Ep. 252: The Deep Life Stack

00:00:00.000 | but I thought this would be a great time to beta test my more complete

00:00:03.200 | understanding of the deep life. So we'll call today's deep question.

00:00:06.120 | How do I rebuild my life into something deeper?

00:00:12.200 | I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions,

00:00:20.800 | the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world.

00:00:29.160 | So I'm here in my deep work HQ joined as always by my producer,

00:00:34.280 | Jesse. Jesse, I got some news.

00:00:37.280 | There is now officially available on Amazon

00:00:42.000 | for pre-order is the new edition of the Time Block Planner.

00:00:47.840 | Oh, nice.

00:00:48.780 | It's took a long time coming because of supply chain issues, et cetera.

00:00:52.680 | Also we really spent a lot of time trying to get it right.

00:00:54.760 | I'll have to bring it in, but we have a stack of what are called blanks.

00:00:59.080 | So just to get the new material, right, the new binding, right.

00:01:01.920 | They build these blank versions, right? There's no color. It's all white.

00:01:04.960 | And we went through a lot of those that try to get it just right,

00:01:07.720 | but very happy with how it ended up. Spiral binding, right? Spiral bound.

00:01:10.960 | So these are, I'll get into these details as it gets a little bit closer.

00:01:13.800 | The official sell date when it's available to ship is August 15th.

00:01:18.000 | But I can tell you briefly now the big difference is really high quality

00:01:23.120 | spiral binding, double wire, big, big loop spiral bindings.

00:01:27.480 | You can open this thing, lie it completely flat.

00:01:30.800 | I also re-engineered the interior pages.

00:01:33.920 | There are no longer individual time block double page spreads for the weekend days

00:01:39.600 | because I don't recommend that you time block your weekends

00:01:43.400 | to that level of detail.

00:01:45.080 | So instead, we have these new things I call weekend pages

00:01:47.640 | where you have a space on one page.

00:01:50.400 | These are two facing pages.

00:01:51.440 | You have space on one page for building a rougher granularity plan

00:01:56.040 | and still doing metric tracking on the weekend

00:01:58.000 | and another page for your weekly planning.

00:01:59.760 | This saves space.

00:02:00.760 | So now we can get an extra month worth of planning pages

00:02:03.760 | into a single time block planner.

00:02:05.400 | It'll now carry you through an entire four month semester, which to me,

00:02:09.200 | because that's my that's the unit in which I break up my year

00:02:12.760 | was very important.

00:02:15.640 | So I'm telling you about it now early

00:02:18.280 | because you might consider wanting to preorder a copy of the planner.

00:02:22.440 | The only reason why I'm bringing this up is that supply chain issues.

00:02:26.600 | So depending on how things go, we may be in a circumstance

00:02:30.360 | where we sell out the initial printing of the new planners,

00:02:33.840 | and then it might take a little bit before that supply chain catches up

00:02:37.920 | and we have the steady flow going.

00:02:39.720 | So if you're looking for this on Amazon,

00:02:42.240 | the original time block planner is still up there.

00:02:44.400 | You can differentiate that page from the page for the new planner

00:02:48.800 | because it says second edition in parentheses in the title.

00:02:52.720 | We don't even have the graphic yet.

00:02:53.960 | You'll see the graphic is the same for both.

00:02:55.440 | So look for that second new version or second edition at the top.

00:02:58.680 | So if you're interested in making sure you get your copy on August 15th,

00:03:02.840 | you might want to preorder it.

00:03:05.440 | My editor wanted me to note that there if there are

00:03:08.120 | time block planner 1.0 fans out there,

00:03:11.320 | you also might want to consider stocking up now while they're still available.

00:03:15.760 | That page will be up there on Amazon until we sell out

00:03:18.920 | of the printing of the old version, and then it'll disappear.

00:03:21.840 | So once that stock is gone, that's gone.

00:03:24.160 | So if you're a diehard original version aficionado,

00:03:28.040 | you might want to stock up now.

00:03:30.560 | And if you want to make sure you get your second version

00:03:33.120 | as soon as it's available in August, you might want to consider preordering now.

00:03:36.960 | As we get closer, we'll talk about it in more detail.

00:03:39.680 | Well, maybe I'll do another primer and time block planning

00:03:42.880 | and we'll show you the new planner.

00:03:44.680 | I think I'm going to see it in July is when I get my first hands

00:03:47.280 | on a fully formed one.

00:03:48.760 | So stay tuned.

00:03:49.400 | But I just wanted to drop one of the drop that note.

00:03:52.680 | Yeah, that'll be good for new listeners to that don't are familiar with it.

