Full Length Episode | #173 | February 14, 2022

00:00:00.000 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 173.

00:00:15.680 | I'm here in the Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:21.280 | Jesse, I've been hearing feedback that these core idea segments that we're doing, people

00:00:25.960 | like them.

00:00:26.960 | Yeah, we just got them published on YouTube today, so they can listen on the podcast and

00:00:32.880 | they can listen to it on YouTube as well.

00:00:35.080 | I think the factor on YouTube now is a big deal.

00:00:38.280 | So for people who don't know, the core idea segments, we've been doing these in recent

00:00:41.960 | episodes.

00:00:42.960 | It's where I do a deep dive on one of the basic core ideas I come back to again and

00:00:47.280 | again.

00:00:48.680 | I forget how used to I am with some of these notions, because I've been writing about them

00:00:53.160 | and talking about them for, in some cases, decades.

00:00:57.960 | But I forget that not everyone is so familiar.

00:00:59.800 | So we're going through and taking some of the core ideas and let's just walk through

00:01:03.040 | it from scratch.

00:01:04.640 | Now these segments are beginning to appear on YouTube.

00:01:06.760 | You can actually now go back and reference a particular core idea segment without having

00:01:11.160 | to find the podcast episode in which I talk about it and fast forward to the part where

00:01:17.240 | I talked about it.

00:01:18.440 | So I believe as of the day we're recording this episode, you can find on YouTube, the

00:01:23.400 | core idea segment on time management, on slow productivity, and on my thoughts around passion

00:01:30.040 | and career satisfaction.

00:01:33.060 | Going forward as you hear new core idea segments, those will go online pretty soon afterwards.

00:01:38.080 | What do we think, Jesse?

00:01:39.080 | Usually a couple of days after the episode airs?

00:01:40.720 | Yeah, be quick.

00:01:41.720 | Yeah.

00:01:42.720 | A couple of days.

00:01:43.720 | And they're in their own playlist.

00:01:44.720 | We'll put them in their own playlist so they will be easy to find.

00:01:48.160 | Now I'm going to do a new core idea segment to start today's episode.

00:01:52.800 | But first, first I want to do a quick plug and I will explain why I'm doing this plug

00:01:59.160 | here in a second because it's relevant to the show.

00:02:01.000 | But the plug is for my long time friend from when I was growing up in Pennington, New Jersey,

00:02:08.440 | Jamie Kilstein.

00:02:10.960 | He is doing a going away comedy show in Austin on February 24th at Creek and Cave, which

00:02:19.920 | is a cool venue.

00:02:20.920 | So Jamie Kilstein, February 24th is doing a comedy show Creek and Cave.

00:02:24.320 | Go to creekandcave.com to reserve tickets.

00:02:28.320 | A really talented, funny guy.

00:02:29.960 | He dropped out of high school to start doing comedy full time.

00:02:33.300 | And I've seen him off and on doing shows throughout his career.

00:02:38.400 | Real talent.

00:02:39.400 | So a little back story about why I'm talking about this on the show.

00:02:42.800 | Jamie has an interesting but also pretty complicated and tumultuous life story.

00:02:47.480 | As I mentioned, he dropped out of high school, started doing comedy full time in New York

00:02:53.720 | as a teenager, ended up starting one of the very first political podcasts.

00:02:58.960 | And then that got really big and that blew up.

00:03:02.280 | He got tied up in scandals and had ups and downs.

00:03:07.400 | He would come back to comedy because he had a real natural talent there and then would

00:03:10.920 | go back underground, struggled with mental health issues.

00:03:14.540 | In all of this complicated storyline, social media began to play an increasingly negative

00:03:19.800 | role in his life.

00:03:21.460 | So we recorded this two-part podcast episode.

00:03:25.640 | And the first part we recorded in December.

00:03:27.640 | And Jamie just lays out, here's my life story and the struggles I'm going through.

00:03:34.200 | And then I gave him Dr. Phil style some advice.

00:03:39.560 | Here's what I want you to do about social media in your life.

00:03:41.520 | And then we came back 30 days later and recorded a follow-up podcast where he reported back,

00:03:46.200 | this is what happened.

00:03:47.200 | And the idea here is Jesse and I are going to edit these two things together because

00:03:50.600 | I think it presents a really interesting nuanced portrayal of the benefits and the extreme

00:03:56.240 | harms of social media.

00:03:57.520 | And this is a complicated person.

00:03:59.360 | So this is not just some simple story of here's like this great guy and everything was going

00:04:02.600 | well and then social media made it bad.

00:04:04.120 | It's a real story.

00:04:05.120 | It's gritty.

00:04:06.120 | But you also see in real time what it's like to try to disentangle your life.

00:04:09.120 | So we're working on this cool episode, but it requires a lot of editing and we're not

00:04:13.120 | great at that.

00:04:14.120 | We don't have our act together.

00:04:15.500 | In that episode, we were promoting this going away show.

00:04:19.600 | And so we did not get the episode live in time for this promotion.

00:04:22.760 | So I'm just giving the promotion now.

00:04:25.000 | And you don't know what going away means or why it's important because we haven't played

00:04:28.380 | the episode yet.

00:04:29.380 | But I can tell you if you're in Austin, Jamie is someone you shouldn't miss February 24th,

00:04:35.060 | Creek and Cave and stay tuned for that interesting, complicated Dr. Phil slash intervention slash

00:04:42.940 | reminiscing about Cal's childhood episode that is coming soon.

00:04:46.740 | All right.

00:04:48.380 | So let's get on to the meat of our business today, which is our next core idea segment.

00:04:56.260 | I thought I would tackle the topic for which I am probably best known, which is deep work.

00:05:05.020 | So I'm known for deep work because of the book I published in 2016 of that same name.

00:05:12.520 | This was a book that had a bit of a quiet launch.

00:05:18.380 | It was a Wall Street Journal bestseller for a week or so.

00:05:21.060 | And that was just off of the strength of my email list audience at that time.

00:05:24.740 | And then it sort of went under the radar.

00:05:27.860 | And then a year or so later, something just started to happen.

00:05:30.860 | People kept buying it and they started buying it at a higher rate than they did before.

00:05:35.060 | And it's a book that never actually had a week in which it was gangbusters.

00:05:38.880 | It never had a week in which it was number two on the charts on Amazon.

00:05:45.300 | It never had a Mark Manson or James Clear moment.

00:05:47.700 | But this book has quietly moved into almost 40 languages.

00:05:52.180 | Now you can get this book in a lot of places.

00:05:55.080 | There is a Mongolian version of this book.

00:05:57.540 | We have a book being sold.

00:05:59.940 | There's a French speaking Africa version of the book.

00:06:05.140 | It's a lot of places.

00:06:06.400 | It's also quietly sold in English more than a million units.

00:06:10.220 | It's out there.

00:06:11.220 | It's had an impact, but never loudly.

00:06:13.220 | It's a little background.

00:06:16.500 | So let's talk about deep work.

00:06:18.180 | Let's talk about it.

00:06:19.260 | Three things, three things to cover here.

00:06:22.360 | Number one, what is it?

00:06:24.820 | Number two, why is it important?

00:06:28.520 | Number three, how do you do it better?

00:06:32.180 | Those are the three key points if we're going to talk about deep work.

00:06:34.060 | So number one, what is deep work?

00:06:36.420 | It is an activity.

00:06:38.260 | People often explode or expand this definition to cover all sorts of different things, entire

00:06:43.100 | lifestyles, whole value judgment systems about what work is important and what's not.

00:06:47.400 | Deep work is none of those things.

00:06:48.600 | It is a humble description for a very specific activity.

00:06:53.180 | It is when you are focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.

00:06:58.940 | If you are doing that activity, you are doing deep work.

00:07:01.380 | Now let's unfold those two parts.

00:07:05.020 | The easy part of that is cognitively demanding.

00:07:07.020 | So you're working on something hard and you're thinking hard about it.

00:07:10.340 | There's a hard thing and you're thinking hard about it.

00:07:12.660 | That's the easy part of the definition.

00:07:14.860 | The more demanding part of the definition is that you're doing this without distraction.

00:07:20.260 | Now what I mean by that more technically is that you are doing this cognitively demanding

00:07:23.300 | work in the absence of context shifts.

00:07:29.100 | Context shift is when you turn the focus of your attention from one cognitive context

00:07:32.940 | to another for a session to count as deep work.

00:07:37.840 | You cannot be doing those switches.

00:07:40.620 | So if you're working on something non-cognitively demanding, let's say you're trying to format

00:07:44.420 | properly a chart in PowerPoint.

00:07:47.740 | That's not cognitively demanding.

00:07:48.860 | That's not deep work.

00:07:49.860 | But let's say you are doing something cognitively demanding.

00:07:52.860 | You are trying to write a strategy memo.

00:07:57.220 | It's hard.

00:07:58.220 | You got to think about this.

00:07:59.220 | Like, what are we trying to say here?

00:08:00.220 | I have to say this just right.

00:08:01.500 | But let's say while you're writing the strategy memo, every five to six minutes, you quick

00:08:06.900 | check your email inbox.

00:08:08.860 | You glance at your phone to see what's going on.

00:08:11.380 | That session also does not count as deep work because you are doing these context shifts,

00:08:15.660 | which significantly degrades your cognitive effectiveness.

00:08:19.260 | So if you can avoid the shifts, you're working on something hard, you are doing deep work.

00:08:24.300 | Otherwise, you're either doing shallow work, which is work that's not cognitively demanding,

00:08:28.940 | or you're doing pseudo deep work, which is you're working on something hard, but you

00:08:32.020 | keep switching context.

00:08:33.380 | So you are at a fraction of your capability of producing clean thought.

00:08:38.300 | So that's all deep work is a particular type of activity, among many types of activities

00:08:44.620 | you might do during a typical workday.

00:08:47.840 | Number two, why is it important?

00:08:50.020 | Well, I first want to make make clear that there's not a moral hierarchy here.

00:08:57.020 | There's not an argument that the only type of work that matters is deep work.

00:09:01.980 | We know in almost any professional context, there's lots of other types of efforts that

00:09:05.740 | are critical for those efforts.

00:09:09.260 | If you are not properly invoicing your clients, which is not a deep activity, but if you are

00:09:14.140 | not properly invoicing your clients, you're going to get no money and your business is

00:09:18.040 | going to go out of business.

