A Strange (But Effective) Productivity Hack To Enhance Focus, Clarity & Creativity

00:00:00.000 | Well, to get to today's topic, I'll tell you what inspired it.

00:00:03.720 | Let me give you a little bit of a peek behind the curtain.

00:00:07.480 | As I was leaving New Hampshire, I spent my summer up at Dartmouth College as a Montgomery

00:00:11.200 | fellow.

00:00:12.200 | As I left New Hampshire, one of the things I was thinking in particular I'm going to

00:00:15.880 | miss is the locations I would leverage on the campus of Dartmouth College to get some

00:00:24.400 | thinking done.

00:00:26.120 | So I worked on some New Yorker pieces.

00:00:27.560 | I worked on some academic pieces.

00:00:29.280 | I finalized the manuscript for Slow Productivity, my next book.

00:00:33.360 | All that happened this summer while I was up there.

00:00:36.440 | Dartmouth is a very scenic campus.

00:00:38.360 | If you make your way to the upper valley of New Hampshire, you have to check it out.

00:00:41.040 | One of the most beautiful campuses in the country.

00:00:43.520 | It's one of the reasons I went there is I just thought visually it would be conducive

00:00:48.580 | to deeper thinking.

00:00:49.920 | But they've got great locations.

00:00:51.120 | I was using this summer the Orozco murals in the basement of Baker Library quite a bit.

00:00:57.900 | This is a long basement room in which there are these famous murals painted by Orozco in

00:01:05.840 | the 1930s.

00:01:06.840 | This may have been a WPA funded project about the history of the Americas from the perspective

00:01:17.120 | of a non-white European.

00:01:18.560 | But they're famous murals.

00:01:21.080 | We actually found in my grandfather, John Newport's diaries after he died, he talked

00:01:26.360 | about coming to visit Dartmouth in the 1930s as part of a debate trip.

00:01:32.800 | I guess they were doing debate up there.

00:01:34.720 | He writes about in his diary, coming there to see these brand new Orozco murals.

00:01:37.920 | That's a great place to work.

00:01:39.480 | The Tower Room in Baker Library is another great place to work.

00:01:42.480 | This is an old school wood paneled library, double story library with good dark wood details.

00:01:49.520 | You can sit in a plush armchair looking out a window over the green.

00:01:54.000 | I also made use of the cross country trails down beyond Ockham Pond, surrounding Pine

00:01:59.320 | Park that was right down the street from where we lived.

00:02:01.640 | Good thinking walks through the woods there.

00:02:04.400 | So a lot of great locations.

00:02:06.000 | A lot of great locations.

00:02:07.720 | So that got me thinking about locations and its connection to having creative or really

00:02:18.200 | high value thoughts.

00:02:21.520 | So that was on my mind.

00:02:23.280 | Then one of you sent me an article on this same topic.

00:02:28.440 | So now I was thinking about, okay, all of these cool places I worked at Dartmouth.

00:02:31.880 | Then one of you sent me a really cool article on this topic, which I'm going to load up

00:02:34.720 | on the screen now.

00:02:36.520 | So you can watch this.

00:02:37.640 | If you're watching, and I'll read what's on the screen.

00:02:39.560 | If you're watching, you can go to the deeplife.com or youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

00:02:45.820 | This is episode 262.

00:02:48.200 | We don't put the number on the title anymore, but the episode titles are in the descriptions.

00:02:54.540 | It's also just the episode that came out on August 21st, if you're looking for it.

00:02:59.320 | Okay.

00:03:00.320 | So here's this article I have on the screen.

00:03:01.320 | This is from Lance Fortnow, the complexity theorist, computer scientist, Lance Fortnow's

00:03:06.280 | blog, Computational Complexity.

00:03:08.760 | I have it on the screen.

00:03:10.760 | This is a guest post.

00:03:12.000 | So Lance didn't write it, but by a guest post by Evangelos Georgiotis.

00:03:17.920 | All right.

00:03:19.600 | So here's what we want to see here.

00:03:20.840 | This article is talking about where good academic papers come from.

00:03:26.880 | So in order, I'm reading now, in order to generate a paper, one needs to come up with

00:03:30.240 | a result, something novel, fresh, or interesting to say.

00:03:33.480 | The question that has baffled this author is what represents a conducive or perhaps

00:03:37.520 | even optimal setting for generating papers.

00:03:40.280 | These papers come in different flavors, dot, dot, dot.

00:03:44.160 | The settings may vary, but ultimately what would be interesting to investigate is whether

00:03:48.260 | there is a common denominator in terms of setting or environment, a necessary but not

00:03:52.360 | sufficient condition so to speak.

00:03:55.120 | All right.

00:03:56.120 | So this is the setup for this article is the author here is saying, where do people come

00:04:00.880 | up with really good academic paper ideas?

00:04:04.120 | What is the right environment or process for doing this?

00:04:07.960 | All right, so let's return to the article and see what the author concludes.

00:04:15.120 | Here are some accounts of others which may be helpful as reference point.

00:04:19.240 | Knuth's papers entitled semantics of context-free grammar along with the analysis of algorithm

00:04:24.040 | represent two instances that suggest research institutes might not provide an optimal idea

00:04:30.560 | environment for idea generation.

00:04:32.560 | As Knuth points out in selected papers on computer languages, perhaps new ideas emerge

00:04:37.980 | most often from hectic disorganized activity when a great many sources of stimulation are

00:04:42.980 | present at once, when numerous deadlines need to be met, and when other miscellaneous activities

00:04:48.380 | like child rearing are also mixed into the agenda.

00:04:53.080 | Knuth goes on to say that it was challenging to do creative work in office and that finding

00:04:57.120 | a few hideaways provided some form of solution, aka sitting under that oak tree near Lake

00:05:02.920 | Lagunita.

00:05:04.680 | That said, the inspirational settings for getting to the zone for the aforementioned

00:05:07.640 | two papers were provided by California beaches.

00:05:11.600 | All right, so there Donald Knuth, famed Stanford professor emeritus now and author of the art

00:05:16.920 | of computer programming talks about having a pristine research location.

00:05:21.520 | Okay, we're at this research institute.

00:05:24.320 | We're all just here in our offices working on research.

00:05:27.520 | Actually isn't that conducive in his opinion to really good ideas.

00:05:30.360 | He says more hecticness is important, that you have deadlines, you're rushing between

00:05:35.320 | different activities you're going to, even child rearing.

00:05:38.240 | We've talked about this in recent episodes, that we shouldn't think about child rearing

00:05:42.320 | only as a source of negative or drag on the ability to have a sustainable professional

00:05:47.760 | career.

00:05:48.760 | So you see all these different distractions in his experience somehow unlock or occasionally

00:05:53.200 | unlock more insight than just being in the pure pristine.

00:05:56.720 | I'm in my office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

00:05:59.960 | I'm just sitting here trying to come up with big ideas.

00:06:02.640 | He also mentioned sometimes just novel environments, a particular tree he liked to sit under, and

00:06:09.080 | in particular, California beaches.

00:06:11.280 | The two papers cited earlier from Knuth were both had core ideas that came up at beaches.

00:06:16.440 | All right, let's return to the article here.

00:06:20.400 | All right, so then he says, hold that observation.

00:06:24.760 | Is this not something we've come across somewhere else?

00:06:27.640 | Fields medalist Stephen Small in Chaos, Finding a Horseshoe on the Beaches of Rio, suggests

00:06:33.240 | that some of his best work happened at his beach office.

00:06:39.040 | Whether beaches do provide a good setting remains to be shown, perhaps for very innovative

00:06:42.720 | ideas.

00:06:43.720 | Oceanic freedom is necessary.

00:06:48.320 | There's a couple other quotes from here.

00:06:50.460 | Some other meaningful probabilistic advice comes from the Fat Tales Department.

00:06:53.520 | In The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, he says, go to parties.

00:06:58.880 | If you're a scientist, you will chance upon a remark that might spark a new research.

00:07:03.440 | Meanwhile, Murray Gelman provides an interesting collective account in his Google Tech Talk

00:07:08.760 | entitled On Getting Creative Ideas.

00:07:11.400 | Gelman recollects a workshop he attended in 1969 in Aspen that focused on the experience

00:07:15.880 | of getting creative ideas, not just among mathematicians and theoretical physicists,

00:07:19.280 | but also poets and artists.

00:07:21.520 | This account seems to neglect the actual setting that might nurture creative thought process,

00:07:25.560 | but provides interesting references to people, such as Herman Von Helmots, who happen to

00:07:30.400 | have thought about this topic and partitioned the process in terms of saturation, incubation,

00:07:36.920 | and illumination.

00:07:40.200 | So we got here, you know, some more ideas.

00:07:42.800 | Nassim Taleb is saying, go to parties, be around other people.

00:07:47.400 | Murray Gelman, the physicist, talks about a workshop on creativity where Herman Von

00:07:52.120 | Helmots talked about this formula that he had.

00:07:56.520 | Let me say it again, saturation, incubation, and illumination as a way of actually building

00:08:03.560 | up insight.

00:08:06.040 | There's a book, Jacques Hadamard has a book called The Mathematician's Mind that both

00:08:14.520 | goes through and iterates on this Helmots three-stage process for coming up with big

00:08:18.880 | ideas.

00:08:19.880 | And finally, here's the last thing from this paper, I'll just read this here.

00:08:23.760 | What are good venues or workshops for generating paper?

00:08:25.840 | Or let's rephrase that a bit.

00:08:27.280 | What type of atmosphere at venues fosters creativity?

00:08:29.800 | What food for thought to provide participants and how to distribute that food for thought

00:08:32.800 | over a given day?

00:08:35.740 | One person, the author talked to proposed easy problems, informal atmosphere focusing

00:08:39.440 | exclusively on thinking about problems in a cycle of downtime where one meets in two

00:08:43.520 | intense sessions and have free time otherwise.

00:08:45.320 | All right, so just a bunch of thoughts there.

00:08:48.360 | That's a theoretical computer scientist thinking about where good ideas come from.

00:08:53.200 | This of course is a topic I've written about as well.

00:08:55.880 | I'm going to load up one of my own old articles here from my blog from calnewport.com.

00:09:02.720 | All right, here's an article from April 2016.

00:09:07.280 | This was actually probably right after Deep Work came out.

00:09:11.480 | The title of this article I have up on the screen is on using inspiring locations to

00:09:17.320 | inspire deep work.

