Ep. 217: Using Slow Productivity To Do The Best Work Anywhere

00:00:00.000 | Two, I would really lean into the slow productivity principle of obsessing over quality.

00:00:07.920 | How do I be better?

00:00:10.100 | How do I do better work?

00:00:11.760 | How do I become the best person who is doing this anywhere?

00:00:15.040 | When you obsess over quality, two things happen.

00:00:17.960 | There's two directions that it interacts with slowness.

00:00:20.560 | One is just when you're trying to do something really well.

00:00:23.460 | It's hard to be super busy.

00:00:25.560 | It's hard to be super interleaving.

00:00:27.640 | Quality demands concentration and attention, but two, quality once achieved at any non-trivial

00:00:34.380 | level gives you more autonomy to control your schedule going forward.

00:00:44.640 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 217.

00:00:54.780 | For those who are new, this is the show where I take questions and calls from my audience

00:01:00.920 | about the theory and practice of living and working deeply in an increasingly shallow

00:01:06.740 | world.

00:01:07.740 | If you want to contribute your questions, there is a link in the show notes.

00:01:13.800 | If you want to watch these episodes instead of listening, go to youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

00:01:21.420 | We have video of full episodes as well as clips of some of our more popular questions

00:01:26.180 | and segments.

00:01:27.180 | I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as normal by my producer, Jesse.

00:01:33.540 | Jesse, do you miss with Republic, the restaurant that was below us, now it's gone.

00:01:38.780 | It's shut down.

00:01:39.780 | It's gone out of business.

00:01:40.780 | I kind of blame you, but not completely.

00:01:43.560 | Do you miss, now that they've been gone, the weird smell Wednesdays?

00:01:48.060 | No, I don't.

00:01:50.780 | I don't know if it was Wednesdays or not.

00:01:52.700 | That just alliterates, but we would get these weird smells.

00:01:57.580 | And it has to be the kitchen.

00:01:59.580 | That was our best guess, but it wasn't every day.

00:02:02.340 | So we weren't quite sure if they cook something weird on certain days of the week or if they're

00:02:05.780 | cleaning their grease trap or whatever.

00:02:07.680 | But I just remember when you first started working here, Jesse, the first weird smell

00:02:11.500 | Wednesday, you spent a lot of time in my memory looking for, is there garbage in our studio?

00:02:17.060 | Is there a corpse somewhere?

00:02:18.060 | And I had to explain like, no, no, that's just the building.

00:02:22.080 | It's actually kind of funny because they went out of business right around the time we got

00:02:24.860 | our first cleaning service into the building.

00:02:27.780 | So yeah, so it's possible.

00:02:29.460 | It's true.

00:02:30.460 | It's possible.

00:02:31.460 | It was definitely the restaurant.

00:02:32.540 | It's possible the cleaning service found the corpse of a raccoon that was in the closet

00:02:38.700 | somewhere.

00:02:39.700 | So maybe it's not, maybe we are casting aspersions against the restaurant that used to be there,

00:02:42.500 | but anyways, it's nice.

00:02:43.500 | So yeah, we have a nice and clean studio, no weird smells.

00:02:45.700 | I think we're ready to bring, you know, respectable adults up here now.

00:02:48.420 | Oh, it's starting to look great.

00:02:49.420 | Yeah.

00:02:50.420 | So exciting.

00:02:51.420 | Yeah.

00:02:52.420 | We'll, we'll do a video at some point.

00:02:53.420 | Jesse has been helping me.

00:02:54.420 | We've been renovating this room by room, piece by piece.

00:02:56.540 | We've been renovating the HQ.

00:02:57.660 | We'll do a video.

00:02:58.660 | We'll use your, uh, yeah.

00:02:59.660 | Your nice steadicam.

00:03:00.660 | So, so stay tuned for that.

00:03:01.660 | Check out the YouTube channel.

00:03:03.500 | We got a good show today.

00:03:05.460 | So we got a good segment of questions.

00:03:07.580 | I'm looking at it now.

00:03:09.420 | We have a call mixed in there.

00:03:11.600 | We have a case study mixed in there.

00:03:13.820 | Later in the show, I will do the books I read in September, 2022.

00:03:19.100 | We should have done that last episode.

00:03:20.260 | I forgot.

00:03:21.260 | So we're doing a little late.

00:03:22.260 | So we have that later in the show.

00:03:23.260 | Uh, first, however, I wanted to do a brief segment about something I came across online

00:03:30.420 | that fascinated me.

00:03:32.100 | I then ended up writing a essay about it for my newsletter at calnewport.com that went

00:03:38.140 | out last week.

00:03:39.860 | And I wanted to bring it up here.

00:03:41.980 | And it has to do with our favorite writer on the show, fantasy novelist, Brandon Sanderson.

00:03:50.620 | I believe Jesse still gets emails from people mad that I once accidentally said that he

00:03:56.940 | wrote the name of the wind series.

00:04:00.460 | So again, any complaints about that can go to Jesse at calnewport.com.

00:04:05.780 | He did not write that series.

00:04:07.340 | I'm not even going to try to say what the series are.

00:04:09.340 | He wrote, because I don't want to get it wrong, but he's a very productive, very

00:04:11.820 | popular fantasy novelist that we've talked about before on the show.

00:04:15.660 | Well, I went down a rabbit hole online about the, let's call it home office.

00:04:21.660 | And as you're going to see, this is really a stretch, but the home office that he built

00:04:25.220 | a few years ago, and it's only now just finishing and only now just revealing to the world.

00:04:31.820 | So here's the setup.

00:04:32.820 | And then I'm going to show some photos, but let me get this set up first.

00:04:35.800 | He lives in a suburban Utah.

00:04:39.160 | He doesn't reveal exactly where in Utah.

00:04:42.000 | It's not hard to find out because he teaches once a week at Brigham Young university, which

00:04:46.460 | is in a specific city in Utah, but we'll, we'll, we'll keep the location anonymous,

00:04:50.020 | but he lives in a standard cul-de-sac subdivision in a house he bought in 2008.

00:04:55.820 | This was before he became a very successful writer because on me, I went back and looked

00:04:59.920 | this up and his debut book was 2005.

00:05:03.220 | So this was early in his writing career.

00:05:04.940 | So just a standard house cul-de-sac suburban Utah, the lot next to the house was empty.

00:05:10.980 | So they hadn't built the house there yet.

00:05:13.240 | So he started to have an idea.

00:05:14.240 | It's like, we could maybe do something cool with that one day, if, and when, you know,

00:05:18.840 | I have the resources.

00:05:20.180 | So the next year he had done well enough with his books to buy the lot.

00:05:25.080 | So he had a house, there's an empty lot house next to the empty lot on a cul-de-sac.

00:05:28.480 | So he bought the, he bought the empty lot and he hatched this plan.

00:05:32.020 | He said, I want to build a home office, but because I'm a fantasy author, I don't want

00:05:35.700 | to just build a building on this lot.

00:05:37.540 | I want to build it underground.

00:05:39.880 | And he told his wife when he bought that lot in 2008 or 2009, I want a super villain layer

00:05:47.100 | underground that no one knows it's there.

00:05:50.180 | And he actually followed through on this and it took him a long time to do.

00:05:53.860 | It turns out it's very hard to get the permissions required to do this from any reasonable city,

00:05:59.160 | but he got the permissions.

00:06:00.220 | He threw enough money at it and he built this super villain underground layer.

00:06:04.280 | So I'm going to show some photos here.

00:06:06.360 | So if you're listening, I'll try to describe what's on the screen.

00:06:09.780 | You can also see these, we'll, we'll put the clip up at the youtube.com/CalNewportMedia.

00:06:16.520 | So the first photo I'm putting up here on the screen is the hole that they had to dig.

00:06:20.420 | Now if you're looking at this, what you see is a massive hole and there's a, whatever

00:06:25.940 | that is, a skid steer at the bottom of this massive hole.

00:06:29.220 | The walls there, I mean, Jesse, what would you say that's probably going from the bottom

00:06:32.780 | of the hole to the top of the wall and then the rubble on top, it's probably almost 30

00:06:36.980 | feet.

00:06:37.980 | Yeah.

00:06:38.980 | If you compare it to the guy's height, he's probably just shy of six feet.

00:06:40.460 | Yeah.

00:06:41.460 | So this thing looks massive.

00:06:42.820 | Like something you would see in a giant lot.

00:06:44.800 | Keep in mind, this is a one house size footprint between two houses.

00:06:48.580 | So he digs this, uh, massive hole.

00:06:52.540 | Then the next picture, they're building the underground layer, concrete walls, 20 foot

00:06:58.660 | high ceiling.

00:06:59.660 | So what you're seeing on the screen now is the concrete bunker structure of this underground

00:07:04.620 | layer.

00:07:05.620 | Now you can see the house right next door and you realize this is just in the middle

00:07:07.820 | of a suburban neighborhood, 20 feet tall, steel I-beams and concrete.

00:07:12.360 | This thing is never going away by the way, 200 years from now, once we've all been exploded

00:07:18.140 | in nuclear war, this is what the, uh, the archeologists will find.

00:07:21.020 | This will still be there.

00:07:22.380 | All right.

00:07:23.620 | And then what he did in this third picture is the after.

00:07:27.380 | They built it, they covered it.

00:07:30.320 | And then he's building in this scene, decoy buildings on top of it so that it doesn't

00:07:35.440 | draw your attention.

00:07:36.440 | So from what I understand, if you look in this picture, there's like a nice circular

00:07:40.720 | tile driveway that's on top of the layer.

00:07:44.180 | His house, I think it's this thing you see to the right.

00:07:46.180 | So you see a little bit of his house.

00:07:48.620 | There's a garage they built that you'll see.

00:07:51.260 | They built that on top of the layer.

00:07:53.060 | So again, it's kind of a decoy.

00:07:54.060 | So you're like, oh, this is, um, it's just a big driveway next to their house with a

00:07:58.820 | garage.

00:07:59.820 | Uh, I can't quite figure out everything happening here.

00:08:02.460 | There's these windows.

00:08:03.460 | I think they're building a gazebo, but the main thing here is there it's a decoy.

00:08:07.300 | So that if you now show up at Brandon Sanderson's house, it doesn't feel like there's anything

00:08:11.260 | amiss.

00:08:12.260 | There's a house, they have a nice big drive and a garage and it's the next house.

00:08:15.920 | Underneath this is a super villain layer.

00:08:17.460 | All right.

00:08:18.460 | So as far as I can tell from my research, and again, I'm sure, uh, my, my collaborators

00:08:25.300 | as computer scientists are happy.

00:08:26.620 | I'm seeing all this time researching this.

00:08:28.340 | I'm sure my editors at the New Yorker are happy.

00:08:30.300 | I'm spending so much time researching this instead of working on articles.

00:08:33.300 | I'm sure my book editor is very happy that I'm researching this instead of working on

00:08:36.620 | articles, but it felt very important to me.

00:08:39.180 | I think they finished this construction around 2019, 2020.

00:08:45.660 | But only now are they finishing the actual interior design.

00:08:50.700 | And we got our first look inside this super villain layer when he went on the CBS morning

00:08:56.260 | show, which I will say, Jesse, I have been on as well, though, in less cool circumstances,

00:09:03.220 | went on the CBS morning show and brought them into the layer.

00:09:07.260 | So it's not done, but he brought them into the layer.

00:09:09.300 | So what I've done here is I've snagged some screenshots from that appearance.

00:09:13.060 | All right.

00:09:14.300 | So on the screen now is a very nice staircase, wide marble with red carpet, stained glass

00:09:22.140 | windows on the way down the stained glass windows turns out are his book covers.

00:09:26.740 | He had them custom built.

00:09:28.740 | The top of the staircase is I believe lets out into his garage.

00:09:34.020 | And so there's a, there's an entrance from his house to the underground bunker, uh, nearby.

00:09:40.300 | It's nice woodwork, right?

00:09:41.300 | Jesse, look at that.

00:09:42.300 | Yeah.

00:09:43.300 | I mean, he made a lot of money.

00:09:44.300 | I mean, what was his Kickstarter?

00:09:45.780 | He just did $40 million.

00:09:48.420 | It was something like that.

00:09:49.420 | It was like $48 million.

00:09:50.500 | So, you know, he has some money.

00:09:52.220 | All right.

00:09:53.220 | Next picture is, this is part of his bunker.

00:09:54.860 | He likes movies.

