How To Escape Mediocrity & Get Ahead Of 99% Of People - Change Your Life In 3 Months

00:00:00.000 | So today I want to talk about one of the most important skills you can have as a human.

00:00:07.940 | Something that I think most of the most interesting, successful, and impactful people I know are

00:00:14.480 | very good at, and I'm talking about thinking.

00:00:18.100 | Now this may sound stupid at first because we all think all the time, our minds are worrying

00:00:22.780 | all the time, if anything our problem is getting away from our own thoughts, but when I say

00:00:26.760 | think here I mean something very specific, I mean giving sustained attention to potentially

00:00:34.360 | complicated or ambiguous information with the ultimate goal of building a new conceptual

00:00:38.880 | structure that has value to yourself or to the world.

00:00:43.980 | This is what I mean by thinking.

00:00:47.140 | Now here's the thing, most people are very bad at this brand of serious thinking.

00:00:52.520 | The way most people go through their lives is as follows, first they outsource any sort

00:00:56.940 | of normative or ethical thinking to online tribal vibes and approval.

00:01:04.640 | I don't know, what does my team think?

00:01:07.680 | Do they like this?

00:01:08.680 | They don't like this?

00:01:09.680 | What's going to get me not yelled at?

00:01:10.800 | What's going to get me approved?

00:01:12.520 | That's about as far as I want to go trying to actually build up some sort of framework

00:01:15.880 | for understanding what I stand for, what's good and what's bad.

00:01:19.360 | Most people prioritize a sort of high energy emotion in the moment over the subtler satisfactions

00:01:26.600 | of real understanding and appreciation.

00:01:28.800 | They want to just feel something, and often their phone can give them that something quite

00:01:34.520 | easily.

00:01:35.720 | They don't want to do the work for actually deeply engaging with something beautiful.

00:01:40.840 | Most people also gravitate when it comes towards the realm of accomplishment towards checklist

00:01:46.880 | productivity.

00:01:49.120 | Just give me a list of things I can follow where the key here is that the information

00:01:55.040 | is scarce, and I have a special list of things to do, and then I'll be in great shape, or

00:01:58.640 | then my web business will take off, or then I'll make six figures per month.

00:02:02.480 | Just give me a checklist.

00:02:03.480 | I want secret information that I found online as opposed to seeking out to produce things

00:02:08.560 | that are unambiguously valuable.

00:02:11.360 | Serious thinkers live differently.

00:02:13.240 | They have a deep and evolving understanding of the world, what's good, what's bad, and

00:02:16.720 | what it means to live a good life.

00:02:19.200 | They appreciate the beautiful.

00:02:21.560 | They appreciate the quality, and they find inspiration in it.

00:02:24.320 | Their output is often slower, but when it does come out, it's more impact, and it engenders

00:02:31.120 | more respect.

00:02:33.840 | So if you're interested in the deep life, serious thinking needs to be a goal that you

00:02:38.720 | are pursuing.

00:02:39.720 | So here's what I want to do today is help you become a more serious thinker, and I want

00:02:43.160 | to do that in a practical way.

00:02:45.520 | I have five different practices.

00:02:48.640 | Each of these are concrete that I want to run through.

00:02:51.240 | These are all things you can start doing right away in your own life that if you stick with

00:02:55.360 | them, you will find after a month, your cognitive abilities are much better than they were before.

00:03:01.920 | After six months, the experience of your day to day life is going to be notably different

00:03:07.840 | and richer, and after a year or so, you're going to find yourself actually able to produce

00:03:14.560 | ideas for yourself and the world that have real value.

00:03:17.000 | Really you're going to unlock major options.

00:03:20.320 | So it's worth becoming a serious thinker.

00:03:22.080 | Let's go through five practices for how to do it.

00:03:23.560 | I'm going to illustrate, for those of you who are watching instead of just listening,

00:03:28.560 | by popular demand, I will illustrate what we're doing here.

00:03:32.400 | So on the screen, I'm going to put in the center my world famous picture of a brain.

00:03:38.440 | So what we got here is a cerebellum, and we got some wrinkles and folds in the brain.

00:03:44.400 | So I have a brain in the center, and I'm going to illustrate around this.

00:03:47.920 | I'll put one expertly drawn icon per practice we are going to discuss.

00:03:55.240 | All right, so the first practice that I want to discuss is to improve the quality and decrease

00:04:04.000 | the quantity of information that you consume.

00:04:10.920 | So to illustrate this with an icon, I'm going to expertly draw here, the Twitter T. I know

00:04:18.080 | they've switched to X, but I sort of am boycotting that.

00:04:20.480 | So I'm drawing a T, and I'll put in a circle with a line through it.

00:04:25.960 | I'm going to indicate consuming better quality and less quantity of information.

00:04:30.560 | So what does this mean?

00:04:31.560 | I'm talking particularly here about news or other information you use to learn more things

00:04:35.760 | about the world.

00:04:37.920 | Stop using social media algorithms to curate your news flow.

00:04:41.880 | Social media algorithms are bad curators.

00:04:44.160 | Their interest is not making you as informed as possible.

00:04:46.440 | Their interest is making you as engaged as possible to make you as engaged as possible.

00:04:50.600 | They are going to push you to places that are not emotionally healthy.

00:04:54.200 | It's also not going to lead you to the most nuanced understanding of issues.

00:04:58.280 | I want you instead to focus on a multi-scale news and information consumption.

00:05:06.980 | So I want your news and information consumption to be divided over three scales, daily, monthly,

00:05:12.400 | and seasonal.

00:05:13.400 | And here's what I mean by that.

00:05:14.480 | Daily have a very small number, probably just one sources of quality, non-algorithmically

00:05:22.660 | curated news and information.

00:05:25.600 | This could be one of the growing number of daily news roundup newsletters.

00:05:31.000 | I like, for example, if you're a subscriber to the New York Times, I think David Leonhardt's

00:05:36.120 | Daily News Summary is a fantastic one.

00:05:39.320 | I'm saying this mainly because they featured my profile from the New York Times Magazine

00:05:43.520 | from last year.

00:05:44.520 | They re-featured it recently in that newsletter, so we know that's expertly curated.

00:05:48.320 | It could be a daily news roundup podcast.

00:05:51.380 | It could be a physical newspaper that you pick up or have delivered.

00:05:54.800 | At the monthly scale, you spend the time to go through a collection of, let's say, two

00:06:01.160 | to six in-depth long-form magazine articles.

00:06:05.800 | So now, this is still relatively current, but not day-to-day current.

00:06:10.560 | This is now information where enough time has passed for a professional journalist or

00:06:15.640 | writer to actually spend some time to really digest information about what's going on in

00:06:20.680 | the world and produce and have edited a long-form piece.

00:06:24.560 | Now we're at a lag of a month or so from what's actually going on.

00:06:27.900 | This is where, for example, you can pull out a few selected articles from my own journalistic

00:06:32.000 | home, which is the New Yorker, maybe you pull out some long-form articles from the Atlantic

00:06:36.520 | or Foreign Affairs or the National Review or the Wall Street Journal's Sunday issue,

00:06:41.160 | whatever it is that you particularly follow.

00:06:43.960 | It could be print, could be not print, tablet magazine.

00:06:47.440 | I'm just thinking of different things I've pulled from before, and you're like, "Here's

00:06:51.000 | my six articles I've gathered throughout the month, 3,000, 5,000 word beast.

00:06:55.720 | I'm going to go to a coffee shop somewhere.

00:06:57.880 | I've got these printed out," and let's just engage at this slower scale, deeper understanding,

00:07:03.880 | slower scale.

00:07:05.480 | Now we jump up to the seasonal scale, and this is books.

00:07:09.920 | When there's something going on in the world you care about, you should get a book written

00:07:16.400 | by an expert, someone who has spent years working on this artifact based on many more

00:07:21.440 | years of actually engaging with this topic, and you get this beautiful artifact here that

00:07:25.960 | you can hold and consume in about a week or two that is going to give you as deep or nuanced

00:07:31.080 | as an understanding of a topic as you're ever likely to get outside of actually studying

00:07:35.460 | that topic professionally yourself.

00:07:37.720 | You should at the seasonal scale have a book that you're reading on whatever thing is going

00:07:42.520 | on in the world that is most important to you.

00:07:46.760 | Let's take this multi-scale information consumption plan out for a spin with a particular topic.

00:07:54.860 | Let's compare it to what most people would normally do.

00:07:57.060 | Let's talk about fears about AI.

00:07:59.360 | Now, what you could do, which is what most people do, is let me read a lot of tweets

00:08:05.360 | and histrionic YouTube videos and short articles on the online news sites.

00:08:10.920 | They're all like, "Oh my God, Google Gemini is doing this, ChatGPT just did that, Sam

00:08:16.420 | Altman just said this," and there's this sort of just frenzied sense of, "Oh, this is very

00:08:21.040 | uneasy and I don't know what's going on, and I'm kind of stressed all the time."

00:08:24.440 | What would it look like to engage this topic with a multi-scale information consumption

00:08:27.840 | approach?

00:08:28.840 | Well, you would be getting daily information.

00:08:31.400 | When something important happened, it would be covered in whatever your high-quality non-algorithmically

00:08:35.720 | curated source of news would be.

00:08:38.280 | When Sam Altman, for example, got fired and then rehired, David Leonhardt's newsletter

00:08:42.880 | covered that, so you would get the main points.

00:08:46.120 | You're subscribed to Axios's daily news roundup, you would get the main points.

00:08:50.280 | Then on the seasonal scale, you could actually say, "Let me sit down with, for example, the

00:08:53.760 | New Yorker's recent AI issue, and read some of these longer form pieces.

00:08:58.840 | Let me sit down and listen to, you know, Ezra Klein had a fantastic AI podcast recently

00:09:04.760 | with Kevin Roos and Casey Newhoff, I think, and let's just spend an hour and 20 minutes

00:09:11.400 | just sort of walking through what we know, maybe go back and finally read my New Yorker

00:09:14.620 | piece on the guts of how ChatGPT actually works."

00:09:18.760 | This is not so frenzied, this is more digested information, like, "Okay, I'm getting some

00:09:23.120 | deeper sense of what's going on."

00:09:25.240 | On the scale of a season, you say, "I'm going to read a book about artificial intelligence,

00:09:32.360 | maybe about the alignment problem or how people are thinking about its role in society," and

00:09:36.200 | now get like a really measured, deeper understanding of it.

00:09:40.320 | That is how multiscale information consumption works.

00:09:43.040 | Serious thinkers are going to consume information that way, they have no interest for algorithmically

00:09:48.700 | curated social media information.

