Cal Newport's Professional Flywheel For A Deep Life

00:00:00.000 | All right.

00:00:01.000 | Now that you're back in action, Jesse, the microphone's back and running.

00:00:06.160 | What do we got for our second question here?

00:00:07.800 | All right.

00:00:08.800 | Next question.

00:00:09.800 | That's funny.

00:00:10.800 | Thanks for rescuing me there.

00:00:12.060 | We have a question from Richard about your business model.

00:00:16.680 | Hi, Cal.

00:00:19.480 | This is Richard from California.

00:00:23.600 | I love the podcast and have read many of your books.

00:00:27.920 | Thanks for all you do.

00:00:28.920 | I have a question about your business model.

00:00:31.880 | I'm wondering, I know you have a full-time job as a professor, but you are doing all

00:00:37.280 | these activities, writing books, podcasts, speaking, articles for The New Yorker.

00:00:43.280 | Do you have an overall business model behind this?

00:00:47.960 | Is there something that you are mainly focusing on?

00:00:51.560 | Or are these simply activities that you are doing because you're interested in them and,

00:00:58.960 | of course, you don't want to lose money on them?

00:01:01.520 | So I'm wondering, is everything a support to your book publishing, or is there some

00:01:07.740 | bigger empire-building plan behind it?

00:01:11.780 | Love to hear more, and whatever you can tell us would be appreciated.

00:01:17.360 | So Richard, there is a plan, and I do think a lot about this, and I tweak and adjust this

00:01:23.800 | over time.

00:01:25.960 | Sometimes I think about what's going on in my writing career.

00:01:30.160 | I'll use a Jim Collins flywheel metaphor.

00:01:34.280 | So if you know his flywheel metaphor that was originally introduced in Good to Great,

00:01:39.560 | you're trying to make your business into a flywheel that it picks up momentum.

00:01:45.200 | As you go around this flywheel, it turns faster and faster, so it builds upon itself.

00:01:49.640 | Positive stuff builds upon itself, and that's the key to having something go somewhere interesting.

00:01:53.720 | And I often think about my writing business that way.

00:01:56.200 | So at the top of the flywheel, the core thing, the foundation of my writing business is my

00:02:01.000 | writing, books and New Yorker.

00:02:03.520 | And New Yorker was a great simplification of lots of different places I used to write.

00:02:07.160 | For now, as long as they'll have me, I like the idea of just this is where I focus for

00:02:11.360 | the most part my non-book writing.

00:02:14.400 | So books and New Yorker, blockbuster book releases, attention-catching, beautifully

00:02:19.680 | crafted articles.

00:02:20.960 | That's the core grist for my writing business.

00:02:24.680 | Mill, I think without that, nothing else really matters.

00:02:29.160 | Then you're just like an online marketer or influencer or something.

00:02:33.120 | That's the foundation.

00:02:34.120 | Okay.

00:02:35.120 | Then next, if you go around the flywheel, I have this, think of it as like the online

00:02:41.720 | platform, the online business, the other online activities that happen.

00:02:48.240 | So people find their way to these other online activities, which is at this point, primarily

00:02:52.660 | my email newsletter, my podcast and the associated videos.

00:02:57.800 | They find their way there because they've read my books, they've read my articles, but

00:03:01.200 | then they go there and we can interact with that audience and build relationships with

00:03:07.400 | the audience.

00:03:08.400 | So we pull more people into that audience who maybe haven't seen my books or haven't

00:03:15.640 | read my articles.

00:03:16.640 | So then we have this online, it's the podcast newsletter video.

00:03:22.200 | And then that all fuels what I call just my deep life.

00:03:28.200 | So making my life interesting and as deep as possible, you get flexibility with like

00:03:33.160 | the income that these things bring in, the opportunities they bring in, you can make

00:03:35.920 | your life more interesting.

00:03:37.280 | And that actually fuels back into the flywheel.

00:03:41.120 | And I may have these out of order.

00:03:42.840 | Let me think.

00:03:43.840 | I think the way I normally think about it is the books doing really well allows more

00:03:50.400 | flexibility and interesting things to happen in my life, makes my life deeper.

00:03:54.000 | I think it's the way I normally think about it.

00:03:55.680 | And my life being more interesting and deeper feeds into my online platforms and makes that

00:03:59.880 | more interesting because it makes it more interesting to hear from me or to see me.