00:09:19.220 | A couple years ago, I was to give another example, the director of graduate studies

00:09:24.000 | for the computer science department here at Georgetown and something we had to do each

00:09:27.980 | spring as part of that role is build a budget that talked about for every doctoral student

00:09:33.860 | we have, where is the money coming from for the tuition, for the research assistantship,

00:09:39.260 | for the TA ship, for the health insurance, we had to work out this budget.

00:09:42.840 | And there was nothing about that this that was deep, it wasn't cognitively demanding,

00:09:45.820 | it was just a huge pain because as you can imagine, it's complicated to untangle this

00:09:49.340 | is coming from a grant and this is coming from a fellowship and this is coming from

00:09:52.340 | a, from the department funds, but you know what critically important work without it,

00:09:58.780 | the students don't get paid and they can't do what they're trying to do.

00:10:03.300 | So deep work is not from a moral standpoint, the only work that matters, but in many professional

00:10:10.740 | contexts, and this was the core concept for my book, deep work, it is the deep efforts

00:10:16.580 | that move the needle.

00:10:19.380 | Ultimately, the activity that produces the value that allows you to keep doing what you're

00:10:24.940 | doing, that allows you to get promoted in what you're doing, that allows your company

00:10:29.300 | to grow or be more successful.

00:10:31.180 | Typically, these core activities are going to have a foundation of deep work.

00:10:35.820 | So it's what moves the needle.

00:10:39.140 | This is particularly clear in knowledge work, work where you're sitting at a computer screen

00:10:42.860 | all day.

00:10:44.780 | No one's going to pay your company for how quickly you answer emails, no one's going

00:10:48.540 | to pay your company because you are really rocking zoom meeting after zoom meeting, no

00:10:52.500 | one's going to pay you or give money to your company because you're jumping on calls, no

00:10:55.700 | one's going to pay you or your company, because you're shooting around PowerPoint decks with

00:11:00.460 | rapid speed, what are they going to pay your company for in a knowledge where context adding

00:11:05.140 | value to information, this is almost always a effort of deep work, skilled thought on

00:11:09.660 | something if it was not skilled thought or difficult, it would be easily replicatable

00:11:13.140 | and his value would plummet.

00:11:16.540 | You run the ad agency, there's a lot of stuff you have to do to keep the lights on, but

00:11:19.660 | it's coming up with the really good ad campaigns that gets you paid.

00:11:23.140 | You run the tech company, there's a lot you have to do to make sure that the code is released

00:11:27.260 | properly and marketed, but if you're not writing fantastic code, it gives you a good stable

00:11:32.180 | product, you're out of business.

00:11:34.780 | There's a lot that goes into marketing books.

00:11:36.500 | But if you're not writing fantastic book, it doesn't matter how much of that you're

00:11:39.220 | doing.

00:11:40.740 | So in knowledge work, shallow efforts keep the lights on deep work moves the needle,

00:11:45.740 | it's important that the core of what creates value.

00:11:49.380 | In other types of industries, this is even more clear.

00:11:52.380 | If you're an athlete, it's all about the deep efforts, the deep training and the deep

00:11:57.020 | performance.

00:11:58.020 | Training is a matter of deep work, focused incredibly intensely on what you're trying

00:12:02.660 | to do.

00:12:03.660 | Performing, you're on the court, you're on the field, incredibly deep, focused effort,

00:12:09.380 | no distractions.

00:12:10.580 | So deep work is clearly what moves the needle there.

00:12:13.620 | See this in art, you see this in the skilled crafts, if I'm a elite woodworker, ultimately

00:12:19.500 | what matters more than anything else in my producing beautifully made, very well constructed

00:12:23.780 | artifacts.

00:12:24.780 | So deep work is often what moves the needle.

00:12:26.020 | Not the only effort that matters, but it's what often moves the needle.

00:12:29.940 | The issue we got into, and this was the premise of the book, Deep Work, the issue we have

00:12:35.500 | gotten into more recently is that we forgot that.

00:12:39.580 | We began to think about all work being work, it's all equal.

00:12:42.500 | Either you're doing stuff or you're not.

00:12:44.620 | And if you're doing stuff and working hard, that's good.

00:12:46.620 | And if you're not doing stuff and working hard, that's bad.

00:12:49.000 | We stopped differentiating between deep work and shallow work.

00:12:52.200 | So why was this a problem? because we had developments in the digital world.

00:12:57.060 | Tools like low friction communication channels, email, slack, we got highly distracting entertainment

00:13:02.660 | like YouTube and social media pulling out our attention from the phones.

00:13:06.220 | We got zoom and PowerPoint slides and jumping on calls and our work got more ambiguous,

00:13:10.060 | it became less clear exactly what it is that we do.

00:13:13.500 | And in this context, we fell into this mode where increasingly you could go through most

00:13:17.060 | of your day never actually concentrating hard without distraction.

00:13:21.040 | Most of your day is now on calls in emails on zoom, changing those proverbial fonts and

00:13:26.400 | trying to get that chart to work in your PowerPoint slides.

00:13:28.860 | And we all patted ourselves on the back and said, look how busy we are.

00:13:33.340 | We're crushing it, we're getting after it.

00:13:35.940 | But we forgot that we weren't doing the actual underlying core deep work activities that

00:13:39.380 | was going to allow this company to keep existing in the first place.

00:13:41.940 | It's going to allow you to continue to keep your job in the first place.

00:13:46.380 | We were on the deck of the Titanic, sending Instagram pictures of our deck chair arrangements,

00:13:52.420 | not even realizing that the ship underneath us was sinking.

00:13:56.660 | And so the core argument in the book is that is a problem.

00:14:01.180 | But it's also an opportunity.

00:14:04.540 | Because what we have is a situation where this really important thing is becoming more

00:14:07.980 | scarce.

00:14:08.980 | So guess what, if you are one of the few people to prioritize it, if you're one of the few

00:14:12.540 | organizations to prioritize it, you are going to get a disproportionate competitive advantage.

00:14:19.140 | If you prioritize depth in an increasingly shallow world, there is large reward that

00:14:25.220 | you are going to get.

00:14:27.900 | So we could see it as a negative, we are forgetting about deep work as we drown in the shallow,

00:14:33.020 | or you can see it as a positive, everyone else is doing that.

00:14:36.740 | But I don't.

00:14:38.420 | I am getting wildly and disproportionately rewarded for that.

00:14:42.020 | Because you know the old saying, you don't have to be faster than a bear.

00:14:47.140 | When you run into that grizzly in the park, you just have to be faster than the person

00:14:50.140 | who's there with you.

00:14:52.180 | Bear will get him first.

00:14:54.300 | So that's why deep work is important.

00:14:55.460 | So what we need is to make sure that it's something that we prioritize.

00:14:58.940 | And it has a good presence, an intentional presence in our working life.

00:15:04.820 | Alright, so the third idea here is, how do we do that?

00:15:09.500 | How do we do deep work better?

00:15:12.620 | Well that's most of my book.

00:15:14.460 | I have a keynote I've been giving for a long time where I spend 30 minutes going through

00:15:19.660 | examples about this.

00:15:20.820 | It's an endlessly rich topic.

00:15:21.980 | So let me just give you a sampling of some ideas here about what matters, if you want

00:15:26.220 | to take advantage of this reality that deep work is valuable, but becoming more scarce.

00:15:30.060 | One just defining it is critical.

00:15:31.860 | The fact that we have terminology is at the core of any change.

00:15:37.100 | Just knowing deep work is different than shallow work allows you to actually say, Oh, I see

00:15:41.060 | what we're trying to do here.

00:15:42.300 | Otherwise, the only knob you have to turn is work harder or not.

00:15:47.380 | Stay up later, be on your phone more.

00:15:50.440 | As soon as the plane lands, whip it out, do those emails.

00:15:52.900 | If you don't know what it is you're trying to do better, you're not going to actually

00:15:55.700 | do the right things better.

00:15:56.700 | So defining it is key.

00:15:58.700 | Two, you need to measure it and you need to have goals.

00:16:02.060 | One of the most important ideas from that book, I believe was the deep to shallow work

00:16:06.300 | ratio.

00:16:08.660 | The concept is you figure out for your particular position, what is the ideal ratio of deep

00:16:14.900 | work hours to non deep work hours in a standard work week?

00:16:21.980 | This will differ depending on your job, but you should know what the right answer is.

00:16:26.860 | If you work for someone else, you should have this conversation with the person you work

00:16:30.180 | for with your supervisor.

00:16:32.660 | Here's what deep work is.

00:16:33.660 | Here's what shallow work is.

00:16:34.660 | Both is important.

00:16:35.660 | We have to get the invoices out the door.

00:16:37.740 | But if I'm not producing good ad copy, we're not going to get any more money.

00:16:41.100 | What is the ratio in my job that I should do that will best serve this company and you

00:16:44.380 | get a number and then you measure and if you already time block plan, you can just look

00:16:49.780 | straight on your time block plan for the week and see all the blocks that you've marked

00:16:52.900 | off as deep work blocks.

00:16:53.980 | It's easy to actually get these numbers, but you measure and you say, Hey, here's how we're

00:16:58.540 | doing.

00:16:59.660 | You and I talked about this and said it should be 50 50.

00:17:02.260 | Guess what?

00:17:03.260 | I got two hours of deep work in last week.

00:17:06.020 | Remember it does not count as deep work if it is not hard and if it's not with zero distraction.

00:17:12.940 | Now you're confronting a clear number.

00:17:16.020 | We decided 50 50 would best serve this company.

00:17:18.220 | We're nowhere near 50 50.

00:17:20.340 | We either have to say, you know what, Cal?

00:17:23.500 | I don't want you to do any deep work, which is crazy because again, that's what creates

00:17:28.140 | the value.

00:17:29.140 | Or you say, we're gonna have to make some changes and then you get changes to the company

00:17:31.340 | culture.

00:17:32.940 | Then you get more flexibility or workload changes.

00:17:35.380 | It is a driver for change that comes from a place of positivity.

00:17:37.880 | If you work for yourself, do the same exercise.

00:17:40.100 | Here's the ratio.

00:17:41.100 | I'm going to hold myself to it.

00:17:42.100 | If I'm not hitting it, something has to change.

00:17:46.420 | Schedule your deep work time is another big one that's very important.

00:17:50.220 | Do not wait for the instinct to hit you.

00:17:53.880 | You know, I'm just in the mood to do some deep work and I have nothing to do.

