How To Actually Achieve Your Dream Life (Evidence-Based Goal Setting Formula)

00:00:00.000 | So I want to talk today about the desire to build a good life.

00:00:05.360 | One that's focused on what you care about.

00:00:07.880 | One that feels meaningful.

00:00:10.140 | One where the appeal of zoning out on your phone or losing hours to mindless video game

00:00:15.000 | playing is diminished.

00:00:17.780 | Now I have a specific strategy for achieving this goal that I want to talk about in today's

00:00:21.200 | episode.

00:00:22.200 | It's one that's going to pull from both my background as a computer scientist as well

00:00:27.200 | as from the habits of a reclusive writer.

00:00:31.400 | So this should be fun.

00:00:32.760 | I call it the good life algorithm.

00:00:35.200 | Let's get into it.

00:00:36.200 | All right.

00:00:37.200 | I am going to start and my apologies for people who are watching instead of just listening.

00:00:42.880 | I'm going to draw something.

00:00:44.200 | So this is always a risk.

00:00:45.640 | I haven't done this in a little while, Jesse.

00:00:47.980 | New viewers of the podcast are not used to my artistic skills, but here we go.

00:00:51.800 | I want to draw a picture that's going to help coordinate us here.

00:00:54.880 | I have a big box on the screen.

00:00:57.600 | Okay.

00:00:58.600 | So I want to think about this box as capturing possible lives.

00:01:04.600 | Let's say it that way.

00:01:06.520 | Now within this space of possible lives that you could live, only some of them are actually

00:01:14.080 | achievable.

00:01:15.440 | So we'll draw like a region within this, this bigger space here.

00:01:20.100 | So if you're just listening, I'm drawing this region is green.

00:01:23.200 | So within this space of possible lives, we kind of have a region of things that are actually

00:01:26.840 | reasonably achievable.

00:01:27.960 | So for example, here's a life outside of that region that might be becoming a Cy Young award

00:01:34.280 | winning pitcher.

00:01:35.700 | If this was my diagram of achievable lives, I mean, I'm not quite there, Jesse.

00:01:40.480 | I still have some hope, but I'm rapidly getting to the point where like I'm probably not going

00:01:45.240 | to be able to make it to that.

00:01:47.120 | I'll probably not be a Cy Young award winning pitcher.

00:01:49.120 | So there's lives in here that are achievable.

00:01:52.360 | All right.

00:01:54.560 | And what we want to do is get to the achievable lives that are deep or good.

00:02:01.040 | It's like, I don't know, I'm, I'm drawing a couple possible lives in here.

00:02:06.080 | I'm going to highlight one of them.

00:02:07.360 | Like maybe this life right here, I have drawn up here, this achievable life that I've circled.

00:02:12.900 | Maybe that is like a really good one.

00:02:14.400 | That's one that would satisfy our definition of deep, meaning that if you could live that

00:02:18.000 | life, it would feel meaningful, it would feel interesting, the appeal of being just distracted

00:02:22.280 | on your phone would be reduced.

00:02:23.280 | Like that, that's a goal.

00:02:24.280 | And then maybe like right now you're, you're down, we're like down here.

00:02:28.120 | So I'll circle life, you know, down here on the side.

00:02:31.220 | The whole challenge, we want to think about this visually, the whole challenge of trying

00:02:37.280 | to cultivate a deep life is to try to get from wherever you are to one of these possible

00:02:45.160 | deep lives that's going to be much better.

00:02:46.920 | That is the challenge of trying to do some sort of lifestyle design.

00:02:50.400 | So the question is, how do we actually achieve that?

00:02:53.400 | Well, what most people do is what I often call on the show, the grand goal strategy.

00:02:58.680 | This is where you pick an appealing sounding grand goal and just go for it and hope that

00:03:02.040 | it will, if achieved, make your life better all at once.

00:03:05.920 | Well, when we have this diagram, this landscape of possible lives, it allows us to visualize

00:03:12.160 | the problem with this strategy, because here's what actually happens if you apply the grand

00:03:16.000 | goal strategy.

00:03:17.160 | You can think about each of these possible lives that I've drawn here, it's a two-dimensional

00:03:22.400 | picture.

00:03:23.400 | So they exist on, they're going to exist on two axes, right?

00:03:26.120 | So we can think about each of these points as being described by two values in this particular

00:03:31.080 | simple example.

00:03:32.080 | So like how far it is on this vertical line and how far it is on this horizontal line.

00:03:37.960 | So I don't know, we can just make up properties, but maybe like this horizontal line describes

00:03:43.600 | like number of hours per day spent reading Brandon Sanderson books.

00:03:49.000 | So higher is more, lower is less.

00:03:52.320 | And maybe this one over here, the horizontal line represents like hours spent working per

00:03:57.280 | day.

00:03:58.680 | And so like as we move over here, you're working more hours and as your points over here, working

00:04:02.920 | less hours.

00:04:03.920 | Like every point in this simplified example has some combination.

00:04:06.160 | In reality, of course, your lives will be defined by hundreds of relevant points.

00:04:10.880 | I can't draw in a hundred dimensional space, so let's just use two for this example.

00:04:14.680 | What happens when you apply the grand goal strategy is, to simplify it a little bit,

00:04:18.760 | you're basically choosing one of these axes.

00:04:20.720 | So like one of these points you care about, and then just leaping in that direction.

00:04:26.560 | Hey, this is something I care about.

00:04:28.600 | My grand goal is going to take one of these properties and just take that singular property

00:04:32.760 | and try to greatly amplify that in my life.

00:04:36.020 | So for example, maybe you say, "I know I like reading Brandon Sanderson books, so I'm going

00:04:42.240 | to find an opportunity, a big grand goal that's going to increase that."

00:04:45.180 | And maybe you decide, "I am going to start a full-time business making novelty t-shirts

00:04:52.300 | with esoteric quotes from Brandon Sanderson books."

00:04:54.620 | You're going to read them all day, like looking for quotes.

00:04:57.040 | And so you make a big leap up that axis, but that's the only thing you care about.

00:05:03.940 | So where might you end up?

00:05:06.660 | All you do know is that you're going to be increasing that one thing, and maybe you end

00:05:09.080 | up like up here.

00:05:10.080 | So for those who are just listening, I've drawn something that is higher on the reading

00:05:14.180 | Brandon Sanderson scale, but it's also way far over on the hours of work scale because

00:05:19.440 | you weren't thinking about that.

00:05:20.440 | You were just trying to leap up.

00:05:21.940 | So maybe for example, you start that novelty shirt company and you're working 15 hour a

00:05:25.540 | day trying to pay your bills because you got to sell a lot of shirts and there's not a

00:05:29.180 | big market and you're really having to hustle.

00:05:31.300 | And so yes, you did improve, you did move, improve on this one factor, but you disregarded

00:05:36.880 | this other factor.

00:05:37.880 | So yeah, you're reading a lot of Brandon Sanderson in this example, but you're also exhausted

00:05:41.940 | from how much you're working.

00:05:44.440 | That's what happens with the grand goal strategy is it is a, think of it as a blunt way of

00:05:50.360 | moving through the landscape of possible lives.

00:05:53.220 | You're just picking one of many dimensions that matters and just making a leap that increases

00:05:57.760 | that one dimension.

00:05:59.680 | But where it puts you on the other dimensions might be a problem.

00:06:02.320 | It's disregarding these other areas.

00:06:05.440 | So what should you do instead?

00:06:07.220 | Well, this is where I want to turn and take some advice I mentioned from a reclusive author.

00:06:12.040 | I'm going to bring up here an article on the screen and those who are listening, I mean

00:06:18.100 | watching instead of just listening can see this.

00:06:20.080 | Let's see here.

00:06:21.080 | Okay.

00:06:22.080 | So this article, it's a podcast interview.

00:06:25.260 | This is from Tim Ferriss' podcast.

00:06:28.440 | Episode 361 of his podcast.

00:06:30.400 | This is from six years ago, February of 2019.

00:06:33.360 | I actually remember listening to this interview.

00:06:35.440 | I was shoveling snow.

00:06:36.440 | I don't know if I remember that, Jesse, but I was shoveling snow.

00:06:39.200 | There was a big snowstorm in February of 2019 here in DC.

00:06:43.360 | The interview was with Jim Collins.

00:06:46.000 | So Jim Collins is a former Stanford Business School professor who is a very well-known

00:06:52.480 | business book writer.

00:06:54.600 | Good to Great and Build to Last are probably his two most famous books.

00:07:00.040 | He sold something like 10 million total copies of his books, which puts him in like the elite

00:07:04.860 | of elite when it comes to nonfiction advice writing.

00:07:09.220 | He left Stanford right around the time he was 38 years old.

00:07:11.920 | So kind of similar to my age, just to write full time.

00:07:14.840 | And he doesn't do a lot of public interviews.

00:07:17.520 | So this was a big get for Tim, and we got some interesting insights into how Jim approached

00:07:23.120 | his life.

00:07:25.080 | And so there's a part in here that I want to capture, because we're going to bring back

00:07:29.320 | this idea that Jim Collins talks about in his interview.

00:07:34.800 | We're going to bring it back to that landscape of possible lives, and it's going to help

00:07:37.460 | us solve this problem of how do we more systematically make our way to better lives.

00:07:42.360 | All right.

00:07:43.360 | So I'm going to quote here from the interview.

00:07:46.440 | Let me just set this up.

00:07:48.160 | Tim has mentioned to Jim, like, hey, I've heard you mention that you use like a stopwatch

00:07:52.680 | to track things and that you track in particular each day how many hours you spend doing deep

00:07:59.720 | work.

00:08:00.720 | You put it in a spreadsheet, and you have this goal of like 1,000 hours a year of doing

00:08:04.240 | deep work.

00:08:05.240 | Like, what's going on with this, Jim?

00:08:06.240 | Explain what's going on here.

00:08:08.700 | And so he said, okay, here's what he explained.

00:08:11.880 | Let me find the right quote.

00:08:16.040 | Okay.

00:08:17.040 | So he explained why he was doing that.

00:08:18.600 | "I was worried what would happen if I went from being invisible to visible, and that

00:08:23.480 | if I was fortunate enough to have a success, that I might wake up in five or six or seven

00:08:28.460 | years and have not gone back to the wellspring of the deep, quiet solitude of work.

00:08:32.640 | And then your second book is half as good, right?

00:08:34.420 | So I started, as I was heading out on the Thelma and Louise leap," he's referring here

00:08:39.200 | to leaping, being a professor, "counting my hours every day."

00:08:42.360 | All right.

00:08:43.360 | So that's how he got started.

00:08:44.360 | He was counting his, how many hours did I spend doing creative work every day?

00:08:47.920 | Because he thought if that went down, like if you had a successful book and that went

00:08:51.720 | down, then he was never going to produce anything good again.

00:08:54.780 | So he was going to track it to make sure.

00:08:56.360 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:08:57.360 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:09:02.220 | to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:09:09.680 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:09:15.120 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:09:20.480 | I know you're going to like it.

00:09:22.280 | Check it out.

00:09:23.280 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:09:24.640 | So Tim starts pushing them because Tim likes details.

00:09:26.680 | Okay.

00:09:27.680 | But Jim, like what is in the spreadsheet?

00:09:28.680 | Is it all your tracking, like every day, how many hours of deep work?

00:09:33.140 | And Jim revealed, I think for the first time, well, actually every line of my spreadsheets

00:09:38.660 | one day, I have three cells on each line.

00:09:42.000 | So the first cell is actually a quick summary of what I did that day.

00:09:45.320 | The second cell, as I talked about, was the number of hours I spent doing deep work.

00:09:49.580 | What was interesting is the third cell, this is what's going to start getting us closer.

00:09:53.260 | All right.

00:09:54.260 | I'm going to read this.

00:09:55.260 | There's kind of an exchange here that's worth hearing in full.

00:09:57.960 | So here's what Jim says.