00:03:55.680 | Yeah, exactly.

00:03:56.360 | We could be a good chance to go through time blocking the nuances,

00:03:59.160 | show off the new show off the new planner and such.

00:04:03.440 | All right. So what do we want to talk about today?

00:04:04.920 | Well, Jesse, here's let me give you the thought process

00:04:07.800 | that leads us to today's topic.

00:04:09.560 | So I'm just finishing up the manuscript.

00:04:12.480 | The final changes, the very final changes on the manuscript for my new book

00:04:18.000 | on slow productivity, which will come out next year.

00:04:21.120 | And so we're about to it's called manuscript submission.

00:04:24.560 | But it's where you actually officially the publisher hands it off

00:04:28.000 | to the the team that works on things like copy editing. Right.

00:04:31.120 | So you're done writing and now you're into polishing. So

00:04:34.200 | I have begun to think a little bit about the topic of the next book,

00:04:39.360 | which is going to be about the deep life.

00:04:41.280 | I sold both of those together.

00:04:43.600 | And almost immediately, once I started thinking

00:04:46.040 | just in recent weeks about the idea of the deep life,

00:04:50.960 | it became apparent to me that the the process we talk about here

00:04:55.240 | on this show, the taking of the deep life buckets.

00:04:58.760 | And focusing on those buckets one by one is incomplete.

00:05:03.760 | Now, when I think about the deep life from giving one on one advice to someone,

00:05:08.080 | there's other aspects to the cultivation of depth that goes beyond there.

00:05:12.280 | In some sense, by the time you get to the point where you're looking at

00:05:14.840 | individual aspects of your life and trying to do a potentially radical overhaul,

00:05:20.320 | that's pretty far along in the process of trying to cultivate a life more of depth.

00:05:25.280 | There's a whole psychological self-identification process piece

00:05:29.120 | that goes to this.

00:05:29.760 | We call it a pre process where you set yourself up,

00:05:32.440 | you set up your life on a foundation in which you can make those types of changes.

00:05:35.920 | So I've been trying to brainstorm a systematic way

00:05:40.280 | of describing the broader goal of cultivating the deep life,

00:05:44.200 | a more complete system where you can go from I'm overwhelmed, I'm stressed out.

00:05:49.960 | I'm anxious. I feel as if my life is just mired in a sort of superficial shallowness.

00:05:55.240 | The fuller process of how you get from there.

00:05:58.320 | To a deeper life, one that seems remarkable, one that seems impactful.

00:06:03.160 | I want to stretch that out a little bit more.

00:06:06.320 | So what I have here is the first version of an elaborated deep life process.

00:06:12.680 | I want to go through it today in the show

00:06:15.760 | and then solicit your feedback as my listeners send me some notes.

00:06:20.000 | You can send them straight to author@calnewport.com

00:06:23.120 | or interesting@calnewport.com.

00:06:25.080 | I'm interested in your thoughts on this.

00:06:26.680 | This is still early stages, but I thought this would be a great time

00:06:29.320 | to beta test my more complete understanding of the deep life.

00:06:32.480 | So we'll call today's deep question.

00:06:35.480 | How do I rebuild my life into something deeper?

00:06:40.320 | All right, so I'm going to load up on the screen here my notes, I'm going to draw.

00:06:45.240 | So caveat emptor, Cal Newport's going to try drawing.

00:06:49.000 | This never ends up being that beautiful.

00:06:51.040 | Be ready for it.

00:06:52.600 | If you're listening and you want to watch what I'm drawing on the screen.

00:06:55.320 | This is episode 252.

00:06:57.640 | So go to YouTube.com/CalNewportMedia and look for episode 252

00:07:02.480 | or go to the deep life.com and look for episode 252.

00:07:05.720 | I'll also do my best to narrate what I'm drawing for those who are just listening.

00:07:09.520 | All right. So what you'll see on the screen here

00:07:12.520 | is what I call the deep life stack.

00:07:16.160 | Right now I have it empty.

00:07:17.880 | We're going to fill in the details as we go along.

00:07:20.360 | The stack has four different levels to it.

00:07:23.400 | I'll highlight those.

00:07:24.480 | We got level one, two, three, four.

00:07:26.680 | And the way I'm conceptualizing the deep life stack is sequential.

00:07:31.560 | You start with developing the bottom layer of the stack.

00:07:35.320 | Then you move up to the second layer, then the third, then the fourth.

00:07:39.040 | And then we're going to iterate and we'll get into that soon.

00:07:41.560 | All right. So what happens on the first layer of the deep life stack?

