3 Steps To Reinvent Your Life Before 2024 Ends | Cal Newport
Chapters
0:0 Connect with Cal Newport:00:00:00.000 | This may sound stupid at first, because we all think all the time. Our minds are worrying all
00:00:04.080 | the time. If anything, our problem is getting away from our own thoughts. But when I say
00:00:08.160 | "think" here, I mean something very specific. I mean giving sustained attention to potentially
00:00:15.600 | complicated or ambiguous information with the ultimate goal of building a new conceptual
00:00:20.000 | structure that has value to yourself or to the world. This is what I mean by "thinking."
00:00:28.240 | Here's the thing, most people are very bad at this brand of serious thinking. The way most
00:00:34.080 | people go through their lives is as follows. First, they outsource any sort of normative or
00:00:39.600 | ethical thinking to online tribal vibes and approval. I don't know, what does my team think?
00:00:47.200 | Do they like this? They don't like this? What's going to get me not yelled at? What's going to
00:00:52.160 | get me approved? That's about as far as I want to go trying to actually build up some sort of
00:00:56.560 | framework for understanding what I stand for, what's good and what's bad. Most people prioritize
00:01:01.600 | a sort of high-energy emotion in the moment over the subtler satisfactions of real understanding
00:01:09.280 | and appreciation. They want to just feel something, and often their phone can give them
00:01:14.400 | that something quite easily. They don't want to do the work for actually deeply engaging with
00:01:20.400 | something beautiful. Most people also gravitate when it comes towards the realm of accomplishment,
00:01:26.320 | towards checklist productivity. Just give me a list of things I can follow where the key here
00:01:34.880 | is that the information is scarce, and I have a special list of things to do, and then I'll be in
00:01:38.880 | great shape, or then my web business will take off, or then I'll make six figures per month.
00:01:43.360 | Just give me checklists. I want secret information that I found online as opposed to seeking out to
00:01:49.040 | produce things that are unambiguously valuable. Serious thinkers live differently. They have a
00:01:54.560 | deep and evolving understanding of the world, what's good, what's bad, and what it means to live
00:01:58.720 | a good life. They appreciate the beautiful, they appreciate the quality, and they find inspiration
00:02:04.800 | in it. Their output is often slower, but when it does come out, it's more impact, and it engenders
00:02:12.240 | more respect. So if you're interested in the deep life, serious thinking needs to be
00:02:17.600 | a goal that you are pursuing. So here's what I want to do today is help you become a more
00:02:22.880 | serious thinker, and I want to do that in a practical way. I have five different practices.
00:02:29.520 | Each of these are concrete that I want to run through. These are all things you can start
00:02:33.600 | doing right away in your own life that if you stick with them, you will find after a month,
00:02:37.920 | your cognitive abilities are much better than they were before. After six months,
00:02:43.840 | the experience of your day-to-day life is going to be notably different and richer,
00:02:49.760 | and after a year or so, you're going to find yourself actually able to
00:02:54.240 | produce ideas for yourself and the world that have real value. Really, you're going to unlock
00:02:58.800 | major options. So it's worth becoming a serious thinker. Let's go through five practices for how
00:03:04.160 | to do it. I'm going to illustrate for those of you who are watching instead of just listening.
00:03:09.520 | By popular demand, I will illustrate what we're doing here. So on the screen,
00:03:14.160 | I'm going to put in the center my world-famous picture of a brain. So what we got here is a
00:03:20.960 | cerebellum, and we got some wrinkles and folds in the brain. So I have a brain in the center,
00:03:26.880 | and I'm going to illustrate around this. I'll put one expertly drawn icon per practice we are going
00:03:35.200 | to discuss. All right. So the first practice that I want to discuss is to improve the quality
00:03:43.840 | and decrease the quantity of information that you consume.
00:03:50.320 | So to illustrate this with an icon, I'm going to expertly draw here the Twitter T. I know they've
00:03:59.360 | switched to X, but I sort of am boycotting that. So I'm drawing a T, and I'm putting a circle with
00:04:04.880 | a line through it. I'm going to indicate consuming better quality and less quantity of information.
00:04:11.440 | So what does this mean? I'm talking particularly here about news or other information you use to
00:04:16.080 | learn more things about the world. Stop using social media algorithms to curate your news flow.
00:04:21.600 | Social media algorithms are bad curators. Their interest is not making you as informed as
00:04:27.040 | possible. Their interest is making you as engaged as possible to make you as engaged as possible.
00:04:31.520 | They are going to push you to places that are not emotionally healthy. It's also not going to lead
00:04:36.480 | you to the most nuanced understanding of issues. I want you instead to focus on a multi-scale
00:04:44.240 | news and information consumption. So I want your news and information consumption to be divided
00:04:51.120 | over three scales, daily, monthly, and seasonal. And here's what I mean by that. Daily
00:04:55.680 | have a very small number, probably just one sources of quality, non-algorithmically curated
00:05:04.480 | news and information. This could be one of the growing number of daily news roundup newsletters.
00:05:11.040 | I like, for example, if you're a subscriber to the New York Times, I think David Leonhardt's daily
00:05:18.080 | news summary is a fantastic one. I'm saying this mainly because they featured my profile from the
00:05:23.840 | New York Times Magazine from last year. They re-featured it recently in that newsletter.
00:05:27.200 | So we know that's expertly curated. It could be a daily news roundup podcast.
00:05:32.320 | It could be a physical newspaper that you pick up or have delivered. Okay. At the monthly scale,
00:05:36.880 | you spend the time to go through a collection of, let's say, two to six
00:05:42.800 | in-depth long-form magazine articles. So now this is still relatively current,
00:05:50.080 | but not day-to-day current. This is now information where enough time has passed
00:05:53.920 | for a professional journalist or writer to actually spend some time to really digest
00:06:00.320 | information about what's going on in the world and produce and have edited a long-form piece.
00:06:05.520 | Now we're at a lag of a month or so from what's actually going on. This is where, for example,
00:06:10.080 | you can pull out a few selected articles from my own journalistic home, which is the New Yorker.
00:06:14.640 | Maybe you pull out some long-form articles from the Atlantic or Foreign Affairs or the National
00:06:19.440 | Review or the Wall Street Journal's Sunday issue. Whatever it is that you particularly follow,
00:06:24.480 | could be print, could be not print, tablet magazine. I'm just thinking of different
00:06:29.440 | things I've pulled from before. And you're like, "Here's my six articles I've gathered
00:06:33.760 | throughout the month, 3,000, 5,000 word beast. I'm going to go to a coffee shop somewhere. I've
00:06:39.360 | got these printed out." And let's just engage at this slower scale, deeper understanding, slower
00:06:45.120 | scale. Now we jump up to the seasonal scale, and this is books. When there's something going on in
00:06:52.480 | the world you care about, you should get a book written by an expert, someone who has spent
00:06:59.360 | years working on this artifact based on many more years of actually engaging with this topic.
00:07:05.280 | And you get this beautiful artifact here that you can hold and consume in about a week or two
00:07:09.200 | that is going to give you as deep or nuanced as an understanding of a topic as you're ever likely
00:07:14.880 | to get outside of actually studying that topic professionally yourself. So you should, at the
00:07:19.360 | seasonal scale, have a book that you're reading on whatever thing is going on in the world that
00:07:24.320 | is most important to you. So let's take this multi-scale information consumption plan out for
00:07:33.760 | a spin with a particular topic, and let's compare it to what most people would normally do.