00:10:00.140 | Now there's a third cell that I put in there that most people don't know as much about

00:10:03.980 | because people know about the hours thing somewhat.

00:10:06.620 | But what I started to do is I started creating a code, which is +2, +1, 0, -1, -2.

00:10:16.900 | And the other thing I put in, and the key on all of this, by the way, is you have to

00:10:20.260 | do it every day in real time.

00:10:21.900 | You can't five days later, look back and say, how did I feel that day?

00:10:24.980 | So what this is is a totally subjective how quality was the day, or like a +2 is a super

00:10:29.540 | positive day.

00:10:30.800 | So Ferris interrupts and says, you're talking about emotionally speaking?

00:10:35.540 | And Jim Collins says, exactly.

00:10:37.100 | Just like, was it a great day?

00:10:38.860 | A +2 is just a great day.

00:10:40.820 | It doesn't mean it wasn't.

00:10:42.540 | There might not have been a really difficult day.

00:10:44.100 | It might've been a day of total really hard rock climbing.

00:10:46.100 | It might've been one of really hard riding, but if it felt really good, right, I'd put

00:10:49.220 | that down.

00:10:50.220 | +1 is another positive day.

00:10:51.460 | 0 is meh, -1 is kind of a net tone negative, and -2 is bad days.

00:10:57.300 | And so you can say over the last five years, what's going on in all of the +2 days?

00:11:02.280 | So Tim comes in and says, oh, so this is why you're writing the description of those days

00:11:05.400 | as well.

00:11:06.660 | And here we get to the punchline.

00:11:07.660 | Jim says, yeah, exactly.

00:11:09.780 | And over the last five years, what's going on in the -2 days?

00:11:13.020 | And now as I navigate, it's kind of like the simplex method in operations research, where

00:11:17.700 | you find optimal by never knowing what optimal is ahead of time.

00:11:21.660 | You do it by a series of iterative steps of the next best step.

00:11:26.740 | This is where we get to the magic of Jim's advice.

00:11:29.020 | I'm going to load back up my diagram here.

00:11:33.020 | All right, this is where we get to the magic of his life.

00:11:35.940 | He is saying, if I track every day, here's what I did, just a sentence or two, and here's

00:11:42.160 | if it was a +2 day, a +1 day, a 0 day, a -1 day, or a -2 day.

00:11:48.860 | He can start to gather data, right?

00:11:51.580 | He can start to gather data about what am I doing on the +2 days?

00:11:56.900 | Also what am I doing on the -2 days?

00:11:58.340 | Like, what are the days I come away from saying that was really good, and what are the days

00:12:01.820 | that I come away from and saying that was really bad?

00:12:03.740 | And I can learn over time the type of stuff that makes me happy, and over time the type

00:12:07.220 | of stuff that doesn't make me happy, and he says, I can use that to make iterative changes

00:12:11.140 | in my life.

00:12:12.140 | Now, this is where my computer science hat comes on.

00:12:14.340 | He references the simplex algorithm.

00:12:16.580 | The simplex algorithm, if you do any sort of like mathematical theory, is like an algorithm

00:12:20.220 | you use for finding feasible solutions for linear programs.

00:12:23.060 | So linear programs is just basically where you say, maximize this value or this vector

00:12:27.260 | of values given a bunch of constraints on them.

00:12:30.300 | You're trying to figure out like a really good answer to a question.

00:12:34.500 | Think about it that way.

00:12:36.020 | There's a lot of possible values you can assign, so how do you find like a set of values to

00:12:40.220 | assign that's really good?

00:12:42.840 | The simplex algorithm is a solution to that.

00:12:45.460 | The details don't matter.

00:12:47.180 | I mean, as you probably all know, and Jesse's shaking his head like a chorus, you're moving

00:12:51.340 | through a multidimensional polytope, which we understand through the vertexes of the

00:12:55.420 | multidimensional polytope.

00:12:56.660 | We all know about this.

00:12:57.740 | That's fine.

00:12:58.740 | But the key is, if you actually look at the simplex algorithm operating, it's iterative.

00:13:03.320 | So you're sort of moving ever closer towards an optimal solution.

00:13:08.300 | So you don't know in advance where you're going, you're moving there.

00:13:11.260 | So if we come back to our diagram here, looking at the landscape of possible lives, and we

00:13:18.940 | have the circle down here where we started, the Jim Collins simplex algorithmic approach

00:13:24.140 | is as you learn about, well, what days am I happy, what days am I not, you make a little

00:13:29.340 | change.

00:13:30.340 | Well, I'm going to do a little bit more of this because I associate this with plus two

00:13:35.100 | days.

00:13:36.100 | A little bit less of that because I associate that with minus two days.

00:13:42.220 | Let me look at what's possible, and let me make this change here.

00:13:45.060 | All these changes are small, and they're within the realm of what's possible, given just your

00:13:50.940 | current obstacles and opportunities, right?

00:13:52.740 | So there's no big grand scheme here.

00:13:54.100 | You're not going off to start your Brandon Sanderson shirt business.

00:13:57.440 | Small changes to get more plus twos and less minus twos.

00:14:01.540 | And maybe some of these, eh, that didn't work out, but that's okay if it didn't work out

00:14:06.300 | because it's not a big change in your life.

00:14:07.980 | Maybe we go over here, and you work your way iteratively towards that optimal solution.

00:14:14.580 | You make your way towards a much better life.

00:14:19.700 | This I think is a, it's not the only way to get to a deep life, but I think when we look

00:14:23.740 | at this diagram of the landscape of possible lives, and we imagine it as existing on these

00:14:28.420 | multiple dimensions, we really begin to see the difference between evidence-based iterative

00:14:33.700 | changes versus gut-based grand leaps.

00:14:36.740 | It's just really hard to make a grand leap because you make one thing much better.

00:14:41.260 | You might make another thing much worse.

00:14:43.340 | Also, you don't have a great understanding of the full landscape between here and there.

00:14:49.020 | What's actually around here?

00:14:50.240 | Maybe there's a lot of challenges around here.

00:14:51.980 | This thing here is in some sort of fitness lull.

00:14:54.700 | It's not as good as you think.

00:14:55.740 | There's traps around it.

00:14:56.860 | The iterative approach is not exciting this week, but over five years it leads you somewhere

00:15:00.940 | really cool.

00:15:03.300 | Collins has built this really cool life.

00:15:05.620 | He left academia and formed this really cool life that's built on doing this deep work

00:15:10.140 | and these other activities, and he's built these books that matter, but it's not fallen

00:15:12.980 | to the typical traps, the time traps that authors fall into.

00:15:15.900 | I think it's really interesting, the iterative approach.

00:15:20.380 | I have a friend who has been doing this for the last, it might have been five or six years.

00:15:27.420 | He has the spreadsheet.

00:15:28.740 | He has the plus and minuses.

00:15:31.340 | He has the short description, and he has been changing his life bit by bit based on this

00:15:38.020 | data.

00:15:39.020 | I talk to him all the time.

00:15:40.020 | I've heard him do this.

00:15:41.020 | Right now, he's ended up in a really interesting, I'm going to say idiosyncratic, because it

00:15:45.500 | is never something that he or anyone else would have come up with from scratch if he

00:15:48.980 | was just thinking 10 years ago, "What do I want to do with my life?"

00:15:51.460 | But he has a fantastically deep and interesting, admirable life.

00:15:53.900 | I'm actually going to go interview him for my "Deep Life" book.

00:15:56.780 | I'm going to have him come on the podcast soon.

00:15:58.900 | We'll do an in-depth episode to really get into it, but he was the one who really helped

00:16:03.460 | me come back to this concept of actually the data-based, evidence-based, iterative improvement

00:16:08.220 | of your life is much more likely to move you towards the good life than taking these big

00:16:13.080 | gut-driven swings.

00:16:14.460 | Those could work, but often they don't.

00:16:17.420 | They make one thing better while making other things worse, and then it can be just sort

00:16:21.760 | of a wash in the end.

00:16:24.820 | For now, let's just sit with this idea.

00:16:26.140 | The path to depth is sometimes iterative and not the result of major leaps.

00:16:31.620 | I call that the good life algorithm.

00:16:34.300 | I like it.

00:16:35.300 | I actually met Jim.

00:16:36.440 | I don't remember how I got in touch with him, but it was probably after listening to that

00:16:41.180 | interview.

00:16:42.180 | We had a good talk.

00:16:43.180 | Good advice.

00:16:44.180 | When I talked to him, I was like the exact age he was when he left Stanford.

00:16:47.020 | He was like, "It works out pretty well if you go and just become a full-time writer."

00:16:52.100 | I didn't, but he did make an interesting pitch.

00:16:54.740 | Well, you like teaching, right?

00:16:56.460 | I do like teaching.

00:16:57.460 | Yeah.

00:16:58.460 | He was in the business school.

00:16:59.460 | It's kind of different, I think, too.

00:17:00.460 | Yeah.

00:17:01.460 | It's its own sort of business.

00:17:02.460 | I mean, you're around some pretty smart kids.

00:17:03.460 | It keeps you pretty young.

00:17:04.460 | People leave business schools, I think, more than other type of academic schools because

00:17:08.380 | there's a lot of going out to start businesses or coming back to business schools after you've

00:17:12.060 | done something in business.

00:17:13.060 | I think there's more of a revolving door than – though I would say at MIT, in the theory

00:17:20.180 | group in a computer science lab where I worked, people came and went.

00:17:24.260 | They would go, and then they would come back like $250 million richer.

00:17:28.980 | There is a lot of that.

00:17:29.980 | There is a lot of like Robert Morris would go, invent the first shopping cart for the

00:17:35.420 | web, and then come back with a lot of money.

00:17:38.020 | Ron Rivest would go, sell RSA for $1.7 billion, and come back and start teaching.

00:17:43.380 | So there was more of a revolving door just because –

00:17:45.860 | And then they'd buy you coffee in the break room?

00:17:48.980 | They did.

00:17:50.460 | Ron Rivest, his personal secretary, B, was in charge of the coffee.

00:17:56.060 | We had a lot of coffee on that floor.

00:17:58.620 | It was none of this like little pot nonsense.

00:18:01.840 | We had the professional brewers and the big, giant carafts, and we just had thing after

00:18:07.620 | thing of Pete's coffee.

00:18:09.660 | Like the big where you could brew like 20 or 30 cups at a time and fill up one of those

00:18:12.940 | things like you would have at like a conference.

00:18:14.780 | Yeah.

00:18:15.780 | Yeah, we had a lot of coffee.

00:18:16.780 | The good coffee machine was actually the floor below where the WC3 consortium is, so Tim

00:18:23.500 | Berners-Lee's web consortium.

00:18:26.340 | So Tim Berners-Lee is the guy who's invented the HTML and HTTP and the World Wide Web.

00:18:31.020 | So he worked on the fifth floor, and he's – I guess he's English.

00:18:34.500 | He's a Sir, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and they had a fancy espresso machine, a really nice

00:18:39.740 | one.

00:18:40.740 | Were you able to get any of that?

00:18:41.740 | We would go down there sometimes.

00:18:42.740 | We'd go down there sometimes.

00:18:44.860 | Anyway, so there we go.

00:18:46.500 | We'll call that the good life algorithm.

00:18:47.860 | All right.

00:18:48.860 | We've got a bunch of questions.

00:18:49.860 | We're going to cover a lot of topics, but first, here from one of our sponsors.

00:18:53.940 | I want to talk about our friends at Thrive Market.

00:18:58.260 | Here's the thing.

00:18:59.260 | My wife and I, we do a lot of online grocery shopping.

00:19:02.900 | We learned this during the pandemic, like, "Oh, you can do this," and now it's become

00:19:06.520 | a bit of a habit because of the convenience of it.

00:19:09.220 | The problem is you don't always know what you're going to get or the stuff you really

00:19:13.820 | want is not always available with the sort of standard online shopping stores.

