How To Escape Mediocrity & Get Ahead Of 99% Of People

00:00:00.080 | So today I want to talk about one of the most important skills you can have as a human.

00:00:07.320 | Something that I think most of the most interesting, successful, and impactful people I know are

00:00:14.540 | very good at, and I'm talking about thinking.

00:00:17.900 | Now this may sound stupid at first because we all think all the time, our minds are worrying

00:00:22.820 | all the time, if anything our problem is getting away from our own thoughts, but when I say

00:00:26.900 | think here, I mean something very specific.

00:00:30.200 | I mean giving sustained attention to potentially complicated or ambiguous information with the

00:00:36.880 | ultimate goal of building a new conceptual structure that has value to yourself or to the world.

00:00:42.360 | This is what I mean by thinking.

00:00:46.180 | Now here's the thing, most people are very bad at this brand of serious thinking.

00:00:52.120 | The way most people go through their lives is as follows.

00:00:55.340 | First, they outsource any sort of normative or ethical thinking to online tribal vibes and

00:01:03.240 | approval.

00:01:03.800 | I don't know.

00:01:05.120 | What does my team think?

00:01:06.240 | Do they like this?

00:01:08.260 | They don't like this?

00:01:08.960 | What's going to get me not yelled at?

00:01:10.660 | What's going to get me approved?

00:01:11.940 | That's about as far as I want to go, trying to actually build up some sort of framework for

00:01:16.100 | understanding what I stand for, what's good and what's bad.

00:01:19.000 | Most people prioritize a sort of high energy emotion in the moment over the subtler satisfactions

00:01:26.600 | of real understanding and appreciation.

00:01:29.180 | They want to just feel something and often their phone can give them that something quite easily.

00:01:35.060 | They don't want to do the work for actually deeply engaging with something beautiful.

00:01:40.460 | Most people also gravitate when it comes towards the realm of accomplishment towards checklist

00:01:46.880 | productivity.

00:01:47.920 | Just give me like a list of things I can follow where the key here is that the information is

00:01:55.260 | scarce and I have a special list of things to do and then I'll be in great shape or then

00:01:58.760 | my web business will take off or then I'll make six figures per month.

00:02:02.380 | Just give me checklist.

00:02:03.180 | I want secret information that I found online as opposed to seeking out to produce things

00:02:08.640 | that are unambiguously valuable.

00:02:10.020 | Serious thinkers live differently.

00:02:12.280 | They have a deep and evolving understanding of the world, what's good, what's bad, and what

00:02:16.820 | it means to live a good life.

00:02:18.880 | They appreciate the beautiful, they appreciate the quality, and they find inspiration in it.

00:02:23.980 | Their output is often slower, but when it does come out, it's more impact and it engenders

00:02:30.940 | more respect.

00:02:32.140 | So if you're interested in the deep life, serious thinking needs to be a goal that you

00:02:38.780 | are pursuing.

00:02:39.220 | So here's what I want to do today is help you become a more serious thinker and I want to

00:02:43.280 | do that in a practical way.

00:02:44.920 | I have five different practices.

00:02:48.340 | Each of these are concrete that I want to run through.

00:02:50.820 | These are all things you can start doing right away in your own life that if you stick with

00:02:55.360 | them, you will find after a month, your cognitive abilities are much better than they were before.

00:03:01.600 | After six months, the experience of your day-to-day life is going to be notably different and richer.

00:03:08.380 | And after a year or so, you're going to find yourself actually able to produce ideas for

00:03:15.320 | yourself in the world that have real value.

00:03:16.720 | Really, you're going to unlock major options.

00:03:20.020 | So it's worth becoming a serious thinker.

00:03:21.740 | Let's go through five practices for how to do it.

00:03:23.500 | I'm going to illustrate for those of you who are watching instead of just listening.

00:03:28.060 | By popular demand, I will illustrate what we're doing here.

00:03:31.980 | So on the screen, I'm going to put in the center my world-famous picture of a brain.

00:03:37.200 | So what we got here is a cerebellum and we got some wrinkles and folds in the brain.

00:03:44.240 | So I have a brain in the center and I'm going to illustrate around this.

00:03:47.940 | I'll put one expertly drawn icon per practice we are going to discuss.

