8 Productivity Books To Change Your Life. Here's What Actually Works.

00:00:00.000 | So that's what we're going to do today.

00:00:01.440 | Our deep question, we're going to explore.

00:00:03.360 | What are the best ideas from other productivity authors?

00:00:09.120 | All right, let's get started.

00:00:11.400 | Uh, I'm going to bring up pictures of these books on the screen.

00:00:14.580 | So if you're just listening to this, you can find the video at the deep life.com.

00:00:18.720 | This is episode two 65.

00:00:20.320 | The videos are linked at the bottom.

00:00:22.460 | All right.

00:00:22.660 | So the first book I have on the screen right now, the, uh, the OG, the goat

00:00:28.720 | of the productivity boat book space.

00:00:31.000 | That is Stephen Covey's the seven habits of highly effective people.

00:00:36.820 | A very important book in the space also led to, I don't know, five or six years

00:00:44.300 | of everyone having numbers in their titles.

00:00:46.120 | So I don't know if that's a good legacy or a bad legacy.

00:00:48.860 | I think we've gotten past that now, but for a while, uh, after the seven habits

00:00:52.780 | came out, there were so many books that had the eight habits of this, the six

00:00:56.060 | habits of this, the nine laws for this, we've sort of moved past that,

00:00:59.300 | but that was a trend it started.

00:01:00.740 | All right.

00:01:01.160 | This book is a little bit older.

00:01:02.420 | Uh, it's an incredibly influential book.

00:01:04.460 | It has sold millions upon millions of copies.

00:01:06.740 | I read this when I was in high school.

00:01:08.180 | So it was very influential on me for a long period of time.

00:01:12.420 | So what's the big idea I want to pull out of this book.

00:01:15.300 | Start with the end in mind.

00:01:19.580 | All right.

00:01:20.860 | So this is a key notion from Covey, which is productivity for productivity

00:01:25.540 | sake is meaningless.

00:01:28.100 | Why are you being more organized?

00:01:30.380 | Why are you keeping better track of things?

00:01:31.960 | You need to figure out what it is you are trying to do with your life, with

00:01:37.100 | your work in your role as a parent, in your role as a community leader, and

00:01:40.740 | all the productivity should be working backwards to support that vision.

00:01:43.820 | So it instrumentalizes productivity towards much more philosophically

00:01:51.400 | or spiritually important goals.

00:01:54.420 | That is a very influential idea, not just for me, but for anyone who's

00:01:58.900 | writing in the sustainable productivity or the, uh, the sustainable productivity

00:02:03.500 | or the humanist productivity tradition.

00:02:05.020 | A lot of that goes back to Stephen Covey and seven habits of highly effective.

00:02:09.980 | So if you know what you're trying to do, then you can care about, Oh, this is why

00:02:14.380 | I'm organizing my calendar and keeping track of my tasks and making sure that

00:02:17.540 | I'm balancing the important, but non-urgent work with the non-important, but urgent

00:02:22.540 | tasks that are pulling for my attention.

00:02:24.100 | All of these really good on the ground, tactical productivity ideas that come

00:02:28.500 | out of this book are all aimed towards big picture goals.

00:02:30.980 | What am I trying to do in these different parts of my life?

00:02:34.700 | Obviously this resonates with how we talk about productivity on the show.

00:02:39.540 | It resonates with the notion of the deep life.

00:02:42.260 | It resonates with lifestyle centric career planning.

00:02:44.380 | Covey's shadow looms large in a lot of what we talk about here.

00:02:49.220 | So that's an important book.

00:02:50.260 | Don't be turned off by the number in the title.

00:02:53.140 | This is actually a much deeper book than you might be

00:02:55.660 | thinking if you've never read it.

00:02:56.820 | All right.

00:02:58.820 | Book number two, another classic from the genre, David

00:03:05.380 | Allen's Getting Things Done.

00:03:08.740 | Now people think about getting things done.

00:03:11.820 | People who don't know the book often caricature what they think

00:03:16.140 | it's about because of the title.

00:03:18.700 | So those who are writing in the more recent anti-productivity camp often

00:03:24.140 | see that title and say, well, this, this book is part of a whole industry

00:03:29.980 | that valorizes getting as much things done as possible, that getting

00:03:34.100 | things done is all that matters.

00:03:35.380 | That accomplishing more tasks off your list is what matters.

00:03:38.500 | And, and it's part of this productivity, Protestant work ethic complex that just

00:03:43.900 | tries to push us to do more and more.

00:03:46.940 | But David Allen's book is way more complicated and interesting than that.

00:03:51.460 | I actually wrote a whole long form New Yorker piece about this a few years

00:03:55.620 | ago called The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done, and it's about David

00:04:00.060 | Allen and it's about Merlin Mann and it's about the evolution of the productivity

00:04:04.220 | industry, and it's a cool article and it's a rich topic.

00:04:07.580 | Now your first hint, if you've never read this book, your first hint that

00:04:12.700 | there's more going on here than someone just saying, do more work is the subtitle.

00:04:17.020 | Look at the subtitle of this book, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

00:04:23.820 | Stress-free and art are in the subtitle.

00:04:28.740 | This is not what you would expect from a book that's about

00:04:30.580 | how to crush your task list.

00:04:31.860 | So what's really going on?

00:04:33.340 | Well, if you read this book, you see what Allen cares about is

00:04:37.260 | psychological sustainability.

00:04:41.060 | His concern is as you get more and more to do, which by the way, he just posits

00:04:46.100 | as an unfortunate reality of modern work, not as a goal that you're pursuing.

00:04:51.900 | He says, this is the unfortunate reality of work is the nineties give way to the

00:04:55.620 | two thousands is that we have more and more to do, and this is very stressful.

00:04:59.540 | And I want to find a way to make this unavoidable reality

00:05:02.740 | of modern work less stressful.

00:05:04.460 | How do we get more psychological sustainability from a world of work

00:05:08.460 | that demands a to-do list that are 50 things long, email inboxes that are

00:05:12.700 | clogged, inbox trays that are overfilling.

00:05:15.220 | So he's not pushing.

00:05:16.740 | It's good to do more work.

00:05:17.620 | He says, how in the world can we survive that reality?

00:05:19.620 | How do we present prevent that from being too stressful?

00:05:23.820 | So one of the big ideas from his book, the idea I want to isolate here is

00:05:27.820 | that open loops generate stress.

00:05:31.980 | So open loop is his term for some sort of obligation or commitment that you've

00:05:37.620 | made that is not captured somewhere that you can trust it's an obligation or

00:05:43.580 | commitment that you're really just keeping track of in your mind.

00:05:47.060 | Alan is pointing out that as a major source of stress and anxiety in work.

00:05:51.540 | If you answer an email and say, yeah, I'll work on that project.

00:05:54.580 | And you're not really keeping track of that anywhere else, but in your brain,

00:05:57.620 | it's going to use up brain resources and be this little engine that generates a

00:06:02.780 | little background thrum of anxiety.

00:06:05.940 | And if you have 50 or 60 things that you're sort of supposed to be working on,

00:06:08.900 | or you said you've been working on and you don't have it written down anywhere,

00:06:12.300 | or you've written it down somewhere that you don't trust, you're going to look

00:06:14.260 | each one of those things, each one of those, what he calls open loops, little

00:06:18.060 | engine of anxiety going in your brain.

00:06:20.300 | And it all adds up.

00:06:21.820 | And that's what stresses us out.

00:06:23.140 | And that's what makes work psychologically unsustainable.

00:06:25.620 | So the entire program and getting things done is full capture.

00:06:29.940 | How do you have a single trusted system?

00:06:34.420 | Where once something gets written in it, you do not have to think about it.

00:06:37.900 | You know, you will see it there in that system.

00:06:40.300 | When the time comes, how do you build a system like this and make sure that

00:06:43.020 | everything that you've committed to be it implicitly or explicitly, let it,

00:06:47.740 | whether it be very large or whether it's just, Hey, call back and give me this

00:06:50.900 | information, how do you make sure that everything you've committed to is in that

00:06:54.020 | system?

00:06:54.380 | So your brain can just be free of trying to remember it free of the stress of

00:06:58.580 | forgetting and just focus on whatever you're doing right now.

00:07:02.740 | Now, does this actually work?

00:07:05.140 | Well, it, there's some issues.

00:07:07.180 | I mean, Alan was working on this just as email and the hyperactive hive

00:07:11.380 | mind was getting out of control.

00:07:12.540 | So the book is really right.

00:07:13.700 | Pre that period.

00:07:14.860 | I think the, the, the world of checking an inbox once every five to six minutes.

00:07:18.700 | Makes the getting things done methodology not so cleanly apply.

00:07:23.300 | It's a, people now use their inbox to keep track of things.

00:07:26.780 | There's much more interruption and distraction when you have to

00:07:29.460 | keep checking these inboxes.

00:07:30.500 | So it's not a panacea for our modern world, but I think the key about this

00:07:34.820 | is that he's trying to reduce stress.

00:07:36.460 | And the way he's trying to reduce stress is recognizing that keeping things

00:07:41.140 | track of things in your mind is one of the biggest sources of this bad feeling.

00:07:44.340 | So don't do that.

00:07:45.060 | Have good systems, have full capture.

00:07:46.580 | So that's the big idea from Alan misunderstood.

00:07:50.020 | I think when you really understand them, you see he's much more on the side of

00:07:54.100 | humanist productivity than he is the straw man that the anti productivity

00:07:58.220 | camps often make him out to be.

00:08:00.900 | When you Google his book, your article is one of the first things that comes up.

00:08:03.900 | Oh, there we go.

00:08:05.220 | If you Google getting things done.

00:08:06.740 | Yeah.

00:08:07.140 | Oh, there we go.

00:08:07.740 | Deep work and getting things done.

00:08:10.340 | We're often in competition for top spot on Amazon's, I guess, time management list.

00:08:17.020 | So the books that live at the top of that list are deep work, getting things done,

00:08:22.580 | the four hour work week, uh, and essentialism, which will also two

00:08:28.020 | other books we'll talk about.

00:08:29.220 | Yeah.

00:08:29.420 | So we're all, we're all in the mix up there.

00:08:31.460 | All right.

00:08:32.580 | Let's, uh, speaking of these, let's go to book three, Tim Ferris, the four

00:08:38.580 | hour work week, escape the nine to five, live anywhere and join the new rich.

00:08:43.020 | This book came out in 2007.

00:08:44.740 | I remember this book coming out because my mutual friend with Tim.

00:08:49.700 | So Tim and I shared a mutual friend of Ramit Sethi.

00:08:52.180 | And I remember in 2007, Ramit saying, Hey, Cal, you got to read this book.

00:08:57.660 | This friend of mine, Tim has, it's a crazy, he's done some crazy things.

00:09:00.740 | This book is really going to blow up.

00:09:01.940 | You got to read this.

00:09:02.580 | And I listened to it on audio.

00:09:04.180 | I remember for all of those sort of Cambridge people out there, I was

00:09:08.020 | living near a Huron village in Cambridge, outside of Boston.

00:09:12.620 | And I remember listening to this walking on Porter street towards Porter square.

00:09:17.700 | I don't know why I have this memory.

00:09:19.300 | I just do to go to the Brugger bagels near Porter square, listening

00:09:22.380 | to the four hour work week.

