Feeling Lost, Lazy & Can't Focus? - This One Idea Will Change Your Life In 2024

00:00:00.000 | All right, so in today's deep dive, I want to start by noting that this is the type,

00:00:03.440 | the time of year rather, where there is a lot of discussion about how to be

00:00:07.280 | more productive, whether that be in our professional lives or in terms of our leisure.

00:00:14.080 | Today, I want to talk about something different. I want to talk about what we do with our time when

00:00:19.520 | we are not trying to be productive, when we are seeking distraction in that downtime in between

00:00:26.800 | more serious activities, when we're done with work and exercising and building that canoe

00:00:32.400 | out in the garage, what do we do? Now, our temptation in such situations is to seek the

00:00:38.240 | most compelling possible distraction in the moment, something that almost always will be

00:00:42.960 | delivered to us through a screen. But the distractions that we fill this free time

00:00:48.480 | with actually do matter, not in a sense of productivity or creativity, but in the sense of

00:00:54.000 | the overall quality of your life. So here's what I want to do in today's deep dive. I'm going to

00:00:59.280 | introduce the idea of slow distractions versus fast distractions. I'm then going to explain

00:01:07.600 | why slow distractions are a better way to spend your free time than their fast counterpart.

00:01:14.160 | And then I will talk about how to specifically rewire your brain to prefer slow distractions.

00:01:23.120 | So let's start by trying to be clear about what do we mean by a slow versus fast distraction,

00:01:28.560 | a slow distract, a fast distraction, rather. It plays on our fundamental interest

00:01:33.680 | and attractions as a human being, but it just surfaces.

00:01:38.240 | It just surfs rather on the surfaces of these reactions, never really requiring you to load up

00:01:45.200 | your brain in its full capacity, never really requiring you to actually interrogate or

00:01:50.400 | interact with yourself or your world or your understanding of the world. I want to give you

00:01:54.480 | some examples here of fast distractions that just play with and surf on the surface of our human

00:02:00.640 | instincts, and then I'll contrast them to slow distractions that would play on those in a deeper

00:02:06.480 | way. So I'm going to, with great trepidation, do some illustration here. So for those who are

00:02:10.720 | watching, instead of just listening, I'm going to load up on the screen. You'll see two columns,

00:02:15.680 | fast and slow, so we can sort of illustrate what we're talking about. All right, so here's an

00:02:19.680 | example of a fast distraction. This is my, now I would say world famous, Jesse, at this point,

00:02:27.360 | illustration of the Twitter T. Notice my sort of silent protest about X, I still draw the Twitter

00:02:33.520 | T. Twitter scrolling is a great example of a fast distraction because it plays on our human

00:02:39.520 | attraction to ideas, and in particular, ideas that tend to support our group or tribe against

00:02:47.760 | perceived enemies. But when you're encountering these ideas on Twitter, they're cursory,

00:02:52.880 | they're short, they're devoid of contact. So they don't really require you to load up or

00:03:00.080 | interrogate your understanding of any part of the world in any detail. They surf by on a shallow

00:03:05.280 | wave of emotions. You get the simulacrum of being exposed to ideas and intellectual combat,

00:03:13.120 | but you don't actually have to do much cognition. Now let's compare this, I'll draw on the other

00:03:19.040 | side here. Compare this to reading a polemical nonfiction book written by someone who knows

00:03:24.400 | what they're talking about. Expert illustration over here of a book. There we go. Right?

00:03:31.440 | Compare these two things. So when you're reading a book on, and I'm saying polemical books,

00:03:36.960 | hey, I'm making an argument here. Here's a my take on something. I'm an expert author,

00:03:41.200 | and I'm reading, I'm writing this book. This also plays on the same basic human instinct that

00:03:46.480 | Twitter draws upon. We're interested in ideas and ideas that support our group perhaps against

00:03:52.240 | others, but it's doing so in the book form in a slower way. We get into the book and the chapters,

00:03:57.840 | the ideas are being developed more slowly. Over time, we load up in our mind, our mental structure

00:04:04.480 | on which our understanding of those topics currently rest. We interrogate it, we update it.

00:04:10.320 | It's a slower, more deeper intellectual process. It's instigated by the same human interest,

00:04:16.800 | ideas, tribes, but the intellectual engagement is much deeper.

00:04:22.640 | All right, let's do another example here so we can get better at this distinction. I'll

00:04:26.800 | erase my beautiful artwork from before. Here is another example of slow, I mean, fast. Let's see

00:04:35.360 | here. Jesse, tell me if I'm, let me ask you, let me quiz you, Jesse, what am I drawing here?

00:04:41.680 | YouTube.

00:04:42.160 | There we go. YouTube logo. I should be a graphic designer. The key for people who are watching

00:04:47.120 | can see you want to just messily fill things in. All right, there we go. YouTube. You know,

00:04:54.720 | I have nothing against YouTube as a repository for video. Video is a great form of content,

00:04:59.840 | but let's talk about YouTube wandering, that very specific 21st century behavior where you just sort

00:05:06.080 | of wander to random YouTube clip, the random YouTube clip, surfing the recommendations and

00:05:12.240 | auto plays that jump up. Now, this plays on our human interest in watching interesting things.

00:05:19.440 | Hey, something interesting is happening to my visual field. I want to attend to that.

00:05:25.040 | But again, too often in the service of algorithms, the videos you're going to end up being

00:05:29.760 | pushed towards, if you're just wandering on YouTube are refining and simplifying and abstracting

00:05:37.520 | the observation of interesting things until it just purifies out just those pure moments of

00:05:42.640 | reaction with all of the other surrounding context and content eliminated. It's what

00:05:48.480 | leads you this sort of algorithmic pursuit, something like Mr. Beast, where in the end,

00:05:52.400 | it's just boom, boom, boom, reaction producing thing, reaction producing thing. Here's a car.

00:05:57.280 | I'm giving this guy money. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Stripping the purified, ooh, something

00:06:04.400 | interesting is happening, stripping the purified version of that from any other surrounding

00:06:09.760 | information or context. Now, compare this to the slower alternative. See how I'm going to draw this.

00:06:16.480 | Just to see if you can tell what I'm drawing here. Here's going to give it away.

00:06:24.960 | A movie, a movie. All right. There we go. I'm going to yell. This is a great drawing. I'm a

00:06:29.520 | great drawer. Great artist. Compare it to watching a good movie. Again, this would be this slower

00:06:38.160 | alternative is playing on the same instinct. I like to watch interesting things. Humans like

00:06:43.360 | to watch interesting things. But when you watch a two hour movie, a good movie, what you're going

00:06:47.920 | to be brought into is a carefully constructed world with carefully constructed characters.

00:06:53.200 | Your mind completely loads up this context of the world and the characters. It begins doing

00:06:58.320 | some mere neuron style mind reading simulation of the minds of the characters in the movies.

00:07:03.200 | You're put into a certain state of mind in this context. And when the things that generate a big

00:07:09.520 | reaction happen, this is a much more rewarding reaction because it's happening in a rich context.

00:07:16.480 | So it's, it's changing your understanding of something or the world or how you perceive

00:07:20.720 | things. It's reaction built into a matrix of sort of deep human reality. Same initial instinct

00:07:29.200 | draws us to both. But the movie option gives you something slower. Let's do another example here.

00:07:36.080 | Keep doing examples just as an excuse to draw awesome pictures for our viewers. Oh, I don't

00:07:41.760 | know how I'm going to draw this. OK, Jesse, I'm going to have you guess. I don't even know how

00:07:46.720 | to draw this. All right. So what I'm going to draw here as a example of a fast distraction.

00:07:51.920 | So this is clearly a phone, right? Yeah. All right.

00:07:55.920 | I don't know. It's supposed to be like someone dancing.

00:08:02.160 | Tick tock, tick tock. There we go. All right. Tick tock scrolling. We just swipe up,

00:08:07.280 | swipe up, swipe up on tick tock. I think among other things, this plays on our interest in

00:08:13.040 | being around. Other human beings, tick tock is very human oriented, there's a

00:08:20.480 | person right there in front of you almost always it's people right there in front of you,

00:08:25.120 | so it plays on that interest. But but again, it abstracts away the deeper, more interesting

00:08:30.400 | elements of being around other humans and abstracts away all authentic connection.

00:08:34.160 | It simulates that feeling. Of having a connection with a person, it simulates that feeling

00:08:43.120 | by having the people in the video do arresting things. So it's like, OK, this person is dancing

00:08:49.440 | demonstrably. In a situation where someone wanted dance or someone talking, but it's like every

00:08:55.200 | facial expression, you watch a tick tock monologue, every facial expression is exaggerated over the

00:09:01.840 | top, it's emotional, it's huge smiles and it edits from one to the other. So you never even have to

00:09:07.520 | have any interstitial facial configurations. Everything is arresting pressing buttons.

00:09:12.800 | So it gives you the simulacrum of I'm feeling things that I'm seeing a person. That's kind of

00:09:17.120 | what it's like to connect with someone. That's not an actual connection. It's just giving us that

00:09:21.920 | simulation. Now, again, compare this to the alternative of, you know, actually, I'll draw a

00:09:28.320 | picture here of two people being with someone like spending time with someone actually spending time

00:09:35.280 | with them, finding a connection, finding something after you've built up this connection over an hour

00:09:39.360 | or two, something funny that you're both laughing about. Now you have a real human connection.

