Cultivate A Deep Life: One Idea To Change How You Think About Life In 2025

00:00:00.000 | So, this Christmas was just past, really for the first time, I found myself watching multiple

00:00:07.700 | Hallmark and Netflix Christmas movies.

00:00:12.760 | This all transpired because I came across an interesting article written by the New

00:00:16.440 | York Times cultural critic, Amanda Hess.

00:00:18.680 | The article was titled, "How I Aged Into the Bad Christmas Movie."

00:00:22.620 | It was an interesting discussion which piqued my interest, so I decided to go watch some

00:00:25.960 | of these movies over the break.

00:00:28.320 | And what I want to argue today is that in watching these movies, I identified an unexpected

00:00:33.460 | but interesting connection to one of the major ideas we talked about on the show, an idea

00:00:38.280 | that is very relevant to the New Year season where we are right now.

00:00:42.220 | So let's start with this article.

00:00:43.220 | I'll pull it up on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening.

00:00:47.900 | Here is the article from the New York Times, "How I Aged Into the Bad Christmas Movie,"

00:00:53.240 | written by Amanda Hess.

00:00:55.100 | So I want to start for those who are, like I was until recently, uninitiated with these

00:00:59.820 | movies.

00:01:01.260 | What are they about?

00:01:02.320 | So I'm going to read from this article up here on the screen.

00:01:04.960 | This is Amanda Hess's summary of the typical Hallmark Christmas movie.

00:01:12.500 | So quote, "The protagonist will be a pastry chef or a gift wrap shop owner or a candy

00:01:17.200 | cane company CEO.

00:01:18.620 | She will acquire an Alaskan inn or she will inherit a Scottish castle or her flight will

00:01:22.980 | be diverted to a Christmas-themed town."

00:01:25.180 | By the way, Jesse, I watched both the Scottish castle movie and the flight being diverted

00:01:31.020 | to the Christmas-themed town.

00:01:32.180 | I saw both those movies.

00:01:33.420 | "She will become a recent widower.

00:01:35.940 | She will meet a recent widower."

00:01:37.260 | I feel a lot more dark if early in the movie she becomes a widower.

00:01:41.660 | "She will meet a recent widower or a handsome woodworker or a charming earl.

00:01:46.340 | His home will be aggressively bedecked with Christmas lights and decorative bowls of frosted

00:01:49.740 | pine cones.

00:01:50.740 | He'll wear a scarf.

00:01:51.740 | He'll wear another scarf.

00:01:52.740 | At some point he will gift the protagonist a seasonally appropriate necklace.

00:01:57.060 | Together they will be forced to put on a strudel fest or locate a missing antique nutcracker.

00:02:01.980 | In the end she will abandon her professional ambitions in order to join him in his small

00:02:05.460 | town or in a more recent plot reversal he will forgo his small town life to join her

00:02:09.740 | in the big city.

00:02:10.740 | It will snow and they will kiss."

00:02:12.240 | So that's kind of the plot of most of these movies.

00:02:16.020 | A few observations with my cinematic hat on.

00:02:18.820 | The production values are not great.

00:02:20.740 | I think at their worst they look very bad and at their best it's sort of network TV

00:02:25.820 | show quality.

00:02:28.020 | They're shooting fast and quick, like a Clint Eastwood movie.

00:02:32.420 | The writing is very bad in these movies, I will say that.

00:02:35.380 | No one's really caring much about the dialogue.

00:02:38.660 | The acting also tends to be very bad as well.

00:02:41.480 | No one really seems to care about this.

00:02:43.700 | The Netflix movies, they try to be more funny.

00:02:46.860 | They're like more ironic and then the Hallmark movies are much more earnest.

00:02:51.820 | And a lot of the Hallmark movies are on Netflix, so it's kind of confusing.

00:02:54.260 | All right, so why are these movies popular?

00:02:56.420 | Well, again, I'm going to go back to Amanda Hess explaining her conversion from someone

00:03:03.940 | cynical about these films into someone who grew to like them.

00:03:08.740 | So here's what Amanda said, "When I first discovered the existence of made-for-television

00:03:13.020 | Christmas movies maybe 15 years ago, they struck me as sentimental and anti-feminist.

00:03:17.180 | Recently, I have felt so pummeled by stress and responsibility that I have found it difficult

00:03:24.700 | to turn on a compelling new television show at the end of the day.

00:03:28.060 | I have no extra energy to expend familiarizing myself with unknown characters, deciphering

00:03:32.980 | twists or even absorbing scenes of visual interest.

00:03:37.820 | What I've been looking for instead is a totally uncompelling new television show, one that

00:03:41.580 | expects nothing from me and that gives me little in return.

00:03:44.940 | The bad Christmas movies' beats are so consistent, its twists so predictable, its actors and

00:03:49.740 | props so loyally reused.

00:03:52.260 | It's easy to relax drowsily into its rhythms.

00:03:54.740 | The genre is formulaic, which makes for a kind of tradition.

00:03:58.580 | Now it plays through the winter like a crackling fireplace in my living room.

00:04:01.820 | This is clearly a big part of the appeal.

00:04:03.460 | You watch for six weeks or so.

00:04:05.380 | It's traditional.

00:04:06.380 | It's escape."

00:04:07.380 | So, look, you wouldn't be able to keep this up for a full year because these movies aren't

00:04:11.220 | very good.

00:04:12.220 | But this idea, she's saying that it's something that you look forward to in the season.

00:04:16.020 | It's supposed to be corny.

00:04:17.260 | It doesn't make much demands from you.

00:04:19.380 | That makes sense.

00:04:20.380 | She then, Amanda then elaborated in a podcast I listened to, she did a daily episode.

00:04:25.920 | She talked about this article and she elaborated the, she was pummeled by stress and responsibility

00:04:30.060 | in part because a friend had gotten a potentially very scary medical diagnosis and they were

00:04:34.980 | sort of fearing the worst that it ended up okay, but it was a stressful time.

00:04:39.620 | So you can kind of set that context.

00:04:41.220 | All right.

00:04:42.220 | That's what these movies are.

00:04:44.300 | That is why Amanda Hess came around to them.

00:04:47.100 | What I want to add today is that I think there is another reason for the appeal of these

00:04:52.260 | movies, especially to people of our generation, that is not only relevant to us, but underscores

00:04:57.380 | one of the big lessons we talk about on this show.

00:05:01.460 | So what is this hidden lesson in these movies?

00:05:03.780 | Well, look, there's this funny SNL skit.

00:05:06.500 | I remembered it vaguely and I found it earlier today, it was from five years ago, that made

00:05:11.660 | fun of Hallmark movies and it set up was, it was a dating game where the, it was the

00:05:18.220 | sort of the female protagonist and dating the sort of classic characters from these

00:05:22.500 | movies and the dating game was titled A Winter Boyfriend for Holiday Christmas.

00:05:27.320 | And toward the end, the host named Emily Kringle delivers sort of the joke line, the true reason

00:05:33.620 | for Christmas is husband.

00:05:36.180 | And I think that matches a curve of common misunderstanding about these movies that they're

00:05:41.800 | basically visual romance novels where the thrill is in imagining sort of finding true

00:05:47.220 | love and giving up everything for it.

00:05:49.500 | This was sort of the original understanding that led Amanda Hess to think like, hey, these

00:05:53.420 | movies are anti-feminist.

00:05:55.260 | I want to argue for millennial viewers, this is not why these movies are largely appealing.

00:05:59.620 | A lot of these viewers already are married, already have families.

00:06:03.900 | It's not the, the fantasy of the Christmas tree lot owner that captures them.

00:06:09.660 | The real value I think these movies have, the real aspiration is in their portrayal

00:06:14.820 | of lifestyle centric planning.

00:06:17.340 | So yes, Jesse, I brought this all back to my favorite deep life topic, lifestyle centric

00:06:21.780 | planning.

00:06:22.780 | All right, so hear me out.

00:06:23.780 | The most common plot for these movies, think about this, is a lead that has a stressful

00:06:28.860 | job in the big city.

00:06:32.140 | They end up in a small town where they do not have the stresses of that job.

00:06:38.600 | They connect with the community, which tends to be like tightly knit around.

00:06:42.100 | They all are coming together around a holiday.

00:06:44.540 | The holiday itself gives them exposure to sort of escapism and fantasy.

00:06:50.280 | The town is beautifully lit up and they just sort of appreciate the way it looks.

00:06:54.780 | They appreciate the people in the town.

00:06:57.820 | The pace is slower.

00:06:59.820 | The days are unpredictable.

00:07:01.700 | There's adventure going on.

00:07:03.020 | They're hunting down an antique nutcracker, trying to put on the strudel fest.

00:07:07.020 | The escapism in here, therefore, is not, hey, maybe I can find a husband who owns a Christmas

00:07:11.900 | tree farm, but instead the idea that you might be able to reduce your work hours, spend more

00:07:15.940 | time outside, walk down the street through the snow to the coffee shop that has the quirky

00:07:20.780 | owner who knows you and get lost that evening in some like town tradition or they like light

00:07:25.800 | up the tree in a way that is really over the top attractive.

00:07:31.360 | So one way to recast these movies then is the struggle between two approaches to trying

00:07:36.480 | to cultivate a meaningful life.

00:07:38.060 | The protagonists at the beginning of these movies are often implicitly deploying what

00:07:42.540 | here on the show we call the grand goal strategy, which is where you pursue a single big and

00:07:48.220 | impressive goal that you hope will make everything in your life good.

00:07:52.180 | Right?

00:07:53.180 | So in the movies, as it is for many people, that ambitious goal is usually some sort of

00:07:57.620 | focused, impressive professional goal.

00:07:59.340 | They're trying to get the CEO slot there, whatever it is, it's the big city job ambition.

00:08:06.440 | By the end, the protagonist has found happiness deploying something more like the lifestyle

00:08:10.560 | centric approach in which it's not a singular goal that's going to make their life better,

00:08:16.720 | but they're identifying the properties of an ideal lifestyle and then finding ways to

00:08:20.300 | move closer to it.

00:08:21.440 | And then so often what they are discovering is that this new life that is presented to

00:08:25.440 | them in the town, which is usually called like Jingle Bell City or something, this new

00:08:31.440 | life hits a lot of beats of a lifestyle that's more attractive.

00:08:34.600 | So there's no one thing about the new lifestyle.