00:17:57.580 | That's never going to happen.

00:17:59.580 | If that happens, you're not working hard enough.

00:18:03.060 | That's not something that's going to arise naturally.

00:18:04.380 | So you need to get it on your calendar one way or the other and treat it like you would

00:18:08.060 | any other meeting or appointment.

00:18:09.460 | That's time that is protected.

00:18:10.740 | That's time that you cannot overschedule.

00:18:12.660 | Have a philosophy for how you do this.

00:18:14.420 | Maybe it's the same time on the same days every week.

00:18:17.860 | Maybe instead when you do your weekly plan, it's more bespoke.

00:18:20.300 | Here's where I'm going to fit it in this week.

00:18:21.540 | Maybe you take one day a week where you do just deep work and the other days you don't.

00:18:25.140 | However you want to do it, but have a philosophy, schedule it, protect it, and if possible,

00:18:29.460 | have rituals surrounding these actual sessions that really helps your mind slip into the

00:18:33.620 | deep work mode.

00:18:34.620 | I do the same walk.

00:18:35.820 | I go to the same secondary office space.

00:18:38.140 | I make the very same cup of coffee in the same cup.

00:18:41.200 | Have a ritual so your brain knows, oh, it's time to do deep work.

00:18:46.740 | Maybe you have to train this ability concentration is hard.

00:18:51.080 | If you look at your phone and every single piece of downtime you have, you are out of

00:18:55.480 | cognitive shape.

00:18:57.740 | You're a cognitive slob.

00:19:00.620 | If you give yourself a two-hour window and say, "Let's go do some deep work," that's

00:19:05.260 | like taking the guy who is in terrible shape and be like, "Look, man, we're going to run

00:19:08.840 | some stadiums."

00:19:09.840 | It's not going to go well.

00:19:12.620 | You are going to be distracted.

00:19:13.620 | It's going to be difficult.

00:19:15.140 | You are going to literally be sweating.

00:19:16.500 | You're like, "This is terrible."

00:19:18.140 | That's because you haven't trained.

00:19:19.580 | Don't give up if it's hard.

00:19:20.720 | That just means you haven't been on your virtual Peloton yet long enough to get those virtual

00:19:26.700 | lungs back in shape here.

00:19:28.760 | You have to train, which means you have to spend time free from distractions on a regular

00:19:34.540 | basis, read books because that forces your mind to concentrate, do productive meditation

00:19:39.340 | where you try to work on a professional problem just in your head as you walk.

00:19:43.140 | That is fantastic training.

00:19:47.020 | Board games, any type of strategy game where you have to think hard about it.

00:19:50.700 | Do all these type of things.

00:19:53.380 | Complicated hobbies that require real focus and skill, be it manual or physical.

00:19:56.900 | You have to get your mind in shape if you're going to succeed at deep work.

00:19:59.380 | It's not enough just to say, "I'm going to do it."

00:20:01.860 | You got to train for it.

00:20:02.860 | All right, so those are the main three ideas about deep work, what it is, why it's important,

00:20:08.780 | and how to get better at it.

00:20:12.460 | I'm going to add a coda here that I think is also critically important, which is once

00:20:17.500 | you are doing these things, you have to work the word deep into your everyday conversation

00:20:24.260 | as a prefix and adjective absolutely as much as possible.

00:20:28.360 | That's how people know you're awesome, and people are going to think you're really cool

00:20:31.940 | if you do it.

00:20:32.940 | That's my final piece of advice.

00:20:34.980 | You need to just walk in and be like, "Hey, guys, deep Monday, am I right?

00:20:38.580 | Yeah, I'm just going to get a deep coffee break over there.

00:20:41.700 | Now you're doing a little deep urination.

00:20:42.700 | All right, good work with that.

00:20:43.860 | You come back.

00:20:44.860 | We'll deep it up.

00:20:45.860 | Stay deep.

00:20:46.860 | Let's deep on over to the deep conference room, man.

00:20:49.860 | We're going to go deep on these type of things.

00:20:51.260 | This is going to make you sound awesome, and people are going to love you."

00:20:54.300 | Jesse here will attest, "Every time I see him, we fist bump and say, 'Deeple Meeple.'"

00:21:05.380 | You can attest to that.

00:21:06.380 | Just see each other in the street, "Deeple Meeple."

00:21:08.180 | Let it explode.

00:21:09.180 | If you're going to do all this work, you got to let people know.

00:21:14.340 | It'll make you ... Trust me.

00:21:15.820 | I know from personal experience, people love it when you use the word deep all the time,

00:21:19.220 | and they think you're awesome.

00:21:20.220 | Let's throw that in there.

00:21:21.220 | All right, guys, that's it.

00:21:22.660 | Core idea, work deeply, deeple meeple.

00:21:27.180 | All right, Jesse, we got a lot of good questions here, but we should probably pay the bills

00:21:33.700 | if we're going to deep up this episode.

00:21:38.740 | We got to do some deep ad reads.

00:21:41.180 | We're going to get deep on these.

00:21:43.780 | Make sure the listeners use the promo code "deep."

00:21:46.820 | Yeah, it's promo code.

00:21:48.420 | You got promo code "deep" for these ads.

00:21:50.420 | Deeple meeple.

00:21:51.420 | All right, so we got a couple sponsors here I want to talk about.

00:21:54.900 | The first one is My Body Tutor.

00:21:59.820 | Adam Gilbert, who founded My Body Tutor, I've known for a very long time.

00:22:03.820 | Long time readers of my blog, Study Hacks, would remember that Adam was actually the

00:22:08.260 | fitness advice guru in 2007, if you can believe it, on Study Hacks.

00:22:14.260 | I would ask him questions about how to get in better shape and nutrition, especially

00:22:18.340 | for students, and he was our guru, so I've known him for a long time.

00:22:21.580 | He founded this company, My Body Tutor, which is brilliant.

00:22:26.180 | It's 100% online fitness and health coaching.

00:22:32.180 | You have a coach who's assigned to you, and you check in with this coach virtually.

00:22:39.020 | Here's what I did today.

00:22:40.020 | Here's what's going on with my exercise.

00:22:41.020 | Here's what I'm doing with my eating, and you get daily feedback from that coach.

00:22:44.660 | The whole thing is virtual, but because it's virtual, you can actually get daily back and

00:22:49.140 | forth feedback with your coach, which is what you need when it comes to major changes in

00:22:54.860 | health and fitness.

00:22:55.860 | The issue is not information.

00:22:57.140 | The issue is consistency, actually doing the work, having someone on the other side there

00:23:02.660 | who you know, who you've been working with week after week, who's on the journey with

00:23:08.100 | you, who is custom building your plan for getting where you specifically want to get.

00:23:13.900 | There's no better way to do this.

00:23:15.100 | I know My Body Tutor has been doing great.

00:23:16.780 | It did great during the pandemic because obviously virtual coaching made a big difference, and

00:23:22.460 | it's just a brilliant idea.

00:23:23.500 | I highly recommend it.

00:23:26.220 | If you are serious about getting fit, go to mybodytutor.com.

00:23:33.380 | That's mybodytutor.com.

00:23:39.380 | Mention that you came from Deep Questions, and Adam will give you $50 off your first

00:23:45.180 | month.

00:23:46.180 | That's mybodytutor.com.

00:23:47.220 | Mention Deep Questions and get $50 off your first month.

00:23:51.540 | I want to talk about another sponsor here, Athletic Greens.

00:23:57.180 | Jesse, you can attest, I talk about this.

00:23:59.620 | I take Athletic Greens daily.

00:24:02.080 | This is actually the one type of supplement that I actually take.

00:24:05.900 | So I've been, I bother Jesse about these things because he knows about health and fitness

00:24:10.900 | things.

00:24:12.300 | Here's what it is.

00:24:13.300 | It's a powder that you take with water, 12 ounces of water each morning, and that's it.

00:24:20.340 | Every morning I take this powder.

00:24:22.160 | It has 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole foods, sourced superfoods, probiotics,

00:24:27.300 | and adaptogens.

00:24:29.580 | But the big thing is you don't have to worry about, "Am I getting the right mineral for

00:24:34.420 | my food?

00:24:35.420 | Do I have the right vitamin that has this thing I need?"

00:24:39.620 | You just take the Athletic Greens and trust them.

00:24:41.880 | This is why, let me tell you personally why I landed on the Athletic Greens bandwagon.

00:24:46.820 | It's because I talked to someone from the company, had a good conversation with them

00:24:50.340 | when I was thinking about letting them be a sponsor.

00:24:54.900 | And here's what they explained to me that caught my attention.

00:24:57.740 | This is the only thing they do.

00:24:59.900 | They don't have a big line of, "Here's our shakes and here's this type of pill and that

00:25:04.060 | type of pill."

00:25:05.060 | Athletic Greens does one thing.

00:25:06.260 | It makes this powder and they think of it as a product that they upgrade every single

00:25:11.540 | year.

00:25:12.540 | So they're just obsessed with, "How do we get the very best versions of these vitamins,

00:25:15.780 | of these minerals, of whatever it is that's in there?

00:25:18.500 | How do we upgrade what we have in there?

00:25:20.060 | How do we improve it?

00:25:21.060 | How do we improve it?"

00:25:22.060 | All they do is obsessively try to improve this one product.

00:25:25.100 | And now I don't have to worry about any of these other things.

00:25:28.660 | I don't have to walk into a GNC.

00:25:32.060 | If I walk into a GNC and say, "Deeple Meeple" to the person behind the counter, some guy

00:25:38.300 | with biceps the size of a grapefruit is going to punch me in the stomach and then another

00:25:42.500 | guy is going to push me right back out of there.

00:25:44.820 | I don't want to walk into a GNC.

00:25:46.180 | I don't want to think about that.

00:25:47.180 | I just take the Athletic Greens every morning and it gets done what I need to have done.

00:25:52.380 | Then I don't think about it.

00:25:55.020 | So right now, I'll give you a little bit of call to action here.

00:25:58.260 | Right now it's time to reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient

00:26:01.660 | daily nutrition, especially heading into flu and cold season.

00:26:05.740 | I'll say I add their vitamin D. The vitamin D they have in separate drops because they

00:26:11.820 | studied it.

00:26:12.820 | So you can't have powdered vitamin D. It's not as good.

00:26:14.820 | We need it with vitamin K. It has to be an olive oil immersion.

00:26:18.580 | That's the very best way to do it.