00:07:37.920 | Let's talk about fears about AI. Now what you could do, which is what most people do,
00:07:43.520 | is let me read a lot of tweets and histrionic YouTube videos and short articles on the online
00:07:51.440 | news sites. They're all like, "Oh my god, Google Gemini is doing this. ChatGPT just did that. Sam
00:07:57.440 | Altman just said this." And there's this sort of just frenzied sense of, "I'm just like very uneasy.
00:08:02.560 | I don't know what's going on, and I'm kind of stressed all the time." What would it look like
00:08:06.000 | to engage this topic with a multi-scale information consumption approach? Well, you would be getting
00:08:11.200 | daily information. When something important happened, it would be covered in whatever your
00:08:15.280 | high-quality, non-algorithmically curated source of news would be. When Sam Altman, for example,
00:08:20.720 | got fired and then rehired, David Leonhardt's newsletter covered that. So you would get the
00:08:25.840 | main points. You're subscribed to Axios's daily news roundup. You would get the main points.
00:08:30.480 | Then on the seasonal scale, you could actually say, "Let me sit down with, for example,
00:08:34.640 | the New Yorker's recent AI issue and read some of these longer form pieces. Let me sit down and
00:08:40.480 | listen to..." Ezra Klein had a fantastic AI podcast recently with Kevin Roos and Casey Newhoff, I
00:08:49.680 | think. "Let's spend an hour and 20 minutes just walking through what we know. Maybe you go back
00:08:54.560 | and finally read my New Yorker piece on the guts of how Chats GPT actually works. This is not so
00:09:00.320 | frenzied. This is more digested information." "Okay, I'm getting some deeper sense of what's
00:09:04.960 | going on." On the scale of a season, you say, "I'm going to read a book about artificial
00:09:12.000 | intelligence, maybe about the alignment problem or how people are thinking about its role in
00:09:16.720 | society and now get a really measured, deeper understanding of it." That is how multiscale
00:09:22.160 | information consumption works. Serious thinkers are going to consume information that way.
00:09:26.640 | They have no interest for algorithmically curated social media information.
00:09:31.360 | The same thing, though, applies, I'm going to say this, in improvement of quality,
00:09:36.960 | decreasing of quantity. We can think of this also applying to other types of information
00:09:42.160 | as well. Think about shows or movies you watch on streaming services. To increase the quality of
00:09:48.400 | that, simple heuristic, one-to-one ratio, fun smart. If I watch a movie that is just pure fun,
00:09:56.960 | I want to watch something that's going to challenge me, either artistically,
00:10:00.240 | this is a well-respected movie, or informationally, it's a documentary on something that's
00:10:06.400 | complicated, but I want to know about it. One-to-one ratio, so that the quality of what
00:10:11.600 | you're engaging in the streaming media gets better. You can do the same thing with podcasts.
00:10:15.040 | Here's a fun podcast, one-to-one ratio with something that I'm learning from, etc.
00:10:18.720 | Practice number two, increase your comfort with boredom. Let's draw a picture for this one as
00:10:29.600 | well. What I'm going to draw here is a rock. All right, there we go. Sitting on this rock,
00:10:38.000 | we see someone contemplating. Jesse appreciates my artwork. Increase comfort with boredom.
00:10:46.240 | What is the idea here before we get even more specific about the practices?
00:10:50.640 | If your brain is used to this idea that it is never bored, that when it lacks novel stimuli,
00:10:58.160 | you will always feed it a shiny digital treat in the form typically of your phone,
00:11:02.400 | or an iPad, or a browser tab that's going to give you something emotionally salient.
00:11:06.320 | In the moment, it can't tolerate serious thinking. Because serious thinking requires you to keep your
00:11:13.040 | attention sustained, this inner eye of your attention sustained on a single abstract topic.
00:11:18.480 | That's boring, because there's not a lot of novel stimuli. Your brain has to be comfort with boredom.
00:11:25.280 | So by increasing your comfort with boredom, you're just teaching your brain it's not that
00:11:28.880 | you're bored all the time. It's also not trying to put too much of a positive value on boredom.
00:11:33.440 | It's just teaching your brain sometimes we're bored and sometimes we're not, and I'm comfortable
00:11:37.600 | with that state of boredom. So how can you do this? Two things I'm going to suggest.
00:11:45.360 | One, actually have every day a particular outing, or chore, or task you do. It can be short,
00:11:51.440 | but a particular thing you do without your phone. Go to the drugstore, go put in your laundry. It
00:11:57.360 | doesn't have to be long. Taking out the garbage and do it with nothing in your ear. So you're
00:12:01.840 | like, okay, I'm just doing this activity. There's no novel stimuli here. I'm just kind of having to
00:12:05.520 | be alone with my own thoughts. A lot of people who take this advice will also typically add a
00:12:12.000 | longer outing on the weekends, hour plus, no phone. You can ramp that up over the weekend.
00:12:19.680 | The other really important thing you can do is the phone foyer method. The idea here is when
00:12:26.800 | you're at your home or your apartment or wherever you live, you keep your phone plugged in in one
00:12:30.480 | place. If you have a house with a foyer, it's in the foyer or it's in the kitchen. If you have an
00:12:34.320 | apartment, whatever, but it stays plugged in when you're at home in one place. If you need to look
00:12:38.720 | something up, you go to where it's plugged in and you look it up there. If you need to receive or
00:12:43.600 | text with someone, you go where the phone is plugged in and you receive and do text there.
00:12:46.880 | Same with phone calls. You have to go to where the phone is. It is not where you are. Now,
00:12:52.080 | this is going to be annoying at first, but what you're doing here is severing this permanent
00:12:56.720 | accessibility of the distraction. So now when you're watching something or doing something
00:13:00.880 | in your own house or in your own apartment, you can't pull out the phone. It's somewhere else.
00:13:05.920 | You still have the benefits of ID to look this thing up, but you have to walk 10 feet to go do
00:13:09.920 | it. You're going to get more many moments of boredom during your evenings and mornings at home.
00:13:16.880 | Very important if you want to prepare your brain to be a serious thinker.
00:13:22.000 | All right. Third thing I want to suggest here, third practice for becoming a more serious thinker,
00:13:28.880 | cultivate your ability to pay attention. So illustrate this here.
00:13:39.280 | You won't know at first what this means. So provocatively, what I'm drawing here
00:13:43.600 | is a stopwatch. Is there something on the top, Jesse? I don't know. Let's do this.
00:13:50.240 | Perfect rendition of a stopwatch. Why am I drawing a stopwatch? Because one of the first things I'm
00:13:55.600 | going to recommend for cultivating your ability to pay attention is interval training. So actually
00:14:03.600 | increasing the timed intervals at which you're comfortable giving sustained attention to a single
00:14:09.280 | target. These intervals should be intense. You only increase the time of the intervals as you
00:14:15.200 | get comfortable with the current duration, right? So what we're trying to do here is get your mind
00:14:21.360 | comfortable with sustaining attention. So the previous practice, getting a comfort for boredom,
00:14:27.840 | we think of that as the table stakes, the foundation. Your mind has to be okay with
00:14:33.760 | not having a lot of stimuli. This practice now about focusing and practicing the actual activity
00:14:38.880 | of focus, the actual activity of sustaining attention. So you have to be able to do it,
00:14:44.400 | and then you have to actually practice what this actually feels like. So with interval training,
00:14:47.920 | you can do this with multiple activities. It could be a difficult work or school activity.