00:19:18.140 | You'll often have this experience where you'll say, like, "I don't know.

00:19:21.620 | Can we get some bananas?" and they bring you a can of pineapples, and like, "Well,

00:19:26.220 | it's also yellow, so isn't that like a reasonable substitution?"

00:19:28.900 | So yeah, we kind of have trouble with them sometimes, but we're used to the idea of

00:19:31.340 | doing grocery shopping online.

00:19:34.380 | This is why I love Thrive Market, because what they offer is a really good online shopping

00:19:39.300 | experience that is focused on, in particular, getting you healthy stuff, right?

00:19:45.740 | So you can go online and buy stuff, and you know that you're going to get healthy essentials

00:19:51.180 | delivered.

00:19:52.980 | One of the things in particular where this is really useful for us is that I have three

00:19:56.640 | boys and they eat a lot of snacks.

00:19:59.480 | We have a snack box, and they grab their snacks in the morning, the pack for school or when

00:20:04.320 | they get home.

00:20:05.320 | The snack box plays a—it's a high-throughput food distribution service in our house, and

00:20:09.940 | we don't want them necessarily just eating a bunch of processed stuff.

00:20:12.420 | This is like a perfect use of Thrive Market, like, "Oh, I'm going to go find snacks

00:20:15.300 | on Thrive Market.

00:20:16.300 | I know they're going to be healthy."

00:20:19.620 | It's a no-junk online grocery store, and they'll just get sent straight to our house,

00:20:23.140 | and then we can keep filling up the snack box for it.

00:20:25.180 | So that's like one of the ways I have been using Thrive Market.

00:20:28.720 | They have a cool feature on there right now called Healthy Swap Scanner.

00:20:32.340 | You can scan a product, and it will recommend a healthier alternative to it, which I think

00:20:37.180 | is a great idea.

00:20:40.020 | The main way you can navigate is they have these on-site filters.

00:20:43.140 | So if you have particular things you care about—I want high-protein, right?

00:20:47.700 | I want none of this—whatever it is you're searching for, you can filter real quickly

00:20:50.880 | to find those as well.

00:20:51.880 | So if you want the convenience of online grocery, and you also want healthy stuff, you got to

00:20:56.820 | check out Thrive Market.

00:20:59.840 | So if you're ready to make the switch, go to thrivemarket.com/deep to get 30% off your

00:21:05.740 | first order, plus a free $60 gift.

00:21:09.860 | All right, that's thrivemarket.com/deep, Thrive Market dot com slash deep.

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00:22:36.140 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:22:41.180 | Hi, first question is from Chris.

00:22:44.940 | How should I navigate the barrage of negative news as a federal worker?

00:22:48.220 | I feel like I should stay informed to understand how my livelihood might be impacted, but it's

00:22:51.740 | very stressful.

00:22:52.740 | Well, here's what's going on here.

00:22:55.260 | If you're a federal worker, and half the people I know are, I live in Washington, D.C., at

00:23:00.820 | the moment when we're recording this, Elon Musk's doge is trying to do, among other things,

00:23:07.220 | psychological warfare.

00:23:09.400 | He wants to terrorize the federal workforce because he is essentially, A, kind of a broken

00:23:16.420 | person inside, but B, he's mad about having to deal with federal regulators with some

00:23:20.780 | of his companies, right?

00:23:22.780 | So he wants to, beyond just finding inefficiencies or trying to save money, he wants to add a

00:23:29.660 | note of terror about it.

00:23:31.500 | If you want to hear more about this, by the way, I wrote an article for The New Yorker

00:23:34.660 | last week.

00:23:36.260 | Last week it came out, I think on Tuesday or Wednesday, that looked at Elon Musk's two

00:23:42.020 | weeks ago email that said, "Send me five things you did yesterday," which any manager will

00:23:46.900 | tell you is like what insecure managers do who are just trying to be a-holes.

00:23:49.900 | I went through the whole history of, not just Musk, but productivity in Silicon Valley and

00:23:54.260 | seemed like they don't exactly have this figured out yet, but that's an aside.

00:23:58.020 | He's trying to terrorize you.

00:23:59.020 | So I'm saying don't give him the pleasure.

00:24:01.620 | If you're not a congressional appointee or a probationary worker, you're most likely

00:24:07.420 | not in an imminent threat of your computer's going to be shut off at any moment.

00:24:12.160 | So what I would suggest is you have a couple set check-in times.

00:24:15.620 | What do I need to know about what has happened?

00:24:17.740 | It could be every day for 10 minutes, what's happening on the times, or maybe even like

00:24:22.700 | every other day you just check in to see what's going on.

00:24:25.540 | But anything that directly you need to do something, also you're going to hear from

00:24:28.900 | your supervisor, you're going to hear from your agency heads, right?

00:24:32.680 | So extremely limit the time you check and when you check, and do not give it other time.

00:24:39.360 | Do not be online following it.

00:24:41.720 | Do not be on social media.

00:24:46.120 | Don't be like sort of obsessively talking about it.

00:24:48.760 | Why?

00:24:49.760 | Because that is allowing Musk to live rent-free in your head, right?

00:24:53.400 | So if you actually want to do something here that is going to frustrate the person terrorizing

00:25:00.480 | you as hard as it might be, it's just don't look.

00:25:05.860 | I'll check in briefly to see if what's going on, if I need to know something.

00:25:09.840 | And otherwise, I'm going to do my job, I'm going to live my life.

00:25:14.540 | You don't get a live rent-free in my head.

00:25:15.720 | So that's what I would suggest.

00:25:18.060 | It's chaos and it's a bit of psychological warfare going on.

00:25:22.920 | Let's not give him too much of the pleasure.

00:25:24.400 | All right, what do we got next?

00:25:26.760 | This is from Anthony, "Can you give a preview of your thoughts on relationships for your

00:25:30.440 | upcoming deep life book?

00:25:32.280 | What about if your partner does not like to geek out on systems, values, and stacks?"

00:25:35.800 | What you're talking about, your partner might not enjoy references to the simplex algorithm

00:25:41.280 | as a way of trying to navigate iterative improvement of your lifestyle configuration parameters?

00:25:45.920 | I don't believe it.

00:25:48.400 | I will give you some reassuring words.

00:25:51.180 | I do like to geek out.

00:25:54.560 | The deep life book, which I'm working on now, and just for a timeline purpose, I'll probably

00:25:59.620 | finish the first draft at some point by the end of the summer.

00:26:02.320 | So it's kind of a slow process.

00:26:03.640 | I am not writing it in a super geeky tone.

00:26:06.520 | So I am trying to write this book to be accessible even to people who aren't hopeless nerds like

00:26:12.320 | myself.

00:26:13.320 | So I'm hoping that's not going to be a problem.

00:26:15.760 | There's no stack in it.

00:26:16.760 | I'm not using stack terminology.

00:26:18.360 | I'm not going to talk about the simplex algorithm.

00:26:19.920 | I might talk about the landscape of possible lives, but I might use more of an actual navigation

00:26:25.960 | metaphor.

00:26:26.960 | You're trying to get to a destination on an actual physical map, not in terms of a multidimensional

00:26:32.720 | vector or a linear program.

00:26:34.800 | So I'm trying to be good, Anthony, about toning down the geekiness for the book, which I'm

00:26:41.180 | usually pretty good at, I think.

00:26:42.800 | If you read Slow Productivity, my most recent book, it's not super geeky.

00:26:48.120 | I'm trying to be more accessible, so like the larger audiences, so audiences who do

00:26:56.640 | not obsessively quote random scenes from season five of The Simpsons as if that's a reasonable

00:27:02.520 | conversational gambit.

00:27:04.200 | People who think that's weird, I want to also be able to enjoy my book.

00:27:06.960 | So I'm trying to de-geekify myself somewhat.

00:27:08.680 | I've been pretty good about it, I think, Jesse.

00:27:11.160 | I geek out a little bit more in here sometimes because I can't help myself, but my editors

00:27:14.840 | would not let me get away with it.

00:27:16.440 | Yeah.

00:27:17.440 | It's like publishing, it's all English majors.

00:27:19.800 | Yeah.

00:27:20.800 | Yeah.

00:27:21.800 | Like, come on.

00:27:22.800 | Stop talking about simplex algorithms.

00:27:23.800 | I, by the way, held myself back.

00:27:25.460 | I've done some research.

00:27:26.460 | I won an award a few years ago, Best Paper Award, for a paper I did on a new application

00:27:31.440 | of an algorithmic analysis technique called smooth analysis, which was Spielman and Tang

00:27:37.520 | originally created this method for understanding why, in practice, the simplex algorithm converges

00:27:42.440 | faster than you might expect in the worst case.

00:27:44.520 | And I took that same technique and applied it to some distributed system analysis.

00:27:47.720 | So I could have gone a level deeper in my nerding, but I did not.

00:27:51.560 | So you're all welcome.

00:27:52.560 | All right.

00:27:53.560 | Who do we got next?

00:27:54.560 | Next question is from Rebecca.

00:27:56.440 | I'm recovering from a health setback and struggle with creating a schedule for my projects.

00:28:00.200 | Since I may need to adjust for rest in recovery, what approaches do you recommend for developing

00:28:05.280 | a schedule that balances productivity with flexibility?

00:28:08.280 | Rebecca, I was just there.

00:28:11.200 | And I'm like just coming out of a relatively still happening, but better rehab about a

00:28:17.440 | bunch of stuff that got messed up after I went through this sort of injury and surgery

00:28:20.280 | recovery.

00:28:21.280 | And here's what I basically learned, was start with like, OK, here's the schedule I think

00:28:25.480 | that like gives me some more rest, you know, so it's a little bit like I'm taking my foot

00:28:29.360 | off the gas a little bit, right?

00:28:30.680 | So here's what I'm thinking.

00:28:31.680 | I'm going to, you know, tell my boss or my supervisor, like, here's how I want to do

00:28:35.200 | it to try to prioritize rest a little bit more.

00:28:37.880 | And take the amount of rest in that schedule and then multiply that by two.

00:28:41.280 | Like your initial reaction about what to do here is not going to be enough rest.

00:28:45.280 | It's going to be the sort of minimum possible change because you're very worried.

00:28:49.920 | It seems like in the moment, your brain interprets these changes that you're making to accommodate

00:28:55.520 | rest or rehab.

00:28:57.460 | It interprets these as a permanent change.

00:29:00.440 | And it begins to predict a future and say, my God, if I only work this much, you know,

00:29:05.240 | for the next 20 years, I'm going to really fall behind.

00:29:08.600 | I'm going to get fired.

00:29:09.600 | I'm not going to be able to keep up with my job.

00:29:11.480 | But the reality is you're probably talking three months or six months or one month or

00:29:14.920 | whatever it is.

00:29:15.920 | It's not actually that much time.

00:29:17.740 | And all the time, people have to take their foot off the gas for three months or four

00:29:22.240 | months and then come back to it again.

00:29:23.680 | So if you're going to take your foot off the gas, take your foot off the gas enough to

00:29:26.320 | really rehab and recover.

00:29:27.600 | So that's my main advice is you probably need the rest more than your brain thinks is reasonable.

00:29:33.440 | One of the things I actually like to do is collect just internally, I like to collect

00:29:37.880 | stories that I encounter of real historical figures who are super accomplished and they

00:29:42.460 | all have these like long periods where they were barely working.

00:29:47.840 | You know, they were sick, they were dealing with this.

00:29:51.040 | If you go back far enough, like in American history, I'm sort of a fan of colonial history

00:29:56.940 | and early post-colonial history.

00:29:58.900 | You read these biographies of like founding fathers.

00:30:01.800 | It would be, oh, for that month, they were just traveling from here to there, like just

00:30:07.880 | to get from here to there.

00:30:09.920 | That was like a month of time that was just like, they weren't doing anything.

00:30:13.640 | Like you read about, you know, Ben Franklin, there would just be these like six to two

00:30:18.160 | months, six weeks to two month gaps where it's like, well, he was traveling to London

00:30:22.040 | and he just can't do anything.