00:26:19.580 | So you add the vitamin D at the last minute.

00:26:21.060 | I'm big on that in the winter.

00:26:22.060 | It's not as much sun.

00:26:23.860 | It's just one scoop and a cup of water every day.

00:26:26.100 | That's it.

00:26:27.100 | No need for a million different pills and supplements to look out for your health.

00:26:29.620 | I'll also add there's no need to get punched in the stomach in GNC, which is 100% what

00:26:33.580 | will happen if you try to go in there.

00:26:34.980 | You have to use athletic greens instead.

00:26:37.540 | So to make it easy, athletic greens is going to give you free one year supply of immune

00:26:43.180 | supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase.

00:26:48.740 | All you have to do is visit athletic greens.com/deep.

00:26:55.420 | Again that is athletic greens.com/deep to take ownership over your health and pick up

00:27:01.620 | the ultimate daily nutritional insurance.

00:27:07.060 | There we go.

00:27:08.060 | Between my body tutor and athletic greens, Jesse, our listeners are going to be superheroes.

00:27:12.380 | They're going to be jacked.

00:27:13.380 | They're going to be jacked.

00:27:14.380 | They're going to be in good health, good shape, not sick.

00:27:18.540 | And then they're going to return to GNC and they're going to fight that guy.

00:27:23.540 | And that is ultimately what we're trying to do here is we're going to make our move on

00:27:27.700 | the over muscular guys at GNC.

00:27:30.380 | Wait, what's this note you just passed me?

00:27:32.620 | GNC is our next sponsor.

00:27:33.900 | Oh man, I got to read these things in advance.

00:27:36.700 | We're screwed, Jesse.

00:27:37.900 | All right, let's do some questions.

00:27:40.700 | I see I'm pacing myself now.

00:27:45.300 | Little insider view into the show for those who are new to it.

00:27:49.940 | But Jesse and I one take this.

00:27:51.740 | We just turn on the camera and we rock and roll.

00:27:53.580 | So I'm learning, you know, I got to pace myself a little bit, catch my breath because we've

00:27:58.380 | got a lot of show to get through here.

00:28:00.460 | All right, so we'll start with questions about deep work.

00:28:05.380 | Our first such question comes from Tyler.

00:28:09.020 | Tyler says, I'm a subscriber to Top Performer Executive Edition, as well as a few other

00:28:16.300 | professional optimizing services.

00:28:18.380 | All right, so just as an aside, Top Performer is one of two online courses that I offer

00:28:25.460 | with my longtime friend, Scott Young.

00:28:27.980 | So Top Performer is a course about applying deliberate practice to get better at your

00:28:32.300 | career.

00:28:33.300 | All right, back to Tyler's question.

00:28:35.820 | My understanding is that there is a lot of focus on building skills that move the needle

00:28:40.020 | in terms of hard skills.

00:28:41.900 | But I wanted to see if you could touch on developing projects around increasing your

00:28:45.100 | exposure and image alongside your deep work projects to build their impact and grow your

00:28:49.220 | CV.

00:28:50.620 | Tyler, be very wary here.

00:28:55.860 | This is a trap.

00:28:58.340 | There is a clear trap here that I'm talking to you about from personal experience.

00:29:05.100 | The trap of focusing on exposure, marketing, presentation, how do I get the word out about

00:29:12.780 | this?

00:29:13.780 | How do I get the message just right?

00:29:15.540 | It is a trap because those efforts are seductive.

00:29:20.860 | They're kind of hard, but not too hard.

00:29:23.380 | And it's something your mind would much rather do than the actual deep work to produce the

00:29:26.980 | stuff that you're producing, trying to promote in the first place.

00:29:31.180 | You look at things like what's my email funnel or my social media promotion plan, and what

00:29:35.820 | you see is what I used to call checklist productivity.

00:29:38.620 | This is something you can get better at by learning the right checklist.

00:29:42.940 | You know, I went and I learned how to do online marketing, and other people don't know this

00:29:48.900 | that are just off the street.

00:29:50.580 | And now I have this insider knowledge, and I follow this checklist, and I have this funnel

00:29:53.940 | here, and I have this social media strategy there, and I'm spending some money on this

00:29:58.540 | graphic design here.

00:29:59.540 | And it's all immensely fulfilling, and it's not really challenging, and it begins to take

00:30:04.780 | up all your time.

00:30:06.780 | But in the end, what matters?

00:30:09.740 | Producing something so good it can't be ignored.

00:30:12.180 | So it is a trap.

00:30:13.180 | Now, I said this is from personal experience.

00:30:14.180 | It's because this is where I was when I first began to develop my concept of deep work.

00:30:21.740 | I was relatively early in my graduate student experience at MIT.

00:30:25.820 | I was doing research.

00:30:27.700 | I was thinking too much about what's the topic of my research?

00:30:31.700 | Like, can I find a sexier topic?

00:30:34.180 | And if I promote it just right and talk about it right, you know, I was thinking too much

00:30:37.300 | about this.

00:30:38.300 | Like, an idea for the research that would catch attention and get coverage.

00:30:42.660 | And it was then that I came across Steve Martin's professional autobiography, Born Standing

00:30:48.260 | Up.

00:30:49.260 | And it was then when I watched the Charlie Rose interview of Steve Martin, where he said

00:30:55.020 | to Charlie, "My advice to people is be so good they can't ignore you."

00:30:58.980 | This was a huge turning point.

00:31:00.420 | Because what I learned was, no, write papers to get cited.

00:31:04.700 | Do really good work that's really, really hard, and the rest will work itself out.

00:31:10.020 | That notion got ingrained in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

00:31:12.900 | That notion got developed into my book, Deep Work, as well.

00:31:17.500 | Be so good they can't ignore you.

00:31:20.020 | Don't worry so much about how you let people know.

00:31:21.660 | Now, it's not to say that other stuff is not important, but you should just get some reasonable

00:31:27.180 | evidence-based practices for how you present stuff or how the promotion works.

00:31:32.100 | Set that on autopilot.

00:31:33.100 | So you're not making unforced errors.

00:31:36.220 | You're not handing out flyers at the mall.

00:31:39.820 | Yeah, OK.

00:31:40.820 | Figure out some reasonable stuff to do.

00:31:41.820 | Set it on autopilot.

00:31:43.020 | And then get your attention back to producing stuff that's too good to be ignored.

00:31:46.340 | If you look at these two scenarios, I've produced something excellent, and I have a reasonable

00:31:50.300 | autopilot promotion machinery in progress.

00:31:54.580 | Compare that to another scenario where I produce something pretty good, but have a cutting-edge

00:31:59.220 | promotional apparatus.

00:32:00.220 | I think all about it.

00:32:01.280 | That first scenario is going to dominate the latter.

00:32:04.560 | People find good things.

00:32:05.580 | You can help them a little bit, but don't think too much about that step of actually

00:32:10.980 | making an impact.

00:32:12.980 | All right, second question.

00:32:16.620 | This comes from Jim, the CFO.

00:32:20.060 | A technical question.

00:32:21.060 | Jim asks, "When you develop your weekly plan, do you do your written version first, or do

00:32:27.620 | you update your Trello board first, or do you do both simultaneously/iteratively?"

00:32:34.180 | So this is a great opportunity to plug our core ideas.

00:32:38.860 | We were just talking about this in the opening of the show.

00:32:40.960 | If you're wondering what Jim is talking about with weekly plans and Trellos and updates,

00:32:45.880 | go to the YouTube page, go to the core ideas playlist, watch the core idea on time management,

00:32:51.900 | and you'll know exactly what he's talking about.

00:32:53.700 | All right, so Jim, here's my technical answer.

00:32:57.500 | When I do my weekly plan, writing out the weekly plan is the last step.

00:33:02.240 | So I go through a bunch of things.

00:33:03.580 | I go through my Trello board and do organization there.

00:33:05.860 | I clean things up and move things around and take things off and see what's going on there.

00:33:10.060 | I go through my calendar for the week, and I look through my semester plans, what other

00:33:15.020 | people would call quarterly plans, to remind myself what I'm working on.

00:33:19.120 | As I do this, I take notes.

00:33:21.460 | I take it in a text file on my desktop, workingmemory.txt, and I'm just taking a bunch of notes.

00:33:26.260 | Oh, here's some tasks as I was organizing my Trello boards.

00:33:29.620 | Here's some tasks that are important this week.

00:33:31.660 | I'm looking at my calendar.

00:33:32.980 | I got to remember these big things.

00:33:35.020 | Very unstructured here.

00:33:36.300 | I'm just taking notes of stuff I want to remember, and then I use those notes from the workingmemory.txt

00:33:41.340 | to write my weekly plan.

00:33:43.500 | So I do all the steps, look through all my systems, review all my stuff, take notes,

00:33:46.540 | use the notes to make the weekly plan.

00:33:48.540 | That is how that works.

00:33:50.380 | All right, what do we have here?

00:33:54.780 | A question from Adnan.

00:33:59.180 | He says, "Does writing on digital paper, in your opinion, really have any advantage

00:34:06.460 | over conventional paper writing?"

00:34:11.220 | And he points in particular to a product that I've heard a lot about called Remarkable.

00:34:16.980 | I guess they're now up to the Remarkable 2.

00:34:21.340 | I'll tell you, I have not yet tried Remarkable.

00:34:25.300 | It is very alluring, and I don't know if that's just branding or if it's actually useful,

00:34:31.420 | because it's a cool thing.

00:34:34.140 | It's like a tablet, and it uses an e-ink technology like a Kindle.

00:34:39.180 | So it's not a screen.

00:34:40.180 | It's not a backlit screen.

00:34:41.180 | It's actually, if you don't know how e-ink works, there's actually these teeny little

00:34:44.220 | disks that are black on one side and gray on another.

00:34:46.740 | With an electrical impulse, you can switch it from one to another.

00:34:48.740 | So it's literally making a non-illuminated, just an actual physical picture that you're

00:34:56.060 | looking at.

00:34:57.060 | There's no light involved.

00:34:59.180 | This Remarkable tablet, you can write on it.

00:35:00.820 | So it sort of follows your special pencil.

00:35:02.380 | So you're writing on it, and then it can save the pages.

00:35:05.340 | And you can go back to them.

00:35:06.340 | So it's like a notebook, except for it's all stored digitally.

00:35:09.140 | It's not actually a physical notebook.