00:14:52.560 | It can also be, and I think this is critical, a high quality leisure activity, like watching a
00:14:59.600 | movie, which a lot of people, especially young people right now have a very hard time doing for
00:15:03.920 | more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time without actually looking at their phone. It's gonna be
00:15:07.840 | a high quality leisure activity or a difficult work activity. It could be reading a book, even
00:15:12.880 | anything that requires focus. You start with an interval that you're comfortable with,
00:15:18.240 | keep it small at first, maybe even just 10 minutes, you use a real timer,
00:15:22.160 | set that timer, and might as well do it on your phone, by the way, because you want your phone
00:15:26.880 | right there in timer mode. So you know for a fact if you use your phone, because you've left the
00:15:31.360 | timer mode on your phone, set the timer for 10 minutes and work on that work task, watch that
00:15:37.280 | movie or read that book with as much concentration as you can muster, zero checks of anything
00:15:43.840 | screened outside of your target until that timer goes off. If you break that concentration,
00:15:51.440 | I just have to check Twitter. I just have to see what's going on my text messages. You have to
00:15:57.520 | start that timer and start it over. It doesn't count. Once you're able to consistently hit the
00:16:02.400 | current time duration, you increase it by 10 minutes. So this is just literally training
00:16:07.200 | the thing you want to be better at, sustaining attention on cognitive tasks, the absence of
00:16:12.080 | stimuli, sustaining the attention. You got to train your brain what that feels like.
00:16:18.560 | Okay, another thing you can do when it comes to cultivating your ability to pay attention is more
00:16:25.600 | passive, which is care about ritual, care about environment. Set up, this is where I go to read.
00:16:32.880 | And it's different than where I just sit and work or watch TV. I've set up like a very special chair
00:16:39.040 | and I have this light here and it's by like a warm radiator in the winter. This is where I go to work
00:16:45.360 | on deep work challenges versus just regular work or email. I have a separate part of my house. I
00:16:50.720 | went up to the attic and I've renovated an eve there and that's where I go to do deep work.
00:16:54.640 | And it's different than where I do my email and where the printer and all the filing cabinets are.
00:16:58.400 | I have a ritual I do before I watch a hard movie. I do a thing to get my mind into that mode. I
00:17:05.200 | listen to a movie podcast while walking for 20 minutes. Ritual and environment will help you
00:17:10.720 | fall into that deeper attention mode. Combine that with interval training. All right, let's go to our,
00:17:17.360 | let's look at my list here. Let's go to our fourth idea to help you become a serious thinker,
00:17:26.560 | our fourth practice, I should say. And this is going to be strengthen your working memory.
00:17:34.560 | So I'm going to draw here is a person very determinedly walking,
00:17:39.920 | because he loves my art. And this person is thinking about all sorts of things.
00:17:46.480 | Why am I drawing a person walking? Because my number one tip for increasing your working
00:17:52.320 | memory is productive meditation. It's an idea that goes all the way back to my 2016 book,
00:17:58.720 | Deep Work. With productive meditation, you take a professional problem,
00:18:02.320 | or it could be a complicated personal problem, but a clear complicated problem.
00:18:07.920 | You go for a walk, and you try to make progress on that problem only using your head. The walking
00:18:13.200 | helps you do this. If you're just sitting and thinking it's much more difficult, but the walking
00:18:16.720 | actually quiet some noises in your cognitive circuit. So it's a little bit easier to focus.
00:18:21.200 | And every time you notice your attention wander away from the problem that you're trying to make
00:18:25.360 | progress on in your head, you notice that wandering and you move your attention back
00:18:29.440 | to the problem. This forces you to get very comfortable holding lots of information in
00:18:34.720 | your head and trying to manipulate it and generate new information based on it.
00:18:38.960 | You can make these walks longer and longer as you get more comfortable with this exercise.
00:18:44.640 | This is directly increasing your working memory strength.
00:18:47.120 | Your working memory strength is critical to being a serious thinker. Serious thinking requires you
00:18:53.120 | to pull multiple pieces of information and hold onto them in your mind's eye.
00:18:56.560 | This piece, but also this piece and this piece is over here. And how do these things relate?
00:19:01.440 | And then how do I connect that to this other thing I thought before?
00:19:03.680 | Working memory is at the core of deep thoughts. Most people have a bad working memory, however,
00:19:10.080 | because we're not used to holding a lot of stuff in our head in a way that we can actually access
00:19:15.440 | them with our mind's eye. Productive meditation is direct and intense practice for exactly this
00:19:20.560 | problem. It gets exactly to the heart of what you're trying to do here.
00:19:24.480 | All right, we got one more practice to help you become a serious thinker. I'll draw one more
00:19:34.240 | picture. So this final practice, I'm going to say it this way, practice being intellectual.
00:19:41.520 | And so let's see, let's draw our stick figure person here. So how do we know this person is
00:19:48.640 | intellectual? Oh, it's not going to work. I'm going to draw him in a turtleneck, but he needs
00:19:53.920 | a neck, Jesse. That's the problem. So let me give him a neck. My stick figure person, there we go.
00:19:59.680 | Give him a big neck. - Your French accent.
00:20:02.080 | - I probably will give him a beret as well. - And a pipe.
00:20:04.560 | - Yeah, so there you go. Turtleneck, because he's an intellectual. All right. Beret,
00:20:13.520 | because he's an intellectual. And a pipe. There you go. Practice being an intellectual. Now,
00:20:22.480 | I joke by drawing this picture of like sort of a pretentious Frenchman with a pipe,
00:20:27.120 | because intellectual is often used in modern conversation as a pejorative term, but there's
00:20:33.040 | also a very specific and positive meaning here. It's a stance towards the world of information
00:20:38.560 | in which you are seeking out nuance and subtlety. You're also seeking out integration of information
00:20:43.440 | into complex understandings that you already have. So to be an intellectual is that you are
00:20:48.880 | engaging with the world of information, trying to master it and integrate it.
00:20:54.400 | Now, if you do this for a living, like I do, if you're a professor,
00:20:58.560 | they teach you how to do this. I mean, this is what you do for a living, but we don't talk enough
00:21:03.760 | about everyone else. How do you practice this intellectual stance, an intellectual approach
00:21:11.760 | to the world of information? I'm going to give you two very concrete ideas that I think almost
00:21:17.600 | anyone can do. And it's going to make you literally seem much smarter. The first is
00:21:23.040 | pairing primary and secondary sources. Pairing secondary and primary sources. Okay. Here's what
00:21:29.840 | this means. It's most obvious with books. So you want to read a great book. Let's say I want to
00:21:35.520 | read The Odyssey. I want to read Joyce. I want to read Epsilon Epsilon. The typical approach that I
00:21:43.760 | think professional intellectuals have, which is flawed because they forgot their own training,
00:21:48.320 | is they say, just read it. Just expose yourself to the ideas and then pretend like it's really
00:21:56.640 | changed your life. But that's not actually the way you learn how to engage information and draw
00:22:01.440 | out nuance and complicate it. What you should do instead is say, okay, let me now get, before I
00:22:05.920 | read this hard book, a secondary source. A secondary source means it's a book about the book.
00:22:11.680 | So here is a book about why Faulkner is important or why Epsilon Epsilon is important. Here is a
00:22:20.880 | book about the heroic Greek world in which Homer wrote The Odyssey and why this is such an important
00:22:28.320 | book. I'm going to read about the book first and then go and read the actual primary source itself.