00:30:23.040 | You're just like on a ship and you're sick or you read about Darwin.

00:30:26.240 | And for like a year, he's basically just throwing up on the Beagle, just like really seasick,

00:30:32.520 | right?

00:30:33.520 | And so I find this, and I talk about this in Slow Productivity.

00:30:36.600 | So if you want to get into these examples, get my book Slow Productivity, principle two

00:30:41.640 | is work at a natural pace.

00:30:42.840 | And I really go through a lot of case studies here of people that we look back at the end

00:30:46.120 | of their lives.

00:30:47.120 | We look back at these historical figures and say, wow, they produced all this stuff and

00:30:49.960 | it was awesome.

00:30:50.960 | And I was like, yeah.

00:30:51.960 | And they had all sorts of ups and downs and big, long extended periods where they were

00:30:56.480 | doing nothing.

00:30:57.480 | And then periods where they're really productive.

00:30:59.800 | That is just the natural pace with which people produce things.

00:31:02.920 | Like here's another story.

00:31:03.920 | I have so many of these.

00:31:04.920 | Galileo, I believe this was Galileo.

00:31:09.560 | He went at some point to stay with friends who had basically like a vacation home.

00:31:15.480 | And it was up in the Italian mountains.

00:31:18.320 | And they had had this clever system, if I understand this correctly, that in their villa

00:31:25.320 | they built a series of chutes that take air from deep in a cave in the mountainside and

00:31:31.640 | bring it up into the villa because that air was cool.

00:31:34.560 | So it was like air conditioner, right?

00:31:36.600 | So it's pretty cool.

00:31:37.600 | Like they built an air conditioning system.

00:31:39.640 | It was pretty cool, literally cool, and also cool pragmatically, except for there was some

00:31:45.920 | sort of poisonous gas that was being vented into this cave.

00:31:49.760 | And so Galileo is sleeping in this room with his villa with his friends on like vacation

00:31:54.080 | and it poisons everybody.

00:31:56.180 | And it kills like two of the people in the room and he barely survives and is basically

00:32:00.200 | like debilitated for a really long time and never fully recovers from it.

00:32:04.920 | We don't know any of that.

00:32:05.920 | Like, yeah, Galileo, we know the work he did, it was fantastic.

00:32:09.880 | So like people have this, John F. Kennedy, you know, battling Addison's disease, huge

00:32:16.000 | issues.

00:32:17.000 | Like he'd be like, look, I got to just go down to the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach

00:32:21.160 | and just be there for like three weeks.

00:32:22.880 | Like they called that place the Southern White House or the White House South or whatever,

00:32:27.080 | because he'd be like, I just can't, I'm in pain, I can't move, like just weeks would

00:32:30.940 | be lost.

00:32:31.940 | And then, you know, he'd do his best to work and come back.

00:32:33.720 | Anyways, this is all to say, we are used to the modern pace of knowledge work that is

00:32:39.320 | set by the concept of pseudoproductivity, which is this heuristic I talk about in my

00:32:43.160 | most recent book, where we use visible activity as our proxy for useful effort.

00:32:47.560 | In that type of mindset, anytime you're not doing something is like a disaster.

00:32:53.280 | And that's what leads to these thoughts of like, I can maybe like rest a little bit,

00:32:57.280 | like take a little bit off my plate, but like anything more than that for more than a couple

00:33:00.600 | days is a disaster.

00:33:02.200 | But when you do not have pseudoproductivity, when you're instead focused on like, I want

00:33:05.480 | to produce good stuff this year and this decade or the next three years, I have some big initiatives

00:33:09.160 | I want to go well, the fact that these three months you're not doing a lot of email or

00:33:12.840 | Zoom meetings because you're recovering from a surgery or something is not that big of

00:33:15.680 | a deal.

00:33:16.680 | So if you need to get bucked up about resting more than you think you should, read while

00:33:21.880 | you're resting, read slow productivity, because that's sort of at the core, especially that

00:33:25.200 | second principle of working at a natural pace.

00:33:28.560 | It really is, Jesse, like people don't know how artificial it is, this idea of even if

00:33:33.480 | I'm just finishing work at four for a few days, for a lot of people, they're in their

00:33:38.880 | mind, they'd be like, this is a disaster, which is crazy.

00:33:41.920 | There's nothing they're doing where like not being there is like working to four instead

00:33:45.600 | of five is going to make some sort of major difference.

00:33:47.400 | That's just a straight up pseudoproductivity.

00:33:48.760 | All right, who we got next?

00:33:52.360 | Next question's from Shark Loffin.

00:33:55.280 | I have the opportunity to lead the reboot of a once successful aerospace company of

00:33:59.320 | about 100 people.

00:34:00.720 | I've got full autonomy to set everything from building to culture.

00:34:04.000 | I'm going to attempt to use many of the ideas and deep work, including office layout, workflow

00:34:07.960 | management.

00:34:08.960 | The site is performing poorly and is best described as the most shallow workplace ever.

00:34:14.160 | So much busy, so little production.

00:34:16.040 | Any suggestions on how I can implement this transformation?

00:34:19.720 | Well, don't take a book out of Elon Musk's strategy.

00:34:24.640 | I actually went through, this is a bit of a side, but for that New Yorker piece I was

00:34:28.960 | talking about, I went through and cataloged what happened in the first few months after

00:34:34.480 | he took over Twitter in 2022.

00:34:35.920 | It just reminded me of this question.

00:34:38.200 | It was, I would call it, haphazard random chaos that led nowhere good.

00:34:44.740 | So don't do that.

00:34:45.740 | That was just like, I'm going to start sporadically making declarations, losing interest in that

00:34:50.760 | declaration, then make another declaration, and then kind of lose interest in that, and

00:34:53.480 | then do this and lose interest in that, and then just fire half the people for no reason.

00:34:57.440 | So don't do that.

00:34:58.440 | What should you do?

00:34:59.440 | I took a couple notes, but here's the big picture organizational principle for these

00:35:03.760 | notes I'm about to give you.

00:35:05.620 | You need a small number of clearly identified, we'll call them North Stars, for the journey

00:35:10.240 | you're about to take with this company that you've taken over that you want to be really

00:35:13.000 | clear and transparent about.

00:35:16.240 | Everything we're going to do, is what you should be telling your company.

00:35:19.800 | Everything we're going to do is aiming us at these North Stars, so you know why we're

00:35:22.240 | doing it and what our goals are.

00:35:24.920 | I'll give you a few sample North Stars, but I think this general approach is really important,

00:35:29.360 | because otherwise you could end up in that sort of must-taking-over-Twitter-in-2022 territory,

00:35:35.560 | which was more like, I am going to haphazardly do things and you don't know why.

00:35:42.560 | Haphazardness can really be a problem, right?

00:35:45.480 | That really can be a problem, where it's like, I don't know why you're doing this or what's

00:35:48.400 | going on.

00:35:51.000 | What then, what might these North Stars be?

00:35:52.840 | Well based on my books, I would mention three ideas you could start with.

00:35:56.720 | One, North Star number one, context switching is productivity poison.

00:36:02.460 | This is the thing we're really worried about.

00:36:04.720 | We are willing to go to a pretty extreme extent to try to minimize the times during a typical

00:36:11.080 | day where you have to switch your cognitive context from one target to another, because

00:36:14.940 | we know every time we do that, there's this huge cognitive cost.

00:36:17.720 | We're basically siphoning cognitive fuel out of your brain, and there's only so many times

00:36:22.560 | we can siphon it before you're just burnt out and can't do anything else for the day.

00:36:26.340 | That's what we want to try to minimize, is cognitive context switches.

00:36:31.040 | I would emphasize here, this is very different than what other people implicitly try to optimize

00:36:35.940 | or minimize, which tends to be things like friction or response time, or they try to

00:36:41.400 | maximize the velocity of information.

00:36:43.400 | You say, no, this is a business run on brains.

00:36:46.080 | We want our brains to run well.

00:36:47.960 | We're spending a lot of money on these brains.

00:36:51.120 | Contact shifts is putting sand in the gears.

00:36:54.400 | Priority one, how do we rethink about how we do work and communicate, etc., to minimize

00:36:59.080 | contact shifts.

00:37:00.480 | North star number two, I would suggest, make it very clear, deep work on things that move

00:37:05.840 | the needle, that is bring in new revenue.

00:37:09.320 | That's the priority.

00:37:11.080 | We're going to make changes, bend, transform how we do things, whatever is needed to protect

00:37:19.440 | that priority.

00:37:21.340 | This is what we're going to measure.

00:37:22.960 | This is what we are going to reward.

00:37:24.680 | This is what we are going to defer to, even if deferring to this makes other parts of

00:37:29.920 | our lives less convenient.

00:37:32.740 | Even if deferring to this means the HR department has a much harder time getting the information

00:37:37.360 | they need for payroll because they can't just blast email everyone and say answer in six

00:37:40.920 | hours with this information so we can fill out these charts and it's going to make our

00:37:44.720 | job in the HR department much easier.

00:37:47.120 | Our goal is not to make the lives of the HR department as easy as possible.

00:37:50.400 | It's to produce aerospace products that make money.

00:37:53.160 | So if someone is doing that, we're going to let them cook, to reference our episode from

00:37:58.320 | a couple weeks back about let Brandon cook, our reference to Brandon Sanderson.

00:38:03.800 | This is what matters.

00:38:04.800 | We protect it.

00:38:05.800 | So if you're able to prove to me, I am producing something with my brain that is directly valuable,

00:38:10.680 | but in order to do this, you have to stop.

00:38:12.720 | I can't go to these meetings people keep sending me or I need to take these things off my plate.

00:38:16.480 | If you can make a case, this is going to produce more cognitive output that is directly valuable.

00:38:22.080 | I will listen to that case.

00:38:23.200 | I will always listen to that case.

00:38:24.480 | You got to come back to what ultimately actually makes the difference.

00:38:27.440 | As soon as we lose sight of that, we are going to end up in a productivity thunderdome where

00:38:33.280 | everyone is just trying to optimize their own lives, make their own lives easier, and

00:38:36.520 | that's not our business.

00:38:37.520 | We're in the business of making aerospace and the stuff that matters matters, meritocracy

00:38:41.880 | in that way.

00:38:42.880 | North Star number three, no more pseudo productivity.

00:38:48.760 | Visible activity is meaningless to me.

00:38:50.840 | Results matter.

00:38:51.840 | What are you working on?

00:38:52.840 | Did it go well?

00:38:53.840 | Good.

00:38:54.840 | What are you going to work on next?

00:38:55.840 | To this end, teams should be tracking work in a more transparent fashion so that no one

00:39:00.120 | gets overloaded.

00:39:02.080 | Teams should have, like I talk about a lot in my book, Slow Productivity, here's the

00:39:06.040 | things we are working on.

00:39:07.800 | Here's the things we need to work on.

00:39:09.760 | We have a whole list, and it doesn't exist distributed haphazardly through different

00:39:13.940 | team members' email inboxes.

00:39:15.600 | It is on this digital board or this physical bulletin board, a card for everything that

00:39:20.240 | we need to do.

00:39:21.420 | Over here, we're tracking who's working on what right now, and you can only have so many

00:39:25.920 | cards under your name, like one or two, maybe that's it.

00:39:30.140 | We don't take all these things we need to do and just sort of spread them around everyone's

00:39:33.320 | plate and just start talking to each other all the time about all of these things.

00:39:36.120 | "Hey, what about this?

00:39:37.120 | What about that?"

00:39:38.120 | That puts us back to our first north star that violates minimized context shifting.

00:39:42.720 | It also violates our second north star, prioritize deep work on the stuff that really matters.

00:39:47.080 | So why don't we track work carefully so that no one gets overloaded?

00:39:51.240 | You're not allowed to work on 10 things.

00:39:52.560 | Work on two things.

