Full Length Episode | #178 | February 28, 2022 | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.120 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 178.

00:00:07.120 | I'm here at my Deep Work HQ,

00:00:15.600 | joined as usual by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:20.600 | Now, Jesse, do I look more tanned and relaxed?

00:00:24.840 | - You look very tan.

00:00:26.120 | - Given that-- - Like Mark Sisson.

00:00:27.440 | - Like Mark Sisson.

00:00:29.720 | I look like a 65-year-old man, like Mark Sisson.

00:00:33.160 | I just got back from Mark Sisson's home stomping grounds

00:00:37.120 | of Florida just a few days ago.

00:00:40.560 | And let me tell you what the important thing was

00:00:42.360 | about that trip.

00:00:43.280 | I didn't work.

00:00:45.880 | All right, and that's rare for me

00:00:47.840 | because when I go on any type of vacation,

00:00:49.520 | now this was a short one,

00:00:50.440 | but when I go on any type of vacation,

00:00:51.760 | I pretty soon get antsy.

00:00:54.200 | If I don't have things to think about,

00:00:55.840 | if I don't have progress to be making.

00:00:57.600 | So I'm usually working on a writing problem,

00:00:59.880 | a writing project, or a math problem I'm trying to solve.

00:01:03.520 | And I'll walk the beach and I'll try to make progress.

00:01:05.400 | And I didn't bring anything like that.

00:01:06.680 | I didn't write and I didn't try to solve anything.

00:01:10.800 | I mean, I did a little writing in my head,

00:01:12.120 | but I wasn't actually typing and making progress.

00:01:14.720 | I wasn't trying to solve anything.

00:01:16.480 | It was nice.

00:01:17.600 | - How many books did you read?

00:01:19.120 | - 12.

00:01:21.080 | - No, one and a half, one and a half.

00:01:26.120 | So, oh yeah, by the way, what are we now?

00:01:28.360 | The 25th or 6th?

00:01:30.680 | So yeah, we got another book episode.

00:01:32.440 | Next time we record, we'll have books.

00:01:34.800 | I will admit, so we're recording this on February 25th,

00:01:37.840 | and I finished my five books in February

00:01:41.440 | early in that trip.

00:01:42.680 | So now I'm working on two books concurrently

00:01:45.400 | that I'll finish in March.

00:01:48.440 | So I'm sort of on my way.

00:01:49.960 | And I'm working on a really big book in the background too.

00:01:52.560 | And I don't know how to report that

00:01:53.720 | because it's gonna take me,

00:01:55.320 | it's an 800 page beast.

00:01:57.120 | And so I just work on it a little bit at a time

00:01:59.200 | in the background.

00:02:00.040 | And so it doesn't get captured in my monthly reports,

00:02:03.280 | but that thing's rolling along as well.

00:02:05.440 | So a lot of good reading got done.

00:02:07.720 | Saw some sun, saw some dolphins,

00:02:11.160 | did not see Mark Sisson,

00:02:13.360 | but it was all in all a good trip,

00:02:15.280 | but not working is a big deal for me.

00:02:17.240 | Just actually wrangling family and looking at the ocean

00:02:21.640 | and doing what one does.

00:02:22.560 | So it was a good trip.

00:02:24.040 | - Good to hear.

00:02:25.560 | So I figured we'd do a little deep dive

00:02:26.960 | and then get into some listener calls.

00:02:31.120 | I was thinking this might be a good time

00:02:34.480 | to remind people, Jesse,

00:02:35.560 | that if they go to calnewport.com/podcast,

00:02:39.120 | there's a link on there about how to submit listener calls.

00:02:42.600 | You can do it straight from your browser.

00:02:44.760 | It's easy to do.

00:02:46.520 | And we use those and appreciate those.

00:02:47.960 | We use those right in the show.

00:02:50.720 | Also, I guess I should remind people,

00:02:52.640 | I always forget to do this,

00:02:53.720 | but YouTube page is up.

00:02:56.400 | So if you want to see videos of full episodes

00:03:00.600 | or videos of each individual question and segment we do,

00:03:03.720 | all of that is on the YouTube page.

00:03:05.320 | We finally have our own URL.

00:03:08.160 | So you don't have to just look in the show notes.

00:03:09.720 | You can just remember youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

00:03:14.720 | One word, right?

00:03:18.000 | - Yep.

00:03:18.840 | - What was the one?

00:03:19.680 | We couldn't get Cal Newport, right?

00:03:20.800 | - Yeah, somebody has it, I guess.

00:03:22.000 | - Yeah, it makes me nervous.

00:03:23.160 | - But then when you try to go to it,

00:03:24.320 | it doesn't go to anything.

00:03:25.160 | - Yeah, it makes me nervous.

00:03:26.480 | There's a Twitter account.

00:03:28.040 | So there's been a lot of fake Cal Newport Twitter accounts

00:03:30.440 | off and on, and usually they're fine.

00:03:32.280 | We had to get one taken down

00:03:33.480 | because it was getting pretty inappropriate.

00:03:36.160 | It was my picture and my name, my bio.

00:03:39.280 | But there's one now that's actually doing pretty well.

00:03:41.600 | I think they're up to 800 followers

00:03:43.480 | that they're clear in the description, at least,

00:03:45.760 | that this is not Cal Newport.

00:03:49.320 | He's not on social media.

00:03:51.720 | But as far as I can tell,

00:03:52.600 | the Twitter account is just my quotes.

00:03:55.880 | And I think the guy's doing pretty well with it.

00:03:57.680 | So there we go.

00:03:59.080 | So hopefully, youtube.com/calnewport is not that weird.

00:04:04.080 | Remember we found that Professor Cal erotic ASMR guy.

00:04:08.920 | Hopefully it's not gonna be that,

00:04:10.560 | with a picture of me, a big prominent picture of me,

00:04:14.560 | and just a bucket load of erotic ASMR.

00:04:18.360 | It's possible, so I'll pre-warn people.

00:04:21.240 | So it's Cal Newport media.

00:04:24.120 | That media might end up being critical.

00:04:26.640 | It could get rough, it could get dicey.

00:04:30.800 | All right, but let's do a deep dive.

00:04:34.240 | So I wanted to talk about this topic

00:04:36.240 | of tips for doing hard things.

00:04:41.240 | And what's gonna be different about this deep dive

00:04:44.320 | versus past deep dives is I'm not giving my advice

00:04:48.400 | for doing hard things.

00:04:49.240 | I actually wanna relay some advice

00:04:51.360 | that I saw in an interesting video

00:04:53.600 | that a reader sent to me from 2020

00:04:56.960 | of an author giving a talk about this topic.

00:04:59.440 | And I recently wrote an essay about this talk,

00:05:02.080 | and I published it in my email newsletter,

00:05:04.840 | which if you don't get, you probably should.

00:05:07.280 | You can sign up for that at calnewport.com.

00:05:09.040 | But I figured I just wrote that this morning

00:05:11.240 | before we started recording.

00:05:12.240 | I said, I wanna talk about this on the show.

00:05:13.840 | So I brought in some of my notes from it.

00:05:15.520 | So here's the setup.

00:05:17.400 | The video is from 2020.

00:05:18.640 | It's from the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson,

00:05:21.920 | who wrote a bunch of best-selling series.

00:05:26.360 | I've read some of his books.

00:05:27.800 | I read "Name of the Wind" and whatever the second book was

00:05:32.000 | in that particular trilogy.

00:05:33.680 | And it's really good.

00:05:34.960 | And I'm actually now,

00:05:36.400 | one of the books I'm reading right now is,

00:05:37.800 | I decided I wanted to read some Ursula K. Gwynn.

00:05:42.600 | And I was going back and reading

00:05:43.920 | some of her "Earthsea Chronicles,"

00:05:45.760 | which has, that's from the '60s,

00:05:47.840 | but it has some ideas about the true names

00:05:51.120 | of elements being critical to the magical system

00:05:53.440 | that Sanderson plays with.

00:05:55.160 | Anyways, think big, successful fantasy novelist.

00:06:00.080 | And he gives a talk in 2020 that was titled,

00:06:05.080 | let me have it here, "The Common Lies Writers Tell You,"

00:06:07.280 | but this was not really what the talk was about.

00:06:10.240 | The talk was about doing hard things.

00:06:13.960 | And Sanderson comes right out,

00:06:15.400 | and you know I'm gonna appreciate this.

00:06:17.800 | He comes right out up front and says,

00:06:19.680 | he dislikes the fact that the media

00:06:22.080 | keeps telling young people

00:06:24.840 | that you can do anything you want to,

00:06:26.400 | and you should follow your dreams.

00:06:29.760 | And he said, "Look, that is way too simplistic.

00:06:32.400 | "That's not the way it works.

00:06:33.640 | "That's not gonna help anyone to say that."

00:06:36.880 | It's definitely a perspective you would hear,

00:06:39.840 | for example, in my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You."

00:06:41.720 | And he says, "Okay, here is the more realistic claim."

00:06:45.480 | And I'm quoting him here.

00:06:47.200 | "I can do hard things.

00:06:49.240 | "Doing hard things has intrinsic value,

00:06:51.480 | "and they will make me a better person,

00:06:52.880 | "even if I end up failing."

00:06:54.520 | He said, "That's the right way to talk about ambitious goals,

00:06:59.880 | "is there's value in doing hard things.

00:07:01.600 | "You are able to do hard things,

00:07:03.160 | "and you're gonna get value out of it,

00:07:04.560 | "no matter what actually happens,

00:07:06.160 | "whether it makes you a famous novelist or not,

00:07:09.760 | "or whatever that dream happens to be."

00:07:11.440 | And that this is better than telling people,

00:07:12.600 | "No, of course you'll succeed,

00:07:13.440 | "and you can do whatever you want."

00:07:15.720 | And then for the remainder of his talk,

00:07:16.880 | he said, "So let's talk about doing hard things."

00:07:19.240 | And he gave three tips,

00:07:22.080 | three tips for the reality,

00:07:24.400 | reality-based tips for dealing with hard things.

00:07:28.040 | So I thought what I would do here

00:07:28.920 | is I wanna go through these three tips,

00:07:30.880 | I'll tell you what he said,

00:07:31.720 | and then give a little bit of my own commentary on each.

00:07:35.820 | So the first tip he gave was make better goals.

00:07:41.760 | So when it comes to doing hard things,

00:07:44.040 | he thinks we are not good at setting the right goals,

00:07:47.560 | and we don't help people set better goals.

00:07:50.520 | So he mentioned, for example,

00:07:51.600 | that in an AP literature class in high school,

00:07:56.600 | he won a minor contest for a story he wrote,

00:08:00.680 | and decided, "Oh, my goal is to be a successful novelist."

00:08:05.280 | And he said that was not a good goal.

00:08:07.920 | It was way too long-term, vague, and grandiose.

00:08:11.960 | How do you make progress on that particular goal?

00:08:15.840 | In particular, what are you supposed to do tomorrow

00:08:19.000 | to make progress towards that goal

00:08:21.600 | and become a successful writer?

00:08:24.400 | He said what you should do instead

00:08:26.000 | is make goals that you have control over.

00:08:29.240 | And what Sanderson ended up doing

00:08:31.040 | was writing 13 manuscripts

00:08:33.120 | before he actually had a book he could sold,

00:08:35.160 | and he said his goal should have been focused

00:08:36.680 | on producing a certain number of manuscripts

00:08:39.500 | as an act of practice and having a commitment

00:08:43.000 | with each manuscript to be more ambitious

00:08:47.360 | than the last to push and develop his skills,

00:08:49.840 | because that's a goal he could make progress on.

00:08:53.040 | I could write another manuscript.

00:08:54.480 | I can for sure make this next manuscript

00:08:56.040 | be even more ambitious in this way, this way, or that way.

00:08:58.160 | Those are achievable goals.

00:08:59.360 | Saying, "Be a successful author," that was too vague.

00:09:02.360 | All right, now my take on this

00:09:04.560 | is I write about something similar in my book, "Deep Work."

00:09:09.440 | In that book, "Deep Work," I talk about this methodology,

00:09:13.000 | this business methodology called 4DX,

00:09:15.880 | the four disciplines of execution.

00:09:19.000 | And I talk about how this methodology,

00:09:20.800 | which was designed to help teams and companies do better,

00:09:24.080 | gives us some insight into accomplishment

00:09:26.640 | when we apply it to individuals.

