Zack Arnold | How to Edit Your Life and Optimize Yourself

Srini: Yeah. I'm so glad you're brought up to attention to detail, 'cause that was the first thing that came to mind when you started describing this a town of 400 people. What are the social dynamics of growing up in a town like that?

Zack Arnold: The social dynamics are that everybody knows everything about everybody. The school that I went to was one building it housed K through 12 and there were about 500 students. And I was in, by far the largest class of, I think maybe 65 students. The average when I say class, I mean the entire grade. So the entire grade that I graduated from was a class of 65. The average class size or grade size is about 30, 35 people. So we were much larger than the rest. And just an example would be that let's say that you're a sophomore or a junior in high school and you're walking down to shop class. You walk past the kindergarten, that was the environment that I grew up in, and you knew the first and last names, the brother, the cousin, and the mom of every single person in your class. So it was a very small, incestuous world.

Srini: What were the pros and cons of growing up in that sort of small, insular world and you're a guy who creates television for a living? So I think for many of us who aren't exposed to small towns like that, our primary exposure comes through media. And in media, I feel like there's almost this very sweet, warm story that gets told about these places being these idyllic paradises where everybody loves each other, but I know that's not entirely true. So what do you think the media does to misrepresent these towns and what are the pros and cons of the environment?

Zack Arnold: I will say first of all, that I think some of the idyllic portrayals are fairly accurate because there are a lot of things about living in a small town that really is as good as it is on TV, where, you can think of the local fall festivals where the town comes together and they have a parade or they have the local carnival that takes place where the high school team also plays baseball. Like all these kind of little details here and there that kind of make it like, oh, that's so quaint. Or, I want to have. A lot of that's actually very true. The cons are that if you cannot conform to the way that people think or the things that people do, it is very easy to become an outsider very quickly. When you're in a much larger town or you're in a city, you can be your own person. You can do what it is that you want to do, and you're probably gonna find at least one person, if not a smaller group of people that think similarly to you that have similar interests. So you always feel like you have somebody that's similar to you that you can relate to. And in a small town, if you're not

Srini: Yeah. The reason this just occurred to me is a question to ask I've been watching this TV show over the last couple of months called Virgin River on Netflix, and it's a really beautiful story. It's exactly like you're talking about this idyllic sort of town in Northern California, and sometimes some of the people who are there shock you--wait, why did they come back here? Or even end up here in the first place? Are people who live in places like this, when you grew up in them, people who end up there or are there for life and never leave? Or is it a mix of everybody, and why in the world would somebody, for example, like I end up in a place like this?

Zack Arnold: Oh man, that's a really good question. The very first job I had I was probably about six years old and it was working for my dad cuz my dad has been an entrepreneur on and off his entire life. And my very first job was that I was enlisted after I would get home from first grade to fill envelopes and lick envelopes and put labels on envelopes cuz he had a direct marketing company, which nowadays you do email blasts. He was literally sending out a direct mailing blast and had an entire assembly line in our basement. And I was helping him put together and collate all the direct marketing materials that he was sending out. And I worked for my father for years. I also grew up on a farm, so I worked on the farm building structures, feeding animals, mowing the lawn, mowing hay, and all this fun stuff.

But if we were to talk about my first technical, real job for somebody that wasn't my father, where I was actually punching a time card and I was getting paid by somebody else. I worked for the local hardware store in the town that I grew up in, of 400 people. And I believe I was a senior in high school.