00:03:54.860 | All right.

00:03:56.440 | So the first practice that I want to discuss is to improve the quality and decrease the

00:04:04.320 | quantity of information that you consume.

00:04:10.560 | So to illustrate this with an icon, I'm going to expertly draw here the Twitter T.

00:04:17.180 | I know they've switched to X, but I sort of am boycotting that.

00:04:20.460 | So I'm drawing a T and I'm putting a circle with a line through it.

00:04:24.860 | I'm going to indicate consuming better quality and less quantity of information.

00:04:30.180 | So what does this mean?

00:04:31.180 | I'm talking particularly here about news or other information you use to learn more things

00:04:35.840 | about the world.

00:04:37.500 | Stop using social media algorithms to curate your news flow.

00:04:40.460 | Social media algorithms are bad curators.

00:04:43.500 | Their interest is not making you as informed as possible.

00:04:46.360 | Their interest is making you as engaged and possible to make you as engaged and possible.

00:04:50.040 | They are going to push you to places that are not emotionally healthy.

00:04:54.020 | It's also not going to lead you to the most nuanced understanding of issues.

00:04:57.960 | I want you instead to focus on a multi-scale news and information consumption.

00:05:06.640 | So I want your news and information consumption to be divided over three scales, daily, monthly,

00:05:12.200 | and seasonal.

00:05:12.920 | And here's what I mean by that.

00:05:14.100 | Daily have a very small number, probably just one sources of quality, non-algorithmically

00:05:22.740 | curated news and information.

00:05:25.180 | This could be one of the growing number of daily news roundup newsletters.

00:05:29.960 | I like, for example, if you're a subscriber to the New York Times, I think David Leonhart's daily news summary is a fantastic one.

00:05:38.920 | I'm saying this mainly because they featured my profile from the New York Times magazine from last year.

00:05:44.140 | They re-featured it recently in that newsletter, so we know that's expertly curated.

00:05:47.600 | It could be a daily news roundup podcast.

00:05:50.320 | It could be a physical newspaper that you pick up or have delivered.

00:05:54.380 | Okay.

00:05:54.740 | At the monthly scale, you spend the time to go through a collection of, let's say, two to six in-depth long-form magazine articles.

00:06:05.440 | So now this is still relatively current, but not day-to-day current.

00:06:10.440 | This is now information where enough time has passed for a professional journalist or writer to actually spend some time to really digest information about what's going on in the world and produce and have edited a long-form piece.

00:06:24.460 | Now we're at a lag of a month or so from what's actually going on.

00:06:27.460 | This is where, for example, you can pull out a few selected articles from my own journalistic home, which is the New Yorker.

00:06:33.440 | Maybe you pull out some long-form articles from the Atlantic or Foreign Affairs or the National Review or the Wall Street Journal's Sunday issue.

00:06:41.040 | Whatever it is that you particularly follow.

00:06:43.480 | It could be print.

00:06:45.440 | It could be not print.

00:06:46.240 | Tablet magazine.

00:06:47.600 | I'm just thinking of different things I've pulled from before.

00:06:49.460 | And you're like, here's my six articles I've gathered throughout the month.

00:06:53.440 | 3,000, 5,000-word beast.

00:06:55.760 | I'm going to go to a coffee shop somewhere.

00:06:57.740 | I've got these printed out.

00:06:59.160 | And let's just engage at this slower scale.

00:07:02.700 | Deeper understanding, slower scale.

00:07:04.380 | Now we jump up to the seasonal scale.

00:07:07.800 | And this is books.

00:07:09.280 | When there's something going on in the world you care about, you should get a book written by an expert.

00:07:17.160 | Someone who has spent years working on this artifact based on many more years of actually engaging with this topic.

00:07:24.360 | And you get this beautiful artifact here that you can hold and consume in about a week or two.

00:07:27.960 | That is going to give you as deep or nuanced as an understanding of a topic as you're ever likely to get outside of actually studying that topic professionally yourself.

00:07:37.360 | So you should, at the seasonal scale, have a book that you're reading on whatever thing is going on in the world that is most important to you.

00:07:46.100 | So let's take this multi-scale information consumption plan out for a spin with a particular topic.

00:07:54.200 | And let's compare it to what most people would normally do.

