Ep. 220: The Two Types Of Ambition

00:00:00.000 | So what I would like to do is I would like to talk about how I've been applying so good

00:00:04.240 | they can't ignore you since I read it like a long time ago, actually.

00:00:07.200 | But then I feel like I kind of messed up somewhere along the way.

00:00:10.920 | So after after I kind of summarize, I would like us to go into kind of like, where did I go wrong and where do I go from here?

00:00:17.200 | Sounds good.

00:00:18.260 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.

00:00:28.560 | Episode 220.

00:00:30.520 | So if you're new to the program, it is where I answer questions from my audience about the theory and practice of working and living deeply in an increasingly distracted world.

00:00:42.600 | We're recording today on Halloween, which I think is exciting.

00:00:48.640 | Jesse thought it'd be a good idea, producer Jesse, to wear a costume, which I which I encouraged.

00:00:55.000 | I think he went a little bit too far, though.

00:00:58.200 | I'll let you be the judge.

00:00:59.240 | If you're if you're listening, you'll have to go look for the episode 220 video at YouTube.com/CalNewportMedia to participate here.

00:01:07.200 | But you be the judge.

00:01:09.000 | I think Jesse went a little bit too far here.

00:01:10.760 | So I really got into the costume.

00:01:15.920 | So what do you think about that?

00:01:17.840 | I mean, it's pretty elaborate, Jesse.

00:01:21.040 | Well, what is a skeleton's favorite plant?

00:01:28.400 | I don't know what.

00:01:29.200 | A bonsai.

00:01:31.880 | I mean, I think I have to fire you at this point.

00:01:41.360 | I think that's clear.

00:01:42.920 | All right, fair enough.

00:01:44.160 | Oh, my. All right.

00:01:46.040 | Enough nonsense.

00:01:46.800 | Actually, I take it back.

00:01:47.880 | If you're listening, don't go to YouTube to watch this.

00:01:50.720 | This will be a waste of everyone's time.

00:01:53.600 | All right, well, we get the the real producer, Jesse, back into his seat.

00:01:57.720 | I got a couple of announcements to make.

00:02:00.880 | Look, we can even look what he look what I've read for Jesse.

00:02:05.680 | I have on camera now.

00:02:07.560 | Oh, my. I'll tell you, Jesse, before I do the announcements,

00:02:11.200 | this felt like a good idea when I was walking out of my house.

00:02:17.840 | As I got to the HQ, I began to have doubts.

00:02:20.480 | And I'll tell you why.

00:02:22.240 | Right next to our office in the HQ is a legitimate documentary

00:02:27.280 | video production company, right?

00:02:29.840 | And we're talking about a company that does serious issue based documentaries.

00:02:34.400 | Now they know who I am, like they know my books, but I think they're

00:02:38.160 | they're confused why I have an office.

00:02:40.000 | And in their minds, it's probably some sort of weird,

00:02:42.560 | you know, grown man's clubhouse.

00:02:45.080 | And I just was having this thought as I was walking down the street

00:02:49.400 | carrying a fluorescent skeleton.

00:02:52.240 | That if they see me right now, I'm not going to be disabusing them

00:02:55.840 | of their impression of what's going on in here.

00:02:59.280 | So fortunately I did avoid them, avoided our super, did run into my

00:03:03.720 | neighbor carrying the skeleton, but yeah, could be worse.

00:03:07.160 | For those not watching, it's good to know that the skeleton

00:03:10.280 | is, you know, probably five feet tall.

00:03:11.880 | It is a short.

00:03:14.840 | Yeah.

00:03:15.280 | Yeah.

00:03:15.680 | It's a, we take it seriously.

00:03:16.960 | We take it seriously.

00:03:17.640 | Our, our Halloween decorations have a lot of skeletons in them.

00:03:20.240 | So we got a good show.

00:03:22.440 | So there's, there's two blocks of questions coming up early in the first block.

00:03:26.200 | We have our very first live caller.

00:03:28.800 | Jesse had promised us by the end of October, this episode has been

00:03:33.040 | recorded on the last day of October.

00:03:34.560 | So that's exciting.

00:03:35.200 | So we'll actually have me talking live with a caller going back

00:03:38.840 | and forth about their issue.

00:03:41.200 | Also have a good deep dive.

00:03:42.680 | I want to get into before we get into all that, a couple of quick announcements.

00:03:46.280 | First, I want to mention the live event.

00:03:48.680 | Come see Jesse and I live Monday, November 14th at 7:00 PM at the East

00:03:56.480 | City Bookshop here in Washington, DC.

00:03:59.280 | That's on Capitol Hill.

00:04:00.360 | There is a book of it.

00:04:02.280 | My friend David Sacks has a new book out called The Future is Analog, and I'll

00:04:07.040 | be moderating a conversation with him.

00:04:09.480 | So sort of like me interviewing David, but I haven't really done or been to an

00:04:14.760 | event just for my readers and listeners since pre pandemic.

00:04:17.840 | So if you're in the DC area, come by November 14th, 7 PM East City Bookshop.

00:04:23.440 | Other reminder, submit your questions.

00:04:25.400 | There's a link right in the show notes to do so.

00:04:28.320 | You go right to a survey, you fill in the questions.

00:04:30.960 | If you're interested in doing the question live, you can also put

00:04:33.360 | your email address there at the end.

00:04:35.200 | While we're still early in this new survey, it's your best chance

00:04:39.400 | to get your question on a show.

00:04:40.680 | So definitely go submit your questions.

00:04:43.600 | All right.

00:04:45.160 | Well, that's our news for now.

00:04:46.680 | Uh, let's get rolling right away with today's deep dive.

00:04:51.680 | I'm calling it the two types of ambition.

00:04:56.840 | Now this deep dive is based off of a, an article I posted to my newsletter

00:05:02.120 | at calnewport.com just a few days ago.

00:05:05.280 | So the original title of the article, and I have it on my screen here for those

00:05:08.880 | who are watching, instead of just listening, the original title of the

00:05:12.400 | article was on Michael Crichton's busy ambition.

00:05:16.960 | It's from October 28th.

00:05:19.200 | So the motivation for this article, which I want to pick apart in our deep dive

00:05:23.200 | today was actually coming across a profile of Crichton in the New York

00:05:29.360 | Times archives from 1970.

00:05:32.480 | And I have this on the page now on the screen, if you're watching a profile

00:05:38.200 | that's titled for Michael Crichton medicine is for writing.

00:05:41.360 | There's also a picture of a young Michael Crichton there.

00:05:45.000 | So what struck me when I read this profile recently was the busyness of

00:05:51.240 | Michael Crichton at this very early stage of his career.

00:05:54.280 | So let me set the scene for you.

00:05:55.520 | This is the scene that I, I opened the article with.

00:05:58.440 | All right.

00:05:58.920 | It's Michael Crichton, his last year at Harvard medical school.

00:06:02.480 | He's 26 years old.

00:06:04.040 | He goes to the Dean of the medical school.

00:06:07.720 | Uh, and he says, I don't think I'm going to practice medicine.

00:06:12.280 | I figured this out.

00:06:13.640 | But what I do want to do is publish a nonfiction book about hospital life in a

00:06:18.400 | particular, uh, the hospital in Boston where he was doing his, uh, intern rounds.

00:06:24.400 | And he's, and, and he asked, can I, instead of doing some of the normal,

00:06:29.120 | whatever, uh, work you would do during your final semester, can I instead go

00:06:33.360 | around the hospital and gather research for my book?

00:06:35.520 | And here's the actual quote I have here.

00:06:37.720 | From this article, which was written one year after this occurred, he said, why

00:06:41.640 | should I spend the last half of my last year at medical school learning to read

00:06:45.680 | electrocardiograms when I never intended to practice?

00:06:48.120 | All right.

00:06:48.840 | So he says this, the Dean of Harvard medical school, the Dean

00:06:54.200 | replies, paternalistically, Michael.

00:06:56.920 | I don't think you realize how hard it is to write a book.

00:07:00.200 | Right.

00:07:01.160 | So he's trying to warn this young kid, like you can't just like go walk around

00:07:04.000 | the hospital and gather some notes.

00:07:05.120 | This is when Crichton did his mic drop and revealed to the Dean of Harvard

00:07:10.040 | medical school that he had already published four books during his

00:07:13.480 | first three years at medical school.

00:07:15.360 | He had been doing so under the pen name, John Lang, L A N G E.

00:07:21.960 | Not only had he written those four books, but he had multiple other projects in

00:07:25.680 | action, not just this nonfiction book idea, which he had already started by the

00:07:29.080 | way, but his first two, I would say serious publication efforts, his first

00:07:33.720 | four books are potboilers.

00:07:34.920 | I've read them.

00:07:35.360 | You can buy them.

00:07:35.920 | They reissued them under Michael Crichton's original name.

00:07:39.200 | They're Clive Kustler, James Bond style thrillers with

00:07:43.800 | some techno flavor added in.

00:07:45.400 | But he was also by this final year of his med school deep underway

00:07:49.880 | with some more serious books.

00:07:51.360 | The first being a case of need, which he published under a pseudonym as well, but

00:07:57.840 | it was really the first thriller he wrote that got medicine more deeply involved.

00:08:02.960 | This would win that next year.

00:08:05.800 | It would win an Edgar award for best mystery novel of the year.

00:08:10.000 | It's a hard award to win.

00:08:11.680 | He also was working on the Adronima strain first book he would publish under his own

00:08:17.960 | name and of course would be a big breakout bestseller.

00:08:20.280 | It's what really started his fame in the literary world, became

00:08:23.800 | a big movie back in the seventies.

00:08:25.880 | He had all this stuff already going on when he went to talk to the med school dean.

00:08:31.240 | So by the time you get to a year later, when this New York times profile is

00:08:34.560 | written, you see that this is a one man multimedia operation.

00:08:39.000 | So in addition to all of those projects going on, he somehow has two more.

00:08:43.160 | Pot boilers he writes under his pseudonym by 1970.

00:08:47.600 | So somehow he adds two more books unrelated to a case of need,

00:08:50.800 | unrelated to the Adronima stream.

00:08:52.120 | He also, by this point was working on what would become the terminal man.

00:08:56.000 | His second techno thriller written under his own name.

00:09:00.080 | It was called something different in the profile.

00:09:02.200 | They're still calling it a sympathetic man, like a sympathetic nervous system,

00:09:05.680 | but terminal man is much better.

00:09:07.880 | He revealed that he was already intent on directing the movie for the terminal man.

00:09:13.520 | So he was concurrently writing a screenplay.

00:09:16.160 | He was also traveling to Hollywood every week on what he called, and I'm

00:09:21.120 | highlighting this here, a skills building gambit.

00:09:24.280 | So he was going to Hollywood to be trying to pick up because

00:09:27.320 | he wanted to be a director as well.

00:09:28.680 | And so he was going to Hollywood a couple of days a week.

00:09:31.920 | So this was the year after he left medical school.

00:09:34.160 | So he, he had this sort of half-hearted postdoc at the

00:09:38.120 | Salk Institute in La Jolla, uh, La Jolla, Lajolla, J O L L A.

00:09:43.760 | Coya.

00:09:44.520 | Coya.

00:09:44.880 | Is it La Jolla?

00:09:45.400 | Yeah.

00:09:45.560 | Okay.

00:09:45.800 | Which is not far from LA, I guess.

00:09:47.560 | Yeah.

00:09:48.000 | So he was going back and forth community.

00:09:49.800 | San Diego area.

00:09:50.560 | Yep.

00:09:50.800 | All this stuff was going on.

00:09:51.960 | At 27 years old, all this was going on at the same time.

00:09:55.720 | The New York times profile called his career hyperactive.

00:09:59.480 | And it is, can you imagine that?

00:10:02.880 | I mean, I do a fair amount of things.

00:10:04.160 | That's crazy.

00:10:04.840 | The amount of things he had going on.

00:10:06.320 | So all these different projects he was juggling at the same time.

00:10:08.560 | Oh, and by the way, he also published a novel with his brother.

00:10:11.160 | Under a pseudonym between 1969 and 70 as well, an experimental novel

00:10:15.520 | about drug dealing, where they would pass the manuscript back and forth.

00:10:18.440 | And, uh, he would write an entire draft and then his brother

00:10:21.920 | would edit entire draft, all this stuff's going on.

00:10:23.600 | So busy guy.

00:10:25.600 | I compared him in this article, let's say apples to apples, another

00:10:30.920 | really successful fiction writer, John Grisham, John Grisham's younger.

00:10:36.880 | Um, he, he really got a start in the early nineties, whereas, uh, we have

00:10:41.280 | Crichton getting a start in the early seventies, but whatever, same idea.

00:10:44.880 | And there was a period in the nineties where they were competing back and

00:10:47.200 | forth, not just for the biggest book sales Grisham and Crichton for a

00:10:51.160 | period of the nineties, there were in a huge war on movie rights.

00:10:54.520 | They were breaking deals, uh, breaking records for movie deals.

00:10:58.520 | And their agents would say things like, I want whatever Crichton got

00:11:02.000 | for his last book, plus $1.

00:11:03.600 | Like they were trying to one up each other.

00:11:04.920 | All right.

00:11:05.640 | So what's John Grisham story.

00:11:06.800 | So John Grisham in the 1980s, uh, is a lawyer, small town, Mississippi lawyer.

00:11:13.800 | He runs for, and also wins a seat in the Mississippi state legislature.

00:11:17.920 | So he's a Democrat state legislature and a small town lawyer

00:11:21.640 | doing both of those things.

00:11:23.000 | State legislators, a part-time job.

00:11:25.880 | And he decides he wants to write a book.

00:11:28.520 | He gets an idea for a book from a case that he wasn't trying, but was observing.

00:11:33.400 | And he gets this idea for a book and he tells his wife, I want to

00:11:36.240 | try to write a legal thriller.

00:11:38.360 | And she said, okay, but do two in a row.

00:11:40.080 | Right.

00:11:41.440 | So that way, you know, maybe one of the ideas doesn't work.

00:11:44.360 | You have two shots at it right away.

00:11:46.400 | And if both of those ideas don't work, then you know that

00:11:48.240 | maybe that's not for you.

00:11:49.200 | So he does this, uh, it's hard.

00:11:52.240 | It takes him longer than it takes Crichton.

00:11:54.760 | I have the numbers in here, but I think it was something like three years.

00:11:57.160 | Because he's writing in between these two jobs and you can find them in some

00:12:02.880 | interviews talking about, oh, I have my notepad while I was waiting for meetings.

00:12:06.600 | I was waiting for a legislative session to begin at scribble notes, but, but I

00:12:11.440 | found a really definitive interview where he said, this is the secret.

00:12:14.320 | I woke up at five and I wrote every morning and it was really hard

00:12:18.640 | and I was often really tired and it wasn't like all that fun.

00:12:21.800 | And that was the only way to really make progress.

