Pursuing Pain, Not Pleasure: How Laziness & Comfort Cripples You

00:00:00.000 | So I've been thinking a lot recently about discipline.

00:00:03.320 | Now I don't mean punishing other people.

00:00:07.720 | I also don't mean those performative shows on social media where you brag about how

00:00:14.120 | many miles you can run or how many minutes you can survive a cold plunge.

00:00:18.680 | I mean, instead the quiet contentment of consistently making progress on

00:00:25.240 | things that are hard right now, but move you towards meaningful goals in the future.

00:00:30.720 | Now, this is the problem with talking about discipline is that it is hard

00:00:34.680 | to get the definition straight.

00:00:36.360 | Uh, there's a lot of confusion about exactly what we mean.

00:00:39.480 | So I wanted to actually do something different with our

00:00:41.600 | conversation about discipline today.

00:00:43.280 | I want to start with a concrete case study.

00:00:46.280 | Excuse me.

00:00:47.400 | This is a question posed in a recent Reddit thread on the life

00:00:53.160 | pro tips, Reddit, uh, community that I think is going to make concrete what we

00:00:59.440 | mean when we talk about discipline.

00:01:01.200 | All right.

00:01:01.400 | So this is a real Reddit thread.

00:01:02.600 | I want to read here to prime our discussion.

00:01:04.440 | Now, this is not a work school related post.

00:01:08.320 | I generally don't have any major problems with procrastination or meeting deadlines.

00:01:12.520 | I'm structured in how I work and get things done when they are expected of me.

00:01:16.280 | However, in my personal life, I always seem to put off things I want to do in

00:01:22.680 | favor of playing video games, watching movies, or scrolling on social media.

00:01:26.160 | I love painting and being creative, but rarely make time to do it.

00:01:30.600 | Even though it does seem to make me very happy when I do, I tend to skip social

00:01:35.720 | occasions because I want to stay home and play some video games, even though I

00:01:38.560 | always enjoy myself when I do push myself to go, I've always wanted to learn a new

00:01:42.840 | language, but when it comes down to it, I don't make the time to do it without

00:01:46.320 | external pressure.

00:01:47.080 | I choose an easy dopamine hit 95% of the time.

00:01:50.880 | Any advice, advice on how to make it easier to choose the things that take a

00:01:55.800 | bit more effort up front, but will make me happier in the long run.

00:01:59.440 | All right.

00:02:00.760 | So I like this because it's concrete.

00:02:02.120 | This is what we mean by discipline.

00:02:04.880 | Being able to consistently work on your art or learning the language or going to

00:02:11.480 | the meaningful social event.

00:02:12.640 | When in the moment, it would be much easier just to play video games.

00:02:16.040 | And of course we could replace video games here with look at your phone, get

00:02:20.040 | lost on YouTube, drink, whatever it is, eat, distracting food, get lost in

00:02:26.360 | binging on dumb shows online, whatever it is, we all have our own version of video

00:02:32.040 | games.

00:02:32.400 | So this is what I want to talk about.

00:02:35.080 | I want to talk about discipline through the lens of this specific example, and I

00:02:38.920 | want to get practical here.

00:02:40.560 | I want to get practical advice for how to improve your discipline.

00:02:43.200 | I'm going to use this case study as a guide and divide my answer into two

00:02:47.920 | parts, because we see there's two parts to the question.

00:02:50.600 | So the first part is how do you resist playing that proverbial video game so

00:02:55.200 | often?

00:02:55.600 | How do you resist the lure of the non-discipline shallow?

00:02:58.520 | So we'll start by talking about exactly that challenge.

00:03:00.720 | Then part two of this question will be part two of this segment.

00:03:04.080 | We'll talk about how do you make the deep, meaningful effort to learning a

00:03:08.920 | language, to working on your art?

00:03:10.360 | How do you make that more appealing and more consistent?

00:03:12.320 | So how do you reduce the negative?

00:03:14.240 | And then how do you increase the positive?

00:03:17.600 | That's the way we're going to structure our discussion of discipline today.

00:03:20.480 | All right, let's start with this first part, resisting the proverbial video

00:03:24.360 | game.

00:03:24.800 | I want to do a little bit of neuroscience here, but not too much.

00:03:27.800 | And I'm going to do it with some trepidation.

00:03:29.600 | It's easy to get overconfident in summarizing neuroscience, which is in my

00:03:34.480 | experience, always much more complicated than you think.

00:03:36.840 | So we're going to, with some caveats here, give a little bit of neuroscience

00:03:42.120 | we're going to use to generate our advice.

00:03:44.640 | All right, I'm going to read a quote from a 2010 survey article that appeared in

00:03:48.960 | the journal Neuron that talks about how our brain deals with the prospect of an

00:03:55.280 | immediate reward.

00:03:56.720 | All right, so I'm quoting now.

00:03:58.440 | "Most goal-directed motivation, even the seeking of food or water, is learned.

00:04:03.960 | It is largely through selective reinforcement of initially random

00:04:07.200 | movements that the behavior of the neonate comes to be both directed at and

00:04:12.080 | motivated by appropriate stimuli in the environment.

00:04:15.520 | For the most part, one's motivation is to return to the rewards experienced in

00:04:20.160 | the path and to the cues that marked a way to such rewards.

00:04:23.440 | It is primarily through its role in the selective reinforcement of associations

00:04:28.080 | between rewards and otherwise neural stimuli that dopamine is important for

00:04:32.040 | such motivation.

00:04:32.960 | Once stimulus reward associations have been formed, they can remain potent for

00:04:37.560 | some time."

00:04:39.240 | This is what you're dealing with when you see that phone or the video game is

00:04:42.800 | lying there, and you feel that strong attraction to play it.

00:04:45.960 | It's a type of short-term planning that's sometimes called reflexive planning,

00:04:50.320 | where your brain has hard-coded this stimuli, seeing the video game controller

00:04:56.840 | in the living room, seeing the phone in my hand or on the table next to me.

00:05:02.120 | The stimuli is directly connected to a reward that we've experienced in the

00:05:06.960 | past. And through having this immediate reward occur enough times, we've had

00:05:13.160 | dopamine mediated reinforcement learning, which means we've meant to connect now

00:05:16.720 | our neurons will connect that stimulus with that reward.

00:05:19.000 | So when we see the stimulus, we get a neurochemical flush that is experienced

00:05:23.760 | as motivation to do the activity.

00:05:25.320 | It's very tempting to pick up the phone, it's very tempting to pick up the

00:05:28.680 | controller, it's very tempting to go pour that drink.

00:05:31.800 | So how do we reduce this urge?

00:05:34.200 | How do we reduce the urge to do the immediate but shallow?

00:05:37.000 | All right, I have three things to suggest here that are concrete.

00:05:39.320 | Two of them are obvious, one of them is a little bit more subtle.

00:05:41.440 | Number one, reduce the stimuli, right?

00:05:46.480 | So we can actually look at just not encountering that stimuli to which we've

00:05:51.880 | learned the connection to the reward, not encountering that stimuli as much.

00:05:55.480 | This is where, for example, on the show, we often talk about the phone foyer

00:06:00.080 | method, where you don't keep your phone with you when you're at home, it's in

00:06:03.080 | another room, so you're not seeing the phone.

00:06:06.200 | It could be taking apart your video game system when you're not playing, putting

00:06:11.080 | the controllers with the actual box into a closet somewhere, not just having it

00:06:15.880 | out and being easy to play.

00:06:17.720 | You can also do this by taking, for example, applications off your phone so

00:06:21.880 | that when you do pick up your phone to do something like listen to a podcast, you

00:06:25.040 | don't see the app for TikTok right there.

00:06:26.760 | All this is about stimuli reduction.

00:06:28.880 | It makes sense in the light of this basic neuroscience that we just reviewed,

00:06:33.200 | if you don't encounter the stimuli, there is no trigger of that neurochemical

00:06:39.560 | urge to do the action.

00:06:41.200 | All right, well, here's the second obvious piece of advice.

00:06:44.360 | Encode related, but alternative rewards.

00:06:50.000 | So teach your brain to enjoy through reinforcement learning, other things that

00:06:55.840 | are rewarding that are better for you or more meaningful or less time consuming

00:07:00.800 | than the thing that you're worried about.

00:07:03.360 | This is very common with, uh, food and drug related motivational centers, you

00:07:09.200 | know, uh, Hey, I'm used to pouring this drink when I get home from work, but I'm

00:07:14.200 | trying to stop drinking.

00:07:15.320 | So you have like an alternative activity you start doing when you get home from

00:07:19.000 | work, just rewarding in its own way, but doesn't involve alcohol.

00:07:21.800 | Uh, and then you begin to really enjoy that other routine.

00:07:24.720 | So it's still like I come home and I go for a jog while listening to music.

00:07:29.200 | I really like, or like a fun podcast and your mind learns to really like that too.

00:07:33.480 | And so now the stimuli of coming home has this other association that's

00:07:36.960 | going to be, uh, less harmful.

00:07:39.160 | So you can encode alternative rewards just through pure

00:07:43.080 | engineered exposure to them.

00:07:45.360 | So there's other stimuli that when you get that stimuli, that would normally

00:07:48.760 | make you do the thing you don't want to do.

00:07:50.120 | You're motivated to do things you do want to do.

00:07:52.440 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:07:54.000 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you

00:07:58.320 | need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of

00:08:03.080 | Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:08:05.560 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:08:11.240 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:08:16.560 | I know you're going to like it.

00:08:18.160 | Check it out.

00:08:19.240 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:08:20.600 | The final piece of advice here is going to be more subtle.

00:08:25.800 | You become comfortable with being uncomfortable.

00:08:30.080 | Now here I'm drawing from something I read from the, uh, the, the former

00:08:37.280 | professor and, and writer, Michael Easter and his book, The Comfort Crisis,

00:08:42.480 | which I read last month.

00:08:43.360 | We talked about that in the book roundup a couple of weeks ago.

00:08:45.920 | In his book, Michael Easter talked about this pioneering nutritionist

00:08:51.600 | named Trevor Kashi, K-A-S-H-E-Y, who has had fantastic success with helping

00:08:57.760 | people lose weight and get, um, into better shape.

00:09:01.280 | So I'm going to quote a little bit here from Easter.

00:09:04.920 | This is actually a summary Easter wrote of this chapter of his book.

00:09:07.520 | Let me quote a little bit about Kashi, um, from Easter himself.

00:09:11.440 | And then I'm going to apply this to what we're talking about here.

00:09:13.480 | So in the book, this is Easter talking about his own book.

00:09:18.480 | In the book, Kashi suggests finding calorie negative ways of coping with stress.

00:09:24.440 | His number one recommendation is walking.

00:09:27.200 | It relieves stress, put distance between you and the temptation

00:09:29.680 | to eat and burns calories.

00:09:30.760 | It also gives you the opportunity to think about why you want to eat.