00:08:37.960 | They realize a lifestyle that day to day resonates, has more value than the pursuit and accomplishment

00:08:46.120 | of a single grand goal.

00:08:48.580 | So let's recap then lifestyle centric planning since these movies are implicitly endorsing

00:08:53.600 | it.

00:08:54.600 | So let's see how this actually works.

00:08:56.920 | To do lifestyle centric planning, you begin by imagining a typical day, like what it's

00:09:01.360 | like, it's rhythms.

00:09:02.360 | It's not specific.

00:09:03.360 | I'm in this town, I have this job, but what's it like?

00:09:05.320 | Are you walking to the coffee store?

00:09:06.560 | Are you going through a trail walk through the woods?

00:09:09.040 | Are you in a busy city and you're, it's like this really active scene.

00:09:12.040 | You kind of get a sense of like, what are the rhythms?

00:09:14.000 | How does this resonate?

00:09:15.320 | You use specific imagery that also resonates.

00:09:18.400 | You imagine yourself in this scene or that scene.

00:09:20.320 | You're really playing with these internal resonance, trying to imagine sort of like

00:09:24.440 | a day in an ideal lifestyle.

00:09:26.880 | You then identify and isolate the properties that make these images, that make these scenes

00:09:32.200 | resonate.

00:09:33.200 | So what is it about the sort of day I've constructed in my head that makes it resonate so much

00:09:39.060 | for me?

00:09:40.560 | You can then survey your full landscape of opportunities and obstacles to figure out

00:09:44.360 | what's your best bet for moving towards those properties in your life.

00:09:46.940 | And it's here where like really interesting options come up.

00:09:49.200 | I'm just giving all the obstacles I have and opportunities I have, how can I move closer

00:09:53.840 | to these particular properties?

00:09:55.380 | You're able to explore a wider range of options.

00:09:58.080 | Would you do this with my job?

00:09:59.360 | I move this work to this work.

00:10:00.640 | We move here.

00:10:01.640 | I start doing this.

00:10:02.640 | If I, if I move this over here, if we, you begin to come up with these interesting configurations,

00:10:07.280 | which you probably never would have thought of from scratch.

00:10:11.120 | It's not necessarily like, oh, here's the obvious big thing to do.

00:10:15.020 | But it ends up in the end having the effect of making your lifestyle overall more congruent

00:10:20.400 | with things that actually resonate.

00:10:23.220 | So I think that's what, that's one of the true messages of these movies.

00:10:29.460 | Lifestyle centric planning.

00:10:30.460 | They're happy because in the end, they better aligned your lifestyle with stuff that matters.

00:10:36.160 | And I've realized that the pursuit of the singular grand goal wasn't making them happy.

00:10:43.920 | And so we're seeing, I think millennials in particular, because they're at that stage

00:10:47.300 | of life are saying, huh, there's something here.

00:10:50.600 | And so that's where I think we have our hidden value of these movies.

00:10:55.380 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:10:56.640 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:11:01.140 | to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:11:08.600 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:11:14.040 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:11:19.400 | I know you're going to like it.

00:11:21.200 | Check it out.

00:11:22.200 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:11:24.340 | So yes, you know, somehow in the end, as I always do, I've made the leap from Hallmark

00:11:27.460 | movies to lifestyle centric planning, like one of my, one of my favorite topics.

00:11:31.600 | And as I always argue, all this stuff comes back to the modern digital landscape of the

00:11:35.560 | modern digital environment one way or the other.

00:11:37.360 | And one of the reasons why lifestyle centric planning is so important is because in our

00:11:41.800 | current digital environment, work has become more abstract.

00:11:46.240 | It's moving symbols around on a screen, so it's much less able to sort of directly provide

00:11:52.040 | us a sense of concrete meaning.

00:11:54.560 | Work can follow us everywhere.

00:11:56.800 | So these sort of modern symbolic knowledge jobs now have the way of sort of infusing

00:12:00.240 | more and more of our life and therefore bleaching from those parts of our lives are things that

00:12:04.760 | are meaningful.

00:12:05.760 | So this helps create a meaning crisis.

00:12:07.040 | So we have that going on.

00:12:09.640 | We also have all of this sort of electronic distraction that subverts our deeper instincts

00:12:13.960 | for meaning.

00:12:14.960 | So when we feel connection and wonder and all this type of stuff, we get a very attenuated

00:12:21.720 | form of this through social media in our form.

00:12:23.640 | I'm kind of like talking to people on Twitter or I'm seeing these TikToks that are kind

00:12:27.200 | of pressing the button of like, "Whoa, that was kind of cool to see."

00:12:30.560 | And it subverts those instincts just enough that the drive doesn't push us to actually

00:12:34.200 | like change our lives in meaningful ways to get there.

00:12:36.720 | So the modern digital environment did help set up this sort of meaning crisis that we

00:12:42.380 | have right now.

00:12:43.560 | It also opens up new opportunities.

00:12:45.760 | That abstract work that persists as sort of you're just on a screen moving symbols can

00:12:49.880 | be pretty portable.

00:12:50.880 | It can give you a lot of autonomy.

00:12:52.400 | It's something that's compatible with a much greater variety of day-to-day lifestyles than

00:12:58.840 | maybe work would have been 40 years ago, where it's like, where's your office building?

00:13:02.040 | You need to be within 10 miles and that's just what your day is going to be.

00:13:05.660 | So all of this comes back to the modern digital environment, but that's the lesson I think

00:13:09.480 | is there.

00:13:10.480 | So I've connected Hallmark movies to email and social media because I always find a way

00:13:13.540 | to do that.

00:13:14.680 | So I would say my work here is done.

00:13:18.240 | So I don't know.

00:13:19.240 | Have you ever seen these movies, Jesse?

00:13:20.720 | Yeah.

00:13:21.720 | A long time ago, though.

00:13:22.720 | A long time ago.

00:13:23.720 | Yeah.

00:13:24.720 | I watched several.

00:13:25.720 | I would say my, I think the best example this year of this year's crop that kind of hit

00:13:30.600 | my theory and just the best production values was Christmas Island, which has a no-nonsense

00:13:37.640 | plot, a very ambitious young pilot.

00:13:42.280 | And this doesn't quite track if you look at the plot line.

00:13:46.780 | This very ambitious young pilot, she wants to be a very successful pilot, but she's flying

00:13:51.720 | just the regional routes and gets hired to be a pilot of a private plane for like a rich

00:13:56.960 | couple.

00:13:57.960 | Now, for some reason, the first flight she's given on the private plane is LA to Switzerland.

00:14:03.280 | So she's been doing regional flights and now she's flying for LA to Switzerland, whatever.

00:14:06.800 | As things go, the flight gets diverted to Christmas Island, which is like a small island

00:14:11.960 | off the coast of Canada that's really into Christmas.

00:14:15.360 | And the air traffic controller that was sort of snippy with her while she was in the air

00:14:19.080 | also for some reason lives on Christmas Island.

00:14:23.440 | Classic movie, you know, ends up falling in love with Christmas and becoming less blah,

00:14:28.480 | blah, blah.

00:14:29.480 | But I liked it.

00:14:30.480 | It had good scenes of the island and they had a really good decorated downtown.

00:14:35.320 | It often comes to like how Christmassy they can decorate the sets.

00:14:38.080 | So that was a good one.

00:14:39.080 | I watched another one where they were in Ireland maybe or Scotland and Scott Wolfe and Lucy

00:14:48.560 | was her name, who were both in Party of Five, are like the siblings and they find out their

00:14:52.760 | mom I guess owns a castle or something.

00:14:56.720 | But they have a newspaper clip.

00:15:00.160 | These are things I noticed.

00:15:01.160 | They have a newspaper clip of the mom being born.

00:15:05.200 | It was like 1963, right, mom, you know, Duke has a baby or something.

00:15:10.520 | They show that clip because I guess the actress liked the idea of like whatever age that was

00:15:13.800 | she wanted to be.

00:15:15.000 | The problem is Scott Wolfe is playing her son and Scott Wolfe was born in like 1967.

00:15:20.520 | So like for this to actually work, she would have had to been five years old when she had

00:15:24.000 | Scott Wolfe.

00:15:25.000 | I think that's more Scott Wolfe trying to play 20 years younger than the mom trying

00:15:28.280 | to play too young.

00:15:29.280 | Anyways, I don't think I'll be watching a lot of these movies now that we're in the

00:15:32.160 | new year, but I think that's what's going on, lifestyle-centric planning captured in

00:15:36.480 | a movie.

00:15:37.480 | I did see the red one on Amazon Prime with The Rock.

00:15:40.800 | Who is that movie for?

00:15:42.480 | A PG-13 Santa movie.

00:15:48.120 | Who is it for?

00:15:49.120 | That's a good question.

00:15:50.120 | It's like a Santa movie with cursing.

00:15:51.680 | Oh, because they're usually PG?

00:15:54.560 | Yeah, because, you know, it seems like it's aimed more like a teenage crowd, but teenagers

00:15:59.040 | don't want to watch a Santa movie.

00:16:00.440 | And was it good?

00:16:02.960 | It was entertaining.

00:16:03.960 | Yeah.

00:16:04.960 | I'm glad I watched it.

00:16:05.960 | All right.

00:16:06.960 | I might watch it.

00:16:07.960 | I watched Carry On.

00:16:08.960 | That was another good new one.

00:16:09.960 | Jason Bateman.

00:16:10.960 | Oh, that was horrible.

00:16:11.960 | I couldn't stand it.

00:16:12.960 | You didn't like it?

00:16:13.960 | Yeah.

00:16:14.960 | I mean, let's say the plot didn't completely check out.

00:16:16.280 | It didn't completely check out.

00:16:18.120 | You liked that movie?

00:16:19.120 | It was fun.

00:16:20.120 | I didn't completely understand the plan, but it was good.

00:16:25.240 | It was fun.

00:16:26.240 | They spent some money on that.

00:16:27.240 | They filmed at the airport.

00:16:28.240 | Have you seen the new Dylan movie?

00:16:29.960 | Not yet.

00:16:30.960 | Yeah.

00:16:31.960 | I do.

00:16:32.960 | I do want to see that, though.

00:16:33.960 | A Complete Unknown.

00:16:35.920 | It won't hold a candle in an Oscar competition perspective, probably.

00:16:40.080 | A Complete Unknown will probably struggle to beat out, for best picture, Christmas Island,

00:16:45.320 | which I think is going to make a big push.

00:16:47.440 | All right.