00:09:20.080 | The article has a picture of the Capitol building.

00:09:22.040 | Then it starts by saying, "The return of spring marks the return of one of my favorite

00:09:25.960 | deep work strategies, the concentration circuit."

00:09:31.180 | So the idea here is you go through a series of very deep work inducing locations.

00:09:37.760 | You circuit from one to the other.

00:09:38.960 | So I took pictures.

00:09:40.560 | I took pictures of a concentration circuit that I had done recently.

00:09:44.160 | According to this article, I was in downtown DC to record a radio show appearance and here

00:09:51.400 | is my concentration circuit.

00:09:53.760 | All right, location number one is a bench that was tucked into a quiet corner not far

00:09:59.340 | from the Capitol building.

00:10:00.340 | I believe that bench is on the grounds of the National Botanical Gardens outside the

00:10:07.560 | Botanical Gardens.

00:10:09.320 | All right, and then here is me inside.

00:10:11.280 | I spent some time.

00:10:12.280 | There's a picture of a bench inside the jungle biome of the National Botanical Gardens inside

00:10:17.440 | a giant greenhouse.

00:10:18.880 | That's another place I worked.

00:10:21.040 | Then there's a picture here of the, what is this called?

00:10:26.260 | This is in the basement of the National Gallery, the tunnel underground that connects the East

00:10:30.700 | and West Wings, the modern and the non-modern wings.

00:10:34.280 | You go through this cool light display tunnel to a cafe in which no Wi-Fi and there's no

00:10:41.200 | cell service.

00:10:42.200 | You can see a waterfall falling.

00:10:44.120 | And then finally I had a pair of armchairs I found.

00:10:46.920 | This is on the second floor of the Native American History Museum, also off the mall.

00:10:53.120 | So those were, it was an article where I was talking about a concentration circuit of different

00:10:58.840 | novel locations in downtown DC, where on a recent day when I wrote that article, I had

00:11:04.320 | gone to work.

00:11:06.560 | All right, so what's going on here?

00:11:09.920 | I would say this use of location to help get big ideas, which we know is a well-known idea.

00:11:18.200 | We just heard from all of those famous mathematicians talk about it.

00:11:21.440 | We read one of my articles about it.

00:11:23.520 | That is a well-known strategy in a broader philosophy that I call creativity hacking.

00:11:31.160 | The idea between creativity hacking is actually being systematic or intentional about how

00:11:35.120 | you extract the most creative or impactful ideas from your brain.

00:11:41.400 | So location is a big role in this.

00:11:43.440 | Now how does location interact with the generation of deeper, more impactful ideas?

00:11:50.040 | Well here I think where people get confused is there's no one explanation.

00:11:53.480 | There was a lot of different examples there, the party, the beach, being at a workshop

00:11:58.720 | or at the third floor of a museum in DC.

00:12:03.520 | There's no one explanation, no one mechanism that explains why all of these different example

00:12:08.700 | locations of locations being used to generate creativity, there's no one mechanism that

00:12:13.440 | explains it.

00:12:14.440 | Because there's actually, the best I could summarize, at least three different mechanisms

00:12:17.800 | at work that explain the various ways that locations can interact with your thinking.

00:12:24.320 | Different locations will draw from different mechanisms, but not typically all three.

00:12:28.480 | So I want to go through these three mechanisms real quick and then we'll step back and say,

00:12:33.240 | okay, so what is my advice for leveraging these mechanisms to do creativity hacking

00:12:36.920 | in your own life?

00:12:39.120 | So the first mechanism at play is the whiteboard effect.

00:12:43.400 | And this is centered on being around other interesting people.

00:12:48.280 | So environments that put you around other interesting people have these two sub-components

00:12:54.200 | that lead up to the whiteboard effect.

00:12:56.080 | Number one, they have information or ideas you don't.

00:12:58.800 | So it's like you're expanding the reservoir of potential ideas.

00:13:03.520 | So I call this the whiteboard effect because it's the proverbial scene of you're at the

00:13:07.400 | whiteboard with other people working on the same problem.

00:13:11.160 | They're going to know a technique you don't.

00:13:12.460 | You're going to have an idea that you didn't have.

00:13:14.440 | You're extending the amount of neuronal real estate that is dedicated to whatever thinking

00:13:20.000 | is happening that gives you more grist for that particular metaphorical mill.

00:13:25.300 | The other sub-component here is that when you're working with other people, so you're

00:13:28.760 | talking with them directly about an idea, or you're at the whiteboard taking turns trying

00:13:33.640 | to solve a proof, you focus harder.

00:13:37.640 | So again, you're going to get more out of your brain.

00:13:39.800 | Now I go into that particular sub-component in more detail in my book, Deep Work.

00:13:45.420 | But the idea is if I'm staring at a whiteboard and you're staring at the same whiteboard,

00:13:50.660 | we're trying to solve a problem.

00:13:52.560 | I'm more likely to sustain my concentration because if I let my mind wander, there's going

00:13:58.000 | to be a social capital cost.

00:13:59.120 | I'm going to have to stop you and say, hold on, hold on, go back, go back.

00:14:01.580 | I wasn't paying attention to what you said.

00:14:03.580 | Also I want to make progress.

00:14:04.780 | It's impressive.

00:14:05.780 | I want to impress you or be a team player.

00:14:07.860 | So you also get more focus out of your own brain when you're working with other people.

00:14:11.980 | All right, so that's the first factor whiteboard effect.

00:14:16.020 | More ideas, more focus if you're working with other people.

00:14:20.020 | We see this when Lance Fortnow, that art on his blog, they're talking about the right

00:14:25.380 | workshops or the scene to lab talking about parties.

00:14:28.540 | That's all about the whiteboard effect.

00:14:31.120 | Another great example from my own life.

00:14:32.700 | There is a seminar series held in rural Germany called the Dagstuhl seminars, Dagstuhl, D-A-G-S-T-H-U-L.

00:14:41.940 | And it's dedicated mainly towards theoretical computer science.

00:14:45.820 | And what they do is they will, someone will apply, I want to organize a workshop, a Dagstuhl

00:14:50.380 | workshop.

00:14:51.380 | And you invite, it's one problem, you'll come up with one problem and you invite researchers

00:14:55.100 | around the world who know about that problem.

00:14:57.300 | And you all come to this research center, which is built on a castle, a castle in rural

00:15:02.660 | Germany.

00:15:03.660 | And I remember going to one of these earlier in my career and a bunch of us came from all

00:15:07.060 | over the world.

00:15:08.820 | And what you do is you have informal talks where people talk about problems they're working

00:15:13.280 | on or techniques that are really interesting.

00:15:16.100 | And then a lot of time beyond that to just discuss problems with the people who are there.

00:15:21.620 | There's unlimited coffee, the meals, they assign the seats and rotate so that you have

00:15:26.900 | to encounter different people and different ideas.

00:15:30.100 | There's also all the German beer you can drink in the evenings, this honor system to keep

00:15:34.980 | track so you can pay later for what you drunk and really cool grounds.

00:15:38.260 | There's nowhere to go.

00:15:39.260 | It's impossible to get here.

00:15:40.740 | There's nowhere to go to, no town, you're sort of stuck at this castle.

00:15:43.300 | So I went there earlier in my career, a bunch of my colleagues were there.

00:15:47.060 | I did the math at some point, six papers.

00:15:49.700 | And the years that followed, six papers came out of the conversations that were held at

00:15:54.620 | Dagstuhl.

00:15:55.620 | All right, so that's the first mechanism.

00:15:58.020 | The second mechanism that can come into play when creativity hacking using location is

00:16:04.500 | novel stimulation.

00:16:07.100 | So being in environments that have new or novel stimulation in terms of sights, smells

00:16:11.820 | and sounds can fire up new circuits of your brain.

00:16:15.780 | Your brain is open to this new experience.

00:16:18.220 | It's interested, it's taking in more input.

00:16:20.100 | And I don't know exactly how this neuroscience works, but it seems to be when you're in that

00:16:24.740 | state, you're also open to new abstract ideas.

00:16:30.260 | So if you're going to the same office at the same building where you go every day, your

00:16:33.220 | brain is not as open or interested in what's going on.

00:16:36.140 | It's more focused probably on internal issues or what's happening in your inbox.

00:16:40.440 | But when you're in the novel situation, your brain shifts mode and then you can hijack

00:16:44.380 | that shift to have originality in your thinking that might be otherwise hard to generate.

00:16:52.080 | So I think those examples from Lance Fortnow's blog about the beach, Knuth and others using

00:16:58.880 | the beach is an example of this.

00:17:01.260 | The beach is a novel environment.

00:17:02.760 | You have this big, vast vista and the sounds, and it's very different than life in a building.

00:17:08.600 | It's very different to life in a town.

00:17:10.600 | So beaches are famously leveraging this mechanism.

00:17:13.480 | I've had multiple, multiple papers come out of beach walks back when we used to do more

00:17:19.080 | beach vacations.

00:17:21.160 | Real minimalism, that book, that whole philosophy came out of a beach walk as well.

00:17:25.400 | I think my examples of the museums in DC, my concentration circuit that I showed you

00:17:30.760 | recently, that's another example of using novel stimulation.

00:17:34.840 | I'm in a jungle, in a giant greenhouse, in the National Botanical Gardens.

00:17:40.760 | I'm going to have some original thoughts there that I'm not going to have on the third floor

00:17:45.120 | of St. Mary's Hall at Georgetown University.

00:17:46.880 | All right, the third mechanism that can come into play when creativity hacking with location,

00:17:53.520 | avoidance of the familiar.

00:17:55.600 | All right, so that novel stimulation can open up your mind.

00:18:00.520 | Very familiar stimuli can close it.

00:18:04.880 | So if your brain sees something in a familiar location that brings with it a lot of cognitive

00:18:12.760 | weight, you can hijack your brain to start thinking about what's related to that object.

00:18:18.240 | And now you are worse off when it comes to having original thinking.

00:18:22.440 | So the classic example here, I think I talked about this in my New Yorker piece on working

00:18:27.880 | from near home, is if you're at your home office and you see the full laundry basket,

00:18:33.440 | because you're at home, there's a part of your brain that starts thinking, "We got to

00:18:37.800 | do laundry.

00:18:38.800 | When should I do it?

00:18:39.800 | Do I have enough clothes for tomorrow?"