00:09:33.040 | Developed by, uh, Trevor Kashi nutrition plan first comes down to this and

00:09:37.720 | awareness well before he addresses eating specific foods to reduce body fat.

00:09:41.800 | So what is Trevor Kashi doing?

00:09:43.520 | He's saying, why are people, you know, part of why people are eating more than

00:09:47.880 | they should is because they are, um, they're feeling these motivate dopamine

00:09:55.640 | derived or mediated motivational urges to, to eat the bad food, right?

00:10:02.360 | The stimuli is I'm stressed.

00:10:03.920 | The response I've been trained for is, uh, grab the chips.

00:10:08.520 | And so what Kashi does, he said, forget at first talking about what you should

00:10:13.480 | eat or why chips are bad, or like what the right amount of food to eat is.

00:10:16.840 | Kashi says, no, what we got to start with is that exact response.

00:10:19.440 | Why are you eating the stuff?

00:10:21.040 | You know, you shouldn't eat.

00:10:21.840 | Well, you have this particular response.

00:10:23.880 | So let's deal with that response.

00:10:25.480 | This is probably for a lot of people at stress, but for other people, it's

00:10:28.000 | boredom or whatever, uh, or sociality, social context, but you have these

00:10:32.040 | stimuli as you're connecting with certain types of eating and he says, well, we're

00:10:35.320 | going to deal directly with that.

00:10:36.640 | And that's where he recommends like walking, for example, you have other

00:10:40.040 | things you do in response to those stimuli, but one of the, the, where the

00:10:43.360 | advice ends up, and this is how Michael Easter summarizes this in his book.

00:10:46.720 | Where the advice ends up is ultimately too, you have to just be okay.

00:10:51.200 | With the discomfort of your feelings, motivation to do this thing.

00:10:55.240 | And you don't, and just be more okay than most people are with like, yeah,

00:10:59.560 | that feels uncomfortable with food.

00:11:02.000 | It's often this, uh, dopamine mediated motivation response is felt as a feeling

00:11:07.440 | of hunger, as well as a sort of attraction.

00:11:10.440 | It's like, it's hunger and attraction.

00:11:12.200 | And Kashi says, it's just be a little bit.

00:11:14.360 | Okay.

00:11:14.600 | Being a little bit hungry, you know, because see part of what happens, this

00:11:18.800 | is a big thesis from Easter's book.

00:11:20.600 | Part of what happens is we have a very comfortable life.

00:11:23.160 | Um, we lose all comfort with discomfort.

00:11:26.160 | So we're really susceptible to these motivational or motivational short

00:11:30.400 | term motivational system, pushing us towards things, because if we resist

00:11:33.360 | that, it feels uncomfortable and we flee discomfort.

00:11:35.280 | He's just said, what if we just get more comfortable with being.

00:11:37.680 | A little bit uncomfortable.

00:11:39.280 | And if you work with Trevor Kashi, it's part of what he works with you on is he

00:11:42.320 | says, uh, let's get used to being a little bit hungry, nothing bad's going to happen.

00:11:47.440 | It's just a feeling you can separate yourself from that feeling.

00:11:51.080 | You'll eat again soon.

00:11:52.800 | You're not going to starve.

00:11:54.240 | It's not the hunger pains of actual fasting.

00:11:56.960 | You'll be okay.

00:11:58.200 | And in the book, Easter talks about, uh, working with Kashi and how like over

00:12:03.320 | time, he just got more comfortable with like a certain parts of the day.

00:12:06.160 | I feel kind of a little more hungrier and then I'm okay.

00:12:09.280 | It's not the worst thing in the world that applies to almost any of these

00:12:12.240 | short-term motivational system cues.

00:12:14.040 | It feels uncomfortable when you don't pick up your phone, because not only

00:12:18.600 | does the system make you motivated to pick it up, but it motivates it by making

00:12:22.760 | your current situation feel uncomfortable.

00:12:24.600 | I mean, if we really get subtle about what are these motivational impulses feel like.

00:12:29.400 | It's often presented to us as a solution to a current discomfort, right?

00:12:36.240 | How does our body motivate us to eat?

00:12:37.720 | It makes us feel the discomfort of hunger.

00:12:40.800 | And it lets us imagine that picking up that food is going

00:12:43.000 | to make that hunger go away.

00:12:44.040 | Well, the same thing happens with the video games or with the phones.

00:12:47.000 | Uh, we feel the discomfort of, uh, boredom or stress.

00:12:52.840 | And we have the senses.

00:12:54.120 | Like when we pick that thing up, that's going to go away.

00:12:56.760 | It's the alleviation of the discomfort.

00:12:58.400 | Uh, drinkers will tell you about this, that the motivational system, uh, drug

00:13:04.320 | users as well, the motivational system that kicks in, that makes you want to

00:13:07.720 | like pick up the, that drink or the drug, um, how you feel in the moment.

00:13:11.720 | What does that anticipation feel like?

00:13:13.080 | You actually start feeling terrible.

00:13:14.440 | You feel bad in the moment.

00:13:15.640 | Like you'll get stressed or feel there'll be a physical discomfort that builds up

00:13:20.360 | that your mind can then say, this will be alleviated.

00:13:22.560 | That's very powerful.

00:13:23.400 | It'll be alleviated by doing that.

00:13:24.720 | So we have to become more comfortable with discomfort to, again, succeed

00:13:30.080 | with not letting the short-term motivational system just rule

00:13:32.720 | what's going on in our life.

00:13:35.120 | That's part one, resisting the proverbial video game.

00:13:37.800 | Part two in this example is how do you, uh, motivate yourself

00:13:43.040 | to do something harder instead?

00:13:44.400 | So we want to make the distraction less appealing.

00:13:47.440 | We want to make the target more meaningful activity, more appealing.

00:13:51.760 | A little bit more neuroscience here is going to help.

00:13:55.640 | But again, I'm going to be very, very high level in particular.

00:13:58.000 | What I'm going to do here is read a sentence from the press release.

00:14:03.680 | Describing a brand new paper that appeared in nature neuroscience, a very

00:14:07.000 | interesting kind of landmark paper on long-term planning, but the press release

00:14:11.040 | had a good summary by one of the authors about how does our brain generate

00:14:17.200 | motivation for doing things that are not going to give us an immediate reward.

00:14:21.080 | But, you know, down the line may give us a reward.

00:14:25.320 | It's, it's a short-term thing that's hard, but it'll help us make progress

00:14:29.360 | towards a long-term good thing.

00:14:30.960 | So let me read this quote from the press release surrounding this paper.

00:14:33.680 | The prefrontal cortex acts as a simulator, mentally testing out possible actions

00:14:41.240 | using a cognitive map stored in the hippocampus explains Marcella Mattar,

00:14:46.960 | an assistant professor at New York university's department of psychology

00:14:50.560 | and one of the papers authors.

00:14:52.560 | So what happens here is you read more in this paper and the paper is not

00:14:56.800 | just about how this works.

00:14:57.680 | It builds a model for it.

00:14:58.800 | But what you learn in this paper is that you have the prefrontal cortex and

00:15:02.760 | the hippocampus work together when coming up with long-term plans and

00:15:06.960 | having them motivate future behavior.

00:15:09.680 | So the prefrontal cortex is simulating.

00:15:12.680 | Where is this going to lead us down the line?

00:15:15.480 | This thing we want to do now, and it relies on the hippocampus, which is

00:15:19.880 | where memories are stored to help evaluate the simulation outcomes.

00:15:24.320 | So it uses your past experience to understand like, okay, so if we end

00:15:29.040 | up over here, is that good or bad?

00:15:30.720 | And your hippocampus has stored these experiences or memories or

00:15:33.920 | exposures to what it means to be quote unquote over there.

00:15:36.560 | And you can sort of evaluate the value of the different things you're simulating.

00:15:40.280 | So you have this map and you have this memory store and together you can do

00:15:43.920 | these simulations of the future.

00:15:45.400 | And if you find a good path forward, that's possible and leads to a place

00:15:49.600 | that you associate with good things, you get motivation.

00:15:52.760 | And that's how you make progress on the longer-term goals.

00:15:59.120 | So how do we make that easier?

00:16:01.400 | Well, again, I have three pieces of advice to offer here, two more

00:16:04.600 | practical and one that's going to be a little bit more subtle.

00:16:06.760 | So the first practical advice, drawing from this neuroscience,

00:16:10.600 | improve your cognitive map.

00:16:13.320 | So what I mean by that is improve your understanding of how the thing

00:16:19.520 | you're doing actually works so that your brain knows this is how people learn a

00:16:24.800 | language, this is how people get to this particular level of being an artist,

00:16:29.880 | which is very appealing to me.

00:16:31.360 | This is how people actually become professional genre novel writers.

00:16:36.240 | This is what's actually involved.

00:16:37.800 | The more detailed your cognitive map, the better simulations your brain can do.

00:16:43.480 | So this requires you learn about the thing, whatever this goal is, you got

00:16:49.080 | to rabbit hole and obsess on it for a little bit.

00:16:50.960 | You read the forums and books and you, you watch videos.

00:16:55.520 | This is the fun part, right?

00:16:56.600 | You go deep on Reddit threads.

00:16:58.040 | Like you really learn this world, like how it actually works.

00:17:03.000 | This doesn't require a lot of effort, but it makes your

00:17:06.400 | cognitive map much more rich.

00:17:08.040 | All right.

00:17:09.840 | Number two, boost what's stored in your hippocampus.

00:17:13.480 | So now you have a better understanding of how this world works.

00:17:17.560 | You need to store in your hippocampus, lots of examples of this thing succeeding

00:17:24.840 | that are very positive and very inspiring.

00:17:26.920 | So you have to fill your hippocampus with these things, these memories that when

00:17:32.000 | your prefrontal cortex is trying to evaluate a particular path forward, it

00:17:37.440 | will look to your hippocampus, bring for these examples and say, Oh, that's great.

00:17:40.560 | That feels good.

00:17:41.320 | So we do want to do this.

00:17:42.400 | So this means exposing yourself constantly to positive examples of people who have

00:17:47.960 | succeeded with the thing you're interested in, examples that inspire you or motivate

00:17:51.480 | you, and you want to have these as richly encoded as possible.

00:17:54.760 | So video is great.

00:17:55.880 | Audio is great.

00:17:56.840 | Read, meet people in person, and you want to essentially fill your hippocampus

00:18:02.200 | with these positive examples.

00:18:03.680 | And this is why when people are trying to get, you know, stronger in a certain

00:18:08.120 | type of way, like they're constantly watching influencers online and YouTube

00:18:11.840 | videos and talking to other people who are in really good shape, this is not

00:18:16.120 | some sort of narcissism or vainness.

00:18:18.960 | They're actually doing something really smart here.

00:18:21.120 | They're filling their hippocampus with very strong examples that resonate.

00:18:25.440 | This is going to allow this whole simulation system to work better.

00:18:28.600 | So master the field, like really understand the field and keep exposing

00:18:33.040 | yourselves to examples of what you really want to do.