00:22:33.840 | You are now approaching this primary artifact with a framework for how to understand it,
00:22:41.200 | what you're looking for, what's important about it. And this gives your brain practice
00:22:45.920 | seeing things at a new level. You might not understand everything you saw in a secondary
00:22:49.600 | source and you might not come away saying, I completely understand this book or it's changed
00:22:53.280 | my life, but you've practiced reading multiple layers below the surface. See, when we just tell
00:22:59.760 | people, read the great books, go to the museums, and you'll just be inspired. We really are selling
00:23:06.400 | them short because that experience of inspiration requires you seeing multiple layers below the
00:23:12.560 | surface. And you got to practice that. Secondary sources first. Same thing with museums. I do not
00:23:18.240 | like this idea when parents have of like, all that's important is that we expose our child to
00:23:22.720 | art museums and then they'll love art. They're not going to come away from that loving art. What
00:23:26.960 | you're really just teaching them is how to be comfortable in the social context of an art museum.
00:23:32.000 | So they'll seem cultured if they're around other people. Staring at paintings does not make you
00:23:37.360 | a lover of paintings. Reading about those paintings, who was this artist? Why was this
00:23:43.520 | important? What was happening before when this artist came along? What was the historical context
00:23:49.760 | or turmoil created by this painting? And then you go and see the artifact, you have a completely
00:23:54.080 | different relationship with it. So you could teach kids even, let me give you some basic
00:23:57.840 | information. Who was Jackson Pollock? What was going on with the abstract expressionist? What
00:24:03.920 | were they fighting against? Why was this so exciting if you lived in Soho in 1942? What
00:24:10.080 | was happening here? And then you see this artifact and it's a different experience.
00:24:14.800 | It's like when you go to the Smithsonian and see Judy Garland's Ruby Slippers, what's exciting about
00:24:20.240 | the Ruby Slippers is not just they're shiny, but it's like those were the things in Wizard of Oz.
00:24:24.400 | That was a really important movie and this famous person wore them. That context helps.
00:24:29.360 | So you get in the habit of doing this. You can do it with art, you can do it with books,
00:24:33.680 | you can do it with movies. I do this all the time. Let me read five reviews about this movie.
00:24:40.560 | Not like contemporary, but people looking back, it's a great movie. People looking back and
00:24:46.560 | writing essays about this movie. Roger Ebert did a lot of this. Later on, he went back and wrote
00:24:52.640 | this series of essays about the great movies. The Guardian over in the UK does a lot of this.
00:24:57.520 | They'll write these retrospective essays about movies that might be decades earlier.
00:25:02.480 | And then you go and watch the movie. It's a completely different experience.
00:25:05.520 | It could be modern movies, it could be older movies. You read about, for example,
00:25:10.480 | center focusing, and then you watch George Miller's Mad Max Fury Road. It's a completely
00:25:17.120 | different experience and appreciation when you just put the movie on without that type
00:25:20.240 | of knowledge about the cinematography. Secondary sources paired with primary sources. This is what
00:25:26.000 | academics do during their training. They read and write their own secondary sources based on
00:25:30.320 | these primary sources. So it becomes second nature, seeing levels below the surface on all
00:25:34.320 | sorts of things. But if you're not going to a doctorate program, you're not getting this training,
00:25:38.160 | you have to do it yourself. It really makes your intellectual world a lot more interesting.
00:25:42.400 | Here's the other thing I want to recommend for practicing being intellectual.
00:25:46.480 | Maintain idea documents. These are actual documents you maintain like a Microsoft Word file,
00:25:54.240 | just in your own personal files, or if you're a good handwriter, you could do this in journals.
00:25:58.400 | And you have particular topics that you are recording and updating a summary in your own
00:26:05.760 | words of your best understanding of that topic. Now, these can be just general, timeless topics.
00:26:12.560 | Like I'm interested in Stoic philosophy, and I have this document I build out and add to about
00:26:18.480 | what Stoic philosophy is, who the thinkers are, what their major thoughts are, your current
00:26:24.640 | summary of how you're thinking about Stoicism being in your own life. You are, through writing,
00:26:28.880 | consolidating information, structuring information. Now, again, this is something that real
00:26:34.240 | intellectuals get good at doing naturally, but you have to practice it. So writing and
00:26:38.720 | updating these summaries is a good way of doing it. You can do the same thing with current event
00:26:44.480 | topics as well. There's something going on in the world that you care about. I don't know,
00:26:50.160 | this scares me or interests me, or just it feels important to me. Create and begin
00:26:55.680 | maintaining a document of how you feel about this and why. This is a fantastic way to free yourself
00:27:02.320 | from the emotional ping pong game of just let me expose myself to social media or algorithmic
00:27:08.560 | content. Let me choose a tribe and make that tribe make me feel good or scared and help me get mad
00:27:13.040 | about the other tribe. It gets you out of that trap and allows you to begin building your own
00:27:17.120 | understanding of things. You're worried about AI. Start building out this document. Here's what's
00:27:21.440 | going on. Here's the main types of AI. Here's where things are. Here's a list of thinkers
00:27:25.680 | and where they stand. And this thinker is against this thinker. You organize your thoughts.
00:27:29.200 | You're really worried or upset or conflicted or uneasy about conflict in the Middle East.
00:27:37.760 | Build out a document. Shut down Twitter. Build out a document. Here's what's going on. I mean,
00:27:42.080 | this is why I'm trying to articulate my concerns here. I really worry about this,
00:27:46.080 | but this, I don't know how this is making me feel bad as well. And there's this argument
00:27:50.240 | doesn't quite work. And here's why you're talking about arguments and where it falls
00:27:53.520 | short for you, where it resonates. Build idea documents as a way of structuring to write is to
00:27:58.400 | think. So the right about what matters is to help you think about what matters and your brain gets
00:28:05.440 | used to organizing information in the conceptual structures. So actually I have to practice being
00:28:10.240 | an intellectual. All right. So if you do these five things, all of which I've beautifully illustrated
00:28:14.800 | here, you begin, uh, improving the, the quality and decreasing the quantity of the information
00:28:21.360 | that you consume. You get comfort, uh, comfort with boredom. You do interval training for just
00:28:28.080 | maintaining your concentration. You do particular training, the strength in your working memory,
00:28:32.080 | and you actually practice engaging information as an intellectual. You can become a much more
00:28:37.600 | serious thinker. It's not something you just choose to do. It's not something you're just
00:28:42.320 | born to do or not. It's something you cultivate. And hopefully if you're a listener of the show,
00:28:48.640 | you do agree that this is worth cultivating because I think it is, you see someone who's
00:28:52.800 | doing something cool. They're probably a serious thinker. You see someone who's done really well
00:28:56.800 | for themselves. They probably have the way to do serious thought. And in this case, maybe it's
00:29:00.080 | applied to a business issue, a strategy, but there's serious thought going on there. You see
00:29:05.680 | someone who just has a really interesting, engaged life. They're probably a serious thinker. They
00:29:09.200 | appreciate this. They can go to the movies and, and love the experience. They have things they're
00:29:14.160 | deeply engaged in. Your brain is your number one portal to the world. And if you train that brain
00:29:19.200 | to be a serious thinker, your experience of the world changes the technicolor, the font gets
00:29:25.440 | smaller. The, uh, clarity gets much increased. It's just a different sort of improved experience
00:29:32.720 | with life. So train it, train that thinking, and you will get better at it. I'm struggling
00:29:39.120 | to be social and confident. What can I do to speak more articulately and gain confidence
00:29:44.240 | and impress more people? Well, Tanya, it's a good question. And I can tell you a lot of this
00:29:48.560 | is practice, right? The more you're around people in different situations, the more comfortable
00:29:54.800 | you get in those situations. The more you spend talking about things or explaining yourself or
00:29:59.680 | talking to people, the more comfortable and articulate you get in those types of conversations.