00:18:40.920 | You've just hijacked part of your brain.

00:18:42.640 | It's going to get in the way of original thinking.

00:18:45.560 | Same thing happens at a traditional office.

00:18:47.800 | Let's say you say hi to a colleague in the hallway as you walk back from the coffee machine.

00:18:52.360 | Well, that colleague might remind your brain, "Oh my God, I got to get back to her because

00:18:56.260 | we're trying to organize this thing and I owe her this information.

00:18:58.880 | Well, what should I say in my email?

00:19:00.520 | Oh, let me start writing the email in my head."

00:19:02.640 | There's nothing our brains like to do more for whatever reason than to write emails in

00:19:06.000 | our head.

00:19:07.000 | You've just hijacked a big portion of your brain.

00:19:08.980 | When you're at your desk where you also work on logistics, where you also do email, where

00:19:12.560 | you also do Zoom, that same desk, your brain is thinking about those or have those things

00:19:18.840 | in its background that's in that type of mindset.

00:19:21.080 | It's hijacking neuronal hardware there.

00:19:23.560 | You're getting less original thinking.

00:19:27.520 | This is why, for example, people, at least in the day before you could turn on Wi-Fi

00:19:31.060 | on air travel, used to get a lot of cool thoughts done on planes because there was nothing familiar.

00:19:38.800 | So even though it was not a novel stimulated environment like the beach, like, "Oh my

00:19:42.680 | God, look at this great vista," you still were avoiding the familiar and people would

00:19:47.840 | find out they could focus more.

00:19:49.000 | There wasn't anything pulling at my attention.

00:19:51.960 | So we have three different mechanisms that can explain location's role in creativity

00:19:55.800 | hacking, the whiteboard effect, novel stimulation, and avoidance of the familiar.

00:20:00.320 | And as we saw, different environments leverage different combinations of these mechanisms.

00:20:04.500 | No one mechanism explains all of the different environments that seem to be useful for deep

00:20:09.420 | thinking.

00:20:10.420 | All right, so now let's put this into use.

00:20:14.060 | Let's say you were in a position where having original ideas would be professionally valuable.

00:20:18.780 | Maybe it's core to your main job, coming up with a new strategy or algorithm if you're

00:20:22.980 | a computer programmer.

00:20:24.500 | Maybe you're working on the side on a book and having a brilliant idea for a book could

00:20:28.300 | make a really big difference.

00:20:29.960 | Whatever the situation is, how do we leverage these mechanisms?

00:20:33.540 | If you really want to up the quality of the original thoughts you have?

00:20:38.300 | Well, I'm going to give you three suggestions, each taking place at a different timescale.

00:20:43.820 | So if you want to leverage this creativity hacking every day, you should have a separate

00:20:50.420 | space set aside in which you do deeper, more creative thinking.

00:20:54.420 | All right, so this is an everyday habit.

00:20:57.020 | I just have a place I can always go if it comes time to think.

00:21:01.220 | And this place should be distinctive.

00:21:02.740 | Now, it could be an actual physical location at your office or home office.

00:21:06.340 | If you work in an office, this could be I go to a conference room.

00:21:10.380 | I reserve a small conference room to go to with just my notebook when I want to do creative

00:21:15.540 | thinking.

00:21:16.540 | If it's at your house, you could have something distinct from your normal home office where

00:21:21.180 | you go when you want to do the deeper thinking, the sort of attic space that you've transformed,

00:21:26.900 | the garden shed that you've made into a thinking shed.

00:21:30.300 | That last example, by the way, is drawn from the late great nonfiction writer David McCullough,

00:21:37.460 | whose house in West Tisbury, Martha's Vineyard, had a very nice home office with fax machines

00:21:41.440 | and phones and all of his files, and then had a garden shed with a typewriter and a

00:21:47.140 | desk.

00:21:48.140 | So when it came time to write, he went to the garden shed.

00:21:49.820 | When it came time to organize a publicity tour, answer mail, or send out requests for

00:21:57.660 | accessing archives, he had a different home office.

00:21:59.960 | The more distinctive you can make your dedicated deep workspace, the more effective it is going

00:22:04.520 | to be.

00:22:05.660 | It does not have to be a space you own.

00:22:08.540 | It could also be a path.

00:22:12.280 | This is like Darwin with his path at downhouse.

00:22:14.940 | It could be, okay, I leave my office and walk this loop on the grounds at the office park.

00:22:19.160 | It could be I leave my house and I do this one mile loop with a coffee shop halfway through.

00:22:24.260 | So it could be someplace that you don't own.

00:22:26.260 | It could be a particular path you follow.

00:22:28.820 | And it's something you can do every day just to make sure that your deepest thinking is

00:22:31.900 | done in a different location than your other type of thinking.

00:22:36.180 | All right, moving up in time scales, every week, schedule time on your calendar to go

00:22:41.440 | somewhere novel and interesting to work.

00:22:45.420 | It could be going to a coffee shop.

00:22:47.860 | It could be driving to a trailhead, hiking a half mile into the woods and working by

00:22:52.860 | particularly scenic spot near a stream.

00:22:55.260 | That's something I used to do quite frequently.

00:22:58.620 | It could be going to a museum in town or a particular public library or university library

00:23:03.300 | if you're near a college town.

00:23:04.540 | But get a good session in once a week where you put in some effort to get there.

00:23:09.860 | You're not there very often, but when you do get there, you are there to really think

00:23:13.980 | originally and creatively.

00:23:15.980 | Final time scale, every season, every season try to gather other people you work with to

00:23:22.460 | unlock bigger ideas.

00:23:24.540 | So gather people in an interesting space.

00:23:27.420 | Let's do a mini Dagstuhl.

00:23:28.820 | Let's do a mini workshop.

00:23:30.580 | Let's think through big ideas.

00:23:32.140 | If you're a writer, it's different writers to bounce writing ideas off of them.

00:23:35.620 | If you're in business, you bring your team to think through strategies together.

00:23:40.700 | Your computer scientist working on an algorithm, your computer developer, get together some

00:23:44.380 | of the programmers and talk shop.

00:23:46.280 | Go somewhere that's not your office.

00:23:47.660 | Go somewhere novel.

00:23:48.940 | If it's possible, go for a hike.

00:23:50.420 | I like that one a lot.

00:23:51.740 | Two, three people hiking, talking generates ideas at a rate that is five times what you're

00:23:56.820 | going to get on a Zoom meeting if we're going to make a comparison.

00:24:00.660 | Or you go to the beach.

00:24:01.900 | If you live near the beach, someplace interesting, a restaurant, a pub, I don't know what it

00:24:05.460 | is, but at least once a season, get together the best minds that you know, working on what

00:24:09.480 | you know and get that whiteboard effect going.

00:24:13.980 | You do those three things, have a distinctive deep workspace every day, have a distinctive

00:24:17.420 | location you go every week and have a gathering of other great minds to brainstorm once a

00:24:23.620 | season.

00:24:24.620 | Those three things, which are not a major ask in terms of your schedule, will significantly

00:24:32.100 | increase the depth and originality of the creative thoughts you have.

00:24:36.220 | This is the core of creativity hacking.

00:24:39.020 | It's not just that there's creative people and non-creative people.

00:24:41.880 | How you go about this weird alchemy, which is extracting original novel thoughts from

00:24:47.700 | a mess of neurons that weren't evolved for abstract symbolic thinking, how you go about

00:24:52.620 | that matters.

00:24:53.620 | So it's good news, bad news.

00:24:54.700 | The bad news is you can't just hope to white knuckle yourself the big ideas in between

00:24:58.580 | email checks and Zoom meetings at your home office desk.

00:25:01.720 | The good news is most people are not creativity hacking.

00:25:05.460 | So if you do, you are going to get an advantage.

00:25:08.840 | You are going to have a much more steady stream of great ideas.

00:25:14.860 | So the second segment of the show, we're going to do questions from you.

00:25:17.020 | And I'm going to try to make these questions all roughly orbiting this topic of coming

00:25:20.860 | up with ideas, stimulation, creativity, brainstorming.

00:25:25.020 | So we'll get into the weeds here.

00:25:27.600 | Before we get to that, though, I do want to mention one of the sponsors that makes this

00:25:31.600 | show possible.

00:25:32.600 | In particular, this show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

00:25:40.620 | So we talked about creativity hacking.

00:25:42.460 | Well, let's generalize this briefly here for the purposes of this ad to cognitive hacking.

00:25:50.900 | If you are suffering mentally, if you find yourself having ruminative, repeated negative

00:25:56.740 | thoughts, if you find anxiety, like so many people are experiencing these days, is so

00:26:01.560 | strong that it's getting in the way of how you approach your life.

00:26:04.460 | If there's strong emotions that are really getting in the way, they feel as if this is

00:26:09.860 | not helpful to me and what I'm doing with my life.

00:26:12.580 | There's something you can do about that, and that is therapy.

00:26:17.580 | With therapy, you have trained experts who know how to deal with the life of the mind.

00:26:22.660 | And if the life of the mind has gone in a non-helpful direction, they can help get it

00:26:26.400 | back.

00:26:27.400 | They can help you get your mind back under control, make it someone, a companion and

00:26:33.580 | not an enemy.

00:26:36.700 | So in a world of knowledge work where your mind matters, it's at the core of everything

00:26:41.620 | you do, you should really care about your mental health.

00:26:44.260 | So you're thinking about starting therapy, I suggest giving BetterHelp a try.

00:26:51.100 | Here's why.

00:26:52.100 | It's entirely online.

00:26:53.260 | It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule.

00:26:56.900 | You just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and

00:27:00.540 | you can switch therapist at any time for no additional charge.

00:27:04.520 | So what BetterHelp is doing here is getting rid of that complicated, ambiguous barrier

00:27:09.180 | of entry to therapy that used to be there.

00:27:11.620 | This sort of asking friends for referrals and just calling places that happen to be

00:27:15.700 | nearby and you find out that of course they're full and their waiting list is seven years

00:27:20.740 | long and why would you even bother calling them in the first place?

00:27:23.700 | There's also the expense factor.

00:27:25.200 | You're not sure about therapy or what style you want to try, and it's very expensive locally.

00:27:30.300 | BetterHelp solves all that.

00:27:31.340 | You do it online so you can be matched with someone anywhere in the country.

00:27:36.480 | It's more affordable.