00:18:35.280 | So like, let's be specific.

00:18:37.120 | Let's say, you know, you're, you have this long-term thing you want to make

00:18:40.560 | disciplined action on that's like writing a genre novel.

00:18:44.200 | You got to really understand how writing really works.

00:18:47.600 | Talk to real writers, read interviews with real writers.

00:18:50.080 | How did they get good enough to write this first book?

00:18:53.120 | What was actually involved in, you know, doing this?

00:18:56.480 | What are the steps?

00:18:57.480 | What marks a good book from a bad book?

00:18:59.560 | Did they have to go to writing workshops as part of this?

00:19:02.880 | Whatever you need, you really learn to feel.

00:19:04.320 | Talk to an agent, talk to other people who have failed at this.

00:19:07.960 | Why did they fail?

00:19:08.800 | Join a writer's group, right?

00:19:10.320 | And then you have to constantly be exposing yourself to the

00:19:12.520 | most exciting examples possible.

00:19:14.280 | Watch those videos of Brandon Sanderson's underground layer.

00:19:18.560 | I'm like, man, imagine like a fantasy writer who like has this underground

00:19:21.840 | layer, read interviews with writers where it's really inspiring when they

00:19:25.520 | talk about where they go to write and what their life has been like while

00:19:28.640 | they're doing it, this is all really important to when it comes time for

00:19:33.960 | you to actually sit down and write, you're going to be more likely

00:19:35.960 | to be motivated to do it.

00:19:37.000 | All right.

00:19:38.560 | So my third piece of advice here is going to be the subtle one.

00:19:40.800 | Distinguish this unique flavor of motivation.

00:19:46.640 | There's not something I've heard written about or talked about a lot, but it's

00:19:50.920 | something I really believe is true.

00:19:53.640 | There is overlap in the motivational systems involved when we're talking

00:19:59.480 | about these short-term rewards and the long-term planning, there's overlap.

00:20:03.920 | For example, dopamine is a mediating neurochemical in both of these.

00:20:09.640 | The striatum in the brain is involved in both of these, but they're

00:20:12.960 | not the exact same systems, right?

00:20:15.720 | They don't unfold.

00:20:17.120 | Resulting motivation does not unfold from a neuroscientific

00:20:22.200 | perspective, the exact same way.

00:20:23.920 | Like when it comes to the short-term stimulus response, you have particular

00:20:28.400 | neurons that are probably, or clusters of neurons that are connected to this

00:20:32.480 | exact stimulus that can fire pretty quickly when they recognize what that is

00:20:36.320 | and get a direct motivational response.

00:20:38.760 | Obviously, when you're doing long-term planning, the neuroscientific

00:20:42.680 | machinations here are way more complex.

00:20:44.560 | You have the prefrontal cortex, you have the hippocampus, the signals

00:20:47.600 | that produce is going to be different.

00:20:49.200 | The motivation response itself is going to be different.

00:20:52.160 | If we're going to make this less neuroscience and more practical, another

00:20:55.400 | way of saying it is that motivation will feel different.

00:20:57.720 | There's a subtlety to it.

00:21:00.800 | There's a difference between the urge I feel to pick up my phone and the urge I

00:21:04.880 | feel to start writing after I've carefully primed my cognitive maps and hippocampus.

00:21:08.920 | It's more subtle.

00:21:10.400 | It has more cognitive terroir.

00:21:13.680 | It's connected to sort of images of yourself and your future.

00:21:17.920 | It doesn't generate a huge discomfort that you need to relieve.

00:21:22.120 | It's more easily ignorable, but the signal seems somehow more authentic.

00:21:27.040 | Like it's getting to something more about your core self.

00:21:29.520 | You have to just learn to be a connoisseur of that more subtle, nuanced, authentic

00:21:33.600 | feeling of motivation that comes for these long-term goals that you're pursuing.

00:21:38.320 | And just get to really like that.

00:21:40.680 | And really separate it from the discomfort of the much more short-term

00:21:44.840 | motivational system and be more comfortable, as we talked about before,

00:21:48.000 | riding those waves of discomfort.

00:21:49.800 | There's some subtlety there.

00:21:51.920 | Anyways, all of this comes together to define what we mean by discipline.

00:21:56.800 | Right?

00:21:57.160 | And it answers a lot of issues we have when we deal with these problems.

00:22:02.840 | Like, let me just point out a few things here before we move on.

00:22:05.000 | One, what I think is key about this example we used to structure this, is that

00:22:08.520 | there's two different things going on.

00:22:10.000 | Resisting the short-term temptation and making the long-term

00:22:14.600 | valuable thing more meaningful.

00:22:16.040 | We don't always break it up that way.

00:22:18.360 | We don't always break it up that way.

00:22:20.520 | Right?

00:22:20.840 | But these are two very different things that require different responses.

00:22:24.000 | So if you ignore the short-term temptation, and that's derailing your

00:22:30.320 | attempts to do the long-term thing that's useful, the things you're going

00:22:34.400 | to do are never going to help with the short-term, if all you're doing is

00:22:38.120 | trying to work on your narrative of yourself and your life and what's

00:22:41.320 | important and you're getting these examples and you're getting motivated

00:22:44.000 | about these big grand things, none of that will affect your short-term

00:22:47.200 | motivational system, which could care less.

00:22:48.760 | It doesn't talk to your prefrontal cortex.

00:22:50.600 | It doesn't talk to your hippocampus.

00:22:51.840 | It's boom, reward, let's rock and roll.

00:22:54.880 | Right?

00:22:55.080 | So you have to deal with that completely differently.

00:22:56.840 | On the other hand, if all you deal with is this sort of, why am I

00:22:59.880 | picking up my phone so much?

00:23:01.080 | Why am I drinking so much?

00:23:02.200 | Why am I playing video games so much?

00:23:04.640 | If all you're doing is trying to deal with those, you're left

00:23:06.680 | with a vacuum on the other side.

00:23:08.040 | Because just not having those in your life doesn't automatically make the

00:23:13.640 | stuff that matters be more appealing.

00:23:15.320 | Your brain still needs a good cognitive map for those things.

00:23:17.720 | That takes time.

00:23:18.400 | Your brain still needs lots of positive examples of this

00:23:20.680 | thing being executed properly.

00:23:22.400 | That takes time and work to do.

00:23:23.880 | So, you know, we, we often just focus on one piece or the other.

00:23:28.200 | And that really, I think, prevents us from actually cultivating what

00:23:32.960 | we really mean by discipline, which is I'm consistently and happily

00:23:35.600 | making progress on the things that are hard in the moment, but value

00:23:38.360 | are valuable to me in the longterm.

00:23:40.440 | It also, this more subtle approach also, I think really, uh, eliminates

00:23:47.840 | this idea that discipline is somehow a trait like your eye color.

00:23:52.920 | Oh, you're disciplined or you're not disciplined.

00:23:54.560 | Disciplined people, um, do the important stuff.

00:23:58.200 | Non-disciplined people don't.

00:23:59.320 | We're like, no, we're talking about brain systems that are subtle

00:24:01.880 | and you have to work with them.

00:24:02.800 | And what makes someone more disciplined than someone else?

00:24:05.680 | It all has to do with what's going on with these brain systems.

00:24:08.040 | Like maybe they have not built up through happenstance, like where they

00:24:12.200 | are, how they're raised, their personality.

00:24:13.960 | They have less of the short-term distractions to have to combat.

00:24:17.560 | Or maybe because of like who their parents were, what they were exposed

00:24:20.800 | to in college, they have these very rich cognitive maps, their hippocampus

00:24:23.880 | is stuffed full of positive examples.

00:24:25.600 | And they don't find it hard at all to generate motivation for these

00:24:29.320 | long-term goals that have value.

00:24:31.160 | Where someone else that has completely empty stores there, and they have to

00:24:34.400 | start from scratch, trying to build these things up.

00:24:36.280 | Um, a lot of this is experience determined.

00:24:39.160 | A lot of this is malleable.

00:24:41.000 | Discipline is something you train.

00:24:43.360 | It's not something that you're born with.

00:24:45.760 | So anyways, hopefully that's useful.

00:24:47.440 | Becoming more concrete here with in the weeds, what discipline might mean and

00:24:51.440 | giving us a, a fuller vision of how to hack it, uh, you know, we get a lot of

00:24:55.840 | questions about this, which we'll get to soon.

00:24:57.520 | And I figured it might have made sense just to spend a little time getting into this.

00:25:01.480 | So there you go, Jesse.

00:25:03.640 | That's a, I say discipline 101, but maybe it's like discipline 505.

00:25:08.280 | We've talked about it a lot.

00:25:09.440 | There's a lot of layers to this topic, but hopefully that one made some sense.

00:25:12.720 | I like the, uh, part one of, or the first point of part two, improving your cognitive map.

00:25:18.680 | Uh, often forgotten by people, often overlooked.

00:25:22.760 | Yeah.

00:25:23.080 | Yeah.

00:25:23.440 | You know, it's, this is the problem, by the way, with looking at someone who's far

00:25:28.360 | along in some sort of discipline, livelihood.

00:25:32.040 | And if you're starting out, say, give me your advice.

00:25:34.880 | It's the problem of your, if you're starting out writing books and you talk to like me,

00:25:41.640 | who is working on his ninth, you know, I have such a rich cognitive map.

00:25:46.400 | I have a hippocampus stuffed full of these positive examples that what it takes for me

00:25:52.680 | to sit down and write is just a completely different subjective experience than the

00:25:56.840 | first time writer.

00:25:57.600 | And this happens for almost every field.

00:26:00.160 | It's, it's a, the problem, who you want to talk to is the person who just had their

00:26:04.040 | first success and try to understand what was it like, like right before they made

00:26:07.600 | progress for it.

00:26:08.680 | Um, when you talk to the people who have already succeeded, you get money advice.

00:26:12.280 | All right, well, we've got some good questions, uh, about this and related

00:26:17.440 | topics, but, uh, first Jesse, let's, uh, let's hear from some sponsors.

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00:30:47.880 | All right.

00:30:48.560 | And with that, let's move on to questions.

00:30:50.840 | Jesse, who's our first question from today.

00:30:54.680 | Our first question is from Ranjit.

00:30:57.800 | I am unemployed and have been studying web development.

00:31:01.760 | I consider myself disciplined as I set aside two hours per day to look

00:31:05.320 | for a software engineering job.

00:31:06.840 | However, I've not found anything yet.

00:31:08.760 | Should I work harder?

00:31:11.840 | Well, uh, Ranjit, it's a good question and it lets me emphasize a point.

00:31:16.280 | I've also been thinking about a lot recently, which discipline is not

00:31:22.040 | about energy expenditure in the abstract.

00:31:25.120 | I think there is a sort of a strain of discipline being performed online

00:31:34.680 | right now that sort of just abstracts away the notion of hardness and there's

00:31:41.000 | a kind of a test of how much hardness can I, how much hardness can I take?