00:30:06.000 | I mean, I talk pretty, you know, here on this podcast, but in part, because I've been
00:30:10.800 | professionally speaking since I was in my young 20s. So I'm sort of used to it. The cadences of
00:30:16.000 | speaking, the pacing, the coming up in your head with what you're going to say next, it all just
00:30:19.760 | sort of comes with practice. So social stuff really can be practiced. You can start with very low key
00:30:25.840 | social stuff early on stuff that you're already pretty comfortable with. I know this person,
00:30:29.600 | I don't mind hanging out with them. So we go to, you know, a restaurant or a bar together or go to
00:30:35.280 | movies together on a fairly regular basis. I'm just used to in a comfortable situation,
00:30:39.200 | being out in the world with people and talking to them and interacting, but the stakes are low.
00:30:43.440 | Then you can build that up to bigger things. Okay, I'm going to go to bigger social events
00:30:49.360 | or parties at first, you know, small ones. Here's my friend, that's their birthday party,
00:30:53.440 | and you get more confident with that. So a lot of this is just practice.
00:30:56.400 | Now, one of the things I think that is often left out of this conversation is the role of anxiety.
00:31:02.800 | Anxiety gets really intertwined with socializing in ways that I think it's hard for people who
00:31:09.120 | don't feel that same anxiety to understand. They don't understand how these really get
00:31:14.560 | mixed in together. You really can start to build up a sort of dread or anxiety around
00:31:20.240 | different situations. It's why one of the outcomes of pretty severe anxiety disorders would be an
00:31:26.480 | agoraphobia where you don't leave your house anymore. It's because often those two things can
00:31:30.800 | go together. The same circuits that are related to sociality are often the same circuits that
00:31:35.760 | are short-circuiting when you're suffering from anxiety. So if anxiety is a real issue here,
00:31:41.200 | Tanya, it's not just, "Oh, I'm out of practice. What do I do?" It's, "I really feel physically
00:31:45.040 | dread and concern and panic when I'm in these situations." I would look towards ACT, ACT-based
00:31:54.560 | techniques. They're very good for exactly this situation. So ACT, otherwise known as third wave
00:32:00.000 | psychotherapy, stands for acceptance commitment therapy. It's a very effective evidence-based
00:32:06.160 | type of psychotherapy that does really well with anxiety, social anxiety, panic-type anxiety around
00:32:13.680 | other people. It's really based upon separating feelings from your actual actions. It really
00:32:22.320 | helps train you to recognize the physical symptoms of something like anxiety and say, "Yes, but I'm
00:32:28.320 | still going to commit to do this thing that I think is valuable, and I can still do that even
00:32:31.600 | if this feeling comes and goes." It helps you avoid labeling that feeling as, "This is really
00:32:36.720 | important. Something really bad is happening. It's really bad to be feeling this way." It breaks that
00:32:40.880 | loop of you labeling your feelings and just seeing them as feelings themselves. We talked about this
00:32:48.000 | a little bit in last week's episode. We read Marcus Aurelius' meditation. He had some actually
00:32:54.000 | stoic ideas that are connected to modern acceptance commitment therapy. But I just want to point that
00:32:59.120 | out there, Tanya, that there's a more serious training you can do with the tools of ACT
00:33:03.440 | that are there and available. And so if the anxiety is really holding you back,
00:33:09.120 | that's not permanent. You have to think about that like knee pain. You had knee pain. The
00:33:13.840 | doctor's going to help you fix it, though it might take some PT and a little bit of time.
00:33:17.280 | Same thing here. Look into acceptance commitment therapy. There's some good books on it.
00:33:22.400 | I think it's The Happiness Trap is one of the famous public-facing books on ACT. That's a
00:33:28.160 | good entry place into it. Harris, Russ Harris, maybe. You can look that up, Jesse. It's The
00:33:33.600 | Happiness Trap. But I just want to throw that out there because it can be frustrating if you're on
00:33:39.520 | the anxiety spectrum. I'm on that spectrum. It manifests for myself in interesting ways. I have
00:33:43.520 | to do a lot of training on it. Depending if you're on that spectrum, it can be frustrating to just be
00:33:49.040 | around someone really social. It's like, what's the problem? Just come to the thing. What could
00:33:53.040 | go on? And they don't realize that you're feeling immense dread. So there's a lot of things you can
00:33:57.440 | do there, Tonya, that train. Do the work. It is worth it. Sociality is very important.
00:34:02.880 | Yeah, you got it right. It was Russ Harris.
00:34:05.920 | Russ Harris, OK. The Happiness Trap.
00:34:07.920 | Yep.
00:34:08.160 | Yeah, it's a good book. All right, what do we got next?
00:34:11.280 | All right, next question is from Ben. In what ways can being ordinary be good in life?
00:34:17.680 | This was an interesting question, Ben. I had to think about it a little bit. It resonated a little
00:34:21.520 | bit because I think what you're getting at here is this interesting trade-off when you're thinking
00:34:27.280 | about the deep life and how you want to shape it. Because one way you can go, of course, is towards
00:34:33.440 | exceptionalness. I want to do something exceptional. I want to be noted for it. I
00:34:38.880 | want to do something noteworthy, have some fame for this thing that I'm doing that's important.
00:34:43.200 | That's one particular path for the deep life. The other path for the deep life is I want to
00:34:47.600 | build a life around my values, start with discipline, figure out my values, organize my stuff,
00:34:54.080 | sacrifice and be a leader on behalf of others, and then find areas of my life to be remarkable.
00:34:58.560 | And you could sort of have this quiet, deep life where you really matter to a lot of people
00:35:02.880 | and you find and extract out of life a lot of joy and appreciation of stuff that's fantastic
00:35:07.840 | or great or remarkable, all without having to be I am an exceptional X and people recognize it.
00:35:13.360 | You have sort of two paths towards depth here. There's kind of pros and cons of each,
00:35:18.640 | especially when we look at that exceptionality path, right? Because there's good there and we
00:35:22.800 | shouldn't turn down the good. Why do people want to try to be great at things? Well, first of all,
00:35:26.640 | you do gain more autonomy, right? You do something really well. There's more demand for it. You often
00:35:32.960 | gain more financial reward and or more control over how you live your life. There are several
00:35:38.160 | things I do at a pretty high level, and I do have a lot of flexibility in my life. We get to mess
00:35:42.080 | around in this playhouse, deep work HQ. You know, I go away in the summers. I have very high control
00:35:50.320 | over my schedule. I don't worry about money, really. That's not really an issue. So there's
00:35:54.880 | great autonomy that comes from doing some things really well. Also, it feels good to be respected
00:35:59.840 | in the moment. We're wired for that. This is the whole tribal leadership thing. We tell ourselves
00:36:04.480 | it doesn't matter, but there is ego. And you do feel if something goes really well, you'll feel
00:36:10.320 | good about that for a while. There's a reason why people chase it. That is the stimulus that is
00:36:14.560 | perverted when we see workaholism, right? So with an addiction, there's usually some sort of very
00:36:20.800 | powerful stimulus that becomes the driver for the addiction, the feeling of intoxication, right?
00:36:26.240 | Workaholism is really that feeling of, wow, I did this thing well, and people recognize that my boss
00:36:33.200 | rewarded me. That's a very strong stimulus. That's why you can build a whole addiction around it.