00:09:51.560 | The same thing, though, applies, I'm going to say this, in improvement of quality, decreasing

00:09:56.400 | a quantity, we can think of this also applying to other types of information as well.

00:10:02.720 | Think about shows or movies you watch on streaming services.

00:10:05.880 | To increase the quality of that, simple heuristic, one-to-one ratio, fun smart.

00:10:12.200 | "Hey, quick interruption.

00:10:14.160 | If you want my free guide with my seven best ideas on how to cultivate the deep life, go

00:10:21.360 | to calnewport.com/ideas or click the link right below in the description."

00:10:27.440 | This is a great way to take action on the type of things we talk about here on this

00:10:32.400 | show.

00:10:33.400 | All right, let's get back to it.

00:10:34.960 | If I watch a movie that is just pure fun, I want to watch something that's going to

00:10:39.960 | challenge me, either artistically, this is a well-respected movie, or informationally,

00:10:46.000 | it's a documentary on something that's complicated, but I want to know about it.

00:10:50.800 | One-to-one ratio, so that the quality of what you're engaging in the streaming media gets

00:10:54.760 | better.

00:10:55.760 | You can do the same thing with podcasts.

00:10:56.760 | Here's a fun podcast, one-to-one ratio with something that I'm learning from, et cetera.

00:11:01.120 | All right, practice number two, increase your comfort with boredom.

00:11:09.520 | Let's draw a picture for this one as well.

00:11:11.480 | What I'm going to draw here is a rock.

00:11:14.280 | All right, there we go.

00:11:18.680 | Standing on this rock, we see someone contemplating.

00:11:24.960 | Jesse appreciates my artwork.

00:11:26.480 | Increase comfort with boredom.

00:11:28.600 | What is the idea here before we get even more specific about the practices?

00:11:33.680 | If your brain is used to this idea that it is never bored, that when it lacks novel stimuli,

00:11:39.720 | you will always feed it a shiny digital treat in the form typically of your phone or an

00:11:44.080 | iPad or a browser tab, that's going to give you something emotionally salient in the moment.

00:11:50.040 | It can't tolerate serious thinking because serious thinking requires you to keep your

00:11:54.480 | attention sustained, this inner eye of your attention sustained on a single abstract topic.

00:12:00.940 | That's boring because there's not a lot of novel stimuli.

00:12:04.340 | Your brain has to be comfort with boredom.

00:12:07.000 | By increasing your comfort with boredom, you're just teaching your brain, it's not that you're

00:12:10.440 | bored all the time.

00:12:11.680 | It's also not trying to put too much of a positive value on boredom.

00:12:15.040 | It's just teaching your brain sometimes we're bored and sometimes we're not, and I'm comfortable

00:12:19.880 | with that state of boredom.

00:12:23.800 | How can you do this?

00:12:25.520 | Two things I'm going to suggest.

00:12:27.040 | One, actually have every day a particular outing or chore or task you do.

00:12:32.360 | It can be short, but a particular thing you do without your phone.

00:12:35.520 | Go to the drugstore, go put in your laundry.

00:12:38.760 | It doesn't have to be long, taking out the garbage and do it with nothing in your ear.

00:12:43.160 | You're like, "Okay, I'm just doing this activity.

00:12:45.080 | There's no novel stimuli here.

00:12:46.240 | I'm just having to be alone with my own thoughts."

00:12:49.720 | A lot of people who take this advice will also typically add a longer outing on the

00:12:54.640 | weekends, hour plus, no phone.

00:12:58.040 | You can ramp that up over the weekend.

00:13:01.240 | The other really important thing you can do is the phone foyer method.

00:13:07.560 | The idea here is when you're at your home or your apartment or wherever you live, you

00:13:10.480 | keep your phone plugged in in one place.

00:13:12.320 | If you have a house with a foyer, it's in the foyer, or it's in the kitchen, if you

00:13:15.640 | have an apartment, whatever, but it stays plugged in when you're at home in one place.

00:13:19.680 | If you need to look something up, you go to where it's plugged in and you look it up there.

00:13:23.240 | If you need to receive or text with someone, you go where the phone is plugged in and you

00:13:27.280 | receive and do text there, same with phone calls.

00:13:30.280 | You have to go to where the phone is.

00:13:31.680 | It is not where you are.

00:13:32.680 | Now, this is going to be annoying at first, but what you're doing here is severing this

00:13:37.640 | permanent accessibility of the distraction.

00:13:40.200 | So now when you're watching something or doing something in your own house or in your own

00:13:43.640 | apartment, you can't pull out the phone.

00:13:46.520 | It's somewhere else.

00:13:47.560 | You still have the benefits of I need to look this thing up, but you have to walk 10 feet

00:13:50.800 | to go do it.

00:13:52.280 | You're going to get more mini moments of boredom during your evenings and mornings at home.

00:13:58.640 | Very important if you want to prepare your brain to be a serious thinker.

00:14:04.400 | All right.

00:14:06.760 | Third thing I want to suggest here, third practice for becoming a more serious thinker.

00:14:12.440 | Cultivate your ability to pay attention.

00:14:17.520 | So illustrate this here.

00:14:20.920 | You won't know at first what this means.

00:14:23.320 | So provocatively what I'm drawing here is stopwatch.

00:14:30.000 | Is there something on the top, Jesse?

00:14:31.000 | I don't know.

00:14:32.000 | Let's do this.

00:14:33.000 | Perfect rendition of a stopwatch.

00:14:34.000 | Why am I drawing a stopwatch?

00:14:36.160 | Because one of the first things I'm going to recommend for cultivating your ability to

00:14:39.200 | pay attention is interval training.

00:14:43.120 | So actually increasing the timed intervals at which you're comfortable giving sustained

00:14:49.480 | attention to a single target.

00:14:52.060 | These intervals should be intense.

00:14:54.320 | You only increase the time of the intervals as you get comfortable with the current duration,

00:14:59.680 | right?

00:15:00.680 | So what we're trying to do here is get your mind comfortable with sustaining attention.

00:15:04.960 | So the previous practice, getting a comfort for boredom, we think of that as the table

00:15:12.160 | stakes, the foundation.

00:15:13.760 | Your mind has to be okay with not having a lot of stimuli.

00:15:16.880 | This practice now about focusing and practicing the actual activity of focus.

00:15:21.520 | The actual activity of sustaining attention.

00:15:23.800 | So you have to be able to do it and then you have to actually practice what this actually

00:15:27.680 | feels like.

00:15:28.680 | So with interval training, you can do this with multiple activities.

00:15:31.120 | It could be a difficult work or school activity.

00:15:34.160 | It can also be, and I think this is critical, a high quality leisure activity like watching

00:15:40.920 | a movie, which a lot of people, especially young people right now, have a very hard time

00:15:44.840 | doing for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time without actually looking at their phone.

00:15:48.520 | It's gonna be a high quality leisure activity or a difficult work activity to be reading

00:15:53.660 | a book, even anything that requires focus.

00:15:56.960 | You start with an interval that you're comfortable with.

00:15:59.920 | Keep it small at first, maybe even just 10 minutes.

00:16:02.440 | You use a real timer.

00:16:05.280 | Set that timer and might as well do it on your phone, by the way, because you want your

00:16:08.000 | phone right there in timer mode.

00:16:10.040 | So you know for a fact if you use your phone because you've left the timer mode on your

00:16:13.600 | phone.

00:16:15.000 | Set that timer for 10 minutes and work on that work task, watch that movie, or read

00:16:19.720 | that book with as much concentration as you can muster, zero checks of anything screened

00:16:26.880 | outside of your target until that timer goes off.

00:16:30.840 | If you break that concentration and say, "I just have to check Twitter.

00:16:36.640 | I just have to see what's going on in my text messages," you have to start that timer and

00:16:39.680 | start it over.

00:16:40.680 | It doesn't count.

00:16:42.200 | Once you're able to consistently hit the current time duration, you increase it by 10 minutes.

00:16:46.840 | So this is just literally training the thing you want to be better at, sustaining attention

00:16:50.840 | on cognitive tasks, the absence of stimuli, sustaining the attention.

00:16:55.800 | You got to just train your brain what that feels like.

00:17:02.720 | Another thing you can do when it comes to cultivating your ability to pay attention

00:17:06.680 | is more passive, which is care about ritual, care about environment.

00:17:11.640 | Set up this is where I go to read, and it's different than where I just sit and work or

00:17:17.600 | watch TV.

00:17:18.600 | I've set up a very special chair, and I have this light here, and it's by a warm radiator

00:17:24.160 | in the winter.

00:17:25.520 | This is where I go to work on deep work challenges versus just regular work or email.

00:17:30.480 | I have a separate part of my house.

00:17:32.120 | I went up to the attic, and I've renovated an eave there, and that's where I go to do

00:17:35.280 | deep work.

00:17:36.280 | It's different than where I do my email and where the printer and all the filing cabinets

00:17:39.520 | are.

00:17:40.520 | The ritual I do before I watch a hard movie, I do a thing to get my mind into that mode.

00:17:46.560 | I listen to a movie podcast while walking for 20 minutes.

00:17:49.760 | Ritual and environment will help you fall into that deeper attention mode.

00:17:54.400 | Combine that with interval training.

00:17:56.240 | All right, let's go to our ... Let's look at my list here.

00:18:01.800 | Let's go to our fourth idea to help you become a serious thinker, a fourth practice, I should

00:18:09.160 | say, and this is going to be strengthen your working memory.

00:18:15.240 | I'm going to draw here is a person very determinedly walking, just because he loves my art, and

00:18:25.200 | this person is thinking about all sorts of things.

00:18:28.120 | Why am I drawing a person walking?

00:18:31.080 | Because my number one tip for increasing your working memory is productive meditation.

00:18:35.240 | This is an idea that goes all the way back to my 2016 book, Deep Work.

00:18:41.080 | With productive meditation, you take a professional problem, or it could be a complicated personal

00:18:47.400 | problem, but a clear complicated problem.

00:18:49.520 | You go for a walk, and you try to make progress on that problem only using your head.

00:18:54.200 | The walking helps you do this.

00:18:55.480 | If you're just sitting and thinking, it's much more difficult, but the walking actually

00:18:58.640 | quiets some noises in your cognitive circuit, so it's a little bit easier to focus.

00:19:03.120 | Every time you notice your attention wander away from the problem that you're trying to

00:19:06.480 | make progress on in your head, you notice that wandering, and you move your attention

00:19:10.640 | back to the problem.

00:19:13.200 | This forces you to get very comfortable holding lots of information in your head and trying

00:19:17.180 | to manipulate it and generate new information based on it.