00:31:45.400 | Like, I think we, we see a lot of this happening with, um, cold plunging,

00:31:49.440 | right there, there's maybe some health benefits to cold plunging, but there's

00:31:53.040 | this other benefit of like, it's really hard and I can, you know, I can do it.

00:31:57.240 | Um, we see this in sort of ultra endurance events.

00:32:00.320 | You sort of imagine, uh, posting about, I didn't just run a marathon.

00:32:04.120 | I ran 30 miles.

00:32:04.840 | I ran 50 miles.

00:32:05.680 | I ran the Leadville 100, right.

00:32:07.640 | Just sort of just, um, abstracting difficulty.

00:32:11.040 | Now there's not necessarily something wrong with that.

00:32:13.920 | Um, it can be, for example, cognitive training for actual, more concrete

00:32:18.520 | goals that require discipline.

00:32:19.760 | You can teach yourself through these types of endeavors that I am able to do

00:32:23.120 | things that are really hard that other people can't do, and that can be really

00:32:25.960 | important identity development.

00:32:27.640 | It can be really important for preparing yourself to do, um,

00:32:31.360 | actual, more specific goals.

00:32:33.280 | But it's, I don't want you to mix up this more abstract notion of

00:32:38.000 | just difficulty equals discipline.

00:32:40.080 | I don't want you to mix that up with.

00:32:42.000 | Focus discipline, the discipline pursuit of things that are actually important.

00:32:46.480 | And I think that might be what's happening here, right?

00:32:50.520 | You're spending hours doing this job searching, right?

00:32:52.960 | You're structured, you're disciplined.

00:32:54.120 | I will sit here and do the job searching for hours every day, and

00:32:57.240 | it's not giving you what you need.

00:32:59.320 | And it's because, uh, effort alone doesn't alchemize in the results.

00:33:03.280 | It's specific effort aimed with evidence at specific goals that really matter.

00:33:08.040 | So in this case, really what's going on is the search is not your problem.

00:33:10.760 | Your problem is not, you're not searching enough.

00:33:12.400 | Most people, when they're finding a new job, doesn't come

00:33:16.040 | after 150 hours of searching.

00:33:17.600 | And it's all about, uh, how many, how fast can I do the

00:33:20.040 | searching or how many hours I can do?

00:33:21.560 | There's probably other things going on here.

00:33:23.440 | The web development skills you have aren't quite right.

00:33:27.040 | You need to push your skill level to the next level.

00:33:29.000 | You're looking at the wrong types of jobs.

00:33:30.760 | Um, so what you really need here is to interrogate the actions you're doing.

00:33:34.880 | You have the ability to do hard things, but you need to interrogate

00:33:39.480 | the actions you're doing to make sure that you're doing the right ones.

00:33:41.920 | We want to go back to the terminology of the deep dive.

00:33:45.440 | We can talk about getting your cognitive map here a

00:33:48.320 | little bit more accurate.

00:33:49.480 | All right.

00:33:50.480 | So anyways, discipline for the sake of discipline, I treat with some wariness

00:33:54.160 | again, not because I think it's bad, but because it's not a replacement

00:33:58.360 | for actual focus discipline, where you have an evidence, evidence-based

00:34:01.920 | plan for what it is that you're applying that effort towards.

00:34:04.360 | So I think that's your problem, Ranjit.

00:34:05.560 | It's not time spent searching.

00:34:06.760 | It's, uh, you need to really figure out why am I not getting these jobs?

00:34:10.520 | What skill am I missing?

00:34:11.640 | How could I get it?

00:34:12.480 | Is there a different type of job I should go for?

00:34:14.320 | Get a reality check on what's really going on in your world.

00:34:17.200 | All right.

00:34:19.320 | Who do we got next?

00:34:20.080 | Next question is from RJ.

00:34:22.360 | I love the idea of the deep life stack.

00:34:25.000 | I didn't know how long to spend in each layer.

00:34:27.760 | So I devoted my entire quarter to developing discipline.

00:34:30.640 | However, I ran into a conundrum after the quarter was over.

00:34:33.720 | I did just okay.

00:34:35.080 | I was able to sustain several weeks of performing the Keystone habits, but there

00:34:39.240 | were also some stretches of time where I wasn't, I was traveling, I had an injury.

00:34:43.240 | I was busy at work, stuff like that.

00:34:44.680 | Is there some objective metric I can use to determine when it's appropriate

00:34:49.120 | to move to the next layer?

00:34:50.400 | Well, RJ, as I've been working on this topic more, I tend to think about the

00:34:55.440 | deep life, but for the uninitiated, we mean here, creating an intentional life,

00:35:01.000 | focusing on things that matter and minimizing things that don't.

00:35:04.480 | I don't think about it as much anymore in a strict stack.

00:35:08.280 | When you finish this layer, then do this layer, then do this layer.

00:35:11.360 | I tend to think about it more now in three parts.

00:35:14.320 | So the first part is preparation.

00:35:16.880 | And that's where cultivating your discipline lies.

00:35:20.200 | I also would put in there right now, getting organized, organizing your stuff

00:35:24.480 | and controlling your time.

00:35:25.680 | I would also put in there, quieting your mind, right?

00:35:29.760 | One of the things I've learned working on this is becoming more comfortable with

00:35:33.400 | your own mind, spending time alone with your own thoughts, being good with just

00:35:36.760 | dealing with ideas and emotions.

00:35:38.960 | This is really important as well for being able to later discern what's

00:35:43.160 | important to you and what's not and how to make progress in life.

00:35:45.480 | Like that's all preparation.

00:35:46.640 | Then you have a planning part.

00:35:48.320 | How do you figure out what it is you should do to make your life deeper?

00:35:53.000 | And here again, my big thought is don't work forward towards a big grand goal,

00:35:59.440 | but work backwards from a more general vision of an ideal lifestyle.

00:36:02.800 | And then you have execution as the third part, like how do I actually move closer

00:36:06.120 | to this ideal lifestyle and the actual art of figuring out how to get from where

00:36:10.560 | you are here to where you want to go over there.

00:36:13.080 | And here, like we talked about in the last question, evidence-based planning

00:36:18.120 | is really important, looking for a multi-factor results like this thing

00:36:24.120 | could help these three things.

00:36:25.400 | You know, there's all sorts of complexities that come into planning.

00:36:27.880 | These are roughly sequential, but they're not terminally sequential.

00:36:31.960 | Like you need to start preparing before you plan.

00:36:33.920 | You need to plan before you execute.

00:36:35.320 | But even when you start planning, you still want to worry about the preparation.

00:36:38.720 | And even when you're executing, you might go back and tweak your plan and

00:36:41.200 | then return back to the preparation.

00:36:42.600 | All of these things are kind of going to be happening all together once you get

00:36:47.040 | going, which is all a way of saying your one quarter spent working on discipline

00:36:52.280 | is not enough to say, okay, now I have sufficient discipline to transform my

00:36:55.080 | life.

00:36:55.400 | It doesn't mean you have to be stuck at just working on the preparation for

00:36:59.520 | multiple years, but it also means you can't just move on and not think about

00:37:03.640 | it anymore, right?

00:37:04.800 | It's a ongoing process, working on your discipline, working on your

00:37:10.560 | organization and control, working on your quiet mind.

00:37:12.600 | It's an ongoing process.

00:37:13.760 | And I think for a lot of people who are new to this, it's probably going to be

00:37:16.640 | about a half year of working on those three things.

00:37:20.600 | Start with the discipline, layer on some organization control, move on the quiet

00:37:24.840 | mind, and then keep going back and tweaking and fixing what's not working.

00:37:27.880 | You need about six months of that before you would even move on to the next idea

00:37:31.320 | of like, okay, now let me start thinking about what I want to do in my life.

00:37:33.640 | Um, and then even then you're going to return to the preparation, maybe every

00:37:36.680 | six months or so you're like, okay, where am I still lacking?

00:37:39.040 | Where are things getting loose?

00:37:40.040 | But you need at least six months, I think, preparing before you're ready to even

00:37:44.240 | sort of think about the next part of building a deep life.

00:37:47.000 | So what you experienced is absolutely normal.

00:37:49.680 | Yeah, you began working on discipline.

00:37:52.440 | You used a keystone habit strategy where you just start practicing doing small,

00:37:55.960 | but important things in different parts of your life.

00:37:57.640 | And it did okay.

00:37:58.400 | And then it kind of fell apart.

00:37:59.400 | Great.

00:37:59.760 | That's your first data point.

00:38:00.760 | Now we evolve.

00:38:01.480 | We fixed the metrics.

00:38:03.720 | We get better at these circumstances that tripped you up.

00:38:07.080 | What's your fallback protocol when you're sick?

00:38:10.600 | Do you have alternative versions of these metrics for when you're traveling?

00:38:14.280 | Maybe you do so that you can keep a discipline streak alive.

00:38:16.920 | Even when you don't have access to the things at home, you need to do the

00:38:20.120 | keystone habits you originally chosen.

00:38:21.880 | These are all data points for you to evolve your approach to discipline.

00:38:25.680 | You also need to build probably off of the keystone habits as a starter towards

00:38:30.400 | now actually taking on at least one highly disciplined long-term project,

00:38:34.680 | maybe something involving fitness or physical health, those tend to work

00:38:37.560 | better, like you need to kind of up the game here a little bit.

00:38:40.080 | If you're starting from scratch, it can really take a while until you've

00:38:42.960 | cultivated your discipline muscles to be strong enough that you're really

00:38:46.240 | ready for the stuff to follow.

00:38:47.360 | So this is all to say, keep working on the preparation, be willing to do two

00:38:53.840 | or three major overhauls of what you're trying to try to find something that

00:38:56.960 | works.

00:38:57.360 | And then even as you move on to the more fun stuff, your vision of your ideal

00:39:01.560 | lifestyle and making the, making the big moves, keep checking back in on those

00:39:05.920 | preparation stuff and say, where have I fallen off?

00:39:08.240 | What can I improve?

00:39:09.440 | What can I tweak?

00:39:10.240 | That's always going to be ongoing.

00:39:12.120 | All right, who do we have next?

00:39:16.040 | Next question is from Liz.

00:39:18.080 | My question is about cultivating a good relationship with tech during times of

00:39:22.480 | increased stress, in my case, lack of sleep.

00:39:25.120 | After an evening shift, it is super difficult to stop picking my phone for

00:39:29.360 | that easy dopamine distraction.

00:39:31.440 | All right, this is a good question.

00:39:34.800 | There's a temptation here to say, look, you know, you're stressed, so it's okay.

00:39:43.960 | You know, it's stressed.

00:39:46.720 | It's okay.

00:39:47.360 | Cause it's not really fair because other people just, it's not as stressed.

00:39:52.520 | So it's going to be easier for them to work on other types of things.

00:39:55.960 | But you're stressed.

00:39:57.800 | That's okay.

00:39:58.400 | You know, this is just harder for you.