00:16:48.440 | Enough of that.

00:16:49.440 | We've got cool questions, but first, let's hear from a sponsor.

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00:20:44.940 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:20:50.620 | First question's from Michael.

00:20:51.860 | I just finished reading Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson.

00:20:55.980 | Johnson talks about the Commonplace book, a notebook to record interesting ideas.

00:21:00.760 | The idea is that you can revisit this book to examine incomplete ideas.

00:21:04.140 | Does Cal keep a Commonplace book?

00:21:05.820 | And if so, what form does it take?

00:21:08.380 | I like Steven.

00:21:09.380 | Actually, I was trading emails with him not that long ago.

00:21:14.660 | Cool writer, one of that like original idea writers who came up in the '90s and early

00:21:18.300 | 2000s, and written a lot of cool books.

00:21:21.100 | Okay, so Steven, if I remember, was really early to these ideas of using technology to

00:21:29.540 | help manage partial ideas.

00:21:31.860 | He was big on a tool called DevinThink that you could enter in ideas and it would help

00:21:37.300 | make connections.

00:21:38.780 | I think that's now since been more subsumed by these Zettelkasten-specific techniques

00:21:42.580 | that are all about storing ideas even when you don't know what to do with them in a way

00:21:47.140 | that like connections can be formed and excavated, and the tool can work with your ideas to help

00:21:51.620 | you come up with new connections.

00:21:52.620 | He was really excited about that.

00:21:54.060 | Right now, a lot of other people are excited about that as well.

00:21:58.140 | I don't tend to do that, so I don't keep any sort of digital equivalent of a commonplace

00:22:03.580 | book, at least with that type of rigor.

00:22:05.900 | My problem is not coming up with an idea when it comes to writing.

00:22:11.860 | It's having too many ideas, right?

00:22:14.800 | It takes a long time to write something.

00:22:17.580 | There's only so many things I can write, and the limiting factor is almost always time

00:22:21.700 | to write for me, not scarcity of ideas.

00:22:25.340 | So I actually tend to just use my brain as a commonplace book, informally speaking.

00:22:30.060 | I read lots of stuff.

00:22:31.060 | I talk to lots of people.

00:22:32.060 | I listen to lots of stuff.

00:22:34.180 | What I look for, for ideas, is something that becomes insistent.

00:22:38.580 | It kind of sticks around in my mind.

00:22:40.180 | I'm using my brain as its own informal filter.

00:22:42.620 | An idea really sticks around in my mind, and it keeps coming back, and I'm like, "Yeah,

00:22:47.460 | I like that.

00:22:48.460 | Oh, I just heard this new thing that supports what I was thinking about before.

00:22:51.980 | Oh, listen to that interview over there.

00:22:53.660 | My idea would be very relevant there."

00:22:55.220 | If an idea has really stuck around, then that's usually when I'll write about it.

00:22:59.500 | Now once I'm writing on an idea, like, "Okay, I'm going to do an article on this.

00:23:03.140 | I'm going to write a book chapter on this," then I start collecting information systematically.

00:23:07.300 | I typically just put that right into the Scrivener project I'm using for that particular writing

00:23:13.780 | objective.

00:23:14.780 | So I don't have a separate system.

00:23:16.100 | If I'm writing an article, the research folder of the Scrivener project for that article

00:23:20.140 | is where I'll start throwing any sort of ideas I have, any sort of links, clips, movies.

00:23:25.100 | So once I'm specifically working on something, I do collect everything, but not in a highly

00:23:28.740 | structured way.

00:23:29.740 | I just throw them all into some folder.

00:23:31.120 | So I lean more into my mind's informal ability to sort through ideas.

00:23:35.300 | I lean into that quite a bit and don't really use outside structures to help me structure

00:23:41.740 | my information.

00:23:42.740 | Steven Johnson.

00:23:43.740 | He had an op-ed in The New York Times this morning.

00:23:48.100 | Oh, he did?

00:23:49.100 | Yeah.

00:23:50.100 | All right.

00:23:51.100 | Let's go.

00:23:52.100 | All right.

00:23:53.100 | Who we got next?

00:23:54.100 | Next question is from Mark.

00:23:55.100 | "I'm looking for some advice on a weekly template.

00:23:56.100 | I'm a high school teacher and need to set aside time for prep.

00:23:59.440 | I'm also learning web design with a view to starting a side business.

00:24:02.700 | I train in the gym three times per week and run two times per week.

00:24:06.340 | I train in the gym in the mornings before school.

00:24:08.700 | At the moment, I get some school prep done at school, but most in the evenings.

00:24:11.940 | I would like to use the mornings more for cognitive work."

00:24:14.540 | Well, let's just remember real quick what's meant by a weekly template.

00:24:18.540 | We talked about this earlier in the fall in an episode.

00:24:21.900 | So a weekly template is where you've set aside certain times of the week to sort of work

00:24:27.900 | on certain things on a regular basis.

00:24:30.660 | So when you make your weekly plan for a week, you apply the template first.

00:24:34.780 | Oh, yeah.

00:24:35.780 | Monday mornings, I always work on this.

00:24:37.260 | I always go to the gym in the afternoons.

00:24:39.220 | On Thursdays afternoons is when I work on this.

00:24:41.520 | So when you're making your weekly plan, you start with that template, then you can fill

00:24:44.960 | in the rest.

00:24:45.960 | You can add some regularity to your work, and I always argue if you have stuff you're

00:24:49.440 | going to do on a regular basis, have a weekly template, and then that can change season

00:24:54.560 | to season.

00:24:55.560 | I change my weekly template every semester because depending on my teaching schedule,

00:25:02.800 | the days and times I want to do certain work is going to change.

00:25:06.340 | I'm constructing a weekly template now for the upcoming spring/winter semester.

00:25:13.560 | The good thing about designing a weekly template is that it forces you to use terminology from

00:25:18.980 | earlier in the show to face the productivity dragon.

00:25:22.140 | That's the situation I think Mark is in.

00:25:24.980 | Mark says, "I want to learn web design.

00:25:27.040 | I want to start a side business.

00:25:28.980 | I want to train at the gym.

00:25:30.620 | I want to run and have a bunch of prep to do."

00:25:35.100 | Setting up a weekly template for all those regular occurring activities will help you

00:25:39.720 | figure out, is it even possible?

00:25:41.960 | Time is time.

00:25:42.960 | You might as well go through this exercise of, where am I going to actually make this

00:25:46.820 | happen?

00:25:47.820 | If you're hitting up against hard constraints, like, "I really don't have enough time.

00:25:52.300 | So much of my day is spent in the classroom, and then prepping takes a lot of time, and

00:25:56.580 | I'm not just seeing enough time unless I wake up at four in the morning," that's an important

00:26:00.620 | signal.

00:26:01.620 | Time is time, and you don't have it.

00:26:02.620 | Some sort of change has to be made.

00:26:04.980 | Maybe that change is dropping something from this ambition, or it's alternation, or it's

00:26:08.580 | finding a way to mix cardio with strength training in a more intense way, or whatever

00:26:14.380 | it is.

00:26:15.380 | It might look different or be more effective about prep.

00:26:19.380 | The time is time, and that signal is going to force you to be sort of innovative.

00:26:24.220 | So I can't tell you a specific template because I don't know your exact details of your schedule.

00:26:30.940 | But I think coming up with the template is important because it's a way for you to actually

00:26:35.100 | just move your time around like chess pieces.

00:26:37.680 | If you were just going to take each day as it came, say, "What do I want to work on today?"

00:26:42.580 | Just imagine how much less you would get done.

00:26:45.380 | You would have such a lower probability of actually fitting these various things into

00:26:48.980 | your life.

00:26:49.980 | So the weekly template, we can see in examples like this, is really important for figuring

00:26:54.560 | out the puzzle that is your week and can be really important as a reality check.

00:26:59.420 | I mean, I'm just starting that now.

00:27:01.260 | I mean, we're recording this on the, what, January 2nd.

00:27:04.900 | And so I have like a week until the semester starts.

00:27:08.200 | So I'm working on my weekly template now, Monday-Wednesday teaching.

00:27:13.080 | And so I'll work around.

00:27:14.080 | Like, I'm doing Monday-Wednesday teaching.

00:27:16.540 | I'm probably going to use the space in between the classes as office hours.

00:27:20.620 | Like, I'm trying to, like, piece together.

00:27:22.900 | And then, like, what day we're going to podcast and versus, like, what days—I often like

00:27:27.940 | to have a meeting afternoon on my weekly template, on-campus meeting afternoon.

00:27:31.980 | Like, I'm still trying to figure out where that's all going to fit.

00:27:34.780 | In terms of, Mike, in terms of the question in terms of cognitive work in the mornings

00:27:41.660 | and going to the gym in the mornings, do you think that working out in the afternoon would

00:27:47.020 | be better than doing all this stuff in the morning?

00:27:48.780 | I think more people should work out in the afternoon, yeah.

00:27:51.420 | I think for most people, the natural rhythm, all things being equal, cognitive work in

00:27:56.580 | the morning, exercise is a transition from work to non-work.

00:28:00.380 | That might not be logistically possible for everyone, but just from, like, a physiological

00:28:05.500 | standpoint, I would say for probably the majority of people, that's best.

00:28:10.460 | Get up—I mean, you could stretch or do some things in the morning, but take advantage

00:28:14.180 | of, like, that first rush of coffee and have good thoughts.

00:28:19.700 | And then, like, serious exercise, use that to transition.

00:28:22.100 | I mean, that's what I try to do.

00:28:23.820 | I think that works well for a lot of people.

00:28:25.260 | Some people really do swear by, like, the early-morning run.

00:28:28.020 | But cognitive work in the afternoon is hard for a lot of people.

00:28:32.620 | I mean, when you hear about writers who are night owls, the reality is typically what

00:28:36.780 | they mean is not 4 o'clock, but, you know, 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. or something like that,

00:28:43.500 | where they find this, like, completely blank bit of time.

00:28:46.780 | But for most people, afternoon's hard, early evening—I sometimes do early evening writing

00:28:51.540 | sessions.

00:28:52.540 | I call them happy hour sessions because it falls, like, in the time that you would normally

00:28:56.460 | have happy hour at a bar, and it sometimes works.

00:28:59.260 | I'll often come here to the HQ so that it's, like, a definitive break from, you know, home.

00:29:04.900 | It feels different.

00:29:05.900 | I work.

00:29:06.900 | I'm done.