00:09:56.620 | I like movies too.

00:09:57.620 | I have some friends coming over tonight of a movie club.

00:10:00.120 | We watched him in my basement.

00:10:01.620 | He has a screening room.

00:10:03.060 | It's a full movie theater.

00:10:04.700 | As you can see him in the hoster in these, uh, giant leather reclining chairs, five across

00:10:09.620 | three rows of these, there's a giant projection screen at the front.

00:10:12.420 | So that's where he watches movies.

00:10:14.260 | It turns out that he actually, his staff, you know, he has a company and his company

00:10:20.180 | is not headquartered out of this layer.

00:10:22.060 | It has, you know, a warehouse and an office building somewhere.

00:10:24.740 | Um, and he said something about they rotate through, you can sign up to rotate through

00:10:29.140 | to come watch, you know, movies here on Fridays.

00:10:33.300 | And then finally I wanted to get to where is he going to write?

00:10:37.020 | He is a writer and that is the scene we're seeing here.

00:10:40.020 | So it's, it's him being interviewed by the host and they're in chairs in a, uh, a wood

00:10:45.460 | paneled nook.

00:10:47.320 | And he revealed later that nook is where he's going to put his desk.

00:10:51.700 | So if you're watching this on YouTube, this nook wood paneled, it's beautiful work with

00:10:57.580 | books.

00:10:58.700 | That's where his desk is going to be in the background.

00:11:01.420 | You see a giant saltwater fish tank in this big room with black and white tiles.

00:11:05.380 | That's what he calls the adventurers club.

00:11:08.060 | And it's going to be for gatherings, like he's having people over to, um, attack goblins.

00:11:15.060 | I don't know.

00:11:16.060 | I'm not good at fantasy.

00:11:17.060 | I, again, I should like fantasy.

00:11:18.060 | I don't.

00:11:19.060 | Anyways, I thought that was cool.

00:11:20.820 | Uh, Brandon Sanderson wins the work from home contest.

00:11:26.660 | Anyone who has tried to build a cool space to work at home, uh, is at best second place

00:11:31.140 | compared to what Sanderson has done here.

00:11:35.980 | So a couple of notes about this.

00:11:38.540 | One there was some complaints.

00:11:39.540 | I got some feedback from people that were, uh, frustrated at the amount of money.

00:11:45.020 | It is extravagant that he probably spent to do this.

00:11:48.500 | I believe this is probably 80% marketing slash publicity for Sanderson.

00:11:53.800 | So it probably helps if you think about this as a business expense.

00:11:58.820 | He's this fantasy writer, really big audience made a big push starting in the pandemic to

00:12:05.460 | have more one-on-one connection with his audience, using things like YouTube and his email newsletter.

00:12:11.460 | He shifted away from going to conferences and trying to do digital connection with people.

00:12:18.180 | Given this one to many broadcast style marketing connection to your audience, I think actually

00:12:24.080 | having an over the top layer like this is a good business expense because it puts him

00:12:31.260 | in the minds of his reader into this lofty position of this aspirational fantastical

00:12:38.460 | life I'm in my adventurers club writing these books.

00:12:41.700 | And it just puts an aura of true fantasy around these books that I think will help sell them.

00:12:47.780 | So it's actually probably a reasonable business expense.

00:12:50.460 | I'll also give him credit.

00:12:51.540 | He didn't move to a giant house.

00:12:53.980 | You know, he didn't say let's move to a giant compound somewhere in the mountains of Utah.

00:12:59.620 | Let's go to Park City now and have a near the ski slopes with one of these $10 million

00:13:05.140 | houses.

00:13:06.140 | He's in the same house.

00:13:07.140 | He bought before he had money.

00:13:08.140 | He's like, let's just build this thing onto it.

00:13:09.460 | So I don't know if that's good or bad, but I think it is a marketing more than anything

00:13:14.940 | else.

00:13:15.940 | Interesting point.

00:13:16.940 | Dan Brown did something similar.

00:13:20.380 | Dan Brown, the author of the Da Vinci Code series, who earned, according to my paper,

00:13:27.580 | all the money with those books he built in Rye, New Hampshire, a house that was also

00:13:33.900 | filled with over the top fantastical elements.

00:13:37.740 | You know, you press the press the button hidden on the bookshelf and the whole thing swings

00:13:41.980 | open and there's a hidden room, these type of touches.

00:13:44.860 | He built a house like that as well with his money.

00:13:47.020 | Again, I think there's some marketing to it.

00:13:49.100 | Every time he does an interview surrounding one of his book launches, they come to this

00:13:55.420 | house.

00:13:56.420 | They see these cool touches.

00:13:57.420 | These things matter if that's the type of book you're writing.

00:14:00.780 | I'll give you another example of this from a non-fantasy, non-thriller world.

00:14:05.420 | I think Anne Lamott did something similar.

00:14:08.500 | So Anne Lamott, the novelist and nonfiction writer, and the fact that she wrote Bird by

00:14:13.860 | Bird, the sort of classic book on how to write, she moved to this really cool old property

00:14:19.920 | up in Marin County that they rescued.

00:14:23.860 | Her and her husband sort of renovated over time.

00:14:26.580 | It was a little bit dilapidated, grew these gardens.

00:14:28.820 | It's a touch of marketing in that.

00:14:30.740 | I mean, when you think about Anne Lamott, you want to think about her in this scenic

00:14:35.580 | environment.

00:14:36.580 | It's a little bit run down, but it's beautiful and she's planting flower gardens there.

00:14:41.220 | It fits with her novels.

00:14:42.980 | So again, sometimes there's some marketing in what writers do.

00:14:48.280 | But for now, let's just leave this as what I think is a great example of working from

00:14:51.420 | your home, that's that New Yorker article I wrote back earlier in the pandemic.

00:14:57.260 | Writers will often go to eccentric extremes in designing their workplaces to get out of

00:15:06.100 | their home, to have somewhere new to go to try to get the juices flowing.

00:15:08.840 | So he's just pushed it to a new place.

00:15:11.940 | So there we go.

00:15:14.900 | Underground lair.

00:15:15.900 | Yeah.

00:15:16.900 | That'd be cool.

00:15:17.900 | That'd be claustrophobic, I think.

00:15:18.900 | 20 foot ceilings.

00:15:19.900 | Yeah.

00:15:20.900 | I'm just thinking all that dirt.

00:15:21.900 | I'm going to die in here.

00:15:24.900 | All right.

00:15:26.180 | Let's take a moment to talk about a sponsor before we get to our questions from this week.

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00:19:42.440 | It's not going to be wrinkly.

00:19:43.860 | It's very lightweight.

00:19:45.480 | It's not going to wrinkle, but it looks, it looks really good.

00:19:48.540 | You could wear it with a blazer on, you can wear it, you know, by itself with a, with

00:19:52.580 | a pair of shorts in the summer.

00:19:54.260 | I'm really enjoying the commuter, the commuter shirt.

00:19:57.700 | They also have pants again, flexible, breathable, lightweight.

00:20:04.820 | You feel like if you needed to, you could pull a Tom Cruise mission impossible and jump

00:20:08.780 | off a building, but they look great.

00:20:10.180 | So you can be around with them all day, be active, but still, it looks great when you

00:20:13.420 | have to go to the event at your kid's school as well.

00:20:18.980 | So there's some tech here.

00:20:21.020 | So if we actually want to get specific about it, it's four way stretch fabric.

00:20:26.460 | They have wrinkle release technology.

00:20:29.660 | They use gold fusion anti-odor technology.

00:20:32.360 | So you'll be smelling fresh if you've been active all day long.

00:20:37.060 | Anyways, I am a fan of Roan from my, my casual clothes, the commuter shirts I've been wearing

00:20:43.140 | it.

00:20:44.140 | So I'm glad I'm glad that we actually get a chance to promote them.

00:20:49.520 | So the commuter shirt in particular can get you through any workday and straight into

00:20:54.320 | wherever comes next.

00:20:55.320 | So if you head to Roan.com/Cal and use the promo code Cal, you can get 20% off your entire

00:21:03.940 | order.

00:21:04.940 | That is a really good deal.

00:21:05.940 | So 20% off your entire order when you head to R H O N E.com/Cal and use the code Cal,

00:21:15.060 | it's time to find your corner office comfort.

00:21:17.980 | That's great.

00:21:18.980 | Jesse, we're starting to get sponsors of things that I have.

00:21:23.420 | I have long used.

00:21:24.820 | Cool.

00:21:25.820 | Yeah.

00:21:26.820 | Now we just, we have to get a, there's a podcast blue shirt.

00:21:31.300 | It's funny if there's just like a company.

00:21:32.780 | Roan will make one.

00:21:33.780 | Yeah.

00:21:34.780 | Roan, Roan needs to make me, it's like the, the, the deep questions like Cal branded.

00:21:40.540 | Actually their commuter shirt would be great for podcasting.

00:21:42.460 | Yeah.

00:21:43.460 | Yeah.

00:21:44.460 | Yeah.

00:21:45.460 | So good for them.

00:21:46.460 | So I'm thinking about other things I used that we need, we need to sponsor us now.

00:21:48.540 | How about the generic white coffee cup?

00:21:52.780 | This gets used a lot.

00:21:53.780 | Are you tired?

00:21:54.780 | Moving my eye.

00:21:55.780 | Are you tired of burning yourself as you try to hold hot coffee in your hands to bring

00:22:03.340 | it to your mouth?

00:22:04.820 | We have a solution.

00:22:06.480 | White cup, put the coffee in the cup instead of in your hands and you get 98% less burns.

00:22:13.020 | All right.

00:22:14.020 | Enough of that nonsense.

00:22:15.180 | Let's do some questions.

00:22:19.020 | Actually be useful here.

00:22:20.940 | So what do we got?

00:22:21.940 | What's our first question, Jesse?

00:22:22.940 | All right.

00:22:23.940 | The first question is from Julian.

00:22:26.580 | Julian says, I intend in university for a brief period to get a degree in film, but

00:22:30.780 | dropped out.

00:22:31.780 | I want to be a screenwriter, but I currently work in the service industry.

00:22:35.060 | So my days can be long and tiresome.

00:22:37.660 | At 20 years old, I feel incredibly behind in my writing.

00:22:40.980 | Was dropping out of university a bad decision?

00:22:44.340 | Well, Julian, first of all, I think dropping out or not dropping out, this is a red herring

00:22:50.660 | when it comes to the specific question of screenwriting and jumpstarting your screenwriting

00:22:55.940 | career.

00:22:56.940 | I think there's a lot to be discussed about dropping out of college, whether you should

00:22:59.940 | or shouldn't, but I don't think it really matters either way, good or bad when it comes

00:23:06.260 | to this very specific question of are you behind in your screenwriting career and what

00:23:10.900 | would you need to do?

00:23:13.400 | So I'm not a screenwriter myself.

00:23:15.780 | I don't have a specific background in it.

00:23:18.140 | I am a big fan of movies.

00:23:19.500 | I am a big fan of the movie industry.

00:23:21.180 | I know screenwriters.

00:23:22.180 | I'm going to try to pull together from stuff I have learned to try to offer you some advice

00:23:26.740 | here.

00:23:27.740 | I have two things to recommend Julian.

00:23:31.180 | One surround yourself by other artists.

00:23:36.180 | This is critical in the movie industry, particular if you're going to be a screenwriter, you

00:23:41.020 | have to be around other people with high artistic aspirations in this field.

00:23:48.400 | If you're trying to do this in isolation, how do I write a movie that gets made?

00:23:53.660 | You're going to produce things that are formulaic.

00:23:55.580 | You're not going to find traction.

00:23:56.800 | You have to aim incredibly high and be around people who are really pushing themselves.

00:24:00.980 | You see this again and again when you look back through the personal stories in particular

00:24:05.260 | of directors or director writers that really break out.

00:24:09.300 | They're surrounded by other aspirational film industry types.

00:24:13.780 | They're pushing each other.

00:24:14.780 | They're learning from each other.

00:24:16.740 | They have big aims.

00:24:17.860 | I'm just reading right now a Francis Ford Coppola biography and about that generation

00:24:26.260 | of filmmakers.

00:24:27.580 | They came from various places, but they were all with each other.

00:24:32.060 | So he had George Lucas.

00:24:33.500 | He was very close with George Lucas.

00:24:35.900 | And then that crew met up with the USC crew.

00:24:39.660 | So you had Scorsese, you had Brian De Palma.