00:39:59.800 | I think the reality is like, it's, it's harder for you.

00:40:03.040 | And that's, there's empathy there, but it's still really important.

00:40:06.880 | It's still just as important that you work towards the same goal of making

00:40:13.440 | sure that behaviors that you don't think are important to you or behaviors that

00:40:18.280 | get in the way of things that are don't take over because once you have that

00:40:23.920 | strong connection, man, when I'm stressed, when I'm tired, I pick up that phone and

00:40:27.520 | it immediately gives me this sense of relief.

00:40:29.520 | It is a really strong connection.

00:40:32.800 | And other times when you're not stressed and you're not tired and you're trying

00:40:35.560 | to make progress on these other things that matter to you, you're not gonna be

00:40:38.280 | able to, because you have that strong connection that's been reinforced about

00:40:43.760 | the phone.

00:40:44.320 | So, you know, the bad news is this is going to be harder for you.

00:40:48.600 | Um, but the good news is, is that exactly the things we talked about in the first

00:40:52.840 | part of the deep dive still apply.

00:40:53.960 | These are still the right ideas.

00:40:56.400 | Reducing the stimuli, right?

00:40:58.680 | Okay.

00:40:58.960 | It's just my, my phone is not around as much of taking the fun apps off of it.

00:41:02.680 | That helps.

00:41:03.160 | We know that's not enough.

00:41:04.440 | How do we know that's not enough?

00:41:05.480 | Because in the full version of your question, we edited this for the episode,

00:41:09.400 | but in the full version of Liz's question, she talked about how she tries that, but

00:41:14.120 | she still goes and finds her phone.

00:41:15.720 | Even if it's in the phone foyer method, uh, she uses Safari to search and get

00:41:21.240 | Instagram on the browser, even if she's taking the app off of it.

00:41:23.720 | But that's why we had the other pieces of advice there as well.

00:41:26.880 | Okay.

00:41:27.160 | Now you need to build in the alternative rewards that when you're in similar

00:41:31.680 | stimuli situation that would normally lead you to pick up your phone, you have

00:41:35.360 | these other rewards.

00:41:36.280 | You've trained yourself to crave that are triggered by the same stimuli.

00:41:39.200 | You sort of swamp the stimulus that makes you pick up your phone with these other

00:41:44.800 | things.

00:41:45.200 | And it could be whatever it's still like, I, I, you know, the run or the walk while

00:41:50.840 | listening to music that creates a chemical response is a good one.

00:41:54.960 | The taking a book to the nearby coffee shop where you're around other people and

00:41:59.320 | you get the same herbal tea and like, whatever it is, right.

00:42:02.520 | You, but you have this thing that you get this deeper reward out of, you get this

00:42:05.880 | and, and it's a similar stimuli.

00:42:07.320 | You really get used to doing it.

00:42:08.920 | Right.

00:42:09.760 | Um, like I always now try to exercise at the end of my day between the end of my

00:42:16.960 | work day and the start of the evening.

00:42:18.600 | Right.

00:42:19.520 | Um, and now I have a lot of strong associations with that and it's, it gets

00:42:24.400 | lots of chemicals going and it really is physiologically active.

00:42:27.480 | Um, and it, you know, it prevents me from just being like, Hey, let me just like,

00:42:30.760 | I don't know, eat snacks or veg or something like that.

00:42:33.240 | So, so that one's going to be really important.

00:42:35.120 | Um, and then of course, just a more subtle piece of advice there about getting more

00:42:39.440 | comfortable with the discomfort of resisting that stimuli.

00:42:41.720 | But the key thing I'm going to point here is this white knuckling won't do it.

00:42:46.640 | You have to have those alternatives that you're, you're putting in place instead.

00:42:50.840 | So, uh, it's worth doing because again, life, once the phone and for other people,

00:42:57.200 | video games and for other people drinking, like once it becomes like what you do when

00:43:01.880 | you're at all bored or stressed, it really is like someone's draining a proverbial

00:43:06.680 | battery.

00:43:07.160 | It's like, it's so hard to get away from.

00:43:09.640 | And it just like makes your life gray.

00:43:12.400 | It brings down these energy.

00:43:14.120 | You're looking at these updates and social media.

00:43:16.240 | Uh, and it just stops all this other stuff that over a long time, it's just going to

00:43:20.200 | make that life deeper, more interesting.

00:43:21.560 | So it's really good that we're thinking about this.

00:43:23.200 | All right, let's move on.

00:43:24.640 | What do we got next, Jesse?

00:43:25.520 | Okay.

00:43:26.640 | Next question is from Paul in college.

00:43:28.960 | I didn't use any social media.

00:43:30.280 | It was very successful after college.

00:43:32.400 | I moved to Dublin and I'm working in a tech company.

00:43:34.920 | However, I now feel very distracted for two reasons.

00:43:37.920 | First, I always have to check my phone app to find an apartment.

00:43:41.160 | Second, I started using dating apps and I'm hooked on those.

00:43:44.640 | How can I regain control?

00:43:46.600 | I mean, let's think about this for a second.

00:43:49.480 | Okay.

00:43:50.120 | You used to not use social media and you were quote, very successful.

00:43:54.120 | Now you're on your phone more and you're unhappy.

00:43:56.320 | All right.

00:43:58.400 | I mean, we got, we got a clear answer here.

00:44:00.840 | Go back to where you were before, where you didn't use your phone

00:44:03.000 | that much for these things.

00:44:03.920 | Now that the issue here, and this is like a common reaction I get, uh, this

00:44:10.120 | is the using the, the molehill.

00:44:13.240 | And I'm trying to think this on, on the fly here, Jesse, but like transforming

00:44:16.600 | the molehill into the mountain.

00:44:18.760 | So what you're saying is like, oh, there are these incredibly narrow reasons.

00:44:22.680 | I feel like I need to use my phone searching for an apartment

00:44:27.120 | and being on a dating app.

00:44:28.720 | And because of that, I use my phone all the time now, but that's crazy.

00:44:33.400 | Look, do 20 minutes a day during your lunch hour on your laptop, not on your

00:44:38.800 | phone, uh, look at what apartments have come available.

00:44:42.400 | Look at what responses you've got to your dating app.

00:44:45.320 | That is all the time it could possibly take in the world on a day-to-day basis.

00:44:49.080 | How many apartments become available throughout the day?

00:44:51.920 | How many people have responded to your dating profile throughout the day?

00:44:56.320 | Like 20 minutes a day during lunch on your laptop, you can be looking for what

00:45:00.280 | apartments are new and that anyone respond to my dating app response, and then you

00:45:03.560 | can still maintain what you had before.

00:45:05.160 | Just go back to what you had before.

00:45:06.680 | I don't really use my phone.

00:45:07.800 | You're in a good situation here, Paul, because it's not like you're decoding a

00:45:11.800 | behavior and going to a new behavior.

00:45:13.600 | You've never been to before.

00:45:15.040 | You're going back to where you were before.

00:45:16.840 | So your brain knows and has great memories of what life was like when you

00:45:20.720 | didn't use your phone all the time.

00:45:21.840 | So all you have to tell your brain to do is like, that's what we're going back to.

00:45:25.040 | Let me just take this two stimuli that are messing me up, the dating app and the

00:45:29.400 | apartment app, and let me just constrain that to my laptop at lunch.

00:45:32.120 | All right.

00:45:32.800 | With that out of the way, it won't be too hard to go back to where you were before.

00:45:36.640 | So don't let the molehill of like, I have this digital stuff I need to do become

00:45:42.600 | the mountain of, I have to be on my phone all the time, right?

00:45:46.280 | We talked about this last week when we were reading common objections to the

00:45:52.000 | idea that younger kids should not use smartphones.

00:45:54.400 | And one of the common objections was like, well, there's this one thing I

00:45:59.120 | sometimes need to do, you know, get access to my kid occasionally because like the

00:46:04.240 | plan changed and they need to not take the bus.

00:46:06.880 | I need to tell me if they missed the bus and need to get picked up or something.

00:46:10.080 | And they went from that immediately to, therefore they should be on TikTok in

00:46:13.760 | their room at two in the morning.

00:46:14.720 | Like we can't let these small digital necessities become a skeleton key to

00:46:23.040 | bringing unrestricted technology into our lives.

00:46:25.800 | And I think this is a great example of that.

00:46:27.600 | All right.

00:46:28.360 | So Paul, you're in good shape though, because you already know what it's like

00:46:30.560 | not to use your phone all the time.

00:46:31.600 | Let's just get you back there.

00:46:32.840 | All right.

00:46:34.160 | What do we have next?

00:46:34.880 | Next question is from Ron.

00:46:38.080 | I notice in the El Pais article that Cal's home desk didn't have a large desktop

00:46:42.320 | monitor.

00:46:42.840 | I have both a laptop and a desktop.

00:46:45.040 | I use my desktop as my main computer and my laptop when portability is needed.

00:46:49.360 | It occurred to me recently that sitting down at a desk right in front of a massive

00:46:53.360 | screen kind of sets me up to go first to the screen.

00:46:56.200 | Temptations to news sites, email, or even the vast labyrinth of my own files and

00:47:00.800 | folders.

00:47:01.320 | Does Cal only use a laptop?

00:47:03.240 | Well, first of all, we should.

00:47:07.080 | I don't know if we talked, we talked about this article, right?

00:47:09.080 | Yeah.

00:47:09.840 | Yeah.

00:47:11.600 | Let me load it up though.

00:47:12.800 | We haven't, I can, I have it here.

00:47:14.760 | So I'm going to load it up for those who are watching instead of just listening.

00:47:20.200 | So this was a profile that I want to show you the desk he's talking about.

00:47:24.000 | All right.

00:47:24.840 | So let me load this up.

00:47:25.840 | All right.

00:47:28.880 | So this was a profile in a newspaper in Spain about me.

00:47:34.200 | And so it has this picture.

00:47:36.280 | So for those who haven't seen it, this is a picture of me for those who are

00:47:39.480 | watching at my office, my library, at my house.

00:47:43.920 | Okay.

00:47:45.000 | And as, as you can see, and as was pointed out in this question, that there is no

00:47:50.040 | monitor on this desk, the nice desk is custom made desk from Houston and company

00:47:55.640 | in Maine that does actually university library desk primarily.

00:47:58.920 | So it's kind of my, my mini library desk.

00:48:01.040 | All right.

00:48:01.720 | So this is what the question is about.

00:48:03.120 | Um, as long as we have this loaded up though, we might as well show the real,

00:48:06.680 | the real star of this article quick aside is there's been the studio that, uh, for

00:48:13.720 | those who haven't seen Jesse skeleton has featured in this article.

00:48:17.280 | There you go.

00:48:18.880 | I don't know why they thought this was important.

00:48:21.760 | I love the matter.

00:48:23.160 | By the way, Jesse, I love this matter of fact, caption, a corner

00:48:26.280 | of Newport's recording studio.

