This Idea Will Make You Unstoppable. (How To Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals)

00:00:00.000 | So today I want to talk about a common feature that comes up when you study the lives of

00:00:05.040 | people who have embraced depth, that is, they are living deep lives.

00:00:10.560 | And this common feature is they often are notably good at something valuable, right?

00:00:16.640 | So if you can be a 10x coder or throw a baseball that's hard to hit or write in a way that

00:00:22.360 | is compulsively readable, your options for cultivating a remarkable existence expand

00:00:28.280 | significantly, right?

00:00:30.860 | Because it's rewarding to be good at something.

00:00:34.000 | Humans crave mastery.

00:00:35.840 | It can provide you financial independence, which gives you a lot of control over how

00:00:39.720 | you live and work.

00:00:40.920 | You can shape the rhythms of your life in unique and interesting ways.

00:00:44.660 | And mastery tends to open up interesting varieties and interesting opportunities of the type

00:00:48.600 | that makes your life itself more interesting.

00:00:51.400 | Let me be specific about it because I was just talking to him the other day.

00:00:55.080 | Let's consider my friend, the writer, Ryan Holiday.

00:00:59.440 | He got very good at pragmatic nonfiction writing.

00:01:01.680 | In fact, he basically, over the last decade or so, revolutionized how the genre of pragmatic

00:01:08.280 | nonfiction can function in the internet age.

00:01:11.600 | So I went down to Texas last spring to visit him, and he has built this really interesting

00:01:16.480 | life.

00:01:17.580 | So him and his wife own this really cool bookstore, The Painted Porch, in a quaint town in Texas

00:01:22.560 | that's about 30 miles outside of Austin.

00:01:25.440 | He works in an office suite that's up above this coolly decorated bookstore, and his team

00:01:30.340 | works up there.

00:01:31.560 | He records his podcast next door.

00:01:33.580 | They bought the building next door.

00:01:35.000 | It has a generic storefront, and then behind it is this beautiful studio.

00:01:38.600 | Behind that is the space where he has his editors and graphics people are all working.

00:01:42.400 | They have this back porch behind.

00:01:44.920 | I went for a nice walk while I was there.

00:01:46.600 | You can just walk from this building down to the river, and there's this long path you

00:01:50.400 | can walk on.

00:01:51.840 | People come from all over to just hang out at this bookstore.

00:01:55.920 | There's a steady stream of fascinating writers, athletes, and actors that make the pilgrimage

00:02:00.680 | there to hang out with Ryan and record in his studio, and when he wants some more quiet,

00:02:04.960 | he retreats right outside of town to his 50-acre property where there's cattle and a pond,

00:02:11.920 | and it's quiet.

00:02:12.920 | You can go for a long walk without ever leaving land that you actually own.

00:02:16.520 | On top of that, Ryan, his life has a lot of interesting adventures.

00:02:19.760 | He goes and hangs out with NFL teams and just got back from Australia and hung out with

00:02:24.160 | Arnold Schwarzenegger not long ago.

00:02:26.080 | The point here, I'm using Ryan as a case study.

00:02:29.160 | The point here is that getting notably good at something valuable is a powerful tool for

00:02:34.840 | crafting a deep life.

00:02:38.020 | Let's talk a little bit today about how people get good at things that are valuable.

00:02:42.800 | I have three rules I want to share.

00:02:46.460 | Rule one is something I informally call the 10-year rule, and to make it a little bit

00:02:51.880 | more clear what I'm talking about, I actually want to play a little bit of tape here.

00:02:56.580 | This is from the Rewatchables podcast, Bill Simmons' Rewatchables podcast, one of my favorites.

00:03:04.560 | They're talking here in this clip about Quentin Tarantino, his rise in the '90s, and Pulp

00:03:10.360 | Fiction.

00:03:11.360 | It's also going to be a little bit about Bill itself.

00:03:12.360 | Let's listen to it, and then I'm going to analyze it for you.

00:03:16.260 | It felt like in '94, the ceiling just came off.

00:03:21.500 | That's definitely how it felt and how it was narrativized.

00:03:24.120 | If you listen to Tarantino talk about it, he's basically spent eight years in obscurity

00:03:28.920 | trying to get stuff made.

00:03:31.480 | That was a great story to tell in magazines about this guy who came out of nowhere to

00:03:35.240 | take over movies forever, but that isn't really what happened.

00:03:39.120 | He tried to get this 60-millimeter movie off the ground for years and years.

00:03:42.560 | He was shooting it on the weekends, just like Kevin Smith shot Clerks, self-funding, trying

00:03:46.760 | to write his own ticket in that way.

00:03:49.520 | It took a really long time, and it took him convincing people to give him money.

00:03:54.120 | He talks about the story about getting Richard Gladstein to give him money from live entertainment

00:03:57.920 | for Reservoir Dogs.

00:03:58.920 | He worked really hard for a long time, dead broke, thinking he was going to fail.

00:04:05.880 | There's this tension in the storytelling where you're like, "Wow, you could do it too, but

00:04:10.280 | you also have to [expletive] for a decade and maybe not succeed."

00:04:13.920 | By the way, I completely identify it because when I went to ESPN in 2001, I had the calm,

00:04:19.120 | and then it was like, "Oh, yeah.

00:04:20.120 | You were at the forefront of when the internet and sport..."

00:04:23.120 | I was like, "Yeah, I [expletive] from '93 to 2001, and I was on my own, and nobody read

00:04:29.020 | anything I did."

00:04:30.320 | When you read the stuff about how long it took him even to get meetings with people,

00:04:36.760 | you're just like, "This guy's just going to work and [expletive]."

00:04:39.960 | All right.

00:04:40.960 | That was Bill Simmons talking with Chris Ryan and Sean Finnessey on the Rewatchables.

00:04:44.600 | All right.

00:04:45.600 | Here's what was important about that clip, why it caught my attention when I first heard

00:04:48.320 | it.

00:04:49.320 | Tarantino took about a decade to get to where he was going.

00:04:53.000 | The myth, as Chris made clear in that clip, the myth is 1993, this guy comes out of nowhere,

00:04:59.880 | Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, boom.

00:05:02.400 | The reality was almost a decade of him out there working, trying to make...

00:05:08.040 | They're filming Reservoir Dogs on 60mm.

00:05:10.160 | They're trying to make it work.

00:05:11.160 | They're trying to get funding.

00:05:12.280 | He was selling some scripts.

00:05:13.460 | He was doing anything he could.

00:05:15.920 | Then Bill Simmons spoke up and said, "Yeah, that was the same for me."

00:05:19.780 | People remember him and Grantland at ESPN like, "Oh, Bill Simmons came out of nowhere

00:05:23.880 | and sort of revolutionized sports coverage and using podcasts and blogging for doing

00:05:27.880 | so."

00:05:28.880 | He was like, "Well, wait a second.

00:05:29.880 | That was eight years before that, before things really started to click."

00:05:34.760 | So 10 years more or less is what it took Tarantino, 10 years more or less is what it took Bill

00:05:39.720 | Simmons to actually start to make a mark in what they were working on.

00:05:44.160 | This rule, which I call the 10-year rule, give or take a couple years in either direction,

00:05:50.300 | is pretty ironclad when you look at people who do really cool things.

00:05:53.560 | I mean, this is true of my own life.

00:05:55.840 | When did my first book come out?

00:05:57.520 | 2006.

00:05:58.520 | This one was my first hit book, 2016, 10 years.

00:06:02.800 | Steve Martin, I recently reread his professional memoir, Born Standing Up.

00:06:07.800 | I wrote a whole thing about it for my most recent book, Slow Productivity, which I cut.

00:06:12.480 | But I did all the math for this section that I cut about Steve Martin.

00:06:15.680 | It took about a decade after he quit his comedy writing job full-time to do stand-up to really

00:06:21.040 | begin to explode in the stand-up world.

00:06:24.840 | Now sometimes you will find people who make their move faster, but oftentimes in these

00:06:29.720 | stories what you'll realize is they're doing basically 10 years worth of work, but they're

00:06:33.380 | just like confining it like a madman to a shorter period of time.

00:06:37.240 | Michael Crichton's a great example of this.

00:06:39.640 | There's only a three-year gap between the publication of his first book in 1966 and

00:06:44.960 | his first hit book, The Adronomous Train, which came out in 1969.

00:06:50.460 | But during that three-year period, he published five books before he got to The Adronomous

00:06:56.980 | Train.

00:06:57.980 | They were all published under his pseudonym, Zhang Ling.

00:07:00.200 | They were like potboiler spy adventure thrillers.

00:07:03.540 | So that's like 10 years worth of writing.

00:07:05.380 | He just collapsed like a madman into three years, but he was doing 10 years worth of

00:07:09.640 | work.

00:07:10.640 | And honestly, there was another three years after that before his next book under his

00:07:13.580 | own name came out.

00:07:14.780 | So you can really think about it as really like a six or seven-year period before he

00:07:19.060 | was regularly writing books under his own name.

00:07:22.540 | All right.

00:07:23.540 | So the conclusion here for this rule is that getting good at something that is unambiguously

00:07:27.820 | valuable, it takes a lot of time.

00:07:29.380 | It takes a lot of effort.

00:07:31.420 | In some sense, that's the bad news.

00:07:33.700 | You're not going to be able to have Ryan Holiday's life next year.

00:07:38.480 | But in other ways, that's the good news because most people are not willing to stick with

00:07:42.000 | something that long.

00:07:43.900 | So when you're thinking about the odds of success in one of these interesting fields,

00:07:48.500 | there's two odds to consider.

00:07:50.640 | The odds of just anyone who starts down this path, what are their odds of succeeding versus

00:07:56.460 | what are the odds of someone who sticks with this seriously for a decade?

00:08:00.620 | What are their odds of succeeding?

00:08:01.900 | So maybe for example, one in a thousand people who set out to become a writer and write novels

00:08:09.180 | actually becomes like a sustainable professional novelist, right?

00:08:12.820 | Next month or maybe November, I guess, is National Novel Writing Month and all over

00:08:17.060 | the country, people will sort of try to kick off their writing careers and maybe it's like

00:08:20.140 | a one in a thousand of them are going to actually succeed.

00:08:23.380 | But what are the odds if you say, let's just consider people who give it a decade of concerted

00:08:29.180 | effort?

00:08:31.180 | What are the odds that someone in that position succeeds in professional writing?

00:08:33.820 | I bet it's like one in three, right?

00:08:36.500 | So your odds radically change if you're willing to stick with something over a longer period

00:08:40.860 | of time.

00:08:41.860 | And you could see that as bad news because it takes more time than you might hope to

00:08:44.580 | get good at something, or you see it as good news because that's a barrier that's going

00:08:47.740 | to squeeze out 99% of people who might be competing for those same limited slots.

00:08:53.660 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:08:54.660 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:08:59.460 | to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:09:06.940 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:09:12.380 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:09:17.740 | I know you're going to like it.

00:09:19.540 | Check it out.

00:09:20.540 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:09:22.020 | All right.

00:09:23.020 | Rule number two, you must relentlessly expand, explore, and exploit.

00:09:31.220 | I'm trying to be alliterative here, so I'll have to explain what I mean by each of these

00:09:35.060 | words.

00:09:36.060 | To understand expand, I want you to think about a common observation.

00:09:40.620 | If you go to a gym, a normal gym, there's usually a crowd of guys in their upper 40s

00:09:47.300 | and 50s who are just cycling from machine to machine, and they're going through the

00:09:53.360 | motions with a moderate amount of weight on, just knocking out their reps and then moving

00:09:57.900 | on to the next machine, checking things off of a list.

00:10:01.660 | If you talk to these guys, almost always they're there because their doctor said, "Look, we're

00:10:06.380 | looking at these numbers from your blood panels.

00:10:09.300 | You got to exercise because we worry about your heart."

00:10:12.020 | Very common.

00:10:13.020 | They're cardiologists, mid-40s.

00:10:14.020 | "You got to go exercise."

00:10:15.300 | They're kind of doing, "Look, I'm here, I'm exercising, I'm doing lots of machines."

00:10:19.980 | The thing here, of course, is what they're doing is not going to make them super strong.

00:10:22.940 | It's not going to make them much stronger at all.

00:10:25.700 | We know what's involved for muscle growth or strength growing, and you have to make

00:10:30.380 | a concerted effort to exhaust muscles.

00:10:32.240 | It's difficult, it's uncomfortable, but you have to do that if you want to get stronger.

00:10:36.860 | These guys aren't getting stronger.

00:10:37.860 | It's not bad, they're doing it, but they're just sort of going through the motions.

00:10:41.960 | This applies to when we think about the 10 years it takes to get good at something.

00:10:46.180 | If you spend those 10 years doing the equivalent of the middle-aged guys on the machines in

00:10:50.700 | the gym, nothing's going to happen, right?

00:10:53.900 | So if you're just sort of, "I just kind of have my writing time every morning and I get

00:10:58.940 | my pages in," and you're sort of just doing this year after year, you're not guaranteed

00:11:04.460 | to get much better.

00:11:05.460 | You're not guaranteed to actually increase your odds.

00:11:07.660 | What you actually have to do during those 10 years for them to actually be useful is

00:11:12.420 | you need to deliberately improve your skills.

00:11:14.860 | That's what I mean by expand.