00:39:53.560 | Do those things well.

00:39:54.560 | I don't want to overload you.

00:39:55.560 | If I give you 10 things, you're going to have to have meetings and emails about all 10 of

00:39:59.040 | those things, which means most of your day will be having meetings and emails, which

00:40:02.000 | means when are you doing the deep work on the stuff that really moves the needle?

00:40:05.440 | That's no good.

00:40:06.880 | So let's track at the team scale workloads in a transparent fashion so no one has to

00:40:12.840 | take on too much and we can allow people to be more efficient.

00:40:16.600 | This in turn will allow you to structure communication because now you can check in on this.

00:40:20.560 | You can have daily standups at the team scale.

00:40:22.640 | Okay, who's working on what?

00:40:23.800 | I know that actually.

00:40:24.800 | It's on the board.

00:40:25.800 | What do you need to get this done?

00:40:26.800 | All right.

00:40:27.800 | You've been working on this since Monday.

00:40:28.920 | What is the roadblock?

00:40:29.920 | "Oh, you need this information.

00:40:33.000 | You need this information from, you know, Bob.

00:40:35.040 | You're right here in the daily standup."

00:40:37.880 | When can you get that information over to Cal?

00:40:39.880 | You can get it, okay, by 11.

00:40:41.640 | Get it to him by 11.

00:40:43.120 | We all agree on this?

00:40:44.120 | Great.

00:40:45.120 | And then you're going to work on this for the four hours after that you're going to

00:40:46.280 | get that done?

00:40:47.280 | Great.

00:40:48.280 | Now just go work.

00:40:49.280 | Don't look at your inbox.

00:40:50.440 | Go work.

00:40:52.160 | So those would be my three north stars if I was taking over a 100-person company.

00:40:56.400 | Make it clear that context shifting is productivity poison.

00:40:59.080 | Make it clear that the number one thing we care about is cognitive efforts to produce

00:41:02.120 | things that directly move the needle.

00:41:03.640 | Everything else is going to revolve around making that better and doing more of that.

00:41:07.520 | That is our north star.

00:41:08.520 | It's what we care about.

00:41:09.520 | And three, no more pseudoproductivity.

00:41:10.520 | We're going to track work carefully so that no one gets overloaded and so that we can

00:41:15.120 | make sure people have what they need with a minimum of unnecessary activity.

00:41:18.960 | And if you're moving things from your column to the done column, I don't care about anything

00:41:22.480 | else.

00:41:23.480 | I don't care about how fast you answer emails.

00:41:24.480 | I don't care about how many Zoom meetings you're in.

00:41:27.440 | Productivity versus pseudoproductivity.

00:41:28.440 | So that's what I would do.

00:41:29.440 | All right.

00:41:30.440 | What do we got next?

00:41:32.360 | We have our corner.

00:41:33.840 | Ooh, slow productivity corner.

00:41:36.240 | This last one could have been a part of the corner a little bit, too.

00:41:38.080 | So slow productivity corner, we specifically highlight a question that's related to my

00:41:41.920 | book, Slow Productivity.

00:41:44.720 | We want to highlight at least one question each week that is related to that.

00:41:48.280 | Wow, we're running out of time on that, though, Jesse.

00:41:50.080 | We said one year, right?

00:41:51.720 | Yeah.

00:41:52.720 | When did my book come out?

00:41:53.720 | Pretty early in March last year.

00:41:54.720 | I think it was like March 5th.

00:41:55.960 | Uh-oh.

00:41:56.960 | This could be the last one.

00:41:58.920 | Technically, this would be the last episode with a slow productivity corner.

00:42:03.760 | So go buy the book, Slow Productivity.

00:42:05.700 | We'll find a reason to play this theme music.

00:42:08.800 | We'll find a reason.

00:42:12.280 | All right.

00:42:15.200 | What's our slow productivity corner question of the week?

00:42:17.920 | All right.

00:42:18.920 | It's from Daniel.

00:42:19.920 | Are there perceived benefits of pseudoproductivity in the workplace?

00:42:23.040 | At my company, being responsive at all times on email and instant messaging leads someone

00:42:26.520 | to being seen as dedicated to work and visible to leaders, which leads to advancement.

00:42:31.120 | How do I advance if I don't do this?

00:42:32.960 | Well, yeah, I mean, this is the dangerous nature of pseudoproductivity, is that as long

00:42:40.120 | as this becomes the implicit heuristic by which your company measures value, it's hard

00:42:44.760 | to escape.

00:42:45.760 | So again, we talked about in the last question, but just to reemphasize, pseudoproductivity

00:42:50.880 | is using visible activity as a proxy for useful effort.

00:42:54.380 | So the more visibly active you are, the more useful you will be assumed to be.

00:42:58.120 | In a digital world, this is a problem because mobile computing means you can be demonstrating

00:43:02.920 | effort at any location at any time, and mobile communications like email and Slack means

00:43:08.720 | you can be demonstrating effort at this incredibly fine granularity, at the granularity of like

00:43:12.740 | answering individual emails, being involved in back and forth conversations.

00:43:16.320 | So it leads to a sort of overload of work.

00:43:18.880 | You work too many hours, and it leads to a style of work that is very draining and doesn't

00:43:22.960 | produce much that's actually valuable.

00:43:24.580 | I hate pseudoproductivity.

00:43:25.580 | I think it is a cancer on employee well-being in the knowledge sector.

00:43:31.280 | It's why I wrote the book Slow Productivity to say, do this instead.

00:43:35.760 | Part one, here's why this is bad.

00:43:37.240 | Part two, do this instead.

00:43:40.920 | First of all, just recognize the problem.

00:43:41.920 | All right, so what can you do if you are in an organization that still worships at the

00:43:48.000 | altar of pseudoproductivity?

00:43:49.120 | Well, most of the advice in my book is geared at least in part towards this situation.

00:43:55.680 | You're behind enemy lines, and you're trying to make your way towards safety.

00:44:00.040 | So there are still things you can do.

00:44:02.120 | One is trade clarity for responsiveness.

00:44:06.720 | Be really clear what you're working on, its status, when it's going to get done, and deliver

00:44:10.600 | it when you say you're going to deliver it.

00:44:13.200 | If you're trusted, if you have this clarity, the need for you to be responsive goes down.

00:44:20.560 | Because why do people want answers typically right away to messages?

00:44:24.800 | It's because they don't know what's going on.

00:44:27.800 | They have an open loop in their head, "Oh, yeah, this project, I forgot about that.

00:44:32.200 | What is Jesse up to with that?"

00:44:33.600 | It's just an open loop in their head, and until you respond, they have to keep track

00:44:37.360 | of it, and it's a source of stress.

00:44:39.360 | But if you have some other system, they could be like, "Oh, no, Jesse's on the ball."

00:44:41.640 | You're like, "Yep, I'm working on it.

00:44:43.240 | It's in position five in my queue.

00:44:44.760 | Here's what it is.

00:44:45.760 | I think I should have it done by Tuesday, and I'll tell you if that's going to shift."

00:44:48.200 | And they trust if they don't hear from you it's going to come on Tuesday, they don't

00:44:50.680 | have to worry about it.

00:44:51.680 | So a lot of responsiveness is driven from uncertainty.

00:44:54.400 | So if you're very clear, you can reduce the demands of responsiveness.

00:44:57.640 | Two, it's a big thing in the book, you have to have some way of limiting concurrent workload.

00:45:06.520 | The kiss of death in pseudoproductivity is working on too many things at the same time

00:45:09.960 | because everything you're working on brings with it its own administrative overhead.

00:45:14.280 | So if you're working on too many things, that administrative overhead aggregates until most

00:45:20.560 | of your schedule is servicing tasks instead of actually completing them, and that's this

00:45:24.560 | terrible state where almost nothing gets done, and it's incredibly stressful.

00:45:28.560 | So how do you do that?

00:45:30.120 | Well, one thing you can do is distinguish between, "Here's what I'm actively working

00:45:35.120 | on, and here's what I'm waiting to work on," of the things I've accepted.

00:45:39.560 | Active waiting.

00:45:40.560 | I do email meetings about the stuff I'm actively worked on, not on the stuff I'm waiting to

00:45:44.040 | work on, and I make this transparent and clear, it's in a shared document, I'll send a link

00:45:47.720 | right to you.

00:45:48.720 | "Oh, you want to have a meeting to talk about it?

00:45:51.280 | Here's my queue.

00:45:52.280 | It's still in the waiting part.

00:45:53.600 | It's in position three.

00:45:55.440 | You know, it should get there in about a week or so.

00:45:57.240 | I'll email it as soon as it gets to active, and then we'll talk about it all day if you

00:45:59.960 | want.

00:46:00.960 | But I can only be actually working on a few number of things at a time."

00:46:04.640 | That sort of clarity works.

00:46:07.280 | Also if you have some flexibility on what you can say yes and no to, so the problem

00:46:10.680 | is just not yourself wanting to say no to too much, use quotas, "Yeah, I do this type

00:46:15.440 | of thing, but only this many per quarter."

00:46:17.040 | And when your quota is filled, say, "Yeah, of course, typically I would like to have

00:46:20.800 | a mentoring lunch, or jump on this call, or come to this committee meeting, but I've already

00:46:25.280 | passed my quota for this quarter, or for this month, or for this week, so I can't do it

00:46:28.840 | this time."

00:46:29.840 | It's a very reasonable way to moderate activities that are important, so that you're still doing

00:46:34.560 | things that are important, but not doing too many.

00:46:35.960 | There's a bunch of other ideas like that that are in the book, but those are the two big

00:46:40.060 | picture things to think about, trading clarity for responsiveness and finding ways to manage

00:46:44.920 | your concurrent workload.

00:46:46.400 | You do those two things, you'll be better.

00:46:48.360 | Above all else, just get really good at things that matter.

00:46:50.600 | That's principle three of my books, obsess over quality.

00:46:53.120 | If you're doing something that's valuable, they do not want to lose you.

00:46:57.480 | I'll just make this final point, because I think a lot of people have an overly character

00:47:04.500 | charred, antagonistic mental image of their employer or boss, and they really do see their

00:47:11.520 | employer or boss like a Bond villain, who is somehow converting rapid email responses

00:47:19.240 | into fuel for a laser that they're going to use to destroy the world.

00:47:23.680 | That's what they care about.

00:47:24.680 | This thing that really makes you miserable, they're twisting their mustache and they have

00:47:27.960 | a cat that they're petting, and it's like, "We need you to be answering emails is what's

00:47:32.760 | important because we use those quick responses in my volcano layer to fuel my laser."

00:47:38.560 | The reality is, it's really hard to hire good people.

00:47:41.720 | They worry about people leaving.

00:47:42.720 | They don't have enough people.

00:47:43.720 | If you're doing something valuable, you're really good at something that the company

00:47:46.440 | needs.

00:47:47.440 | You know what they're staying up late at night thinking about?

00:47:49.200 | Not, "Hey, how quickly is he responding to my emails?"

00:47:52.400 | They're thinking, "Oh my God, what if he leaves?"

00:47:54.920 | You got to recognize, make yourself valuable.

00:47:57.700 | Don't be a jerk about it, but recognize you have value.

00:48:01.200 | You don't have to make a big manifesto or a big autoresponder, but I work differently.

00:48:05.400 | You know why?

00:48:06.400 | Because I deliver.

00:48:08.280 | I produce this code that's awesome.

00:48:10.200 | I organize these events that kill.

00:48:12.960 | I put together these marketing campaigns that have the highest ROI of my entire team.

00:48:18.400 | Yeah, I do this Cal Newport stuff that's a little bit weird.

00:48:22.080 | My project queue, you hear from me within 24 hours, but not within 24 minutes when you

00:48:27.840 | email me.

00:48:28.840 | And I'm responsible, but I'm a little bit off kilter and I say no to a lot more things.

00:48:32.280 | But if I go, you're going to lose that ROI.

