coming through high school and trying to figure out what I wanted to do and what I wanted to pursue, the internet was kind of blowing up.
I thought this was just amazing.
I was into video games, as I said, and before I could go on the journey of thinking about creating them, I thought, well, let me just write about them. So I did video game journalism for quite a number of years. The internet was just a perfect position for that, because I was still in high school.
No one was really going to give me a column or whatever in a magazine, a printed magazine, but here's the internet, and I can just put whatever I want online.
So that's exactly what I did.
I started a couple of websites and built up the skills of organization.
We had a whole distributed team, actually, back there in, what's this, '96, '97, where we didn't have any funding.
We didn't have any money.
I would go to a video game shop in town and basically walk up to the guy who ran the console division and ask him if I could borrow the games, such that we could review them, so we could write about them, and so could put that stuff online.
That taught me a lot about the constraints. It taught me a lot about organization.
It taught me a lot about remote work.
We were all distributed over the country of Denmark, and I would send out the cds with the games to the different reviewers in different towns. I kind of just got a lot of satisfaction out of building something. There was nothing.
There was not a website.
Then I started working on a website.
All of a sudden, there's a website.
There's a community.
There's readers.
There's writers.
I'm interfacing with publishers.
We started going directly to the people importing the games in Denmark and asking if we could just get the games from them, rather than having to go down to the local shop to borrow them.
I was building up all these skills that are still, today, the main things that I rely on to do the work that I do.
And it all sprung up out of just a passion for video games, and a passion for publishing and making something of my own, and to be in an environment where I could do what I wanted to do with nobody telling me any different.
Ritika: What happened next?
DHH: I took a number of jobs working for technology companies in Copenhagen.
In some ways it felt like, wow! I'm getting paid to do this stuff.
For years, I hadn't gotten paid. We hadn't made any money whatsoever. We'd only spent money trying to publish all these video game reviews and so on, and all of a sudden I'm getting paid, and that feels, oh, that's amazing!
I quickly learned that just having a paycheck was by no means enough.
Working for other people is not inherently a problem. I mean, I've worked with lots of people who I respect or enjoyed working with.
What I had to give up to get that paycheck was not worth it for me.
I was just building up all this ... I mean, it sounds harsh…but I kept thinking, “I don't want to run my company like this. This is a shitty way to run a company. Why are they doing it like this? Can't they see that we, as workers, ended up miserable from their actions, and completely needlessly so. They're not making any more money because they're acting in these ways. And I was just building all this up. ”
Justin: How did you make that chance, ultimately, to branch out on your own and leave the workplace and start your own company?
DHH: It happened sort of slowly.
After I had worked in a number of startups in Denmark, around 2001, everything came crashing down. The dotcom boom turned into a bust, and I saw the writing of the wall in 2001 and thought, you know what? I don't have to stick around for the crater.
So I quit the company I was working for at the moment and thought, let me just go to school for a while.
That seems like a good place to hide out while all this rubble is being sorted through.
So I got into the Copenhagen Business School, and attended a joint program of computer science and business administration. And it says computer science on the label, but it really wasn't computer science.
It was some very introductory courses to computer science that weren't really that deep.
But what it was was information system design. It actually had some great classes on that, and that was something I was really interested in.
I quickly learned that the part of the computer that I was interested in was not the computer science part. I was not fascinated by compilers.
That was just not a topic of interest.
I was really fascinated about building information systems, and building systems in general for actual human beings.
I didn't know at the time, but that was a great foundation that I'm happy that I've gotten out of it.
But towards the end of the three year program, I had already taken up consulting, writing software for clients.
I had connected with Jason Fried, who is now my business partner at Basecamp, and started working with him, which is sort of a roundabout way we got involved. He had a blog he had started in 1999 alongside the company 37signals. It was called Signal v. Noise. I'd been a reader of that blog since '99, and was just a big fan.
