How Do You Balance Ambition With Life?

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - All right, the next question is about balancing

00:00:07.320 | and balancing ambitious with everyday life.

00:00:10.960 | - Hey, Cal, this is Saheem from India.

00:00:17.400 | Thanks for your podcast and I really enjoy it.

00:00:20.360 | My question to you is that

00:00:21.600 | how do you balance ambition with life?

00:00:24.440 | I see many entrepreneurs and leaders say that

00:00:27.080 | they are overly ambitious

00:00:28.600 | and have very little time available for life

00:00:31.280 | and health related tasks.

00:00:33.880 | On the other side of the spectrum,

00:00:35.400 | I see more people having regrets

00:00:37.360 | about not meeting their potential.

00:00:41.000 | So how should we find this ambition life balance?

00:00:45.440 | Thank you.

00:00:46.280 | - Well, it's a critical question.

00:00:50.760 | And I think it's one that we're not necessarily

00:00:55.520 | dealing with in a sophisticated manner right now

00:00:58.360 | in our cultural moment.

00:01:00.920 | The way I read our current moment is that

00:01:04.800 | in the first decade of the 2000s,

00:01:08.120 | we had a emphasis on crushing it, right?

00:01:13.120 | I mean, this was a time where we were,

00:01:15.520 | especially in American culture,

00:01:16.560 | lionizing the new wave of tech entrepreneurs

00:01:20.720 | and that burst of the whole like Zuckerberg, Musk,

00:01:25.440 | that whole world, Bezos, et cetera, right?

00:01:28.600 | So we were like into like these people

00:01:30.320 | who got after it up all night,

00:01:33.080 | moving fast, breaking things,

00:01:34.720 | building fortunes, changing the world.

00:01:37.400 | This was also the period of like Sheryl Sandberg

00:01:39.680 | and Lean In.

00:01:40.520 | And so there's definitely an emphasis of

00:01:43.520 | we were pretty activity oriented.

00:01:47.200 | And then we whipsawed.

00:01:49.000 | So now more recently,

00:01:51.520 | we have the anti productivity movement.

00:01:54.400 | So we've gone hard the other direction

00:01:56.320 | and we can look at things like Ginny O'Dell's book,

00:02:00.320 | or which was, I always mix it up.

00:02:03.640 | It's How to Do Nothing,

00:02:05.680 | or I think it's How to Do Nothing,

00:02:07.240 | or the Art of Doing.

00:02:08.080 | I think it's the How to Do Nothing.

00:02:09.080 | And then Chelsea Headley had Do Nothing.

00:02:12.840 | There's Berkman's book, which I really enjoy, 4,000 Weeks.

00:02:17.080 | But there was a pushback in the other direction,

00:02:21.200 | which was we shouldn't really be doing things

00:02:24.680 | like productivity in general is constructed.

00:02:28.320 | And depending on who you talk to,

00:02:29.560 | you get different extremes on this.

00:02:31.400 | So like, I think Berkman has a much more milder

00:02:33.960 | setup to this, which is just like,

00:02:36.400 | hey, in general, we're excited about doing two things,

00:02:39.480 | but we set our aspirations too high.

00:02:40.840 | And on the other extreme,

00:02:42.480 | you have the commentators to think like all of productivity

00:02:44.920 | is basically exploitative mythology

00:02:48.440 | created by capitalists to oppress

00:02:51.600 | the new digital age proletariat.

00:02:54.280 | So it gets pretty extreme,

00:02:56.280 | but it's more of let's normalize this idea

00:02:58.680 | that the drive to do action is all kind of fake anyways,

00:03:03.280 | and you should be okay just chilling.

00:03:05.320 | Do nothing, how to do nothing, et cetera.

00:03:08.360 | So we've kind of gone too far in the other direction.

00:03:10.280 | That's not really working either

00:03:11.840 | because humans like to do things,

00:03:14.160 | and we like accomplishment,

00:03:15.320 | and we like to make long-term plans and execute them.

00:03:17.640 | You can actually point to the specific sectors

00:03:20.920 | of the brain that evolved in humans

00:03:22.720 | that we don't share with our primate ancestors

00:03:24.640 | that actually help us make those plans and reward them.

00:03:27.040 | It's what helped our species differentiate.

00:03:28.600 | So there's a deeply human aspect of having goals

00:03:32.320 | that you then make a plan for and execute

00:03:34.080 | and see your intentions being manifest

00:03:36.760 | concretely in the world.

