A Key Thing Stealing Your Focus: How To Achieve More By Working Less

00:00:00.000 | from Loyad from India.

00:00:02.600 | I often take on multiple projects,

00:00:04.280 | but then they, as they become hard, I abandon them halfway.

00:00:08.240 | How do I stop doing this?

00:00:10.040 | - All right, so we have a very consistent type theme today.

00:00:13.040 | I think the reader could,

00:00:15.180 | or the listener could almost answer this question

00:00:16.760 | on their own now, which is my goal.

00:00:18.000 | I really want to hammer this point home as much as I can.

00:00:22.580 | So Loyad, why are you abandoning projects

00:00:25.760 | when they become hard halfway?

00:00:28.480 | - Well, as you can imagine, I'm gonna have two parts

00:00:31.480 | to my answer here.

00:00:32.760 | One is mindset.

00:00:34.780 | If your mindset is one that depends on external power

00:00:38.000 | for you to get through goals,

00:00:40.060 | you are not gonna get very far in hard projects

00:00:42.240 | because the external power, which in this case

00:00:44.220 | is that actual emotional feeling of motivation,

00:00:47.400 | excitement will die down as projects go on,

00:00:51.760 | as they get harder, and then you'll stop doing them.

00:00:55.080 | So you need to reshape your mindset towards one

00:00:57.440 | and seeing yourself as someone who can handle

00:00:59.120 | internally powered goals.

00:01:00.920 | Guess I'm gonna suggest you do that.

00:01:02.360 | Layer one of the deep life stack,

00:01:03.720 | two to three daily disciplines,

00:01:05.040 | non-trivial, but tractable, everyday mark 'em.

00:01:09.400 | Just train your mind.

00:01:10.440 | I do things that are important for me,

00:01:12.120 | even if they're hard, even if I'm not excited in the moment,

00:01:14.280 | and there's a deeper satisfaction I get out of that.

00:01:16.820 | That's why I trust myself to do this going forward.

00:01:19.500 | Secondly, the issue here is gonna be similar

00:01:22.080 | to what I talked to both Fahad and Jacob about.

00:01:24.760 | You might just have too many projects

00:01:26.160 | and they might just actually be too hard.

00:01:28.240 | So be very careful about that.

00:01:31.600 | I think one project worked on consistently

00:01:33.840 | and slowly over time is gonna, in the end,

00:01:36.440 | open up more opportunities and have more impact

00:01:38.680 | in multiple projects that you're trying to tackle

00:01:40.760 | in a frenzied burst.

00:01:43.120 | So it's sort of a key slow productivity principle here,

00:01:46.160 | work on fewer things.

00:01:47.700 | So you might just have too many projects.

00:01:50.180 | Again, you have this impatience of I'm young

00:01:52.640 | and there's so much I wanna do and I have to make my mark,

00:01:55.380 | and you don't realize just choose the one thing

00:01:57.880 | that you patiently start building your skill on.

00:02:00.400 | It's frustrating maybe now when you're 22,

00:02:02.800 | but by the time you're 24, 25, and that's bearing fruit,

00:02:05.600 | the fruit is gonna be so much riper and sweeter

00:02:08.440 | than if you had spilled that time instead,

00:02:09.840 | just jumping from thing to thing,

00:02:11.240 | trying to jump from the latest idea to the latest interest.

00:02:16.240 | I mean, I knew someone like this in college, Jesse,

00:02:18.280 | and I kind of remember his name,

00:02:20.920 | but I'm not sure if I have his name right.

00:02:22.320 | And maybe I should anonymize it anyways.

00:02:24.560 | But I knew about him because he was my year at college,

00:02:26.940 | maybe he was a year younger,

00:02:28.020 | and he was the only other person I knew

00:02:29.340 | who was trying to write a book.

00:02:31.300 | And so he had interest in books,

00:02:32.980 | but he had all these other interests as well.

00:02:34.940 | Like he was interested in politics

00:02:36.980 | because Dartmouth is in Hanover, which is in New Hampshire.

00:02:41.120 | So when the presidential season would come through,

00:02:44.460 | which happened twice when I was there,

00:02:46.680 | everyone comes to New Hampshire because of the primaries.

00:02:48.700 | You get lots of political figures coming through.

00:02:50.140 | So he was also getting really involved

00:02:51.440 | in helping to like organize,

00:02:53.060 | I believe it was a debate for the 2004 presidential election

00:02:57.560 | and he had this other project going on.