00:48:37.080 | You do not want that person to go, so you kind of put up with it.

00:48:40.340 | So remember that.

00:48:41.340 | If you're doing something valuable, you are really needed.

00:48:44.320 | You are really wanted, right?

00:48:46.400 | I mean, unless, again, you're under the supervision of Elon Musk and the Department of Government

00:48:52.120 | Efficiency, if you're at an actual company with an actual boss who doesn't walk around

00:48:57.760 | holding chainsaws, they are desperately afraid of losing good people.

00:49:01.240 | So be good.

00:49:02.240 | And you get a lot more flexibility as well.

00:49:03.720 | All right.

00:49:04.720 | Do we have a call this week?

00:49:06.120 | We do.

00:49:07.120 | All right.

00:49:08.120 | Let's hear it.

00:49:09.120 | Hi, Cal.

00:49:10.120 | My name is Joe and the majority of my work centers around optimizing websites for clients.

00:49:18.520 | My job is remote, flexible, and I have a lot of autonomy.

00:49:22.080 | However, my responsibilities aren't clearly defined since I'm on a very small team.

00:49:27.480 | This has sort of led me to a cycle of reacting to urgent tasks, putting in a lot of work,

00:49:32.760 | and then taking work easier for a while until something urgent comes up again.

00:49:36.640 | This has left me either overwhelmed and tired some days or feeling bad that I haven't done

00:49:41.160 | enough for most others.

00:49:42.480 | I'd love to strike a balance between client work and working on company goals while also

00:49:48.380 | leveraging the sort of flexibility and autonomy at work so I can work on my personal projects

00:49:54.240 | like content creation while not quite going full quiet quit mode.

00:50:00.320 | While struggling with motivation is definitely one of my problems here, one of the other

00:50:04.340 | thorns in my side has been struggling to define what enough means for a work day or a work

00:50:10.680 | week.

00:50:11.800 | For people with more autonomous or flexible roles or even just business owners in general,

00:50:17.000 | how do you recommend going about defining what it means to have worked enough?

00:50:21.760 | Thanks.

00:50:22.760 | All right, we've got a couple things going on here.

00:50:26.640 | Let's get to your job situation in particular.

00:50:29.180 | I think you need to think about your job as really being two different jobs.

00:50:34.360 | The first job is client responsiveness, right?

00:50:37.560 | Your first job is working with clients with their issues or requests and satisfying them.

00:50:44.880 | Then you have the second part of your job, which is self-initiated, less monitored, and

00:50:49.360 | less deadline.

00:50:50.960 | Let's just call that part B because what that is could depend, but you sort of have to think

00:50:55.560 | of it as like the self-initiated part of your job and you have the client responsiveness

00:50:58.240 | part of your job.

00:50:59.320 | Let's look at both of these.

00:51:00.320 | Let's do some work on both of these and then I want to talk about overall this question

00:51:03.720 | of how much work is enough, how do I know if I'm working enough.

00:51:08.040 | I would look at the client piece first and even though it's reasonable, right?

00:51:12.680 | You're saying it's only sometimes there's issues that I have to deal with.

00:51:15.800 | I would say, how do I make this piece as sustainable as possible, right?

00:51:20.280 | Let's do some optimization over there and maybe this is about how do I stop crisises

00:51:25.880 | from occurring as much as they do or how do I have, more importantly, maybe a way of dealing

00:51:31.400 | with crisises that is reassuring to the client and moves us away from just constant immediate

00:51:39.800 | responsive communication, right?

00:51:41.680 | In the lack of structure, if you run like a website dev company and there's a problem

00:51:45.060 | that a client has had, with a lack of structure for like, here's how we stay in touch and

00:51:48.440 | here's how we deal with crises, what it's going to be is like, answer my call, answer

00:51:52.160 | my call, answer my call, like this is now a big source of stress for me and I don't

00:51:54.760 | know what's happening until you finally like tell me what's going on.

00:51:56.960 | So you might want to work on that a little bit like, here's our crisis response, you

00:52:01.160 | know, we have crisis@webdevelopmentcompany.com, you send in that email, like we will be on

00:52:08.720 | it within two hours, we have a daily setup call, I don't know.

00:52:11.600 | I don't want to give you the details, but find a way to make sure that's not too stressful

00:52:14.680 | or draining.

00:52:15.680 | All right, all the other days you're working on part B of your job and here you have a

00:52:19.840 | choice.

00:52:21.760 | You can either do a phantom part-time job, this is our word for I have like a consistent

00:52:27.960 | amount of sort of unstructured time that I'm going to structure for another goal, something

00:52:32.800 | that's really important to me that I'm working on and it could be building up a technical

00:52:36.880 | skill or something that might eventually become a side business or it could be a self-education

00:52:41.480 | project or something completely unrelated, community related, unrelated to your professional

00:52:45.160 | job.

00:52:46.160 | So you could do that.

00:52:48.080 | Or as you suggest, build in a more sort of self-initiated sort of value-growing project

00:52:54.160 | within your company.

00:52:55.960 | Like I also do this, which is going to have value within the company.

00:53:00.520 | So you have to make that decision.

00:53:03.200 | There's something to be said for if you like the general company and the client stuff's

00:53:09.040 | a little bit stressful, you have this flexibility where you could start building a secondary

00:53:15.360 | pursuit within your company that you're initiating that you want to become so good you can't

00:53:18.720 | be ignored on eventually, but there's no actual pressure or deadlines or close monitoring

00:53:23.720 | in the short term with the idea of if I keep getting better at this, I can spend less time

00:53:27.800 | doing the client stuff and more time doing what I want to do.

00:53:30.480 | So you can have a vision of like, what do I want my job at this company in an ideal

00:53:34.040 | world to be like and start working your way towards there with this extra time.

00:53:38.440 | That might not be a bad way of thinking about it.

00:53:40.320 | Oh, I have a vision for what I could be doing here.

00:53:43.100 | You know, I don't know.

00:53:44.100 | Maybe it's building back-end tools that not only helps the company, but then the company

00:53:49.360 | can license and sell to other people and you're just on your own doing dev and no one really

00:53:54.880 | knows what you're doing in a particular day, but you're kind of pulling out cool tools

00:53:57.840 | or something like that.

00:53:58.840 | That's an example of something you could do within your company that makes you really

00:54:01.760 | valuable.

00:54:02.760 | You could point to the money you're bringing in the door, like we're much better because

00:54:05.840 | of this and you made 500K selling licenses for this last year.

00:54:09.480 | So like, obviously my salary is justified, but it's entirely autonomous and there are

00:54:13.600 | no crisis days.

00:54:14.600 | Right.

00:54:15.600 | So something like that might not be a bad idea.

00:54:17.800 | I don't want to discourage you from spending this time on a content creation related phantom

00:54:22.560 | part-time job, but I will say the content creation world is really hard.

00:54:26.200 | I think you'd say that's probably true, right, Jesse?

00:54:28.960 | Like we work pretty hard at this and I have 20 years of writing books that helps.

00:54:31.960 | I mean it's a tough, that's a tough world and there are traps there.

00:54:38.000 | There's a lot of, a lot of this world right now is this thin stream of people making a

00:54:43.080 | good living and then a lot of people that they're, they're saying they can use similar

00:54:48.120 | tools and kind of feel like you're in this world.

00:54:50.360 | You have like a sub stack or you're used to be like you're posting your medium post or

00:54:53.800 | you're doing your threads on X that are in the exact same format and at the end of this

00:54:58.000 | last one you say, if you want to find out more, sign up here, but a lot of that's just

00:55:01.720 | like getting people to churn and be online and be monetized.

00:55:05.440 | Like you're not making money, you're being monetized.

00:55:07.040 | So be careful about it.

00:55:08.160 | Content creation is a rough world, but you know, whatever, you do you with that.

00:55:12.320 | The final question then, regardless of how you choose to do through A and B, is how should

00:55:17.240 | you feel about, you know, guilt or non-guilt?

00:55:19.280 | Look, here's the thing, if you're not defrauding your company, if you are doing what they're

00:55:24.040 | asking you to do and you're doing a good job at it and they're happy with you and they're

00:55:27.160 | actually giving you a check that has money in it and that money is enough, the market

00:55:32.560 | is saying you are working enough as far as that employer is concerned.

00:55:36.640 | Right?

00:55:37.640 | Again, this pseudo-productive culture, pseudo-productivity culture, the thing I invade against in my

00:55:44.720 | book Slow Productivity.

00:55:47.000 | Pseudo-productivity culture says activity is what is valuable and this arbitrary amount

00:55:51.640 | of activity, which should be like 40 hours, but really like 40 plus, like you should have

00:55:55.040 | a couple of late days, somehow that amount of activity means you're worthwhile and anything

00:56:00.880 | less than that means you're not.

00:56:01.880 | Which is crazy because if you look at any sort of kind of classical value creation figure

00:56:05.920 | from history, there's all sorts of different amounts of times they're working and it's

00:56:08.740 | not 40 hours.

00:56:09.740 | 40 hours a week is just what the labor unions compromised with, with the factory owners

00:56:14.560 | for like how long can we get someone to stay on an assembly line and put steering wheels

00:56:18.640 | on Model T's before they begin to bleed out of the eyes.

00:56:20.960 | Right?

00:56:21.960 | And they're like, well, the factory owners are like, can't you just do this for 80 hours?

00:56:24.460 | And the unions were like, I think people will die on their feet and like, all right, I guess

00:56:27.460 | 40.

00:56:28.460 | Right?

00:56:29.460 | It has nothing to do with like web development.

00:56:31.280 | It's no magic when it comes to what's the right amount of time to be a writer, to be

00:56:35.240 | doing marketing campaigns or to be working on software dev.

00:56:38.800 | So what matters is, is your employer happy?

00:56:41.520 | Are you making money?

00:56:42.520 | Are people paying you?

00:56:43.520 | I mean, money is a neutral indicator of value.

00:56:44.640 | Are they paying you a good living for what you're doing?

00:56:49.120 | And there's no deceit, right?

00:56:50.560 | You're not tricking them.

00:56:51.560 | You're not tricking them.

00:56:52.560 | Like I making them think you did something, you didn't.

00:56:54.520 | They know what you're doing.

00:56:55.520 | Yeah.

00:56:56.520 | We have these clients, these clients are being handled.

00:56:57.520 | The clients are happy.

00:56:58.520 | Here's your paycheck.

00:56:59.560 | That is a free exchange in a capitalist market.

00:57:02.400 | Your labor is being valued there.

00:57:03.960 | And it's, you know, one of the cool things about these sort of more entrepreneurial knowledge,

00:57:08.040 | sort of remote work, knowledge, work markets is that like the market, it will try to value

00:57:13.200 | you properly.

00:57:14.200 | And it's possible that like, yeah, this job is taking 15 hours a week and I'm making a

00:57:17.920 | good living off it.

00:57:18.920 | That's not a problem.

00:57:20.760 | That just means you're doing something high value for this particular company.

00:57:23.800 | You're bringing skills to the table and it's worth that much money to them.

00:57:26.240 | So I wouldn't worry about that.

00:57:27.900 | If they're unhappy with you, you're not working enough, right?

00:57:32.160 | That's what you should, but they're happy with you.

00:57:33.920 | You're working enough.

00:57:34.920 | Now you're saying, how do I, now what do I want to do with my job?

00:57:37.120 | What do I want to do with my surplus time?

00:57:38.360 | So that's the way I would think about that.

00:57:40.040 | All right.

00:57:41.040 | We have a case study here.

00:57:43.600 | This is where people send in their accounts of applying the type of advice we talked about

00:57:47.160 | on the show to their own lives so we can see what it looks like in practice.

00:57:51.040 | Today's case study comes from Ariel who says, I worked my butt off in grad school and landed

00:57:57.540 | what I thought was a dream job in biotech.

