Reconfiguring Your Life To Amplify Sources Of Value

00:00:00.000 | So that's our plan.

00:00:01.500 | So let's get started with the deep dive.

00:00:04.360 | So the topic of the deep dive today is the deep reset.

00:00:10.880 | Now the deep reset is a term I introduced

00:00:14.880 | in my email newsletter and talked about briefly

00:00:16.960 | on this podcast back in the early months

00:00:19.160 | of the coronavirus pandemic.

00:00:21.940 | I wanna revisit it today and make it more structured,

00:00:25.540 | make it more pragmatic.

00:00:27.140 | So to understand the deep reset,

00:00:29.880 | I wanna talk about three different forces

00:00:33.240 | that exist in the world today

00:00:35.340 | that I think are gonna converge together

00:00:37.680 | to create this new phenomenon.

00:00:40.860 | So if you're watching instead of listing,

00:00:42.420 | so if you're watching the video of this segment

00:00:44.460 | at youtube.com/calnewportmedia,

00:00:46.880 | you'll see I have the tablet up here

00:00:49.480 | where I've listed three different forces,

00:00:52.440 | and I'm gonna write right in the middle here,

00:00:55.200 | deep reset, 'cause these all,

00:00:59.120 | hand lays, beautiful,

00:00:59.960 | these all are feeding into the deep reset.

00:01:02.600 | All right, so what are the forces

00:01:03.680 | that I think are gonna feed into this thing

00:01:04.960 | I'm gonna call the deep reset?

00:01:06.280 | First, the fact that millennials

00:01:09.760 | are approaching middle age.

00:01:12.900 | So let's be precise about demographics here.

00:01:15.720 | People use these generation descriptions,

00:01:18.120 | I believe, too vaguely.

00:01:20.840 | Like we're in the bad habit, for example,

00:01:22.440 | of using the word millennial to mean young person,

00:01:24.880 | but let's be very demographically specific here.

00:01:27.240 | The millennials, by most accounts,

00:01:29.240 | are more or less people born between 1981 and 1996.

00:01:34.240 | So that puts Jesse and I at the older end

00:01:37.760 | of the millennials, so we're 40.

00:01:41.300 | The youngest millennials are in their late 20s.

00:01:43.040 | The bulk of this generation is in their 30s right now.

00:01:46.800 | So these are more or less the children of the baby boomers.

00:01:50.500 | All right, so the millennials are approaching middle age.

00:01:53.880 | Jesse and I are older,

00:01:54.780 | but the rest of them are going through their 30s.

00:01:56.940 | This is a very important cultural shift

00:02:00.480 | because the millennials is a very large population boom.

00:02:04.200 | The baby boomers was a very large population boom,

00:02:06.720 | so their children is itself gonna be a very large boom.

00:02:11.120 | That's why our demographic was originally called

00:02:13.480 | the echo boom, because it was an echo of the baby boom.

00:02:16.640 | So we have this very large group population demographic

00:02:20.780 | that are now approaching middle age,

00:02:23.580 | which means those that are gonna end up,

00:02:25.640 | let's say, getting married or starting a family,

00:02:28.520 | they're doing that right now.

00:02:30.540 | All right, number two, second of three forces,

00:02:34.280 | relevant in the world right now,

00:02:36.760 | is the philosophy of work as a means to an end

00:02:41.160 | that the millennials have developed

00:02:43.560 | over the past, let's say, 20 years.

00:02:46.260 | So we got into this briefly

00:02:49.040 | in my deep dive from episode 218.

00:02:52.440 | So just to give you the short summary here,

00:02:54.920 | when the millennials were growing up,

00:02:57.040 | so this was the 1990s into the early 2000s,

00:03:00.560 | when the first millennials were growing up,

00:03:02.680 | their parents, the baby boomers,

00:03:05.280 | wanted to offer them advice

00:03:06.840 | about what to do with their career.

00:03:09.120 | Now, the baby boomers had these two extreme experiences.

00:03:12.800 | When they were little, they had seen their parents

00:03:14.520 | had had this sort of corporate conformist experience.

00:03:17.080 | This was the era of the organization man.

00:03:19.360 | This was the 1950s in which you moved to the suburbs

00:03:22.640 | and you dedicated your life to IBM

00:03:24.500 | and they would give you lifetime employment in return.