00:07:56.600 | Let's talk about fears about AI.

00:07:59.900 | Now what you could do, which is what most people do, is let me read a lot of tweets and historic YouTube videos and short articles on the online news sites.

00:08:10.880 | They're all like, oh my God, Google Gemini is doing this.

00:08:13.920 | ChatGPT just did that.

00:08:15.920 | Sam Altman just said this.

00:08:17.640 | And there's this sort of just frenzied sense of, oh, I'm just like very uneasy and I don't know what's going on and I'm kind of stressed all the time.

00:08:23.960 | What would it look like to engage this topic with a multi-scale information consumption approach?

00:08:28.240 | Well, you would be getting daily information.

00:08:31.160 | When something important happened, it would be covered in whatever your high-quality, non-algorithmically curated source of news would be.

00:08:37.820 | When Sam Altman, for example, got fired and then rehired, David Leonhart's newsletter covered that.

00:08:43.520 | So you would get the main points.

00:08:45.820 | You're subscribed to Axios' daily news roundup.

00:08:48.360 | You would get the main points.

00:08:49.400 | Then on the seasonal scale, you could actually say, let me sit down with, for example, the New Yorker's recent AI issue and read some of these longer form pieces.

00:08:57.740 | Let me sit down and listen to, you know, Ezra Klein had a fantastic AI podcast recently with Kevin Roos and Casey Newhoff, I think.

00:09:08.880 | And they just, let's spend an hour and 20 minutes just sort of walking through what we know.

00:09:12.840 | Maybe you go back and finally read my New Yorker piece on the guts of how ChatGPT actually works.

00:09:17.780 | This is not so frenzied.

00:09:19.820 | This is more digested information.

00:09:21.800 | Okay, I'm getting some deeper sense of what's going on.

00:09:24.440 | And on the scale of a season, you say, I'm going to read a book about artificial intelligence, maybe about the alignment problem or how people are thinking about its role in society.

00:09:36.040 | And now get like a really measured, deeper understanding of it.

00:09:38.860 | That is how multi-scale information consumption works.

00:09:42.240 | Serious thinkers are going to consume information that way.

00:09:45.280 | They have no interest for algorithmically curated social media information.

00:09:50.260 | The same thing, though, applies.

00:09:53.440 | I'm going to say this in improvement of quality, decreasing of quantity.

00:09:57.000 | We can think of this also applying to other types of information as well.

00:10:01.720 | Think about shows or movies you watch on streaming services to increase the quality of that.

00:10:07.640 | Simple heuristic.

00:10:09.260 | One-to-one ratio, fun, smart.

00:10:12.740 | If I watch a movie that is just pure fun, I want to watch something that's going to challenge me, either artistically, this is a well-respected movie, or informationally.

00:10:24.580 | It's a documentary on something that's complicated, but I want to know about it.

00:10:27.740 | One-to-one ratio, so that the quality of what you're engaging in the streaming media gets better.

00:10:33.180 | You can do the same thing with podcasts.

00:10:34.660 | Here's a fun podcast.

00:10:35.720 | One-to-one ratio with something that I'm learning from, et cetera.

00:10:38.280 | All right, practice number two, increase your comfort with boredom.

00:10:45.940 | So let's draw a picture for this one as well.

00:10:49.560 | What I'm going to draw here is a rock.

00:10:52.040 | All right, there we go.

00:10:54.580 | And sitting on this rock, we see someone contemplating.

00:11:01.760 | Jesse appreciates my artwork.

00:11:04.160 | Increase comfort with boredom.

00:11:06.300 | What is the idea here before we get even more specific about the practices?

00:11:10.180 | If your brain is used to this idea that it is never bored, that when it lacks novel stimuli, you will always feed it a shiny digital treat in the form typically of your phone or an iPad or a browser tab that's going to give you something emotionally salient in the moment.

00:11:27.780 | It can't tolerate serious thinking because serious thinking requires you to keep your attention sustained, this inner eye of your attention sustained on a single abstract topic.

00:11:38.080 | That's boring because there's not a lot of novel stimuli.

00:11:42.060 | Your brain has to be comfort with boredom.

00:11:44.040 | So by increasing your comfort with boredom, you're just teaching your brain it's not that you're bored all the time.