And then, in 2001, Jason was trying to learn PHP programming and asked a question on the blog. I was like, wow! This is my moment to give something back. I've gotten so much away from this philosophy of how they were designing things.
The 37Signals website, for example, here's a design company that does design for clients, and the website has no design.
Or it has no graphics, I should say.
It had a lot of design. It had no graphics.
It was a manifest of 37 short, punchy essays on how 37Signals saw business. And I just thought that was fascinating.
Because, especially at the time, everything had flash intros and mouse over animations and all of this graphics, and here's a design company that doesn't do graphics.
What is that?
So I just became a big fan, and I wrote Jason back with a detailed answer to his question about PHP. We started trading emails, and Jason decided it was simply easier to hire me than it was to learn how to program in PHP.
So we started working together.
We'd worked together on a number of client projects and around 2003, we had some trouble dealing with those client projects.
Everything was just managed on email, and as with anything that's just managed on email, eventually it falls apart.
There's got to be a better way.
We're making technology. We know how to program. We know how to design.
Can't we just make a system so it isn't such a mess, so we don't have to lean on email so much?
So that's what we did.
And that was Basecamp.
We started creating Basecamp in the summer of 2003, and I built it alongside going to school, again, with heavy constraints of pursuing my degree and I also liked rollerblading.
I liked to go out with friends.
I'm not just in it for 100 hours a week. So I had all these other things going on, and then I was building Basecamp on the side with Jason and the rest of 37Signals.
So I had about 10 hours a week to make that happen.
It took us just over six months.
We released the first version of Basecamp in February of 2004. During that process, I was also learning a new programming language.
I had just picked up this little known programming language at the time called Ruby. And Ruby, when I picked it up, didn't have a lot of stuff to help you learn how to build web applications or websites.
So I built what was needed to basically just build Basecamp.
That was what became Ruby on Rails, which I then released open source in late 2004.
So I think that's pretty much the trip.
Ritika: Wow. That's amazing!
One of the things you said that was interesting was that you were spending around 10 hours a week working on this.
I wonder if you could shed some light on this kind of work/life philosophy and balance?
DHH: Yeah.
The question I often get, or the accusation, I should rather say, that I often get when I talk about 40 hours a week being enough is, "Yeah, that's fine for you to say now.
Basecamp is this big success, and you don't even have to program Ruby on Rails anymore. There's all these contributors. But I'm sure when you got started you probably worked 100 hours a week, right?"
It's just taken as an assumption that anyone who ends up building something of note, they started out pouring everything that they had, 100% of their mental capacity, into the thing, because otherwise it would be impossible.
So when I say, well, that's not how I did it. That's not how we did it, usually I'm faced with this look of incredulity.
They just cannot believe that that is actually true, that we were building Basecamp on 10 hours a week. And the funny thing about the 10 hours is the reason I know so specifically was that I was billing 37Signals for the time.
This was a consulting project.
The first version of Basecamp was billed at about 385 hours, spread out over the time it took us to build it. So I know in quite specific detail how long it took, because this was how I was paying for my technology.
It's funny to look back at now, but Jason was paying me $15 an hour in early 2000.
This was, obviously, at a time where the dollar was a little bit stronger against the Danish Krone, and I wasn't even getting paid in dollars, right? Because what I wanted most of all, I just wanted some technology.
So he would send me an iPod when that came out, the first iPod. I would get an iBook, one of the first Mac laptops that ran OS10 that was new at the time.
So I'd just get all this stuff that Jason would order, and then he would pay the invoices in that, basically.
I think sometimes origin stories…they get more airbrushed over time. And I'm sure there's some airbrushing involved here, too.
It wasn't just ... So I spent, or I billed 10 hours a week. But I also spent some time above that doing some Ruby programming and so on. So it's not like it was just exactly that.
But it wasn't 100 hours a week. It wasn't even 80 hours a week. And it surely was not even 40 hours a week, because I was going to school full time, and I was doing the things that someone going to college would do, and participate in life, and not just lock me into a room and do nothing else than the pursuit of business or whatever else have you.