00:24:43.620 | And they connected with Spielberg, who didn't get into USC, but also had a deal with Universal

00:24:50.740 | at 19, so it didn't really matter.

00:24:53.220 | So you had Spielberg, you had De Palma, you had Scorsese, you had Coppola, you had Lucas.

00:24:57.780 | They're all hanging out and pushing each other and working with each other.

00:25:03.180 | And out of that came really interesting work.

00:25:07.180 | JJ Abrams has a sort of interesting similar story.

00:25:11.420 | So surround yourself by other artists, people who are obsessed with this.

00:25:15.220 | I just went down a PTA rabbit hole, Paul Thomas Anderson rabbit hole, same thing.

00:25:21.200 | You see him at Sundance Labs as a really young filmmaker, just surrounded by all of this

00:25:26.500 | talent.

00:25:27.500 | So surround yourself by talent.

00:25:28.500 | If you're not, it's not going to work.

00:25:30.620 | Then when you write, aim really high.

00:25:33.900 | Because the other thing I picked up, even with screenwriters that you associate later

00:25:40.180 | on with this seems like a commercial blockbuster movie.

00:25:43.740 | So if we're thinking, I'm thinking JJ Abrams, maybe go back and think about John

00:25:47.700 | Milius.

00:25:49.260 | They were artistically really ambitious and they were working on and they would work on

00:25:55.020 | scripts that were really stretches, novelistic, literary, interesting, nuance of character

00:26:02.860 | and pacing.

00:26:05.180 | Your produced works are going to fall below where you're aiming.

00:26:09.000 | So if you come into the industry thinking like, how do I write an action movie?

00:26:14.420 | Like one I just saw, like a Marvel movie or something, you're going to fall below that

00:26:18.420 | standard and do nothing.

00:26:19.420 | But when you come into the industry with interesting artistic stuff, you show real skill.

00:26:24.380 | That is what is going to develop your skill.

00:26:26.260 | That's what's going to catch attention.

00:26:27.540 | Even if the things you end up getting produced later are farther down the ladder.

00:26:31.020 | Now, 50% of what I'm saying here, Julian, might be nonsense.

00:26:34.020 | Again, I'm not in the movie industry.

00:26:36.620 | I did though have an interesting conversation once with the head of story at Paramount.

00:26:42.300 | So it was someone who doesn't write scripts, but helps develop all the scripts that Paramount

00:26:47.500 | is actually going to work on.

00:26:48.940 | I learned a lot from that conversation, but basically you have to be, if you're going

00:26:52.260 | to succeed in screenwriting, people have to see you as having this spark, this artistic

00:26:58.020 | genius.

00:26:59.980 | And then they're happy to have someone with an artistic genius, you know, write, take

00:27:02.980 | a hack at the next Guardian of the Galaxy franchise.

00:27:05.960 | But you got to, you have to come in with this spark.

00:27:07.980 | So aim really high, be very aspirational, very ambitious, surround yourself with other

00:27:12.100 | artists.

00:27:13.100 | That's what matters.

00:27:14.100 | Whether you dropped out of college or not, it doesn't matter for that specific thing.

00:27:17.240 | So that'd be my advice.

00:27:18.600 | How would you suggest that Julian balances it with his service industry job?

00:27:23.480 | Like say, say he works some nights, he might work some doubles, stuff like that.

00:27:29.180 | I mean, go back and read a bunch of Tarantino oral histories.

00:27:34.000 | That's a good one.

00:27:35.000 | I mean, I've seen early interviews with Tarantino, find out about how he was crafting his scripts

00:27:42.380 | when working at the famous, what was it?

00:27:44.580 | The video, what was it called?

00:27:46.220 | You said the video store, but that way I don't remember the exact name of the video store.

00:27:51.260 | I think that's a good example.

00:27:52.500 | Kevin Smith is another good example of people who were honing this skill while just working

00:27:57.040 | in a service industry.

00:27:58.040 | Tarantino is where I'm going to point you actually, Julian, if you really want to see

00:28:01.500 | what I'm talking about in action, because he was obsessed with film, obsessed with it,

00:28:06.900 | watching everything, tracking down where the weird prints were.

00:28:11.020 | This art house across town is playing, you know, some early Kurosawa there.

00:28:16.300 | You know, Oh, I want to see, you know, Hitchcock's rope, which is not really widely played, but

00:28:21.060 | there's maybe an interesting print happening over here.

00:28:22.920 | He was obsessed with film and that obsession with film drove it.

00:28:27.900 | He had a service industry job.

00:28:28.900 | He was working at a video store doing other odd jobs.

00:28:31.220 | And that's when he also started writing.

00:28:33.620 | By the way, look at Tarantino's rise.

00:28:36.180 | He did a lot of script work early on with some pretty major blockbuster type films.

00:28:43.420 | I'm blanking on what some of the names are now, but films you would remember from the

00:28:48.220 | early, the mid nineties films that were just straight up like Nicolas Cage action films,

00:28:53.440 | he would call it.

00:28:54.440 | And he would have a passion to work on those things, which again shows that the writers

00:28:58.360 | who work are artistically ambitious, even if not everything they work on itself is artistically

00:29:03.400 | ambitious.

00:29:04.400 | So use Tarantino, I think is a good case study.

00:29:06.840 | You're 20, you have energy.

00:29:08.880 | So if you get obsessed and let that obsession drive you, you can, you have the time, you

00:29:16.040 | have the time.

00:29:17.040 | All right.

00:29:18.040 | What do we got next, Jesse?

00:29:20.120 | All right.

00:29:21.300 | Next question is from the alchemist.

00:29:23.360 | He's an actuary in his thirties.

00:29:26.120 | He says, in a world without email, you make a case for processes.

00:29:29.960 | Is there a preferred method or tool for where you or how you store, update or communicate

00:29:34.920 | these processes?

00:29:35.920 | I mean, my answer is kind of yes, dot, dot, dot.

00:29:42.020 | So what I mean is you should have a preferred tool.

00:29:45.360 | I don't care what it is.

00:29:47.940 | So the tool you use to keep track of and promulgate the details of the processes you use on your

00:29:54.880 | team or in your organization, the processes you use to try to get away from the hyperactive

00:30:00.280 | hive mind where everyone just rocks and roll on email or slack or teams, they do need to

00:30:04.200 | be somewhere.

00:30:05.200 | Everyone needs to understand where they are.

00:30:06.960 | They need to be able to find them.

00:30:08.120 | There needs to be some process for how they're reviewed and for their updated.

00:30:11.360 | The details of how you do that, I could care less about.

00:30:16.280 | This is one of these situations where technology is not going to save us.

00:30:20.460 | We have to figure out the right processes and then go find a technology to use to actually

00:30:24.800 | work with those processes.

00:30:26.040 | So you could have a Google doc somewhere.

00:30:28.640 | You could have drop boxes with sub folders for the different processes and text files

00:30:32.540 | in each that describe them.

00:30:34.880 | You could chisel it on stone.

00:30:36.200 | It could be laminated and posted up on the office wall.

00:30:39.600 | I mean, I don't really care how you do it so long as it's clear and everyone understands.

00:30:44.720 | What I am going to recommend though, and I think this is very important, is no matter

00:30:48.560 | how you store the processes your team or organization uses, you have to have a meta process or on

00:30:57.480 | a regular basis.

00:30:58.480 | And I think at least once a month, everyone who is involved with one of these processes,

00:31:04.000 | so everyone who it affects, I have to actually now follow some of these rules, needs to review

00:31:10.340 | and say, is this working or not?

00:31:13.120 | And if it's not working, how can we fix it?

00:31:15.640 | And if it's out of date, we don't really need this anymore.

00:31:18.420 | This never really worked or we needed it back last January when we were crunching on this

00:31:23.200 | client, we don't need anymore.

00:31:24.200 | You get rid of it.

00:31:26.160 | Now that's really important because dead weight processes weigh down everything else.

00:31:33.220 | So if your team puts together, here's seven different processes we use for collaboration.

00:31:36.840 | This keeps us out of our inbox.

00:31:38.280 | It's great.

00:31:39.280 | If two of them don't really work very well or don't really need to still be there, but

00:31:43.800 | they're sticking around and people feel like they have to go through the motions that will

00:31:47.840 | put friction on the entire idea of using processes.

00:31:51.060 | In this example, those two deadweight processes could bring down the other five.

00:31:54.420 | It could bring down the whole idea that we follow processes.

00:31:56.960 | That friction makes the whole gears of processes begin to seize up and people just fall back

00:32:02.360 | to hyperactive hive mind.

00:32:04.440 | I'm not going to go through, I have to upload this and this seems like a waste of time.

00:32:08.840 | This seems like busy work.

00:32:09.840 | This seems like bureaucracy.

00:32:12.040 | I'm just going to hit you up on Slack.

00:32:14.880 | So more important than where you store the processes is making sure that you update them,

00:32:19.200 | that everyone is involved in what works, what doesn't, what do we have to, what do we have

00:32:22.560 | to get rid of?

00:32:23.560 | Because there is a fine line between a well-structured collaboration environment and stress inducing

00:32:30.040 | bureaucracy.

00:32:31.040 | So the latter is terrible.

00:32:33.880 | That's poison for morale.

00:32:35.120 | The former can be great.

00:32:36.480 | The line is fine.

00:32:37.480 | So you have to be careful about that.

00:32:42.200 | See here.

00:32:43.200 | Oh, it looks like we have a call coming up.

00:32:44.200 | I like calls.

00:32:45.200 | All right.

00:32:46.200 | Let's see what we got here.

00:32:47.200 | We have a call from Robert about slow productivity.

00:32:50.200 | Hi, Cal.

00:32:51.920 | My name is Robert from Nova Scotia, Canada, and I'm a process improvement consultant.

00:32:58.120 | And I've been thinking a lot lately about your scales of productivity, including your

00:33:03.120 | most recent interview on the Tim Ferriss podcast.

00:33:06.680 | And in my role, I'm stuck between balancing slow productivity and bill blockers.

00:33:12.300 | So my measure for productivity is billable hours, but it does seem very short term focused.

00:33:17.840 | I know in the long term, I can be more productive by doing activities such as building a better

00:33:23.200 | sales engine, creating better training programs, basically all of these other elements of being

00:33:28.680 | so good that our team can't be ignored that are associated with bill blockers.

00:33:34.240 | So currently, this has led to extra work in the evenings and weekends, which seems counterproductive

00:33:39.120 | to slow productivity.

00:33:40.960 | So do you have any recommendations for slow productivity for workers that are measured

00:33:45.080 | by billable hours?

00:33:46.080 | Thank you.

00:33:47.080 | That's a good question, Robert.

00:33:51.520 | First of all, just I want to comment on the audio of your recording.

00:33:54.960 | It sounds like in your effort to work from near home, you are working and recording your

00:33:59.040 | question from within a inside a large metal buoy.

00:34:02.560 | I don't know, Jesse, what you think it does sound like he's in a Sanderson's lair.

00:34:07.240 | Maybe he's in Sanderson's lair before they put in the walls.

00:34:09.960 | Yeah.

00:34:10.960 | Or he's trapped in a metal box somewhere.

00:34:12.360 | No, it is a good question.

00:34:13.920 | Billable hours throws an interesting wrench into discussions of slow productivity.

00:34:19.480 | I do have a few thoughts, a few thoughts about it.

00:34:24.260 | So I'm going to suggest two things.

00:34:27.520 | One, start billing yourself for hours put aside for long term projects, projects that's

00:34:35.960 | going to make your team more effective in the long term.

00:34:39.240 | Have a goal.

00:34:40.240 | I'm spending two hours a day, three days a week working on sales engine, working on,

00:34:46.800 | you know, updating the technology we use for this particular process that we're often consulting

00:34:51.280 | on and keep track of those hours and report them.

00:34:56.000 | So when your boss says, okay, Robert, what was your billable hours this quarter?

00:35:00.280 | You say, well, I built this many, this client, this maybe that client, this many hours were

00:35:05.080 | billed to this longterm improvement project, which I think is going to make us more profitable

00:35:09.480 | in the longterm by having specific numbers.

00:35:13.760 | The only feedback you can really get from your boss is like, hey, that's good.

00:35:16.400 | Or B, maybe you should not do that improvement or let's do less hours, but you have a particular

00:35:20.300 | number to kind of deal with.

00:35:21.880 | You're quantifying this work that otherwise wouldn't be quantified.