00:09:27.880 | And one of the core ideas from that methodology

00:09:30.240 | is lead versus lag indicators.

00:09:33.220 | A lag indicator is the big goal

00:09:37.360 | you eventually want to accomplish.

00:09:39.600 | I want my next academic paper

00:09:41.660 | to get into a top-tier journal.

00:09:44.540 | And the problem with lag indicators, according to 4DX,

00:09:48.400 | is that it doesn't give you a clear action.

00:09:50.880 | So they said instead,

00:09:52.640 | you should focus on what they call lead indicators,

00:09:55.080 | which are things you can track and do and control.

00:09:57.440 | And they should be chosen such that

00:09:58.840 | if you do well with those lead indicators,

00:10:00.400 | you're likely to have success with the lag indicators,

00:10:02.520 | but it gives you something concrete to focus on.

00:10:04.680 | And so for that example,

00:10:05.760 | the right lead indicator might be,

00:10:08.160 | I'm going to do 15 hours of deep work per week

00:10:12.480 | on the paper I'm writing.

00:10:14.360 | Well, that I can track.

00:10:16.280 | That creates friction I can push back against.

00:10:19.280 | Now I can actually make real changes

00:10:21.080 | in the intentional application of my energy,

00:10:23.200 | cancel things, move things, wake up early,

00:10:25.480 | progress can happen.

00:10:27.540 | So I like Sanderson's idea there,

00:10:29.000 | and I've talked about variations of that.

00:10:31.160 | All right, his second tip,

00:10:33.960 | learn how you work.

00:10:36.240 | So Sanderson, when it comes to writing,

00:10:39.840 | thinks it's a real disservice

00:10:43.640 | when he hears people say things like,

00:10:45.960 | real writers have an overwhelming compulsion to write.

00:10:49.360 | And that if you don't have that compulsion,

00:10:52.320 | you should do anything else.

00:10:53.440 | And only people who just can't help but write,

00:10:55.480 | and that's all they can do,

00:10:56.420 | should be people who should be writers.

00:10:59.000 | He thinks that's nonsense.

00:11:00.040 | He says, writing is hard,

00:11:01.240 | and it's hard work to figure out

00:11:02.440 | how to get yourself to do it.

00:11:04.520 | He is a professional writer,

00:11:05.680 | and I'm quoting him here,

00:11:06.600 | "I love writing,

00:11:08.680 | "but I have a hard time sitting down and writing."

00:11:12.240 | So even for this very successful professional writer,

00:11:14.960 | he says, writing is hard.

00:11:17.520 | So his advice is, when it comes to doing hard things,

00:11:21.280 | you have to put in a lot of effort

00:11:22.520 | to figure out what works for you

00:11:25.200 | to basically get yourself to do that type of effort.

00:11:27.880 | And it could differ from person to person.

00:11:29.800 | Sanderson uses daily word count tracking in a spreadsheet.

00:11:34.280 | It's like a game for him.

00:11:35.320 | He likes that, but he says,

00:11:36.320 | other people thrive under the social pressure

00:11:39.320 | of a writer's group.

00:11:40.840 | Other people need a deadline.

00:11:42.460 | Now, I talk about this a lot in my own work.

00:11:46.880 | I talk a lot about how deep,

00:11:49.080 | cognitively demanding efforts are unnatural.

00:11:52.000 | It uses a lot of energy.

00:11:54.160 | More ancient parts of our brain

00:11:55.800 | cannot immediately see what benefit

00:11:58.160 | they're going to get from this energy.

00:11:59.880 | What's the threat we're escaping?

00:12:02.640 | Where's the food or mate source

00:12:04.040 | that this thinking is gonna give us right away?

00:12:06.200 | And it doesn't have an answer for that.

00:12:08.440 | You try to convince your brain, for example,

00:12:11.280 | that your 460,000 word epic fantasy novel

00:12:16.100 | is going to help you in mate selection,

00:12:18.360 | your brain's not gonna buy it.

00:12:20.420 | It's gonna see that you're talking a lot about wizards

00:12:23.440 | with names like Gargamel,

00:12:25.360 | who are passing wind spells on elves.

00:12:28.960 | And it's gonna say,

00:12:29.800 | this is not gonna get us children.

00:12:32.320 | This is not gonna get us food.

00:12:34.400 | Why are we doing this?

00:12:35.640 | And this is generally true

00:12:37.180 | when it comes to doing cognitively demanding work.

00:12:38.960 | It's unnatural.

00:12:40.600 | So a lot of effort is required

00:12:42.000 | to trick yourself into doing it.

00:12:43.720 | So I like what Sanderson talked about.

00:12:45.300 | I would also add scheduling philosophy and ritual.

00:12:48.820 | That's why this plays such a big role.

00:12:51.300 | Get rid of any decision your mind has

00:12:53.200 | about when you're gonna do this work

00:12:55.180 | instead you have a philosophy.

00:12:56.260 | It's always these days at these times.

00:12:58.240 | Or at the beginning of the week,

00:12:59.360 | I put it on my calendar and it's right there

00:13:01.480 | in the same color as meetings I know I can't skip,

00:13:04.900 | that time is protected.

00:13:06.640 | I don't always feel like I wanna go to a meeting,

00:13:08.220 | but if it's on my calendar, I'd go.

00:13:09.720 | I don't always feel like I wanna write,

00:13:12.160 | but it's there on my calendar,

00:13:13.360 | that's what I'm doing next.

00:13:14.720 | And this is also why ritual matters.

00:13:18.240 | Writers will build out these spaces

00:13:20.640 | that seem over the top or go to weird places

00:13:23.640 | like I wrote about in my New Yorker piece last summer

00:13:26.680 | about working from near home,

00:13:29.220 | where writers will leave perfectly nice and good homes

00:13:31.720 | to go to weird eccentric locations to write

00:13:35.040 | just because they associate that transit.

00:13:37.560 | They associate that new environment just with writing.

00:13:40.380 | That's why Peter Benchley left his bucolic carriage home

00:13:45.240 | on East Welland Avenue there.

00:13:47.640 | Actually, no, he's on Curliss Avenue.

00:13:49.480 | Curliss Avenue there in Pennington, New Jersey

00:13:51.560 | to work in the back room of a furnace factory.

00:13:54.200 | That's why Steinbeck would balance a legal pad

00:13:57.560 | on a boat in Sag Harbor.

00:14:00.460 | It's why Maya Angelou would go to hotel rooms

00:14:04.800 | and take everything off the walls

00:14:06.080 | so there is zero distraction.

00:14:07.360 | And Wright laying down on the bed, propped up on an arm,

00:14:10.400 | doing this so often that she built up deep calluses

00:14:12.720 | on that arm that she was supporting herself

00:14:14.120 | because it's hard to do this work.

00:14:15.880 | You gotta figure out how to get your mind into there.

00:14:18.480 | So scheduling philosophies and rituals,

00:14:21.200 | especially over-the-top rituals, play a big role.

00:14:24.520 | And I'll say when it comes to writing, there's a quote

00:14:28.000 | I've said a few times, has bounced around a few times,

00:14:30.760 | which is basically what some people call writer's block.

00:14:34.600 | By some people, I mean amateurs,

00:14:36.000 | is actually just the physiological feeling

00:14:38.500 | of what writing, the writing experience is.

00:14:41.600 | That feeling of I don't know what to say,

00:14:42.920 | I don't feel inspired, I don't know what to say, I'm stuck.

00:14:47.400 | It's like, great, now you've started writing.

00:14:49.160 | That's what it feels like.

00:14:50.600 | All right, Sanderson's third tip, break it down.

00:14:53.100 | Maybe his most prosaic tip out of the three.

00:14:56.120 | But basically, if you have a big goal,

00:14:58.040 | break it into manageable pieces

00:14:59.360 | so you have something to go after.

00:15:00.600 | He noted that the book he was writing at that time

00:15:03.880 | was longer than the entire Hunger Games series put together.

00:15:08.380 | So he's saying that's such a big, hairy, epic goal

00:15:13.160 | because he'll write 400,000 word plus books, which is crazy.

00:15:19.840 | By comparison, my books are usually 70 to 90,000.

00:15:23.500 | So it's like five deep works.

00:15:26.920 | He's like, you gotta break that down.

00:15:28.720 | That can't be your goal.

00:15:30.160 | I'm writing this book.

00:15:31.160 | It's no, no, I'm trying to finish the chapter cycle

00:15:35.680 | that establishes the backstory for the wizard Gargamel

00:15:40.580 | that passes the wind spells on the elves, or whatever it is.

00:15:43.480 | I obviously know a lot about fantasy books.

00:15:45.960 | So I think that's good work.

00:15:48.720 | I think the key part about this final tip

00:15:50.800 | is that he says in figuring out what those goals are,

00:15:53.720 | that's where all the magic happens,

00:15:57.400 | is that we don't give people enough training,

00:16:00.480 | especially in creative fields,

00:16:01.560 | to figure out what those smaller goals are.

00:16:03.600 | He said this is a particular problem in writing

00:16:06.460 | where if you talk to a professional writer and say,

00:16:08.520 | look, I really wanna do what you do, what's your advice?

00:16:10.960 | They'll just look at you and say, well, you gotta write.

00:16:14.200 | He says, that's too vague.

00:16:15.560 | No, no, what you need to tell me is

00:16:17.000 | it's gonna take about six manuscripts

00:16:20.040 | before you get your chops down.

00:16:21.360 | And those manuscripts have to be

00:16:22.360 | successively harder in this way.

00:16:24.200 | And here is the level, type, and source of feedback

00:16:26.600 | you need on each to make sure

00:16:27.720 | that you're gaining particular skills.

00:16:29.160 | You do one on your own.

00:16:30.720 | You do one with two with a writing group.

00:16:32.880 | For the fourth, maybe you wanna hire an editor

00:16:35.840 | a day of their time to come back and give you a harsher.

00:16:38.360 | The fifth, you wanna submit and get notes

00:16:40.340 | from the publisher that you submit to.

00:16:42.360 | We need that type of detailed roadmap.

00:16:44.400 | It's non-trivial and it's non-obvious.

00:16:46.160 | You don't just tell people, if you wanna write, write.

00:16:47.960 | If you wanna be a musician, play music.

00:16:50.040 | You wanna be an artist, paint.

00:16:51.280 | No, these are big, hairy goals that you need to break down

00:16:53.640 | and it's not obvious how they break down.

00:16:56.080 | And the thing I talk about a lot

00:16:57.880 | on this show in particular

00:16:59.600 | is that if you're going to get this information,

00:17:03.240 | you have to go get it.

00:17:04.940 | And by what I mean by that is you have to go to people

00:17:07.600 | who know what they're doing

00:17:08.760 | and don't just say, what's your advice?

00:17:10.280 | Because they'll just say, write.

00:17:11.740 | They'll just say, paint.

00:17:12.940 | Say, I wanna hear your story.

00:17:16.320 | How did you get there?

00:17:18.080 | What was the first thing?

00:17:18.920 | Then what was the next thing?

00:17:19.740 | Oh, oh, Sanderson, you wrote 13 manuscripts?

00:17:22.560 | Oh, I didn't realize that.

00:17:23.600 | So you mean I can't just do National Novel Writing Month

00:17:27.240 | and have the name of the win be the book that comes out of it?

00:17:29.520 | Oh, okay, now I get that.

00:17:30.860 | I don't like that that's reality, but that's reality.

00:17:32.400 | Okay, I have to write 13 manuscripts.

00:17:33.560 | How long is that gonna take?

00:17:34.720 | You know, maybe I'm gonna need much more time on this

00:17:36.600 | than I think.

00:17:37.440 | You get the reality, not what you wanna be true.

00:17:39.440 | You get the reality of what actually matters

00:17:41.480 | for the endeavor you wanna do.

00:17:42.480 | You get that reality from people who came before.

00:17:44.800 | Not by asking for advice, but asking for their story.

00:17:48.840 | You look at that and you find out what really matters.

00:17:52.200 | I talked about this.

00:17:53.160 | If you wanna see a more extensive conversation about this,

00:17:56.560 | when I was on the Tim Ferriss podcast earlier

00:18:00.320 | in, whenever this was, January, I guess I was

00:18:02.140 | on his podcast, we get into how I got started in writing.