00:29:07.900 | I come home.

00:29:08.900 | And I'll use that sometimes.

00:29:09.900 | But it's always a stretch.

00:29:10.900 | It's always much harder than just coming over in the morning and writing.

00:29:13.580 | What do we got?

00:29:16.280 | Next question's from Gonzalo.

00:29:17.280 | "Are the five books you read every month separate from the reading you do for book and article

00:29:22.180 | research?"

00:29:23.180 | Yeah, it's a good question.

00:29:25.240 | If I finish a book—I read a book in its entirety—I will count it on my list of books

00:29:30.440 | read.

00:29:32.400 | So you will see, you'll notice—the astute listener will notice—that in my monthly

00:29:38.160 | book collection, you can often pull out, like, "Oh, I think these books were being read for

00:29:42.640 | something he's working on."

00:29:43.840 | It'll be kind of one-off.

00:29:44.840 | You'll see a couple books on similar themes that I read, like, one after another.

00:29:49.800 | But when I'm researching a book or an article, oftentimes I'm not reading an entire book.

00:29:54.440 | I'm reading certain chapters of a book, or I'm skimming a book, or trying to get out

00:29:57.620 | of it what's important.

00:29:58.620 | And that's a lot of research, and those don't get counted.

00:30:02.640 | So yeah, I will count the book if I finish it, regardless of the cause.

00:30:06.600 | But when it comes to research, there's a lot less finishing a book than you might imagine.

00:30:11.200 | You get very good at, like, "This chapter's what's important of this book.

00:30:14.640 | Let me read these 10 articles.

00:30:15.640 | Oh, I remember reading this book 10 years ago, and this section is relevant to what

00:30:19.860 | I'm doing."

00:30:21.180 | I'll give you an example for the deep life book I'm working on now.

00:30:26.620 | The first part of the book, and especially the first chapter, the first part of the book,

00:30:29.860 | I'm drawing some from the history of monasticism.

00:30:32.040 | I'm actually sort of using the history of monasticism—we've talked about this on the

00:30:35.180 | show before—I'm using that as an analogy for understanding, preparing for the deep

00:30:43.340 | life.

00:30:44.340 | The idea being in the history of monasticism, just very, very briefly, you see very early

00:30:48.180 | on, Christian monasticism was kicked off.

00:30:52.260 | Its precursors were the so-called desert fathers, the hermits, essentially, that went out into

00:30:57.380 | the desert and led aesthetic lives, going to just be in a cave and eschew everything

00:31:04.660 | and have these religious experiences.

00:31:07.680 | What they discovered is, okay, this just, like, throw everything out and just go out

00:31:12.540 | there and be aesthetic and try not to die, and you'll eventually have a religious experience.

00:31:15.660 | It wasn't very replicatable.

00:31:17.380 | So the monastic system was built up, where they said, "Okay, we have to have structure.

00:31:21.680 | We have to kind of help people prepare, the monks prepare to have these religious experiences

00:31:26.260 | with some structure.

00:31:28.260 | Here's how we run our days, and here's our rules.

00:31:30.740 | We have these short-term goals and structures to help get you ready for the big encounter

00:31:36.380 | with divinity, as opposed to just, like, let's just go for it."

00:31:39.460 | I have this whole analogy in the first part of the book, is this is the same when it comes

00:31:42.940 | to overhauling your life and overhauling a deep life.

00:31:45.340 | Don't just do the equivalent of going to the desert.

00:31:47.620 | Don't just make the big changes.

00:31:48.760 | You actually need short-term goals and structure that get you ready, that prepare you for making

00:31:52.700 | that big change.

00:31:53.700 | So the first part of the book is about, like, preparing yourself and practicing to get ready

00:31:56.980 | for big changes.

00:31:58.380 | Okay.

00:31:59.380 | I wanted to pull from Jamie Creener's book, The Distracted Mind, which is this, like,

00:32:05.420 | great book.

00:32:06.420 | She's a medievalist.

00:32:07.420 | I think she might be at Emory.

00:32:08.860 | I might have that wrong, but a medievalist that studies monks and wrote this good book.

00:32:12.980 | I think I blurbed it.

00:32:14.060 | So I had read it years ago, and I said, "This book is – she's a great medievalist.

00:32:17.540 | It's got a great sort of history about monks and how they think about distraction."

00:32:21.180 | But I didn't read that whole book.

00:32:23.540 | I read selected chapters that really had what I needed.

00:32:27.560 | It's like, that book didn't show up – I wrote this in July.

00:32:30.860 | That book did not show up on my July books I read, but I got really good information

00:32:35.780 | out of it.

00:32:36.780 | So a lot of research for books and articles is like that.

00:32:39.300 | You've heard of a book, you've read it a long time ago, and you're pulling out

00:32:42.260 | what you need.

00:32:44.100 | On the other hand, there are some books – I think, was it last month or the month before?

00:32:50.220 | Or is it this month?

00:32:51.220 | Let me see.

00:32:52.780 | What books are we reading this month?

00:32:54.460 | I don't know.

00:32:55.460 | I can't remember when I read what, but there's been a couple of these memoirs I've been

00:32:59.500 | reading recently.

00:33:00.500 | Like, Zena Hertz's – what was that book called?

00:33:07.700 | Not The Intellectual Life, that's Churchill and Jeans, but whatever – Lost in Thought,

00:33:11.540 | I think her book was called.

00:33:13.100 | And that was like a memoir of like an intellectual life.

00:33:15.060 | I reread Rich Roll's memoir recently, and that might be in the January books.

00:33:19.620 | I don't remember where these things are.

00:33:22.860 | I finished – you'll see there's like a bunch of memoirs that are coming up soon,

00:33:27.420 | and that's because I was preemptively like, I'm reading these various memoirs that have

00:33:31.300 | particular properties because I might want to pull something from them for my book.

00:33:34.460 | So what I'm trying to say, my peak inside the writing process here is a lot of times

00:33:40.460 | when researching stuff, you're not reading full books, and then sometimes you are, and

00:33:44.260 | I only report them when I do.

00:33:45.740 | And is that research done during deep work hours?

00:33:49.300 | Yeah.

00:33:50.300 | I mean, I worked on that – most of that monk writing was when we were up in the mountains

00:33:56.740 | and at the house that had the writing shed, that like really cool writing shed.

00:34:00.180 | Again, in the morning were my deep work hours, and I would go down to that writing shed with

00:34:03.300 | my coffee, and I was like reading that book.

00:34:05.180 | I have very strong connections with that book and that place, really.

00:34:09.220 | But that I was largely reading in deep work hours.

00:34:12.140 | I would be there with my laptop and I would read a chapter and underline it and then pull

00:34:16.860 | from it and write a little bit and read.

00:34:18.500 | It was really intertwined with the writing.

00:34:21.500 | Other books, if I'm lost in thought, that book, that was just reading during my normal

00:34:25.420 | reading hours.

00:34:26.420 | Yeah.

00:34:27.420 | Good question.

00:34:28.420 | I haven't really thought so systematically about how and when I read, so that's cool.

00:34:33.860 | All right.

00:34:34.860 | Who do we got next?

00:34:36.260 | Next question is from Heath.

00:34:37.500 | I'm a third year mechanical engineering student at Georgia Tech, and I've failed integral

00:34:43.980 | calculus twice.

00:34:44.980 | I spend over 30 hours in the library every week trying to study and never seem to get

00:34:48.500 | the results that one would expect from that effort.

00:34:50.980 | I bought How to Become a Straight A Student, but would appreciate an overview of the best

00:34:56.300 | strategies to learn high-level math.

00:34:59.060 | All right.

00:35:00.900 | Integral calculus.

00:35:01.900 | I was just reading about that in that math class book.

00:35:05.260 | Oh, yeah.

00:35:06.260 | Yeah.

00:35:07.260 | I'm going to go back to the remember multivariate integration.

00:35:11.180 | Okay.

00:35:12.500 | So Heath, when I see you say, "I spend over 30 hours in the library every week trying

00:35:19.260 | to study," that's meaningless to me.

00:35:23.700 | And I think the fact that that's meaningless is important because this really is one of

00:35:27.300 | the key messages I had for students in books like How to Become a Straight A Student.

00:35:31.340 | The term study is meaningless.

00:35:32.740 | It can mean all sorts of things, many things which aren't very useful at all when it comes

00:35:36.040 | to learning information.

00:35:38.100 | Studying is not a self-evident activity that you either do or don't do.

00:35:42.580 | A lot of students get into similar trouble like you get into by "studying for hour

00:35:47.220 | after hour," but what they're really doing is actually very ineffective when it comes

00:35:51.100 | to cementing in their mind understanding of knowledge.

00:35:54.700 | So a lot of people just have this mindset of like, "I spent a ton of time in the

00:35:59.260 | library the weekend before the exam," and that this is like penance.

00:36:04.060 | The pain of being in the library for 30 hours should transmute into a better grade.

00:36:08.700 | But your exam doesn't care like how painful your weekend was or how many hours you spent

00:36:13.500 | in the library.

00:36:14.500 | It cares how much you understand the material.

00:36:16.180 | And so all that really matters is activity that cements your understanding of the material.

00:36:20.820 | And as it turns out, the activities that best cement understanding of the material don't

00:36:25.100 | tend to be extremely time-consuming.

00:36:27.160 | The very best students don't tend to be the students who "study" the most, but they

00:36:31.460 | can be unpleasant because they're demanding.

00:36:34.680 | So for example, in your case, integral calculus, I write about this in the book How to Become

00:36:39.360 | a Straight A student.

00:36:40.360 | I also wrote a blog post you can find on my blog from way back when.

00:36:44.640 | It's titled something like "How I Got the Highest Grade in My Discrete Mathematics Course."

00:36:47.940 | I wrote this not long after I graduated from college, so I remembered getting the highest

00:36:52.820 | grade in my discrete math class, which was 50 or 60 students.

00:36:56.620 | My number one tool for studying in that class was a big stack of white printer paper.

00:37:02.980 | And what I would do, I had written down, and this method is in How to Become a Straight

00:37:06.400 | A Student, I had for every topic we covered sort of sample problems taken from lectures

00:37:11.660 | and/or problem sets.

00:37:13.860 | And I would copy one of the problems without the answer onto a sheet of white paper and

00:37:19.460 | then solve it on that paper while solving it, annotating it as if I was lecturing to

00:37:26.340 | a class.