00:04:03.700 | And that online platform, as that grows, it allows my books to be bigger, which then fly

00:04:09.160 | wheels back around to my life, getting more interesting, I have more options, which makes

00:04:12.540 | the platform bigger.

00:04:13.540 | That's the actual way.

00:04:14.540 | So I had that ordering wrong, Richard.

00:04:15.820 | So that's the actual flywheel I see.

00:04:17.580 | So the book fuels a more interesting, deeper life.

00:04:22.340 | And the more interesting, deeper life fuels the online platform.

00:04:24.860 | The online platform means the books can be bigger.

00:04:27.240 | That makes an even bigger, more deeper, interesting life, which makes the platform even bigger,

00:04:30.980 | which makes the books even bigger.

00:04:32.380 | That's a classic Jim Collins flywheel.

00:04:34.700 | And that's the way I think about these things feeding into each other.

00:04:39.980 | Now, in terms of time, I'm very careful about this.

00:04:44.900 | So as I've talked about here on the show, I separate writing from non-writing.

00:04:50.500 | The writing is a core thing and it's seasonal.

00:04:52.300 | When I'm working on a book or an article, it's getting time.

00:04:54.780 | There's times where I'm not writing something, but that's a core time that I protect on my

00:04:58.380 | calendar and that's at the core of my business.

00:05:01.940 | The other stuff, the other recording the podcast, writing the newsletter, working on the logistics,

00:05:07.020 | right now I try to keep that to roughly like a long half day.

00:05:12.540 | And Jesse can confirm, it's like roughly a half day.

00:05:14.980 | I got here today at 1030 and I don't know what time it is now, but I think we're aiming

00:05:20.260 | for like 2.30 or we're done here today.

00:05:24.580 | And so podcast recording, working with Jesse on anything we need to do for the podcast,

00:05:29.660 | video, talking to our video people, talking to our sound engineer, like all of that stuff.

00:05:35.300 | I want to be in basically a half day once a week.

00:05:38.300 | And that's my fixed schedule productivity setup.

00:05:41.100 | I want to do the best I can with that half day.

00:05:42.580 | So I'm very aggressively and ambitiously trying to push things forward, but it has to fit

00:05:45.660 | within that, with that confines.

00:05:47.260 | So maybe it's a little bit of a slower pace than if my whole time was spent on the podcast,

00:05:51.940 | on the video and the newsletter and all these types of things, but it's still making forward

00:05:55.700 | progress and its footprint is contained.

00:05:59.020 | So I keep that footprint really contained.

00:06:00.780 | Then there's a few other ancillary income producing things.

00:06:04.140 | There's talks on my online courses.

00:06:05.420 | I'm very careful about spending time on those and I don't spend, aggregated over the year,

00:06:09.580 | I spend not that much time on those.

00:06:11.900 | Like right now I'm not doing a much talking.

00:06:13.900 | So new is a busy semester and I had my half days for the podcast, video, newsletter, and

00:06:19.980 | I had some writing to do and I knew I had a lot of busy semester, so I'm not doing much

00:06:24.660 | talking.

00:06:25.660 | I just told, I tell my speaking agents, turn off the spigot for now.

00:06:30.300 | So I've significantly reduced the writing and the online courses, Scott Young and I

00:06:34.980 | have two and we release them twice a year and I'll add it when we add new courses, it'll

00:06:42.380 | usually be over a summer and we only do that every, God knows not very long.

00:06:46.940 | One of our courses we built in 2014 and the other we built during the pandemic, but I'm

00:06:51.820 | very careful about when I invest time in that and then we do the launches twice a year and

00:06:57.260 | that's it.

00:06:58.260 | So those things are very careful about, I don't want to spend too much time on those

00:07:01.300 | things.

00:07:02.300 | The reason why I spend any time on those things is again, the income feeds into the making

00:07:06.220 | your life deeper and making your life deeper makes the platform more interesting, which

00:07:10.940 | makes the books more interesting.

00:07:12.180 | So that's part of the flywheel that those things are like someone running up and giving

00:07:15.820 | an extra push to it.

00:07:18.180 | So that's the way I see it and so just to summarize the key points here is I do have

00:07:22.260 | a flywheel, two, writing's at the core of it, three, I'm incredibly careful about the

00:07:28.100 | time footprints I allow for the non-writing stuff and that's all very constrained and

00:07:34.900 | I don't know what number I'm on now, four or D, I'll just switch the letters.

00:07:39.660 | Really income in this picture is all about flexibility, remarkability, interestingness

00:07:47.660 | and not just scorecarding income.