00:11:16.140 | You have to expand your actual abilities, and this requires that you look to relentlessly

00:11:25.820 | stretch yourself beyond where you're comfortable on the areas you need to get better at, right?

00:11:32.380 | Just like if you want to make that muscle stronger, you can't just sit down and do the

00:11:36.060 | butterfly machine with 25 pounds and move on to the next thing.

00:11:39.980 | You have to do, like I was doing the other day and I hate, you just have to do is you

00:11:43.780 | have to get on an incline bench and get those 45-pound dumbbells and just do set after set,

00:11:50.640 | and it really kind of stinks, but you're putting the real weight on the real muscles.

00:11:55.300 | You got to do the same thing with whatever it is that you're trying to get better at.

00:11:57.980 | I mean, look, I'll go back to our example before of Ryan Holiday, right?

00:12:02.140 | 2014, he published his Obstacle is the Way.

00:12:06.020 | This kicks off what's going to be his career where he finally succeeds as writing about

00:12:10.380 | stoicism for a big audience, but that book doesn't do great out of the gates.

00:12:15.000 | People forget that book doesn't hit a bestseller list until five years after it comes out,

00:12:19.180 | after he's already sort of off to the races.

00:12:22.380 | So he's right away sold his next book, Ego is the Enemy.

00:12:25.780 | He was like, "I'm going to give this a try."

00:12:28.820 | And I remember talking to him during this point.

00:12:31.700 | He was very systematic about how do I make this better?

00:12:37.340 | What is it that's, where can I improve myself?

00:12:40.420 | Where are the points where I have actual ground I can make up that's going to make this book

00:12:43.740 | better than the last one?

00:12:44.940 | He was stretching, like where I want to not just be working towards this goal of being

00:12:49.380 | a professional nonfiction writer, I need to be working at getting better.

00:12:52.780 | There's a sort of relentlessness there.

00:12:55.300 | Crichton was the same way.

00:12:56.540 | He relentlessly wrote these thriller novels under pseudonyms.

00:13:00.380 | This was like a lower barrier of entry and it allowed him to practice the different elements

00:13:07.180 | of writing like a really high quality thriller type novel.

00:13:11.500 | I own a lot of these.

00:13:12.580 | They re-released them not long ago.

00:13:13.940 | I own a lot of these and they're not like a later Crichton book, right?

00:13:18.260 | They're much simpler.

00:13:19.300 | You can see he's working, they'll have technology in it.

00:13:22.260 | You can see he's still working with how do you bring technology into these books.

00:13:26.380 | They have some preposterous characters that are cardboard that he gets better at making

00:13:31.220 | the characters a little bit more interesting.

00:13:33.120 | You can see there's plotting, pacing elements that he starts to get better at.

00:13:37.400 | Even with his first book, The Adronomous Strain, he wrote that book.

00:13:42.020 | And his editor, the famed editor Robert Gottlieb, who before that ran The New Yorker, basically

00:13:49.780 | said to him, "We got to rewrite this from scratch."

00:13:52.340 | He went through this whole training process where he wrote The Adronomous Strain with

00:13:55.520 | a lot more interiority and psychological realism.

00:13:59.060 | They said, "Look, you're not Tolstoy.

00:14:02.580 | We got to rewrite this book.

00:14:04.100 | It's not about the psychological life of these scientists who are fighting this virus.

00:14:09.240 | It's about the fact this virus is getting through the seals, or I guess it's a bacteria,

00:14:13.300 | and everyone's going to die, and the clock is ticking.

00:14:15.860 | Rewrite this like a New Yorker piece, like Richard Preston reporting on the Ebola outbreak

00:14:20.660 | in Reston, Virginia later on.

00:14:22.380 | Write this like you're reporting on something that happened that was exciting, and rewrite

00:14:26.660 | that book from scratch.

00:14:28.040 | This is all deliberately expanding skills.

00:14:30.260 | So yeah, it takes 10 years, but it has to be 10 years of getting better.

00:14:34.100 | All right, explore, that was the second piece of our alliterative trio here, explore.

00:14:40.860 | The other thing you notice when you study people who go through this period of becoming

00:14:44.260 | good at something notably good is that they're constantly looking around for opportunities

00:14:48.600 | within the general direction that they're pursuing.

00:14:50.900 | There's like this paradox to this.

00:14:53.800 | You need to stay focused on one thing for a long time, but within this one thing, you

00:14:57.860 | have to be incredibly agile, looking around, where is my traction point?

00:15:02.500 | Basically this means finding places to actually like produce and ship something that other

00:15:05.900 | people are going to see or care about or pay you for.

00:15:08.460 | These are the traction points you can actually move.

00:15:10.460 | If you don't have traction, you can't move forward.

00:15:12.820 | And you see this a lot.

00:15:13.820 | It's like Crichton trying with these thriller novels.

00:15:16.340 | He also wrote a lot of nonfiction books, and he was trying to figure out where his niche

00:15:20.020 | was as a writer.

00:15:21.260 | He was trying lots of things.

00:15:22.860 | Ryan Holiday tried lots of things.

00:15:24.380 | His first book was about marketing.

00:15:26.140 | The same year that Obstacles the Way came out, he tried publishing a digital-only book

00:15:31.020 | called Growth Hacker Marketing.

00:15:32.860 | He was thinking, "Am I a marketer?

00:15:34.700 | Is that my space?

00:15:35.780 | Is the stoicism thing going to work?"

00:15:37.460 | He was trying lots of things.

00:15:39.940 | My similar in my career is, "Let me try this book.

00:15:42.860 | Let me try that.

00:15:43.860 | Let me write for this place."

00:15:44.860 | It's all within walls of like, "I want to be a writer," but you're exploring.

00:15:49.900 | You have to keep looking for opportunities within the field that you're in.

00:15:57.060 | That brings us to the third element from rule two, which is exploit.

00:16:01.020 | The people who really make their move, when their exploration finds something that has

00:16:06.940 | traction, they mash the accelerator.

00:16:09.780 | "Oh, this is working.

00:16:11.900 | Let's get after it."

00:16:12.900 | So I'm going to follow these same examples.

00:16:17.380 | Ego is the enemy.

00:16:18.380 | Holiday's second book does better.

00:16:20.980 | There's traction here.

00:16:21.980 | He's like, "Okay, we're doing the stoicism thing."

00:16:24.860 | Exploitation point number two, he starts a daily newsletter, The Daily Stoic, based off

00:16:30.060 | of the book he put out called The Daily Stoic.

00:16:32.860 | That model takes off.

00:16:34.420 | Now he's off to the races.

00:16:35.900 | He's like, "Oh, I see.

00:16:37.660 | Daily newsletters."

00:16:38.660 | He now has three, Daily Dad, Daily Stoic, and one called Daily Philosophy.

00:16:43.780 | He ramped up this format for stoicism, this story-based format built around a single principle,

00:16:48.580 | "Let's go."

00:16:49.580 | He's seven books since, just boom, boom, boom, "Let's go."

00:16:54.500 | Build the audience.

00:16:55.500 | Find a thing to work.

00:16:56.500 | Let's go for it.

00:16:57.500 | For Crichton, it was really Terminal Man, his follow-up to Adronomous Train.

00:17:01.300 | He's like, "I think this might be it."

00:17:04.380 | He experiments with his third and fourth book are out of the techno-thriller genre.

00:17:08.260 | He wrote The Great Train Robbery and Eaters of the Dead.

00:17:11.900 | These are books that no one associates with Crichton.

00:17:15.540 | After that, it's all Michael Crichton techno-thriller, one book every year, every other year.

00:17:20.700 | I'm going to war with Clancy and Grisham.

00:17:23.300 | Let's go.

00:17:24.300 | He's going to mash that accelerator, and that's where he was going after then.

00:17:28.220 | When you discover what's working, you're like, "Great.

00:17:31.980 | We have to give that a huge amount of effort.

00:17:33.540 | We got to really push that."

00:17:35.540 | It's not just taking 10 years.

00:17:38.060 | It's what you're doing during those 10 years.

00:17:41.580 | That's a lot to handle, so that brings us to rule number three.

00:17:44.740 | You must abandon distractions.

00:17:47.540 | The core of this podcast, of course, is cultivating a deep life in a distracting world.

00:17:53.580 | It's in this world with largely digital distractions of both work and our life outside of work.

00:17:58.940 | How do we navigate and build full human lives?

00:18:00.900 | That's what I care about.

00:18:01.900 | I'm a computer scientist.

00:18:02.900 | I'm a digital theorist.

00:18:03.900 | I care about that angle.

00:18:05.500 | It plays a big role here.

00:18:08.660 | You cannot succeed with all of the expanding, the exploration, and the exploitation for

00:18:16.500 | 10 years within a narrow field if you're looking at your phone all the time.

00:18:21.740 | If you're looking at highly engaging, addictive social platform or content platforms all the

00:18:27.060 | time, it is just stealing the brain cycles you need to actually build a cool thing, to

00:18:32.380 | do the thing that's going to allow you to actually craft the cool life.

00:18:36.740 | We're talking TikTok.

00:18:37.740 | We're talking Instagram.

00:18:39.540 | We're talking YouTube recommendation wandering, wander from recommendation to recommendation.

00:18:45.500 | We're talking Twitter.

00:18:46.500 | Now, there's a couple of forces at play here that makes these particularly pernicious.

00:18:50.440 | The first one is the obvious one.

00:18:53.140 | You spend more time looking at these things as time you could have been spending on your

00:18:56.140 | pursuit.

00:18:57.140 | It just steals time.

00:18:58.340 | We know that to be true.

00:18:59.940 | This was actually, and I've made this point, I want to keep preaching this point.

00:19:04.100 | The point I had in my book, Digital Minimalism, which was a little bit counter-cultural at

00:19:10.100 | the time and remains counter-cultural today, I said, "Hey, when we're thinking about digital

00:19:14.620 | distraction in our personal lives, like what's happening on our phones, don't get so side

00:19:20.260 | tracked by the what of what people are looking at.

00:19:23.420 | What matters is the how long."

00:19:26.140 | All of the interest in this topic was, no, what matters, and it continues to be this

00:19:29.780 | way today, what matters is what's distracting people.

00:19:34.420 | The content is, it's bad content.

00:19:37.960 | It's the wrong people putting out content.

00:19:39.820 | It's misinformation.

00:19:41.660 | It's making you mad.

00:19:43.380 | It's making you crazy.

00:19:45.180 | It's all about the content is what's wrong.

00:19:48.220 | I said, "Forget that."

00:19:50.220 | This is not what I'm picking up from the average person.

00:19:52.020 | The average person is not on Twitter yelling at people.

00:19:54.220 | The average person is upset by how long they're looking at these things.

00:19:59.100 | That's what matters.

00:20:00.780 | It matters because it takes away time from other things, and in particular, none of these

00:20:05.660 | people I talked about spend a lot of time looking on their phones because they're building

00:20:08.600 | the stuff that made their life cool.

00:20:12.140 | Ryan doesn't look at social media.

00:20:15.140 | They have this team that puts stuff out on all these channels.

00:20:18.340 | I don't think he knows how any of that stuff actually works.

00:20:20.180 | I don't think he cares.

00:20:21.180 | I don't use social media.

00:20:23.100 | I don't have enough cycles for that to lay claim to my life.

00:20:26.740 | But there's a less obvious harm as well if you have a lot of these highly addictive digital

00:20:33.140 | distractions in your life.

00:20:35.500 | It's not just that the content distracts you.

00:20:39.660 | It's that the tools trick the people producing things into thinking the tools are productive

00:20:45.300 | things to do.

00:20:47.180 | So if you're in, especially in some sort of creative field, these tools have this insidious

00:20:51.940 | way of convincing you that spending time on them is actually part of what you need to

00:20:55.540 | be doing to build up your really good skill, to get an audience, to get noticed.

00:21:00.380 | It tricks you.

00:21:01.380 | You say, "Look, I'm not just being distracted.

00:21:02.820 | I'm on here like posting and engaging because this is a key part of me being someone doing

00:21:08.260 | something creative."

00:21:10.820 | That is you just being tricked by these companies.

00:21:13.380 | It's just a great way to get a lot more of your attention to convince you that that one

00:21:17.580 | or two hours per day you spend working on these platforms, they want you to think that's

00:21:21.220 | productive because it's fun.

00:21:23.140 | It's a simulation of actual hard creative work.

00:21:26.460 | It's like going to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland instead of going to the

00:21:31.460 | actual Caribbean.

00:21:33.120 | It kind of feels like you've gone to the Bahamas, but in reality, you're in a blacked out warehouse

00:21:40.220 | in Orlando.

00:21:42.980 | That's what happens when creators get sucked into the social media world.

00:21:46.660 | It tricks you into thinking you're doing work.

00:21:48.860 | And it's the best, most fun work you've ever done because it doesn't require much of you

00:21:53.500 | to concentrate.

00:21:54.500 | It's interesting.

00:21:55.680 | It's pressing all these buttons.

00:21:57.020 | It's low friction.

00:21:58.060 | It's high energy.

00:21:59.060 | And you can check things off.

00:22:00.060 | I'm maximizing my account, and I'm doing these Twitter threads that people told me I need

00:22:04.900 | to do where the very last tweet in the thread says, "Thanks for listening.

00:22:09.180 | If you like these type of things, please subscribe."