00:02:58.940 | And so there was this real sense,

00:03:00.560 | I remember, man, he's doing a lot of things.

00:03:03.500 | Book writing was one of them, all these different projects.

00:03:05.380 | It's the excitement of, he was very capable,

00:03:07.940 | very capable in all these different things

00:03:09.740 | that could make my market.

00:03:11.500 | I was not that way.

00:03:12.580 | I wanted to, I was just writing.

00:03:15.100 | I was doing my CS work and writing.

00:03:17.100 | And I just, that was my main thing

00:03:18.900 | outside of my schoolwork was just writing.

00:03:20.740 | And I just, I wanted to write this book and do it well

00:03:23.940 | and then immediately turn around and sell another.

00:03:25.620 | But I just wanted to make my writing better.

00:03:27.940 | And I was willing to put my time, just focus on that.

00:03:31.460 | And so there's this point early on,

00:03:32.820 | we're both kind of working on books

00:03:34.020 | and he had a lot of other stuff going on,

00:03:36.380 | but all that stuff, I don't know what happened to it,

00:03:38.940 | but I just kept focusing on books.

00:03:40.820 | And I wrote another book and I was a little bit better.

00:03:42.580 | And then I took some time and wrote a third book,

00:03:44.300 | which was much better.

00:03:45.220 | And then it set up my fourth book, which was a hardcover.

00:03:47.740 | And now that has borne much more interesting fruit.

00:03:51.420 | I have actually, it took me a long time,

00:03:53.180 | but I've developed myself into a writer

00:03:54.980 | who can have a career as a writer.

00:03:56.460 | So in the moment when I was 20 or 21,

00:03:59.940 | it seemed maybe naively slow,

00:04:02.780 | like I'm just gonna work on this book

00:04:04.180 | and try to make it good.

00:04:05.020 | I don't wanna be distracted.

00:04:06.940 | But looking back as a 41 year old,

00:04:09.660 | I said, man, I'm so glad I stayed focused on that

00:04:11.880 | because how much interesting stuff has making writing

00:04:14.900 | one of my two core focuses of my life really opened up.

00:04:17.600 | So Llyod, slowing down, doing less things,

00:04:22.180 | sticking with that in a sustainable pace

00:04:24.220 | over a long period of time,

00:04:26.100 | that's typically what you wanna be doing

00:04:27.900 | if your goal is either impact

00:04:29.900 | or opening up interesting opportunities in your life

00:04:32.140 | or some combination of those two.

00:04:33.300 | That slow productivity approach is probably better.

00:04:35.260 | So that might be what's going on as well,

00:04:36.640 | is your mind is so overwhelmed, this is too much.

00:04:39.420 | So we got mindset and we have your mind being reasonable.

00:04:42.220 | So your mindset might be off.

00:04:43.660 | You need external power.

00:04:44.540 | We fixed that through practice.

00:04:45.860 | Your mind might be working perfectly fine

00:04:47.700 | and is making the reasonable observation

00:04:49.700 | that now this is too much work.

00:04:51.020 | We have too many things.

00:04:51.860 | We can't possibly be making a difference in all of these.

00:04:54.260 | They're beginning to conflict with each other.

00:04:56.780 | So you might actually just have to think about doing less.

00:05:00.480 | - Actually focusing is one of the main messages

00:05:04.700 | in your student books,

00:05:05.540 | like where you tell people not to do

00:05:06.780 | like a thousand activities and stuff like that.

00:05:09.180 | - Yeah, in fact, I was reminded that,

00:05:13.500 | so I'm back at Dartmouth

00:05:14.980 | and I didn't really remember this till I got up there.

00:05:17.320 | I was like, oh, I've been back a bunch of times

00:05:19.300 | over the course of the last couple of decades to give talks.

00:05:21.900 | And one of the first talks I gave,

00:05:23.840 | there's an old poster of this I have somewhere

00:05:25.980 | in my basement, I'd forgotten about this.

00:05:27.900 | I think it was a year out of college.

00:05:29.900 | I came back to Dartmouth

00:05:31.220 | and gave a lecture to students there

00:05:33.500 | about navigating their student career.

00:05:37.420 | And this was one of the big points I was making

00:05:39.700 | was do fewer things.

00:05:41.460 | Do fewer things, do 'em really well.