00:09:44.880 | There's emotion involved, but you have this rich cognitive context. You've built up in your mind,

00:09:50.000 | a rich model of who this person is, what their life is like, how it relates to you.

00:09:56.400 | It's a slower thing to do. It's playing on the same instinct to want to be around people,

00:10:04.400 | but it gives you a completely different experience. All these examples involve screens. I talk a lot

00:10:08.960 | about screens, obviously, as a digital theorist, but not all fast versus slow distractions are

00:10:15.120 | digital. So let's consider, for example, a quick interruption. If you want my free guide with my

00:10:24.400 | seven best ideas on how to cultivate the deep life, go to calnewport.com/ideas,

00:10:32.400 | or click the link right below in the description. This is a great way to take action on the type of

00:10:38.320 | things we talk about here on this show. All right, let's get back to it. Let me draw a picture here.

00:10:43.200 | All right. Just going to give it away with this.

00:10:48.240 | What do we got there? Ducati? Yeah, some sort of alcohol. Yeah. So think about drinking alcohol

00:10:58.080 | and not in a social setting, which has its own sort of cultural history, but just like, hey, I'm

00:11:04.000 | cracking whatever this really weird looking green bottle with X's on it that I just drew here. I'm

00:11:09.200 | cracking, you know, it's at night. I'm going to, you know, it's at the end of a long day,

00:11:11.760 | cracking the six pack. What is that simulating? What is that playing on? It's actually playing

00:11:18.320 | on our desire to be happy, to be in a good mood. You can simulate I'm in a good mood

00:11:25.680 | about what's going on, you know, in my life. I'm in a good mood. I can simulate that with a

00:11:30.960 | alcohol induced buzz. So I'm short circuiting this desire to sort of feel good about things

00:11:38.320 | in this case with a chemical. Now actually compare this. What's the alternative here?

00:11:43.040 | What's the slower alternative? Actually working yourself up into the state of feeling good about

00:11:49.520 | things, not simulating it with a chemical, but actually feeling good about things.

00:11:54.400 | I mean, imagine you sort of put in the time, I drew a person with a flower here,

00:11:58.320 | but imagine you put in the time, you know, it's after work. You're proud of what you did that day.

00:12:03.840 | You called and checked in with, you know, a friend that was going through a hard time.

00:12:07.840 | And then you go for like a sunset walk through like a nearby nature trail and you're clearing

00:12:12.640 | your mind and having some gratitude for what's going on in the day and appreciating the changing

00:12:17.920 | of the seasons. This is much slower than breaking open the six pack, but the sense of, you know,

00:12:25.840 | I'm in a generally good mood that this generates is deeper and more lasting.

00:12:31.200 | So in almost all of these cases, when we're talking about fast versus slow distractions,

00:12:37.520 | the fastest attractions are just short circuiting the path to something we really care about

00:12:42.000 | and giving us a shallow simulation of it as compared to slower distractions.

00:12:47.520 | Where we are following a human instinct to where that human instinct actually expects us to go and

00:12:52.880 | put it in the work of actually satisfying that instinct slowly, but steadily.

00:12:57.120 | Remember, we're talking about distractions here. So just to clarify,

00:13:01.040 | it's not leisure time in the sense of like a serious hobby, exercising, I've taken up woodworking.

00:13:08.560 | This is not about work. This is just nothing. What we're talking about here is about trying to

00:13:13.200 | master a new skill or create a new product in the world. It's like what you do in your downtime.

00:13:18.800 | But these slower distractions, I want to argue are better. I can give you three reasons why.

00:13:25.120 | One, they require full brain deep thinking. You actually have to get your whole brain involved

00:13:30.720 | in almost every one of these slow distraction examples. You're engaging with the book,

00:13:34.400 | you're engaging with the film, you're engaging with the person, you're engaging with the world

00:13:37.840 | around you as you go on the walk in nature. Our mind likes to think.

00:13:42.000 | It likes to be engaged fully thinking about something, be it our own thoughts or an invented

00:13:50.000 | world that we're exposing ourselves to. When we do not allow our mind to fully engage,

00:13:54.880 | when we just surf on the surface of emotions with, you know, it's TikTok or Twitter

00:14:00.960 | or just drinking a six pack or whatever it is, most of our mind is not engaged in that.

00:14:06.800 | We're not loading up complicated structures of understanding. We're not interrogating it.

00:14:11.440 | We're not giving something intense focus. We get anxious in that state.

00:14:15.520 | You know, they say idle hands is the devil's workshop. I think

00:14:20.320 | the idle mind is anxiety's playground. And so the fast distractions do not engage our mind

00:14:28.720 | in the type of stuff that it's expecting to do. And we get the rumination. We're all over the

00:14:32.720 | place. We're flitting back and forth. The emotions hit us. We don't know what to do.

00:14:35.760 | With them, we escape even deeper into the chemical numbing of the fast distractions.

00:14:39.520 | It's a bad loop. Second advantage of slow distractions, they leave a lasting positive

00:14:47.360 | residue. You come out of 30 minutes of Instagram or Twitter, nothing's left behind except for some

00:14:53.680 | emotional traces. You come out of 30 minutes of a book. You've actually loaded up your

00:14:59.600 | your cognitive schema for understanding the relevant topics. You loaded that up with a book.

00:15:04.960 | You've actually loaded up your mind. You've interrogated it and updated it and then filed

00:15:08.720 | it back away again. You've left a positive lasting change on your conception of yourself

00:15:15.520 | and the world. This feels good. This feels useful. This feels like our time is actually being spent

00:15:25.840 | towards something that has some purpose, which again, we value. That leads us to the third thing,

00:15:33.920 | which is heavily related, which is that slow distractions slow down the sensation of passing

00:15:41.280 | time. Your days feel longer. They feel more idiosyncratic and unique.

00:15:47.760 | Therefore, your appreciation of the world around you goes up. You have a perception of your own

00:15:56.160 | life as richer and more full when more of your downtime is engaged in slower distractions than

00:16:02.000 | fast time spent in fast distractions doesn't really get stored away because, again, we're

00:16:06.320 | leaving no lasting residue. We're not using our full mind thinking. It's not novel. And so our

00:16:12.080 | perception of time just goes really fast. I don't know. I was at work and then I was sort of on my

00:16:15.520 | phone. Now I'm in bed. If you instead engage in slow distractions, your own perception of your

00:16:21.440 | own life is one of its interesting and unique and rich and slower. So the actual character of your

00:16:31.200 | life improves when you spend more of your downtime in a slower fashion. So how do we rewire ourselves

00:16:39.760 | to prefer slow distractions over fast? And it's an important question because, again, if you're used

00:16:46.480 | to fast distraction, it is highly appealing. It short circuits the response that your brain is

00:16:53.040 | looking for with these fundamental desires. You need a two part approach here. I need both of

00:16:58.560 | these parts to successfully rewire from fast towards slow. One, you need to surround yourself

00:17:04.640 | with opportunities for slowness and two, you need to complicate your access to the fast alternative.

00:17:10.800 | So to dive a little deeper there, surround yourself with opportunities for slowness. That

00:17:15.840 | means you have, for example, the books around that you looking forward to read. They're with

00:17:22.480 | you. You don't have to go find them. You've been reading reviews of movies or you have three or

00:17:27.520 | four movies that you've read about and you're very excited to watch. So it's there. You've

00:17:31.200 | prepared it. So you have the slow alternative there. You have rituals like the evening walk,

00:17:37.840 | the transition from the workday to the day after work with reflection. You have rituals in place

00:17:43.360 | to get used to doing that require a certain type of slowness. You have to make access to the slow

00:17:50.000 | easy. At the same time, you want to make fast a little more difficult. A couple of things that

00:17:57.040 | help here. Number one, probably above all else is the phone for your method. When you are at home,

00:18:01.600 | your phone is plugged in in the set place in your house or apartment. That's where it stays.

00:18:05.680 | If you need to do a text message, make a call or look something up, you have to go to your phone.

00:18:09.920 | It is therefore not with you as a default companion throughout every activity you do

00:18:16.880 | at home without that ability to just whip it out at the slightest hint of boredom. You get better

00:18:22.720 | at persisting with slower activities. You get more used to it. I might also recommend when it

00:18:27.680 | comes to YouTube to a treat it more like a library. So you go there when there's a specific

00:18:34.080 | thing you want to look up and be for things like this show, treat it like a cable channel.

00:18:40.240 | Yeah, there's a couple of things I like to watch the deep questions episodes or

00:18:44.560 | whatever, Andrew Huberman episodes. Here's when I do it for this much time and I treat it like

00:18:52.320 | this show is on TV at this time. And that's when I go and I treat it like a TV. In fact,

00:18:56.160 | maybe watch it on your smart TV. It's not something that's always available. It's just

00:19:00.080 | a default distraction. It's a library and a cable service, not a constant source of distraction.

00:19:06.640 | You might also try temporarily canceling most streaming services. All right, when I want TV

00:19:13.840 | time, I have to now go out and rent the movie off of iTunes or Amazon Prime. I have to go rent.

00:19:21.520 | I'm going to pay $395. I got to think what do I really want to watch? There is not just these

00:19:25.680 | quick options of things I can click on and just have shows I can jump back and forth.

00:19:29.280 | I rented this and it's all I have to watch. Again, all of this slowing down,

00:19:35.360 | complicating your access to fastness helps you get more used to and comfortable with

00:19:39.760 | the slow alternatives. All right, so that's where I want to leave this.