00:35:25.000 | You'll want to quantify it because now once it's quantified, they can understand, oh,

00:35:29.440 | your total number of hours you're working is a good amount.

00:35:32.960 | And I see that 20% of those hours were going towards longterm improvements.

00:35:36.800 | So I'm okay that the other billable hours were reduced by a little bit because I see

00:35:40.480 | where your time is going.

00:35:41.900 | If you don't keep track of these non-client focused activities, then you do have to end

00:35:47.640 | up doing them at night or on the weekend or in the morning, because otherwise it would

00:35:50.780 | just look like to the outside observer that your total amount of work has shrunk.

00:35:55.000 | You got to capture why that work shrunk.

00:35:57.800 | Two, I would really lean into the slow productivity principle of obsessing over quality.

00:36:05.520 | How do I be better?

00:36:07.720 | How do I do better work?

00:36:09.380 | How do I become the best person who is doing this anywhere?

00:36:12.640 | When you obsess over quality, two things happen.

00:36:15.560 | There's two directions that it interacts with slowness.

00:36:18.160 | One is just when you're trying to do something really well, it's hard to be super busy.

00:36:23.160 | It's hard to be super interleaving.

00:36:25.240 | Quality demands concentration and attention, but two, quality once achieved at any non-trivial

00:36:31.960 | level gives you more autonomy to control your schedule going forward.

00:36:35.360 | So as you get better at what you do, as you find specialties within your field that you

00:36:41.000 | become world-class at, you will gain more flexibility.

00:36:44.600 | You can bill higher hours.

00:36:46.300 | You can start doing less total hours because you're still generating the same amount of

00:36:49.720 | work.

00:36:50.720 | So I would say obsessing over quality, that principle three of slow productivity is something

00:36:55.560 | that you really want to keep in mind there.

00:36:57.480 | All right.

00:36:58.480 | So keep track of what you're doing for the non-actual billable hours and treat them like

00:37:03.000 | they are billable and two, obsess over quality.

00:37:06.000 | And three, I would say if you need help getting out of that giant metal buoy floating out

00:37:11.640 | there in the Nova Scotia Bay, let us know because I don't know if that's the most productive

00:37:16.760 | place to actually be doing your work.

00:37:18.360 | Jesse, as someone who, because we've had to, I mean, you weren't here when I was first

00:37:22.600 | setting up the studio, but like obsessing over echoes and sound is a big part of setting

00:37:26.200 | up podcasting studios.

00:37:27.520 | So I think for audio engineers everywhere, it gives them hives.

00:37:32.600 | I agree.

00:37:33.600 | The live space.

00:37:34.600 | Yeah.

00:37:35.600 | I have a lot more respect for sound quality now than I did prior.

00:37:38.880 | Yeah.

00:37:39.880 | I mean, speaking of rabbit holes, very impressed by anyone who's good at sound.

00:37:44.440 | Yeah.

00:37:45.440 | Yeah.

00:37:46.440 | We need a sound person to let's put out the bat signal.

00:37:48.920 | I don't know if we're going to catch, catch you in the middle of an episode.

00:37:50.920 | If you're in the DC area and a very good sound engineer, let Jesse know.

00:37:54.720 | Yeah.

00:37:55.800 | So if you heard that last recording and, and thought it sounded good, then don't contact

00:38:01.080 | us.

00:38:02.080 | Otherwise we're always in the market for a good sound person.

00:38:04.360 | All right.

00:38:05.360 | What do we got next?

00:38:08.080 | Next question is from Paul.

00:38:09.800 | He's a software developer from Zambia.

00:38:13.200 | What are great hobbies to have outside of work that will aid in our focus levels during

00:38:17.000 | our deep work sessions?

00:38:18.840 | Well, Paul, when it comes to becoming better at concentration, so training your ability

00:38:25.200 | to concentrate, which readers of my book, deep work, no, is something that I find to

00:38:30.880 | be important.

00:38:31.880 | This idea that concentration is something you have to train.

00:38:36.120 | It is a skill you develop, not a habit that you just need to do more of.

00:38:40.200 | So once you decide you want to train your ability to concentrate, I typically divide

00:38:45.480 | relevant training activities in the two categories, passive and active.

00:38:51.800 | So the passive activities when it comes to concentration typically have to do with becoming

00:38:57.160 | more comfortable with boredom.

00:39:01.000 | And by boredom in this context, I mean lack of novel stimuli.

00:39:04.540 | So if you're going to try to concentrate deeply on a hard problem, that effort by definition

00:39:10.020 | is going to be boring.

00:39:11.680 | If we use the official definition of boredom, meaning a sort of uncomfortable lack of novel

00:39:16.000 | stimuli because you're doing the same thing hour after hour.

00:39:20.200 | So if your brain is uncomfortable with that, if most of the time when you're not working

00:39:26.900 | on something hard, you're pulling out your phone at the slightest hint of boredom.

00:39:30.960 | I'm in line.

00:39:31.960 | I'm in a red light with my car.

00:39:34.880 | I'm waiting for someone to come back from the bathroom at a restaurant.

00:39:37.280 | If at every hint of boredom, you're exposing yourself to hyper palatable digital distraction,

00:39:42.800 | your brain will create a Pavlovian connection.

00:39:46.000 | Distraction follows boredom.

00:39:48.320 | Distraction follows boredom.

00:39:49.320 | And once it has that connection made, it's not going to tolerate three hours trying to

00:39:53.360 | work on a book chapter, two and a half hours working out a complicated business strategy

00:39:58.080 | because it will say we don't have stimuli.

00:39:59.700 | We always get stimuli when we lack it.

00:40:01.760 | Where's the phone?

00:40:02.760 | Where's the phone?

00:40:03.760 | Where's the phone?

00:40:04.760 | And no matter what your intention is, no matter how much you told yourself, it's very important

00:40:08.160 | that I concentrate now.

00:40:09.680 | I read deep work.

00:40:10.680 | I know I will produce at a higher level if I don't switch my context, no matter how much

00:40:14.580 | you pep yourself up.

00:40:17.020 | If the last three or four years you've trained your brain, boredom, distraction, boredom,

00:40:22.680 | distraction, it's not going to put up with it.

00:40:24.080 | You'll be very uncomfortable.

00:40:25.080 | You're not going to be able to concentrate well.

00:40:26.960 | So passive training activities for concentration are just things that get you used to not giving

00:40:34.280 | in to boredom.

00:40:35.760 | And almost any hobby you come up with has this capability.

00:40:41.560 | I like films.

00:40:43.140 | You know, I have a film watching group with some buddies of mine watching movies.

00:40:47.560 | Believe it or not is great passive training.

00:40:49.440 | Put your phone away, put your tablet away.

00:40:51.320 | You have to just follow the movie that's happening on screen, reading books, going multiple chapters

00:40:57.400 | without taking out your phone, without looking at a tablet.

00:40:59.400 | That is great passive training.

00:41:00.960 | Anything outside is as well.

00:41:02.480 | Basically any sport, you're playing pickup basketball, you're focused on the basketball.

00:41:08.080 | You're going for a long walk or a hike without a phone with you, without an earbud in your

00:41:12.560 | ear, you're getting that passive training.

00:41:13.800 | So you want a lot of that in your life.

00:41:15.200 | You want on a regular basis to be doing things with your full attention without looking at

00:41:19.080 | a phone, without looking at a screen.

00:41:22.160 | So almost any hobby will get you there.

00:41:24.400 | Just be sure whatever hobby you do, you keep purified in a distraction context.

00:41:29.520 | So no screens while you do that hobby.

00:41:32.320 | All right.

00:41:33.540 | Active training is where you actually practice maintaining your focus on something difficult.

00:41:41.400 | So you can actively increase your capacity for focus by doing that very activity.

00:41:49.240 | So if we're going to connect this back to hobbies, any hobby that requires really unbroken

00:41:55.740 | concentration to succeed is going to actually help you get this training with concentration.

00:42:01.360 | That most commonplace you're going to get this is actually training.

00:42:05.440 | So it's maybe not the application of the hobby.

00:42:08.000 | Like once you know how to do it, it's when you're trying to increase your skill at that

00:42:10.600 | hobby.

00:42:12.160 | So I don't know if you're playing pickup basketball, you might be in a flow state.

00:42:17.400 | I'm just playing.

00:42:18.400 | I'm just trying to be loose.

00:42:19.400 | And that's not actually a state of I'm really pushing my ability to concentrate.

00:42:23.760 | But when you're practicing, you're practicing, like I'm trying to get a jump shot that works

00:42:29.120 | and you're thinking so hard about, okay, what's my arm angle?

00:42:31.720 | What am I doing?

00:42:32.720 | It's that deliberate practice zone of trying to increase your skill.

00:42:37.280 | That's actually where you get a lot of the improvement.

00:42:41.160 | Chess is another example.

00:42:43.720 | Playing the game of chess.

00:42:44.720 | Yes, you do have to concentrate.

00:42:45.720 | You're trying to read the board and what's going on.

00:42:48.560 | What are the moves?

00:42:49.560 | That's good training.

00:42:50.560 | The practice for the games, though, if you're a serious chess player, you're going to be

00:42:54.120 | doing puzzles with your coach, with your trainer, where they're setting up scenarios where you

00:42:58.160 | have to try to solve it that are just past where you're comfortable.

00:43:02.300 | That's even better training because every single thing you're doing is at the limits

00:43:05.680 | of your comfort.

00:43:06.680 | In the chess game, maybe that's only true of 20% of the positions.

00:43:10.280 | So any hobby that has you concentrating really intensely in a way that if your concentration

00:43:15.840 | wavers, your success reduces is going to get you more comfortable with concentration as

00:43:22.200 | an activity.

00:43:23.200 | So do those two things.

00:43:24.200 | I'm comfortable with boredom and I'm used to the feeling of concentration.

00:43:27.320 | I've practiced that.

00:43:28.680 | That will translate.

00:43:30.600 | And now when you're doing the cognitively demanding professional task, you're writing

00:43:34.920 | the code because you're a software developer, Paul, so that makes sense.

00:43:38.960 | You're writing the code or whatever.

00:43:41.680 | You're going to lock in longer.

00:43:44.080 | You can have more intensity.

00:43:45.540 | You can hold more of the variables in your working memory.

00:43:47.840 | You can play around with the algorithm designs.

00:43:50.480 | And so, yeah, hobbies can really help if you know what you're trying to achieve.

00:43:54.440 | All right, so I want to try a case study next.

00:43:59.960 | I'm trying to work more of these in where we actually have people reporting back on

00:44:05.480 | various successes or failures with the ideas we talk about on this show.

00:44:11.240 | So the case study I want to share today comes from Bryce, a 28 year old living in North

00:44:17.720 | Carolina.

00:44:18.720 | All right, so let me read what Bryce sent me and then we'll talk about it.

00:44:23.600 | I started house hacking right at the beginning of the pandemic to lower expenses and have

00:44:29.120 | more financial flexibility.

00:44:32.040 | Now I'm on my third house plus guest house in two years.

00:44:35.340 | This allows me to live what I currently consider to be the ideal work schedule and deep life.

00:44:42.680 | Here is my current daily work schedule.

00:44:45.400 | He puts work in quotation marks.

00:44:48.200 | First I consult part time for a health care startup.

00:44:52.280 | Long term career goal is to fix U.S. health care.

00:44:54.480 | I do that in the morning.

00:44:55.480 | Next, I listen to podcasts during lunch.

00:44:58.660 | Then I train for power lifting or go out to walk on non lifting days.

00:45:02.880 | This is the afternoon.

00:45:04.520 | Occasionally meetings or networking calls on non lifting days as well.

00:45:08.200 | I watch a show during dinner.

00:45:10.480 | I read a physical book or go to a meetup or work on an upcoming speech when relevant.

00:45:18.720 | I listen to audio books or podcasts until I go to sleep at 930.

00:45:23.200 | All right, so that was Bryce explaining his current deep life.

00:45:31.300 | Let me just define a few things here.

00:45:32.580 | He's talking about house hacking.

00:45:33.780 | You might not have heard of house hacking before.

00:45:36.720 | That's the concept where you buy a house as a primary residence.

00:45:42.820 | You can get a very low mortgage rate.

00:45:45.300 | And then you rent out part of that house and the renting of that house then pays for the

00:45:50.860 | rest.

00:45:51.860 | So maybe you buy a duplex and you live in the one half of the duplex.

00:45:57.460 | You rent out the other half of the duplex.