00:22:10.940 | And I took some course online that said, "This is how I'm going to build up an audience."

00:22:14.060 | And I'm going to do these stupid articles on Medium.

00:22:16.300 | They're like 400 words, and I'm convinced that it feels good because it's easy, and

00:22:21.220 | you can check it off, and it exposes you to all these distractions.

00:22:25.320 | The robotic pirates are funny, but it's not the same as being on the beach on Eleuthera.

00:22:33.320 | So you've got to be careful, especially if you're trying to do something interesting,

00:22:39.440 | that you've got to hold these digital distractions at bay to use them all the time.

00:22:44.120 | You're not being savvy.

00:22:45.600 | You're clocking into a factory that's owned by Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

00:22:50.120 | You're clocking into the factory to do your shift, and they're not sending you a paycheck.

00:22:53.620 | All right, so those are my three rules.

00:22:57.680 | To get notably good at something that can help you unlock the deep life, you have to

00:23:03.320 | follow the 10-year rule.

00:23:04.540 | It's going to take a while, but use that to your advantage.

00:23:07.300 | During that time, you need to expand, explore, and exploit, and that is going to require

00:23:10.720 | that you significantly reform your relationship with digital distractions.

00:23:14.840 | Here's the good news about that last piece, by the way.

00:23:16.880 | If you're thinking to yourself, "Man, I'm going to have a really hard time.

00:23:21.160 | I do all this stuff on my phone.

00:23:22.160 | I'm going to have a really hard time not doing this," you know what makes that a lot easier?

00:23:26.340 | To be getting after something you care about.

00:23:29.040 | The people who are locked in, doing something like, "I'm starting to get some traction here.

00:23:32.760 | I'm exploring.

00:23:33.760 | I'm shipping things.

00:23:35.880 | I can feel myself getting better.

00:23:37.360 | I'm being deliberate about it."

00:23:39.240 | They have a pretty easy time not spending all day on Instagram because they have something

00:23:42.400 | else capturing their attention that seems even more rewarding.

00:23:45.960 | So that final rule won't be as hard as you think once you actually get going.

00:23:50.040 | So there you go, Jesse.

00:23:52.800 | I like it.

00:23:53.800 | Good.

00:23:54.800 | 10-year rule.

00:23:55.800 | That means we have six more years until this podcast gets good.

00:23:58.560 | We're about four and a half years in.

00:24:02.080 | We're getting there.

00:24:03.080 | Yeah.

00:24:04.080 | We're getting there.

00:24:05.080 | Though we do a lot of podcasts, so maybe we'll have a bit of the Michael Crichton effect

00:24:06.960 | where we're kind of compressing work, so maybe like five or six years.

00:24:11.120 | Extend the lease on the HQ.

00:24:12.120 | I know.

00:24:13.120 | We're getting new desks.

00:24:14.120 | I mean, we'll have to extend the lease.

00:24:15.740 | We are.

00:24:16.740 | We are.

00:24:17.740 | It's very exciting.

00:24:18.740 | We're going to have the Maker Lab portion of the HQ also where we do our editing bay.

00:24:22.720 | Big substantial, big wood desks.

00:24:26.120 | So yeah, we got it.

00:24:27.120 | Now we got to make this succeed.

00:24:28.120 | If this doesn't succeed now, we're going to be stuck with a lot of desks.

00:24:31.640 | Yeah.

00:24:32.640 | All right.

00:24:33.640 | So we've got some cool questions that just cover a lot of these topics, time management,

00:24:37.840 | career, like a lot of stuff just around trying to like succeed.

00:24:42.040 | Cool stuff.

00:24:43.040 | But first, let's hear from one of our sponsors.

00:24:46.520 | So I talk about a relatively new sponsor that I'm pretty excited about, and that is our

00:24:50.580 | friends at Factor.

00:24:54.380 | These are fantastic.

00:24:55.380 | I love this product.

00:24:56.820 | Factor provides you.

00:24:57.820 | They ship right to your house.

00:24:58.820 | These no prep, no mess meals.

00:25:02.120 | These are chef, chef, chef, I can't say, I'm saying chef.

00:25:08.380 | This is how you know it's Friday afternoon, folks.

00:25:10.860 | Chef crafted meals.

00:25:13.020 | And they come from, they have these different options.

00:25:15.300 | So like whatever your wellness goals are, you just choose the option you care about.

00:25:18.740 | So like if you're trying to do weight loss, there's calorie smart.

00:25:21.140 | They're like constrained calories, but they have protein plus.

00:25:24.060 | If you're doing like a keto, they have keto.

00:25:27.940 | And the thing about these meals is they get delivered to your door.

00:25:30.740 | They're refrigerated, not frozen.

00:25:32.180 | They're fresh.

00:25:33.180 | Right.

00:25:34.180 | And you just cook them in the microwave.

00:25:36.600 | So it's like two minutes in the microwave, boom, and you've got this fresh meal.

00:25:41.480 | It just makes it so simple.

00:25:42.480 | Like whatever the goal you're going for, you can just get the meals from that category,

00:25:46.900 | get them shipped to your house, not even think about it.

00:25:49.340 | They have 35 different meals with more than 60 add-ons to choose from every week.

00:25:53.300 | So you'll always have new flavors to explore.

00:25:55.200 | I have now tried five different of the meals.

00:25:57.420 | I enjoyed all five.

00:25:59.260 | I use them all for lunch.

00:26:00.660 | We've talked about this on the show before.

00:26:02.640 | Like my approach to nutrition is automate breakfast and lunch, do interesting stuff

00:26:06.500 | with dinner.

00:26:07.500 | But I always either have no breakfast, just coffee or the same breakfast that's going

00:26:12.260 | to be two eggs and one piece of Ezekiel toast if I'm hungry.

00:26:15.500 | And I don't want to think about lunch.

00:26:16.660 | I want it to fuel me and solve whatever nutrition goal I have.

00:26:20.260 | So factor is now, it's a great way to do that because a factor meal now, it couldn't be

00:26:24.900 | more automated.

00:26:25.900 | Boom.

00:26:26.900 | Microwave.

00:26:27.900 | Boom.

00:26:28.900 | Food.

00:26:29.900 | Eat it.

00:26:30.900 | It's great.

00:26:31.900 | Tastes better than what I would whip up and takes no time to do.

00:26:32.900 | And there you go.

00:26:33.900 | All right.

00:26:34.900 | So we've covered a lot of meals here from breakfast to dessert.

00:26:37.700 | I mean, they have a lot of options here.

00:26:39.060 | It's really restaurant quality.

00:26:40.220 | I agree with that.

00:26:41.220 | I've tried five of these.

00:26:42.220 | They are, we're talking about filet mignon, shrimp, blackened salmon, like it's good food.

00:26:47.500 | Kitchen time is to a minimum, it's about two minutes.

00:26:49.860 | I mean, I have a terrible microwave, Jesse.

00:26:51.540 | So it takes me a little bit more.

00:26:53.300 | We have like a small, I don't know why.

00:26:55.420 | We have a small microwave.

00:26:56.740 | Really?

00:26:57.740 | Yeah.

00:26:58.740 | For whatever reason.

00:26:59.740 | I think we just bought on Amazon when one broke and it was like, oh, this much smaller

00:27:01.700 | than we thought.

00:27:02.700 | I mean, our microwave is basically, I think it's like, there's like a squirrel, like rubbing

00:27:08.360 | sticks together in there to create a little bit of heat.

00:27:10.340 | So like everything takes much longer than it should.

00:27:12.340 | But if you have a normal microwave, two minutes should be enough.

00:27:16.260 | So head to factormeals.com/deep50 and use the promo code DEEP50 to get 50% off your

00:27:26.100 | first box plus 20% off your next month.

00:27:30.420 | Right?

00:27:31.420 | This is a good discount.

00:27:32.420 | If you want to use these promo codes, trust me, that's code DEEP50 at factormeals.com/deep50

00:27:40.140 | to get 50% off your first box of meals and 20% off your next month while your subscription

00:27:45.700 | is active.

00:27:47.580 | Also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN.

00:27:51.980 | You need to be using a VPN to be using your computer without a VPN is like leaving your

00:27:57.860 | laptop out at the coffee shop when you go to go to the bathroom.

00:28:02.140 | Like it will be fine often.

00:28:04.520 | You do this enough, it's going to get snagged.

00:28:06.020 | Well, same thing.

00:28:07.020 | If you're connecting to the internet, especially in public without a VPN, you are just opening

00:28:11.220 | yourself up to having your information stolen or your machine being hacked.

00:28:17.420 | Every time you connect to an unencrypted network, cafes, hotels, airports, et cetera, your online

00:28:21.660 | data is not secure.

00:28:23.940 | Anyone on the same network can gain access to your personal data.

00:28:27.700 | It doesn't even take a lot of knowledge.

00:28:29.300 | You don't have to be like one of these losers that goes to MIT to, I don't know why you

00:28:35.380 | trust anyone from MIT.

00:28:36.380 | You don't need to be one of them.

00:28:38.260 | You could just buy this cheap hardware, you plug into a laptop, there's scripts.

00:28:41.100 | It's like really easy for people to steal your data.

00:28:43.220 | And look, there's a reason they want to do it too.

00:28:44.980 | You can get up to $1,000 on the black market for the data these hackers steal.

00:28:49.980 | If you have ExpressVPN, they can't do it.

00:28:52.740 | If you have ExpressVPN, what happens is your data gets encrypted on your machine and on

00:28:57.520 | breakable code.

00:28:59.420 | Your traffic gets sent to a VPN server, which unencrypts it and then talks to the site and

00:29:04.000 | service that you're trying to communicate to on your behalf, encrypts the result, sends

00:29:08.620 | it back to you, and then your computer unencrypts it.

00:29:10.860 | So the people who are nearby you in the coffee shop, all they can see is you have encrypted

00:29:14.720 | traffic to a VPN server.

00:29:16.140 | They learn nothing about you.

00:29:17.380 | They cannot get your information.

00:29:19.860 | Why I like ExpressVPN is that it's easy to use, right?

00:29:23.820 | You fire up the app, you click a button, it's on, and you just use everything like normal.

00:29:27.640 | Real easy to set up.

00:29:28.640 | It could be on your phone, it can be on your laptop, it can be on your tablet.

00:29:32.400 | It's rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge.

00:29:37.240 | You need a VPN, and ExpressVPN is what I recommend.

00:29:40.880 | So secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com/deep.

00:29:46.760 | That's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n.com/deep, and you will get an extra three months free, but only

00:29:54.500 | when you go to expressvpn.com/deep.

00:29:56.420 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:30:00.220 | Who do we have first?

00:30:02.680 | First question is from Pete.

00:30:04.220 | I've watched your time management video a hundred times on YouTube.

00:30:07.780 | For whatever reason, I can't make it stick.

00:30:09.940 | It just feels like I have this insurmountable backlog of stuff that is forever in my inbox.

00:30:14.860 | Running beyond a single day feels impossible.

00:30:17.580 | Why can't I succeed with your time management system?

00:30:20.100 | It'd be funny if we looked up our time management video and it had like 105 views.

00:30:24.940 | It's just all Pete.

00:30:28.100 | And there's like 20 comments all from Pete.

00:30:29.740 | That would be depressing.

00:30:31.140 | Actually, your time management video is pretty popular.

00:30:33.420 | Yeah, it's very popular.

00:30:35.180 | It's a great video.

00:30:36.180 | Yeah.

00:30:37.180 | All right.

00:30:38.180 | Well, Pete, I appreciate the question.

00:30:39.180 | A couple things here.

00:30:40.180 | Okay, so first of all, let me start philosophically, then we'll get tactically.

00:30:45.380 | Okay.

00:30:46.380 | Philosophically, when you say you have a hard time planning beyond a single day, I'm not

00:30:51.420 | quite sure what this means, right?

00:30:54.180 | So my system does not necessarily have you building detailed plans for multiple days

00:30:58.260 | in the future.

00:30:59.820 | You'll build a plan for the current day.

00:31:01.060 | You'll time block plan, make the most of the time you have available that day.

00:31:05.300 | You might have a weekly plan, but a weekly plan probably does not mean you're making

00:31:09.700 | detailed plans for your week.

00:31:11.420 | It's you're checking in on your week.

00:31:12.980 | What days are open?

00:31:14.020 | What days aren't?

00:31:15.020 | Do I need to move anything?

00:31:16.900 | Your weekly plan is where you might be.

00:31:18.620 | You're looking at your quarterly goals.

00:31:20.200 | You might say, "You know what?

00:31:21.200 | I want to make time this week to make progress on some bigger non-urgent goal I have."

00:31:25.300 | And maybe you schedule some time on your calendar for that.

00:31:28.340 | But this idea that you're doing a lot of detailed planning to the future is not necessarily

00:31:32.520 | something that you need to be doing with my system.

00:31:35.660 | The thing that I think might be affecting you here is that you don't have a good capture

00:31:41.460 | board.

00:31:42.460 | When you say stuff is forever in your inbox, I'm suspecting what you might be trying to

00:31:46.740 | do is just answer all and do all the stuff in your inbox.

00:31:51.820 | Like once I handle the thing in this message, I take it out of my inbox.

00:31:56.340 | In most knowledge work jobs, that's going to be impossible.

00:31:58.140 | It's going to be impossible to keep up.