00:07:46.440 | This is the first big change or breakthrough

00:07:49.880 | I would say I've had when thinking about the deep life more recently.

00:07:52.720 | What I'm going to put at this bottom layer.

00:07:55.720 | It's going to be discipline.

00:07:57.720 | That's going to mean two things.

00:08:01.760 | But let me let me say what my goal is here.

00:08:05.160 | I'm realizing when it comes to cultivating a different type of life,

00:08:08.840 | any type of transformation, you have to first change your self

00:08:12.680 | identification to be the type of person who is able

00:08:16.960 | to persist with things that are difficult

00:08:20.880 | in the moment in pursuit of a greater good down the line.

00:08:25.920 | And I think it's very easy for people like me who give advice for a living

00:08:29.800 | and who've been doing this for a long time to take for granted

00:08:32.200 | that that's what we do already.

00:08:33.480 | But this is actually for most people, maybe the most critical step

00:08:36.680 | is transitioning from someone who says, look, this is not me.

00:08:39.440 | I don't have discipline.

00:08:41.440 | I'm not really able to pursue goals unless I feel really excited

00:08:44.720 | about it in the moment.

00:08:45.760 | How do we shift that self identity?

00:08:48.640 | And it's longtime listeners of the show, no, I really do see discipline

00:08:51.800 | as an identity.

00:08:54.600 | It is not something you do.

00:08:56.400 | It is an identity.

00:08:57.440 | You see yourself as someone who is disciplined or you don't.

00:09:01.720 | That requires some cultivation.

00:09:04.840 | So at the very bottom of the deep life stack, and this is why I've highlighted

00:09:07.360 | this, you would get started by putting some elements into your life.

00:09:12.400 | That required discipline to accomplish, and it it doesn't really matter

00:09:17.840 | when we're first beginning here.

00:09:20.400 | What these are, you just want to push them to be past what's trivial.

00:09:25.720 | But still south of intractable.

00:09:29.000 | So where you're starting from might depend where how ambitious

00:09:34.520 | these initial bits of discipline are.

00:09:36.600 | So this is where you might say, look, I'm going to train for a 5K.

00:09:40.720 | I am going to read five books a month.

00:09:43.760 | You're trying to find something that's going to require some discipline.

00:09:46.240 | I'm going to overhaul my nutrition.

00:09:47.600 | I'm going to do something new.

00:09:48.960 | I'm going to do this workout routine, try to hit a streak on Peloton,

00:09:51.400 | whatever it is, you're calibrating it to where you are.

00:09:54.520 | And I don't really care at first.

00:09:56.400 | The content of these things you're pursuing with discipline.

00:09:59.320 | This is identity formation.

00:10:01.800 | And that's where we get started.

00:10:02.800 | You take a couple of things in your life.

00:10:05.200 | You say, how can I make progress on this every day?

00:10:07.480 | And if it's too hard, you find something easier

00:10:09.360 | until you can move up to something harder.

00:10:10.840 | But you're establishing discipline.

00:10:12.520 | The second piece here.

00:10:14.720 | Is you're going to establish your route for everything we're about to do.

00:10:19.640 | A directory, a folder, a drawer in a desk, where it's going to be the one place

00:10:24.880 | where you keep track of everything that you've committed to do in your life,

00:10:27.880 | your rules, your systems, your goals.

00:10:29.640 | So you're going to initialize this route to your ultimate life

00:10:33.480 | planning processes with these initial discipline projects.

00:10:36.520 | So at the beginning, you could just have a folder on your desktop.

00:10:39.600 | You could have a drawer where you're just writing down.

00:10:41.760 | Here's my disciplines.

00:10:42.720 | I'm working on these two things.

00:10:44.000 | Here's what I do every day towards them.

00:10:46.360 | This is going to grow as we move to the deep life stack.

00:10:48.880 | But you're establishing here in the discipline step.

00:10:50.960 | Here's where I keep track of what I commit to.

00:10:53.680 | And you're starting to practice having commitments

00:10:55.480 | that are about long term value, not what you want to do in the short term.

00:10:58.720 | So already, we're a little bit different

00:11:01.880 | than standard thinking about lifestyle designs,

00:11:04.480 | because we're not starting with the decisions.

00:11:06.520 | We're not starting with the let's quit my job.

00:11:09.760 | I want to move to the country.

00:11:12.240 | We're recognizing that there is some effacement that has to happen first.

00:11:16.960 | There's some preparation that has to happen first.

00:11:18.960 | We don't want to jump into the decisions to develop the self first.

00:11:23.920 | So that's the first layer of the stack.

00:11:25.920 | All right. So once that's going, I have a couple of things and I've impressed myself.