00:09:24.340 | It's just this really clear memory that I have.

00:09:26.900 | A very influential book.

00:09:28.980 | I also wrote a New Yorker article about this.

00:09:31.260 | There's a good piece from a couple of years ago where I interviewed Tim.

00:09:34.260 | And I interviewed him about where the book came from and what the reaction

00:09:38.900 | was like when the book came out.

00:09:41.100 | This is also a book that I think has been overlooked in recent years.

00:09:46.540 | I don't really know why this was one of the questions I asked in that New Yorker

00:09:50.460 | piece, what Tim was talking about in 2007 is actually super relevant to what

00:09:55.380 | people were talking about in 2021 and 2022, when they were thinking about

00:10:00.580 | post pandemic, rethinking their lives and the role of work in their lives and

00:10:05.460 | where they live and what they do and what their life is like, and everyone

00:10:09.220 | was rediscovering this idea of there's more to life than just work.

00:10:12.180 | And Tim had written the definitive book on this and wasn't a part of the

00:10:16.380 | conversation, but should have been.

00:10:17.460 | So what's the core idea I want to point out from the four hour work week.

00:10:21.380 | It's the notion that work is a tool to use in implementing an ideal lifestyle.

00:10:28.500 | This was very influential to me because Tim basically separated

00:10:32.700 | your ideal lifestyle from work.

00:10:34.620 | So you figure out what you want to do.

00:10:37.300 | He called them mini retirements.

00:10:38.820 | You know, he had all these examples in his book of people in their

00:10:41.700 | twenties that would live in Argentina and take tango lessons and rent

00:10:46.940 | a helicopter to go up and drink some Malbec up in the mountains.

00:10:52.260 | These really sort of a, of amazing things that like people in their

00:10:55.100 | twenties would really care about.

00:10:55.980 | You're like, look, there's these cool lifestyles.

00:10:57.620 | Work is just about funding that.

00:10:59.220 | And once you know that, then you can start to get pretty clever and say,

00:11:02.380 | well, how much money do I need?

00:11:03.540 | Well, I can reduce that amount if I live overseas in a place

00:11:06.300 | where the dollar is stronger.

00:11:07.540 | And he goes into all of these, these systems for, uh, automating your work

00:11:11.740 | and simplifying your work and basically creating little money engines, not

00:11:16.260 | things that are going to make you rich.

00:11:18.900 | But things that would generate enough money that you could do tango in

00:11:21.580 | Argentina, and he called that lifestyle design.

00:11:24.500 | Now, I think he got dismissed in part because the specific examples he gave

00:11:28.860 | were the examples that again, a 28 year old in 2006 would be thinking about.

00:11:34.500 | But the broader point underneath this book, I think is much more general.

00:11:38.300 | And much more impactful, which is this idea that it's the

00:11:41.220 | lifestyle ultimately that matters.

00:11:42.700 | Work is something that supports that.

00:11:45.660 | And it might support it by just being a money source.

00:11:47.700 | And you want to minimize its footprint as much as possible, or it might

00:11:50.460 | support it much more substantially.

00:11:52.020 | Like what you're doing with your work, uh, helps put into your life,

00:11:55.620 | specific things that you like, or lets you live in a place you really like,

00:11:58.660 | but you have to see it instrumentally.

00:12:00.860 | And again, this was really different than the way that people were seeing careers

00:12:04.140 | in the period leading up to this book.

00:12:06.340 | The first decade of the two thousands, this was the rise of passion culture.

00:12:10.780 | It was the peak of passion culture.

00:12:12.300 | It was the peak of this idea that the.

00:12:15.180 | Secret to happiness was following your passion with your career only

00:12:19.620 | through matching your job to what you loved, could you find passion?

00:12:23.060 | And Tim said, forget that.

00:12:24.300 | The things that you're going to make your life happy might have

00:12:27.660 | very little to do with work, but you know what, in this new world

00:12:29.860 | of technology and internet, you could probably find ways to make enough

00:12:33.900 | money if you're a smart person and have some advantages, you can make enough

00:12:38.220 | money to go do things cool right now.

00:12:39.460 | I think it's a really influential idea.

00:12:43.180 | Uh, definitely an influence on me.

00:12:45.460 | I think you see that in lifestyle centric career planning work

00:12:48.980 | backwards from the lifestyle.

00:12:50.020 | I think you see it in my deep lifestyle thinking work is in there, but it's in

00:12:54.580 | there along with other sorts of things that you're all deploying towards the

00:12:58.460 | vision of making your life deeper.

00:13:01.180 | The four hour work week is an influential book.

00:13:03.740 | And I mean, really think it helped kick off this notion of work to live as

00:13:08.740 | opposed to live to work that's really kind of dominant right now in our

00:13:11.260 | discourse about productivity and happiness.

00:13:14.020 | All right.

00:13:16.140 | Book number four, bring it up on the screen here.

00:13:19.220 | This is Greg McEwen's essentialism.

00:13:23.540 | Uh, this book came out a couple of years before deep work, very

00:13:29.460 | popular book, very influential.

00:13:31.540 | Uh, I know Greg, uh, I think Greg may have been on this podcast

00:13:35.220 | way back in the early days.

00:13:36.100 | I've certainly been on Greg's podcast.

00:13:37.660 | I, you know, I, the early days of this podcast are hazy, but he's a friend of

00:13:41.540 | mine, I like to think of him as a friend of the show, so essentialism.

00:13:46.860 | What's the, the idea I want to isolate there saying no can make you more valuable.

00:13:53.060 | So the whole book about essentialism is about doing less things.

00:13:56.700 | We do too much in work and we should do less things at work and why you

00:14:00.340 | should do that and how to do that.

00:14:01.300 | But there was a story in there that really stuck with me.

00:14:04.580 | And the story was of a, an employee that was overwhelmed.

00:14:07.460 | I forget exactly what industry is in some sort of management

00:14:10.180 | consultancy type thing, really overwhelmed with work.

00:14:13.380 | And so he hatched this plan of, you know what I'm going to do?

00:14:16.060 | I'm going to partially retire.

00:14:17.460 | Uh, maybe I'm just gonna do some consulting on the side.

00:14:20.180 | I can make this work financially.

00:14:21.820 | So he knew he was going to leave the job.

00:14:23.860 | So he said, why not before I actually leave the job, why

00:14:27.580 | don't I launch an experiment?

00:14:29.140 | What if I just say no to most things?

00:14:32.620 | Because this was his big problem is that all these different bosses and

00:14:35.780 | colleagues were always throwing stuff on his plate and he thought the way to

00:14:38.980 | get ahead was to be agreeable and say yes to everything, be the person that

00:14:41.980 | could count on to I'll take what you want me to do and I'll get it done.

00:14:44.780 | And it was really exhausting him.

00:14:46.300 | That's why he was going to quit.

00:14:47.100 | He's like, well, what if I just, before I quit, I just said no to most things.

00:14:50.540 | It just kept my focus on the really most important projects.

00:14:53.460 | It's like, Hey, I'll probably get yelled at, but I was going to leave anyway.

00:14:57.500 | So why not?

00:14:58.060 | He tries this experiment.

00:15:00.340 | And what happens?

00:15:02.500 | He gets promoted.

00:15:03.140 | He starts saying no to more things and he gets promoted.

00:15:07.620 | Why?

00:15:08.380 | Because when you say no, in the moment, of course, there's a little

00:15:11.820 | bit of a social uncomfortableness.

00:15:14.580 | But no one's tallying that up somewhere, your score of social

00:15:18.100 | uncomfortableness and how high is that getting, what do they notice is the

00:15:21.420 | work that you're actually completing.

00:15:22.740 | And by being able to focus on a smaller number of things and do those things

00:15:25.740 | better, he began to gain more attention for the great stuff he was producing.

00:15:31.380 | And that was way more valuable than him saying yes in the moment.

00:15:34.420 | So he didn't end up needing to leave his job.

00:15:36.780 | He fixed his overload problem by just saying no.

00:15:39.420 | And instead of it being something that he had to figure out, how can I get

00:15:42.540 | my employer to tolerate me doing less?

00:15:44.820 | It turned out that his employer celebrated him after he started doing less.

00:15:50.340 | Now that's not always possible, right?

00:15:52.820 | Different jobs have different social dynamics and power hierarchies.

00:15:55.620 | But I think this core idea that doing fewer things better can produce more

00:16:00.740 | value for you and your employer than doing lots of things mediocre is very

00:16:04.940 | influential, it not only justifies the whole program of essentialism that

00:16:10.620 | McEwen talks about, it became a core plank of slow productivity, the first

00:16:15.500 | principle of slow productivity, which says do fewer things.

00:16:19.460 | This is not just about, I want to be less stressed.

00:16:23.980 | It actually can be a strategy for being better at what you do, whether you work

00:16:28.140 | in a big company or just handling clients on your own.

00:16:30.940 | So essentialism did really well.

00:16:33.180 | And I think in part, people recognize overload was an issue.

00:16:35.700 | And there was some optimism in this idea that doing less is not just a survival

00:16:39.940 | move, it might actually be a move towards advancement.

00:16:43.380 | All right, let's roll along here to a more recent book.

00:16:47.780 | So one's by my friend Oliver Berkman, 4000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals.

00:16:56.540 | This came out in 2021, did very well in both the UK where Berkman's from and

00:17:01.860 | here in the US, the book did very well.

00:17:04.700 | I like to take a small amount of credit for that because I helped convince Tim

00:17:09.220 | Ferris that you would like this book and he did, and then he had Berkman on his

00:17:12.980 | show and having Berkman, it'd be on the Ferris show, pushing a book that Ferris

00:17:18.220 | likes, helps you sell books.

00:17:20.220 | I don't know if you know about that, but that does pretty well.

00:17:24.020 | Anyways, this book did really well.

00:17:26.180 | It really hit a chord for what we think of as a sort of an exhausted in phase

00:17:32.860 | pandemic audience of people who were just burnt out from work and Zoom.

00:17:36.460 | And this book hit a really good chord.

00:17:39.260 | All right, so what's the big idea I want to pull out of 4000 Weeks?

00:17:43.460 | Accepting you don't have time to do most things.

00:17:47.260 | Accepting you don't have time to do most things that you want to

00:17:52.660 | do can help you chill out now.

00:17:54.220 | All right, so let me say that better.

00:17:55.660 | Accepting that you don't have enough time to do most things can

00:17:58.540 | help you be more relaxed right now.

00:18:00.300 | Oliver does a better job explaining this to me, but what I'm getting at here is

00:18:05.060 | that basically the core of this book is this notion that you're only going to

00:18:09.220 | live on average about 4000 weeks.

00:18:10.980 | That's not that much time.

00:18:12.140 | So most things that you could do, you're not going to do.

00:18:15.220 | So instead of obsessing about the border of like, well, what if I could

00:18:18.540 | have done this and I did in this?

00:18:19.940 | Enjoy the things that you are doing and be okay with you're not doing most.

00:18:25.140 | If you can't get close to doing any anywhere near the whole list of

00:18:28.740 | possibilities, you're saying no to most things anyways, why stress out about

00:18:32.500 | that small border of things that maybe you could squeeze in, but you didn't.

00:18:35.500 | What if you just didn't squeeze in the extra thing and said, I'm okay with this.

