Most Self-Help Advice Is Wrong - Here's The Fastest Way To Transform Your Life

00:00:00.000 | So what do we normally talk about here? The general topic is how do you cultivate a deep life

00:00:07.920 | in a world that is increasingly distracted? Now, if you go back and look at all the things I've

00:00:13.840 | said about this topic, you could put these into three main categories of advice. Category number

00:00:21.040 | one is just how do you get your act together? How do you get organized in both your life

00:00:27.200 | and in your job? How do you stay on top of your task and your commitments? How do you find enough

00:00:32.160 | control over your schedule to actually intentionally choose what you want to do and what you don't want

00:00:37.040 | to do? How do you develop discipline? But that's not the category I want to talk about today.

00:00:41.360 | The second category of advice is about how do you add the stuff that really matters to you

00:00:46.640 | and how do you subtract the stuff that doesn't matter to you? So how do you add what's important

00:00:51.200 | and subtract what's not? This could be big changes to your job or where you live or removing from

00:00:57.840 | your life things that are really draining your energy. But that's not the category I want to

00:01:02.000 | talk about today either. What I want to talk about comes from the third category, which is how do you

00:01:08.960 | periodically reflect on your life and what you've been doing, reflect on what you care about and

00:01:15.200 | where you're trying to go, and then iterate back into the decisions you're making. It's that stepping

00:01:20.880 | away to reflect and iterate that drives forward the process of trying to cultivate a deeper life.

00:01:28.000 | That's a big category, but there's one specific idea within that third category that I want to

00:01:33.280 | focus on today, and that is self-help. If you are going to continually focus what matters to you and

00:01:43.600 | your strategies for how to get there, you are going to have to consume self-help. Now this term

00:01:50.240 | is one that I think is broad, but we often narrow what we think it means. So when we think about it,

00:01:56.800 | we're imagining potentially cheesy books from the self-help shelf in the bookstore that's going to

00:02:03.360 | have a lot of lists of advice or a lot of emotional encouragement, like you can do it,

00:02:09.120 | go get after it. It's a very narrow thing, something we're almost embarrassed about.

00:02:13.600 | I think though, what I'm going to try to argue here today is that the variety of information

00:02:18.960 | sources that count as self-help is much, much broader, and understanding this and understanding

00:02:25.680 | how to intelligently navigate this landscape of self-help writ large is absolutely necessary if

00:02:33.120 | you want to become wiser and therefore have a foundation on which to cultivate a truly deep

00:02:37.520 | life. So here's what I'm going to do today. I'm going to break the broad category of self-help

00:02:43.440 | into three smaller categories, and I'm going to talk about each, and I'll give you a piece of

00:02:48.880 | advice for each about how to navigate that particular collection of self-help sources

00:02:54.160 | in the most effective way possible. Then too, at the end, I have a couple of thoughts about

00:02:58.400 | what you should do with all of this information. I'm talking logistically, administratively,

00:03:02.800 | what do you do with all the information that you encounter in your self-help journey so that you

00:03:08.800 | can actually remember to make use of it going forward? All right, so that's my plan. For those

00:03:13.920 | who are watching, I'm going to bring up my tablet here. So if you're listening and you want to watch

00:03:18.720 | this, this is episode 286. Just go to the deeplife.com/list and find episode 286. The video

00:03:24.800 | of the episode will be posted below. All right, so here's what's on my screen. For those who can't

00:03:29.760 | see it, there is a header, three categories, because I am going to divide the world of things

00:03:35.680 | we could potentially call self-help into three categories. And I am going to expertly draw,

00:03:42.000 | because as Jesse knows, I'm a fantastic artist. When I draw on this tablet, it is not unlike

00:03:47.440 | Picasso drawing the peasant's hands. I'm going to draw a picture for each of these categories.

00:03:53.440 | Those who are watching can try to guess. All right, so for the first category,

00:03:57.120 | let's see, what am I going to draw here? Jesse's gotten pretty good at guessing,

00:04:02.800 | roughly speaking, at least when I'm drawing. Maybe not what the category is. All right. Yay.

00:04:08.560 | All right, so I'm realizing now, Jesse, what I drew kind of looks like a body in a coffin.

00:04:14.560 | It's not what I meant. I mean, category one, it would be funny if my first category was like,

00:04:20.320 | you want real self-help? You need to hang out at the cemetery. Memento mori, you sons of bitches.

00:04:27.760 | You got to look at the corpses and say, that's going to be me. No, that's supposed to be a phone.

00:04:33.440 | That's supposed to be a phone with someone dancing on it. All right. So what is this

00:04:36.720 | first category? I call it pre-digested self-help. So what I mean by pre-digested is that these are

00:04:44.880 | forms of self-help in which the advice has already been extracted and clarified for you.

00:04:49.760 | Here's some ideas, but more importantly, here's what you should do. Like here's 10 things you

00:04:54.320 | should do. Here's a plan you can follow. Here's a particular procedure that you can put into place.

00:04:59.440 | So it has, someone has taken an information from the world that is relevant to improving yourself

00:05:04.560 | and digested it for you already. And they have been given it to you in the form of advice.

00:05:10.160 | There's three big categories, subcategories in here. And what I'm going to do is list them in

00:05:15.520 | the order of increasing quality. And by quality, I mean potential for impact in your own life.

00:05:23.760 | So within pre-digested, the lowest quality subcategory would be short videos and social

00:05:30.000 | media posts. It is a lot of this, a lot of Instagram, a lot of tech talk, a lot of YouTube

00:05:35.920 | that is, Hey, I'm going to help you figure out how to cut fat so you can get shredded.

00:05:41.680 | I'm going to help you figure out like how to study better for your exam. And let's go

00:05:45.280 | a lot of this content, nothing wrong with it. But the reason why I'm putting that at the bottom

00:05:51.280 | of the hierarchy here is that there are different objectives for the authors of this content.

00:05:58.000 | There's sort of mixed motivations. The number one thing, if you're creating this type of content

00:06:03.280 | is virality. So really the master that these content creators are serving is they want the

00:06:10.720 | relevant algorithm to like and bless what they're doing over time. This pushes the way the content

00:06:16.400 | goes. It doesn't mean there's not useful information in this content, but the goal

00:06:20.400 | of the content is not to be as useful to you as possible. It's to get recommended as many times

00:06:24.960 | as possible. Right? And so this, this is different. So it's the most watchable of all self-help

00:06:30.480 | content. It's the easiest and most accessible because it's, it draws you along. You don't have

00:06:35.760 | to exert any will to continue watching it, but it's also perhaps the most diluted because the

00:06:41.680 | objective here is not really to make you better at what they're talking about. That's secondary.

00:06:47.120 | Primary is virality. And that's not always the same thing. All right. The second subcategory

00:06:51.120 | of predigested self-help I'm going to say is podcast. These are better because when you're

00:06:57.120 | creating a podcast, that's relevant to self-help. So a podcast like this one, right? Give you advice.

00:07:02.000 | I'm not serving at the altar of virality because that's not the way that podcasting works. There

00:07:09.520 | is no algorithm that recommends podcast. And if you, if you do something just right with your

00:07:14.000 | content, you're going to be recommended to a couple million people and have this big growth.

00:07:17.680 | Now, podcasting is very word of mouth. It's very organic. If you like this show enough,

00:07:22.000 | you'll eventually tell someone about it. Well, what makes you like a show over the weeks or

00:07:27.200 | months that you've listened to it? It's been effective for you. So listening to podcasts

00:07:31.440 | that are giving advice, this is a higher level of predigested self-help because the incentives are

00:07:38.880 | now aligned. I want to make this show as useful as possible to you because that's how this show

00:07:45.440 | grows. Not because, you know, there's a thumbnail that's attention catching. The third subcategory,

00:07:52.240 | this is the, what most people think about when they think about self-help is advice books.

00:07:56.880 | So I put this at a higher level of quality than just podcast because like podcast,

00:08:02.880 | the incentive is in line. I want this book to really help people. That's how you sell more

00:08:08.160 | advice books. Remember, it's not marketing. It's not publicity. When Deep Work was published,

00:08:15.120 | I was disappointed. There wasn't a big marketing or publicity push. Friends of mine were going to

00:08:20.800 | Barnes and Noble and they were telling my friends, "Oh, we don't even, you know,

00:08:23.360 | we didn't bother stocking a copy of this book." Fast forward now, we're coming up to the eighth

00:08:28.160 | year that this book has been out, one and a half to 2 million copies sold. Why? Because over time,

00:08:34.320 | people found it worked and they're like, okay, they told other people about it.

00:08:38.160 | So advice books like podcast, advice podcast want to be useful,

00:08:41.760 | but the authors have more time to clarify, clean up, and polish what they're saying. When you read

00:08:48.080 | an advice book, like my new book, Slow Productivity, this is something I spent a year writing,

00:08:53.920 | right? A year trying to get my thoughts right and clarified into the most useful structure.

00:08:58.880 | After spending before that, another two years previously, just thinking about those ideas,

00:09:03.840 | writing articles, podcasting on it, just thinking about it in conversation.

00:09:07.760 | And then all of that goes through extensive editing. Well, this isn't quite clear. How do

00:09:11.040 | we make this better? So what you get in an advice book is pre-digested advice for making your life

00:09:16.320 | better that has been polished and thought through to the furthest extent possible of the person

00:09:21.520 | working on it. So that's going to be the highest quality of pre-digested self-help advice.

00:09:25.520 | All right. So what's my advice for navigating this particular category of self-help?

00:09:33.280 | I would say be wary of the short videos and social media posts. You could use those for

00:09:38.640 | entertainment. Be wary about using them too much as a source of advice for how to live your life,

00:09:43.600 | because again, the quality is the least aligned. And you have this fear of scratching an itch

00:09:51.280 | insufficiently. And what I mean by that is that we have a human drive to want to improve.

00:09:55.520 | That drives us to seek out this information. Your fear is that you scratch that itch entirely with

00:10:01.840 | TikTok videos. Hey there. I want to take a quick moment to tell you about my new book,

00:10:06.640 | Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. If you like the type of things I

00:10:14.720 | talk about on this channel, you're really going to like this book. It distills all of my ideas

00:10:20.480 | into a clear philosophy combined with step-by-step instructions for putting it into action. Now,

00:10:27.840 | if you pre-order this book before it comes out on March 5th, I have some bonuses I want to offer you

00:10:34.400 | as my way of saying thanks. These include a chapter-by-chapter audio commentary from me,

00:10:41.280 | the author, and a crash course that will teach you how to put the ideas of slow productivity

00:10:46.880 | into action in your own life right away. So to find out more about the book and how

00:10:53.040 | to redeem your pre-order bonuses, check out calnewport.com/slow. Everything you need,

00:11:00.400 | you can find there. All right, thanks. Let's get back to it.

00:11:02.960 | And you've convinced yourself, yeah, I'm taking in advice and I'm making my life better, but

00:11:07.920 | the information is not really that quality. So you're not really getting what you need. It's

00:11:12.400 | like scratching the itch of hunger with junk food. It kind of works in the moment, but long-term,

00:11:17.600 | that's not going to be a good strategy. On the podcast side, have a rotation of high-quality

00:11:23.680 | advice podcasts. They're just a part of your life. Of course, I hope that rotation includes

00:11:27.760 | our show here, but there's other good ones as well. And then when it comes to advice books,

00:11:33.520 | you want to read, I would say at least one per month. The good news is they're not hard to read.