00:11:49.780 | It's also not trying to put too much of a positive value on boredom.

00:11:52.820 | It's just teaching your brain sometimes we're bored and sometimes we're not.

00:11:56.000 | And I'm comfortable with that state of boredom.

00:12:00.540 | So how can you do this?

00:12:02.960 | Two things I'm going to suggest.

00:12:04.740 | One, actually have every day a particular outing or chore or task you do.

00:12:10.500 | It can be short, but a particular thing you do without your phone, go to the drugstore, go put in your laundry.

00:12:16.680 | It doesn't have to be long, taking out the garbage and do it with nothing in your ear.

00:12:21.320 | So you're like, okay, I'm just doing this activity.

00:12:22.900 | It's there's no novel stimuli here.

00:12:24.360 | I'm just kind of having to be alone with my own thoughts.

00:12:26.980 | A lot of people who take this advice will also typically add a longer outing on the weekends, hour plus no phone.

00:12:35.760 | You can ramp that up over the weekend.

00:12:39.040 | The other really important thing you can do is the phone foyer method.

00:12:44.760 | The idea here is when you're at your home or your apartment or wherever you live, you keep your phone plugged in in one place.

00:12:50.440 | If you have a house with a foyer, it's in the foyer or it's in the kitchen.

00:12:53.520 | If you have an apartment, whatever, but it stays plugged in when you're at home in one place.

00:12:57.340 | If you need to look something up, you go to where it's plugged in and you look it up there.

00:13:00.940 | If you need to receive or text with someone, you go where the phone is plugged in and you receive and do text there.

00:13:06.500 | Same with phone calls.

00:13:07.580 | You have to go to where the phone is.

00:13:09.660 | It is not where you are.

00:13:10.720 | Now, this is going to be annoying at first, but what you're doing here is severing this permanent accessibility of the distraction.

00:13:17.840 | So now when you're watching something or doing something in your own house or in your own apartment, you can't pull out the phone.

00:13:24.120 | It's somewhere else.

00:13:25.520 | You still have the benefits of, I need to look this thing up, but you have to walk 10 feet to go do it.

00:13:29.660 | You're going to get more mini moments of boredom during your evenings and mornings at home.

00:13:36.440 | Very important if you want to prepare your brain to be a serious thinker.

00:13:41.660 | Alright, third thing I want to suggest here, third practice for becoming a more serious thinker, cultivate your ability to pay attention.

00:13:54.580 | So I'll illustrate this here.

00:13:57.220 | You won't know at first what this means.

00:14:01.340 | So provocatively, what I'm drawing here is a stopwatch.

00:14:06.500 | Is there something on the top, Jesse?

00:14:09.040 | I don't know.

00:14:09.360 | Let's do this.

00:14:09.880 | Perfect rendition of a stopwatch.

00:14:12.460 | Why am I drawing a stopwatch?

00:14:13.700 | Because one of the first things I'm going to recommend for cultivating your ability to pay attention is interval training.

00:14:19.860 | So actually increasing the timed intervals at which you're comfortable giving sustained attention to a single target.

00:14:29.420 | These intervals should be intense.

00:14:31.640 | You only increase the time of the intervals as you get comfortable with the current duration, right?

00:14:38.200 | So what we're trying to do here is get your mind comfortable with sustaining attention.

00:14:42.860 | So the previous practice, getting a comfort for boredom, we think of that as the table stakes, the foundation.

00:14:51.220 | Your mind has to be okay with not having a lot of stimuli.

00:14:54.320 | This practice is now about focusing and practicing the actual activity of focus, the actual activity of sustaining attention.

00:15:01.460 | So you have to be able to do it, and then you have to actually practice what this actually feels like.

00:15:06.240 | So with interval training, you can do this with multiple activities.

00:15:09.280 | It could be a difficult work or school activity.

00:15:11.800 | It can also be, and I think this is critical, a high-quality leisure activity, like watching a movie, which a lot of people, especially young people right now, have a very hard time doing for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time without actually looking at their phone.

00:15:26.640 | So it could be a high-quality leisure activity or a difficult work activity.

00:15:31.080 | It could be reading a book, even anything that requires focus.

00:15:34.480 | You start with an interval that you're comfortable with.