00:03:27.520 | As people left this urban cores of cities

00:03:29.720 | and small villages, these corporate loyalties

00:03:32.320 | became a substitute for civic engagement.

00:03:34.840 | So it was a time of conformity,

00:03:36.520 | but it also sort of made sense.

00:03:37.800 | These are the same people who had subordinated themselves

00:03:40.540 | to the larger cause of fighting fascism

00:03:43.040 | during World War II.

00:03:43.880 | So they were used to this idea,

00:03:45.480 | subordinate yourself to the larger cause

00:03:47.440 | as a source of meaning.

00:03:48.660 | The baby boomers didn't buy that

00:03:50.160 | because by the time you get to the '60s,

00:03:51.960 | you have all these social disruptions happening.

00:03:53.840 | You have the civil rights movement, you have Vietnam,

00:03:56.120 | you have the women's liberation movement,

00:03:58.120 | all of these social forces,

00:04:00.120 | these social disruptions are happening.

00:04:02.280 | And suddenly their parents ethos

00:04:05.360 | seemed stiflingly conformist.

00:04:07.920 | And so the baby boomers created

00:04:10.160 | the counter-cultural movement,

00:04:11.900 | which went hard the other way.

00:04:13.740 | So now we had, let's get rid of work altogether.

00:04:17.280 | It's an obstacle to self-actualization.

00:04:21.220 | Let's go back to land, let's move to communes.

00:04:23.720 | You're gonna find yourself outside of work.

00:04:26.840 | That fell apart too.

00:04:28.760 | So by the time the baby boomers were having kids,

00:04:31.120 | like how do we balance these two forces?

00:04:34.280 | And they came up with, I think at the time,

00:04:36.240 | a clever innovation.

00:04:38.040 | We'll tell our kids to follow their passion.

00:04:40.420 | See, this is a tightrope act right here.

00:04:44.580 | The counter-culture idea of forget work,

00:04:47.560 | just go move to a commune and self-actualize,

00:04:51.840 | that didn't work.

00:04:52.680 | But they also still distrusted pure corporate conformity.

00:04:56.320 | So they had this compromise.

00:04:57.840 | All right, you still need to get a job

00:04:59.840 | and pay your mortgage payments and make a living,

00:05:02.460 | but make it a job you love.

00:05:04.240 | So now the job itself can be a source

00:05:06.840 | of meaning and fulfillment.

00:05:08.280 | So this is what we saw as millennials.

00:05:13.140 | We were taught this idea of follow your passion.

00:05:16.040 | That then fell apart.

00:05:17.200 | And again, I talked about this last week,

00:05:18.400 | but that then fell apart in the early 2000s.

00:05:21.020 | We had 9/11, the financial crash after 9/11.

00:05:23.920 | We barely got back on our feet

00:05:25.240 | before the 2008 financial crash happened.

00:05:27.660 | This was the period when the bulk

00:05:29.120 | of the millennial generation was leaving college

00:05:31.440 | and entering the workforce.

00:05:32.920 | This idea that you should just follow your passion,

00:05:35.960 | that idea began to lose steam.

00:05:38.400 | Employment seemed much more precarious.

00:05:41.000 | The instrumental value of money to stave off hardship

00:05:44.000 | and support things that are meaningful

00:05:45.280 | became much more clear

00:05:46.200 | when people were going through hard times.

00:05:48.520 | And so the millennials in general moved past

00:05:51.540 | the follow your passion notion

00:05:53.700 | and began to work on an alternative philosophy

00:05:56.060 | of work as a means to an end.

00:06:00.200 | This is the hack work culture.

00:06:02.560 | This is what's captured in the minimalism movement.

00:06:04.820 | This is what's captured in Tim Ferriss' lifestyle design.

00:06:07.620 | This is what's captured in the fire movement.

00:06:09.780 | This is what's captured in early influencer videos

00:06:13.060 | on Instagram and YouTube,

00:06:14.620 | where you see millennials focusing on lifestyle.

00:06:17.580 | It's the moms in the white linen dresses

00:06:19.680 | walking through the fields with their kids.

00:06:21.380 | It's the sort of impossibly ripped dads

00:06:23.640 | doing feats of endurance in YouTube videos.

00:06:26.320 | The lifestyles being pushed to the millennials

00:06:28.760 | by millennials, it was not about work.

00:06:30.660 | It was meaning in life.