00:36:38.080 | On the flip side, though, it can be very stressful and anxiety-producing to try to do something
00:36:41.840 | exceptionally well. It's hard to do. And it puts you into bigger, more stressful circumstances you
00:36:47.600 | have to navigate. You get more people, perhaps, who want your time than you have nearly enough
00:36:52.080 | time to actually give. And you have to start saying no to people, and people think that you're
00:36:55.520 | being snobby or elitist. High-stake things are just anxiety-producing. And you have to figure,
00:37:02.080 | is this worth the anxiety? Is this one not? Things can fall apart. It's hard to do things at a high
00:37:07.280 | level. So there's negatives that come with it. I mean, I constantly have to make these decisions.
00:37:10.880 | There's television things I've turned down, for example, that may be in isolation. You say,
00:37:16.960 | well, that's cool. I know that show. That would be really cool to go on. And it's like,
00:37:20.080 | I can't do all of these things. And if I did, it's going to overwhelm me with time
00:37:24.400 | constraints and anxiety. I have to be careful about how I make my path. So it's tricky.
00:37:29.040 | So I think it's a really good question, Ben. If you're going the route of, let me just be
00:37:34.400 | exceptional, you can build depth around that. And there are some real positives you're going to get,
00:37:39.200 | but there's also negatives. And I say that because I think that then when you get the scale between
00:37:43.600 | the quiet remarkability approach versus the exceptional, notable, famous remarkability
00:37:51.520 | approach, when you put the cons with the pros on this ladder, the scales become about balanced.
00:37:57.440 | And so you really, if you're going the quiet remarkability approach, a life that,
00:38:01.440 | you know, it's Lorelei Gilmore and the Gilmore Girls, not famous outside of Stars Hollow,
00:38:09.680 | not like exceptional at anything, but in that world, you know, is really well known and has
00:38:15.680 | built this really interesting life. And people really know her and appreciate her. And she's
00:38:19.680 | involved in people's lives and having a positive impact on that town. But she's not famous outside
00:38:24.880 | of that small little town. That's quiet remarkability. Not so bad of a path. And again,
00:38:30.800 | I don't want to say the other path, the sort of exceptional remarkability is bad. I'm just saying
00:38:33.920 | when you have the pros and the cons, it's no longer like, well, this is clearly better if you
00:38:37.360 | have the skill, you know, you have the whatever, I can shoot a really good jump shot. I could go
00:38:40.960 | that way. If you have the possibility to go that way, it's not bad, but it's also not a no brainer.
00:38:46.640 | And if you don't see an obvious way to get to the exceptional remarkability,
00:38:50.640 | you shouldn't feel bad about it. Because again, these things balance out.
00:38:53.200 | Steph Curry versus Lorelei Gilmore, that old famous comparison, like there's,
00:38:58.320 | I don't know, there's pluses and minuses to both. So neither should be dismissive of the other.
00:39:05.040 | That's a weird comparison. I might be the first person in history to make that particular
00:39:10.400 | comparison. Probably. I mean, I can't imagine it's come up in the locker room, you know,
00:39:17.600 | the NBA finals stuff, man, this is your, it's your Lorelei moment, buddy.
00:39:21.440 | This is it. You got to just get out there. I want you to man up and Lorelei this. All right. I mean,
00:39:27.120 | you gotta, uh, your dribbling should be like the fast speech cadence of Lorelei Gilmore,
00:39:33.440 | confusing people with, as you move back and forth verbally through various things.
00:39:37.840 | And this is the Kirk of your town, but you need to get the ball to Luke.
00:39:42.640 | And it's probably some basketball strategy metaphor. The end of that speech would be like,
00:39:48.080 | hold on one second. Someone's handing me a piece of paper and oh yeah, I'm fired.
00:39:50.800 | And then the coach just walks out. That's how that story ends. Like, yeah, that makes sense.
00:39:55.760 | And I was fired. All right. Nonsense. Stop the nonsense. Let's move on. What do we got next?
00:40:00.320 | All right. Great. Next question is from Samantha. How important are having friends in life?
00:40:04.800 | If it is important, how would you recommend an introvert go about finding some? Also,
00:40:09.680 | can you provide some advice on moving on from certain friendships that could be holding someone
00:40:14.240 | back? So this is a good compliment to Tanya's questions about being more social and confident
00:40:20.800 | friends. As I mentioned, there are critically important. And for a friendship to be real,
00:40:26.080 | it has to involve non-trivial sacrifice of time and attention. Otherwise your brain doesn't treat
00:40:30.480 | it as real. So just texting someone all the time doesn't count. Commenting on their social media
00:40:36.320 | doesn't count. Being active in a WhatsApp channel with them also does not count as far as your brain
00:40:42.400 | is concerned. They're not a friend until you're going places and doing things with them, doing
00:40:46.400 | things you might not otherwise want to do, but you're doing it because they're your friend.
00:40:49.440 | That's when your brain begins to take the relationship seriously. So this should be a
00:40:55.120 | regular part of your weekly planning, especially if you're trying to build up friendships as
00:40:59.520 | something that's more important than a regular part of your weekly planning should be. What am
00:41:03.040 | I doing this week to strengthen or develop friendships? You have to be pretty systematic
00:41:06.880 | about it, especially if you're sort of getting back in the saddle, so to speak.
00:41:11.680 | So fortunately, I can point you towards a resource here. There was a segment we did a few episodes
00:41:18.480 | back on this notion of the friendship recession, this idea that Americans in particular have less
00:41:25.040 | friends than ever before. It's a segment where I had my friend Jamie Kilstein come on and talk about
00:41:31.040 | what he went through to gain a new group of friends in his 40s as a male, where this is
00:41:36.800 | kind of difficult. So we got into the weeds in that episode about specific things you can do
00:41:41.280 | to actually find and cultivate friends. So I won't repeat that all, but I will say find that segment
00:41:46.800 | on the friendship recession. That was a final segment on a relatively recent episode. Maybe
00:41:52.400 | Jesse knows whenever Jamie's on, I begin just furiously messing up their names.
00:42:00.160 | And as Jesse has pointed out, maybe it's because Joe Rogan's podcast producer is named Jamie. So
00:42:06.880 | it's just in the collective conscious of like, Jamie is what you call the other person on a
00:42:11.440 | microphone when you're podcasting. So it doesn't take much to tip me into that. He'll look that up.
00:42:16.320 | But anyways, I think- It was 266.
00:42:18.320 | 266. Take control of your technology habits.
00:42:21.600 | Right. Episode 266, deeplife.com/listen. You'll find that and then the video for it's there as
00:42:27.520 | well. So look at that discussion with Jamie, because I think this is critically important,
00:42:31.360 | especially if you do not have a robust group of friends. Think about that like getting in shape.
00:42:35.520 | It's going to require a lot of work on a regular basis with some tried and true tactics, but it is
00:42:40.160 | absolutely worth doing. Friction can be a real problem. Notetaking, I think, is one of those
00:42:47.760 | cases. When information is coming at you, your time to act, your energy to think,
00:42:56.000 | both are probably pretty limited. So if I have a relatively complicated system, I have to boot up
00:43:02.240 | and start using markup code to take this article I just randomly came across and enter into my
00:43:08.320 | system and cross-reference it with the right Zettelkasten categorization system. So it will
00:43:14.000 | semantically link to other related articles. I'm probably just going to say, forget about it.
00:43:18.720 | That friction stops me from taking action. Or if I have friction over something I need to do,
00:43:24.080 | like reading a book, I have an elaborate way of how I'm going to copy every note from this book
00:43:28.000 | into my system, I might not just read that book because I only have so much energy for reading,
00:43:33.600 | and I might be taxing every last bit of energy I have just to tackle this book.
00:43:37.280 | You make that 20% harder, I might not just read the book. Or I'll read it and say,
00:43:43.040 | forget it. I'm not taking notes on everything, and that information then is lost.