00:37:27.340 | All right, so next we're going to do this.

00:37:28.340 | Well, hey, if we're doing this integration, what we're looking for here is the anti-derivative.

00:37:32.860 | And notice when doing the anti-derivative here that we can sort of ignore those terms

00:37:36.540 | because those would be constant, et cetera, et cetera.

00:37:39.740 | If I could do that, I could get the answer right, show the proof, get to the right answer

00:37:44.100 | without looking at my notes, explaining my steps so I'm clearly indicating to myself

00:37:47.620 | I understand it.

00:37:49.020 | That topic's done.

00:37:50.020 | I don't come back to it.

00:37:51.020 | If I struggle, I go back and review it and try again later.

00:37:55.260 | Once I can actually teach from scratch sample problems from every topic I need to know,

00:38:00.820 | then I know it and I'm ready to take the class.

00:38:02.340 | And that got me the highest grade in my math class.

00:38:05.740 | Now the problem you might be having if you try this approach is that you might find that

00:38:09.220 | you're not able to answer many of the questions.

00:38:11.660 | Because what a lot of people do, and this is a huge problem I think with undergraduate

00:38:15.020 | education in general, a lot of people don't attend lectures or sort of tune out in lectures

00:38:19.100 | and then sort of implicitly hope that in the two days before the exam that they can not

00:38:23.580 | only study but teach themselves all the material from scratch.

00:38:28.740 | This is going to be the trap that I think really captures people.

00:38:32.260 | If I had to guess, the problem with your 30 hours is partially that what you're doing

00:38:36.260 | is ineffective.

00:38:37.260 | You're probably reading notes silently to yourself as opposed to trying to recreate

00:38:40.460 | problems from scratch, and partially you're spending most of that time trying to teach

00:38:43.660 | yourself the material.

00:38:44.660 | But the material's hard to teach.

00:38:46.180 | That's why they pay us professors the big bucks.

00:38:48.460 | It's not obvious how to teach yourself this stuff.

00:38:50.760 | So the other thing you have to do is the 48-hour rule, and again, this comes from how to become

00:38:55.820 | a straight-A student.

00:38:56.820 | But the idea is this.

00:38:57.820 | You go to lecture, you pay attention in lecture, you take notes.

00:38:59.620 | In a math class, you want to capture every sample problem, every step to the solution

00:39:03.460 | and annotate those steps to the best of your ability.

00:39:06.340 | When you don't understand something, this step in this integration problem, I don't

00:39:10.940 | understand how they did that, you put a question mark and you circle it.

00:39:15.020 | Now the clock is ticking.

00:39:16.740 | You got 48 hours to replace that question mark with understanding, not deferring it

00:39:21.600 | till the day before the exam.

00:39:22.600 | You got 48 hours to fill in that question mark right then, 40 hours from right then.

00:39:28.120 | Now you have various circles of time, sort of concentric circles of time to stretch out

00:39:33.500 | that you can work with here.

00:39:35.600 | So the very tightest circle is right away raise your hand.

00:39:37.920 | Hey, I don't understand what you just did.

00:39:39.820 | The next tightest circle is right after class.

00:39:42.520 | Go up to the professor.

00:39:43.520 | Hey, I don't understand what was happening here and here.

00:39:45.240 | Can you explain this to me?

00:39:46.880 | The next tightest circle would be office hours.

00:39:50.020 | Like when is the next time that there's office hours with either a TA or the professor?

00:39:55.620 | Also in between those circles is like talking to a friend or looking at the textbook to

00:39:58.840 | try to figure it out.

00:40:00.220 | So typically why we call it the 48 hours rules is that you're no more than 48 hours away

00:40:04.760 | from all of those circles being done, that you're no more than 48 hours away from probably

00:40:08.060 | the next office hours and all these other things can happen quicker.

00:40:11.320 | So by that point, you should have resolved those question marks.

00:40:14.720 | Now when you do this, when it comes time to "study for the exam," you already at some

00:40:20.920 | point understood all of the techniques.

00:40:23.080 | You actually went through the mental effort of grokking the technique already.

00:40:26.840 | There's nothing you're learning from scratch for the first time.

00:40:28.640 | You might have to review it, but there's a huge difference between remembering something

00:40:32.440 | you actually did the mental activity of learning than there is actually learning it from scratch.

00:40:38.060 | The effort to learn from scratch is intense, so you want to spread that out over the semester

00:40:42.120 | so you're not doing too much of it at once.

00:40:44.400 | And so "study," now you're reviewing.

00:40:45.400 | And then when you're reviewing, you want to use the white paper method of just, "I'm recreating

00:40:48.760 | things from scratch.

00:40:49.760 | If I can, I understand that.

00:40:50.760 | If I can't, I don't.

00:40:51.760 | Go back and review again."

00:40:52.760 | That's how you study for math class.

00:40:55.680 | It's all about distributing the understanding of the material as you learn it, and then

00:41:01.960 | you're reviewing being all what we call active recall, as that's the most effective way to

00:41:05.880 | actually cement knowledge.

00:41:07.840 | So if you can absolutely pass integral calculus, and integrals are not actually that complicated,

00:41:13.720 | but I think what's happening is you're probably trying to teach yourself this material from

00:41:17.700 | scratch a couple days before the exam.

00:41:19.800 | All right.

00:41:20.800 | What do we got next?

00:41:24.040 | We have our corner.

00:41:25.040 | Hey, slow productivity corner question.

00:41:27.540 | We like to have one question every week that is related to my new book, "Slow Productivity,

00:41:31.980 | the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout."

00:41:33.640 | We mainly do this corner because we have theme music, which we're going to hear right now.

00:41:39.520 | All right, what's our slow productivity corner question of the week?

00:41:47.680 | It's from Dylan.

00:41:48.680 | In addition to your books, do you have any book recommendations for cultivating a deep

00:41:52.360 | life or to embrace slow productivity?

00:41:56.520 | What I often recommend, like if you're interested broadly in the deep life or more specifically

00:42:00.940 | in more of a slow productivity approach, find real stories that resonate.

00:42:08.200 | Usually this means memoir.

00:42:10.640 | Look for memoir that resonates because what happens is the written form, when you're reading

00:42:15.320 | a nonfiction book like a memoir, the written form can put you inside the head and experience

00:42:21.760 | of someone else.

00:42:22.760 | You get a sort of step into another life.

00:42:26.460 | When you're in that life, you've stepped into someone else's shoes.

00:42:29.320 | You really get a visceral sense of what resonates and what doesn't.

00:42:34.360 | It's really informative.

00:42:36.480 | There's a lot of self-discovery to be made.

00:42:38.160 | There's a lot of motivation or inspiration to be made about what's important to you,

00:42:41.240 | what's not important to you, what about this life is important to me, what's not.

00:42:44.000 | I'm a big believer of finding memoirs where the life of the person being lived in the

00:42:48.600 | memoir speaks to you in some way.

00:42:51.240 | When I say memoir, I use that broadly.

00:42:55.000 | It could be a book that is specifically a memoir, but sometimes it could be like a nonfiction

00:42:59.360 | book where it's a certain part of a person's life and they're doing some adventure or something

00:43:04.200 | like that.

00:43:05.200 | It could be anything that's actually about someone's life that resonates.

00:43:08.600 | I often think that's the right way to better understand yourself and what you're looking

00:43:12.560 | for, what the possibilities are for pursuing it, as opposed to just straight-up advice.

00:43:19.120 | The obvious exception, of course, would be my books, which you need to buy many, many

00:43:22.280 | copies of.

00:43:23.280 | All right.

00:43:24.280 | Do we have a call this week?

00:43:26.360 | We do.

00:43:27.360 | Oh, wait.

00:43:28.360 | Should we hear the music one more time?

00:43:29.360 | Do we play ourselves out with the music?

00:43:30.520 | We do it half the time.

00:43:32.200 | I think in 2025, we should commit to playing ourselves out of the slow productivity corner

00:43:36.960 | by hearing the music one more time.

00:43:38.240 | Are we going to have a slow productivity for the whole year?

00:43:42.600 | That's a good question, at least for the next couple of months.

00:43:46.720 | I want to get to the one-year mark of the book.

00:43:48.680 | How about that?

00:43:49.680 | Oh, that's fair.

00:43:50.680 | That's only three months.

00:43:51.680 | The book came out in March?

00:43:52.680 | Yeah.

00:43:53.680 | Yeah.

00:43:54.680 | OK.

00:43:55.680 | So we're going to keep the corner alive until we get to the one-year anniversary of the

00:43:57.680 | book and in 2025, in the three months that are between now and that anniversary, we're

00:44:02.840 | going to play the music twice.

00:44:03.840 | So let's hear it one more time.

00:44:04.840 | All right.

00:44:05.840 | She said we have a call this week, Jesse.

00:44:14.360 | Yes, we do.

00:44:15.360 | All right.

00:44:16.360 | Let's hear it.

00:44:17.360 | OK.

00:44:18.360 | Hey, Cal.

00:44:19.360 | This is Trevor.

00:44:20.360 | I'm a digital product manager and earlier this year, I left my full-time position and

00:44:24.080 | started my own business.

00:44:25.880 | I'm offering consulting and fractional product management.

00:44:32.040 | Where I'm struggling is applying multi-scale planning to the growth of my own business.

00:44:37.440 | Previously, as an employee, I've gotten pretty good at applying the principles and prioritizing

00:44:45.080 | and time blocking toward our company goals.

00:44:48.640 | And even now, I feel like I'm doing a decent job applying that to my client work and helping

00:44:54.480 | them achieve theirs.

00:44:57.400 | Last week, I spent a day trying to work on multi-scale for my own business.

00:45:03.440 | And while I was able to develop the values, which I want to develop my lifestyle, career

00:45:12.880 | plan around, putting together that career strategic plan, I kept banging my head against

00:45:21.000 | the wall.

00:45:22.760 | So I'm curious if you could share more details in terms of what kinds of things are in your

00:45:29.960 | career strategic plan, because it's that middle piece between the values and principles into

00:45:42.960 | the weekly and daily planning that I'm struggling with in terms of growing my own business and

00:45:49.240 | career capital now as a solo printer.

00:45:52.680 | Thanks as always.

00:45:53.680 | All right.

00:45:54.680 | So in multi-scale planning, we have three levels.

00:45:58.440 | There's that strategic plan, which is maybe covering the next season.

00:46:02.840 | Then you have weekly planning, then you have daily planning.