00:12:23.280 | And it still took him three years to write the first book.

00:12:25.240 | He started the second book the day after he finished the first.

00:12:29.080 | Good thing he did that because the first name, the, the, uh,

00:12:33.080 | the first book of time to kill.

00:12:34.560 | He had a hard time finding a publisher when it came out, small first

00:12:37.680 | printing did nothing disappeared, but he had already basically finished

00:12:41.080 | his second book by that point.

00:12:42.360 | So he's like, I might as well.

00:12:43.840 | This time, his second book, which is the firm, his agent leaked bootleg

00:12:51.720 | copies of the manuscript to movie producers.

00:12:54.880 | So before they had even sold the book, Paramount came in and said, we'll pay

00:12:59.800 | you $600,000 for the movie rights for the firm.

00:13:02.880 | So then once the publishing industry heard that Paramount had paid 600,000,

00:13:06.720 | they're going to do a big movie, which they eventually did with

00:13:08.720 | Gene Hackman and Tom Cruise.

00:13:10.000 | Double day snapped up the book rights for a lot of money.

00:13:13.160 | That book got a lot of coverage, went on to sell a lot.

00:13:17.000 | The number I quote in the article, 7 million copies.

00:13:20.680 | I couldn't really source that well.

00:13:22.280 | It might be less than that, but anyways, it's sold.

00:13:24.480 | It's sold a lot of copies instead of his whole career.

00:13:26.360 | This is where, and I say in the article, Grisham's path diverges from Crichton.

00:13:32.520 | Grisham does not look at the buffet of appealing opportunities that is generated

00:13:41.080 | by his initial success and say, let's start feasting.

00:13:43.920 | He does something very different.

00:13:46.400 | He says, I now have the leverage and money needed to simplify my

00:13:52.080 | life in a way I couldn't before.

00:13:53.600 | Stops practicing law, leaves the legislature.

00:13:57.680 | Based on the advice he heard from a bookseller that all the big fiction

00:14:02.320 | names published once a year, he said, that's what I'm going to do.

00:14:04.480 | One book a year.

00:14:06.600 | That's what matters, especially in the beginning.

00:14:08.840 | I need a book every year to solidify my audience.

00:14:12.120 | And he basically retreated into just a writing routine of one book per year.

00:14:17.520 | And I have some of the details of it because he's talked about this before.

00:14:20.800 | Here's how he eventually perfected this.

00:14:22.480 | I would call it almost monastic writing routine.

00:14:25.240 | He starts writing on January 1st.

00:14:27.600 | He works three hours a day, five days a week.

00:14:31.720 | He used to write in their Oxford.

00:14:34.520 | Then he moved to Charlottesville, Virginia.

00:14:36.680 | They have a farm.

00:14:37.520 | He has an outbuilding on that farm that they renovated for him

00:14:40.800 | to write no internet connection there.

00:14:42.280 | First thing in the day, three hours.

00:14:44.640 | He basically writes till lunchtime, five days a week, not on the weekends.

00:14:47.880 | All right.

00:14:49.000 | That rhythm has him finish the first draft usually by March.

00:14:53.680 | The editing begins.

00:14:55.840 | He wants to have the manuscript completely locked in by July.

00:14:58.280 | Starts in January, six months later, done with the manuscript.

00:15:02.600 | Now that's it for writing until the next January.

00:15:06.120 | Now he'll think and do research about what his next book

00:15:09.240 | is going to do at his own pace.

00:15:10.760 | He will do clearly publicity.

00:15:13.200 | He usually does fall releases.

00:15:15.440 | So when that book comes out in the fall, he'll do publicity,

00:15:18.080 | but he's not a big publicity guy.

00:15:19.760 | He does limited tours.

00:15:20.720 | He'll do the big shows and interviews and then retreats again back to his farm.

00:15:24.400 | And that's kind of it.

00:15:26.480 | He doesn't do these other projects.

00:15:28.720 | He doesn't want to direct.

00:15:29.800 | He doesn't want to do 17 different types of books like Crichton was doing.

00:15:33.040 | He wasn't trying to establish a production company or

00:15:35.800 | get involved in television.

00:15:37.320 | They would sell the movie rights to his books, but that was about it.

00:15:40.880 | 15 hours a week, six months out of the year.

00:15:44.480 | Uh, the rest of his energy goes to other things.

00:15:46.880 | When he had younger kids, they were really, he was really

00:15:49.400 | into little league baseball.

00:15:51.400 | And so he built, uh, it's not, he doesn't want, it's not officially

00:15:56.560 | associated with little league, but a youth baseball, uh, complex

00:15:59.960 | five, really great fields.

00:16:01.720 | They started their own youth baseball league.

00:16:04.680 | He was the commissioner of the league.

00:16:07.280 | He loves baseball.

00:16:08.120 | He loves coaching.

00:16:08.800 | He thinks it's great.

00:16:09.520 | You know, for kids, I know he's heavily involved in

00:16:12.840 | political fundraising as well.

00:16:14.480 | It just has other stuff that he does.

00:16:16.520 | So I found an article and I can't, I can't excavate this anymore, but I

00:16:21.480 | remember finding this and reading this and I wrote about this somewhere.

00:16:25.160 | I can't find where, so I can't find the original source, but you'll have

00:16:27.640 | to take me, take me at my word for this.

00:16:29.440 | Uh, at some point, this was an article from probably the last 10 or 15 years.

00:16:34.080 | His longtime assistant retired.

00:16:35.880 | And he realized, according to this article, I found that he didn't

00:16:39.040 | need to hire a replacement because there was no work for her to do.

00:16:41.360 | I mean, his agent has his number.

00:16:44.480 | His editor has his number.

00:16:46.120 | They know his routine.

00:16:47.720 | He's not involved in a lot of projects.

00:16:49.400 | He's not involved in a lot of schemes.

00:16:50.960 | So there was nothing for the assistant to even organize.

00:16:53.560 | He writes from January to March edits from March to July does a one

00:16:57.400 | week publicity tour in the fall.

00:16:58.880 | So it was very different than Crichton.

00:17:02.560 | Crichton says, I now have success.

00:17:05.160 | I want to go do lots of different things.

00:17:07.040 | Grisham says I have success.

00:17:08.880 | I want to simplify my life.

00:17:10.040 | So what I did in this piece and what I want to do right here is try to put names

00:17:13.840 | to these two different approaches to ambition.

00:17:16.240 | So what I write in the article is the first model exemplified by

00:17:20.160 | Crichton is what I call type one.

00:17:22.800 | It craves activities and feasts at the buffet of appealing

00:17:26.160 | opportunities that success creates.

00:17:29.240 | The other model exemplified by Grisham is what I call type two.

00:17:33.680 | It craves simplicity and autonomy and see success as a source of leverage

00:17:38.520 | to reduce stressful obligations.

00:17:40.040 | Medical school wasn't sufficiently stimulating for Crichton.

00:17:43.080 | Life as a lawyer was too hectic for Grisham.

00:17:45.840 | They therefore reacted to their success in much different ways

00:17:48.560 | when it respectively arrived.

00:17:50.760 | Now, my argument is this is a spectrum, but most people fall towards one end of

00:17:56.000 | the spectrum or the other, the type one Crichton end or the type two Grisham end.

00:18:00.880 | And that it's important to understand where you fall on the spectrum because

00:18:05.360 | it will have a big impact on not only do you, how you plan your professional

00:18:10.800 | or aspirational endeavors, but how you react to successes when they come.

00:18:14.280 | If you don't have this figured out, you can end up in a mismatch situation.

00:18:18.800 | If you're a Grisham that allows the pressure of your success to push you

00:18:23.240 | into a bunch of Crichton style projects, you're not going to be happy.

00:18:26.360 | If you're a Crichton and you use the, the, you know, your first book taking

00:18:31.280 | off to move to the middle of the woods, I can finally now live in the house

00:18:36.000 | in Maine, overlooking the water.

00:18:37.480 | You might be bored.

00:18:39.280 | You might be depressed.

00:18:40.480 | You say, what I've just isolated up here.

00:18:42.160 | This doesn't make me happy.

00:18:43.080 | So understanding where you fall, I think is important.

00:18:45.920 | And that was the call I made in that article, recognizing those

00:18:50.080 | are two very different types.

00:18:51.560 | And they're both valid, I think is in itself, very validating for people.

00:18:55.840 | So when you're doing something like lifestyle centric career

00:18:58.760 | planning, you have some clarity.

00:19:00.440 | So the final question is where do I fall?

00:19:03.400 | Well, in the article, I was really clear.

00:19:04.680 | Grisham is what resonates with me.

00:19:07.360 | I got some pushback though.

00:19:09.720 | People say you say Grisham resonates with you, but your life looks

00:19:13.360 | more Crichton-y to us from the outside.

00:19:16.280 | And I think that's a very good point.

00:19:17.840 | And I guess what I would say is that I'm aspirationally Grisham.

00:19:21.880 | I mean, to me, being able to work autonomously on a hard project on my own

00:19:27.320 | terms and my own timings to disappear for a while and just come back into

00:19:31.240 | the public eye occasionally, that really resonates when I read that profile

00:19:34.720 | of Crichton, it stressed me out, made me anxious.

00:19:37.760 | So I think I resonate more times Grisham-y.

00:19:40.400 | Now it looks like I'm doing a lot and partially that's true.

00:19:44.120 | I'm probably a little bit more in the Crichton spectrum than

00:19:46.760 | where I need to end up.

00:19:47.880 | But partly it's an illusion because I do things sequentially.

00:19:52.880 | I work on things a little bit at a time.

00:19:54.760 | This is classic slow productivity, a little bit of time, but with great focus.

00:19:58.600 | Do that long enough and things begin to pile up, but I'm not necessarily working

00:20:02.320 | on all those things at the same time.

00:20:03.680 | I think the, the podcast newsletter video portion of my empire makes it,

00:20:08.440 | makes my activity seem really multiplied.

00:20:10.640 | But as Jesse will attest, this is a half day venture for me.

00:20:15.560 | So the way I see all of this, like what you're hearing right now is unlike

00:20:19.480 | Grisham, I'm a web 2.0 guy.

00:20:22.120 | I grew up with the internet.

00:20:23.280 | So I do like to be able to connect directly with my readers and listeners.

00:20:27.880 | To me, that's really important, but I keep it confined.

00:20:29.920 | And so I just have a burst each week of let's do a bunch of stuff to

00:20:33.720 | connect with our readers, but it's confined.

00:20:35.960 | It's not a lot of ongoing projects that are eating up a lot of

00:20:38.800 | my time throughout the week.

00:20:40.360 | So if you put that aside, it's basically writing in CS.

00:20:44.080 | And if I had to pick an ideal, where would I be when I sell, you know,

00:20:48.080 | 7 million copies of the firm or whatever my equivalent is, honestly, to me, an

00:20:52.200 | ideal would be, I'm always writing.

00:20:54.400 | I'm always thinking sequentially though, one thing at a time, you know, I'm

00:20:57.640 | finishing this book chapter, then I'm writing this New Yorker piece that I'm

00:21:01.000 | writing this academic article that I'm writing a couple more book chapters.

00:21:03.800 | With a half day every week where we do this nonsense so that I'm

00:21:08.320 | not just living in a cave.

00:21:09.280 | To me, that would be great.

00:21:10.400 | I'd be happy with that.

00:21:12.160 | I don't need to be directing or whatever the equivalent is

00:21:14.680 | of all of Crichton's busyness.

00:21:15.760 | So anyways, type one, type two, know where you are.

00:21:18.240 | Use that knowledge to help direct how you approach both your

00:21:22.360 | ambitions and your successes.

00:21:24.840 | And I think it would make people a lot happier.

00:21:26.360 | Do you think Crichton's still like that?

00:21:29.640 | Well, he's dead.

00:21:31.200 | So he's the ultimate.

00:21:33.960 | Oh, right.

00:21:35.320 | I was thinking, yeah.

00:21:36.360 | Yeah.

00:21:36.720 | So Crichton died in '08 maybe?

00:21:39.920 | Cancer.

00:21:40.880 | Yeah.

00:21:41.840 | He's older.

00:21:42.560 | By the way, I'm always surprised by how old he was.

00:21:44.920 | Well, we talked about this before on the show, but you read his first book under

00:21:48.000 | his own name, The Adronoma Strain, which again, reads so modern.

00:21:51.680 | You think this book was from the nineties.

00:21:53.800 | And yet in the book, no one's landed on the moon yet.

00:21:57.240 | So that's a long career.

00:21:59.200 | So he, when he first started writing these things, there were, there

00:22:02.160 | were no personal computers.

00:22:03.560 | We hadn't landed on the moon yet, you know, uh, because he's, he was born in 1942.

00:22:10.120 | Yeah.

00:22:10.520 | I was getting confused with Moneyball.

00:22:12.880 | Oh, Michael Lewis.

00:22:14.240 | Yeah.

00:22:14.560 | Yeah.

00:22:14.920 | Uh, yeah.

00:22:16.600 | I wonder what his deal is.

00:22:17.560 | He, so he has a podcast with his, his buddy Gladwell's network.

00:22:22.920 | He writes, uh, usually he's always working on a book.

00:22:26.360 | I thought he had a, one of these sort of visiting like

00:22:29.600 | professorship things at Tulane.

00:22:31.200 | Yeah.

00:22:31.880 | For a while.

00:22:32.560 | I mean, I know that's what Isaacson's doing.

00:22:34.920 | I think Meacham is doing that.

00:22:36.360 | A lot of these writers, like these sort of that generation of came out of magazines.

00:22:42.760 | Yeah.

00:22:42.960 | They're in their sixties, uh, Pulitzer winning writers.

00:22:45.920 | A lot of them have these positions at universities.

00:22:48.720 | But yeah, I think Lewis is a good example.

00:22:52.600 | You know, I think he's just like, I just want to write.

00:22:54.800 | Yeah.

00:22:55.200 | I know both the whole time.

00:22:56.240 | I was just thinking about Lewis for some reason.

00:22:58.000 | I don't know why.

00:22:58.480 | Yeah.

00:22:58.880 | Why don't you go down that rabbit hole too.

00:23:00.000 | Um, all right.

00:23:01.280 | So we're almost to our, our very first live call.

00:23:04.840 | Uh, I first want to mention a sponsor, actually two sponsors that I'm very

00:23:09.280 | excited about because this is just coming straight out of my own life.

00:23:11.960 | So this will be, these are two things I really want to recommend that it

00:23:14.360 | will be easy to recommend because this is just pulling from my own life.

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00:23:35.000 | Jesse, I missed my 8 Sleep so much.

00:23:37.200 | I just got back from Georgia.

00:23:38.800 | I really missed it there.

00:23:40.760 | I was staying in a hotel in Georgia, the Marriott.

00:23:43.200 | And here's what happens at a hotel.

00:23:46.000 | And I think it happens other places too.