00:11:30.480 | I'm doing these. I didn't think I could.

00:11:32.280 | I am capable of discipline and I have a centralized place now

00:11:35.640 | to keep track of what I'm doing.

00:11:37.480 | We move on to the next layer.

00:11:39.600 | I'll write this in here.

00:11:41.880 | We'll call this values.

00:11:46.800 | All right. So yet we're not yet the choosing to quit your job.

00:11:49.720 | We're not yet the moving values is where you are going to establish.

00:11:53.800 | What it is that is important to you.

00:11:57.600 | What are the truths that exist rooted outside of just your own preferences

00:12:01.960 | around which you were going to structure your life?

00:12:05.960 | This is committing to what is important to you.

00:12:08.360 | There's three pieces to figuring out what your values are going to be.

00:12:11.400 | I'll write them all three down, then we'll talk about it.

00:12:14.760 | Code rituals. Routines.

00:12:23.600 | So code is actually figuring out this is my code that I live by.

00:12:27.720 | I strive to do this. I will never do this.

00:12:31.080 | I have integrity. I am honest.

00:12:33.280 | I will prioritize the protection of others, whatever it is.

00:12:37.040 | This is where you make that clear.

00:12:39.000 | I have a code by which I live and all of my decisions are going to come back

00:12:43.280 | and make sure that they satisfy this code.

00:12:45.360 | All my big decisions, all my short term actions will live by this code.

00:12:50.280 | The code should be something that forces you on occasion to do things

00:12:53.880 | that are hard or scary in the moment to move away

00:12:55.880 | what might be in your best interest.

00:12:57.480 | But you have a code written down.

00:13:00.120 | Then you have rituals recorded, some sort of rituals that you commit to

00:13:05.920 | that help just reinforce in your life what it is that you value and take seriously.

00:13:12.120 | Finally, you're going to have routines, things you do on a regular basis

00:13:16.520 | that ensure that you are supporting these values that are encoded in your code,

00:13:21.000 | that make sure that you are pursuing them,

00:13:23.480 | reflecting the things you value in your everyday life.

00:13:27.840 | Now, of course, the most obvious pre-packaged answer

00:13:32.120 | to these three things would be a traditional religion.

00:13:34.680 | So if you are already religious, that's going to make it very easy

00:13:37.600 | for you to figure out code or rituals and routines for if you're religious.

00:13:40.560 | The ritual is going to involve, for example, let's say you're Muslim.

00:13:44.600 | It might involve daily prayer ritual as a way of reinforcing

00:13:49.320 | or reminding yourself of your relationship to God.

00:13:51.960 | Routines might involve things that your religion asks you to do,

00:13:56.320 | such as some sort of charitable giving on a regular basis

00:14:00.200 | to go out and serve others in the community.

00:14:03.200 | But you don't have to have a religion to fill in code, rituals and routines.

00:14:07.280 | You can do so on your own.

00:14:09.080 | The thing I want to emphasize here is don't worry so much about getting this

00:14:12.480 | exactly right, because when we're done with this stack,

00:14:14.880 | we're going to add one final piece, which is iterate.

00:14:17.560 | So you come to the stack where you are in your life right now,

00:14:21.440 | and you can expect that might change and evolve as time goes on.

00:14:25.560 | Now, everything you're going to figure out here for values.

00:14:28.960 | Gets recorded in that system you set up during the first

00:14:33.160 | the first level of the stack during discipline,

00:14:35.000 | that's why I'm drawing an arrow back down there, that's where you record.

00:14:38.560 | Here's my code, the things I value, things I don't,

00:14:41.360 | how I plan to live my life, that's where you record your rituals.

00:14:44.680 | You know, I meditate every morning, I read a book of philosophy,

00:14:48.160 | one book per month, I observe Shabbat as a time to reflect whatever it is.

00:14:53.840 | That's where your the routines go in.

00:14:57.000 | I volunteer every month.

00:15:00.120 | I whatever whatever it is actually going to be.

00:15:02.560 | And I go to services, whatever it is.

00:15:05.640 | This is all written down and you have a central place for it

00:15:08.360 | because you set that up in discipline.

00:15:11.280 | These two things, these first two layers of the stack, discipline and values.

00:15:14.960 | This now becomes our safety net foundation.

00:15:18.600 | Before we go up, the things that are going to follow

00:15:20.560 | are going to be a little bit more complicated and ambitious.

00:15:22.960 | But if everything else falls apart in your life,

00:15:25.480 | your professional system goes apart, there's health or sickness issues.

00:15:29.320 | Your life takes a turn.

00:15:31.520 | There's some sort of disaster.