00:27:37.480 | You can switch.

00:27:38.480 | You can try out.

00:27:39.480 | You can see what works.

00:27:40.480 | So it's a fantastic on-ramp to the critical goal of taking care of your mental health.

00:27:47.040 | So let therapy be your map with BetterHelp.

00:27:50.480 | Visit BetterHelp.com/deepquestions.

00:28:03.660 | Don't forget the slash deep questions as it will get you 10% off your first month.

00:28:08.800 | That's BetterHelp.com/deepquestions.

00:28:09.800 | I also want to talk about our good friends at Hinson Shaving.

00:28:17.440 | The razor that I use.

00:28:21.320 | So here's the deal.

00:28:22.320 | The Hinson razor is this beautifully precision milled aluminum tool.

00:28:29.780 | And Hinson's knows how to do precision milling because their main business is actually doing

00:28:34.040 | aerospace parts manufacturing.

00:28:36.480 | We're talking about things that go into the International Space Station, components that

00:28:39.700 | go onto the Mars Rover.

00:28:41.420 | So they have these aerospace grade CNC milling machines that can do incredibly precise metal

00:28:45.880 | milling.

00:28:46.880 | And they use these to build this beautiful razor.

00:28:49.280 | And why does precision matter?

00:28:50.600 | Well, it means you can take a 10 cent safety razor blade, put it into this beautiful aluminum

00:28:57.600 | precision milled razor, screw it in, and only a, and I'm looking at the number here, .001

00:29:06.680 | inch of the blade goes past, well, 0013, let's be precise, of the blade goes past the edge

00:29:15.240 | of the razor.

00:29:16.240 | And when you have just the very edge of the blade sticking past the razor, what you avoid

00:29:21.560 | is the diving board effect, the up and down bending of the blade if too much sticks out.

00:29:25.880 | That's what caused nicks.

00:29:27.320 | That's what leads to clogs with just the barest edge sticking out.

00:29:30.320 | It's very stiff.

00:29:31.320 | And what that gives you with this 10 cent razor and this beautiful blade and this beautiful

00:29:36.440 | razor is a really good shave.

00:29:40.000 | It's close, no nicks, no clogs.

00:29:42.920 | Now this is also very cost effective.

00:29:44.520 | So in addition to just getting this beautiful tool that just works really well, you pay

00:29:48.120 | a little more upfront, but because you can just use a standard 10 cent blade in this

00:29:52.040 | beautiful razor, it doesn't take long before the cost of operating a Henson's is much cheaper

00:29:58.120 | than a subscription service.

00:29:59.600 | It doesn't take long before the cost of operating a Henson is much cheaper than buying the plastic

00:30:05.560 | disposable blades from the drugstore.

00:30:10.080 | So anyways, I love beautiful tools to do a job very well and do it cost effectively.

00:30:14.360 | This is what you get with Henson's razor.

00:30:16.540 | So it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime.

00:30:20.680 | Visit hensonshaving.com/cal to pick the razor for you.

00:30:26.040 | And if you use the code CAL, you will get two years worth of blades free with your razor.

00:30:31.360 | Just make sure you add the two years of blades to your cart.

00:30:34.880 | And then when you type in CAL as a promo code, the price of those blades will drop to zero.

00:30:39.960 | It's 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com/cal and use that promo code CAL.

00:30:50.480 | All right, well, let's move on to questions.

00:30:54.320 | No Jesse today to read the question, so I'll have to do that all by myself.

00:30:58.880 | All of these roughly connect to our theme of creativity hacking.

00:31:02.720 | All right, our first question comes from Maude.

00:31:07.480 | Maude asks, I'm curious about whether Cal reads magazines, RSS feeds and or email newsletters.

00:31:15.720 | And if so, how reading those media fits into his schedule.

00:31:19.480 | I am pretty discriminating in terms of which magazines and newspapers and feeds I follow,

00:31:24.080 | but trying to keep up takes so much time that I have little left for reading books in the

00:31:28.120 | evening.

00:31:29.120 | I am really curious as to how Cal approaches this.

00:31:33.880 | Well, Maude, there are, I'll go through my habits here and then I'll give you my reasoning.

00:31:40.080 | There are some email newsletters I subscribe to.

00:31:43.040 | I like email newsletters.

00:31:44.920 | I read them if I can.

00:31:47.040 | So I don't put pressure on myself.

00:31:48.280 | If I subscribe to it, it's because I like them and I'm willing to pay money for email

00:31:51.480 | newsletters.

00:31:53.240 | I'll pay money for some sub stack newsletters if I really like it.

00:31:56.120 | Others are free.

00:31:57.120 | I don't put pressure on myself.

00:31:58.680 | They're there.

00:32:00.260 | And if I have time, you know, let's say I'm taking a break, I'm eating lunch during the

00:32:04.520 | day, I'll read them.

00:32:05.800 | And if I don't, and I miss the newsletter for a week or so and I don't read it, that's

00:32:10.000 | fine too.

00:32:11.000 | I don't put pressure on myself for completism that I have to read everything that comes

00:32:14.560 | out.

00:32:15.560 | Now people ask, wait a second, the world without email, you don't like email.

00:32:19.160 | Isn't this a problem?

00:32:20.480 | Not a problem.

00:32:21.520 | If you read my book, A World Without Email, what I don't like is the hyperactive hive

00:32:27.000 | mind mode of collaboration that email enabled.

00:32:30.120 | It's a mode of collaboration where you work things out with back and forth messaging.

00:32:33.960 | Back and forth messaging is my productivity kryptonite.

00:32:37.840 | Back and forth messaging is what requires you to constantly check inboxes and constantly

00:32:41.620 | send messages back and forth.

00:32:43.880 | One direction broadcast are not a source of stress.

00:32:46.740 | One direction broadcast are not a source of drag on productivity.

00:32:50.920 | They're actually a really good use of email.

00:32:52.800 | Oh, there's some newsletters that can sit here in my inbox, tell if and when I want

00:32:57.040 | to read them.

00:32:58.040 | I don't feel compelled to keep checking my inbox to look for them and seeing a newsletter

00:33:02.200 | arrive does not make me stress.

00:33:03.840 | So email newsletters I subscribe to probably half dozen, read them some weeks, some weeks

00:33:09.040 | I don't.

00:33:10.040 | Of course, I should turn this into an ad and say, if you're just a podcast listener, you

00:33:13.680 | should subscribe to my email newsletter at calnewport.com roughly twice a month.

00:33:19.440 | I send out articles on the types of topics that we talk about here on the show.

00:33:23.400 | Okay.

00:33:24.400 | What else do I do?

00:33:25.400 | I work with the New Yorker as they employ me.

00:33:29.120 | This feels like it is a relevant thing to do.

00:33:31.640 | My goal is typically make sure you read at least one article from each magazine and be

00:33:36.480 | in my goal.

00:33:37.480 | My role here is read the one you might not expect.

00:33:40.720 | The one people might not expect you to read.

00:33:42.120 | You want to try to open your mind to good writing on interesting topics.

00:33:44.720 | I also get the daily email from the New Yorker because every day they're publishing articles

00:33:50.360 | online, right?

00:33:52.280 | This is true of most publications.

00:33:53.600 | Now, there's only a handful of articles in the actual printed magazines.

00:33:56.720 | So you got to follow what's going online.

00:33:58.480 | They have a really good, the New Yorker daily newsletter, and I'll look through that every

00:34:02.320 | day and there it'll be if there's something that particularly catches my attention, then

00:34:08.080 | I'll read it.

00:34:10.600 | So if something catches my attention, I'll read it online.

00:34:13.720 | And then I try to read at least one article from the print magazine when I can.

00:34:18.340 | The other types of online articles I read are those that you send me.

00:34:22.360 | So my listeners and my readers send me articles and videos they think I will like to interesting@calnewport.com.

00:34:28.440 | I don't have time to read or watch all of them, but I really do appreciate it.

00:34:33.960 | And it's where I get a lot of grist for the show and other ideas.

00:34:36.880 | Things will catch my attention that you send me.

00:34:39.160 | And so I'll, when I check that inbox once or twice a week, I'll often find a bunch of

00:34:43.240 | articles and videos that I'll read as part of that inbox checking.

00:34:46.440 | All right, so that's it.

00:34:49.540 | So we add that up.

00:34:50.540 | We have a lot less online information consumption than I think most people actually do.

00:34:55.940 | And here's the thing.

00:34:56.940 | I feel completely fine with this.

00:34:58.680 | I'm up to date.

00:35:00.460 | I know what's happening in the world enough.

00:35:03.420 | Maybe I don't know a lot of memes and trends going on.

00:35:06.980 | That's fine.

00:35:07.980 | Maybe I'm not completely up to speed on the latest controversies.

00:35:10.700 | That's fine.

00:35:11.700 | I don't want to be.

00:35:12.700 | I think I come across as sufficiently erudite, as sufficiently up to speed, as sufficiently

00:35:16.860 | knowledgeable.

00:35:17.860 | And so what I think happens is, is that we have in our modern attention economy world,

00:35:22.100 | we have adjusted, we have adjusted our understanding of the world to the realities of massive amounts

00:35:29.580 | of money being invested in the getting us to look at stuff online.

00:35:32.260 | And we've adjusted our reality of the world to tell ourselves, it's very important that

00:35:36.740 | I keep up with all of these things.

00:35:39.520 | So our perspective on information flow adjusted to the modified information flow, the greatly

00:35:47.160 | magnified and accelerated information flow of the 21st century, it says this must be

00:35:52.100 | important.

00:35:53.100 | I need to keep up with all of this.

00:35:54.380 | And what I'm saying, you don't.

00:35:56.620 | You don't.

00:35:58.040 | You don't have to be reading hours, articles a day, read books.

00:36:01.140 | You have some email newsletters.

00:36:02.460 | I don't know.

00:36:03.460 | Have a magazine you like to read when you can.

00:36:05.760 | Don't be stressed when you can and mainly read books and do other stuff and watch cool

00:36:08.780 | movies and you'll be fine.

00:36:10.300 | That would be fine, but your anxiety level will probably go down.

00:36:14.540 | To be so plugged into all this online chatter, it just really makes you feel like the world

00:36:19.260 | is about to fall apart and civil wars around the corner and the earth will be destroyed

00:36:23.260 | by Thursday.

00:36:24.600 | You stop consuming all that online information and suddenly you feel a lot more peaceful.