00:23:47.280 | Is I sleep hot.

00:23:48.480 | I make the room cold.

00:23:50.200 | I had that thing rock and rolling at 65 degrees.

00:23:53.320 | 65.

00:23:54.120 | 65 degrees.

00:23:55.000 | So when you're first getting in the bed in a hotel room at 65 degrees, you

00:23:59.080 | think I'll never be warm again.

00:24:02.120 | Like maybe I'll need extra blankets.

00:24:03.840 | Like it's freezing.

00:24:04.720 | I got to get under covers.

00:24:05.560 | It's like uncomfortable to be outside.

00:24:07.000 | It takes 10 minutes before you're uncomfortably hot, because what happens

00:24:13.040 | is your body heat builds up in those comforters and in the mattress and you're

00:24:17.600 | hot.

00:24:17.920 | And I had those covers kicked off by the time I was waking up in the middle of the

00:24:21.880 | night.

00:24:22.160 | This is what the 8 Sleep does.

00:24:24.400 | It's not about, Oh, I want it to feel really cold on my skin.

00:24:27.480 | It's that it takes the heat away.

00:24:30.280 | So that really comfortable feeling you get when you first get into a warm bed on a

00:24:34.800 | cool night, before your body heats, warmed it up, you keep it all night long.

00:24:38.040 | The 8 Sleep is just pulling that heat away through its capillary system.

00:24:42.440 | And so it always stays comfortable under the, under the comforters.

00:24:46.360 | So, I mean, 8 Sleep has basically ruined me for travel.

00:24:49.480 | Cause I, I really notice it now.

00:24:51.880 | I'm like, man, I miss my 8 Sleep.

00:24:54.200 | It would be pretty eccentric to bring it with me though, Jesse.

00:24:56.880 | It's a, you know, it's, you have this big mattress cover and this cool, like

00:25:00.520 | spaceship looking pod that maybe is going too far, but you know, this is my evidence

00:25:05.880 | that I love my 8 Sleep is now I have a hard time when I'm not with it.

00:25:08.280 | Uh, they have a lot of data, but I'm not even going to quote the data.

00:25:11.400 | Take it from me.

00:25:12.640 | I love it.

00:25:13.880 | I'm a negative one on their temperature scale.

00:25:16.800 | I think my wife is a negative two.

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00:25:21.080 | Uh, I am a big 8 Sleep fan.

00:25:23.560 | So go to 8sleep.com/deep to save $150 on the pod.

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00:25:33.600 | 8 Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select

00:25:37.320 | countries in the EU and Australia.

00:25:39.840 | We have a new sponsor today.

00:25:42.040 | Again, something that I have been using for a long time before they sponsored the

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00:26:12.480 | Let me tell you, I've been a subscriber to Masterclass for a while.

00:26:15.440 | I'll tell you three classes I've done on it.

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00:26:24.960 | So I did a class with Ron Howard, which is filmed, by the way, the set they filmed

00:26:31.520 | Ron Howard's class on is itself cinematic.

00:26:34.960 | They have like a 30 foot LED wall where he can like show what he's talking about.

00:26:39.840 | Uh, that was really good because he did scene deconstruction.

00:26:42.800 | Let's look at this scene from one of my movies.

00:26:45.440 | Look what the camera is doing.

00:26:46.560 | Fascinating.

00:26:47.760 | Then I found a class from Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, Oscar

00:26:52.400 | award-winning and Emmy award-winning Aaron Sorkin.

00:26:55.160 | The cool thing about that class is that there was this extra.

00:26:58.680 | So some of these classes have extras where it was him teaching a screenwriting

00:27:03.840 | seminar with students and the students would present their screenplays and Sorkin

00:27:10.040 | would give feedback on the screenplays.

00:27:11.760 | Like that's how you get to the guts of like how does screenwriting work?

00:27:15.640 | You see a master actually working with real first time screenwriters

00:27:20.320 | and helping them with it.

00:27:21.560 | Uh, on the writing side, this is the first master, uh, the first class that I viewed

00:27:27.440 | once I subscribed for masterclass Gladwell has one really interesting.

00:27:31.160 | Like he really gets into all of the elements of how he does his writing.

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00:28:17.600 | All right.

00:28:21.840 | We're gonna start our first question block with a something we've been

00:28:24.480 | excited about for a while now, a live caller.

00:28:27.880 | So I can actually talk to someone back and forth.

00:28:31.840 | Uh, we have video on the live caller too.

00:28:34.080 | So if you're a YouTube listener, youtube.com/counterpartmedia, you can

00:28:37.720 | actually see both of us on the screen.

00:28:40.160 | Our first live caller is Spiros who has questions about lifestyle centric career

00:28:47.240 | planning and concerns about falling into the second control trap with his current

00:28:52.400 | career that may be going too well.

00:28:55.360 | And because of that, it is steering him, the pressures of that, or perhaps

00:28:59.640 | steering him away from a deeper life.

00:29:01.080 | All right.

00:29:01.720 | So let's go to our phone line and talk with Spiros.

00:29:04.360 | All right.

00:29:07.600 | We have our next caller here.

00:29:09.520 | Spiros, thank you for calling into the deep questions podcast.

00:29:13.480 | And now for what I understand, you actually have a case study you want to

00:29:16.880 | share with us of some of the principles I talk about actually put into action.

00:29:21.480 | Yep, exactly.

00:29:23.200 | Yeah.

00:29:23.400 | So what I would like to do is I would like to talk about how I've been applying.

00:29:27.240 | So would they can't ignore you since I read it like a long time ago, actually.

00:29:30.600 | But then I feel like I kind of messed up somewhere along the way.

00:29:34.360 | So after, after I kind of summarize, I would like us to go into kind of like,

00:29:38.160 | where did I go wrong and where do I go from here?

00:29:40.600 | Sounds good.

00:29:41.680 | All right.

00:29:43.040 | So, uh, I moved to the U S from Greece in 2012, like literally 10 years

00:29:47.800 | ago to do a PhD in robotics.

00:29:49.600 | Uh, and I read your book a couple of years later.

00:29:52.280 | So in 2014, and I was like, Whoa, okay.

00:29:55.080 | I see what I'm supposed to do.

00:29:57.120 | So I started applying it first to research, but then I got the opportunity to

00:30:01.000 | participate in the 2015 DARPA robotics challenge.

00:30:04.200 | So then I started applying the principles to robotics software, as

00:30:07.480 | opposed to just robotics research.

00:30:09.040 | That went pretty well.

00:30:10.840 | I got really, I got really into kind of like the more the software side of robotics.

00:30:14.520 | Uh, I decided to take a leave of absence to join a robotic startup and that dropping

00:30:19.280 | out of the PhD program with a master's did really well in that startup.

00:30:22.840 | I was the first software engineer.

00:30:24.400 | I hired the team eventually, uh, followed the startup to Austin, Texas in 2016.

00:30:30.080 | Uh, then moved to San Francisco in 2017 to work for another robotic startup.

00:30:34.520 | Again, did really well, got promoted, got to travel to Hong Kong and

00:30:37.800 | China for manufacturing purposes.

00:30:39.520 | And now since 2018, uh, I've been working for one of the top three, perhaps the top,

00:30:46.280 | uh, self-driving car company here in San Francisco.

00:30:48.640 | Uh, again, I've been doing really well.

00:30:51.560 | Uh, I've gotten very high performance reviews.

00:30:53.840 | I've gotten promoted.

00:30:54.720 | I'm on track to get promoted again.

00:30:56.320 | Uh, I I'm considered very reliable, high performer, all of, you know, all of the

00:31:00.760 | good stuff you would expect from somebody, you know, following these principles.

00:31:04.280 | Uh, I have tons of options.

00:31:05.680 | Like, I don't mean to like sound, I don't mean to brag, but like, I get so much

00:31:10.600 | recruiter email these days that it's like spam.

00:31:13.120 | So I do have options.

00:31:14.320 | Um, now the, the reason there now, this is where this is turning from a case

00:31:20.120 | that is more to a question.

00:31:21.200 | I feel like, like to put it in terms of your book, I think I fell

00:31:24.480 | for the second control trap.

00:31:26.000 | I think I got too excited about the, you know, the performance and the

00:31:30.080 | promotions and the compensation and the recognition.

00:31:33.640 | Uh, that I've kind of become too busy to, I have too many responsibilities.

00:31:39.040 | I'm too busy.

00:31:39.920 | My compensation is too good to ignore if you will.

00:31:43.040 | Yep.

00:31:43.600 | So, uh, that's kind of where I would like to focus the question part.

00:31:46.440 | Excellent.

00:31:47.240 | Excellent.

00:31:47.520 | Well, let me, let me, first, I'm going to back you up to the beginning of your

00:31:50.200 | case study, uh, just for the edification of our audience.

00:31:54.120 | I want to go back to you as a PhD student.

00:31:57.480 | You read so good.

00:31:58.560 | They can't ignore you.

00:31:59.640 | Now you, you, you glossed over a little bit.

00:32:01.800 | Oh, I put those principles into play.

00:32:03.520 | And started becoming very successful in my studies.

00:32:06.720 | Let's go back and try to make that concrete.

00:32:08.960 | So like, can you identify what did you start doing that let's say other students

00:32:15.000 | in your cohort who weren't as successful or you, uh, the passwords yourself weren't

00:32:19.080 | doing, let's try to do some differential analysis here, because I'm curious in

00:32:22.200 | this beginning point first, and then we'll get to you now.

00:32:24.120 | Yeah, yeah, for sure.

00:32:25.880 | I think so.

00:32:26.760 | B because of your, your own case study in the book, you were also a PhD student

00:32:31.600 | and eventually a postdoc, et cetera.

00:32:33.240 | I was like, Oh, I'm just going to do exactly what Kyle talks about here.

00:32:35.840 | Kyle talks about, you know, getting a, like a very fundamental research paper

00:32:39.440 | and kind of like going deep into the research paper, trying to understand the

00:32:42.760 | proofs, trying to understand the results.

00:32:44.600 | So that's something that I did a schedule some time every week to go through

00:32:47.960 | either fundamental papers in my field.

00:32:49.640 | So I was in a formal methods in robotics, which is like formal

00:32:53.440 | verification, formal sentences.

00:32:55.040 | Anyway.

00:32:55.440 | Yeah.

00:32:56.000 | Um, which by the way, I'm happy to geek out with you about that.

00:33:00.320 | We can talk about your improvers and, and we would, uh, we would lose all of our

00:33:04.240 | audience, but just let me know.

00:33:06.240 | I'm restraining myself right now.

00:33:07.560 | You know, I'm tiptoeing around it on purpose.

00:33:09.520 | Cause yeah, cause this can be a rabbit hole.

00:33:10.920 | Yeah.

00:33:11.160 | So that's one thing that I remember very distinctly doing.

00:33:14.720 | Um, then when, once I got the opportunity though, to participate

00:33:19.000 | in the DARPA robotics challenge, I was like, okay, I can apply this here as well.

00:33:22.960 | So then it shifted from like reading research papers as my, as my deliberate

00:33:26.800 | practice, let's say, to learning, uh, learning C plus plus learning Python,

00:33:32.720 | which are like some fundamental languages for, uh, for this kind of thing.

00:33:36.040 | And then something called the robot operating system, which is like a

00:33:39.160 | middleware for robotics applications.

00:33:40.800 | So I knew, I knew that these things existed and I knew some

00:33:43.680 | programming of course already.

00:33:44.760 | But I was like, okay, these are the three fundamental things I need to know.

00:33:48.600 | If I want to write robotics software and like get the robot to actually do something.

00:33:52.560 | By the way, we go to work like my team for the DARPA robotics challenge, go to work

00:33:56.400 | with those like Atlas humanoid robots from Boston dynamics.

00:33:59.520 | So yeah, pretty, pretty crazy platform to be working on.

00:34:04.200 | Also terrifying, but yeah, go on.

00:34:05.840 | Yeah.

00:34:07.000 | And so that's another way I applied that.

00:34:08.960 | So like I was, for example, I remember very distinctly scheduling blocks at the

00:34:13.440 | very beginning of my day, like before I even went to into the, you know, the grad

00:34:17.760 | student cubicles or whatever, like I would, I would, let's say, go to a coffee

00:34:21.480 | soap or something like that.

00:34:22.600 | And I would spend like, let's say two hours just going through tutorials, you

00:34:25.600 | know, writing code, you know, just deliberate practice.

00:34:29.120 | Okay.

00:34:31.000 | So just to clarify for the audience, the first thing you did was it's hard to

00:34:36.120 | understand these fundamental papers.

00:34:37.840 | Having that knowledge will be useful.

00:34:40.120 | Quick follow up here, because I get this question a lot.

00:34:42.640 | How did you actually structure the reading of hard papers without a formal forcing

00:34:48.000 | function?

00:34:48.480 | Like I need this for a project I'm working on.

00:34:50.640 | You just had a system quota.

00:34:52.880 | How did you do that?

00:34:53.560 | So, yeah, so, so the way I motivated myself was that, Hey, I'm, I'm seeing that

00:34:59.400 | I'm having a hard time with like the very formal aspect of writing.

00:35:02.600 | So I was able to write research papers, but they were kind of like, they weren't

00:35:06.880 | going very deep on the, on the math, on the, on the proof side of things.

00:35:10.000 | So I was like, okay, I'm going to motivate myself by saying that by

00:35:12.800 | understanding the fundamental papers and how these proofs work, I will be able to

00:35:16.280 | do that myself eventually.

00:35:17.880 | Then in terms of like how I structure that, I think it was something like, you

00:35:22.720 | know, kick off a note in Evernote, you know, pick a, pick a, pick one of these

00:35:26.040 | papers and then schedule time within the week.

00:35:28.560 | You know, as a grad student, I, you know, you have, like, I, I kind of like

00:35:32.480 | reminisce about the flexibility I have in my, I had in my schedule as a grad

00:35:35.960 | student.

00:35:36.320 | I remember scheduling like, yeah, once a month, at least once a month, I have a

00:35:41.320 | moment where I just insanely nostalgic for that.

00:35:43.920 | But anyways, go on.

00:35:44.560 | Yeah.

00:35:45.280 | Yep.

00:35:45.760 | And so I was, I was, if I recall correctly, this was like eight years ago at this

00:35:49.120 | point, I was scheduling time, like on a weekly basis.

00:35:52.520 | To make sure I get in at least a couple of hours.

00:35:55.440 | So it's kind of like go over the paper.

00:35:57.160 | And then the other thing I was doing, which I think you also mentioned in the

00:35:59.400 | book is when I was reading like papers around what I was writing around, like

00:36:04.760 | papers I wanted to reference, I wanted to cite in my own paper, I wouldn't just

00:36:08.920 | like, you know, skim through them or read them and then forget about them on a

00:36:11.480 | pile.

