All right. Another deep life question here. This one is from Penelope. Penelope asks, what's it like to be a published author? And how do you keep sane amid all the competition and obsession with book sales and contracts? You can't-- Penelope, you can't pay much attention to it. Writing is weird, especially if you're doing big scale professional nonfiction writing like I do.

It's weird and stochastic. Some books blow up. Some don't. It's complicated. No one can understand necessarily why. It's like a confusing world. Sometimes you come across a book, you're like, this is-- I get it. It's a really interesting story, or it's really original, or it's Danny Kahneman is writing Thinking Faster, Slow, and it's his life's work, and he's finally put into a book.

I kind of get that. And then sometimes it's random. It's like, I don't know. Why did-- why does James Clear's book on habits 5x outsell Charles Duhigg's book on habits? I don't know. Why did-- why is Mark Manson's first book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving Enough Word, why did that sell 12 million copies?

It's a great book. But there's a lot of great books that don't-- he doesn't know. I've asked him. It's like, I don't know. So you can't worry about it. So how do you not worry about it? Well, I'll tell you what I do is I never signed up for the author portals.

I don't know how to look up sales numbers on my books. My agent will mention things to me. My editors will sometimes mention things to me. I'm like, that sounds great. But I mainly find out how well my books are doing twice a year when I get my royalty statements.

I'm like, ah, that's great. And I think that has done really well. Contracts, don't worry about book contracts. That's such a small percentage of your time where that's relevant. Like, oh, I'm working on a book contract now. Great. And then it'll be two years again until you're working on another book contract again.

You're just sort of writing at that point. So don't worry about that. But Penelope, that's my advice. It's not that you're going to do this perfectly. But you just can't compare. It's like a weird stochastic world. Why one book does well over here tells you nothing about how your book should do over here.

Maybe this book should do really well, and it doesn't. Or it's going really slow, and then it does really well later. What I always do is just focus on the next book. So when I have a book out, I don't look up at sales numbers because I don't know how.

And I always just get to the mindset of, well, forget that book, this new one. This is the one that's going to be a home run. I was rushed for that one, but this one's going to be the home run. I just get my attention towards what's happening in the future.

Interesting story. I've talked about this before. I have a lot of books that seem slow and then sold a lot later. So "So Good They Can't Ignore You." That came out in 2012. That was my first major hardcover release. I had written those three student books. It was my first major hardcover idea book.

Got a reasonable advance for it, a lot of energy behind it. And nothing really happened much when it came out. And so I think it was considered-- assuming it was considered a failure because a couple years later when I sold "Deep Work," they knocked $50,000 off the advance that I got for "So Good They Can't Ignore You." Like, yeah, I don't think this book worked.

It's 2012. Fast forward to today, that book has sold 300-plus thousand copies. It's a very successful book, but you never would have known it. "Deep Work" has sold a million copies. But I was worried when "Deep Work" first came out. I was on the phone frustrated with my agent.

My friends can't even find this in Barnes & Noble. No one cares about this book. So sometimes it's random. You think something's not going to do well, and then it does really well later. Or you think something's going to do really well, and it never does. So write the next one.

Don't look at sales numbers. Write the next one. (upbeat music)