00:46:06.880 | So the caller today is talking about that biggest scale, thinking through that more

00:46:11.040 | strategic plan that's maybe existing at the scope of something like a season.

00:46:16.560 | And it sounds like, if I'm understanding him properly, he's not sure what to put in there,

00:46:20.240 | right?

00:46:21.240 | Like, what is it?

00:46:22.240 | Like, what are my strategic goals?

00:46:24.200 | What am I working on, more specifically, you know, if you're writing this plan right now,

00:46:29.320 | for the winter and the spring?

00:46:30.320 | Like, what am I trying to get done by June?

00:46:32.600 | Where do I want to steer this ship?

00:46:34.440 | Well, I think there's two things that are relevant here that hopefully are helpful.

00:46:39.120 | One, it's OK for this to seem relatively underspecified if you're doing something new.

00:46:49.400 | In particular, it is sometimes not even clear what the potential opportunities to pursue

00:46:58.160 | are, what, like, you should put the pedal down on and what you should put the brake

00:47:02.960 | pedal down on.

00:47:04.360 | Sometimes this is not even clear yet when something is relatively new.

00:47:08.180 | You're still feeling out your client base and what's working and what the opportunities

00:47:11.560 | are.

00:47:12.560 | So it's completely fine if you're like, "I don't have this crystal clear.

00:47:14.240 | We need to try to...

00:47:15.240 | My goal for the next four months is to try to introduce this product or move this."

00:47:19.780 | You might actually be very sensically gathering data on this new setup and trying to just

00:47:24.960 | look for your moments, look for your spots.

00:47:27.080 | So that's completely fine to be underspecified, especially when something is new and you're

00:47:31.480 | still feeling yourself around.

00:47:32.720 | So your strategic plan, let's say, for this upcoming semester or season, for something

00:47:37.040 | new like you're talking about, might really seem very mundane.

00:47:42.440 | You know, it's continuing to polish your client management setup and to get your some sort

00:47:50.820 | of logistical pieces that you're using to bill or deliver assets, like, get those cleaned

00:47:57.680 | up and operating smoother.

00:47:58.960 | It might seem very mundane.

00:48:00.320 | And that's fine.

00:48:01.320 | That doesn't mean your ambitions are mundane.

00:48:02.440 | It means you're waiting to choose your spot to make a bigger move.

00:48:08.400 | The other thing I would say when it comes to these plans, the key is working backwards,

00:48:12.600 | especially when you're doing something like you're doing, which really is a lifestyle

00:48:15.080 | play.

00:48:16.080 | Fractional project management, for example, clearly you're looking for autonomy.

00:48:19.880 | You're looking for more flexibility.

00:48:22.100 | You really want to have this clarity about the properties of the ideal lifestyle that

00:48:27.640 | you're aiming towards.

00:48:29.520 | And you can keep coming back to that and asking the question, "What's going to move me closer

00:48:37.600 | towards those?

00:48:38.600 | What's going to move me farther away?"

00:48:40.440 | And this can lead you to some objectives that you might not otherwise come up with if you're

00:48:44.280 | just trying to say, like, "What's good for this business?" or "What's a big idea I can

00:48:47.640 | pursue?"

00:48:48.640 | So, like, one of the analyses you might be doing the new year, for example, is you have

00:48:52.680 | these properties identified that you're looking for in your ideal lifestyle and be saying,

00:48:55.680 | "Is there any big disconnects right now?

00:48:58.000 | Is there, like, one of these properties I'm really far away from or one that I seem to

00:49:02.640 | be moving farther away from?

00:49:04.280 | What changes could I imagine that could stop that erosion or move me closer to it?"

00:49:09.700 | So when you're specifically working backwards from properties of ideal lifestyle, specific

00:49:13.600 | changes can emerge that wouldn't normally show up if you were just taking an approach

00:49:18.000 | of, "Hey, what's something good to do with my business?" or "What's the natural next

00:49:21.120 | step to take with this?"

00:49:22.120 | Right?

00:49:23.120 | So those are my two answers.

00:49:24.120 | If you're doing something new, it's okay to—don't feel underspecified.

00:49:27.120 | That's okay.

00:49:28.560 | Sometimes you're just trying to, like, get the lights on and the invoice is sent out.

00:49:32.440 | And once you really get to know what you're doing, then the opportunities will become

00:49:34.880 | clear six months, a year down the line.

00:49:37.120 | And number two, work backwards from the properties of ideal lifestyle and just keep asking the

00:49:41.360 | question, "Am I on track towards getting closer to these?

00:49:44.920 | And in the places where I'm not, do I yet see a change I could make that would correct

00:49:49.560 | that?"

00:49:50.560 | And the answer might be, "Not yet, but at least I have it at the top of my mind."

00:49:54.280 | Or the answer might be, "You know what?

00:49:55.600 | I could do this completely unexpected thing that makes no sense financially, makes no

00:49:59.640 | sense strategically, but from the point of view of, like, it's really important to me

00:50:03.480 | that I can, you know, ski every day, makes a lot of sense.

00:50:07.920 | When I'm working backwards from my lifestyle image, this change I'm making makes a lot

00:50:11.280 | of sense."

00:50:12.280 | So those are the two things I would say keep in mind.

00:50:13.840 | All right.

00:50:14.840 | Well, we have a case study here.

00:50:16.960 | This is where people send in a description of how they've applied the type of advice

00:50:20.520 | we talked about on the show into their own life.

00:50:22.360 | So we can see the advice we discuss in action.

00:50:25.120 | If you have a case study, you can send it to jesse@calnewport.com.

00:50:28.440 | All right.

00:50:29.440 | The next case study comes from Holden.

00:50:32.760 | Holden says, "Long time listener, first time writer.

00:50:36.000 | I'm 28 years old and a gardener by trade.

00:50:39.760 | Out of high school, I fell for the follow your passion narrative.

00:50:42.600 | At the time, I was not ready to pursue a degree and elected to move across the country and

00:50:46.880 | pursue my dream of working in the mountain bike industry.

00:50:51.200 | I graduated from a certification program related to the mountain bike industry, got my foot

00:50:55.040 | in the door and accomplished what dreams I had for the industry by the time I was 22.

00:51:00.200 | I shortly became embittered by the industry and realized that regardless of one's passion,

00:51:04.920 | work eventually becomes just that.

00:51:07.060 | I left the bike industry at 23 and having established connections and friendships in

00:51:10.840 | a town that I love, I took the best job available to me at the time.

00:51:15.220 | This was a landscape gardening job where I could leverage the trail building and construction

00:51:18.480 | skills that I had gained over the preceding years.

00:51:22.000 | In the five years since leaving the mountain bike industry, I started my own landscaping

00:51:25.400 | company and enjoyed some success at that.

00:51:27.400 | For the last year and a half or so, I began to feel unfulfilled in my business venture

00:51:31.120 | and unhappy with the path I was on and had set for myself the past decade.

00:51:35.920 | This sense of unfulfillment as well as economic circumstances motivated me to begin to shutter

00:51:40.540 | my business and take a job with the local government as a gardener.

00:51:44.240 | I had fun in my early 20s, but I'm unfulfilled with where that has left me in my late 20s.

00:51:48.600 | I found that I enjoyed being a business owner/entrepreneur, but did not like my future in the particular

00:51:52.600 | industry I was in.

00:51:54.360 | I began doing lifestyle-centric career planning a few months ago.

00:51:58.880 | I have taken your advice and started a single-purpose notebook to jot down anything that resonates

00:52:02.860 | with me as it pertains to my ideal lifestyle.

00:52:05.960 | These things then inform my lifestyle-centric career plan.

00:52:09.000 | I have found the career path that I have been on since high school is not in alignment with

00:52:12.360 | where I want to be in life.

00:52:14.360 | I am called to more intellectual pursuits and work in which my mind as opposed to my

00:52:17.960 | body is the main tool I use to produce value.

00:52:20.720 | I am unsure how to make this transition or begin this transition towards a knowledge-based

00:52:25.720 | professional life.

00:52:26.720 | I do feel ready to pursue a degree now, but have trouble determining what I may study

00:52:30.640 | as I have an embarrassment of intellectual interest.

00:52:32.760 | I also cannot shake the small cow on my shoulder telling me that I am falling for the trap

00:52:36.680 | of grand goals, but I really enjoy studying for studying and knowledge's sake and do believe

00:52:41.240 | a degree would set me up better for a professional life where my mind is the main producer of

00:52:45.880 | value.

00:52:46.880 | All right, Holden, we see a pretty realistic case study here of lifestyle design in both

00:52:54.120 | its positives and negatives in action.

00:52:56.960 | I'm going to zoom in early on this story where he talked about my, quote, "dream of working

00:53:02.640 | in the mountain bike industry," end quote.

00:53:04.440 | That's like a classic passion trap type move, as Holden correctly identifies.

00:53:09.560 | The interest was in mountain biking, and our mind tricks us into thinking, well, if I had

00:53:14.960 | a job related to this thing I like, that must be my dream.

00:53:20.560 | And as Holden quickly learned, a job is a job.

00:53:23.960 | What matters for a job are the properties of the job, not the content, not the subject

00:53:28.720 | of that job.

00:53:29.720 | So the fact that your job is related to mountain biking probably doesn't matter so much as

00:53:33.000 | like what are the properties of that job—engagement, autonomy, connection, mastery, et cetera.

00:53:39.120 | So kind of a classic passion trap.

00:53:41.640 | All right, so he fell out of that, went into gardening where he could start his own business,

00:53:45.960 | use skills that he had built up.

00:53:47.320 | You have some rare and valuable skills.

00:53:48.720 | Now you have something you can put in the marketplace and you seem to do well with that.

00:53:52.640 | The government job doing gardening simplified probably his life, got rid of some autonomy,

00:53:59.120 | but simplified his life.

00:54:00.240 | Like I can just sort of do the work that I'm given.

00:54:03.920 | And now he's doing lifestyle-centric career planning and realizing there's parts of his

00:54:06.880 | life.

00:54:07.880 | Like if he really sits and says, well, what is it that I'm looking for in my life?

00:54:09.960 | He feels like there's a lack.

00:54:10.960 | All right, so now there's the complicated piece.

00:54:13.760 | Because yes, hold on.

00:54:14.760 | The small cow on your shoulder has a point.

00:54:18.800 | You want to be careful here of being like, OK, maybe what I'm missing is intellectual

00:54:23.280 | work.