00:36:11.920 | I would actually take notes, like in a, in a, I would take digital, I would take

00:36:15.880 | notes on the paper and digital notes.

00:36:18.520 | And I would kind of sketch out what this paper is trying to do and how the, and

00:36:21.920 | how it, you know, proves the results.

00:36:24.960 | Yeah.

00:36:25.680 | Right.

00:36:26.800 | Well, okay.

00:36:27.120 | So just to summarize that before we jump now to the current moment, just to

00:36:30.000 | summarize that for the listener, what Spiros is doing here, which is straight

00:36:34.600 | out of So Good They Can't Ignore You is identifying the thing that is actually

00:36:39.280 | valuable in the field where you are, not what you want that answer to be, not what

00:36:43.880 | matches how you want your day to go, but what is actually valuable.

00:36:47.120 | So first off for him, that was understanding how to do this more

00:36:51.600 | fundamental theoretical work.

00:36:53.120 | And then later on, okay, understanding how to use all the different programming

00:36:57.240 | language tools that are relevant to the DARPA robotics challenge.

00:37:00.600 | So I can be as useful as possible.

00:37:02.200 | And in both cases, what you did, which I think is right, is said, okay, that's

00:37:05.840 | the reality of what matters.

00:37:06.840 | What do I actually have to do to learn that?

00:37:09.080 | Oh, it's hard.

00:37:09.720 | I have to read these hard papers and, you know, I'm in the same place.

00:37:12.880 | Theoretical computer science is the same as early in your grad student career.

00:37:17.040 | Understanding papers is how you advance.

00:37:19.680 | Understanding papers is incredibly hard.

00:37:22.120 | And those two things are true at the same time.

00:37:24.240 | And it was a big differentiating factor when I was coming up.

00:37:26.880 | Those who would wrangle papers and those who would just look for what's easy.

00:37:30.320 | So I think that's a great example of the principles in action.

00:37:35.000 | And it worked.

00:37:36.240 | Okay, so it worked too well.

00:37:37.480 | So now we jump ahead.

00:37:38.400 | You're suffering from the second control trap.

00:37:41.920 | So for people who haven't read that book, the first control trap is trying to get a

00:37:46.760 | lot of autonomy in your career before you built up the skills to actually justify it.

00:37:50.840 | That's where you are 23 and you quit to start your nonprofit that's going to

00:37:54.680 | change the world, but you don't know what you're doing.

00:37:56.560 | The second control trap is when you get enough leverage and skills and power in

00:38:02.640 | the marketplace to actually have control of your career is exactly when all of the

00:38:06.160 | pressure in the marketplace is going to be to stay, to move up to the next level,

00:38:10.440 | to take the higher salary.

00:38:11.720 | So it's when you're most able to be autonomous is when it's hardest.

00:38:14.800 | And that's what you're hitting now.

00:38:16.200 | So why don't you explain to us a little bit more?

00:38:17.840 | What is your job like now?

00:38:20.240 | What is your, what is your day to day like now?

00:38:22.280 | Is it managerial?

00:38:23.320 | Is it technical?

00:38:24.040 | Let's get a sense of where you are.

00:38:25.200 | It's yeah.

00:38:26.200 | So I'm a, my title is a staff software engineer.

00:38:29.760 | So it sounds like I'm a software engineer, like I'm writing code every day, but I'm

00:38:32.960 | not actually writing code every day because at a certain level in the individual

00:38:37.120 | contributor, like a real ladder, as we call it, you kind of like fork into

00:38:40.560 | different archetypes.

00:38:41.480 | So there is the software engineer archetype, and this is the person that like

00:38:45.040 | writes really good code.

00:38:46.160 | There is the domain expert archetype.

00:38:48.520 | This is the person who has like, you know, three PhDs in convex optimization or,

00:38:52.320 | you know, machine learning or whatever.

00:38:53.600 | So domain expert.

00:38:54.600 | And then there is the archetype that I think I better fit into, which is kind of

00:38:57.880 | like high level tech lead is what we call it.

00:39:01.040 | And so this is the person who is able to kind of see, understand how the system

00:39:05.160 | works end to end and kind of, you know, coordinate this team with this other team

00:39:09.640 | and this other person over here and get this, you know, other subsystem to do the

00:39:13.440 | right thing.

00:39:14.000 | And then you get the entire project or the entire effort to do the right thing just

00:39:18.520 | by understanding the system end to end and leading the integration efforts.

00:39:22.400 | So to put it more concretely, I do everything from, you know, analyzing kind

00:39:27.400 | of like metrics to see kind of like where we have, you know, gaps, writing project

00:39:33.200 | proposals, writing design documents.

00:39:35.720 | And then once we kind of move into the execution part of the project, I'm usually

00:39:40.040 | maybe, maybe I'm running some meetings or not, depending on whether we have a

00:39:43.040 | proper program manager support or not.

00:39:45.160 | I'm coordinating all of these different individuals, you know, software engineers,

00:39:49.400 | systems engineers, test engineers, sometimes operations teams that are like,

00:39:53.960 | you know, handling the self-driving cars on the road.

00:39:56.680 | So what's a day look like?

00:39:58.120 | Is it, how much of it is Slack and email?

00:40:01.000 | How much of it is?

00:40:02.120 | That's, that's exactly where you hit the nail on the head.

00:40:06.040 | It's very much, you know, hyperactive hive mind modes all the way.

00:40:10.720 | Like I have to fight really hard just to block out like two hours at the beginning

00:40:15.320 | of my day.

00:40:16.080 | And maybe if I'm lucky, I will actually, you know, get to actually do, do deep

00:40:20.200 | work on those two hours.

00:40:21.480 | Like today I'm on call, for example.

00:40:23.680 | So like for all I know, once my on-call, you know, shift starts, I will be

00:40:28.480 | completely derailed by like a, by like, you know, like an issue coming in on

00:40:32.680 | pager duty.

00:40:33.360 | There is a lot of activity on Slack.

00:40:35.880 | I've, I've done all sorts of little tips and tricks, you know, applying some of the

00:40:40.280 | stuff from, from your books and your podcast to minimize that.

00:40:43.800 | I only check email like one, I try to check only once a day.

00:40:48.400 | I once experimented with going a week without checking work email and nothing

00:40:54.000 | terribly happened.

00:40:54.880 | So I'm very much inclined to keep doing that again.

00:40:57.040 | Yeah.

00:40:57.280 | But, but like email is okay.

00:41:00.200 | Slack is where most of the hyperactive hive mind is kind of like operating.

00:41:03.800 | There are lots of meetings.

00:41:06.720 | It got much worse, you know, during the lockdown.

00:41:09.000 | So I'm sure I'm sure others are saying the same, like, it's like, sometimes I feel

00:41:12.920 | like, when am I supposed to like use the restroom and like make coffee?

00:41:16.920 | Like there's no time in between these meetings.

00:41:18.760 | Yeah.

00:41:19.160 | Which is a first.

00:41:19.760 | So there is a lot of that.

00:41:20.640 | Yeah, exactly.

00:41:21.320 | There is a lot of that.

00:41:22.160 | Um, like I, I, one of the things I talk to with my manager the most often is like,

00:41:27.240 | Hey, I need to feel, we need to figure out a way for me.

00:41:29.720 | I need to carve out time to do proactive work as opposed to waiting for a problem

00:41:34.840 | to arise and then doing reactive work and then fixing the problem.

00:41:38.160 | Like the reactive work, part of the problem is that reactive work is

00:41:43.000 | actually gets recognized a lot.

00:41:44.760 | So there is like, it's really hard to motivate proactive work when there is

00:41:48.640 | tons of reactive work to do and it gets recognized too.

00:41:51.240 | So that's one challenge.

00:41:52.680 | But why do you care about it being recognized?

00:41:54.280 | Um, Ooh, wow.

00:41:59.560 | I was not expecting that question.

00:42:00.880 | Um, when I say recognized, I mean, okay, there's the, there's a recognition in

00:42:05.800 | terms of like, you know, like performance reviews and stuff, but there is also the,

00:42:08.840 | like doing what the company, the business thinks is most, you know, valuable, you

00:42:14.480 | know, right now, this, this, this quarter, this month, you know, this, this year,

00:42:18.600 | whatever.

00:42:19.120 | Uh, and it's often the case that what, you know, the business priorities are to deal

00:42:24.240 | with their, with the reactive problems.

00:42:26.120 | They are not to go and, you know, do proactive work.

00:42:28.680 | Yeah.

00:42:28.960 | All right.

00:42:29.560 | Well, I'm going to give, uh, I'm going to give a two part answer here and I'm

00:42:33.440 | going to be terse because the second part of this answer is something that's probably

00:42:36.400 | going to take you weeks of actual thinking to do right.

00:42:38.960 | So you'll have to check back in.

00:42:40.120 | I'm going to give you a short term, a short term thing to try and a longterm

00:42:43.800 | thing to consider.

00:42:44.600 | Uh, the short term thing to try is I think this might be a good setup for a deep to

00:42:49.920 | shallow work ratio conversation with your manager.

00:42:53.560 | So I talked about this some in deep work, but then got a lot of feedback from people

00:42:57.960 | after that book came out about this particular strategy working well.

00:43:01.680 | So it's pretty well road tested.

00:43:03.120 | Uh, and it's where you, you have a conversation like the type you're already

00:43:06.240 | having with your manager, but it's a little more quantitative, right?

00:43:08.720 | You say, okay, um, this is what deep work is.

00:43:11.560 | This is what like reactive work is.

00:43:13.240 | You're in a tech company in San Francisco, so they probably know the term already.

00:43:17.000 | Um, and you say, what ratio of this sort of reactive shallow to deep proactive do

00:43:23.680 | you think is optimal for my position?

00:43:26.000 | Like what ratio of those two is going to produce the most value net for the

00:43:31.560 | organization?

00:43:32.160 | So we got to get a number on it and when you have to get quantitative about it, uh,

00:43:36.280 | they're not going to come back with the answer.

00:43:38.520 | I want you to do a hundred percent reactive shallow, right?

00:43:42.040 | Because you have this other value, you, you have this training, you can produce new

00:43:46.240 | things.

00:43:46.600 | Um, so when you get a number that they agree to, this often leads to the dissolving

00:43:52.760 | of ossification in business culture.

00:43:54.600 | So it lets let loose a lot of innovations.

00:43:56.880 | They might say, okay, maybe it should be 50 50.

00:43:59.240 | So what we're going to do is, you know, mornings now are for you to do proactive

00:44:03.080 | work.

00:44:03.400 | No calls start till you're not on call till the afternoon.

00:44:06.080 | We tell the whole team, don't expect responses.

00:44:08.000 | That's just an example.

00:44:09.080 | I don't know your exact situation.

00:44:10.320 | It might be, you know, Tuesdays and Fridays.

00:44:12.320 | Uh, you work from not at the office and maybe from somewhere else and you're just

00:44:17.400 | doing proactive.

00:44:18.120 | The quantitative nature of that really makes a difference and the positive

00:44:23.200 | orientation makes a difference.

00:44:24.480 | So it's you coming to your manager saying, how do I produce more for the company?

00:44:29.760 | Not you coming to the manager and saying, I'm fed up with you slacking me all the

00:44:34.040 | time.

00:44:34.480 | You know, you're terrible.

00:44:35.720 | The latter conversation doesn't go well.

00:44:37.640 | The former conversation I have report after report of that working.

00:44:40.680 | This, there was a short term solution.

00:44:42.680 | Try that, see how it helps.

00:44:44.280 | And that might be it.

00:44:45.400 | My longterm solution.

00:44:47.360 | I'm going to, I'm going to ask that you, you probably are at a good point.

00:44:50.280 | And let me actually ask you, how old are you?

00:44:51.480 | If you, if you don't mind sharing.

00:44:52.520 | Yeah, I'm 34.

00:44:54.200 | Okay.

00:44:54.520 | So you're, you're in this sort of heart of the millennial generation approaching

00:44:58.080 | middle age.

00:44:58.680 | It's a perfect time to, to start thinking through these questions of, okay, let me

00:45:03.240 | step back.

00:45:03.840 | How are things going in my, my life?

00:45:05.720 | What reconfigurations are looming on the horizon?

00:45:09.200 | It's a good time to go through a serious lifestyle centric, uh, career planning

00:45:14.120 | exercise where you really look out.

00:45:15.880 | I would look at 40 and 50 as age targets.

00:45:18.880 | And like we talked about on the show, have this really clear vision of, of

00:45:23.760 | all aspects of your life in an ideal world at that point, not just work, but

00:45:28.160 | where you live, what you're doing with your time, who you're around, see it,

00:45:32.440 | smell it, taste it.

00:45:33.280 | We like to say, uh, get that vision for 40, get that vision for 50.

00:45:37.560 | And then look backwards and say, how do I get there?

00:45:41.200 | And in answering that question, you may end up saying, okay, my current career

00:45:45.880 | trajectory, that's fine.

00:45:46.840 | I just have to do this deep to shallow work ratio.

00:45:48.520 | Maybe do a lateral move at some point into more, you know, you could maybe

00:45:52.040 | figure it out, or you might end up with an answer.

00:45:54.520 | You say, I have a lot of skills.

00:45:56.200 | I am a, an ML robotics expert engineer.

00:45:59.720 | Okay.

00:46:00.120 | Why don't I take that out for a spin?

00:46:01.680 | And I can actually maybe do something drastically different.

00:46:04.040 | I'm on contract.

00:46:05.040 | I work six months out of the year.

00:46:07.360 | I live on Vancouver Island.

00:46:08.920 | You know, I mean, you could, you have a lot of flexibility.

00:46:12.280 | So short term, I would do that ratio conversation long-term.

00:46:16.840 | I would say, let's, let's go through that exercise in detail and just see where

00:46:21.920 | it leads you and don't be afraid if it leads you to, I'm more or less close.

00:46:25.680 | I see to make some tweaks or if it leads you to, you know, I'm about to

00:46:30.280 | buy a ranch outside of Austin, you know, it could, it could lead you in a lot

00:46:33.480 | of different directions to be open to all of that.

00:46:35.080 | How does that, how does those as a one, two punch, how does that

00:46:37.760 | sound as a potential way forward?

00:46:39.040 | I'm glad the conversation went there because I kind of anticipated this

00:46:42.720 | and I've already like, I've already done the first draft of what you just

00:46:45.840 | described, knowing that it was, you know, it could come up, but should

00:46:49.840 | I, should I actually go into it?

00:46:51.560 | Yeah.

00:46:51.760 | Okay.

00:46:52.040 | Give us the, give us the, the, the brief summary of the, the ideal

00:46:55.200 | lifestyle picture you're playing with.

00:46:56.440 | So the brief summary is that I, so I'm originally from Greece, right?

00:47:00.120 | So I want to, I want to get to a point where I can, I can spend more

00:47:03.880 | or less every summer in Greece.

00:47:05.320 | Working, not working doesn't really matter.