00:03:37.800 | So just telling people like, let's just chill,

00:03:40.840 | it's important that we normalize

00:03:43.360 | that you don't have to be a superhero,

00:03:45.920 | but that doesn't do it either.

00:03:47.200 | And I think this question gets right at that tension.

00:03:51.480 | So my answer here,

00:03:54.080 | this is where I become a bigger believer

00:03:55.760 | in this term I've been trying to popularize,

00:03:59.120 | slow productivity.

00:04:00.200 | And this is a concept that's still in development.

00:04:04.920 | It's embryonic.

00:04:05.800 | I change what it means each time I talk about it.

00:04:07.840 | So you're seeing this in real time.

00:04:09.800 | But critical to slow productivity is this idea of,

00:04:14.240 | yes, seeking out accomplishment, but on larger timescales.

00:04:17.240 | Over the next few years,

00:04:20.000 | I care about what I produce over the next few years

00:04:22.200 | that I've produced some things of real value.

00:04:25.080 | When you're focused on execution at that slower timescale,

00:04:28.880 | it gives you a lot of breathing room and flexibility

00:04:30.960 | on the small timescales.

00:04:32.840 | When you're trying over the next two year period

00:04:35.080 | to produce something that you're proud of,

00:04:37.480 | a product or a piece of writing,

00:04:39.680 | that allows you next Tuesday

00:04:42.600 | to just be with your kids and do nothing.

00:04:45.800 | Because on the larger timescale,

00:04:47.480 | that one day is not that important.

00:04:48.920 | It allows you to have a month where you're really pushing it

00:04:51.800 | and then a month where you're taking a breather.

00:04:53.320 | Three months where you're just doing research

00:04:54.760 | and a summer when you're at a cabin

00:04:56.200 | and writing six hours a day.

00:04:57.440 | It's seasonal, it's varied, it's diverse.

00:04:59.600 | It fits the rhythms of the human condition.

00:05:02.040 | Slow productivity feeds into all of that.

00:05:04.120 | I think this is probably the ideal setup

00:05:06.320 | for satisfying the human desire to accomplish

00:05:09.560 | is that you are working on a small number

00:05:11.440 | of important things.

00:05:13.000 | You return to it and you hone your craft

00:05:15.080 | and you try to be so good they can't ignore you.

00:05:16.600 | But this is work that is diligently applied

00:05:18.560 | over long periods of time.

00:05:20.120 | And when you look back five years later,

00:05:21.480 | you're proud of what you produced

00:05:22.760 | and you don't care so much about what happened

00:05:24.760 | in the last five hours.

00:05:27.120 | That I think is where you get that balance

00:05:29.720 | where most people are gonna be happy.

00:05:32.160 | So how do you introduce this all into your life?

00:05:33.920 | Well, again, this is where doing

00:05:35.040 | the multi-scale planning is important.

00:05:37.120 | Have your semester plan that feeds into a weekly plan,

00:05:40.480 | which feeds into a daily time block plan.

00:05:42.440 | That semester or quarterly plan,

00:05:44.080 | whatever you wanna call it,

00:05:46.000 | helps you see what you're working on

00:05:48.760 | in this big picture for the next three or four months.

00:05:50.960 | And then that can filter into your week

00:05:52.400 | where you say what days we wanna work on this, if any.

00:05:54.320 | And then that filters into your day.

00:05:56.320 | And it allows you to have clarity

00:05:59.640 | but adapt your execution of that clarity

00:06:02.120 | over the realities of what's really going on in your life

00:06:05.720 | and the busy times, not busy times, et cetera.

00:06:07.600 | So basically my advice here is be ambitious

00:06:11.760 | but slow down your execution of those ambitions.

00:06:14.440 | Be proud of what you produce five years from now,

00:06:18.920 | which again is gonna require your planning at multi-scale

00:06:21.080 | so you don't just do nothing for months,

00:06:23.560 | but be really easy on yourself about what you do this week.

00:06:25.920 | Because it's a hard week because your kid's homesick

00:06:27.920 | and there's a deadline for another work-related project

00:06:30.760 | that's annoying you.

00:06:31.600 | And it's okay to be annoyed.

00:06:32.420 | It's okay not to get much done that week.

00:06:33.720 | So be ambitious, but slow down

00:06:36.920 | the execution of that ambition.

00:06:38.520 | For most people, I think that's gonna be the sweet spot.

00:06:42.560 | (upbeat music)

00:06:45.140 | (upbeat music)

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How Do You Balance Ambition With Life?

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