00:11:38.720 | They're typically readable in a few sessions. You can skim the parts that aren't particularly

00:11:43.360 | important. You can use a service like Blinkist if you want to get the main ideas in advance to

00:11:49.040 | figure out which books are worth reading, but I think you should do one a month. So if you have

00:11:52.960 | two or three podcasts a week that you just regularly listen to in the background and you

00:11:57.520 | read one advice book per month, that is a really good stream of high-quality, pre-digested self-help

00:12:03.760 | content. All right, that's where most people stop when they think self-help, but that's just one of

00:12:10.560 | the three categories that I want you to consider. All right, so we're going to go to category two,

00:12:15.520 | which once again, I will expertly draw. This I'm better at drawing. I think, well, all right,

00:12:22.640 | there we go. Now, I'll have to explain. Got this and let me draw. All right, so what I've drawn

00:12:38.720 | here, Jesse, this should be clear, is a book. And the thing next to it is, here I'll draw

00:12:47.120 | projection lines. It's a movie screen. All right, so what do I mean by the second category? I'm

00:12:52.240 | going to call it interpersonal. That's not going to make sense at first until I explain it, but

00:12:57.440 | this is an important one. Interpersonal is a category that includes media, typically in book

00:13:05.360 | form or movie form, in which you create an emotional, empathetic connection with another

00:13:12.720 | character. So it elicits in you an empathetic connection. I can feel what this person is

00:13:20.560 | feeling. I feel privy to the inner psychological state of this other character. So you could get

00:13:27.600 | this in memoir. I'm reading a memoir of someone. I'm really, over time, getting to understand this

00:13:33.520 | person and what they were going through and what their life was like. It could be novel, right? I

00:13:37.840 | mean, what is a novel? If anything, a good novel is a mind-reading device, an author connecting

00:13:44.720 | your brain to the brain of a character that they've crafted. That's what you're using words

00:13:48.240 | to induce emotional states in the reader. And documentary can do this as well. All sorts of

00:13:56.800 | films can, but documentary in particular, if it's focusing on a particular subject, if well done,

00:14:00.800 | it sort of brings you into that person's life. That's why I call it interpersonal. You're

00:14:04.880 | connecting to another person, another character. So why is this important? Well, one of the deep

00:14:11.040 | sources of powerful self-reflection comes from encountering another person in the psychologically

00:14:20.400 | complex way and feeling resonance. There's something about the way they live their life

00:14:26.560 | that resonates with me. There's something about, be it their internal character or something about

00:14:33.200 | the external world in which they live, the living on the island, the slower existence,

00:14:38.560 | or maybe it's the will or fortitude of a heroic leader type character, or maybe it's the exactitude

00:14:44.800 | and focus on craft of a sort of Jiro from Jiro Dreams of Sushi documentary, right?

00:14:49.920 | Something resonates about you, about another person to which you have an empathetic connection.

00:14:56.080 | That's a huge source of wisdom because you have this complicated connection to the person. When

00:15:01.840 | you feel resonance, you can study this connection and say, what is it about this person that's

00:15:06.480 | causing this sense of resonance, this sense of attraction or appealingness? And that's great

00:15:11.280 | insight into what matters for you and what matters in your picture of a life well lived.

00:15:16.960 | So you have to think about these sophisticated characterizations that you encounter

00:15:23.280 | as just as important as a source of self-help as reading slow productivity or deep work,

00:15:30.160 | or listening to a podcast like this. Think about it in that same framework.

00:15:34.400 | So what's my advice for actually navigating this interpersonal category? Well, you got to be

00:15:40.080 | emotionally open when you encounter these sources, reading a novel, watching documentary, be willing

00:15:46.880 | to open up and create that empathetic connection. Because again, you have to create

00:15:52.080 | in yourself these reactions because that's what you're going to study to figure out what

00:15:58.640 | matters to you. So you have to be emotionally open. Keep your resonance radar high.

00:16:03.040 | You should really have this tripwire of, oh, wait a second. Something about what I'm seeing or

00:16:08.960 | reading is feeling very appealing to me. I don't know what it is. I'm watching this movie about

00:16:15.040 | big wave surfers and they're in Hawaii and something here is working for me. I don't know

00:16:18.320 | why, but it is. Keep your resonance radar high. When that tripwire trips, you're like, okay,

00:16:23.840 | there is something here to be examined. Then be willing once you feel that sense of resonance to

00:16:29.680 | almost right away in the moment or right after to do the internal work to figure out, well,

00:16:33.840 | what specifically about what I just read or saw or encountered, what specifically about that

00:16:39.280 | was appealing to me. And you have to do a little bit of forensic analysis here.

00:16:44.000 | And a good way to do this is to take out elements and then test it.

00:16:47.040 | Well, is it the surfing in the big wave surfing thing, like the sport, the challenge? Well,

00:16:54.080 | let me take that part, but remove it from Hawaii and all of that. And just imagine

00:16:58.560 | someone training for a big sport like this with an otherwise busy lifestyle. Now that doesn't

00:17:04.960 | resonate the same. Okay. So let me take the surfing out of it and just keep in it living

00:17:09.520 | somewhere natural and having to slower schedule. Oh, that's still working for me. Okay. So what's

00:17:14.320 | resonating here, nature and slowness, maybe. All right. So let me try to separate these two things.

00:17:19.040 | Let me think about a slow existence in an urban environment. Do I still have the same resonance?

00:17:23.920 | Let me think. So you know what I'm doing here is I'm taking out elements. It's like a differential

00:17:28.080 | diagnosis in medicine, doing internal work while the emotions are still fresh to figure out what

00:17:32.800 | exactly in here is resonating. So these interpersonal sources of self-help advice,

00:17:38.720 | do not sleep on those. There's a lot of wisdom lurking. All right. Let's go. Let's go to our

00:17:46.880 | third category here. All right. All right. I know what I'm going to draw. Oh, no, that's not good.

00:17:57.360 | Hold on. I aborted. I'm going to try again. All right. Sitting. I'm going to put them on.

00:18:03.680 | I've drawn this before, Jesse, so you might recognize it.

00:18:06.800 | All right. It is Rodin's The Thinker. Again, expertly, expertly drawn. It's a man sitting on

00:18:18.640 | a rock. And what I'm talking about here is probably what people would have thought about

00:18:25.760 | the term that didn't exist. But if you explain to them the goal of self-help, right, information is

00:18:32.720 | going to improve my life. This is what people would have thought of for hundreds of years until

00:18:37.440 | most recently. I'm going to call this the scholarly slash theological category of self-help content.

00:18:46.880 | Right. These are the heavy hitters, the heavy hitter sources that scare most people away.

00:18:53.520 | We're talking about seriously serious scholarly works that touch on meaning.

00:18:57.920 | Works of philosophers, for example. We're also talking here serious theological works like

00:19:03.920 | religious text or religious commentaries, theology, and scholarly philosophy. There is clearly a lot

00:19:12.000 | of wisdom in here for living your life well, but it also scares a lot of people off.

00:19:19.280 | Right. This is complicated stuff. I'm not just going to pick up Heidegger or, you know,

00:19:26.640 | Haftor reading in the original Hebrew and just like jump into it. I feel better with TikTok.

00:19:32.560 | So this kind of scares people away, but it shouldn't if you have the proper on-ramp

00:19:40.240 | into these deep ideas. So in fact, I'm even going to draw below this little on-ramp.

00:19:45.600 | So it's like an on-ramp. Well, it's a ramp. It's not an on-ramp, but a ramp. There we go.

00:19:49.680 | I drew in a ramp towards the thinker. So you don't have to start. You don't have to start

00:19:57.760 | with the really complicated, seriously scholarly or theological text. Where you can start is

00:20:02.960 | secondary sources. So say, okay, here's where we're gonna start first. People writing about

00:20:07.600 | the serious text, explaining them, their role in their life, why they're important.

00:20:13.840 | This is way more accessible because it's written with less jargon meant to be accessible in the

00:20:20.640 | vernacular that you're currently used to. Right. So it may be, instead of jumping straight into

00:20:26.880 | Marcus Aurelius, you say, I'm going to read Ryan Holiday first. Ryan is a secondary source

00:20:31.200 | talking about this primary source. Maybe before you say, I'm going to explore,

00:20:36.080 | you know, my Christian faith by reading the gospels. Why don't I read like a Tim Keller

00:20:41.840 | book first? Makes it more accessible, right? It's talking about those books,

00:20:46.080 | but it's not actually those books. Maybe existentialism. There's something here. I

00:20:51.760 | really want to know about these thinkers, but they're really hard. So you can read

00:20:55.360 | at the existential cafe, right? This is Sarah, I think Blakewell, which has like a great secondary

00:21:02.160 | source talking about these philosophers, but it's not directly the philosophy itself.

00:21:08.800 | So you could start with secondary sources. From there, you can move to what I call

00:21:13.520 | accessible primary sources. So now these are serious works, serious or scholarly or theological

00:21:20.480 | thinking, but they're relatively accessible. You can read this without having to have

00:21:25.760 | a lot of expert background. I think, for example, we talked about this in the show.

00:21:31.600 | I bought an early edition of Thomas Merton's Seven Story Mountain, which has some really

00:21:37.760 | interesting reflections on theology and life, but it's accessible because he's also telling

00:21:43.280 | his story. Same thing with like Augustine's Confessions. It's accessible. It's the very

00:21:48.320 | first psychologically real autobiography. I think from a philosophical standpoint,

00:21:56.160 | Thoreau is very accessible. Walden is something you can read, and he's making philosophical

00:22:02.960 | arguments about the life well lived. You can get them, right? You can go through that. It's

00:22:08.240 | an accessible primary source. And then finally, you can build your way up to the expert primary

00:22:12.640 | sources. Now you're reading the original philosophers in translation. Now you're

00:22:16.960 | grappling with the original religious text or the serious religious commentaries. It's not

00:22:24.320 | Tim Keller anymore. It's Thomas Aquinas. It's not just reading Ryan Holiday. Now it's grappling

00:22:34.800 | with the Stoics directly themselves, etc. So what's my advice here? That you build towards

00:22:41.600 | expert sources. You build towards the expert sources by starting with secondary sources

00:22:47.200 | that teach you a lot about what you were going to read. They give you the landscape of ideas

00:22:53.360 | so that by the time you get to the expert source, you really sort of understand the references and

00:22:57.600 | what you're trying to get out of this. I would recommend at least once per year, if not twice,

00:23:02.000 | build towards an expert source. And you might read two or three secondary sources to get there.

00:23:05.840 | Meanwhile, you can sprinkle in accessible primary sources, the ones that you can just dive in and

00:23:12.240 | read and get wisdom out of directly without it requiring a lot of prior study. You might want

00:23:17.680 | to retain a one to two or one to three ratio of accessible primary sources to standard self-help

00:23:24.400 | advice books. So for every two or three standard self-help or advice book I read, I'll try to read

00:23:30.880 | one more scholarly or theological primary source that's accessible. There you're going to get the

00:23:36.960 | right mix. So you build up the one real expert source per year that you dive into, and you have

00:23:42.160 | a steady, not overwhelming, but sort of steady background drumbeat of sort of accessible primary

00:23:47.760 | sources that are thinking seriously about how to make your life better and what strategies

00:23:53.280 | get you there. This is a more sophisticated strategy for consuming self-help. It draws

00:23:59.840 | from these different categories, all of which have something to add, and it does so in a balanced

00:24:04.640 | manner. It is a key attribute, I think, of any intentional plan to live a deeper life is to make

00:24:11.040 | sure that you are fueling that engine of insight and thoughts and decisions with better and better

00:24:16.000 | understanding of what it is that actually matters for you. So that comes to my final piece of

00:24:20.480 | advice is, well, what do you do with all this information you're discovering? You should store

00:24:25.120 | it. The stuff that really matters should be extracted and written down somewhere.