00:31:59.820 | Your inbox is just going to grow longer and longer.

00:32:02.160 | So I want you to get your obligations out of your inbox and into some sort of capture

00:32:06.260 | system.

00:32:07.940 | And the one I recommend is using these sort of role-based status boards.

00:32:12.660 | So you should have a different status board for each of your professional roles.

00:32:18.540 | So if you have multiple hats you wear in your job, have a separate board for each.

00:32:22.020 | I use Trello, but you could do this in another tool.

00:32:24.740 | You can also do this in a shared document.

00:32:26.700 | You could do this with a stack of index cards in your desk if you wanted to.

00:32:29.900 | I'm sort of tool agnostic here.

00:32:32.260 | For each role, you have a column or a stack for the different statuses of things you need

00:32:38.540 | to do.

00:32:39.540 | So this could be like backlog, like non-urgent, but stuff I might need to get to.

00:32:44.060 | You can have a stack here that is working on this week.

00:32:48.020 | You can and should have a stack that says waiting to hear back.

00:32:51.140 | It's a critical one.

00:32:53.020 | I sent a message to this person.

00:32:55.420 | I'm waiting to hear back.

00:32:56.980 | When I hear back, here's what I have to do next.

00:32:58.820 | You need that to exist somewhere.

00:32:59.940 | It should exist in your waiting to hear back stack.

00:33:02.300 | If you have regular meetings with people at your organization, have a stack for things

00:33:06.980 | to discuss at the next meeting with that person.

00:33:10.460 | I'm the director of undergraduate studies for Georgetown Computer Science this year.

00:33:14.780 | I have one of those stacks for my associate DUS for our weekly meetings, and I have a

00:33:18.820 | stack for our department chair that we have monthly meetings.

00:33:21.580 | So I put stuff on there to remember to discuss it at our next meeting.

00:33:27.840 | You want to get everything into these boards.

00:33:31.300 | So you don't have to do the things in your inbox, but you do got to process them out

00:33:35.340 | of your inbox into one of these status-based boards.

00:33:38.420 | Now you don't have the problem of, I can't keep my inboxes overflowing.

00:33:41.660 | I'll never get to everything in my inbox.

00:33:44.140 | When people say, I'm just going to have to declare email bankruptcy, I say, oh, you don't

00:33:47.300 | have a capture system.

00:33:49.320 | Your capture system is your inbox.

00:33:52.140 | And the thing is, so many things that show up, if you look at your status boards, especially

00:33:57.340 | these like backlog or things to get to one day, those things grow really wrong, right?

00:34:01.060 | You don't empty these boards out.

00:34:02.600 | Like the stuff that you actually need to be working on is relatively small compared to

00:34:06.540 | the full amount of stuff that comes in.

00:34:08.580 | So if you're just storing your task in your inbox, that thing is going to grow.

00:34:11.720 | It's going to continue to grow.

00:34:13.020 | So you got to get into these status boards.

00:34:15.420 | Now because they're role-based, so you have a different board for each different role,

00:34:19.780 | this allows you now to avoid higher level context shifts.

00:34:22.940 | You can say, okay, here's one of my roles is like I'm in charge of the hiring committee

00:34:27.220 | at my company.

00:34:28.220 | And I have a board that just has the tasks for that and that's piled by their statuses.

00:34:34.340 | When I'm working on hiring committee stuff, I just see hiring committee stuff.

00:34:37.620 | My mindset is in hiring.

00:34:38.740 | I've given myself two and a half hours to work on hiring committee stuff.

00:34:42.380 | All I'm doing is looking at the task on this board and my mind is in it.

00:34:45.780 | And you will find after like 10 or 15 minutes, you're able to make progress through these

00:34:49.020 | things much faster.

00:34:50.380 | And then maybe after lunch, you're like, I'm working on my other role as like a copywriter.

00:34:55.020 | And now I go to that board and my mind is only focused on doing copywriter stuff.

00:34:59.060 | And it could be a long deep work session or I could be churning through tasks, but they're

00:35:02.260 | all related to the same role.

00:35:04.180 | That makes it much easier.

00:35:06.760 | If you instead just have all this stuff mixed together in your inbox, and it's an archive

00:35:10.380 | that's growing longer and it's mixing urgent stuff with non-urgent stuff and backlog stuff

00:35:14.220 | with stuff that maybe you're waiting to hear back from someone, and you're trying to go

00:35:17.900 | message by message, you're shifting from role to role, task by task, and your brain just

00:35:22.140 | says enough, and you get exhausted.

00:35:25.740 | The final advantage of having these task boards is that over time, you'd appreciate stuff

00:35:31.020 | out of there.

00:35:33.060 | Stuff you put onto these like backlogs.

00:35:34.700 | I often also have a stack called to process where I don't even know how to turn this into

00:35:39.340 | a task yet.

00:35:40.340 | So let me just put this here as a stake in the ground so I don't forget it.

00:35:43.660 | But I might just say something pretty vague, like new website.

00:35:48.820 | This was come up in a meeting, I don't even know what this means, but let me just not

00:35:52.940 | forget this, I'll put it over here.

00:35:55.100 | Over time, you're going to take stuff off this.

00:35:57.180 | You're like, you know what, this has sat here forever, no one has brought it up again, I'm

00:36:01.380 | taking this off.

00:36:03.140 | This thing over here.

00:36:04.540 | You know what I'm going to do?

00:36:05.540 | I'm going to write the person involved.

00:36:06.540 | Like, look, I know we talked about this.

00:36:08.380 | I really don't have cycles for this right now.

00:36:10.500 | It doesn't seem too urgent unless, and this is a key terminology, unless I hear otherwise

00:36:14.660 | from you, I'm just going to put this on hold for now.

00:36:17.860 | And when people hear, unless I hear otherwise, they say, great, I don't have to reply.

00:36:21.500 | And so you get to take these things off, right?

00:36:23.060 | So it's the other thing, it allows you to sort of over time, clear stuff out of your

00:36:27.040 | obligations in a really systematic way.

00:36:30.760 | This doesn't happen when everything just exists in your inbox.

00:36:34.060 | It just grows and it grows.

00:36:36.020 | And then you feel like you have to declare email bankruptcy and just delete everything.

00:36:39.160 | But the problem is, in that stack of 1600 emails is probably like 200 that you probably

00:36:45.180 | do need to keep track of, and you probably still need to have that information somewhere.

00:36:49.200 | So it's a really stressful situation.

00:36:52.100 | So get your inbox empty, not by doing everything, but by getting things into these role-based

00:36:55.860 | status boards.

00:36:57.100 | It really makes a big difference.

00:36:58.340 | I mean, I really, I really have to push people towards that.

00:37:01.900 | It really makes a big difference.

00:37:02.900 | All right, what do we got next?

00:37:05.820 | Next question is from Matthew.

00:37:07.500 | I'm an electrical engineer and I'm able to work from home a lot.

00:37:10.540 | The phone foyer method is effective, but I still enjoy staying up to date on things like

00:37:14.340 | my Substack, YouTube feed, and other distraction machines.

00:37:17.740 | I'm looking for ways to effectively slow down the consumption of this content, especially

00:37:21.940 | using RSS aggregators to facilitate the way content is delivered.

00:37:25.780 | All right, well, Matthew, I tend to care more about the how you consume content than the

00:37:30.140 | when, right?

00:37:32.380 | So a couple of things I would suggest here.

00:37:34.260 | Let's tackle these distractions category by category.

00:37:38.980 | I like newsletters.

00:37:39.980 | I think email newsletters are great.

00:37:42.500 | You can effectively create a custom magazine for yourself of just writers you like, just

00:37:48.460 | writing about stuff you care about.

00:37:49.820 | That's the way I think about newsletters.

00:37:52.180 | You need to see yourself now, like, okay, these aren't email correspondence.

00:37:57.020 | I am an editor and these are my writers.

00:38:00.220 | And they're sending me these pieces that I'm going to put together into an awesome issue

00:38:03.300 | of a magazine that I'm then going to sit down at some point and read.

00:38:06.260 | So collect all of your Substacks or other email newsletters you subscribe to, collect

00:38:10.060 | them in a folder or a Gmail label, and then semi-regularly, you want to get these out

00:38:14.740 | of your inbox into another form to sort of read all at once.

00:38:17.980 | Again, use the magazine metaphor.

00:38:20.280 | One of the cool tools I like that's out there right now is called Newsletters, the Kindle.

00:38:24.800 | You can Google that and you can find it.

00:38:26.140 | It makes it easy for you to take these email newsletters and to get them onto your Kindle.

00:38:31.300 | Now what you can do is like have a set time.

00:38:33.860 | All right, what I do is on like Friday mornings or something.

00:38:38.860 | I go through my folders, I send all the interesting looking emails to my Kindle and I go to a

00:38:42.980 | coffee shop and I take an hour and I have some coffee and I get a cinnamon roll and

00:38:47.020 | I'm reading these newsletters with zero distraction on my Kindle and it's great.

00:38:51.420 | And it's like this awesome magazine that I wish existed in the nineties and now I have

00:38:55.300 | it and it takes me an hour to read.

00:38:57.820 | It's not some, I'm not engaging with these newsletters exactly as they arrive and just

00:39:02.340 | seeing it as like part of like my flow of my work.

00:39:04.620 | It's a magazine and I don't read magazines in the middle of my work day and I'm not going

00:39:07.620 | to read these newsletters in the middle of my work day.

00:39:10.860 | When it comes to something like YouTube, I think video is the future of independent generated

00:39:16.460 | media.

00:39:17.460 | I've said this before.

00:39:18.460 | I'm also very suspicious of algorithmic recommendations and the idea of using YouTube as a distraction

00:39:24.140 | machine.

00:39:25.140 | So let's be really careful about how we use YouTube.

00:39:28.100 | Have the channels you like, treat them like shows like you would again, 20 years ago,

00:39:34.100 | like shows you like watching, right?

00:39:37.060 | In like 2006 there would be shows you liked watching and you would TiVo them, right?

00:39:45.520 | Whatever it is.

00:39:46.520 | I like to watch the office on NBC.

00:39:49.740 | I want to watch the amazing race.

00:39:52.940 | I'm trying to think of shows that were around there.

00:39:54.340 | There was a show in 2005 or six that was called kid's town on Fox or it was, there's like

00:40:01.020 | a town, it was like a kind of like an old west town and they put a bunch of kids in

00:40:05.620 | it and said, okay, you guys got to just like run this town by yourself and it was like

00:40:09.700 | the kids had to just run the town and I guess there's camera people there.

00:40:16.740 | But it was like, okay, that's a great idea.

00:40:18.060 | But anyways, you would TiVo your shows, PBS shows, whatever.

00:40:22.340 | And then like you would have times you sit down to watch like, yeah, we're going to make

00:40:25.820 | dinner on a Thursday night.

00:40:26.900 | We're going to watch kids town and amazing race, right?

00:40:29.100 | That's the way you should think about YouTube.

00:40:30.780 | And I would use bookmarks even, right?

00:40:32.540 | I mean, I would even like bookmark the channels I like.

00:40:35.740 | So you bookmark my channel.

00:40:38.660 | You bookmark the like hardcore kids town fans for 20 years, been trying to bring that show

00:40:42.940 | back.

00:40:43.940 | Whatever, right?

00:40:44.940 | Bookmark these things.

00:40:45.940 | And in fact, you should learn, like, I kind of know when the new episodes come out, like,

00:40:49.300 | you know, Cal episodes come out on Mondays or whatever.

00:40:52.100 | And then you can have like appointment viewing, like on your iPad, instead of watching TV,

00:40:55.380 | I'm going to sit down and watch like the latest episode of XYZ or I'm going to load the YouTube

00:40:59.260 | app on my TV and I'm going to watch it on my TV while I eat dinner.

00:41:02.380 | Treat YouTube like you would TV in 2006.

00:41:04.660 | That's fine.

00:41:05.660 | What you shouldn't do is say in the middle of the workday, I'm going to open up YouTube

00:41:08.860 | and I'm just going to rock and roll down those recommendation letters, right?

00:41:13.320 | Because you start with kids town clips and then, you know, 20 minutes later, you're either

00:41:19.060 | in unboxing videos or you're like watching people's videos about like we should imprison

00:41:24.340 | kids in towns.

00:41:25.740 | And they're like trying to make a case for like, we basically should, you know, whatever.

00:41:31.460 | So that's the way I would suggest doing YouTube.

00:41:32.620 | So you just have to have care about how you do these things.

00:41:34.740 | In my book, Digital Minimalism, I said, look, if it comes to a social platform, if there's

00:41:39.020 | a specific value you get out of it, and there are specific values you can get, have rules

00:41:44.020 | around it.

00:41:45.020 | I talked about artists, for example, reducing their Instagram feeds to just other visual

00:41:50.740 | artists.

00:41:51.740 | And on Friday nights, they sit down with like a glass of wine and they look at the art they

00:41:54.520 | posted and they get inspiration and that's valuable.

00:41:56.700 | And that's the only time they mess around with that app the whole week.

00:42:00.240 | Another important use for YouTube for some people is exposure to positive portrayals

00:42:05.340 | of a goal they're pursuing.

00:42:07.220 | So you're getting really into rowing, like, okay, I want to follow some of these rowing

00:42:12.720 | feeds because it's like seeing the workouts and the success of these rowers like motivates

00:42:18.060 | you.