00:07:50.700 | To me that's it's entirely utility.

00:07:53.660 | The fact that I make enough money on my books means for example, I don't have to take summer

00:07:57.340 | salary from research grants.

00:07:59.360 | So my summers are mine.

00:08:00.740 | I pay my own salary so I can do whatever I want.

00:08:04.300 | I'm not working for Georgetown in the summer and that's really important for me.

00:08:09.060 | That's money opening up autonomy that allows me to do cooler things.

00:08:14.300 | The income from this podcast right now, a lot of the income from this podcast goes to

00:08:18.980 | making the Deep Work HQ possible, which I think is an interesting part of my deep life,

00:08:24.380 | having this HQ and being able to come here and we have different plans for what we want

00:08:28.500 | to do with this space.

00:08:29.500 | That's interesting and deep and remarkable.

00:08:32.300 | That's what I care about, not can I, I don't know, buy a car with podcast money or something

00:08:38.620 | like that.

00:08:39.620 | So that's the other thing I see because I think as my life gets more deeper and interesting,

00:08:44.060 | it makes what I do on a show like this or in our videos or my newsletter more interesting.

00:08:48.220 | And that means more people are engaging with me, which means when I write a book, more

00:08:50.740 | people want to write the book and the books generate a lot of money.

00:08:53.740 | So then we can make the life even more remarkable, more interesting.

00:08:58.860 | There's things on the table where if I want to take a half sabbatical, for example, or

00:09:04.220 | take a, this is insider baseball, but basically when you have a sabbatical, it pays for one

00:09:08.460 | semester, but you can spread it over two semesters and take half salary for those two semesters.

00:09:12.980 | And when people do that, it's usually because they're going to like go to Google for the

00:09:18.860 | work on research and the company will fill in the rest of their salary.

00:09:21.900 | But like now I could have the option of doing that and just filling in the half salary with

00:09:25.900 | book money and just spending a whole year writing.

00:09:27.820 | Like those types of things to me are very important.

00:09:29.500 | Being able to have the summers to myself, those types of things are very important,

00:09:34.380 | et cetera.

00:09:35.380 | So that's the business model, turning that flywheel and everything in that flywheel keeps

00:09:41.320 | coming back to making my life deeper, more interesting and more focused.

00:09:45.020 | Everything keeps coming back to that and everything's aimed at that.

00:09:47.420 | And as that gets, as that's accomplished more, the rest of the flywheel turns, rest of the

00:09:52.980 | flywheel turns more and more.

00:09:54.740 | And that's the, that's the goal.

00:09:58.300 | All right, Richard.

00:09:59.300 | So that's, that's the, the business model.

00:10:02.340 | And and it's earned me literally dozens of dollars, dozens of dollars a month that like

00:10:09.420 | I just drink a second cup of coffee, three cups of coffee.

00:10:12.320 | I don't even have to worry about that cost, man.

00:10:14.160 | This is with all of our, with all of our podcast money.

00:10:17.560 | Jesse knows Jesse, you will confirm.

00:10:18.560 | I have, I have, I have drawn the flywheel on a whiteboard for you before you've, you

00:10:23.920 | know, I talk about the flywheel quite a bit.

00:10:28.680 | The scary thing is what's going to happen if the flywheel keeps picking up speed.

00:10:31.680 | If it all comes back to like making my life more deeper and focused and more remarkable,

00:10:37.360 | potentially that might lead to some pretty radical things.

00:10:40.900 | You might have to buy a remarkable tablet.

00:10:43.740 | That's where it's all.

00:10:44.740 | The flywheel is all aimed at buying a remarkable tablet.

00:10:47.840 | Then you can have a life like that.

00:10:49.300 | That's that.

00:10:50.300 | That's the story right there.

00:10:51.300 | Yes, exactly.

00:10:52.300 | I want to have a remarkable tablet that I, I want to be very well dressed on a balcony,

00:10:56.980 | looking pensively out over the ocean and then writing poetry on a remarkable tablet.

00:11:01.740 | That's where this all leads, Richard.

00:11:02.740 | That's where this all leads.

00:11:04.860 | So anyways, oh, and let me caveat this all that I'm very bad at business.

00:11:09.360 | And so don't use my, don't use anything I'm saying as like an example of how you should,

00:11:14.360 | how you should run things because I have negative business instinct.

00:11:18.440 | [MUSIC]

Cal Newport's Professional Flywheel For A Deep Life | Deep Questions Podcast

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