Make Learning As Addictive As Social Media - Quickly Make Progress At Anything

00:00:00.000 | Can we make learning as addictive as social media?

00:00:05.000 | Last week, I talked briefly on the show

00:00:09.060 | about a TED talk that has been going viral recently.

00:00:13.200 | It was done by Louis Von Ahn, the co-founder of Duolingo.

00:00:18.200 | Today, I wanna take a deeper look at this question.

00:00:21.460 | I wanna draw from the science of motivation and distraction

00:00:24.380 | to argue number one, Von Ahn's specific claims

00:00:29.220 | about making learning as addictive as social media

00:00:33.100 | are doomed to failure, but number two,

00:00:35.020 | if we look more closely at how the brain actually functions,

00:00:39.060 | we can find there is a lasting and effective way

00:00:41.980 | to make learning more appealing,

00:00:44.800 | and yes, even more appealing to social media.

00:00:46.780 | It's just gonna be different than the Duolingo approach.

00:00:50.940 | In the second argument, we are gonna see

00:00:52.660 | a more general playbook for cultivating

00:00:54.980 | a deeper life in general.

00:00:58.500 | All right, so let's jump into this.

00:00:59.620 | I wanna start with the video.

00:01:01.180 | I'll put it up here on the screen.

00:01:02.940 | For those who are watching,

00:01:04.060 | you can see this is Louis Von Ahn giving his talk.

00:01:09.060 | I wrote down here the main points from his talk

00:01:11.920 | so that we can be on the same page here.

00:01:15.260 | So what does he argue in this?

00:01:17.260 | Well, he argues that Duolingo wants to give

00:01:19.140 | equal access to education for everyone.

00:01:22.540 | This is why they're moving language learning

00:01:26.380 | onto mobile phones.

00:01:27.980 | They use a freemium model.

00:01:30.220 | Some people pay for it, or you can watch the ads.

00:01:32.460 | The people paying for it help subsidize

00:01:34.280 | the people who can't afford to pay to it

00:01:35.680 | so you get more people to see it.

00:01:37.300 | To make learning more engaging,

00:01:38.700 | Duolingo uses techniques like streaks,

00:01:41.420 | notifications, and a fun mascot

00:01:44.180 | that game and social media apps use to hook users

00:01:47.700 | to make the learning more addictive.

00:01:49.860 | They're showing you can use addictive techniques for good.

00:01:52.700 | Millions use the apps to learn languages

00:01:54.980 | more than in all US high schools combined.

00:01:58.320 | Von Ahn hopes that these techniques can be applied

00:02:00.980 | to teaching other subjects like math on phones.

00:02:05.980 | So we can even take a closer look.

00:02:08.740 | I'm gonna switch to another video here

00:02:10.940 | that will just show us some actual app usage

00:02:15.660 | of Duolingo in progress.

00:02:18.500 | So I have it up here on the screen now.

00:02:20.660 | You can see, if you're watching this

00:02:22.340 | as opposed to just listening, I'll narrate it to you.

00:02:24.060 | I'll narrate if you're just listening,

00:02:25.860 | you'll see you're selecting avatars,

00:02:29.900 | you're clicking on things, questions are coming up,

00:02:33.180 | quick, bright graphics so you can see what's happening.

00:02:37.500 | There's an avatar that looks nice.

00:02:39.960 | There's an owl that looks really fun.

00:02:42.180 | Things are moving around, questions are coming up.

00:02:45.260 | So it does really look like a really sort of

00:02:47.900 | friendly, colorful app.

00:02:51.300 | And so it's supposed to have this addictive feel

00:02:53.060 | so that when you feel that urge

00:02:54.940 | to pull your phone out of your pocket

00:02:57.080 | instead of going to TikTok,

00:02:58.700 | so what we're gonna do Duolingo.

00:03:00.180 | There's an owl with glasses.

00:03:01.340 | We're gonna have fun with this, let's go.

00:03:03.300 | All right, so let me start by saying a couple things

00:03:04.720 | I like about Duolingo.

00:03:06.020 | I wanna give credit where credit is due.

00:03:08.300 | Using applications on the internet

00:03:10.100 | to make information more accessible,

00:03:12.380 | especially information you can use to better yourself

00:03:15.440 | in terms of learning is a really good idea.

00:03:19.140 | I think it was a really good idea

00:03:20.100 | when Khan Academy did this, for example,

00:03:22.620 | having a very easy to grok visual format

00:03:26.060 | for teaching mathematics

00:03:27.140 | and then making those mathematic lessons widely available.

00:03:29.900 | That did a lot of good.

00:03:31.020 | That is the internet being used towards its full potential.

00:03:35.900 | We're gonna see similar leaps in the ability

00:03:38.460 | for people to teach themselves material

00:03:41.240 | delivered through the internet.

00:03:42.220 | Similar leaps are about to happen

00:03:44.140 | due to the integration of large language models

00:03:47.240 | like ChatGPT in learning.

00:03:48.860 | They're actually very good at this.

00:03:52.260 | ChatGPT and related language model-based chat tools

00:03:55.580 | are really good.

00:03:56.420 | You can go back and forth and ask it questions,

00:03:58.500 | for example, about a mathematics technique.

00:04:00.440 | Well, can you give me an example of this?

00:04:01.740 | Why did you do this here?

00:04:03.020 | We are gonna see big changes happening

00:04:04.740 | in terms of tutoring and education with those tools as well.

00:04:07.100 | This is all great.

00:04:08.660 | The internet bringing more information to more people.

00:04:11.780 | But what about this idea that we can make a learning app

00:04:16.660 | as addictive as social media

00:04:18.900 | so that people will pull out this app

00:04:21.380 | instead of something else and over time

00:04:23.060 | will essentially addict people to learning

00:04:25.780 | and increase the level of learning in the world?

00:04:29.740 | Well, here is where I think we need to get

00:04:32.180 | a little bit more wary.

00:04:35.460 | And to understand my wariness here,

00:04:37.400 | we actually are gonna have to look a little bit deeper

00:04:39.380 | about how the brain gets motivated to do things.

00:04:41.840 | There are two separate types of motivational systems

00:04:44.620 | that are relevant to this discussion.

00:04:47.540 | If we're gonna understand the problem with Vaughn On Strategy

00:04:50.340 | and if we're gonna understand an alternative

00:04:51.740 | that might work better,

00:04:52.860 | we have to understand these systems.

00:04:55.580 | And so to help us understand the first system,

00:04:57.460 | I'm bringing an article up here on my screen.

00:05:00.100 | The title is "Dopamine Smartphones and You,

00:05:02.460 | A Battle for Your Time."

00:05:03.940 | This is written by Trevor Haynes.

00:05:07.380 | And what I like about this article

00:05:08.660 | is that it does a good job of explaining the dopamine system

00:05:12.500 | which is gonna be the relevant system

00:05:15.740 | when we think about the urge to pull out a phone

00:05:19.100 | and do something on the phone.

00:05:20.460 | So when we think about addictiveness,

00:05:22.100 | quote unquote, surrounding apps,

00:05:24.540 | this is the system that's at play.

00:05:27.180 | I'm gonna read a couple of quotes from this article

00:05:29.020 | that'll be relevant for our purpose here.

00:05:31.220 | Here's the first quote that I wanna read.

00:05:34.620 | Dopamine is a chemical produced by our brains

00:05:38.220 | that plays a starring role in motivating behavior.

00:05:41.260 | It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food,

00:05:43.740 | when we have sex, after we exercise,

00:05:45.980 | and importantly, when we have successful social interactions.

00:05:50.100 | If you can do all four of those things at the same time,

00:05:51.740 | you're really winning.

00:05:53.220 | In an evolutionary context,

00:05:54.580 | it rewards us for beneficial behaviors

00:05:56.180 | and motivates us to repeat them.

00:05:58.260 | So this is sort of what we've heard about dopamine.

00:06:00.820 | It's kind of the layman's understanding.

00:06:03.020 | It has something to do with motivating us

00:06:04.340 | to do pleasurable behaviors.

00:06:06.820 | Let's look a little bit deeper here.

00:06:09.220 | Every time a response to a stimulus results in a reward,

00:06:15.820 | every time a response to a stimulus results in a reward,

00:06:19.620 | these associations,

00:06:21.460 | so the associations mediated by the dopamine system,

00:06:24.540 | become stronger through a process

00:06:26.660 | called long-term potentiation.

00:06:30.340 | This process strengthens frequently used connections

00:06:32.860 | between brain cells called neurons

00:06:34.700 | by increasing the intensity

00:06:36.140 | at which they respond to particular stimuli.

00:06:38.020 | Now, this is really important.

00:06:39.860 | When we look closer at the mechanisms of the dopamine system,

00:06:43.920 | we see a Pavlovian aspect to it.

00:06:46.780 | There's a response, some sort of stimuli,

00:06:49.500 | and there's a response to that stimuli that feels good.

00:06:53.380 | So this is an immediate thing.

00:06:55.500 | Stimuli response, stimuli response.

00:06:57.500 | So what's building up here in neurons

00:06:58.980 | is this immediate connection.

00:07:01.340 | I pull out this app and almost right away,

00:07:03.900 | I'm seeing something that triggers an emotional reaction,

00:07:06.300 | be it an outrage if I'm looking at

00:07:08.700 | a sort of outrage peddler on Twitter,

00:07:10.700 | or amusement if I'm looking at TikTok videos

00:07:14.080 | from a curated list that's towards funny videos,

00:07:16.520 | and your brain builds this stimuli response,

00:07:20.040 | stimuli response type of connection.

00:07:23.300 | The dopamine system then plays off of this

00:07:28.300 | and says, "Let's go do this behavior right now

00:07:31.080 | to get the response right away."

00:07:32.520 | So there's a real immediacy there.

00:07:35.360 | I have one more quote here.

00:07:37.460 | Just to give us another technical term,

00:07:38.880 | "Research and reward learning and addiction

00:07:40.680 | have recently focused on a feature of our dopamine neurons

00:07:43.080 | called reward prediction error encoding.

00:07:46.520 | These prediction errors serve as dopamine-mediated

00:07:48.480 | feedback signals in our brains."

00:07:49.720 | So we're constantly, the system is constantly monitoring

00:07:52.360 | this very tight feedback loop.

00:07:54.160 | There's a particular stimulus

00:07:55.360 | and what type of response do we get,

00:07:57.120 | and where it has learned that a stimulus

00:07:59.960 | gives you often a positive response,

00:08:02.340 | then it really drives you to do it.

00:08:04.080 | Now, this was the effect, all of this was unlocked.

00:08:08.240 | When this effect was uncovered in the context of apps

00:08:11.600 | on phones accidentally by Facebook.

00:08:15.580 | This happened about a decade ago.

00:08:18.680 | Facebook engineers, we've talked about this before,

00:08:20.800 | but it's worth repeating.

00:08:21.680 | Facebook engineers had this very pragmatic idea

00:08:25.160 | that we are gonna add the like button

00:08:28.080 | to our Facebook mobile app,

00:08:30.120 | because it is highly inefficient

00:08:32.800 | when a Facebook post is generating lots of simple,

00:08:37.000 | positive, affirmative responses,

00:08:38.920 | don't have much information,

00:08:40.000 | lots of congrats, great, that's awesome.

00:08:42.320 | And the Facebook engineers were very pragmatic

00:08:44.480 | and they said, "Here's the problem.

00:08:45.600 | I post a triumph, everyone's saying great

00:08:48.120 | and congratulations,

00:08:49.580 | that buries the more meaningful comments."

00:08:52.440 | So I post the picture of myself with my diploma

00:08:56.160 | and everyone's saying, "Great, congratulations."

00:08:57.640 | And you have 30 or 40 of these short exclamatory comments.

00:09:00.760 | You don't realize that three pages into those comments

00:09:03.420 | is the guy who's saying, "Hey, in the background,

00:09:05.760 | there's a Yeti stealing your Jeep."

00:09:08.120 | And that's like the interesting comment

00:09:09.360 | probably about this picture,

00:09:10.360 | but you don't find out about the Yeti

00:09:11.640 | stealing the Jeep in the background 'cause it's buried.

00:09:13.600 | So I said, "Oh, we'll add a like button."

00:09:14.800 | So if all you're gonna do is say, "That's great."

00:09:16.560 | You click the like button and we can save the comments

00:09:18.600 | for more meaningful information,

00:09:20.320 | like letting people know

00:09:21.320 | there's a Yeti stealing their Jeep.

00:09:23.120 | This was the idea behind the like button.

00:09:24.720 | They turn it on, almost immediately they noticed,

00:09:27.040 | "My God, people are using the app a lot more."

00:09:29.340 | And the reason was, is that the accumulation of likes

00:09:34.980 | was a positive reward signal.