00:48:27.640 | The skeleton is named Jesse after Jesse Miller, the producer of Newport's

00:48:31.720 | podcast, no other explanation, just like a supernatural, like, yeah.

00:48:36.240 | So like, here's a skeleton, uh, the number, this capture writer was thinking,

00:48:41.320 | okay, here's the number one question someone will have when they see that

00:48:45.920 | this author has a skeleton, a literal skeleton in the recording studio that

00:48:49.760 | most people's question will be, oh, but where did it get to its name from?

00:48:54.320 | Like, that's the question you have.

00:48:56.640 | Yeah.

00:48:57.960 | Yeah.

00:48:58.080 | Skeleton.

00:48:58.440 | Yeah.

00:48:58.600 | We have skeletons.

00:48:59.160 | Yeah.

00:48:59.280 | But, but, but where is the skeleton's name from?

00:49:01.760 | I just think it was funny, but anyways, okay.

00:49:04.560 | Uh, back to, back to my office.

00:49:07.840 | So why don't I have a monitor on this desk?

00:49:10.440 | Um, an important thing about this library and here I'll turn off the sharing here.

00:49:14.640 | An important thing about this library is, uh, no permanent electronics.

00:49:18.280 | So I didn't want a permanent computer in there.

00:49:21.920 | There's no printer in there, no scanner in there, no big monitor in there.

00:49:27.160 | Cause I really wanted to cognitively associate this space

00:49:30.520 | with, uh, thinking and writing.

00:49:33.280 | And there's other things I associate with admin tasks, printing out

00:49:38.560 | bills, doing the budget, et cetera.

00:49:40.120 | It's like, I did not make that into a home office.

00:49:42.520 | It's a library it's for, for thinking and writing.

00:49:45.120 | When I write in there, I bring in my laptop and I write on my laptop,

00:49:48.320 | but it's not in there permanently.

00:49:49.480 | Now I also like screens.

00:49:51.840 | They're useful, but I have different spaces.

00:49:54.040 | So upstairs in my house is a small, smaller sort of like cubby annex

00:49:58.480 | where we have our home office.

00:50:00.840 | That's where my filing cabinets are.

00:50:03.080 | That's where the printer is.

00:50:04.520 | That's where the scanner is.

00:50:05.640 | That's where the color printer is.

00:50:06.840 | There is a big monitor there that I can plug my laptop into.

00:50:10.400 | That's where I do the budget.

00:50:12.160 | That's where I do taxes.

00:50:13.400 | That's where paperwork happens.

00:50:14.920 | That's where, um, we sign medical and scan medical forms

00:50:19.440 | to send back for our kids camps.

00:50:21.800 | Uh, I'll, I'll tell you, Jesse, the rough estimate of the number of

00:50:25.880 | forms you have to send to a camp about medical issues related to your child.

00:50:31.040 | And this is a rough estimate is somewhere around a

00:50:33.320 | hundred thousand pieces of paper.

00:50:34.520 | I don't know.

00:50:35.980 | I don't know what, uh, times three for three kids.

00:50:39.040 | You would think when you were sending your kid to a summer camp in the

00:50:43.280 | Washington DC area that, uh, they were probably also going to be a

00:50:48.280 | part of a NASA mission to the moon.

00:50:50.560 | It is a similar level of medical documentation between the original

00:50:57.080 | Apollo astronauts and fifth graders going to a day camp in Washington, DC.

00:51:04.080 | It's crazy.

00:51:04.680 | The amount of paperwork you need to have.

00:51:05.840 | I don't want that mind space to be activated when I'm

00:51:10.720 | writing a New Yorker article.

00:51:11.880 | So in the place where I write, uh, I don't have permanent electronics.

00:51:16.280 | Now at the HQ where you are right now, Jesse, as you know, there, we

00:51:19.040 | got a real beastie setup where we have two big monitors on a movable arms

00:51:23.120 | and a really powerful Mac studio computer.

00:51:24.960 | And so I'll often go there if I, if I'm doing some part of writing where, um,

00:51:29.720 | I really want a lot, I need a lot of sources open more so than just a single

00:51:32.880 | Scrivener double pane on my laptop.

00:51:35.080 | Uh, you know, I'm editing and I need a bunch of sources open or something.

00:51:38.680 | Sometimes I'll go there and use our giant sort of spaceship

00:51:42.120 | cockpit setup we have at the HQ.

00:51:43.880 | But the library is for really like the most thinking, reading,

00:51:48.720 | thinking, hard craft typewriting.

00:51:51.000 | So it's a good question because that's very much on purpose that there's no

00:51:53.920 | screen in that room.

00:51:55.440 | I thought a lot about that.

00:51:56.360 | All right.

00:51:58.240 | We should get a copy of, I want a copy of that Jesse skeleton picture.

00:52:01.520 | We should, we should have got that paper from the reporter.

00:52:03.600 | We could have framed it for the HQ.

00:52:05.640 | Yeah, that's a good idea.

00:52:08.320 | All right.

00:52:09.280 | Uh, Oh, our next question is our slow productivity corner question.

00:52:13.720 | So let's get some theme music.

00:52:14.800 | So for those who are new, the slow productivity corner, that's where

00:52:25.480 | we pick a question each week that is related to my new book, slow

00:52:30.760 | productivity, the last start of accomplishment without burnout.

00:52:34.560 | If you like the show, you need that book, right?

00:52:37.800 | That book is like the, the handbook or the source guide for

00:52:41.480 | so many ideas we talk about.

00:52:43.560 | Um, you know, I'm really proud of it.

00:52:45.240 | We reference it all the time.

00:52:46.440 | So slow productivity, you should check out that book if you have not already.

00:52:50.200 | All right.

00:52:50.840 | So we have a question here that's related to the book, Jesse, let's hear it.

00:52:54.480 | Questions from Joe Vita.

00:52:56.520 | How can somebody who is just starting a professional knowledge career apply the

00:53:00.720 | slow productivity principles as they start their new job?

00:53:04.520 | How can I initially avoid falling into a pseudo productivity trap without

00:53:08.520 | appearing lazy and unmotivated?

00:53:11.800 | That's a good question, Javita, because when you're very new to a job, you're

00:53:14.560 | not going to, for example, make tons of proclamations about the complex systems

00:53:19.680 | that you're running and explain to everyone why what they're doing is wrong

00:53:22.920 | and how you're going to be super productive.

00:53:24.360 | You kind of have to earn your keep a little bit, but as you point out, if you

00:53:29.360 | fall into the trap of pseudo productivity, that is using visible effort as your

00:53:33.120 | main proxy for you being useful, you may never actually escape that trap.

00:53:37.160 | So how do we bootstrap this whole slow productivity mindset when you're

00:53:41.320 | new to a job?

00:53:42.480 | Well, I'm going to have you focus at first on workload, right?

00:53:46.680 | Principle one of that book is do fewer things.

00:53:49.040 | Once you have too many things you're actively working on, the administrative

00:53:52.360 | overhead of these tasks pile up to the point where you spiral into administrative

00:53:57.320 | overload and most of your day is now spent tending work.

00:54:01.480 | You don't have much time to actually do the work.

00:54:03.200 | You fall behind.

00:54:03.920 | Equality gets lower.

00:54:04.720 | It's very hard to escape that trap.

00:54:06.080 | So we do not want you in this new job, the fall into the overload that's

00:54:10.320 | generated by having too many things on your plate at the same time.

00:54:13.240 | We also have to, as quickly as possible, establish your reputation with your

00:54:19.280 | colleagues and bosses as someone who has organized and get things done.

00:54:22.080 | This is going to gain you quite a bit of flexibility in how

00:54:27.480 | you approach your workload.

00:54:28.560 | If they know you have your act together, they trust your decisions about what

00:54:34.360 | you're going to take on or how long it's going to take.

00:54:36.000 | So how do we accomplish both of those goals at the same time?

00:54:39.480 | I'm going to focus in on one particular piece of advice from the book

00:54:42.400 | and suggest that you start with it.

00:54:44.000 | This is the advice of pre-scheduling time for every major commitment

00:54:49.480 | you are going to agree to.

00:54:50.760 | So you're, you're considering, your boss asks you to do a particular project.

00:54:56.800 | It's going to take more than just, you know, 20 minutes.

00:54:58.720 | Find the time to do it on your calendar, put on your calendar, like a meeting,

00:55:02.640 | you know, like you have to estimate and be conservative about it, but like, yeah,

00:55:06.440 | this is going to take like three major sessions probably, uh, to write this

00:55:11.000 | thing and then a meeting and then like another major session to edit, go find

00:55:14.760 | that time and block it out on your calendar.

00:55:16.640 | There's a lot of advantages to this.

00:55:19.680 | Number one, uh, it is going to prevent you from getting overloaded because

00:55:26.280 | you're literally putting the time aside for what you're going to do.

00:55:29.160 | You can't overload yourself because everything you have to do has

00:55:34.080 | to find free time in the calendar.

00:55:35.800 | So if you have too many things for the time you have the next week or two, you

00:55:38.520 | just can't fit those things onto your calendar and you get this really clear

00:55:41.720 | signal coming back.

00:55:42.640 | Oh, I can't, this is how long it's going to take.

00:55:44.400 | I don't have time for this.

00:55:45.600 | It doesn't fit in my calendar for another three weeks.

00:55:48.280 | Okay.

00:55:49.520 | So if I take this on, I can tell you it'll be three weeks till it's done.

00:55:52.760 | So it just prevents you almost, uh, literally makes overload impossible.

00:55:58.760 | Two, it allows you to prove that you're reliable because you've scheduled

00:56:05.360 | the time in advance for when things are going to be done.

00:56:07.560 | You know, when they're going to be done.

00:56:09.240 | So tell them that, and then deliver.

00:56:12.000 | That's like magic in the knowledge work world.

00:56:15.400 | When you say, yeah, boss, I'm on this.

00:56:17.840 | I'll get this to you, uh, by Tuesday.

00:56:20.760 | And then on Tuesday, you deliver it.

00:56:23.160 | Repeat that by four or five times.

00:56:25.280 | Now you have earned your reputation as someone who has their

00:56:27.960 | act together and is organized.

00:56:29.520 | So now when they say, well, can you do this?

00:56:31.560 | And you realize you can't get it done really in a reasonable

00:56:34.040 | fashion for another six weeks or so.

00:56:35.680 | You will get the leeway.

00:56:38.360 | Like, yeah, I can get it done, but I, you know, you know, me, I'm very organized

00:56:41.360 | and I, I allocate my time for everything I'm working on.

00:56:44.280 | There's not really enough time to get this done.

00:56:46.400 | Uh, it'll be about six weeks.

00:56:48.040 | Now you have more flexibility to do that.

00:56:50.280 | So it's like a flywheel.

00:56:51.320 | It's like a self-reinforcing flywheel.

00:56:53.080 | Also, when you're explicitly scheduling your time, it allows you to turn a

00:56:57.160 | knob because you can decide how much time you want to schedule.