And that's what It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work is about.
Push back against this idea that to do great things, or even to do good things, or even to be content doing things, that you have to be completely absorbed in just one activity for however long it takes for that thing to be a success. We try to put out a different ideal, and say, first of all, what are you chasing?
A lot of people are like, well, I have to put all this in because I want to be this enormous thing.
What are your aspirations, and start there.
What are your goals? Why are they the biggest thing ever? Why is that a goal in itself? And maybe if you've set your sights on something that's both more plausible, realistic, and fulfilling in many ways, you'd be better off.
And then once you have those goals packed into a more sustainable place, you can design work practices around that that are healthy, sustainable, maintainable.
And being in technology, I often also get the question, so what's next?
Essentially, when are you going to sell your company, or pursue something else?
Because there's this assumption that no one could keep up the rigor of building a technology company for 20 years and come out on the other side and want more.
Because there's just this stereotype that it is one definition of hell, right?
That it is this death march all the time.
And if that's the image you have in your head that someone is just sleeping under their desk, working 100 hours a week, yeah, of course you'd ask when are you done with that torture regimen?
When are you getting out of that?
But if it's not, then why would you get out of that?
What is it that I'm going to do that's so different than what it is that I'm already doing?
Justin: One of the really interesting things that Ritika and I have experienced as we've been building our business is a lot of times, we've either put things off to the side and come back to them months later, or run into these delays.
And when we did, we often found that we came up with better ideas for ways to do what we wanted to do that got us father along than if we had just been sitting there, working on them the entire time tirelessly.
DHH: A hundred percent.
Taking breaks, recharging, that's where the big leaps of productivity are hidden.
And it's so funny, too, because there's lots of people in technology who believe the heroic myths, for example, of the 10x programmer, that some programmers and some people in general are just 10 times as productive as other people.
How do you think that is? Do you think it's because they type faster?
That they type 10 times as quickly as another programmer, that that's how they're so much quicker?
Of course it's not.
It's because they have better insights. They have better ideas. They think more clearly.
They have insights that are leaps, not just strolls, right?
And to get those insights, you have to be in a special place, and that place is well rested, well nourished, well slept, well situated.
At least that's my belief, that there's where I got my great insights from.
It was not when I had worked all night, which I've done several times in my career.
The ideas that I would get at the end of an all nighter were usually the ideas that I would then have to spend another three days cleaning up afterwards, because it would be a total mess.
Ritika: I ask you this question from the perspective of someone who doesn't game, who's fascinated with gaming, but what are some things that you learned as a gamer that you have carried through to adopt these philosophies?
DHH: That's a great question. I have three boys.
That has forced me, or invited me, to take a look at parenting as a general concept, and to think about what were the things that worked for me when I was a kid?
And how do I want to put those same opportunities in front of my kids?
One of the answers is video games, is play, is focused play. I learned so much from video games. I credit video games with all sorts of things, but the perseverance of getting better at something, leveling up, and sticking with it, and realizing that you have to put in the time. Again, it's not about putting in the 18 hours, although I surely did game for 18 hours some days, I'm sure.
But just that there is this trajectory where you can get better, that video games have this amazing opportunity of especially allowing kids to influence the world in ways that are quite limited for a lot of kids outside of that domain.
Most of the time, most kids don't get to call the shots.
They don't get to decide when to get up in the morning.
They don't get to decide whether or not to go to school most days.
They don't get to decide all sorts of things that they want to decide.
So here's video games offering them a universe where they can make all sorts of choices, authentically, on their own, and learn just how much power is in that.
I took that away from video games.
Ritika: What does “leveling up” mean to you?
DHH: It’s really the pursuit of mastery.
Leveling up your skills, leveling up your capabilities, getting better.