00:15:33.400 | The two levels that will always be there for you to fall down on

00:15:36.360 | will be discipline plus value.

00:15:38.600 | So this is very important.

00:15:39.920 | The idea that I can do things that are hard

00:15:42.800 | when it's in my long term interest or the interest of my values,

00:15:45.280 | even if I don't want to, I'm capable of doing this and I know what I'm all about.

00:15:49.000 | What is my code?

00:15:50.120 | And I'm able to build my life around it.

00:15:52.280 | That is your insurance for disaster.

00:15:54.600 | That is your insurance against everything else going wrong.

00:15:56.880 | If everything else we're about to talk about unravels,

00:15:59.040 | you will be able to fall back on that.

00:16:02.000 | And that's going to give you a soft landing

00:16:04.160 | and it's going to give you a foundation in which you will eventually be able to rebuild.

00:16:08.680 | All right, so now we're going to head towards a layer

00:16:11.240 | where we're getting a little bit more into the traditional design,

00:16:15.040 | life design type waters, and that's going to be what I call calm.

00:16:19.920 | So the goal with calm is to gain control over your life.

00:16:29.520 | And to leverage that control to give yourself breathing room.

00:16:36.280 | So it's the calm level of the stack where you are actually going to start

00:16:39.720 | thinking about organizational and productivity systems.

00:16:42.680 | How do I keep track of the different obligations in my professional life

00:16:46.240 | and my personal life?

00:16:47.960 | How do I plan? How do I manage my time?

00:16:50.440 | This is all about I have control.

00:16:52.440 | I'm not just stumbling reactively through life.

00:16:56.120 | I have some control of what's going on.

00:16:58.480 | Now, once you have control, I'm organizing things.

00:17:00.640 | I can I could build out smart plans.

00:17:02.600 | I can now see much more clearly the relationship between my implicit workload,

00:17:08.280 | my tacit obligations and my schedule.

00:17:10.880 | Now you have a really good sense of is this reasonable or not,

00:17:13.960 | or how much can I actually have on my plate before I begin to get stressed out?

00:17:17.440 | And you can leverage this control to start doing some minimalism,

00:17:21.280 | start taking some things off of your plate to simplify aspects of your commitments

00:17:25.640 | in your personal life, in your family life, in your professional life.

00:17:28.240 | The goal here is I have control of my time.

00:17:32.520 | I pruned my schedule to the degree that I have some flexibility in breathing room.

00:17:36.760 | And I am now ready to start thinking about some bigger picture changes.

00:17:42.080 | Because if we get to the final stack, which is where you do the fun stuff.

00:17:45.880 | We move to the farm.

00:17:48.280 | If you get to that final stack and your life is chaotic

00:17:51.920 | and you're overwhelmed and you're busy and exhausted and fatigued,

00:17:55.320 | there's not going to be room for you to do what you need to do.

00:17:57.760 | There's not going to be room for you to reflect.

00:18:00.120 | There's not going to be room for you to pursue the disciplines and values

00:18:03.480 | that lay under it.

00:18:04.080 | And there's not going to be room to actually make the big changes.

00:18:06.400 | If you don't control your life, you also are not going to be able to

00:18:09.400 | build up the career capital.

00:18:11.720 | You'll probably need to execute some of these ideas.

00:18:14.040 | The more you're killing it at work

00:18:17.600 | because you control your time and your obligations

00:18:20.520 | and you can give things the time they need,

00:18:22.320 | the more options you're going to have to transform that work.

00:18:24.360 | This is true in a lot of different elements as well.

00:18:26.480 | And so this is, again, something you don't

00:18:28.480 | you don't always see in the discussion of lifestyle design,

00:18:30.680 | but I think it's it's foundational. I'm throwing it in there.

00:18:32.960 | Calm. I'm under control.

00:18:35.600 | These three things, if you're starting from scratch,

00:18:38.560 | might take a while, by the way.

00:18:40.520 | This might be the work of six months to a year to build the first three layers.

00:18:44.200 | But once you have, you get to the final stack,

00:18:47.360 | you're the final layer of the stack.

00:18:49.920 | Which I call plan.

00:18:53.840 | And this finally.

00:18:56.640 | Is where we get back to more familiar territory.

00:18:58.600 | This is where we get back towards the deep life buckets territory.

00:19:02.400 | This is where you divide your life into the major areas that are important to you

00:19:06.680 | and start to think through,

00:19:09.280 | what does my life look like in each of these areas?

00:19:11.720 | What changes do I want to make?