00:05:43.700 | You are much better off, for example,

00:05:47.620 | being the best student in the computer science department

00:05:51.200 | than you are being the student

00:05:52.420 | with the hardest schedule on campus.

00:05:54.100 | I have three majors and I'm doing these impossible.

00:05:56.900 | You're much better off saying,

00:05:57.860 | I'm only a computer science student.

00:05:59.300 | And in fact, I balance my computer science courses

00:06:01.460 | with easier courses and I take full advantage

00:06:03.940 | of independent studies and thesis studies

00:06:06.900 | where I can reduce my course load, but still get credits.

00:06:09.140 | And so, my course load is very, very manageable.

00:06:12.100 | And what I do is I take that energy

00:06:13.700 | to become the best student

00:06:15.140 | in those computer science classes.

00:06:16.660 | That is way, way more valuable than I did a triple major

00:06:20.760 | or I had really hard semesters.

00:06:21.900 | No one cares how hard your semesters are.

00:06:23.340 | Similarly, I wrote a book.

00:06:25.260 | I wrote a book for Random House.

00:06:27.500 | It's gonna get you much farther than I.

00:06:29.500 | I had six different clubs.

00:06:30.700 | You know how hard that was?

00:06:31.880 | I was a treasurer here and I ran this.

00:06:33.480 | I did this initiative.

00:06:34.980 | No one's keeping track of that.

00:06:36.100 | No one cares.

00:06:36.940 | I mean, they're like, yeah, you seem like a go-getter,

00:06:39.380 | but it doesn't catch their attention.

00:06:41.220 | People care about the thing you do best.

00:06:43.900 | So, you're almost always better off

00:06:45.480 | making your best things as good as possible,

00:06:47.740 | which almost always requires doing less.

00:06:50.460 | And this was, again, this came out of my advocacy

00:06:53.140 | about student stress, which I did this 2004 to 2007 period.

00:06:56.980 | I did a lot of this, a lot of talks

00:06:58.160 | all over the country about this.

00:06:59.420 | And at the core of my advocacy about student stress

00:07:02.460 | was students need to do much less.

00:07:06.540 | There's only so much that tactics and strategies

00:07:10.060 | and time management, they can only get you so far

00:07:12.300 | if you have too many courses and activities.

00:07:14.700 | And then as a college student,

00:07:16.220 | there's no real reason to do a lot of things

00:07:19.440 | because no one in your future is gonna care about that.

00:07:21.780 | There is no college admissions officer type figure

00:07:25.720 | in your future who is going to pore over

00:07:28.540 | what you did at college and say,

00:07:30.180 | how hard was their schedule?

00:07:31.540 | Let's get letters.

00:07:32.580 | They say, this person was really impressive.

00:07:34.380 | They worked on all these things.

00:07:35.660 | How hard were their course load?

00:07:37.920 | No one looks at that after college.

00:07:40.300 | If you're trying to go to grad school,

00:07:42.380 | it's gonna be a professor evaluating your application.

00:07:45.140 | And what do they wanna know?

00:07:46.140 | Where'd you go to school?

00:07:46.980 | What grades did you get in your major?

00:07:48.020 | Have you demonstrated you can do research?

00:07:49.500 | That's all they care.

00:07:50.660 | It's all they care about.

00:07:51.580 | They're not gonna look at your, oh my God,

00:07:52.900 | they had three, this was a really complicated schedule

00:07:54.660 | or look at these activities.

00:07:55.540 | They could care less.

00:07:56.500 | You're gonna work for a company.

00:07:57.560 | Typically, they wanna know, where'd you go to school?

00:07:59.000 | What was your GPA?

00:08:00.580 | How'd they do in the interview?

00:08:02.060 | That's what they care about.

00:08:04.260 | And again, we're gonna see this again and again.

00:08:07.040 | Go to law school.

00:08:07.880 | What do they care about?

00:08:08.700 | Here's LSAT's GPA.

00:08:10.300 | You can look up the grid school by school.

00:08:13.420 | This LSAT requires this GPA to have a high chance

00:08:16.500 | of getting in for basically every school

00:08:18.720 | except for maybe Yale.

00:08:20.180 | That's what you need to do.

00:08:22.060 | I have this grade point average.

00:08:23.100 | I need this LSAT score.

00:08:23.940 | Practice till I get it.