00:18:38.420 | I like what's going on with my work.

00:18:41.540 | I it's sustainable right now.

00:18:44.100 | I like the people I work with.

00:18:45.340 | It's flexible.

00:18:46.180 | Uh, I like what I'm doing.

00:18:48.020 | That's good.

00:18:48.500 | I have like one hobby.

00:18:49.940 | This is, I like this hobby I work on and sometimes I don't.

00:18:53.780 | And the sunset's nice.

00:18:54.700 | Yeah.

00:18:55.220 | It's, it's a, a push towards more of a present, a focus on presence, a

00:19:00.620 | focus on savoring what you do have a focus on, uh, accomplishing more things.

00:19:07.300 | Making that list longer.

00:19:08.580 | Is it necessarily going to make me much happier, but it could create a lot of

00:19:11.500 | unnecessary stress or self-recrimination.

00:19:13.740 | So it was a call to slow down.

00:19:15.620 | To be happy with what you did have.

00:19:18.140 | A lot of people were feeling this coming out of the pandemic.

00:19:20.900 | So I think this book hit the, uh, the culture at a really good time.

00:19:25.140 | They weren't looking to add more to their list.

00:19:28.420 | They're looking to simplify and be okay with that simplification.

00:19:31.380 | Again, it's a big idea, uh, influential on my slow productivity philosophy as well.

00:19:36.180 | Doing less things, keeping the pace natural, try and do those things really

00:19:41.380 | well, but being okay with it, taking a lot of time, that's a very congruent

00:19:46.420 | with an Oliver Berkman, 4,000 weeks.

00:19:48.220 | Style mindset.

00:19:50.500 | All right.

00:19:50.780 | Moving on.

00:19:51.660 | Six book.

00:19:52.980 | I want to talk about here is Jenny Odell's how to do nothing.

00:19:56.140 | All right.

00:19:57.580 | This is a book that came out the week.

00:20:00.380 | I think the same week as my book, digital minimalism.

00:20:03.060 | So there's a period there.

00:20:04.860 | These books were seen kind of as being in similar, a similar category.

00:20:09.380 | So we, we did some things together.

00:20:11.300 | The books were reviewed together.

00:20:12.580 | Often the New Yorker had a Gia Tolentino piece that co-reviewed my book and

00:20:18.180 | Jenny's the New York times book review did something that, that had my book and

00:20:21.940 | Jenny.

00:20:22.220 | So we were, we were sort of intertwined there for a while because we were both

00:20:25.100 | dealing in part with distraction and the attention economy.

00:20:27.740 | Uh, this book was very successful.

00:20:29.740 | New York times bestseller, Barack Obama put it on his list of recommended books,

00:20:34.900 | his reading list for 2019.

00:20:37.980 | So it's, it's a good book.

00:20:39.740 | It's a, it's a deep book.

00:20:40.700 | It's a complicated book.

00:20:41.820 | It has more of a foundation in, uh, actual academic thinking than a lot of other

00:20:47.580 | books in this space.

00:20:48.500 | There there's a particular Italian Marxist philosopher, the Jenny's very

00:20:51.900 | influenced by.

00:20:52.660 | And so you have a particular academic lineage from this particular, uh,

00:20:58.300 | Italian Marxist that, that is being updated to apply to the social media age

00:21:03.180 | by Jenny.

00:21:03.620 | So this is, it's more academic than a lot of books in this space, which I think

00:21:06.540 | is part of part of its appeal.

00:21:08.020 | But the idea I want to pull out of this now, which I think was important is the

00:21:13.660 | notion that the attention economies monetization of our attention led us to

00:21:19.940 | increasingly monetize our own time.

00:21:23.180 | So what Jenny is trying to say here is, uh, the attention economy.

00:21:28.180 | So these apps that want you to look at their apps on the phone for clear

00:21:32.740 | capitalist reasons, see your moments of attention as a resource to commodify and

00:21:37.980 | sell.

00:21:38.420 | Okay.

00:21:38.660 | So we know this tick tock wants you to spend more time looking at tick tock

00:21:42.740 | because it can package up your attention and the data describing that attention

00:21:45.700 | and sell it.

00:21:46.140 | Same for Instagram, same for Twitter.

00:21:47.980 | What Jenny is saying, okay, this influences the way that we then begin to

00:21:52.980 | personally think about time.

00:21:54.140 | We're so used to this notion that we've been trained by these economic forces,

00:22:00.380 | this economic reality, we've been trained to think about moments as something that

00:22:03.460 | can be transformed into something that someone's going to value.

00:22:06.180 | It becomes hard then to just exist and be present in a moment.

00:22:09.460 | We could be monetizing this.

00:22:11.860 | I could be documenting this and putting this on Instagram where it could get

00:22:14.700 | likes.

00:22:15.180 | So even though we don't directly participate in the monetization of our

00:22:18.900 | attention, Instagram is not sending us a check for the amount of eyeball minutes

00:22:25.060 | that are video captured.

00:22:26.940 | We still adopt this mindset of time is something to be commodified.

00:22:31.020 | Time is something to be productively transformed into attention, into

00:22:36.660 | something that is valued by someone else.

00:22:38.700 | And she says in that mindset shift, we lost a lot of our humanity.

00:22:43.420 | And so what was her suggestion, her recourse to this reality was do nothing.

00:22:48.340 | Relearn how to do nothing.

00:22:50.340 | Relearn how to just be in a field watching birds.

00:22:55.380 | So Odell is an amateur ornithologist.

00:22:58.220 | She likes looking at birds for no other reason than it's just, this is, I just

00:23:01.740 | like to see this bird and it's peaceful out here.

00:23:03.660 | And isn't that nice?

00:23:06.060 | That she says it's become an act of resistance, a political

00:23:10.020 | resistance to do nothing.

00:23:11.380 | To go do something just for the enjoyment of doing this with no

00:23:14.500 | documentation, no mindset towards the monetization of this moment, capturing

00:23:19.340 | attention, trying to document it for others.

00:23:20.980 | I think this really hit a chord as well.

00:23:23.300 | In 2019, we had reached this peak of new dissatisfaction with the social media

00:23:27.820 | age and her message was, was just right.

00:23:31.220 | Because she was, she was given a complicated critique for why

00:23:34.620 | we feel the way we feel.

00:23:35.700 | There's a really cool idea.

00:23:37.660 | I like it.

00:23:39.020 | Doing nothing as an act of resistance.

00:23:41.300 | And even when you strip off the sort of Marxist anti-capitalist

00:23:44.660 | framework of thinking here, there's a deeper truth that I think most

00:23:47.820 | people recognize, which is that there is a deep satisfaction in an experience

00:23:52.500 | that's had just for the experience.

00:23:54.020 | We know this.

00:23:55.860 | This has been intertwined into both secular and Eastern philosophical

00:24:00.260 | traditions for a long time.

00:24:02.460 | However, we want to explain why this is true.

00:24:04.620 | We derive great satisfaction out of being able to just spend a moment,

00:24:09.180 | just being there in that moment.

00:24:11.220 | So Adele, I think, uh, gives nice support to that timeless claim.

00:24:16.660 | All right.

00:24:18.100 | I got two more here.

00:24:18.740 | Speaking of timeless claim, uh, here's another book I really liked.

00:24:22.020 | It's called make time how to focus on what matters every day.

00:24:26.380 | This is by Jake Knapp and John.

00:24:29.100 | So Rasky, uh, they're from Google.

00:24:31.140 | And what they had done over at Google, if I understand the backstory, right.

00:24:35.300 | Is that they had taken this sprint methodology.

00:24:38.620 | That's very popular in software development.

00:24:40.740 | You say to a small number of programmers work on adding this feature for the next

00:24:45.500 | few days and do nothing else, and then let us know when you're done.

00:24:48.900 | And over at Google, they had adapted this to other types of work, not just programming.

00:24:53.020 | Let's just work on one thing as a group and just do that without

00:24:56.340 | distraction until it's done and make time.

00:24:58.780 | They then are generalizing this idea into personal productivity.

00:25:02.620 | How to you, you spread this idea into your own personal productivity practices.

00:25:07.340 | The key piece of that I want to pull out is the following design your

00:25:11.060 | days around focusing on what matters.

00:25:12.740 | Most the rest will work itself out.

00:25:15.380 | I think that's a key idea.

00:25:18.060 | Prioritize.

00:25:20.340 | I want to work on this thing that really matters.

00:25:22.220 | And maybe that means for a few hours every day, or maybe, uh, I put

00:25:25.500 | aside an entire day and do nothing but work on this thing that matters.

00:25:28.220 | And that can make you uncomfortable because of the emails you're missing

00:25:31.260 | and the task you could be crossing off your list, but Jake and John say,

00:25:34.660 | this is what's going to, this is the engine of your success.

00:25:37.700 | It's a really important stuff getting done.

00:25:39.780 | Well, everything else will work out.

00:25:41.860 | It'll work out.

00:25:43.180 | People won't notice they'll forget, but if you accomplished a core thing,

00:25:46.140 | you're supposed to do well, everything else will follow.

00:25:48.500 | I think it's a great idea.

00:25:49.500 | It's one that of course I preach in deep work.

00:25:52.140 | It's one I preach in my new book on slow productivity.

00:25:55.060 | And I think Jake and John have a lot of great examples to back it up.

00:25:57.660 | All right.

00:25:58.140 | One more book, one more idea.

00:25:59.700 | Final book comes from our friend, Laura Vanderkam, her personal

00:26:06.420 | productivity, classic 168 hours.

00:26:10.100 | That's the number of hours in a typical week.

00:26:12.780 | You have more time than you think.

00:26:14.860 | That's the subtitle kind of interesting.

00:26:17.460 | Tension with Oliver Berkman's 4,000 weeks.

00:26:21.220 | It's all about, you don't have that much time.

00:26:22.980 | So stop trying to do too much.

00:26:24.860 | And Laura's is you have more time than you think it's because

00:26:27.500 | we're operating on different scales.

00:26:28.780 | Here's the core idea from Laura's book.

00:26:30.540 | The core idea I want to, I want to pull out here.

00:26:32.620 | You're not working as much as you think.

00:26:35.100 | Your sense of overload comes from what you're doing with your work hours.

00:26:40.420 | This was the big surprising point from Laura's book is that she had a lot of

00:26:44.060 | people actually keep track of their time.

00:26:46.180 | She calls it the time diary method.

00:26:49.980 | People actually keep track of what did I do with every hour of my day.

00:26:53.940 | And then she went back and she studied these time diary logs.

00:26:56.740 | What she saw was there's often a big disconnect between how busy people

00:27:01.220 | think they are and how much work they're actually doing.

00:27:03.620 | So you'll ask someone, well, how much are you working?

00:27:05.420 | And they're like, look, I gotta be doing 60, 70 hour weeks.

00:27:07.660 | And you look at the time diary and say, well, no, you're

00:27:10.100 | working 35 to 40 hour weeks.

00:27:11.700 | Now, what do we take away from that?

00:27:14.100 | Well, we could just say, ah, suck it up.

00:27:16.260 | You're not really that busy, but no, the real message to take away from that is

00:27:19.100 | why, why do you feel like you're working so much?

00:27:23.740 | If even the time diary really says it's not actually that much.