00:35:10.540 | Anyways, it's a cool-looking product.

00:35:13.540 | I like Jesse's note.

00:35:16.380 | I think this tells you why it's so appealing.

00:35:18.300 | His note about the promotional video is really good-looking people in rich places writing

00:35:24.580 | stuff.

00:35:25.580 | It's good branding.

00:35:26.580 | I mean, it was a great video, and it's what it shows.

00:35:30.700 | It's true, though.

00:35:31.700 | I've seen this video, and I'm like, A, I got to go to Monaco.

00:35:34.500 | B, I probably need to dress better.

00:35:37.180 | And C, I need to be looking out over the bay.

00:35:39.460 | Yeah, in your mansion.

00:35:40.460 | Yeah, writing.

00:35:41.460 | I don't know what.

00:35:44.260 | Poetry or something.

00:35:45.860 | So Adnan, if you use one, report back.

00:35:49.660 | This branding hits me like an arrow.

00:35:51.460 | And I'm like, I really need one of these things.

00:35:53.540 | I suspect that-- let me show you.

00:35:57.920 | This probably solves the same problem, because it's analog.

00:36:02.380 | It's very easy to get to the pages you already wrote, because you can just flip to them.

00:36:05.780 | It doesn't require batteries.

00:36:07.500 | But I see that ad, and I want it to.

00:36:09.620 | So I don't know.

00:36:11.020 | Try it.

00:36:12.180 | If my listeners out there have tried this and have a compelling use case for one of

00:36:16.140 | these e-ink notebooks like Remarkable, send me a note or send Jesse a note at jesse@calnewport.com,

00:36:21.980 | because we're curious.

00:36:22.980 | Maybe it'll make us rich.

00:36:25.860 | Is that how it works?

00:36:26.860 | We'll be in a mansion.

00:36:27.860 | You'll start writing.

00:36:29.300 | Your next book will be a poetry book.

00:36:31.500 | Yeah, reflections for me staring at the waves from my mansion.

00:36:34.860 | Oh, my.

00:36:35.860 | All right, what do we got here?

00:36:38.980 | Allie has a question.

00:36:42.040 | Why are norms regarding maintaining email threads not widespread?

00:36:49.060 | Then she goes on about a very big frustration about email should be in one topic per thread,

00:36:55.340 | and people at my company don't do it, et cetera, et cetera.

00:36:57.180 | I'm going to skip those details.

00:37:00.140 | I'm going to skip those details to get to the bigger point here, which is a point that

00:37:03.500 | I really learned working on my book, A World Without Email.

00:37:06.900 | Norms are not going to save you from email problems.

00:37:11.020 | When I was working on that book, and I would go give talks, and I talked to executives

00:37:17.140 | or C-suites, I do this occasionally where I go talk to a small group of executives.

00:37:23.220 | They were so sure that email was the key to a productivity nirvana, and the only thing

00:37:30.140 | holding them back was norms.

00:37:31.980 | If we could just get some better norms about what should be in the subject line, how long

00:37:35.820 | you should expect for a response, what's appropriate in a thread or not a thread, CC versus BCC,

00:37:43.220 | then we would be in productivity nirvana.

00:37:45.900 | The reality is that is not going to solve the problems.

00:37:50.020 | Norms is not going to solve the problems.

00:37:52.500 | The problem is that if your primary mode of collaboration is through ad hoc back and forth

00:37:57.740 | digital messaging, you are going to have a large number of messages arriving at unscheduled

00:38:03.780 | times that require relatively prompt responses from you to keep the wheels of your business

00:38:07.740 | rolling, and that's going to require that you send and receive emails all the time.

00:38:11.060 | There is no norms that are going to save you from that if that's the way that your business

00:38:14.300 | is organized.

00:38:16.380 | If this underlying what I call hyperactive hive mind workflow is implicitly how work

00:38:20.740 | gets done, there's nothing you can tell me about response time expectations.

00:38:23.940 | There's nothing you can do with subject line edits.

00:38:25.660 | There's nothing you can do about what goes into a thread and what doesn't that will prevent

00:38:29.540 | me from needing to check this inbox or this instant messenger channel again and again

00:38:33.540 | and again because there's unscheduled messages coming in that I have to reply to quickly

00:38:38.700 | to keep the wheels of business rolling.

00:38:42.580 | So this is a distraction.

00:38:44.580 | Again, this is you're on the Titanic deck, and you're really upset that the people looking

00:38:52.000 | for lifeboats are messing up the deck chairs.

00:38:55.740 | You can get those deck chairs really nice.

00:38:57.620 | You can move them in a way so people can move around on the deck really well.

00:39:00.380 | But your problem is there's not nearly enough lifeboats.

00:39:03.500 | That is the issue with trying to tackle email overload issues from the top down.

00:39:08.940 | So what do you have to do instead?

00:39:09.940 | Well, you read my book world without email.

00:39:11.620 | And what that will teach you is that you have to actually fix the underlying systems for

00:39:15.900 | how you collaborate.

00:39:17.380 | Instead of just allowing back and forth, let's just rock and roll on email beer solution.

00:39:21.300 | You have to put in bespoke explicit alternatives systems for each of the different types of

00:39:27.260 | work you do.

00:39:28.260 | Here's where the information comes in.

00:39:29.260 | Here's when and how we talk about it.

00:39:30.860 | Here's where we store things.

00:39:31.860 | Here's the process for getting this done.

00:39:33.460 | And you have to do that again and again and again for all the things you do regularly

00:39:36.380 | as a business.

00:39:38.020 | That's how you fix the hole that the iceberg made in the ship and stop it from sinking

00:39:41.780 | in the first place.

00:39:42.780 | It's processes and systems, not norms.

00:39:44.820 | All right.

00:39:46.260 | So I've given that lecture a lot, but still want that message to get out there.

00:39:53.860 | Let's do one more deep work question.

00:39:55.780 | I got one here from Peyton.

00:39:58.060 | Peyton says, do you have suggestions for high schoolers?

00:40:02.820 | At my school, we have to check our email daily to receive updates from our teachers, and

00:40:08.220 | we rely heavily on our computers.

00:40:10.860 | Are there tips you would have for students like me?

00:40:13.340 | I do have tips for students.

00:40:15.220 | The idea that you have to check your email once a day for updates from your teachers

00:40:18.180 | is not your problem.

00:40:19.660 | The fact that, yes, there's work you do during the school day on your Chromebook is not your

00:40:23.580 | problem.

00:40:24.580 | But those are the things that I'm going to tell you matter.

00:40:26.460 | And it's what you are doing voluntarily with your time and how you are voluntarily engaging

00:40:32.860 | with the digital world that matters.

00:40:36.140 | So here are the rules.

00:40:38.140 | And I say rules.

00:40:39.140 | I mean, you can listen to them or you not.

00:40:40.340 | But I'm saying this is what I would suggest.

00:40:42.180 | If I was a high schooler and I'm thinking, I want a deeper life, I don't want to just

00:40:45.420 | be anxious and lost in my screen all the time.

00:40:48.740 | Number one, don't play online video games.

00:40:52.900 | I'm not against video games in general as a distraction, but the ones where you're online

00:40:58.140 | and there's lots of other people on them.

00:40:59.860 | In Roblox, I'm looking at you.

00:41:03.060 | The I don't know these things.

00:41:04.060 | Fortnite, I'm looking at you.

00:41:06.500 | World of Warcraft, is that still a thing?

00:41:07.820 | Look, I don't know games, but the ones in which there's lots of people who are online

00:41:10.780 | on a shared server are some of the most addictive technologies ever created by man.

00:41:17.060 | If you study digital addiction, these can be the worst.

00:41:21.240 | These are the worst.

00:41:22.240 | It's not social media.

00:41:25.060 | It's not I'm on YouTube too much.

00:41:26.620 | The thing that can cause I have to go to a rehab center level of addiction is actually

00:41:32.100 | these massive multiple online games.

00:41:35.140 | It's going to eat up your life.

00:41:36.400 | There's better things you can be doing with that time.

00:41:39.140 | You get very little return in the sense of connection, growth, resilience, character,

00:41:45.100 | skills.

00:41:46.100 | You get nothing out of the time you spend when you're five hours in Fortnite.

00:41:51.540 | Don't do online video games.

00:41:52.900 | Second, don't do social media.

00:41:56.120 | You can use your phone to communicate with your friends.

00:41:58.580 | This is the good news.

00:41:59.660 | This is a change that has happened since when I first started researching my book, Digital

00:42:03.220 | Minimalism.

00:42:04.220 | Today, back then, social media platforms were critical to teen socialization.

00:42:10.420 | Snapchat in particular was really big.

00:42:12.460 | That has changed today.

00:42:13.500 | The socialization has largely migrated off of social media platforms, especially for

00:42:18.020 | teenagers.

00:42:19.020 | There's text messaging and instant messaging tools.

00:42:22.500 | The social media platforms are more about distraction, entertainment, keeping up with

00:42:25.940 | cultural memes.

00:42:26.940 | Just don't use those.

00:42:28.380 | Communicate with your friends on WhatsApp and text or whatever you need to do so you

00:42:31.140 | can make plans and know when the party is, but don't use the other ones.

00:42:36.180 | Yeah, TikTok is interesting, but TikTok is also designed from the ground up to be like

00:42:44.060 | one of those pods in the Matrix where you're in a bathtub full of goo and a robot alien

00:42:49.100 | has stuck a needle straight into your spine.

00:42:52.340 | It's just engineered from the ground up to just press buttons and keep you looking at

00:42:56.300 | that screen.

00:42:57.300 | And God forbid, if you are posting on TikTok, they don't even try to hide what they're doing

00:43:01.100 | there.

00:43:02.100 | They are playing entirely with the weak spots of your adolescent brain to make you completely

00:43:06.300 | addicted.

00:43:07.300 | Here's what happens if you start using TikTok.

00:43:09.660 | You post a few videos.

00:43:10.660 | They have this all figured out.

00:43:12.620 | They will wait until your second or third video, and then the algorithm is going to

00:43:18.180 | expose that video to a bunch of people's feeds.

00:43:21.580 | And what do you see?

00:43:23.040 | You see a big burst of views, and you start to suspect, "Hey, man, maybe I'm on to something.

00:43:30.840 | Maybe people dig what I'm doing here.

00:43:32.260 | I kind of have a bit of an audience."

00:43:33.700 | And, "Oh, man, the next one didn't get that.