00:08:24.760 | Now I can get it, right?

00:08:25.600 | No one is gonna be pouring over your resume

00:08:27.220 | to see how hard your schedule is or how stressed you were.

00:08:30.100 | So that became a big core of my student advocacy,

00:08:32.740 | stress advocacy, was avoid unforced error, students.

00:08:36.420 | Create schedules and loads that are very manageable

00:08:40.380 | and then do what you do really well.

00:08:41.820 | Do a small number of things well

00:08:42.980 | is such a more sustainable strategy.

00:08:45.140 | And in the end, opens up more opportunities

00:08:47.060 | than I did a lot of hard.

00:08:47.980 | I had a hard schedule and did a lot of things okay.

00:08:51.220 | So that was a big part of my schedule.

00:08:52.460 | You know, the other part of my,

00:08:54.180 | this is going off tangent, Jesse,

00:08:55.700 | but I was talking about this at a student event

00:08:58.180 | the other week up at Dartmouth.

00:09:00.060 | We kind of brought up all this.

00:09:02.060 | I dredged up all of this stuff I used to do

00:09:04.140 | around student stress advocacy way back when.

00:09:06.340 | And I remember the other thing,

00:09:08.820 | the other thing that came up often

00:09:12.940 | was when student stress became a big issue,

00:09:15.860 | especially at the high school level,

00:09:18.260 | the response, and I think this is still

00:09:19.980 | sort of an instinct we have right now,

00:09:22.540 | the response was all of these Ivy League educated

00:09:25.940 | commentators who are writing about this,

00:09:30.340 | thinking like Alexander Robbins or Denise Pope

00:09:33.820 | would then turn to these aspirational students

00:09:36.900 | who were stressing themselves out

00:09:37.900 | trying to get into like an Ivy League school

00:09:39.340 | and say, guys, there's more to life

00:09:41.100 | than going to a good school.

00:09:43.180 | You know, just chill out about it.

00:09:45.420 | And this was completely falling flat

00:09:47.260 | because here they were with their Stanford

00:09:48.660 | and Yale degrees saying like, well, I did it.

00:09:50.980 | And I'm doing this kind of cool stuff

00:09:52.420 | and I'm kind of famous, but like, just go to the,

00:09:55.580 | you're so, you're kind of, in fact, you're flawed

00:09:57.260 | and especially your parents are flawed

00:09:58.980 | for pushing you to actually wanna come here.

00:10:00.580 | Just temper your ambition.

00:10:02.220 | So it was very much this pull up the drawbridge

00:10:04.820 | behind you type of mentality that just wasn't working.

00:10:07.780 | The students who were most stressed,

00:10:09.260 | if you came to them with your Ivy League diploma

00:10:11.740 | on the wall and said, there's more to life

00:10:13.420 | than going to an Ivy League,

00:10:14.780 | they would 100% tune you out.

00:10:17.060 | 'Cause they would say, I disagree.

00:10:19.220 | You look like you're doing something cool.

00:10:20.820 | I wanna do something cool like that.

00:10:22.260 | If the only thing you can offer me is be less ambitious,

00:10:25.780 | I'm sorry, but I'm gonna ignore you

00:10:27.220 | and go back to whatever's caused me all the stress

00:10:29.460 | and causing all these troubles.

00:10:30.380 | And so I was also back then, this 2005, 2006 period,

00:10:33.940 | this lone voice out there in the student stress debates.

00:10:36.620 | And this is when they really picked up speed.

00:10:38.820 | When the millennial demographic bump hit up

00:10:41.460 | against limited college admission slot,

00:10:43.660 | when the common application became widespread

00:10:45.820 | and now you could apply to 50 colleges pretty easily.

00:10:48.620 | This is when acceptance rates plummeted, right?

00:10:50.900 | So the 2000s, early 2000s,

00:10:52.860 | this is when it became a real problem.

00:10:54.540 | And I was out there as a lone voice

00:10:57.060 | among these other voices saying,

00:10:59.540 | what you have to offer students

00:11:00.980 | is an alternative path to their ambitions.

00:11:04.060 | You have to keep the ambition in the question.

00:11:06.860 | Okay, you wanna go to a really good school.

00:11:08.780 | I'm not gonna try to talk you out of that.