00:45:59.540 | The rent from the other half of the duplex covers the mortgage payments and insurance

00:46:05.720 | or what have you on the whole building.

00:46:07.740 | Now you're living for free.

00:46:09.460 | So not only are you living for free, but you're building up equity in this property as well.

00:46:13.860 | So eventually you're also going to own this property outright.

00:46:17.180 | So when he says he's on his third house plus guest house, I think he's property laddered

00:46:20.540 | up to bigger properties where he can rent more of it.

00:46:24.940 | He may be, he's renting out multiple houses.

00:46:26.820 | That's not house hacking.

00:46:27.820 | So I'm a little bit confused, but basically he's using real estate in a way to keep his

00:46:32.340 | expenses very low.

00:46:33.340 | So if you're young, like he is, if you're 28, you don't have a family and you're house

00:46:36.900 | hacking, you might have zero living costs while building up equity in a house, which

00:46:40.980 | means you can live pretty cheap because you don't have to pay for your house.

00:46:44.620 | So it looks like he's doing part-time consulting, but part-time consulting is giving him more

00:46:50.480 | than enough money to live on because again, he has no housing expense.

00:46:55.260 | And so that's a, it's an interesting lifestyle that he's designed there.

00:46:58.620 | Why I like this is because it is a great example of lifestyle centric career planning, going

00:47:03.660 | to an extreme place.

00:47:06.980 | So when we talk about the deep life, one of the tools that we commonly discuss on this

00:47:11.620 | show is lifestyle centric career planning, where you start with a vision of what you

00:47:15.260 | want your life to be like in the medium term future.

00:47:18.660 | And then you work backwards from that to try to figure out how you engineer it.

00:47:22.840 | What Bryce did here is when he was fixing that image, he had an image of a life, at

00:47:27.680 | least for his later twenties, before he had a family or whatever else he wants to do.

00:47:31.400 | He clearly had an image that was very autonomous, very focused on as a young adult, sort of

00:47:38.440 | coming into his potential, establishing himself as an adult.

00:47:41.480 | He wanted a life where he was reading and he was exercising and he had a lot of flexibility

00:47:45.480 | and he was getting exposed to ideas and getting sleep.

00:47:48.000 | I think it's very aspirational for someone who's in their twenties to think about.

00:47:51.200 | It's a pretty good thing to do.

00:47:53.980 | And once he worked backwards from that, he says, well, how do I get this?

00:47:57.180 | How do I get this much flexibility?

00:47:58.320 | And here's the magic of lifestyle centric career planning.

00:48:00.760 | When you work backwards from the lifestyle instead of forward from career options that

00:48:04.000 | seem available to you, you can land on some pretty radical solutions.

00:48:08.240 | And that's what happened here.

00:48:10.580 | So probably working backwards from that vision, he was thinking, well, to have this much autonomy,

00:48:16.680 | you know, the exercise and the long evenings with friends and all the reading, that's

00:48:21.800 | going to be hard if I'm working till five or six every night.

00:48:24.480 | So how can I, how can I cut down my work hours?

00:48:27.280 | He's probably doing the math and well, I have some background in health care.

00:48:31.720 | It turns out if he elaborates the story, I think he has a pharmacy degree or a background

00:48:35.040 | in pharmacy.

00:48:36.040 | It's probably thinking, well, I could probably do consulting, but that's not going to be

00:48:38.760 | enough money to live on.

00:48:40.040 | I'm going to be living super frugally, so that might not be great.

00:48:43.200 | And then that's what probably brought him to house hacking.

00:48:45.600 | You know, if I could get rid of my living expenses, though, now these numbers track

00:48:50.960 | and this kind of makes sense.

00:48:52.200 | And then if I'm building equity in my house, let's say I want to start a family in my early

00:48:55.960 | thirties.

00:48:56.960 | By then I might own this house that I've been living in for free, and then I could turn

00:49:01.540 | around and sell that house.

00:49:03.560 | And with that money that could really get me started with setting up a new home for

00:49:06.520 | my family.

00:49:07.680 | You don't end up in these interesting, unusual configurations.

00:49:11.920 | If you go from your current situation forward, hey, what job's available to me, how would

00:49:16.360 | that work?

00:49:17.360 | You only get there when you work from a lifestyle backwards.

00:49:20.320 | So that's what I like about Bryce.

00:49:21.920 | Not that his particular path is some sort of model that we should all do or that is

00:49:26.320 | available to everyone, but that his approach can lead to really interesting places.

00:49:34.360 | So I think that's interesting.

00:49:35.640 | So good for you, Bryce.

00:49:37.500 | Working from a lifestyle, you can end up in interesting places.

00:49:41.000 | This reminds me, Jesse, of we were talking about quiet quitting in a recent episode.

00:49:45.000 | And one of the things I pointed out is my one frustration on behalf of the quiet quitters

00:49:51.040 | or those who are having this discussion is that they're missing how much of an existing

00:49:55.440 | conversation there is out there already about what to do when you feel burnt out or stuck

00:50:00.060 | in your work life.

00:50:01.060 | And so this is another example.

00:50:02.060 | You do lifestyle centered career planning, you end up somewhere interesting, you get

00:50:05.960 | there with intention, you feel autonomy, you feel control.

00:50:09.800 | There's just so many more levers available to people in crafting their life than simply

00:50:15.360 | have to have a job.

00:50:17.520 | And I'm kind of upset at my job.

00:50:20.640 | And so I guess I'll just not do as much of my job and wait for capitalism to be overthrown.

00:50:27.240 | This is all these really interesting ideas out there.

00:50:29.880 | Lifestyle design, the Tim Ferriss lifestyle centric career planning, what we talk about,

00:50:34.280 | the financial independence people.

00:50:37.520 | They're under fire.

00:50:39.760 | The financial, the fire community, you know, we talk about them sometimes.

00:50:43.360 | Ironically, the fire community.

00:50:45.080 | So this is the financial independence retire early community is under fire themselves.

00:50:51.480 | So I think the media in particular has decided that fire is bad and there's now like a pretty

00:50:56.640 | consistent drumbeat against that movement.

00:51:00.080 | So if you don't know fire, I mean, it is a relatively narrow movement, but it was basically

00:51:05.240 | largely came out of people who were young and in the tech sector because salaries were

00:51:09.320 | high in the tech sectors and they worked the math and say, if you have a high tech sector

00:51:14.080 | salary because it's a high salary, if you work, live really cheaply, you can actually

00:51:20.000 | save up a huge amount of money because you started a pretty high salary early on in tech.

00:51:25.440 | And if you're living really cheaply and saving most of your salary in about 10 years, you

00:51:29.560 | can actually save enough money where you can continue to live equally cheaply just off

00:51:34.300 | of your investment returns.

00:51:35.960 | People in the tech industry also figured out there's a lot more freelancing or consulting

00:51:39.820 | opportunities.

00:51:40.820 | So, so you can live cheaply, quit the full-time job, do some consulting, live off the money

00:51:46.440 | you spent and you have a lot more flexibility.

00:51:48.600 | That was the fire movement.

00:51:50.320 | The fire movement is under fire right now.

00:51:53.520 | The sense is I think is the, the general media response is that they're not sufficiently

00:51:58.840 | on board with other things they care about.

00:52:01.960 | So there was a, an article in the Washington post last week, for example, about Vicki Robbins,

00:52:07.240 | who wrote your money or your life, which was this book from the seventies.

00:52:10.480 | It was the, the Bible of sorts that fire used in the two thousands and building up their

00:52:16.080 | movement.

00:52:17.080 | It's a sort of throwy and argument about your life is worth money.

00:52:21.040 | Ours your life is worth value.

00:52:24.280 | So how much of that you want to give away for this much income.

00:52:27.440 | And it's really a beginning of this idea of getting financial independence early came

00:52:31.360 | from that book.

00:52:32.360 | But the whole point of this article was well, she and us are very disappointed in the fire

00:52:37.480 | movement because they don't talk enough about various political issues they think are important.

00:52:43.480 | So it's interesting.

00:52:44.480 | So, so the fire movements being discarded for not sufficiently engaging in discussions

00:52:49.880 | of economic inequality or other political issues.

00:52:53.640 | You know, my friends, the frugal woods who are in the fire community, I talked about

00:52:58.720 | them in digital minimalism, Liz won't talk about fire anymore, even though that's their

00:53:04.760 | whole thing.

00:53:05.760 | They left Cambridge, Massachusetts, the move up to Vermont to a homestead, and they, they

00:53:10.720 | live very cheaply, saved a lot of money and use that.

00:53:13.800 | So they could, they could have a lifestyle on a homestead and not have to work as much.

00:53:17.640 | I think it's actually pretty cool what they're doing up there.

00:53:20.400 | She has announced recently, I'm not going to talk about fire anymore.

00:53:24.320 | You know, all I'm going to do is maybe get personal finance advice to people who write

00:53:27.040 | in because she couldn't take the negative feedback.

00:53:30.400 | The tide turned against fire and she started doing these long disclaimers about like, here's

00:53:36.880 | the 17 different ways, you know, I'm privileged and, and the, and people still get mad at

00:53:42.200 | her.

00:53:43.200 | I just don't think she could take it.

00:53:44.200 | And she's like, I'm just not gonna talk about this anymore.

00:53:45.920 | So anyways, fire is under fire, but I think it's interesting as a case study of the broader

00:53:52.600 | goal of lifestyle centric career planning.

00:53:54.520 | When you work backwards from what you want your lifestyle to be like, lots of different

00:53:58.320 | options can show up.

00:53:59.560 | And so you could end up like the frugal woods on a, they're in a homestead in Vermont.

00:54:04.580 | She was freelance writing.

00:54:06.240 | Nate was doing computer programming remotely and then was able to stop that.

00:54:10.760 | So they're basically living off of, they kept their house in Cambridge and they rented out

00:54:15.200 | and she makes some freelance money and they live cheap and they live in the woods.

00:54:18.320 | It's kind of cool.

00:54:19.360 | That's an option.

00:54:20.360 | You could end up like Bryce house hacking, you know, I don't have housing expenses.

00:54:24.440 | So I can do part-time work and have a lot of other free time.

00:54:28.000 | That's an option.

00:54:29.000 | Or it could be something completely different.

00:54:30.160 | It could be like me or where to me, it's not so much that I want to have very small work

00:54:33.800 | hours, but I wanted to be able to write and do intellectual work and have some flexibility

00:54:38.400 | in my schedule and spent my entire adult life trying to craft exactly what I'm doing right

00:54:42.720 | now.

00:54:43.720 | So I'm kind of rambling here, but let me just bring this in for a landing lifestyle centric

00:54:48.760 | career design, working backwards from the lifestyle to your decisions in the near future

00:54:54.280 | leads to a lot more interesting opportunities than just saying what's available to me right

00:54:59.320 | now.

00:55:00.400 | What's a reasonable of those things, what, which is the things I'm going to do.

00:55:03.600 | So that's how we should think about fire.

00:55:06.440 | Just like house hacking, just like anything else.

00:55:08.800 | It's one geo arbitrage living, working remotely while living somewhere cheaper.

00:55:12.560 | So now you don't need as big of a salary because where you live is cheaper, but you like the

00:55:15.320 | environment more.

00:55:16.320 | So a lot of these are just tools in the big toolbox of stepping back, taking deep breath,

00:55:23.160 | getting excited about a vision for your life and figuring out what do I need to take out

00:55:27.240 | of here and apply to actually get there.

00:55:30.640 | Mr. Money Mustache has said I wasn't a special on Netflix.

00:55:34.200 | Oh yeah?

00:55:35.200 | Yeah.

00:55:36.200 | Someone sent me a Mr. Money Mustache thing recently.

00:55:38.720 | Yeah, that's not.

00:55:40.680 | Yeah.

00:55:41.680 | That's interesting.

00:55:42.680 | So did you see the special?

00:55:43.680 | Yeah.

00:55:44.680 | What's the show?

00:55:45.680 | It's like a, they follow several different people.

00:55:48.920 | Mr. Money Mustache advises one couple about lowering expenses and stuff like that.

00:55:55.880 | I like him.

00:55:56.880 | I like him too.

00:55:57.880 | He was in one of your books.

00:55:58.880 | Yeah.

00:55:59.880 | He blurbed digital minimalism.

00:56:00.880 | And then you talked about him in another book, right?

00:56:03.560 | Yeah.

00:56:04.560 | Yeah.