00:27:26.260 | And it's because it's how we approach our work.

00:27:28.500 | It's this fragmented way we approach it.

00:27:31.500 | This is me throwing on my spin here, this switching back and forth

00:27:34.380 | rapidly between many different things.

00:27:36.100 | The cognitive tax of overload of your mind, knowing you have more things going

00:27:40.740 | on than you can even imagine completing this all stretches out and exaggerates

00:27:44.180 | our senses of busyness.

00:27:45.460 | So one of Laura's big messages are if you're more careful about your time.

00:27:49.020 | Organizing when you work on what being careful about what you bring on your

00:27:53.300 | plate, be careful about your systems.

00:27:54.900 | Without even having to substantially change much of what you're actually

00:27:58.940 | working on from a quantity standpoint, you can make yourself feel much less.

00:28:02.060 | Much less overworked.

00:28:03.380 | If you just get a little bit more intentional about your time, you might

00:28:06.580 | have more time to work with than you think.

00:28:08.340 | And this idea of course resonates with me as well.

00:28:11.820 | My multi-scale planning philosophy, multi-scale time management planning

00:28:17.100 | philosophy is a perfect way.

00:28:19.740 | It is built around actually confronting the reality of your work and your

00:28:23.020 | schedule and making the most of it.

00:28:24.460 | And it does make a big difference.

00:28:25.980 | And again, this is something I think the anti-productivity

00:28:29.540 | advocates often get wrong.

00:28:31.060 | They think about these systems or they think about books like Laura.

00:28:34.620 | As being focused on trying to fit more in.

00:28:37.540 | Oh, you have more time than you think.

00:28:39.700 | Great.

00:28:39.900 | We can fit in more work.

00:28:40.900 | That's not Laura's point.

00:28:42.020 | Her point is you have more time than you think.

00:28:43.940 | So if we get smarter about how we organize your work, you can be less stressed.

00:28:46.980 | Same thing with multi-scale productivity planning.

00:28:50.780 | The anti-productivity people will say, oh, the whole point of multi-scale time

00:28:54.700 | management is to try to fit more work in.

00:28:56.180 | That's not the case.

00:28:57.100 | It's about trying to take the work that you already have and make it more

00:29:00.220 | sustainable.

00:29:00.900 | The more you can control, the more you can turn down the volume of the stress

00:29:06.140 | and the overload.

00:29:07.340 | So anyways, Laura's book there is very valuable.

00:29:10.300 | All right.

00:29:11.100 | So Jesse, those are the eight books.

00:29:12.180 | There's so many other books that I really like.

00:29:14.060 | Yeah.

00:29:14.540 | If I'm omitting a book here, it's not because I don't think it's important.

00:29:17.460 | It's just, these were the first eight that came to mind.

00:29:19.500 | They're eight that have really big ideas I like.

00:29:21.620 | There's another eight more I could probably list.

00:29:23.740 | Yeah.

00:29:24.140 | There's also other ideas in each of these books.

00:29:26.900 | I'm just trying to pick out one idea in particular that I that I happen to like.

00:29:29.980 | We could do future books in future episodes.

00:29:31.940 | We really should.

00:29:32.580 | We really should.

00:29:33.180 | And of course, left out of this is my own books.

00:29:34.780 | Of course, those all have big ideas.

00:29:36.780 | So what we have now is we do have some questions that are all roughly orbiting

00:29:41.500 | this theme of productivity and productivity books and big productivity ideas.

00:29:44.940 | I mean, that's a broad topic.

00:29:45.940 | So we had no trouble finding those questions.

00:29:48.540 | Uh, before we get there though, I want to briefly mention one of the sponsors

00:29:51.500 | that makes this show possible.

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00:31:34.780 | I also want to talk about our friends at Henson shaving.

00:31:38.900 | This is the razor I use to get my famously close shave.

00:31:43.500 | I love Henson shaving because I love good tools.

00:31:46.140 | The Henson razor is a beautiful, well-manufactured tool.

00:31:50.380 | It's a precision precision.

00:31:54.740 | I don't know what the word is.

00:31:55.620 | What do you call the word?

00:31:56.540 | What's the word Jesse for carving something out of metal crafted forged.

00:32:02.340 | I don't know.

00:32:02.740 | Um, I don't know how they do it, but let's just say they precisely

00:32:08.340 | engineer these razors because this is the Henson's business.

00:32:11.020 | Uh, before they got involved in razors, they worked with.

00:32:14.180 | Aerospace parts manufacturing.

00:32:16.540 | We're talking about parts for the ISS or Mars rover.

00:32:19.140 | So they know how to engineer incredibly precise parts.

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00:32:23.700 | You put a single 10 cent safety razor blade into a Henson razor.

00:32:28.820 | You screw it in and it's so precisely milled or whatever the term is that the

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00:32:54.740 | razor, they get this beautiful shave every time this of course is cost effective as

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00:33:45.100 | Metalworking or soldering?

00:33:47.580 | Metalworking.

00:33:48.980 | Okay.

00:33:49.340 | I looked it up.

00:33:50.420 | Yeah.

00:33:50.740 | So they're, they're a precision metalworking at Henson shaving.

00:33:55.100 | I think we probably need like a metal precision metal mill in my maker lab.

00:33:59.260 | Yeah.

00:33:59.740 | So I could just mold aluminum.

00:34:01.020 | Yeah.

00:34:01.500 | And you can incorporate that in your light project.

00:34:04.900 | Custom aluminum precision parts for my light project.

00:34:08.940 | All right.

00:34:09.460 | Enough of that nonsense.

00:34:10.460 | Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:34:11.500 | Who do we have first?

00:34:12.380 | First question's from Diana.

00:34:14.740 | I'm a researcher and I'm trying to get better at time management.

00:34:18.180 | One issue I keep running up against is that I can't control nor anticipate when

00:34:22.620 | exactly I'll get that critical aha moment of insight for a project.

00:34:27.380 | I feel like the work that happens after the said aha moment is the most

00:34:31.300 | productive, but I obviously can't write, chase dead ends and mull over the RQ

00:34:36.380 | for an undetermined period of time.

00:34:37.780 | Why I'm struck on divine inspiration as an activity in my delivery plan.

00:34:43.300 | Do you have any advice?

00:34:44.540 | Well, Diana, this is a common question.

00:34:46.620 | What happens when you have a big idea and you need to work on it, but you

00:34:50.980 | already have a plan for the day and it doesn't involve you working for the next

00:34:53.980 | two hours, trying to chase down a big idea.

00:34:56.940 | Well, you have two options here.

00:34:58.060 | So option number one, if the idea is important, work on it.

00:35:01.860 | Because you have to remember if you're, let's say you're planning your day, using

00:35:06.340 | something like time block planning.

00:35:08.060 | Of course, check out timeblockplanner.com for my own second edition

00:35:12.300 | of the time block planner.

00:35:13.180 | But if you're time blocking your hours, it's easy to get into the mindset that

00:35:18.500 | you are playing a game where you win.

00:35:20.820 | If you never change your plan, if you build the perfect plan and you stick with

00:35:24.260 | the plan, and if you leave the plan, then you've lost, that's an easy game to fall

00:35:28.740 | into because our mind likes these simple binaries.

00:35:31.380 | I win.

00:35:32.340 | If I do this, I lose.

00:35:33.260 | If I do that, but it's not the point of time block play.

00:35:35.740 | Why are you planning the hours of your day so that you can have intention

00:35:39.100 | about how you spend your time?

00:35:40.420 | What are you trying to avoid by time blocking your day?

00:35:42.660 | Wasting particular time and energy doing low value activity for the moment or

00:35:49.700 | switching back and forth between a lot of things.

00:35:51.340 | You don't want to squander the time you put aside for work.

00:35:55.300 | You want to make the most out of it.

00:35:56.700 | So a time block plan gives you some intention.

00:35:58.740 | So what happens if a really good idea pops up?

00:36:02.020 | Well, working on that really good idea sounds like a very intentional use of

00:36:07.060 | your time as far as I'm concerned.

00:36:08.820 | That's not wasting your time.

00:36:10.620 | That's not squandering your time.

00:36:11.820 | That's not just being distracted and letting three hours go.

00:36:14.060 | That's an incredibly productive use of your time.

00:36:15.820 | I have an idea that's important to my work and I'm going to work on it.

00:36:20.140 | So the big idea comes up, work on it.

00:36:21.580 | And then when you're done working on it, next time you have a chance, cross out

00:36:25.820 | the remainder of your time block plan and build the best plan you can for

00:36:28.420 | the time that remains.

00:36:29.580 | That's it.

00:36:31.300 | That satisfies the goal of I'm being very intentional about my schedule.

00:36:35.620 | So once you leave that mindset that somehow not changing your time block plan

00:36:40.900 | is winning and instead say, what I'm trying to avoid is just not having a plan,

00:36:44.860 | then you'll feel completely fine about pursuing a big idea in the moment.

00:36:50.180 | All right.

00:36:50.380 | Now let's say here's option number two.

00:36:52.020 | Let's say it's an important idea, but it's not critical that you work on it in

00:36:56.380 | the moment.

00:36:57.060 | Your bigger concern is you don't want to forget it.

00:36:59.060 | Like, let's say, for example, you're working on a book in the background.

00:37:03.020 | Now, on a particular day, you have a pretty busy day that has nothing to do with

00:37:06.020 | your book.

00:37:06.460 | You have some meetings, you're trying to get progress on some work stuff that's

00:37:09.380 | due, and you have an insight right in the middle of this for a chapter that you're

00:37:13.380 | going to work on your book.

00:37:14.180 | Like, you know what?

00:37:14.780 | If I did this with this chapter, it's going to be much better.

00:37:18.100 | You don't want to forget that, but you also don't want to, in this case, it's not

00:37:21.700 | the best use of your time, the deep six, the rest of your work schedule to start

00:37:25.180 | working on your book.

00:37:25.900 | What you can do in these cases is have a place anywhere to capture notes about

00:37:32.060 | this.

00:37:32.260 | Take five minutes.

00:37:33.060 | Okay.

00:37:34.100 | Think about for chapter seven, this, this, this, this, this, this, and then just put

00:37:38.300 | a note in your capture system.

00:37:39.980 | Process my notes on the book chapter.

00:37:42.260 | So if you're using something like a time block planner, you just put it right

00:37:45.820 | there in the little task list.

00:37:47.260 | Remember, I wrote down notes and I don't care if you wrote the notes in a $500

00:37:51.020 | remarkable dedicated to books or in a text file that you just do on your desktop.

00:37:54.940 | The point is you have a capture system.

00:37:57.260 | You say process notes about books.

00:37:58.780 | And now you can move on and return back to your time block schedule because you

00:38:03.100 | know, at the end of the day, as you go through your shutdown routine, one of the

00:38:06.420 | things you're going to do is process all those tasks you've jotted down.

00:38:09.180 | And when you see the task about, uh, Hey, remember those notes I took on my book,

00:38:12.900 | you can either move that into your permanent task system to deal with later,

00:38:16.580 | or take some time right there to move those notes over to wherever you're

00:38:19.860 | working on your book so that you'll see them next time you work on them.

00:38:22.020 | And then that's handle.