And I think that is the feedback loop that I’m addicted to—of seeing where I’m at, realizing there’s a whole other level, and then figuring out how to get there.
A lot of the time, leveling up is just about widening your field of view.
You start to notice things you didn’t see before.
Like with photography—I got into it maybe fifteen years ago.
At first, I didn’t know what made a photo good. I just had this gut feeling like, “That looks nice.”
But when I really started paying attention, I began learning all these layers: rule of thirds, white balance, focus, ISO, focal length… all these factors that go into how something looks and feels.
You absorb the vocabulary.
You start recognizing what’s going on inside a picture.
You can break it down. You can replicate it. You can improve it.
And I love that.
That process of going from “I don’t know what this is” to “I understand this domain”—that’s something I chase in so many areas: writing, programming, building a business, racing, photography, even something as weirdly specific as indoor air quality systems.
Ritika: Wait—air quality?
DHH: Yeah.
So we built a new house recently. And my wife got sick from formaldehyde poisoning in one of the rooms—because of poor ventilation.
That was shocking to me.
We just built this house… how is it making us sick?
So I dove in.
I started from zero—no knowledge about HVAC systems or VOCs or anything. But I went down the rabbit hole. I read everything I could, talked to experts, learned how to measure air properly, how to understand airflow and filtration.
And I ended up solving it.
More importantly, I leveled up.
That’s the theme that connects all of this for me.
Whether it’s racing, writing code, or figuring out air flow—I’m always following that thread of: how do I get better at this?
And if I hit a plateau? I start looking for new angles. New routes. New ways to keep climbing.
Because when I can feel myself growing, when I can see that I’m objectively better than I was before, there’s just nothing more satisfying than that.
Justin: Changing directions a little bit, one of the major things going on right now for a lot of people who are doing things in Silicon Valley especially, but elsewhere, is this idea of imposter syndrome and self doubt.
I wonder if, going back to when you were consulting and starting out and building your first company, were there ever any moments where it wasn't so clear that you were necessarily going to create this incredibly successful thing?
And how did you deal with those?
DHH: A hundred percent.
When I first started doing programming, I never thought myself as a programmer, or that I was going to do programming. This was sort of just something I had to do to get the things I wanted. And I wanted to publish video games reviews online. So I had to figure out how the ASP and the PHP and the other systems we used back then kind of worked, because it was just such a hassle to constantly have to go to another programmer and ask that person to make the changes I wanted. It would just be more immediate. I would have a more direct influence on the world if I could do these things myself.
So I learned programming as a skill in that regard, not as a pursuit.
And it took a long time, until I fell in love with programming, as it was something I was going to do for the rest of my life. And I just didn't ... I didn't treat it in that way.
I didn't treat it in the way of, oh, I'm learning programming now because I want to get on this path of making something great in programming.
No.
I learned programming because I wanted to build some specific things, and this was just what I needed to do.
Given the fact that I hadn't internalized the idea of being a programmer, I had a very distanced relationship with programming, that I didn't know a bunch of things, and I had to ask people all the time. And I was very inefficient, and very just poor programming.
The funny thing about programming is I tried to learn programming probably about four times before it clicked.
I tried to learn programming at six years old, when I got my first computer and tried to type in a game from the back of a magazine.
Then I tried to learn it again, I think, at about maybe 12 or something?
And then I think I tried again around, like, 15 or so.
These were all failed attempts.
I wanted to learn programming, because I wanted to do some stuff with programming, but I couldn't figure it out.
And I can still remember the things I couldn't understand, which is just a fascinating concept. Like, variables, for example.
And then I can remember other programming techniques like recursion, methods of functions that call themselves. It was just something that I could not wrap my head around. And I have these vivid memories of trying to crack it, of getting my brain to somehow turn the wheels in the way that this would be understandable. And they just wouldn't. And it then took sometimes years where I had to leave it, and not think about it, and then come back to it. And then, the fourth time was when some of it clicked. And then, later on, more of it started clicking faster.