00:19:22.040 | You can make these walks longer and longer as you get more comfortable with this exercise.

00:19:26.240 | This is directly increasing your working memory strength.

00:19:29.600 | Your working memory strength is critical to being a serious thinker.

00:19:33.560 | Serious thinking requires you to pull multiple pieces of information and hold onto them in

00:19:37.200 | your mind's eye.

00:19:39.520 | This piece, but also this piece, and this piece is over here, and how do these things

00:19:42.440 | relate, and then how do I connect that to this other thing I thought before?

00:19:46.080 | Working memory is at the core of deep thoughts.

00:19:49.400 | Most people have a bad working memory, however, because we're not used to holding a lot of

00:19:54.360 | stuff in our head in a way that we can actually access them with our mind's eye.

00:19:58.500 | Active meditation is direct and intense practice for exactly this problem.

00:20:03.640 | It gets exactly to the heart of what you're trying to do here.

00:20:06.280 | All right, we've got one more practice to help you become a serious thinker.

00:20:12.600 | I'm going to draw one more picture.

00:20:17.280 | This final practice, I'm going to say it this way, practice being intellectual.

00:20:25.440 | So let's see, let's draw our stick figure person here.

00:20:29.000 | So how do we know this person is intellectual?

00:20:30.480 | That's not going to work.

00:20:31.480 | I'm going to draw him in a turtleneck, but he needs a neck, Jesse, that's the problem.

00:20:37.000 | So let me give him a neck.

00:20:39.400 | My stick figure person, there we go, give him a big neck.

00:20:42.200 | >> You're a French accent.

00:20:44.320 | >> I probably will give him a beret as well.

00:20:45.680 | >> And a pipe.

00:20:46.680 | >> Yeah, so there you go.

00:20:47.680 | Turtleneck, because he's an intellectual.

00:20:52.320 | All right, beret, because he's an intellectual.

00:20:57.520 | And a pipe, there you go.

00:21:02.520 | Practice being an intellectual.

00:21:03.880 | Now I joke by drawing this picture of like sort of a pretentious Frenchman with a pipe

00:21:08.520 | because intellectual is often used in modern conversation as a pejorative term.

00:21:14.320 | But there's also a very specific and positive meaning here in say stance towards the world

00:21:18.900 | of information in which you are seeking out nuance and subtlety, you're also seeking out

00:21:23.460 | integration of information into complex understandings that you already have.

00:21:27.960 | So to be an intellectual is that you are engaging with the world of information, trying to master

00:21:34.320 | it and integrate it.

00:21:37.080 | Now if you do this for a living like I do, if you're a professor, they teach you how

00:21:41.440 | to do this.

00:21:42.440 | I mean, this is what you do for a living, but we don't talk enough about everyone else.

00:21:46.640 | How do you practice this intellectual stance, an intellectual approach to the world of information?

00:21:55.560 | I'm going to give you two very concrete ideas that I think almost anyone can do and it's

00:21:59.800 | going to make you literally seem much smarter.

00:22:03.440 | The first is pairing primary and secondary sources, pairing secondary and primary sources.

00:22:10.400 | Okay, here's what this means.

00:22:12.000 | It's most obvious with books.

00:22:14.280 | So you want to read a great book, let's say.

00:22:16.680 | I want to read the Odyssey.

00:22:18.960 | I want to read Joyce.

00:22:20.560 | I want to read Epsilon Epsilon.

00:22:23.900 | The typical approach that I think professional intellectuals have, which is flawed because

00:22:28.440 | they forgot their own training, is they say, just read it.

00:22:33.320 | Just expose yourself to the ideas and then pretend like it's really changed your life.

00:22:39.080 | But that's not actually the way you learn how to engage information and draw out nuance

00:22:43.480 | and complicate it.

00:22:44.680 | What you should do instead is say, okay, let me now get, before I read this hard book,

00:22:49.000 | a secondary source.

00:22:51.360 | A secondary source means it's a book about the book.

00:22:54.360 | So here is a book about why Faulkner is important or why Epsilon Epsilon is important.

00:23:01.980 | Here is a book about the heroic Greek world in which Homer wrote the Odyssey and why this

00:23:08.840 | is such an important book.

00:23:10.080 | I'm going to read about the book first and then go and read the actual primary source

00:23:15.080 | itself.

00:23:16.840 | You are now approaching this primary artifact with a framework for how to understand it,

00:23:22.920 | what you're looking for, what's important about it.

00:23:25.960 | And this gives your brain practice seeing things at a new level.

00:23:28.780 | You might not understand everything you saw in the secondary source, and you might not

00:23:32.440 | come away saying, I completely understand this book or it's changed my life, but you've

00:23:35.440 | practiced reading multiple layers below the surface.

00:23:39.720 | See, when we just tell people, read the great books, go to the museums, and you'll just

00:23:45.280 | be inspired.

00:23:47.020 | We really are selling them short because that experience of inspiration requires you seeing

00:23:52.680 | multiple layers below the surface, and you got to practice that.

00:23:57.320 | Secondary sources first.

00:23:58.440 | Same thing with museums.

00:23:59.440 | I do not like this idea when parents have of like, all that's important is that we expose

00:24:03.540 | our child to art museums, and then they'll love art.

00:24:06.840 | They're not going to come away from that loving art.

00:24:08.460 | What you're really just teaching them is how to be comfortable in the social context of

00:24:12.600 | an art museum, so they'll seem cultured if they're around other people.

00:24:17.480 | Staring at paintings does not make you a lover of paintings.

00:24:22.440 | Reading about those paintings.

00:24:23.760 | Who was this artist?

00:24:24.760 | Why was this important?

00:24:25.800 | What was happening before when this artist came along?

00:24:29.100 | What was the historical context or turmoil created by this painting?

00:24:33.200 | And then you go and see the artifact.

00:24:34.960 | You have a completely different relationship with it.

00:24:36.800 | So you could teach kids even, let me give you some basic information.

00:24:40.680 | Who was Jackson Pollock?

00:24:42.320 | What was going on with the abstract expressionist?

00:24:45.420 | What were they fighting against?

00:24:46.420 | Why was this so exciting if you lived in Soho in 1942?

00:24:51.520 | What was happening here?

00:24:52.960 | And then you see this artifact, and it's a different experience.

00:24:56.400 | It's like when you go to the Smithsonian and see Judy Garland's ruby slippers, what's exciting

00:25:01.480 | about the ruby slippers is not just they're shiny, but it's like those were the things

00:25:04.920 | in Wizard of Oz.

00:25:05.920 | That was a really important movie, and this famous person wore them.

00:25:09.960 | That context helps.

00:25:12.240 | So you get in the habit of doing this.

00:25:13.520 | You can do it with art.

00:25:14.520 | You can do it with books.

00:25:15.520 | You can do it with movies.

00:25:16.680 | I do this all the time.

00:25:18.840 | Let me read five reviews about this movie.

00:25:23.320 | Not like contemporary, but people looking back.

00:25:25.920 | It's a great movie.

00:25:27.280 | People looking back and writing essays about this movie.

00:25:30.360 | Roger Ebert did a lot of this later on.

00:25:33.160 | He went back and wrote this series of essays about the great movies.

00:25:37.080 | The Guardian over in the UK does a lot of this.

00:25:39.200 | They'll write these retrospective essays about movies that might be decades earlier, and

00:25:44.280 | then you go and watch the movie.

00:25:45.720 | It's a completely different experience.

00:25:48.560 | It could be modern movies.

00:25:49.560 | It could be older movies.

00:25:50.800 | You read about, for example, center focusing, and then you watch George Miller's Mad Max

00:25:57.200 | Fury Road.

00:25:58.200 | It's a completely different experience and appreciation when you just put the movie on

00:26:01.000 | without that type of knowledge about the cinematography.

00:26:05.200 | Secondary sources paired with primary sources.

00:26:07.040 | This is what academics do during their training.

00:26:09.600 | They read and write their own secondary sources based on these primary sources.

00:26:12.640 | So it becomes second nature, seeing levels below the surface on all sorts of things.

00:26:17.200 | But if you're not going to a doctorate program, you're not getting this training, you have

00:26:19.800 | to do it yourself.

00:26:20.800 | It really makes your intellectual world a lot more interesting.

00:26:25.320 | Here's the other thing I want to recommend for practicing being intellectual.

00:26:29.360 | Maintain idea documents.

00:26:32.200 | These are actual documents you maintain, like a Microsoft Word file, just in your own personal

00:26:36.760 | files, or if you're a good handwriter, you could do this in journals, and you have particular

00:26:42.440 | topics that you are recording and updating a summary in your own words of your best understanding

00:26:49.320 | of that topic.

00:26:50.320 | These can be just general, sort of timeless topics.

00:26:55.320 | Like I'm interested in Stoic philosophy, and I have this document I build out and add to

00:26:59.440 | about what Stoic philosophy is, who the thinkers are, what their major thoughts are, your current

00:27:06.040 | summary of how you're thinking about Stoicism being in your own life.

00:27:09.040 | You are, through writing, consolidating information, structuring information.

00:27:14.320 | Now again, this is something that real intellectuals get good at doing naturally, but you have

00:27:18.640 | to practice it.

00:27:19.640 | Writing and updating these summaries is a good way of doing it.

00:27:22.640 | You can do this same thing with current event topics as well.

00:27:28.160 | There's something going on in the world that you care about.

00:27:31.000 | You're like, "I don't know.

00:27:32.000 | This scares me, or interests me, or it just feels important to me."

00:27:36.800 | Create and begin maintaining a document of how you feel about this and why.

00:27:41.560 | This is a fantastic way to free yourself from the emotional ping pong game of just, "Let

00:27:47.840 | me expose myself to social media or algorithmic content.

00:27:50.560 | Let me choose a tribe and make that tribe make me feel good or scared and help me get

00:27:54.160 | mad about the other tribe."

00:27:55.840 | It gets you out of that trap, and it allows you to begin building your own understanding

00:27:59.160 | of things.

00:28:00.160 | You're worried about AI.

00:28:01.160 | Start building out this document.

00:28:02.720 | Here's what's going on.

00:28:03.920 | Here's the main types of AI.

00:28:05.240 | Here's where things are.

00:28:06.240 | Here's a list of thinkers and where they stand, and this thinker is against this thinker.

00:28:09.320 | You organize your thoughts.

00:28:13.040 | You're really worried or upset or conflicted or uneasy about conflict in the Middle East.

00:28:19.480 | Build out a document.

00:28:20.480 | Shut down Twitter.

00:28:21.760 | Build out a document.

00:28:22.760 | Here's what's going on.