00:38:23.580 | So if it's something that's important long-term, but not important that you

00:38:29.060 | work on it in the moment, this is where you just throw down the notes somewhere,

00:38:32.460 | put up placeholders, what David Allen would call a stake in the ground in your

00:38:36.660 | task system.

00:38:37.460 | So, you know, you won't forget it.

00:38:38.500 | So you can move your mind back a hundred percent to what you're working on.

00:38:41.500 | And you move on.

00:38:43.820 | All right.

00:38:45.100 | So Dan, don't be worried about plans changing.

00:38:47.220 | Uh, that's fine.

00:38:48.660 | What you want to do is be intentional.

00:38:50.500 | And if you have a lot of ideas, you don't want to work on at the time, just

00:38:54.300 | make sure your capture system and shutdown routines are up to up to code as they

00:38:58.700 | would say, because the key there is to make sure that this doesn't sit there

00:39:01.500 | like an open loop in your mind and distract you from the other work that

00:39:04.660 | you're returning to.

00:39:05.300 | All right.

00:39:07.540 | Who do we have next?

00:39:08.020 | Jesse.

00:39:08.340 | Next question is from John, a surgeon.

00:39:12.220 | Time block time blocking was always my safety net when my schedule got hectic

00:39:16.580 | as an undergrad or medical student, but it's nearly impossible to do now that

00:39:19.940 | I'm a surgeon surgeries get added or removed at a whim, new patients who need

00:39:23.980 | me to be seen immediately show up without notice, et cetera, et cetera.

00:39:27.940 | And this isn't just a one one-time thing.

00:39:30.460 | I would say 75% or more of my days are shaped on the fly.

00:39:34.100 | This variability is an addition to the sheer time burden of my job, pretty

00:39:38.060 | much 80 hours a week.

00:39:39.940 | I need a new strategy to help me get things done.

00:39:42.540 | I hate the list reactive way of things, but that's how I've been getting by.

00:39:46.660 | Well, John surgery is one of these jobs.

00:39:50.780 | There's other jobs, many of which are in medicine, but others that are in other

00:39:54.980 | fields that are by definition reactive.

00:39:57.820 | It's I'm a surgeon.

00:40:00.060 | If there is a surgical emergency, I have to go do this surgery.

00:40:05.100 | Uh, there's also then going to be suddenly post-op checkups and other

00:40:09.580 | things to get thrown on my schedule.

00:40:10.820 | So it sounds like you have a fundamentally reactive schedule.

00:40:13.620 | You're not gonna be able to time block that your days are going to be built around.

00:40:18.500 | Here is my major thing I have to do and being flexible.

00:40:23.300 | So what's the right thing to do in those cases is to simplify everything

00:40:27.540 | else you can about your job.

00:40:28.540 | If you have one of these fundamentally reactive jobs, you want to focus on doing

00:40:34.020 | these things in your case surgery, as well as possible and trying to minimize.

00:40:38.260 | Everything else you cannot, I mean, you can, but I'm going to say you should not

00:40:42.820 | take the mindset that you might've had as an undergrad or in med school, where I am

00:40:48.140 | going to establish my impressiveness by doing three or four different things.

00:40:52.300 | And you're gonna be so impressed that I'm, I'm doing my studies and running

00:40:56.180 | this organization and training for this mirror, I'm doing all these things at once.

00:40:58.980 | And your impressiveness, your impression of me is going to be driven by.

00:41:03.260 | The quantity of different things I do.

00:41:05.700 | You have to abandon that mindset.

00:41:07.580 | You're a surgeon.

00:41:08.260 | You want to be a good surgeon.

00:41:09.300 | You want your life outside of surgery to be as flexible as possible.

00:41:12.700 | So that if something pops up, you're like, this is what I'm doing today.

00:41:15.820 | This surgery.

00:41:17.460 | And this is a life where you're going to have downtime in between these things.

00:41:21.460 | Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility.

00:41:24.500 | That's what you want to be aiming for.

00:41:25.780 | The stuff you do have to get done.

00:41:27.540 | It's fine.

00:41:27.980 | You can tackle it day by day.

00:41:29.580 | I have a really good capture system for your tasks.

00:41:32.340 | Be like, uh, ongoing heuristics, flexible heuristics for regular work.

00:41:36.780 | Hey, if I could get three sessions a week in on my whatever duties as director of

00:41:41.340 | whatever lab at the hospital, I'll be fine.

00:41:43.380 | Uh, so that can be helpful too.

00:41:45.060 | Okay.

00:41:45.300 | This day I have room for one of these sessions.

00:41:47.100 | These two days I didn't.

00:41:48.460 | So I need to fit one in these last two days.

00:41:50.140 | So flexible heuristics, good capture systems for tasks, fit in work where

00:41:54.180 | you have time during the day.

00:41:55.380 | Don't overschedule yourself.

00:41:56.580 | Do all that, but keep your overall number of obligations small.

00:42:00.380 | You've already, you're a successful, impressive person.

00:42:02.900 | It's hard to be a surgeon.

00:42:03.740 | Do that.

00:42:04.100 | Well, don't do other things.

00:42:06.380 | Especially as you elaborated in the longer version of this question, you have a new,

00:42:10.700 | you're a, you have kids, they're new, you're, your family's young and growing.

00:42:15.180 | And I'm seeing in your elaborated version of this question, these like national

00:42:18.380 | organizations you're involved with, you got to get rid of all that.

00:42:20.580 | I'm already impressed with you for being a surgeon.

00:42:23.380 | So just do that well with huge flexibility.

00:42:25.660 | And that's what makes a job like that sustainable.

00:42:29.100 | If you try to do the other thing, I want to, uh, a huge high, high skill, high

00:42:34.140 | time demand, unpredictable job and do five or six other things, there's really

00:42:38.380 | no recourse to that except for you stay up really late, you work every weekend.

00:42:42.100 | And my point there, John, is why you're doing interesting work and

00:42:45.700 | helping the world by being a surgeon.

00:42:46.940 | Is it really so important that you, what become department head or at your

00:42:53.780 | hospital at a young age or something, you know, is to what end you're making a lot

00:42:58.420 | of money, you're doing something important.

00:42:59.620 | It's high skill is satisfying.

00:43:01.820 | So I've been increasingly pitching that to people that have

00:43:04.020 | fundamentally reactive jobs.

00:43:05.220 | I say, great, make your life easier.

00:43:06.660 | Make your life as easy as possible.

00:43:09.540 | Given the reality of the highly reactive job.

00:43:11.940 | That's pretty similar to the student advice you give to, for, you know, kids,

00:43:16.340 | like not doing too many activities outside of school and just getting best grades.

00:43:20.540 | Yeah.

00:43:20.820 | Don't do, uh, make your schedules easier.

00:43:23.260 | Yeah.

00:43:23.460 | It's like the number one.

00:43:24.580 | When I used to work with college students, give talks about college students,

00:43:27.460 | stress, the number one source of college students stress was

00:43:30.380 | schedules that were too hard.

00:43:32.380 | And there's very little you can do about a schedule.

00:43:34.380 | That's really, really hard.

00:43:35.620 | If you have two majors and nine activities and a job, there's nothing I could do to

00:43:41.100 | make that student's life sustainable.

00:43:42.500 | It's just too many things.

00:43:43.700 | Yeah.

00:43:44.060 | And I would say, what you got to do is do less.

00:43:45.700 | I used to have the slides when I would give a talk at this case study.

00:43:49.860 | I don't remember the guy's name.

00:43:51.420 | It started with, it was like TOEF or something like this.

00:43:53.460 | It was kind of weird.

00:43:54.100 | And he was a student and he had this, uh, this interesting case study where he had

00:43:59.020 | gone to a study abroad in Australia, I believe it was.

00:44:03.220 | So before he went to a study abroad in Australia, he was completely burnt out.

00:44:07.180 | And because he had multiple majors and all these clubs and a job, and he was

00:44:11.380 | really stressed out and he went to Australia and for a bunch of contingent

00:44:14.900 | reasons, uh, he couldn't get a, he couldn't get a job because he was

00:44:18.580 | from a different country.

00:44:19.420 | He couldn't get all the normal hard course load because you had to get majors

00:44:22.940 | approved and he couldn't get most of the courses approved.

00:44:25.100 | And it turned out to do activities, extracurricular activities.

00:44:28.500 | You had to pay for an activity card that he couldn't afford.

00:44:31.780 | So he was doing a, a under-scheduled course load, no activities, no job.

00:44:36.700 | It was this huge epiphany for him.

00:44:39.180 | He's like, wait a second.

00:44:40.060 | I just have more than enough time to focus on my courses.

00:44:42.980 | He crushed the courses because he had so much time to focus on them.

00:44:46.780 | Uh, the professors thought he was a star.

00:44:49.380 | So he comes back from the study abroad, cuts off all the activities, reduces his

00:44:54.180 | major, gives himself this huge schedule, a hugely open schedule, crushes his courses.

00:45:00.180 | His professors think he's a star and all these opportunities open up.

00:45:03.180 | And the slides I used to use was he took a snapshot of his calendar.

00:45:07.540 | From now at the time with his simplified schedule.

00:45:10.740 | And it was like course, course, empty day course, like just all this white.

00:45:15.300 | And then he used the time machine feature on his Mac to go back a year earlier and

00:45:18.820 | take a snapshot of his calendar on the same week from a couple of years before.

00:45:21.740 | And it was just, just completely full of stuff.

00:45:24.460 | And I used to show those two side by side.

00:45:26.780 | So yeah, doing fewer things is such a powerful tool.

00:45:31.140 | Uh, but you just get trained.

00:45:32.420 | I'm sure John, I'm kind of a surgeon.

00:45:33.820 | Yeah.

00:45:34.540 | Great grades, you know, went to a medical school, crushed it in medical school, got

00:45:39.420 | a good residency, got a good fellowship, always impressing everyone.

00:45:42.260 | And so you just have this mindset of, I do a lot of things.

00:45:45.300 | And that's what makes me impressive.

00:45:47.420 | But by the time you get to the thing you're going to do, you're going to be a

00:45:49.660 | surgeon, no, just do your surgery.

00:45:51.020 | Well,

00:45:52.060 | and engineer the rest of your life to be as livable as possible.

00:45:55.020 | Given that reality.

00:45:55.980 | Yep.

00:45:56.460 | Yeah.

00:45:56.740 | People don't often think that.

00:45:57.700 | All right, let's keep rolling.

00:45:59.700 | Next question's from Rachel.

00:46:02.020 | You've often mentioned how the business of books is to continually keep contact

00:46:06.220 | coming as the demand never ends.

00:46:07.940 | How should one couple this insight with the plethora of productivity and self

00:46:11.900 | help books that are constantly published?

00:46:14.300 | Can there be that many new ideas?

00:46:17.380 | Well, Rachel, my advice is every time you're tempted to buy a book on any topic,

00:46:23.300 | really, if you want to maximize your return, instead go and buy multiple copies of my

00:46:28.820 | books, because you know, you're not going to be let down by my books.

00:46:31.980 | Everyone should just buy my books again and again.

00:46:33.780 | Now, are we running out of ideas?

00:46:36.180 | Here's the thing, Rachel.

00:46:37.300 | Your premise is correct.

00:46:40.460 | So when you say here, the business of books is to continually keep content coming.

00:46:45.300 | It is true the point that publishers biggest issue is actually they don't have enough

00:46:49.780 | books to publish.

