The Value In Fighting Conventional Wisdom | Deep Questions With Cal Newport
Chapters
0:0 Cal's intro0:36 Cal's contrarian views
1:52 People are overwhelmed
00:00:00.000 | All right, so this will be question number eight.
00:00:03.800 | Do a little mental math here.
00:00:06.440 | Question number eight comes from Matt.
00:00:08.340 | Matt says, "It seems to me that a lot of your views
00:00:12.000 | "that you're most famous for are contrarian.
00:00:14.480 | "This seems to have served you pretty well.
00:00:17.060 | "Do you often reflexively adopt these contrarian views?
00:00:20.340 | "If so, does it ever end up backfiring?
00:00:23.240 | "And if you are selective in adopting
00:00:24.680 | "certain contrarian views, what factors do you weigh
00:00:26.840 | "when deciding to go against a grain?"
00:00:29.340 | Well, two points, Matt.
00:00:30.480 | One, not all of my views are contrarian.
00:00:35.480 | I would say there's really three large categories,
00:00:38.800 | the type of stuff I write about.
00:00:39.880 | So I do have some well-known contrarian views.
00:00:42.040 | In particular, my pushback against the idea
00:00:44.360 | that you should follow your passion
00:00:45.800 | and my pushback against using social media.
00:00:48.240 | Those, at least in the moments in which I articulated those,
00:00:51.520 | were quite contrarian, not so much anymore.
00:00:53.880 | A lot of my other popular ideas, however,
00:00:56.600 | I would put in a different category.
00:00:58.680 | I would say it is structuring and articulating
00:01:01.480 | clearly things people already believe.
00:01:03.420 | They just need someone to help them
00:01:06.920 | organize their pre-existing feeling.
00:01:10.180 | So with contrarian ideas, you're often trying
00:01:12.120 | to convince someone to change their mind about something.
00:01:16.160 | You think following your passion is the right thing to do.
00:01:19.080 | I wanna convince you of something different.
00:01:20.800 | Here's a secret.
00:01:22.280 | It's hard to have a really successful nonfiction book
00:01:25.080 | convincing people to change their mind.
00:01:27.120 | What's much more effective is giving structure and voice
00:01:31.120 | to something they already believe.
00:01:32.780 | So a lot of my popular ideas fall under that category.
00:01:37.040 | "Deep Work" is an example.
00:01:39.120 | It's not contrarian.
00:01:41.640 | That book didn't do well because people picked it up
00:01:43.400 | and said, "No way!
00:01:45.200 | What do you mean 'Deep Work'?
00:01:46.960 | I want more email.
00:01:47.840 | What are you talking about?"
00:01:48.680 | And then they read it and they were convinced.
00:01:49.880 | No, that's not how that book was successful.
00:01:51.280 | People were overwhelmed.
00:01:53.080 | They knew something was wrong
00:01:54.500 | with the way work was unfolding.
00:01:56.600 | And this gave voice to it.
00:01:57.760 | That's why that book was successful.
00:01:59.640 | Slow productivity is like that.
00:02:02.080 | People feel this discomfort with burnout.
00:02:04.760 | They feel the ambiguity and lack of specification
00:02:07.360 | around our notions of what we even mean to be productive.
00:02:10.120 | And when they hear slow productivity, just that term,
00:02:12.960 | when they hear the three principles,
00:02:14.480 | do fewer things, working at a natural pace,
00:02:17.980 | obsessing over quality, it sounds right from moment one.
00:02:22.580 | Structure articulating things people already believe.
00:02:25.600 | Same with a lot of my work on the deep life.
00:02:28.280 | I'm convincing people that deep life is worthwhile.
00:02:32.180 | They know that.
00:02:33.480 | Trying to give some structure
00:02:34.360 | to that already existing impulse.
00:02:36.160 | And then the final category of stuff I write about,
00:02:39.080 | it's like a lot of my New Yorker writing.
00:02:40.280 | It's more just observing and explaining trends.
00:02:42.360 | It's an expository.
00:02:43.480 | So I would say most of my stuff actually is not contrarian.
00:02:47.760 | I do like contrarian ideas though, Matt,
00:02:49.460 | and I think it comes from my appreciation
00:02:51.100 | of the Socratic dialectic.
00:02:53.560 | A lot of people think this, you think that.
00:02:56.200 | Two opposing views collide.
00:02:57.920 | Truth aburges.
00:03:00.360 | Big believer on hitting one view against another,
00:03:03.620 | taking something you believe in
00:03:04.760 | and getting the best articulation
00:03:05.960 | to get someone to believe something different.
00:03:07.200 | In that collision of opposition,
00:03:09.120 | the roots of deeper understanding are grown.
00:03:12.140 | So when I do go towards the contrarian,
00:03:14.360 | it's probably motivated by the dialectic.
00:03:17.260 | (upbeat music)
00:03:19.840 | (upbeat music)