00:56:05.560 | Yeah.

00:56:06.560 | I think maybe I talked about him in a world without email.

00:56:07.560 | Um, but I talked about digital minimalism.

00:56:09.760 | He blurbed it.

00:56:11.040 | My story, my Mr. Money Mustache stories that he told me the way he, the way he read digital

00:56:16.160 | minimalism, I sent them, you know, sent them the book to read the blurb is he went to a

00:56:19.280 | tree and he read it under a tree because he wanted to be away from all distractions while

00:56:25.000 | he read it.

00:56:26.000 | And I was like, you get the prize for the coolest way to read this book.

00:56:28.480 | Mr. Money Mustache sitting under a tree.

00:56:30.200 | He's a cool guy.

00:56:31.200 | He's an interesting story as well.

00:56:33.200 | Um, again, it's, he had a clear vision for what he wanted his life with his son, what

00:56:38.480 | they wanted it to be like.

00:56:39.760 | Yeah.

00:56:40.760 | And he's very intentional about how it works.

00:56:44.440 | Now he's an interesting situation because he lives cheaply.

00:56:47.960 | They had this all figured out.

00:56:49.960 | And then him writing about what he was doing suddenly became incredibly lucrative.

00:56:55.840 | So then he had this fire hose of money, which was not part of the plan.

00:56:59.720 | And to his credit, he just didn't change his lifestyle at all because of the money that

00:57:05.960 | that Mr. Money Mustache website was producing.

00:57:08.520 | He would give a huge amount of it away to charity.

00:57:11.520 | So he's doing six figure charitable donations.

00:57:13.400 | And then he bought some real estate, which I thought was cool in downtown Longmont and

00:57:17.920 | renovated it and build a, like a coworking space.

00:57:20.800 | So like people could come and work and they have events there where people come and give

00:57:24.360 | talks about this.

00:57:25.360 | And I mean, it's a little bro-y because he, but he's a bro-y guy.

00:57:28.400 | I mean, he's literally a bro.

00:57:29.760 | He's a big guy.

00:57:30.800 | He likes to lift weights.

00:57:31.880 | He welds.

00:57:32.880 | Really handy.

00:57:33.880 | Yeah.

00:57:34.880 | He's very handy.

00:57:35.880 | He builds a ton.

00:57:36.880 | He builds a weight racks there and squat racks and stuff like this.

00:57:40.360 | And I know that's one of the attacks on some of these people is what the bro-y, but like,

00:57:45.200 | yeah, this guy is a literally a bro in the sense that he's like a, you know, Burt Reynolds

00:57:52.200 | type character, but he built a very intentional life.

00:57:55.520 | Yeah.

00:57:56.520 | And he didn't spend the money on, you know, buying big houses or this or that.

00:58:01.280 | All that stuff's interesting.

00:58:02.280 | I sort of feel a synthesis coming for a lot of these ideas.

00:58:06.640 | Maybe not for me, but there's a whole generation that's like, oh, so how does this work thing

00:58:10.560 | work?

00:58:11.560 | And there's so much interesting ideas.

00:58:12.960 | Maybe we just need a good umbrella to put over the whole thing.

00:58:15.520 | And I just, I have, I'm a lot, I'm excited for the potential for all these people out

00:58:18.960 | here right now.

00:58:19.960 | They're thinking, I don't know, I don't really like this job and I'm on zoom and what is

00:58:23.080 | work and, uh, like all that sort of youth anxiety.

00:58:26.960 | There's more options now than there's ever been before for how to like really rethink

00:58:31.880 | work.

00:58:32.880 | So it's exciting.

00:58:33.880 | All right.

00:58:34.880 | So let's, uh, see, we've been a couple more questions here before we get to my books.

00:58:38.320 | What do we got next?

00:58:39.320 | Uh, next question is from Jeannie.

00:58:41.840 | She's from Singapore.

00:58:43.600 | In episode one 65, you said you would give an update on your experience with Zettelkasten.

00:58:49.200 | How are things going?

00:58:50.200 | All right.

00:58:51.200 | Well, I'm, I'm not really doing much Zettelkasten.

00:58:53.960 | I failed at that experiment.

00:58:56.840 | I'll tell you where I might need it so I can put out the bat signal to the Zettelkasten

00:59:01.400 | experts out there if they want to respond.

00:59:04.360 | So where I have systems that work just fine is books.

00:59:08.640 | I'm writing articles.

00:59:10.520 | I'm writing stuff I'm committed to.

00:59:12.320 | They each just get their own project in Scrivener.

00:59:15.960 | Scrivener has great tools for organizing research and notes.

00:59:18.920 | And I want them.

00:59:19.920 | That's where I want the research and notes because when I actually writing that book

00:59:22.720 | chapter or writing that article, I want all of the relevant research right there.

00:59:26.600 | So my thoughts, my notes, all of that goes in the Scrivener once I'm actually working

00:59:31.000 | on a writing project.

00:59:33.440 | Same thing for academic writing for computer science work.

00:59:37.720 | I'll start a latex document for a paper I'm writing, even if it's very early stages.

00:59:44.080 | And I'll, I use a online tool called Overleaf, which is just a browser based editor that

00:59:50.480 | all your collaborators can edit the same file.

00:59:54.140 | So we used to whatever, I don't want to get too technical.

00:59:57.000 | We used to use code based version management software to keep track of files when we're

01:00:02.280 | writing papers together because we're nerds.

01:00:05.080 | And now there's cool tools like Overleaf.

01:00:07.560 | It's all web based.

01:00:08.560 | But anyways, I'm early in a paper.

01:00:10.400 | I'm going to start a document and everything's going to go in there and it's going to get

01:00:13.840 | huge.

01:00:14.840 | And then eventually I'm going to pull out of there, you know, what we'll actually submit

01:00:17.520 | for publication.

01:00:18.520 | So all that's fine.

01:00:20.080 | The place that's weakest in my note universe is ideas that I'm not really working on yet.

01:00:27.920 | Random ideas, thoughts for things I might want to do.

01:00:30.260 | Even just interesting information like this could be useful for a book one day.

01:00:34.260 | This could be useful in an article one day.

01:00:36.160 | From what I understand that that universe of, we can think of it as like non-instrumental

01:00:42.780 | note capture is where Zettelkasten type ideas might come into play.

01:00:49.040 | I am capturing a lot of this in Obsidian, which is a markup based note taking software

01:00:53.660 | that's very compatible with Zettelkasten style philosophies, but I'm not doing it well.

01:00:59.460 | It feels disorganized or forced.

01:01:01.240 | So I'm just not there yet.

01:01:02.600 | So, Jeannie, I'm not there yet, but I do need help.

01:01:06.060 | I don't think I'm quite capturing non-instrumental notes properly yet.

01:01:10.200 | So again, I will give you another update if I advance that particular area.

01:01:16.240 | Some of your notes carry over in your moleskin, right?

01:01:19.040 | From month to month.

01:01:21.040 | Yeah.

01:01:22.440 | So my moleskin captures typically lifestyle design related questions.

01:01:27.060 | So things about my life, my vision, examples that are aspirational to me.

01:01:34.000 | But things are supposed to move out of there when I check it every month into more permanent

01:01:37.880 | systems.

01:01:38.880 | And sometimes it happens in a very obvious way.

01:01:39.880 | It's like, great, I'm now going to put this into my strategic plan.

01:01:42.160 | I'm now going to update my values document.

01:01:44.760 | My strategic plan for work has this long-term vision for what's going on with my academic

01:01:49.520 | work and I'm going to update that vision.

01:01:51.420 | So sometimes it's obvious and sometimes it's not.

01:01:54.760 | It's just an idea and I don't know what to do with it.

01:01:57.360 | Got it.

01:01:58.360 | And it'll sit in there for, yeah, it may languish in there for a while.

01:02:00.280 | So that's the piece I need to get better.

01:02:02.720 | I like Obsidian as a tool.

01:02:05.180 | My methodology is not great though.

01:02:06.880 | All right, let's do one more question.

01:02:10.760 | All right.

01:02:12.640 | Nature's call.

01:02:13.640 | I'm a PhD candidate in humanities and your system has helped me enormously in creating

01:02:18.040 | structure for myself.

01:02:19.760 | The main thing getting in my way is my IBS.

01:02:22.240 | I have good days and bad days, but on bad days I find my deep work sessions frequently

01:02:26.920 | interrupted by trips to the bathroom.

01:02:28.880 | I'd love your tips for realistically mitigating these issues.

01:02:33.200 | So I did a little IBS or irritable bowel syndrome research and I was looking up list of famously

01:02:42.520 | productive people who have had digestive ailments, some sort of variety probably of IBS.

01:02:50.120 | And some of the names I found, for example, were Tyra Banks, the actress Sybil Shepard,

01:02:56.480 | the musician Kurt Cobain, former president JFK and onwards and onwards.

01:03:02.920 | And the reason why I'm pulling out these names is to underscore a point here that I think

01:03:08.880 | is important.

01:03:09.880 | And this is a point that comes up often in discussions of slow productivity, which is

01:03:15.880 | if you're returning to something that's important to you with intention again and again to the

01:03:20.800 | best of your ability in the situation.

01:03:24.280 | So some days are better than others.

01:03:26.960 | When you zoom out to the scale of many months or years, you can have a highly productive

01:03:35.380 | impact on the world.

01:03:36.880 | Cobain, JFK, Shepard, Banks, huge amount of productive output into the world, stuff they

01:03:42.120 | find very important.

01:03:43.240 | So at that scale, the scale that matters, you can be producing things that you're proud

01:03:48.080 | of, even if on the scale of days and weeks, you have wildly varying abilities to actually

01:03:55.360 | do things.

01:03:56.360 | Even if I could do very little today or this week has been a bad week, even if that's happening

01:04:02.720 | to that scale, if you keep coming back to things with intention, the good days or the

01:04:07.480 | small progress on the bad days adds up the things that are really important.

01:04:12.640 | So there's this shift of scale I think is important, this shift of timeline from days

01:04:17.840 | and weeks to instead months and years is going to take some pressure off of you and your

01:04:23.280 | self-evaluations.

01:04:24.280 | JFK had terrible days.

01:04:27.360 | He had Addison's, IBS issue, all sorts of issues.

01:04:29.680 | He had days where he was immobilized in the White House, immobilized in constant pain.

01:04:37.900 | But if you look over the period of the whole first year, you see he did things that were

01:04:41.840 | important.

01:04:42.840 | FDR was similar.

01:04:43.840 | It was an IBS with FDR, obviously it was the issues with his polio and how difficult that

01:04:49.800 | made things.

01:04:51.400 | Very bad days, bad weeks, some days could do more than others, but you zoom out and

01:04:56.640 | you say, "Ah, you helped win World War II."

01:04:58.960 | So I think that scale shift is really important so that you're not so down, you won't be

01:05:04.040 | too down on yourself during the temporary bad periods.

01:05:09.200 | To give a contemporary, let's say relevant example from the headlines is Hilary Mandel

01:05:15.280 | died recently, the acclaimed historical fiction writer, she wrote Wolf Hall among other books.

01:05:24.960 | She had huge chronic issues.

01:05:26.440 | I don't know exactly what they were with pain and other types of things, very difficult

01:05:31.840 | sort of day to day.

01:05:33.160 | She would have days where she could do nothing, but she wrote these books that when you zoom

01:05:36.320 | out, reader obituaries, when you zoom out, incredibly influential.

01:05:41.560 | She was acclaimed for the work she did.

01:05:42.800 | So to me, I think that's very important, shifting scales, especially when the reality of your

01:05:46.880 | life is one where every day is not going to be a banger.

01:05:49.560 | All right, let me give some practical advice now, once we've done that bigger picture shift.

01:05:56.960 | One, simplify your professional life.

01:06:00.120 | So simplify your obligations.

01:06:01.640 | For a humanities PhD student, to the extent possible, just be focusing on your dissertation.

01:06:07.000 | You might be able to get out of other types of things that other PhD students might be

01:06:10.520 | doing.

01:06:11.520 | Simplify, that's fine, because what you want the ability here is relatively flexible days.

01:06:18.680 | Mainly what I'm doing until this afternoon is just working on my dissertation and I'm

01:06:22.720 | flexible on that.

01:06:23.880 | And so like some days I get less work done than others, but it's flexible.

01:06:26.560 | It's just what I'm doing each day is doing as much work as I can or feel comfortable

01:06:30.440 | doing.