00:43:35.300 | The next one didn't get it."

00:43:36.300 | But then the algorithm gives you another burst of views.

00:43:37.900 | "Oh, that one caught on.

00:43:39.140 | All right, man, this is important.

00:43:40.140 | Now I know I got my audience.

00:43:41.340 | I got to be on there.

00:43:42.340 | They don't really care about me."

00:43:43.340 | You are being 100% manipulated.

00:43:45.100 | They control exactly how many views you get.

00:43:48.140 | The algorithm has figured out how to titrate bursts of fake simulated popularity so that

00:43:53.360 | you think that you're one slot machine pull away from being an influencer.

00:43:59.940 | All the while, they are just, "Here's your pocket.

00:44:02.020 | Money, money, money, money."

00:44:03.460 | So just don't use it, man.

00:44:05.380 | Just don't use it.

00:44:06.380 | Don't use social media.

00:44:07.380 | Don't use online video games.

00:44:09.580 | Answer this by aggressively going after autonomously chosen positive social pursuits.

00:44:17.780 | If you're in any way athletic, get on a sports team and get serious about it.

00:44:22.900 | And you might have to do some exploration to find what sports team that is.

00:44:25.540 | I mean, if you look at my history, I played all the rec sports.

00:44:28.980 | I came from a family that said, "You've always got to be in a sport because otherwise you're

00:44:35.180 | bouncing off the walls into pain."

00:44:36.700 | I played soccer.

00:44:37.700 | I played basketball.

00:44:38.700 | And I was terrible at all of them.

00:44:40.660 | But then at some point in high school, I realized I had the right type of leg muscle fibers

00:44:44.380 | to run.

00:44:46.100 | I got really in the track and track got me into crew.

00:44:48.820 | And that made a big difference.

00:44:49.820 | So if you can do anything athletic and it might take some discovery, do that.

00:44:52.800 | If you're not athletic, that's fine.

00:44:53.980 | Find something else, a team.

00:44:55.140 | You can be involved in this where you work with other people towards building skills

00:44:57.900 | in the competitive situation where things could go wrong, but you feel the victories

00:45:01.040 | when you have the victories and you're working together on it.

00:45:03.820 | And you need this in your life.

00:45:07.640 | Active skilled social pursuits that you can put a lot of energy into and to give you a

00:45:12.800 | lot back in return.

00:45:14.000 | That's where you want to be spending your time.

00:45:15.340 | Do that and also spending time with your friends and figuring out how to be a social human

00:45:18.520 | being and going to those parties where you're not quite sure if you should be in the party

00:45:21.300 | and try to navigate that social difficulty.

00:45:23.700 | That's just calisthenics for your social brain.

00:45:25.380 | You need to do that so that you're not weird when you're an adult.

00:45:27.320 | That's all great.

00:45:28.680 | Don't spend five hours on an online video game.

00:45:31.340 | Don't be tricked by the TikTok algorithm into thinking that you are six dance videos away

00:45:35.640 | from being Kim Kardashian.

00:45:36.920 | You're not.

00:45:37.920 | You're in the tub of goo and there's a thing in the back of your neck.

00:45:41.160 | And I think this is easier now than it was five years ago because socialization as a

00:45:45.240 | teenager does not require you to be on these services.

00:45:48.560 | That now happens separately.

00:45:50.320 | So that's what I would suggest.

00:45:51.680 | Honestly, even if you have a flip phone, get the phone where you can still text, but you

00:45:59.480 | can't go on apps.

00:46:01.320 | That's becoming the new countercultural thing, by the way, especially if you have some other

00:46:04.440 | thing you do really well, like you're an athlete or on the robotics team or something like

00:46:07.640 | this, you're like, yeah, I don't bother with that smartphone stuff.

00:46:10.480 | That doesn't make you the weird loner anymore.

00:46:12.020 | That makes you kind of the cooler guy.

00:46:14.680 | So if you're doing that and if you very strongly ignore my advice from earlier to say, "Deeple

00:46:20.240 | meeple" when you run into people, I think you'll be okay.

00:46:23.760 | Maybe they should do that more.

00:46:26.200 | I don't know.

00:46:27.200 | Deeple meeple.

00:46:28.200 | All right.

00:46:29.200 | Jesse, I want to move on here in a second to do some questions about the deep life,

00:46:36.440 | but first we should get some deep payment from some deep sponsors to help keep this

00:46:42.040 | show rolling.

00:46:43.040 | I want to talk in particular about stamps.com.

00:46:47.360 | Now this is one of these companies that just makes sense.

00:46:52.760 | It's easy to pitch because it just makes sense.

00:46:57.240 | You've probably heard about stamps.com, but let me tell you from personal experience,

00:47:00.320 | it saves you the time, money and stress that they claim it does, because here's how it

00:47:04.240 | works.

00:47:05.240 | It allows you to access all of the post office or UPS shipping that you would do just from

00:47:10.080 | your home.

00:47:11.080 | You print the postage, you stick it on, you don't have to go to the post office.

00:47:17.120 | You can be up and running in minutes.

00:47:18.960 | You print postage for any letter, any package, anywhere you want to send.

00:47:23.120 | All you need is a computer and a standard printer.

00:47:27.520 | We're right down the street here at the HQ from the Tacoma Park post office.

00:47:31.800 | And every time I see, especially during the pandemic with spacing, there would be this

00:47:34.640 | long line outside.

00:47:35.920 | So it just made really visible pre pandemic, the line that would just be really scrunched

00:47:40.240 | inside.

00:47:41.240 | It made it super visible how long those lines are because it would stretch outside.

00:47:43.800 | And every time I would see that line and think about just waiting in that line, I would say,

00:47:48.400 | I am glad that stamps.com exist.

00:47:51.960 | So the other cool thing about it is you get discounts up to 40% off USPS rates and 76%

00:47:57.400 | off UPS rates.

00:47:58.480 | You pay a small monthly fee to be able to ship things straight from your home, to print

00:48:02.480 | postage straight from your home.

00:48:04.080 | But you get such big savings off of that, that you are ending up making money, not spending

00:48:09.800 | it.

00:48:11.000 | So save time and money this year with stamps.com.

00:48:13.880 | Sign up with promo code "DEEP" for a special offer that includes a four week free trial,

00:48:20.320 | free postage and a digital scale, no long-term commitments or contracts.

00:48:25.380 | Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page and enter the code

00:48:29.560 | "DEEP".

00:48:32.960 | I also want to talk about one of the longest running sponsors of the Deep Questions podcast,

00:48:39.160 | and that is Grammarly.

00:48:41.160 | You know, we're in it now.

00:48:44.600 | We're in that winter grind period.

00:48:46.720 | We're past the winter break, summer is still far away.

00:48:49.740 | So we're busy, we're doing a lot of work.

00:48:51.000 | And when you're doing all this work, you want to make sure above all else that you are communicating

00:48:56.340 | clearly with all of the different types of messaging that we have to do all day these

00:49:02.320 | days.

00:49:03.320 | This is where Grammarly comes in.

00:49:06.760 | They can do stuff now.

00:49:08.360 | This Grammarly product, especially the Grammarly premium product, they can do stuff to improve

00:49:12.200 | your writing that absolutely blows me away.

00:49:14.720 | I mean, we thought about grammar support before, it used to be the grammar checker in Word

00:49:21.180 | Perfect.

00:49:22.180 | It could do two things.

00:49:23.180 | It could tell you that you spelled "their" wrong or that you did the possessive "its"

00:49:27.540 | when you really meant the non-possessive "its".

00:49:29.860 | Here's what you can do today with Grammarly.com.

00:49:33.660 | They can adjust your tone.

00:49:35.300 | Hey, here is the tone.

00:49:37.500 | This is coming across like this.

00:49:38.740 | Maybe that's not what you meant.

00:49:40.560 | It can suggest full sentence rewrites.

00:49:44.200 | Let's redo this sentence in a way that's going to be clearer.

00:49:46.780 | It can give you clarity suggestions.

00:49:48.200 | This is probably not the right phrase or word.

00:49:49.820 | Why don't you use this word instead?

00:49:51.140 | Look, I've tried this.

00:49:52.140 | It is eerie.

00:49:53.140 | It's like having an editor sitting over your shoulder so that the stuff you send out there

00:49:56.340 | delivers the point with the right tone, with a lot of clarity.

00:50:00.660 | You're not confusing people.

00:50:02.460 | You don't have people tricked into saying, "What did they really mean by this?

00:50:05.100 | Why is this so ambiguous?"

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00:50:19.520 | Go to Grammarly.com/deep to sign up for a free account.

00:50:23.340 | When you're ready to upgrade to Grammarly Premium, you will get 20% off just because

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00:50:30.300 | So that's 20% off if you go to grammarly.com/deep.

00:50:43.340 | All right, speaking of deep, let's do some questions about the deep life.

00:50:51.660 | Sandy asks, "What were your thoughts on the Get Back documentary?"

00:50:58.060 | She elaborates, "I've been watching the Beatles Get Back documentary, and one thing that strikes

00:51:03.740 | me is the novelty of watching people just hanging out, playing with creative ideas and

00:51:07.580 | without distracting technology.

00:51:08.900 | I wondered if you have any thoughts on it.

00:51:10.860 | They spend a lot of time just hanging out, apparently not doing much.

00:51:14.560 | Is this important if you want to be as creative as the Beatles were?

00:51:18.820 | Do you think the lack of technology contributed to their brilliance?"

00:51:22.740 | Yes.

00:51:24.740 | I think the answer is yes and yes.

00:51:28.540 | Creative work requires a lot of deep work.

00:51:32.700 | So there's a lot of moments of just being able to be very comfortable being very focused,

00:51:36.200 | but also a lot of what we can think of as cognitive wandering.

00:51:39.660 | It's the Beatles just hanging out, talking, messing around on their instruments, noticing

00:51:45.060 | things, "Wait a second, let me try about that.

00:51:46.900 | What if we did this?"

00:51:47.900 | None of that can happen at a high level if you're constantly context switching.

00:51:52.700 | Look at a text message thread, look at a WhatsApp thread, look at social media to see what's

00:51:55.580 | going on.

00:51:56.580 | I can give you a very specific case study from exactly this world.

00:52:02.020 | A couple of years ago I was communicating with a very high level songwriter.

00:52:07.540 | So she's well known and she works on songs for some pretty famous pop stars.