00:06:32.660 | Work was a funding source for running endurance races

00:06:37.420 | and having only white dishes on white shelves

00:06:41.020 | in your walls at your house.

00:06:42.400 | So that's this big shift.

00:06:44.540 | The millennials are very attuned to this idea

00:06:47.380 | that follow your passion, forget that.

00:06:50.540 | Work supports other things that are important.

00:06:54.180 | It's a source of money.

00:06:55.340 | We can take it.

00:06:56.180 | Maybe you'll get some mean out of it.

00:06:57.000 | Maybe you don't like your job,

00:06:57.840 | but it's a financial backing

00:07:00.740 | for the systematic construction of a life that's meaningful.

00:07:03.340 | So we've adopted that.

00:07:04.500 | And this is very generational.

00:07:06.540 | Gen Z, for example, the generation born after 1996,

00:07:09.780 | who's just now entering the workforce,

00:07:12.220 | as we talked about last week, they have their own ideas.

00:07:14.860 | They're right now,

00:07:15.700 | they're stuck on this notion of quiet quitting.

00:07:17.340 | They're just taking the first basic steps of saying,

00:07:20.460 | what is work gonna mean to us?

00:07:21.900 | But for the millennials, we've been through this.

00:07:24.160 | Work is a means to an end.

00:07:26.060 | All right, so millennials approaching middle age,

00:07:27.840 | millennials adopting a work as a means to the end philosophy.

00:07:31.680 | And then we add the third element,

00:07:33.340 | the catalyst to this particular

00:07:35.060 | metaphorical biochemical mixture,

00:07:38.300 | and that is pandemic disruptions.

00:07:41.520 | So the pandemic comes along, disrupts work.

00:07:46.140 | Everything goes remote.

00:07:47.640 | The pain points that people feel with their jobs

00:07:51.180 | are amplified.

00:07:52.860 | At the same time,

00:07:56.180 | the idea that you have more freedom and flexibility

00:07:59.460 | in configuring your work and your life was also amplified.

00:08:03.620 | People were moving.

00:08:05.900 | They were doing different schooling configurations

00:08:08.280 | with their kids.

00:08:09.120 | They were pushing back on things.

00:08:11.860 | People were leaving jobs.

00:08:13.260 | There's this spirit of, hey, anything can go.

00:08:16.760 | Things are so bad

00:08:18.300 | that there's really nothing off the table now.

00:08:20.260 | And it inculcated this idea of change is possible.

00:08:25.260 | So I think those three things are gonna come together

00:08:27.960 | for this particular generation

00:08:29.820 | to lead to a lot of people to engage

00:08:31.700 | in what I call a deep reset.

00:08:33.980 | So I have a definition for this.

00:08:36.740 | I'm scrolling up if you're watching this online.

00:08:39.140 | Here's a definition of a deep reset.

00:08:42.800 | It's an intentional reconfiguration of your life

00:08:45.880 | to amplify the small number of things

00:08:49.680 | you've learned through experience that you value

00:08:51.720 | and minimize those things that get in their way.

00:08:56.720 | So a deep reset is saying, wait a second,

00:09:00.200 | let's step back and reconfigure our whole life.

00:09:04.160 | And I think at this moment,

00:09:06.700 | the millennials in particular,

00:09:08.240 | because of those three forces coming together,

00:09:10.080 | have begun doing these deep resets.

00:09:11.720 | And this is gonna be a very important work trend

00:09:14.320 | in the next handful of years that are coming up ahead.

00:09:18.740 | Now I wanna point out,

00:09:20.680 | this is different than a midlife crisis,

00:09:22.440 | which is a phenomenon that afflicted our parents.

00:09:24.800 | The midlife crisis came at a similar point in people's lives

00:09:29.160 | as their 30s went into their 40s,

00:09:30.840 | but it was much more haphazard,

00:09:32.240 | self-focused and less intentional.

00:09:34.320 | The midlife crisis was famously characterized

00:09:37.120 | by people realizing, oh my God, my life is halfway done.

00:09:40.740 | What am I doing?

00:09:42.040 | Let me respond haphazardly.

00:09:44.760 | I'll buy a sports car.

00:09:46.540 | I'll get divorced and married a 25 year old.

00:09:49.580 | I'll do a dramatic sort of visible

00:09:53.920 | narcissistic lifestyle changes to try to distract

00:09:56.980 | or stave off or avoid the inevitable conclusion

00:09:59.660 | that I'm getting older.