00:18:06.320 | And I go into detail of the story about how,

00:18:08.760 | through connections with my family,

00:18:10.940 | I got in touch with an agent, a literary agent,

00:18:13.680 | who I promised, I'm not gonna try to sell you a book.

00:18:16.760 | And I had that agent walk me through step by step

00:18:19.840 | what exactly would a 20-year-old need to do

00:18:21.960 | to get a book deal with a major publisher.

00:18:23.760 | And she walked me through, here's what matters,

00:18:25.360 | here's what doesn't, here's the process, here's the steps.

00:18:28.240 | And it was not at all what I would have guessed,

00:18:29.720 | and it's not at all what most young people I've met

00:18:31.840 | who say, I wanna write a book do, but it was the reality.

00:18:35.880 | And it took me two years, but I followed that plan

00:18:38.240 | and sold that book and wrote that book as a senior

00:18:41.800 | and everything else unfolded from there.

00:18:43.400 | So that's my advice there is, yes,

00:18:45.400 | you need to break down your goals

00:18:46.520 | into more manageable goals.

00:18:47.520 | It's not always obvious how to do that.

00:18:50.640 | Ask the experts, but not for their advice,

00:18:52.320 | but for their story, and you can extract from their story

00:18:55.240 | the reality of what matters.

00:18:57.520 | All right, so Sanderson, thank you for giving that talk.

00:19:02.300 | Excuse me for my wizard elf jokes.

00:19:06.920 | Obviously, you're very good at what you do

00:19:09.720 | and I am of great awe, but that's good advice.

00:19:13.160 | Don't just follow your dreams.

00:19:15.080 | Focus on doing hard things for the meaning

00:19:17.640 | of doing hard things and treat doing hard things

00:19:19.560 | like a complicated endeavor that requires

00:19:21.320 | a lot of nuanced feedback.

00:19:24.420 | There we go.

00:19:26.800 | Are you a fantasy guy, Jesse?

00:19:28.300 | - Yeah, yeah, I am.

00:19:31.280 | - Do you read fantasy books?

00:19:32.680 | - I read a lot of science fiction right now.

00:19:37.800 | - Oh, I see.

00:19:38.640 | I feel like I should be more into fantasy.

00:19:42.960 | And I've read some, like the classics,

00:19:44.480 | but I think I should be a huge fantasy fan

00:19:48.140 | just given my demographics.

00:19:50.000 | It's like a semi-nerdy, computer science, whatever,

00:19:54.120 | guy who reads a lot.

00:19:56.000 | And I don't know, I lose steam.

00:19:58.400 | But I've read the classics.

00:19:59.240 | I've done "The Lord of the Rings."

00:20:00.240 | I'm doing Ursula Gwynn's "Earthsea Cycle."

00:20:04.000 | Oh, I'm reading at least the first one.

00:20:06.160 | Just why not?

00:20:07.160 | I like "Name of the Wind,"

00:20:08.800 | so I like Brandon Sanderson's book.

00:20:10.600 | I mean, man, it's long.

00:20:12.760 | But I like that.

00:20:14.120 | But I've tried a lot of other things that I've just,

00:20:17.480 | I don't know, I can't get in.

00:20:18.320 | I tried Robert Jordan.

00:20:19.800 | - How is "Lord of the Rings?"

00:20:21.400 | - I reread that again at some point, and it's cool.

00:20:25.380 | It's written in a mythological meter,

00:20:28.560 | if that makes sense, right?

00:20:29.620 | So he writes it almost like you're reading,

00:20:33.440 | because he's an expert in Old English,

00:20:35.340 | like it's mythological,

00:20:38.160 | where now things are more boldly expository.

00:20:41.080 | Like I'm the third-person observer

00:20:43.400 | just explaining everything that's happening.

00:20:44.640 | But this had a more,

00:20:45.920 | especially the first "Lord of the Rings" book,

00:20:47.600 | I don't know, there's more of a mythological

00:20:50.400 | than I remembered meter to it.

00:20:52.040 | The language is a little chewy.

00:20:53.600 | It kind of sets the scene,

00:20:57.320 | and it's not all just pure action,

00:20:59.920 | and sometimes the description feels more mythological

00:21:02.500 | than modern, just objective description of what's happening.

00:21:06.920 | So it's a very impressive, very impressive book.

00:21:09.760 | - Did you like the movies?

00:21:11.840 | - I kind of get bored in the movies.

00:21:13.880 | I don't know, do you like them?

00:21:15.280 | - I did, yeah.

00:21:16.120 | - Yeah, I just, that's my memory.

00:21:17.960 | I re-watched some of them recently.

00:21:20.440 | It's my memory in the theater was getting a little antsy.

00:21:24.200 | Here's my, okay, here's the "Lord of the Rings" question

00:21:26.200 | about the movies,

00:21:27.400 | because no one else seems to agree with this.

00:21:29.840 | But to me, and this is probably unavoidable

00:21:34.280 | because of budgets,

00:21:35.800 | the world seems so uninhabited.

00:21:38.540 | It's all just empty fields and mountains,

00:21:42.400 | and then they'll eventually come to a city with a king,

00:21:44.560 | but it'll be 70 people in the middle,

00:21:47.760 | like a giant empty field or this or that.

00:21:49.520 | It just feels like there's no people in that world.

00:21:51.880 | And so is that supposed to be

00:21:53.500 | because after ancient warfare,

00:21:55.600 | it's largely depopulated,

00:21:56.920 | or it's just a very sparsely populated country?

00:21:59.440 | But nowhere in the "Lord of the Rings" universe,

00:22:02.000 | in the visual movie universe,

00:22:03.200 | you ever have this feel of medieval England or something,

00:22:07.120 | where there's big cities and villages and stuff.

00:22:09.900 | It's just, everything is so empty.

00:22:12.740 | - Was it that way in the books?

00:22:14.300 | - You know, I'm trying to remember.

00:22:17.780 | Yeah, I don't know.

00:22:19.480 | I don't remember.

00:22:20.320 | It's a good question.

00:22:21.220 | I mean, I think the,

00:22:22.660 | I read a book about "Lord of the Rings."

00:22:24.660 | This part, a couple of years ago,

00:22:27.100 | I read a book about the making of the movies.

00:22:31.300 | That was actually kind of an interesting book.

00:22:32.940 | Like what, everything that went through,

00:22:34.580 | like the movie rights and how Peter Jackson got them

00:22:37.340 | and how they filmed it and where they found it.

00:22:40.340 | Like, to me, that was actually more interesting.

00:22:42.580 | And I think the reality is like,

00:22:44.020 | they can't afford to,

00:22:45.780 | you can't make medieval England.

00:22:48.180 | It's just too many people.

00:22:49.860 | So it's easier for it to be sparsely populated.

00:22:51.940 | - Yeah.

00:22:52.780 | - But let's add this to our list of directions

00:22:56.500 | for us not to go with this podcast.

00:22:57.900 | Next to, we had from last week,

00:23:00.300 | becoming like a hardcore sports talk radio show,

00:23:03.460 | but the premise is I know nothing about sports,

00:23:05.340 | but I'm very enthusiastic about it.

00:23:06.940 | And like Pat McAfee,

00:23:07.860 | where a tank top and stand up and yell,

00:23:10.300 | but know nothing about sports.

00:23:11.900 | And then two, let's not become a like hardcore fantasy

00:23:16.900 | discussion podcast.

00:23:18.740 | This is gonna be a lot of like, I don't know.

00:23:19.940 | I didn't like it.

00:23:20.940 | I didn't read it.

00:23:22.500 | I don't know.

00:23:23.340 | Those are on the list.

00:23:26.100 | Our list is growing, Josie.

00:23:27.220 | Our list of things we should not try to discuss

00:23:28.880 | on this show is,

00:23:31.220 | is growing, growing with each week.

00:23:34.140 | Fantasy book reviews with Cal and Jessie.

00:23:38.500 | Like, oh no, seems kind of nerdy.

00:23:41.360 | What's next?

00:23:43.900 | We out of here in like a crisp five minutes.

00:23:47.820 | Oh man.

00:23:48.760 | All right.

00:23:49.600 | Well, we have calls, call an episode,

00:23:52.180 | looking forward to it.

00:23:53.020 | But as always, let's talk about this week's sponsors.

00:23:56.220 | And we'll start with Blinkist,

00:23:58.620 | longtime friend of the show.

00:23:59.740 | You heard me talking about them in Monday's episode,

00:24:02.620 | the subscription service in which you can get these 10 to 15

00:24:05.980 | minutes summaries of thousands of the best,

00:24:09.560 | most important nonfiction titles that are out there.

00:24:12.820 | If you want to know what this book is about 10 to 15 minutes

00:24:16.460 | later, you will have that information.

00:24:19.300 | I recommend that people use Blinkist to help learn about

00:24:23.620 | ideas and figure out which of many books written on a topic

00:24:26.500 | they should read.

00:24:29.420 | I like that idea.

00:24:30.620 | Jessie, let me put you on the spot here.

00:24:31.780 | You have your computer there.

00:24:33.220 | Let's go to Blinkist.com.

00:24:35.940 | Let's see what's popular.

00:24:39.380 | So what's popular right now.

00:24:40.400 | So we can get a sense of what it would be like,

00:24:42.780 | what value you could get out of Blinkist.

00:24:44.540 | If like me, you're curious about books and curious about the

00:24:46.740 | world of ideas.

00:24:49.020 | And so we're doing this unprompted.

00:24:52.120 | All right.

00:24:52.960 | So if we go to Blinkist.com, what do we,

00:24:55.300 | what books are they showing there that are popular?

00:24:58.260 | Now this is where Jesse should lie and say,

00:25:00.660 | deep work, digital minimalism, a world without email,

00:25:04.580 | or in a category at the top called can't miss modern

00:25:08.900 | classics, deep work, digital minimalism,

00:25:12.380 | a world without email, the Bible.

00:25:14.220 | Those are in their own box, but be under that box,

00:25:18.060 | Jesse, what do we got?

00:25:19.060 | - Well, I actually just signed up for my Blinkist account

00:25:22.220 | last week.

00:25:23.300 | So on a different computer.

00:25:25.060 | So when I'm going to this one, it's making me sign in.

00:25:28.340 | - Oh, it's about you.

00:25:29.180 | - So then I need to get my password.

00:25:31.780 | - Well, what's the first blink?

00:25:32.980 | What's the first blink you considered?

00:25:34.880 | Once you signed up for Blinkist.

00:25:37.700 | - I read, what'd I read?

00:25:40.340 | I read two of them earlier this week.

00:25:42.360 | There were a couple of like philosophy things.

00:25:46.060 | What was the name of it?

00:25:47.260 | - Philosophy is a good topic for Blinkist, right?

00:25:49.940 | Because it's, let me see what this is

00:25:52.660 | before I get into the book.

00:25:55.120 | - Yeah.

00:25:56.320 | Well, let me ask you this though,

00:25:57.160 | for either of those two philosophy books you read blinks on,

00:26:00.200 | did either of them then pass the bar of like,

00:26:01.720 | I should buy this or were they both like,

00:26:03.600 | I know what I need to know from this book

00:26:05.040 | and I'm kind of glad I did it.

00:26:07.120 | - The cool thing with that is I have a Scribd account.

00:26:09.320 | Do you know what Scribd, you might have.

00:26:10.560 | - Yeah.

00:26:11.400 | - Yeah, I think Ryan Holiday talked about it.

00:26:12.560 | So it's like $10 a month for books.

00:26:14.880 | So I just, I went to the Blink and then added to the Scribd.

00:26:18.560 | - That's a good one to punch right there.

00:26:20.280 | Yeah, so then you can dive in.

00:26:21.920 | All right, so Jesse has invented,

00:26:23.560 | I think a really good one to punch there.

00:26:24.920 | So now you can really,

00:26:26.200 | you can move quickly through a lot of blinks

00:26:28.000 | and then Scribd the things that catch your attention.

00:26:30.160 | And then the things that really last after that,

00:26:32.440 | you can put it into your library

00:26:33.840 | if you really want to get into it.

00:26:35.720 | - The other thing, cool thing with the Blinkist

00:26:37.320 | is you can listen to the audio.

00:26:40.000 | - Yeah, so you can listen or read now, right?