00:19:13.800 | And you don't have to overhaul everything at the same time,

00:19:16.240 | but maybe you look at community

00:19:18.960 | through your relationship with your family and friends,

00:19:21.240 | those who are important to you and say, OK.

00:19:24.040 | Let's start overhauling this.

00:19:25.400 | What do I want this aspect of my life to look like?

00:19:27.440 | Where does it fall short?

00:19:28.360 | What type of changes would I need to make to better fulfill my values here?

00:19:33.360 | And this is where you might make the bigger change.

00:19:35.320 | You move to be closer to family.

00:19:37.000 | You commit the community organizations.

00:19:39.680 | Maybe craft, of course, would be a big one here.

00:19:41.640 | Your job. OK, let me really think about my job.

00:19:43.600 | What's going on here? Is it overwhelming me?

00:19:45.600 | Is it compatible with the other things I care about?

00:19:48.280 | Maybe I want to hatch a plan to transform this job

00:19:51.680 | into something that's going to better support my vision for my life.

00:19:54.600 | All of this happens here.

00:19:55.680 | The buckets, lifestyle, career planning, all of this is squeezed

00:19:58.840 | into the top layer out of four in the deep life stack.

00:20:03.240 | And this really is the big innovation between the way we used to talk about it

00:20:07.760 | and the way we had talked about it,

00:20:10.080 | the way we're talking about it now.

00:20:12.400 | If discipline, values and calm is foundational, and if we ignore that,

00:20:17.120 | whatever we do up in plan is going to be haphazard and be very likely to fizzle.

00:20:23.680 | We try to make some big change, but we don't have anything else nailed down.

00:20:26.640 | We're building this big change, this new conceptual structure

00:20:29.840 | for our life on top of sand.

00:20:31.000 | That foundation is not strong enough.

00:20:33.200 | I'm going to add a couple more arrows here, because again,

00:20:35.880 | throughout each of these stacks, where do your decisions go?

00:20:40.120 | Back into that central repository you set up during the discipline level.

00:20:44.760 | These are my organizational systems for calm.

00:20:48.560 | This is what I'm working on right now, working on my craft bucket.

00:20:51.960 | And here's my vision.

00:20:53.840 | So in that discipline step, that all got set up.

00:20:56.320 | Now, the number of disciplines, the things that you are pursuing regularly

00:21:00.000 | that you're committed to, that also increases as you move up the stack.

00:21:02.680 | Values adds rituals and routines to your list of disciplines.

00:21:06.400 | Calm adds organizational systems to your list of disciplines.

00:21:08.960 | Plan might add bucket specific keystone habits to your list of disciplines.

00:21:13.360 | So this everything down there grows the description of your systems,

00:21:16.440 | the descriptions of your discipline commitments that all grows as you

00:21:19.480 | as you move up the stack.

00:21:22.000 | So I have these arrows pointing back down.

00:21:23.600 | And then finally, once you're once you've made it through the whole stack,

00:21:28.160 | you draw one last arrow here.

00:21:31.480 | You are going to iterate,

00:21:33.360 | which means you return back.

00:21:35.840 | Towards the bottom.

00:21:37.440 | And refactor focusing on what needs the most work,

00:21:42.080 | so you you've made it through the whole stack.

00:21:44.800 | Enjoy that for a while.

00:21:46.960 | Then you're going to iterate back down again.

00:21:48.200 | OK, let's go back down the discipline.

00:21:49.480 | How is this going?

00:21:50.480 | Is my if I cleaned up my description of my systems and my disciplines

00:21:54.120 | or the stuff hanging around here, I don't do anymore.

00:21:55.680 | Let me clean that up.

00:21:56.520 | Make sure the way I'm tracking this goes well.

00:21:58.600 | Am I committing discipline to the things I said I am?

00:22:01.840 | If I'm not, do I have too many things in here?

00:22:03.280 | Do I need to clean that up? OK, we're good.

00:22:04.840 | Let's move up the values.

00:22:06.040 | Am I liking my current code?

00:22:07.800 | The rituals I have in place to help reinforce the code routines

00:22:10.400 | I have to put that code into action in the world.

00:22:12.760 | Am I ready to tweak that?

00:22:14.200 | Do I want to make a major change in my maybe at first earlier in my life?

00:22:18.240 | These were self-imposed and in middle age with a family.

00:22:20.800 | They're going to be more tied to a formal theology.

00:22:23.480 | So you're going back and checking that out.

00:22:25.240 | You're going up the calm.

00:22:26.840 | How are my systems going for organization?

00:22:28.440 | Oh, maybe they're going well.

00:22:29.560 | What about my load?

00:22:30.400 | You know, I feel overloaded. Great.