00:47:07.520 | Um, spend, you know, about six months out of the year in the U S and then

00:47:12.400 | spend another quarter, you know, just working from somewhere else.

00:47:15.680 | Um, other things I want to be doing, I want to be able to be near the water.

00:47:20.080 | I love swimming.

00:47:20.840 | You know, I love, I love water sports and whatnot.

00:47:22.760 | So I want to be able to do that.

00:47:23.960 | Uh, I wanna, I want to start writing.

00:47:26.920 | I wrote a few blog posts and articles back in grad school.

00:47:30.400 | Um, and I really enjoyed that, but I gave that up later

00:47:34.000 | on to focus on my career.

00:47:35.160 | So when I get back into, uh, into writing, maybe eventually actually

00:47:39.520 | write a book, we'll see about that.

00:47:40.840 | Um, I want to, uh, so I I'm currently single.

00:47:45.520 | So eventually I want to be able to meet somebody now.

00:47:47.640 | I feel like I'm so busy or so exhausted that I don't even like

00:47:50.320 | make enough time in my schedule for dating.

00:47:52.200 | So I definitely want to, uh, you know, uh, like the connection back

00:47:55.720 | at the suffering essentially to put it in deep life terms.

00:47:58.200 | Um, other things in there, funny, you mentioned Austin.

00:48:01.440 | It's actually Austin is on that roadmap because I figured that if I were to move

00:48:05.960 | to Austin, which is central time, but I work Pacific time hours, then I get two

00:48:12.280 | extra hours in the morning when I still have energy and willpower to do things

00:48:16.520 | like deep work, to do things like writing before I engage with the hyperactive hive

00:48:21.400 | mind.

00:48:21.680 | So Austin is actually on the trajectory, uh, potentially.

00:48:25.320 | Well, okay.

00:48:26.360 | Um, I mean, it sounds like to me, uh, you're, you're heading down the path

00:48:31.920 | towards changing your career situation.

00:48:33.480 | If that lifestyle sounds like either a, a, uh, greatly reconfigured job at your

00:48:40.640 | current employer or a different setup altogether, that's maybe more freelancer

00:48:46.040 | contractor based.

00:48:46.880 | Is that a scary thought for you?

00:48:48.240 | Or is that where you you've led yourself already?

00:48:50.080 | I will.

00:48:50.800 | Exactly.

00:48:51.560 | You you're, you're spot on again.

00:48:53.000 | What is scary is I don't want to, in my attempt to escape the second control trap,

00:48:57.520 | I don't want to accidentally veer all the way to the first control trap.

00:49:01.280 | Cause it'd be easy to say, you know, screw all of these.

00:49:04.280 | I have enough money in the bank to last me, you know, X many years.

00:49:07.560 | I'm just going to quit.

00:49:08.560 | I'm just going to say, you know, screw Silicon Valley.

00:49:10.560 | I'm going to go to.

00:49:11.440 | You know, Mexico and work on my book or whatever, but then I would be probably

00:49:15.440 | falling for the first control trap if I go so extreme.

00:49:17.800 | Yep.

00:49:18.240 | So the, like the scary challenge is bridging the gap between like where I am

00:49:23.000 | right now and kind of this vision for my, for when I'm 40 or when I'm 50.

00:49:27.080 | Yeah.

00:49:27.640 | Well, okay.

00:49:28.160 | This is great.

00:49:28.840 | So, so in the first answer, we got to, I got to give some generic advice about deep

00:49:32.600 | to shallow ratios as a first step and lifestyle center career planning.

00:49:35.880 | Now we get an example of lifestyle center career planning.

00:49:38.080 | So I can give you a, a, a piece of advanced advice that goes to lifestyle center

00:49:43.000 | career planning implementation and, and you're spot on about, you don't want to

00:49:47.400 | fall back into the first control trap.

00:49:49.040 | You're not going to be happy if you say, I'm going to go to, you know, rent a

00:49:53.040 | house in Cabo and just work on my book.

00:49:54.920 | It that'll last a month before you start to get antsy.

00:49:58.200 | So what I'm always looking for in this situation is concrete exemplars.

00:50:03.480 | I'll often talk about the rule of three.

00:50:05.240 | So you want to find a real person who has your background, who has a professional

00:50:11.960 | setup that resonates, Hey, that works.

00:50:14.120 | Okay.

00:50:14.360 | Here's how they did it.

00:50:15.400 | Oh, I, they're a, a, they're a contractor that works on this type of ML project

00:50:21.080 | or whatever, like it's concrete.

00:50:22.640 | This is someone, and it's a, it's a, a job that they do.

00:50:26.120 | It's a six month a year job.

00:50:27.600 | It's a flexible enough job that they take summers off.

00:50:29.720 | They go up to New England in the summer.

00:50:30.960 | So real people doing with your skillset, what you want to do.

00:50:34.480 | Rule of three is if you want to be really secure, find three different

00:50:37.120 | people doing something like that.

00:50:38.400 | So now, you know, it's not a one-off it's actually a viable path, but

00:50:42.040 | have a specific, a specific target that you're working backwards from this guy,

00:50:47.320 | her and him did this set up with my type of skillset.

00:50:51.360 | How do I move there?

00:50:52.800 | I mean, I will say I'm doing that in some of my own lifestyle centric

00:50:55.720 | midlife career planning I've been doing.

00:50:57.560 | I don't share a lot of details about exactly what I'm thinking about because

00:51:01.760 | there's a lot of stakeholders involved, but this has been my approach is what

00:51:05.760 | I'm seeking is examples.

00:51:08.600 | I'm seeking people with similar backgrounds who have already figured out

00:51:13.240 | a configuration that seems to work.

00:51:14.960 | That's how I think you can avoid the first career trap.

00:51:17.000 | I think you're there right now.

00:51:18.400 | The seeking stage.

00:51:19.640 | Go see out these examples, meet the people also, by the way, say, can I call you?

00:51:24.320 | Can I take you out for coffee?

00:51:25.880 | If they're local, people are happy to share details of their

00:51:29.200 | experience and get concrete with them.

00:51:30.720 | How did you make this change?

00:51:31.920 | What are the hard parts?

00:51:32.920 | What advice do you have?

00:51:34.000 | I don't know if you ever talk, you probably didn't, but in that top

00:51:38.200 | performer course I did with Scott Young, we talked a lot about this, this

00:51:42.240 | journalistic approach to career development where it's like you're off

00:51:45.200 | that course, but I haven't taken it.

00:51:46.960 | No, we have students actually go through this.

00:51:48.800 | It's like you're writing a article on how this specific type of job transition works.

00:51:53.800 | You're out there doing research, gathering real information, always concrete.

00:51:57.440 | Always like this is something that people are actually doing.

00:52:01.200 | Um, and I think you were ready to start looking for those exemplars, which is

00:52:04.280 | also an exciting part of the process because you get all the aspiration

00:52:07.560 | without actually having to yet do anything to scary.

00:52:10.080 | So, you know, good for you.

00:52:11.280 | I think you're in the fun part.

00:52:12.320 | Uh, but I would.

00:52:13.400 | No reason why you can't start just trying to find people right now who come out of

00:52:17.200 | your background, who have a setup where they, they work eight months a year.

00:52:21.080 | They work six months a year.

00:52:22.000 | They're location independent.

00:52:23.040 | I'm sure they're out there in your field.

00:52:24.840 | Uh, there may be an academic affiliation.

00:52:27.280 | There may be a nonprofit affiliation.

00:52:29.000 | Maybe they're a fellow at the open AI, whatever.

00:52:31.880 | And there's so many options out there for your field.

00:52:34.120 | I think you're ready to start looking for concrete examples.

00:52:37.320 | This makes a lot of sense and really resonates.

00:52:39.880 | Yeah.

00:52:40.160 | I didn't, you've mentioned this before, but I never, you know, pieced it together.

00:52:43.520 | You're right.

00:52:43.840 | Yeah.

00:52:44.080 | That's what I need to do.

00:52:44.840 | Excellent.

00:52:45.640 | Well, Spiros, keep me posted.

00:52:47.280 | I want to know what you end up doing.

00:52:48.600 | Uh, and maybe I'll, we'll follow up and we'll share that with the audience.

00:52:51.360 | But in the meantime, you know, thanks for the case study.

00:52:53.720 | Thanks for the questions.

00:52:54.560 | And also an excuse for me to go through a lot of different advice.

00:52:57.800 | So I find that useful as well.

00:52:59.200 | Yeah.

00:52:59.800 | So, all right.

00:53:00.320 | So good luck for you.

00:53:00.800 | Thanks very much.

00:53:01.440 | Thank you, Kyle and Jesse.

00:53:02.760 | Bye.

00:53:03.160 | All right.

00:53:04.400 | So there we go.

00:53:05.520 | Our first live call.

00:53:06.640 | I enjoyed that.

00:53:07.360 | We have more of those to come, so stay tuned.

00:53:10.680 | And if you have feedback, of course, you can always send us notes

00:53:12.920 | to, uh, jesse@calnewport.com.

00:53:15.680 | All right.

00:53:17.920 | So let's move on now with, uh, some written questions.

00:53:21.440 | Let's see, Jesse, do you have the, uh, the written questions?

00:53:26.840 | Yeah.

00:53:27.640 | To me now we've got kind of a culture shock here.

00:53:30.400 | We've just talked to someone live and now we're going to written

00:53:32.800 | questions, but we do it all on here.

00:53:34.040 | All right.

00:53:34.280 | What's our first written question?

00:53:35.360 | Of the day.

00:53:35.760 | Uh, first question is from Philip.

00:53:38.560 | He says you got started by blogging, but what are your thoughts about using

00:53:44.320 | private journaling or building creativity or even a writing career?

00:53:48.400 | Like, so what are your thoughts for using journaling to, you know, build that?

00:53:51.760 | Well, so Philip, my thought on becoming a better writer is the best way to do this

00:53:58.880 | is to write, but in particular to write for audiences where there's feedback.

00:54:04.200 | So you have some sort of feedback function that is going to apply pressure

00:54:08.400 | to your craft to try to improve it.

00:54:10.600 | So that could mean writing for editing.

00:54:13.080 | So there could be an editor that needs to either accept or reject your piece.

00:54:16.920 | And if it's not good enough, they'll reject it or they've commissioned the

00:54:20.960 | piece, but they're going to be editing it.

00:54:22.600 | And you, you have that feedback in your mind of, if this is not good,

00:54:26.120 | they're going to be disappointed.

00:54:27.320 | There's going to be a lot of work to do.

00:54:28.360 | I want to impress them.

00:54:29.280 | It can also mean writing for an online audience.

00:54:32.040 | If you have other metrics to look at, such as it could be views or clicks.

00:54:35.520 | It could be more the direct feedback you get from your readers, the comments,

00:54:41.600 | they leave the emails, they send you, was this thing clicking or not?

00:54:44.800 | Did this, if you're a tech writer, get picked up on hacker news and do well,

00:54:49.360 | how is the subscribers to my email list doing?

00:54:52.560 | So you can get online metrics now as well, but what you want is writing

00:54:55.960 | for an audience with feedback.

00:54:58.040 | It's that stretch to want to optimize or improve that feedback

00:55:02.400 | function that you get better.

00:55:03.400 | That's where you get the deliberate practice effect.

00:55:05.600 | Writing to a private journal is not going to generate that.

00:55:09.120 | So as a source of making you a better writer, writing your private journal,

00:55:12.920 | it's not going to directly improve your craft.

00:55:15.240 | There are other benefits to it.

00:55:18.400 | I see here in the elaboration of your question, you mentioned that the book,

00:55:23.160 | The Artist's Way, talks about private journaling as a way to increase creativity.

00:55:29.280 | And that might be the case.

00:55:30.600 | If you're a novelist, doing private journaling on ideas might surface more

00:55:35.640 | random recombinations and connections of ideas in your mind and help you pull out

00:55:40.480 | more grist for the creative mill.

00:55:42.120 | So I could believe that if you're a nonfiction, like idea writer, I think

00:55:46.320 | taking notes on thoughts you have, different theories or connections between

00:55:50.160 | ideas, you don't want to lose that.

00:55:51.520 | So having a place to take notes that could help as well.

00:55:53.360 | So my summary is as grist for material.

00:55:57.680 | That material, then yeah, private journaling could help.

00:56:01.440 | I don't, but it could help for making you a better writer.

00:56:04.320 | You have to write for people who care and you have to care about how

00:56:07.160 | they feel about what you're writing.

00:56:08.360 | That's what's going to push you to improve.

00:56:10.880 | All right.

00:56:12.840 | What's our next question.

00:56:13.600 | All right.

00:56:14.840 | Next question is from Alessandro, a 24 year old from Italy.

00:56:19.200 | What are some examples of keystone habits for the community bucket?

00:56:22.240 | Yeah, I've got this question a few times, a really brief review

00:56:27.480 | for those who are new to the show.

00:56:28.800 | One of the methods we talk about on here for developing what we call the deep life

00:56:33.400 | is to divide your life into these different categories that we call buckets that cover

00:56:37.560 | different aspects of what's important for you.

00:56:39.720 | And the method we often propose is you start with a keystone

00:56:43.880 | habit in each of these buckets.

00:56:45.120 | Just something you do every day to signal to yourself that you take each of these

00:56:48.960 | parts of your life seriously to single self-efficacy to yourself.

00:56:52.800 | I am able to do things that's not required or mandatory just

00:56:56.840 | because I think it's important.

00:56:57.840 | And then step two is you rotate from bucket to bucket and spend a month or two

00:57:02.960 | on each overhauling that part of your life.

00:57:05.120 | All right.

00:57:05.520 | Alessandro is saying, and I've heard this again from multiple people.

00:57:09.000 | The community bucket.

00:57:11.080 | So the bucket where it's you sacrificing non-trivial time and intention on behalf

00:57:16.120 | of other people or people who are important to you, it's not always obvious.

00:57:19.680 | What's a daily habit to do there in the same way that it might be more obvious for

00:57:25.400 | craft, it might be something like I do an hour of deep work every morning or for

00:57:30.280 | constitution, it might be, I walked in thousand steps a day.

00:57:33.320 | What's the equivalent for community.

00:57:34.680 | I wrote down three ideas here just to get you thinking, Alessandro.

00:57:38.280 | Um, write, text, or call someone, you know, every day, you know, it could just be,

00:57:44.720 | Hey, a friend there, I was thinking about you.

00:57:46.800 | You thought my things was interesting.

00:57:48.000 | Calling your parents as you're driving home from work, seeing what's going on

00:57:51.960 | with the sibling, but just in this discipline, if I take a little time out

00:57:54.520 | of every day, just to keep touches on different people in my life, see what's

00:57:58.520 | going on.

00:57:58.880 | Idea number two, perhaps there's an online community that you're involved in.

00:58:04.280 | That's very important to you.