00:26:42.040 | - Yeah.

00:26:42.880 | - Yeah, I like the listen option.

00:26:44.960 | Yeah, the listen option is great because in my commute,

00:26:47.520 | it's about 35 minutes to no problem.

00:26:50.920 | Yeah, no, I like to listen.

00:26:53.960 | So there you go.

00:26:54.800 | So Blinkist, use it to get that information quickly

00:26:58.960 | about what some of these books are about.

00:27:01.320 | So you can figure out the lay of the land

00:27:02.880 | and decide if you want to read further.

00:27:05.640 | The good news is right now Blinkist has a special offer

00:27:08.200 | just for our audience.

00:27:10.640 | If you go to Blinkist.com/deep

00:27:12.720 | to start a free seven-day trial,

00:27:14.240 | they will give you 25% off

00:27:17.000 | your Blinkist premium membership.

00:27:19.200 | So that's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T,

00:27:24.200 | Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off

00:27:28.880 | and a seven-day free trial, Blinkist.com/deep.

00:27:33.520 | Let me talk about one other sponsor.

00:27:36.120 | Now, Jesse, this is an absolute true story.

00:27:38.640 | And I think you'll recognize when you hear it

00:27:40.440 | that it's an absolute true story.

00:27:42.240 | Not long ago, I decided,

00:27:44.640 | I think I might be missing some nutrients that I might need,

00:27:47.840 | some minerals I might need.

00:27:49.000 | So I'm gonna go to GNC and I'm gonna get pills.

00:27:52.800 | I'll go talk to them in that store.

00:27:55.960 | And I walked in the GNC and I was kind of confused

00:27:58.400 | because there's all these different things

00:27:59.920 | and all these different pills

00:28:01.040 | and all these cardboard cutouts of like weird,

00:28:03.120 | scary people that do these extreme sports.

00:28:05.320 | And the staff at GNC ran up

00:28:09.120 | and they beat me with crates of Jocko fuel.

00:28:14.120 | Beat me with them because they could tell

00:28:17.600 | that I did not know my way around that store.

00:28:20.680 | They beat me with crates of whatever.

00:28:23.320 | And that's when I discovered,

00:28:25.080 | this is an absolutely true story,

00:28:26.760 | as they drew me out the door to the gutter,

00:28:31.080 | I saw going by in the gutter,

00:28:34.480 | in the water going towards a drain,

00:28:36.960 | there was a travel pack wrapper from Athletic Greens.

00:28:41.960 | So I said, "I gotta find out more about this."

00:28:43.640 | Right here, I'm bloodied in there.

00:28:44.720 | I gotta find out.

00:28:45.560 | And here I am in the gutter bleeding.

00:28:47.400 | Take out my phone, let me look up Athletic Greens.

00:28:50.280 | Absolute true story.

00:28:51.120 | I think everyone will recognize

00:28:51.960 | when they hear this, it's absolutely true.

00:28:53.400 | And that's when I found out, oh, this is what I need.

00:28:56.680 | Athletic Greens is a company that says,

00:28:58.120 | "We will do all that work for you

00:29:00.040 | of figuring out the things that you need to be healthy."

00:29:04.360 | The vitamins, the minerals, the probiotics, the adaptogens.

00:29:08.040 | And we do nothing, this is the company talking here,

00:29:10.280 | we do nothing but obsess about getting the highest quality,

00:29:13.040 | most ingestible forms of these things.

00:29:15.280 | They put it all into one product,

00:29:16.880 | they only do one product,

00:29:18.320 | their AG1 Green Athletic Greens powder.

00:29:21.960 | It gets shipped to you in the mail.

00:29:24.320 | You don't have to go into GNC.

00:29:26.440 | And you put it in cold water,

00:29:29.000 | mix it up, drink it every morning.

00:29:30.680 | 75 high quality vitamins, minerals,

00:29:32.640 | whole food source superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens.

00:29:36.120 | You do that once a day,

00:29:37.720 | you know they've got the right stuff.

00:29:39.640 | You know they've been thinking about it.

00:29:41.280 | You know they keep improving this one product.

00:29:44.080 | And then you don't have to worry about this anymore.

00:29:46.000 | So after I healed, and you know, again, true story,

00:29:49.200 | it took me 14 months in the hospital.

00:29:52.280 | But after I healed,

00:29:54.080 | I picked up my habit of athletic greens every morning.

00:29:57.040 | Which actually that part is true.

00:29:58.760 | I do take my athletic greens every morning.

00:30:00.960 | They convinced me when I talked to them.

00:30:04.120 | So that is how I came across athletic greens.

00:30:07.800 | But if you wanna make sure

00:30:10.840 | you're getting all the right stuff,

00:30:12.800 | just do the AG every morning.

00:30:15.120 | Problem solved.

00:30:16.800 | Good news, to make it easy for you to sign up,

00:30:20.640 | athletic greens is gonna give you free

00:30:22.600 | a one year supply of immune supporting vitamin D

00:30:25.240 | and five free travel packs with your first purchase.

00:30:28.640 | I definitely do the vitamin D.

00:30:30.040 | You have to add it separately with a dropper

00:30:31.920 | because again, they are obsessed with,

00:30:33.720 | if it's not gonna work, we don't want it.

00:30:35.480 | And they figured out the vitamin D can't be in powder form.

00:30:38.120 | It needs to be mixed with vitamin K

00:30:39.640 | and an olive oil suspension if it's gonna work.

00:30:41.440 | So you have to add that.

00:30:42.280 | And I add it every morning

00:30:43.280 | 'cause it's cold and flu season.

00:30:44.840 | And I have three young kids

00:30:47.640 | in three different congregate settings every day,

00:30:50.920 | which means I get roughly 17 colds a week.

00:30:53.840 | I believe my kids are probably the source

00:30:57.200 | of the evolution of COVID

00:30:58.680 | because there are so many coronaviruses going back and forth.

00:31:01.280 | So I care about this.

00:31:02.120 | So I take my vitamin D.

00:31:04.000 | So you get your vitamin D

00:31:05.240 | and you get five free travel packs.

00:31:07.440 | So when you travel, like when I went to Florida,

00:31:09.320 | you can bring it pre-portion.

00:31:11.400 | And all you have to do

00:31:12.240 | is visit athleticgreens.com/deep.

00:31:15.480 | Again, this is athleticgreens.com/deep

00:31:17.920 | to take ownership over your health,

00:31:19.880 | to pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance

00:31:23.440 | and to avoid savage, savage beatings

00:31:26.720 | at the hands of people in the physical supplement stores

00:31:30.200 | where you will have to go if you don't use Athletic Greens.

00:31:33.880 | True story.

00:31:36.520 | I've told you that story before, right, Jesse?

00:31:37.880 | - I've heard it, yeah.

00:31:38.840 | - Yeah, that's why I have the limp.

00:31:40.540 | (Jesse laughs)

00:31:42.300 | That's why I have the limp.

00:31:43.140 | All right, let's do some calls.

00:31:44.220 | All right, so what are we starting off with today?

00:31:47.460 | - All right, so we got a call.

00:31:48.420 | The first call is basically about

00:31:50.100 | the different types of people

00:31:51.900 | and how they go about planning.

00:31:54.280 | - Hi, Cal.

00:31:56.380 | My name is Johan van der Putte.

00:31:58.140 | I'm a Belgian psychologist.

00:32:01.140 | And I've been thinking that there's probably a continuum.

00:32:05.840 | At one end of it,

00:32:07.260 | you have people who are skilled at planning

00:32:11.300 | or they have become skilled at it.

00:32:12.860 | And then you have people who, a bit like me,

00:32:15.880 | aren't so skilled at it.

00:32:17.400 | I guess planning involves dividing up life into tasks

00:32:23.580 | and then allocating these tasks to pockets of time.

00:32:30.100 | I guess it requires some spatial skill.

00:32:37.300 | I think I'm not very good at it.

00:32:40.540 | It is hard for me to do.

00:32:43.460 | And it makes me sometimes stressed

00:32:46.580 | and a bit anxious when I try to do it.

00:32:49.280 | You have any suggestions of how people

00:32:53.740 | who maybe aren't so talented at it,

00:32:57.980 | how they could move in this direction

00:33:04.820 | without attempting to become very good planners

00:33:09.820 | in the short time?

00:33:15.340 | Thank you.

00:33:16.180 | - Well, I think it's an important question.

00:33:19.980 | And I am gonna give you

00:33:22.340 | what I think of as planning baby steps,

00:33:24.420 | like a way to ease yourself into something

00:33:26.980 | that looks more like my time management philosophy.

00:33:31.260 | And for those who are interested about that,

00:33:32.860 | we did a core idea video

00:33:36.900 | about my time management philosophy

00:33:38.380 | that you can find at the YouTube.com/CalNewportMedia

00:33:43.380 | YouTube page.

00:33:44.700 | You can find that core idea video on time management.

00:33:46.700 | So I do have some baby steps to help you get into that.

00:33:48.940 | But let me just first emphasize that, yes,

00:33:51.860 | planning is anxiety producing.

00:33:54.760 | And that that shouldn't come across if this happens to you.

00:34:00.540 | Should not come across as if there's something wrong.

00:34:03.460 | It's just the reality of planning

00:34:05.620 | is that it's anxiety producing.

00:34:06.740 | And the reason is, is because you are confronting,

00:34:09.220 | you are confronting this typically too large stack

00:34:13.380 | of things that you have been committed to doing.

00:34:15.700 | You can't easily imagine how they're gonna get done.

00:34:19.060 | The planning centers of your brain short circuit

00:34:22.060 | when they're faced with this type of overload scenario,

00:34:24.700 | that short circuiting causes anxiety.

00:34:26.700 | I'm simplifying this.

00:34:27.700 | There's a lot of other things going on,

00:34:28.860 | but that's a simplified way

00:34:30.260 | of understanding what's happening.

00:34:31.380 | So in particular, when you do weekly planning,

00:34:33.380 | this is my experience.

00:34:34.740 | When I am looking over all of my to-do lists,

00:34:37.060 | when I'm looking over my calendar,

00:34:38.300 | when I'm looking over my strategic plans

00:34:39.860 | and I'm trying to figure out

00:34:40.780 | what am I gonna do this week?

00:34:42.280 | I get very anxious.

00:34:43.900 | It is a natural reaction.

00:34:45.740 | It's similar to having your heart rate increase

00:34:48.900 | when you're running on a treadmill.

00:34:49.940 | So don't fear that.

00:34:50.820 | Don't think that's a problem.

00:34:52.200 | That anxiety then fades once you're done planning.

00:34:55.220 | When you go day to day and do your daily time block planning

00:34:57.940 | if you follow my system, that's much less stressful.

00:35:00.820 | 'Cause now your weekly plan

00:35:01.820 | has already confronted the productivity dragon.

00:35:04.460 | It's already confronted the short circuit inducing

00:35:07.960 | overload of tasks and come up with an idea for your week

00:35:12.140 | that makes sense.

00:35:13.180 | And now you can just look at that idea for your week

00:35:15.060 | when you do your daily planning, it should be less stressful.

00:35:18.380 | So let's start with that.

00:35:19.220 | It is supposed to cause anxiety.

00:35:20.740 | Now, what I'm gonna suggest is for your baby steps

00:35:24.180 | is essentially have low granularity plans.

00:35:29.180 | Plans that don't get into a lot of detail,

00:35:32.760 | but are more structured than just what's next to my inbox.

00:35:36.540 | What do I feel like doing next?

00:35:38.100 | So if we're talking about daily planning,

00:35:41.340 | I want you to do some time blocking.

00:35:43.660 | This is when I'm working.

00:35:45.040 | When I'm working, I wanna have some say in advance

00:35:48.060 | about what I wanna do with my time.

00:35:49.800 | Get you out of the mindset of the list reactive method

00:35:52.200 | where you just react to things that come in

00:35:54.020 | and occasionally glance at to-do lists.

00:35:55.700 | But to get started with time blocking,

00:35:57.380 | make your time blocks very large and quite generic.

00:36:00.060 | Here are my meetings.

00:36:02.700 | Well, I might as well copy those down

00:36:04.500 | into my time block plan.

00:36:05.720 | Let me take this big chunk of time here,

00:36:07.340 | not get too specific about it, but just say,

00:36:09.540 | catch up on email and small tasks.