00:10:00.700 | That's very different than the deeper reset,

00:10:02.460 | which is much more intentional,

00:10:04.460 | much more focused on your whole life, your whole family,

00:10:07.880 | much more focused on amplifying meaning,

00:10:10.720 | not avoiding things that are distressing.

00:10:14.020 | So what might go into a deeper reset?

00:10:17.060 | Well, here are some things I've seen.

00:10:18.900 | Work simplification is a big part of that.

00:10:23.960 | So people really rethinking the role of work.

00:10:28.080 | So we get a lot of, for example, lead stepping.

00:10:32.020 | That's a term for where you've been going up the ladder

00:10:34.980 | at your organization and you say, you know what?

00:10:36.740 | I'm fine where I am right now for a while.

00:10:38.960 | Let me step off the ladder onto a ledge

00:10:41.580 | where I can just hang out.

00:10:43.420 | So without the need to strive to get to the next level,

00:10:46.860 | it reduces the pressure and the amount of work on your plate.

00:10:49.900 | So as you approach middle age as a millennial,

00:10:52.300 | you may already have a lot of career capital,

00:10:55.740 | have a really a job that's at that right balance.

00:10:58.020 | You have a lot of leverage, a lot of autonomy.

00:10:59.560 | It's probably a reasonable place

00:11:01.560 | where you could let step for a while

00:11:03.540 | without it being boring or as it would be

00:11:06.880 | if you tried when you're 22

00:11:08.000 | and you're still in an entry-level position.

00:11:09.540 | So we definitely see work simplification.

00:11:11.680 | People also going all remote

00:11:13.920 | could be a work simplification move.

00:11:15.800 | Reduced hours is a work simplification move.

00:11:18.620 | Freelancers or people running small businesses,

00:11:20.920 | eliminating streams of income,

00:11:24.780 | the focus on just a smaller number of things

00:11:26.920 | is work simplification.

00:11:27.920 | So it's all about reducing that work volume

00:11:31.160 | that's coming at you from your job.

00:11:32.520 | That's common in deep resets.

00:11:34.040 | A term that I just made up,

00:11:36.400 | but I'm trying to popularize,

00:11:37.760 | candle fire, capital F-I-R-E,

00:11:41.640 | goes along with this.

00:11:43.040 | So FIRE is this millennial movement,

00:11:46.080 | financial independence, retire early,

00:11:48.120 | that we've talked about on the show before.

00:11:49.480 | And it was a movement that came out of the tech world

00:11:51.940 | about super aggressively saving

00:11:54.560 | while living aggressively cheaply

00:11:56.160 | so that you could achieve financial independence

00:11:59.040 | at a relatively young age.

00:12:01.120 | What I think we're seeing a lot more of now

00:12:03.800 | is what I call candle fire,

00:12:05.840 | the candle being referenced to a small flame,

00:12:09.120 | in which the idea is not,

00:12:10.480 | oh, I need to be financially independent.

00:12:13.180 | That is, I can live entirely off of my saved assets,

00:12:16.540 | but instead, let's bring down our cost of living

00:12:19.360 | substantially so that with a simplified work portfolio,

00:12:25.280 | we can still support ourselves.

00:12:27.320 | So it's not leaving work

00:12:29.400 | and living entirely off your investments.

00:12:31.360 | It's moving to the cheaper location,

00:12:34.220 | getting rid of one of the cars,

00:12:36.840 | moving to the cheaper location.

00:12:38.200 | We're homeschooling instead of private school.

00:12:40.200 | Our expenses are lower,

00:12:42.340 | so now I don't have to work as much,

00:12:44.600 | but I'm going to leverage the fact

00:12:45.980 | that I have a lot of career capital.

00:12:47.240 | I'm 35, I know what I'm doing, I'm in demand.

00:12:49.380 | It's not that hard for me

00:12:50.220 | to negotiate a part-time contractor position.

00:12:53.040 | It's half the money.

00:12:53.880 | I live on half the expenses, and there we go.

00:12:56.840 | We have a nice life with a lot less work.

00:12:58.400 | So candle fire, we're gonna see a lot of that.

00:13:00.520 | That's gonna go alongside work simplification.

00:13:03.880 | Relocation is big.

00:13:05.120 | We saw a lot of this during the pandemic.

00:13:07.160 | I call it intentional relocation

00:13:09.680 | 'cause it's moving for intentional value-based reasons.