00:19:43.840 | The productive stuff with you do with your time is important. But how you approach your life

00:19:49.840 | outside of those productive moments is also important. And to be really clear,

00:19:54.320 | this is not one of those tiresome pleas for you have to be careful in how you engineer your

00:20:02.160 | downtime to make sure that you're more rested and creative and productive in your productive time.

00:20:05.840 | This is not about servicing your productive time. I don't care what you do for the sake

00:20:09.280 | of this discussion with your productive time. Slow distractions is not about wringing more

00:20:15.280 | out of your life. It's about making the quality of your day-to-day life better.

00:20:20.000 | Richer and more human. So as you work on your productivity habits this new year,

00:20:24.320 | also think about your downtime habits and consider

00:20:26.320 | sifting and rewire your brain away from the fast and towards the slow.

00:20:31.040 | There you go, Jesse, slow distraction. I like the ritual of coffee shop reads.

00:20:39.120 | That's a good one. Yeah. So you mean like the weekend ritual where you bring a bunch of

00:20:44.720 | articles to the coffee shop? Yeah. Yeah. Do you do that sometimes? No, I kind of want to do it more.

00:20:51.200 | You're probably playing golf. I was just thinking I was, I wish they had a better place in my club

00:20:56.320 | like a reading place. Yeah. Why don't clubs have a lot of them do? Like a library? Yeah.

00:21:01.920 | They're like a really nice locker room respectively for women or men to sit down.

00:21:08.400 | They don't, they're building one, but they don't have it yet. Well, there's a place in Boston near

00:21:13.840 | Beacon Hill that I never really joined. I think we talked about on the show before, but they had a

00:21:18.080 | private library, like a membership library called the Anathemium and you would pay. I think it was

00:21:26.320 | expensive, but I was a student at the time. So it would have been cheap for me if I had done. I just

00:21:29.920 | think of my act together and I could have walked to it from my apartment. It's like a private

00:21:34.400 | library. When I toured it, one of the big rooms they have is just like this big room with like

00:21:39.760 | all the newspapers from all over the country. Yeah. It's just all these like older guys sitting

00:21:44.000 | there, like reading their newspapers in the morning. I was like, that's cool. Now a place to

00:21:48.160 | go to read. There's bus statues of, you know, a bust of literary figures on columns. And it was

00:21:55.040 | one of those two story libraries, you know, where there's like the second level balcony level at the

00:21:59.040 | books. So that was cool. All right. So anyways, I want to get to some questions before we do.

00:22:05.040 | I want to mention one of the, I'm going to talk about sponsors. Still learning Jesse about the

00:22:11.040 | sound effects. I keep forgetting. Let's talk first about Notion. So you probably know about Notion.

00:22:19.200 | It combines your notes, docs and projects all together in one beautiful space.

00:22:22.400 | We use Notion here on the Deep Questions podcast. It is at the core of how we interact with our ad

00:22:29.280 | agency. It allows us to have scripts for the different ads, the particular ads we're doing

00:22:36.160 | for each episode, the timestamps of when those ad reads happen, the download numbers, all this type

00:22:42.640 | of information we can load it up in all sorts of different views. Hey, show me all the episodes

00:22:46.960 | where this ad read is coming up. Let me go to this episode to see all the ad reads I'm doing for that

00:22:51.040 | episode. Let me look at all the ads we did, ad reads we did for this advertiser and get their

00:22:56.160 | download numbers. The beauty of Notion is you can build systems that allow you to do all of that

00:23:01.120 | in one beautiful interface. Now, what's cool is they have a new feature called Q&A, which is an

00:23:09.040 | AI assistant that helps you answer questions and find information from within your existing

00:23:16.320 | Notion setups. It gives you instant answers to your questions using information from across

00:23:22.720 | your Wiki projects, documents and meeting notes. So as your Notion system you've built to help

00:23:29.760 | control some workflow or your own personal life gets more filled with information,

00:23:34.720 | Notion's Q&A AI assistant helps you get out exactly the information you need. So it makes

00:23:40.480 | it even more effective and useful to rely on Notion to organize the information that matters

00:23:46.800 | in your life or your business. You can ask these questions anywhere in Notion. So you can find

00:23:53.280 | exactly what you need without having to leave the page you're on at the moment. You can also

00:23:57.600 | trust your data is secure because Notion AI is designed from the ground up to protect your

00:24:02.960 | information. No AI models are trained with your information. The data is encrypted.

00:24:06.960 | The answers will never use information from pages you don't have access to.

00:24:12.560 | So it's safe, secure, and makes it easy to do meaningful work. So try Notion AI for free when

00:24:18.960 | you go to notion.com/cal, that's all lowercase letters, notion.com/cal. Try the powerful,

00:24:24.880 | easy to use Notion AI today. When you use our link, you're supporting our show. That's notion.com/cal.

00:24:29.280 | Excuse me. I just want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN.

00:24:41.600 | Oh, this is interesting. So have you ever read the fine print that appears when you start browsing

00:24:46.800 | in incognito mode? It says that your activity might still be visible to your employer, your

00:24:51.760 | school, or your internet service provider. How can they even call it incognito? To really stop

00:24:56.720 | people from seeing the sites you visit, you need to use the VPN I use, which is ExpressVPN.

00:25:02.400 | Yeah, so here's the thing. When you access websites, even if you're using a secure protocol,

00:25:11.120 | which means the specific information you're submitting to the website is encrypted,

00:25:15.200 | everyone can see what websites you're talking to. It's in the packet header,

00:25:19.760 | if we're going to be geeky about this. Your internet service provider can see it,

00:25:22.800 | your employer can see it. If you're on Wi-Fi, anyone nearby with a radio antenna

00:25:27.440 | can see the site you're talking to. Incognito mode does nothing to stop that. That's just about

00:25:34.240 | what's stored or not stored on your own computer. But still, everyone else can see exactly,

00:25:40.800 | you know, what sites you're talking to. So how do you get around that? How do you get actual privacy

00:25:44.720 | using a VPN? So with a VPN, you package the site you really want to talk to an encrypted message

00:25:52.240 | and then send it to a VPN server. So everyone looking at your packets just knows you're

00:25:56.400 | talking to a VPN server. They don't know who you want that VPN server to talk to on your behalf.

00:26:01.520 | The VPN server then unencrypts the real packet you wanted to send, talks to the website or service

00:26:07.680 | you really want to talk to on your behalf, encrypts the response and sends it back to you.

00:26:11.840 | So if you really don't want your employer, your internet service provider, anyone around you with

00:26:17.680 | an antenna to know what sites and services you're using, you need a VPN. If you're going to use a

00:26:22.400 | VPN, I recommend ExpressVPN. They have servers all around the world. There's almost always going to

00:26:29.520 | be one near where you are. They have a lot of bandwidth, so it's a very fast connection.

00:26:34.320 | Their software is easy to use. You turn it on with a click of a button and then just use your

00:26:37.680 | sites and services like normal and all the VPN forwarding happens automatically in the background.

00:26:42.960 | So stop letting other people invade your online privacy, protect yourself at ExpressVPN.com/deep.

00:26:49.200 | Use my link at ExpressVPN.com/deep to get three extra months free. That's

00:26:57.920 | ExpressVPN.com/deep to learn more. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:27:05.840 | Who do we got first? Sounds good. First question is from Cubicle Dog. As a stay-at-home parent of a

00:27:14.480 | young child, I have the opportunity to get some work done, some deep work done in the afternoon

00:27:18.720 | when my child sleeps. But afternoons are when I'm usually groggy despite having gotten a good night's

00:27:23.360 | sleep, and so I fail to get much done. I'd love to be more productive during those valuable hours

00:27:28.800 | without resorting to caffeine. Thoughts? So Jesse, it's not going to seem apparent at first,

00:27:35.280 | but this is going to end up being our stealth slow productivity corner question of the day.

00:27:40.400 | This is the one question of each episode where the answer will have something to do with my

00:27:51.360 | upcoming book, Slow Productivity, which comes out March 5th. Go to calnewport.com/slow

00:27:56.960 | to download a free excerpt from that book. All right. So at first, this question seems to be

00:28:03.760 | unrelated to slow productivity, but I'm going to drive it there by the end of my answer.

00:28:09.280 | All right. So I'm going to start by doing my sort of pedantic semantic policing here.

00:28:16.720 | I think you're probably using the word deep work incorrectly. So again, deep work is very narrow.

00:28:24.160 | It refers to professional activities that are cognitively demanding,

00:28:29.200 | and it refers to approaching those activities without context switching.

00:28:34.320 | So instead of switching back and forth between that activity and other things like email and

00:28:39.280 | Slack, I'll give it my full attention. By giving cognitive demanding professional tasks your full

00:28:44.160 | attention, you're able to accomplish it faster and a higher level of quality than to approach it with

00:28:48.160 | divided attention. Now, I'm assuming because you use the terminology stay at home parent,

00:28:54.080 | you're not also working a job. So it's not like you're trying to

00:28:57.520 | balance an unrelated knowledge work job with deep work requirements with being at home and caring

00:29:05.200 | for a child. So probably what I'm assuming you're referring to is just important work. You have

00:29:10.240 | things that need to get done. And when you get to the afternoon, which seems like the right time to

00:29:15.360 | sort of get things done and make a real push through your task list, you find that you're

00:29:20.160 | tired, which, by the way, I'm not surprised by young children are incredibly tiring.