00:36:12.360 | And let me just find one block in that day

00:36:15.240 | I'm gonna say work on something specific.

00:36:18.100 | All right, this is where I'm gonna work on that report.

00:36:20.580 | And any other time you might just say,

00:36:22.420 | whatever, email and small tasks.

00:36:24.380 | So like when you're starting off,

00:36:26.540 | you're really trying to have maybe one block each day

00:36:29.260 | where you specifically say,

00:36:31.420 | even though it's not on my calendar,

00:36:32.540 | even though no one's forcing me to do it,

00:36:34.220 | even though I might wanna do something else,

00:36:35.460 | I'm gonna work on a long-term cognitively demanding task

00:36:37.980 | during that time.

00:36:38.820 | And the rest is like by default, like let's do,

00:36:41.100 | you know, shallows, let's do email, let's do tasks.

00:36:45.540 | Then you might get a little bit better.

00:36:46.860 | The way you get a little bit better

00:36:47.880 | is add in a focused admin blocks.

00:36:50.540 | You do this for a couple of weeks.

00:36:51.380 | Now you say this block right here,

00:36:54.700 | I'm gonna go run those errands.

00:36:56.260 | You know, I have an hour between this meeting

00:36:59.340 | and this meeting, so I'm gonna eat lunch

00:37:00.580 | and then I'm gonna swing by the drug store and the bank.

00:37:03.700 | So now you're getting used to like,

00:37:05.900 | let me be a little bit more conscientious about admin,

00:37:10.140 | certain times being better for certain tasks.

00:37:11.660 | And then just do that for a while.

00:37:13.360 | I have a simple time block plan.

00:37:15.860 | There's like one big block in there somewhere

00:37:18.140 | for focusing on something deeply.

00:37:21.620 | There's one block in there

00:37:22.660 | for like a specific type of admin task

00:37:24.420 | and everything else is like, whatever,

00:37:26.060 | let's react of email, looking at to-do list.

00:37:28.980 | You'll just get used to that after a while.

00:37:32.420 | And then you can begin to add more granularity.

00:37:34.700 | And I get into a lot of details about this

00:37:36.420 | in the front of my time block planner in particular,

00:37:39.140 | I actually have a chapter all about,

00:37:42.140 | there's like a book chapter at the front of my planner.

00:37:44.160 | That's just all about the mechanics of doing time blocking

00:37:48.260 | at a much higher level of detail

00:37:49.900 | and getting really good at it.

00:37:51.620 | So you can find out about that planner

00:37:53.260 | at timeblockplanner.com.

00:37:54.620 | And I really get into it, but that's how I would start.

00:37:56.580 | And the same thing with your weekly plan,

00:37:58.340 | do a weekly plan and feel the anxiety

00:38:00.820 | and trust that's gonna go away,

00:38:01.940 | but you can make that weekly plan kind of bad at first.

00:38:04.700 | You know, it's like, I'm looking at my calendar,

00:38:09.380 | you know, let me just write down a few notes about this week.

00:38:13.580 | Like I need to get started this week on this report

00:38:15.940 | that's doing two weeks,

00:38:16.780 | because next week is busy or something like this.

00:38:18.420 | Or Friday is gonna be a good day

00:38:19.740 | for catching up on something.

00:38:20.580 | Like just make a couple decisions

00:38:21.900 | and maybe have a reminder for some habits.

00:38:25.780 | Like don't do anything that complicated,

00:38:27.180 | but get in the habit of doing it.

00:38:28.700 | And that's the main advice I'm gonna give here

00:38:30.860 | is the binary from doing none of this planning

00:38:34.320 | to doing some of this planning bad is the key binary.

00:38:39.320 | That's the hard shift.

00:38:41.440 | I do a weekly plan.

00:38:43.080 | I don't care if it's terrible, I do it.

00:38:44.980 | I do a daily time block plan.

00:38:46.280 | I don't care if it's pretty terrible.

00:38:47.380 | There's only a few meaningful blocks, I do it.

00:38:49.300 | That's the shift that matters.

00:38:51.460 | Going from that to doing those things well,

00:38:53.620 | that'll come later, it's not too hard.

00:38:55.200 | You'll get used to it.

00:38:56.100 | You'll feel that impulse.

00:38:57.060 | Like after you've done this for a while,

00:38:58.100 | like, well, I might as well make this better.

00:38:59.900 | That's not a big deal.

00:39:01.220 | It's going from zero to one.

00:39:02.420 | That's the flip that's gonna matter.

00:39:03.900 | And don't mind, again,

00:39:05.300 | don't mind that anxiety around weekly plans.

00:39:07.260 | That's just your brain doing

00:39:08.260 | what your brain is supposed to do.

00:39:11.100 | So let's say, I don't know how much I can talk about it,

00:39:15.140 | Jesse, but we are deep in discussions

00:39:17.580 | about version 2.0 of my time block planner

00:39:20.100 | and what it's gonna be like.

00:39:23.620 | I have a lot of upgrades in mind

00:39:24.900 | because as I told people, like if you,

00:39:27.140 | the time block planner, you're not buying a single thing.

00:39:31.520 | You're buying into a system because, you know,

00:39:34.880 | you have to get new ones when it fills up.

00:39:36.780 | And like over time, it's gonna keep improving.

00:39:39.140 | And probably the longest cycle of improvement

00:39:41.940 | is this one we just went through

00:39:42.940 | because we printed a bunch up front.

00:39:45.180 | So it's like, okay, until we sell,

00:39:46.820 | we have to sell the ones we have before we do new ones.

00:39:49.260 | And we've done that.

00:39:51.860 | So now we're working on the next one.

00:39:53.560 | And as we print them in smaller batches,

00:39:55.180 | making tweaks going forward will be cool.

00:39:56.500 | So I can't talk about any specifics yet

00:39:58.140 | because I gotta tell you,

00:39:59.900 | in a global supply chain crisis moment,

00:40:03.140 | it's surprisingly hard to design

00:40:06.180 | new paper product type things,

00:40:08.720 | stuff you wouldn't even think about

00:40:10.100 | being potentially scarce, like glue can be.

00:40:12.900 | So it's been a bit of a journey,

00:40:14.760 | but I should have announcements to make soon

00:40:18.100 | about new and improved time block planners.

00:40:20.180 | - Exciting stuff.

00:40:21.260 | - Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

00:40:23.020 | Yeah, definitely.

00:40:23.860 | Let's move on.

00:40:26.440 | What do we got?

00:40:27.280 | - Okay, moving on here.

00:40:29.220 | We got a question.

00:40:31.000 | Basically, he has a question about,

00:40:33.580 | he thinks your mom might be a computer scientist and she--

00:40:36.540 | - She was a computer programmer.

00:40:38.060 | - Okay, so he's got a question about that

00:40:39.660 | and types of values she instilled in you.

00:40:41.980 | All right.

00:40:43.260 | - Hey, Cal, this is Michael from Falls Church, Virginia.

00:40:46.460 | I recently read in one of the magazine articles of yours,

00:40:49.460 | I think it was in New Yorker,

00:40:50.980 | you said your mother was a computer scientist.

00:40:53.820 | So I can imagine she must have instilled some values

00:40:56.380 | and habits into you that are different

00:40:58.940 | from most mothers your generation growing up.

00:41:02.020 | Could you possibly share some of these values

00:41:04.020 | and habits that she instilled in you

00:41:06.060 | that helped shape who you are today?

00:41:08.460 | Thanks, and I hope to see you at an in-person event

00:41:11.060 | or a talk or a bookstore around DC one of these days.

00:41:14.980 | - Well, yeah, first of all, to your second point,

00:41:17.860 | yes, we should hope to see you in person at some point

00:41:20.900 | once Jesse and I get our act together

00:41:22.260 | to organize something.

00:41:23.100 | Falls Church is not too far from here,

00:41:25.100 | so that would be great.

00:41:26.260 | Yeah, so my mom.

00:41:29.680 | The article you're talking about was an article

00:41:31.900 | I wrote early in the pandemic about remote work.

00:41:34.020 | She wasn't a computer scientist,

00:41:35.340 | she was a computer programmer, COBOL programmer

00:41:38.860 | on series seven IBM mainframes for the Houston Chronicle

00:41:42.420 | back when we was born and raised in Texas.

00:41:45.700 | And so, yes, so I talked about in that article

00:41:51.740 | the fact that she was one of the first remote workers

00:41:54.060 | and they had set up a terminal,

00:41:55.660 | but that's important for your question

00:41:57.820 | because what it meant was is we had computers,

00:42:00.200 | personal computers in our house in the '80s

00:42:02.300 | at a relatively early period,

00:42:04.560 | because again, as a very early remote worker,

00:42:07.180 | she had a personal computer that she could connect

00:42:09.820 | into the mainframe and program from home there in Houston.

00:42:13.960 | So we had computers in our house at a very early age.

00:42:16.880 | So that had an impact on my interest in computers

00:42:21.380 | and eventually in computer science

00:42:23.220 | because I could ask her what she's doing

00:42:25.660 | and she'd tell me what computer programming was.

00:42:27.180 | I knew what computer programming was.

00:42:28.500 | We had computers in the house.

00:42:29.580 | So at a pretty early age, I started computer programming.

00:42:32.620 | And I got pretty deeply into that

00:42:35.380 | and that set up my whole computer science career.

00:42:37.420 | Of course, ironically, as soon as I got to MIT

00:42:40.420 | in grad school, I said, "I'm done with computer programming.

00:42:42.380 | "I want to be a theoretician."

00:42:43.380 | And I haven't programmed a computer since, more or less,

00:42:46.620 | but that was very useful.

00:42:48.940 | The other influence here, and I'm going to say right now,

00:42:51.140 | I'm just focusing on influences relevant

00:42:54.460 | to my public professional life.

00:42:56.120 | Obviously, there's very important influences on my values

00:42:59.500 | and me as a person and character,

00:43:01.700 | but I don't want to get into all of that right now.

00:43:03.740 | But in terms of things that are publicly visible

00:43:06.700 | in my professional life, the other important thing

00:43:09.940 | that I got out of my mom is that when we moved,

00:43:12.760 | we moved to New Jersey, and I have three siblings,

00:43:17.020 | so there's four of us.

00:43:18.860 | And we moved to New Jersey,

00:43:20.500 | she stopped working for the Houston Chronicle

00:43:23.340 | and was just helping to raise the kids

00:43:26.060 | because we were at an age where it's four kids.

00:43:28.820 | It's a really hard job.

00:43:30.980 | And we generated a lot of chaos.

00:43:32.820 | There's a lot of paperwork and things that happen

00:43:34.860 | when you move.

00:43:35.700 | And my memory was it was quite overwhelming

00:43:38.300 | until one of her friends sold her on a Franklin Planner.

00:43:44.140 | It was like the Franklin Planner

00:43:47.420 | is a productivity organizational system

00:43:49.740 | that was in particular quite popular in the '80s and '90s.

00:43:52.780 | And she got very organized,

00:43:56.000 | and it made all the difference in the world.

00:43:57.460 | And it went from chaos, like a completely organized household

00:44:00.660 | to completely organized childhood

00:44:02.600 | in a way that was very impressive and very comforting.

00:44:05.260 | So I had been exposed all throughout my childhood

00:44:08.020 | to the power of being structured and organized

00:44:11.620 | in terms of your calendar, your to-do list,

00:44:14.060 | your days, your plan for what should happen.

00:44:16.220 | There's a lot of ideas

00:44:17.660 | from that original Franklin Covey system

00:44:20.180 | that permeate the time management systems

00:44:24.060 | I talk about today.

00:44:25.380 | Looking to the week ahead,

00:44:27.540 | figuring out in advance when things were gonna happen,

00:44:29.660 | full capture of things.

00:44:30.980 | You had all the information in place.

00:44:32.880 | Avoiding the chaos of what do I wanna do next,

00:44:35.320 | and instead having the structure

00:44:36.600 | of what's my plan for the day.

00:44:37.740 | A lot of that I saw happening as we were growing up,

00:44:40.000 | and it meant a very stable, structured household.

00:44:42.600 | Oh, it's this holiday happening,

00:44:44.120 | those decorations come out,

00:44:45.720 | there's these events we do,

00:44:47.400 | everyone gets their, we gotta get clothes for the kids.