So I've been in those exact shoes, as well.
What I perhaps didn't have was this constant bombardment of imagery and Tweets and people telling me how wonderful and great they already were for me to compare myself against poorly. I think that was one of the wonders of the early internet, that we didn't have those things. I was learning most of my programming from actual books
Ritika: That's interesting you talk about social media, because now you can't escape it.
It's pervasive.
And you're still building, you're achieving new levels of mastery and new areas in education, and social media's such a part of what you do.
How do you strike that balance?
DHH: I have a very ambivalent relationship with social media. I recognize all the ills of it, and I also recognize that there are many goods of it.
But it's also part of a system and a machine that's incredibly unsatisfying and detrimental to people, to societies, to professions.
I think there's all sorts of nasty things in the sense of the addiction that it causes, and I'm not about that.
That's the insidiousness of it, that they're hacking core human functions that it's just lizard brain reacting. And even if you're observing it, and even if you're aware of it, the lizard brain is still acting. You can know that these things are unhealthy.
Justin: One of the things that I learned about you recently is that stoicism is important to you, and it's something that has a large influence in your life.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what its meaning is to you
DHH: The reason I came to like stoicism is because I recognized a lot of my own thoughts in it. I recognized a lot of my own unpolished thoughts and thought patterns, really, not just thoughts, but thought patterns and techniques of how to deal with experiences in the very refined framework that is stoicism. Well, at least comparatively refined to my beta, home grown ideas on these things.
There was just such a revelation to ... Here I am, processing the world in a certain way, thinking, maybe I'm the only one who thinks like this. And then, encountering stoicism and stoic ideas and going like, wow! 2,000 years ago, someone thought in exactly these same ways?
That is amazing.
That recognition of some of the core principles, for example, negative visualization, was something that just went, like, okay. There's clearly some kindred spirit here that if I independently arrived at a very similar technique to one of the stoic core techniques of negative visualization, then let me see what else they have.
I kept pulling on the thread, and kept finding things, and kept finding perspectives and a way to view life in a really grand, yet practical, sense.
So I've been exposed to all sorts of philosophy over the years. Some of it had been sort of mildly interesting, and I've always had a sort of an affinity for reading about that, and how people think.
But what struck me about stoicism was just how utterly practical it was, and that it was derived from the same way and the same challenges of life that 2,000 years ago, they were worried about the same things. They were worried about overwork.
They were worried about what other people thought. They were worried about, essentially, imposter syndrome. They were worried about all the same anxieties and problems that we face today. They were the same. And the human mind, in that regard, hasn't evolved very much. In fact, maybe it's regressed in some regards, that there was a greater focus and attention to try to wrestle with that in productive ways.
When I first started reading books, I read mostly technical books. I've never been big on novels or what have you. I wanted practical tools. So I read a bunch of technical stuff, both in terms of programming and then I read a bunch of business books. Out of maybe the hundred books of more that I read in those two domains, I can count maybe two that I wanted to read again.
Then I found books on stoicism.
I found that here were books that I wanted to read again. Not because I didn't know what they had to say, but because I needed to be reminded about what they had to say. That was a breakthrough in some regard of it's not just about the accumulation of knowledge.
It's about the constant rejuvenation of the ideas that are truly important and that will naturally decay from your present mind if you don't frequently refresh.
Ritika: You speak of leveling up, and that you're still wrestling with stuff, and many of the people listening, they'll look at all of the things that you've achieved, and they want to achieve just one.
They want to write a book.
They want to start a software company.
They want to race. They want to get somewhere racing.
I'd love to learn, what are you wrestling with right now? What is that next phase of leveling up for you?
DHH: One of the great insights I've taken away from learning a lot of different things to a reasonable level of mastery is that the process is quite similar, whether you're learning how to drive a race car, you're learning how to program, or how to write a book, or start a business, or photography, it's not that dissimilar.