00:29:25.920 | So what can we do about that? Let me start with a couple of practical suggestions,

00:29:31.280 | and then I'm going to give you a slow answer as well. Find more ways to get things done

00:29:35.680 | in the morning when your energy is higher, even though your kid is around. So especially with

00:29:41.440 | first kids, there's this idea that, look, they need to be constantly entertained. Direct one

00:29:47.360 | on one engagement with a parent. But that's not really the case. By the time you have two or three

00:29:52.240 | kids like I do, your standards there really start to go down. There's probably certain types of

00:29:58.400 | things at certain times in the morning when you can get that done. OK, so we have breakfast and

00:30:02.560 | after breakfast, he or she watches some Bluey. And that's when I, you know, check up on email

00:30:08.960 | or that's when I build the, you know, the grocery list or whatever it is. So there's there's ways

00:30:14.800 | you can integrate more work. I call people when we go for a stroller walk in the afternoon.

00:30:21.280 | I bring I do some planning at the library during storing time. So if you get a little bit more

00:30:26.880 | creative about finding times to get things done during the morning when your energy is higher,

00:30:32.080 | you're going to get a lot more done. You see the put aside the guilt that somehow

00:30:35.440 | the kid needs constant one on one attention. You might want to automate the afternoon work you do

00:30:42.480 | to make it less of a motivational push. All right, here's something kind of simple I can do. It's

00:30:49.120 | kind of automated. I can preferably something you can do while listening to a podcast or

00:30:53.120 | something else is desirable. And so you push into that afternoon nap space something or chores that

00:30:59.760 | like you really can just sort of do listening to something else. It doesn't require a lot of

00:31:04.800 | concentration. So you don't leave the more complicated stuff for the afternoon. And finally,

00:31:09.040 | arrange for more time off. There's this idea sometimes, especially with stay at home parents,

00:31:14.960 | if you have a partner who's working outside the home, that what you're doing is somehow easier.

00:31:22.640 | And therefore, it's you have to always be doing that. It's always you who should be watching the

00:31:28.400 | kid. But actually, it's an incredibly hard job to watch a kid. And it's usually emotionally a lot

00:31:34.960 | more demanding than going to an office. And so a lot of successful setups say, okay, I want at least

00:31:41.680 | two half days a week, that's entirely time to myself. And there's a lot of different ways to do

00:31:45.920 | this. It could be, you know, when the kid naps in the afternoon on Thursdays, or some sort of

00:31:51.600 | childcare option, usually arrange with your partner, hey, you work from home sometimes and not

00:31:56.400 | start work later on Fridays, you watch the kid, I'll pick it up at 11. Or on Sundays, I get the

00:32:03.600 | date that that's your day with the kid. And I spent three or four hours on that day, doing something

00:32:08.640 | else. So try to have multiple long stretches of time, just to yourself built into your week.

00:32:14.640 | And now you don't always have to just work at that time also do stuff for yourself during that time

00:32:20.000 | as well. But I don't think stay at home parents give themselves enough time, not being a parent.

00:32:27.600 | And you need that. I mean, think about someone who goes to an office, half of their waking hours is

00:32:33.040 | not in the office and not working. Compare that to a parent, all their time is with the kid. So

00:32:38.480 | it really matters that you put that time in there. Right now for my slow productivity answer,

00:32:44.240 | whatever it is you're calling deep work, be okay doing less of it.

00:32:48.000 | That you're doing this happens often. You have a kid, like I have a kid, I still have to do all

00:32:56.800 | these other things. It's like, no, the kid is now like the major thing is items one through three

00:33:01.840 | on your list of five that you're doing. So you should commiserately reduce other things that

00:33:06.800 | you can be okay with that. I'm going to do less things for a while. I'm not going to do this club

00:33:13.840 | anymore. The side hustle side product idea, let's give that a year off. I need more time. This is

00:33:21.520 | hard what I'm doing. I don't need to necessarily fill the afternoon with whatever it is you're

00:33:26.800 | calling deep work. What if that's when you exercise and took a nap or just read? I mean,

00:33:32.880 | it is again, for whatever reason, we don't count taking care of a kid as much as we should in

00:33:42.240 | terms of how hard it is. So if someone, again, let me use an analogy to other types of work.

00:33:46.480 | If I had an office job, I went to from nine to five and I was like, okay, here's the problem.

00:33:50.880 | I'm at the office and I have this job and then there's this completely unrelated job. And I'm

00:33:55.600 | trying to like spend a few hours on that in the afternoon while I'm at the office. But my job is

00:33:59.840 | so hard when I'm trying to do the second job at the same time, I find it to be hard. They say,

00:34:03.280 | stop doing a second job, right? I mean, you already have a job. But when that first job

00:34:08.080 | is taking care of a kid, sometimes we're like, ah, come on. I mean, I'm just at home. I'm not

00:34:12.800 | in an office. Like I should be doing all these other things. So this is my slow productivity

00:34:16.880 | answer. Principle one of slow productivity is do fewer things, just have less things on your plate.

00:34:22.960 | And I think that that might go farther than almost any other piece of practical advice that I just

00:34:27.440 | gave. All right, Jesse. So that is our slow productivity corner. All right, what do we got next?

00:34:39.600 | Next question's from Matt. Isn't no smartphones for young children a bit myopic? For example,

00:34:46.800 | I've been using Grammarly to make my writing significantly easier and eliminate all human

00:34:50.720 | errors. Isn't being proficient with these tools helpful? I don't see why young children shouldn't

00:34:55.520 | learn to use these tools effectively earlier in their lives when their young brains can figure

00:34:59.280 | them out quickly. Now, let me tell you how long it takes someone to learn how to proficiently

00:35:05.920 | use a smartphone or a tablet. Approximately, and this is give or take 10%, 17 seconds.

00:35:12.640 | They do not need to practice having a smartphone at a young age so that they will be comfortable

00:35:20.560 | with a smartphone when they're a little bit older. These consumer-facing products are some

00:35:26.080 | of the lowest friction, easy to use design projects in the history of such products.

00:35:31.040 | Exposing your 11-year-old to Grammarly is not a good enough reason for that 11-year-old to have

00:35:37.920 | a smartphone. So again, wait till post-puberty, wait till 16 or older before you give unrestricted

00:35:46.320 | access to internet to a young person. A smartphone is typically unrestricted access to the internet.

00:35:53.360 | They'll be fine. They'll pick this all up incredibly quickly. Don't use that as a concern.

00:35:59.200 | I do like Grammarly though. It's a good product, but your 11-year-old doesn't need to use it.

00:36:03.040 | All right, who do we got next? Next question's from Fab. I'm a Peruvian musician looking to grow

00:36:10.160 | my audience while also employing the elements of digital minimalism, reclaiming my focus,

00:36:14.960 | doing deep work, and living a social media free life are my top priorities. The only advice I've

00:36:19.840 | received so far regarding making progress in audience building is to post on platforms such

00:36:24.720 | as Instagram and TikTok. Is this true? Fab, it's a common question, but here's an

00:36:31.600 | alternative approach. All right, so step one, focus on being so good you can't be ignored. So

00:36:36.800 | just being an excellent musician who's writing good music, that's doing something new, do something

00:36:43.840 | that's unabashedly good. If you don't have that, no matter how much social media you use, there's

00:36:49.040 | only so far you can go. Now let's say you have that. Well, here's an alternative that just posted

00:36:54.240 | on TikTok a lot. Ask this question, how would a musician, he was really good at music, what they

00:37:00.880 | did, 12 years ago, how would they get their start? Because as early as 12 years ago, ubiquitous

00:37:08.240 | social media use was not assumed. So what mechanisms, just 12 years ago, what mechanisms

00:37:13.840 | would a musician use to get noticed or to try to grow an audience? Because here's the thing,

00:37:19.840 | those mechanisms are still there. They didn't disappear in the last 10 years. I think what

00:37:25.200 | the story being told by musicians and artists and creatives about social media is that there's this

00:37:32.400 | shortcut that it's possible. It's like a lottery ticket, creative lottery ticket. It's possible

00:37:39.360 | if you're posting your stuff online due to algorithmically amplified virality, you can find

00:37:44.240 | an audience very quickly and you can sort of jump to being a well-known creative in a very short

00:37:51.120 | amount of time. It's possible, right? It's also possible that you're going to get the Powerball.

00:37:57.760 | Actually, my dad played the Powerball last week, the $700 million jackpot, got four numbers,

00:38:05.200 | not an order, but four numbers, which is a hundred dollar payoff. Pretty close. So then I looked up

00:38:12.080 | the odds. So how much harder is it to get that versus winning the Powerball? It was a hundred

00:38:17.520 | million times harder. So it looked close, but it wasn't. Did you program a software thing like you

00:38:25.120 | did for the Dradle simulation? I did not program a software thing. I looked up the odds. Did I show

00:38:31.600 | you the email someone sent me about the Dradle simulator? No. He sent me a blog post of another

00:38:37.200 | computer scientist who had the exact same issue I had. And instead of, he didn't just simulate

00:38:43.360 | Dradle, he built a formal model of Dradle as a game so that you could actually analytically

00:38:50.240 | calculate what is the expected number of rounds for a Dradle game to finish. Now he looked starting

00:38:55.760 | with a larger initial pot. It was either 10 or 15 pieces. We looked at six and he found that the

00:39:02.320 | expected number of rounds before you finish was 649. So he had the exact same conclusion. This

00:39:08.080 | computer scientist had the exact same conclusion. Dradle is a terrible game. And you should, if you

00:39:13.760 | play it, you should play it with very small pots and very aggressive betting or you'll be there

00:39:17.360 | forever. But what are we talking about? Music? Oh, music. Okay. So fab. A, don't play Dradle.