00:13:14.200 | Two examples from my own life.

00:13:16.740 | We have friends who were kind of overwhelmed

00:13:20.640 | by the crowdedness and the stress

00:13:24.040 | of the Washington, D.C. suburbs.

00:13:26.460 | Both their jobs were remote for the most part.

00:13:30.040 | They really like outdoor activities.

00:13:31.460 | They really like skiing.

00:13:32.860 | God help them.

00:13:35.340 | They were trying to get their skiing in each year

00:13:37.280 | in West Virginia.

00:13:38.440 | There's only so many mountains around here.

00:13:41.080 | They're not that great.

00:13:43.000 | And so they moved to Colorado, right outside Boulder,

00:13:45.980 | half hour from a great ski slope,

00:13:47.540 | mount the bike all the time, intentional relocation.

00:13:50.980 | Another friend of mine worked for the government,

00:13:53.660 | was a lawyer for the government.

00:13:55.260 | They're enjoying life here,

00:13:57.380 | but his family was from Santa Fe,

00:14:01.500 | and they're like a long-running Santa Fe family,

00:14:04.720 | sort of like his family runs the town.

00:14:06.340 | They've been there since you were fighting off

00:14:08.640 | Indian raid-type things.

00:14:10.380 | And they were all there.

00:14:11.820 | So he negotiated like, hey, in the height of the pandemic,

00:14:14.300 | when anything went, he negotiated a permanent remote work,

00:14:17.060 | and they moved to Santa Fe.

00:14:18.060 | He sends me photos.

00:14:18.900 | He has a cool Adobe style house with a hill in the backyard.

00:14:21.820 | There's a gazebo at the top of it.

00:14:23.060 | He goes up there to watch the sunset.

00:14:24.440 | All of his family's there.

00:14:25.820 | It's all thickly connected connections,

00:14:27.660 | intentional relocation.

00:14:29.660 | You're gonna see a lot more of that.

00:14:31.740 | We will also see deep community involvement.

00:14:33.940 | This is something else that happens in deep resets,

00:14:36.820 | where people get deeply involved in communities

00:14:39.900 | that are meaningful for them.

00:14:41.600 | This could be family communities.

00:14:43.900 | Like my friend who moved back to Santa Fe

00:14:45.980 | is now deeply connected to all sorts of different relatives.

00:14:50.980 | They're in each other's lives.

00:14:52.260 | There's pluses and minuses,

00:14:53.440 | but generally we're a familial tribal species,

00:14:58.100 | so that's usually positive.

00:14:59.340 | Sometimes it'll be, let's say like a faith-based community.

00:15:01.780 | I'm gonna get really seriously involved in my temple,

00:15:06.140 | right, in my whatever, my mosque.

00:15:09.680 | Maybe it's more like an activist community.

00:15:12.460 | This is a cause that's important to me,

00:15:14.860 | and I'm gonna get deeply involved in it.

00:15:16.340 | So we're seeing more of investment

00:15:17.780 | of amplifying time spent in things like that that are useful.

00:15:21.060 | And then finally, deep play and self-development.

00:15:23.460 | People dedicating serious time to,

00:15:26.900 | it might be leisure activities.

00:15:28.620 | I mean, I think my brother is an example of this.

00:15:31.500 | Outdoor activities, in particular mountain-based activities

00:15:34.380 | are really important to him,

00:15:36.300 | and they've really built a lifestyle

00:15:37.500 | that involves lots of trips to the mountains,

00:15:40.500 | hiking, alpine skiing, mountain biking,

00:15:43.980 | trail running, and he's built the way his life works,

00:15:47.340 | his schedule, to do a lot of that.

00:15:50.220 | But you might see this with other types

00:15:51.780 | of self-development as well.

00:15:53.460 | Someone, you know, I'm really going to invest in philosophy.

00:15:56.840 | I wanna become an expert on this type of philosophy,

00:15:59.660 | health and fitness.

00:16:00.760 | I'm gonna spend a lot of time outside.

00:16:03.500 | I'll give you one more example.

00:16:04.780 | There's a writer who wrote the book.

00:16:07.460 | His name's Christopher McDougall.

00:16:09.200 | He wrote the book "Born to Run,"

00:16:12.860 | which was a surprise bestseller

00:16:16.100 | that started the barefoot or Vibram shoe running craze.