00:36:29.960 | So no, I don't read a ton online and the stuff I do read, I don't mind when I miss.

00:36:35.300 | All right.

00:36:37.300 | Next question is from Ryan.

00:36:39.900 | Ryan says, I have an Apple watch.

00:36:41.380 | I've had an Apple watch since the series zero, but in hindsight, I'd let it serve as a constant

00:36:47.460 | and consistent distraction.

00:36:49.260 | That is until very recently.

00:36:52.300 | In the past few months, I have disabled all notifications peeing through the watch other

00:36:55.780 | than phone calls and set up my text messages to only notify me if someone responds to a

00:36:59.960 | prompt and essentially says, yes, this is urgent.

00:37:02.540 | Well, I think these were the correct steps to take to regain my time and concentration.

00:37:07.500 | I have often toyed with the idea of switching to a traditional dumb watch, but every time

00:37:11.340 | I take the Apple watch off for a bit, I end up getting what I would describe as anxiety

00:37:15.480 | around my metrics because I am very fitness oriented.

00:37:20.820 | Am I creating excuses to keep myself from breaking this technological tie?

00:37:26.060 | Well, I included this question in part because of a warning.

00:37:32.140 | The warning being if you're doing creativity hacking and let's say you're trying to use

00:37:35.940 | a novel stimulation and avoidance of the familiar, you're using those two mechanisms to try to

00:37:42.980 | amplify the originality and creativity of your thinking.

00:37:46.740 | It is not hard at all to sabotage those efforts.

00:37:51.740 | In particular, the avoidance of the familiar mechanism is easily defied and your phone

00:37:59.060 | or an Apple watch are fantastic ways to defy that advantage because as soon as you're being

00:38:04.980 | exposed to text conversations and emails, as soon as you're connected back to a familiar

00:38:14.020 | flow of conversations, you have negated most of that advantage.

00:38:17.500 | Those will fire up huge portions of your brain to be like, "Oh, yes.

00:38:20.860 | Okay.

00:38:21.860 | I just got a text from Ben.

00:38:22.940 | Let me think through what does this mean?

00:38:25.780 | What do I need to do?

00:38:26.780 | Well, what am I going to write back?

00:38:27.780 | Well, we're running back now, but what am I going to say?"

00:38:29.380 | And you've just hijacked a big portion of your brain and the effect of the fact that

00:38:32.860 | you're on the beach or in the middle of a museum somewhere, that effect has now diminished

00:38:36.540 | dramatically.

00:38:37.540 | So you have to be very careful about sabotaging what makes novel locations so useful for having

00:38:46.020 | creative thinking.

00:38:47.020 | All right.

00:38:48.020 | So Ryan, in your case, do you need to get a dumb watch?

00:38:49.460 | I'm a big dumb watch guy, a mechanical watch.

00:38:54.100 | Psychologically, I like that.

00:38:55.740 | There's no battery in my Omega.

00:38:57.540 | You just hand crank it.

00:39:00.140 | Do you need to do that?

00:39:01.140 | No, if you're a fitness buff and you do tracking of metrics on your watch, you don't want to

00:39:07.100 | necessarily give up those advantage.

00:39:08.660 | Fitness is important.

00:39:09.660 | But the answer here is so simple.

00:39:10.660 | Just turn everything else off.

00:39:13.000 | Just make your Apple Watch into a dumb watch and use it just for fitness tracking.

00:39:17.580 | No notifications, no email.

00:39:18.580 | All right.

00:39:19.580 | That's it.

00:39:20.580 | So if you worry about it, do that.

00:39:21.700 | And you probably should worry about it, again, at least in the circumstances where you're

00:39:25.220 | trying to do deep or creative thinking, because it doesn't take much to sabotage those creativity

00:39:30.780 | hacking mechanisms.

00:39:32.260 | We have another question here.

00:39:34.700 | This one is from Fahad.

00:39:37.620 | He says, when it comes to developing brilliant ideas, who has the advantages?

00:39:42.000 | Those who live in the city or those who live in the country?

00:39:44.140 | It's a good question, Fahad, because I normally live in a city, but just got back from a summer

00:39:50.460 | in the country.

00:39:51.860 | Well, there is no clear answer, but we know why there's no clear answer, because in the

00:39:56.620 | beginning of the show, we went through the three different mechanisms that help explain

00:40:01.460 | why locations can help induce more creativity.

00:40:05.300 | So the city and the country draw from overlapping but not identical sets of advantageous mechanisms,

00:40:13.220 | right?

00:40:14.220 | So the city, for example, in particular, is very good at factor one in a way that maybe

00:40:18.820 | the country is not.

00:40:20.060 | So that factor one is the whiteboard effect.

00:40:24.940 | This is Stephen Johnson famously talking about liquid intelligence networks.

00:40:31.500 | When you're around a lot of other people, there's just a lot of ideas in the air.

00:40:34.900 | There's smart people to talk to.

00:40:36.620 | You constantly can bring in my writer friend, my philosopher friend, my movie director friend.

00:40:40.860 | We all got together at this party to celebrate our painter friend who just had a show, and

00:40:45.100 | you're awash in ideas.

00:40:46.920 | You can go see interesting talks.

00:40:48.880 | You can go to interesting exhibits.

00:40:50.680 | So you can be around smart people and really interesting ideas more easily, because there's

00:40:54.820 | just more people.

00:40:56.620 | Cities attract a lot more people, attracts a lot more thinkers.

00:40:59.860 | There's a lot more events going on.

00:41:01.700 | It's also a lot easier just to get together with other people.

00:41:05.240 | The friends of mine who have moved to the country often will on regular occasions come

00:41:08.760 | back to the city in part so that they can hang out with a bunch of people who don't

00:41:13.140 | happen to live where they are out there in the country.

00:41:16.960 | So the city is really good at that.

00:41:19.300 | The city also has probably a larger menu of choices for novel locations to go to, because

00:41:27.420 | you have museums and you have art galleries, and there's probably a university and all

00:41:31.700 | these different coffee shops.

00:41:34.200 | So there's a lot of different options, like the concentration circuit I showed at the

00:41:37.780 | opening of the show in Washington, DC.

00:41:39.660 | It's got those options.

00:41:40.660 | Those are advantages.

00:41:42.940 | I think the country has the advantages of more powerfully dramatic novel locations.

00:41:51.740 | So nature in particular is really novel.

00:41:55.740 | The thing with the city is everything is kind of crowded, so there is some difference.

00:41:59.140 | Even if you're in a museum that's different than your office, it's still sort of the same

00:42:04.060 | people, lots of people, people on their phone.

00:42:06.180 | It's different, but it's not as different as I'm on top of Mount Cardigan in New Hampshire.

00:42:13.700 | Quiet mountain, the wind is going by, and I'm looking out over the hills in the distance.

00:42:21.220 | It's more powerful novelty.

00:42:23.220 | Also a more powerful avoidance of the familiar, because when you're going to novel locations

00:42:27.820 | in the country, it's often locations that are in nature and really, really different

00:42:33.820 | from not being in nature.

00:42:34.820 | Or again, in the city, the differences are not as strong.

00:42:38.140 | There's really something powerful.

00:42:39.140 | So I think the city has that advantage.

00:42:41.860 | This is not directly one of the mechanisms, but I think it's indirectly one of the mechanisms.

00:42:47.540 | What I learned up in Hanover is things are just slower.

00:42:51.140 | It's not a lot of crowds.

00:42:52.140 | It's not a lot of cars on the road.

00:42:54.960 | You're not having that anxiety of trying to monitor and keep track of you among lots of

00:43:00.460 | other different people.

00:43:01.500 | I think that hits on that mechanism that we discussed before of the familiar.

00:43:07.700 | So there's just not as much stimuli, social crowd, people stimuli, tickling your brain

00:43:15.020 | in the country.

00:43:16.020 | So that's an advantage too.

00:43:17.020 | So both have advantages.

00:43:18.020 | And so we understand why it's possible to say the answer is both, because we understand

00:43:22.100 | there's different mechanisms at play when you deploy location to amplify creativity

00:43:26.300 | and the city and the country leaning the different.

00:43:29.900 | What's the right thing to do?

00:43:30.900 | Chess your personality or do what I did this year.

00:43:35.500 | Easy, right?

00:43:36.860 | Get a fellowship in the country and go do that in the summer and then come back to the

00:43:41.660 | city for the rest of your just everyone should just do that simple.

00:43:43.900 | All right, let's do another question here.

00:43:47.860 | This one comes from a new.

00:43:48.860 | He says, I've been trying to cultivate a deep life since I first read your books in 2019.

00:43:55.580 | Four years in, I'm known for solving complex problem no one else seems to want to tackle

00:43:59.860 | and I'm shining at work because I limit my exposure to the hive mind.

00:44:04.580 | Now I'm trying to get to the next level, which is my own research projects in writing.

00:44:09.780 | How should I approach organizing my writing goals and organize my thoughts on disparate

00:44:13.380 | topics and projects?

00:44:14.940 | All right, well, I like this in part because what we're looking to do here is build a creativity

00:44:22.500 | hacking game plan for a new.

00:44:26.020 | He already and I love this piece because this is like a case study, a mini case study.

00:44:29.920 | He already is enjoying success by being separated from the hive mind in his works.

00:44:35.380 | Now he's known for solving more complex problems and he wants to push that to the next level.

00:44:39.060 | But let's just pause for a moment on that mini case study.

00:44:43.580 | Right, because a lot of people are worried about disconnecting themselves more from the

00:44:48.780 | hyperactive hive mind, not being in the regular flow of back and forth emails and slack.

00:44:53.820 | They're worried that the inconvenience, they're going to cause people inconvenience and that's

00:44:57.520 | all that matters and their stock will fall in that position.

00:45:00.460 | They'll get yelled at or they'll lose their job.

00:45:03.780 | Doesn't always happen.

00:45:04.780 | Look what I knew here.

00:45:05.780 | I limited my exposure to the hive mind, but instead I concentrated hard on problems that

00:45:11.820 | mattered and now he's known within his company, oh, this is the guy that does hard problems.

00:45:16.180 | He actually generated more career capital because the hive mind doesn't generate career

00:45:20.460 | capital.

00:45:21.540 | It's not a rare and valuable skill to be accessible.

00:45:23.720 | It's not a rare and valuable skill to answer email threads quickly, but it does take away

00:45:27.020 | time and cognitive cycles from stuff that does matter.