00:39:25.040 | B, don't be too excited if you get four numbers in the Powerball out of order,

00:39:30.000 | because that's actually much easier than getting the jackpot. And three, this lottery ticket vision

00:39:37.280 | that social media gives to creatives, I think is actually pretty damaging because it distracts them

00:39:41.440 | from the actual paths that have been around for decades and we're still the only path to success

00:39:47.280 | in music as early as 12 years ago. It distracts you from those paths. And typically what those

00:39:52.640 | paths are is you're really good at music. You're performing that music in real venues, honing your

00:39:59.120 | ability to actually play in front of a crowd and not just in front of a webcam that's being broadcast

00:40:03.920 | the TikTok. You're then our showcases. There's formal ways that, okay, let me show what I'm

00:40:10.880 | doing once I'm at a certain level to executives from music companies who are desperate to find

00:40:16.080 | good musicians. They're not going to turn down any opportunity to find good musicians.

00:40:20.560 | If they like what they see, it's still a long process. I actually write about this in Slow

00:40:25.680 | Productivity. I have a whole long chapter about the story of Jewel, the musician Jewel, because

00:40:31.680 | she wrote a detailed memoir and then also did a few really detailed interviews. And I pulled from it

00:40:37.200 | to really recreate her slow path to becoming an incredibly successful musician. And then you learn

00:40:44.240 | from her memoir, she's touring all the time, small venues, a car instead of a van to save money.

00:40:53.120 | There's a period of time early on in her career where she made a deal with a group called Earth

00:40:58.240 | Jam that would do environmentally themed concerts at high schools. And she would perform with them

00:41:05.440 | in the afternoon so that she could use their van to get to her non high school performances in the

00:41:11.600 | evening. It was slow and it built and she got better. And then her career took off from there.

00:41:17.680 | The key point in the Jewel story, this again, I do this in more detail in Slow Productivity,

00:41:22.240 | but the key point in the Jewel story is that she wanted it to be slow. So the key turning point in

00:41:26.880 | the Jewel story, which Fab I hope will give you some peace of mind here when thinking about a

00:41:31.600 | slower approach, is that when she was discovered at the Interchange Coffeehouse down in San Diego,

00:41:38.720 | when she was discovered because she was doing something really too good to be ignored,

00:41:42.400 | a record label put a million dollars on the table. And this is kind of the equivalent of now

00:41:48.800 | my YouTube videos get caught Justin Bieber style and catch on some wave and then like suddenly

00:41:57.760 | I'm going on a Saturday Night Live, put a million dollars on the table.

00:42:02.400 | And she was like, OK, you know, this seems kind of nerve wracking. So she went to the library,

00:42:07.360 | got a book out about how the record industry works. And she's like, wait a second, if I take

00:42:14.160 | this million dollar deal, it's a loan against royalties. They're going to want me to make this

00:42:18.320 | money back soon. They're going to have to make a big push. And if I don't have a huge hit right out

00:42:22.800 | of the park, I'm being dropped from this label. But she's like, also, I've only ever really

00:42:27.760 | performed at this coffeehouse. I'm not I don't know if I'm there yet. She turned down the million

00:42:31.680 | dollars. She said, don't worry about the advance. Let's just do a deal that has a pretty good

00:42:36.640 | like a back end. If things do do well, I'll make a lot of money, but I got to cost you very little.

00:42:43.440 | And she spent years on the label costing the very little learning how to be a really good

00:42:49.040 | performing musician. And then things finally took off and that back end deal made her a lot more

00:42:56.080 | than a million dollars. I tell that story because her path was slow, but the slowness was a feature,

00:43:01.760 | not a bug. She got the attention of labels by being too good to be ignored, in this case,

00:43:08.160 | playing these epic concerts in this coffeehouse in San Diego and then spent years just performing,

00:43:13.440 | learning. So one of the things that had to happen, for example, not to give too much away from my

00:43:17.920 | book, but, you know, her one of her first hits was You Were Meant for Me. But when that was first

00:43:21.840 | release, it did not do too well. And in part because her initial recording of that was done

00:43:27.360 | soon after she signed her record deal. And she did it at Neil Young's Ranch out in California

00:43:32.320 | with a lot of Neil Young's band. And she was nervous. It showed a year or so later, she went

00:43:38.640 | back and re-recorded it. Interestingly, with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who was her friend

00:43:43.840 | from San Diego, playing bass on it, re-recorded it after like practicing, getting better at

00:43:49.040 | performing, more confident. And that new version is what took off. So anyways, I think for creative

00:43:54.640 | social media is a lottery ticket. And even if you that ticket does pay off, it may not be what you

00:44:00.880 | think it is. Maybe more of a curse than a blessing. I don't know if Justin Bieber was better off being

00:44:07.440 | discovered by YouTube as instead of having a jewel like rise where that same sort of precocious

00:44:13.600 | singing was discovered in Canada at showcases. And then there's a two or three year period where

00:44:18.640 | he really found his voice. It is a cautionary tale. So anyways, there's ways to get the scars

00:44:25.920 | of creative that have been around forever. It did not go away in the last 12 years. I think those

00:44:29.520 | slower ways are better. So the idea that if I'm on social media, algorithmic lightning will strike,

00:44:36.400 | I don't even know if you want that. So I don't know. I feel alone preaching that message these

00:44:40.480 | days, Jesse, but that's my whole career, you know? Yeah. Slow and steady. You're running about

00:44:46.080 | without social media. Yeah. Slow and steady. I've never had something just explode and take off.

00:44:52.880 | I've never had virality, but I just try to produce really good things and keep talking about them.

00:44:58.880 | And then the stuff that's good, it lasts. And over time it builds my reputation. Not everything works.

00:45:04.240 | Some things do. It just seems like a better way to do it. Yeah. And you're also writing all the

00:45:08.400 | time. I write all the time. I write all the time. I try to write the best possible things.

00:45:12.400 | Every hit book I've ever had took years to become a hit, but I think that's probably healthier.

00:45:18.240 | I mean, if I look at a book like Deep Work, that's probably, I mean, I think about it now,

00:45:26.080 | if I look at like the Amazon, that book sold a lot of copies, 1.5 million or whatever it is.

00:45:30.000 | And nowadays it's right up there. If you look at the rankings, it's right at the top of

00:45:34.640 | productivity. It's usually with David Allen, Essentialism and 4-Hour Workweek. We often kind

00:45:40.240 | of compete for it, but I never had Tim's experience. I never had Tim's experience.

00:45:43.600 | 4-Hour Workweek took off. It just took off. Now in the end, actually our sales aren't that

00:45:49.760 | different. And right now they're both in sort of an equal area of impact probably on the culture.

00:45:55.920 | Mine never had a six month period up front where it just like exploded, but that's better. I mean,

00:46:02.720 | Tim will tell you it's rough. It was rough to like have this thing explode. It like

00:46:06.400 | turned his world upside down. People would show up at his house. He was all over the place. These

00:46:11.920 | deals came around to do TV shows that he now regrets because he was like, this was a huge

00:46:16.720 | time sink and nothing came of it. And I lost the rights to things I was working on. Slower in this

00:46:21.840 | case was probably better. So you don't always want things to explode. You want it to last,

00:46:27.360 | and that can be different. All right. Let's do one more question. What do we got?

00:46:33.440 | Next question is from Deep Mountains. I abandoned social media, but now I feel left out and

00:46:38.880 | forgotten. Since I now barely have an online existence, people tend to make plans that don't

00:46:43.680 | include me. And when I do send somebody a message to arrange a meetup, my energy gets sapped waiting

00:46:48.720 | for the replies. Most of my friends communicate through social media. So my old way of communicating

00:46:54.400 | gets lost. How can I still live a meaningful social life with this quandary? So what do you

00:47:01.280 | think, I don't know if it's a he or she, let's say he, what do you think he means by his friends

00:47:09.120 | make plans mainly using social media? What tool is he talking about? Because he separates out

00:47:16.160 | messaging, which he does do. Well, you can message on Instagram. I think a lot of people do that,

00:47:20.880 | especially young people. So like using Instagram instead of like iMessage or WhatsApp. Yeah.

00:47:28.240 | Using the communication within those apps. I know that like with our guys, my coach,

00:47:34.000 | like in high school, they use instant Instagram messaging a lot. Okay. And this, is this different

00:47:42.080 | than it is DM Twitter? That's DM. Or it's Instagram DM as well. DMing is... Direct messaging. That's

00:47:50.240 | Instagram. Right. Okay. So it's like a main way. It's why like a lot of people... And I could see

00:47:57.200 | parties and stuff like that being announced there, especially on Facebook. Like they,

00:48:01.280 | people would invite people more our age, but I bet you people use a lot Facebook to make plans and

00:48:08.880 | invitations, stuff like that. So Instagram does this. TikTok is not a social network, right? So

00:48:14.320 | it's not TikTok. There you're seeing stuff the algorithm shows, but Facebook, Instagram,

00:48:19.360 | maybe Twitter, or probably not as much anymore like Instagram. Okay. So I think my thought here

00:48:27.360 | is okay. Perfectly fine use for social media. I mean, if your friends are using a messaging feature

00:48:34.800 | of let's say Instagram to meet up, then use the messaging feature on Instagram to meet up.