00:15:37.700 | Keep it small at first, maybe even just 10 minutes.

00:15:40.300 | You use a real timer.

00:15:41.700 | Set that timer.

00:15:44.040 | And might as well do it on your phone, by the way, because you want your phone right there in timer mode.

00:15:47.900 | So you know for a fact if you use your phone because you've left the timer mode on your phone.

00:15:52.080 | Set that timer for 10 minutes and work on that work task, watch that movie, or read that book with as much concentration as you can muster.

00:16:02.000 | Zero checks of anything screened outside of your target until that timer goes off.

00:16:07.480 | If you break that concentration and say, I just have to check Twitter, I just have to see what's going on in my text messages, you have to start that timer and start it over.

00:16:18.320 | It doesn't count.

00:16:18.780 | Once you're able to consistently hit the current time duration, you increase it by 10 minutes.

00:16:25.300 | So this is just literally training the thing you want to be better at, sustaining attention on cognitive tasks, the absence of stimuli, sustaining the attention.

00:16:33.820 | You've got to just train your brain what that feels like.

00:16:38.180 | Okay.

00:16:39.860 | Another thing you can do when it comes to cultivating your ability to pay attention is more passive, which is care about ritual, care about environment.

00:16:47.780 | Set up this is where I go to read.

00:16:53.080 | And it's, it's different than where I just sit and work or watch TV.

00:16:56.500 | I've set up like a very special chair and I have this light here and it's, it's by like a warm radiator in the winter.

00:17:03.020 | This is where I go to work on deep work challenges versus just regular work or email.

00:17:08.560 | I have a separate part of my house.

00:17:10.220 | I went up to the attic and I've renovated an Eve there and that's where I go to do deep work.

00:17:14.020 | And it's different than where I do my email and where the printer and all the filing cabinets are.

00:17:17.740 | I have a ritual I do before, uh, you know, I watch a hard movie.

00:17:21.860 | I do a thing to get my mind into that mode.

00:17:24.660 | I listened to a movie podcast while walking for 20 minutes, ritual and environment will help you fall into that deeper attention mode.

00:17:32.240 | Combine that with interval training.

00:17:35.500 | All right, let's go to our, let's look at my list here.

00:17:39.780 | Let's go to our fourth, our fourth idea to help you become a serious thinker.

00:17:46.160 | Our fourth practice, I should say.

00:17:48.520 | And this is going to be strengthen your working memory.

00:17:53.180 | So I'm going to draw here is a person very determinedly walking.

00:18:01.240 | Jesse loves my art and this person is thinking about all sorts of things.

00:18:06.140 | Why am I drawing a person walking?

00:18:08.780 | Because my number one tip for increasing your working memory is productive meditation.

00:18:13.920 | This is an idea that goes all the way back to my 2016 book.

00:18:17.300 | Deep work with productive meditation.

00:18:20.100 | You take a professional problem.

00:18:21.940 | Or it could be a complicated personal problem, but a clear complicated problem.

00:18:27.300 | You go for a walk and you try to make progress on that problem only using your head.

00:18:31.900 | The walking helps you do this.

00:18:33.600 | If you're just sitting and thinking, it's much more difficult, but the walking actually

00:18:36.680 | quiets some noises in your cognitive circuit.

00:18:38.960 | So it's a little bit easier to focus.

00:18:40.380 | And every time you notice your attention wander away from the problem that you're trying to make

00:18:44.900 | progress on in your head, you notice that wandering and you move your attention back to the problem.

00:18:49.640 | This forces you to get very comfortable holding lots of information in your head

00:18:54.780 | and try to manipulate it and generate new information based on it.

00:18:58.580 | You can make these walks longer and longer as you get more comfortable with this exercise.

00:19:03.900 | This is directly increasing your working memory strength.

00:19:06.660 | Your working memory strength is critical to being a serious thinker.

00:19:11.240 | Serious thinking requires you to pull multiple pieces of information and hold on to them in your

00:19:15.600 | mind's eye.

00:19:16.220 | This piece, but also this piece, and this piece is over here, and how do these things relate?

00:19:21.060 | And then how do I connect that to this other thing I thought before?

00:19:23.900 | Working memory is at the core of deep thoughts.