00:09:37.160 | The clicking of the app,

00:09:38.760 | that little white F in the blue box on your phone,

00:09:41.680 | was a very clear stimulus, boom.

00:09:44.940 | You press that stimulus and often you get this nice reward

00:09:50.240 | of people liked what I did.

00:09:52.120 | Hey, it's Cal here.

00:09:52.960 | I just wanted to mention,

00:09:54.560 | if you wanna have help taking action

00:09:57.200 | on the type of ideas we talk about in this show,

00:09:59.800 | sign up for my email newsletter.

00:10:02.200 | The link is right here below in the description.

00:10:04.980 | Two to four times a month,

00:10:06.540 | I send out detailed articles

00:10:08.580 | about the types of ideas we discuss here.

00:10:11.740 | It's the best way to stay connected

00:10:14.700 | to me and my audience's quest to live a deeper life.

00:10:17.020 | So sign up below.

00:10:18.000 | That created a association.

00:10:22.300 | So now we get these reward prediction error

00:10:24.140 | encoding neurons involved.

00:10:25.840 | Once that association was very strong,

00:10:27.580 | your dopamine system is like, "Click that button.

00:10:30.780 | Click that button."

00:10:31.940 | And people would click it more and more and more.

00:10:33.660 | That was the birth of the attention engineering

00:10:35.960 | era that we're in now.

00:10:38.700 | That was the realization among attention economy platforms

00:10:41.400 | that if we hack the dopamine system,

00:10:43.220 | we can 5X, 6X, now in the case of TikTok,

00:10:46.460 | probably 10X engagement on these apps.

00:10:48.380 | And that's just more data, more ads to sell.

00:10:51.380 | So that is the system that's at play

00:10:52.820 | when you keep pulling out your phone.

00:10:54.360 | So what Vaughn is saying in his TED Talk

00:10:57.500 | is let's try to win at that game.

00:11:00.220 | You know, let's make this sort of fun

00:11:02.740 | and there'll be a nice reward

00:11:05.060 | because when you click on the app,

00:11:06.640 | there's an owl wearing glasses and stars fly around

00:11:09.940 | and you have streaks and that dopamine system will say,

00:11:12.400 | "Hey, let's take out this app and let's play it."

00:11:14.940 | All right, here's the problem about that.

00:11:16.260 | If you had nothing else going on on your phone,

00:11:18.180 | if it was your phone had the weather app and Duolingo,

00:11:20.740 | that's a nice reward and you might feel compelled

00:11:22.860 | to pull out the Duolingo and play with it.

00:11:25.420 | The problem is, is that you are competing with TikTok,

00:11:30.420 | Instagram, Twitter, mobile games.

00:11:33.980 | You're competing with applications

00:11:35.860 | that are also trying to hack the dopamine system.

00:11:38.340 | So now you need to out-reward them.

00:11:40.940 | You want your dopamine neurons associated with Duolingo

00:11:43.540 | to have a stronger reward response,

00:11:45.980 | a notably stronger reward response

00:11:47.420 | than these other attention engineered applications.

00:11:50.300 | And the reason why I think that is almost likely

00:11:52.800 | not going to happen is because you cannot engineer

00:11:55.880 | the reality, cannot engineer out the reality

00:11:58.960 | that learning requires strain.

00:12:00.480 | Learning is hard.

00:12:03.860 | This is something I've talked about first in my book,

00:12:06.240 | "So Good They Can't Ignore You."

00:12:08.040 | I think this also comes up in deep work.

00:12:09.920 | I think this also comes up in my book, "Digital Minimalism."

00:12:12.260 | This comes up time and again,

00:12:13.560 | this notion that how do you learn

00:12:15.020 | a complicated new procedure?

00:12:16.980 | It's through a process known as deliberate practice.

00:12:20.700 | Deliberate practice forces you to strain yourself

00:12:23.660 | with the activity at hand, be it conceptual or physical,

00:12:26.500 | past where you're comfortable.

00:12:28.560 | And it's in that strain past where you're comfortable

00:12:30.860 | that you're able to actually move forward your capabilities.

00:12:33.860 | If you want to play a guitar lick faster,

00:12:37.920 | you have to actually push yourself past

00:12:39.560 | where you can comfortably play that guitar lick.

00:12:41.040 | And at first you have to concentrate

00:12:42.960 | on that playing that guitar lick faster

00:12:44.880 | with your full concentration,

00:12:46.560 | really stretching yourself.

00:12:47.640 | And it's really hard, you're making mistakes.

00:12:49.180 | You're giving it your full attention

00:12:50.280 | not to make mistakes.

00:12:51.160 | You know what happens?

00:12:52.720 | You get better at it,

00:12:53.840 | and eventually that speed becomes easier.

00:12:55.880 | I know that analogy 'cause I actually captured that

00:12:58.740 | in my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You,"

00:13:00.320 | where I talked about deliberate practice.

00:13:02.320 | I spent time with a professional guitar player,

00:13:04.440 | and I documented, journalistically,

00:13:06.840 | the amount of strain this guy had practicing.

00:13:10.600 | Trying to move the speed of his fingers

00:13:13.220 | on guitar picking faster, he would concentrate so hard

00:13:16.600 | that he would forget to take a breath.

00:13:18.880 | And then after a while, he would have

00:13:20.480 | the savage intake gas as his body was trying

00:13:23.520 | to stave off him going unconscious from lack of oxygen.

00:13:26.920 | That's how hard he was concentrating,

00:13:28.640 | but that's what actually makes you better.

00:13:30.620 | Same thing applies for conceptual goals,

00:13:33.280 | be it learning Spanish or calculus.

00:13:35.880 | You have to stretch yourself past where you're comfortable

00:13:38.240 | to make a higher level comfortable.

00:13:40.280 | Now, I used to have this debate all the time

00:13:43.400 | on my website at calnewport.com

00:13:45.020 | with my articles and on my newsletter,

00:13:47.000 | because people would often take these type of activities

00:13:49.920 | and say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, you gotta get in a flow state."

00:13:52.880 | And I had to keep coming back and saying,

00:13:53.880 | "This isn't a flow state."

00:13:55.300 | The flow state, a concept that was invented

00:14:00.080 | and studied by the late great performance psychologist,

00:14:02.800 | Anders, no, it's not Anders Ericsson,

00:14:04.560 | this was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,

00:14:06.720 | who I had corresponded some with, actually.

00:14:09.480 | Flow states, you lose yourself in the activity.

00:14:14.000 | Flow states, time seems to disappear.

00:14:17.040 | It's the downhill skier just getting lost

00:14:20.440 | in executing the ski route,

00:14:22.040 | and you're completely lost in the activity.

00:14:24.120 | Flow states are very pleasurable.

00:14:26.240 | Deliberate practice is not.

00:14:28.340 | You can get lost playing a song you really know well

00:14:30.820 | on stage and get lost in the music.

00:14:32.720 | You never get lost when you're practicing a song

00:14:34.600 | because you're pushing yourself so damn hard

00:14:36.340 | that you're like, "Oh my God, this is miserable."

00:14:38.560 | So learning is hard.

00:14:39.660 | It requires strain.

00:14:41.560 | To try to learn without strain would be like saying,

00:14:43.740 | "I wanna grow a muscle

00:14:44.640 | without ever having to tire my muscles."

00:14:46.640 | Isn't there a way I could grow my biceps bigger

00:14:48.360 | without having to actually lift heavy things

00:14:50.320 | in a way that's heavier than I'm used to?

00:14:52.280 | No, you have to actually overload your muscle

00:14:54.440 | before it can grow.

00:14:55.400 | The same thing happens cognitively.

00:14:57.080 | So learning is always gonna have that strain.

00:14:59.320 | It's not pleasant.

00:15:01.420 | And so you can add as many owls with glasses and streaks

00:15:05.240 | as you want around it,

00:15:06.360 | but TikTok doesn't have the unpleasant strain.

00:15:08.720 | It's just like saying, "If I want you to eat more broccoli,

00:15:12.160 | I can put it in a Happy Meal box.

00:15:14.820 | It could be in like a fun wrapper

00:15:16.640 | where confetti flies open when you open the wrapper.

00:15:19.180 | But when you get down to it,

00:15:20.140 | the broccoli is still gonna be pretty bitter

00:15:21.780 | and the french fries are gonna taste much better.

00:15:24.060 | And in the end, I'm gonna eat the french fries

00:15:26.900 | if it's just they're both sitting there in front of me."

00:15:30.180 | So I'm not sure that when you take an activity,

00:15:33.820 | meaningful as it is,

00:15:35.380 | that has an inherent cognitive strain to it

00:15:38.900 | as part of its character,

00:15:40.220 | that you are gonna be able to win in the dopamine neuron game

00:15:43.400 | against other types of stimulus reward pairings

00:15:46.160 | that don't have that strain.

00:15:47.080 | The reward is simply much more pure with TikTok.

00:15:50.360 | Just like if you wanted to compare TikTok to meth,

00:15:55.760 | the reward for meth is probably much stronger than TikTok

00:15:59.680 | because now you have a substance

00:16:00.880 | that is crossing the blood brain barrier, right?

00:16:03.520 | So if I'm a meth addict, I'm like, "Well, I like TikTok,

00:16:05.720 | but what I really like is some meth."

00:16:07.560 | Just like if I'm using TikTok, I might say,

00:16:09.320 | "Well, I really like Duolingo,

00:16:10.400 | but my God, I wanna use some TikTok."

00:16:13.000 | So if it's just an apples to apples comparison

00:16:15.160 | of reward stimulus game,

00:16:17.000 | these attention engineered applications

00:16:20.280 | that we think of as modern social media

00:16:21.960 | just have the upper hand on any type of learning app.

00:16:25.700 | Okay, so does that mean that we're out of luck,

00:16:29.040 | that basically social media is gonna take all of our time?

00:16:31.960 | No, we're not out of luck.

00:16:33.160 | And the reason why is because there are other systems,

00:16:36.520 | and in particular, one other system

00:16:38.100 | that our brain uses to motivate behavior

00:16:40.960 | that is not built off of this near term stimulus reward

00:16:44.640 | dopamine neuron mediated system.

00:16:46.360 | We have another system that is at the core

00:16:50.200 | of how humans have done what we have done.

00:16:53.080 | It's at the core of what defines humans

00:16:55.240 | versus almost any other species.

00:16:56.960 | It helps explains why humans are so successful

00:16:59.520 | in a way that other smart animals

00:17:01.280 | like ravens or dolphins are not.

00:17:03.400 | And that's gonna be our ability

00:17:07.360 | to build motivation based off of future predictions.

00:17:11.680 | So let me tell you what I mean here.

00:17:12.520 | I'm gonna bring up an article

00:17:13.440 | for those who are watching instead of listening.

00:17:15.280 | I'm gonna bring up an article

00:17:16.820 | that'll help us make sense of this.

00:17:18.680 | This was an article that was written

00:17:19.980 | by Jane McGonigal for TED.

00:17:23.320 | It's called "Mental Time Travel

00:17:24.600 | is a Great Decision-Making Tool.

00:17:26.520 | This is How to Use It."

00:17:28.020 | I like this article because it has a good summary

00:17:31.860 | of the otherwise complicated neuroscience.

00:17:35.400 | So I'm gonna skip way ahead here

00:17:37.300 | and to what I think is the relevant portion.

00:17:40.080 | All right, I'm reading now from the article.

00:17:42.600 | Scientists call this form of imagination

00:17:45.480 | episodic future thinking or EFT.

00:17:49.500 | EFT is often described as a kind of mental time travel

00:17:53.680 | because your brain is working to help you see

00:17:56.480 | and feel the future as clearly and vividly

00:17:58.860 | as if you were already there.

00:18:00.380 | EFT is not an escape from reality.

00:18:04.960 | It is a way of playing with reality

00:18:08.140 | to discover risks and opportunities

00:18:10.580 | you might not have considered.

00:18:12.540 | EFT is not a daydream in which you fantasize

00:18:16.020 | about waking up in a world

00:18:17.100 | where your problems are magically solved.

00:18:18.600 | It is a way of connecting who you are today

00:18:21.660 | with what you might really feel and do in the future.

00:18:25.000 | More quotes.

00:18:27.900 | Because EFT allows us to pre-feel

00:18:30.900 | different possible futures,

00:18:34.060 | it's a powerful decision-making,

00:18:35.600 | planning, and motivational tool.

00:18:37.200 | It helps us decide, is this a world I wanna wake up in?

00:18:42.560 | What do I need to do to be ready for it?

00:18:44.160 | Should I change what I'm doing today

00:18:47.020 | to make this future more or less likely?