00:43:46.960 | So when it comes to actually capturing information from all the stuff that's out there,
00:43:52.800 | unlike say writing a long New Yorker piece, friction is a problem. So you want your note-taking
00:43:59.920 | systems to lower that friction so that you can actually capture effectively as much of
00:44:04.640 | the important information as is possible. Another problem with elaborate systems is that they often
00:44:12.080 | aim to take everything out of your brain. It should be in this external system. The system
00:44:19.440 | will organize the information. You don't have to remember anything. When you want to know about
00:44:24.480 | something, you can dive down in the system and it will unearth for you everything you've encountered
00:44:30.320 | that's relevant to it. I actually think when it comes to the big things in your life, be it big
00:44:35.200 | work projects or be it things about just the way you live, keeping some of this in your brain is
00:44:42.320 | not a bad thing. Because what your brain is doing with this information is updating its internal
00:44:47.920 | schemas that it used to make sense of the world. And if information is useful, if it's in your brain,
00:44:54.160 | it's going to get integrated into these systems. And then when you apply these systems to try to
00:44:58.000 | make decisions, you'll remember this information or at least some of it, "Okay, this is relevant
00:45:02.240 | to me. This idea sticks." In other words, when it comes to big ideas and important information,
00:45:06.720 | you want your brain to be part of the curation filtering system. You remember, "Yeah, this book,
00:45:14.720 | it stuck with me. It had these examples I remember were really important for X." Now,
00:45:19.760 | you might have to still go to your notes to see what those examples are.
00:45:22.160 | But the fact that your brain remembered that book was important, that I think is crucial.
00:45:29.280 | We don't want to outsource everything out of our brain. We want it to be involved in filtering and
00:45:33.840 | prioritizing, curating, and trying to make sense of information in the background. Simple systems
00:45:39.760 | allow that because they're not trying to capture everything relevant to the information you come
00:45:45.680 | across. All right, so let's actually talk about my systems. I'm going to break this up into three
00:45:51.520 | sections. The first, let's deal with books. I read a lot of books. Hopefully, you read a fair
00:45:57.200 | amount of books as well. There is information in books that's relevant to your work. There's
00:46:01.760 | information in books that's relevant to your life. The last episode, we had a big, long thing about
00:46:08.000 | how to actually encounter self-help information of various levels of quality that's important.
00:46:11.920 | How do you take notes on books? Well, I'm going to show you my method. I'm going to draw here.
00:46:18.400 | Jesse will bring up, for those who are watching, if you're listening, go to thedeeplife.com/listen
00:46:24.080 | episode 287. The video will be at the bottom. I'm going to draw a picture of a book page here,
00:46:30.880 | Jesse, so I can show you. We'll pretend like this is a real book page.
00:46:35.040 | Then, I'll take some sample notes on it. I'm putting some words on here.
00:46:38.240 | The method I use for taking notes on books, I call it the corner marking method.
00:46:44.480 | It is as low friction as you can possibly make note-taking on books, while still actually being
00:46:51.200 | useful. Here's what I do. If there's something on this page, like the page you see here,
00:46:54.880 | that is interesting to me or I want to remember, first thing I do is I mark the corner like this.
00:47:01.280 | Just mark a line across the corner. Now, I know if I'm flipping through this book,
00:47:06.160 | that that page has something important on it. What do I then do with the information on this page
00:47:12.480 | that is actually, I want to remember? Simple marks in the margins. I might, for example,
00:47:22.240 | put a little box. Let's see here. I might put a little bit of a box around text that's important,
00:47:30.080 | or I might just put a little bit of a check mark next to a line, or I might put a curly brace next
00:47:34.720 | to a paragraph that I want to remember. Just small marks in the margins to indicate what lines
00:47:40.480 | are important. Occasionally, I might scribble a little note to myself as well, if there's a
00:47:45.200 | particular thing that reminds me of. That's it. This barely slows you down as you're going through
00:47:50.800 | a book. Mark, mark, mark. You'll see me. I'll have a pencil in my teeth as I'm reading. I'll
00:47:55.200 | pull it out. Mark, mark, mark. That's all it is. So it barely slows you down. But here's the
00:48:01.360 | reality of the corner marking method. If you go back to that book way later, so it's out of your
00:48:07.360 | working memory. It's a year later. It's five years later. I've done this before. And you start going
00:48:11.680 | through that book, looking for the pages that are marked in the corner, and then reading the
00:48:15.600 | sentences or paragraphs that have been marked in the margins, you will, in about five minutes,
00:48:21.520 | reconstitute all the important ideas from that book. So it's a very effective way of capturing
00:48:28.160 | that information. It's not in some fancy system where it'll automatically show you all the quotes,
00:48:32.720 | but you get to them almost as fast. It takes a little bit longer to go through the book,
00:48:36.800 | but the information is there. So the low friction here is important because it doesn't
00:48:42.320 | prevent you from reading. In other words, if the effort required to read, you're just there
00:48:47.040 | in terms of what you have available, corner marking note-taking barely changes that effort.
00:48:52.000 | So it's not going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. You'll still read that book.
00:48:55.840 | On the other hand, it is still going to be effective for getting the information you need.
00:49:00.240 | The one shortcoming, which I don't think is really a shortcoming at all, is that you still
00:49:04.480 | have to remember, oh, that book, vaguely speaking, had some important ideas about X.
00:49:10.080 | So later when you need some important ideas about X, you do have to remember to go back to that book
00:49:15.360 | and then use the corner marking to very quickly hone in on where those ideas are.
00:49:19.200 | But as I mentioned before, that's not a problem.
00:49:21.040 | I want you to have to try to remember that book is useful. If you don't, it probably wasn't that
00:49:27.760 | useful. And remembering that book is useful allows you to then, and I do this all the time,
00:49:33.040 | even without remembering the specific quotes, use the gist of what I learned from that book
00:49:38.400 | in the schemas of knowledge that I'm constructing and modifying and growing in my head.
00:49:42.880 | So that's not really a bug, but a feature. You do have to remember some about what's in what book,
00:49:47.120 | but you can do that. You'll become a better reader. You'll become better at remembering
00:49:52.320 | and connecting books without having to reference your system. And when you need the specific
00:49:55.840 | examples, this very simple system will get you there very fast. All right, so that's the part one.
00:50:02.240 | Part two, projects. Now, typically what I'm thinking here is professional projects,
00:50:10.000 | but we'll see this can apply to personal projects as well. So think about my life.
00:50:15.120 | I write books. I write articles for popular press, like magazines. I write academic articles.
00:50:22.720 | All right. Where do I keep notes relevant to these things? It's like I have a book that maybe
00:50:29.280 | is due in three years. I'm not going to start writing it for another year.
00:50:34.960 | I come across a podcast interview, and I'm like, ah, this is relevant to that book. Where do I put
00:50:40.400 | this? Where is my magic system that I put it? My approach is to store notes relevant to projects
00:50:47.040 | in the location where you will one day work on that project.
00:50:50.480 | So for example, I write my popular press articles using Scrivener.
00:50:55.920 | So if I have an idea for an article, I'll create a Scrivener document for it. If I come across an
00:51:01.760 | article or a link or even just a brainstorm that is relevant to that article, I will go to the
00:51:08.160 | Scrivener project for that article. I will go to the research folder for that particular article.