00:42:19.060 | That's great.

00:42:20.060 | Like make that your feed, have a set time you look at it.

00:42:22.300 | Ten minutes before my workout, I'd look at these videos.

00:42:24.860 | So you got to understand the value you're getting out of these things, put smart walls

00:42:31.000 | around it that preserves the value and gets rid of everything else.

00:42:34.920 | And they're no longer distraction machines.

00:42:37.080 | They're just one of other sources of sort of like valuable, interesting information.

00:42:40.680 | Like that's how you have to navigate the world of information.

00:42:43.560 | And if you time block your workday, then you really don't have to worry about this stuff

00:42:46.480 | intruding on your workday, because unless you put down a time block for, you know, mess

00:42:50.000 | around on the internet, you're not going to do it.

00:42:52.760 | You know, if you really want to end your day early, if you need to, and put aside 90 minutes

00:42:57.360 | to mess around the internet, but time blocking will keep this out of your workday, but put

00:43:00.360 | walls around it, put fences around it.

00:43:02.320 | All right, who do we got?

00:43:04.840 | Next question is from Giacomo.

00:43:06.920 | As a UX designer, I find it to be cognitively demanding to emphasize with and persuade others.

00:43:14.080 | Is preparing for and attending reviews about my designs deep work?

00:43:17.600 | Yeah, there's nothing about deep work that demands it be solitary.

00:43:22.240 | It's one of the big misconceptions.

00:43:23.960 | I tried to dispel it in the book, Deep Work, I call it the whiteboard effect.

00:43:28.040 | I talked about the advantages of doing deep work with other people.

00:43:32.800 | It's not by definition, a solitary activity.

00:43:37.600 | The things that define it, if we go back to the original definition, cognitively demanding,

00:43:43.120 | and you're doing it with no distraction.

00:43:45.480 | So it requires you to concentrate, and you're not context switching.

00:43:50.200 | If you're context switching, you're looking at email, you're looking at your phone back,

00:43:53.240 | it's not deep work.

00:43:54.240 | It could be cognitively demanding, but it's not deep work.

00:43:57.100 | If you're giving it your full attention, but it's filling out forms, that's not cognitively

00:44:01.280 | demanding, that's also not deep work.

00:44:03.000 | So there's nothing about being in front of an audience, for example, that makes it not

00:44:07.480 | deep work.

00:44:08.480 | So yes, if you're pitching to an audience, and it's requiring you to empathize and try

00:44:11.960 | to understand what people are saying, and integrate that information real time to try

00:44:16.440 | to adjust your pitch or update your ideas on the fly, that's deep work.

00:44:21.960 | I consider, for example, if I'm teaching or lecturing, that's deep work.

00:44:25.920 | I'm in front of an audience, I'm trying to synthesize complicated information, I see

00:44:30.080 | that as being deep work.

00:44:31.760 | Yesterday, I spoke on a panel with a bunch of digital legal experts, that's deep work.

00:44:38.680 | I had to be thinking about what they were saying, I had to adjust my stuff to fit into

00:44:41.840 | the context, I had to respond to the questions, we're in a room with 100 people, that's as

00:44:46.120 | much of deep work as when I'm sitting alone with a computer.

00:44:48.560 | So I think it is good to think about anything that's cognitively demanding that's getting

00:44:52.920 | your full focus, like that is deep work, and deep work is important.

00:44:57.400 | So yeah, what you're doing is deep work, even when there's other people around.

00:45:00.840 | All right, what do we got?

00:45:04.680 | We got from Lindsey, "My son has just entered high school, my goal is to help him think

00:45:09.680 | through the kind of lifestyle he would want in the future, rather than simply encourage

00:45:13.520 | him toward arbitrary college and career goals.

00:45:16.120 | I want to ensure that his academic and career choices are intentional and aligned with his

00:45:20.320 | personal values and interests."

00:45:21.960 | All right, so I'm going to give you book recommendations.

00:45:26.040 | Right now, with your son in high school, I'm going to recommend that you both take a look

00:45:29.920 | at my book, How to Become a High School Superstar.

00:45:33.760 | This follows a collection of high school students from the early 2000s, who got accepted to

00:45:39.560 | good colleges, but had interesting, non-stressed high school careers.

00:45:45.220 | The terminology I use in the book is I call them relaxed superstars.

00:45:49.600 | And I deconstruct how did they do it, right?

00:45:54.260 | In particular, there's a chapter in here on what I call "interestingness".

00:45:57.280 | How is a high school student to become an interesting person, and why this is like a

00:46:01.560 | much more important goal than becoming a highly "accomplished" person, why this is a more

00:46:08.020 | important goal than having the most crowded possible resume, that there is a huge power

00:46:13.640 | to becoming interesting.

00:46:15.920 | And this is something that you can systematically cultivate.

00:46:18.360 | I give ideas for how to do that.

00:46:19.840 | So in high school, that's what I would look at, this relaxed superstar model.

00:46:24.400 | It's a great preparation for what's going to come next.

00:46:28.440 | Once you're in college, I would then recommend that your son read my book, So Good They Can't

00:46:32.580 | Ignore You.

00:46:33.580 | And this is going to change the way that they think about the career world, and it's going

00:46:39.660 | to push them away from this idea of like, you got to choose the right job right now,

00:46:45.040 | and there is a right job, and it's about matching that job to you.

00:46:47.800 | It's about following your passion or finding the job that you were meant to do.

00:46:50.800 | And if you get that wrong, you'll be miserable.

00:46:52.840 | And it changes that and says, no, no, no, no, no.

00:46:55.080 | Your working life is a part of your bigger life, and you cultivate it to be good for

00:46:58.600 | you and interesting and resonant.

00:47:00.160 | And how do you cultivate it?

00:47:01.580 | You build up what I call career capital, which you build up by becoming good at things that

00:47:05.840 | are valuable.

00:47:06.840 | And as you become good at things that are valuable, you get more control over your career

00:47:10.080 | and you can shape this into something cool.

00:47:12.600 | Whatever cool means to you, and it can mean a lot of different things.

00:47:15.720 | So interestingness in high school, so you avoid getting caught in the trap of just more

00:47:20.240 | is better, professionalizing yourself at too young of an age, and then career capital training

00:47:24.520 | in college.

00:47:26.280 | Those two things together, A, your son is going to enjoy and find life interesting in

00:47:31.620 | high school.

00:47:32.620 | He's going to enjoy and find life interesting in college, not going to be in this grinding

00:47:37.540 | mindset of sacrifice now for some unspecified future later.

00:47:41.520 | He's also going to be able to craft a really cool life in college and beyond.

00:47:46.940 | So I care a lot about those issues.

00:47:48.060 | I wrote those two books.

00:47:49.060 | I recommend them.

00:47:50.060 | All right.

00:47:51.060 | What do we have, Jesse?

00:47:53.620 | We have our corner.

00:47:54.620 | Slow Productivity Corner.

00:47:56.060 | Let's hear that theme music.

00:48:05.220 | So every episode, we like to have one question that connects to my most recent book, Slow

00:48:10.400 | Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:48:14.020 | If you have not read the book, you should.

00:48:15.900 | It's sort of like a cheat sheet for so many of the ideas we talk about on the show.

00:48:20.380 | You can find Slow Productivity anywhere books are sold, including an audio version, which

00:48:25.100 | I recorded.

00:48:26.100 | So you can hear the dulcet tones of Cal Newport.

00:48:29.740 | The Slow Productivity theme music, interesting fact, plays nonstop during the audio book.

00:48:35.660 | Six hours of just that theme music.

00:48:38.480 | We recorded it with a live band.

00:48:39.980 | So for six hours, we had a live band.

00:48:42.300 | There's like a guy on a guitar doing arpeggios and someone doing ... I'm going to demand

00:48:47.020 | that for my next book.

00:48:48.020 | All right.

00:48:49.020 | Enough nonsense.

00:48:50.020 | Let's hear the Slow Productivity Corner question this week.

00:48:51.520 | All right.

00:48:52.520 | It's from Jonathan.

00:48:53.520 | I've been getting close to launching a new business.

00:48:56.220 | I've been reading Slow Productivity and applying your lessons to get rid of every extraneous

00:49:00.700 | project and minimize time suck when possible, but I still find it difficult to give each

00:49:05.460 | endeavor the intention it deserves to grow.

00:49:07.740 | How do I find time?

00:49:09.300 | Well, Jonathan, what you got to do here is like we sometimes use this phrase on the show,

00:49:13.660 | you have to face the productivity dragon.

00:49:15.420 | Now face the productivity dragon is deep question speak for confronting the reality of how long

00:49:22.180 | things you want to do take and how much time you actually have.

00:49:27.140 | We often write fairy tales where we can just go get the proverbial gold and we don't realize

00:49:33.940 | that there's an actual dragon there.

00:49:36.140 | So be really clear, like what needs to be done for this business to launch successfully?

00:49:40.640 | How hard is it to do those things?

00:49:42.380 | How much time and energy is required?

00:49:44.940 | You might find the answer is this is going to take a lot of time.

00:49:49.780 | There's more here than I thought.

00:49:51.220 | There might be some of these things are going to be sort of ambiguously long.

00:49:54.780 | Like I have to find a partner to do this.

00:49:57.660 | And what I'm going to recommend from a Slow Productivity perspective is to say, that's

00:50:02.420 | cool.

00:50:03.420 | It's going to take longer, right?

00:50:05.380 | The Slow Productivity mindset is if you're willing to relentlessly stick to something,

00:50:13.420 | you can make its footprint in your life reasonable and sustainable.

00:50:17.940 | You can trust what we call the compounding interest of accomplishment, that if I stick

00:50:23.500 | with it, let me do this thing, then this thing, and it's going to take me a month.

00:50:26.300 | And this is at the time I have free, this might take me a couple of weeks and it might

00:50:29.420 | be four months to get this done.

00:50:31.500 | As long as you don't stop and you keep making deliberate progress, intentional progress,

00:50:36.780 | not just going through the motions, but intentional progress, it's okay to say this might take

00:50:40.460 | two years.

00:50:41.460 | I'm going to aggregate up the, again, the compound interest of accomplishment.

00:50:44.900 | I'm going to aggregate up these steps and this is going to lead to this and lead to

00:50:47.780 | this.

00:50:48.780 | And it might be two years later and now I'm ready to pull the trigger and it's not at

00:50:51.460 | all risky or weird.

00:50:52.740 | Everything's in place.

00:50:53.780 | All the pieces are here.

00:50:54.780 | I have my first clients.

00:50:56.020 | We've done these test things.

00:50:57.060 | We have a fallback option.

00:50:58.900 | And if you do this right, when you flip the switch to like switch over to the new company,

00:51:01.940 | it's not even stressful.

00:51:03.900 | A Slow Productivity mindset says it's okay if this stuff takes time.

00:51:07.860 | In fact, many accomplishments that you see that are very impressive took people a really

00:51:11.700 | long amount of time.

00:51:13.140 | I do these stories again and again in Slow Productivity, the book, "Hey, you know this

00:51:17.700 | famous thing from history, Newton's Principia, Galileo figuring out the laws of pendulum

00:51:27.340 | motion.

00:51:28.340 | It took decades.

00:51:30.120 | They worked on it regularly.

00:51:31.580 | They didn't give up, but they weren't burning the midnight oil.

00:51:34.460 | They weren't going in some sort of frenzy.

00:51:36.660 | They just let the compound interest of accomplishment accrue.

00:51:39.300 | And over time they produced these things which are awesome and we remember them for that.

00:51:42.660 | And we have no idea how long it took.

00:51:45.780 | The issue is our culture right now, especially the internet culture, and a lot of this again

00:51:50.860 | is shaped by this fool's goal that the social media and influencer community puts out there

00:51:54.820 | to try to get more engagement.

00:51:56.540 | This culture gives you this idea that inspiration plus the ability, the willingness to just

00:52:03.100 | like get after it and be frenzied for a few days is like how stuff happens.

00:52:06.780 | That you're like, "I'm going to make this YouTube channel work," and you just sort of

00:52:10.820 | like get after it and record these cool things crazy.

00:52:13.580 | You're like Mr. Beast for a week and then it just works.

00:52:17.060 | That like I have these pithy things I'm sending on Twitter and then I'm just like a famous

00:52:20.700 | influencer, right?

00:52:22.740 | That's not how most useful stuff happens.

00:52:24.980 | It takes time.

00:52:25.980 | So Slow Productivity is about that's fine.

00:52:27.820 | That's the slow piece of it.

00:52:29.180 | Be fine.

00:52:30.180 | Life is long.

00:52:31.320 | Life is long.

00:52:32.740 | Enjoy the day, right?

00:52:34.340 | You want to enjoy each day and you want over the years to have done stuff that's pretty

00:52:37.540 | cool.

00:52:38.540 | So maybe this is just a matter, Jonathan, of just being okay once you face the productivity

00:52:42.700 | dragon and be like, "It's going to take a lot longer than I thought," but that's not

00:52:45.020 | a bad thing.

00:52:46.020 | It's not a bad thing because I'm making progress on it every day, but each of these days is

00:52:50.540 | sustainable.

00:52:51.540 | So just got to slow down.

00:52:53.040 | Let's hear that music one more time, Jesse.

00:53:02.940 | All right.