00:19:25.640 | Most people have a bad working memory, however, because we're not used to holding a lot of

00:19:32.620 | stuff in our head in a way that we can actually access them with our mind's eye.

00:19:35.940 | Productive meditation is direct and intense practice for exactly this problem.

00:19:40.560 | It gets exactly to the heart of what you're trying to do here.

00:19:45.740 | All right.

00:19:46.120 | We've got one more practice to help you become a serious thinker.

00:19:51.100 | Draw one more picture.

00:19:54.280 | So this final practice, I'm going to say it this way.

00:19:57.100 | Practice being intellectual.

00:20:03.020 | And so let's see.

00:20:03.920 | Let's draw our stick figure person here.

00:20:06.840 | So how do we know this person is intellectual?

00:20:08.780 | Oh, it's not going to work.

00:20:11.820 | I'm going to draw him in a turtleneck, but he needs a neck, Jesse.

00:20:14.200 | That's the problem.

00:20:14.820 | So let me give him a neck.

00:20:16.700 | My stick figure person.

00:20:18.620 | There we go.

00:20:19.300 | Give him a big neck.

00:20:20.100 | Your French accent.

00:20:21.680 | I probably will give him a beret as well.

00:20:23.660 | And a pipe.

00:20:24.500 | Yeah.

00:20:24.700 | So there you go.

00:20:25.340 | Turtleneck.

00:20:26.100 | Because he's an intellectual.

00:20:28.780 | All right.

00:20:30.760 | Beret.

00:20:32.040 | Because he's an intellectual.

00:20:34.220 | And a pipe.

00:20:36.700 | There you go.

00:20:39.820 | Practice being an intellectual.

00:20:41.540 | Now, I joke by drawing this picture of like sort of a pretentious Frenchman with a pipe,

00:20:46.660 | because intellectual is often used in modern conversation as a pejorative term.

00:20:52.400 | But there's also a very specific and positive meaning here.

00:20:55.120 | It's a stance towards the world of information, in which you are seeking out nuance and subtlety.

00:21:00.180 | You're also seeking out integration of information into complex understandings that you already have.

00:21:05.720 | So to be an intellectual is that you are engaging with the world of information.

00:21:10.540 | Trying to master it and integrate it.

00:21:14.000 | Now, if you do this for a living, like I do, if you're a professor, they teach you how to do this.

00:21:20.060 | I mean, this is what you do for a living.

00:21:21.980 | But we don't talk enough about everyone else.

00:21:24.540 | How do you practice this intellectual stance, an intellectual approach to the world of information?

00:21:32.680 | I'm going to give you two very concrete ideas that I think almost anyone can do.

00:21:37.840 | And it's going to make you literally seem much smarter.

00:21:41.260 | The first is pairing primary and secondary sources.

00:21:45.340 | Pairing secondary and primary sources.

00:21:48.440 | Okay, here's what this means.

00:21:49.840 | It's most obvious with books.

00:21:51.220 | So you want to read a great book, let's say.

00:21:54.660 | I want to read the Odyssey.

00:21:55.800 | I want to read Joyce.

00:21:58.360 | I want to read Absalon, Absalon.

00:22:00.360 | The typical approach that I think professional intellectuals have, which is flawed because they forgot their own training, is they say just read it.

00:22:11.220 | Just expose yourself to the ideas and then pretend like it's really changed your life.

00:22:17.140 | But that's not actually the way you learn how to engage information and draw out nuance and complicate it.

00:22:22.460 | What you should do instead is say, okay, let me now get, before I read this hard book, a secondary source.

00:22:28.760 | A secondary source means it's a book about the book.

00:22:31.300 | So here is a book about why Faulkner is important or why Absalon, Absalon is important.

00:22:39.800 | Here is a book about the heroic Greek world in which Homer wrote the Odyssey and why this is such an important book.

00:22:48.200 | I'm going to read about the book first and then go and read the actual primary source itself.

00:22:53.440 | You are now approaching this primary artifact with a framework for how to understand it, what you're looking for, what's important about it.

00:23:03.200 | And this gives your brain practice seeing things at a new level.

00:23:06.840 | You might not understand everything you saw in a secondary source and you might not come away saying I completely understand this book or it's changed my life.

00:23:13.280 | But you've practiced reading multiple layers below the surface.