00:46:50.540 | Because there is a lot of books are bought each year.

00:46:54.220 | There's a lot of people buying books.

00:46:55.860 | The more books they can put out in some sense, the better.

00:46:59.900 | So why do they have a hard time getting enough books to fill their pipelines?

00:47:05.300 | Well, it's actually because their standards are high.

00:47:07.700 | Right.

00:47:08.740 | I mean, for a publisher to publish a book, they want it to be a good book.

00:47:12.060 | Well written with a good idea written by someone who makes sense that they wrote it.

00:47:15.820 | So this is why I'm saying if you can if you can cross that bar as an aspiring writer, I

00:47:20.940 | have something to say that people care about.

00:47:22.460 | I can write it well and I'm the right person to write it.

00:47:24.340 | You're not going to have that much of a hard time getting a book deal.

00:47:29.180 | Book publishers are not in the business of gatekeeping so much as in the business of

00:47:32.980 | desperately trying to find good stuff to publish.

00:47:35.700 | But what does that mean for the reader?

00:47:37.260 | Well, there's a lot of readers and there's a lot of genres.

00:47:41.300 | And so I would not worry that in your particular genre you care about, that there's

00:47:45.500 | going to be too many books.

00:47:46.580 | So let's consider productivity in particular.

00:47:49.180 | I think there's this there's this understanding, this vision of the world of

00:47:54.380 | productivity books.

00:47:55.540 | That a lot of people hold and I think is completely disconnected from reality.

00:48:01.020 | So if you talk to a lot of people, they're they're guests at the productivity book

00:48:06.660 | space is that there are hundreds of these books being published every year and most

00:48:12.420 | of them are saying you got to hustle.

00:48:14.180 | You got to do more things.

00:48:15.980 | Busyness is great.

00:48:17.620 | It's bad to not be not be working.

00:48:20.260 | How can you do more work?

00:48:21.700 | Right. You hear this this straw man vision of the productivity book industry is

00:48:26.180 | discussed all the time.

00:48:27.460 | I mean, people are always setting up like, you know, I'm so brave because I'm pushing

00:48:32.860 | back against all of those books that are saying the more tasks you do, the better.

00:48:37.020 | And I'm saying you should do less task.

00:48:38.540 | And I'm look, I might get killed for this, but I'm so brave.

00:48:42.220 | Here's the reality.

00:48:43.500 | No one's publishing that book.

00:48:45.780 | I don't remember the last time I've seen a book, I went over eight productivity books

00:48:50.540 | at the beginning of the show.

00:48:51.300 | None of them are saying, how do you do more work?

00:48:53.540 | How do you fit in more tasks?

00:48:54.900 | I can think of essentially, I don't know, one book that's ever really been about

00:48:59.380 | that. And there was this book called Extreme Productivity.

00:49:02.340 | And it was just a no nonsense guide for executives.

00:49:04.940 | Basically, look, executives to succeed, they have to do a lot of things.

00:49:09.260 | And here is how I, as an executive, balanced a bunch of different things and tried to

00:49:13.220 | fit more in because he was being honest.

00:49:15.180 | If you're a C-suite type, it helps.

00:49:17.100 | That's like the only book I can think of in the last 10 years that even was in the

00:49:21.380 | vicinity of saying, how do you do a lot more things?

00:49:24.100 | Also, the volume of books being published in the productivity space is pretty small.

00:49:29.380 | I know this space very well.

00:49:32.180 | I know all the writers, all the major writers in the space.

00:49:34.660 | I know the major editors in the space.

00:49:36.140 | This is not a space that has a huge number, especially if we're talking about big

00:49:41.100 | publishers, they're high quality titles like books coming out of Portfolio at

00:49:45.820 | Penguin, for example.

00:49:46.980 | You're looking at these books.

00:49:48.540 | There's not that many that are coming out.

00:49:50.060 | And they tend to be pretty thoughtful and have a pretty specific point of view.

00:49:54.140 | You know, like I have my book on slow productivity coming out.

00:50:00.660 | The last book I wrote that was about work productivity, I guess you go back three

00:50:04.500 | years to get like a world without email.

00:50:06.220 | But really, that was more a critique of work.

00:50:07.860 | You got to go back six years before that or five years to get to deep work.

00:50:13.300 | I mean, these books don't come out that often.

00:50:15.460 | So, Rachel, I wouldn't worry about it.

00:50:16.980 | If you look at books about work and productivity that top tier publishers are

00:50:22.060 | publishing, these are thoughtful titles.

00:50:24.180 | There's not that many of them.

00:50:25.260 | Buy the ones that resonate.

00:50:27.420 | They're going to have ideas that are good.

00:50:29.700 | It's just simply not the case that these big publishers are publishing nonsense.

00:50:33.060 | They're just not the 10 ways to get more done does not exist as a major

00:50:37.740 | publication book.

00:50:38.620 | No one is publishing that right now.

00:50:40.220 | It does not exist.

00:50:41.700 | So I think you're OK, Rachel.

00:50:43.900 | This might not be the case in other genres, but the productivity genre, I think, is

00:50:47.540 | not as crowded or as poor quality as you might fear.

00:50:50.540 | It's true, you know, it's to the point now where if you publish the book that was

00:50:56.420 | like 10 ways to get a lot more done, that book might actually do well because it

00:51:00.460 | would be so different than everything.

00:51:01.780 | I mean, every book right now in productivity always starts the same way.

00:51:05.860 | I'm not one of these guys telling you the, you know, they get more done and

00:51:09.940 | hustle. Where are these guys?

00:51:11.780 | I cannot find these books.

00:51:13.500 | I think if you leaned into the opposite and are just like, do more stuff because

00:51:17.380 | that's what matters.

00:51:18.380 | 50 tips.

00:51:19.220 | The contrarianism of that actually, ironically, paradoxically, might make that

00:51:23.380 | book sell really well.

00:51:24.620 | Well, one of those guys you could probably find, you know, from those like on

00:51:28.220 | YouTube with those.

00:51:29.220 | They're on YouTube.

00:51:30.060 | Yeah.

00:51:30.540 | Yeah.

00:51:31.100 | YouTube.

00:51:31.500 | Stuff like that.

00:51:32.060 | Social media.

00:51:32.780 | YouTube has this weird productivity culture, but YouTube has a lot of weird

00:51:38.260 | cultures because there's a lot of people publishing videos on there.

00:51:41.020 | There's a whole culture on there of people who just work like 10 hours and they

00:51:44.660 | film it.

00:51:45.100 | So here's a 10 hour video of me working.

00:51:47.540 | Yeah.

00:51:48.140 | Which is.

00:51:48.340 | That's what I was thinking about.

00:51:49.540 | But YouTube just does this on every topic.

00:51:51.580 | On every topic, there's going to be a subculture where people push a topic to an

00:51:55.060 | extreme because that makes for interesting watching.

00:51:57.020 | I mean, it's every topic.

00:51:58.060 | If you're in the bread baking, you can find a whole YouTube subculture about, uh,

00:52:02.820 | I'm a hundred loafer.

00:52:03.780 | I bake a hundred loaves a day, you know, or I bake the biggest bread you've ever

00:52:07.220 | seen.

00:52:07.580 | It's just extremes work well on YouTube.

00:52:10.100 | So every topic has a subculture of extremes, but that does not stand in for how the

00:52:14.260 | publishing industry thinks about productivity.

00:52:15.780 | But if you take your advice, you like, we never see it because like we're not on

00:52:19.700 | social media and we have those YouTube blockers.

00:52:21.860 | That's true.

00:52:22.540 | And, but the authors that write those other books probably do see it because they

00:52:25.700 | probably on social media.

00:52:26.900 | Yeah, that's right.

00:52:27.700 | You're right.

00:52:27.980 | Those of us writing these books, we're not as seen on YouTube with like, here's a

00:52:32.100 | video of me just working a little bit and then going and doing something else.

00:52:34.700 | It's not that interesting, I guess.

00:52:36.220 | I'm hanging out with my kid because I didn't work that much today.

00:52:40.140 | Oh, well.

00:52:41.300 | All right.

00:52:42.420 | What do we got?

00:52:42.780 | Let's get a couple more in here.

00:52:43.780 | Here's a question from Kyle.

00:52:47.740 | Your conversations about the deep life remind me some of the seven habits of

00:52:51.580 | highly effective people.

00:52:52.620 | And in particular, the goal to start with the end in mind.

00:52:55.700 | Was Covey an influence of your thinking?

00:52:58.220 | Well, Kyle, very perceptive because we talked about this in the opening segment of

00:53:03.140 | today's episode.

00:53:04.060 | Yes, I think Covey influenced me and a lot of people who are in this sort of

00:53:09.340 | humanistic productivity space that's become so popular recently.

00:53:12.420 | His early writing that book about starting with the end in mind.

00:53:17.940 | Figure out what you're trying to do in the different roles of your life and then

00:53:22.420 | work backwards to figure out how your activities can be organized to support

00:53:26.260 | those visions.

00:53:26.940 | I think it's really important.

00:53:28.060 | It grounded productivity as a means towards a more philosophically rich end.

00:53:34.260 | And I think that has reemerged in our current moment of humanistic productivity

00:53:38.860 | where people are now thinking about all of this type of thinking as a way to

00:53:42.820 | intentionally craft your life.

00:53:44.420 | And so, you know, you see Covey's influence in so many important books in this

00:53:47.860 | space.

00:53:48.180 | Tim Ferriss, I think that's that's very Covey influenced.

00:53:52.020 | We're seeing it certainly in something like 4000 Weeks or Oliver Berkman's book,

00:53:57.300 | right again, is very Covey influence.

00:53:59.060 | You only have so much time.

00:53:59.940 | What do you want to do with it?

00:54:00.740 | So I think that's a good question.

00:54:04.500 | And yes, I think Covey, which I read young, definitely influenced me that you need a

00:54:08.900 | purpose for your productivity or you're going to find yourself in this sort of

00:54:13.620 | peak 2006 productivity prawn, making your Mac Macintosh macro so that your KTG

00:54:21.460 | KGTD configuration can automatically pull tasks from your quick search, quick

00:54:26.380 | silver taskbar.

00:54:28.660 | You just end up in that world of just optimizing because you think optimizing is

00:54:32.380 | fun or productivity systems are like hot rods.

00:54:35.260 | It's just you just get fun and tuning them up for the sake of tuning them up, not

00:54:39.500 | because it helps you get from here to where you're trying to go.

00:54:42.500 | And that's fun for some people.

00:54:43.740 | But that's where you end up if you don't ground productivity, bigger vision.

00:54:48.660 | And Covey helped me do that.

00:54:50.060 | It's a good book.

00:54:50.940 | I recommend people, if you haven't read it, read it.

00:54:52.820 | It's not what you necessarily think.

00:54:54.780 | All right, Jesse, let's let's do one more.

00:54:57.740 | We got time.

00:54:58.300 | We have a question from Carissa.

00:55:00.740 | I really like the concept of the deep life stack and especially the emphasis that is

00:55:04.940 | the iterative process rather than a linear process.

00:55:07.380 | Does establishing discipline count if the discipline comes through an external

00:55:11.460 | pressure rather than from a self-imposed structure?