00:24:29.840 | So one of my recommendations is that you should think about what you're trying to do here is to

00:24:36.080 | maintain a personal operating system. I have a personal operating system that sort of specifies

00:24:43.200 | how I live my life, what values are important to me, what commitments I have, what actions I do

00:24:49.280 | and don't do. You have this personal operating system, and I use the operating system metaphor

00:24:54.080 | in part because I'm a nerd, but also in part because we think about operating systems as

00:24:58.000 | something you upgrade all the time. So there's no notion of like, I have to figure out the right

00:25:02.480 | operating system for living. You want some operating system and you're going to be upgrading

00:25:06.960 | this regularly. One of the big sources of this upgrading is going to be this encounter,

00:25:13.600 | this balanced, intelligent, comprehensive encounter with self-help. So wherever you

00:25:17.920 | write down this operating system, and I don't want to get too caught in the weeds of structure

00:25:21.520 | format here. You do what works, but wherever you write down, here's what matters to me. Here's

00:25:25.440 | what I'm trying to head towards. Here's the commitments, the things I do, and here's the

00:25:28.480 | things I definitely don't do. Wherever you write that down, you can have a place to capture and

00:25:33.680 | refine big ideas that you've encountered in self-help. This is resonating, this is resonating.

00:25:41.280 | And over time, as ideas in that list that is important really stay there and prominently

00:25:46.160 | catch your attention, they can influence the operating system rules ahead that are above it.

00:25:50.800 | Now, these ideas that I've had down here, been here for a year now, I'm going to update my values

00:25:55.760 | in the operating system to reflect that. This over here is really resonating with me. I

00:26:00.560 | encountered this in a documentary and then in a couple other novels.

00:26:04.240 | It's going to change my list of commitments. Like I always do this, or I don't do this.

00:26:07.920 | So you need some sort of personal operating system to guide this whole effort to live

00:26:13.120 | a deep life. And that's a topic we can dive into in depth in a completely different episode.

00:26:17.680 | But that's where you capture these ideas. And that's ultimately where these ideas that come

00:26:22.960 | out of self-help to catch your attention. That's where they ultimately are going to have their

00:26:27.200 | impact. Changing the OS that you use to drive all of your other efforts to live a deeper life.

00:26:31.840 | So self-help doesn't have to just be Eckhart Tolle and hack videos on YouTube.

00:26:38.720 | It's a much broader term. We should treat it as a much broader term. And it's something we should

00:26:43.840 | take seriously. It's hard to live a deep life if you don't have a good evolving sense of what

00:26:49.840 | deep actually means. - I got a couple of follow-up questions.

00:26:54.320 | - What have we got? - What was your

00:26:56.240 | expert source in 2023? - Well, I read, I probably read

00:27:03.360 | more than one per year. We have to go back and look at our books read list.

00:27:11.440 | I've recently been reading a lot of Heschel, who's definitely a primary source scholarly thinker.

00:27:19.520 | We read some Stoicism in the original, if you'll remember going back. I'm reading the entire,

00:27:25.840 | I started this in 2023 and it continues in 2024. I'm reading the entire Hebrew Bible.

00:27:32.720 | There's a set schedule. So the first five books of the Bible, there's a set schedule that both

00:27:40.960 | Jews and Christians will follow in their study that breaks it up into 50 readings that spreads

00:27:46.880 | over the year. So right now, it's the same for everybody, right? So you can follow this along,

00:27:54.160 | just look up what's the weekly Torah reading. And you'll find that a lot of different websites,

00:27:59.440 | Christian and Jewish. Like this week is 10 Commandments, actually the Decalogue is in

00:28:05.520 | this week. So we're in Exodus, the second book of the Bible. Last week was the song of the sea

00:28:10.880 | and the Red Sea crashing on the whatever. So that's a project I'm doing right now.

00:28:15.600 | It's very accessible in the sense that it's not much reading. These readings aren't too long

00:28:21.600 | each week. And then what you typically do or what I typically do is couple each reading

00:28:27.760 | with a commentary. So someone writing a commentary on that week's reading. So I figured that's a

00:28:36.800 | cultural touchstone. They have really read through the first five books of the Bible,

00:28:41.200 | what the Jewish tradition would call the Torah. And so there's another sort of source that I'm

00:28:48.160 | working on. That's a good question. I'd have to go back and look at my list in 2023. I think

00:28:53.520 | there's multiple philosophical and theological primary sources I grappled with, but I'd have

00:29:00.240 | to go back. I'm reading some Chesterton right now. He's an interesting thinker. I guess that's 2024.

00:29:04.960 | >> I need to bump up my self-advice one a month per book.

00:29:11.920 | >> Yeah, right. Because what I say in the one a month per self-advice book.

00:29:16.880 | >> Yeah, I don't do that.

00:29:17.840 | >> At least one expert theological philosophical source you're building towards per year

00:29:23.280 | and like a three to one ratio. So if you're doing a three to one ratio of accessible primary source

00:29:28.640 | to self-help book, that means three of those a year, maybe three months, self-help book,

00:29:35.760 | fourth month, accessible primary source, or maybe you do both in that month. So

00:29:39.920 | I basically want people to up the variety of their intellectual diet here, basically. And of course,

00:29:48.480 | as with all my advice, the foundation of that is stop spending so much time looking at things

00:29:52.320 | on screens. >> Yeah, your analogy about eating junk

00:29:54.880 | food and satisfying your hunger was really good. >> Yeah, big screens are fine. Big

00:29:58.400 | screens are fine. But anything that's meant for virality, it's just the nutrients have been

00:30:03.760 | pulled out of that food. All right. Well, anyways, we got a good group of questions.

00:30:08.240 | Before we get there, though, I want to talk about some of the sponsors that makes the show possible.

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00:33:38.800 | Element is one of these things that's a sponsor of the show that I also buy

00:33:43.200 | regularly. Element is what I use when I hydrate after working out. I'll also drink it in the

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00:34:32.880 | special forces, including Navy SEAL teams, FBI sniper teams, and Marines, they all use Element.

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00:34:43.040 | sniper teams, Navy SEALs, U.S. Olympic weightlifters, and Rob was like, "This is great,

00:34:49.600 | but can we get a real man in here?" What I really want is to associate this with a really manly man

00:34:59.360 | who knows, the type of man that other men just bow down, the ultimate alpha. SEALs are fine.

00:35:04.400 | Olympic weightlifters are fine, but you know what we really need? A computer science professor

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00:36:22.560 | pack with anything you order. All right, let's get on to some questions. Who do we have first, Jesse?

00:36:30.320 | Hi, first question is from Larry. I have found what seems to be the crux of my inconsistency

00:36:35.920 | with personal productivity. I have a decent system in place and can get on a roll, have a good week

00:36:41.440 | or two, but then it all falls apart when I run into a task that acts like an impenetrable brick

00:36:46.880 | wall. I can't bear to look at it directly and end up cowering into escapism activities of endless

00:36:52.080 | scrolling or videos. Is there general advice for facing down these hard tasks? Well, I mean,

00:36:59.280 | I think the key here, Larry, is when you get to these brick wall tasks, your solution is to punt

00:37:04.960 | on the task, not on your system, right? So there's a couple of things going on. I think one, the way

00:37:12.240 | you're thinking about your systems is in the game version, right? We talk about this often on the

00:37:19.040 | show that people think about, especially when we talk about planning systems, in a particular daily

00:37:23.840 | planning systems, that it's a game and you win the game if you can build this perfect plan that you

00:37:30.720 | follow exactly. And you lose the game if you fall off the plan, right? So there's a gamified version

00:37:37.280 | of professional planning. The problem with this version is that when you fall off the plan, you

00:37:43.600 | say, I lost the game. So why keep, you know, why keep playing, right? Like once the, that final

00:37:49.760 | touchdown has been scored, you don't stay on the field and keep playing. So you're like, okay,

00:37:53.040 | then, you know, whatever, I failed today. Let's load up the browser. Let's get the TikTok up and

00:37:58.320 | going. That's the wrong way to think about professional planning. It's not a game.

00:38:02.800 | The goal is not the win. The goal instead is to apply intention to your activities.

00:38:08.480 | The binary you should care about is not stuck with schedule, failed to stick with schedule,

00:38:12.960 | but instead have intention for what I'm doing right now versus don't have intention for what

00:38:18.800 | I'm doing right now. And how do you get intention by having a plan and what happens when you fall

00:38:22.880 | off your plan, you fix your plan and then you keep going. It doesn't matter so much that over

00:38:28.400 | the last week, I rarely changed my plan. That doesn't matter. What matters to me is what

00:38:34.320 | percentage of your work hours over the past week were spent working on things that you actually

00:38:39.280 | thought in advance about what you wanted to do and had chosen this intentionally as a good activity.

00:38:43.920 | What is your intention hour ratio? That's what really matters. So if you get to in your plan,

00:38:49.920 | some sort of hard task and you're like, "I just can't get going on this. I don't have what I need.

00:38:55.920 | I just, whatever. I'm resisting it brick wall. I don't have the energy." You say, "Okay,

00:39:03.280 | take a breather, fix the plans, go do something else. Not a big deal." Because what matters is

00:39:09.040 | that you keep coming back to intention, not that everything in your plan actually gets executed.

00:39:15.840 | All right. So I think that's important. Let me give you a couple of tactical things here

00:39:20.080 | about the specific brick wall activities. So we have the big picture, punt on the idea,

00:39:25.680 | not on the system. Punt the task, not on the system. You're not trying to win a game. You're

00:39:28.880 | trying to be intentional. But let's talk a little bit more about these really hard activities.

00:39:32.880 | I'm going to give you two practical suggestions. One, softer entry. So if you have a really hard

00:39:40.480 | task that every time it comes up, it just paralyzes you. Like for me, this might be something like,

00:39:45.920 | here's a really tricky long form New Yorker piece that you've promised to write. It's hard to just

00:39:53.280 | sit down and be like, "Let's go." So I get it. Softer entry is often the way to do. Instead of

00:39:59.360 | scheduling on your calendar four hours to quote unquote, write a draft of this really hard article,

00:40:05.200 | you schedule one half hour to go for a walk somewhere scenic and just think about like,

00:40:11.440 | "How am I going to do this article? How am I going to get into it? What's going to work here? What's

00:40:15.920 | not? What can I get excited about? What structure can I get excited about?" And there will be no

00:40:19.840 | actual writing during this session. It is just you thinking. And what happens if you don't really

00:40:25.120 | come up with any good ideas? Nothing. You get a nice walk for a half hour. That's a softer entry.

00:40:30.960 | So you get to one of these pre-deep tasks, you'll do it. "Yeah, I got to go for a walk. This is an

00:40:35.200 | easy thing to do." And you know what's going to happen after five or 10 minutes? You are going

00:40:38.240 | to have some good ideas and you're going to be like, "Okay, here's a good opening. And what if

00:40:41.840 | I do this or that?" And now that you've had that preparatory period, when you next get to a bigger

00:40:46.720 | block scheduled to do the hard thing, it's going to be much easier to start because it's not a cold

00:40:50.720 | start. You already have some preparation. So for the really hard things, give yourself some of

00:40:56.160 | these softer entry blocks first before you tackle the main event. The other thing to keep in mind is

00:41:02.640 | maybe you're procrastinating on these really hard tasks. I'm looking at your wording here,

00:41:06.880 | impenetrable brick wall tasks. Maybe you're having a hard time getting started because your brain is

00:41:15.040 | not on board with the plan. You have this task like, "All right, I am going to write my killer

00:41:20.640 | novel. Let's get going." And your brain is like, "Hey, buddy, you don't know how to do this."