00:23:17.240 | See, when we just tell people, read the great books, go to the museums and you'll just be inspired, we really are selling them short because that experience of inspiration requires you seeing multiple layers below the surface and you've got to practice that.

00:23:33.740 | Secondary sources first.

00:23:36.120 | Same thing with museums.

00:23:37.240 | I do not like this idea when parents have of like, all that's important is that we expose our child to art museums and then they'll love art.

00:23:44.500 | They're not going to come away from that loving art.

00:23:46.460 | What you're really just teaching them is how to be comfortable in the social context of an art museum so they'll seem cultured if they're around other people.

00:23:53.600 | Staring at paintings does not make you a lover of paintings.

00:24:00.160 | Reading about those paintings.

00:24:01.660 | Who was this artist?

00:24:02.540 | Why was this important?

00:24:03.480 | What was happening before when this artist came along?

00:24:06.340 | What was the historical context or turmoil created by this painting?

00:24:10.980 | And then you go and see the artifact.

00:24:12.600 | You have a completely different relationship with it.

00:24:14.880 | So you could teach kids even.

00:24:16.260 | Let me give you some basic information.

00:24:18.020 | Who was Jackson Pollock?

00:24:19.860 | Like what was going on with the abstract expressionist?

00:24:22.680 | Like what was, what were they fighting against?

00:24:24.460 | Why was this so exciting if you lived in, uh, Soho in 1942, like what was happening here?

00:24:30.720 | And then you see this artifact and it's, uh, it's a different experience.

00:24:34.380 | It's like when you go to the Smithsonian and see Judy Garland's, uh, ruby slippers, what's exciting about the ruby slippers is not just they're shiny, but it's like, those were the things in wizard of Oz.

00:24:43.960 | That was a really important movie.

00:24:45.400 | And this was this famous person wore them.

00:24:47.200 | That context helps.

00:24:49.020 | So you get in the habit of doing this.

00:24:51.600 | You can do it with art.

00:24:52.220 | You can do it with books.

00:24:53.180 | You can do it with movies.

00:24:54.460 | I do this all the time.

00:24:55.860 | Let me read, uh, uh, five reviews about this movie.

00:25:00.200 | Not like contemporary, but people looking back.

00:25:03.980 | It's a great movie.

00:25:04.720 | Let me do it with people looking back and writing essays about this movie.

00:25:07.620 | Uh, Roger Ebert did a lot of this later on.

00:25:11.240 | He went back and wrote this series of essays about the great movies.

00:25:14.740 | The guardian over in the UK does a lot of this.

00:25:17.160 | They'll, they'll write these retrospective essays about movies that might be decades earlier.

00:25:21.900 | And then you go and watch the movie.

00:25:23.760 | It's a completely different experience.

00:25:25.180 | It could be modern movies.

00:25:27.460 | It could be older movies.

00:25:28.260 | You read about, for example, center focusing, and then you watch George Miller's, uh, Mad Max Fury Road.

00:25:36.140 | It's a completely different experience and appreciation when you just put the movie on without that type of knowledge about the cinematography.

00:25:42.920 | Secondary sources paired with primary sources.

00:25:44.720 | This is what academics do during their training.

00:25:46.900 | They read and write their own secondary sources based on these primary sources.

00:25:50.700 | So it becomes second nature, seeing levels below the surface on all sorts of things.

00:25:55.060 | But if you're not going into a doctorate program, you're not getting this training, you have to do it yourself.

00:25:58.680 | It really makes your intellectual world a lot more interesting.

00:26:01.880 | Here's the other thing I want to recommend for practicing being intellectual.

00:26:05.960 | Maintain idea documents.

00:26:09.920 | These are actual documents you maintain, like a Microsoft Word file, just in your own personal files.

00:26:15.340 | Or if you're a good handwriter, you could do this in journals.

00:26:17.480 | And you have particular topics that you are recording and updating a summary in your own worlds of your best words of your best understanding of that topic.

00:26:28.140 | Now, these can be just general, sort of timeless topics.

00:26:32.140 | Like, I'm interested in Stoic philosophy.

00:26:35.220 | And I have this document I build out and add to about what Stoic philosophy is, who the thinkers are, what their thoughts, major thoughts are, your current summary of how you're thinking about Stoicism being in your own life.