00:53:03.940 | Do we have a call this week?

00:53:04.940 | We do.

00:53:05.940 | Oh, let's hear this.

00:53:06.940 | Hey, ETL.

00:53:07.940 | My name is Brom and I'm from Maryland.

00:53:11.280 | So I have a nonfiction book idea that I'm working on.

00:53:15.460 | So far, I've only written one chapter that captures the core of the idea.

00:53:21.080 | I also don't have social media or a blog.

00:53:25.180 | What would you recommend as a way to test the demand or to see if it's useful to people

00:53:31.520 | before actually writing the full thing?

00:53:33.720 | Thanks.

00:53:34.720 | All right.

00:53:35.720 | Well, I got two pieces of advice here.

00:53:37.960 | One is just tactical book writing advice, and then the second is specific to your question

00:53:41.800 | about social media or blogs and writing careers.

00:53:46.120 | My tactical piece of advice, stop writing the book.

00:53:49.140 | That's not how nonfiction works.

00:53:51.520 | You do not write the book in advance.

00:53:54.040 | Having written the book in advance is a big negative hit against you.

00:53:58.280 | In nonfiction, you sign an agent based on the potential of the idea and the potential

00:54:04.420 | of you as a writer.

00:54:05.740 | The agent helps you write a proposal, which you then sell to a publishing house.

00:54:09.680 | The publishing house then gives you an advance for the book, and then you go write it.

00:54:13.920 | The editors want to be involved in shaping the ideas.

00:54:16.200 | Your agent is going to want to be involved in shaping your ideas.

00:54:19.320 | Do not try to get around this system.

00:54:23.120 | Everyone has like, "Well, I'm going to get around it by writing my book, and I'm going

00:54:25.720 | to do this and that.

00:54:26.720 | I'm going to make an in run around the system."

00:54:28.120 | The system works.

00:54:30.320 | Everyone's desperate for good stuff to publish.

00:54:32.360 | No one is trying to hold you out of this system, but it's also a really good checkpoint.

00:54:37.520 | You don't have to do that much work to approach an agent, but your idea plus you gets a really

00:54:44.040 | good early screening.

00:54:46.240 | You've got to convince an agent.

00:54:47.240 | If an agent is convinced, then they have to convince a publisher, so you've got to follow

00:54:51.120 | the real process.

00:54:52.120 | I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago, I think just two books into my publishing

00:54:57.320 | career.

00:54:58.320 | I wrote this blog post at calnewport.com.

00:55:00.720 | You can find it with Google.

00:55:01.720 | Google calnewport.com, and I think it's called "How to Get a Nonfiction Book Deal."

00:55:06.720 | I go through, "Here is how this world works.

00:55:09.640 | Don't write your own rules.

00:55:11.160 | Follow the real rules of the world.

00:55:12.920 | If you're afraid to follow the real rules of the world because you think you're going

00:55:16.440 | to get rejected early on, that's useful feedback."

00:55:18.920 | Good.

00:55:20.000 | How do we make sure you don't get rejected?

00:55:21.840 | It gives you feedback right away of, "How do I actually make this idea ready to go?"

00:55:26.400 | All right.

00:55:27.400 | Now going to the role of social media and blogs.

00:55:30.080 | Here's something to remember.

00:55:32.400 | There has been a nonfiction publishing industry in this country for a long time.

00:55:37.960 | I'm reading a Thoreau biography right now, for example, mid-19th century.

00:55:42.800 | He is selling Walden to Tickner, right?

00:55:46.720 | There's companies.

00:55:47.720 | They were based in Boston.

00:55:49.720 | This was big business for at least 200 years.

00:55:54.620 | Social media, blogs, as a widespread use thing, is about 12 years old.

00:56:02.080 | Just ask yourself this question.

00:56:04.660 | How did all of the tens of thousands of nonfiction writers who existed before 12 years ago, how

00:56:09.440 | were they able to come up with ideas and sell books?

00:56:12.840 | There's your answer, right?

00:56:14.160 | I do not buy the premise that in the last 12 years, the way we did this for 150 years

00:56:20.080 | now no longer works and the only way to sell a nonfiction book is to have an online platform

00:56:24.400 | or to test ideas out on platforms.

00:56:28.720 | People have been doing this for a very long time.

00:56:32.240 | What you're looking for, if we want to be more specific, and this is in my blog post,

00:56:35.240 | so find it.

00:56:36.840 | If you're a nonfiction, and it's pragmatic nonfiction, not journalistic nonfiction, but

00:56:41.080 | like, here's a book about an idea, a book about advice.

00:56:43.920 | This is where non-journalist authors can write.

00:56:46.800 | It's got to be an idea that people are going to feel like they have to read, and you have

00:56:51.440 | to be the right person to write it.

00:56:52.720 | You get those two things together, and you can prove that you're a not bad writer.

00:56:56.280 | You don't have to be a good writer, but you have to be a not bad writer.

00:56:58.800 | It can't be embarrassing.

00:56:59.800 | Then you've got a shot of selling that book.

00:57:02.160 | You don't need to test run this on social media.

00:57:05.260 | You don't need to have a blog, necessarily.

00:57:08.400 | You just have to be thinking.

00:57:10.280 | I read a lot.

00:57:11.280 | I know the industry.

00:57:12.280 | I feel strongly about this idea.

00:57:14.320 | I think it is an idea that is hitting my gut, as that people will see that on a shelf and

00:57:19.040 | say, "I have to read it, and I'm the right person to write about it."

00:57:22.640 | That's what it takes.

00:57:24.360 | That's how I came up with my first books.

00:57:26.240 | I didn't have a platform or this or that.

00:57:28.720 | I think about ideas, and what works and what doesn't, and I trust my gut, and I see what's

00:57:32.480 | happening in the market.

00:57:34.040 | Don't get distracted.

00:57:35.040 | If you want to be a writer, don't get distracted by the platform right now.

00:57:39.060 | We talked about this back in the deep dive, where I said the meanest trick that these

00:57:43.900 | online distraction platforms ever played was figuring out how to convince potential creators

00:57:48.940 | that these platforms were necessary.

00:57:52.180 | It's like tricking a professional endurance athlete into thinking that the key to their

00:57:57.300 | success is going to involve smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

00:58:01.160 | It's actively making them worse at what they do.

00:58:04.060 | That is what happens.

00:58:05.060 | That's what these platforms do so well.

00:58:07.180 | They want to steal this energy you have towards doing something really meaningful, like writing

00:58:13.300 | a book that might affect thousands of people.

00:58:15.280 | They want to steal that energy into you doing these sort of ephemeral fake activities that

00:58:23.180 | they've created for you, to go into their warehouse and to seem like you're being productive,

00:58:28.420 | which they can just monetize.

00:58:31.020 | It's like a shame.

00:58:32.020 | It's like a tragedy.

00:58:33.020 | Don't let them steal your energy.

00:58:35.340 | Polish your idea.

00:58:37.020 | Find an idea that you're the right person to write.

00:58:39.220 | If you're not a not-bad writer, become a not-bad writer, which means you have to go out there

00:58:42.620 | and find places where you can write.

00:58:44.240 | You have to find magazines, online magazines, newsletters, whatever it is that people let

00:58:48.020 | you write for.

00:58:49.020 | You've got to be a good enough writer.

00:58:50.020 | All this is hard work.

00:58:51.020 | That's fine.

00:58:52.020 | We talked about the 10-year rule during the deep dive.

00:58:53.580 | That's fine.

00:58:54.580 | It took me 10 years to write my first really good book.

00:58:58.060 | That's fine.

00:58:59.060 | Be willing to do the work.

00:59:00.060 | Get the idea.

00:59:01.060 | Be the right one to do it.

00:59:02.060 | Learn how to write.

00:59:03.060 | Pitch the right way to agents.

00:59:04.340 | Don't write your own path.

00:59:05.340 | That's how this all works.

00:59:06.620 | Don't let Instagram or TikTok or Elon Musk's Twitter steal that energy from you.

00:59:13.180 | They have enough money.

00:59:14.940 | I was looking at the richest persons, the top 10 in the world list earlier today.

00:59:19.900 | Musk is number one right now.

00:59:21.580 | Zuckerberg is like number five.

00:59:23.780 | They have enough money.

00:59:25.040 | You don't need to monetize your time on their behalf right now.

00:59:28.860 | You need to focus on your idea, learning how to write, figuring out the idea where you're

00:59:33.140 | the right person to write it.

00:59:34.900 | Go read that post, CalNewport.com and how to get a nonfiction book deal.

00:59:39.540 | If you Google something like that, you'll find it and then get after it.

00:59:43.900 | Let those guys have their stocks high enough.

00:59:46.740 | They don't need your help.

00:59:48.300 | With all the literary agents you know, do they get pitched a lot by potential?

00:59:52.900 | They do, but not enough.

00:59:55.460 | To me it's just the oddest thing that if you want to be a writer, why not figure out how

01:00:01.140 | does the world of writing work?

01:00:04.020 | Everyone wants to write their own story to that, their own answer to that question.

01:00:08.140 | They want the world.

01:00:09.140 | I mean, it's usually the same thing.

01:00:11.060 | They want it to be a combination of like having the right tools and like writing every day,

01:00:16.660 | like the romantic elements and I have a beautiful idea notebook and I write each morning, but

01:00:22.780 | I spend 10 minutes each morning, Instagramming a photo of my earthenware mug next to my notebook

01:00:28.460 | and I'm just going to have this brilliance eventually that it's going to shock the world.

01:00:36.220 | The world is like, you got to convince an agent.

01:00:38.740 | What are the agents, what do they care about?

01:00:40.460 | If you don't know the answer to that question, don't start yet.

01:00:43.620 | That is going to be your first step is selling the agent.

01:00:46.860 | So many people try to go around the agents, write to the publishers because they're worried

01:00:50.740 | it's too much of a proximate rejection.

01:00:52.940 | It's a really quick rejection with an agent.

01:00:54.580 | It's like, here's my query letter.

01:00:55.900 | Here's who I am.

01:00:56.900 | Here's my idea.

01:00:57.900 | Do you want to find out more?

01:00:58.900 | And it's often like, no, that's not quite right.

01:00:59.900 | They don't want that rejection.

01:01:00.900 | It's like, maybe I'll just go and send like a fully written nonfiction book, which is

01:01:04.940 | do not do straight to a publisher.

01:01:08.020 | And why?

01:01:09.020 | Because I think it feels like, you know, maybe you never know, like it feels somehow like

01:01:12.260 | the rejection won't be so proximate.

01:01:14.060 | Don't write your own story.

01:01:15.260 | Learn how the world works, right?

01:01:19.060 | When you learn how the world works, it's accessible.

01:01:22.220 | It might be hard, right?

01:01:24.620 | I mean, it might take years to get it done, to figure it out right.

01:01:30.460 | But learn how it works and go for it.

01:01:31.700 | The other problem that happens, and I see this a lot with writers, is they forever wheel

01:01:35.420 | spin.

01:01:36.420 | Especially like the potential novelists, it's just manuscript after manuscript, they just

01:01:40.660 | get stuck into like, I'm writing and I'm editing.

01:01:43.660 | And like, no, get the wheels on the track sooner.

01:01:47.340 | Like here's this thing.

01:01:48.340 | I'm pitching an agent.

01:01:49.940 | They're telling me it's not right.

01:01:51.460 | I'm going to do something else and pitch that agent and get like, be in the game as early

01:01:55.700 | as you can be in the game.

01:01:57.260 | Find the easiest way in too.

01:01:58.820 | Like that's another way to do this.

01:02:00.060 | Like I got into book writing with student advice guides because it was the only thing

01:02:04.860 | I could sell as a 21 year old.

01:02:07.100 | And they were easy to write, right?

01:02:08.540 | We were just, man, those were short chapters.

01:02:11.140 | We were just with my agent and I were talking about my first book, which came out in 2005,

01:02:17.580 | I think.

01:02:18.860 | And we're, we're updating a few, like making some corrections and, uh, you know, there's

01:02:23.340 | some stuff in 2005 that doesn't exist in 2025.

01:02:26.380 | So we just had to go through, but I'm like, man, these chapters are like, you know, a

01:02:31.660 | page and a half when you print them out.

01:02:34.060 | But like, that was like a very low friction way for me in the writing.

01:02:36.900 | Like I could not have written so good.

01:02:38.620 | They can't ignore you, uh, when I was 21, you know, but I was able, I wrote it when

01:02:44.420 | I was 29.

01:02:45.620 | And by then I was ready.

01:02:46.620 | I'd written three books and done a bunch of magazine writing.

01:02:48.220 | I was like, I was ready to do it.

01:02:49.420 | So like find low friction ways in, you know, it's like Michael Crichton.

01:02:53.300 | He didn't start with Jurassic Park.

01:02:55.780 | He started with these Zhongling, uh, pop boiler thrillers, which like back then we don't have

01:03:01.540 | this industry today, but back then, because there was no phones, right.

01:03:05.340 | There was these huge industries of just, there's paperbacks everywhere.

01:03:08.340 | Cause that's like your entertainment.

01:03:09.820 | So they're like these like kind of bad paperback.

01:03:11.620 | You buy them in the drugstore, you buy them at the supermarket, you'd read them in three

01:03:14.700 | days.