00:45:30.900 | So it's an interesting calculus.

00:45:33.260 | Less hive mind became more valuable.

00:45:36.020 | All right, so Anu, how do we push this to the next level?

00:45:39.140 | Well, first of all, do the multi-scale creativity hacking strategy I described at the beginning

00:45:45.380 | of the show.

00:45:47.020 | Have a location that you can use every day when you're doing deep work to separate from

00:45:50.820 | the location where you do everything else.

00:45:53.120 | Make it distinctive.

00:45:55.500 | Every week put aside a non-trivial amount of time to actually go somewhere, to leave

00:45:59.700 | the normal building or house or location where you work, to go somewhere that's much more

00:46:04.380 | novel, the woods, a museum, a library, to have an extended creative session where you're

00:46:10.460 | really trying at this point to amplify the uniqueness and the novelty, the lack of the

00:46:15.980 | familiar.

00:46:17.260 | Every season, roughly speaking, have some sort of brain trust get together.

00:46:22.140 | And you get together with other smart people working on similar problems and you go to

00:46:25.380 | a novel location and you present information and think together and leverage the whiteboard

00:46:30.040 | effect to really try to find the best ideas, to really try to push your thinking to the

00:46:34.000 | next level.

00:46:35.080 | Do that multi-scale creativity hacking and you're already going to find yourself moving

00:46:39.700 | up to the next level.

00:46:41.780 | All right, so I think that's a really good place to start.

00:46:44.980 | A couple of things I would throw in there, make sure you're exposing yourself regularly

00:46:49.140 | to interesting and relevant material, read interesting wide variety of books, listen

00:46:54.820 | to interesting podcast interviews, go to talks.

00:46:59.020 | Also make sure you have a good system to capture ideas as you're working on it.

00:47:02.540 | It can be as simple as just starting a document for every potential idea you're going to work

00:47:06.740 | on or you can capture thoughts on that as they arise.

00:47:10.940 | You might have multiple documents going for multiple ideas.

00:47:14.220 | Finally, I'll say be patient about starting on something new.

00:47:20.740 | So when the quality of the idea matters, patience matters as well.

00:47:25.260 | Be hesitant to get started.

00:47:27.500 | You know, I'm working on this idea and that idea, I'm kind of growing these documents

00:47:31.340 | only after something really, really seems like this is, I can't avoid this anymore.

00:47:35.220 | It's a great idea.

00:47:36.900 | I have the right pieces here.

00:47:38.140 | I see how it's going to come together.

00:47:39.300 | I have signs that this is a great thing to work on.

00:47:42.080 | Only then should you pull the trigger to work on it.

00:47:44.540 | And then I want you to deploy slow productivity, steady but relentless.

00:47:50.620 | Again and again, you just keep coming back to it.

00:47:52.820 | Most days, not all.

00:47:54.020 | Go to your deep work location, push hard, but not an excessive amount of time.

00:47:59.700 | Slow and steady accumulation.

00:48:00.700 | Not, I'm going to just crush it for this weekend and get it done.

00:48:04.620 | Slow but relentless, pile up intense concentration on an idea once you can't help but start

00:48:09.940 | it.

00:48:10.940 | Don't worry about how long it takes.

00:48:12.300 | It doesn't really matter.

00:48:14.340 | What matters is steady progress until this thing finishes.

00:48:16.980 | So do all those different types of things anew and you're going to put yourself to the

00:48:20.860 | next level of original creative thinking.

00:48:24.180 | All right, let's do one more question here.

00:48:26.900 | This one comes from Reading Guy.

00:48:30.780 | Reading Guy says, "Do you remember a time when reading books from other genres that

00:48:33.980 | are totally unrelated to your field has helped you in thinking about or directly contributing

00:48:38.500 | to your work as a professor or a writer?"

00:48:42.900 | Reading Guy, I read all sorts of genres all the time.

00:48:46.820 | I don't have a set genre of book that I read from.

00:48:49.940 | I love the diversity.

00:48:51.140 | Go back and look at my reading reports.

00:48:53.020 | Every month we put on the podcast, here's the five books I read the month before.

00:48:58.140 | They are all over the place.

00:48:59.140 | I'm reading a book right now about deep sea exploration.

00:49:01.900 | I just finished a thriller novel about, believe it or not, werewolves.

00:49:07.700 | Before that, I read a Kenneth Galbraith book on economic policy from the mid-century.

00:49:16.660 | I'm all over the place and I'm always pulling interesting ideas from these books.

00:49:20.740 | It happens all the time.

00:49:21.780 | So I think about reading in different genres.

00:49:25.500 | I think about that like the cognitive equivalent of working in novel spaces.

00:49:31.580 | It's the internal equivalent of going to the museum or the beach to think.

00:49:35.620 | It's because you're exposing the interior of your mind, the place where ideas are stored

00:49:40.500 | and thought about, to all sorts of different ideas.

00:49:42.820 | So it can be just as important to have cognitive diversity as it is to have physical diversity.

00:49:48.780 | This happens all the time.

00:49:49.780 | So look for example, I'll give you one concrete example.

00:49:52.140 | You asked for a concrete example.

00:49:55.020 | Last year I published a New Yorker piece on what we can learn about knowledge work from

00:50:00.100 | looking back at how early humans worked.

00:50:03.660 | You'll see a bunch of books cited in there.

00:50:05.580 | These are books of anthropology, anthropology books.

00:50:09.980 | They're looking back and studying extant hunter-gatherer communities or looking at

00:50:14.700 | archaeological evidence.

00:50:15.940 | I had just read some books like that because why not?

00:50:19.660 | And that was the seed of this idea of we could learn from this lessons for modern work.

00:50:24.900 | I wrote a big New Yorker piece on it.

00:50:26.300 | In my new book on slow productivity, I have the same ideas.

00:50:28.820 | So there's a concrete example.

00:50:30.220 | So yes, read broadly with nonfiction.

00:50:35.900 | With that in mind, I want to talk briefly about another sponsor that makes this show

00:50:38.460 | possible and a sponsor that is relevant to that last question.

00:50:42.500 | And that is our friends at Blinkist.

00:50:44.780 | All right.

00:50:46.140 | So Blinkist is a subscription service that gives you access to short summaries of over

00:50:52.620 | 5,500 nonfiction titles spread through 27 different categories.

00:50:58.860 | These summaries, which they call Blinks, take about 15 minutes to read or listen to.

00:51:03.660 | So you can listen to the summary or you can read it right there in the app.

00:51:08.300 | Well, this is a great way, as we just talked about in the answer to my last question, a

00:51:13.420 | great way to expose yourself to interesting books and other genres because you don't have

00:51:17.340 | to know a lot about that genre to find what you want to read.

00:51:20.380 | Instead, you should do what I do, what Jesse does, which is you add to a list the books

00:51:26.220 | you're thinking about maybe reading, and before you purchase a book, you go to Blinkist and

00:51:31.580 | you read or listen to the Blink.

00:51:33.900 | And in that short summary of the book, you get a lot of information about, is this something

00:51:38.100 | I want to actually read the entire book of or do I just want to take these main points

00:51:41.900 | and move on?

00:51:42.900 | It is a triage service for the reading life.

00:51:48.200 | If you are a big reader and you read a lot of nonfiction, you have to have something

00:51:52.820 | like Blinkist.

00:51:54.260 | Jesse and I use it for exactly this purpose.

00:51:56.940 | You'd be surprised how easy it is to determine once you've listened to a summary.

00:52:00.060 | Nope, nope, yes.

00:52:01.060 | Like, okay, I know what this book is about.

00:52:03.500 | That's not what I thought.

00:52:04.500 | Let me put that aside.

00:52:05.500 | Oh, this sounds fascinating.

00:52:06.740 | Let me buy that book.

00:52:10.020 | There's also a cool feature going on right now called Blinkist Connect, which allows

00:52:16.140 | you with a subscription to Blinkist to give a subscription to a friend for free.

00:52:20.340 | It's a two for the price of one deal, which I think your friends will appreciate.

00:52:28.540 | So I'm just looking here at my, I was looking here at my list.

00:52:33.460 | Honestly, what I'm looking at right now, guys, is my Blinkist app.

00:52:38.860 | I have this off camera and I was just looking at this to emphasize the utility it has in

00:52:45.180 | my actual day to day life.

00:52:46.700 | Well, anyways, I don't want to, I was trying to find a way to put my screen up to the camera

00:52:51.780 | here.

00:52:52.780 | That's not going to work well, but let me just leave it at this.

00:52:55.300 | It is something I use.

00:52:56.620 | It is something you should consider using for triaging your nonfiction reading.

00:52:59.620 | All right.

00:53:00.620 | So right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience.

00:53:03.660 | Go to Blinkist.com/deep to start your seven day free trial and get 25% off a Blinkist

00:53:08.860 | premium membership.

00:53:09.940 | That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off any seven day free trial, Blinkist.com/deep.

00:53:19.740 | And remember, for a limited time, you can use Blinkist Connect to share your premium

00:53:24.700 | account.

00:53:26.320 | You will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one.

00:53:32.620 | I also want to talk about our friends at Ladder.

00:53:37.240 | If you're like me, you're my age, one of the things you know that's on your list is life

00:53:43.560 | insurance.

00:53:44.560 | Maybe you have some, but it's not nearly enough.

00:53:46.560 | Maybe you don't have any at all, and you're very worried about your loved ones being left

00:53:50.360 | in the lurch if something tragic happened.

00:53:54.200 | So knowing that importance of life insurance, why don't you have any?

00:53:57.400 | Well, for a lot of people, it's because it's ambiguous how to do it.

00:54:02.840 | Where do you go?

00:54:03.840 | Who do you talk to?

00:54:05.800 | What's a good price or a bad price?

00:54:07.680 | This is where Ladder enters the scene.

00:54:09.800 | It makes it so simple to check that item, get more life insurance off your to-do list.

00:54:15.560 | It's 100% digital.

00:54:17.480 | There's no doctors, needles, or paperwork involved when you're applying for $3 million

00:54:21.240 | in coverage or less.

00:54:22.720 | You just answer a few questions about your health in an application.

00:54:26.400 | You need just a few minutes and a phone or a laptop to apply, and then their smart algorithms

00:54:30.280 | will work in real time.

00:54:31.920 | You will find out if you're instantly approved.