00:18:50.460 | According to fMRI studies, EFT involves heightened activity

00:18:55.120 | and increased connectivity

00:18:56.140 | between 11 distinct brain regions.

00:18:58.940 | Compare this to simply remembering a past event

00:19:01.420 | which activates just six of those 11 regions of the brain.

00:19:04.960 | To get a little more technical here,

00:19:06.280 | during EFT, your brain goes on a hunt

00:19:08.200 | for realistic details and plausible ideas.

00:19:10.480 | To do this, it activates the hippocampus,

00:19:12.840 | the seat of memory and learning,

00:19:14.440 | and digs through your memories

00:19:15.560 | plus any other facts and ideas you've stored away.

00:19:18.600 | Depending on what kind of future you're imagining,

00:19:20.240 | the hippocampus identifies the most relevant stuff

00:19:22.320 | and retrieves and recombines it into a new scene.

00:19:25.500 | One last thing to say about that,

00:19:27.200 | those are called clues to the future.

00:19:30.360 | Your brain fires up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex,

00:19:35.360 | otherwise known by the catchy acronym, VMPFC,

00:19:39.740 | a region that's heavily used

00:19:42.680 | whenever you set goals and track your progress.

00:19:45.060 | Like the hippocampus, the VMPFC can suggest any goals

00:19:48.320 | you've had or previously considered.

00:19:51.280 | One of the most interesting things about the EFT

00:19:53.160 | is that the motivations that pop into your mind first

00:19:56.180 | are likely to be closely linked to your deepest values

00:19:58.380 | and most essential needs,

00:20:00.020 | like always learning something new,

00:20:03.440 | helping others, pushing yourself to do brave things,

00:20:05.500 | taking care of your family, being creative,

00:20:07.000 | or putting new ideas or art into the world.

00:20:09.760 | You still have to figure out the best way

00:20:12.120 | for your future you to achieve these future goals.

00:20:14.560 | So then the putamen, P-U-T-A-M-E-N,

00:20:18.160 | also part of the motivation and reward system kicks in.

00:20:21.320 | The putamen, which I'm almost certainly saying wrong,

00:20:23.420 | helps keep track of what specific actions and behaviors

00:20:25.840 | typically lead to positive results for you.

00:20:27.680 | It's the part of the brain that knows things like,

00:20:29.520 | I feel better when I get some fresh air.

00:20:32.040 | Okay, I read all those technical details

00:20:35.280 | so you could get a lay of the land

00:20:36.680 | that this is a different type of motivational system.

00:20:39.540 | It is based on you projecting yourself into the future,

00:20:44.000 | imagining a result in the future that is very positive

00:20:47.020 | because you have evidence from your past it will be positive

00:20:50.200 | and it connects to your deeply held values and goals.

00:20:53.320 | This then fires up other parts of your brain

00:20:57.460 | that gives you motivation to do the thing right now

00:20:59.920 | that's gonna help lead you to that future state.

00:21:02.220 | EFT is a different motivational system

00:21:06.000 | than the dopamine system.

00:21:07.480 | It is a system that can beat the dopamine system.

00:21:11.380 | This is critical to human survival.

00:21:16.040 | This is why you can have in the caveman times

00:21:21.040 | some nice looking food.

00:21:23.520 | Okay, there's honey on the ground and I really want honey.

00:21:27.020 | I like honey, I need sugar.

00:21:28.700 | My dopamine neurons say, eat that honey.

00:21:30.680 | My God, eat that honey, that's gonna feel good.

00:21:33.240 | But also I know there's a bear nearby

00:21:35.240 | 'cause there's honey on the ground.

00:21:36.560 | And the EFT system says, the thing about bears

00:21:39.000 | is they tend to eat you and that's not good.

00:21:42.000 | And so we're gonna override the dopamine system

00:21:44.500 | that says, go get that honey

00:21:46.800 | because we don't wanna be eaten by a bear,

00:21:48.660 | which is something that might happen here.

00:21:50.460 | The EFT system is what allows us

00:21:52.320 | to rise above our base instincts and say,

00:21:55.320 | let's invent the ax, let's invent the wheel,

00:21:59.800 | let's invent systems of philosophy.

00:22:02.620 | It's what allows us to do human flourishing

00:22:05.160 | and creative actions.

00:22:06.480 | The ideas, the leaps of creative thinking

00:22:09.160 | that Yuval Harari in "Sapiens" identifies as the crux

00:22:12.440 | that makes humans humans,

00:22:13.600 | what makes our species what they are.

00:22:15.320 | So this EFT style motivation is more powerful

00:22:17.940 | because it's what allows us to do big and great things.

00:22:21.240 | It's what allows us to rise above our base instincts

00:22:23.200 | in a way that a tiger cannot or a house cat cannot.

00:22:25.760 | So when we think about, hey, how do we learn more?

00:22:31.520 | We don't wanna play the dopamine game.

00:22:34.600 | We don't wanna say, how do I make learning feel the same

00:22:38.480 | as checking Facebook to see if I get those likes.

00:22:40.720 | We instead wanna master our EFT system,

00:22:43.800 | the episodic future thinking system.

00:22:45.940 | And what this means is we have to fill up that hippocampus

00:22:50.920 | with all sorts of concrete details and experiences

00:22:53.840 | and memories that allow us to connect,

00:22:57.000 | allow us to connect this behavior

00:22:58.560 | with very positive futures.

00:23:00.680 | It requires us to have really deeply instilled values

00:23:03.280 | about what we care about so that we can then say,

00:23:06.640 | this activity that I know a lot about now

00:23:08.760 | leads me to something that I feel really strongly about.

00:23:12.100 | Now, I talk about this a lot in the context of the deep life

00:23:15.480 | as lifestyle-centric planning,

00:23:18.020 | where you start with this clear vision

00:23:19.440 | of what you want your life to look like

00:23:20.860 | and use that to work backwards to build plans.

00:23:22.640 | This is no accident.

00:23:23.840 | This is no mere contrivance.

00:23:26.640 | This is a instruction manual to fully leveraging your EFT.

00:23:31.400 | So if you wanna learn more,

00:23:33.260 | you have to expose yourself

00:23:36.280 | to as many resonant examples as possible

00:23:39.200 | of people who have learned and you admire,

00:23:43.340 | people who are really well-learned

00:23:45.000 | and what they do in their life

00:23:46.200 | or how they approach the world

00:23:47.240 | resonates with you on a deep level.

00:23:49.720 | You need to watch these documentaries, read these profiles,

00:23:52.240 | read the biographies, look for these types of videos,

00:23:54.720 | meet these people in real life, go to their talks,

00:23:57.440 | go to see their presentations.

00:23:59.080 | You need to surround yourself in examples

00:24:01.800 | of people who have converted a love of learning

00:24:05.920 | into a life that really resonates with you.

00:24:08.240 | And then you need to clarify your values

00:24:10.280 | of what is the value here that's at stake

00:24:12.280 | and make that a big part of your vision

00:24:14.120 | for yourself and your life.

00:24:15.280 | It'd be engaging ideas in a way

00:24:17.640 | that is above base rancor,

00:24:20.520 | or maybe about taking your mind

00:24:22.140 | and pushing to its fullest potential

00:24:23.520 | so you can have impact on the world.

00:24:25.280 | Maybe there's a religious impulse here,

00:24:27.080 | a sort of Newtonian interest

00:24:28.720 | in trying to uncover the workings of God.

00:24:32.480 | You know that there's almost a religious impulse

00:24:34.200 | to be able to understand things better.

00:24:36.360 | Maybe it's, I want to support my family

00:24:39.780 | and my brain is gonna be one way I can do this.

00:24:42.080 | There's whatever it is, you have a clear value

00:24:44.040 | and you expose yourself to example after example

00:24:46.120 | that resonates about people who have pursued this value.

00:24:49.440 | And they're showing you tangibly in their example,

00:24:51.840 | something you really want.

00:24:53.960 | You do these things, your EFT system

00:24:56.040 | can kick your dopamine system's butt.

00:24:57.880 | And you say, yeah, there's a TikTok is there

00:25:02.040 | and it's gonna give me a little reward in the moment.

00:25:05.920 | It's gonna feel good.

00:25:06.960 | But this future I'm projecting feels even better.

00:25:10.540 | And so you know what, I'm not gonna take out TikTok.

00:25:15.120 | I'm gonna read, I'm going to go watch this movie.

00:25:19.120 | I am going to go through the discomfort

00:25:21.080 | of stretching my mind past what it can do or not,

00:25:23.400 | whether or not there's an owl wearing glasses

00:25:25.540 | or an avatar stars a shootout when I do it.

00:25:28.460 | So, I mean, I think Vaughn is on to something

00:25:32.720 | when he says, we shouldn't just take learning for granted

00:25:35.840 | and say, learning is good, you should learn more.

00:25:37.760 | Here's a workbook.

00:25:39.000 | We really should think about

00:25:40.480 | how do you make learning desirable?

00:25:42.000 | And I think it's fantastic that he is thinking about that,

00:25:44.520 | that he is identifying learning

00:25:47.000 | as this sort of tier one activity

00:25:48.600 | that can improve people's situation,

00:25:50.320 | that can improve the world in so many different ways.

00:25:53.040 | I'm arguing though, the right way to spread that

00:25:54.840 | is less about playing the dopamine game

00:25:56.520 | and more about playing the EFT game.

00:25:58.360 | And this applies not just to learning,

00:25:59.900 | but almost to any type of activity

00:26:01.680 | that will take a shallow life and make it deeper.

00:26:04.320 | So when we understand the brain,

00:26:06.040 | we get a more nuanced playbook

00:26:08.440 | for how we convince ourselves to work towards

00:26:11.600 | the best vision of our future

00:26:13.440 | and not just the most desirable understanding

00:26:16.040 | of what could happen right now.

00:26:18.220 | There you go, Jesse, that's my take on that video.

00:26:23.680 | - Yeah, I like it.

00:26:24.520 | - EFT.

00:26:25.840 | There's some pretty long acronyms.

00:26:27.840 | Neuroscientists have their acronym game on point.

00:26:31.140 | Not catchy, no vowels in a way

00:26:35.240 | that it sounds like a real word.

00:26:36.560 | And what I really loved was,

00:26:37.880 | if you're watching instead of just listening,

00:26:40.280 | the mix of lowercase and capital letters in an acronym.

00:26:43.520 | So like, it really makes it confusing.

00:26:46.060 | So way to go neuroscientists.

00:26:48.580 | So I got a bunch of questions,

00:26:50.560 | all roughly about learning and these types of things.

00:26:52.980 | We have a call in there, we have a case study in there,

00:26:55.080 | but first let us hear from some of the sponsors

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00:31:28.380 | All right, so let's do some questions.

00:31:30.600 | Liking the sound effect.

00:31:34.220 | - I like it too. - Yeah, there we go.

00:31:35.740 | There we go.

00:31:36.580 | All right, what do we got Jesse?

00:31:37.400 | What's our first question?

00:31:38.240 | - First question's from Matt.

00:31:39.580 | I believe my curiosity is my strongest quality

00:31:42.840 | and I read and learn constantly about all kinds of topics.

00:31:45.540 | The problem is my company's core business

00:31:47.340 | is exceedingly uninteresting to me.

00:31:50.300 | I like being an attorney,

00:31:51.880 | but learning as much as I can about law stuff

00:31:53.880 | makes me want to chug Drano.

00:31:55.660 | Does your advice against follow your passion

00:31:57.960 | have room for a need to be interested

00:32:00.680 | in the subject of one's work?

00:32:02.320 | - I'm gonna be careful here, Matt.

00:32:05.480 | I'm gonna be careful and a little bit 50% curmudgeonly

00:32:08.900 | and 50% skeptical because there is a danger

00:32:13.700 | that we might be wandering close towards,

00:32:15.380 | which is a standard notion in our current world

00:32:20.380 | in which we want our work to be everything.

00:32:26.800 | I think this is an outgrowth of this idea

00:32:30.020 | that first arose in the 1990s,

00:32:32.720 | this follow your passion idea that really became

00:32:36.180 | a mimetic vector that spread widely starting in the 1990s

00:32:41.180 | and beyond that your work is gonna be your main source

00:32:44.660 | of passion and meaning and identity.

00:32:46.980 | This is something I've written about.

00:32:48.460 | I would point people, for example,

00:32:49.980 | towards my New Yorker piece from,

00:32:52.260 | I guess probably last January about quiet quitting

00:32:55.220 | where I get into the ways different generations grappled

00:32:58.340 | with work and meaning and how this idea

00:33:00.180 | of the baby boomers invented for their kids this idea

00:33:03.680 | of well, you need to work like a normal job, right?