00:16:21.100 | And it's a cool book about a New York-based reporter

00:16:24.940 | who runs a lot and just was trashing his knees.

00:16:28.060 | And he goes and spends time

00:16:30.300 | with this native tribe in Mexico

00:16:33.160 | that do these long endurance runs.

00:16:35.380 | It's a tradition, and they do it barefoot.

00:16:37.620 | And he goes down this rabbit hole and, you know,

00:16:39.820 | finds out that, okay, actually barefoot movement's

00:16:42.220 | what we're meant to do.

00:16:43.100 | And you put in these big cushioned shoes,

00:16:44.660 | you get hurt, et cetera.

00:16:46.140 | Anyways, he writes this book, "New York-Based Reporter."

00:16:49.160 | Ends up really getting into this type of stuff,

00:16:51.340 | relocates to a farm.

00:16:53.900 | I believe he's in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,

00:16:56.060 | so an Amish country.

00:16:57.100 | And it's this farm with this barn.

00:16:59.580 | And there's these videos of him

00:17:00.820 | that Outside Magazine did, you can find,

00:17:02.620 | where he's out there now barefoot

00:17:06.100 | doing these Rocky Four style physical training activities,

00:17:10.780 | climbing ropes in his barn and throwing hay bales around.

00:17:13.700 | Then he built this life

00:17:15.220 | that has a huge amount of physical activity in it,

00:17:17.980 | outside, interesting physical activity.

00:17:20.340 | All these are examples of the same point.

00:17:23.140 | Investment, almost radical investment,

00:17:25.180 | in this case in deep play or self-development.

00:17:28.680 | These are the type of things that you're gonna see

00:17:31.740 | when people conduct a deep reset.

00:17:33.780 | It's simplification, amplification,

00:17:36.020 | usually with a couple of these changes made more radical.

00:17:40.420 | You can have some radical moves in here,

00:17:42.580 | typically as part of a deep reset.

00:17:44.900 | Now, how does this connect to our discussion

00:17:46.300 | of the deep life and the systematic pursuit

00:17:48.940 | of the deep life?

00:17:49.820 | The pursuit of a deep life will probably lead you

00:17:53.620 | to something like a deep reset.

00:17:55.140 | A lot of people are coming to this more haphazardly.

00:17:57.860 | It's Christopher McDougall moving to that barn,

00:18:00.940 | my friends moving to Colorado.

00:18:02.820 | People are coming at this a little bit more haphazardly.

00:18:04.980 | We try to be more systematic about it here on the show.

00:18:07.500 | But my point is, regardless of what we talk about here,

00:18:10.200 | I think deep resets are something we're gonna see

00:18:12.740 | as a defining characteristic of the millennials

00:18:15.420 | in their 30s and early 40s.

00:18:17.580 | And I, for one, think it's a positive trend.

00:18:20.340 | I think it's a nuanced and sophisticated approach

00:18:22.900 | to thinking about life, the relationship between work

00:18:25.460 | and other elements of life.

00:18:27.340 | I think our parents' generation struggled more with this.

00:18:30.420 | We got more of this, "Oh my God,

00:18:31.980 | what happened to the first half of my life?

00:18:34.020 | Let's buy a Corvette," type reaction.

00:18:36.300 | Because this new generation had this long period

00:18:39.340 | of developing a work as a means to an end ethic.

00:18:42.820 | They were ready for the disruptions of the pandemic.

00:18:44.860 | They were ready for the distress

00:18:47.400 | and wake up call of middle age.

00:18:49.620 | So we have a bit of perfect storm of forces coming together

00:18:53.180 | to create a phenomenon that I think is gonna be

00:18:57.380 | quite positive, actually, when we look back at it

00:18:59.900 | for my particular cohort.

00:19:01.820 | There you go, Jesse.

00:19:05.980 | I wrote an essay on the deep reset in my newsletter.

00:19:08.980 | You can find it at calnewport.com

00:19:11.380 | real early on in the pandemic.

00:19:13.640 | But it was way more sort of poetic and emotional.

00:19:17.820 | So it was just feeling,

00:19:18.940 | it's an interesting document to go back and read

00:19:21.500 | 'cause it was projecting this feeling that was in the air

00:19:25.300 | of, "I think changes are coming.

00:19:26.460 | People are gonna make big changes."

00:19:28.260 | But it was clearly not really worked out yet.