00:28:23.760 | This is why I'm trying to articulate my concerns here.

00:28:26.640 | I really worry about this, but this is making me feel bad as well, and this argument doesn't

00:28:31.920 | quite work, and here's why.

00:28:33.160 | You're talking about arguments and where it falls short for you, where it resonates.

00:28:36.880 | Build idea documents as a way of structuring.

00:28:39.000 | To write is to think.

00:28:42.120 | To write about what matters is to help you think about what matters, and your brain gets

00:28:46.880 | used to organizing information in the conceptual structures, so actually, I have to practice

00:28:51.440 | being an intellectual.

00:28:52.440 | All right, so if you do these five things, all of which I've beautifully illustrated

00:28:56.320 | here, you begin improving the quality and decreasing the quantity of the information

00:29:02.800 | that you consume.

00:29:04.680 | You get comfort with boredom.

00:29:08.200 | You do interval training for just maintaining your concentration.

00:29:11.220 | You do particular training to strengthen your working memory, and you actually practice

00:29:14.960 | engaging information as an intellectual.

00:29:18.180 | You can become a much more serious thinker.

00:29:21.000 | It's not something you just choose to do.

00:29:22.660 | It's not something you're just born to do or not.

00:29:25.540 | It's something you cultivate, and hopefully, if you're a listener of the show, you do agree

00:29:31.880 | that this is worth cultivating because I think it is.

00:29:33.880 | You see someone who's doing something cool, they're probably a serious thinker.

00:29:37.000 | You see someone who's done really well for themselves, they probably have the way to

00:29:39.720 | do serious thought, and in this case, maybe it's applied to a business issue, a strategy,

00:29:45.400 | but there's serious thought going on there.

00:29:46.800 | You see someone who just has a really interesting, engaged life, they're probably a serious thinker.

00:29:50.600 | They appreciate this.

00:29:51.680 | They can go to the movies and love the experience.

00:29:54.980 | They have things they're deeply engaged in.

00:29:56.440 | Your brain is your number one portal to the world, and if you train that brain to be a

00:30:00.920 | serious thinker, your experience of the world changes the technicolor.

00:30:06.280 | The font gets smaller.

00:30:08.240 | The clarity gets much increased.

00:30:11.800 | It's just a different sort of improved experience with life, so train it.

00:30:17.980 | Train that thinking, and you will get better at it.

00:30:20.400 | All right, Jesse, we got, I think our questions today are all pretty tightly connected, which

00:30:28.280 | I appreciate.

00:30:29.280 | They're very tightly connected to this exact theme of increased thinking, but before we

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00:33:48.880 | Jesse, when we open up our long awaited online store, Shopify would absolutely be how we're

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00:34:11.820 | We don't yet have our great idea for what exactly we're going to put in our store.

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00:34:21.800 | So my favorite thing will just be stuff we invent.

00:34:25.840 | We invent the sell, but I look forward to it.

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00:34:53.640 | So while I brainstorm ideas for our soon to come eCommerce store, let's get started with

00:34:59.680 | questions.

00:35:00.680 | What do we have today for questions?

00:35:03.520 | Hi, first questions from Mir.

00:35:07.800 | You have said that four hours of deep work is the max per day.

00:35:12.320 | Does reading count towards this limit?

00:35:14.440 | Well, two things here.

00:35:16.320 | The four hour limit is approximate.

00:35:19.660 | Where that actually comes is from studies of professional musicians, looking at how

00:35:24.040 | long they're able to practice in a typical day.

00:35:28.120 | Professional music caliber practice being essentially an extreme form of deep work.

00:35:33.480 | It's at the more extreme scale because it requires intense sustained concentration.

00:35:38.760 | That's harder to use your brain harder than a professional musician trying to learn a

00:35:42.000 | new piece.

00:35:43.000 | So we use that as our upper limit.

00:35:45.220 | The study I looked at found that the most common configuration of practicing for these

00:35:51.840 | professional musicians studied was a two hour session, a break, and then another two hour

00:35:56.200 | session.

00:35:57.200 | So I recommend if you're doing the hardest type of deep work, you know, don't expect

00:36:00.160 | to be able to do more than four hours.

00:36:02.080 | There's huge variation here.

00:36:04.280 | Some people are more comfortable doing more.

00:36:06.660 | More commonly, however, is a lot of deep work is not as hard as what a professional musician

00:36:11.460 | does when they're practicing so that you can fit more in.

00:36:14.720 | Computer programmers will often report they can go many, many hours in a row.

00:36:17.960 | And that's because if you really zoom in on the actual cognitive activity, when someone

00:36:23.440 | is computer programming, there's periods in there where it's very intense concentration.

00:36:26.880 | I'm trying to figure out new code from scratch, this sort of algorithmic logic to make this

00:36:32.400 | work, which is equally an intensity to learning a new professional music piece.

00:36:35.720 | But then there's other parts where you're autopilot coding or you're looking up information.

00:36:41.120 | How does this library work?

00:36:42.520 | So it's a lot of ups and downs.

00:36:44.440 | So you see the programmer who works for 10 hours straight, there still may be only four

00:36:48.240 | hours total of super intense thinking in there.

00:36:51.500 | So depending on what's going on with your deep work, you might be able to spend more

00:36:54.240 | time.

00:36:55.240 | So what about reading?

00:36:56.240 | How does this affect it?

00:36:57.240 | You know, it just affects, depends on how difficult the reading is.

00:37:02.960 | So if you're a Talmudic scholar who is trying to understand a complicated piece of the Gemara,

00:37:12.000 | that might be very difficult, similar to algorithmic thinking, similar to trying to learn a new

00:37:17.440 | piece of music.

00:37:18.440 | And there's only so much of that you can do.

00:37:20.680 | On the other hand, if you're reading, as I am right now, as part of Thriller December,

00:37:24.680 | because of course in December I like to, among other things, read more thrillers, a Tom Clancy

00:37:30.680 | book written well after Tom Clancy's death about a stealth fighter crashing in Arizona

00:37:38.160 | and some spy thing happening in Eastern Europe, you're not taxing your brain that much.

00:37:43.640 | So it just depends on the type of reading.

00:37:44.960 | The more intense it is, the more it's going to sort of pull from that pool of deep work

00:37:48.640 | reserves.

00:37:49.640 | And the more fun it is, the more you can do.

00:37:50.640 | I wouldn't worry about it.

00:37:52.040 | I just think reading is a good leisure.

00:37:54.300 | Your mind is more happy engaging in reading than consuming passively.

00:37:57.600 | So keep reading as much as feels comfortable.

00:38:00.240 | All right, Jesse, what do we got next?

00:38:03.800 | Next question is from SR.

00:38:06.000 | I read and think a lot.

00:38:07.400 | Consequently, I have a lot of notes on all sorts of subjects, but I still feel like my

00:38:11.320 | understanding of these ideas are scattered when I attempt to communicate them with others.

00:38:16.440 | My presentation just seems haphazard and shallow.

00:38:19.560 | How should I fix this?

00:38:20.560 | Well, sorry, I like this question because we've already done the answer in the deep

00:38:24.360 | dive, which is idea documents.

00:38:27.680 | So you might have noticed this among people who are more sort of traditionally intellectual

00:38:32.400 | or professional intellectuals.

00:38:34.440 | They're very good at I read this New Yorker piece or watch this documentary and can now

00:38:39.120 | with great confidence sort of talk on this topic.

00:38:41.720 | In fact, I can talk sort of I'm speaking from experience here, sort of like 60 percent out

00:38:46.440 | of my butt on this.

00:38:47.440 | But like I picked up enough things that I can sort of talk about this really confidently.

00:38:52.200 | That's practice.

00:38:53.800 | That's practice with taking information and integrating them into a structure, a conceptual

00:38:58.160 | structure that you can then apply to generate new information.

00:39:02.280 | So in conversation, I can now use this conceptual structure when engaging on this topic and

00:39:07.880 | be able to pull from it and seem really smart.

00:39:10.560 | How do you practice doing that is idea documents.

00:39:13.480 | You create these documents around ideas you care about or think are interesting.

00:39:17.200 | You begin to fill them out and evolve them.

00:39:19.760 | The act of actually writing forces you to build conceptual structures because the writing

00:39:24.260 | is just a reflection of an internal abstract structure on the page.

00:39:29.660 | If you write something structured about a topic you care about, I've written something

00:39:32.560 | structured about the conflict in the Middle East, how I'm feeling about it, where my confusions

00:39:36.840 | are, who I don't agree with, who I do agree with.

00:39:39.900 | That requires you to build a conceptual structure for the information you have.

00:39:44.440 | Now for a lot of people who are not professional thinkers, it really changes your experience

00:39:48.300 | of the world.

00:39:49.300 | Because if you're not building conceptual structures in which you integrate information,

00:39:54.040 | what you're doing instead is just surfing vibes.

00:39:57.320 | You know, I don't know, like, I don't, I don't like this person.

00:40:01.960 | And that person seems to be on the other side of this thing.

00:40:04.440 | So like, boo, or I don't know, I saw this thing, someone tweeted, and it made me feel

00:40:10.400 | righteous at the time.

00:40:11.400 | No, I didn't try to actually integrate this into a conceptual structure.

00:40:14.800 | So I just sort of feel like it, this is a clear cut issue, right?

00:40:17.320 | And like, we're just really right.

00:40:18.320 | And then you get into a conversation and you try to repeat the thing you saw tweeted that

00:40:22.160 | in that form felt so righteous, and it's like, this doesn't really feel so convincing anymore.

00:40:26.000 | And the other person just said three things I wasn't thinking about, I don't know what

00:40:28.520 | to do.

00:40:29.520 | And your head sort of explodes, or you just, you know, you're on the other team.

00:40:36.360 | So we're not used to it.

00:40:37.360 | Most people are not used to this way of actually engaging with the world.

00:40:42.080 | This is how you practice.

00:40:43.800 | Idea documents.

00:40:44.800 | So do this with actual topics that you talk to people about.

00:40:48.840 | Do this also with topics that are completely timeless that you want to know more about.

00:40:52.480 | If it's a technology, a type of philosophy.

00:40:55.320 | I built out a pretty extensive document a few years ago when I was listening to one

00:40:59.160 | of the great courses on the great ideas of Western philosophy.

00:41:04.560 | And I sort of start building this thing out.

00:41:06.200 | Like, I don't know, let me just write this down.

00:41:08.080 | And this person thought this, it just really helped me sort of structure who is who and

00:41:12.480 | what they were thinking and how this is important.

00:41:14.680 | When you don't write it down, it all sort of just filters through.