00:54:24.280 | So let me just make a big swing and go get a degree and hope that this somehow leads

00:54:27.720 | to something that is better.

00:54:30.200 | I would be way more specific about this.

00:54:32.040 | I would really try to clarify what your ideal day looks like.

00:54:37.080 | Like is it sitting in an office?

00:54:39.480 | Is it writing poetry by the pond?

00:54:44.320 | Is it being outside but having a lot of flexibility with your hands?

00:54:49.080 | It could be that the government gardening job is this very stable base on top of which

00:54:54.860 | you are a writer, that you teach yourself to be a writer, which doesn't involve you

00:54:58.960 | like quitting everything and spending years going back for a degree.

00:55:01.720 | Or maybe really it's like you're tired of working with your hands and it's exhausting.

00:55:05.160 | And you say I would be very happy to have like a shed in my backyard that I convert

00:55:10.600 | into an office that I can go to and like work on a laptop and like five hours a day.

00:55:14.200 | And it's like kind of engaging that I could be done and go mountain biking.

00:55:16.760 | OK, great.

00:55:17.760 | That's a very specific other vision.

00:55:18.760 | You can start asking, what's the quickest way to get there?

00:55:21.520 | What are skills I can learn effectively and efficiently that allow me to try to find a

00:55:26.000 | job that can do that?

00:55:27.000 | So I would get very specific about what you want your day to be like and then figure out

00:55:31.600 | what are your opportunities and obstacles.

00:55:33.560 | You know, I'm concerned that you might just say I'll just go get a degree and then maybe

00:55:36.480 | this will all work out.

00:55:37.480 | You should be way ahead on your planning than that.

00:55:41.120 | I want to know how to do this because then I could do this type of work which allows

00:55:44.760 | my day to unfold in this type of way and that's what I'm really looking for.

00:55:47.400 | So you need to sort out like what is this like this appeal of the intellectual?

00:55:51.760 | What does this really mean?

00:55:52.840 | Is it really related to your actual day to day work?

00:55:56.440 | Is it related to what you do in your time outside of work?

00:55:59.160 | What are you actually looking for in work in terms of like how it feels and the autonomy

00:56:03.240 | or the financial remuneration?

00:56:05.160 | You need to keep thinking about your career capital.

00:56:08.000 | You're starting from scratch with career capital is very hard to compete in the marketplace

00:56:11.520 | with people that have more, etc.

00:56:14.340 | So this is a time not to get caught up in like a singular move because it can be seducing

00:56:21.760 | the move itself, right?

00:56:24.600 | You'll feel good if you do something big for a little while.

00:56:28.360 | Go back to school, you'll feel good because you made a big change.

00:56:30.820 | That's exciting.

00:56:31.820 | There's opportunity.

00:56:32.820 | That goodness wears off and you're still pursuing that change and it doesn't necessarily lead

00:56:37.800 | you to somewhere better.

00:56:39.400 | So this is the time to do careful lifestyle centric planning.

00:56:44.560 | Don't be seduced by any one particular change or move.

00:56:48.160 | That's a complicated case study there, Jesse.

00:56:51.480 | I love the reference of the little cow on the shoulder.

00:56:56.000 | That's what we're going to sell in our Shopify store.

00:56:58.640 | Little cows you place on your shoulder that basically just chastises you for looking at

00:57:03.180 | Instagram and says, "Don't get a master's degree."

00:57:06.860 | And don't make grand goals.

00:57:07.860 | Don't make grand goals.

00:57:08.860 | Stop looking at Instagram.

00:57:09.860 | Couldn't you be reading right now?

00:57:11.700 | That would sell well.

00:57:13.700 | That would sell well.

00:57:14.700 | All right.

00:57:15.700 | Well, speaking of books, we got a final segment coming up where I talk about the books I read

00:57:20.500 | in December.

00:57:21.500 | But first, another brief word from our sponsors.

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01:01:09.380 | All right, let's get on to our final segment.

01:01:13.620 | All right.

01:01:14.860 | So I like to report in the first episode of each month, the books I read in the preceding

01:01:19.180 | month as longtime listeners.

01:01:21.540 | No, I read, I try to read five books a month.

01:01:24.500 | Okay.

01:01:25.500 | So it's January 2nd when we're recording this, so we're gonna be talking about the books

01:01:30.460 | from December 2024.

01:01:34.460 | There's no, I like in December because of the holidays as a way to kind of unwind from

01:01:38.020 | the fall to be thrillers.

01:01:39.380 | I love thrillers in particular, techno thrillers.

01:01:41.500 | So I call December thriller December.

01:01:45.860 | And this December did not disappoint, especially because I was dealing with these medical,

01:01:49.580 | this injury I've been recovering from.

01:01:50.980 | I was like, the thrillers were like, I went two ways with this.

01:01:54.180 | I read a bunch of thrillers early on.

01:01:56.260 | And then, and these books are all gonna show up in the January list because I was just

01:02:02.380 | finishing them now.

01:02:03.380 | So I turned to books that were like hardcore intellectual because I couldn't exercise.

01:02:06.860 | So I was like, well, what can I do still?

01:02:09.340 | I can still think.

01:02:10.380 | So like I read a bunch of math stuff, which we'll get into at the next book.

01:02:13.300 | But I started December with a bunch of thrillers.

01:02:15.260 | All right, here's the first thriller I read was Brad Meltzer's book, Midnight Ride.

01:02:21.900 | So Brad is known, he's a Boston based writer that's known for writing these sort of narrative

01:02:25.780 | nonfiction books.

01:02:27.800 | He got famous with Bringing Down the House, which was about the MIT Blackjack Club that

01:02:32.020 | got made into the movie 21.

01:02:34.060 | But he also wrote the book The Social, no, The Accidental Billionaires about Mark Zuckerberg,

01:02:40.260 | which was the book on which the movie The Social Network was based.

01:02:45.860 | So this was his style was he wrote these nonfiction books, but he would write the nonfiction books

01:02:50.460 | in a novelistic style, like with dialogue and interior thoughts.

01:02:53.140 | So he was like, he kind of just like guesses.

01:02:55.340 | So it's like this mix of like fiction and nonfiction.

01:02:58.220 | But during the pandemic, he serialized in a Boston newspaper, a thriller like each week,

01:03:07.740 | like another chapter.

01:03:08.740 | It's kind of cool, like Dickens used to do.

01:03:10.640 | And then he collected into this book, The Midnight Ride.

01:03:12.900 | So this is like a National Treasure style plot line.

01:03:16.340 | It takes place in Boston.

01:03:18.360 | It's a Harvard professor and a Tufts professor.

01:03:21.060 | It has to do with the colonial periods.

01:03:23.780 | They're going to all these different historical sites in Boston to try to collect clues that

01:03:27.940 | are hidden in them.

01:03:29.140 | One of those type of one of those types of books.

01:03:30.780 | And it was a lot of fun.

01:03:32.660 | It doesn't end at the end of this book as part of a longer series, so you're going to

01:03:36.620 | have to keep going.

01:03:37.620 | And, you know, I thought it was well done.

01:03:39.380 | I mean, it's the style he was writing his nonfiction books in.

01:03:41.540 | So when it's purely fiction, he can just let it unfold in any crazy way he wants.

01:03:48.060 | And so there's some cool Boston history in there, some good villains.

01:03:50.940 | I don't know.

01:03:51.940 | I think it was well done.

01:03:52.940 | Midnight Ride.

01:03:53.940 | Then I went and read one of the few Michael Crichton books that I haven't yet read.

01:04:00.780 | Was Eaters of the Dead.

01:04:03.540 | Have you heard of this one?

01:04:04.540 | No.

01:04:05.540 | So, I mean, this was written in this period post Andromeda Strain, but really before Crichton

01:04:10.300 | was like a huge writer.

01:04:12.180 | Andromeda Strain was a big deal.

01:04:14.380 | But he wasn't a huge writer right away after that.

01:04:16.660 | He was he was much more eclectic in his writing style.

01:04:19.900 | He was still doing some kind of cheaper thrillers under nom-de-guerres, like under fake names

01:04:25.500 | at this period.

01:04:26.500 | And he was also going all around stylistically.

01:04:30.620 | This is when he wrote like The Great Train Robbery.

01:04:32.500 | He was doing nonfiction.

01:04:35.220 | He wrote a book about like a memoir of his travelings.

01:04:38.660 | He wrote a biography of Jasper Johns.

01:04:40.980 | And in that period, that early experimental period, he wrote The Eaters of the Dead, which

01:04:45.340 | is it's a book about Vikings.

01:04:47.620 | It's told, it's written like you've discovered a historical document.

01:04:50.820 | The whole conceit is like this is a document, written by someone who is part of this trip

01:04:58.700 | with these Vikings.

01:04:59.700 | And this is like in the year 600 or something.

01:05:02.020 | And we've translated this from the Arabic.

01:05:04.700 | And you're reading a historical document, right?

01:05:06.540 | Like that's the conceit.

01:05:08.100 | He actually built it off of a real document that talked about the travel of someone from

01:05:13.740 | like, I don't know, some court in the Middle East all the way towards Scandinavia.

01:05:18.780 | And then once they actually get to Scandinavia, it's basically Beowulf.

01:05:23.260 | So there's like grindles in there.

01:05:25.340 | So then it becomes full out fantastical.

01:05:27.260 | So he kind of is in the style of like a real historical account that existed of traveling

01:05:32.440 | with Vikings back then that turns into Beowulf and they're fighting monsters or whatever.

01:05:36.780 | And it's, you know, it's interesting.

01:05:39.260 | It's weird because it's like in the style of a translated 7th century travelogue.

01:05:45.760 | He wrote weird stuff back then.

01:05:48.100 | So it's okay.

01:05:49.100 | It's okay.

01:05:50.460 | Then following this theme, the third thriller I wrote was The Andromeda Evolution, a follow

01:05:55.580 | up to Michael Crichton's breakout book, The Andromeda Strain, written after Michael Crichton

01:05:59.620 | died by Daniel Wilson.

01:06:02.660 | That's a pretty good thriller.

01:06:05.260 | Pretty good straight up thriller.

01:06:06.540 | Man, it gets a little crazy, you know, it makes me respect early Crichton more.

01:06:13.620 | The Andromeda Strain had some like big, big high concept ideas in it, but it still felt

01:06:20.380 | very grounded.

01:06:21.620 | Like you're reading like a cool New Yorker piece.