00:41:24.720 | You can't just like load up Scrivener and start typing. No, this is stupid. It's going to be a

00:41:28.720 | waste of time. You haven't thought this through. You don't have a lot of information on how one

00:41:32.080 | succeeds in this. We don't have confidence that this is a first step towards many that will have

00:41:36.880 | a high probability of a good return. There's stuff you're not doing that you kind of know you need to,

00:41:41.920 | but as annoyance, you're avoiding it to do something else instead. I don't want to have

00:41:45.200 | anything to do with this. Hey, motivational center, turn off. So that could be going on as well.

00:41:51.040 | Make sure your brain's on board, which means you really believe the thing you're doing that you're

00:41:56.800 | struggling with is worth doing and that you believe you have a very good, effective plan

00:42:00.800 | for actually tackling it. So I put those two things in there. I think that'll help.

00:42:05.600 | So just in terms of these specific tasks, soft entries, making sure you really should be doing

00:42:12.080 | the task that really matters. More philosophically, the system is not about winning the game. The

00:42:19.360 | system is about intention, and that should help you prevent from going back.

00:42:23.280 | I'm going to riff on you a little bit here. One more piece of advice.

00:42:26.880 | Get rid of that escapism as an option. Have better escapism activities. It's not going to help you

00:42:35.200 | start the activity. But when you find yourself seeking escapism,

00:42:39.920 | don't do endless scrolling or videos. Have higher quality escapism. That alone won't solve your

00:42:47.040 | problem because when you get to the impenetrable task and you give up on your schedule, you're

00:42:50.240 | going to go through escapism. But if you're a grown man, don't scroll videos. Make that escapism

00:42:56.240 | like I'm reading something. I'm going for a walk. I'm watching a movie. I needed a break last week,

00:43:04.480 | and so I put aside two hours to finally watch Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon.

00:43:08.720 | Cool movie, by the way. Filmed it in natural light, Jesse.

00:43:12.800 | Really?

00:43:13.840 | They used the fluorescence in the set. They built a fake bank, but on a real street in the warehouse.

00:43:19.520 | Used the fluorescence as the lighting. They only had to augment the lighting during the scenes

00:43:24.560 | where the power went out. Natural lighting. Everyone was wearing their own wardrobe,

00:43:30.400 | so it was all naturalism. It was all about naturalism. They told Pacino, "Wear your own

00:43:35.760 | clothes. Just wear your own clothes." Probably 50% of the dialogue was improvised.

00:43:40.880 | Really?

00:43:41.280 | Yeah. Great movie. Yeah. Interesting. Also, it's really cool, and Larry, I know you care about

00:43:48.320 | this. It's from the '70s. The actual plot that this bank robbery is turning on is very progressive

00:43:56.240 | for the time. What's really happening is Al Pacino is trying to get this money to pay for a sex

00:44:02.000 | change operation for his boyfriend who's in a mental institution. He's been hospitalized. This

00:44:08.400 | is out there stuff for the '70s. Lumet, because I just read a book. I just read Lumet's book,

00:44:15.360 | Making Movies. He talks a lot about this. He's very careful. You build this connection with

00:44:21.280 | Pacino. You don't know why he's robbing the bank until halfway through so that you have this

00:44:26.000 | connection with him. Then he wanted the 1970s audience to be okay with realizing the full scope

00:44:32.480 | of the story. If he had just opened with that, they would have put up walls. He'd call it the

00:44:36.400 | People in the Balcony. It would have been like, "Ah." But he builds up this connection over an

00:44:40.080 | hour, and then he layers on this new layer of psychological complexity. Now you're all in.

00:44:45.760 | Anyway, it's a great movie. That's what I'm saying, Larry. Watch Dog Day Afternoon instead

00:44:50.560 | of scrolling videos, okay? If you're a grown man, enough of this. That's not going to solve

00:44:54.720 | your problem. All my other stuff is going to solve your problem of giving up on your system,

00:44:58.400 | but you also have this other problem of you need better escapism. I think of the compulsive

00:45:04.800 | scrolling is like the day drinking a little bit. It's like in the '60s, like, "Oh, man. This job

00:45:11.840 | runs me down. My life is hard. Can't we just have a couple more martinis and lunch?"

00:45:16.560 | In the moment, you're kind of getting away from bad feelings, but when you get to your

00:45:22.880 | kid's little league practice, you're pitching the ball into the stands because you can, etc.

00:45:26.800 | All right. I'm going to tighten up here. It's a long answer, Larry. Let's move on. Let's do

00:45:32.160 | another one. What do we got here, Jesse? All right. We got Ramil. "How should I choose a

00:45:35.920 | project to boost my career capital? I currently have two choices. One I will surely enjoy at all

00:45:41.040 | times, but it's debated how much it will increase my career capital. The other will give me an

00:45:44.960 | almost immediate boost in my career capital, but I will hate doing it." Ooh, there's a dilemma.

00:45:49.680 | Yeah. I was going to say, but this is not fair. So, Jesse, I was going to say at first, "Oh,

00:45:55.200 | this is one of those famous questions we get where they try to lead me to the answer."

00:45:59.680 | We're like, "Well, I could do this option. It would require ritual castration,

00:46:10.480 | and I would have to move to Bakersfield, California, and I would have to live under

00:46:17.360 | an oil derrick, so that's going to be going on. I'll probably be blinded by the acid fumes,

00:46:25.520 | but I could do that, or I could try to become a YouTube influencer and live a life of peace

00:46:34.000 | and happiness." But I don't know. What do you think I should do? We get a lot of those,

00:46:37.520 | but this is not quite that, because this is exact counterpoints. I think this is a true

00:46:44.720 | Prisoner's Dilemma game theory issue here, because he's saying option number one for his career

00:46:49.120 | will be good for his career, but he'll hate it. Option number two will not be good for his career,

00:46:54.640 | but he'll love it. Actually, this is not him leading us. This is a well-balanced dilemma.

00:47:02.000 | Here's what I'm going to say. First of all, I'm very wary of the activity that you say is not

00:47:07.920 | going to build career capital, but is fun. I tend to think about professional projects that are fun,

00:47:12.960 | but don't actually move the needle on the things that matter in your career.

00:47:16.320 | You're just smuggling a hobby into your work. Let your hobbies be your hobbies. Have things you do

00:47:22.880 | just because they're really fun. In your work, you want to be simplifying, and with the time that

00:47:28.160 | remains, focusing as much as possible on things that really matter, unambiguously rare and valuable

00:47:32.960 | skills that you want to deploy and get better and better at. For those who don't know what he means

00:47:37.680 | when he says career capital, it's an idea from my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. It's the

00:47:42.560 | metaphorical substance you acquire as you develop rarer and more valuable skills. It is the main

00:47:49.040 | leverage you have to make your job better. You invest your career capital into the things that

00:47:54.960 | make great jobs great. So if you don't get good at things, you can't expect a good job.

00:47:57.920 | So I don't want to really waste my time, at least significant amounts of my time,

00:48:02.720 | on projects that don't help with that. If you want just fun stuff, you know, have a fun hobby.

00:48:08.160 | So that being said, let's look at this other option that will build your career capital,

00:48:12.160 | but you'll say you hate it. Here, it just depends on what your definition of hate is

00:48:16.800 | about what I'm going to recommend. If your definition of hate it is just, look,

00:48:20.080 | this is going to be hard. It's going to require deliberate practice to master the skills needed

00:48:26.000 | to pull off this new project. In the end, I will have more career capital, but it's going to be

00:48:30.000 | hard. I don't want to do that hard work. I hate doing that type of hard work. Then I'm going to

00:48:34.080 | say do the hard work and just get more comfortable with that feeling of, oh, I'm straining myself to

00:48:40.800 | get here. Because that feeling of strain is how you get better and how you take control of your job.

00:48:45.600 | On the other hand, if the reason why you hate it is more specific to the activity itself,

00:48:51.200 | the people are involved, you're like, I don't have anything to do with them,

00:48:54.080 | or the activity itself, I hate doing this type of thing. I'm an introvert. And this particular

00:49:00.000 | project is going to require me to like reach out and network and be super social. And I know I'm

00:49:05.040 | going to hate every minute of it. If it's intrinsic to the activity itself, clashing with you,

00:49:10.640 | your personality, or your values, then don't do that activity. But also in that case, don't default

00:49:17.360 | back to the fun thing. Keep searching to find another good option. Keep searching for something

00:49:22.720 | else you can do that you're not going to hate, but will grow your career capital. I don't want

00:49:28.400 | you to give up, to take your eye off this prize of systematically building rare and valuable skills,

00:49:34.560 | because that's what's going to make your job good. It's what gives you leverage and options.

00:49:38.240 | It's what's going to allow you to say, here's where I want to work, when I want to work,

00:49:40.960 | and what I want to work on. It's what allows you to say at 55, I'm going down to 30% time

00:49:46.320 | and moving to the white mountains because I'm really, really good. And the stuff I do is really

00:49:51.520 | valuable. And I have leverage in this marketplace. So don't give up building up leverage yet.

00:49:58.400 | So don't do something just because it's fun, if it's not really going to help. On the same token,

00:50:05.040 | don't do something you hate, if you really, intrinsically, you hate it. But if you just hate

00:50:09.440 | the hard work of getting better, well, you got to get used to it. That's what it takes to do

00:50:13.440 | something deep. All right, rolling along. What do we got here next? We got Sammy. I quit my software

00:50:21.200 | sales job three years ago to pursue freelance B2B content, writing full-time. My goal was to get my

00:50:28.560 | rate high enough to work only three to four hours a day, leave me free to pursue my dream of writing

00:50:33.600 | fiction. I'm happy to say that I've reached the necessarily hourly rate to write every afternoon.

00:50:38.400 | But after three hours of technical writing in the morning, I'm too drained to write fiction later in

00:50:43.120 | the day. Any advice? Well, Sammy, I'm glad you hit your goal that allows you to actually

00:50:48.880 | implement the schedule you envisioned, working three or four hours and then working on your

00:50:54.560 | novel. The step back, I don't recommend this path for other people. So again, going back to my book,

00:51:00.640 | So Good They Can't Ignore You, don't use the big change as your source of motivation to pursue a

00:51:06.160 | different project. Don't quit your job and say, because that'll motivate me to do better at this

00:51:11.040 | other job and so I can write full-time. Probably in this case, I would have suggested write while

00:51:17.440 | doing your sales job to really see, am I good at this? Can I sell a book? Sell a book first

00:51:26.480 | and then say, great, I know I can make a go at this. Now I'm going to reconfigure my job so I

00:51:31.360 | can do this with more time. I'm not a big believer in just like taking the huge leap because I think

00:51:36.080 | people prioritize that momentary feeling of excitement and possibility of making the big

00:51:41.200 | change, but the big change might not have been the right idea. But okay, here you say it's fine.