00:41:18.680 | So SR, start doing those idea documents and you're going to get better and better at this.

00:41:23.080 | All right.

00:41:25.200 | Let's keep rolling.

00:41:26.200 | Jesse, what do we got next?

00:41:27.200 | Next question is from Maggie.

00:41:29.080 | I work in data analysis and I'm regularly bored in my day to day tasks.

00:41:33.240 | At the same time, my side hustle has gotten to the point where I can spend the whole day

00:41:36.480 | in deep work without distraction.

00:41:39.040 | What should I do in the interim to maintain my deep work muscle while also getting through

00:41:43.760 | the day?

00:41:44.760 | So Jesse, if you've gotten used to this type of question, we get the, I call it the leading

00:41:50.100 | the witness question, right?

00:41:52.360 | Where it's like, well, my work is bad and it's really boring and it's stupid and, but

00:41:58.960 | this other thing is really great and it's awesome and I could do it all day long and

00:42:02.880 | I, it gives me meaning in life.

00:42:05.480 | What should I do?

00:42:06.480 | Yeah.

00:42:07.480 | It's a leading, leading the question.

00:42:08.480 | Yeah.

00:42:09.480 | So I want you to be careful here.

00:42:10.480 | This is Maggie.

00:42:11.960 | I want you to be wary of Grasses Greener Syndrome.

00:42:15.920 | So when you're just sort of going through your professional life with what in my book,

00:42:21.320 | so good, they can't ignore you, I call the passion mindset, which is what is this job

00:42:24.520 | offering me?

00:42:26.360 | You're very susceptible to the grasses greener syndrome, which is like, I don't love like

00:42:31.000 | what I'm doing day to day right now.

00:42:33.600 | Maybe there's something where I would love what I'm doing day to day more.

00:42:35.960 | And when you start messing around with side hustles, this gets even more dangerous because

00:42:40.080 | it is easy to create a quote unquote side hustle that just like lets you do the thing

00:42:46.800 | you think is fun in the moment, right?

00:42:48.960 | Because when you don't have to depend on that side hustle for all of your income, when you

00:42:52.880 | don't have to depend on that side hustle to actually create an impact in the world or

00:42:58.760 | support people, you can just make it whatever you want.

00:43:01.800 | And then you tell yourself the story that like, there's jobs like this out here, I could

00:43:04.840 | just be doing this really fun thing.

00:43:06.640 | But over here on this other world in this non data analysis, there's, you know, I have

00:43:09.880 | to fill out memos and it's not always like that.

00:43:12.280 | My boss is kind of annoying and it's not always interesting what I'm doing.

00:43:17.380 | But in my side hustle, I'm writing a novel and it's like fun, I'm just writing all day.

00:43:21.200 | But the issue is that side hustle could just be you cosplaying some sort of imaginary ideal

00:43:27.000 | of what work could be.

00:43:28.560 | It's a dangerous thing to have pulling you.

00:43:31.120 | So how do we get out of this situation?

00:43:33.180 | It's not just we say, well, just grin and bear whatever your job is, because maybe your

00:43:35.880 | job isn't in its current state what it should be.

00:43:39.880 | The way you get out of this situation is lifestyle centric career planning.

00:43:44.240 | I have an ideal vision of where I want my life to be, and here's my sort of target in

00:43:48.480 | the next few years, all the aspects of my life, where I live, what I do, what my days

00:43:52.400 | are like, my engagement with community and the rest of the world.

00:43:55.560 | All these things are really clear.

00:43:57.720 | And as part of this, you then look back and say, how does I use my working life to get

00:44:02.280 | me closer there?

00:44:03.720 | Then what you were doing in your working life is part of a intentional plan to get you closer

00:44:08.080 | to a more idealized version of your lifestyle.

00:44:10.820 | That is much more effective than just the passion mindset of, do I like what I'm doing?

00:44:14.380 | Is there another thing I could be doing that I would like more?

00:44:16.500 | Maybe I should just be a novelist because this is fun.

00:44:21.140 | Like Cal, I bought a hipster keyboard and it clickety clacks and I'm drinking coffee

00:44:27.700 | and clickety clacky.

00:44:30.140 | Brad Stolberg, by the way, Jesse, called my new keyboard a hipster keyboard.

00:44:33.380 | Oh, really?

00:44:34.380 | Yeah.

00:44:35.380 | He's like, ah, so you got one of those hipster keyboards.

00:44:36.380 | Does he see them a lot in coffee shops?

00:44:38.140 | I don't know.

00:44:39.140 | I don't know.

00:44:40.140 | I don't know.

00:44:41.140 | I don't know about Asheville.

00:44:42.140 | There's probably a lot of hipsters there, right?

00:44:43.140 | That's what I understand.

00:44:44.140 | Yeah.

00:44:45.140 | So he calls it a hipster keyboard, which it is.

00:44:46.140 | So you're like, this is fun.

00:44:47.140 | I clickety clack and wear a beret and a pipe in Starbucks, which is exactly what I do.

00:44:51.420 | I'm just like, ha, ha, ha.

00:44:52.900 | Right, right, right.

00:44:53.900 | I don't think this is fun and data now, this is, the other stuff is kind of, you know,

00:44:56.780 | it's annoying, right?

00:44:57.780 | You're just going to get drawn into that.

00:44:59.880 | But if you're like, no, no, no, this data analysis job is part of the money it generates,

00:45:05.740 | what I'm doing now, but where I want to shift my position here eventually as I get to this

00:45:09.760 | level, I'm going to shift this to a consultant because I've saved this much money, and then

00:45:13.780 | it's going to be six months on, six months off, which is going to allow us, like, you

00:45:16.620 | have this plan worked out that the work you're doing now and what you're working towards

00:45:21.020 | with your work is part of a plan that connects to deeply with what resonates.

00:45:25.020 | That's where you want to be, not just analyzing this, your day-to-day activity, something

00:45:28.420 | you enjoy or not, and then inventing, you know, this ideal job cosplay, like, well,

00:45:33.260 | I'm comparing it to that.

00:45:35.940 | You know, it couldn't be that.

00:45:36.940 | It's the equivalent of, like, you're looking at your romantic partner and then you're watching

00:45:42.420 | a Ryan Reynolds movie and you're like, oh, Ryan Reynolds seems kind of better.

00:45:46.620 | I mean, he's funny, he's, like, pretty good shape, you know, he's like the handyman in

00:45:52.260 | this small town in this Christmas movie that, like, I didn't realize would teach me the

00:45:56.980 | meaning of Christmas.

00:45:58.780 | And then, you know, you look over at your romantic partner, like, oh, no, I mean, maybe

00:46:03.180 | it's probably because of Ryan Reynolds.

00:46:04.180 | It's kind of the same thing when you're, you know, cosplaying on your hipster keyboard,

00:46:07.980 | like, well, this is more fun than, you know, my job that's sending my kids to private school.

00:46:12.780 | So I think working backwards, and I know I'm a broken record on this, but lifestyle-centered

00:46:16.500 | career planning gives you focus on what you're doing and why, which is what you need to keep

00:46:21.460 | moving.

00:46:22.540 | Your motivational system needs an understanding of what you're doing and how it leads to something

00:46:27.700 | important, so that your episodic future thinking can see something that really resonates.

00:46:32.180 | That's what it needs.

00:46:33.180 | You don't need to enjoy every minute of what you're doing.

00:46:36.380 | That's the wrong metric.

00:46:38.240 | The athlete who really wants to be the best in their field does not enjoy all the time

00:46:43.660 | they spend in the weight room, but they're motivated to do it because it's part of their

00:46:47.020 | vision of being number one.

00:46:48.420 | So that would be my advice there.

00:46:50.460 | Be careful of Grass's Greener Syndrome.

00:46:51.980 | All right, what's our next question, Jesse?

00:46:54.820 | - All right, this is the moment of truth, too.

00:46:57.180 | - Is this Slow Productivity Corner?

00:46:58.700 | - Yep.

00:46:59.700 | - All right, let's get some theme music.

00:47:00.700 | All right, what is our Slow Productivity Corner question of the day, Jesse?

00:47:12.540 | - That came from Kiran.

00:47:13.540 | - Thank you, Kiran.

00:47:15.540 | - I'm a slow thinker, but at times my employee wants complicated answers quickly.

00:47:20.900 | I struggle at times to gather my thoughts into concise answers to appease management.

00:47:25.460 | How should I compensate?

00:47:26.460 | - Okay, well, I'm gonna give you a couple ideas here.

00:47:31.620 | One of them will be concrete, and one of them's gonna be a little bit more psychological.

00:47:34.540 | Let me start with the concrete.

00:47:37.020 | Lean into your slowness here by cultivating, this could be like a quirky idiosyncratic

00:47:44.420 | trait of yours.

00:47:45.420 | When you get that email, "Hey, Dante, what about like whatever?"

00:47:50.140 | You say, "Interesting question, let me give this a thought.

00:47:55.020 | I'll get back to you after lunch."

00:47:57.660 | You have a specific time.

00:47:59.660 | That then gives you enough time to sit down and say, "Okay, let me take a break, let me

00:48:03.820 | take a beat, and let me think through like what do I really wanna say here?

00:48:09.380 | And let me gather some points here and actually make this pretty thoughtful and then send

00:48:14.100 | it back by the time I said I was gonna send it back."

00:48:17.380 | So then people think like, "Well, Dante, yeah, he's a very thoughtful guy.

00:48:20.900 | He never responds right off the cuff in the meetings.

00:48:23.060 | He says, 'Let me get back to you,' and then he does, and he gets back to us in the time

00:48:26.020 | he says."

00:48:27.020 | And it's always really thoughtful stuff.

00:48:28.120 | And now you're leaning into the slowness, instead of losing opportunities, like, "Ah,

00:48:32.780 | like Dante doesn't get back to us," or it's incomplete.

00:48:36.580 | They're like, "This is just the way this guy operates.

00:48:40.100 | That's actually kind of cool.

00:48:41.540 | He's careful, so we can kind of trust him on careful stuff.

00:48:44.180 | And here's the bonus, Dante, they will maybe start leaving you out of this sort of knucklehead

00:48:48.540 | like back and forth hyperactive hive mind, like, "Let's just go back and forth 70 emails

00:48:52.460 | right now and try to like get some answer."

00:48:54.140 | You don't really wanna be a part of that anyways, like, "I'm slower, so no, I can't do the less

00:48:59.300 | than 70 emails next 30 minutes, but I can really help think what's really gonna be best

00:49:03.300 | for this client."

00:49:04.300 | To do this, you really have to deliver, though.