00:33:07.860 | Because the baby boomers tried counterculture

00:33:09.580 | and that didn't work.

00:33:10.420 | So you need to work a normal job

00:33:11.460 | but make the job still a source of passion.

00:33:13.580 | So for the baby boomers,

00:33:15.300 | they had this countercultural idea,

00:33:17.260 | leave the world of work and find passion in other things

00:33:22.260 | like hemp seed oil.

00:33:24.900 | And that kind of didn't work because it turns out

00:33:26.900 | you need money to buy things.

00:33:28.060 | And so they sort of shifted and said, okay,

00:33:29.740 | well, you need to work and pay for your mortgage

00:33:31.660 | but your work itself maybe should be a source of passion.

00:33:34.460 | We've really internalized that.

00:33:36.140 | So we want our work to be everything.

00:33:38.780 | Should be interesting, it should be engaging,

00:33:40.580 | it should make me feel good,

00:33:41.660 | it should be my main source of community,

00:33:43.380 | it should be like everything needs to come from my work,

00:33:45.720 | which is this impossibly high bar to meet,

00:33:48.660 | especially if you think about what work was like

00:33:52.300 | until basically a minute ago.

00:33:54.860 | So it's not necessary.

00:33:57.300 | I'm not saying it's a bad thing,

00:33:58.380 | but it's not in any ways necessary

00:34:01.440 | that your job has to be day-to-day,

00:34:03.540 | very exciting and novel.

00:34:05.180 | There's other major sources of meaning

00:34:08.000 | that your job can provide.

00:34:09.980 | A connection to people, impact on the world,

00:34:13.260 | a sense of mastery, a foundation of being

00:34:17.100 | a reputable member of the communities that you care about.

00:34:21.180 | This is where like in the mid 20th century,

00:34:23.060 | jobs were much more boring.

00:34:24.300 | You sold insurance or maybe you were a farmer, right?

00:34:26.500 | These weren't jobs where the things you were doing every day

00:34:29.540 | was super exciting, you were learning all this novel stuff.

00:34:32.500 | But you could be as the farmer,

00:34:34.380 | also head of the local agricultural union

00:34:37.720 | and a deacon at your church

00:34:39.160 | and you're providing for your family

00:34:40.640 | and you know the other farmers

00:34:41.980 | and you're involved in coaching the football team

00:34:44.780 | and it's just part of your identity

00:34:46.780 | and an important part of what you do.

00:34:49.000 | The insurance salesman is also at the rotary club

00:34:52.280 | and it's just a piece, you're supporting your family,

00:34:56.240 | you're a productive member of your community,

00:34:58.720 | you're giving back to these various causes.

00:35:01.280 | So the job itself has to be,

00:35:02.960 | this is what has to be exciting and interesting,

00:35:04.760 | that's a new notion.

00:35:05.760 | So I say that first just to lay the foundation

00:35:09.640 | that like let's come off the ledge a little bit, Matt,

00:35:11.800 | we'll look at this a little bit more closely,

00:35:13.200 | but let's come off the ledge of,

00:35:14.560 | oh my God, this is a crisis, something has to change.

00:35:17.440 | This is not a crisis.

00:35:18.520 | Yeah, lawyers have boring jobs.

00:35:20.280 | It doesn't mean that we shouldn't have lawyers.

00:35:23.120 | All right, does that mean though

00:35:25.600 | you definitely shouldn't try to change something?

00:35:26.920 | Well, no, maybe.

00:35:28.560 | Now that we're off the ledge,

00:35:30.240 | we've calmed down a little bit,

00:35:31.840 | we had a couple of drinks, now we're relaxed.

00:35:34.240 | I'm gonna say, okay, look, I mean,

00:35:35.960 | having something interesting in your job is good too.

00:35:40.120 | There's a way to make a lateral move

00:35:41.700 | in terms of career capital stores.

00:35:44.200 | So if you're a lawyer, something that makes use of the fact

00:35:46.520 | you trained so long to become a lawyer,

00:35:48.120 | but maybe it's more interesting lawyer work,

00:35:49.920 | I find consider that.

00:35:51.440 | Don't throw everything out.

00:35:52.960 | Don't throw out your career capital.

00:35:55.000 | Don't say, I'm gonna become someone

00:35:58.360 | who dresses up as pirates for kids' birthday parties

00:36:01.000 | because that just sounds more interesting

00:36:02.160 | than being a lawyer

00:36:03.000 | because you're starting with no career capital.

00:36:05.560 | There's people who I suppose are very good

00:36:07.280 | at dressing up as pirates for kids' birthday parties

00:36:09.360 | and you're not, and it's gonna be hard to make a living.

00:36:11.800 | So it's a completely reasonable move

00:36:14.160 | to redeploy your career capital

00:36:16.640 | towards some new challenges

00:36:18.360 | or more interesting aspect of your work.

00:36:20.440 | But I don't want you to fixate on this idea

00:36:23.680 | that your work has to be the source of that.

00:36:25.680 | So the best thing you can do here, Matt,

00:36:27.580 | and this is such a broken record

00:36:28.880 | in everything I say on this show,

00:36:30.220 | is gonna be some lifestyle-centric career planning.

00:36:32.680 | Fix the full vision of what you want your life to be

00:36:34.840 | like five years, 10 years, and 15 years from now,

00:36:37.040 | all aspects of your life, not just your job,

00:36:39.520 | where you are, what you're doing,

00:36:40.880 | the character of the day, the people you're around,

00:36:42.820 | how the day unfolds, your surroundings,

00:36:44.640 | how it looks, how it smells, how it feels,

00:36:46.840 | this visceral, resonant image

00:36:48.400 | of what all the aspects of your life.

00:36:50.200 | And then you work backwards from that and say,

00:36:52.200 | what changes do I make to progress closer

00:36:54.800 | towards that vision?

00:36:55.720 | And that will give you a lot more confidence.

00:36:57.840 | And you might find that actually, my job is just fine.

00:37:01.480 | There's other parts of my life I need to update.

00:37:03.360 | Or you might say, no, no, actually,

00:37:05.160 | I need to use my job as the main leverage

00:37:07.720 | for getting this new vision.

00:37:09.360 | But at least now you're changing things

00:37:11.280 | as part of a more coherent vision

00:37:13.320 | and not a sort of more primal or spasmatic switch

00:37:17.360 | between, I don't know, this seems boring,

00:37:19.040 | let's do something else.

00:37:21.080 | So maybe you're a lawyer in the city,

00:37:22.680 | in the suburb of a city, and you're in, you know,

00:37:24.880 | whatever, you're in Northern Virginia,

00:37:26.360 | and you're a lawyer for whatever,

00:37:28.080 | and it's the commute, and it's boring,

00:37:30.240 | and things are expensive, and you have this vision

00:37:33.180 | that, you know, it's a mix between the Gilmore Girls,

00:37:36.660 | but you're near the ocean, and you're walking in the woods

00:37:39.320 | or something like this.

00:37:40.160 | And so then maybe as you're like working

00:37:41.680 | through all the details of this vision,

00:37:43.440 | you realize like I could be an estate,

00:37:45.080 | wills and trust lawyer in a town up in Cape Ann,

00:37:49.600 | you know, north of Boston,

00:37:51.920 | and small town kind of near the water, we live cheaper.

00:37:55.160 | This work is, it's not that the work is more interesting

00:37:57.060 | here, but having a small shingle out up near Newberry Port

00:38:02.060 | allows us to be in this better location

00:38:03.800 | and have more flexibility, and it's near the woods.

00:38:05.800 | And so when you're working from a lifestyle image,

00:38:08.000 | this lifestyle-centric career plan,

00:38:09.320 | you can make these really targeted changes.

00:38:12.080 | 'Cause I really, as long-time listeners know,

00:38:14.200 | get very nervous about random or obsessive changes.

00:38:17.360 | I'm just obsessed on this piece, my work's boring.

00:38:19.560 | If I made my work less interesting,

00:38:20.800 | everything's gonna be better.

00:38:22.480 | You gotta have the whole lifestyle image in place.

00:38:24.400 | And when you're fixing this lifestyle image,

00:38:25.880 | keep in mind your job's not supposed

00:38:27.680 | to do everything for you.

00:38:29.520 | Now most of history's people's jobs were boring,

00:38:32.040 | but a lot of people had interesting, meaningful lives.

00:38:35.120 | So you gotta open up the window to the full part

00:38:37.440 | of your life once you start making your plan,

00:38:39.080 | and then you can actually work with the full set of tools

00:38:41.240 | that you have in crafting something deeper.

00:38:43.400 | All right, what do we got next, Jesse?

00:38:46.520 | - Next question's from Dylan.

00:38:48.520 | When it comes to learning,

00:38:49.600 | I often fall victim to deep procrastination.

00:38:52.400 | As a medical student, when I'm revising a topic,

00:38:55.080 | I tend to spend way too much time on a topic.

00:38:57.280 | I feel the urge to read a condition from many sources.

00:39:00.400 | Instead of covering a module in one day,

00:39:03.120 | I end up covering one topic in that entire day.

00:39:05.920 | A few days later, it appears like I haven't retained

00:39:08.200 | any of it very well.

00:39:09.600 | It feels uncomfortable moving on from topic

00:39:11.560 | when my mind still has more questions.

00:39:13.360 | How do I remedy this?

00:39:15.240 | - Well, Dylan, I got good news and bad news.

00:39:17.840 | The good news is what I'm about to tell you is fixable,

00:39:21.280 | and in fact, just knowing it's a problem is half the battle.

00:39:24.400 | The bad news is you're very bad at learning.

00:39:26.600 | I think this is an important point to make

00:39:29.440 | because we don't often contextualize learning

00:39:34.400 | as a skill that has a spectrum of proficiency.

00:39:38.640 | We too often think of learning or studying

00:39:40.600 | as this abstract verb that all that matters

00:39:43.720 | is the quantity of it that you do.

00:39:46.200 | I gotta go study.

00:39:47.920 | I'm gonna study more than this other person.

00:39:49.600 | I'm gonna stay up a couple more hours studying.

00:39:52.800 | And so we just think about this generic thing

00:39:53.920 | that we all do, it's just a matter of how much we do it,

00:39:56.600 | but that's not the case.

00:39:58.720 | You know, I wrote some books about this back in the day,

00:40:00.680 | in particular, "How to Win at College,"

00:40:03.280 | "How to Become a Straight-A Student."

00:40:05.760 | Those books have been out there for 15 years now,

00:40:10.760 | at least, 2006, 2005.

00:40:13.280 | So I used to think a lot about how students actually learn.

00:40:15.960 | And in fact, Jesse, I just got the royalty statements.

00:40:18.560 | Those books are quietly, they quietly move on.

00:40:22.280 | - That's good. - Those three student books,

00:40:23.880 | 400,000 copies all in, almost like 275,000,

00:40:28.400 | 275,000 on "How to Become a Straight-A Student."

00:40:30.520 | - I mean, they're great books.

00:40:31.440 | - It just sort of trickle, trickle, trickles,

00:40:33.560 | you know, word 'em out.

00:40:34.400 | So you know the stuff is actually right in there.

00:40:37.240 | But what I learned working on those books

00:40:38.840 | is studying is a skill,

00:40:39.800 | and the better you get at it, the better you do.

00:40:42.760 | And so you need to be super specific about how you learn.

00:40:46.500 | And this is probably gonna require

00:40:49.000 | some learning about learning.

00:40:50.880 | So you could read something like my book,

00:40:52.080 | "How to Become a Straight-A Student,"

00:40:53.440 | but it's also going to involve a lot of experimentation.

00:40:56.240 | We talked about this in episode 272.

00:41:00.120 | If you go to the Q&A in that episode,

00:41:02.760 | the number one "New York Times" bestselling author,

00:41:04.800 | David Epstein, joined me in the Q&A

00:41:07.760 | and had some really good ideas

00:41:09.760 | about actually keeping a journal

00:41:12.080 | about all of the various experiments

00:41:14.040 | that you're running in your life

00:41:15.320 | so that you can see what works and what doesn't.

00:41:17.400 | You have to do that with your learning, Dylan.

00:41:20.000 | How do I study cardiology?

00:41:22.240 | How do I break up the work?

00:41:24.440 | Do I copy notes over here?

00:41:25.760 | Do I read things?

00:41:26.600 | Do I go on, like you said in your extended answer,

00:41:29.000 | on the YouTube and start watching videos about it?

00:41:31.920 | Take notes, what works, what didn't?

00:41:34.360 | And then after each exam, go back and do a post-mortem,

00:41:37.920 | what I used to call in the early days

00:41:39.520 | of my calnewport.com newsletter,

00:41:41.560 | a post-exam post-mortem.