00:58:00.300 | As these things go, the dream job, I'm putting this in scare quotes, is turning into a career

00:58:05.200 | with many flaws and limited growth potential, but I've really been able to improve my productivity

00:58:09.860 | per unit time.

00:58:11.660 | To achieve what I used to accomplish in about 60 hours of, again, scare quotes, work, showing

00:58:16.560 | up at an office for six days a week has turned into about 10 hours of focused work that is

00:58:21.080 | very flexible plus 12 hours of meetings.

00:58:24.200 | I use many of the tools you talk about as a means to be very productive, but work far

00:58:27.600 | less than I used to.

00:58:30.400 | But the workaholic thoughts are a daily struggle.

00:58:32.360 | Anytime I have some free time, I think things like, hey, maybe I should start a science

00:58:35.580 | sub stack in my specialty.

00:58:37.480 | Maybe I should write some fiction.

00:58:39.440 | Shouldn't I be busier?

00:58:41.440 | I would love to be at peace with consuming great books and movies, but the drive to create

00:58:45.080 | is pretty relentless.

00:58:46.760 | I am torn between creating things in my free time that may benefit my career or turn into

00:58:51.160 | a new one or maintaining this fairly stress-free lifestyle while it lasts.

00:58:55.520 | My question is simply why can't knowledge workers be happy just doing less?

00:58:59.400 | If we have the means and the drive, should we all just start creating content in hopes

00:59:03.240 | that people will consume it?

00:59:06.040 | All right.

00:59:07.040 | Well, interesting case study.

00:59:08.440 | I want to really, before we get to the meat of Ariel's embedded question, let's get to

00:59:13.960 | the meat of what happened here that I think is really telling.

00:59:17.880 | He was working 60 hours a week.

00:59:21.720 | And when he stepped back and said, what actually creates value?

00:59:25.640 | And let me focus on that and be careful about my time.

00:59:27.960 | He reduced that to 10 hours of deep work and then 12 hours of performative meetings.

00:59:33.640 | This is true of a lot of jobs.

00:59:36.480 | Pseudoproductivity is different than actual productivity.

00:59:40.240 | Actual activity is a low risk, highly replicatable way of trying to trick people into thinking

00:59:46.440 | that you're valuable.

00:59:48.440 | But again, it is just rarely the case that actual value production requires roughly 40

00:59:53.640 | to 60 hours a week.

00:59:54.640 | That's like an arbitrary number.

00:59:55.640 | So I think this is really telling that in 10 hours of actual work, he did all the stuff

00:59:59.520 | he used to do in 60.

01:00:02.260 | That's what happens when you move from pseudoproductivity to actual value production.

01:00:05.740 | The workaholic question is an interesting one.

01:00:08.120 | I'm actually going to point towards the future.

01:00:10.960 | If all things go well, I believe I have an in-depth episode coming out on Thursday of

01:00:16.680 | this week, which is a conversation on exactly this question, this question of the pursuit

01:00:22.520 | of greatness.

01:00:23.520 | Is this a problem?

01:00:24.820 | Why does it make us uncomfortable?

01:00:26.080 | Why does it also motivate us?

01:00:27.320 | How do we navigate the conflicting constraints and the conflicting demands of trying to be

01:00:32.720 | really good?

01:00:34.760 | We get into that in the upcoming in-depth episode.

01:00:37.320 | So listen to that.

01:00:39.200 | My short take on this, though, is it usually helps—so in this situation, if you're doing

01:00:47.860 | something good, you like your work, you think it's important what you're doing, it usually

01:00:52.940 | helps if you are doing some lifestyle-centric planning.

01:00:57.640 | So what you're working towards with your time in your life is making your lifestyle closer

01:01:02.480 | to things that resonate and away from things that don't.

01:01:05.420 | That might be professional.

01:01:06.420 | It might be like, "Okay, once I've done lifestyle-centric planning, I really need to get to this point

01:01:10.480 | in my job.

01:01:11.480 | So I'm building up a new skill specifically because that'll allow me to move from the

01:01:16.440 | headquarters and work remotely out of Maine because I want to live by blah, blah, blah."

01:01:21.200 | Or it could be completely unrelated to your job.

01:01:22.880 | It gives you a real effort for a real purpose for energy that you're investing outside of

01:01:27.360 | your job, whatever it is, like with your kids or your health or something else that's going

01:01:32.460 | on.

01:01:34.060 | Lifestyle-centric planning is going to give you a direction for these efforts, so it's

01:01:37.920 | not just, "Maybe I'm just reading a lot of big books or maybe I'm just trying to do more

01:01:41.400 | work at my job."

01:01:42.400 | It gives you a reason for why you're doing that.

01:01:44.200 | You have a particular target you're trying to go to.

01:01:46.000 | So I think that might be helpful.

01:01:48.440 | But also, it is okay to just have some seasonality and like, "My job's not that hard right now.

01:01:54.440 | It's kind of nice.

01:01:56.320 | I don't know.

01:01:57.760 | I'm exercising a lot.

01:01:59.240 | I spend a lot more time with my kids.

01:02:00.960 | I'm like involved with a—yeah, I'm writing a fiction writing group just for fun, no stakes.

01:02:06.640 | Something to do."

01:02:07.640 | That's not the worst thing either.

01:02:08.960 | I really think slow productivity, the book Slow Productivity, is perfectly timed for

01:02:12.320 | what you're going through now because it'll continue to have strategies to help you tighten

01:02:16.120 | the strategies you're already doing to keep this job load small.

01:02:19.120 | But the seasonality, you could really take advantage of the ideas of seasonality, the

01:02:23.600 | work at a natural pace principle, and the obsess over quality, like do something really

01:02:26.960 | well for more leverage, like that also is right where you are right now.

01:02:29.880 | So I think that book is really going to resonate.

01:02:31.720 | But I appreciate the case study, 60 hours down the 10 hours of focused work and 12 hours

01:02:35.960 | of meetings.

01:02:36.960 | And I bet in those 12 hours of meetings, 25 minutes of actual useful information, if I

01:02:42.000 | had to guess.

01:02:43.000 | All right, well, we got our final segment coming up where we'll talk about the books

01:02:46.080 | I read.

01:02:47.080 | But first, let's briefly hear from some more sponsors.

01:02:50.280 | I want to talk about our friends at the Defender line of vehicles, the Defender 90, the Defender

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01:03:09.440 | but to maintain the same sort of durability that they've had before, that sort of go anywhere

01:03:18.000 | durability they had before with the comfort of a modern vehicle.

01:03:21.760 | I actually, this is true, Jesse, yesterday, I'm going to load this on my phone because

01:03:26.280 | he's not going to believe me.

01:03:27.280 | I'm going to turn out my phone here.

01:03:29.920 | Our friend Brad Stolberg, who's like my partner in crime when it comes to Defender, sent me

01:03:33.920 | a picture from his neighbor.

01:03:37.120 | Look at that.

01:03:40.440 | So it's a Defender logo illuminated on the sidewalk next to Brad's house.

01:03:46.980 | His neighbors just bought a Defender.

01:03:48.880 | And you can set the car that when it is parked to actually shine down the sort of Defender

01:03:54.000 | logo just sort of discreetly on the ground next to it.

01:03:57.040 | I thought it was really cool.

01:03:58.880 | I am assuming they bought that Defender because they heard me say they should.

01:04:03.040 | But it's a really cool, these cars are everywhere.

01:04:05.400 | Last time we did a read for the Defender, we saw one right outside the HQ.

01:04:08.720 | We're doing a read for the Defender today, and Brad sends me a photo of his neighbor's

01:04:11.800 | just got one.

01:04:12.800 | I don't know.

01:04:13.800 | It's a really cool car, but you can check it out.

01:04:14.800 | If you haven't seen one, go to LandRoverUSA.com, and you can see what these cars look like.

01:04:21.480 | It's an iconic car that's been updated with all of the modern conveniences, drives great

01:04:26.120 | on road and off.

01:04:28.120 | It's kind of like the official car of the Deep Questions podcast right now.

01:04:32.160 | Check that out, LandRoverUSA.com.

01:04:34.880 | You can explore the full Defender lineup when you go to LandRoverUSA.com.

01:04:39.360 | I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify.

01:04:44.120 | Look, if you are going to be selling things online or in a store, you have goods you're

01:04:51.280 | going to exchange for money, you got to be thinking about Shopify.

01:04:55.360 | But the thing that anyone who is in the online space like we are knows is this is what people

01:05:01.040 | use when they want to start selling something.

01:05:03.040 | They go to Shopify.

01:05:04.040 | It makes it very easy to set up.

01:05:05.880 | You get this sort of best-in-class tech.

01:05:08.920 | The conversion rate on sales is high.

01:05:10.560 | The experience is fantastic.

01:05:12.000 | It makes everything simple.

01:05:14.240 | People who set up physical stores, they use Shopify point-of-service systems.

01:05:17.800 | It all just works really well.

01:05:20.120 | It's basically almost like a shorthand in our world, our online world.

01:05:26.280 | It's like, "Yeah, I'm going to start selling these shirts or coins or whatever.

01:05:29.760 | Yeah, I'm going to Shopify it."

01:05:32.080 | It is the technology that people that we know who sell things, it is the technology that

01:05:39.540 | they use.

01:05:40.540 | Statistically, they're the number one checkout on the planet.

01:05:43.720 | Their shop pay feature, so this is what happens when you're checking out.

01:05:49.600 | Sales conversions up to 50%, meaning that way less sharp carts go abandoned and way

01:05:54.560 | more sales get going.

01:05:57.640 | If you're growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever

01:06:01.600 | your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web in your store and their feed and

01:06:05.040 | everywhere in between.

01:06:06.640 | You need Shopify businesses that sell more sell on Shopify.

01:06:11.480 | Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that basically everyone I know who sells things

01:06:16.160 | uses.

01:06:17.500 | You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep, but you have to type

01:06:23.680 | that in all lowercase.

01:06:24.680 | Go to shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today at shopify.com/deep.

01:06:29.600 | All right, let's get on, Jesse, to our final segment.

01:06:34.600 | All right, this is our first episode of March, so I'm going to talk about the books I read

01:06:38.900 | in the short month of February 2025.

01:06:43.960 | The first book I read was Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman.

01:06:48.720 | A couple of people have been talking to me about Rutger.

01:06:51.320 | He's, I believe, Danish, maybe?

01:06:55.080 | Danish philosopher?

01:06:56.080 | He's had a couple of books that have really raised some eyebrows, young guy.

01:06:58.840 | I like the idea of this book, Moral Ambition.

01:07:01.680 | It was basically a call to use your skills to go do things that are useful for the world.

01:07:06.880 | I don't know if it's out yet or not.

01:07:08.400 | I actually read this in galley form.

01:07:10.080 | I was given a blurb for it, but I enjoyed it.

01:07:12.440 | I actually read it very closely, and so I'm including it then on this list.

01:07:17.760 | I admire the ambition of the book, Moral Ambition.

01:07:22.000 | It's sort of nice to have someone say, "Hey, smart person.

01:07:27.040 | Maybe your whole life shouldn't be centered on how do I make the most money in private

01:07:30.840 | equity or something.

01:07:31.840 | Go do things that are good."

01:07:32.840 | I like when people challenge people to stand up, do more.

01:07:37.600 | It's an interesting book.

01:07:38.600 | I like the program that Bregman has going on over there.

01:07:42.720 | Then I read a thriller.

01:07:43.720 | You've got to have some thrillers.

01:07:45.440 | The thriller I read was Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morrell.

01:07:48.600 | David Morrell is a big thriller writer from the '70s and '80s in particular, maybe best

01:07:53.720 | known for Rambo First Blood.

01:07:55.960 | It was First Blood that became the first Rambo movie, which was actually one of the very

01:07:59.600 | first modern form action movies.

01:08:02.280 | I rewatched it a couple of years ago.

01:08:03.640 | It's worth watching.

01:08:04.640 | Actually, that's a very cool movie.