00:55:13.940 | I went back to school for my master's in my 30s and started off working a full

00:55:18.980 | time job simultaneously.

00:55:20.340 | This forced me into a routine where I had to be productive in the evenings instead

00:55:24.140 | of leaning into my usual sloth habits like watching TV.

00:55:27.580 | Since finishing my degree and returning back to work, I've realized that unless I

00:55:32.140 | have an external pressure, then I have little sense of urgency that pressures me

00:55:35.260 | to consistently commit to an activity.

00:55:37.460 | So I'm not sure if I established discipline for myself, but have shown myself that I

00:55:42.260 | can work even when I'm tired and that the small, consistent effort over time can

00:55:46.740 | yield results.

00:55:47.660 | Well, as we talk about on the show and when we talk about what we talk about, the

00:55:51.340 | deep life stack, discipline is an identity.

00:55:54.660 | So your goal is to convince yourself that you're a disciplined person, by which we

00:56:00.940 | mean someone who can make effort towards something important, even if in the short

00:56:06.340 | term, it's not fun or even if the short term, there's no pressure to have to do so.

00:56:10.340 | So transforming your self identity into a disciplined person is the foundation on

00:56:15.180 | which you could do all sorts of cool stuff in your life.

00:56:17.060 | So the exposure to discipline you had by your degree program is useful.

00:56:21.820 | It showed you what it's like to have a life that has more discipline in it.

00:56:27.460 | OK, I got to work, I got to follow a schedule, I can't just do what I want to

00:56:30.220 | do. So that's useful.

00:56:32.860 | That's no longer a mystery.

00:56:34.220 | But if you want to fully transition your self identity to one of a disciplined

00:56:38.980 | person, the next step and an unavoidable step is introducing some things you do for

00:56:44.700 | no other reason than you think it's important.

00:56:46.740 | So you do need to have some disciplined pursuits for which there is not external

00:56:52.940 | pressure. You do need to convince yourself, I will deny myself this or pursue this or

00:56:59.460 | do this thing, but I don't really feel like doing it today on a consistent basis.

00:57:02.700 | Based purely on my own vision for what I want for my life, not because I'm going to

00:57:06.420 | fail out of this course or not because my boss is going to get mad.

00:57:08.780 | So you still have that step ahead of you.

00:57:11.100 | If you're not, if you're worried about it, I mean, follow what I talk about.

00:57:14.660 | We talk about the deep life stack.

00:57:15.900 | Start with some keystone habits, two to three things covering two to three different

00:57:20.100 | areas of your life.

00:57:21.260 | Tractable, not trivial, but also tractable.

00:57:27.420 | So not super easy, but not really, really hard.

00:57:29.820 | Find that sweet spot in the middle.

00:57:31.500 | Make it three different parts of your life, a professional thing, a health and fitness

00:57:34.380 | thing, and either a hobby or social connection thing.

00:57:36.940 | And get those three keystone habits going.

00:57:40.500 | That's how you begin to give yourself this self-efficacious identity of discipline.

00:57:47.380 | I can do this even when I'm not being forced to.

00:57:49.580 | So non-trivial, tractable, keystone habits covering a couple different areas.

00:57:54.380 | Do that for a month or two, and then you can start layering in something that's a

00:57:58.260 | little bit more ambitious, a more progress towards a more ambitious, self-driven

00:58:03.340 | pursuit. Do that for a while, and your self-identity is going to flip.

00:58:07.140 | When you see yourself as a disciplined person, everything becomes possible.

00:58:12.220 | And that's why I push that as the first step in moving towards the deep life.

00:58:16.140 | It's not making the big decisions.

00:58:17.700 | It's not buying the Peloton or moving to the country.

00:58:20.300 | It starts with these small habits that you practice doing for no other reason than

00:58:24.820 | you think they're important for you and your vision of your life.

00:58:27.060 | If you're someone who's willing to put an effort now to shape a vision for what

00:58:31.260 | you want in the future, there's a lot that becomes available.

00:58:33.940 | All right.

00:58:36.180 | Uh, we've got a final segment coming up here.

00:58:38.180 | I'm going to talk about the books I read in August, but first I want to mention

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01:01:58.900 | I don't have it with me right now.

01:02:00.020 | Uh, I wanted to have a backup phone that was not a smartphone.

01:02:04.340 | For periods where I was doing long bits of disconnected deep work, but needed to

01:02:08.140 | be reachable in an emergency.

01:02:10.140 | So I just bought a phone, a flip phone off Amazon.

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01:02:13.540 | Mint Mobile is how I put service on that $15 a month.

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01:02:41.580 | And Jesse just found the phone.

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01:02:57.780 | So there you go.

01:02:58.860 | I just have to hold this.

01:03:00.180 | Jesse, this needs to be in a holster hanging off my belt.

01:03:03.180 | Yeah.

01:03:03.780 | That's what I'm missing or into my fanny pack, but I'm thinking like in a holster

01:03:08.180 | off my belt next to my fanny pack.

01:03:10.140 | While you're installing the lights.

01:03:11.820 | While I'm installing the lights, because I'm an old man and metal working and metal

01:03:15.660 | soldering or whatever you looked up soldering my own razors.

01:03:19.260 | Oh my.

01:03:20.460 | All right.

01:03:20.820 | Uh, final segment.

01:03:22.500 | Hey, we're, we're full of books today.

01:03:24.020 | We should have been really informally sponsored by people's books at

01:03:26.780 | Tacoma park today, because we're just talking about books all day.

01:03:28.740 | Yeah.

01:03:29.340 | I'm just in a book mood.

01:03:30.260 | Our final segment, like I do every month is I talk about the five

01:03:33.980 | books I read the month before.

01:03:35.700 | So we're in September now.

01:03:37.500 | So I should be reading about the books I read in August 2023.

01:03:42.220 | All right.

01:03:43.020 | So these were all.

01:03:43.980 | Mainly read when I was still up in Hanover at the Montgomery house

01:03:48.060 | as part of my Montgomery fellowship.

01:03:49.700 | This is important because two of these books were written by past Montgomery

01:03:54.300 | fellows and the copies I read were signed copies of the books that were there on

01:03:59.060 | the bookshelf at the Montgomery house.

01:04:01.100 | So the first one of those was at home in the universe by the system biologist,

01:04:07.220 | Stuart Kaufman, former Montgomery fellow, former MacArthur genius grant winner.

01:04:13.060 | This is a public facing book about, uh, he does a lot of work on self

01:04:17.860 | organization, how complex systems can arise in an emergent fashion.

01:04:22.780 | How, for example, if you have enough reactive chemicals, just

01:04:25.740 | mixed together in a soup, there's a high chance that, um, uh, among these

01:04:30.380 | interactions is going to emerge a self-sustaining auto-catalytic system.

01:04:33.740 | His work ties connections between biology and complexity theory

01:04:39.340 | and other types of mathematics.

01:04:41.700 | It was, I love this book.

01:04:42.660 | I'm a nerd for that stuff.

01:04:43.700 | Uh, as a theorist, as a computer scientist, I've done a reasonable

01:04:47.140 | amount of work at the intersection of algorithm theory and biological systems.

01:04:50.540 | So this was speaking my language and I liked that it was a signed copy and

01:04:54.220 | knowing that this, this guy Kaufman was in this house back in the nineties.

01:04:58.420 | Thinking about these thoughts.

01:05:00.140 | It's like a book I read was the soul of an octopus by Si Montgomery.

01:05:07.100 | I believe lives in New Hampshire, Vermont.

01:05:10.220 | I think maybe New Hampshire.

01:05:11.860 | Um, this book, I picked it up at bookstore, a still North bookstore

01:05:17.380 | up in Hanover, New Hampshire.

01:05:18.500 | Shout out.

01:05:18.980 | I picked it up randomly.

01:05:20.460 | It's a science nature book that got a lot of acclaim.

01:05:23.660 | I think it was a finalist for a national book award.

01:05:25.580 | Won some other nature science writing specific awards.

01:05:29.380 | It was not what I expected.

01:05:31.380 | So I thought this was going to be a real deep dive on, on how octopuses, uh,

01:05:38.660 | ink and their brains and, and their, their evolution and their cool features.

01:05:43.220 | And there was a lot of this, but really the core of this book is that Si it's,

01:05:46.420 | it's a, it's a novelistic look at the human characters.

01:05:49.540 | The book is actually about all of these interesting, often in some ways, um,

01:05:54.500 | broken human characters who found healing through interactions with this animal.

01:06:00.780 | So Si is spending a lot of time at the Boston aquarium, the

01:06:04.780 | new England aquarium in Boston.

01:06:06.140 | And it's, it's the, the, uh, the volunteers there, the person

01:06:09.940 | in charge of this exhibit, you get this novelistic look at their inner life.

01:06:13.980 | And how these, their interactions with octopuses in some

01:06:18.380 | sense, healed them or saved them.

01:06:19.580 | So it's a book about people and the octopuses in the book are there to

01:06:25.380 | draw out this kind of nuanced picture of humans and life and meaning.

01:06:29.060 | And it's like, oh, I see why this book won all these awards.

01:06:31.220 | It wasn't what I thought.

01:06:32.860 | So that it's a really cool book.

01:06:33.940 | Soul of an octopus.

01:06:35.380 | The only thing that's a little weird about it, and maybe I'm just alone about this.

01:06:39.380 | The way Si talks about being, uh, touched by an octopus.

01:06:44.620 | So there's a lot of these, a lot of time is spent at new England aquarium.

01:06:48.060 | The octopuses would come over and like wrap their

01:06:50.220 | tentacles around your arm.

01:06:51.660 | The way she talks about this is that it's just self-evidently the

01:06:55.860 | coolest, best thing you could ever do.

01:06:57.300 | It's like, is there anything better than having octopus

01:07:01.380 | tentacles wrapped around your arms?

01:07:02.740 | I mean, it's, it's almost weird to the degree to which she fetishizes

01:07:07.700 | being touched by octopuses as this like self-evident thing.

01:07:11.660 | It's like, you know, um, uh, combing the mane of your pony type, just

01:07:17.180 | like what could be better and it does not hit me that way I like this is weird

01:07:21.620 | and gross and the octopus is going to face suck my face, it's going to pull my

01:07:26.020 | arms in and rip my nose off with his beak.

01:07:28.380 | I would be terror.

01:07:29.020 | It's weird and slimy and they're hard to get off.

01:07:31.180 | So that's the only thing that was really weird about this is like, I don't think

01:07:33.700 | Si made the case that this is actually something that normal people like.

01:07:36.940 | Having octopus.

01:07:37.980 | She's like immediately in the book, she's obsessed.

01:07:40.700 | I got it.

01:07:41.860 | I had to get back.

01:07:42.620 | I had to get back and have another encounter with the octopus.

01:07:45.020 | So I, I, that caught my attention.

01:07:46.380 | Uh, the meal seemed weird and strange.

01:07:48.700 | I'd be afraid of an octopus, but anyways, really good book.

01:07:51.380 | The next book was not good at all.

01:07:53.620 | One of the worst books I've read recently.

01:07:57.260 | But you finished it.

01:07:58.180 | I yeah, I got it from the Hanover library.

01:08:01.140 | I was like, Oh my God, I'm just going to finish this.

01:08:03.940 | All right.

01:08:05.220 | I feel bad.