01:06:23.920 | This thing, it gets pretty crazy.

01:06:25.580 | It's an outer space.

01:06:26.580 | Like it gets pretty crazy.

01:06:27.900 | Like it's pretty high octane.

01:06:30.420 | The biggest issue I had with it is not everything is well motivated.

01:06:35.580 | There's this like mission to go investigate this thing and it's unclear like why these

01:06:41.060 | people have to do it and why they have to like go through the woods to do it and why

01:06:44.420 | they can't just drop them off.

01:06:45.420 | Like there's, there's some, we just need these people to be in the woods and so action can

01:06:50.320 | take place and it doesn't really, there's some lack of motivation that Crichton was

01:06:53.180 | fantastic at.

01:06:54.180 | Like everything is always motivated in a Crichton book.

01:06:56.140 | You completely believe why someone is doing what they're doing.

01:06:59.660 | They play a little fast and loose with this here, but it gets wild and it was fun.

01:07:03.380 | It was good.

01:07:04.380 | It was pretty good.

01:07:05.380 | So evolution.

01:07:06.380 | All right.

01:07:07.380 | Then I read, leaving the thriller theme, I read Open.

01:07:12.260 | That's Andre Agassi's memoir.

01:07:13.860 | Man, tough to be a professional athlete.

01:07:18.580 | He grew up in a situation where his dad was like, I'm going to make you into a tennis

01:07:22.380 | player.

01:07:23.820 | And it wasn't necessarily like the best childhood.

01:07:26.740 | And then he builds these entourages where it's like very needy and I don't think, I

01:07:33.620 | don't think Agassi even realizes this where he'll, he'll just glom on to these people

01:07:37.380 | and then give them these big speeches of like, you have to be in my life and my life means

01:07:40.580 | nothing without you.

01:07:41.580 | And he creates these like entourages of big trainers and stuff that just like follow him

01:07:44.940 | around.

01:07:45.940 | And it was interesting.

01:07:46.940 | The main issue is I'm dealing with some pain from my injury I'm recovering from and like

01:07:53.340 | Agassi's whole life becomes pain after a while, you know, a professional athlete who plays

01:07:56.580 | well into their thirties.

01:07:57.580 | So I was like, that's a little close to home.

01:07:59.060 | And it was, what's his face?

01:08:01.820 | He wrote the book, right?

01:08:02.820 | Yeah.

01:08:03.820 | He wrote it with the ghostwriter.

01:08:04.820 | Yeah.

01:08:05.820 | Yeah.

01:08:06.820 | It was the guy who wrote, well, Henry Barr.

01:08:08.820 | Yeah.

01:08:09.820 | And Prince Harry's.

01:08:10.820 | Yeah.

01:08:11.820 | Yeah.

01:08:12.820 | Prince Harry's.

01:08:13.820 | Yeah.

01:08:14.820 | So it's a great, good ghostwriter.

01:08:15.820 | He kind of takes on his voice.

01:08:16.820 | It was a good story though.

01:08:18.700 | You really learn about the world of professional tennis.

01:08:20.420 | I mean, it's a problem with all these sports memoirs is they sometimes have a hard time

01:08:24.580 | really capturing at that level what makes you so good.

01:08:31.060 | And, you know, this book had the issue of there was a lot of like, just, I was feeling

01:08:36.980 | it today.

01:08:39.020 | And so I beat Pete Sampras.

01:08:40.020 | And then other days, like, I just wasn't feeling it that day.

01:08:43.700 | They often make it seem like in these books that winning at this level is like a matter

01:08:47.380 | of just, you really extra commit.

01:08:50.700 | And then, you know, you turn it on and like some sort of abstract sense.

01:08:54.420 | And I'm much more interested, like they give hints that like, no, no, no.

01:08:57.540 | It's like, I guess he had like the serve return that his dad had forced into him that like

01:09:03.980 | this was his advantage or his quickness or it's like, you know, I really love when a

01:09:08.300 | book gets to that.

01:09:10.500 | What makes a great athlete great?

01:09:11.700 | So if you look at levels of the game, by contrast, John McPhee's book about tennis, the US Open,

01:09:17.580 | that's much better at capturing like what made the tennis player good, like what they

01:09:24.300 | did, what the other player did, what that cat and mouse game was like, how this all

01:09:27.940 | works.

01:09:28.940 | Like that was a much better book at capturing like what, what makes you good at the sport.

01:09:32.060 | A lot of times you support memoirs don't get there.

01:09:33.780 | Well, you still have to be on the, in that level, right?

01:09:37.180 | Yeah.

01:09:38.180 | And then it's amongst the level where it gets distinguished.

01:09:40.500 | Yeah.

01:09:41.500 | So like at that level, like why, yeah.

01:09:43.540 | What did he have that even when he's like a little bit older and achy that like he could

01:09:47.140 | turn it on and beat so many of these other people?

01:09:48.940 | I just looked it up.

01:09:49.940 | He had eight majors.

01:09:50.940 | I didn't realize he had so many.

01:09:51.940 | Yeah.

01:09:52.940 | Yeah.

01:09:53.940 | Yeah.

01:09:54.940 | Yeah.

01:09:55.940 | He was good.

01:09:56.940 | He was good.

01:09:57.940 | I mean, the other problem about the book, it's not a problem, the book, but just about

01:09:58.940 | tennis, like most of the time he's losing because most of the time you lose, you know,

01:10:01.560 | so there's like these whole long sweatshirt and you just lose, lose, lose, lose because

01:10:04.420 | it's so minor that a little edge you're required to win that you can just lose for a year.

01:10:09.500 | Yeah.

01:10:10.500 | I guess in individual sports is you lose a lot like golf, you lose a lot.

01:10:12.940 | You just lose a lot.

01:10:13.940 | Yeah.

01:10:14.940 | Yeah.

01:10:15.940 | Like if you read a memoir of golf, like you lose most of the matches or tournaments, whatever

01:10:18.940 | they're called.

01:10:19.940 | Yeah.

01:10:20.940 | So he was, he was good.

01:10:21.940 | But yeah, he won a bunch of, he won a bunch of majors.

01:10:23.380 | He was very good.

01:10:24.420 | He was not, the sense I got is like the, he's a great, but like the super greats were more,

01:10:33.180 | not organized, but like their life was much more structured around.

01:10:36.580 | He was more fast and loose, right?

01:10:38.420 | It's like Pete Sampras was more just regimented.

01:10:42.060 | Like his life was much more carefully built around what you need to do to do well at tennis.

01:10:46.860 | What do you need to do with like your body and your recovery and the, and it was very

01:10:51.020 | like locked in and Augusty was sort of all over the place.

01:10:54.100 | There's a part of this book where he's, he's taking meth.

01:10:57.580 | Did he talk about his hair?

01:11:00.020 | Yeah.

01:11:01.020 | Yeah.

01:11:02.020 | His hair fell out early and then he would wear, he was wearing wigs and stuff like that.

01:11:03.780 | Yeah.

01:11:04.780 | Yeah.

01:11:05.780 | It's interesting.

01:11:06.780 | The final book I read in December is called The Future Was Now by Chris Nashawati.

01:11:11.260 | This is from this genre of book that I like that there's a lot of similarity to it, right?

01:11:16.460 | It's a movie book where it'll be about a movie or a group of movies and it's kind of basically

01:11:20.520 | oral histories, right?

01:11:21.620 | Like we're just going to like tell you a lot about, like it's not, I discovered there's

01:11:26.180 | a whole genre of these I've been reading where we're going to talk about this movie year

01:11:30.340 | or this particular movie and it's just like an oral history.

01:11:32.700 | Like here's what happened.

01:11:34.180 | Here's, they collect quotes from like a lot of other sources and pull it together.

01:11:38.120 | But I find them comforting.

01:11:39.580 | The Future Was Now is about the sci-fi movies from 1989.

01:11:44.220 | So there's like all of these like big sci-fi movies came out in the same year.

01:11:47.660 | This is like ET, this is the year that Blade Runner came out, it's the year that Conan

01:11:52.820 | the Barbarian came out and Tron came out and so there's all of these, these big sci-fi,

01:12:01.140 | like the idea of the big sci-fi movie became a thing in this one year.

01:12:04.900 | And so he kind of tells the stories of all these movies and how they came about or whatever.

01:12:08.260 | So it's interesting.

01:12:09.700 | You learn, you hear about the directors and what was happening and this was sort of the

01:12:12.620 | year that changed movies.

01:12:13.620 | It was like, oh, we could, these like big sci-fi movies can be like huge box office

01:12:17.200 | and that it kind of helped kicked off that idea.

01:12:20.180 | So it was great.

01:12:21.180 | If you like movies and like these sort of oral history style movie books, this one was

01:12:25.380 | good.

01:12:26.380 | I listened to this one instead of read it and finished it.

01:12:28.780 | So it's good.

01:12:29.780 | All right.

01:12:30.780 | That's what I got.

01:12:32.540 | Those are my books from December and at the end of January, I'll report what I read in

01:12:38.740 | January.

01:12:39.740 | As I mentioned, it's a lot more mathy because I was sort of punishing myself, I don't know,

01:12:43.820 | trying to compensate for lack of physical activity with more intellectual activity.

01:12:48.200 | So more on that, but let's just say I can tell you now about how support vector machines

01:12:56.060 | and machine learning are really using kernels to help do multidimensional dot products to

01:13:02.160 | help figure out optimal margin algorithms in multidimensions without the computational

01:13:06.400 | power.

01:13:07.400 | I can talk to you about infinite dimension calculus and why you want to use this on vector

01:13:11.040 | representations of functions as a dual way of thinking about function calculus, etc.

01:13:15.840 | All stuff I learned after Thriller December to try to compensate for my body not doing

01:13:19.720 | what I wanted to do.

01:13:20.720 | You'll learn all about that in a few weeks, but we'll be back next week with just a normal

01:13:24.000 | episode.

01:13:25.000 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:13:28.800 | If you like today's episode, and in particular, the part where I talked about weekly templates,

01:13:33.760 | you might want to check out episode 316, where I give a much more detailed discussion of

01:13:38.200 | that particular productivity technique.

01:13:40.480 | Check it out.

01:13:41.480 | I think you'll like it.

01:13:43.160 | So what is this tool we're going to talk about?

01:13:45.160 | I call it the weekly template.

Cultivate A Deep Life: One Idea To Change How You Think About Life In 2025 | Cal Newport

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