00:44:49.960 | That was a big thing,

00:44:51.040 | because you grow out of your clothes so fast.

00:44:52.760 | And my mom would bring down the catalogs,

00:44:54.720 | be like, "Okay, you have to go through

00:44:55.800 | "and circle what you want."

00:44:57.040 | And there would be the day she called and ordered it.

00:44:59.160 | And that, I think I took to heart for sure.

00:45:03.140 | And that would lead me to be someone

00:45:04.380 | that had productivity and productivity systems

00:45:07.780 | instilled in my DNA.

00:45:08.860 | So those are my two things I will say

00:45:10.660 | in terms of my mom's influence

00:45:12.200 | on my public professional visible lifestyle.

00:45:17.200 | Me as a computer scientist,

00:45:19.860 | and me as someone that does some productivity guru-ing,

00:45:23.780 | that goes back to her.

00:45:28.100 | - Yeah, that's a good question.

00:45:29.500 | All right, what do we have next?

00:45:34.740 | - Okay, our next question is about weekend planning.

00:45:38.340 | - Weekend planning, okay.

00:45:40.580 | - Hi, Cal, my name is Lucia,

00:45:45.020 | I'm a law student from Spain.

00:45:46.960 | Thank you for your writing on your student advice,

00:45:49.460 | it has helped me a lot.

00:45:51.140 | My question is this,

00:45:52.520 | you recommend that people don't time block their weekends

00:45:55.020 | because it may lead to burnout.

00:45:56.860 | However, we students often need to work on weekends

00:45:59.580 | in order to live up to the study load.

00:46:01.860 | How do you recommend that we approach weekend planning?

00:46:05.220 | Thank you so much.

00:46:06.320 | - For a student, what I would rely on

00:46:11.220 | is my autopilot schedule philosophy,

00:46:15.820 | which is where you figure out all the work

00:46:19.060 | that regularly needs to be done,

00:46:21.600 | and you get the days and times

00:46:23.660 | in which that work is actually accomplished.

00:46:26.340 | So I always use whatever,

00:46:28.340 | Thursday mornings is when I do the problem set

00:46:31.500 | that's due on Friday,

00:46:32.540 | and I do my lab write up right after my lab on Monday.

00:46:35.540 | I have a two hour window

00:46:36.580 | where I just stay in the science library right there,

00:46:38.420 | and I do the lab write up that's due every week.

00:46:40.740 | And so you just have fixed on your schedule,

00:46:42.500 | here's the times when this work gets done,

00:46:44.220 | this work I know that always has to happen.

00:46:47.060 | So that gives you a realistic vision of

00:46:49.700 | how much do I really have to do,

00:46:52.100 | and where does it fit?

00:46:54.460 | And now if you're already filling that up,

00:46:56.760 | autopilot the weekends.

00:46:58.460 | So you might have autopilot things scheduled

00:47:00.300 | on the weekends, right?

00:47:01.340 | So I don't have to think about it,

00:47:02.780 | I'm working on the weekend,

00:47:04.900 | but I don't have to think about when or how I do it,

00:47:06.900 | this is just what I do on Sunday afternoon,

00:47:08.500 | this is what I do on Saturday morning.

00:47:09.900 | So when you're building your autopilot schedule as a student,

00:47:13.060 | feel free to just use the weekends as well.

00:47:15.940 | And this is different than time blocking,

00:47:17.660 | autopilot scheduling is different than time blocking

00:47:19.580 | because you just get used to,

00:47:20.460 | I always do this work on this point,

00:47:22.020 | and that's very different than

00:47:23.660 | I'm wrangling a whole day,

00:47:25.500 | beat by beat what I'm doing,

00:47:26.940 | I have to keep turning my attention

00:47:27.980 | from one thing to another,

00:47:28.820 | a complicated, intricate schedule

00:47:30.240 | where you're locked in until you're done.

00:47:32.420 | Now on the weekend, it's like, look,

00:47:33.520 | I do Sunday mornings and Saturday afternoons,

00:47:35.500 | I just always do that, I go to the library,

00:47:37.060 | I don't have to think about it,

00:47:38.180 | it's not gonna burn you out the same way.

00:47:39.540 | So you write the note that students often

00:47:41.320 | do make use of the weekends,

00:47:42.720 | but let your autopilot schedule do a lot of that work.

00:47:47.140 | Now, what about the one-time things, papers and exams,

00:47:49.700 | studying for exams, writing papers?

00:47:52.180 | For that, what I used to recommend in my books on this,

00:47:55.740 | and also my writing on the Study Hacks blog,

00:47:58.380 | is that you are going to create a plan

00:48:02.220 | for prep and execution for these one-time big things

00:48:06.740 | at least a month in advance.

00:48:08.540 | And you figure out what really needs to be done

00:48:12.180 | to study for an exam,

00:48:13.580 | what is gonna be involved in writing this paper?

00:48:16.420 | And you get that work onto your calendar far in advance.

00:48:21.720 | And I would even suggest,

00:48:22.820 | when I used to talk about this to students,

00:48:24.140 | I would say at the beginning of every semester,

00:48:26.260 | go through your syllabus for each class,

00:48:27.980 | find a major one-time things,

00:48:29.540 | find the exams, find the papers,

00:48:32.700 | go back one month from each

00:48:34.300 | and put a note on your calendar that says,

00:48:35.780 | make a plan for this.

00:48:37.260 | So you do that at the beginning of the semester.

00:48:38.460 | Now, as you're going through your semester,

00:48:39.580 | execute your autopilot schedule, everything's fine,

00:48:42.780 | you're not time blocking every minute of your day,

00:48:44.180 | you're just executing the schedule

00:48:45.300 | that's the same every day, every week.

00:48:47.660 | And when you get to this note that says,

00:48:48.940 | hey, time to start thinking about the midterm,

00:48:51.840 | then you make a plan and you put that work on your calendar

00:48:55.440 | like doctor's appointments or other classes.

00:48:58.520 | And now you're back to just them executing.

00:49:00.200 | Autopilot schedule, oh, my autopilot schedule,

00:49:02.280 | plus today I have a block of time on my calendar,

00:49:04.720 | so let me do that.

00:49:05.880 | Oh, today I only have it Saturday,

00:49:07.480 | I have my Saturday afternoon

00:49:08.360 | where I always work on my CS problem set,

00:49:10.440 | but you know what?

00:49:11.280 | This Saturday I have a study session in the morning

00:49:14.440 | on my calendar because I have a midterm coming up,

00:49:16.840 | so let me just do that too.

00:49:19.700 | And when you're starting a month out

00:49:21.380 | and really spreading this stuff out,

00:49:22.660 | what you avoid is this thing is due on Monday,

00:49:25.580 | it's Saturday morning,

00:49:26.780 | I now have to work all day and all night

00:49:28.580 | and all day the next day and all day the next night

00:49:30.260 | to try to get something done

00:49:31.180 | because you're spreading work out,

00:49:32.260 | so you have plenty of breathing time,

00:49:33.380 | plenty of time to recharge.

00:49:34.740 | And it does not feel the same.

00:49:37.700 | An autopilot schedule augmented

00:49:39.420 | with these pre-planned sessions for papers and exams

00:49:41.540 | does not feel the same as let's say my situation

00:49:44.380 | where I will say, okay, I have eight hours I'm working today

00:49:47.020 | and I need to get everything out of those minutes.

00:49:49.340 | Let's go.

00:49:50.180 | Because as a student,

00:49:51.840 | you do not have that chronic overload issue

00:49:53.680 | of people are just piling work on you,

00:49:55.580 | you have more on your plate

00:49:56.420 | than you could ever imagine actually doing.

00:49:57.820 | No, you can actually wrap your arms

00:49:59.360 | around your work as a student.

00:50:00.360 | You autopilot schedule the regular stuff,

00:50:02.000 | you pre-plan the one-time stuff.

00:50:03.720 | If that's too crowded, get an easier schedule,

00:50:06.160 | make sure you don't have too many extracurriculars,

00:50:07.540 | you can control this.

00:50:09.000 | And it's not gonna be nearly as stressful

00:50:10.680 | as time-block planning,

00:50:11.560 | even if this work is happening on weekdays and weekends.

00:50:18.680 | - The good news about that question,

00:50:21.380 | that collar we should say,

00:50:23.800 | is that she's thinking about this.

00:50:26.200 | That's the biggest issue with college kids in these issues

00:50:28.840 | and with student stress in college

00:50:30.600 | is that most students that are doing the traditional,

00:50:34.300 | I'm 19 doing a four-year residential college,

00:50:36.580 | those type of students is they don't wanna hear it.

00:50:39.120 | I don't wanna hear study advice.

00:50:41.860 | It's gonna make me uncool or something like that.

00:50:44.960 | I'm fine, I can just do it.

00:50:46.740 | And it's so needlessly stressful and overwhelming.

00:50:51.740 | College, if you do it right,

00:50:53.740 | if you keep your schedule reasonable

00:50:55.860 | and don't do the 70 extracurricular nonsense

00:50:58.560 | and don't do the triple major nonsense

00:51:00.140 | and you autopilot schedule and pre-plan your exams and papers

00:51:02.900 | you don't have to work at night.

00:51:04.700 | And you rarely have a busy day.

00:51:07.280 | It's not that much work.

00:51:08.340 | It all changes when you get out there in the real world

00:51:10.300 | if you follow and have an ambitious, difficult job.

00:51:13.300 | So it doesn't have to be that hard.

00:51:14.220 | But the main thing is thinking

00:51:15.780 | I'm actually going to be systematic

00:51:18.820 | about how I approach my job as a student.

00:51:20.260 | Like that's the zero to one binary for college life

00:51:22.420 | that makes all the difference.

00:51:23.920 | It did for me.

00:51:26.140 | All right, well, let's do a, before we do a final call,

00:51:30.700 | I'll talk about a couple other sponsors here real quick.

00:51:33.620 | This next ad comes to you from a company

00:51:36.120 | that's cooking the best omelets you'll have all year

00:51:39.900 | all while changing the world one egg at a time.

00:51:41.460 | It's called Just Egg.

00:51:44.260 | Now I talked to you about Just Egg on Monday's episode

00:51:46.700 | but let me remind you what this is.

00:51:48.340 | Just Egg is a cholesterol-free plant-based egg

00:51:53.020 | that will give you the most decadent quiches of your life,

00:51:55.100 | the fluffiest scrambled

00:51:56.020 | and the easiest egg sandwiches of all time.

00:51:58.300 | As I mentioned, I eat a lot of chicken eggs.

00:52:00.700 | It feels like too much chicken eggs.

00:52:02.540 | Just Egg was the solution I needed

00:52:05.180 | because I like the taste of them, of chicken eggs.

00:52:07.060 | I don't want to have them every day.

00:52:08.440 | So I can throw Just Eggs into my schedule instead

00:52:12.900 | and get a nice cholesterol-free plant-based product

00:52:17.900 | that I can enjoy.

00:52:19.240 | The one thing I'll say, Jesse,

00:52:21.700 | that I'm not sure about Just Egg and it worries me

00:52:24.900 | because I haven't tested it yet is

00:52:27.060 | what if I want to throw this at someone

00:52:30.860 | that I am trying to jeer or indicate my displeasure?

00:52:34.800 | 'Cause this is one of the key uses of eggs

00:52:39.300 | is throwing them at people, right?

00:52:41.140 | You egg people when they're saying something you don't like,

00:52:44.220 | you suspect they might be a witch or a sorcerer,

00:52:47.820 | or if they are trying to push some sort of unpopular cause.

00:52:51.860 | And I gotta say,

00:52:54.780 | this is something I think we need to test out.

00:52:57.060 | We need to pelt people with Just Egg.

00:52:59.640 | It's not actually a, it's liquid form,

00:53:03.020 | so I don't know how it's gonna work.

00:53:04.660 | So we're gonna have to figure out

00:53:05.700 | how to actually take that product

00:53:08.580 | and turn it into something

00:53:09.620 | that we can actually pelt at someone.

00:53:11.220 | But once we have solved that problem

00:53:12.880 | and combine it with the fact

00:53:14.020 | that this is a cholesterol-free plant-based egg

00:53:16.980 | that tastes great and helps the plant

00:53:19.460 | 'cause it's good for you,

00:53:20.300 | I think we'll really be onto something.