00:52:12.640 | Not to spoil this for the kids out there, but unlike the Beatles, pop stars today don't

00:52:17.300 | write their own music.

00:52:19.260 | Some do, but a lot of them don't.

00:52:21.260 | But she wrote me because she was having a real problem.

00:52:24.660 | She was constantly on social media and she had told herself this story about people need

00:52:30.460 | to know who I am and promotion and it's going to help me get work.

00:52:34.240 | But guess what was not happening?

00:52:36.260 | Songwriting.

00:52:37.260 | She wasn't writing songs.

00:52:39.820 | She was obsessed with posting, but did people like what I posted?

00:52:44.160 | What were people thinking about me?

00:52:45.260 | What are other people doing?

00:52:46.340 | What's happening in the world of the related pop star celebrity?

00:52:49.460 | And I talked to her and gave her some advice and said, don't worry about people finding

00:52:52.980 | you man.

00:52:53.980 | What people worry about is are you writing killer hooks?

00:52:55.940 | And she did pull back and it made all the difference.

00:52:58.060 | She's like, man, I'm back into it again.

00:53:00.580 | I just don't do this thing on my phone anymore.

00:53:03.300 | That's a direct example from this world.

00:53:05.500 | You also see this all the time with novelists.

00:53:08.140 | Novel writing is difficult, cognitively demanding work.

00:53:11.660 | It is very difficult.

00:53:13.300 | They don't mess around.

00:53:14.300 | I mean, some do, but there are so many novelists that say, I don't want to have anything to

00:53:17.820 | do with this stuff.

00:53:20.620 | I go, I disappear.

00:53:22.500 | I'm Dave Eggers where I have a writing house with no Wi-Fi on an old laptop with no internet

00:53:27.260 | connection and eight hours at a time, you can't get to me.

00:53:30.260 | It's John Grisham who like the groundhog comes out of his Warren in the ground once a year

00:53:38.560 | to promote his book for two weeks and then disappears.

00:53:40.500 | It's like, I don't want to have anything to do with that.

00:53:43.760 | This is like Aziz Ansari has a new comedy special out that I was watching the other

00:53:48.840 | day on the rowing machine and he uses a flip phone.

00:53:52.800 | He's like, this just was killing me and I'm supposed to create creative, interesting things

00:53:57.800 | and I can't if all I'm thinking about is what's happening on this little glowing piece of

00:54:00.600 | glass flip phone.

00:54:01.600 | I'm sure he could be on Instagram and Twitter and trying to get an audience back and now

00:54:07.160 | he's like, forget it.

00:54:08.280 | I want to do this and I don't care if I'm less successful at it.

00:54:11.840 | I can't do creative work with this.

00:54:13.180 | So I think it's a good point, Sandy.

00:54:15.760 | It's not compatible.

00:54:16.760 | Jesse, I hear this with sports too.

00:54:19.160 | I've talked quite a bit of people within professional sports.

00:54:22.680 | I've talked with general managers of NBA teams.

00:54:24.920 | I've talked with people at national rugby teams.

00:54:28.200 | I've talked with people within football.

00:54:29.960 | I've talked with golfers and this is like a real issue is especially coaches and managers

00:54:35.940 | are very worried of the impact of the cognitive drain of looking at these things all the time

00:54:41.160 | on their athletes.

00:54:42.820 | And so it's another world.

00:54:43.820 | So forget creative stuff.

00:54:44.820 | What about physical, high concentration, physical stuff?

00:54:48.040 | Phones kill you.

00:54:49.040 | A lot of the coaches, general managers, they're on their phones all the time too.

00:54:53.280 | Agents.

00:54:54.280 | Yeah.

00:54:55.280 | Well, the agents are part of the problem because the agents are talking in one ear, especially

00:54:58.720 | so the NBA is a real problem because these are the youngest athletes of any sport, right?

00:55:03.600 | It's the only sport where you can come out of high school into it really, right?

00:55:06.200 | I mean, you're not the play, whatever, professional football, you got to grow, you know?

00:55:11.680 | And so typically you're going to come out of college for that.

00:55:14.360 | Baseball, you're going to have this 10 year path of the minors before like anyone cares.

00:55:19.400 | Basketball players, you could be 19 and on the national stage.

00:55:24.120 | And the agents are in their ears.

00:55:25.960 | People got to know.

00:55:27.400 | People got to know your brand, you know?

00:55:29.360 | You got to be on there.

00:55:30.360 | You got to be.

00:55:31.440 | And they get on the court and it's not that they can't play, but I've had this conversation

00:55:38.100 | with a really high level person in the NBA at that level, it is a game of epsilons.

00:55:44.000 | If you are 3% off of your peak, you're on the bench because everyone is fantastic and

00:55:50.520 | everyone is playing at their fullest extent.

00:55:53.780 | There's really no room unless you're really, you know, Giannis or someone who has like

00:55:57.120 | a little bit of wiggle room here.

00:55:59.560 | It makes a huge difference.

00:56:00.560 | These agents are in their ear.

00:56:01.560 | You got to be on your phone.

00:56:02.560 | You got to be on their phone.

00:56:03.560 | It destroys their concentration and then they're 5% worse and then they're out of the league

00:56:09.580 | in two years.

00:56:10.620 | A lot of them start clothing lines too.

00:56:14.120 | You know, Aziz Ansari talked about this in that special.

00:56:17.080 | He's like, yeah, a lot of comedians I know like have these other products and do these

00:56:20.380 | other things.

00:56:21.380 | He's like, it kind of makes me feel like a slacker, but like, I just want to write, I

00:56:24.640 | just want to write comedy basically.

00:56:26.800 | I saw a David Goggins video and he was talking about being in the gym at a hotel and like

00:56:35.480 | an NBA player came in with his coach and I forgot exactly, it was a Goggins video.

00:56:40.520 | So, you know, it was like really intense, but basically like the long and the short

00:56:44.960 | of it was like the NBA player was just going through the motions and the coach, and by

00:56:48.320 | coach I mean trainer, not coach.

00:56:50.080 | The trainer was like, let's do 15 reps, not 12.

00:56:52.120 | And the player's like, nah man, I'm just doing my 12.

00:56:54.080 | And Goggins went off on like, you know, not pushing yourself, whatever.

00:56:58.760 | But that it's like an example of what happens when you have this pull from you coming from

00:57:03.880 | the phone is like you're doing the 12 reps instead of the 15.

00:57:07.160 | It makes a difference when you're at a very high level.

00:57:10.840 | So yeah, I'm a big believer in that.

00:57:12.360 | I think it's a huge, it's a huge competitive advantage.

00:57:14.520 | Be the guy or the woman not on this stuff.

00:57:17.080 | I think it's a big advantage.

00:57:18.720 | Yeah, you're gonna produce better work.

00:57:20.520 | Nothing matters more than producing better work.

00:57:22.760 | Social media, and I don't mean to rant too much, but social media is great for spreading

00:57:26.480 | the word about you, but it's best when other people are doing it for you.

00:57:30.460 | So yeah, you should be happy that social media exists if you're doing something awesome,

00:57:33.680 | because it makes it easy for people to talk about it, but they don't need you on there

00:57:37.300 | saying, look at me.

00:57:38.500 | That only helps a little bit.

00:57:39.500 | So there we go.

00:57:40.500 | All right.

00:57:41.500 | Let's see what we got here.

00:57:42.500 | All right.

00:57:43.500 | So we have a question here from Alexis.

00:57:51.080 | More similar to a question we did earlier, so we can come at it from a different angle.

00:57:54.000 | Alexis says, how would you apply the concepts of deep work to one's kids?

00:57:59.400 | So she says, I'm a parent and have noticed that electronics generally reduce our daughter's

00:58:05.040 | attention span.

00:58:06.960 | As such, we ban video games and social media, but we do let her do protective activities

00:58:10.840 | on electronics.

00:58:12.360 | Mostly we require reading.

00:58:14.940 | She gets to do TV, movies, has earned time for piano school, et cetera.

00:58:17.680 | What would you do?

00:58:18.680 | Our daughter is 14 now.

00:58:19.680 | I think that's fine.

00:58:21.760 | So 14-year-olds are not going to be fantastic at focus.

00:58:24.560 | It's a practiced art, and their brains are scattered.

00:58:29.000 | So yes, avoid, as I talked about earlier in the show, avoid online video games, avoid

00:58:33.560 | social media for kids.

00:58:35.080 | And by kids, I mean even adolescents.

00:58:37.400 | That's going to be poison.

00:58:38.760 | I don't really mind TV.

00:58:40.440 | I don't mind your shows you watch.

00:58:41.840 | You obviously do the same advice we learned in the 1980s, have some control over it.

00:58:46.720 | So you can't just use the TV all the time.

00:58:49.160 | But I'm not one of these strict screen time zealots where my 14-year-old gets to watch

00:58:54.160 | one minute of TV.

00:58:55.160 | I think some of that's more about the parents wanting to feel like they're optimizing parenting

00:58:58.840 | than it is like it's going to make some big difference for the kid.

00:59:01.000 | And it makes the kids kind of weird.

00:59:02.960 | So I don't worry about that too much.

00:59:04.500 | And then separately, you need to sort of introduce the notion that concentration on hard things

00:59:13.560 | is an important, respectable, really useful skill.

00:59:18.360 | You can talk about this.

00:59:19.640 | There's examples of this.

00:59:21.040 | We're watching the Olympics.

00:59:22.040 | We're looking at this artist.

00:59:23.040 | We went to this movie.

00:59:25.600 | This type of stuff that's really inspiring.

00:59:27.000 | How do you do that?

00:59:28.000 | You focus really hard on things.

00:59:29.000 | You're willing to do it even when it's hard.

00:59:30.760 | You push yourself.

00:59:31.760 | There's grace in that.

00:59:33.160 | There's something really deeply human in that.

00:59:34.920 | You demonstrate it.

00:59:36.900 | If you're walking around your house as a parent with your phone, looking on your phone all

00:59:40.000 | the time, doing all these text message threads, it doesn't matter what you say.

00:59:43.320 | They see it.

00:59:44.320 | Like, "No, no, this is what life should be."

00:59:45.320 | So keep the phone in the foyer.

00:59:46.920 | Don't carry it with you throughout their house.

00:59:48.080 | Let them see in your life, "Hey, I prioritize other things.

00:59:51.640 | I'm not constantly distracted."

00:59:53.440 | And then you can literally just give them structure so they can practice it.