00:51:46.240 | Your new job is working out, you're making enough money, that's good. So you're having a hard time

00:51:51.120 | still writing. All right, I wrote down four ideas about how you might solve that. Number one, I

00:51:57.280 | think it's the obvious thing. Write your novel first, then do your freelance writing job. Start

00:52:04.160 | with the novel, then switch to the other thing. B2B content writing and for software, you don't

00:52:11.440 | need to have 100% going there, right? This is not Hemingway. It's not Lauren Groff needs to be

00:52:19.280 | writing these things. They have to carefully craft the freelance B2B software writing content to

00:52:24.480 | expose the human experience. So do the novel writing first. Maybe get up a little bit early.

00:52:29.280 | I do that from 7.30 a.m. to 9.30 a.m. and then get my day started with the other type of writing

00:52:35.680 | after a walk. That's obvious. Two, add more rituals and routines surrounding your fiction

00:52:40.800 | writing. So your issue here may be just the context switch. Sometimes when people think

00:52:45.680 | they're drained, what they're really feeling is just the immediate friction of my brain is in this

00:52:50.720 | context. It's freelance software writing. And when I wrench it away from that, and two minutes later,

00:52:57.600 | I'm like, "Let's get going on the novel." Your brain is saying, "I have none of the relevant

00:53:02.560 | stuff loaded up. I don't have the characters loaded up. I don't have the plot loaded up.

00:53:08.560 | You're going to have to give me 15 or 20 minutes until I have switched my cognitive context from

00:53:13.200 | what we were doing before to what we're doing now." A lot of people experience that 10 to 20 minute

00:53:18.880 | switch of cognitive context as, "Oh, I'm drained. I can't do this. I guess my brain doesn't want to

00:53:24.000 | do it." What professional writers know is you just keep powering through. And after 20 minutes,

00:53:28.320 | why does it get easier? Because your brain has switched over all the context, and it's no longer

00:53:32.400 | pulling neuronal teeth that actually make progress on what you're doing. So it might just be you need

00:53:37.680 | to give it a little bit more time. A ritual and routine helps here. Okay, I'm going to go for a

00:53:42.800 | walk and make this coffee. I'm going to read my last pages and then walk through the woods for 20

00:53:47.840 | minutes and then come back and start writing. These types of rituals help you through the

00:53:52.720 | process of converting your cognitive context. It'll feel then less strain once you sit down

00:53:57.440 | at the keyboard. Number three, make sure your brain actually trusts you to write a novel.

00:54:03.760 | We talked about this in our answer to a previous question in this episode.

00:54:09.040 | But a lot of times why novelists get blocks is because their brain says,

00:54:13.520 | "You're not ready to be a novelist. You're just writing, but you don't really... I have no faith

00:54:17.200 | that you're producing something here that's going to be a sellable novel. You haven't talked to

00:54:22.080 | other novelists about how they got started. You have no way of evaluating what you're doing to

00:54:26.160 | see if it's of the right caliber to even be considered. Hey, you haven't even looked into

00:54:30.160 | the process of what happens when this novel is over. Why aren't you joining a writer's group?

00:54:34.320 | Why don't you know about how agencies work? Why haven't you talked to two or three other people

00:54:39.040 | about how many books it took before?" Your brain might just say, "You just don't want to write.

00:54:44.400 | You just like the idea that I write every day. You like the idea of being someone who published

00:54:49.120 | a book, but you haven't spent time figuring out what do I have to do to be that person."

00:54:53.760 | So make sure you've really convinced your brain that what you're doing with this writing

00:54:58.560 | has a good chance of succeeding. And if not, you need to go get that information. You got to

00:55:03.520 | convince your brain first, because otherwise it's going to turn off that motivational center.

00:55:06.720 | And you're going to read that as being drained. Because keep this in mind,

00:55:12.720 | there are many well-known writers, especially in genres, genre writing, who get started writing

00:55:21.280 | in addition to a very busy full-time job. So the human brain is capable of doing this.

00:55:26.080 | You're doing freelance writing three to four hours a day. You could still work on your novel.

00:55:30.720 | In my new book, Slow Productivity, I have a whole thing about genre writers and when they wrote

00:55:36.720 | their first books. I talked about Stephanie Meyers writing the Twilight books. She was raising three

00:55:41.280 | young boys. So there's these little windows of time. That's a really hard job. I have three boys.

00:55:46.080 | She was writing while doing that. John Grisham was writing while a lawyer and a member of the

00:55:50.880 | Mississippi State Legislature. You get up at 5 a.m. to put in those pages. Michael Crichton was

00:55:56.240 | writing while a med student. When he would get bored in class, he would just switch over to

00:56:02.720 | working on the novel that he was working on. We had Clive Kussler. So his wife took a job that

00:56:10.240 | had a night shift. So he had the kids at night. After he put the kids to bed, his wife wasn't

00:56:15.440 | there. He was bored. That's when he would write. He was an ad executive. He'd write late at night.

00:56:20.240 | Robin Cook spent time writing in decompression chambers. He was a Navy diver after the Korean

00:56:26.800 | War doing experiments, early experiments with scuba. And so he would write and bring a typewriter

00:56:32.720 | into decompression chambers. He was a ship doctor on a submarine in the Navy for a while. He'd work

00:56:38.000 | on books down there. So it's not like you're coming up against some physical limit. So you

00:56:43.280 | really want to care about these other factors that are going on to see what's really going on here.

00:56:47.040 | And finally, be okay going slow. Key idea from slow productivity. I'm doing this with another

00:56:52.880 | job. It's my first book. So maybe this takes me two years instead of six months. As long as you

00:56:58.640 | couple and steady with the word slow, you're okay. Keep the pace realistic. I think that'll be okay.

00:57:06.480 | All right. I think we got time for one more question. Let's do one more here.

00:57:12.000 | Okay. We got Todd. I'm a software engineer at a small tech company, and I have almost no meetings,

00:57:18.720 | a pull-based task management system, zero emails, and almost exclusively asynchronous

00:57:24.160 | communication through our project management tool. As a result, I can spend my entire day

00:57:29.040 | in a deep work state. Can there be too much deep work? Because to me, the entire ordeal feels

00:57:34.320 | dehumanizing. I'll tell you what, Jesse, for reasons that I will soon explain, I want to call

00:57:39.680 | this question our slow productivity corner of the day. All right. So as longtime listeners and

00:57:52.480 | watchers know, in celebration of my new book, Slow Productivity, that comes out on March 5th,

00:57:57.520 | I choose one question per episode to make my slow productivity corner question of the day.

00:58:02.560 | I choose a question that overlaps with ideas from my book, Slow Productivity.

00:58:08.400 | If you want to get a free excerpt from that book, go to calnewport.com/slow to learn more.

00:58:16.640 | All right. So why is this connected to slow productivity? Because this question is fantastic

00:58:23.040 | because it connects to the evolution of work in the 20th and 21st century and the problems with

00:58:30.240 | the way this evolution unfolded. So Todd is explaining from a systemic perspective, a

00:58:37.680 | perspective of systems, in my mind, a fantastic knowledge work structure, no meetings, poll-based

00:58:46.880 | task management. That's a big idea from slow productivity, but that's where you pull in the

00:58:50.480 | next thing you're going to work on when you're done with the current thing, as opposed to having

00:58:54.320 | anyone and everyone push work onto your plate that you then have to juggle or manage without

00:58:59.520 | having a say in it. Zero emails, almost exclusively asynchronous communication through project

00:59:04.240 | management tools, meaning you're not servicing back and forth email and chat conversations all

00:59:09.040 | day, which creates context switching. This is an ideal setup for a knowledge work job that's built

00:59:14.400 | on doing deep work like software engineering. So why is Todd dehumanized and miserable?

00:59:19.680 | It's because we have a mismatch here. We have a mismatch between the way we've learned to work

00:59:28.320 | and the reality of these better ways of working. So let me explain here. This is an idea from the

00:59:32.400 | first part of my book, Slow Productivity. In the first part, I say, how did we get to this place

00:59:36.960 | where we are very unhappy with the notion of productivity in knowledge work? And the story I

00:59:43.280 | tell is one of haphazardness and heuristics. So we have mid 20th century, it's 1959, the year that

00:59:51.920 | knowledge work is first coined as a term. This is the decade in which knowledge work emerges as a

00:59:57.440 | major economic sector, right? Not just, we have a few people in an office to support

01:00:02.000 | our iron foundry, but now we have just whole companies that do nothing but work in offices,

01:00:08.240 | working with our brains. And a question arises, what does it mean to be productive in this new

01:00:14.000 | type of work? In the factories that were dominant in the economy until this point, it was really

01:00:19.680 | easy. Here's the stuff we produce. We produce Model Ts. We measure how many labor hours it

01:00:25.440 | requires for each Model T produced. If you give me a system for building Model Ts that reduces

01:00:30.480 | that number, I know it's a better system and we switch to it. Before industrialization,

01:00:34.080 | we had productivity clearly defined in agriculture. Here's how many bushels of wheat I get

01:00:39.280 | per acre of land. You change the system you use to rotate your crops, that number went up. That's

01:00:43.360 | a better system. Knowledge work just doesn't work anymore. We're not producing one thing.

01:00:48.240 | Individual knowledge workers, and just reflect on your own life here,

01:00:52.080 | individual knowledge workers work on all sorts of things. Many different types of projects and

01:00:56.480 | many different types, some administrative, some more serious. There's no number to output the

01:01:02.000 | measure and put a number on and say this is up or down. These workloads are highly varied depending

01:01:10.240 | on what you happen to say yes to or not, or how many things were pushed your way. So you can't

01:01:14.720 | compare different people, apples to apples. And there's no clear system that everyone is following

01:01:20.320 | to organize and tackle their work. So it's not like we can say, hey, when we changed our

01:01:25.120 | productivity system from X to Y, we got more work done. So that's a better system.

01:01:28.960 | No, in knowledge work, it's autonomous. Everyone comes up with their own techniques.

01:01:31.680 | It's up to you to figure out how to manage their work. So we had no systematic way of actually

01:01:37.040 | talking about productivity. So what do we do instead? We fell back on this heuristic called

01:01:43.280 | pseudoproductivity. Visible activity becomes a proxy for productive effort. If I see you doing

01:01:52.880 | stuff, that's better than me not seeing you do stuff. So as long as I see you're busy,

01:01:58.480 | then it's a good approximation as far as I'm concerned that you're being productive.

01:02:02.880 | I get into this in the book, but it's like, okay, and if we need more productivity,

01:02:06.720 | what we need is just more hours of work, just more busyness. It was just a bandaid. We didn't

01:02:11.120 | really know how to measure productivity in the office environment, so we came up with this

01:02:14.080 | heuristic, visible activity. That's productivity. We created what I call an invisible factory

01:02:20.640 | for knowledge work. We clock in at a certain time, we have to do stuff until a certain

01:02:25.600 | closing time, and then we kind of clock out and leave our office and go home.

01:02:28.320 | We got very used to that. But here's the issue with the invisible factory pseudoproductivity

01:02:34.480 | model is that most of what we're doing is not actually moving the needle on things that matter.

01:02:41.200 | Most of what we're doing is we're talking about work, we're having meetings, we're trading emails

01:02:44.880 | back and forth, we're on chat channels, we're trying to chime in quickly on chain so people

01:02:51.360 | know that we're there. The activities that show that you are active can be quite orthogonal to

01:02:57.040 | the activities that actually make a difference. So we're just filling our days with busyness,

01:03:01.280 | the administrative overhead surrounding overloaded schedules and to-do lists, and

01:03:06.160 | 40-50% of what we're doing doesn't even really matter. So what happens then when we get back to

01:03:11.360 | Todd and we abandon pseudoproductivity and we abandon busyness as a proxy for productive

01:03:18.720 | effort and we get rid of the busyness through smarter systems, there's no more email chains

01:03:24.480 | you can endlessly respond to in five or six Zoom meetings a day, you can't hop on calls,

01:03:29.200 | you're an engineer program, make good programs. When you're done with this feature, tell us,

01:03:32.960 | you can pull in another one. So what happens when we get rid of all the busyness?