01:03:15.700 | So today this equivalent would probably be writing online or something like this.

01:03:18.940 | Right.

01:03:19.940 | But he was just like, let me get in there and start figuring out how to actually like

01:03:23.980 | make writing work.

01:03:25.300 | You know?

01:03:26.300 | So I do have a soapbox.

01:03:27.420 | I think writing is a great thing, but you gotta, you gotta embrace the reality of how

01:03:30.940 | that world works and do not let the social media companies take that energy from you.

01:03:34.620 | I hate that they steal this from creative potential creatives.

01:03:38.180 | It's such a target for them because it's a right target because if you're, if you're

01:03:42.260 | a creator, it is such like an appealing thing to be like, I could be doing this stuff on

01:03:47.220 | this platform and it feels productive and I'm checking things off and there's like a

01:03:50.500 | lottery feel that like something could go viral and it's all brain cycles that could

01:03:57.900 | be going to creating something new that matters.

01:03:59.940 | Just being stolen and ossified into the stock price of like a small number of these giant

01:04:04.580 | conglomerates.

01:04:05.580 | All right.

01:04:06.580 | Anyway, it's a good call.

01:04:07.980 | Got me on my soapbox.

01:04:08.980 | I went to a case study now.

01:04:11.140 | This is where people send in accounts of how they put the ideas we talked about on this

01:04:14.980 | show and in my books into practice in their own life.

01:04:17.780 | If you have a case study of your own, send it to Jesse@calnewport.com.

01:04:24.140 | Today's case study comes from Connor.

01:04:26.740 | Connor said, I played in the Australian football league for nine years.

01:04:31.980 | During this time, I discovered how to become a straight A student and deep work.

01:04:36.880 | These books helped me complete my degree in commerce.

01:04:39.780 | While playing, I began to think about the life I wanted to live.

01:04:42.580 | I couldn't see myself wearing a suit and being inside all day.

01:04:45.620 | I wanted to be outside and began to appreciate my love of turf.

01:04:49.100 | I used my career capital of playing to build relationships with the turf managers.

01:04:54.660 | This allowed me to start my own lawn and garden business called Blakeley's Backyards.

01:04:59.380 | Unexpectedly, my turf knowledge has also led to another development following my AFL career.

01:05:05.140 | I started playing cricket at a community level with friends.

01:05:07.660 | This escalated to where I'm now heading to the UK to play a season there.

01:05:11.940 | Playing cricket in England will allow me to further my career capital in the sports turf

01:05:15.780 | world.

01:05:16.780 | I will take back the intricacies of the English soil, growing conditions, and other gardening

01:05:21.060 | techniques to Australia when I'm done.

01:05:24.340 | So Connor is a fantastic example of two career related ideas we talked about on here, lifestyle

01:05:30.140 | centric planning and career capital theory.

01:05:33.720 | These go together real tightly.

01:05:36.820 | So lifestyle centric planning says you need to work backwards from an image of your ideal

01:05:41.080 | lifestyle as opposed to trying to choose the perfect job.

01:05:43.980 | So Connor here knows, I want to be outside.

01:05:47.300 | I don't want to go to an office that the rhythm of that type of day feels wrong for me.

01:05:51.740 | I want to be outside.

01:05:52.740 | I want that type of autonomy, right?

01:05:54.460 | So now he's working backwards from a lifestyle vision.

01:05:57.900 | There are many, many different ways that could get there.

01:06:00.340 | He's really maximized his chances of actually finding something that gives him a lifestyle

01:06:04.420 | that's enjoyable.

01:06:05.420 | This is much different than just choosing from scratch your perfect job, which may or

01:06:08.580 | may not work out.

01:06:10.080 | He then deployed career capital theory, which is a fancy term for what we talked about back

01:06:14.940 | in the deep dive earlier in the show.

01:06:18.120 | You want control over what your life is like, get good at something people care about.

01:06:22.820 | The better you are, the more control you have.

01:06:26.060 | And so he realized turf is something I could get good at.

01:06:29.300 | He already had career capital in the sense that he came out of a sports league.

01:06:33.060 | So he sort of had an entrance to this world.

01:06:35.220 | He's not a random person.

01:06:37.180 | And he's looking ahead to like his cricket career in England is going to give him even

01:06:40.980 | more career capital.

01:06:42.100 | He's imagining how he can leverage this idea of like, I know about turf, I just spent a

01:06:45.940 | year in England.

01:06:46.940 | I'm a professional athlete.

01:06:47.940 | Like that's going to come together and really probably help what he's doing here with this

01:06:52.460 | turf business, which itself is a perfect fit for his lifestyle vision, right?

01:06:58.100 | So lifestyle centric planning plus career capital theory.

01:07:00.880 | This is how people build deep lives, much more so than the dominant ideas of passion

01:07:07.340 | theory or grand goal theory.

01:07:09.260 | I figure out some perfect thing for me to do, and if I succeed, I'll be happy.

01:07:12.300 | And if I don't, I won't.

01:07:14.060 | So Conor, I appreciate that case study.

01:07:18.180 | Australian football is no joke, by the way.

01:07:20.240 | He was writing that from a UK pub, by the way, and he like provided some explanation.

01:07:26.500 | I emailed him about it.

01:07:27.500 | What was he drinking?

01:07:28.500 | A pint of ale.

01:07:30.860 | Yeah, I like that.

01:07:33.860 | We still, that's what we are missing.

01:07:36.860 | We talked before about, you were above a bar here, shout out the Motocat.

01:07:41.420 | We talked about having like a bucket system, but no, I think what we need is a English

01:07:47.100 | pub style beer engine, right?

01:07:50.620 | Because think about it, in the English pubs, they often have the casks in the cellar and

01:07:55.460 | then the beer engine, they use just like pressure and hand energy to like pump up from whatever.

01:08:00.380 | So like we could have a beer engine, I feel like from some cask that they keep for us

01:08:05.220 | down at the actual bar down there.

01:08:06.620 | Yeah.

01:08:07.620 | All right.

01:08:08.620 | I think we'd get more guests on the show if we did that.

01:08:10.620 | Yeah.

01:08:11.620 | If there was a beer engine inside the studio.

01:08:14.180 | That would be a great show idea because you probably get people, if the interview goes

01:08:18.940 | on long enough and they're pumping that beer, you know, we'd get some interesting truths

01:08:22.160 | out of people after a while.

01:08:24.260 | Like Rogan style.

01:08:25.260 | Rogan style.

01:08:26.260 | Yeah.

01:08:27.260 | Let's get people.

01:08:28.260 | Long Rogan style interviews with a beer engine in the room would get like a, I don't know.

01:08:34.020 | It'd be like Elon Musk smoking marijuana.

01:08:36.020 | Yeah.

01:08:37.020 | Except for we'd have just like a drunk Oliver Berkman, who I'm interviewing soon.

01:08:42.300 | That's just why I was thinking about that.

01:08:43.300 | All right.

01:08:44.300 | So we've got a final segment I want to get to.

01:08:46.020 | Something cool I found on the internet that I'm going to react to.

01:08:48.060 | But first I want to talk about another one of our sponsors.

01:08:51.940 | In particular, I want to talk about Shopify.

01:08:55.800 | When you think about businesses whose sales are rocketing, right?

01:08:59.920 | Like Feastables by Mr. Beast or Thrive Cosmetics or Silicon Valley's seemingly like mandatory

01:09:06.280 | weekend uniform supplier, Cotopaxi.

01:09:09.340 | You think about the products and the brands, et cetera.

01:09:11.780 | But what's often overlooked is the businesses behind the businesses that make the selling

01:09:18.500 | simple.

01:09:19.500 | And so what is it that helps these famous brands sell like the actual mechanics of selling

01:09:24.740 | their products?

01:09:25.740 | And for millions of businesses, the answer to that question is Shopify.

01:09:30.220 | Nobody does selling better than Shopify.

01:09:33.940 | It's the home of the number one checkout on the planet and the not so secret, secret,

01:09:40.420 | which is their shop pay feature boost conversions up to 50%.

01:09:44.580 | People do not abandon their Shopify shopping carts, which means you will sell more.

01:09:49.940 | I mean, it's what people use when they want to sell things online.

01:09:53.060 | Of course, they also have point of sales, they have all sorts of other products.

01:09:56.780 | But like when you're thinking about e-commerce, you have to think about Shopify.

01:10:01.500 | Hopefully our friend Zach who made the VBLCCP hats, which we debuted last week and I think

01:10:06.340 | were a big hit.

01:10:07.340 | He emailed us back as well and he said that he could make it smaller if we want.

01:10:10.700 | Yeah.

01:10:11.700 | I mean, I thought it looked cool.

01:10:13.020 | But anyways, if he sets up a shop, if we were selling those hats, which maybe we should,

01:10:17.620 | actually I am going to ask him, I want that hat with it smaller.

01:10:20.100 | I'm going to talk to Zach.

01:10:21.100 | Okay.

01:10:22.100 | I'm going to get that design perfect.

01:10:23.100 | Zach's the man.

01:10:24.100 | But if we're going to sell those hats, not even a second thought, Shopify.

01:10:28.060 | It's going to be the same software that's behind, you know, Cotopaxi, between Thrive,

01:10:33.740 | Cosmetic, Feastable, all of that same software, but so easy for us to set up and just going

01:10:38.620 | to, the conversions are going to be off the charts.

01:10:42.420 | All the sort of ex-Soviet era bureaucrats that are going to be like, this reminds me

01:10:46.980 | of my days as the Commissar of Agricultural.

01:10:51.580 | That's not a Zach thing, by the way.

01:10:52.940 | That's our acronym.

01:10:53.940 | Just to be clear.

01:10:54.940 | It's the CCP at the end of our acronym.

01:10:56.620 | So anyways, businesses that sell more sell on Shopify.

01:11:01.260 | So upgrade your business and get the same checkout used by Cotopaxi and MrBeast.

01:11:07.340 | Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep.

01:11:12.580 | And you need to type that in all lowercase.

01:11:15.840 | Go to shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today.

01:11:20.060 | That's shopify.com/deep.

01:11:21.060 | I also want to talk about our longtime friends at Element.

01:11:28.140 | Elements Electrolyte Drink Mix is something I use every day.

01:11:32.420 | I am often getting dehydrated.

01:11:34.580 | I do a lot of speaking.

01:11:35.580 | I podcast.

01:11:36.580 | I do interviews.

01:11:37.580 | I teach.

01:11:38.580 | I'm on panels.

01:11:40.980 | You lose a lot of moisture speaking and it's DC, which means six months out of the year.

01:11:47.080 | You essentially live in a sauna.

01:11:49.700 | I exercise a lot.

01:11:52.120 | Element is how I rehydrate.

01:11:54.540 | What I do actually is depending on how dehydrated I am, I control how much of the drink mix

01:11:59.580 | package I put into my water bottle.

01:12:01.380 | I usually use like a full Nalgene bottle.

01:12:04.500 | In the morning if I'm dehydrated, Element.

01:12:06.860 | The afternoon after a hard day of work, Element.

01:12:09.540 | After this podcast, Element.

01:12:11.940 | Right now we're using the lime.

01:12:13.540 | That's what I have.

01:12:14.540 | We kind of do one box at a time, which I like.

01:12:16.780 | The watermelon's good too.

01:12:17.780 | Anyway, so the drink mix is great because it has the electrolyte balance you need but

01:12:21.460 | no junk, no sugar, no weird coloring agents.

01:12:25.400 | You just know you can drink this and it's nothing bad.

01:12:27.820 | It's just giving you what you need.

01:12:29.980 | So I'm a big fan of Element.

01:12:31.980 | I wanted to mention, however, they have this new product coming out, which you should keep

01:12:35.180 | your eyes on.

01:12:36.180 | Element Sparkling, which delivers the same zero sugar electrolyte formulation you already

01:12:40.100 | know and trust, but in a bold 16 ounce can of sparkling water so you can just grab it

01:12:45.540 | out of the fridge already cold, which I think is really cool.

01:12:49.620 | Now, the Sparkling has not been widely released yet, but if you are already an Element insider,

01:12:57.740 | you can purchase Element Sparkling right now.

01:13:02.660 | So there's a good offer here.

01:13:04.080 | You can get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase you do at drinkelement.com/deep.

01:13:13.020 | That's drinkelementlmnt.com/deep and you'll get a free sample pack with any drink mix

01:13:19.320 | purchase.

01:13:20.660 | And if you're an Element insider, you have first access to Element Sparkling, a bold

01:13:24.980 | 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water.

01:13:27.700 | All right, Jesse, let's get to our final segment.

01:13:30.340 | I like to react to things that I discover on the internet or that people send in to

01:13:35.300 | my interesting@calnewport.com email address during this final segment.

01:13:39.620 | This is something cool that someone sent.

01:13:42.740 | It was CS Lewis's advice to a young writer.

01:13:48.220 | I don't know what this is from.

01:13:49.660 | It's from some book I suppose he wrote, but I have it up on the screen here.

01:13:53.620 | So if you are watching, instead of just listening, you'll see it here on the screen, but I'm

01:13:58.340 | going to read it.

01:13:59.900 | All right.

01:14:01.460 | Here's what he says.

01:14:03.340 | It's very hard to give any general advice about writing.

01:14:06.500 | Here's my attempt.

01:14:08.220 | Number one, turn off the radio.