00:41:44.480 | Go back and say, what activities did I do

00:41:46.440 | preparing for this exam that mattered?

00:41:49.280 | What didn't help at all?

00:41:50.760 | What was a waste of time?

00:41:52.520 | What should I have done?

00:41:53.520 | What could I have done that would have led

00:41:55.160 | to a larger, better performance that I didn't do?

00:41:57.520 | And you use that feedback to refine your study plan

00:42:00.680 | for the next time around.

00:42:02.240 | Evidence-based evolution of how you actually do this work.

00:42:06.160 | When I read your extended answer, Dylan,

00:42:07.760 | what I see is that you're just doing

00:42:09.280 | all sorts of random stuff for no real reason.

00:42:11.560 | You study like Darwin,

00:42:15.440 | so in an evolution, natural selection type style,

00:42:17.920 | you're gonna get better, better, better really fast.

00:42:21.080 | And you're gonna stop spending all day on a topic

00:42:23.160 | and look at YouTube videos,

00:42:24.720 | and you're gonna get it down to a science.

00:42:26.720 | Here's how you study it.

00:42:27.800 | You make five flashcards,

00:42:28.960 | you wait till you get the flashcards once,

00:42:30.680 | you do one out loud lecture of each topic

00:42:33.040 | in a way that makes sense,

00:42:34.280 | you check it off, you put it in another folder,

00:42:35.800 | you take out the next topic,

00:42:36.800 | we could do seven topics in an hour.

00:42:38.680 | You figure out what works.

00:42:40.080 | And this really is the secret

00:42:41.400 | of the top performing students.

00:42:42.720 | And I know this because I was one of those students.

00:42:45.960 | I started college as a average

00:42:48.480 | or slightly above average student,

00:42:50.720 | freshman at Dartmouth College coming out of public school.

00:42:53.160 | I didn't know how to study with the intensity

00:42:56.360 | of all these private school kids.

00:42:57.600 | I didn't have the background in the math and science

00:42:59.840 | as all these private school kids.

00:43:01.920 | So I was like an average or above average student.

00:43:04.360 | Into my freshman year,

00:43:05.280 | I got very serious about studying how I studied,

00:43:09.720 | taking notes.

00:43:10.680 | Let's try this, let's try that for this type of test.

00:43:12.760 | Let's do this for problem sets, let's try that.

00:43:14.840 | Seeing what worked, seeing what didn't work,

00:43:16.640 | evolving my study habits.

00:43:18.760 | Result of that, four-year GPA,

00:43:21.960 | every quarter sophomore year,

00:43:23.000 | every quarter junior year,

00:43:24.360 | every quarter senior year,

00:43:25.440 | except for my senior spring where I got one A minus.

00:43:28.880 | 3.96 or something GPA.

00:43:31.480 | I mean, I was like an A away from being the valedictorian

00:43:34.800 | of the entire graduating class of my Ivy League college.

00:43:38.840 | I didn't get smarter between my freshman year

00:43:41.640 | and the three years that followed.

00:43:43.120 | I got better at studying.

00:43:44.840 | And I'll tell you what,

00:43:45.680 | when I got really professional about this,

00:43:47.640 | the time it took me to study plummeted.

00:43:50.200 | I didn't do all-nighters.

00:43:51.680 | I didn't like studying past 8 p.m.

00:43:53.640 | I would be bored during exam periods

00:43:55.360 | because everyone else was in the library

00:43:57.120 | and I didn't have anything else to do.

00:43:58.400 | It's like one of the reasons why I started writing books.

00:44:00.520 | And what were my initial books about?

00:44:02.720 | How to do what I did.

00:44:03.880 | How do you study like this?

00:44:05.040 | Why are people studying so much?

00:44:06.200 | They need to be better about it.

00:44:07.240 | So I'm really passionate about this, Dylan.

00:44:08.840 | You're bad at learning,

00:44:10.000 | that's tough love, you're bad at it.

00:44:13.360 | But if you get better at it,

00:44:14.360 | your life is gonna get so much better.

00:44:16.720 | And it's not that hard, it's not that hard to learn.

00:44:19.480 | So I have faith that things are gonna get better for you

00:44:21.280 | if you just take your learning more seriously

00:44:22.880 | and stop just in a self-flagellating manner,

00:44:25.240 | just studying until you sort of feel

00:44:28.360 | your guilt has been absolved.

00:44:29.800 | That's not the right way to do it.

00:44:31.800 | So get better at learning, Dylan,

00:44:33.240 | and you're gonna find it's not nearly as hard as you feared.

00:44:36.840 | - What was the A minus in?

00:44:38.120 | - Political philosophy.

00:44:40.360 | I don't hold grudges, but.

00:44:42.600 | (Dylan laughs)

00:44:44.200 | See, I was safe, I was taking a lot of math and science

00:44:47.640 | and computer science courses where it was just,

00:44:50.480 | you could know you were gonna get an A

00:44:52.080 | if you just blew everyone away.

00:44:53.320 | Like I just got more points than everyone else.

00:44:54.920 | - Mm-hmm. - Yeah,

00:44:55.760 | you get to the philosophy course

00:44:56.840 | and it could just be like,

00:44:58.120 | eh, no one should have an A, you know?

00:45:00.760 | It gets a little trickier.

00:45:01.720 | - Yeah. - It's a little trickier.

00:45:04.000 | All right, what do we got next?

00:45:05.600 | - Next question is from Nicole.

00:45:07.440 | Our child is in the sixth grade.

00:45:09.000 | He has no struggles academically.

00:45:10.640 | He's well-adjusted socially,

00:45:12.040 | and he has plenty of friends of all ages

00:45:13.640 | and a sense of community inside and outside of school.

00:45:17.680 | We wanna put him on a path to cultivate the skills required

00:45:20.200 | to later be able to do deep work.

00:45:22.400 | What do you recommend we look for in schools?

00:45:24.580 | We were visiting for middle school,

00:45:26.280 | but also in the future, like in high school.

00:45:28.480 | - I would care less about the school

00:45:31.280 | than I would care about what you are modeling

00:45:35.360 | in your own life.

00:45:36.960 | Now, I don't mean don't care about the school at all,

00:45:39.140 | but when it comes to choosing the school for your kid,

00:45:41.380 | just use the normal common sense stuff

00:45:43.580 | that anyone would think about when choosing a school.

00:45:45.960 | Is it convenient where the location is?

00:45:49.000 | Is his friends there?

00:45:52.120 | Do we like the philosophy?

00:45:54.860 | Does it look like good people?

00:45:56.260 | They run the school well.

00:45:57.740 | Do they have good programs, like stuff he's interested in?

00:46:00.060 | Do they have those programs?

00:46:01.020 | The normal stuff anyone would think about

00:46:02.920 | if they're choosing a school, that's fine.

00:46:05.700 | But when it comes to this more advanced stuff,

00:46:07.420 | like, well, we want him to be a deep thinker,

00:46:10.980 | an intellectual, someone who can really succeed

00:46:14.180 | in an intellectual standpoint,

00:46:15.240 | there your modeling's gonna matter more.

00:46:17.240 | They see that you prioritize this.

00:46:20.020 | They see that you have a life of the mind.

00:46:22.080 | They see you're engaged with books and ideas.

00:46:25.060 | They see that you're not on your phone all the time.

00:46:27.420 | This stuff makes a big difference.

00:46:29.380 | The other thing that matters at home here

00:46:31.140 | is just more pragmatically,

00:46:32.480 | making sure that your sixth grader going on seventh grader,

00:46:35.500 | that they do not have unrestricted access

00:46:38.140 | to these dopamine hacking,

00:46:39.640 | smartphone delivered,

00:46:41.900 | attention economy platform applications,

00:46:43.700 | like we talked about in the deep dive.

00:46:46.140 | That's just like saying,

00:46:46.980 | make sure that my aspiring athlete

00:46:48.700 | doesn't get a smoking habit.

00:46:50.020 | So yes, you do wanna make sure that you're not,

00:46:51.820 | you could short circuit everything

00:46:53.640 | by giving your 12 year old unrestricted access

00:46:57.600 | to the internet through a phone.

00:46:59.620 | When they say all my friends are doing it,

00:47:00.980 | you say that you're unlucky.

00:47:03.180 | Your parents listen to Cal Newport.

00:47:04.580 | You don't get a smartphone.

00:47:06.180 | And that's just gonna have to be that.

00:47:07.840 | So yes, keep them away from

00:47:09.660 | complete brain short circuiting distraction

00:47:12.020 | that a sixth or seventh grader cannot handle.

00:47:14.860 | Model a life of the mind,

00:47:16.620 | of respect for deep work and intellectualism.

00:47:19.900 | And then beyond that, just choose a good school.

00:47:22.540 | This stuff really makes a big difference.

00:47:24.180 | Like for example, in my own life,

00:47:26.140 | for whatever reason,

00:47:28.460 | growing up my dad really admired mathematicians

00:47:33.160 | and theoretical physicists of extreme intellect.

00:47:36.100 | So we heard a lot growing up about Richard Feynman.

00:47:39.080 | We heard a lot growing up about John von Neumann.

00:47:41.940 | This idea of just these like big brains

00:47:44.080 | that could manipulate ideas in their heads

00:47:45.820 | and just produce ideas.

00:47:46.660 | We just heard a lot about it.

00:47:48.340 | My dad was really interested in all that.

00:47:50.300 | And it really made a difference.

00:47:51.220 | So when I was going to MIT out of college,

00:47:56.220 | I was not known as a math person.

00:47:58.380 | I was not known as a theory person.

00:47:59.900 | I was being recruited to work in systems groups.

00:48:03.060 | And I sort of tricked my way into a theory group

00:48:06.000 | because I had just grown up with this idea

00:48:08.300 | that is there anything cooler to do

00:48:09.660 | if you're capable of doing it

00:48:10.760 | than staring at a whiteboard and solving math equations.

00:48:13.100 | And so I tricked my way into a theory group by saying,

00:48:15.300 | I'll do systems work for you.

00:48:16.940 | And then as soon as I got to the theory group,

00:48:18.420 | I said, nevermind, I'm gonna do theory.

00:48:19.660 | And I just made myself into a theoretician.

00:48:21.820 | It's because of what I grew up with,

00:48:23.180 | what I was surrounded by.

00:48:24.980 | So model a life of the mind.

00:48:27.260 | Model a life that respects the mind

00:48:29.660 | and isn't staring at screens all day.

00:48:31.220 | Model a life that's engaged and that's reads.

00:48:33.280 | Have a house full of books.

00:48:34.960 | Talk about people you admire in the different types of,

00:48:37.540 | it doesn't have to be professors,

00:48:38.940 | it could be artists or filmmakers or poets,

00:48:41.200 | but these great thinkers that you admire,

00:48:43.200 | let your kids see that and keep them away from TikTok.

00:48:47.520 | Do those two things and give them a fine school.

00:48:51.520 | Don't overthink that.

00:48:53.080 | You're doing everything you can.

00:48:55.400 | You're not gonna be able to engineer your kid.

00:48:57.800 | We see a lot of that.

00:48:58.640 | This is a real DC suburb thing.

00:49:00.040 | That if I just get the right supplemental activities

00:49:03.020 | and tutoring and do all these things,

00:49:04.600 | I can engineer my kid into a great brain.

00:49:07.160 | But if I don't do that, they're not gonna get there.

00:49:09.160 | And it's like, here's the spoiler alert.

00:49:10.540 | If your kid's gonna be an intellect

00:49:12.000 | and have a career as an intellectual,

00:49:13.680 | it's not gonna be because you got them in Russian math.

00:49:17.660 | And so you doing that or not doing it

00:49:20.560 | is not gonna make a difference.

00:49:22.240 | If they're seeing that, they have the right brain for it,

00:49:25.400 | that's where they'll end up.

00:49:27.040 | And if they don't, there's nothing you can do

00:49:28.260 | that's gonna make that happen.

00:49:30.120 | So you could just relax a little bit.

00:49:31.560 | Model what's important to you.

00:49:34.200 | Keep them away from brain melting stuff.

00:49:36.480 | And then you're gonna have to let the kid do

00:49:37.560 | what the kid's gonna do.

00:49:41.360 | - All right, what do we got next?

00:49:43.000 | - Next question's from Mara.

00:49:44.760 | I'm a junior UX designer working at a consultant agency.

00:49:48.240 | And I would like to hear your opinion

00:49:49.560 | on balancing time after work

00:49:51.180 | and taking time to reflect on things

00:49:52.920 | that happened during the working day.

00:49:55.080 | After I finished my day, I'm usually pretty done mentally.

00:49:58.080 | And I just wanna close everything

00:49:59.420 | and not be in a seat anymore.