00:49:07.100 | Really do think through and be deliberate.

00:49:10.060 | Here's my psychological answer.

00:49:11.360 | So that's like what you could do positively.

00:49:13.200 | There could be a negative aspect here as well.

00:49:15.700 | There could be some combination of perfectionism and imposter syndrome self-confidence issues

00:49:19.980 | going on here, right?

00:49:22.100 | So the other thing that might be happening is you're just worried about shooting off

00:49:25.260 | a response because you worry, "I'm insufficient.

00:49:30.020 | This might not be smart.

00:49:31.660 | This might not make sense.

00:49:33.360 | If I send off this response too quick and I really haven't thought about it, the boss

00:49:37.060 | is gonna be like, 'Aha, I knew it.

00:49:39.540 | You're not smart.

00:49:40.540 | You're an imposter.

00:49:41.860 | Pack up and get out of here.'"

00:49:43.260 | And so you're crippled by this idea of, "Do I really belong here?

00:49:51.320 | Are people gonna think I'm dumb?"

00:49:52.320 | It's sort of like a perfectionism imposter syndrome.

00:49:55.060 | That's also very common in these sort of work scenarios.

00:49:58.640 | And there you have to just basically, this is psychological, you have to harness your

00:50:02.660 | sort of inner American white maleness of just, "I will be very confident."

00:50:07.860 | Like, "Yeah, I know about this.

00:50:09.500 | There."

00:50:10.500 | You know?

00:50:11.500 | And just be like, "It'll work out."

00:50:12.500 | You gotta have to kind of get that mindset a little bit.

00:50:15.900 | It's gonna feel artificial at first.

00:50:18.620 | It's sort of like, "Yeah, of course.

00:50:20.460 | Do this.

00:50:21.460 | Of course."

00:50:22.460 | You know?

00:50:23.460 | And then high-five people because that's what American white males do, I suppose.

00:50:25.980 | We high-five each other.

00:50:26.980 | Yeah.

00:50:27.980 | They type on hipster keyboard.

00:50:28.980 | We're just like, "Let me just knock this out on my hipster keyboard.

00:50:33.260 | Give it up."

00:50:34.260 | Just round of high-fives.

00:50:35.580 | Everyone in the room is just high-fiving.

00:50:36.580 | So you got some of that's just mindset.

00:50:39.500 | People, here's the thing, people are not scouring over your responses.

00:50:44.340 | They're not looking at them in detail.

00:50:46.500 | There's not a committee that's like, "Okay, here comes Dante.

00:50:50.060 | Let's put it up.

00:50:51.060 | Project it.

00:50:52.700 | Project it on the board."

00:50:53.700 | For some reason, they have it on a 1980s-style plastic film on the overhead projector, and

00:50:58.300 | they're all staring at it and thinking about it.

00:51:00.420 | And then finally, someone in a tweed jacket shakes their head and says, "No, this is not

00:51:04.020 | good.

00:51:05.280 | This is not good at all."

00:51:07.180 | And then the other guy is like, "So we're gonna murder him?"

00:51:09.740 | Like, "Yeah, let's do it."

00:51:10.740 | And they all just run out of the room to come get you.

00:51:12.100 | That's not what happens when you send a quick email.

00:51:14.180 | It's mainly just people who are really busy and overwhelmed and just trying to throw things.

00:51:17.700 | I need an answer to this because I have so many things going on.

00:51:20.180 | I'm super stressed.

00:51:21.180 | They don't really care.

00:51:22.800 | If you read most people's emails in the hyperactive hive mind situation, they often sound like

00:51:28.420 | you have a caveman who's dealing with a brain injury responding.

00:51:33.420 | You know, it's like, "Me, client meeting, bad, 4 p.m., question mark, emoji," right?

00:51:39.740 | People are just throwing junk around.

00:51:41.420 | So the psychological answer is, like, you go a little easier on yourself.

00:51:44.380 | Just be like, "Yeah, it's fine.

00:51:46.580 | They're not people.

00:51:47.660 | Just the conversation needs to move forward."

00:51:49.260 | So you have some combination of these two options.

00:51:52.740 | Don't be so worried about people scrutinizing your responses, or, and this could be complimentary,

00:51:57.580 | lean into being a slow thinker.

00:51:58.580 | "This is my thing.

00:51:59.580 | I take my time."

00:52:01.340 | But then I give you good responses.

00:52:02.740 | I like this second, this latter response just because I think it might free you from a lot

00:52:09.420 | of the back-and-forth hyperactive nonsense and in a way that's not costing you.

00:52:14.780 | We don't involve Dante in, like, a lot, some of the back-and-forth nonsense because, not

00:52:18.580 | because he's not reliable, but because he's a slower, more careful thinker.

00:52:22.940 | So he probably won't respond to this right away.

00:52:25.060 | In fact, the fact that you are, you will respond to this right away makes me think, "Why aren't

00:52:28.500 | you more like Dante?"

00:52:29.500 | So it's like a positive way to actually get away from some knucklehead stuff.

00:52:33.700 | So anyways, good question, Dante.

00:52:36.260 | That was our slow productivity corner.

00:52:38.140 | Should we hit the music again, Jesse?

00:52:40.980 | Yeah.

00:52:41.980 | All right.

00:52:42.980 | Let's do it.

00:52:43.980 | Just feel calmer.

00:52:44.980 | Do we have a call?

00:52:45.980 | Yeah.

00:52:46.980 | Let's do a call.

00:52:47.980 | We got a call.

00:52:48.980 | All right.

00:52:49.980 | Let's get someone on the phone.

00:52:50.980 | Who do we got here?

00:52:51.980 | Here we go.

00:52:52.980 | Hey, Cal.

00:52:53.980 | Andy here.

00:52:54.980 | Thank you very much for your wonderful podcast.

00:52:55.980 | I've been enjoying going deep and dropping that into every sentence I use.

00:53:12.540 | So question for you today is quite simple.

00:53:15.000 | How do you take deep holiday?

00:53:17.300 | Thanks, Cal.

00:53:19.580 | Well, first of all, Andy makes me think we should have added a sixth practice to our

00:53:25.420 | deep dive about how to become a more serious thinker.

00:53:28.380 | And that practice is adopt an English accent.

00:53:31.020 | Yeah.

00:53:32.020 | I think people just give you, what, 50% more intellectual seriousness?

00:53:35.300 | Yeah.

00:53:36.300 | I was hoping you'd use your French accent.

00:53:37.380 | Well, that's not an intellect.

00:53:38.820 | I think the English accent sounds smarter.

00:53:41.100 | Yeah.

00:53:42.100 | Yeah.

00:53:43.100 | I've got a fantastic English accent.

00:53:46.740 | Holiday, right, chop?

00:53:50.660 | No, it's Russian.

00:53:53.340 | English accents make everything sound smarter.

00:53:55.740 | Deep holidays is a good question, especially if, you know, you do think for a living like

00:54:01.300 | I do.

00:54:02.300 | I had to figure this out.

00:54:04.420 | I used to think the goal for a vacation was to have nothing to do, because you get overwhelmed

00:54:12.100 | by having too much to do as you approach the vacations, you say, wouldn't this be great

00:54:17.540 | to have nothing to do?

00:54:19.700 | Just it's me and my family and some fun books.

00:54:22.520 | It would stress the hell out of me, right?

00:54:26.060 | It's like you're a serious drinker and you say for the next two weeks, you know, I'm

00:54:32.300 | not going to touch it.

00:54:33.620 | It's difficult for those two weeks because you've been doing it all the time.

00:54:37.140 | So I would have a huge difficulty on vacations, especially when we had young kids, just feeling

00:54:43.780 | uncomfortable and antsy and bored and weird because my brain was like, what are we doing

00:54:50.500 | here?

00:54:51.500 | So what I learned to do was to bring things to think deeply about on vacation.

00:54:57.620 | This will not cause stress.

00:54:59.220 | Just make sure these things are fully disconnected from any sort of communication or back and

00:55:04.500 | forth to make sure they can't generate new tasks that you have to deal with and schedule

00:55:08.460 | that really what you want escape from is all of that cognitive context, shifting all of

00:55:12.940 | that, dealing with ever evolving collections of obligations and scheduling.

00:55:17.380 | That's what you need to escape from.

00:55:18.700 | But actually the thinking hard about something interesting piece, well, that's actually the

00:55:23.700 | fun part of work.

00:55:24.780 | And so to be able to just do some of that, you know, I go for, I used to do this when

00:55:28.660 | we'd go to the beach, go for a walk on the beach every day and just think about something

00:55:33.180 | and take notes.

00:55:34.180 | You don't need that much, but that's great.

00:55:37.020 | You know, planning is a good thing to do on vacations.

00:55:39.260 | I want to just like think through, like, what do I want to do with like this new book?

00:55:43.060 | So many of my book ideas have come together.

00:55:45.220 | The final stage of coming together has happened on vacation.

00:55:47.540 | So having things to think through that are allow slowness, you can just spend time with

00:55:53.180 | them.

00:55:54.180 | There's no time sensitivity.

00:55:55.180 | No one's waiting for you.

00:55:56.180 | That generates no new obligations, no back and forth communication.

00:55:59.100 | To me, that's a deep holiday.

00:56:01.380 | You don't want to escape work.

00:56:02.460 | You want to just keep the coolest, most fun intellectual parts of work.

00:56:06.500 | Those then are the, those then are the best trips.

00:56:08.980 | All right.

00:56:09.980 | So I want to end the second segment here with a case study.

00:56:12.840 | This is where one of your listeners sends in a case study about putting my ideas into

00:56:16.460 | practice in your real life.

00:56:18.660 | Today's case study comes from Misha, who says, I read digital minimalism and immediately

00:56:25.200 | started an electronic detox.

00:56:27.300 | I do not have social media before, but I used to watch YouTube in particular Korean video

00:56:32.820 | logs, Netflix and Disney plus while cooking, cleaning, and sometimes for leisure, I used

00:56:38.180 | to complain that I had no time at all.

00:56:41.140 | I was struggling to get things done at work.

00:56:42.780 | I was not able to focus on finishing my data science certification bootcamp.

00:56:47.740 | I was not able to spend quality time with my 12 year old son, and I was not getting

00:56:51.340 | enough sleep.

00:56:53.340 | When I started the 30 day detox, I noticed that I was able to focus more.

00:56:57.140 | I enjoyed spending time with myself and my thoughts.

00:57:00.700 | I was able to read and replicate some machine learning papers.

00:57:03.700 | And most of all, I was fully aware of the present and improving my relationship with

00:57:07.100 | my son.