01:08:05.820 | Uh, I met him once, but he's not going to listen to this.

01:08:09.100 | That book was abduction by Robin cook.

01:08:14.140 | Not a good book.

01:08:15.260 | I like Robin cook.

01:08:16.660 | This is the first time ever that you've talked about a book like this.

01:08:20.060 | I just didn't like this book.

01:08:21.620 | So, so this was, he wrote this in the early two thousands.

01:08:24.700 | I don't know.

01:08:24.900 | He's phoning it in Robin cook.

01:08:26.300 | Uh, you know, obviously writes typically medical thrillers.

01:08:30.020 | His first book, which I read earlier this year and talked on the show is fantastic.

01:08:34.220 | His thriller coma is a fantastic thriller.

01:08:37.220 | Uh, most of his books are medical thrillers.

01:08:39.900 | He was a former doctor and he lives on Beacon Hill and writes these cool books.

01:08:44.820 | I really like him as a writer.

01:08:46.140 | I went to hear him talk at the Beacon Hill civic society once.

01:08:49.020 | And I, I like a lot of his books.

01:08:50.540 | This book is so weird.

01:08:52.180 | It's okay.

01:08:53.380 | Here's what it's about.

01:08:54.180 | And this is, um, this is, I kept thinking early on, like, this is going to like,

01:08:57.940 | it's going to be in their head and it's going to shift.

01:08:59.420 | No.

01:08:59.580 | Uh, people are in a submarine.

01:09:02.900 | They're doing deep sea drill repair or something like that.

01:09:06.820 | Right.

01:09:07.100 | Which is fine.

01:09:08.060 | He knows, uh, cook knows about this world.

01:09:09.940 | He was involved in early Navy experiments with deep sea diving.

01:09:13.100 | He was on submarine.

01:09:13.820 | So all these details are cool.

01:09:15.180 | Um, they get sucked down this sort of vent at the bottom of the ocean.

01:09:19.620 | Okay.

01:09:20.020 | And discover that there is a race of people who live between the earth's like

01:09:28.100 | crust and mantle in a giant underwater underground civilization.

01:09:32.660 | And they've been there for hundreds of thousands of years.

01:09:34.300 | People just live under the earth.

01:09:36.580 | We didn't know about it.

01:09:38.220 | And they, uh, they all speak English and, um, they have all this technology.

01:09:45.580 | And basically these people are just down in this world of people

01:09:48.740 | who live underneath the earth.

01:09:49.780 | They don't need sunscreen.

01:09:51.220 | They don't need sunscreen.

01:09:52.540 | Um, it's just preposterous and nothing really interesting to have.

01:09:57.140 | It's just, uh, it, it's just the craziest thing.

01:10:00.180 | And he doesn't like lean into it.

01:10:01.780 | It's not a metaphor for things.

01:10:03.340 | It's not, no, it's just that here we are.

01:10:04.780 | It's under the earth.

01:10:05.340 | It's like very unimaginative.

01:10:07.620 | They're like, they wear togas.

01:10:09.180 | And you know, the coolest thing about it is like when their bodies are going to

01:10:12.900 | die, they can transfer their brains into like a new body or something.

01:10:15.580 | And there's like some of the guys, the divers who got stuck down there, these

01:10:19.340 | like completely caricatured drunken oafs and they kill some people and they're

01:10:22.940 | hiding them in the freezer and like, we have to escape.

01:10:25.420 | I mean, people living under the secret race, living under the earth,

01:10:30.020 | and it's just all played straight.

01:10:31.340 | I don't know.

01:10:32.460 | I think it was funny then.

01:10:33.220 | It's not good.

01:10:35.340 | And there's like, oh, I guess there's just a hidden race of people live under

01:10:37.500 | the earth.

01:10:37.820 | All right, moving on.

01:10:39.460 | It's just so stupid.

01:10:40.780 | I like Robin cook.

01:10:42.820 | Do not like that book.

01:10:44.460 | Um, all right.

01:10:46.820 | Another Montgomery fellow book.

01:10:48.180 | I read the F the affluent society by John Kenneth Galbraith.

01:10:52.060 | So his sort of famous work of, uh, so junk has Galbraith is from that sort of,

01:11:00.060 | uh, a generation of, of highly trained advisors from the Kennedy era.

01:11:03.700 | I think he went on to be the, our ambassador to India at some point,

01:11:07.500 | economist did a lot of thinking on sort of, um, liberal economic theory.

01:11:12.260 | There's this famous book he wrote in the fifties called the affluent society,

01:11:15.940 | where he's saying essentially now that the U S we're, we're, we're wealthy,

01:11:19.140 | right?

01:11:19.420 | Uh, we have to rethink our economic policy as a, as a, as a wealthy

01:11:24.900 | superpower, the, we, we need to rethink how we think about our economic policy

01:11:28.980 | than the way we might've thought about it before.

01:11:30.500 | So it's a public facing economic analysis book.

01:11:32.940 | He was a Montgomery fellow and they had a version that came out in the seventies

01:11:38.020 | and nineties.

01:11:38.500 | So he's, you know, he was old then, you know, read a signed copy of it.

01:11:41.260 | It's interesting.

01:11:41.860 | People have longer attention spans back then.

01:11:44.820 | Um, he just, it's so, uh, magisterial and just, I'm just going to explain these

01:11:49.860 | things.

01:11:50.300 | Uh, I was really taken by the degree to when you're writing these books in the

01:11:53.940 | fifties, you did not feel the need to hold a reader's hand.

01:11:57.180 | Okay.

01:11:58.180 | I've got, here's my big point.

01:11:59.900 | I'm going to get to this point in these three chapters.

01:12:01.860 | Okay.

01:12:02.060 | Part two is all about this.

01:12:03.140 | No, it's like long essays.

01:12:04.820 | And as you read it, you begin to draw out of it, these different ideas he has.

01:12:08.300 | It's more discursive and slower than more modern idea writing.

01:12:11.980 | Um, but it was a good book and I liked that it was a signed copy.

01:12:14.540 | It made me feel connected.

01:12:15.420 | All right.

01:12:16.180 | Final book I read was, uh, Lee Bargo's.

01:12:19.340 | Is that how you spell her name?

01:12:21.420 | I feel like I have that wrong.

01:12:22.340 | Ninth house.

01:12:23.900 | Can you look that up, Jesse, the book ninth house.

01:12:26.340 | I want to make sure I'm saying her name right.

01:12:28.500 | This was a novel.

01:12:29.460 | So I started reading this up at Dartmouth because this is about Yale, but it's about,

01:12:34.580 | uh, what if the secret societies at Yale actually had knew how to do magic.

01:12:41.780 | And it was like dark kind of bad magic.

01:12:44.900 | And so all these societies were hiding all this magic and there's like a murder

01:12:48.340 | mystery and the main character is part of this house.

01:12:51.660 | It's supposed to just supervise the other houses.

01:12:54.420 | Um, and it's like, it's a, it turns out this is a genre called dark university.

01:12:58.180 | I was like, this is cool.

01:12:59.140 | We're up at Dartmouth.

01:13:00.100 | Dartmouth has a secret societies.

01:13:02.020 | We were showing the boys the tombs, which is a secret society.

01:13:06.340 | Uh, there's a concrete Egyptian tomb.

01:13:10.900 | And it's unclear how you even get in.

01:13:12.820 | And it's like one of the secret societies at Dartmouth, you get tapped to be in the

01:13:15.460 | tombs and then you go do secret things in this building and you know, um, oh, uh,

01:13:20.420 | Bardugo, I said that wrong.

01:13:22.500 | Lee Bardugo.

01:13:23.460 | Sorry about that.

01:13:24.980 | I thought that would be cool.

01:13:25.780 | Like a thriller set in Ivy league school and has magic.

01:13:28.380 | I want to get ready for Halloween, you know?

01:13:29.940 | And so it was cool.

01:13:31.180 | It's here's the thing.

01:13:32.220 | I don't know these genres very well.

01:13:33.660 | It is very dark.

01:13:34.740 | So the main character of this book, um, a young woman who can see ghost.

01:13:39.340 | Gets beat the hell.

01:13:42.100 | I mean, all throughout this book, I guess that's just part of the genre, but just

01:13:45.220 | as sometimes as ghosts doing it, sometimes it's people doing it.

01:13:48.500 | I mean, she's always getting slammed into things and beat.

01:13:51.020 | It's a weird, I guess that's just part of the genre.

01:13:53.860 | It's like they, they, um, materialized trauma into like big, obvious physical

01:13:59.940 | trauma as a way of, I don't know, but I like the magic systems in the plot.

01:14:05.140 | And it was, it was kind of cool.

01:14:06.380 | It took Yale and made it into this really dark thing.

01:14:08.900 | It gave me an idea for a similar book for Dartmouth.

01:14:11.300 | So I want to plant this mind.

01:14:12.940 | If there's any dark university novelist who went to Dartmouth, I think it'd be,

01:14:17.780 | you could, you could definitely have a book that went back and forth.

01:14:21.100 | Between the founding of Dartmouth.

01:14:23.580 | So this is in the 17, uh, sixties when Eliezer Wheelock was, they were there.

01:14:29.580 | This was just dark woods by the Connecticut.

01:14:31.540 | There was like a road that went through here in one Tavern and they were here

01:14:34.740 | trying to cut down these trees and build a log cabin, the start Dartmouth in the

01:14:40.580 | middle of the New Hampshire, New Hampshire woods, middle of nowhere.

01:14:43.940 | Can't you imagine a book where you're telling that story and something dark

01:14:48.860 | happens, you know, like they come across some sort of like dark evil.

01:14:52.700 | And then the other part of it is modern day.

01:14:54.620 | And someone's like uncovering on the Dartmouth campus, a modern student, the,

01:14:58.620 | the clues that have been left behind by Eliezer Wheelock and you know, the, the

01:15:02.460 | old buildings and inside Bartlett tower and you go back and forth and there's

01:15:06.020 | some sort of like dark magic that's released.

01:15:07.580 | There we go.

01:15:08.620 | So someone should write that book.

01:15:10.340 | So Leah Bardugo who wrote ninth house and she went to Yale.

01:15:14.700 | So she's sort of like really drawing from her experience there.

01:15:17.060 | So there you go.

01:15:18.900 | That's what I read in August.

01:15:21.580 | All right.

01:15:21.820 | That's a lot of books.

01:15:23.620 | By my count, we've talked about, and I'm looking at my number here, all the books.

01:15:27.100 | I think that's the right summary of how many books we talked about today.

01:15:29.620 | So I don't know, go buy some books, be inspired.

01:15:32.580 | Uh, we'll be back next week with another episode, maybe with a few less books to

01:15:36.740 | talk about, or maybe even more, but until then, as always stay deep.

01:15:41.820 | Hey, it's Cal here.

01:15:44.900 | If you'd like this discussion today about ideas for deeper living, then I

01:15:50.260 | think you'll also like episode 252, where I lay out the details of my deep life

01:15:57.700 | stack, but I thought this would be a great time to beta test my, my more

01:16:00.980 | complete understanding of the deep life.

01:16:02.860 | So we'll call today's deep question.

01:16:04.580 | How do I rebuild my life into something deeper?

8 Productivity Books To Change Your Life. Here's What Actually Works. | Cal Newport

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