00:48:41.360 | Just don't use Instagram in other ways. Just put up gates about how you want to use it. Like this

00:48:48.080 | shouldn't be too hard. Yeah. Same with Facebook. I mean, if he's a little bit older and a lot of

00:48:53.600 | invitations to be sent through Facebook, just go on there a couple of times a week and see if

00:48:56.560 | there's any invitations to go. Yeah. So go on Facebook, look at invitations. Instagram, go on

00:49:01.040 | there and look at your DMs. Don't post things. Don't really follow anyone except for your friends,

00:49:06.880 | I suppose, if they're posting something. Don't make Instagram on your phone a default place to

00:49:12.880 | go if you're bored. Seek out slow distractions instead of fast like we talked about in the show.

00:49:18.400 | But to use Instagram as sort of a inefficient version of WhatsApp, fine.

00:49:23.840 | So I'm glad you asked this question because we want to be, when we're thinking about our

00:49:29.840 | engagement with the digital, we want to be very intentional, right? I really try to steer away

00:49:35.600 | from more generic prescriptions. This is evil. This is good. Never do this. Always do that.

00:49:43.280 | If you read Digital Minimalism, for example, my book, Digital Minimalism,

00:49:46.800 | I don't go in and say, here's the bad services. Here's the good. I don't go in and say, let me

00:49:52.160 | talk about, you know, how bad of a guy Mark Zuckerberg is. You don't want to support his

00:49:56.720 | company. I said, figure out what you want to do. Figure out the right tools to do that. Use those

00:50:02.000 | tools to do that. And anything else those tools try to get you to do, say, I'm not interested.

00:50:06.320 | Just take control over how you use your digital life. So there's a chapter in Digital Minimalism.

00:50:12.080 | If you get that book, there's a chapter called Join the Attention Resistance that gets to exactly

00:50:16.480 | what I think you need to think about here. And it's about how do you use the advantageous parts

00:50:22.720 | of these giant attention economy platforms without being trapped by the other parts that you're not

00:50:28.480 | interested in and that are poised to perhaps capture your attention and make your life worse.

00:50:33.920 | And to do that is almost like an act of resistance. To come into your Instagram,

00:50:39.120 | and it's not on your phone, it's on your computer to come into Instagram, but you haven't followed

00:50:42.560 | anybody. So there's just like this weird discover stuff that the algorithm chose you could care less

00:50:46.800 | about. And you jump in, look at the DMs and jump out. To do like I talk about in that book,

00:50:52.960 | to use a plug-in. So you can go into Facebook to see Facebook groups where people are posting

00:50:58.480 | about parties, but there's no newsfeed. That's the attention resistance. You say, I'm keeping

00:51:03.920 | control of my attention and you're not going to take control of my attention by luring me in with

00:51:10.080 | these specific really useful features. I can use those useful features without having to become

00:51:15.440 | a pawn in your attention economy scheme. It's like we talked about with YouTube as well.

00:51:19.120 | YouTube is a great library. YouTube is a great cable channel.

00:51:22.480 | It's a dangerous form of wandering distraction. So people come in and use plugins, for example,

00:51:30.000 | that get rid of, and this is an example from that chapter, get rid of the recommendations.

00:51:33.840 | It turns YouTube into like a search engine. I know I like deep questions and I know the new

00:51:40.960 | episodes come out Monday. So on Monday I go and I type into the top deep questions or Cal Newport

00:51:48.000 | and I click on the latest episode and I watch it. I use it. It's like turn down the TV and watch a

00:51:52.480 | certain show, but there's nothing being recommended on the side. That's it. If I want to do something

00:51:57.120 | else, I'll look it up. Oh, I want to know how to fix something. I search for that thing and I get

00:52:00.480 | the video I watch and I'm done. It's a great library. Another example of the attention

00:52:03.760 | resistance. So if your friends are using the communication tools built into social media apps,

00:52:08.400 | use those tools, but only use those tools. And by doing so you're sort of giving a

00:52:14.160 | metaphorical middle finger to the owners of those companies anyways, which itself is kind of fun.

00:52:18.320 | I learned something. Communication tools. I know journalists talk about it a lot. It's very,

00:52:25.600 | journalists find this useful because people, a lot of very online people that you might need to

00:52:30.240 | like get a quote from for an article or whatever. That's how they contact them. Twitter DM. It's

00:52:36.080 | like, it's something I don't have. I think it's been fine, but I think there's a lot of that

00:52:40.480 | going on in journalism. DMing people, social media accounts to try to contact them.

00:52:45.120 | Kind of makes me glad I don't have Twitter. I think about all the DMs we would get.

00:52:50.240 | I mean, we already get so many emails. Can you imagine if people had the illusion of like,

00:52:54.880 | I could just like directly yell at you about things. All right. Let's do a call.

00:53:00.560 | Do we have a call load up? Yes, we do. Here we go.

00:53:03.200 | G'day, it's Logan here. I'm a Kiwi currently living in the US working as a financial

00:53:10.720 | consultant. I have a question around decentralized social media. I've spent the last five years

00:53:16.480 | developing my artistic drawing skills to a proficient level and feel that I could now

00:53:20.400 | generate some real revenue. I'm not about to quit my day job. My question is more about how do I

00:53:25.840 | share my content with an audience? How do I monetize it? How do I do this and still maintain

00:53:31.120 | control over what I create while not handing over the reins of these things and my audience to a

00:53:36.800 | large social media company? Ideally, I would only use social media as a tool to funnel viewership

00:53:42.880 | into some other thing. Well, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I've heard you talk theoretically

00:53:47.920 | about this idea, but don't really know how you imagine it to work in practice. Cheers for all

00:53:52.400 | the hard work. Al. All right. Kiwi, that's New Zealand? I think so. All right. Excellent.

00:54:00.960 | International audience. I like it. So what type of art was he saying? He said visual.

00:54:05.200 | Yeah. Visual, some sort of digital visual art. Yeah. So once again,

00:54:15.200 | I don't know that particular world well, but like in my answer to Fab, I believe it was

00:54:22.960 | the Peruvian musician. I'll give a similar answer here, which is, OK, at 12 years ago,

00:54:30.640 | how did the artists in this general space, how did they get noticed and spread?

00:54:35.600 | Go see if you can do that. Like that's step one. Right. And so it's probably you're doing

00:54:41.680 | something really original and then, you know, it maybe it starts in a local gallery. Maybe it

00:54:47.120 | starts in someone else's sort of showcase that they that they do. That's a starting place.

00:54:54.000 | Building a digital home is another good idea. Build a website. You have a digital home with

00:55:00.480 | a website where people can come in and see your art. Right. And then be OK with not trying to play

00:55:08.880 | the algorithmic amplification lottery. Be OK with I'm working on this art. I'm finding like a slower

00:55:14.000 | way of developing this and spread to an audience. I have a digital home. The point people tours

00:55:17.920 | go to this well-designed website. You can see or buy my art. You can join my mailing list for

00:55:24.720 | updates if you want to know when new pieces are coming out or for sale and build the following

00:55:32.320 | slowly. That is a durable following you're going to build. It's also, I think, a beneficial

00:55:40.480 | feedback loop. You have to interact more with people, convince people to let you in their

00:55:45.760 | galleries, convince people to to buy your work one by one. That feedback loop improves your work.

00:55:52.240 | OK, maybe this is not really original enough, so I need to do something different here. You

00:55:56.240 | don't get any of that feedback if you're just posting on Instagram and hoping that like a

00:56:00.640 | celebrity influencer repost one of your things that all these people are interested in your work.

00:56:05.200 | So like how do people do this 12 years ago? Like do that with a good website and mailing list.

00:56:10.720 | And be ready for that to be a slow process again. And I left this out in the fab answer.

00:56:16.480 | But the other piece here is the slowness of the process motivates you more because you have to

00:56:22.560 | work harder and harder to try to move this thing along when you're just posting stuff on Instagram.

00:56:27.120 | You get caught up in what I call checklist productivity, where you feel like the key to

00:56:31.440 | a big accomplishment is just following some script that other people don't have access to.

00:56:35.440 | That in other words, the scarcity that means most people don't succeed is in the information,

00:56:39.040 | not in the actual execution. So you could end up in a checklist productivity mode where what

00:56:43.680 | you really care about is, am I posting on a regular schedule? Do I have good tags and hashtags for the

00:56:51.040 | algorithm to hit? Am I spending enough time following other artists replying so they'll

00:56:56.080 | follow me? You get caught up because that's so much easier. Checklist productivity, anyone can do it.

00:57:00.640 | That's so much easier than saying, how do I make this better? This local gallery in New Zealand,

00:57:06.960 | you know, they didn't want to show this. Why? How can I make it better? So they would let me be

00:57:11.520 | around more artists, let me meet more artists, let me join or start an artist collective where

00:57:14.800 | we're helping to critiquing each other's work. The slower approach forces you to focus on quality and

00:57:21.760 | lights that fire to keep pushing in a way that when you're just playing the algorithmic

00:57:27.120 | amplification lottery, you're like, I don't know. What really matters is some clever trick I do in

00:57:31.600 | my headline construction. That's going to please the algorithm. And all that's energy that could

00:57:36.320 | be going towards making your stuff better. All right. So that's our questions for today's episode.