00:57:08.740 | Setting aside distractions such as YouTube and streaming services gave me my thoughts

00:57:12.780 | back.

00:57:13.780 | I always enjoyed silence, but I lost that after getting addicted to streaming services.

00:57:17.980 | I can now think in peace.

00:57:21.180 | At the end of the 30 days, I was able to finish my data science certification.

00:57:24.780 | I'm currently sleeping eight to nine hours every night.

00:57:27.100 | I spend much more quality time with my son.

00:57:29.180 | I was able to read four books and my brain is not hungry for dopamine anymore.

00:57:33.180 | I mean, sometimes I want to just lay down and binge on something.

00:57:35.740 | So I always have my Kindle with me.

00:57:37.640 | When I feel this way, I purchase a thriller, mystery, or a fantasy and fiction book that

00:57:41.900 | I get to read.

00:57:42.900 | I rediscovered the pleasure of reading.

00:57:44.420 | I also renewed my library card.

00:57:46.580 | I guess being connected all the time is not just a waste of time, but it shallows the

00:57:50.100 | brain and you feel like you've lost the power to work on deep issues, learn hard things,

00:57:54.220 | and get back to thinking.

00:57:55.780 | Misha, I enjoy that case study.

00:57:58.540 | This is essentially practice number one from our deep dive earlier in the show.

00:58:03.820 | Consume higher quality information and consume much less of it.

00:58:08.700 | So when you cut a lot of these sources of information from your life, especially those

00:58:12.660 | that are just designed around an engagement model, it's a different intellectual world.

00:58:17.800 | Everything is slower.

00:58:18.800 | You can spend time with your thoughts.

00:58:20.420 | You have a lot more time than you thought.

00:58:24.500 | Everything gets better.

00:58:25.500 | You're more present.

00:58:26.580 | There's just a slowness to not being caught up into this net of optimized, algorithmically

00:58:31.880 | curated information that the slow down and get appreciation out of subtle understanding

00:58:36.840 | material and not just as like emotional in the moment raw feelings really is a nicer

00:58:42.540 | way to live.

00:58:44.100 | The only correction or addition I would give to this is I don't typically use the word

00:58:47.500 | detox.

00:58:48.500 | I use the word declutter, right?

00:58:51.620 | So the idea is not I'm just going to stop using all these things temporarily to get

00:58:56.940 | away from them.

00:58:57.940 | It is instead I'm going to stop using all these things so I can rediscover life without

00:59:02.000 | them and then very carefully decide what comes back or not.

00:59:05.880 | Declutter the proverbial closet here.

00:59:08.360 | So what you've done here was not a detox, but a declutter.

00:59:11.020 | You stepped away from everything and now you could decide what do I really need in my life

00:59:14.280 | or not?

00:59:15.280 | You have cleaned up your digital life.

00:59:17.240 | The detox terminology is too often abused in the digital community to talk about breaks.

00:59:22.400 | I'm not a big fan of breaks for the sake of breaks.

00:59:25.640 | I'm a fan of making permanent changes.

00:59:27.840 | So the declutter concept is better.

00:59:30.200 | You don't detox your closet by I empty out my closet for 30 days and put everything back

00:59:35.000 | in.

00:59:36.040 | You declutter your closet by taking everything out and only putting back in what you really

00:59:39.360 | need.

00:59:40.360 | So a great example, Misha, I think people underestimate how much positivity in their

00:59:45.560 | life is waiting on the other side of a more minimalistic approach to the digital.

00:59:51.800 | All right, so I want to get to our final segment.

00:59:54.960 | Before we do, Jesse, let's hear from some more sponsors.

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01:02:02.120 | I also want to talk about our friends at My Body Tutor, a company founded by my longtime

01:02:09.420 | friend Adam Gilbert.

01:02:12.320 | My Body Tutor is a 100% online coaching problem that helps you get healthier.

01:02:19.040 | You have a coach who is assigned to you that helps you figure out what you're doing with

01:02:22.160 | your diet, what you're doing with your exercise, tailored to you.

01:02:25.440 | And then you check in with this coach digitally every day.

01:02:30.160 | So you're getting tailored plans plus accountability, knowing the coach is going to see what you

01:02:36.400 | did every day gets you to actually stick with the plan.

01:02:39.820 | More importantly, they can also help you adjust as needed.

01:02:42.080 | "Hey, it's the holidays.

01:02:43.480 | What do I do this week?

01:02:45.780 | What should I keep in mind?

01:02:46.880 | Help me get through this.

01:02:47.960 | Like coach, how do we adapt this?

01:02:49.120 | I'm going to be on the road.

01:02:50.120 | I don't have my gym."

01:02:51.120 | They're there to help you adapt.

01:02:53.280 | Because it's online, it doesn't cost you nearly as much as having a real trainer in your house,

01:02:57.240 | but you get the same benefits of tailored information and accountability.

01:03:02.960 | I'm going to suggest don't wait until the new year.

01:03:06.600 | Just start your initiative to get healthier.

01:03:09.020 | Start it right now.

01:03:10.020 | So that as you go into the holidays, the new year, you're already on that trajectory.

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01:03:19.520 | to get in shape."

01:03:20.600 | Start it now.

01:03:21.600 | Get your momentum going.

01:03:22.600 | And all you have to do to start to shift to a much healthier life is go to MyBodyTutor.com.

01:03:29.160 | That's T-U-T-O-R, MyBodyTutor.com.

01:03:31.640 | Go sign up.

01:03:32.840 | Do it right now before we even get to the holidays.

01:03:35.320 | If you mention deep questions when you sign up, Adam will give you $50 off your first

01:03:40.060 | month.

01:03:41.060 | That's at MyBodyTutor.com.

01:03:42.060 | Let's go to our final segment where I react to things that are happening in the news.

01:03:54.140 | I want to start this segment actually by reacting to something that a listener sent us.

01:04:02.140 | So let me load this up over here.

01:04:06.600 | So long-time fans of the show know that we have this long-running joke where I pretend

01:04:14.320 | that the Patrick Rufus book, "Name of the Wind" was written by Brandon Sanderson.

01:04:19.240 | Jesse, I got a very concerned email recently from a listener that was like, "Look, I feel

01:04:24.240 | bad about this.

01:04:25.240 | I love the show, but it's really, really bothering me.

01:04:27.080 | I think you have the wrong author.

01:04:29.760 | Brandon Sanderson did not write 'Name of the Wind.'"

01:04:33.000 | So this bit has been going on long enough that we have like a huge amount of our audience

01:04:36.520 | that just thinks I'm dumb, which I sort of appreciate.

01:04:38.400 | Anyways, what's on the screen here, if you're watching instead of listening, one of our

01:04:43.520 | listeners, do we have their name somewhere?

01:04:45.520 | Yeah, it's, I'll get it.

01:04:47.960 | Alaska or something like that, mocked up a fake version of "Name of the Wind."

01:04:52.880 | Lazdi.

01:04:53.880 | Lazdi.

01:04:54.880 | Lazdi.

01:04:55.880 | So on the screen here is a fake version of "The Name of the Wind" with Brandon Sanderson

01:04:58.640 | as the author.

01:05:00.320 | There seems to be a wizard, a lizard in some sort of medieval armor holding, I guess, a

01:05:09.080 | time block plan.

01:05:10.080 | So good.

01:05:11.080 | I appreciate it.

01:05:12.080 | I appreciate it.

01:05:13.080 | I'm going to have to print that out.

01:05:14.920 | We'll put that in the studio.

01:05:16.080 | So there we go.

01:05:17.080 | It's the little things to make me happy.

01:05:19.120 | But I have an actual article here to react to.

01:05:22.560 | Load this up on the screen right now.

01:05:25.400 | This appeared in Nature on November 29th.

01:05:31.640 | So if you're watching, I have it up on the screen here.

01:05:35.800 | Let's see here.

01:05:39.000 | You know, I'm looking at this, Jesse, this is actually, this is not the full article.

01:05:45.560 | This is actually the description of the data tables that got pulled into here.

01:05:48.880 | Oh, okay.

01:05:49.880 | But I can tell you what's in, I can tell you what's actually in this article.

01:05:53.120 | So the title of the article is Remote Collaboration Fuses Fewer Breakthrough Ideas.

01:06:01.560 | Now, this was a study that was published in Nature where they took tens of thousands of

01:06:08.080 | actual research articles and patent applications, and they did some sort of analysis to figure

01:06:13.960 | out the nature of the work that was done to produce this intellectual artifact, in particular

01:06:20.440 | in person or over a long-distance collaboration.

01:06:25.720 | And what they found was a strong connection between the original new ideas and working

01:06:31.380 | in person together.

01:06:33.500 | That these more long-distance collaborations were not as associated with as many new ideas.

01:06:40.720 | So I wanted to get into this a little bit because I have talked about various forces

01:06:45.040 | that could help explain what they were seeing here.

01:06:47.840 | You see, what's going on when we think about the world of creativity and production is

01:06:52.400 | we're really excited about ideas like network theory and recombinant growth models, where

01:06:58.200 | we just imagine there's just pools of information out there, and different people have different

01:07:02.760 | pools of information.

01:07:04.000 | And if we just connect people, their pools of information connect, and we can have the

01:07:08.800 | information share with each other, and we get these interesting new combinations, and

01:07:12.160 | there comes innovation.

01:07:15.000 | The networking itself is abstract to these models, it's just connect.

01:07:17.840 | So it's online, it's digital, whatever, it doesn't really matter.

01:07:22.040 | But this study here in nature is saying, "Well, actually, it does matter how you're actually

01:07:26.240 | bringing people together to work."

01:07:27.840 | And it's because we are missing from these abstract models something that's much more

01:07:32.240 | messy and concrete, which is actual human brain cognition.

01:07:37.240 | Real human brains, messy collections of neurons that are actually trying to concentrate and

01:07:41.960 | create new thoughts, new important thoughts do not form from the low-friction recombination

01:07:49.200 | of abstract information.

01:07:50.680 | They're produced in brains, and it requires serious thinking by real people.

01:07:57.400 | It's a hard alchemical process that takes some information and produces new information

01:08:02.080 | that's valuable.

01:08:03.080 | It is not just a recombination of ideas.

01:08:06.020 | Working in person with other people supports that process much better than virtual collaboration.

01:08:13.500 | Now why is that?

01:08:14.500 | Well, there's an effect I wrote about in deep work called the whiteboard effect.

01:08:18.300 | And what it said is, if you gather groups of people together to work on the same proverbial

01:08:24.640 | whiteboard on a problem for an extended period of time, that can actually unlock higher levels

01:08:31.700 | of cognition than people even just working on their own, because two things happen here.