00:59:56.880 | All right.

00:59:57.880 | So you have some homework.

00:59:58.880 | Let's think through how we want to do this.

01:00:00.760 | Let's schedule it on the calendar.

01:00:01.980 | Let's have set times we do it.

01:00:04.160 | Let's push ourselves, take a break.

01:00:07.560 | How do you organize your thoughts?

01:00:08.920 | You could literally work with and practice and help kids get more comfortable with this.

01:00:12.880 | I talked with my nine-year-old about this with math.

01:00:16.920 | Really walking him through what are you doing in your head when you're trying to solve a

01:00:21.420 | hard math problem?

01:00:22.420 | Because we don't tell kids this and they don't know.

01:00:24.280 | Like, "I don't know.

01:00:25.280 | I just kind of hope it comes to me," or something.

01:00:26.480 | Really walking them through.

01:00:27.480 | Like, your paper is an extension of your working memory and it's a strategy and then you're

01:00:31.200 | recording your work.

01:00:32.200 | And then this is when you concentrate at very set leaps.

01:00:35.040 | Like, it's not just random and it's not just you thinking and hoping something comes from

01:00:37.960 | it.

01:00:38.960 | So then you can practice.

01:00:40.120 | Practice structured thinking.

01:00:41.120 | So do those three things.

01:00:42.120 | Do the poison, which is the online video games and the social media.

01:00:47.040 | Demonstrate that you prioritize depth.

01:00:49.840 | Talk about depth and concentration and how it's the key to a life well-lived.

01:00:53.040 | And then actually literally help them practice.

01:00:55.480 | And then don't expect your 14-year-old to be Richard Feynman.

01:00:59.440 | It's a 14-year-old brain, not a 34-year-old brain.

01:01:02.200 | Not a 44-year-old brain that's been doing this for a long time.

01:01:04.600 | So then have some flexibility on your expectations there.

01:01:08.240 | Kids or kids, they don't need to be, you don't necessarily want them to be super locked in.

01:01:15.520 | That's actually something I talk about a lot.

01:01:17.040 | I think, and we've talked about this on the show before, you know, careful what you wish

01:01:23.760 | for.

01:01:25.200 | You get this around here in these competitive areas like the Washington, D.C. area.

01:01:29.960 | This sort of underlying dream of like, man, I kind of wish my kid was a prodigy.

01:01:34.880 | Like just awesome at math or something and just, you know, because you get as a parent

01:01:41.160 | these victory points, these victories of like, they're the best and they're moving up and

01:01:46.220 | you somehow vicariously take these victories.

01:01:48.400 | And all I'm saying is be careful what you wish for.

01:01:52.720 | Rarely the foundation of a good, meaningful, deep life if you're too good at something

01:01:56.440 | like that early on, be that physical or intellectual.

01:01:59.840 | Careful what you wish for.

01:02:01.520 | Same things you can do in your own life to feel good about yourself.

01:02:04.880 | Not what did my kid do?

01:02:06.440 | Because you didn't do that anyways, so you shouldn't feel good about that anyways.

01:02:09.480 | All right.

01:02:10.480 | Enough about that.

01:02:11.480 | Let's see what we got here.

01:02:14.560 | We got a question from Abby.

01:02:17.720 | Abby says, how do you motivate unmotivated students to get to deep work?

01:02:24.120 | Abby says, I find my work to be of Sisyphus.

01:02:26.560 | So maybe she means like Sisyphean.

01:02:29.680 | I teach high school chemistry.

01:02:30.880 | We do lots of labs and discuss and construct concepts, dot, dot, dot.

01:02:36.040 | However, since I started teaching five years ago, students have become less motivated and

01:02:40.360 | gross in their social media lives.

01:02:42.120 | Parentheses, I hate the phone.

01:02:44.520 | I want them to have a glimpse of the deep life and aspire to exercise and build their

01:02:47.800 | brains.

01:02:48.800 | Where do I start?

01:02:49.800 | Every day is the same thing.

01:02:50.800 | They do not pay attention.

01:02:51.800 | So they either do not grasp anything or forget immediately help lay the future of humanity.

01:02:55.040 | Abby, I feel your pain and you're not going to be able to directly solve this problem

01:03:00.400 | like you are in these kids' lives for a period each day.

01:03:05.360 | But demonstrate the change you want to see in the world.

01:03:07.400 | We were talking about this in the last answer as well.

01:03:11.480 | Discuss concentration, mental difficulty.

01:03:15.680 | I'm willing to stick with something hard even when it gets difficult and stick with it.

01:03:20.200 | Discuss that as a tier one skill.

01:03:22.700 | This is how these breakthroughs in chemistry happen.

01:03:24.600 | This is how athletes become fantastic athletes.

01:03:26.700 | This is how those movies you love are made.

01:03:28.880 | This is how The Rock molded his body and his character into being an international superstar.

01:03:38.400 | Focusing on things when it's hard, keeping your attention on one thing, persisting through

01:03:41.840 | difficulty.

01:03:43.340 | Just giving this message, emphasizing this message, giving examples of this message,

01:03:50.160 | that does sink in.

01:03:51.160 | It doesn't mean it's going to change people right away.

01:03:54.000 | It doesn't mean you can get them off their phones.

01:03:56.080 | A lot more has to be involved in getting that done.

01:04:00.400 | But you lay down the vision of what the alternative could be.

01:04:04.020 | You cannot escape from the trap of the shallows until the attraction of the depths is something

01:04:08.900 | that's even on your radar.

01:04:10.200 | And so that's one thing you could be doing.

01:04:13.000 | And there are schools, including some schools around here, who, for example, teach deep

01:04:18.960 | work.

01:04:21.000 | And there's schools that teach my book Digital Minimalism.

01:04:22.680 | Like, there's schools that go at this straight on.

01:04:25.120 | We want to give you a specific frame for thinking about these type of things.

01:04:29.960 | Otherwise, what's the model they have?

01:04:31.920 | It's like, well, if I'm on this phone a lot, maybe I'll be an influencer.

01:04:35.160 | That's the only model they have.

01:04:38.320 | And TikTok is tricking them into thinking that they're just one video away from that

01:04:41.800 | because it's giving them these fake view bursts.

01:04:43.880 | So you've got to give them the alternative.

01:04:46.320 | The deep life, a life built on focusing on hard but meaningful things, staying diligent

01:04:50.840 | on that, being resistant to distractions.

01:04:53.320 | This is a very attractive, cool thing, because basically everyone out there who's really

01:04:56.920 | interesting that we admire almost always is doing that.

01:04:59.360 | And when that message gets through, you've planted the seed.

01:05:01.960 | And you might not be able to grow that seed tomorrow in your class, but the seeds have

01:05:04.960 | to be planted if they're ever going to grow.

01:05:08.360 | All right, I think we have time for one more quick question.

01:05:12.840 | Richie asks, have you read 4000 Weeks Time Management for Immortals by Oliver Berkman?

01:05:18.360 | If so, what are your thoughts?

01:05:21.000 | Yes, Richie, I've read it.

01:05:23.200 | I blurbed it.

01:05:24.200 | Now look at the back of the cover.

01:05:26.040 | Does no one read the blurbs anymore?

01:05:27.760 | I gave it a nice quote.

01:05:30.800 | I then told Tim Ferriss about it, and Tim read it on my recommendation.

01:05:35.000 | And he actually excerpted the whole first chapter and played it on his podcast, wrote

01:05:39.600 | a blog post about it.

01:05:40.680 | So I've been trying to do what I can to spread the word.

01:05:43.320 | I like 4000 Weeks a lot.

01:05:44.680 | I think it's a great book.

01:05:46.640 | And the premise of the book is we have 4000 weeks, roughly speaking, to live.

01:05:52.400 | You can't do all the things you think you want to do.

01:05:55.760 | So having a value-based system of productivity in which I got to nail all these, get all

01:06:03.040 | these different things done, and that's where I'm going to get my self-worth, through the

01:06:05.880 | quantity of high-end accomplishment, is a sucker's game because you can't do all those

01:06:10.440 | things.

01:06:11.440 | All right, so what next?

01:06:12.440 | And that's the question that Oliver addresses.

01:06:15.240 | Once you realize when you're his age or my age or Jesse's age, we're all roughly the

01:06:18.440 | same age, that like, "Okay, well, I'm not going to do this, and I ran out of time to

01:06:22.720 | do this.

01:06:23.720 | And if this was going to happen in my life, I already would have had to been on the road

01:06:25.760 | to this about 15 years ago.

01:06:28.160 | So what next?"

01:06:29.160 | And that's the question that he tackles.

01:06:31.000 | And I think it's a really big question.

01:06:34.520 | Most things you can't do.

01:06:36.640 | You got to choose a few that matter and do them and enjoy them and go along for the ride

01:06:41.460 | and be resilient when that ride doesn't go exactly where you think it would be and course

01:06:44.440 | correct when you can, but also recognize that maybe this vision you had is not going to

01:06:49.200 | quite be that vision and still be able to enjoy the wonder and grace of life nonetheless.

01:06:55.640 | And I think that was the message Oliver was making, and it's a message that a lot of people

01:06:59.860 | were ready to hear, especially in this post-pandemic moment where everyone got disrupted and are

01:07:06.920 | asking these questions about, "What is the deep life?

01:07:09.040 | What do I actually want to do?"

01:07:10.040 | So it was a perfectly timed book.

01:07:11.240 | It did very well.

01:07:12.400 | If you have not read it, check it out.

01:07:16.200 | Four thousand weeks.

01:07:17.200 | And if you want to hear the first chapter, look at Tim Ferriss's podcast from last month,

01:07:21.800 | I believe, and you can actually hear the whole first chapter online.

01:07:25.640 | All right.

01:07:28.280 | Well, speaking of not having enough time, Jesse, I think we should probably wrap up

01:07:32.960 | this episode.

01:07:34.960 | Thank you everyone who submitted their questions.

01:07:38.660 | Go to the YouTube page linked in the show notes if you want to see videos of every question

01:07:42.840 | and segment done on this show, as well as video of the full episodes.

01:07:46.680 | If you like what you heard, you will like what you read on my weekly newsletter.

01:07:49.880 | You can sign up for that at calnewport.com.

01:07:53.920 | Back on Thursday with a listener calls episode, and until then, as always, stay deep.

01:07:59.020 | [Music]

Full Length Episode | #173 | February 14, 2022

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