00:53:22.280 | I think like a disposable sling or something like that.

00:53:26.620 | I'm trying to think, because it's liquid,

00:53:28.840 | but we could get it into some sort of thing

00:53:30.540 | so that you could throw it at someone that you're jeering.

00:53:33.460 | - All I can think about is you in the field

00:53:35.460 | in Lord of the Rings doing that.

00:53:37.660 | - It would be counterproductive

00:53:39.300 | because there's no one else there.

00:53:41.380 | It would just be me alone.

00:53:44.380 | And eventually, a Brandon Sarensen-type character

00:53:47.420 | would come by and cast a wind spell on an elf,

00:53:51.180 | and I would pelt them with Just Egg.

00:53:53.820 | There we go.

00:53:56.100 | So that's what's gonna happen.

00:53:57.900 | But no, keep your eyes open for Just Egg.

00:54:00.460 | This has been an important part of my routine.

00:54:03.780 | I love throwing it in there 'cause I'm an egg guy.

00:54:06.300 | - Hi, Kevin.

00:54:07.420 | All right, let's also talk briefly about, oh, New Relic.

00:54:12.340 | Yeah, so I'll tell you, if there's a topic

00:54:14.820 | that Jesse won't stop bothering me about

00:54:16.900 | in just casual conversation,

00:54:19.260 | it has to do with getting transparency

00:54:22.340 | into debugging for your entire software stack.

00:54:25.140 | It just bothers me about this.

00:54:27.740 | He's like, "Cal, I..."

00:54:29.700 | No, this is not in Jesse's wheelhouse,

00:54:31.860 | but it's in my world as a computer scientist,

00:54:34.020 | and I'm around a lot of computer engineers,

00:54:36.940 | people who run computer companies,

00:54:38.420 | and I can tell you, New Relic

00:54:41.660 | is one of these critical products in that world, right?

00:54:46.460 | So if you're running one of these complex software stacks

00:54:48.940 | and something breaks,

00:54:50.660 | you need to figure out where the issue is.

00:54:52.100 | And what a lot of people do is they just start calling people

00:54:55.420 | and using ad hoc tools and going onto their cloud interface

00:54:59.700 | and seeing what's going on with their processes.

00:55:02.300 | That is a chaotic way to deal with problems.

00:55:06.020 | The better solution is New Relic,

00:55:08.380 | which combines 16 different monitoring products

00:55:10.900 | that you'd normally buy separately

00:55:12.980 | that allows engineering teams to see

00:55:14.460 | across the entire software stack in this one place.

00:55:18.140 | You can pinpoint issues down to the single line of codes.

00:55:21.620 | You know exactly why a problem happens.

00:55:23.860 | You can resolve it quickly.

00:55:25.700 | It's why dev and ops teams at DoorDash, GitHub, Epic Games,

00:55:29.260 | and more than 14,000 other companies use this tool.

00:55:34.140 | If you're in the dev or ops business,

00:55:35.760 | you know New Relic.

00:55:37.700 | If you're in that business and you're not using New Relic,

00:55:40.420 | you should be.

00:55:42.340 | I don't know why you want it.

00:55:43.900 | So whether you run a cloud native startup

00:55:46.900 | or are a Fortune 500 company,

00:55:49.060 | it takes just five minutes to set up New Relic

00:55:50.700 | in your environment.

00:55:52.460 | So the next time,

00:55:53.520 | the next issue is what I mean to say.

00:55:58.720 | See, I'm thinking about pelting wizards.

00:56:02.540 | This is my problem.

00:56:03.460 | Now I have that in my head,

00:56:04.380 | pelting wizards with liquid egg.

00:56:05.980 | The next issue is just waiting to happen.

00:56:09.260 | So you should get New Relic before it does.

00:56:12.320 | You can get access to the whole New Relic platform

00:56:14.320 | and a hundred gigabytes of data free and forever.

00:56:17.240 | No credit card required.

00:56:19.640 | Sign up at newrelic.com/deep.

00:56:22.320 | That's N-E-W-R-E-L-I-C.com/deep.

00:56:27.080 | Newrelic.com/deep.

00:56:29.320 | All right, Jesse, I think we have time for one more call

00:56:33.560 | because I'm running late today,

00:56:34.440 | but let's get one more call in.

00:56:35.980 | Who do we have here?

00:56:37.880 | - All right, sounds good.

00:56:38.720 | We got a question, a call about living a deep life.

00:56:42.600 | - There we go.

00:56:43.440 | - Hi Cal, this is Karan.

00:56:47.120 | And I took a break from my 33 jobs

00:56:49.200 | to retreat to a cabin in the woods

00:56:50.900 | and think about who am I,

00:56:52.360 | what is identity and how is it crafted?

00:56:54.640 | And I came up with this heuristic

00:56:55.960 | that I would love your thoughts on.

00:56:58.080 | And I have a question that I put a lot of thought

00:57:00.720 | and research into.

00:57:02.640 | First part of this heuristic that I came up with

00:57:04.720 | is identity.

00:57:05.800 | Who am I and how do I live a deep life?

00:57:09.040 | And I go very descriptive into that area.

00:57:11.480 | Next is philosophy.

00:57:12.840 | Digital minimalism helps back up that identity.

00:57:16.240 | Then we have framework.

00:57:17.820 | We use digital minimalism as that framework

00:57:20.120 | for living a deep life,

00:57:21.520 | but we also have the atomic habits by James Clear.

00:57:25.700 | And I use that as part of the framework category.

00:57:28.160 | After that, we have behavioral techniques.

00:57:30.880 | And this is like where like the nitty gritty,

00:57:32.760 | I leave my phone at home and I go for a walk.

00:57:35.960 | I enjoy solitude.

00:57:37.840 | And then we have outcomes, which is really important

00:57:40.400 | because we gotta know how do these behaviors,

00:57:42.700 | what outcomes do they have?

00:57:43.880 | I back on how my anxiety goes down.

00:57:45.840 | Now I'm reading Brad Stolberg's book

00:57:47.520 | on this idea of how I wanted to keep improving

00:57:50.200 | and this idea of always trying to optimize everything.

00:57:54.240 | And this is where my question comes in.

00:57:56.080 | 'Cause the last part of my heuristic is feedback.

00:57:59.640 | I wanna make sure I do better at living the deep life.

00:58:02.120 | But this compound 1% interest that you and James talk about

00:58:05.680 | and that this idea that Brad talks about,

00:58:08.520 | it can be like, how do I,

00:58:09.600 | if I keep trying to optimize living a deep life,

00:58:12.340 | how do I get rid of this background of anxiety?

00:58:15.320 | - Well, Karan, I appreciate the thought you put into this.

00:58:20.960 | And let me just preface my response by saying

00:58:23.080 | just the fact that you were putting

00:58:24.600 | this much intentional thought

00:58:25.920 | into how you want to structure your life

00:58:28.120 | is 80% of the battle.

00:58:30.320 | Most people don't do that.

00:58:32.400 | Most people go from one distraction

00:58:35.720 | or moment of chemical pleasure to another

00:58:39.040 | and hope to string along enough of those

00:58:42.040 | to get later on in life.

00:58:43.560 | It's not the way to do it.

00:58:45.000 | You need a plan, you need to be intentional.

00:58:46.920 | The second thing I'm gonna preface it

00:58:48.360 | is these type of plans evolve over time and that's great.

00:58:51.880 | The goal is not to figure out the one true plan

00:58:55.880 | that's absolutely optimal

00:58:57.120 | and then you have it all figured out, then you execute it.

00:58:59.560 | You don't want paralysis by analysis here.

00:59:02.440 | You come up with something, you live with it,

00:59:04.360 | check in twice a year,

00:59:05.680 | check in at your birthday to make changes.

00:59:07.360 | So you wanna make sure that you're spending

00:59:08.560 | a lot of time living life

00:59:09.520 | and not just thinking about how you're gonna live life.

00:59:11.800 | So those are some prefaces.

00:59:13.920 | All right, now let me start with your last point

00:59:15.760 | about beating back the background anxiety

00:59:19.440 | so that you can live a deep life.

00:59:21.500 | These are unrelated.

00:59:23.120 | Anxiety will do what anxiety does.

00:59:26.080 | You will feel anxiety sometimes, other times you won't.

00:59:28.360 | There will be periods where it's heavier,

00:59:29.520 | there'll be periods where it is not heavier.

00:59:31.760 | Your goal is not to make that go away.

00:59:33.880 | Your goal is to live a deep life

00:59:35.240 | even though you live in a world

00:59:36.680 | in which you sometimes feel

00:59:38.840 | the physical symptoms of anxiety.

00:59:40.520 | Constriction of the chest,

00:59:43.240 | a little bit difficulty of breathing.

00:59:44.600 | There's very specific physical symptoms.

00:59:46.040 | That comes and goes.

00:59:47.320 | Great, what's next?

00:59:48.280 | How do I still build a deep life?

00:59:49.320 | So I don't want you to think about banishing

00:59:53.360 | that which you cannot fully control from your life

00:59:55.560 | as a precondition for it being good,

00:59:57.960 | for it being enjoyable.

00:59:59.920 | And I'm gonna recommend the book here.

01:00:02.120 | So there are, I don't know how much you know

01:00:05.200 | about modern psychotherapy,

01:00:08.060 | but there's, roughly speaking,

01:00:10.020 | people think about there being three waves

01:00:11.960 | of modern psychotherapy.

01:00:14.100 | You have the first wave where you have talk therapy,

01:00:16.480 | which sort of came originally out of Freudian modalities.

01:00:19.600 | Let's talk things through

01:00:20.840 | and try to understand the source of issues.

01:00:23.740 | Largely, this was non-evidence-based therapy modalities.

01:00:27.400 | Then the second wave really is

01:00:29.160 | like cognitive behavioral therapy.

01:00:31.120 | And this was one of the first major approaches

01:00:34.640 | to issues like anxiety

01:00:36.040 | in which they were using studies and evidence

01:00:38.560 | and saying this type of thing worked.

01:00:39.880 | In the core book, the canonical public-facing book

01:00:43.280 | in second wave psychotherapy is "Feeling Good."

01:00:45.840 | And I believe this came out,

01:00:48.360 | so the '70s or '80s,

01:00:49.600 | and it introduced cognitive behavioral therapy

01:00:51.600 | to a larger group.

01:00:54.040 | Third wave psychotherapies is built more around

01:00:58.980 | what is sometimes called acceptance commitment therapy

01:01:02.140 | or ACT, A-C-T.

01:01:03.420 | There's some other things in there,

01:01:04.620 | but it pulls more from some Eastern philosophies as well.

01:01:07.580 | This is where I want to turn your attention,

01:01:09.300 | and I want to turn your attention to a book

01:01:11.480 | that popularizes ACT,

01:01:14.380 | and that is the book, I believe it is called

01:01:16.700 | "The Happiness Trap."

01:01:18.460 | Actually, Jesse, can you look that up

01:01:19.740 | and tell me what the author's name is?

01:01:22.080 | I want to make sure I got that name right.

01:01:23.520 | But it's a book that introduces

01:01:25.000 | acceptance commitment therapy to a broader audience.

01:01:29.600 | And this is a evidence-based methodology.

01:01:33.920 | It's something that's studied pretty well,

01:01:35.820 | and I like it a lot.

01:01:37.560 | I think it's what I want to preach to you right now.

01:01:42.320 | Because at the core,

01:01:44.160 | I can tell you what's at the core of acceptance,

01:01:45.760 | if you'll excuse this digression into psychotherapy,

01:01:49.440 | but at the core of this is this notion that,

01:01:54.440 | oh, we have a name here?

01:01:55.420 | Yeah, Russ Harris, that's right.

01:01:56.660 | And it is "The Happiness Trap," Jesse,

01:01:57.980 | did I get that right?

01:01:58.820 | - Yep. - That's right.

01:02:00.260 | So at the core of acceptance commitment therapy

01:02:01.780 | is they look back at cognitive behavioral therapy,

01:02:04.900 | and cognitive behavioral therapy

01:02:06.060 | directly addresses ruminations.

01:02:07.900 | Ruminations, these insistent, hard-to-control conversations

01:02:11.380 | you have with yourself in your head

01:02:13.460 | are at the core of both major anxiety

01:02:15.740 | and depressive disorders.