01:08:36.460 | One, there's the social pressure not to fall behind on the thread of thoughts.

01:08:39.940 | So we're at the whiteboard, we're trying to figure out an equation.

01:08:42.820 | People are going back and forth and sort of proposing their new additions.

01:08:46.800 | If you let your attention wander, if you switch your cognitive context, there's a social cost,

01:08:51.960 | because now you're going to fall behind the thread of conversation.

01:08:55.620 | You're going to have to say at some point, "Hold on, guys.

01:08:57.740 | I'm sorry.

01:08:58.740 | Can you back up again?"

01:08:59.740 | Right?

01:09:00.740 | You're going to let your mind wander.

01:09:01.740 | So when multiple people are working on something hard concurrently, everyone is focusing longer

01:09:06.460 | and harder than they would than if it was just themselves.

01:09:09.580 | So it's not much of a social cost if you let your mind wander by yourself.

01:09:13.100 | No one knows.

01:09:14.100 | And then you can kind of go back to it.

01:09:16.340 | So when you're working together, one thing that happens is you think harder, you focus

01:09:19.660 | longer, you do less context shifts.

01:09:21.700 | The second thing that happens is you get on-demand additions of new information.

01:09:26.740 | I'm trying to figure out this proof.

01:09:28.940 | I'm stuck right here.

01:09:30.420 | This person right next to me might immediately be able to say, "Use this technique.

01:09:33.980 | I know this technique.

01:09:34.980 | You didn't.

01:09:35.980 | I can get you unstuck."

01:09:36.980 | Then we get to another place where they're stuck, you have a technique that gets them

01:09:39.740 | unstuck.

01:09:40.740 | So you expand your available pool of conceptual tools to apply to the problem at hand.

01:09:46.340 | So people sitting together for hours focusing on something hard, they can actually produce

01:09:53.580 | more than just a single person thinking about it.

01:09:58.460 | So what happens when we have remote collaboration?

01:10:01.040 | Most of that does not unlock those same whiteboard effects.

01:10:04.740 | Remote collaboration, because I did a lot of this during COVID, it's emailing things

01:10:08.500 | back and forth, and it's having Zoom conferences for relatively short periods of time, because

01:10:15.340 | if it's Zoom, you've scheduled it on your calendar and it's an hour, and you're kind

01:10:18.540 | of talking things through.

01:10:19.540 | And it's kind of useful.

01:10:20.540 | You're exchanging some information, but you do not get those boost the cognition.

01:10:24.700 | You do not get those in the moment when I'm stuck and actually thinking, you help me get

01:10:27.980 | unstuck.

01:10:28.980 | When you do remote collaboration, the actual acts of collaboration are typically disassociated

01:10:33.220 | from the serious thinking, the alchemy when you're trying to produce new thoughts.

01:10:37.100 | You lose those advantages.

01:10:39.940 | I see this.

01:10:40.940 | Let me give you an actual example from my own life as a professional thinker.

01:10:45.420 | So last year with some collaborators, I published a computer science paper that won an award.

01:10:49.700 | It won a best paper award.

01:10:52.420 | Here's what's interesting about working on that paper.

01:10:54.640 | Took a long time.

01:10:56.620 | We were started during Zoom on Zoom because it's during the pandemic and my collaborators

01:11:01.420 | were all over the world.

01:11:02.740 | We usually would get together every year, but we weren't.

01:11:05.420 | And so we had these regular Zoom meetings for a long time.

01:11:09.580 | We knew this was a good problem, weren't making progress.

01:11:12.900 | Some progress would get made, but just getting stuck because on Zoom, we would talk about

01:11:15.980 | it and then maybe we'd think about it some on our own and not much was happening.

01:11:20.980 | What got that paper unstuck?

01:11:23.420 | At some point I said, virus or no virus, those of you who are in this area, come to the Deep

01:11:30.940 | Org HQ.

01:11:32.860 | We had the whiteboard in here.

01:11:34.460 | We spent the day, unlocked a lot of things.

01:11:37.460 | Now suddenly we had a real core to this paper.

01:11:42.220 | Around this time, Georgetown was back open again.

01:11:44.180 | Thanks for rock and rolling.

01:11:45.180 | So one of my collaborators who had been overseas as a Georgetown professor came back and we

01:11:49.420 | said, great, let's get together every, there's a day, it was a Wednesday, like we both taught

01:11:55.020 | on Wednesdays, between our classes, let's always get together and go to this whiteboard

01:11:58.980 | and just work.

01:11:59.980 | And more things begin to unfold quicker now, quicker now.

01:12:02.820 | And the core results of this paper really fell out to the place where then we could

01:12:05.620 | go back on our own and each take a different thing and polish it on our own.

01:12:09.140 | Paper came together, won a best paper award.

01:12:11.700 | So we couldn't make progress on this until we could figure out how to get back together.

01:12:17.080 | Still took us two years because a lot of this was still done virtually.

01:12:20.300 | Now I want to contrast that.

01:12:21.420 | I'm going to load up something on the screen here, a cool thing that theoretical computer

01:12:28.460 | scientists get to do.

01:12:29.460 | So I've loaded on the screen a picture of this castle.

01:12:33.940 | This is Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany.

01:12:37.180 | This is hard to get to.

01:12:38.420 | You have to fly to Frankfurt and then take a train for a long time.

01:12:41.700 | And then you get to the end of the line of the train, you have to have a car waiting

01:12:44.660 | to take you the rest of the way to this castle in the countryside.

01:12:47.660 | This whole castle is dedicated to hosting workshops for computer scientists to get together

01:12:51.860 | for a week and do nothing but think about problems.

01:12:54.620 | It's a really cool setup.

01:12:56.660 | They give you assigned seating for all the meals.

01:12:59.560 | So it rotates who you're with.

01:13:01.020 | They have unlimited coffee and unlimited honor system beer.

01:13:05.780 | You can't keep track of how much beer you drunk and like you kind of pay them at the

01:13:08.980 | end.

01:13:09.980 | All day long, all you do.

01:13:10.980 | You can't even walk anywhere from here.

01:13:12.700 | You're stuck.

01:13:14.020 | All day long, all you do is just talk to people in person about work.

01:13:17.980 | You give informal presentations.

01:13:19.300 | I went to these a long time, one of these a while back.

01:13:22.300 | It's a week.

01:13:23.300 | You're a week in this castle.

01:13:25.400 | More recently, I went back and tabulated how many papers came out of that week and it was

01:13:31.140 | six.

01:13:32.140 | Six peer review publications came out of that one.

01:13:34.420 | One week of just working all day in person with people unlocked the core results for

01:13:39.240 | six papers.

01:13:40.520 | The paper that I just won that best paper award for, two years of effort.

01:13:44.040 | Two years of effort, one paper versus one week, six papers.

01:13:49.300 | There's something cognition enhancing to being in the same room with other smart people working

01:13:54.620 | on the same thing.

01:13:55.620 | That is what I think they found or at least they were finding evidence of in that Nature

01:13:58.920 | paper.

01:14:00.320 | The groups that were working together have a bigger brain.

01:14:03.560 | It's a conceptual distributed combined cyborg brain.

01:14:07.320 | They have a bigger brain to apply to the problem, cooler solutions come out.

01:14:12.160 | We can't just think about, and this happens all the time, is we remove from the picture

01:14:17.520 | in lots of different areas when we think about technology intersecting our lives.

01:14:20.780 | We remove from the picture this messy human brain that actually has to do cognition.

01:14:24.740 | We try to reduce everything to just abstraction and it causes trouble.

01:14:28.800 | When we think ideas are just recombining information, we're like, "Great.

01:14:33.040 | It's just a global marketplace of ideas and we're just sharing stuff on Twitter and Zoom

01:14:36.520 | and we'll get all these great new ideas."

01:14:38.760 | Not how it works.

01:14:39.760 | Same thing happened in work.

01:14:41.400 | We saw the world of work is just like people have information that they have to get to

01:14:44.560 | each other.

01:14:45.720 | We adopted the hyperactive hive mind.

01:14:47.680 | Let's just connect everybody up.

01:14:49.080 | We're on Slack and email all day because all that matters is getting information to these

01:14:52.800 | abstract vessels of information that they need, not knowing or thinking about the fact

01:14:57.200 | that these messy collections of neurons between our ears can't keep switching back and forth

01:15:01.160 | between all these things.

01:15:02.640 | That's not how thinking works.

01:15:04.680 | It's not a network router.

01:15:06.280 | It's something much messier.

01:15:07.440 | We all got miserable and our productivity fell.

01:15:10.040 | There's this, again, a cautionary tale that happens again and again when you deal with

01:15:14.480 | the intersection of technology and cultures.

01:15:16.240 | Do not forget the human brain and how it actually operates.

01:15:19.540 | It's weird and it's idiosyncratic, but it can also be wonderful.

01:15:22.380 | But you need to actually work with the reality of how this organ functions if you want to

01:15:27.320 | get the most out of it.

01:15:28.320 | I thought that was a cool example.

01:15:29.320 | You can't just connect a lot of people with the internet and say, "We're going to have

01:15:32.240 | more ideas."

01:15:34.120 | Everything's more complicated than that, and a lot more messy and a lot more analog.

01:15:37.560 | All right, Jesse, we should have a castle.

01:15:41.480 | Why don't we have a castle?

01:15:42.480 | >> A lot of space.

01:15:43.480 | >> A lot of space.

01:15:46.080 | That's our next goal.

01:15:48.480 | We need a Schloss-Dagstuhl-style castle that we get together to figure out podcast ad reads.

01:15:55.520 | I don't know what we're actually going to do at it.

01:15:58.360 | Brandon Sanderson jokes.

01:15:59.360 | >> We're going to popularize our Shopify store.

01:16:01.680 | That's where we're going to think what's going to go on that Shopify store.

01:16:04.560 | Just imagine what we're going to produce.

01:16:06.240 | All right, enough nonsense for now.

01:16:07.240 | Thank you, everyone, for listening.

01:16:08.900 | We'll be back next week with another episode of the show, and until then, as always, stay

01:16:13.260 | deep.

01:16:14.260 | >> Hey, so if you liked today's episode about how to become a more serious thinker, you

01:16:18.920 | should also check out episode 250, which is titled In Defense of Thinking, where I give

01:16:25.820 | a more thorough case for why deep contemplation is so important for living a deep life.

01:16:31.820 | Check it out.

01:16:32.820 | The deep question I want to tackle, why is it important to preserve the vanishing art

How To Escape Mediocrity & Get Ahead Of 99% Of People - Change Your Life In 3 Months | Cal Newport

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