01:03:36.720 | The eight-hour day no longer makes sense. So much of our eight-hour day is filled with this sort of

01:03:43.040 | filler stuff that we can do endlessly, it's not too draining. When you get rid of all of that,

01:03:47.120 | there's only so much deep work you can do. And we know this by studying what I call in my book,

01:03:52.960 | traditional knowledge workers. Let's go back and study people who traditionally made a living with

01:03:56.800 | their brain, but because of the time and their situation had a lot of autonomy to figure out

01:04:01.120 | how they wanted to work, you know, scientists and philosophers and novelists. And what do they do?

01:04:06.720 | They would work hard for three or four hours most, and that would be it. And then they're done doing

01:04:10.320 | that type of work. Novelists don't write for more than three hours a day. The best scientists can

01:04:16.240 | think about physics for a while, but they can't do it all day long. Shakespeare would write his

01:04:21.280 | plays, but not in eight-hour shifts. So the reality of a world without pseudoproductivity

01:04:27.280 | and performative busyness is that they try to sit for eight hours. The artificiality of that

01:04:32.960 | in the context of knowledge production becomes apparent. If all you're doing is really trying

01:04:38.720 | to create valuable stuff with your brain, sitting somewhere for eight hours is not the right way to

01:04:42.160 | do it. Traditionally, people who have done this never worked that way. So what you're experiencing,

01:04:47.040 | Todd, is when you get a better structure of work that gets rid of the performative busyness,

01:04:52.400 | you're realizing the eight-hour workday doesn't match what you're doing.

01:04:56.000 | So long story short, work less. If you have to obfuscate that, obfuscate that. Two hours,

01:05:01.760 | 90-minute break, hour, two-hour break, another hour. If you need to spread it out in the day,

01:05:07.440 | do. If you don't, if you're entirely results-oriented, knock in four hours,

01:05:12.240 | get really good work done. And then with your other time, go do something else that's just

01:05:16.160 | as life-affirming and meaningful. Go back and listen to the first part of this episode where

01:05:21.360 | we talk about how to navigate the complex world of self-help information, reflect, reiterate,

01:05:26.480 | build, add, subtract, do all the stuff that makes a deep life deep. Think of it like you've won the

01:05:31.040 | lottery. You get to actually work the way that knowledge workers should be working.

01:05:34.240 | So yes, to try to fit in eight hours of deep work all day long, that is dehumanizing because

01:05:40.640 | the human brain can't do that. The eight-hour day makes sense for factories. The eight-hour day

01:05:47.040 | makes sense for a pseudo productivity regime where we have no other way of

01:05:50.560 | knowing what you're doing. It does not make sense, however, if your real goal is just to produce the

01:05:54.880 | highest quality, best results using your brain. You have a chance to do that, Todd. So work less.

01:06:00.640 | Was your coining of the invisible factory, did you use that for the first time in the upcoming book?

01:06:08.560 | I think so. I think so. The only reason why I'm saying I think so, it's possible

01:06:14.000 | and so my New Yorker writing, maybe I mentioned it, but I think I coined it in the book.

01:06:19.920 | Chapter four. But I don't want to, it's possible. There's a particular New Yorker piece.

01:06:27.600 | The New Yorker piece that overlaps this is I did one last year where I used anthropological

01:06:34.320 | research of extant hunter-gathering communities to try to understand what did work mean for humans

01:06:42.480 | for 300,000 years, like intelligence very recently. And how does that differ most from

01:06:46.960 | what knowledge workers do today? Because presumably where we have the biggest friction

01:06:51.680 | points between how we work today and how we evolved to work, we're going to find dissatisfaction.

01:06:56.000 | And that's where we want to change how we work today. And all this, I elaborate this whole thing

01:06:59.760 | in the book, of course, but it started as a New Yorker article. And this pace thing was a big

01:07:04.480 | part of it. This idea of like working full intensity for the same amount of time every

01:07:08.640 | day year round is incredibly foreign to the human species. And that's where the invisible factory

01:07:13.440 | notion applies. I don't know if I coined it in that book. I mean, in that article or from the

01:07:17.200 | book, but whatever. - I like the term a lot.

01:07:19.200 | - Yeah, it's a cool term. The types of knowledge you will learn. See, I'm doing an ad here,

01:07:24.960 | Jesse. The type of knowledge you will learn when you read my book, Slow Productivity,

01:07:30.400 | The Lost Art of Accomplishment, Without Burnout. - Just do it again in your French voice.

01:07:34.880 | - For my French readers, it's the type of knowledge you shall learn

01:07:38.880 | when you read the Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment, Without Burnout,

01:07:46.800 | available for pre-order, calnewport.com/slow. The French love slow productivity, by the way,

01:07:54.720 | because they're already on board with this, right? Like the French think we're crazy in the US.

01:07:58.720 | Like, what are you guys doing? Like, look, you're not going to be Jeff Bezos, most of you, right?

01:08:04.720 | Like, I get it if you're like crushing it to make a billion dollars and have a yacht that can't fit

01:08:10.320 | under a bridge. Great. But they're like, what's up, man? You're like an HR manager. Like, you're

01:08:15.520 | not going to be Jeff Bezos. Why are you guys crushing it? You know? They're like, they should

01:08:18.480 | be drinking the wine. You know, we work, we work. But like, what are we going to work in the

01:08:23.360 | afternoon? I mean, the afternoon is when we drink the wine. What is going on here? So the French

01:08:29.920 | get it, man. The French are on board. The Americans, I have to convince. The Germans, I have

01:08:34.640 | to convince. Deep Work is like a big book in Germany. So like, yes, we shall. Yes, I'm boy,

01:08:42.480 | we work hard, work deeply. Yes. So I got to convince the Germans. I got to convince the

01:08:48.080 | Americans. The British, it's not, the British don't, they're neither. They work really hard

01:08:54.240 | or like really like to relax. They just don't trust Americans. So I have to kind of convince

01:08:58.240 | them, though actually my books do well over there, but they're like, I don't know.

01:09:01.760 | How long have the British not trusted Americans for?

01:09:04.880 | I'm just thinking of the self-help category. They think we're all kind of

01:09:08.400 | boorish, you know? They're like, oh, cheerio. It seems a little brash, little brash. So sorry

01:09:15.760 | about this. Like the British and the Canadians are very worried about like tall poppy syndrome.

01:09:19.920 | Who are you to be telling me like what to do? You know, it's so it's, it's interesting. Every

01:09:25.280 | culture has their thing. The U.S. is like, give me whatever. Let's go for it. Like let's though

01:09:29.200 | telling Americans to work slower. It's going to be interesting. Yeah, we'll see. That's why

01:09:35.840 | you got to pre-order this book so that you can help spread the word. All right. That's a slow

01:09:38.720 | productivity corner. Let's get some theme music. All right. Let's, um, do we have a call this week?

01:09:54.000 | Yep. All right. Let's do a call. All right. Hey, Cal. Longtime fan going back a decade plus.

01:10:00.080 | As a fellow Dartmouth alum, I really appreciate what you're doing to elevate the

01:10:04.480 | visibility of our institution. So thanks for all that you do. I have a question for you relating

01:10:10.400 | to writing and productivity. I am currently in the midst of working with a writing coach

01:10:16.560 | who has been encouraging me to adapt my processes to kind of move the ball forward a little more

01:10:22.720 | effectively on some papers that I'm working on. There's one in particular where I'm not

01:10:26.960 | necessarily beholden to another team, but am intermittently chipping away at things when I

01:10:32.160 | have time. Unfortunately, it keeps winding up being a second or third on the bucket list and

01:10:37.200 | then competing priorities kind of overrule it. My coach is encouraging me rather than trying to

01:10:42.480 | slave away and find rocks in the schedule of large chunks of time where I can do some high

01:10:47.840 | quality writing to instead look for short intervals, short bursts, as short as, you know, five

01:10:52.480 | minutes, 15 minutes, things like that, and to do that with more frequency. I know in deep work you

01:10:57.840 | talk a little bit about different approaches and structures to being productive in this way. I find

01:11:04.000 | it really hard to kind of rev up for that, but I'm willing to give it a try and will plan to do this

01:11:08.560 | probably in the interim between submitting this and you answering the question. But I would just

01:11:12.320 | love to hear a little bit around your thoughts in terms of writing productivity. I know you tend to

01:11:16.880 | write every day, but it sounds like your chunks are actually pretty substantial on a daily basis.

01:11:20.960 | I'm currently at a point between family and other work demands where I don't know that I have the

01:11:25.040 | bandwidth to do that effectively right now. And I'd just love to hear your thoughts on

01:11:29.600 | the trade-offs or considerations in like micro chunks for focused deep work versus

01:11:37.920 | more of the macro chunks with lower frequency and the relative merits of both. Thanks very much.

01:11:43.200 | Well, always happy to give advice to a fellow Dartmouth man. You're the crazy Jesse because

01:11:49.360 | you're the same age, you're in the same place, same boat here. We're going back to Dartmouth

01:11:53.040 | this summer. For your 20th anniversary. 20th anniversary. I was getting a lot of emails,

01:11:58.880 | I haven't responded. It's kind of crazy. Kind of crazy. 20th anniversary. There was a book,

01:12:05.680 | there's a book that was big when I was in grad school. It reminds me of this

01:12:11.280 | question. It was, I think it was called writing your dissertation in 15 minutes a day.

01:12:17.360 | Like that was the theory of this book. Hey, 15 minutes a day, that's not so bad. But if you

01:12:23.360 | really do the math, this adds up to a lot of writing. It was similar to that really popular

01:12:28.000 | financial advice in the early 2000s, the latte effect. If you just don't buy one latte every

01:12:33.120 | day, just don't buy your latte. That's $3 a day. Well, that's going to be, you know, $20 a week,

01:12:39.280 | but you know, $20 a week is going to be $80 a month, which is going to be almost $900 a year.

01:12:46.160 | And if we have that $900 a year and we put interest over 20 years, you're going to have

01:12:54.400 | $15,000 or like whatever it is, right? That just little stuff adds up. It's definitely compelling.

01:13:00.320 | That's not going to work. It's not going to work for difficult writing. It's not going to work for

01:13:06.080 | scholarly writing. The problem is, is you need about 15 or 20 minutes just to fully load up all

01:13:10.640 | of the context, all the cognitive context in your brain. Until then, you're not even really ready to

01:13:16.000 | write anything of any substance. I mean, I would say you need 15 or 20 minutes of a startup ritual

01:13:22.000 | before you even start writing. And then you want to write 90 minutes minimum.

01:13:26.320 | You really need 90 minutes minimum to produce enough that it was worth all the cognitive

01:13:33.040 | startup work you had to do to get rolling. If this paper is important to you, find the time,

01:13:39.040 | block it off, and deal with the consequences later. So I'm just going to make this happen.

01:13:43.760 | Three days a week, I can do this first thing and I'm going to do it for two hours or 90 minutes,

01:13:48.320 | and I'm just going to have to make that happen. I can't have other meetings scheduled here at work,

01:13:53.120 | and I'm just going to make it happen. And I'm going to give it its attention. I'm going to

01:13:57.200 | finish it, and then I'll free up those blocks. You know what? Nothing terrible will happen,

01:14:01.120 | almost certainly. And maybe it's I have to get up early. I talked about this in deep work.