01:08:05.640 | It's Sly Stallone, the first one.

01:08:09.200 | The later Rambo movies is where he has the giant biceps and the headband and is firing

01:08:15.520 | exploding arrows.

01:08:17.160 | The first movie was not like that.

01:08:19.280 | It's at the tail end of the new Hollywood '70s, and it is a smaller movie.

01:08:26.680 | The premise of the first Rambo movie is that he's a Vietnam vet who's suffering post-traumatic

01:08:32.920 | stress and walking through this small town where he's being hassled by the sheriff, like,

01:08:38.280 | "Hey, hippie.

01:08:39.280 | Get out of here."

01:08:40.280 | He's really struggling, so he's unresponsive, and he cracks.

01:08:46.480 | All of this training that he had as a special forces guy in Vietnam all comes out.

01:08:52.640 | He goes back in autopilot and breaks someone's nose and stabs the other and flees into the

01:08:58.480 | woods.

01:08:59.480 | They're going after there to catch him.

01:09:00.960 | It was a book about war and its effects and its after effects, and the book has this real

01:09:05.160 | tragic ending.

01:09:06.240 | The movie is cool, though, because of the famous scene where the colonel who trained

01:09:09.200 | Rambo comes to where they're trying to find him in the forest.

01:09:16.400 | I think it's Brian Dennehy who plays the police chief.

01:09:19.040 | The police chief is like, "Colonel, we don't need you here.

01:09:22.520 | We get it.

01:09:23.520 | You're worried about your man.

01:09:24.520 | You don't want him to get hurt, but he killed one of us.

01:09:27.680 | We're going to go get him."

01:09:28.680 | The colonel says, "I don't think you understand.

01:09:31.320 | I'm not here to save Rambo from you.

01:09:33.600 | I'm here to save you from Rambo."

01:09:35.080 | It's this kind of classic line, and he does kill a lot of them.

01:09:38.760 | Different book by David Murrell.

01:09:40.440 | Another classic one, Brotherhood of the Rose, is about these two orphans that have been

01:09:44.000 | trained by the CIA to be assassins, and then they're kind of turning on them and trying

01:09:49.760 | to kill them off to make them scapegoats, and they're being chased.

01:09:54.280 | Classic thriller.

01:09:55.280 | I thought it was really good.

01:09:57.120 | I was hearing about Murrell from Jack Carr, the ex-Navy SEAL novelist who wrote Terminalist

01:10:01.280 | series of books.

01:10:02.280 | He always talked about David Murrell, was a real inspiration for him, and so I had fun

01:10:06.400 | with it.

01:10:07.400 | Then I read How Dante Can Save Your Life by Rod Dreher.

01:10:12.520 | It's an account of Rod Dreher going through a tough period in his life, and Dante's, reading

01:10:22.640 | Dante, the Inferno, Paradiso, and I forgot the one in the middle, but the whole belcanto,

01:10:30.320 | the Grand Comedia.

01:10:31.320 | What do they call it?

01:10:32.320 | The Comedia?

01:10:33.320 | Comedia?

01:10:34.320 | The Grand?

01:10:35.320 | I don't know what the right name is for the three books of Dante.

01:10:39.440 | Look that up.

01:10:40.440 | Oh, well, yeah, I'm getting that wrong, and I read a whole book about it, but basically

01:10:44.880 | he reads Dante, and it brings him out of this funk that he's in, and so there's some cool

01:10:49.800 | history of Dante, and then the lessons he drew out of it.

01:10:53.040 | There's also some memoir going on.

01:10:55.000 | He moves back to a small town in Louisiana where he grew up, and things don't go well,

01:10:59.080 | and he has a psychological crisis that leads to a physical...

01:11:03.200 | Divine comedy?

01:11:04.200 | The divine comedy, yeah.

01:11:05.200 | There's an Italian name for it, right?

01:11:07.080 | That's what I was trying to say, the Comedia, which is not how you say it, right?

01:11:11.880 | But I'm clearly a Dante scholar.

01:11:14.520 | I haven't read the full Divine Comedy, but I have a pretty good translation.

01:11:19.200 | The Penguin...

01:11:20.200 | La Divina Comedia.

01:11:21.200 | Yeah, that's what I was thinking about, La Divina Comedia.

01:11:25.120 | So it's pretty good.

01:11:26.120 | I don't, I mean, honestly, this is probably not fair.

01:11:29.880 | I'm not the right person to read memoirs.

01:11:32.560 | I just, you know, Dreher came across as somewhat self, as the reader, he feels sort of self-absorbed,

01:11:38.600 | which I guess is just what happens in a memoir, but like his whole life was just centered

01:11:42.680 | in this period on like, I can't get past that, like, my family is slighting me or disapproving

01:11:48.240 | of me or whatever.

01:11:49.240 | And at some point you're reading the book and you're like, man, get over it.

01:11:53.080 | There's a little bit of that going on, which is not fair.

01:11:54.760 | But anyways, he ends up okay.

01:11:56.280 | All right.

01:11:57.280 | I also read Buzzsaw by Jesse Daugherty.

01:12:01.520 | This is the, Jesse Daugherty was the beat reporter for the Nationals in 2019, and this

01:12:05.960 | was the book he wrote about the Nationals winning the World Series.

01:12:09.440 | And I went to see him speak at the, there's a new bookstore in Bethesda.

01:12:13.840 | So I went to see him speak and Andrew Golden and Spencer Nussbaum were there, they're the

01:12:17.440 | current beat reporters for the Nationals.

01:12:18.800 | And it was kind of cool to have like a lot of baseball fans get together and just sort

01:12:22.600 | of talk about it.

01:12:23.880 | And I felt bad for him because his book, Buzzsaw, came out March, 2020.

01:12:31.600 | This was the only book event he has done for that book is in February, 2025.

01:12:35.960 | So I was like, this is the only event you got, but he had a full house.

01:12:39.040 | So I felt, I felt really good about it.

01:12:40.240 | So I read the book.

01:12:41.240 | It was great.

01:12:42.240 | I was like, oh man, memory lane, like remembering that season and his style of writing the book

01:12:46.760 | as he explained it is like, there's a, this is his editor at Simon & Schuster told him

01:12:50.280 | this, your book's on a highway that's getting towards them winning, right?

01:12:53.000 | You're going through the season, but you're going to have off ramps along the way where

01:12:56.160 | we get backstories of like, oh, like how did this player come into this system or where,

01:13:00.120 | what's the backstory on this like head of scouting.

01:13:01.960 | So you got all these like side stories about the Nationals as well as you had the through

01:13:06.000 | line of the season.

01:13:07.000 | And it was a lot of fun.

01:13:08.000 | It was, it was a better than I thought it would be.

01:13:11.240 | Jesse's a really good writer.

01:13:13.320 | Finally I read Chris Hayes' new book, The Siren's Call.

01:13:15.720 | This is his big new split.

01:13:16.720 | Chris Hayes from MSNBC is big new splashy book about attention, the attention economy.

01:13:21.200 | This book didn't necessarily have like a big new thesis.

01:13:24.240 | It's doing well.

01:13:25.240 | It debuted at number one.

01:13:26.240 | Like Chris is pretty famous and he was on all the shows.

01:13:29.120 | It doesn't have like a big new splashy thesis, but it's very smartly written.

01:13:31.880 | It's just like a smart idea book.

01:13:33.480 | There's no advice in it, but it's just let me try to understand.

01:13:38.400 | And he's, he, his research assistants are busy.

01:13:41.440 | There are a lot of things and examples they're citing.

01:13:44.000 | And I thought it was like a really well written book.

01:13:46.240 | Chris is a smart writer.

01:13:47.720 | We talk about these issues a lot on this show.

01:13:49.360 | If you want kind of like a smart cultural critic take on attention, the attention economy,

01:13:53.800 | this was a good one.

01:13:54.800 | He's a good writer.

01:13:55.800 | All right.

01:13:56.800 | So that's what I read.

01:13:58.080 | What's this picture you've given me here, Jesse?

01:13:59.760 | It's a Sega Genesis game.

01:14:01.600 | Oh, I didn't know we were going to talk about that.

01:14:04.080 | I'm going to hold it up, hold it up to the camera.

01:14:07.480 | It is a Sega, did a listener send this to us?

01:14:10.360 | Yeah.

01:14:11.360 | It's a Sega Genesis game that has the title Sigma Insidious.

01:14:14.760 | Yeah.

01:14:15.760 | Did we?

01:14:16.760 | Okay.

01:14:17.760 | So this is about us talking about both these terms.

01:14:19.200 | Oh, I have, I have your text here.

01:14:21.280 | All right.

01:14:22.280 | Here's what the listener said.

01:14:24.680 | I was just listening to episode 331 of the Deep Questions podcast where the two words

01:14:28.040 | Sigma and Insidious have taken a prominent role, which made me think about how they perfectly

01:14:31.480 | align with the two central philosophies of the deep life.

01:14:33.800 | Putting these two words together, Sigma Insidious makes me think of an old RPG game where the

01:14:38.800 | hero has to fight the heroes of shallowness and distraction by accumulating career capital

01:14:42.640 | in order to live out and maintain his ever evolving ideal lifestyle.

01:14:46.120 | I like that.

01:14:47.120 | I love the Sega Genesis reference because that's like our childhood.

01:14:49.880 | Yeah.

01:14:50.880 | That's like 1994 to 1997 so that's definitely a deep cut.

01:14:55.200 | I'm going to be honest though, I don't remember what Sigma means.

01:14:58.480 | We talked about it, I guess.

01:14:59.560 | I don't remember what it means.

01:15:00.560 | He describes it in the second paragraph if you want to read it.

01:15:03.520 | Describes an individual who puts his energy into pursuit of real value rather than relying

01:15:08.160 | on empty flashiness.

01:15:09.160 | Oh, I like that.

01:15:10.160 | All right, man.

01:15:11.160 | Sigma.

01:15:12.160 | It's like the big term with young kids.

01:15:13.880 | So it's good.

01:15:14.880 | Yeah.

01:15:15.880 | Did you know?

01:15:16.880 | Cool.

01:15:17.880 | Did you know Ohio is like a negative term?

01:15:18.880 | Yes.

01:15:19.880 | I learned it from my kids recently.

01:15:21.620 | So Sigma is not Ohio.

01:15:23.160 | Right.

01:15:24.160 | I still can't figure out if based is good or bad.

01:15:26.720 | I hadn't heard of that.

01:15:27.720 | Based?

01:15:28.720 | It's a thing.

01:15:29.720 | That's based.

01:15:30.720 | That's the first I heard.

01:15:32.600 | You're clearly not Sigma.

01:15:33.600 | I know.

01:15:34.600 | Guys, just so you know, Ohio.

01:15:37.720 | A Sigma is no about based except for I don't know what it means.

01:15:41.480 | All right.

01:15:42.480 | Every 10 second interval that I'm talking about youth lingo is like a thousand listeners

01:15:47.880 | taking their AirPods off and throwing them.

01:15:50.760 | So we should probably wrap it up there, but I appreciate that Sega Genesis reference.

01:15:54.040 | This was from Alex.

01:15:55.040 | Thank you for that.

01:15:56.040 | All right, everyone.

01:15:57.040 | Thanks for listening.

01:15:58.040 | We'll be back next week with another episode.

01:15:59.960 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:16:02.180 | If you like today's episode, you might also like episode 339 titled Let Brandon Cook,

01:16:09.840 | which is about building a company around letting people do what they do best.

01:16:13.600 | The brand there, of course, is a reference to the very same Brandon Sanderson I talked

01:16:17.800 | about in today's deep dive.

01:16:19.160 | Check it out.

01:16:20.160 | I think you'll like it.

01:16:21.160 | Everything in our company is built around let Brandon cook and take away from Brandon

01:16:28.240 | anything that he doesn't have to think about.

How To Actually Achieve Your Dream Life (Evidence-Based Goal Setting Formula) | Cal Newport

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