00:22:32.040 | So as I revisit that stack, I'm going to make some more cuts.

00:22:34.560 | On the things that I'm committed to or pursuing,

00:22:37.520 | and you can make up the plan, you might say,

00:22:38.920 | I'm going to look at another bucket more carefully.

00:22:41.000 | I looked at craft last time, but I really want to now think about

00:22:43.720 | celebration, sort of quality in my life.

00:22:46.840 | That's iteration.

00:22:47.840 | You go back to the whole stack, check in at each layer,

00:22:50.520 | spending time on the layers that need time before moving on to the next.

00:22:54.280 | You probably want to do this once a year.

00:22:56.560 | I recommend using your birthday as the anchor for this.

00:22:59.240 | Different years, you're going to stop and spend more time

00:23:02.680 | on different layers than others.

00:23:04.320 | Sometimes everything might be rock and rolling.

00:23:06.120 | So you're just tweaking on your way up and it takes you a couple of weeks.

00:23:08.440 | No problem.

00:23:09.600 | Sometimes you're going to lose the next six months of your years

00:23:12.040 | of really reflectively rethinking your life.

00:23:13.920 | But the structures, the way you think about that,

00:23:16.280 | it structures the way you go through trying to refactor or tighten up

00:23:19.600 | what's actually going on in your day to day existence.

00:23:22.920 | So that's what I'm thinking about now.

00:23:26.280 | This is my generalization of what used to just be the deep life

00:23:29.040 | buckets, the deep life stack.

00:23:31.600 | It's equal parts psychology

00:23:34.360 | as it is practical habit, as it is visionary planning.

00:23:39.720 | All of those things are now mixed together in a more structured way.

00:23:44.680 | This also reflects more carefully or closely, I should say,

00:23:47.720 | what I actually do in my own life, the way I think these things through,

00:23:51.040 | the way I order these things.

00:23:53.040 | So I'm interested in your thoughts.

00:23:55.680 | Are we improving or are we overcomplicated?

00:23:58.640 | I still have time to think about this, so feel free to send it through.

00:24:02.000 | I don't know, Jesse, am I adding too much complication or are we getting to some

00:24:05.920 | some levels we actually needed for thinking about this topic?

00:24:12.120 | I think it goes in hand with what you've talked about before

00:24:14.960 | in terms of stacks and discipline and metric tracking.

00:24:19.400 | So like the metric tracking on the time block planner would be in that.

00:24:21.960 | Yeah, it becomes a level, becomes a discipline.

00:24:24.680 | Right. The time block planner is something you might introduce as calm.

00:24:28.680 | The metric planning is installed in the discipline stack.

00:24:33.440 | Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

00:24:35.240 | I think one of the things I was underestimating.

00:24:38.680 | So in addition to just the psychological preparation,

00:24:42.600 | was I take for granted structure and organization in my life.

00:24:45.680 | And it's something we hear from listeners a lot is if you are not

00:24:50.560 | organized and structured in how you manage just even the minutia of your life,

00:24:55.000 | it's actually really difficult to do anything big.

00:24:57.280 | Yeah, it feels impossible.

00:24:59.280 | Or if you try it, it's not going to go well because you're just throwing

00:25:02.800 | a big change in an already chaotic situation.

00:25:05.080 | Yeah, you've had that in place for a really long time.

00:25:07.920 | Yeah. And that's why I take it for granted.

00:25:10.000 | Yeah. But I think for a lot of people, I was thinking,

00:25:12.120 | I'm going to write a book about the deep life.

00:25:14.160 | I can't jump into let's overhaul your job

00:25:17.680 | when there's someone who has never actually had any sort of

00:25:20.800 | coherent organizational system to any part of their life.

00:25:24.160 | It's impossible until you feel that you control your life in a breathing room.

00:25:27.280 | It's very difficult to imagine making a big change.

00:25:30.520 | And, you know, we're going to see that

00:25:32.440 | the questions I chose for today's episode are all deep life related.

00:25:35.200 | There are issues and questions about people, you know, pursuing the deep life.

00:25:38.880 | And we're going to see some of that in the questions.

00:25:41.360 | There's at least one I have in mind where someone is.

00:25:43.680 | They're coming to what you would think about as the plan level of the stack

00:25:47.880 | with the other levels not in place.

00:25:50.480 | And it just feels impossible to them.

00:25:51.960 | Yeah. I mean, a lot of it has come down to your time management system.

00:25:55.120 | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:25:56.600 | How do you keep track of your time?

00:25:58.240 | Then how do you manage your obligations

00:26:00.480 | and how do you then prune those obligations?