00:58:05.920 | People that share a certain interest or a philosophical or theological orientation,

00:58:10.800 | or they're involved in, uh, a niche hobby, whatever it is, right.

00:58:15.320 | But maybe you have an online community.

00:58:16.760 | Hopefully that doesn't exist in a massive public.

00:58:19.920 | Mind warping social media platform.

00:58:22.560 | Hopefully this is in something that's more controlled and niche and more of a long

00:58:26.000 | tail social media type environment.

00:58:27.560 | And maybe you do something every day on that community.

00:58:29.920 | You post something or another type of useful effort.

00:58:33.520 | You do 20 minutes of moderation on their forum, whatever it is, whatever helps keep

00:58:38.280 | that community up and running.

00:58:40.400 | So you feel connected to that online community.

00:58:42.080 | You're giving it energy every day.

00:58:44.200 | Idea three, I talk about this in deep work, something, whatever your equivalent

00:58:51.920 | is of daily Torah study.

00:58:54.360 | I thought this was a really cool example from, from my book, deep work, uh, in the

00:58:59.840 | Orthodox Jewish community, there's this tradition of you read Torah every morning.

00:59:05.520 | There's a page a day, there's a way to break this up.

00:59:08.840 | So it's a page a day.

00:59:10.760 | I don't know page means that there's a scroll, but whatever it's, you know, one

00:59:13.200 | reading per day.

00:59:13.960 | Um, and there's a tradition where you do it with a partner.

00:59:16.240 | Probably say the word wrong.

00:59:18.200 | Uh, Shavrusa, Shavrusa.

00:59:21.840 | I'm saying, I'm not saying that right, probably.

00:59:23.880 | But, uh, what, what they do is they, it's usually early in the morning before people

00:59:27.640 | have to get to work and you have a partner and you sit there and you study a page of

00:59:31.800 | Torah every morning.

00:59:32.680 | There we go.

00:59:33.320 | That's just an example or whatever the equivalent is in your faith community of

00:59:37.600 | every day doing something with someone else.

00:59:40.160 | There's a bunch of us in the same room connects you to that, connects you to that

00:59:44.120 | community.

00:59:44.400 | All right.

00:59:44.640 | Those are just examples, Alessandro, but that's the type of thing that have to be

00:59:47.560 | major, but it's not trivial.

00:59:48.840 | It's tractable.

00:59:50.520 | It might take some sacrifice some days, but you can almost always get this done.

00:59:54.280 | Uh, but it's not over the top.

00:59:56.880 | It's not, I have to spend four hours a day, you know, hosting a live event or

01:00:01.000 | something like that.

01:00:01.680 | So those are the type of keystone habits I have in mind for the community bucket.

01:00:06.680 | All right.

01:00:07.200 | What do we got next, Jesse?

01:00:08.800 | Uh, next is from JP, a 43 year old from Montreal, and he's looking for a deep dive

01:00:16.520 | with concrete examples of a template of a quarterly plan.

01:00:20.400 | Yeah, I like this.

01:00:22.320 | Let's stay nuts and bolts.

01:00:24.440 | All right.

01:00:25.440 | So background here, I'm a big proponent of multi-scale planning.

01:00:30.800 | So you have a quarterly or semester plan that you look at.

01:00:33.920 | Each week when you build your weekly plan, you look at your weekly plan each day,

01:00:37.760 | when you build your daily time block plan.

01:00:39.360 | So you're controlling your time and energy on multiple different scales.

01:00:44.480 | That's what allows you to take advantage and mold your time, uh, optimally

01:00:48.760 | at different types of levels.

01:00:50.280 | You need all three of those levels in there.

01:00:51.920 | There's a lot of variety for what people put into these quarterly or semester plans.

01:00:56.680 | Uh, the prepare for this, I went and just looked at mine before we went on the,

01:01:00.720 | before we went on the live stream.

01:01:02.240 | I looked at mine before we went on the, before we went on the air today, I

01:01:05.880 | maintained two, one for my professional life and one for my life outside of work.

01:01:12.160 | And the thing that struck me about my professional life on when I was looking

01:01:15.440 | at it, my plan for the fall, the semester we're in or quarter we're in right now

01:01:20.920 | is it's pretty brief, honestly, like a normal weekly plan.

01:01:27.240 | I have more text in it than my plan for the entire fall semester.

01:01:32.520 | I mean, so when I was looking at it, basically it was, um, there's three

01:01:36.120 | things in there and I'm talking sentences with a few bullet points under them for

01:01:39.760 | each.

01:01:40.080 | So there is a Georgetown academic work.

01:01:42.800 | It's at least so, you know, it's not that many things to say here.

01:01:46.680 | Like this is, uh, I'm working on these two academic papers and, um, you know,

01:01:52.080 | there's a administrative type thing I'm working on.

01:01:55.920 | The details don't matter, but just boom, boom, boom.

01:01:57.880 | Right.

01:01:58.120 | Writing.

01:01:59.240 | It's not that complicated.

01:02:00.800 | Uh, this is where I want to be.

01:02:03.000 | Like I'm writing my book.

01:02:04.120 | I'm working on my book, slow productivity.

01:02:05.960 | Uh, this is where I want to be by the end of semester.

01:02:08.680 | Here are some miles.

01:02:09.720 | I broke it out month by month milestones for the semester that's there.

01:02:14.080 | And I'm doing some New Yorker stuff and I know what's coming up and I have a

01:02:18.160 | couple of notes there on how I want to interleave it.

01:02:19.680 | All right.

01:02:20.640 | That's it.

01:02:21.640 | And then for, uh, I always call it the online empire, but the, the media

01:02:25.800 | company, the podcast video and newsletter, we have things, just to

01:02:30.280 | have some things we're working on.

01:02:31.280 | I have some bullet points to remind me of like the objectives, like where do

01:02:34.880 | I want to be by the end of the fall?

01:02:36.040 | We're talking about, it doesn't take up a whole page.

01:02:38.320 | My Google doc, like if you printed it, it could fit on one page.

01:02:41.720 | Right.

01:02:42.520 | So these, these aren't essays.

01:02:45.880 | It's not complicated prose.

01:02:49.000 | It's not Gantt charts.

01:02:51.160 | It's not spreadsheets full of different milestones.

01:02:53.680 | It's like get three chapters done and get this article done in between.

01:02:58.360 | And make sure you look into the possibility of shifting, like

01:03:02.080 | for the summer doing X.

01:03:03.200 | Like it's, we're talking about that level of detail.

01:03:05.120 | It seems like that's not enough information to help, but it makes

01:03:08.080 | all the difference in the world because now you have that in mind.

01:03:10.600 | You're doing your weekly plan.

01:03:11.720 | You're like, well, okay, if I'm going to finish this chapter by the end of this

01:03:14.280 | month, then this week, I really Tuesday of this week, I need to maybe take that

01:03:18.760 | over for writing because the Thursday and Friday are busy, this little bit of

01:03:21.840 | information unlocks a, a large volume of decision guidance about all this other

01:03:27.440 | stuff that happens in your life at smaller scales, right?

01:03:29.920 | So JP, it does not have to be complicated.

01:03:32.000 | In fact, the higher scale you go, the simpler these things get, because

01:03:35.360 | you're talking to such a big granularity.

01:03:37.200 | You can only get so many things done when you're talking

01:03:39.360 | about pretty big objectives.

01:03:40.280 | So these things get simpler.

01:03:41.400 | Uh, don't overthink it.

01:03:43.120 | Don't overwrite, don't over detail it.

01:03:45.880 | You just giving your energy for the next few months, some guides

01:03:49.120 | that the roughly guide it down.

01:03:50.640 | Trust your weekly daily habit to then focus that.

01:03:53.120 | So with your personal quarterly plan, is that just kind of keeping an eye on

01:03:59.320 | things outside of your time blocking for the day?

01:04:01.360 | Cause you do that outside of work.

01:04:02.560 | Yeah.

01:04:03.280 | So like that'll have, um, objectives and goals.

01:04:06.520 | So like, let's say you're changing, you have new objectives, fitness

01:04:09.560 | wise, or something like that.

01:04:10.600 | Like that would be on there.

01:04:11.600 | Um, it's like health and fitness stuff would be in there.

01:04:14.320 | A lot of family stuff, you know, you know, we want to do what's coming up.

01:04:18.480 | This, you know, this fall while we got a bunch of birthdays, you know, the fall is

01:04:22.760 | always complicated for our family.

01:04:24.880 | Cause we have Halloween, which we, we have high Holy days.

01:04:28.360 | Yeah.

01:04:28.520 | So then Halloween really kicks off the busyness because we take Halloween

01:04:32.120 | seriously and then I have a son has a birthday the week after Halloween.

01:04:35.880 | Um, then we have, uh, Thanksgiving and then another son has a birthday right

01:04:41.240 | after that, then you get into the whole holiday season.

01:04:43.360 | It's like, we're constantly buying gifts.

01:04:45.240 | We're constantly doing decorations.

01:04:47.080 | And so just having a reminder of that, I might pull back on other things.

01:04:49.840 | The winter, I typically will have like some more ambitious plans for the kids.

01:04:53.640 | Like, okay, we're going to set this up.

01:04:55.000 | We're going to learn how to do this.

01:04:56.080 | We're going to, we're going to have these projects, you know, because the

01:04:59.440 | winters are otherwise dark and less crowded.

01:05:01.040 | So all that type of stuff goes in there.

01:05:02.280 | So for the, for the technicalities of when you look at your quarterly and

01:05:07.120 | you're doing your weekly plan, like every day in the time block that that's

01:05:10.520 | outside the time blocking for your working hours.

01:05:12.480 | So, right.

01:05:12.880 | Most of the time.

01:05:13.480 | Yeah.

01:05:13.760 | Yeah.

01:05:14.400 | So, so, uh, I mean, sometimes it's not right.

01:05:16.480 | I mean, personal stuff, if it happens during my work hours, it has to be, it'll

01:05:20.200 | be integrated the time block plan, but it's also a very effective way, by the way, to

01:05:24.000 | make progress on like annoying personal things, like, ah, I got to do the family

01:05:28.440 | budget or I got to go, you know, uh, I'm, we're doing financial planning stuff right

01:05:34.280 | now.

01:05:34.480 | Like I got up, up some insurance.

01:05:37.080 | I have to change the retirement deductions or whatever from like Georgetown.

01:05:43.320 | And like, that's actually a good thing to maybe capture.

01:05:45.920 | Uh, here's an hour on Wednesday from two to three, like use time block energy for

01:05:51.720 | that stuff.

01:05:52.080 | So I'll often like grab those things inside it, but yeah, for the evenings it'll be,

01:05:55.520 | um, it's the beginning of the week.

01:05:58.480 | I'm looking at my strategic plan, looking at my personal plan for the semester.

01:06:02.000 | I see like, oh, we are, uh, we're one of our objectives for January is to get to this

01:06:07.840 | new milestone with our maker lab.

01:06:09.240 | So like, okay, I'm looking at my week.

01:06:11.160 | Why don't I choose an evening this week that we can go here and then that'll go

01:06:15.600 | into my weekly plan.

01:06:16.360 | Like, yeah.

01:06:16.600 | Tuesday after, after pickup from the bus stop, let's go straight to

01:06:19.120 | the, the maker lab or whatever.

01:06:20.400 | Yeah.

01:06:21.080 | Yep.

01:06:22.800 | So there's the nuts and bolts.

01:06:23.680 | All right.

01:06:26.200 | What do I got next?

01:06:28.040 | All right.

01:06:28.480 | Next question is from Jay.

01:06:30.040 | How do you choose what book to read next?

01:06:33.040 | Good question, Jay.

01:06:34.920 | There's two main ways that books come onto my radar of things I need to read.

01:06:41.040 | Uh, it's either functional.

01:06:43.360 | So I need it for research.

01:06:45.960 | Maybe I'm working on an article or I'm working on a book chapter and I need to

01:06:49.400 | read something because I need to know that information.

01:06:51.200 | So there's functional ways that things come onto my, uh, onto my list of

01:06:57.840 | things to read, everything else is inspirational.

01:07:00.360 | That looks interesting.

01:07:02.000 | Let's get that and read that as soon as possible after I get it.

01:07:05.640 | So it's sort of like spontaneous or functional or

01:07:07.560 | inspirational and functional.

01:07:08.880 | Uh, so I just looked here.

01:07:10.760 | I have four books I bought.

01:07:12.720 | I bought four books in the last week.

01:07:14.800 | So I thought I would just go through those and I'll for each let

01:07:19.000 | you know, uh, what the motivation was.

01:07:22.400 | These are four books that hopefully I'll probably read these all within

01:07:24.680 | the next three or four weeks.

01:07:25.520 | That'd be the idea.

01:07:26.720 | Um, so I bought first man by James Hansen.

01:07:30.480 | So James, it's a biography of Neil Armstrong.

01:07:33.680 | It's because I was watching Damon, uh, Damon Chazelle's movie first man,

01:07:37.720 | which by the way is underrated.

01:07:39.360 | I think it's a fantastic movie, especially if you can watch it on a good

01:07:42.120 | screen with a good sound system.

01:07:43.520 | I don't want to geek out about, you know, his use of 16 millimeter

01:07:48.400 | film and the cockpits, and there's like a lot of really

01:07:50.520 | interesting decisions he makes.

01:07:52.320 | Uh, it's Ryan Gosling and, uh, Claire Foy from the crown, whatever.

01:07:57.840 | So I was watching this movie, which is great.

01:07:59.160 | And the guy I want to write, I want to read the book it's based off of.

01:08:01.800 | So that was just inspiration.

01:08:03.000 | Yeah.

01:08:03.160 | Let's do this.

01:08:03.680 | Karen Armstrong's new book, sacred nature.

01:08:05.960 | I love Karen Armstrong's work.

01:08:08.360 | I talked about the case for God and the history of God a lot on this podcast.

01:08:12.040 | He has a new book out about the ways that people have found, uh, sacredness

01:08:17.000 | and nature throughout history.

01:08:18.120 | I mean, of course I'm on board for that type of thing.

01:08:19.920 | I saw that just mentioned in the New Yorkers roundup of the best

01:08:22.520 | books of the year so far.

01:08:23.520 | Boom.

01:08:24.000 | Just ordered that short book.

01:08:25.560 | You know, I'll read it in a few days.

01:08:26.880 | Very excited for that.

01:08:27.720 | Uh, I also bought super intelligence by Nick Bostrom.

01:08:31.400 | This is an AI ethics type book.

01:08:34.240 | Uh, it's for an article, right?

01:08:36.880 | So that's more like homework.

01:08:38.080 | I'm reading a chapter every morning of that.

01:08:40.200 | And then there's 15 chapters.

01:08:42.360 | I'm reading a chapter every morning as a baseline, and then I'm going to throw in

01:08:46.920 | here and there extra sessions to read a couple more chapters here and there.