00:19:30.380 | And I think two years, or whatever it's been now,

00:19:32.700 | since then, two and a half years,

00:19:34.780 | starting to see this shake out

00:19:36.060 | into something that's a little bit more clear,

00:19:37.460 | a little bit more systematic.

00:19:38.540 | So yeah, I'm a big fan of the deep reset.

00:19:40.060 | I think a lot of people wanna do this.

00:19:41.540 | So hopefully having some terminology helps.

00:19:43.460 | - This'll probably be a chapter in the next book, right?

00:19:47.700 | - Yeah.

00:19:48.540 | I mean, the "Deep Life" book is all kind of about this.

00:19:51.780 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:19:52.620 | In fact, the deep reset was

00:19:54.900 | one of the early titles for the book.

00:19:57.420 | So it was gonna be more prescriptive.

00:20:00.560 | Like, here's how to do a deep reset.

00:20:02.360 | And then we changed the deep life.

00:20:05.260 | I'm not quite sure exactly how I'm gonna tackle that book.

00:20:07.660 | And I like that.

00:20:08.780 | Like, I'm just letting ideas flow

00:20:10.820 | as I work on slow productivity.

00:20:12.300 | And then as slow productivity finishes,

00:20:13.740 | I'm gonna laser lock and see,

00:20:16.540 | like, what do I really wanna do here?

00:20:17.780 | - So with the definition,

00:20:19.700 | an intentional reconfiguration of one's life

00:20:22.300 | to amplify the small number of things that you've learned,

00:20:25.660 | is that to benefit your work?

00:20:28.940 | - So when I say, okay, I have it up here.

00:20:31.700 | Amplify the small number of things you've learned

00:20:33.500 | through experience that you value.

00:20:35.220 | So what I'm trying to emphasize there

00:20:37.340 | is that the millennials are old enough now

00:20:40.420 | to have a experience-based answer

00:20:42.860 | to the question of what's important to me.

00:20:45.020 | - Outside of work.

00:20:46.100 | - Outside of work, in work, in life in general.

00:20:49.560 | Whereas I think if you're 23,

00:20:51.380 | and you're trying to say, what's important to me,

00:20:55.420 | you're basically making some guesses.

00:20:56.700 | You don't really know.

00:20:57.520 | You haven't gone through the ups and downs.

00:20:59.460 | You haven't gone through the various challenges.

00:21:01.820 | So really, by the time you get to, let's say, 35,

00:21:06.180 | you're probably pretty well-equipped

00:21:08.980 | to make a good deep reset

00:21:10.780 | because you have a pretty stable understanding

00:21:13.060 | at this point.

00:21:13.900 | You're far enough along in your career

00:21:15.100 | that you know what works and what doesn't,

00:21:17.860 | what you like about work, what you don't.

00:21:19.220 | You have leverage.

00:21:20.060 | You have career capital.

00:21:21.140 | So it is kind of a critical age.

00:21:24.180 | - You'll have to get your friend, Mr. Money Mustache,

00:21:26.740 | and tell him about your new term, candle fire.

00:21:29.580 | - Yes, we should have Pete on.

00:21:31.860 | I like him.

00:21:32.700 | Yeah.

00:21:35.060 | Let's do that.

00:21:35.880 | I'll talk to him.

00:21:36.720 | - Yeah.

00:21:37.560 | - Yeah, it'd be cool to see what he's...

00:21:38.380 | So from what I understand,

00:21:39.220 | I was just talking to someone yesterday

00:21:40.380 | who's friends with him

00:21:42.060 | and some of the other fire characters.

00:21:43.460 | A lot of them live in Longmont, Colorado.

00:21:45.220 | - They're probably building.

00:21:46.340 | - They're building, yeah.

00:21:48.540 | They have that co-working space there.

00:21:51.040 | We should, yeah, we should get an update

00:21:52.340 | on what's going on.

00:21:53.180 | - And then tell him about your new term.

00:21:55.140 | - Candle fire.

00:21:56.780 | Yep.

00:21:58.180 | I don't know if that's gonna stick.

00:21:59.980 | There's a lot of fire terms, by the way.

00:22:01.420 | Fat fire, light fire, thin fire.

00:22:05.340 | (upbeat music)

00:22:08.760 | (upbeat music)

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00:22:13.920 | (upbeat music)

Reconfiguring Your Life To Amplify Sources Of Value

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