You start out knowing nothing, and that's a gift. It's a very special time.
The beginner's mind is a magical place that lots of people keep trying to get back to.
There's whole branches of philosophy focused on trying to recapture the beginner's mind.
It was the beginner's mind, it was the ignorance, that led me to create Ruby on Rails.
If I had known everything that I know now about what it takes to run an open source project at this level and that had been presented to me, oh, yeah.
Here's 20 years of work with lots of ungrateful strangers on the internet yelling at you constantly over all sorts of decisions, maybe I would have gone, like, that doesn't sound like a good idea at all.
Let me not do any of those things.
But the ignorance of not knowing the limits of my own capacity ... I was just learning Ruby at the time when I created Ruby on Rails. Essentially Ruby on Rails is more or less like my first project in Ruby. I just stuck with it. But it was the beginner's mind that allowed me to do that. It was that gift of ignorance that got me started.
But then, of course, after that, you go through these phases of learning what the grand constellation is, of what the terms are, what the major things are, and they're really fuzzy still, and you don't know how they all work together.
Then things get clearer, and you feel like you have ... Okay, I have somewhat of a solid ground.
I know what people sort of are talking about most of the time. But I don't have any input of my own. I'm just still absorbing.
Then you get to some level of proficiency where you understand, okay, now I know what people are talking about. It's not that fuzzy anymore, and I know how things work together. And I'm starting to form some opinions of my own about how things interact, and how you can do things better, or how you can do things differently.
And as you go through all these phases, it's the same progression.
Once you've been through that once or twice, you're no longer surprised that when you start in a new domain, that you are ignorant.
When I started learning about air quality, I knew going in, I knew nothing. I have the beginner's mind here.
That's a gift that'll allow me to ask a bunch of questions of professionals that seem maybe dumb or irrelevant, and sometimes insightful because I'm taking just something I know from some other domain of systems thinking or whatever and applying it to this new domain. In any case, this is just a phase I'm going to go through.
There's no way I'm going to learn something where I can just jump over those phases, or just jump over being a beginner, where I just jump over being an intermediary. When you've been through that process, you simply accept that that is the process, and it takes some time.
So for me now, that's sort of where I am with a lot of philosophy reading.
I'll read some philosophy book, like Being in Time, where I go, this is really dense in a way where I don't really understand most of what's going on here. But if I stick with it, I will at some point.
And then, you read more and you read more, and you read more, and you try to get it from different sources. I found, especially for learning philosophy, YouTube is wonderful. There's a bunch of great YouTube channels where you have someone else basically re-tell the material to you in a modern interpretation. And you go, ah! Now I kind of understand it. And then you can go back to the original text and all of a sudden, that starts making sense.
That's the step. I'm at such a beginner's phase on the quest of philosophy right now that I can just ... I can cherish it, because what I've also found is of all the different phases, mastery's not necessarily the best.
Race car driving is another example. I've been driving race cars now for over 10 years. I still enjoy driving race cars, but I don't enjoy it as much as I did when I was first learning.
When first learning to drive the car, it was so overwhelming, it needed 110% of all the brain power I had available in such a way that I would close the door, turn on the engine, boom!
Flow.
Just enter the stage, right? Be completely engrossed in the activity to the point where there's nothing else in the world than throttle, brake, steer, counter-steer, making it around the corner.
Such an engrossing experience, it's a version of bliss.
Now, because I've actually gotten so much better at driving race cars, it doesn't require, most of the time, 110%, it's not as enjoyable. So I wish, in some regards, that I could just go back and be an intermediary or even a beginner and erase some of that, and then get to have those experiences again.
Justin: The 24 hour Le Mans race.
What was your mindset while you were doing that? It's such a battle of wits, almost, to keep driving for 24 hours on a competitive level.
I'm curious to know what you were thinking.