00:57:45.680 | His art kind of got me thinking about, did you read that article in the New Yorker about the

00:57:50.400 | invader? Invader who puts all the art murals and like he's he's based in Paris, but he goes all

00:57:57.040 | over the world and puts the art murals and without people knowing, they don't know who he is.

00:58:02.160 | Technically, the author said, if you dig deep, you could find out who he is. So it's like a

00:58:06.960 | big have to read the article. You'll probably like it. It's like a Banksy type situation,

00:58:09.840 | but but not as it's like stuff. Cool. Yeah. Like that guy doesn't care about his own social media

00:58:16.080 | account. I'll read that the invader invader article. I actually do think he has a big

00:58:23.040 | Instagram account. Yeah, probably. He probably does. Let's be honest. By the way, New Yorker

00:58:27.920 | subscribers, I have two new articles of mine have gone up in the last two or three weeks.

00:58:32.320 | Yeah. So, yeah, definitely go check it out. If you haven't the New Yorker in a while,

00:58:35.280 | two of them were on the homepage the other day because I had a new one and they brought up an

00:58:39.680 | old one for the resolutions that a couple of weeks before that, another one. So there's a lot of Cal

00:58:43.200 | Newport right now. So go to the New Yorker. Look for the count, my Cal Newport page. You'll see

00:58:49.280 | some of the new stuff, the new stuff I wrote, the online version, the online version. Yeah.

00:58:53.840 | Or the app. Yeah. You can find it easily in the app as well. All right. We got a Cal React segment

00:59:00.800 | coming up next where I react to something that's spreading on the Internet. But first, let's talk

00:59:05.840 | about a couple more sponsors. In particular, let's start by talking about our friends at Shopify,

00:59:16.880 | the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch

00:59:24.320 | your online shop stage to the first real life store stage, all the way to the did we just hit

00:59:29.680 | a million orders stage. Shopify is there to help you grow. So what's nice about Shopify,

00:59:39.520 | we're talking about online shopping, sure. All in one e-commerce platform, industry leading

00:59:44.880 | conversion of interested buyers. You're talking about in-person, sure. In-person POS system,

00:59:50.720 | whatever you're selling, wherever you're selling, Shopify has you covered.

00:59:54.720 | If you're selling something, Shopify should be who you use. They even have an AI powered

01:00:02.320 | feature called Shopify magic to help you sell with even less effort. We don't yet have our

01:00:09.280 | deep questions online store. But when we do inevitably start this, it's got to be using

01:00:16.320 | Shopify. To me, there's not even a question, Jesse, when we launch our store, it will use Shopify.

01:00:21.280 | All we're missing again is we just don't have an idea. We've had ideas, but none of them are that

01:00:27.120 | good. Here's my new thought about what we should sell in our Shopify powered deep question store.

01:00:31.840 | Once we actually load it, it's going to be a pretty thick monograph. Talking like three,

01:00:36.640 | 400 pages self-published on Dradle and related statistics. Just detailed modeling of Dradle.

01:00:44.800 | I mean, it's going to be a polemic against Dradle as a fun game. Shopify is going to help us start

01:00:51.200 | that when we start up our store. So whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify will help you

01:00:59.040 | do your thing however you cha-ching. So here's a good news. We have a deal here. Sign up for $1

01:01:04.400 | per month trial period at Shopify.com/deep. All lowercase letters for this to work, Shopify.com/deep

01:01:13.200 | and you will get a $1 per month trial period. So go to Shopify.com/deep now to grow your business,

01:01:18.720 | no matter what stage you're in, Shopify.com/deep.

01:01:22.640 | Also want to talk about our friends at Grammarly mentioned earlier in this episode.

01:01:28.880 | We're unsolicited and unrelated to Grammarly being our sponsor. One of our readers wrote in

01:01:36.000 | and talked about how much he enjoyed using Grammarly. That is a real testimonial from

01:01:41.280 | one of our readers, listeners, I should say. I'm not surprised that our listeners appreciate

01:01:47.840 | Grammarly because as we talk about on the show, writing is critical. If you write clearly,

01:01:54.960 | you'll be taken more seriously. You'll be more persuasive. You will think more clearly.

01:02:01.120 | And when it comes to writing, Grammarly is there to support you from start to finish.

01:02:05.040 | For over 10 years, Grammarly has been powered by AI technology that you can trust to help you

01:02:10.560 | access, that you can access in all the places where you write. Grammarly now has a new feature,

01:02:16.640 | a more advanced generative AI feature that pushes the capabilities of Grammarly into new areas.

01:02:25.840 | So for example, let's say you are stuck working on something you're trying to write at work,

01:02:31.680 | Grammarly can now help you get started with ideas, outlines, and even temps. You can say things like,

01:02:36.000 | "Give me 10 possible taglines for a video thumbnail on this topic." It'll give you ideas,

01:02:41.440 | help you get unstuck. It's even better now at polishing your writing. You can say, for example,

01:02:48.000 | "Improve this paragraph, shorten this paragraph," and you can see it tighten up your writing.

01:02:54.880 | It can even help you get through your emails quicker, have Grammarly pointed towards your

01:02:59.680 | email apps, and it can summarize your emails and even provide suggested replies so you don't have

01:03:05.680 | to write that whole reply from scratch. Other things they can do now, let's say you have a

01:03:12.960 | big presentation coming up, Grammarly can create a personalized outline. So you have something to

01:03:18.800 | start with when thinking about your presentation and so on. So Grammarly is there to help you

01:03:23.200 | not just get your grammar right, not just get your tone right, not just help you be more concise,

01:03:27.520 | but now to help you even brainstorm and think and sharpen your writing. So writing is critical.

01:03:32.400 | Grammarly will help you do that writing better. So start being more productive at work and go to

01:03:36.560 | grammarly.com/podcast to download Grammarly for free today. That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/podcast.

01:03:49.040 | And that's our sponsors. All right. So for our third and final segment, I like to take something

01:03:55.840 | that's going around the internet and react to it. Today I want to react to a YouTube video

01:04:02.400 | that some of our listeners were sending in because it's going around the internet right now. I'm

01:04:06.320 | looking at it now. It has over 1.5 million views. And so I thought we would take a look. For those

01:04:13.360 | who are watching instead of just listening, I have it loaded up on the screen here in the corner with

01:04:21.280 | the closed captioning. So the title of this YouTube video is I'm a 33-year-old woman with no life.

01:04:29.360 | My advice to young women. So we have a young woman talking straight to camera. Here I'll read the

01:04:34.880 | closed caption of the beginning. I want to give you some advice on how to deal with this and cope

01:04:41.520 | with no sense of direction. But for now, I kind of want to just tell you my story of how I got here.

01:04:46.720 | And it's not long and it's not that sad. All right. So then we get a story from this person talking

01:04:53.440 | straight to camera about why she is now 33 years old and feels like she has no life. So let me

01:05:00.320 | summarize. I took some notes here. Let me summarize the story that she tells. Coming out of college,

01:05:06.480 | she was interested in digital media, got a good internship in digital media. But then when she

01:05:13.760 | applied for what she described as fun media department jobs, she didn't get them. They kept

01:05:20.160 | saying, no, you don't have enough experience. And so not able to get those jobs she desired,

01:05:25.920 | she fell back and said, I'll just do retail. So she fell back for retail jobs. Some time passed,

01:05:33.360 | an opportunity came up for her to get a quote, good project manager job.

01:05:38.080 | So this is a job with benefits, normal salary. I think this was out west.

01:05:44.000 | But then after a little while, she got fired and has no jobs. As she says, it was so devastating.

01:05:50.640 | It's back like she was when she was looking for her original jobs after her internship. She's

01:05:56.400 | having a hard time finding a solid job. She did some contract work for about eight months.

01:06:00.160 | But now she says, no, it feels like no one wants to hire me. No one wants anything to do with me

01:06:04.400 | because they feel like she doesn't have the right experience. It seems like her new plan,

01:06:11.440 | based on what she says in this video, is to make content for YouTube and hope maybe that works out.

01:06:16.240 | All right. So this is a couple of things I want to talk about here. First of all, I want to say

01:06:22.800 | this is a useful type of video to exist. I think having people actually talk about the realities

01:06:30.880 | of their engagement with the world of work is really useful because we don't really get

01:06:35.440 | a clear picture, especially young people. They don't get a really clear picture about how this

01:06:41.360 | works. You have sort of abstract books, maybe. And then you have this the typical YouTube, TikTok

01:06:48.640 | presentation of work, where it's usually a lot of people who make a living on YouTube and TikTok

01:06:53.920 | kind of talk about how they make a living on YouTube and TikTok. And then maybe you get

01:06:57.440 | exposed to some sort of celebrity workers, you know, famous writers and artists and sports stars,

01:07:06.080 | this type of thing. That's kind of it. So we don't really get exposed to a lot of the reality

01:07:11.520 | of how the world of work works and what to expect and how hard it can be and how emotionally hard

01:07:18.160 | it can be. And so to see that and have someone just say it straight to camera, no holds barred,

01:07:24.720 | I think is really important. Oh, this is how the world of work can work for most people.