00:11:11.020 | I mean, I want you to know it's okay if that doesn't happen,

00:11:14.420 | but I'm not gonna tell you you're bad

00:11:15.740 | or your parents are flawed

00:11:16.700 | for thinking you wanna go to Harvard or whatever.

00:11:18.540 | But let's talk about how you do that.

00:11:20.660 | And actually this path of overloading yourself

00:11:23.500 | and just trying to grind it out is not very successful.

00:11:26.460 | Here's alternative paths where you could be very interesting

00:11:29.420 | and have a good shot at these schools,

00:11:30.740 | but your life is very sustainable.

00:11:32.140 | And I used to call it the Zen Valedictorian Strategy.

00:11:34.660 | And I wrote a lot about it, talked a lot about it.

00:11:36.620 | My third book is actually about this strategy.

00:11:38.740 | I followed five kids who got into really good schools

00:11:41.820 | without being stressed and deconstructed.

00:11:44.300 | How in the world did they do this, right?

00:11:46.500 | And so I was the lone voice out there often

00:11:48.860 | that would say, I think it's completely fine.

00:11:51.180 | You have to recognize and accept people's ambitions

00:11:54.220 | and then start giving them more sustainable strategies

00:11:56.860 | for pursuing those ambitions.

00:11:58.820 | We're way off Loyal's question at this point.

00:12:00.780 | But anyways, I was just thinking about this.

00:12:02.460 | I was talking to all these college students the other day.

00:12:04.220 | We did a student dinner

00:12:05.660 | and I was talking to a lot of them about,

00:12:07.340 | 'cause they had just gone through this

00:12:08.420 | to get into Dartmouth.

00:12:09.500 | I believe Dartmouth's acceptance right now is negative 2%.

00:12:14.660 | Like they actually kick out

00:12:15.660 | a certain number of people each year.

00:12:17.860 | I think to get into an Ivy League school today,

00:12:21.780 | you have to work really hard in STEM classes in high school,

00:12:25.580 | get to the head of those classes,

00:12:27.460 | use those technology to invent a time machine,

00:12:30.180 | then bring yourself back to 1997.

00:12:33.820 | It's negative acceptance.

00:12:34.820 | You actually have to go back in time to be accepted.

00:12:37.780 | I think they try to reduce the number of students

00:12:40.340 | there every year.

00:12:41.180 | I don't know.

00:12:42.780 | That's all neither here nor there.

00:12:44.660 | I'm just in this mindset.

00:12:45.580 | I don't know why I'm in this mindset again,

00:12:46.940 | but I guess Jesse, you caused all this by saying,

00:12:49.820 | I talk about focus in my student books.

00:12:51.540 | And I was like, yeah, like in my student books,

00:12:53.140 | I really was trying to just be very clear about,

00:12:57.260 | here's how a lot of students do really well.

00:12:59.940 | And a lot of it's not doing too much,

00:13:01.940 | being organized about what you do,

00:13:03.260 | but keeping your load manageable

00:13:04.660 | and actually it's a very sustainable path.

00:13:06.260 | - Yeah.

00:13:07.700 | - Not completely out of nowhere though,

00:13:09.100 | because I think we'll see this final question.

00:13:12.100 | I think it's gonna be relevant to this final question.

00:13:14.140 | - All right, last question from a CS student.

00:13:17.100 | In a previous podcast, you mentioned not to work

00:13:19.380 | for 10 hours at a time, like many productivity YouTubers do.

00:13:22.860 | Can you explain why not?

00:13:24.460 | These YouTubers are often the biggest names

00:13:26.540 | in YouTube productivity and seem like

00:13:28.180 | they're excellent students and are creating

00:13:29.940 | long-term deep life habits from it.

00:13:32.380 | As long as you make sure to avoid shallow work,

00:13:34.340 | I was wondering why is working 10 hours a day a problem?

00:13:38.340 | - Have you seen these videos, Jesse?

00:13:39.940 | - No.

00:13:41.140 | - People have been sending them to me.

00:13:42.580 | - I've taken your advice like even before I knew you

00:13:45.260 | about like the no, you can't see any other videos

00:13:49.700 | on the homepage.

00:13:50.780 | - Yes.

00:13:51.620 | - So I only--

00:13:52.460 | - The plugin that takes the recommendations off of YouTube.

00:13:55.500 | - Yeah.

00:13:56.340 | - By the way, I'm a big believer in that still.

00:13:58.300 | YouTube is a great library,

00:13:59.780 | it's a terrible television channel.