01:14:05.520 | Brian, who I actually just talked to the other day, keep in touch, but I had this example of Brian

01:14:11.360 | working on a dissertation while he was doing full-time teaching and other types of stuff.

01:14:15.360 | He did it in the morning. He had this real ritual around it. Read that chapter,

01:14:18.400 | went to his basement, had this really set ritual around an exact cup of coffee made at the exact

01:14:25.200 | time just to get his mind in the writing mode every day. He did the sort of 5 a.m. thing and

01:14:29.200 | got it done. I'll sometimes do afternoon or evening blocks when I have a big deadline. I got

01:14:35.200 | to get this chapter done, or I really need to crack. Let's say I'm trying to crack a New Yorker

01:14:39.280 | piece, and I feel like I'm spinning my wheels. I'll sometimes just arrange with my wife, like,

01:14:43.440 | "Look, I'm going to do 4 to 6.30, and I'll probably go to the coffee shop right there just to get into

01:14:50.320 | the writing mode and then go to my office here and right here." And it's just a way of thinking

01:14:54.160 | through, like, here's a special time I can deploy that's really for pushing it. But make the time

01:14:58.640 | and do it. You have it. I mean, think about this. If you, God forbid, fell and broke your arm,

01:15:04.880 | let's just say that happened. You have a busy job. You have a busy family. What's going to happen?

01:15:09.040 | The doctor's going to say, "You got to do PT. You got to do PT for 6 weeks. You're going to lose

01:15:15.120 | mobility in your arm. You have to come to this place. You're doing it 3 days a week. It takes

01:15:19.280 | a couple hours. It's a pain, but you wouldn't lose your job, and your family wouldn't abandon

01:15:23.200 | you because you would work around it. You'd cancel some things. You'd work a little later.

01:15:26.240 | You'd make it happen. That's what you got to do if this writing is important to you.

01:15:29.520 | Give it 90-minute-plus blocks. Do the fixed-schedule productivity thing. Work around it.

01:15:36.160 | Make the changes you need to make. Focus. Use rituals to get your mind really going,

01:15:40.720 | and then just get into it and write. And don't think about it as a scary thing.

01:15:45.040 | It's just your job. That's what you do, right? Your job requires you to write papers. You're

01:15:50.800 | going to write papers. That's part of the job. It's the way I think about writing. It's my job.

01:15:54.160 | It's like a football player doesn't say, "I hate the running and the weightlifting stuff.

01:15:59.440 | That's so hard." That's the job of being a football player is that you're able and

01:16:03.760 | willing to do that, and other people aren't. So don't do that many. Give yourself more time.

01:16:09.040 | Trust yourself and your organizational abilities for you to keep your job.

01:16:13.680 | It's possible. I think you'll be okay. All right. I'm going to do a quick case study.

01:16:20.880 | I like to do these when possible. It's when someone sends in a more detailed account of

01:16:24.560 | using some of the ideas from the show. This one, I might need your help here, Jesse. This one's

01:16:29.360 | a complicated one. It's a particular system someone built. I don't know that I fully understand it,

01:16:34.480 | but people like when we sometimes get into the really complicated systems people build.

01:16:39.520 | So let's try one of those, and we'll see if we can figure this one out together.

01:16:42.400 | So this system was sent in by someone named Cage, who said, "I study international business with a

01:16:49.760 | minor in economics. I bought How to Become a Straight-A Student and Deep Work, reading the

01:16:54.400 | former multiple times over. One thing I would like to highlight is the benefit I've found in

01:16:59.120 | the quantification of goals in regards to their estimated time. I've created a task planner in

01:17:05.280 | Excel that I will readily admit is both over-engineered and integral to my daily life."

01:17:11.920 | All right. So here's the description of his daily planner spreadsheet.

01:17:17.840 | It contains rows for all of my projects. The first column is the day I put it into the planner.

01:17:24.320 | The second is the project name. The third is the due date. The fourth is the days left,

01:17:32.480 | so the current date minus the due date. I think he has that backwards. It should be the due date

01:17:37.840 | minus the current date. The fifth column is the class or job function the project is for.

01:17:44.720 | The sixth column is the estimated time it will take. The seventh column is the percentage complete.

01:17:51.040 | The eighth column is the time left in the project. Here he gives an equation. It's the estimated time

01:17:58.880 | minus the estimated time times percentage complete. Okay. So if he's saying it's 10

01:18:06.960 | hours to do this, it's my estimate and I've finished 50% of the project, I'll subtract

01:18:11.760 | 50% of the total time and get five hours left. And the ninth column is the time left per day.

01:18:17.680 | This is the one that was confusing me, Jesse. Time left divided by days left.

01:18:23.440 | That's the one that's confusing me. >> Time left, hours left.

01:18:27.200 | >> So the equation he has here is time left divided by days left.

01:18:31.840 | >> Yeah. >> He says the time left per day.

01:18:36.400 | Oh, okay. Maybe it's just the... I get it. So the eighth column is the time left in the project. So

01:18:42.320 | how much of the estimated time is left? And the ninth column is saying, if you spread this work

01:18:48.560 | out evenly over the days that remain till the deadline, here's how much you'd have to do per

01:18:52.720 | day. Okay. All right. I get that. All right. Going on. When I designed this system, I had no idea how

01:18:58.960 | much the estimated time and time left per day would change my work. Though not perfect, I can usually

01:19:06.240 | guess within an hour how extensive a project is going to be. Through this system, I'm able to flag

01:19:12.480 | projects due in a day, and with the exception of those, tackle problems based on time left per day.

01:19:17.760 | This keeps big research papers from distracting me from smaller projects that are coming up fast,

01:19:22.080 | while still allowing me to ensure I attack them in a timely manner without procrastinating.

01:19:26.560 | This triaging has been essential to my life, and now this Excel project has essentially become my

01:19:32.000 | time block planner. Additionally, I can see exactly how many hours per day I have of work in total,

01:19:38.400 | how many projects I have open in the semester, how many I've completed, and much more.

01:19:43.920 | I bring this up because I think this sort of quantification allows for major stress reduction,

01:19:49.920 | preventing anything from creeping up. Additionally, as I sit here, I see 65 completed

01:19:55.760 | assignments totaling 200 plus hours of work, just from the past semester. To see this, it truly

01:20:02.000 | reinforces the idea of slow productivity. Since implementing this system, I have never felt like

01:20:06.640 | I'm scrambling. Instead, I feel like I'm comfortably plodding along as new problems arise.

01:20:11.600 | And that's pretty cool. I mean, right away, Jesse, he doesn't say, oh, he did say business

01:20:18.240 | administration. I was going to say, if he didn't say with an economics. If he didn't say that,

01:20:25.280 | I think we could guess that he was in some sort of economics or science or engineering

01:20:29.600 | as his discipline. This is not the type of system. You're not going to see a system like this

01:20:37.600 | explaining your nine-column spreadsheet with all these equations. And at the end of it, it's like,

01:20:44.640 | and this is how I've organized my life, signed Maya Angelou. You know what I mean?

01:20:50.160 | There's certain types of jobs. There's certain types of jobs. This is not a poet from the West

01:20:58.720 | Village that's writing this system. This is an engineer. Let's be honest. Yeah, this is right.

01:21:06.400 | I like it. I like it. So there's a broader point there I want to emphasize, if his nine-column

01:21:11.360 | spreadsheet's intimidating. And not to keep bringing everything back to the book Slow

01:21:15.680 | Productivity, but it's another thing I talk about in that book, is time quantification.

01:21:20.480 | Time quantification as not a permanent discipline, but actually as an exercise you can go through.

01:21:27.360 | So for a certain amount of time, so you don't have to worry that this is permanent,

01:21:31.360 | but for a certain amount of time, you do like what Cage does. And when you accept something

01:21:37.520 | on your plate, you figure out how long is this going to take? And even more so, you start to

01:21:42.880 | figure out where is this time going to come from? So one of the suggestions in my book, which is,

01:21:47.120 | gets at the same idea but a little bit more lightweight, is for a while what you do is,

01:21:52.800 | every time you are about to agree to a commitment, you figure out how long it's going to take,

01:21:58.800 | and you go and you find that time on your calendar and mark it off.

01:22:02.320 | So you're forcing yourself to actually confront the real time demands. It's easy to say yes.

01:22:10.160 | It's just as easy to say yes as something that will take you 10 minutes as something that will

01:22:13.920 | take you 100 hours. It doesn't take long, it's three letters. But the impact there is different.

01:22:19.200 | So if you take everything you're saying yes to, and before you say yes, you go and find the time

01:22:23.920 | and block it off. A couple things happen. One, you have to confront the reality of how long things

01:22:29.920 | take and what your schedule looks like. So you might say, wait a second, this project is going

01:22:35.040 | to take 20 hours. I can do this over like four sessions. I can't really find time for these

01:22:40.160 | sessions for another month and a half. Now you have realistic timeline, you can say, okay, I can

01:22:44.640 | do this. But I don't have time for this. I'm looking at this, it's going to be six weeks

01:22:49.520 | till I get going. So it allows you to be more realistic about your timelines. It also allows

01:22:56.160 | you to be more realistic about your workload. When you're trying to fit this in, it's stretching you

01:22:59.360 | the hell out. Like, I don't have time for this. I'm gonna have to go six months in the future.

01:23:04.240 | Now you can say with confidence, yeah, I can't do this. I just don't have time. Because you're

01:23:09.840 | not just going off a gut feeling, you're going off of a realistic assessment of what your schedule

01:23:15.600 | looks like. And finally, you're protecting time for these things. So when you do commit to them,

01:23:20.800 | you know it'll get done because the time has been protected. So it's a good system.

01:23:25.760 | Now it's heavy handed and it's annoying. So you don't want to do it all the time. But what happens

01:23:28.640 | is if you do this for like a few months, you build a good instinct for how long do things take? How

01:23:34.640 | busy am I right now? And you're able to do this triage much more quickly once you get a little

01:23:40.240 | bit more sophisticated. All right, good case study. So I want to move on now to our final

01:23:46.800 | segment. But before we do, I want to mention another sponsor that makes this show possible.

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01:27:56.560 | Jesse, to our final segment. Because it's the first episode of a new month, I like to review

01:28:03.360 | briefly the books I read in the month previous. That means I will be reviewing the books I read

01:28:09.120 | in January 2024. I usually strive to read five books per month. In January, actually, Jesse,

01:28:15.840 | I read six because, you know, you get started in the Christmas break and I think there's at

01:28:21.040 | least one or two in there maybe I finished in January. I count books when I finished them,

01:28:25.200 | so, you know, I got some reading done. All right, so it's an interesting mix.

01:28:28.880 | Book number one was The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks. Classic, classic book. I think it's like

01:28:37.600 | 15 years old now. Classic book in the deep life literature. I've heard many people mention it.

01:28:45.120 | It's written by a shepherd, a shepherd in England that does fell shepherding where you keep the

01:28:50.720 | sheep in the valley, but the grazing lands up in the hilltops is public, and so it's shared lands.

01:28:58.720 | Beautifully written book, really beautifully written book about life as a shepherd.

01:29:03.360 | So as I was going through this book, I was like, "Wow, this guy, this must be like a savant.