00:50:01.260 | If I come back later to reflect on work or learning,

00:50:04.160 | I often end up feeling like I need to check something,

00:50:06.740 | then I end up doing work.

00:50:08.200 | Do you have any suggestions or practices

00:50:10.880 | to incorporate time to reflect on learnings

00:50:13.160 | and feelings and ideas that are not strictly work output,

00:50:16.960 | but are work-related?

00:50:18.840 | - Mara, I've got two suggestions.

00:50:20.720 | One, integrate the reflection, the closing of loops,

00:50:24.080 | the engagement with how you feel about things.

00:50:27.060 | You need to integrate that

00:50:28.120 | into the work you do throughout the day.

00:50:30.920 | So what a lot of people do is calendar filling.

00:50:35.060 | Let me try to fill every minute of my day.

00:50:37.760 | And I rush through it full speed

00:50:39.360 | from meeting in the meeting, jumping over here,

00:50:41.200 | jumping over there.

00:50:42.040 | It's like this adrenaline high day.

00:50:43.460 | And you get to the end of the day and say,

00:50:44.520 | "My God, how do I make sense of all this?"

00:50:46.400 | And then you get just lost.

00:50:48.200 | You're exhausted.

00:50:49.920 | And then you get lost just trying to like

00:50:51.280 | make sense of everything.

00:50:52.120 | You're in email and it just spirals out of control.

00:50:54.880 | And either you abandon it,

00:50:56.080 | or like a lot of people these days,

00:50:57.600 | you have the second shift where you're spending hours

00:50:59.560 | on your computer at night.

00:51:00.640 | And that's how you're even just

00:51:01.480 | trying to grapple these things.

00:51:02.880 | The solution is to deal with things each day

00:51:05.160 | as they come up,

00:51:06.200 | which means you have to put aside the time to do that.

00:51:09.640 | So if I'm scheduling a meeting,

00:51:12.200 | we have a Zoom call, I'm putting an hour on my calendar.

00:51:15.000 | I'm adding another 15 minutes

00:51:16.520 | to the end of that appointment for processing.

00:51:18.520 | That time is now protected.

00:51:20.440 | So after this meeting is over,

00:51:21.960 | there's a 15 minutes of protected time

00:51:24.240 | to process everything from that meeting.

00:51:26.520 | Let me update my to-do list on my calendar.

00:51:28.560 | Let me walk around the block and think about this.

00:51:30.800 | Okay, now I am gonna send my response email.

00:51:33.460 | I know how to deal with this.

00:51:35.000 | Now I can close the loop on that

00:51:36.660 | before I move on to the next thing.

00:51:38.640 | Do the same type of post session loop closing session

00:51:42.720 | after long deep work blocks as well.

00:51:44.880 | You know, I'm working on this project

00:51:46.560 | for the next two hours.

00:51:47.480 | Well, what I'm gonna do is put 30 minutes

00:51:49.440 | or 20 minutes at the end of that,

00:51:51.240 | not to keep working,

00:51:53.400 | but to wrap up what I was working on.

00:51:56.040 | Figure out what I'm gonna work on next,

00:51:57.800 | send out the request I need

00:51:59.440 | for the information I didn't have,

00:52:01.120 | schedule on my calendar

00:52:02.280 | when I'm gonna return to this again,

00:52:04.080 | close that loop,

00:52:05.160 | maybe have an extra five minutes left

00:52:06.720 | just to go for a walk

00:52:07.840 | or just completely clear my mind.

00:52:09.440 | So you need to close the loops on things

00:52:12.120 | as they go throughout the day.

00:52:13.620 | You do not get a prize

00:52:15.680 | for squeezing in these extra things.

00:52:17.400 | In the long run, it doesn't mean you get more done.

00:52:19.400 | It just exhausts you

00:52:20.240 | and makes you less productive anyways.

00:52:22.160 | So spend more time on the things

00:52:24.260 | that you're gonna spend time on.

00:52:26.600 | Give yourself time to close down.

00:52:28.080 | All right, so what's the second thing

00:52:29.120 | I'm gonna recommend?

00:52:30.980 | Have a good shutdown ritual.

00:52:32.180 | It sounds like you don't have a good shutdown ritual.

00:52:34.640 | If thinking about your work as you say,

00:52:37.800 | thinking about your work at the end of the day

00:52:39.640 | leads you back into work and email,

00:52:41.220 | you're not really shutting down.

00:52:43.440 | So you need a good shutdown ritual.

00:52:45.660 | You close enough loops to be confident

00:52:47.400 | you're not forgetting anything.

00:52:48.580 | Even if it's just you frantically writing down things

00:52:51.120 | on a piece of paper to get back to

00:52:52.620 | and putting a half hour appointment in your morning

00:52:54.720 | the next day to process it,

00:52:56.160 | you're making sure that nothing is floating out there

00:52:58.420 | that you have to remember.

00:53:00.040 | And then you have some sort of shutdown routine,

00:53:03.040 | a phrase you say,

00:53:04.600 | the shutdown complete checkbox

00:53:06.560 | on the top of every day in my time block plan

00:53:09.400 | or however you wanna do it.

00:53:10.480 | And when you're shut down, you're shut down.

00:53:12.760 | There is no wandering back in the email

00:53:14.320 | when you're shut down, you're shut down.

00:53:16.480 | So close loops after the things,

00:53:18.560 | right after they happen during your day

00:53:20.520 | and close your day with a better shutdown routine.

00:53:22.900 | I think you're gonna be less stressed.

00:53:24.160 | You're gonna work less.

00:53:25.000 | Your brain's gonna be better and you're gonna be happier.

00:53:27.760 | All right, let's keep rolling.

00:53:29.620 | What do we got next, Jesse?

00:53:31.120 | - All right, next question's from Brian.

00:53:32.960 | I just finished reading Scott Young's book,

00:53:35.440 | "Ultra Learning" and wondered what your thoughts were

00:53:37.840 | on how the concepts in that book

00:53:39.440 | interact with slow productivity.

00:53:41.800 | I wanna get up to speed as quickly as possible

00:53:43.880 | on my new career while keeping the concepts

00:53:46.160 | and practices of slow productivity in mind.

00:53:49.400 | - Well, I was just talking to Scott yesterday, Brian.

00:53:51.320 | So this is a timely question.

00:53:54.080 | There's zero conflict

00:53:56.720 | between ultra learning and slow productivity.

00:54:01.080 | I think what might be happening is

00:54:03.720 | you're changing the definition of ultra productivity

00:54:06.520 | to somehow, or ultra learning

00:54:08.360 | to somehow mean super fast learning

00:54:10.680 | or learning all day long.

00:54:13.800 | But if you read "Ultra Learning," a book I really enjoy,

00:54:17.280 | what you'll see is it's about

00:54:19.120 | how do you learn really hard things,

00:54:21.780 | things you might've thought like,

00:54:23.240 | this is harder than I would be able to do.

00:54:25.480 | How do you raise your ambition for learning?

00:54:28.920 | And the answer is it has to do with the techniques

00:54:30.640 | you use to actually learn.

00:54:32.520 | You have to learn how people who learn really hard things

00:54:35.760 | or really ambitious things,

00:54:36.820 | how do they approach this task?

00:54:38.320 | You can't just go at it randomly

00:54:39.780 | like we had in a previous question.

00:54:41.200 | In ultra learning, Scott says,

00:54:42.920 | here are these principles you need

00:54:45.200 | that people who learn hard things use.

00:54:47.080 | Now, the pace at which you learn hard things is up to you.

00:54:50.640 | The quantity of hard things you learn, that's up to you.

00:54:54.620 | If anything, ultra learning is a type of skill

00:54:56.640 | you would see a slow productivity practitioner deploying.

00:55:00.940 | They're saying, okay, I'm going to, over time,

00:55:03.940 | in my obsession over quality,

00:55:06.540 | principle three of slow productivity,

00:55:07.820 | master this really complicated thing.

00:55:10.060 | Because once I've mastered this really complicated thing,

00:55:12.280 | it's gonna open up way more possibilities.

00:55:14.620 | It could be, if anything,

00:55:15.460 | like a classic slow productivity move,

00:55:17.380 | whereas a fast productivity practitioner would say,

00:55:19.440 | I don't have time for that.

00:55:21.180 | I just need to be frenetic all day.

00:55:23.220 | I need to be emailing and jumping around in meetings.

00:55:24.940 | That's too slow.

00:55:25.780 | Ultra learning is too slow.

00:55:26.700 | I don't have time to master

00:55:28.340 | this really difficult new body of mathematics

00:55:31.580 | that's gonna help me in my career.

00:55:33.820 | I'm gonna send emails and do TikTok videos.

00:55:36.820 | So ultra learning, I think, is one of the key tools

00:55:39.760 | in the toolkit of the slow productivity practitioner,

00:55:42.840 | not something that sits contrary to it.

00:55:44.900 | It's a really cool book,

00:55:46.900 | and I recommend that you check it out.

00:55:48.780 | Should we try a call, Jesse?

00:55:51.100 | - Yeah. - All right.

00:55:51.940 | Let's see if this works.

00:55:53.140 | - All right.

00:55:53.980 | - Hi, Cal.

00:55:56.260 | What would you recommend for someone

00:55:57.660 | who's seriously learning and pursuing multiple avenues,

00:56:02.140 | in my case, music, graphic design, and copywriting,

00:56:06.460 | while working a full-time job?

00:56:08.880 | I'm a delivery driver, and I work 40 to 50 hours a week.

00:56:14.300 | Thank you.

00:56:15.120 | - Well, Randall, I'm gonna differentiate here,

00:56:19.460 | or ask for you to differentiate between hobbies

00:56:24.020 | and a systematic plan to learn a skill

00:56:27.900 | as part of a bigger picture, vision, or strategy you have.

00:56:30.820 | So if there's something that's a hobby,

00:56:33.260 | I'm interested in music, I like playing music,

00:56:36.140 | the key there is you wanna integrate this into your life,

00:56:39.140 | but give yourself grace.

00:56:41.460 | Now, there's busier periods

00:56:42.660 | where I'm not able to do it as much,

00:56:43.780 | but I try to play most evenings,

00:56:45.260 | and I've set myself up for success.

00:56:47.060 | And I talk about this in "Digital Minimalism," by the way,

00:56:49.980 | how to build plans for leisure activities

00:56:52.240 | where you, instead of just randomly do it,

00:56:55.060 | you say, "Okay, I'm not just gonna

00:56:56.020 | "randomly noodle on my guitar.

00:56:57.820 | "I'm gonna learn all the songs from this album

00:57:00.800 | "to play at this party in six months."

00:57:02.420 | So you might build up some structure,

00:57:04.100 | and I call it structured leisure.

00:57:06.180 | But you give yourself some grace.

00:57:07.820 | I do this 'cause I enjoy it, I listen to music,

00:57:11.060 | and so I feel more meaningful when I'm learning music,

00:57:13.420 | I'm immersing myself in it, but if I have a busy,

00:57:15.500 | I'm taking two shifts, and it's a busy week,

00:57:17.420 | and I just don't get to it, who cares?

00:57:19.480 | It's there to make my life better,

00:57:21.820 | not to make my life harder.

00:57:23.000 | Now let's say there's something in here

00:57:24.080 | that's part of a structured strategy

00:57:26.600 | for improving or changing your life in a very specific way.

00:57:31.140 | I'm learning graphic design 'cause this job,

00:57:35.740 | which I've convinced myself would be available to me

00:57:37.800 | if I built these skills, would allow me to implement this.

00:57:40.560 | I could reduce my delivery hours and do this consulting.

00:57:43.380 | It's part of this bigger strategy

00:57:44.460 | that gets me closer to my ideal lifestyle vision.

00:57:46.920 | In that case, you do need to be a little bit more systematic.

00:57:51.620 | You schedule time like that, like you would with the doctor.

00:57:54.340 | I do it first thing in the morning,

00:57:56.180 | Fridays after my half shift.

00:57:57.540 | You have to be very systematic

00:57:59.020 | about where that work happens, how I do that work,

00:58:01.780 | how I make sure I'm making progress.

00:58:03.400 | There might be some nights there,

00:58:04.460 | there might be some early mornings there.

00:58:06.300 | It might be some pain that you're going through

00:58:08.700 | because you know it's gonna deliver something good.

00:58:10.960 | Just don't mix those two things up.

00:58:13.160 | Don't mix up the leisure that's giving you

00:58:15.820 | release or relaxation from the systematic acquisition

00:58:18.580 | of a new skill that's gonna get you

00:58:19.580 | closer to your lifestyle.

00:58:21.620 | And just treat those differently.

00:58:22.700 | 'Cause if you make everything a necessity,

00:58:25.060 | it becomes impossible and you beat yourself up

00:58:27.020 | and you might stop doing everything.