00:54:34.520 | There's no hidden fees.

00:54:35.520 | You can cancel any time.

00:54:36.520 | You get a full refund if you change your mind in the first 30 days.

00:54:39.800 | These are policies that are insured by insurers with long proven histories of paying claims,

00:54:45.600 | insurers that are rated A and A+ by AM Best.

00:54:48.320 | All right, so you just go online, click approved.

00:54:53.200 | Here it is.

00:54:54.200 | Here's the price.

00:54:55.200 | Do I want it?

00:54:56.200 | Let's go.

00:54:57.200 | Highly rated insurers.

00:54:58.720 | We got 4.8 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot.

00:55:02.240 | They made Forbes Best Life Insurance list.

00:55:04.400 | All right, so it is just the easy way to get good, affordable, high quality term life insurance.

00:55:10.680 | Since life insurance costs more each year that you age, what's the right time to take

00:55:14.680 | this off your list?

00:55:15.880 | Right now.

00:55:17.140 | The more you wait, the more expensive it gets.

00:55:20.000 | So go to ladderlife.com/deep today to see if you're instantly approved.

00:55:25.880 | That's L-A-D-D-E-R life.com/deep.

00:55:31.700 | That's ladderlife.com/deep.

00:55:34.840 | All right, we got one more segment left in the show.

00:55:38.720 | I want to react to something that has been going around the internet recently.

00:55:45.040 | So I'm actually going to share something on the screen here.

00:55:48.040 | So again, this is the deeplife.com or youtube.com/calnewportmedia to watch this episode, episode 262.

00:55:55.520 | I'm loading up a YouTube video.

00:55:56.920 | I won't have the audio on, but I have closed captioning on.

00:55:59.800 | All right, so this is a video from Better Ideas, a popular channel.

00:56:03.720 | It's 2 million subscribers.

00:56:06.600 | And the title of this video is "How Overstimulation is Ruining Your Life."

00:56:11.280 | And we see there's a young man on screen here in the woods looking earnestly at the camera.

00:56:17.160 | And I have the closed captioning on.

00:56:18.320 | So I'm going to play this and read you a little bit of what he's saying.

00:56:21.560 | He's saying, "During certain periods of my life..."

00:56:23.360 | Oh, that.

00:56:24.360 | Remember when I said the volume was off?

00:56:28.560 | The volume was very much on.

00:56:29.560 | Let me turn that off here.

00:56:30.560 | Sorry about that.

00:56:31.560 | All right.

00:56:32.560 | "During various periods of my life, I have a very difficult time focusing on pretty much

00:56:41.160 | anything important or difficult.

00:56:43.860 | During these periods, it seems almost impossible to break out of the social media limbo where

00:56:50.160 | you're just constantly switching between tabs, refreshing pages, kind of waiting for something

00:56:55.440 | interesting to happen, like for someone to post a cool photo or Instagram or something.

00:57:01.300 | You're kind of waiting to be entertained.

00:57:03.560 | But if you actually have to apply yourself, it's extremely difficult, borderline painful

00:57:07.440 | to do so.

00:57:09.520 | And I'm pretty sure almost everyone can relate to this problem.

00:57:12.720 | I'm sure you've seen a lot of videos on YouTube giving you little tips and tricks as to how

00:57:17.280 | to better focus, including my own channel.

00:57:19.800 | But there are very few videos kind of diving in, talking about why it's so difficult to

00:57:24.320 | focus on hard things.

00:57:27.520 | You know, like what's the deal?

00:57:29.160 | Why can't we just sit down and do something important with very little strain?"

00:57:32.920 | All right.

00:57:33.920 | So that's the start of that video on better ideas.

00:57:37.800 | And he goes on to get into some of the neuroscience of why we're distracted so easily when we're

00:57:42.320 | trying to work on something hard.

00:57:44.240 | And it's a neuroscience explanation you may have heard before, but essentially our dopamine

00:57:48.920 | system, which generates that urge to do something that's going to generate a reward.

00:57:55.720 | Keep in mind, we often get that a little bit wrong.

00:57:57.920 | I think in common parlance, we often think about dopamine as being a source of rewards.

00:58:03.280 | The dopamine itself is what makes you feel a lot of pleasure.

00:58:06.400 | Now, dopamine is what gives you that urge to do the thing that you think is going to

00:58:11.200 | give you the reward.

00:58:12.360 | It's when you have an addiction, it's the dopamine that makes it so irresistible to

00:58:15.720 | grab that cigarette because it wants the other rewards you're going to get when you actually

00:58:20.880 | smoke the cigarette, right?

00:58:22.700 | So what is talked about in this video is this common neuroscience explanation that the dopamine

00:58:27.120 | system is firing up to get those quick hit rewards of seeing the video that's really

00:58:34.240 | interesting, seeing the post that's a little bit scandalous, seeing the like number jump

00:58:39.140 | on something you did earlier, which gives you this big burst of people like me, they

00:58:42.560 | really like me.

00:58:44.200 | The dopamine system likes rewards.

00:58:46.360 | It wants rewards now.

00:58:48.000 | The internet has many rewards lined up.

00:58:50.480 | That system kicks into play and you feel this irresistible desire to click, click, click.

00:58:57.400 | You do not get a similar dopamine push for I'm working for our 900 of 10,000.

00:59:04.800 | It's going to take me to finish this really big project because the reward's not proximate.

00:59:09.880 | And so what's going to win then?

00:59:11.400 | The complicated deep thing, part of your slow productivity push to do something big over

00:59:15.880 | a long period of time or Instagram or Tik Tok.

00:59:20.000 | And he said, yeah, your brain is wired to go for that.

00:59:22.000 | And that's a very hard, that's a very hard challenge to win.

00:59:25.200 | And now what I learned from this video is that yes, he is right.

00:59:28.400 | There are lots of videos that talk about this same thing, quote unquote overstimulation.

00:59:33.600 | People are really feeling it.

00:59:34.720 | And I think young people are feeling it harder because they have more targets for their dopamine

00:59:39.280 | systems.

00:59:40.280 | They have more acclimatized their mind to all of these various rewards.

00:59:43.840 | They're very good at these various rewards.

00:59:45.520 | There's so much pulling at them that young people in particular are really finding.

00:59:49.320 | Yes, this is ruining my life.

00:59:50.600 | I can't do anything long-term, deep, cognitively useful, getting bad grades at school.

00:59:58.520 | I can't advance in my job.

01:00:01.000 | I can't produce something that I really want to produce.

01:00:03.720 | Those of us my age or older, maybe say I distract myself too much and it slows down me doing

01:00:10.040 | important work.

01:00:11.760 | Young people really do feel like it's ruining their lives.

01:00:14.920 | So what should we do about it?

01:00:15.920 | Well, I thought, well, I can offer my own advice here.

01:00:17.640 | I mean, this is something I've studied and written about for a long time.

01:00:21.000 | I kind of wrote the definitive book on the power of focus and why you should cultivate

01:00:25.760 | it.

01:00:26.760 | I've been thinking and writing articles and books about this for a long time.

01:00:29.000 | So I figured, let me, let me review here on the podcast, my own very complicated multi-part

01:00:36.320 | system for combating online overstimulation.

01:00:39.040 | So get a pad of paper ready because you don't want to miss step nine or 10.

01:00:42.800 | There's a very complicated explanation for how you're going to have to very carefully

01:00:47.160 | navigate the online world.

01:00:48.760 | All right.

01:00:49.760 | So it's going to be very complicated.

01:00:50.760 | Are you ready?

01:00:51.760 | Okay, here it goes.

01:00:52.760 | Here's my solution.

01:00:53.760 | Don't use things that cause overstimulation.

01:00:55.880 | All right.

01:00:57.880 | I'm being a little bit facetious here, but honestly, the answer is as simple as that.

01:01:04.560 | Dopamine system is powerful.

01:01:06.860 | So don't give it the targets that it's going to fire up for.

01:01:10.520 | You have to actually remove most of these sources of overstimulation from your life.

01:01:16.980 | If you really want to start thinking and producing original thoughts at a high level, there's

01:01:23.520 | not these complex habits and careful ways of navigating your notifications and when

01:01:28.760 | you use this and when you don't use this.

01:01:30.760 | I'm telling you this as someone who thinks for a living and studies people who thinks

01:01:34.320 | for a living, the more sources of overstimulation you eliminate from your life, the easier.

01:01:40.720 | And we of course know this type of abstention approach is effective because we see it with

01:01:44.840 | other things that historically have hijacked the dopamine system and caused a lot of trouble.

01:01:51.760 | We do not tell people who have an issue with smoking, okay, we need to build a complex

01:01:56.240 | system of where you have cigarettes and where you don't, and you don't want to have it

01:01:59.240 | in the car, but you will have it here.

01:02:00.760 | And we're going to have an app that keeps track of how many cigarettes you've had and

01:02:05.200 | then try to restrict, and then during certain periods, there's a time lock that locks off

01:02:08.960 | the cigarettes and you can't have it during that period, but you can have it on this period.

01:02:12.560 | And we do a week on, but you don't smoke on Saturdays.

01:02:15.520 | No, we just say you got to quit smoking.

01:02:18.440 | As the same with a lot of other addictions like this that people have trouble with, but

01:02:24.000 | we resist applying that type of clarity and abstention to online overstimulation.

01:02:31.000 | So let me get a little bit more granular about this.

01:02:35.440 | Social media, this is a big source of it.

01:02:37.660 | You got to just basically get this out of your life.

01:02:40.720 | If you have to have some social media for professional reasons, it should not be on

01:02:44.560 | your phone.

01:02:45.560 | It should be on a boring computer.

01:02:47.720 | It's something you should do on a schedule or hire someone to do on your behalf.

01:02:51.500 | It should never, ever be something you go to when you're bored.

01:02:54.720 | It should never be a source of distraction.

01:02:56.960 | It should be, I'm an author and I set up my Instagram post in a shared document on Google

01:03:03.680 | Drive.

01:03:05.080 | Here's the photos, here's the text, and I have someone who posts it Fridays and Mondays.

01:03:09.040 | Or if I have to do that, I log in the thing on my computer, I post it, and then I shut

01:03:14.080 | it back down again.

01:03:15.080 | All right?

01:03:16.080 | So if you have to use it professionally, it's on a computer, it's boring, you never use

01:03:19.920 | it as a source of entertainment.