01:08:50.760 | So, so I can get it done within 10 days would be nice.

01:08:53.360 | And then, uh, I also just bought right before I came here, John

01:08:57.080 | Meacham's new Lincoln biography.

01:08:59.960 | I am a big, uh, I'm a Lincoln fan.

01:09:03.160 | I read a lot of Lincoln stuff, but I'm particularly excited about

01:09:05.520 | Meacham's new biography for a lot of reasons.

01:09:08.240 | I read a great review of it in the Washington post book world this weekend.

01:09:11.000 | And so that's on its way.

01:09:12.680 | That's a big book.

01:09:13.480 | I'll find, I'll find time to read it.

01:09:15.360 | I want to get that done in November if I can as well.

01:09:17.200 | So there you go.

01:09:17.760 | It's a mix of inspiration and functionality.

01:09:21.840 | And if I get inspired, I buy it.

01:09:23.840 | I want to get into that book before the inspiration dies down.

01:09:26.200 | When you're reading enough, you can get through a lot of books.

01:09:28.480 | So on a given month, how many books do you read or how

01:09:32.360 | many books do you buy?

01:09:33.160 | Sorry.

01:09:33.520 | Um, I mean, five.

01:09:37.560 | Probably.

01:09:39.120 | So last week you bought a lot of your quota.

01:09:41.680 | Yeah.

01:09:42.160 | Yeah.

01:09:42.960 | I have all I need for the next month.

01:09:44.960 | But sometimes I, I mean, sometimes I buy in books.

01:09:47.080 | I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I need

01:09:48.680 | like this chapter and that chapter for an article

01:09:51.000 | or book research and like that's worth 25 bucks to me.

01:09:53.720 | Yeah.

01:09:54.200 | If I can get a good example out of something, but,

01:09:56.520 | but yeah, I bought a lot of my quote in a big burst.

01:09:59.080 | And then you take trips to the library too

01:10:01.640 | every once in a while too, right?

01:10:02.600 | Yeah.

01:10:03.280 | And, uh, we have little free libraries in my town.

01:10:05.880 | They're really big.

01:10:07.320 | My town is really big on these little free

01:10:08.880 | libraries are everywhere.

01:10:09.920 | And I get a lot of good books out of those.

01:10:12.120 | It's just a take a book, leave a book type system.

01:10:14.320 | Are those on the side of the road?

01:10:15.400 | Yeah.

01:10:15.680 | Okay.

01:10:16.160 | I've seen.

01:10:16.480 | Have you seen them to like, they look like mailboxes.

01:10:18.360 | Yeah.

01:10:18.680 | I walked by one.

01:10:20.080 | Yeah.

01:10:20.240 | You can, I mean, this is like Willy Wonka's

01:10:22.880 | factory for me, for my personality is this town.

01:10:26.240 | It's like, just wander around and just pick up

01:10:30.040 | free books from these like well-educated people's,

01:10:33.920 | like their professors, little free libraries and

01:10:35.840 | just walk around and just like pick up free books.

01:10:38.200 | So when you're done picking up free books, go

01:10:39.520 | to like one of our mini coffee shops to just

01:10:41.280 | sort of like sit and drink coffee and read.

01:10:43.040 | And it's a cool town.

01:10:44.400 | It's a good, it's a good match for me though.

01:10:47.520 | I should stop promoting it because we don't

01:10:48.920 | want too many more people to move here.

01:10:50.280 | It's getting expensive.

01:10:51.040 | So yeah.

01:10:53.080 | Do not move here.

01:10:54.480 | Helps your house value though.

01:10:55.840 | It does help the house value.

01:10:56.960 | There's a cool town.

01:10:58.720 | It's quaint.

01:10:59.360 | It has a lot of books and good coffee shops.

01:11:02.480 | That's all good.

01:11:03.200 | Infested with werewolves.

01:11:05.160 | So just, you know, caveat emptier, otherwise great.

01:11:09.520 | Good books, good coffee.

01:11:11.400 | You may have your flesh be devoured by a

01:11:13.400 | lichen trope, so you just got to balance that out.

01:11:15.760 | All right.

01:11:16.480 | We've got another good block of questions here.

01:11:17.760 | Let me just take a quick break to talk about

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01:12:53.440 | This is where I have to do the, the advertiser disclaimer voice

01:12:57.080 | and say a hundred thousand dollar prize, not guaranteed.

01:12:59.920 | One other sponsor I want to talk about, this one I'm excited about.

01:13:04.680 | It's called Giving What We Can.

01:13:07.880 | This was co-founded, if it sounds familiar, it's co-founded by William

01:13:10.880 | McCaskill, the effective altruist philosopher at Oxford who, who did

01:13:16.280 | 80,000 hours, which we talked about on the show as well.

01:13:19.040 | So he has this co-founded this new group, which I'm, which I am excited

01:13:24.040 | about called Giving What We Can.

01:13:26.360 | So this helps you answer the key question of which charity should I give to you?

01:13:31.960 | Which charity is going to be most effective in spending my money?

01:13:37.040 | This is what Giving What We Can, where it enters the picture because

01:13:41.000 | they've done this research for you.

01:13:42.720 | Founded by William McCaskill and another philosopher named Toby Ord.

01:13:46.800 | Its goal was to try to figure out, their goal is to try to figure out how to help

01:13:50.720 | others give as effectively as possible.

01:13:52.480 | So that's why Giving What We Can takes your ability to do

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01:14:06.040 | charity evaluators and grant makers.

01:14:08.160 | So you can be confident that your donation translates into real world impact.

01:14:15.600 | Otherwise, look, you see a slick website.

01:14:18.840 | I don't know.

01:14:20.320 | You see a bumper sticker.

01:14:21.520 | You're like, Hey, why not?

01:14:22.400 | Why don't I give to this charity?

01:14:23.720 | What is this?

01:14:24.360 | You know, over here, it's the, the Deep Work HQ Skeleton

01:14:28.080 | Fund or something like that.

01:14:29.560 | And then you realize I just gave a hundred thousand dollars to this

01:14:32.560 | charity so that Cal and Jesse can do nonsense with skeletons in their, in

01:14:37.320 | their ad, in their HQ or something like this, right?

01:14:39.760 | You don't want to make that mistake, but you also don't have hundreds of

01:14:42.280 | hours to research in detail how effective charities actually are

01:14:46.120 | at converting money to good.

01:14:47.320 | So you go to Giving What We Can, they've done the research for you.

01:14:50.200 | Now you can put not only your money to use, but put it to use

01:14:53.240 | as effectively as possible.

01:14:57.520 | Um, so over 20,000 donors worldwide right now, trust Giving What We Can.

01:15:01.960 | You should join their group, go to givingwhatwecan.org/deep to maximize

01:15:09.400 | the impact of your donations this giving season that's givingwhatwecan.org/deep.

01:15:14.120 | Don't forget the slash deep.

01:15:15.200 | That's how they know you came from us.

01:15:17.880 | All right.

01:15:20.360 | Well, I think we have time.

01:15:20.920 | Let's do a couple more questions.

01:15:21.920 | Jesse, what do we got?

01:15:22.840 | All right.

01:15:23.880 | Sounds good.

01:15:25.040 | Question from Aaron, a 30 year old from Boston.

01:15:27.800 | Cal's alluded to sleep issues and often mentions caffeine consumption, Bevco,

01:15:33.520 | et cetera, stuff like that.

01:15:34.760 | The coffee shops around Tacoma Park.

01:15:36.400 | I'm curious about his philosophy on caffeine.

01:15:39.200 | Well, first of all, Aaron, uh, I don't know where you get this idea

01:15:43.720 | that I drink a lot of caffeine.

01:15:45.120 | For those who are watching or listening, instead of watching, you will see what

01:15:49.480 | is, uh, one of the world's largest coffee cups in my hand, not as big as the coffee

01:15:55.880 | cup from the HBO show, Veep, the chief of staff's coffee cup, but this one is

01:16:00.480 | actually branded from our ad agency that does all our podcast ads.

01:16:03.520 | I think this is their way of trying to keep me sharp so we can, we can sell more ads.

01:16:07.120 | Um, here's my, my caffeine philosophy.

01:16:09.360 | Uh, a, I drink a lot of it.

01:16:11.040 | So here's the backstory.

01:16:12.840 | I got, I got started drinking coffee in high school.

01:16:16.160 | So I went to high school at a public school in Mercer County, New Jersey, which is the

01:16:21.200 | county that includes Princeton, New Jersey.

01:16:23.200 | And I, I blew through this, not gonna surprise people, but I blew through all of

01:16:28.000 | the available computer science instruction.

01:16:30.320 | By the time I was a sophomore, I took the AP course when I was a sophomore, got a

01:16:33.800 | five, I was sort of like out of computer science stuff to do.

01:16:36.200 | And they had a agreement with Princeton university that they could send students

01:16:41.760 | from the high school who were sort of bored in certain topics to Princeton.

01:16:45.640 | Tuition free to take some courses at Princeton.

01:16:48.280 | So, uh, in high school, I started taking the, the computer science sequence at, at

01:16:53.240 | Princeton, and I would stop at the tiger Mart on route 31 and pick up flavored

01:16:58.960 | coffee and those cheap styrofoam cups.

01:17:01.000 | And so early on, I built an association between coffee and intellectual work.

01:17:05.840 | By the time I got to MIT, that got much worse.

01:17:08.600 | The theory group at MIT is fueled by coffee.

01:17:11.440 | They have these giant, uh, crafts and professional brewers.

01:17:15.440 | The things you see in Starbucks, like the really big brewing

01:17:18.200 | machines up on a big stand.

01:17:19.560 | And I was often tasked, I was the person who would brew it a lot of Pete's coffee.

01:17:23.560 | I drink a lot of coffee at MIT.

01:17:25.560 | And so that's just been a part of, I associate coffee with doing intellectual

01:17:29.560 | work.

01:17:30.000 | Um, I do cut back.

01:17:33.360 | So my philosophy is I don't drink after one 30 or so it is one 27.

01:17:38.320 | So by the time we finished taping the show, that's why I literally, I have this

01:17:41.680 | with me because it'll be too late to drink coffee after taping the show is over.

01:17:45.200 | I try not to drink after one or so, but I don't really limit what I do before then.

01:17:48.960 | I probably drink a lot too much, but stopping at one seems to prevent it from

01:17:53.960 | really affecting my sleep right now.

01:17:55.600 | So there we go.

01:17:57.080 | Coffee is like a liquid manifestation of my type one ambition.

01:18:01.280 | The type one piece of my ambition to reference the beginning of today's show.

01:18:04.400 | That's sort of like, let's get things done.

01:18:06.000 | It sort of manifested in my coffee.

01:18:07.760 | I probably should drink like three cups max in the morning, be done with it.

01:18:12.320 | I should do that.

01:18:14.320 | I don't, but I honestly think the key to doing that is having it's it's it's all

01:18:19.760 | somatic.

01:18:20.280 | I need a alternative ritual to associate with doing deep work.

01:18:24.600 | I mean, that's, that's what this serves.

01:18:26.040 | And so there we go.

01:18:27.040 | That's everything you need to know, Aaron, about Cal and coffee.

01:18:31.240 | You always drink it black, right?

01:18:32.920 | Oh, I used to get black.

01:18:33.680 | Cause that's what I learned.

01:18:34.400 | I like cheap flavored coffee because it's what I associate with being in that lecture

01:18:38.440 | hall at Princeton.

01:18:39.280 | And, uh, you know, that was the first exposure to like, Oh, I see.

01:18:43.760 | This is what college level.

01:18:45.480 | And that's sort of a weed out class too.

01:18:47.320 | It was like, okay, I see what like college level work is like, it's much more

01:18:50.480 | mathematically demanding.

01:18:51.440 | It moves much faster.

01:18:52.360 | So I just have these associations from that.

01:18:54.880 | I have family members who are real coffee snobs and roast their beans and, you know,

01:18:59.760 | carefully extract one drop at a time from a, you know, a bag made out of the wings of

01:19:04.480 | a certain type of moth or whatever.

01:19:06.120 | And for me, I was like, I don't care.

01:19:08.920 | I'm drinking right now, Trader Joe's pumpkin spice, harvest, whatever holiday coffee.

01:19:16.280 | I just associate that acidic cheapness with time to think.

01:19:20.360 | And you never drink tea?

01:19:21.680 | I'll that's what I do when I need the deep work after

01:19:24.840 | one 30, I'll drink herbal tea.

01:19:26.280 | Cause you get half the associations.

01:19:28.680 | It's, it's bitter and it's hot and actually works pretty well.

01:19:31.040 | That'll work pretty well.

01:19:33.040 | You're probably way more, you're more controlled about nutrition.

01:19:36.160 | What's your coffee philosophy?

01:19:38.000 | Um, no caffeine.

01:19:39.280 | No, I drink coffee.

01:19:40.480 | Wait, you had, you had a coffee cup when you came in here today.

01:19:42.280 | Yeah.

01:19:42.520 | Yeah.

01:19:42.840 | I, I like to have cream with it, but ideally I would drink a black, but

01:19:49.280 | sometimes when I treat myself, I put cream in it and I was listening to someone

01:19:53.600 | somewhere, which is not a very useful description.

01:19:55.720 | All I know is it was on a podcast and it was within the last month.

01:19:59.280 | That's all I can locate it.

01:20:01.320 | And he was saying, uh, like full fat cream and coffee is like much better.

01:20:07.000 | Then butter or other types of things, because there's something about the way

01:20:14.320 | the fat is encapsulated in dairy that works well with the coffee and blah, blah,

01:20:21.480 | blah, metabolism, blah, blah, blah.

01:20:23.680 | Something, something is like you get energy out of it and it

01:20:27.080 | doesn't just store the fat away.

01:20:28.640 | But if you have other sources of fat and coffee, cause I guess the keto people or

01:20:32.880 | the, uh, paleo people put like butter in their coffee, actually, it's not so good

01:20:36.960 | like that it becomes, it's not as good.

01:20:39.480 | Like that just gets sucked right into cells to be stored or something.

01:20:42.560 | So he was a big proponent.

01:20:43.520 | Whoever this guy was, some guy I heard some time on something was a really big

01:20:48.760 | believer in just like full cream, full fat cream, heavy cream, like is

01:20:52.760 | actually much better for you.

01:20:54.200 | Got it.

01:20:54.880 | Yeah.

01:20:56.280 | Well, with that type of detail about who he is and his credentials, I don't see

01:20:59.400 | how you could not listen to this advice.

01:21:00.760 | Some guy on something I heard at some time.

01:21:04.240 | I think he ran a heavy cream factory.

01:21:06.920 | All right, let's do one more question.

01:21:07.960 | What do we got?

01:21:08.400 | Okay.

01:21:09.400 | Questions from K man.

01:21:12.320 | Do you have any recommendations for my 16 year old son who is now reading your

01:21:16.120 | books and listening to your podcast?