01:07:29.280 | And it's really hard. And if you're feeling emotionally drained by your difficulty in the

01:07:33.840 | world of work, instead of feeling like you're an outlier, you watch a video like this, you say,

01:07:37.360 | yeah, this is I'm not alone. Work is hard. We just don't hear those stories. Those stories

01:07:42.960 | don't get amplified. Second, however, I think this video is a good reason to revisit some ideas from

01:07:50.560 | my 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. I think in addition to being a useful window into

01:07:57.760 | the reality of the world of work, this video also gives a reality, a window into the reality of how

01:08:04.160 | a lot of people, she's a young millennial, but Gen Z probably feels the same way, but especially

01:08:09.600 | millennials, just when we were raised, it gives a window into some of the issues with how we

01:08:14.480 | think about work. So the model that comes out of this video, at least this was my impression,

01:08:19.760 | was a model of work in which you figured out what you want to do, digital media, whatever it is,

01:08:28.080 | and then you wait to get chosen to do it. So then someone chooses you, say, okay, I will let you come

01:08:34.480 | and do this for my company. They choose you to do it. So it's like getting into college,

01:08:38.720 | right? Getting accepted into graduate school. And then you're good. I got chosen. I put out

01:08:44.400 | my applications and someone said, I choose you. You get to come into this world now and be a

01:08:48.640 | digital media, whatever. And if that doesn't happen, then you're kind of lost. So you figure

01:08:54.800 | out what you want to do. You put yourself out there, hey, can I come do this for you? And either

01:08:59.440 | they say yes, and you're happy, or they say no. And then you really can end up in a hard situation.

01:09:06.000 | What's the alternative model to think about this? Well, it's the model from my book, So Good They

01:09:11.200 | Can't Ignore You, which is based on career capital. It says the whole job industry, the whole job

01:09:17.280 | market, it's all about what do you have to offer specifically that's valuable. And the collection

01:09:23.920 | of your rare and valuable skills, your skills that are rare and valuable to the market in general is

01:09:28.080 | what we call career capital. The more of it you have, the more opportunities and leverage you

01:09:32.400 | have. And therefore, the whole game, especially right out of college, is building career capital

01:09:36.640 | as quickly as possible. It changes the way you think about things, because especially when you're

01:09:41.200 | young, you're not focused on what do I want my job to do for me? All right, I found this job has

01:09:47.840 | all the things I want. I hope they select me. And instead, it turns it around and say, what can I

01:09:51.760 | offer to the jobs? Well, not much yet because I'm new. So let me get my foot in the door somewhere

01:09:57.840 | and aggressively build up rare and valuable skills. This is the only way I have to take

01:10:04.240 | control over my career is to be good at things that people need. Now I can start to dictate.

01:10:08.960 | I want this position instead of that. I don't want to do this work. I want to do that work.

01:10:13.040 | I want to be remote. I'm taking the summers off. I want to make a lot of money. I want to live in

01:10:17.120 | the city. You get more and more autonomy and control over your career, the more valuable

01:10:22.880 | you're making yourself. And when you have this mindset, it changes the way you approach your day

01:10:26.240 | to day jobs because you approach the jobs from the standpoint of a musician who's trying to get to

01:10:32.640 | the first chair in the symphony practice. How do I get better? What am I not good at? How do I get

01:10:37.360 | better at that thing? Now, especially when you're young, you don't have as much going on. You have

01:10:41.280 | the time and energy to actually do this career capital development. When you don't have this

01:10:46.640 | mindset, when you have the mindset of I want to get chosen for the job that's meant for me,

01:10:50.640 | it can lead to a lot of these type of traps. And there's a lot of, I think, bad luck and

01:10:55.520 | unfortunate circumstances that happened in the story as well. But there was also, I think, some

01:11:00.560 | mindset unforced errors, right? So for example, when she didn't get chosen

01:11:05.440 | for the kind of dream digital media job that her internship had prepared her for,

01:11:10.720 | what did she say her only other option was, was just to go back to retail.

01:11:16.400 | As opposed to say, well, I have a college degree and these other types of things.

01:11:19.520 | There's got to be somewhere I could get in my foot in the door and start building up the skills

01:11:25.360 | really fast to then take more control. Oh, it's going to take five years of building up skills

01:11:29.920 | to take control. So I don't need to be in the digital media department of this place. I just

01:11:34.240 | need to get in somewhere and start building up skills. I can move my way over there, right?

01:11:37.120 | So when you get rid of the, if it's not my dream job, then why bother? I should just sort of go

01:11:42.960 | back and work at retail. That's maybe an unforced error you wouldn't make if there was career

01:11:46.160 | capital thinking. It also just affects how you approach your work when you think about

01:11:50.080 | accumulating skills versus just, do I like this job? Yeah, I like this job, but maybe not. When

01:11:55.360 | you're just thinking about the job and if it's what you want, you're not building up aggressively

01:12:00.960 | your value to the organization, it's you're vulnerable. And then when the downsizing happens,

01:12:05.680 | you know, you might be closer to the choppy block because they don't point you and say, well,

01:12:10.560 | she does this for us that no one else does. She's invaluable over here or there. Of course,

01:12:15.040 | she's not going to be the one we let go. So there's a mindset change that can help.

01:12:18.560 | Now, of course, the whole problem with all of this is it's not the difficulty of doing this,

01:12:25.280 | it's not evenly distributed. For some people, a career capital mindset is going to come much

01:12:31.200 | easier. They have many more opportunities to do it just because of who they are,

01:12:35.200 | the opportunities or connections they have. It's not a fairly distributed system.

01:12:40.000 | But it still seems to be the way the job market works, even if it works differently for different

01:12:47.440 | people. So we shouldn't let our frustration with this system is not fair, hide the reality of how

01:12:53.440 | the system works, which is it's a market. Skill is what matters. Building skill is the way to

01:12:58.240 | think about it. So anyways, that's my whole book. So good. They can't ignore you. It's an incredibly

01:13:01.440 | non romantic book. It's really not the way probably to write a book that a lot of people

01:13:06.320 | are going to get excited about and pass on to their friends because it's not telling you these

01:13:09.760 | stories about, man, my life's going to be so awesome if I just follow my passion. It's incredibly

01:13:13.920 | analytical. It's incredibly economic. Build valuable skills. Work might not even be that

01:13:20.000 | fun for the first five years. It shouldn't be that fun for the first five years. You're training.

01:13:23.600 | Your work will be cool after 10 years when you've gotten really good at something and have some

01:13:26.480 | leverage. It's not a romantic book. It's not a quick fix book. But it's now been 12 years since

01:13:32.080 | that book came out and it holds. I think it's ideas hold. The main thing has happened with that

01:13:38.960 | book between the current generation and the generation that I'm in when I wrote that book.

01:13:43.920 | So what's changed in the 10 years is that when I wrote that book, it was aimed at millennials.

01:13:48.480 | So I'm an old millennial. The person's video is she's 33, you know, youngest side of millennials.

01:13:55.520 | Whereas if you're in college now or 23 or 24, you're Gen Z. Millennials were largely

01:14:00.640 | raised with this idea of like, follow your passion, find your passion, match it to your work.

01:14:05.360 | And this book was pushing back against that. I think Gen Z was raised in a different way.

01:14:09.200 | Gen Z does not. I don't think they see the world through the same follow your passion.

01:14:13.920 | Everything will work out. There's more of a cynicism and a different type of naivete in Gen Z.

01:14:19.840 | I don't quite have my arms around how Gen Z thinks about the workplace. It's not this pure

01:14:24.720 | follow your passion mindset. That's a millennial thing. There is more of a,

01:14:30.000 | there is more of the self as economic entity. I think they grew up with monetized social media

01:14:36.160 | and everyone posting. So they see themselves as brands and time is something that to be

01:14:42.000 | monetized or not. I mean, it's a whole different way of thinking about things.

01:14:45.040 | So the world, the thing I push back against is so good they can't ignore you. You might

01:14:49.920 | not be as resident for Gen Z, but I think the solution is still the solution.

01:14:53.040 | See the world of work as a market. Skills are what you bring to the table. The more you bring

01:14:58.000 | to the table, the more you get to come away with. So the game is, especially in your twenties and

01:15:02.000 | early thirties, building up those skills as quickly as possible. And then the game switches

01:15:06.400 | in your mid thirties onwards to having the courage to take those skills out for a spin and shape your

01:15:10.560 | work the way you want it and not just follow the existing trajectories. Anyways, I haven't had a

01:15:16.080 | chance to talk about careers recently. So I thought that video was a good opportunity. The link is in

01:15:20.160 | the show notes. It's a great video. I think it's emotionally very raw and inspiring in certain

01:15:26.560 | humanistic ways. Worth a watch. And I'm glad that that was posted. Also glad to have this talk about

01:15:32.160 | career capital. No one's favorite topic to hear about. All right, Jesse, let me save whatever

01:15:38.720 | voice I have left. Why don't we wrap up today's episode right there? Thank you, everyone, for

01:15:44.560 | listening. We'll be back next week, probably with an interview episode. One I think you're going to

01:15:48.160 | like. So definitely check it out. And until then, as always, stay deep. So if you enjoyed today's

01:15:54.800 | discussion about slow versus fast distractions, I think you'll also enjoy episode 270, where I go

01:16:02.320 | deep on the difference between depth. And distraction. Check it out. I receive a lot of

01:16:09.120 | emails from listeners and readers about struggling to take back control of their life from powerful

01:16:19.120 | sources of distraction.

Feeling Lost, Lazy & Can't Focus? - This One Idea Will Change Your Life In 2024 | Cal Newport

Chapters