01:03:22.240 | You don't scroll online news.

01:03:24.080 | Look, you're not a editor at Gawker.

01:03:29.640 | You just get out of that world of online news and discussion.

01:03:32.460 | You don't have to be a part of it.

01:03:34.200 | How do you keep up with stuff in the world?

01:03:35.580 | We talked about this earlier in this episode where I gave advice to Reading Guy.

01:03:40.440 | You know, subscribe to some email newsletters that you read when you can that gives you

01:03:43.960 | interesting perspectives.

01:03:45.840 | Listen to podcasts, maybe listen to a daily news roundup podcast if you want to be kept

01:03:50.160 | up with more current events.

01:03:52.720 | Or listen to something like Sager and Crystal's, their Breaking Points podcast where they go

01:03:56.680 | through 10 stories about what's going on in the world.

01:04:00.800 | Podcasts are fine, right?

01:04:01.800 | Because it's something you have to turn on and listen to.

01:04:04.480 | It's not a knee-jerk distraction that your dopamine system is going to kick into.

01:04:10.560 | No one is like trying to write and halfway through writing, they're like, "Ahh!"

01:04:13.960 | And quickly turn on a podcast.

01:04:16.000 | TikTok can do that.

01:04:17.400 | Online news can do that.

01:04:18.400 | Twitter can do that.

01:04:19.400 | Podcasts are fine.

01:04:20.400 | Newsletters are fine.

01:04:21.400 | Maybe even print out the articles you like and read them when you get a chance.

01:04:24.880 | That's fine.

01:04:25.880 | You'll be informed.

01:04:26.880 | You got to get rid of all that online news.

01:04:29.120 | What about YouTube?

01:04:30.120 | YouTube is tricky.

01:04:31.120 | Why is YouTube tricky?

01:04:32.120 | I think video is the future of independent content creation, but the recommendations

01:04:38.200 | sidebar on YouTube can make it into one of these dopamine-inflamming sources of distraction.

01:04:44.200 | So when it comes to something like YouTube, you have to use it one way and not another.

01:04:50.400 | So this is maybe the place where I come closest to the navigation lines that you hear in a

01:04:54.800 | lot of these online videos.

01:04:56.160 | But I do think YouTube is a source of information.

01:05:00.200 | YouTube has become more a source of entertainment, high-quality entertainment that rivals what

01:05:07.120 | you would get on TV, but it's also a giant source of distraction.

01:05:09.760 | So how do we make sense of YouTube?

01:05:12.720 | Well, here's my YouTube strategy.

01:05:17.080 | So in order to preserve YouTube as a way to look up instructions for things, which I think

01:05:20.920 | is a great use of YouTube, how do I change the oil in a Honda Odyssey?

01:05:26.080 | Look it up on YouTube.

01:05:27.120 | You can see a video of someone doing it.

01:05:28.520 | It's better than trying to find an article.

01:05:30.160 | To preserve that use of YouTube without it making a dopamine-inflamming system, get one

01:05:35.520 | of these plugins for your browser that you use YouTube on that gets rid of the recommendations.

01:05:42.520 | So what you can do is you can search for something.

01:05:43.880 | You can see the search results.

01:05:44.880 | You can click on a search result.

01:05:45.960 | You can watch it, but there's no, "Here's what's coming up next," or "What about this

01:05:49.360 | and what about that?"

01:05:51.680 | So that one type of plugin alone makes YouTube into a fantastic library without it being

01:05:58.660 | something that you can use as a source of knee-jerk distraction.

01:06:01.360 | Because again, when you're working on something hard, if you have blocked YouTube, you go,

01:06:05.240 | "Oh, I'm just going to YouTube.com."

01:06:06.920 | You don't see anything.

01:06:07.920 | You have to search for something and find something.

01:06:10.160 | It's not a highly salient source of distraction.

01:06:14.000 | Now what about entertainment on YouTube?

01:06:15.680 | Because again, I think this is actually important.

01:06:18.080 | I'm a believer that video trumps audio.

01:06:20.200 | The future of independent content is going to be video.

01:06:22.720 | I mean, this is like radio became a big thing until television was around, and then television

01:06:26.680 | just smashed the market share of radio.

01:06:29.960 | It was just so much bigger because humans like to see faces.

01:06:33.420 | Humans like to see visuals.

01:06:35.480 | And I increasingly believe watching a high-quality interview show on YouTube is better than 99%

01:06:42.600 | of the stuff that's on television or that's on non-unscripted streaming services.

01:06:49.840 | And I think that gap's going to close more.

01:06:51.480 | So how do you, for example, watch a show like mine?

01:06:55.500 | Or maybe you're a Lex Fridman fan.

01:06:57.680 | You want to watch his interviews.

01:06:58.820 | How do you watch these type of programming as a substitute for lower-quality television

01:07:03.600 | with, again, not having YouTube be a rabbit hole?

01:07:07.900 | And my answer here is television sets.

01:07:11.680 | I learned this from our YouTube guide, Jeremy, that increasingly televisions are becoming

01:07:16.800 | one of the most common devices on which this style of YouTube video is watched.

01:07:23.360 | So if you're going to look something up, you have a browser with a plugin that blocks the

01:07:27.520 | recommendations.

01:07:29.080 | If you're going to watch "independent high-quality content" on YouTube, you have it on the YouTube

01:07:35.000 | app and your Apple TV or Fire Stick on your television.

01:07:37.600 | And you watch it like you would any other television show in the same circumstances

01:07:41.140 | where you'd watch television.

01:07:42.480 | I'm sitting down with a lunch break.

01:07:44.960 | I take out my remote.

01:07:46.160 | I turn on the TV.

01:07:47.160 | I go to the YouTube app.

01:07:48.160 | I search for the latest episode of whatever, and I put it on the TV.

01:07:52.960 | There's a lot of friction in using a television.

01:07:54.880 | There's also a lot of routine and ritual built into televisions where that's not part of

01:08:00.120 | your dopamine cycle.

01:08:02.200 | When you're in your home office trying to write something, you don't rush downstairs

01:08:05.160 | and turn on the TV and go to Netflix and select a show and turn it on.

01:08:07.760 | That's too much overhead.

01:08:09.480 | The television, you think about, "Oh, I'm going to have a meal.

01:08:11.960 | I'm taking a break."

01:08:13.480 | It's a big production to get it going.

01:08:15.360 | So you move high-quality independent media consumption to the television and looking

01:08:20.560 | up to a plugin-protected browser, now you don't have to worry about something like YouTube

01:08:29.400 | in your life being a source of distraction.

01:08:32.840 | Also throw in place better, less dopamine-susceptible entertainment sources to fill the gap that

01:08:40.560 | the highly salient distracting content is probably filling right now.

01:08:46.040 | And get back into music.

01:08:48.280 | Go see good movies and read about them before and after.

01:08:51.760 | Read much more books.

01:08:54.240 | High-quality streaming content.

01:08:55.760 | High-quality podcasts.

01:08:58.360 | Get your mind used to other sorts of much higher-quality content for the entertainment

01:09:04.280 | and distraction.

01:09:05.560 | The lower-quality stuff will begin to seem less palatable.

01:09:09.880 | Same thing happens with food.

01:09:10.880 | You eat a lot of junk food.

01:09:12.800 | It's really addictive.

01:09:13.800 | "My God, I just need chips and cookies and this makes me feel better.

01:09:17.360 | What else would I want to eat?"

01:09:18.640 | You stop doing it for a while.

01:09:19.640 | You start eating better food.

01:09:20.640 | You start cooking yourself.

01:09:21.760 | You go to the farmer's market.

01:09:22.920 | You're using high-quality ingredients.

01:09:24.560 | Everyone will tell you this.

01:09:25.760 | You start eating well.

01:09:27.080 | A Snickers bar or a Chips Ahoy seems weird.

01:09:29.920 | It's cardboard.

01:09:30.920 | It's fake.

01:09:31.920 | It's too sugary.

01:09:32.920 | You don't crave it anymore.

01:09:33.920 | So you don't break this connection to junk food by just white-knuckling and eating less.

01:09:39.700 | You replace it with better food.

01:09:40.960 | So that's the final part of solving overstimulation is introducing, flooding the zone with much

01:09:46.920 | more quality stimulation so that you lose your taste for a TikTok video.

01:09:52.800 | You lose your taste for an inflammatory online article that someone tweeted and that you're

01:09:56.720 | scrolling through and then clicking the other links.

01:10:01.000 | So again, this is how I think you solve overstimulation.

01:10:04.800 | If you're serious about it, you get rid of most of the sources of overstimulation.

01:10:07.480 | You stop using social media, you stop doing online news surfing, you put in a lot of high-quality

01:10:13.160 | content.

01:10:14.160 | And in the few places where you might need to encounter these worlds, YouTube, looking

01:10:18.160 | things up, or high-quality independent media, you have to do some limited social media for

01:10:22.120 | your work.

01:10:23.120 | You do so in a way that makes it so far from being a source of knee-jerk distraction that

01:10:27.120 | your dopamine system forgets about it.

01:10:28.960 | So anyways, I appreciated that video.

01:10:31.440 | Overstimulation is a problem.

01:10:32.440 | I'm glad people care about it.

01:10:34.080 | But let's just get blunt.

01:10:36.920 | Stop doing the thing that's ruining your life.

01:10:42.000 | Stop smoking.

01:10:44.000 | Stop eating the junk food.

01:10:45.600 | Replace it with something better.

01:10:46.740 | Let's not get too cute about this.

01:10:47.920 | Let's not get too fine-grained.

01:10:49.680 | Life without the overstimulation really is a deeper life.

01:10:51.920 | It really is a more intellectually engaged life.

01:10:54.320 | It really is going to be a more successful life.

01:10:56.360 | You are going to produce ideas that astound you.

01:10:59.200 | All right, well, that's all the time we have for today.

01:11:02.080 | Thank you for listening or watching.

01:11:03.440 | I'll be back next week with Jesse in the Deep Work HQ.

01:11:07.200 | The band's back together.

01:11:08.320 | Time for fall.

01:11:09.320 | Time to get back to the way we were before the summer.

01:11:11.200 | I'm looking forward to that.

01:11:13.240 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:11:16.080 | [MUSIC]

A Strange (But Effective) Productivity Hack To Enhance Focus, Clarity & Creativity | Cal Newport

Chapters