00:58:28.780 | To be very reasonable about,

00:58:31.080 | these are the things I'm systematically pursuing.

00:58:33.480 | And don't have too much of those.

00:58:36.320 | You know, just only be realistic about your capacity

00:58:39.580 | and keep everything else a little bit looser.

00:58:41.860 | I think that's gonna be the best way to balance those.

00:58:45.180 | I wanna read a quick case study

00:58:48.060 | that was sent in by Cage,

00:58:50.220 | who says the following.

00:58:52.060 | Cage says, "I bought 'How to Become a Straight A Student'

00:58:54.900 | "and 'Deep Work'," reading the former multiple times over.

00:58:58.860 | "Through techniques in the book,

00:58:59.840 | "I have fully recovered my GPA

00:59:01.380 | "into Magna Summa Cum Laude Condition

00:59:03.480 | "and have been on the Dean's List

00:59:06.240 | "since coming back to school,

00:59:08.100 | "while managing a research position

00:59:09.460 | "in two internships in conjunction with my schooling.

00:59:11.680 | "One thing I would like to highlight

00:59:12.900 | "is the benefit I've found in the quantification of goals

00:59:17.100 | "in regards to their estimated time.

00:59:20.260 | "I have created a task planner in Excel

00:59:22.380 | "that I will readily admit is both over-engineered

00:59:24.520 | "and integral to my daily life.

00:59:27.060 | "It contains rows for all my projects, school or otherwise.

00:59:30.360 | "The first column is the day I put into the planner.

00:59:32.740 | "The second is the project name.

00:59:34.360 | "The third is the due date.

00:59:35.980 | "The fourth is the days left."

00:59:38.460 | So the current date minus the due date.

00:59:40.660 | "The fifth is the class or job it is for,

00:59:43.200 | "and the sixth is the estimated time it will take.

00:59:46.420 | "The seventh is the percentage complete,

00:59:48.200 | "and the eighth is the time left in the project."

00:59:52.180 | Cage gives an equation for this.

00:59:54.020 | Estimated time minus quantity,

00:59:56.420 | estimated time times percentage complete.

00:59:58.720 | And the eighth, well, there's eight columns.

01:00:01.620 | "And the eighth is the time left per day.

01:00:03.660 | "When I designed this system,

01:00:06.100 | "I had no idea how much the estimated time

01:00:07.760 | "and time left per day would change my life.

01:00:09.820 | "Though not perfect, I can usually guess within an hour

01:00:12.580 | "how extensive a project is going to be.

01:00:14.660 | "Through this system, I am able to flag projects due in a day

01:00:17.800 | "and with the exception of those,

01:00:20.820 | "tackle problems based on the time left per day.

01:00:23.400 | "This keeps big research papers from distracting me

01:00:25.520 | "from smaller projects that are coming up fast,

01:00:27.300 | "while still allowing me to ensure I attack them

01:00:29.080 | "in a timely manner without procrastinating.

01:00:31.480 | "This triaging has been essential to my life,

01:00:33.660 | "and now this Excel project

01:00:35.220 | "has essentially become my time block planner.

01:00:37.460 | "Additionally, I can see exactly how many hours per day

01:00:39.700 | "I have work in total I have done,

01:00:41.980 | "how many projects I have open,

01:00:43.520 | "how many I've completed, and much more.

01:00:45.740 | "The reason I bring this up is because I think that

01:00:47.400 | "this sort of quantification

01:00:48.620 | "allows for major stress reduction

01:00:50.360 | "and preventing things from creeping up."

01:00:54.060 | It's a very complicated system,

01:00:56.860 | probably more complicated than I would recommend

01:00:58.740 | for most people, unless that's the type of thing you like.

01:01:01.340 | But what I wanna highlight about Cage's approach

01:01:04.540 | is he's controlling his time

01:01:07.260 | by being realistic about what's on his plate,

01:01:11.060 | how long it takes.

01:01:13.040 | You don't necessarily have to have eight columns

01:01:15.440 | with equations to get there, though that's one way to do it.

01:01:17.920 | People who just use basic time blocking,

01:01:20.000 | so people who use my time block planner

01:01:22.160 | just in its basic form, for example,

01:01:24.020 | get 80% of that benefit,

01:01:25.660 | because when you're blocking off time for things

01:01:28.400 | and having to adjust your schedule,

01:01:30.440 | every time something goes past the block you gave it,

01:01:34.240 | you begin to get a realistic feel for your timing.

01:01:37.000 | It's why if you do weekly planning,

01:01:38.800 | over time this feedback tells you,

01:01:41.500 | "Oh, I thought I would just edit this article this week.

01:01:43.880 | "I didn't get anywhere near finishing it.

01:01:45.380 | "This is really a month-long project."

01:01:47.640 | So when you quantify, you get this feedback

01:01:49.480 | on how long things actually take,

01:01:51.240 | because you're being specific

01:01:52.360 | about when you're gonna do things

01:01:53.700 | and how long you think they'll take.

01:01:55.480 | This gives you, like Cage talks about,

01:01:57.480 | this more realistic understanding

01:01:59.600 | of what things really require.

01:02:01.680 | And with realistic understanding,

01:02:02.920 | you can move around the chess pieces of your schedule

01:02:05.760 | and be in the driver's seat.

01:02:06.920 | That's a weird mixed metaphor, but let's just go with it.

01:02:10.080 | You know what's on your plate, what's realistic.

01:02:12.900 | You know when to say no, you know when to say yes.

01:02:14.700 | You know how to make sure the things that need to get done

01:02:16.660 | get done in early enough time that you don't have pileups,

01:02:18.900 | you don't have that stress.

01:02:20.020 | It does reduce stress.

01:02:21.200 | It does help you feel more in control.

01:02:23.060 | It does help you get more of a return

01:02:25.040 | for the hours you have available to invest.

01:02:27.320 | So I like this case study because it tells you

01:02:30.500 | if you don't have control over what's going on in your life,

01:02:33.680 | it has control over you.

01:02:35.460 | And it's not gonna drive you and your chess pieces

01:02:38.920 | in the direction most likely that you wanna actually go.

01:02:41.860 | So it's a cool principle.

01:02:43.100 | So I would say just multi-scale plan,

01:02:47.120 | quarterly, weekly, daily, time blocking,

01:02:49.060 | that's probably gonna get you half, most of the way there.

01:02:51.260 | Have a good task capture system that you review

01:02:53.460 | where things have statuses and you have different lists

01:02:56.380 | or boards for different contexts.

01:02:57.900 | All the stuff we talk about

01:02:59.020 | gets you towards the same place,

01:03:00.860 | but it's why control is a key layer in my deep life stack

01:03:03.960 | because if you don't control all the stuff on your plate,

01:03:06.140 | it's very hard for you to actually control your life

01:03:08.300 | and the direction that it's going.

01:03:10.000 | All right, so I wanna move on to our final segment,

01:03:14.180 | but before I do,

01:03:15.020 | I have a couple other sponsors I want to mention.

01:03:17.520 | Our first is Blinkist, our longtime friends at Blinkist,

01:03:24.140 | which is an app that enables you to understand

01:03:26.420 | the most important ideas or things

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01:03:34.780 | take just 15 minutes to read or to listen to.

01:03:38.520 | The way I use Blinkist, the way Jesse uses Blinkist,

01:03:42.780 | is as a triage mechanism for the reading life.

01:03:45.960 | You have a book you're thinking about,

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01:04:04.500 | If you've been reading for a little while,

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01:04:15.580 | uh-oh, this book is a brochure

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01:04:20.620 | Yeah, I'm good, versus, ooh, this sounds fascinating.

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01:04:47.780 | There's a lot of uses for Blinkist,

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01:06:30.180 | A VPN gets you around that type of surveillance.

01:06:33.260 | The way it works is instead of talking directly

01:06:35.260 | to jessyskeleton.com,

01:06:36.860 | you make a connection to a VPN server.

01:06:39.100 | You then send an encrypted message to the server saying,

01:06:43.220 | who I really wanna talk to is jessyskeleton.com.

01:06:45.940 | The server talks to the website on your behalf,

01:06:48.300 | encrypts the response, sends it back to you,

01:06:51.180 | you unencrypt it and see those beautiful

01:06:53.060 | jessyskeleton clips.

01:06:54.780 | What does your internet service provider learn?

01:06:56.700 | What does the guy with the antenna sniffing your packets

01:06:58.740 | learn?

01:06:59.580 | Nothing.

01:07:00.420 | You're talking through a VPN server to somewhere.

01:07:03.340 | So you get that privacy back.

01:07:04.860 | If you're gonna use a VPN,

01:07:06.300 | I would recommend the VPN I use, which is ExpressVPN.

01:07:10.100 | They've got servers all around the world.

01:07:11.820 | So wherever you are, there's probably one nearby.

01:07:15.100 | An added benefit of that is you can also connect

01:07:17.700 | to a VPN server in another country and get around

01:07:20.540 | and don't tell them I told you this,

01:07:22.380 | regional restrictions.

01:07:24.100 | So I can connect to a VPN server in England

01:07:27.100 | and then through there, talk to bbc.com

01:07:29.260 | and be able to play the videos that I wouldn't otherwise

01:07:31.420 | have access to outside of England.

01:07:33.100 | So there's an added benefit.

01:07:34.340 | They have a lot of bandwidth as well.

01:07:35.780 | The tech is very easy to use.

01:07:37.300 | You install it on the devices you already access

01:07:39.380 | the internet from, you press a button, it turns on

01:07:41.580 | and you use everything like normal.

01:07:43.420 | So if you wanna protect your shameful, shameful

01:07:48.780 | jessyskeleton addiction from other people

01:07:51.180 | or whatever else you're doing,

01:07:52.340 | or just gain some privacy back in your life,

01:07:55.140 | go to expressvpn.com/deep and you will get

01:07:58.420 | an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free.

01:08:00.920 | That's expressvpn.com/deep,

01:08:03.660 | expressvpn.com/deep to learn more.

01:08:07.160 | All right, Jesse, our final segment,

01:08:10.020 | books I read in October, 2023.

01:08:13.260 | All right, so as I do each month,

01:08:16.500 | I summarize the books I read in the month previous.

01:08:19.740 | I should be clear, it's the books I finished

01:08:23.460 | in the month previous.

01:08:24.500 | So it gets kind of complicated, but whatever.

01:08:27.300 | All right, so what books did I finish in October, 2023?

01:08:32.100 | The first one was "Build the Life You Want"

01:08:34.780 | by Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey.

01:08:38.960 | This was a very successful book.

01:08:42.140 | I read it because it reminds me of the type of things

01:08:44.780 | we talk about here about the deep life.

01:08:46.800 | It's a book about engineering your life to be better.

01:08:50.540 | So being systematic about how you do that.

01:08:53.500 | I don't wanna say too much about it now

01:08:55.540 | because Arthur is actually gonna join us on the show,

01:08:57.420 | Jesse, so I don't know if you know that,

01:08:58.420 | but Arthur Brooks next month is gonna join us on the show

01:09:00.720 | and we'll learn about engineering your life.

01:09:03.340 | We'll also learn about working with Oprah.

01:09:05.340 | Should be a good one. - Yeah.

01:09:06.840 | - I also read "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius.

01:09:11.340 | So if you're a listener to the show, you know this

01:09:12.780 | because I did an earlier episode,

01:09:14.820 | I did a segment about ideas from "Meditations,"

01:09:19.160 | but I don't think I'd ever read it before.

01:09:22.020 | I told you about this, Jesse, but it was amazing

01:09:25.160 | when I bought this book, a translation,

01:09:28.120 | we looked this up, it was from like 2004

01:09:31.880 | or something like this.

01:09:32.720 | It's not like it's a new translation.

01:09:34.340 | Top 100 on Amazon. - Yeah.

01:09:36.120 | - Yeah, that thing sells.

01:09:37.380 | Then I read "Dr. No" by Ian Leeming,

01:09:43.360 | one of the original James Bond's books.

01:09:45.420 | I just needed a something fun.

01:09:48.180 | It's a good one, "Dr. No," early James Bond.

01:09:52.220 | One flaw with that, I mean, I'm a thriller aficionado,

01:09:55.020 | I'm an adventure book aficionado.

01:09:57.220 | The one flaw with that book,

01:09:58.460 | and I don't wanna spoil this too much,

01:10:00.660 | is "Dr. No," Bond is escaping from the torture tunnel.

01:10:05.660 | So "Dr. No" puts him in a torture tunnel.