00:14:01.180 | That's what I always say.

00:14:02.700 | So to use it as a library,

00:14:04.500 | I wanna learn how to do this thing.

00:14:06.540 | And I can search and find videos on how to replace the oil

00:14:10.100 | in my very particular type of car.

00:14:11.580 | It's an excellent library.

00:14:12.540 | Or I wanna look up, I've heard about Cal Newport,

00:14:16.740 | I like Cal Newport, I know his podcast is on YouTube,

00:14:20.500 | so I can have that bookmarked.

00:14:21.900 | And I'm going there to look up Cal Newport videos

00:14:24.220 | to see his podcast, that's great.

00:14:27.140 | To use it as a TV channel,

00:14:28.700 | let me just click on a recommendation

00:14:30.460 | and then see if the recommendations are more interesting

00:14:32.740 | than what I'm watching and click on those recommendations

00:14:34.580 | and sort of following those rabbit holes,

00:14:35.980 | that is more dangerous.

00:14:37.780 | But anyways, there's a whole productivity YouTube

00:14:40.020 | where these YouTubers do these over the top,

00:14:43.100 | I think of it as a sort of nerd version

00:14:46.100 | of David Blaine productivity endurance challenges.

00:14:50.380 | I guess it's time-lapse, but 10 hours studying straight.

00:14:54.260 | And they make it sort of heroic.

00:14:56.660 | This often works well on YouTube.

00:14:58.340 | If the thing you're doing is over the top,

00:15:01.100 | you take whatever emotional reaction

00:15:03.940 | that is relevant to that topic.

00:15:05.380 | So you see someone well-organized and studying well,

00:15:07.580 | and you're like, "Oh, I kind of have an affinity for that.

00:15:09.900 | I wanna be a better student."

00:15:11.100 | And then you show someone doing it for 10 hours,

00:15:12.940 | you push it over the top,

00:15:14.300 | it takes that emotional response

00:15:15.700 | and pushes over the top, that's engagement.

00:15:18.700 | And people watch these videos and get really into it.

00:15:20.860 | So it's a classic YouTube strategy

00:15:23.180 | being applied to the topic of productivity.

00:15:26.820 | So why not study for 10 hours a day?

00:15:28.900 | You can see in the student's question,

00:15:31.500 | these are big names on YouTube.

00:15:32.980 | These people are YouTube famous.

00:15:34.820 | They seem like they're really good students.

00:15:36.860 | Why? There's a clarity to it.

00:15:38.100 | There's an extremeness to it, a sort of monastic discipline

00:15:41.020 | to all I do is study all day.

00:15:43.020 | And I guess my answer to the CS student,

00:15:44.660 | it would be to turn the question back on you

00:15:48.580 | and say, "To what end?"

00:15:50.540 | So what are you trying to accomplish

00:15:54.700 | if you're working 10 hours a day on schoolwork?

00:15:57.580 | Well, you might say, "Well,

00:15:59.700 | then for sure I'll get into med school."

00:16:01.380 | Okay, so then what?

00:16:02.940 | Well, okay, I guess I would study 10 hours a day

00:16:06.140 | in med school so that I could graduate top my class

00:16:08.620 | and get a really good residency.

00:16:10.580 | Okay, well, then what?

00:16:11.460 | Well, then I would work 10 hours a day

00:16:13.300 | so I could do research.

00:16:14.420 | I could be the very best resident

00:16:16.860 | and get sort of an academic clinical position.

00:16:20.260 | Okay, well, then what?

00:16:21.100 | Well, then I'd really wanna do 10 hours

00:16:22.260 | because if I could fill every hour

00:16:24.100 | working on my medical research and clinician practice,

00:16:27.900 | I could move up really quickly and become an attending

00:16:30.500 | and get tenure at the associate university very quickly.

00:16:32.980 | It was like, all right, well, then what?

00:16:34.500 | If I really worked 10 hours all day long,

00:16:36.780 | then I could probably become chair

00:16:40.980 | of this particular medical department

00:16:43.300 | and bring in all this different money

00:16:44.740 | and we could really expand the hospitals.

00:16:46.700 | And then what?

00:16:47.580 | You keep following this out and you look back and say,

00:16:50.980 | "All I've done is just work really hard."

00:16:55.500 | What about all the other elements of life?