DHH: The first time I did the race ... was just magical, because you show up, and you have all this conception of what it takes to drive for 24 hours, and then you actually do it, and in some ways it's that, but in many ways it's very different.
It was such a battle against how much have I leveled up?
Have I leveled up enough to do this?
And realizing that, in the physical sense of doing it, and getting up after an hour and a half of sleep at 3:30 in the morning, and then they're like, "All right. You've got to get back in the car in 35 minutes. Get ready!"
And you're like, whoa, what? And get all your gear up, and you're standing there with excitement and thinking, I got to go out there and I can't fail.
I mean, I have two co-drivers. There's a whole team. It's not just me here. I'm not just playing a video game where I can just hit reset. There's a criticality that's a different level, and not withstanding just a mortality part of it, too, of driving a race car 200 miles an hour in the dark. There's a sense of obligation that you don't think about, perhaps, as much when you're fantasizing about what this is going to be.
But that's the fun of it, right? The fun of it is just actually experiencing these ideas that you have, and how it's going to be, and realizing, yeah, okay. In some ways they were what you thought. In many ways, they were not. This is why we do things, to be surprised, to be challenged, to live through it.
I kept doing the race.
It was just such a wonderful physical challenging, too, especially when I drove the race in the prototype cars that are extremely physical to drive, pull upwards of 4Gs. There's just a satisfaction from fatigue, and from pushing that boundary that's really satisfying in a way that is so alien to how I usually work.
Because as we talk about, usually I don't have any of this stuff. I don't do all nighters. I don't do ... And all of a sudden, there's this, I've got to be awake for 36 hours. I got to drive a race car. I got to ... It's such an alien experience that that's why it's good.
I don't have a stressful job. Maybe sometimes it looks like that from the outside, but that's not what it feels like. I feel like I have very little stress in my work.
I do think that having constant stress is one of the key killers.
Having constant stress will lead to all sorts of medical complications, and will kill you. But having some stress, sometimes, of your own choosing?
That can be good for you.
Justin: Have you found stoicism to be helpful in these competing at a high level? Things like racing or trying to do something that requires a lot of performance outside of racing?
DHH: Hugely, especially in racing, I'd say. In racing, there's so many things you cannot control.
As a driver, you have the power of steering the car, but you didn't make the car. And there are different kinds of cars, and there are different cars that are better on some tracks and worse on other tracks.
You didn't even put it together.
You didn't set it up.
There's engineers, there's mechanics, there's all these other people you have to rely on that have a great impact on your performance. So you cannot derive it down to just like if we fail, that's my fault.
Or if we succeed, that was my fault.
I think that's a good metaphor, in general, for society at large. It's never your fault, solely, if you fail. It's never your fault, solely, if you succeed.
Also, the stoic mindset helps you keep that in mind, that why am I getting worked up over this?
Race cars fail all the time.
If my race car fails, that is natural. To get upset about that, okay, there's an impulse where you go, like, oh, man, that's a shame. But then, this is the natural order of things.
This is what happened.
So I think the primary takeaway I have from stoicism is to separate the perception from the reaction.
You see something that happens, then you choose how you want to react.
Most people don't choose very consciously how they want to react. They simply react out of instinct or passion. And those reactions are often poor. They're not adjusted for the reasonable.
We get mad over all sorts of things that make no sense getting mad about.
Right now, there's probably 2,000 people complaining that their flight is delayed.
Just that fact alone. If there's 2,000 other people complaining that their flights are delayed, this is common. Why are you not expecting that flights are delayed? Why are you getting all riled up over the common nature of things? What good does that do you? Are you better off being mad about the completely expect-able? I don't think you are.
So learning to separate perception from reaction, and practicing that, is one of the, if not the greatest, lessons of stoicism.
You can choose.
You can live a better life if you are more considerate in your reactions. And almost all of life is inside of your reactions. Almost anything that happens, whether it's good or whether it's bad, is only bad or good depending on how you take it.
Portrait illustration by Kat Cao