01:29:07.920 | He's like a fantastic poetic writer and he's a shepherd." Well, about two-thirds of the way

01:29:12.640 | through the book, you realize he is a savant. He grows up on a farm, but gets a scholarship to

01:29:20.080 | Oxford. So actually, you don't realize this until you're well into the book. James Rebanks goes to

01:29:25.600 | Oxford, gets a classical education, gets an office job, says, "This stinks," goes back to becoming a

01:29:31.760 | shepherd. So it's this interesting mix of a classical education, but this interesting life

01:29:37.440 | is in agriculture. And so he writes beautifully about it. It's a great book. Really recommend it.

01:29:41.440 | Won all the awards when it came out. Definitely worth reading.

01:29:44.160 | Then I read The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya. This is a biography of Jean von

01:29:53.680 | Neumann, one of the smartest people who ever lived. Huge figure in 20th century physics and

01:30:01.040 | mathematics and computer science. Yes, I listed all three different fields because he was big in

01:30:07.200 | all of these fields. In that world of the Manhattan Project, which he was involved in,

01:30:12.400 | and the U.S. physics revolution as it picked up steam going into the '40s and '50s, in that whole

01:30:19.120 | world, he was considered this huge brain. He was the guy who could walk in, solve the equation on

01:30:24.880 | the chalkboard, walk out, and on his way out, build a computer. So anyways, if you don't know

01:30:29.840 | Jean von Neumann, you should. Incredible polymath, brilliant guy. And this book was really good. It

01:30:38.320 | really covers it well. What I liked about this book, it's a serious science writer. He gets the

01:30:42.080 | science and math right. So there's multiple fields that von Neumann was involved in that overlaps my

01:30:48.400 | own training as a professor. And I can say Bhattacharya got this right. So he goes deeper

01:30:53.760 | on the science and math than you sometimes get in these science biographies. So I really love

01:30:58.240 | this book. I'm a big von Neumann fan. If you like Richard Feynman, for example, you should

01:31:04.000 | read von Neumann. If you're interested in Turing, you should read von Neumann. He was deeply involved

01:31:08.000 | in both of their lives. Great book. "The Man from the Future." Going the other way, I read "The

01:31:14.800 | Pelican Brief" by John Grisham. I realized, I don't know if I'd ever read that before. And it

01:31:19.200 | was fine. I don't know. I've been rereading some Grisham recently. It was fine. It's a reasonable,

01:31:26.720 | serviceable thriller, I would say. Then I read "If You Could Live Anywhere" by Melody Warnick.

01:31:36.000 | I like the premise of the book. If we go back to the categories from the beginning of this episode,

01:31:41.760 | this is classic self-help advice. And the book is about, in a world of remote work,

01:31:49.280 | you have a lot of options about where you could live. So how do you figure out where to live?

01:31:53.920 | That's a good premise. It's very advice-y, very checklist advice-y. Think about this. Build a

01:31:59.200 | spreadsheet. So it's like a very pragmatic book. She wrote another book before this that I'm

01:32:04.240 | interested in reading, which was, "How Do You Learn to Love Where You Are Living?" So she wrote

01:32:09.840 | that pre-pandemic. I might go back and check that book out because I think it has more of her

01:32:14.560 | personal story, which sounds interesting to me. They moved to a small town. I think it's in

01:32:18.240 | Virginia. Maybe it was in North Carolina. Maybe it was in Tennessee. Actually, I clearly have no

01:32:22.640 | idea where this town was. But she moved into some small town. And the book is about how she learned

01:32:28.080 | to love this town. So how do you love the place you are? You get involved and learn to love it,

01:32:33.600 | as opposed to always looking and thinking about what place could be better. So that book,

01:32:38.880 | which preceded this one, sounds interesting too. I just haven't read it yet.

01:32:41.680 | Then I read "Man's Quest for God" by Abraham Joshua Heschel. It's a book about prayer.

01:32:51.520 | A book about prayer coming at it from the Jewish perspective. The thing about Heschel,

01:32:59.680 | I don't know if the audience knows much about Heschel. A German-Jewish theologian and scholar

01:33:07.680 | brought over, essentially rescued from Germany at the last possible minute before the door slammed

01:33:14.960 | shut for Jews in Germany under the reign of Hitler. Comes to the U.S., doesn't speak any

01:33:20.400 | English, becomes a great theologian and scholar in the U.S. His style, the thing about Heschel,

01:33:28.160 | and he's one of the best-known Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, marched with Martin Luther

01:33:33.760 | King, really interesting figure. The thing about his style is he has two things he's mixing.

01:33:42.560 | So there's a scholarly aspect to him because he's a scholar, right? Like systematically,

01:33:47.920 | let's break this down and think about it and here's the framework and what have other people

01:33:52.320 | said about this and let's cite things. He's also very poetic. So he's a poetic writer.

01:33:58.080 | And so when he's writing about religion, he will mix sometimes a very scholarly style,

01:34:04.080 | but also he'll also be poetic. Like I want the poetic nature of my words to convey information,

01:34:10.640 | also my scholarly structures and information. "Man's Quest for God" really mixes these two

01:34:16.080 | together. It's kind of interesting. So there'll be these like long poetic statements, as well as

01:34:20.720 | like very systematic conversations. This book's from the 1950s about the emerging role of symbolism

01:34:26.960 | and modernism and reconceptualizing religious thought. And it's like, it's all mixed together.

01:34:33.120 | So it's not quick reading, but I thought it was really interesting. It's a really interesting

01:34:38.160 | take on prayer, especially the Jewish approach to prayer, which is halakic,

01:34:44.720 | meaning it's very structured, ritualized. Islamic prayer is very similar to this,

01:34:50.000 | as opposed to more of a ad hoc petitionary prayer, personalized prayer style. It's just

01:34:57.760 | when I feel moved, I try to connect to the divine. The Jewish, and I think Islamic style,

01:35:03.680 | it's much more structured. And they think that actually you're going to, in the end, get more

01:35:08.640 | intimations of the divine and insight by building structure around the activity. And he gets into

01:35:13.520 | all that. So if you're interested in that type of theology, it's a good book, but it's hard going

01:35:19.280 | because again, it's semi-academic, semi-academic, semi-poetic, semi-accessible.

01:35:23.680 | >> So that was probably one of your expert primary source.

01:35:26.160 | >> That's an expert primary source. Yeah. Yeah. I just been finishing up another Heschel book

01:35:32.000 | that I think is more accessible. So we'll talk about that next month, but I would call it an

01:35:37.520 | accessible primary source. This kind of accessible, I've read other Heschel, I've read other theology.

01:35:42.640 | So yeah, maybe it's expert. Finally, I read Palestine 1936 by Oren Kessler. Part of my

01:35:51.760 | ongoing efforts to self-educate about that part of the world. So Palestine 1936 is about

01:35:58.160 | the big uprising. I think it was called the great uprising that occurred under British imperial role

01:36:06.000 | of mandate Palestine in the 1930s, 1936. That's why it's in there. The argument of the author

01:36:12.480 | here is that that's really the birth of Palestinian nationalism. Like you can't

01:36:17.280 | understand Palestinian nationalism without understanding what was happening under British

01:36:20.320 | rule. And this first revolt that occurred in the thirties, that this really galvanized a lot of the

01:36:30.720 | structures and thinking and fault lines on which the whole rest of the 20th century

01:36:37.440 | conflict in there played out along. So you have to go back. You can't start with 1948.

01:36:41.920 | You got to go back to the 1930s to really understand what's going on.

01:36:46.160 | Now, Jesse, I felt for this author personally, because he tells the story early in the book

01:36:55.680 | that he comes across this topic. He's like, no one's written about this. So I'm going to take

01:37:02.400 | on this book project because he can read the Arabic. He could read the Hebrew. There's not a

01:37:06.800 | lot in English. So it's a hard project, three-year project. I'm going to take this on. He gets going

01:37:10.880 | in the book. He's deep into the research process. Two books on the topic are announced after years.

01:37:17.440 | There's some book in Hebrew and that's it. He's like, all right, I'm going to cover this. It's

01:37:21.360 | going to be great. He gets into the project. Two books are announced after he starts. But they were

01:37:27.120 | both very scholarly books. So I don't think they really stepped on his toes, but that's like classic

01:37:31.200 | writer's kismet. But anyways, it's a difficult research challenge that I think he did a very

01:37:43.520 | good job on because the sources here, you have to contextually understand early 20th century

01:37:49.520 | Arabic sources. You have to contextually understand early 20th century Jewish sources.

01:37:55.520 | These are different languages, different contexts. And he does. And he pulls it together.

01:37:59.040 | And I think does a pretty good job of talking about this period. And it's also just an

01:38:06.720 | interesting period. I mean, everything going on now is all about Britain's promises and changing

01:38:11.920 | promises for that area. And so Britain comes in. We don't have to go into the whole history of the

01:38:19.440 | middle East, but when Britain takes that over after they beat the Ottoman empire in world war one,

01:38:24.560 | they have this declaration where they say, okay, we're going to take this over.

01:38:27.680 | We'll call this mandate Palestine. And part of the goal here is we're going to establish a Jewish

01:38:32.400 | state. And then they kind of come back from that. Like, actually, maybe, maybe we don't want to do

01:38:38.560 | that. And then they changed their mind again. Like, no, no, we do want to do that. And it

01:38:41.920 | was in response to that second. No, we definitely do want to do this. That caused the great uprising,

01:38:46.160 | the, the, the 1936 uprising. So there's like this negotiation back and forth. Britain was

01:38:52.480 | basically using that region as a pawn. I mean, a lot of their interest had to do,

01:38:56.080 | like, why did they, as they got closer to 1936, why were they saying,

01:38:59.360 | why were they going back and forth on this as they were trying to set things up for this

01:39:03.920 | impending world war two and where they're going to need Arab support. It's like a very complicated

01:39:08.400 | political picture. And I think the book does a good job of capturing what's going on there.

01:39:15.520 | So I think that's useful. I mean, obviously there's other, there's,

01:39:18.240 | you're going to put a lot of emphasis on whatever you write about. So Kessler puts a lot of emphasis

01:39:23.760 | on 1936. And this did seem like an important period, but obviously there's other really

01:39:28.880 | important things that happened subsequently that you need to understand Palestinian nationalism.

01:39:33.920 | I mean, like you really do need to understand Algeria and the, that decolonial movement in

01:39:41.440 | Algeria and how that influenced Yasser Arafat. And there's a lot of other things, especially in

01:39:47.680 | the sixties, I think that happened that were just as important for understanding like modern

01:39:53.120 | Palestinian nationalism. It's, you know, so it's not the full picture, but when you write these

01:39:57.520 | books, you, you, you know, it's always my thing I'm writing about was the key, but I could follow

01:40:01.680 | it. I could follow it. So I thought it was a good, good history book. Well researched.

01:40:08.000 | So, you know, complicated. You got to speak a lot of languages to write about. If I ever became a

01:40:11.840 | historian, this is what I've learned. You want to focus on a topic that is in your language and

01:40:17.440 | from like close to your time period. So you just understand that you understand the language,

01:40:21.440 | understand the context already makes things easier. All right. Anyways, that's probably

01:40:26.800 | enough time for today. Thank you everyone for listening or watching the show. We'll be back

01:40:31.520 | next week with another episode and until then, as always stay deep. So if you liked today's

01:40:36.880 | discussion of reading self-help, you'll also like episode 278, which is about how to think about

01:40:45.120 | hard topics, how to make use of all those big ideas that you're going to encounter in your reading.

01:40:49.760 | So check that out. So today I want to talk about one of the most important skills you can have as

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