00:16:57.600 | So where is there in this point some sort of victory

00:17:03.340 | where you say now I can have a full rich experience of life?

00:17:06.340 | It's just working for the sake of working

00:17:09.100 | because of what's next.

00:17:10.580 | Putting aside the fact that it's completely unsustainable

00:17:12.740 | and these YouTubers don't work 10 hours all the time.

00:17:14.940 | Again, it's like looking at David Blaine

00:17:16.780 | freezing himself into a block of ice.

00:17:18.460 | He doesn't spend most days frozen to a block of ice,

00:17:20.820 | but it got a lot of engagement when he did that

00:17:22.580 | as a stunt for a television special.

00:17:25.340 | They're not spending their day doing this all the time.

00:17:27.420 | It's not a sustainable way to live,

00:17:28.580 | but even if it was, in general,

00:17:30.020 | this is like let me grind and work all of my hours

00:17:32.260 | so I can get to the next level at the very highest level.

00:17:37.260 | It's not sustainable because it keeps going.

00:17:40.780 | Now, there are some exceptions to this.

00:17:42.100 | Like sure, some professional caliber

00:17:44.780 | Olympic athletes do this,

00:17:46.460 | but they're doing this for a very narrow window

00:17:48.340 | because they have until they're, what, 33

00:17:50.460 | before they have to move on and live the rest of your life.

00:17:52.500 | It's very different if you're training

00:17:54.180 | for the Olympics like this with this level of intensity

00:17:56.380 | because it's a in-dated thing.

00:17:58.860 | But if you're talking about your career as a student

00:18:01.420 | to your professional career,

00:18:02.260 | there's no place where that ends essentially until you die.

00:18:06.820 | What type of life is that?

00:18:07.900 | So why don't you work for 10 hours a day

00:18:09.420 | because it's not living.

00:18:10.620 | It's a sort of parody of workism

00:18:14.980 | if I'm gonna take a term from Derek Thompson.

00:18:19.460 | So what works better?

00:18:21.460 | Slow productivity.

00:18:22.500 | Working with good focus and good organization

00:18:26.700 | on things that matter consistently

00:18:28.940 | and systematically over time.

00:18:31.300 | This can produce work of real impact, of real meaning.

00:18:34.180 | It can open up all sorts of interesting opportunities

00:18:36.140 | in your life.

00:18:36.980 | It can allow you to do

00:18:37.820 | and accomplish very competitive things.

00:18:39.660 | And it's compatible with a well-rounded life.

00:18:41.660 | And it's compatible with, I don't just work all the time.

00:18:43.620 | I'm not just always stressed out.

00:18:45.060 | I'm not just always overwhelmed and trying to keep up

00:18:47.980 | or compete with someone else.

00:18:50.380 | It often also produces, in a lot of fields, better results.

00:18:55.100 | You don't see the very best novelists

00:18:59.740 | that are winning all the awards

00:19:00.980 | getting there because they spend more hours

00:19:03.580 | working on their novel every day.

00:19:04.940 | No, it's this sort of slow and steady work on their writing.

00:19:08.100 | They're very careful and intentional about their time.

00:19:11.540 | They think, they read, they walk, they integrate,

00:19:14.060 | and they come back and write.

00:19:15.900 | And you get really great,

00:19:17.340 | you know, it's where you're gonna get

00:19:18.180 | a sort of wholesome whitehead,

00:19:19.020 | is out of the slow development of real talent,

00:19:21.740 | not out of, I wrote 12 hours each day

00:19:24.260 | and the other writers are only writing six hours each day.

00:19:26.500 | Now, I think there's a comfort in this

00:19:27.780 | for very ambitious young people,

00:19:30.380 | because it makes you think,

00:19:32.580 | it gives you a very simple framework.

00:19:33.780 | I turn this knob of hours.

00:19:35.700 | The higher the knob you turn up on hours,

00:19:37.300 | the more successful you'll be.

00:19:38.900 | Most people aren't gonna turn the knob past this point

00:19:40.900 | because they're weak.

00:19:41.860 | I'm not weak.

00:19:42.740 | If I'm willing to take the pain,

00:19:44.180 | it's very simple what I need to do.

00:19:45.580 | It's just hard.

00:19:46.420 | It's just keeping my hand in a metaphorical ice bucket

00:19:48.580 | longer than you did.

00:19:49.580 | I like this.

00:19:51.140 | I'm gonna do 10 hours.