00:51:13.360 | I will add it right there. I write my books in Scrivener. So I'll have a Scrivener project for
00:51:21.280 | a book, be it a book that I've already been paid to write or a book I haven't even pitched yet,
00:51:25.360 | but I'm thinking I might one day want to write. And as I have ideas, I go to the research folder
00:51:30.080 | in the Scrivener project for that book. That's where I put it. Then when it finally comes time
00:51:34.720 | to work more seriously on an article or a book, everything potentially relevant that I've come
00:51:39.200 | across is right there, ready for me to use it. Low friction. I'm not gathering it. I'm not
00:51:44.160 | navigating a system and hoping to encounter interesting ideas. I'm not hoping my system
00:51:49.040 | is going to write the book for me. Hey, just give me all the ideas. No, no, no. Ideas are hard.
00:51:53.520 | You have to think really hard about what's going to make sense. The information needs going to be
00:51:57.920 | there when you get there. It's not an elegant system. An article might find its way to a couple
00:52:04.080 | different projects, but it works. Same thing for my academic articles. So as a theoretical computer
00:52:09.760 | scientist, my papers are largely mathematical. So we write them using a rendering engine called
00:52:15.920 | LaTeX, L-A-T-E-X. Any scientist knows about this. I use software for it called Overleaf. It's web
00:52:23.200 | based software for writing these articles because it's collaborative. So my collaborators and I can
00:52:26.640 | write at the same time. I just put relevant notes for potential papers, create an Overleaf project,
00:52:33.200 | start adding sections and subsections. Any ideas or notes I have about that project goes right into
00:52:39.040 | the document. And then when it comes time to write that paper, we start adding sections to the
00:52:43.600 | beginning of this document, pulling stuff from later on. And at some point when the paper takes
00:52:47.760 | shape, we hide all the notes and we're left with just the polished paper. You can do the same thing
00:52:53.040 | for personal projects. Wherever you plan a project, and this could be just like a folder in
00:52:58.400 | Google Drive, that's where you should go and put the inspiration pictures, the ideas, the
00:53:03.760 | recommendations for contractors. Put the notes immediately into the place where you're going to
00:53:08.720 | one day do the work. Big believer in that for making effective use. And bonus, there's always
00:53:15.920 | a bonus to all these approaches. The bonus here is that every time you come across something new
00:53:23.600 | for one of these projects, I come across a link that's relevant for an article. When I go to add
00:53:29.920 | it to the Scrivener research folder for that article, I encounter again and again, everything
00:53:34.880 | else I've already found. And that refreshes a mental picture of that project in my head and
00:53:40.160 | my head can do some more background processing. You know when some of the best ideas for my books
00:53:44.640 | or articles come, like six hours after I add something new to the research folder, because it
00:53:50.400 | loaded all that stuff up again. My mind was like, "Oh yeah, I forgot about that." And then it's
00:53:55.040 | thinking about it and some new cool angle comes up and now you're rock and rolling and you get
00:53:59.280 | a real insight. So I think it's an effective system, but minimal friction. It's the easiest
00:54:03.040 | possible thing. Load, type it in, out. All right, final thing. What about ideas about your life?
00:54:11.360 | Big ideas about living a more meaningful, sustainable, deep life.
00:54:14.320 | I'm inspired by what I saw in this movie. Maybe I should get really into this particular hobby.
00:54:21.760 | Where do you store ideas not connected to work or projects, but to your own life?
00:54:26.400 | Here, I think you should have an awesome notebook. This is where having a notebook
00:54:31.920 | that's actual form is cool and aspirational and just interesting to you is I think important.
00:54:38.480 | This is where having a really cool pen is really important. So all of that fetish that surrounds
00:54:44.400 | note-taking and systems, most of that is not applicable to your work. It can't keep up with
00:54:49.120 | the volume of stuff relevant in your work. You can bullet journal until your fingers bleed.
00:54:53.680 | You're not going to keep up with working on six New Yorker articles and three academic articles
00:55:00.160 | in a book per year. There's probably 400 or 500, maybe 1,000 different notes to get taken for that.
00:55:05.680 | You're not going to keep up in your paper notebook with that. But your life, you can. Ideas about your
00:55:11.360 | life, you can keep up with in a physical notebook. That's where you want the cool one. That's where
00:55:18.000 | you want the form of the notebook to matter. For a long time, I used Moleskins. Long-time
00:55:22.560 | listeners know this. Earlier this year, I switched over to a Remarkable. So it's a digital notebook,
00:55:29.360 | which I really love. Again, it's ridiculous because it's like $500 or something. It's stupid.
00:55:35.680 | Um, but I love it because I have like 15 different digital notebooks in there now,
00:55:39.760 | and I could just go to any of them at any time. And I really love the technology. We
00:55:42.800 | did a whole thing about it on the show. Uh, but whatever the point is, it's cool and aspirational.
00:55:47.360 | To me, it's interesting. That's where you have your cool notebook for keeping track of ideas
00:55:51.920 | about your life. And all you need there is some sort of semi-regular process of reading through
00:55:58.320 | these. The very simplest thing you can do if you're using a physical notebook is when you fill it,
00:56:03.920 | put aside an hour to review it, and to only copy into your new notebook, short summaries of the
00:56:11.280 | most important or lasting ideas from your previous notebook. So there's a very natural triage you can
00:56:17.520 | do that way. See what sticks, uh, and what you lose interest in over time. So that's my approach.
00:56:26.080 | It is low friction. It is simple. Very little custom software is required. One cool notebook
00:56:33.200 | and whatever else you're already using for your work, but because you're adding very little
00:56:37.760 | friction, you can keep up and the stuff that matters will get captured and put to the place
00:56:42.720 | where it matters. And then of course you get all the bonuses. So again, for books, the bonus is
00:56:47.040 | having to remember which book had, what is a feature, not a bug. It allows you to continue
00:56:53.200 | to work with and build on these ideas after you first encounter them. When it comes to your
00:56:57.200 | projects, having your notes where you want to actually do the work is not just efficient,
00:57:01.760 | but it allows you to re-encounter the gestalt of what you know about that project again and again,
00:57:07.280 | as you grow those notes, allowing your mind to work more with it. And cool notebooks put you
00:57:13.280 | into that mindset of a cultivator or crafter of your own life. So we're sort of hacking the brain
00:57:19.600 | here. We want the brain to be involved in the process of dealing with information, but in ways
00:57:24.960 | that doesn't overload it or overtax it. So that's my system. It's not as exciting as other systems.
00:57:32.160 | Some other systems, people actually make this clear disclaimer, like building systems and that's
00:57:38.800 | fine. I mean, if that's like your hobby, I think that's fine. If you like building the complicated
00:57:43.440 | system because you get enjoyment in the system, you might actually take more notes because you
00:57:47.760 | really love the use this cool system you built. It's like when you build a pool and you customize
00:57:53.440 | it, you really want to have a lot of pool parties, right? So I get that. But if that doesn't appeal
00:57:58.240 | to you, don't worry. You do not need a super complicated system, but you do need something.
00:58:03.120 | So this is my suggestion. At least that's one place to start. It doesn't really give us Jesse,
00:58:07.520 | like a complicated software package we can sell. That's the only problem.
00:58:10.320 | - On our new Shopify store. - Yeah. Our new Shopify store
00:58:13.040 | is going to have like a Moleskine, a Uniball micro pin for marking like the corners of book pages
00:58:19.360 | and like a Scrivener subscription. I don't know. It's not as fun. I, you know, I would,
00:58:27.840 | I could rabbit hole on that stuff pretty hard if I wanted to. Like note-taking systems, you know,
00:58:32.160 | I could get going down there. Hey, if you liked this video, I think you'll really like this one
00:58:37.840 | as well. Check it out.