01:06:31.440 | I have enough time to do it, not this highly pressured.

01:06:34.240 | I have one hour here, two hours here.

01:06:35.520 | I have all these other things going that I'm falling behind on.

01:06:37.680 | So give yourself flexibility.

01:06:40.040 | You have an issue that is real and hard and other people don't have it and you have to

01:06:44.840 | acknowledge that and give yourself a bit of a break.

01:06:47.720 | It's okay for you, for example, to have a lighter load than the other person who started

01:06:52.400 | in your program who doesn't have the same chronic medical issue.

01:06:56.640 | But to not to get graphic, but in your elaboration, you did talk about you.

01:07:05.040 | One of the ways the frequent bathroom trips become a problem is that you bring your phone

01:07:09.920 | with you and you mindlessly scroll and now you are out of the whatever cognitive context

01:07:17.240 | you were in before when you're working on your dissertation and it really can derail

01:07:20.240 | you.

01:07:21.340 | So the simple answer there is bring books into the bathroom.

01:07:25.120 | My grandfather, very well established theologian and scholar, brilliant professor, former provost,

01:07:35.040 | et cetera, et cetera, was famous for this.

01:07:37.920 | I remember his students telling these stories at his funeral that he would come up to them

01:07:42.200 | and say, oh, I found the perfect chapter for your dissertation.

01:07:46.920 | I was just reading about this.

01:07:48.080 | This is going to be perfect for you.

01:07:49.600 | And what they always would notice is many of his bookmarks were toilet paper.

01:07:54.520 | So work can be done in many different environments.

01:07:57.440 | Let's just leave it at that.

01:07:59.360 | Practical advice piece number three.

01:08:01.560 | I think this is relevant for anyone who has some sort of issue going on that is high impact.

01:08:07.400 | It could be chronic health.

01:08:08.840 | It could be mental health.

01:08:10.200 | It could be a traumatic life event.

01:08:13.160 | Someone close to you died, et cetera.

01:08:15.860 | Or you're going through even like a difficult situation with your job or a difficult situation

01:08:19.600 | with a friend and there's a relationship breaking, whatever.

01:08:23.560 | There's something nontrivially difficult happening in your life.

01:08:28.000 | This is a good time to really focus on all of the deep life buckets.

01:08:33.600 | To feel like you're giving each of them attention, that you care about it.

01:08:37.040 | There's keystones, you've overhauled them.

01:08:39.040 | The reason why you want to focus on all of the deep life buckets when times get unusually

01:08:43.500 | hard is because it gives you a, a sense of control and b, it de-centers, if you allow

01:08:51.040 | me to use a more trendy term coming out of a postmodern critical theory, it de-centers

01:08:56.200 | work in your perception of your day to day existence.

01:09:01.360 | Work which falls under the craft bucket is one of the many things that are important

01:09:05.040 | to your life that you're doing what you can, given the difficulties of your situation.

01:09:10.480 | That mindset will make you less stressed about, yeah, I'm not crushing it with my dissertation.

01:09:15.480 | I'm not writing all the book reviews that my fellow grad students are.

01:09:19.580 | That becomes less ominous.

01:09:21.440 | That becomes less stressful when you're like, well, I have my craft and I have my constitution

01:09:24.680 | and I have my contemplation on my community.

01:09:26.520 | I'm working on all these things and trying to keep a foothold in each during this hard

01:09:30.880 | time and I feel intention and I feel some sense of control.

01:09:35.760 | And maybe I'm in an emergency backup mode in a lot of these because I'm have a, there's

01:09:39.480 | a big issue going on right now, but I know what's important.

01:09:42.880 | There's lots of things in my life are important.

01:09:44.240 | It's not just work.

01:09:45.240 | Work is just one of the things that I'm working on and trying to keep alive.

01:09:48.160 | You can get through hard periods with much more calm and confidence than if you've centered

01:09:53.440 | work is this is all that matters.

01:09:54.920 | And so if I'm losing time from work, this is a crisis.

01:09:57.940 | So paradoxically focusing on more will help you feel better when you have time to do only

01:10:04.980 | less.

01:10:05.980 | So one of these interesting paradoxes of productivity.

01:10:09.200 | All right.

01:10:11.080 | So there's my advice and good luck with that.

01:10:15.440 | I, again, though, I would just say replace the toilet paper bookmark before, before you

01:10:21.280 | bring the book, before you bring the book into school.

01:10:24.440 | That's my only, that's my only one piece of advice.

01:10:26.440 | All right.

01:10:28.200 | So what I want to get to soon is the books I read in September every month.

01:10:33.160 | I like to talk about the books I read in the month before.

01:10:36.620 | So that's coming up next.

01:10:37.620 | Let me first just mention one of our sponsors that makes this show possible.

01:10:42.480 | And that is our good friends at ExpressVPN.

01:10:49.680 | Privacy matters.

01:10:51.360 | Most of us think privacy is important.

01:10:56.120 | And we would like to believe that when we are browsing the internet, we have privacy.

01:11:00.640 | Unless someone's looking over our shoulder, we'd like to believe the fact that I'm going

01:11:04.220 | to calnewport.com or whatever, the fact that I'm looking up celebrities with IBS, that's

01:11:08.320 | my business and no one else's.

01:11:11.680 | Well you have a lot less that privacy than you might hope.

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01:11:44.200 | Here is how it works.

01:11:45.200 | I've explained this before, so I'll be very brief.

01:11:47.720 | Instead of just directly connecting to let's say calnewport.com, you instead if you use

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01:11:55.880 | And it's an encrypted secure connection.

01:11:58.000 | So all your internet provider knows is that you're connecting to a VPN server.

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01:12:04.000 | Then you will be sending that server an encrypted message that says, I want to go to calnewport.com.

01:12:09.400 | And the VPN will say, are you sure about this?

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01:12:27.280 | They have no idea who you're talking to.

01:12:28.680 | There is no data for them to scrape and sell.

01:12:32.000 | I love that feeling every time I'm using a VPN of knowing that Verizon can't keep track

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01:12:39.360 | So if you're going to use a VPN, you should use the one I use, which is ExpressVPN.

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01:15:40.840 | All right.

01:15:41.840 | So as promised, I want to go over the books I read in September.

01:15:48.520 | As long time listeners know, my goal is to read five books a month and I then review

01:15:54.280 | them on the show.

01:15:55.280 | So let me go through in the order that I finished them.

01:15:57.200 | The five books I listened to or read in September 2022.

01:16:01.520 | It's kind of a weird list this month, Jesse.

01:16:03.560 | I was looking at this.

01:16:05.360 | I'm all over the place.

01:16:06.360 | I'm excited.

01:16:07.360 | All right.

01:16:08.360 | Number one, I might need your help on number one, Jesse, because I might, I'm mixing up

01:16:12.960 | this author's name in my head.

01:16:15.960 | So it's the book Endure, the memoir Endure by Cameron, is it Haynes or Hayes?

01:16:23.880 | The Bowhunter Extraordinaire.

01:16:25.360 | Haynes.

01:16:26.360 | Haynes.

01:16:27.360 | H-A-Y-N-E-S?

01:16:28.360 | H-A-N-E-S.

01:16:29.360 | Oh, okay.

01:16:30.360 | Cameron Haynes.

01:16:31.360 | Anyways, I don't know why I stumbled across this, but Cameron Haynes is-

01:16:36.520 | Probably Joe Rogan.

01:16:38.480 | He is on Rogan a lot.

01:16:39.480 | He's on a lot of shows a lot.

01:16:41.180 | So probably when he was doing publicity for this book, I caught him on some show I listened

01:16:46.560 | to.

01:16:47.560 | Interesting guy, got very into bow hunting and I guess revolutionized the sport because

01:16:55.400 | he brought to it extreme physical fitness.

01:17:01.280 | So he realized if you're incredible shape, so sort of ultra endurance athlete shape,

01:17:07.260 | you run marathons a couple of times a week to train type shape, you would be more successful.

01:17:11.160 | Bowhunter, because often you're in the back country hiking up and down mountains, they

01:17:15.600 | have to pack these things, hundreds of pounds of meat out of the mountains on their backs.

01:17:21.080 | And so he trains like a fanatic year round and then goes on these bow hunting trips in

01:17:26.360 | the season.

01:17:28.220 | But he, I guess, catalogs a lot of his training.

01:17:30.960 | And so he's been inspiring for a lot of people as part of the sort of discipline culture

01:17:34.840 | that's out there, the internet discipline culture.

01:17:37.640 | David Goggins, Jocko Willink, Rich Roll was a part of that world, now Cameron Haynes.

01:17:44.160 | So people who do really, really intense training.

01:17:48.480 | The book was okay.

01:17:50.360 | I would say my main complaint is I wanted to learn a lot more about the mechanics of

01:17:55.440 | bow hunting.

01:17:57.320 | Like this is very, how does it work?

01:17:59.280 | Like what makes a successful bow hunter not, I wanted many more tales of, of, you know,

01:18:05.200 | actual hunts.

01:18:06.200 | I wanted to be brought into that world maybe a little bit more, but it was interesting

01:18:08.880 | just to hear about this guy rebuilding his life.

01:18:11.880 | And it's a similar story to Rich Roll, troubles with alcohol, trouble with his family.

01:18:17.400 | And he, he turned it all around on discipline.

01:18:20.240 | The main thing I'll say about that entire subculture, that discipline internet subculture,

01:18:27.160 | it gets maligned and I don't think it should be.

01:18:31.560 | It gets maligned because people say these are, it's broey or these guys are like supermen

01:18:35.760 | and weird, unattainable ways, but I'm pretty sure the service that the figures in that

01:18:42.480 | internet subculture serve is not.

01:18:45.160 | You need to be like me or you're a failure.

01:18:48.680 | It actually, I do believe is very inspiring for a lot of men that they need to be in general,

01:18:53.760 | more disciplined in their life.

01:18:54.920 | And that leads to lots of good things and their relationships and their ability to show

01:18:58.340 | up as a husband, as a father and their ability to succeed and be a leader in work.

01:19:03.080 | It introduces the idea of discipline.

01:19:05.400 | This is what I've gotten away from it is not that people are going to become marathon

01:19:08.600 | running bow hunters, but that they might stop drinking and exercising every day and, you

01:19:14.760 | know, spending more time with their son at their baseball game.

01:19:16.760 | So I think there's a lot of good, way more good than bad coming from the discipline subculture.

01:19:21.560 | What were his workouts like?

01:19:25.360 | He does crazy stuff, man.

01:19:27.080 | Like he'll just casually run marathons just to train.

01:19:31.200 | Like I just, I ran a marathon today to train and then the next day he does super endurance

01:19:37.080 | events to a hundred milers, 150 milers.

01:19:40.000 | How old is he?

01:19:41.600 | He's a little older than us.

01:19:43.120 | I think he's like mid forties.

01:19:45.440 | Might be wrong.

01:19:46.440 | His kids are older.

01:19:47.440 | I think he's mid forties, maybe late forties.

01:19:49.640 | I might be wrong about that.

01:19:52.520 | But as a guy, as a beast, he has this, he's famous.

01:19:56.000 | So, okay.

01:19:57.000 | So he said in the book that the reason he got on Joe Rogan's podcast for the first time

01:20:02.360 | was he saw a video of him.

01:20:04.920 | One of his training things he did was just, there's this mountain where he lives in Wyoming

01:20:10.480 | or not Wyoming, I think Washington state.

01:20:13.320 | And he would pick up this giant rock and he's like, I'm just going to go to the top of the

01:20:17.120 | mountain with this rock.

01:20:18.120 | And then, and then he brings the rock back down.

01:20:21.040 | Like that was his train.

01:20:22.040 | He's like, I'm going to hold this giant, uncomfortable rock and carry it to the top of the mountain.

01:20:27.840 | There we go.

01:20:28.840 | Cameron Haynes.

01:20:29.840 | All right.

01:20:30.840 | My second book is from someone who is in slightly less good shape, I would say, then Cameron

01:20:36.640 | Haynes, at least physically.

01:20:38.200 | And that is great movies by Roger Ebert, the late great Roger Ebert.

01:20:44.600 | Ebert's a, I'm a huge Ebert fan.

01:20:49.080 | You know, he won a Pulitzer.

01:20:50.080 | There's not a lot of Pulitzers that have been given out for movie reviews and he has one

01:20:54.640 | of the only ones, maybe the only one, I don't know.