00:19:52.140 | You're only gonna do four.

00:19:53.300 | I'll be more successful.

00:19:54.260 | So it makes success seem much more controllable.

00:19:57.780 | It's just a matter of raw will.

00:20:00.540 | But again, that's not the reality.

00:20:03.380 | Great work, innovative work in academia,

00:20:05.940 | in the arts, in business or business strategy

00:20:08.580 | has its busy periods, but is not built upon,

00:20:12.180 | I have to be working all the time.

00:20:13.660 | So I just think it's no real way to live.

00:20:16.140 | I just say, this is why I come back

00:20:17.300 | to my original question, to what end?

00:20:19.860 | What comes next after your 10 hours a day as a student?

00:20:23.500 | What comes next after your 10 hours a day

00:20:25.420 | as the investment banker junior associate?

00:20:28.460 | Because you took that job

00:20:29.300 | because it was the most competitive,

00:20:30.300 | the hardest one to get.

00:20:31.460 | What comes next after you get managing director

00:20:33.540 | at the investment bank?

00:20:34.740 | What comes next after you go off

00:20:36.620 | to start your own hedge fund?

00:20:37.660 | What comes next after you hit the billion dollar valuation?

00:20:40.340 | I mean, there's always things

00:20:41.900 | you could be overworking yourself towards,

00:20:44.060 | but again, to what end?

00:20:46.340 | What comes next?

00:20:47.180 | These are the questions I always come back to.

00:20:48.260 | So I think it's a stunt

00:20:49.580 | what these productivity YouTubers are doing.

00:20:51.900 | I've spent my entire life in professional academia.

00:20:54.060 | The smartest people don't do that.

00:20:56.060 | They work hard, and undergraduate, they don't, right?

00:20:58.660 | I mean, because it's not that hard.

00:21:00.340 | They work hard in periods and other periods.

00:21:01.900 | They're in thinking periods.

00:21:02.820 | They have other types of things going on.

00:21:04.660 | So I'm just not, this idea that you're gonna somehow just,

00:21:07.700 | I love the simplicity of it,

00:21:08.740 | but this idea that you're gonna somehow

00:21:09.860 | just out-raw number everyone else

00:21:12.540 | and that's where your success is gonna come from.

00:21:13.980 | It just is not sustainable.

00:21:16.260 | It goes against the deep life that we talk about here.

00:21:19.660 | It's way out of balance, over the top,

00:21:22.940 | and really not the right way in my mind

00:21:25.900 | to build a life of intentionality and depth.

00:21:28.500 | All that's new, Jesse, this like work 10 hours thing,

00:21:32.180 | it's because it worked on YouTube.

00:21:34.420 | - Yeah.

00:21:35.260 | - And I think for young people, they see it,

00:21:37.020 | they don't realize how new it is.

00:21:38.140 | If someone just figured this out a few years ago,

00:21:39.860 | that it's very compelling content to be like,

00:21:42.460 | man, I just studied 10 hours.

00:21:44.100 | You watch them doing it, you're like, man, they did it.

00:21:46.060 | They stuck with it.

00:21:46.900 | And look at, that's great.

00:21:48.700 | It just seems so simple.

00:21:49.700 | I don't know.

00:21:50.540 | It's like the productivity equivalent of David Goggins

00:21:52.100 | doing, just ran all day long

00:21:54.100 | or did pushups till my arm fell off.

00:21:56.020 | - It's like when we heard Mr. Beast talk about,

00:21:58.620 | if you want a compelling video

00:21:59.740 | and you don't have a lot of money,

00:22:00.580 | you can put together paperclips

00:22:02.260 | for multiple football fields and people will watch it.

00:22:04.900 | - Yep.

00:22:05.740 | Or what was his, how high can he count?

00:22:07.660 | - Yeah.

00:22:08.500 | - He counted to like a million or something

00:22:09.820 | and it took him 12 hours.

00:22:11.700 | Yeah, it works on YouTube.

00:22:13.620 | It's not actually a strategy for productivity.

00:22:16.380 | It's a strategy for getting good views on a YouTube video.

00:22:19.820 | So I don't know.

00:22:20.660 | Maybe our YouTube videos will be the counterpoint

00:22:23.380 | for the youth out there or old man videos.

A Key Thing Stealing Your Focus: How To Achieve More By Working Less | Cal Newport

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