01:14:11.840 | Number two, read all the good books you can and avoid nearly all magazines.

01:14:18.460 | And number three, always write and read with the ear, not the eye.

01:14:23.480 | You should hear every sentence you write as if it were being read aloud or spoken.

01:14:27.060 | If it does not sound nice, try again.

01:14:28.820 | All right, let's stop here before proceeding because I want to talk about those first three

01:14:32.140 | pieces of advice because not only is he dead on, but the advice is super relevant to our

01:14:38.060 | current digital moment as well.

01:14:40.320 | Turn off the radio.

01:14:41.540 | What is our modern equivalent of that?

01:14:43.820 | Turn off your phone.

01:14:45.860 | In both cases, what he's saying is you do not want a source of context switching distraction.

01:14:52.080 | You need every ounce your brain can offer to successfully write.

01:14:56.020 | And I actually went down this rabbit hole.

01:14:57.260 | I have a New Yorker piece right now in editing where as part of the piece, I wrote about

01:15:01.300 | the neuroscience of writing, TLDR.

01:15:07.180 | It uses like all of your brain is really hard.

01:15:09.340 | So don't have distractions.

01:15:10.340 | All right.

01:15:11.340 | Number two, he says, read all the good books you can and avoid nearly all magazines.

01:15:14.620 | Yeah, that is true today as well.

01:15:18.140 | Just replace magazines with like anything on your phone.

01:15:20.780 | You want to be a good writer, you got to read good writers.

01:15:24.220 | Don't be sitting watching the sort of hyper palatable distractions on your phone, the

01:15:28.780 | stuff coming on social media.

01:15:31.060 | This is not going to make you a better writer because it's not good writing.

01:15:35.260 | Back then it was magazines, today it's going to be your phone.

01:15:38.660 | Number three, write and read with the ear, not the eye.

01:15:42.420 | This is so critical.

01:15:43.420 | This is a big secret of my success.

01:15:46.100 | And I wanted to point this out because people don't talk about it enough.

01:15:49.900 | The internal rhythms of writing, which is entirely like an out loud thing, how sentence

01:15:55.860 | rhythm builds, how word sounds correspond with other word sounds.

01:16:01.160 | Good professional writers care a lot about this.

01:16:02.900 | And I don't think we talk about this enough.

01:16:05.540 | My big competitive advantage that allowed me to get into writing earlier maybe than

01:16:09.740 | other people is that I did comedy writing in college.

01:16:12.980 | I was the editor of the humor magazine at Dartmouth, The Jack-o'-lantern.

01:16:16.860 | And I talked about this, I think, on maybe one of my recent Tim Ferriss episode visits.

01:16:23.700 | But the thing about comedy writing is it's all sound and rhythm.

01:16:27.900 | You have to take the same rhythms a standup comedian would have and you're translating

01:16:31.780 | the words.

01:16:32.780 | But for comedy writing to work, it's that you have to bring the writer along and set

01:16:36.420 | them up and then boom, catch them from off guard.

01:16:39.340 | And so when you comedy write, you obsess about how the sentences sound inside your actual

01:16:44.340 | inner narrative.

01:16:46.100 | It turns out that's what you need to do to write well.

01:16:48.900 | And so I sort of had a little bit of an advantage because comedy writing forces the matter.

01:16:53.300 | It just works not at all.

01:16:55.220 | You can write okay without caring about rhythm and sound.

01:16:57.740 | You can't write comedy right at all without it.

01:16:59.980 | By the time I got to like New Yorker writing, it's all rhythm and sound and commas and semicolons

01:17:06.300 | and how does this unfold and how does this word sound next to that word and this word

01:17:11.140 | with this word doesn't sound right.

01:17:12.820 | Anyways, we don't emphasize that enough when we talk about writing, but it's music and

01:17:17.540 | you have to think about that way.

01:17:18.540 | So great advice.

01:17:19.540 | All right.

01:17:20.540 | Another piece of advice from C.S. Lewis.

01:17:23.060 | Write about what really interests you, whether it's real things or imaginary things and nothing

01:17:27.340 | else.

01:17:28.980 | Notice this means that if you're interested only in writing, you will never be a writer

01:17:31.860 | because you have nothing to write about.

01:17:33.820 | Yeah, I think this is still true.

01:17:35.540 | We gave this advice to the aspiring writer earlier in this show.

01:17:40.420 | You got to have something to say that people care about and you got to be the right person

01:17:43.840 | to say it, which means it's got to be something you care about too.

01:17:47.840 | Interesting point where he says, whether it's real or imaginary, C.S. Lewis was a serious

01:17:54.100 | professor at Oxford and he was writing science fiction and fantasy.

01:18:00.340 | I think it's really cool that this is what resonated.

01:18:03.500 | His books pre Narnia books were science fiction, early 20th century science fiction.

01:18:09.260 | And then he writes the Narnia books, which are fantasy.

01:18:11.740 | So I think it's really cool that these dowdy Oxford dons were like, I'm going to write

01:18:17.940 | fantasy.

01:18:18.940 | I'm going to write science fiction.

01:18:19.940 | Like that's what spoke to them.

01:18:21.220 | I talk about, here's another advertisement for my book, Slow Productivity.

01:18:25.420 | I talk about the group that Lewis, along with his fellow Oxford professor, J.R.R.

01:18:30.820 | Tolkien formed called the Inklings.

01:18:32.540 | And I get into how they having this group of writers like help them figure out, find

01:18:37.580 | their voice and develop their careers.

01:18:38.940 | And I talk about how you should do something similar in your own life if you're working

01:18:41.580 | on something cool.

01:18:43.380 | So check out my book.

01:18:44.380 | All right.

01:18:45.380 | He also says, take great pains to be clear.

01:18:49.740 | Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn't.

01:18:52.620 | And a single ill chosen word may lead them to him, to a total misunderstanding.

01:18:57.180 | All the way on board with this.

01:18:59.020 | I think about this all the time in my writing.

01:19:02.100 | How can I not only make this clear, but like perfectly clear.

01:19:06.940 | And you have to be careful about red herrings and MacGuffins as well.

01:19:11.380 | All right.

01:19:12.380 | So what that means is you introduce something that doesn't pay off.

01:19:15.700 | You can't do that in nonfiction writing.

01:19:17.860 | You can't, if I kind of start talking about this, it either has to be a reason I talked

01:19:22.600 | about it that I conclude right there, or I have to have a callback later.

01:19:25.580 | It can't just be a non-sequitur.

01:19:26.580 | It can't just sit there like a red herring or a MacGuffin.

01:19:29.220 | I can't start going this way in the chapter and then shift gears without ever saying why.

01:19:34.140 | The reader's mind tries to assemble as they read everything you're saying into a pattern

01:19:38.180 | that makes sense.

01:19:39.180 | So when there's pieces that don't fit quite together, it is like alarm bells go off and

01:19:44.580 | there is a intuitive discomfort that the reader develops towards what they're writing.

01:19:50.100 | So that's why like nonfiction writers, we obsess about how all the pieces fit together

01:19:54.940 | so that you don't notice anything when you read.

01:19:58.100 | And so you probably under appreciate a piece of nonfiction writing that just explains something

01:20:02.580 | and it flows like, "Oh, I know more about that.

01:20:04.300 | That was good."

01:20:05.300 | It seems easy and it's not because every piece had to fit with no red herrings or MacGuffins

01:20:09.700 | or hanging.

01:20:10.700 | Everything comes together.

01:20:12.540 | Same thing with screenplays.

01:20:13.580 | Everyone thinks they can write a screenplay because they know movies.

01:20:15.740 | Like I could write people talking and yes, you could write a scene that could be in a

01:20:21.580 | movie.

01:20:22.580 | If you like movies, you could write a scene that could be in a movie.

01:20:24.900 | You could come up with a plot idea that you can make a movie about, but can you write

01:20:28.060 | an hour and a half worth of scenes that all click together?

01:20:31.060 | All the characters get developed properly.

01:20:33.060 | There's nothing just introduced that doesn't pay off.

01:20:35.160 | There's no too much deuce ex machina, like everything kind of fits and flows together.

01:20:39.940 | No loose strings hanging, nothing that catches the attention as being out of place by the

01:20:43.860 | viewer.

01:20:44.860 | Can you do 90 minutes of a movie that has none of that?

01:20:47.460 | Well, that's really hard.

01:20:49.700 | That's what's hard.

01:20:50.860 | So we convince ourselves screenwriting is easy because you say, I could see myself writing

01:20:53.860 | that scene, but you can't do 20 of those scenes in a row without any of that friction coming

01:20:57.780 | in there.

01:20:58.860 | So I think this is great advice.

01:21:00.260 | All right, let's see what else he has here.

01:21:02.820 | C.S.

01:21:03.820 | Lewis also says, when you give up a bit of work, don't throw it away, put it in a drawer.

01:21:11.100 | It may come in useful later.

01:21:13.340 | Much of my best work, or what I think is my best, is the rewriting of things begun and

01:21:17.700 | abandoned years earlier.

01:21:19.380 | All right, I'm on board with that.

01:21:21.660 | When I'm working on a book, for example, I use Scrivener.

01:21:24.380 | I have more words in my cut folders than I have in the final things that I show up in

01:21:31.620 | the book.

01:21:32.620 | I save everything I cut, and I often am able to repurpose that later in the book or in

01:21:37.780 | later books.

01:21:39.280 | So I agree with that.

01:21:40.460 | Save what you're going to save.

01:21:42.860 | This one's interesting.

01:21:43.860 | I don't know if I fully agree with this today, but it's interesting.

01:21:48.260 | He says, don't use a typewriter.

01:21:50.460 | The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.

01:21:56.020 | Here's how I read that.

01:21:58.100 | Your tools matter.

01:22:00.040 | And having a tool that you feel good about working with is what's important.

01:22:06.800 | Because in the end, they're all just writing going on paper.

01:22:08.940 | The speed differentials don't matter too much.

01:22:11.040 | What matters is the tool that's going to produce the best work.

01:22:14.320 | Don't get caught up with conveniences being all that important.

01:22:19.020 | Because writing, look, writing takes a long amount of time.

01:22:22.060 | The final step of getting words onto the page, whether you're handwriting or typewriting

01:22:26.320 | or using a very fancy word processor, like the difference between those two things is

01:22:30.060 | like an epsilon on what's actually required to write.

01:22:32.980 | So, hey, what works for you?

01:22:35.140 | Feel okay with that.

01:22:37.020 | So C.S. Lewis hand wrote, and he felt like the typewriter, like, yeah, I guess it's faster,

01:22:42.060 | but I don't like it.

01:22:43.060 | The rhythm's off.

01:22:44.060 | Why would I use a tool that's going to make me a worse writer?

01:22:47.100 | George R. Martin, who wrote, you know, obviously the Game of Thrones books, still uses one

01:22:52.900 | of the original versions of WordStar, one of the original word processors.

01:22:57.300 | He has an old computer that runs the MS-DOS operating system, and he runs WordStar on

01:23:03.340 | MS-DOS and saves his manuscript files to floppy disks.

01:23:07.740 | Yes, Microsoft Word is more convenient.

01:23:11.180 | Yes, Scrivener is more convenient.

01:23:13.180 | That's what works for him.

01:23:14.340 | And that's way more important.

01:23:15.900 | So I think that's how I would read that tool is, that rule rather, is the tool that works

01:23:20.740 | for you is what matters, not trying to have the best possible tool, whatever that means.

01:23:25.820 | And finally, his last piece of advice, timeless, be sure you know the meaning or meanings of

01:23:30.620 | every word you use.

01:23:31.780 | Yeah, don't try to be smarter than you are.

01:23:33.700 | Don't think that fancy vocabulary is going to impress people.

01:23:38.860 | The smartest people are often the clearest, right?

01:23:41.660 | They let their ideas shine, they don't try to gussy up the language.

01:23:46.740 | So anyways, that's a cool piece of advice.

01:23:48.700 | The link is in the show notes if you want to check it out for yourself.

01:23:52.660 | But some things are timeless, and I think C.S. Lewis nailed it.

01:23:55.500 | Everything there I would recommend even today to an aspiring writer.

01:23:59.740 | All right, that's all the time we have for today's episode.

01:24:02.580 | Thank you for listening.

01:24:04.340 | We'll be back next week with another normal episode of the show.

01:24:07.900 | It's the fall, so we're back in action again.

01:24:09.980 | Vacations are over.

01:24:10.980 | So we'll see you then, and until next time, as always, stay deep.

01:24:15.220 | Hey, so if you liked our discussion today about how to get good at things that matter

01:24:19.900 | so that you can take better control of your life, I think you will also like episode 308,

01:24:24.500 | which is called The Power of the Quiet Mind.

01:24:27.580 | It gives you some extra things to think about when it comes to how you produce stuff that

01:24:31.380 | matters.

01:24:32.660 | Check it out.

01:24:33.860 | And yet, just like with digital knowledge work, we once again have the sinking feeling

01:24:39.540 | that something is off, that our lives are somehow not quite right in a world in which

01:24:45.260 | we're looking at our phones so much.

01:24:46.460 | We can't say exactly why it's a problem, but people just feel uneasy when they survey the

01:24:52.260 | crowds around them and see everyone's face looking down.

This Idea Will Make You Unstoppable. (How To Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals) | Cal Newport

Chapters