01:20:56.960 | I don't know if Pauline Kael ever got a Pulitzer.

01:21:00.320 | That's a good question.

01:21:01.320 | Well, anyways, he has a Pulitzer and movie reviews, a great movie reviewer died in the

01:21:07.520 | two thousands at some point, he had throat cancer, tragic.

01:21:10.520 | But at some point later in his career, he convinced the Chicago Tribune to allow him

01:21:16.260 | to write these every other week essays where he went back and wrote essays on what he considered

01:21:21.720 | to be just great movies from past.

01:21:23.760 | Instead of just reviews of new movies coming out, can I go back and look at great movies

01:21:27.240 | from past?

01:21:28.240 | Can I write an essay on taxi driver?

01:21:29.720 | Can I write an essay on Casablanca or some like it hot?

01:21:33.880 | And then he collected them in this book.

01:21:35.160 | So it's just a hundred movies, a hundred essays.

01:21:37.840 | And it's part of my efforts.

01:21:39.120 | I'm trying to more formally pursue an understanding of film.

01:21:45.760 | I like films a lot, but I've been self-educating at a higher level recently.

01:21:48.760 | And this was just part of that effort.

01:21:49.760 | I was like, I should probably just read a hundred essays by a great movie reviewer on

01:21:54.200 | a hundred great movies and just suck in that information like a sponge.

01:21:56.840 | So I enjoyed that.

01:21:57.840 | It's a great writer.

01:21:58.840 | It was a great introduction to a lot of these movies.

01:22:01.400 | And so I learned a lot.

01:22:03.000 | And what I've been doing is when I watch movies now, my method is I'll watch the movie and

01:22:09.120 | then usually about a half hour into the movie, I'll stop and then go rabbit hole, reading

01:22:15.360 | everything I can on that movie and then return and finish watching the movie with all that

01:22:19.480 | information in my head.

01:22:20.480 | So I get to experience the movie fresh and then read a ton of stuff and then watch the

01:22:25.960 | rest of the movie.

01:22:27.320 | And one of the, it's my insider tip.

01:22:29.080 | One of the coolest places I've found when rabbit holing on movies, they get really interesting

01:22:32.520 | information is cinematographer magazines and forums.

01:22:37.960 | You go to see cinematographers will write off in these incredibly detailed articles,

01:22:42.960 | for example, like American cinematographer magazine, where they'll write these long articles

01:22:48.400 | on how that particular movie was shot.

01:22:51.240 | And it's fascinating.

01:22:52.560 | And there's these discussion boards where you can learn so much about how movies are

01:22:58.360 | made.

01:22:59.360 | This is my, my secret weapon for rapidly building up a sort of cinema appreciation.

01:23:04.160 | It's like my oldest and I were watching the second hunger games movie because he's reading

01:23:09.740 | that series and he likes them.

01:23:11.240 | And it's too scary for the young kids.

01:23:12.760 | We're watching the second one.

01:23:14.280 | And then I went back and found an article that was being written by, it was the, no,

01:23:19.320 | it was in a forum.

01:23:20.320 | It wasn't even an article.

01:23:21.320 | It's in a cinematographer forum.

01:23:22.320 | It was the lead cameraman from that movie.

01:23:25.920 | And you've learned so much because he's just getting into it.

01:23:28.920 | He's like, and then when we went to this set, we were using this and this type of lens.

01:23:32.840 | And this is the issue we were having with the lighting and the smoke.

01:23:35.680 | And everyone was asking him questions.

01:23:36.680 | And then at some point, the cinematographer, who's actually a quite famous cinematographer,

01:23:41.000 | joined the discussion.

01:23:42.000 | And now the cinematographer is in there and they're getting into it back and forth about

01:23:45.240 | the different choices they made and the lenses.

01:23:48.500 | And you learned all these really interesting things.

01:23:50.280 | Like I didn't realize this, but with the hunger games second movie, they were filming anamorphic

01:23:55.160 | on 35 millimeter up until the halfway point when Katniss goes up the tube into the arena,

01:24:00.960 | the hunger games arena, they switched to IMAX and they kept the same aspect ratio, but with

01:24:06.320 | this huge level of detail, oh no, they expanded the aspect ratio.

01:24:10.920 | In the movie theater, they actually expand the picture expands on the screen.

01:24:14.800 | Anyways, cinematographer forums, you find a lot about movies.

01:24:19.200 | Did you find any other good movies from that book?

01:24:21.480 | Oh yeah.

01:24:22.480 | Yeah.

01:24:23.480 | Um, I mean, they're the classics, but I've been, I found I can get through about a movie

01:24:28.200 | a week.

01:24:29.200 | If I, it takes me about three sessions and I use some combination.

01:24:33.720 | So what I'm doing now is at least once a week I try to schedule a lunchtime viewing, right?

01:24:39.520 | When I get a sandwich from the butcher shop in town and just for an hour or so, just the

01:24:44.360 | middle of the day, the kids are at school.

01:24:46.320 | Just watch.

01:24:47.320 | And that's great.

01:24:48.320 | Just watch a movie for an hour.

01:24:49.680 | I can usually get, if I'm very careful about it, if it's, it's my wife and I switched back

01:24:53.400 | and forth bedtime duty.

01:24:54.840 | So if it's a night where it's her turn, if I'm really careful about getting all the other

01:24:58.720 | chores done, I can get an hour in, you know, because I can kind of start early and then,

01:25:03.960 | you know, while she's doing bedtime.

01:25:05.800 | And so usually in like three sessions I can, I can get through, get through a movie.

01:25:10.000 | Yeah.

01:25:11.000 | So I've gone through a lot.

01:25:12.000 | What I went through a bit of a Coppola seventies, any movies in that book that you have on your

01:25:19.640 | list that you didn't know about?

01:25:20.800 | Yeah.

01:25:21.800 | There's ones I didn't know about.

01:25:22.800 | I don't know if, yeah, he, there's definitely some, a lot of foreign films, a lot of yeah.

01:25:30.200 | Interesting films you want to know about, but he's trying to draw your attention to,

01:25:34.720 | I might watch, there's a good famous, um, Warner Hertzog movie he talks about and a

01:25:40.520 | gear, the wrath of God.

01:25:42.480 | That's about conquista doors in central America.

01:25:44.960 | And it's a classic Hertzog, you know, everyone almost died during the filming there in the

01:25:49.480 | jungle.

01:25:50.480 | Uh, and like, I'm going to, that's on my list now.

01:25:53.120 | I never would have known about that, uh, without, without reading him.

01:25:57.100 | Also it's a really good introduction to the French and Italian new wave directors.

01:26:01.080 | Cause he'll just say like, here's the five movies to watch.

01:26:04.360 | So you don't have to fall too far into a mess of Godard and Fellini and trying to understand,

01:26:12.200 | you know, um, Bergman, like, what should I be watching?

01:26:15.080 | So I guess you say Swedish as well as French and Italian.

01:26:17.280 | And he's like, just watch this one, this one, this one, just here's one, you know, from

01:26:21.240 | each, you should be watching, you know, eight and a half and seven seal.

01:26:24.360 | And it just shows you like, just watch these.

01:26:26.440 | Uh, I learned about, I didn't really know a lot about the blow up Michelangelo Antonio's

01:26:32.440 | the blow up, but I learned about it.

01:26:35.200 | And then I watched Francis Ford Coppola as the conversation, which was very inspired

01:26:38.960 | by it.

01:26:39.960 | So the blow up is a, it involves a photographer who's trying to reconstruct us potential murder

01:26:44.780 | that he was captured on film.

01:26:46.600 | So he's like working with the film and it's ambiguous.

01:26:49.120 | And the conversation, it's a potential murder plot captured on audio and Hackman is playing

01:26:55.560 | with the audio.

01:26:56.560 | Uh, and I listened to the director's commentary for that one too.

01:26:59.520 | Anyways, look, I'm nerding out.

01:27:01.400 | Sorry about that, but it's one of my hobbies right now is, is, uh, cinephilia.

01:27:06.880 | And so that's why I read that book.

01:27:08.600 | That's how I'm doing it.

01:27:09.600 | All right, let's speed up book.

01:27:10.680 | Number three, the metaverse by Matthew ball.

01:27:13.440 | I just needed to read this and I write about technology for the New Yorker.

01:27:17.480 | I need to know about these things.

01:27:18.960 | The metaverse is it's, it's a buzzy book written by a real booster of the idea of the metaverse.

01:27:23.960 | He's trying to explain sort of where we are, why it's inevitable.

01:27:27.100 | The thing I like the best about this book is he gets into the tech specs.

01:27:30.240 | He really, and I learned a lot about this, you know, here is the specs on like the latency

01:27:35.480 | and how much of a fast internet connection you would need to have a persistent 3d world.

01:27:39.920 | Here's actually the difficulties with having a hundred thousand people in the same simulation.

01:27:44.360 | We can't do that right now.

01:27:45.360 | You understand how much servers this would require.

01:27:47.160 | Uh, you know, so it gets into the weeds on all the different technical aspects of having

01:27:52.480 | something like the ready player one oasis where these large 3d persistent worlds for

01:27:58.040 | everyone participate.

01:27:59.040 | So actually I like that the best about the metaverse.

01:28:02.920 | You don't see that enough in these tech books.

01:28:04.320 | Like let's get into the weeds with information.

01:28:07.000 | All right.

01:28:08.000 | Number four, genius makers by Cade Metz, C A D E. Metz, the genius makers is on the

01:28:15.480 | rise of deep learning artificial intelligence.

01:28:17.600 | So it sort of tells the stories of the main figures.

01:28:20.800 | You got, uh, you know, Gregory Hinton, et cetera, et cetera.

01:28:24.720 | I've done this as a hobby, deep mind.

01:28:27.440 | I needed that for an article I'm writing.

01:28:30.320 | Can't tell much more about it now because it's in progress, but it's good.

01:28:34.560 | It's accessible.

01:28:35.560 | So you can learn a lot about the recent rise of artificial intelligence and what's driving

01:28:40.200 | that.

01:28:41.200 | Number five, here's the weird one, Jesse.

01:28:43.840 | And then there were none by Agatha Christie, one of her original, I don't know what you

01:28:50.960 | call these mysteries or cozy mysteries.

01:28:53.240 | I listened to it on tape.

01:28:54.640 | Well, Julie listened to it first.

01:28:55.640 | I was like, Oh, you'll love this.

01:28:56.640 | So then I listened to it on tape as well.

01:28:59.480 | And it's great.

01:29:00.480 | It, I mean, it was written in the thirties, but it's very modern in its pacing.

01:29:05.440 | And it's, it's what a great high concept it's, you know, 10 people show up at this island

01:29:10.440 | and, um, they die one by one and they're like, okay, what's going on here.

01:29:16.240 | What's and, and then the people are trying to figure out like what's happening.

01:29:19.480 | Is there someone else on the Island?

01:29:20.800 | They're dying one by one by one by one.

01:29:22.600 | Uh, and it's not a spoiler because of the title, then they all die.

01:29:27.880 | And then there's an epilogue where the whole thing is explained.

01:29:31.520 | Fantastic.

01:29:32.520 | What happened?

01:29:33.520 | I'm not going to say, read it, read the book.

01:29:37.760 | Uh, I recommend it.

01:29:39.000 | It's fun.

01:29:40.000 | And audio it's like six hours.

01:29:41.440 | It's not, it's not even that long.

01:29:42.880 | I did not figure it out, but I'm terrible at figuring things out, but it is very cleverly

01:29:47.080 | constructed like at the end you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:29:50.280 | Oh yeah.

01:29:51.280 | Okay.

01:29:52.280 | So it's like a round of applause and a tip of the cap.

01:29:54.560 | I love that type of writing.

01:29:56.200 | All right.

01:29:57.200 | Well, speaking of round of applause and tipping caps, we should probably wrap this one up.

01:30:01.880 | So I thank you everyone who submitted your questions.

01:30:05.040 | If you want to join the show, go to the survey link in the show notes and you can submit

01:30:10.200 | your question right there.

01:30:11.920 | If you like what you heard, you will like what you see at youtube.com/calnewportmedia

01:30:17.360 | videos of full episodes and clips of popular questions and segments.

01:30:20.560 | We'll be back next week with the next full episode of the deep questions podcast.

01:30:25.680 | And until then, as always stay deep.

01:30:28.280 | [Music]

Ep. 217: Using Slow Productivity To Do The Best Work Anywhere

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