01:21:17.760 | He would like to create multiple streams of income and enjoy a deeply satisfying life.

01:21:22.960 | Let us know.

01:21:24.280 | We'll be listening.

01:21:26.120 | Well, I mean, first of all, good for your son.

01:21:29.800 | They let that be the, the underlying piece of this answer is just to have someone at

01:21:35.760 | that age who is thinking so intentionally about their life is like a superpower.

01:21:41.680 | When you're 35 and starting and thinking really intentional about your life, it's

01:21:47.000 | like, welcome to the club.

01:21:47.960 | Like everyone at that point is starting to think through like, Oh, what works for me?

01:21:51.040 | What does it, how should I organize my efforts?

01:21:52.920 | What do I want to do at 16?

01:21:54.320 | Almost no one's doing that.

01:21:55.560 | Or if you're doing that, they're doing it in a very simplistic formalism, like the

01:21:59.600 | millennial obsession with following your passion, like some notion of like, well,

01:22:03.520 | there's one job I'm meant to do.

01:22:04.720 | And my job is to figure out what that is.

01:22:06.440 | Very few people your age are thinking so systematically.

01:22:09.560 | So that by itself is going to yield lots of benefits.

01:22:12.680 | Irregardless of any particular advice I now give you going forward.

01:22:17.360 | Now, uh, let me provide you, I took some notes on this.

01:22:21.840 | I was looking at this question before.

01:22:24.200 | So I'm going to try to provide some off relatively rough advice for you as someone

01:22:28.320 | who was young to lay a foundation of support of sorts that will support a deep

01:22:34.000 | life as you enter adulthood.

01:22:36.960 | Now, the, the main thing I want to say to set up this foundation before we get to

01:22:41.960 | these specifics is be wary about getting too specific right now at your age at 16,

01:22:47.640 | about what your sort of post schooling adult life is going to be like in terms of

01:22:53.440 | specific sources of income, et cetera.

01:22:55.800 | It's very difficult as a 16 year old, for example, to get 23, what your life's going

01:23:00.600 | to be like at 23 to get those details.

01:23:02.280 | Right.

01:23:02.520 | Cause you're not, you're not, you don't have knowledge yet of what you're going to be

01:23:06.680 | exposed to and what opportunities are going to be open to you.

01:23:09.080 | So this is really the right time to be much more, um, laying a foundation for being

01:23:13.560 | able to take advantage of opportunities and build this lifestyle when the time

01:23:17.920 | comes, uh, as you enter adulthood.

01:23:20.200 | So I would say, don't worry about the specifics yet.

01:23:22.440 | Let's work on you right now to make you into a deep life generation machine so

01:23:27.960 | that you four or five years from now is going to be well suited to start

01:23:31.960 | crafting a really cool life.

01:23:33.840 | So here's a few things I wrote down.

01:23:35.280 | Number one, be 10 times more organized and intentional about your academic

01:23:41.240 | work than everyone else.

01:23:42.680 | You know, most students are terrible at study strategies.

01:23:48.080 | Most students are terrible at time management as a student.

01:23:51.480 | If you are not, you can reduce the amount of time it requires for you to perform

01:23:56.960 | your schoolwork a certain level by a factor of three or four.

01:23:59.560 | It really is almost like a magic trick.

01:24:02.000 | I learned this from experience.

01:24:03.520 | You start treating your student life like a job, like a 35 year old would treat their

01:24:10.320 | job and it becomes significantly easier.

01:24:13.800 | It's footprint on your life becomes significantly easier.

01:24:16.320 | The amount of stress it causes will reduce down to very little and you will be able

01:24:19.880 | to perform academically at the very height of your potential without grinding it out,

01:24:25.800 | without overloading or overburdening yourself.

01:24:29.160 | So, you know, I wrote a book about this, How to Become a Straight A Student.

01:24:32.320 | That's for college kids.

01:24:33.680 | I wrote another book called How to Be a High School Superstar.

01:24:36.760 | If you look at the part one playbook for that book, I adapt a lot of those study

01:24:42.840 | and time management advice from college to the high school context.

01:24:45.640 | So you might find value in both of those.

01:24:48.200 | So the Straight A Student book and the part one playbook from How to Become a High

01:24:52.800 | School Superstar. The story I always tell is I was a reasonable student my first year

01:24:58.200 | of college. At the end of the first year of college, I got serious about my academic

01:25:03.440 | strategies.

01:25:04.800 | I started treating the problem of how do you do well as a student like a entrepreneur

01:25:10.400 | would treat the problem of how do I learn how to market?

01:25:12.600 | How do I find a new audience?

01:25:13.960 | Because I'd run a business, I was used to that way of thinking.

01:25:16.040 | I brought that way of thinking to my academic work and I jumped from a good student, B

01:25:23.120 | plus, A minus student to four O's starting my sophomore fall every single quarter till

01:25:29.200 | I graduated, except for one A minus in my senior spring.

01:25:31.720 | Ended up graduating with a three point nine five GPA.

01:25:35.120 | If I had done this one quarter earlier, I probably would have been the valedictorian of

01:25:40.320 | my class at Dartmouth.

01:25:41.320 | I did not get smarter between the summer of my freshman year, my sophomore year.

01:25:45.720 | What made me unique is I was one of the only people on that campus to start experimenting

01:25:51.160 | with what's the right way to take notes, what's the right way to study for a math test,

01:25:54.960 | what's the right way to study for an art history test.

01:25:56.960 | How can I manage my time so I don't have to ever work past 8 p.m.?

01:26:00.240 | It was much easier than you would think.

01:26:02.200 | All right. So be 10 times more organized and intentional about your academic work.

01:26:05.240 | Number two, introduce some discipline into your life.

01:26:10.600 | So you get used to the idea of having a disciplined life.

01:26:13.440 | There's things that are important but hard, and you're willing to do that work over

01:26:16.520 | time and see the results in the long term.

01:26:18.760 | You probably should have some sort of physical discipline, so some sort of sports or

01:26:23.480 | training, something that you do that will put you in better health or shape than just

01:26:28.120 | sort of the average person you know who's not a serious athlete.

01:26:30.680 | You should have some sort of mental discipline in there built around the reading of

01:26:34.520 | hard physical books.

01:26:35.960 | I'd probably recommend that above all else for someone your age, that you have some sort

01:26:40.200 | of systematic program of study involving real books that you read, you have set times

01:26:44.920 | you put aside. Have two or three things like this just so you have a self-image of

01:26:51.240 | someone who is disciplined.

01:26:52.200 | And again, the details don't matter because you just need to when the time comes, you

01:26:58.200 | know, when you're 24 or whatever, the time comes for your discipline is going to unlock

01:27:02.120 | something awesome. You want to already have that tool sharpened.

01:27:06.840 | All right, number three, be very wary of video games, of social media, your time is very

01:27:13.000 | valuable right now.

01:27:14.000 | Because you get leverage, interesting moves or developments or opportunities you unlock

01:27:20.400 | when you're young, have the maximum amount of time to actually earn experiential interest

01:27:25.920 | and start generating really cool things.

01:27:27.440 | So don't waste your teenage years, your early 20s, your college years.

01:27:32.560 | Don't waste 40 percent of your discretionary time in call of duty.

01:27:36.320 | Don't waste 40 percent of your time on TikTok.

01:27:39.120 | Maybe that's OK for some people, but I can tell right now that this is a kid who is

01:27:44.800 | awesome at it, he's on it, he's listening to deep questions, he's reading my books, he's

01:27:49.480 | intentional, he's already thinking about multiple income streams.

01:27:51.920 | So be very wary of those devices.

01:27:54.080 | Be the guy who's weird about like, yeah, I just don't really use my phone.

01:27:56.880 | Let that be your thing.

01:27:58.080 | All right, number four, expose yourself to bulk positive randomness.

01:28:05.960 | That's a term that comes from my longtime friend, Ben Casanoka, who wrote about that

01:28:10.800 | in his memoir of being a teenage entrepreneur prodigy.

01:28:15.880 | So like starting companies as teenage years, the startup of you is what that book is

01:28:20.120 | called. And he talks about this a lot.

01:28:22.040 | Expose yourself to lots of interesting stuff all the time to see what clicks, what

01:28:26.640 | sticks, what ends up resonating and holding your attention the next day or the next

01:28:30.560 | week. Go hear speakers read interesting things, go to interesting documentaries, go to

01:28:34.640 | conventions. You know, expose yourself to bulk positive randomness.

01:28:39.480 | This is how you get eventually something really interesting clicking in your life.

01:28:45.040 | And now to pull from my book, How to Become a High School Superstar.

01:28:49.120 | Once there is something that catches your attention.

01:28:51.720 | That you're pursuing, you want to pursue what I call the failed simulation effect,

01:28:58.000 | which is you want to get to a place where that activity, if you're a young person.

01:29:03.000 | Where people say, I have no idea how he did that and the way you generate that effect,

01:29:07.240 | which is incredibly powerful and opens up all these interesting opportunities, is you

01:29:10.280 | just keep leveraging up.

01:29:11.400 | You do one thing that's kind of explainable.

01:29:13.400 | You use that to get access to the next thing.

01:29:15.760 | You use that to get access to the third thing.

01:29:17.920 | That third thing you use access to get to the fourth thing.

01:29:20.640 | And by the time you get to that fourth thing, that might be interviewing Supreme Court

01:29:24.040 | justices for my podcast as a 17 year old.

01:29:26.320 | That thing seems like I have no idea how a 17 year old does that.

01:29:29.800 | But if you look the three steps before that started with you being exposed to a court

01:29:35.440 | reporter for the at a whatever, an internship, yes, the path makes sense.

01:29:40.880 | But not when you see the final thing.

01:29:42.600 | Maybe that's a confusing explanation.

01:29:44.360 | I have a whole chapter about this in my book.

01:29:45.920 | I also wrote about this, interestingly enough, for Tim Ferriss's blog.

01:29:51.760 | Way back in the day when I first met Tim.

01:29:54.680 | So it's on there somewhere.

01:29:57.800 | We're talking 2007, 2008, probably.

01:30:01.360 | I wrote an article for Tim Dot blog back when that was his main online platform about

01:30:09.080 | the failed simulation effect.

01:30:10.240 | So you can actually find my article on his blog.

01:30:12.440 | I probably just search for my name and Tim Dot blog or something like that.

01:30:15.360 | But anyways, you expose yourself to interesting stuff.

01:30:17.920 | When something clicks, you keep going, keep going, keep going.

01:30:20.440 | The first six months you're working on something, it's interesting to you, but not to

01:30:24.360 | the outside world.

01:30:25.600 | You get to a year plus six months and you might be at a place now with that interest

01:30:29.040 | where people have no idea how you did that at your age.

01:30:31.720 | And that's when really cool opportunities open up.

01:30:33.800 | Number five.

01:30:36.000 | Steady character and leadership.

01:30:38.880 | Expose yourself to examples of people who live with great character, who act as great

01:30:45.880 | leaders, even during difficult times, read biographies, read profiles, watch

01:30:52.240 | documentaries, maybe if they have a social media presence, so maybe like a Jocko Willink

01:30:57.640 | type, if that resonates, maybe you're listening to his podcast and the military

01:31:02.520 | professionals he has on the Tales of Valor, whatever it is that resonates, you want to

01:31:07.800 | be imprinting young, a real affiliation or affinity for character and leadership,

01:31:15.600 | especially during difficult times.

01:31:17.960 | That is going to be a North Star or a guiding light through all sorts of different

01:31:22.000 | ups and downs and competing pressures and diversions you're going to experience the

01:31:26.000 | next, let's say 10 years of your life.

01:31:27.640 | Now's the time to start building up those examples.

01:31:29.840 | And number six, serve people one way or the other, be doing that now.

01:31:34.800 | And it's just setting the habit of, and it could just be volunteering.

01:31:38.640 | It could be this is this cause or online.

01:31:40.600 | I go and I help, I'm in this community just to help these people, whatever it is.

01:31:43.960 | You also want that imprinted into your soul at a young age that serve other people,

01:31:50.440 | because that's what you need to fall back on when the other pursuit you have isn't

01:31:54.920 | going well, this company failed and I lost this job.

01:31:57.480 | And I really am feeling down on myself because I had these ambitions that I was

01:32:01.320 | going to be Michael Crichton at 27.

01:32:03.280 | And instead I'm at, you know, I'm getting to that age and, and, uh, I'm short on

01:32:07.520 | money and my, my plans didn't work.

01:32:09.200 | You fall back on helping others.

01:32:10.520 | Well, you know what, let me just put that energy to helping others while I also am

01:32:13.760 | trying to figure myself out.

01:32:14.800 | The more you can fall back on how can I serve or help other people, the more.

01:32:19.920 | Uh, emotional and psychological resilience you're going to have for all the ups and

01:32:23.200 | downs that are going to come.

01:32:24.560 | It's what's going to prevent you from ending up instead 26 and bitter and on

01:32:30.360 | Twitter and just mad and yelling at people and, uh, medicated seven ways to

01:32:37.840 | Sunday and just not even sure what to do with your life.

01:32:40.240 | You'll end up maybe like a, you know, an ideological groupie for some weird,

01:32:43.680 | whatever, and just be miserable.

01:32:45.640 | You don't want to be there.

01:32:47.800 | So falling back on serving others as a default is that buffer is that

01:32:51.280 | protection, be useful to the world, be useful to others.

01:32:54.680 | Let that also be a guiding light.

01:32:55.920 | All right.

01:32:56.120 | So those are my six pieces of advice, but good for you for thinking about

01:32:59.720 | this stuff at such a young age, you do these things, you're going to be a rock

01:33:03.600 | star.

01:33:03.760 | You're gonna be a rock star in college.

01:33:04.960 | You're going to come out of college and be living a life that you are going to

01:33:07.560 | have a full control on the reins of this life.

01:33:11.080 | And when you start doing lifestyle centric career planning seriously, but you

01:33:15.280 | know, you really should wait till a little bit later in college to do so.

01:33:18.480 | You are going to have options and whatever comes out of those initial lifestyle

01:33:22.040 | centric career planning exercises, you're going to be able to shape your life there

01:33:25.320 | of a deep life and a useful life.

01:33:26.680 | So I'm glad you asked that question.

01:33:28.400 | That's my advice.

01:33:30.360 | And that is also all the time we have.

01:33:33.280 | So thank you everyone who sent in your questions, click the link in the

01:33:37.240 | description.

01:33:37.800 | If you want to submit your own, we're looking for questions, please submit.

01:33:41.160 | We're also looking for people to do live calls.

01:33:42.840 | You can do that at that same link.

01:33:44.520 | You can express your interest.

01:33:46.280 | We'll be back next week with a new episode.

01:33:49.200 | And until then, as always stay deep.

01:33:51.960 | [Music]

Ep. 220: The Two Types Of Ambition

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