01:02:18.060 | Because if you're obsessively worried about,

01:02:20.420 | so you have these talks,

01:02:21.340 | these conversations in your head

01:02:22.380 | about bad things that could happen, it's anxiety.

01:02:25.020 | And if you have these hard-to-control,

01:02:27.700 | consistent voices, conversations in your head

01:02:29.620 | about what you've done that's bad and why you suck,

01:02:34.620 | that's the foundation for depression.

01:02:36.220 | So it's the same thing as the voices.

01:02:37.460 | And cognitive behavioral therapy,

01:02:38.900 | again, if you'll excuse the lecture here,

01:02:40.700 | focused on directly confronting ruminations.

01:02:44.080 | And so you would say, wait a second,

01:02:46.960 | this is the thing I keep talking about.

01:02:48.900 | Let me actually point out the ways

01:02:52.020 | in which that thinking is distorted,

01:02:53.860 | because often in anxiety and in depression

01:02:56.060 | is very distorted thinking.

01:02:57.180 | There's names for the distortion.

01:02:58.660 | This is black and white thinking.

01:03:00.640 | This is predicting the future.

01:03:02.700 | And you call it out and you push back at it

01:03:04.740 | and say, this is the problem with this rumination.

01:03:06.420 | And over time, that can actually diminish the power

01:03:09.260 | of that rumination to keep cycling faster and faster.

01:03:11.620 | And this can be quite effective for a lot of things.

01:03:14.860 | In fact, I use this quite successfully.

01:03:16.460 | If you want a personal story,

01:03:18.560 | when I was first having bad insomnia problems

01:03:23.560 | early in grad school,

01:03:25.300 | and there's a whole backstory to that,

01:03:27.020 | but basically there's very little

01:03:28.380 | I get anxious about in my life,

01:03:29.820 | even as I do pretty ambitious, big things

01:03:32.340 | that should be scary.

01:03:33.580 | And my theory has always been,

01:03:35.220 | all these things I'm doing that should be really anxious,

01:03:37.660 | anxiety producing, all that anxiety just got funneled

01:03:39.820 | into this random weird thing,

01:03:41.060 | which was I got very anxious about sleep

01:03:42.820 | and I felt physical anxiety every single day.

01:03:45.060 | I was sleeping, but the anxiety about not sleeping

01:03:47.980 | was every single day.

01:03:48.820 | And I read "Feeling Good."

01:03:49.980 | I read the book about cognitive behavioral therapy.

01:03:52.780 | And this was a case where that worked really well

01:03:54.700 | because the ruminations that were creating this anxiety

01:03:58.820 | about not sleeping were disordered.

01:04:01.580 | They were clearly exaggerating.

01:04:03.620 | And I could call out the distortions.

01:04:06.620 | And I had a system where I said twice a day,

01:04:09.860 | in the morning and in the evening,

01:04:12.740 | I'm gonna address these thoughts

01:04:14.740 | and point out the distortions, but not in between.

01:04:16.500 | And in between, my mind's like,

01:04:18.060 | let's think about sleep and why we're worried.

01:04:19.780 | I would say, I thought about this,

01:04:20.980 | went through it in the morning and wasn't that impressed

01:04:22.860 | and I'll do it again in the evening.

01:04:24.220 | So just wait till then,

01:04:25.860 | and then we'll get back to it in the evening.

01:04:27.820 | And that actually worked.

01:04:29.460 | And the day-to-day anxiety,

01:04:30.300 | and for this particular anxiety, it took a long time,

01:04:33.220 | but it went away, it was very effective.

01:04:35.340 | ACT came along and said,

01:04:36.780 | there are certain things for which that doesn't work.

01:04:39.900 | Right, because what if the thing that you're anxious about,

01:04:43.060 | what if the story there is accurate?

01:04:46.060 | What if it's not distorted?

01:04:47.340 | And the key thing that really,

01:04:48.860 | the key thing that led to the divergence of ACT,

01:04:52.900 | my understanding of ACT from cognitive behavioral therapy,

01:04:55.660 | were panic attacks.

01:04:56.780 | So even with panic attacks,

01:04:58.700 | you get a rising sense of panic leads to a place

01:05:01.700 | where you kind of tip over an edge

01:05:03.180 | and have your heart goes, it feels like a heart attack,

01:05:06.420 | you can become faint.

01:05:08.220 | And it could be like a really just disturbing public thing.

01:05:13.140 | And what the ACT people pointed out was,

01:05:15.740 | that's not a, if you're anxious about that happening,

01:05:18.740 | you're gonna go on stage,

01:05:19.580 | you're anxious about that happening,

01:05:20.420 | it's not a distorted thought.

01:05:21.700 | Like it really could happen.

01:05:22.900 | And maybe this has been happening to you quite a bit.

01:05:25.820 | So you can't look at yourself and convince yourself,

01:05:28.420 | oh, it's just distorted,

01:05:29.780 | of course you're not gonna have a panic attack.

01:05:31.060 | It's like, I just had three, I very well could.

01:05:33.300 | So cognitive behavioral therapy didn't work as well

01:05:35.620 | for panic attacks.

01:05:36.820 | And so acceptance commitment therapy was about,

01:05:38.740 | okay, you're not trying to challenge the thought,

01:05:42.380 | you make space for the thought,

01:05:43.980 | but instead of getting into it,

01:05:46.180 | like let's really get into it,

01:05:47.340 | you say, despite that,

01:05:50.340 | I'm gonna go commit to doing something that's value driven.

01:05:53.340 | Because what matters is living true to your values.

01:05:55.820 | And like, that's ultimately what matters,

01:05:56.980 | I'm gonna commit to do that,

01:05:58.020 | even though something bad could happen.

01:06:00.140 | And ACT is all about,

01:06:01.700 | and you'll read this in "The Happiness Trap",

01:06:04.500 | you're able to separate from the feeling of anxiety.

01:06:08.220 | It's there, it's the Eastern part of it.

01:06:11.180 | But it's just a sensation.

01:06:12.260 | It's just physical.

01:06:13.380 | Great, I'm feeling that.

01:06:14.300 | It's like my knee hurts.

01:06:15.220 | Great, what's next?

01:06:16.580 | And you learn to separate from the part of your mind

01:06:18.500 | that wants to tell the stories.

01:06:19.380 | We gotta think about this,

01:06:20.420 | but what if there's a panic attack?

01:06:21.740 | And what if this happens?

01:06:22.620 | And what if you, this or that happens, right?

01:06:25.220 | And you say, I see that story there,

01:06:27.380 | and I'm not mad at that part of my mind,

01:06:28.980 | and it's like a character and I give it a name,

01:06:30.740 | and maybe this is the patron of panic attacks.

01:06:34.020 | And I'm not mad at that person, that character in my mind,

01:06:36.820 | but I'm not gonna get into it with them.

01:06:38.860 | What I'm gonna do is this thing right here,

01:06:40.260 | because it's important to me,

01:06:41.140 | and I wanna live true to my values,

01:06:43.300 | regardless of what happens.

01:06:44.660 | And so you go do it anyways.

01:06:47.220 | And so when they would deal with people

01:06:48.300 | with severe anxiety, they'd say,

01:06:49.540 | you go to the party anyways,

01:06:50.820 | and you give the talk anyways, and you do whatever.

01:06:52.740 | And I like that.

01:06:53.980 | And I would say this is a very long way around

01:06:56.860 | to saying the deep life is about living

01:07:00.820 | in a value-driven way, despite everything else that happens.

01:07:04.820 | Not about creating a life

01:07:06.020 | that these specific good things happen,

01:07:08.820 | and there is no bad.

01:07:10.980 | That's called the fantasy life.

01:07:12.540 | That's not a life that you're gonna achieve.

01:07:16.140 | No one achieves that life.

01:07:17.260 | We all have our issues.

01:07:18.940 | I had to deal with the anxiety with the sleep thing.

01:07:20.900 | I don't have, I have not classic panic attacks,

01:07:23.460 | but I've gone through, I have weird stuff happens to me.

01:07:27.060 | I have whatever, automatic, autonomic,

01:07:31.060 | nervous system panic attack style reactions.

01:07:33.500 | I've had this all the time.

01:07:36.140 | Faint.

01:07:36.980 | I'll have a severe, I'll get lightheaded,

01:07:42.820 | and my whole body will break out in sweat.

01:07:45.500 | Look, man, I've been through all this stuff.

01:07:48.100 | And you wanna talk about high stakes, how about,

01:07:49.900 | okay, you're about to go on air on this network,

01:07:52.500 | or you're on stage in front of a huge number of people,

01:07:56.980 | or you're here sitting next to the dean.

01:07:59.460 | And so I've gone, so we all have this stuff we go through.

01:08:02.860 | And because the point is, our goal is not to avoid

01:08:05.340 | bad things from happening, avoid bad sensations,

01:08:07.220 | and have only good things happen to us.

01:08:08.820 | The goal is to live deeply, to live true to your values,

01:08:11.460 | despite it, it's the ACT mindset.

01:08:13.180 | It's the mindset that Russ Harris talks about

01:08:15.740 | in "The Happiness Trap."

01:08:17.380 | So that's the piece I really, Karan,

01:08:20.420 | wanted the focus on here, is focus on what you can control

01:08:23.740 | in building this good life.

01:08:25.100 | The stuff you can't control will come and go.

01:08:28.820 | It'll do what it does.

01:08:30.380 | Whatever, and you can't, a lot of that you can't control.

01:08:34.100 | Be happy when it's, hey, I'm not feeling this thing

01:08:36.700 | I don't like, great, I'm happy.

01:08:38.940 | But when it's there, don't be devastated.

01:08:40.900 | Be like, crap, but I'm still doing this thing

01:08:42.180 | I really find important.

01:08:43.900 | So I think that's good.

01:08:44.740 | Now, onto your framework.

01:08:45.700 | I mean, look, I nerd out on this stuff all the time.

01:08:48.540 | So yes, I like what you're doing here.

01:08:52.220 | You're building out a system of different layers.

01:08:54.580 | You're thinking things through.

01:08:55.520 | I think of what you're doing

01:08:56.360 | as called a personal operating system

01:08:57.980 | that has these different stack layers that meet together.

01:09:00.540 | My only word of warning would be,

01:09:02.340 | make sure that the fiddling of the knobs

01:09:05.300 | doesn't take over the actual living.

01:09:07.740 | In the end, you actually, life is hard and complicated,

01:09:10.660 | and some days you're anxious, and some days you get sick,

01:09:13.020 | and you're out of commission for two weeks,

01:09:14.620 | and you can't follow your system.

01:09:15.660 | And you wanna make sure that in the end,

01:09:17.220 | you're present and have gratitude,

01:09:20.340 | and are doing interesting things and enjoying good moments,

01:09:22.500 | and that you're not spending all your time

01:09:23.580 | thinking about your system.

01:09:24.500 | But I'm glad you're thinking about it.

01:09:26.180 | I like your heuristics.

01:09:27.340 | Try 'em.

01:09:28.180 | If they don't work, change 'em.

01:09:29.780 | Feel free to simplify them if you feel stressed

01:09:31.820 | by just the complexity of your system.

01:09:33.420 | I think that's all fine.

01:09:34.620 | But let's go back to this original point,

01:09:36.500 | is the goal of the deep life here is not to avoid the bad.

01:09:41.140 | It is to live good,

01:09:43.420 | even when the inevitable bad comes and goes.

01:09:46.120 | All right, Cron, well, talking about going,

01:09:49.900 | I am running late,

01:09:50.940 | so we should probably wrap up this episode.

01:09:53.020 | Thank you, everyone who sent in their listener calls.

01:09:57.300 | If you like what you heard,

01:09:58.700 | you will like what you read in my email newsletter.

01:10:01.180 | Sign up at calnewport.com.

01:10:02.660 | You'll also like what you see on the YouTube channel,

01:10:07.020 | youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

01:10:10.620 | We have videos of these full episodes,

01:10:12.300 | as well as individual videos

01:10:14.320 | for each individual question and segment we cover.

01:10:18.900 | I'll be back next week,

01:10:20.020 | and until then, as always, stay deep.

01:10:22.520 | (upbeat music)

01:10:26.040 | [MUSIC]

Full Length Episode | #178 | February 28, 2022 | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

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