01:10:09.020 | He puts Bond in a torture tunnel

01:10:12.180 | and the woman he's with, they stake down outside

01:10:16.860 | on a path where Jamaican black crabs every day migrate

01:10:20.980 | with the idea that the crabs are gonna eat you,

01:10:23.560 | eat you alive.

01:10:24.880 | So big setup, real thriller.

01:10:26.640 | You can tell by the way this is grade A literature here.

01:10:30.720 | Here's my problem, two problems.

01:10:33.480 | One, how did she get out of it?

01:10:36.520 | They were just like, oh, it turns out "Dr. No"

01:10:38.440 | didn't really understand much about crabs.

01:10:40.200 | Crabs have no interest in eating people.

01:10:42.120 | So she just sort of waited till the crabs were gone

01:10:43.920 | and got up.

01:10:45.480 | So that's not really a fulfilling way to get out of that.

01:10:49.000 | Bond gets out of the torture tunnel, that's fine.

01:10:51.240 | The issue is, so now he has to kind of escape the island.

01:10:54.040 | He kills "Dr. No" halfway through the escape.

01:10:56.560 | It should be the climax of the escape

01:11:00.520 | is finally killing the main villain,

01:11:03.080 | but instead it's like he's on his way,

01:11:05.560 | he takes over a crane and just dumps a bunch of bird guano

01:11:09.600 | on top of "Dr. No."

01:11:11.360 | And like goes on and kills 10 more people

01:11:13.080 | and there's chases that happen.

01:11:14.600 | It's like almost anticlimactic.

01:11:16.580 | It's like, this is this big villain they've set up

01:11:18.560 | and they're just like in the middle of escape,

01:11:19.720 | like, oh, I just killed him.

01:11:20.560 | And they like keep going with like the rest of the stuff.

01:11:22.520 | It should be like the final person you kill.

01:11:24.360 | I think this is like thriller 101.

01:11:26.600 | So those are my two issues with "Dr. No."

01:11:29.440 | These are not the type of analysis you'll hear

01:11:31.120 | from someone who's talking about their experience

01:11:32.840 | having read "Ulysses" by James Joyce.

01:11:37.840 | I read "Awe" by Docker Keltner.

01:11:41.600 | So sort of the buzzy,

01:11:42.580 | one of the buzzy new popular science books

01:11:44.360 | from the last six months.

01:11:45.320 | So Docker is at, I think Berkeley.

01:11:48.960 | Anyways, he's a psychologist who has innovated

01:11:51.440 | the scientific study of awe, A-W-E, as a feeling.

01:11:55.740 | So it's a book that was,

01:11:56.580 | hey, let me get into my research and how this works.

01:11:58.580 | And so it's interesting.

01:11:59.780 | The final book I read was "Israel" by Noah Tisby.

01:12:05.860 | So this is actually one of three books

01:12:09.420 | I'm reading on Israel right now.

01:12:11.380 | Because I'm a real believer in,

01:12:14.620 | let's say there's a big thing happens

01:12:18.420 | and it's traumatic or scary or whatever.

01:12:23.420 | You got a couple options.

01:12:25.780 | You can turtle, like, okay,

01:12:27.820 | let's just watch reality shows on Macs.

01:12:31.060 | You can go to social media and say, get me mad.

01:12:34.840 | Like I need a team and I need to yell

01:12:37.100 | and just like get chemicals.

01:12:38.900 | Or you can read.

01:12:39.880 | And so what I did after October 7th

01:12:42.460 | is I talked to a rabbi and said,

01:12:44.820 | I want you to recommend me books.

01:12:46.820 | I wanna learn about Israel.

01:12:48.420 | I want you to cover the political spectrum

01:12:51.980 | in Israel in terms of perspectives.

01:12:54.180 | So the three books, so the Noah Tisby's book,

01:12:58.100 | this is, you could think of this as coming

01:12:59.560 | from like "Riot of Sin" or Israeli politics.

01:13:02.140 | It's sort of more, not apologia,

01:13:05.200 | but it's more like "Riot of Sin" or pro-Israel.

01:13:10.200 | For the center book, and I just finished this,

01:13:14.280 | but it's November now, so it's not on this list,

01:13:15.960 | is Martin Gilbert's epic history of Israel, 650 pages.

01:13:20.280 | I thought I could do it in a week, took me two weeks.

01:13:23.080 | He's a British historian, sort of,

01:13:25.280 | look, I don't have a dog in this fight.

01:13:26.680 | Just this is the history starting mid 19th century

01:13:31.080 | to late 1990s, right, just like TikTok history,

01:13:34.780 | finished that.

01:13:35.620 | And now I've just ordered Yusuf HaLevi's letter

01:13:41.780 | to my Palestinian neighbor to cover the perspective

01:13:44.960 | from left of center Israeli politics.

01:13:48.120 | HaLevi is someone who had started

01:13:50.000 | as a right-wing Israeli politics

01:13:53.600 | and changed over to being a progressive

01:13:56.920 | in terms of thinking about on the left of Israel.

01:13:59.360 | So I'm reading all three of these books.

01:14:01.120 | Let's boom, right, boom, center,

01:14:03.320 | sort of outside of Israel history,

01:14:06.260 | boom, someone who's coming more from the Israeli left.

01:14:09.000 | So I'm reading.

01:14:10.400 | - Yeah.

01:14:11.240 | - I'll tell you, it feels like a more productive,

01:14:15.240 | calming, just focused response to things

01:14:19.320 | than I gotta tweet about somebody.

01:14:24.240 | I don't know who, but someone I gotta get on there

01:14:28.040 | or I need to just start yelling.

01:14:30.720 | Sometimes reading, at least for me, let me learn.

01:14:35.640 | It's a calming effect, but like a determined way.

01:14:38.320 | It's not an avoidance.

01:14:39.160 | It's like, let me figure out what's going on.

01:14:41.240 | So I am learning more about the history of Israel

01:14:43.480 | in this very short period than I thought I would be,

01:14:46.800 | but that's what I'm up to.

01:14:48.160 | - David Remnick just had a awesome article

01:14:50.760 | on the November 6th issue of "The Yorker 2."

01:14:53.360 | I just finished that.

01:14:54.360 | - So how'd you like it?

01:14:55.200 | I haven't read it yet.

01:14:56.360 | - It was very detailed.

01:14:57.520 | It explained a lot of the history

01:14:59.320 | that I wasn't really aware of.

01:15:01.480 | - Yeah, and David went.

01:15:03.000 | - He was there.

01:15:03.840 | - He went over there right away after October 7th.

01:15:05.680 | I think he's back now, but he reported from there for weeks.

01:15:10.200 | - Mm-hmm. - Yeah.

01:15:11.200 | Yeah, you never wanna not read something

01:15:13.720 | David Remnick writes about a political situation.

01:15:16.320 | I mean, this is one of the preeminent writers

01:15:19.680 | of geopolitical nonfiction journalism

01:15:23.280 | of the last few generations.

01:15:24.720 | He has a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Russia.

01:15:27.000 | He really knows his game.

01:15:28.720 | He's made a few missteps in his life.

01:15:30.720 | Like his magazine allowed this guy

01:15:34.440 | who blogs about productivity to write for them sometimes.

01:15:37.680 | Like that was a clear mistake.

01:15:39.320 | But you know, you're not gonna bat 100.

01:15:43.040 | Not gonna bat 100.

01:15:43.880 | You're gonna eventually, you're gonna occasionally,

01:15:45.600 | accidentally get people writing about getting things done,

01:15:48.680 | the pages of "The New Yorker."

01:15:50.200 | But yeah, other than that,

01:15:52.600 | other than that, I think it was a pretty high hit rate.

01:15:55.240 | But I think there's bigger lesson in that.

01:15:56.560 | Like outside of any particular issues going on, read.

01:15:59.440 | Read.

01:16:01.200 | What happens when you read a book

01:16:02.040 | is you're taking another human mind

01:16:03.680 | who has spent years, if not a lifetime,

01:16:06.760 | thinking about something,

01:16:07.960 | and then years trying to get their thoughts

01:16:10.160 | as clear as possible.

01:16:11.680 | And you mind meld with someone when you read a book.

01:16:15.520 | You mind meld with them.

01:16:17.120 | And really get to understand these nuances

01:16:20.720 | and their perspective.

01:16:21.560 | I mean, it is the way that as like heightened

01:16:23.680 | intellectual beings, we should engage with the world.

01:16:25.880 | And you mind meld with people

01:16:27.160 | who are from different backgrounds

01:16:28.360 | and have different views on things.

01:16:30.120 | It's why I, the one, like charity cause

01:16:35.120 | I really push often on this podcast,

01:16:36.600 | I do this auction every year,

01:16:38.200 | this authors of color auction,

01:16:39.840 | is because I really like what they do

01:16:42.920 | is they give scholarships to help people

01:16:44.640 | from more diverse backgrounds get into publishing.

01:16:46.800 | Because there's often, it can be hard

01:16:49.400 | to get onto the track to be in publishing

01:16:51.280 | because there might be these like very low paid jobs

01:16:54.040 | or internships.

01:16:54.880 | If you don't have other sources of money,

01:16:56.920 | you can't get on this track.

01:16:58.360 | But since books are everything

01:16:59.840 | and it's the portal to other people's minds,

01:17:01.760 | it's the portal to understanding ideas and experiences,

01:17:04.400 | the more interesting books we have,

01:17:06.720 | the more things we cover,

01:17:07.840 | the more people can understand the world.

01:17:09.680 | So I really love that cause.

01:17:10.960 | It's like, if we can get different people,

01:17:13.320 | a bigger variety of people in the publishing,

01:17:15.120 | they will bring in a bigger variety of books,

01:17:17.120 | which means we, the readers,

01:17:18.360 | can get a bigger variety of understanding

01:17:20.680 | about other people.

01:17:21.520 | So I'm just such a huge believer of books and reading.

01:17:24.440 | It really is the right approach to almost everything.

01:17:28.160 | So I'm now 800, 900 pages in my Israeli reading.

01:17:33.160 | I have a three or 400 more, but I'm there.

01:17:35.560 | By next week, I'll have finished my reading assignment.

01:17:37.920 | So we'll have to like ask the fake rabbi segment

01:17:41.960 | where I'll just very knowledgeably

01:17:43.800 | kind of get slightly wrong questions

01:17:45.520 | about the history of Israel.

01:17:46.480 | - We'll be great.

01:17:47.320 | - You get some new music and the--

01:17:49.480 | - Sound effects. - Yeah.

01:17:50.520 | - Everything, man.

01:17:51.640 | I want, we have eight sound effects on there.

01:17:54.240 | We have pads, room on there for eight sound effects.

01:17:55.960 | I want eight sound effects.

01:17:57.200 | We wanna, we got just rock and roll.

01:17:59.560 | I want wacky car horns.

01:18:01.800 | I want applause for sure.

01:18:04.720 | - Yeah.

01:18:05.560 | - I don't think this is pretentious.

01:18:06.560 | I think like whenever I say something particularly smart,

01:18:08.860 | I want, and let's not be crazy,

01:18:10.280 | but like 30 seconds of sustained applause.

01:18:12.840 | (laughing)

01:18:14.920 | And I'll just blow kisses to the camera.

01:18:16.800 | You know, I don't think it's crazy,

01:18:17.880 | but just so people know,

01:18:19.520 | they don't always know,

01:18:20.360 | like this was really smart what I just said.

01:18:22.840 | And then we can have like enthusiastic applause

01:18:25.280 | could be a different one.

01:18:26.120 | It was a really good point

01:18:26.960 | where the applause then crescendos into cheering

01:18:30.560 | and just bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo,

01:18:34.120 | and like whistles.

01:18:34.960 | And then I'll be like, "Oh, come on, please.

01:18:36.160 | "It'll be great."

01:18:37.000 | (laughing)

01:18:39.520 | Feigned applause, that's the secret.

01:18:40.760 | All right, enough of this nonsense.

01:18:41.880 | That's all the time we have for today.

01:18:43.920 | Thank you for listening.

01:18:46.720 | If you liked it, by the way,

01:18:47.720 | you leave a review, subscribe,

01:18:48.920 | that type of stuff really helps other people

01:18:50.440 | get in on this nonsense.

01:18:51.840 | We'll be back next week with another episode of the show.

01:18:55.960 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:18:58.340 | Hey, so if you liked today's discussion

01:19:01.440 | about how to make learning as appealing

01:19:04.600 | as the distractions that you can find on your phone,

01:19:07.080 | you might also like episode 270,

01:19:10.680 | which is called "Depth Versus Distraction."

01:19:14.840 | Check it out.

01:19:16.000 | About struggling to take back control of their life

01:19:20.080 | from powerful sources of distraction.

Make Learning As Addictive As Social Media - Quickly Make Progress At Anything | Cal Newport

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