00:57:01.920 | Now, this is really important because early on in your job, the other thing

00:57:05.440 | you can do that's vital is start to master a skill that's going

00:57:09.280 | to move you to the next level.

00:57:10.320 | You want to become as valuable as possible to this company so that

00:57:13.840 | they really don't want to lose you.

00:57:15.040 | And when they're desperate not to lose you, they will accommodate

00:57:17.800 | almost anything you suggest.

00:57:19.120 | Including many of the other ideas from slow productivity.

00:57:21.920 | Well, if you're pre-scheduling your time, you can pre-schedule first

00:57:25.520 | time for working on new skills.

00:57:26.920 | Right?

00:57:28.480 | Because like that's on my calendar.

00:57:29.960 | So when I'm trying to make these other projects fit, it

00:57:31.760 | has to find other time.

00:57:32.720 | Right?

00:57:32.880 | So you can turn these knobs about how much time am I working on work?

00:57:36.040 | How much time am I working on new skills?

00:57:37.600 | And you control all of this.

00:57:39.160 | And it's also much better than just being in the list reactive mode.

00:57:42.040 | We have a to-do list of stuff you're supposed to do that you try to make

00:57:44.840 | progress on while reacting to stuff that's coming on inbound.

00:57:47.160 | So Jovita, that's how I would get started.

00:57:49.840 | Long-term, you're not going to want to schedule everything out in advance.

00:57:54.040 | This can become pretty burdensome after a while.

00:57:58.360 | Long-term, I would suggest once you've built your reputation, you've made

00:58:02.360 | yourself valuable to the company, probably using something like a pull-based

00:58:06.360 | workload system is going to be more sustainable in the future, as opposed

00:58:09.720 | to trying to put everything on the calendar.

00:58:11.400 | And so you can move onwards to a more sophisticated implementation

00:58:15.400 | of slow productivity, but use pre-scheduled time commitments for your

00:58:19.640 | work for the first like six months of a new knowledge work job.

00:58:22.840 | I really think there's a huge number of benefits to exactly that piece of advice.

00:58:26.720 | Um, so if you buy the book, slow productivity, focus in on principle

00:58:31.280 | one, that's chapter three, which has principle one, that's going to have the,

00:58:35.520 | the details of what we were just talking about.

00:58:37.280 | All right, Jesse, I think it's a good excuse to hear that slow productivity

00:58:40.960 | corner theme music one more time.

00:58:42.840 | All right, now I want to do a case study.

00:58:54.000 | This is where someone will send in an account of putting into action, the

00:58:58.080 | type of advice we talked about here on the show.

00:58:59.720 | So we can see what it looks like out in the real world, right?

00:59:03.920 | Today's case study is anonymous, but it's a good one.

00:59:06.680 | So here's what it says.

00:59:07.440 | I taught for 14 years in a middle school classroom.

00:59:11.320 | This past year, I started a new role as an instructional coach, my job duties

00:59:16.400 | shifted, and I worked on multiple projects at the start of the year.

00:59:20.480 | I knew I would need a system to maintain, organize, reduce distractions

00:59:24.880 | and stay on top of my workload.

00:59:26.200 | My new office was located in a shared suite with tons of foot traffic.

00:59:30.120 | I use principles from deep work, and I also bought a time block planner

00:59:34.560 | weekly planning and using time blocking gave me a clear long-term view of what

00:59:38.720 | needs to be accomplished every week and month and added benefit was that

00:59:42.360 | throughout the year, I was able to avoid bringing work home, which was

00:59:45.000 | great as I have two young daughters.

00:59:47.560 | Initially, I found myself blocking off more time than needed to complete

00:59:50.680 | most tasks other than scheduled meetings.

00:59:52.680 | Then the opposite happened.

00:59:54.120 | I didn't plan enough time and tasks took longer than expected.

00:59:57.640 | Over time, my estimates improved.

00:59:59.640 | I think one of the most underappreciated aspects of time block

01:00:02.400 | planning was the ideas list.

01:00:04.120 | In the past, when an idea popped up, I would delay my work

01:00:07.480 | and go down a rabbit hole.

01:00:08.560 | Next year, our district funding has shifted and my current

01:00:11.920 | position has been eliminated.

01:00:13.360 | So I'll be going back to the classroom.

01:00:15.880 | Each day, I'll have four teaching blocks and two prep box.

01:00:18.440 | Each prep block will be 53 minutes.

01:00:20.720 | Uh, how can I be productive during these short time blocks?

01:00:23.600 | They seem like sprint sessions compared with what I had this past year.

01:00:26.840 | All right.

01:00:27.320 | It's a great case study that also has a hidden question.

01:00:29.720 | The key principle being shown in this case study is multiscale planning.

01:00:33.640 | This is the power of, uh, having a bigger picture plan for like

01:00:38.040 | the quarter or the semester.

01:00:39.440 | Using that to inform a weekly plan.

01:00:41.680 | Okay.

01:00:41.960 | What's on my calendar this week?

01:00:43.400 | What am I going to make progress on the important things?

01:00:45.720 | What things are I gonna make progress on?

01:00:47.080 | How am I going to fit my work into this week?

01:00:49.000 | And then using a daily time block plan on the daily schedule to make the

01:00:52.840 | most of the time you have and also have clear shutoffs, uh, our respondent

01:00:58.400 | here, correspondent here use multiscale planning in their office job, and we

01:01:03.120 | could see how well, uh, that worked out.

01:01:06.040 | All right.

01:01:07.120 | So now there's a hidden question is okay.

01:01:09.080 | Now, uh, he or she has to go back to teaching and is worried about being

01:01:13.160 | productive during the short prep blocks.

01:01:15.720 | Um, it's interesting because it's like in this teaching role, you have some

01:01:19.640 | time block planning that's already automatically happening, your teaching

01:01:22.480 | block and your prep blocks.

01:01:23.640 | Some of the things that are going to matter here is going to be, uh, being.

01:01:30.760 | Pretty process oriented.

01:01:32.760 | Like what, what do I want to do during this prep walks?

01:01:35.080 | What's the most effective way to do it?

01:01:36.560 | And two, like we talk about often with teachers, um, be very careful about

01:01:41.680 | extra sort of non-compensated duties.

01:01:44.320 | Typically you do not have enough time to do more than like your bare bones

01:01:49.240 | teaching job without having to add extra time.

01:01:50.880 | So be very careful about taking on anything else.

01:01:52.760 | Be very jealous about your time.

01:01:54.320 | Um, you're going to need some blocks outside of the student day, but you

01:01:59.000 | gotta just, it's about making the most out of that time, having great processes

01:02:02.240 | and systems, knowing exactly how you prep, how you grade, where you store

01:02:05.400 | the information, no wasted time.

01:02:06.960 | Um, if you can have office hours with your parents, that's great.

01:02:10.880 | One of my son's teachers did it this year, which I thought was great.

01:02:13.400 | Instead of just like email me anytime it was these hours on these days, call me.

01:02:18.640 | So things you can do that makes you less reactive and more proactive and control

01:02:22.880 | your time, that will all matter as well.

01:02:24.320 | But mainly I appreciate this case study of multi-scale planning in a sort of

01:02:29.440 | standard type of office job, really doing, making a big difference.

01:02:32.800 | It really is one of the core ideas on this show.

01:02:34.920 | Uh, if you have a non-entry level, semi-complex knowledge work job,

01:02:38.600 | you have to multi-scale plan.

01:02:40.600 | It's night and day.

01:02:41.600 | It's the difference between chaos, busyness, and stress and being

01:02:46.120 | able to see over the horizon.

01:02:47.440 | And with some confidence, sort of aim your proverbial

01:02:50.120 | boat in the right direction.

01:02:51.280 | All right.

01:02:52.680 | Well, we have a cool final segment coming up here, but first I want

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01:06:37.480 | All right, Jesse, let's get to our final segment.

01:06:41.240 | All right.

01:06:43.840 | So I'm going to call this final segment battle of the sheds.

01:06:47.800 | So if you are a subscriber to my newsletter, and if you're not,

01:06:53.200 | you should go to calnewport.com to sign up.

01:06:56.000 | I have, I don't know what it is now, over a hundred thousand subscribers

01:06:58.840 | now who get my semi-regular dispatches about trying to cultivate a deep life.

01:07:02.840 | Um, you will have noticed as a newsletter subscriber that in the,

01:07:06.800 | the last, uh, two weeks or while I've been up here, let's say while I've

01:07:11.080 | been up here on vacation, I've been publishing these dispatches from being

01:07:15.080 | up North and trying to go deep and right.

01:07:18.720 | Anyways, uh, one of these dispatches, I showed the writing shed on my

01:07:25.080 | property up here where I've been writing.

01:07:26.720 | And in the next dispatch, I went to Arrowhead, the farmhouse bought

01:07:32.720 | by Herman Melville in 1850, where he wrote Moby Dick among other famous books.

01:07:39.880 | And I want to compare where I've been writing with where he's been writing.

01:07:45.480 | I've got visual aids here.

01:07:47.120 | Let me load this up.

01:07:48.280 | I'm going to share my screen.

01:07:50.080 | So for those who are listening, instead of watching, you can see this directly.

01:07:53.720 | Uh, what we have on the screen here is a scene of the writing

01:07:55.880 | shed where I've been working.

01:07:56.880 | So there's a scene here from the outside.

01:07:59.520 | Uh, you can see the hose, the hose, the pipe coming out of here, which is

01:08:05.680 | the exhaust for the wood-burning stove.

01:08:08.080 | There is a scene from inside of this writing shed.

01:08:10.720 | Beautiful view of the Taconic mountains.

01:08:12.640 | Mount Equinox, uh, is in the far distance there.

01:08:16.080 | There's a nice table here I've been writing at.

01:08:18.560 | There's a light, there's a fan to move the air around.

01:08:21.200 | Um, I've been getting some pretty good writing done here.

01:08:24.000 | I've been working on my deep life book.

01:08:25.560 | I wrote these two dispatches and have, have, uh, been doing

01:08:29.760 | some New Yorker work as well.

01:08:31.040 | All right.

01:08:32.320 | About 50 minutes Southeast of here is the farm where Herman Melville did his writing.

01:08:40.800 | So here's a picture of his writing shed.

01:08:43.800 | This is actually not really a shed.

01:08:45.200 | It's the second floor of his house.

01:08:46.760 | He took this premium room, uh, has a dining table here.

01:08:51.640 | That view out the window there is of, you can see it in this picture here.

01:08:56.480 | I took this, these are my pictures.

01:08:57.680 | I took while I went to visit recently.

01:08:59.360 | Mount Greylock, which would have been called Saddleback Mountain back then.

01:09:03.640 | He was enamored by the view of this mountain.

01:09:06.560 | That row of trees you see, so you have to look closely to see the mountain,

01:09:09.960 | but you see the darker shape there.

01:09:11.800 | That row of trees was not there in the 1850s.