00:26:47.080 | You are, through writing, consolidating information, structuring information.

00:26:52.500 | Now, again, this is something that real intellectuals get good at doing naturally.

00:26:55.620 | But you have to practice it.

00:26:57.600 | So writing and updating these summaries is a good way of doing it.

00:27:00.220 | You can do the same thing with current event topics as well.

00:27:05.180 | There's something going on in the world that you care about.

00:27:09.220 | You're like, I don't know.

00:27:09.800 | This scares me or interests me or just it feels important to me.

00:27:13.940 | Create and begin maintaining a document of how you feel about this and why.

00:27:18.020 | This is a fantastic way to free yourself from the emotional ping pong game of just let me expose myself to social media.

00:27:27.580 | Or algorithmic content.

00:27:28.560 | Let me choose a tribe and make that tribe make me feel good or scared and help me get mad about the other tribe.

00:27:33.680 | It gets you out of that trap and allows you to begin building your own understanding of things.

00:27:37.740 | You're worried about AI.

00:27:39.020 | Start building out this document.

00:27:40.520 | Here's what's going on.

00:27:41.680 | Here's the main types of AI.

00:27:42.980 | Here's where things are.

00:27:44.180 | Here's a list of thinkers and where they stand.

00:27:46.300 | And this thinker is against this thinker.

00:27:47.460 | You organize your thoughts.

00:27:48.840 | You're really worried or upset or conflicted or uneasy about conflict in the Middle East.

00:27:57.100 | Build out a document.

00:27:58.320 | Shut down Twitter.

00:27:59.420 | Build out a document.

00:28:00.560 | Here's what's going on.

00:28:01.620 | I mean, this is why I'm trying to articulate my concerns here.

00:28:04.220 | I really worry about this, but this, I don't know how, this is making me feel bad as well.

00:28:08.760 | And there's this argument doesn't quite work.

00:28:10.620 | And here's why you're talking about arguments and where it falls short for you, where it resonates.

00:28:14.240 | Build idea documents as a way of structuring to write is to think.

00:28:18.380 | So the right about what matters is to help you think about what matters.

00:28:23.040 | And your brain gets used to organizing information in the conceptual structures.

00:28:27.500 | So actually I have to practice being an intellectual.

00:28:30.440 | All right.

00:28:31.600 | So if you do these five things, all of which I've beautifully illustrated here, you begin

00:28:35.640 | improving the, the quality and decreasing the quantity of the information that you consume.

00:28:41.820 | You get comfort, comfort with boredom.

00:28:45.720 | You do interval training for just maintaining your concentration.

00:28:48.860 | You do particular training, the strength in your working memory, and you actually practice

00:28:52.700 | engaging information as an intellectual.

00:28:55.020 | You can become a much more serious thinker.

00:28:57.940 | It's not something you just choose to do.

00:29:00.500 | It's not something you're just born to do or not.

00:29:03.500 | It's something you cultivate.

00:29:05.760 | And hopefully if you're a listener of the show, you do agree that this is worth cultivating

00:29:11.180 | because I think it is.

00:29:11.980 | You see someone who's doing something cool.

00:29:13.140 | They're probably a serious thinker.

00:29:14.700 | You see someone who's done really well for themselves.

00:29:16.980 | They probably have the way to do serious thought.

00:29:18.620 | And in this case, maybe it's applied to a business issue, a strategy, but there's serious

00:29:24.060 | thought going on there.

00:29:24.880 | You see someone who just has a really interesting, engaged life.

00:29:27.440 | They're probably a serious thinker.

00:29:28.680 | They appreciate this.

00:29:29.720 | They can go to the movies and love the experience.

00:29:32.640 | They have things they're deeply engaged in.

00:29:34.640 | Your brain is your number one portal to the world.

00:29:37.640 | And if you train that brain to be a serious thinker, your experience of the world changes

00:29:42.320 | the techno color.

00:29:43.100 | The font gets smaller.

00:29:45.460 | The clarity gets much increased.

00:29:49.760 | It's just a different sort of improved experience with life.

00:29:52.940 | So train it, train that thinking, and you will get better at it.

How To Escape Mediocrity & Get Ahead Of 99% Of People | Cal Newport

Chapters