01:09:14.120 | I confirmed this with the docent.

01:09:15.440 | It was, these were more plowed fields.

01:09:17.480 | So you had a direct view of the mountain.

01:09:19.400 | That was his inspiration.

01:09:21.080 | That's what he stared at while he was writing Moby Dick.

01:09:24.160 | He bought this farm in part because of that mountain view.

01:09:28.480 | His uncle Thomas had a farm right next to this, that all throughout his

01:09:32.000 | childhood and young adulthood, he would visit every summer and he loved the view.

01:09:36.440 | And then his uncle said, I'm going to sell it.

01:09:38.280 | And Herman was like, this is really sad.

01:09:40.240 | But then the neighbors of his uncle Thomas, the Brewster said, well,

01:09:44.240 | we're selling our farm too.

01:09:45.640 | And on an impulse Melville bought it.

01:09:47.560 | He's like, I want to read here.

01:09:49.360 | He also built a Piazza, which he writes about famously in a short story, but he

01:09:54.000 | built a Piazza on the house on this side of the house so he could sit outside

01:09:57.560 | and look at the mountain.

01:09:58.360 | And, uh, I was talking to the young woman who was working in the gift shop.

01:10:03.480 | At Arrowhead.

01:10:04.920 | And she said he had built it small enough that it was comfortable for him.

01:10:09.920 | But if you were visiting, you wouldn't feel like you should sit and talk to him.

01:10:15.000 | He didn't want people to bother him.

01:10:16.240 | So he built it small enough.

01:10:17.520 | So he's like, no, this is not a visiting porch.

01:10:19.160 | This is like a me sitting here thinking porch, uh, which I really appreciate.

01:10:22.760 | So here's our dueling sheds, Jesse.

01:10:25.160 | This is my writing shed.

01:10:26.480 | There's Melville's.

01:10:28.240 | All right.

01:10:30.600 | Uh, you can be the judge here.

01:10:32.640 | How are we going to judge this?

01:10:33.960 | Who's a exotic writing location wins.

01:10:38.880 | Well, they're somewhat similar because they're in similar

01:10:44.600 | geographic locations, right?

01:10:46.480 | They are very similar.

01:10:48.480 | Uh, they're looking at, I'm looking at the iconic mountains.

01:10:51.160 | He's looking at the Berkshire mountains, but it is very similar.

01:10:54.520 | We both have a good space.

01:10:56.720 | Uh, here's some criteria.

01:10:58.880 | It depends on your criteria.

01:10:59.920 | His would been noisier because it's in his house and his house

01:11:05.680 | is built around a central chimney.

01:11:07.320 | So the rooms are in a ring and they're all just connected to each other.

01:11:11.400 | So that you have to go through the rooms to get out.

01:11:14.800 | Now, I think it would go the other way, but it was noisy.

01:11:17.000 | They had a lot of people living in that house.

01:11:18.560 | Uh, so that's a point for me, a point for him.

01:11:22.400 | It's just looking at the outcome.

01:11:23.640 | So, you know, in my writing shed, uh, I wrote a chapter of my, you

01:11:29.880 | know, pragmatic nonfiction book in his writing shed, he wrote Moby Dick.

01:11:33.560 | So we, we got this, we got this sort of trade-off here.

01:11:37.120 | I think mine is quieter.

01:11:38.640 | Uh, I think his has a better track record.

01:11:41.840 | So maybe I guess we just have to call it a draw.

01:11:43.920 | Yep.

01:11:45.800 | Uh, that's one of the reasons I love this area I'm in though, is because

01:11:48.680 | especially like the Berkshires, but also Southern Vermont has this great

01:11:51.960 | literary heritage of people who wrote up here, right?

01:11:55.680 | So if you go to Southern Vermont, so just start going North from the Berkshires,

01:11:59.040 | right, uh, go up route, historic route seven, a on the way towards Manchester.

01:12:03.840 | Right.

01:12:04.200 | What do you come across Robert Frost's farm where he wrote, uh, won his first

01:12:10.880 | Pulitzer prize and wrote his famous poem about going through a walk in the winter

01:12:15.360 | woods, uh, that's all up here.

01:12:17.400 | Um, continue up farther North in Vermont, go to the Champlain Valley, take the

01:12:22.360 | pass over to the Mad River Valley.

01:12:24.240 | I don't know if this is the Lincoln pass or the other one.

01:12:25.960 | You get to the town of Ripton home to, uh, environmentalist, Bill McKibben.

01:12:30.920 | You get another Robert Frost farm where he went for the last 20 years of his

01:12:35.040 | life to just sit on this high elevation farm.

01:12:37.200 | Now, interestingly, as I just discovered from my brother-in-law's

01:12:40.400 | staying up there this summer, it's where, uh, Ripton is also where.

01:12:43.960 | Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard have a house.

01:12:46.360 | So there you go.

01:12:47.280 | They keep running into them.

01:12:48.400 | Anyways, it's cool around here because there is this history of writers coming.

01:12:56.800 | They use the environment to help get better thoughts out of their heads.

01:13:00.520 | And so there's a, there's sort of an inspiration to it, the

01:13:03.800 | anti-inspiration of Melville.

01:13:05.280 | So maybe this gives us another nod back to my shed is he, he, uh, financially

01:13:09.640 | failed as a writer there and had to.

01:13:11.800 | Abandon the farm under too much debt and go back and get a desk job

01:13:14.880 | as a custom inspector in the city.

01:13:16.240 | Oh, really?

01:13:17.400 | Yeah.

01:13:18.120 | It was interesting.

01:13:18.800 | Um, not to go too far on this, but he wrote these books before he bought the

01:13:24.520 | farm that no one except for Melville fans know about or remember they were

01:13:29.120 | eventually, I mean, essentially adventure novels, right?

01:13:32.800 | He had been on this like Epic five-year journey as a sailor where he was on a

01:13:38.840 | whaling ship, he deserted the whaling ship in the Pacific somewhere, got on

01:13:44.760 | another whaling ship, just as they had a mutiny put in jail, got out of jail,

01:13:50.440 | made his way to Hawaii, was a farmer in Hawaii for a while, got on a Navy ship.

01:13:55.960 | Five years later, makes it back.

01:13:57.520 | So he writes these sort of 19th century adventure novels that draws from his

01:14:01.960 | knowledge of these exotic places in the Pacific.

01:14:03.840 | And they're like blockbusters, right?

01:14:05.640 | They're like, this is great.

01:14:06.400 | This is a really fun.

01:14:07.480 | So he's thinking, I'm just going to be able to keep being a successful writer.

01:14:10.760 | So great.

01:14:11.840 | We'll buy this farm.

01:14:12.640 | He borrows money from his father-in-law buys this farm.

01:14:14.600 | He's like, yeah, I'm going to sit here.

01:14:15.520 | He had these plans.

01:14:16.360 | I learned from the docent to like rip down the house and build

01:14:18.720 | a new house with a writing tower.

01:14:20.240 | He was going to sit in his writing tower and like, this was going to be his life.

01:14:23.560 | The problem is, is he's hanging out now with, uh, Hawthorne and, um, other

01:14:29.240 | writers of this sort of mid 19th century, new England intellectual explosion.

01:14:33.440 | And he's exposed to all this like really smart stuff.

01:14:36.280 | And so the S the stuff he starts writing, it's like Moby Dick and et

01:14:40.000 | cetera, is not an accessible adventure novel, but is this like psychologically

01:14:46.160 | realist, proto modern type writing that no one had seen before.

01:14:49.560 | No one knew what to do with it.

01:14:51.160 | Like what, what the hell are you doing?

01:14:52.520 | What is this book?

01:14:53.560 | It's like kind of about whaling and it's like a science book, but also it's a

01:14:58.920 | novel and we're, we're going inside the character's head.

01:15:01.920 | Like, what is this?

01:15:02.680 | Right.

01:15:02.880 | And no one knew what to do with those books.

01:15:04.680 | They got terrible reviews and he just lived off of borrowed money from his

01:15:08.560 | father-in-law, got depressed.

01:15:10.400 | And they were eventually like, you can't just live out here on this farm.

01:15:12.800 | You need to go back and just like get a job.

01:15:14.280 | It wasn't until the 1920s that people were like, oh, Melville is a genius.

01:15:19.360 | Because by then, uh, our sensibilities had evolved.

01:15:22.240 | Modernism had come around.

01:15:23.280 | We're like, oh my God, these guys were early to it.

01:15:24.840 | It's like going back to Van Gogh and people realize like, oh,

01:15:27.360 | Van Gogh was onto something.

01:15:28.560 | But at the time they thought he was crazy and he cut off his ear.

01:15:31.240 | So this is a kind of interesting story about, he wasn't appreciated.

01:15:35.560 | So he did this great work there, but didn't really get to enjoy

01:15:40.040 | the rewards of that, that work.

01:15:41.800 | So, so hopefully, hopefully I'll have a more direct rewards in my lifetime

01:15:45.880 | for my writing in my shed than the Melville had.

01:15:47.960 | But it's cool up here.

01:15:49.400 | He died, he was, um, he was older.

01:15:54.240 | I mean, he made it to his seventies, maybe.

01:15:57.480 | But like what year?

01:16:00.280 | That would have been, I don't know, probably like he moved out of the, he

01:16:04.840 | moved out of Arrowhead, I think in 1863.

01:16:07.240 | Okay.

01:16:07.880 | And he would have been.

01:16:09.520 | I don't know, 45, 50, 45, 50.

01:16:13.120 | So he probably lived.

01:16:14.640 | So probably like the 1870s or 1880s, maybe like the early 1890s.

01:16:19.240 | He's buried in New York.

01:16:20.400 | So anyways, there you go.

01:16:23.440 | Battle of the writing sheds.

01:16:24.680 | The key lesson there, of course, is just where you do creative work can be as

01:16:29.160 | important as what work you actually do.

01:16:32.040 | Which is my way of saying, I'm sad that I will be leaving this beautiful

01:16:36.360 | surroundings soon and heading back to DC, but I'm excited to get back to the HQ,

01:16:40.880 | get back to some, uh, some new action as the new school year comes along.

01:16:45.240 | So it'll be sad to leave here, Jesse, but it'll be great to be

01:16:47.880 | back with you in the studio.

01:16:49.440 | So for everyone else, that's all the time we have for today, but we'll be back next

01:16:53.320 | week with the old fashioned in-studio episode.

01:16:56.440 | I'm looking forward to it.

01:16:58.000 | And until then, as always stay deep.

01:17:00.240 | Hey, so if you like today's discussion about decoding discipline, I think

01:17:04.960 | you'll also like episode 256, where we also took a closer look at exactly what

01:17:11.440 | we mean by this idea of discipline.

01:17:13.840 | Check it out.

01:17:14.840 | I think you'll like it.

01:17:15.840 | Why does cultivating the deep life start with discipline?

Pursuing Pain, Not Pleasure: How Laziness & Comfort Cripples You | Cal Newport

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