00:26:03.760 | Right. It's very difficult to keep breathing room in your life

00:26:07.200 | if you can't control the stuff that's taking away the air.

00:26:09.280 | If you don't control it, you're just grabbing.

00:26:12.640 | It's very hard to get at things or organize things or move things out of the way.

00:26:17.000 | It's very paradoxical because people say, I don't want to be so

00:26:21.040 | I don't have time to do all these systems and be so rigid.

00:26:24.720 | And then my whole life will be planning.

00:26:26.320 | But it's exactly the people that.

00:26:27.760 | Make a structure for the stuff in your life that have the flexibility.

00:26:33.640 | Yeah. That have the breathing room that are, you know, have their feet up

00:26:36.760 | by the lake and are reading this, this misnomer that somehow

00:26:39.440 | have an organization will mean your time is more filled.

00:26:42.280 | It's actually the key to actually gain back time,

00:26:46.320 | the fine time affluence, the take some flexibility.

00:26:48.920 | It's your boy, Jaco. Discipline equals freedom.

00:26:51.080 | Yeah. Well, that's that term is definitely motivating

00:26:55.120 | or an inspiration here. Discipline at the base.

00:26:57.160 | Provides the freedom to do other things.

00:26:59.680 | Does read five books. Yeah.

00:27:01.200 | And that was the other breakthrough.

00:27:02.240 | I'm thinking because I found this working with people

00:27:04.880 | just finding that one or two things, that's the place to start.

00:27:07.280 | I'm doing this thing I'm working on every day.

00:27:09.760 | It's hard. It's optional.

00:27:11.720 | I don't want to do it in the moment. Long term.

00:27:13.680 | I did it. I succeeded.

00:27:15.840 | That psychological switch.

00:27:18.120 | That's so important to everything else.

00:27:20.080 | So so I'm working on it, but it's one idea for how I might structure my

00:27:24.800 | my deep life book.

00:27:27.040 | So we do have some questions exactly about the deep life.

00:27:30.560 | Before we get there, I want to briefly mention

00:27:32.960 | one of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

00:27:35.680 | That is our friends at Element LMNT, one of the original sponsors of the show.

00:27:40.360 | And they are back as a sponsor, in part because I never stopped using this product.

00:27:45.360 | And so I lamented what happened to Element.

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00:28:09.080 | as part of your discipline layer of the deep life stack.

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00:28:47.480 | So, look, I live in D.C.

00:28:49.840 | It's humid here. I work out in my garage.

00:28:52.080 | That is not a comfortable space, especially in the summers.

00:28:57.200 | And I also go for long walks.

00:28:58.560 | And when I get going and I get sweaty, my body craves salt.

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00:29:44.800 | Also want to talk about our good friends at Hinson Shaving,

00:29:48.880 | the razor I use to get my famously close shave.

00:29:54.080 | So here's the deal with Hinson Shaving.

00:29:55.640 | You buy from them this very nice precision milled.

00:30:00.080 | I assume it's aluminum aluminum razor.

00:30:03.160 | Hinson's is a company that is known for doing precision

00:30:06.840 | manufacturing for the aerospace industry, so they can they can design

00:30:10.480 | and mill these razors with incredible tolerances.

00:30:14.480 | This is the key to getting a good shave.

00:30:17.280 | You put a standard 10 cent safety blade in a Hinson's razor

00:30:21.920 | and only 0.0013 inch of the blade protrudes past the edge.

00:30:26.560 | This gives you a close, clean shave without the diving board effect

00:30:31.320 | where the blade moves up and down the diving board effect

00:30:33.400 | that creates the next that creates the burn.

00:30:35.760 | When it's such a little amount of the blade sticking past,

00:30:39.120 | you get a very good shave.

00:30:41.160 | No clogs, no nicks.

00:30:44.120 | And what I like about this is you're using a better made product

00:30:48.880 | to save money over time.

00:30:50.400 | So you pay up front to get this beautifully milled razor,

00:30:52.880 | but you can use it with a standard 10 cent blade.

00:30:56.080 | So what does that mean?

00:30:57.440 | It doesn't take long.

00:31:00.160 | To amortize the cost of this razor, it does not take long.

00:31:02.920 | We're now you're just spending a couple quarters per month

00:31:06.720 | on the cheap blades to put into this beautiful razor.

00:31:10.080 | It does not take long before this is much cheaper to maintain

00:31:12.960 | than one of the disposable razors you get from the drugstore.

00:31:16.200 | Then one of the subscriptions that you get.

00:31:18.800 | So you get a beautiful, manufactured, really good tool

00:31:21.880 | that in the end is going to also be cheaper to use.

00:31:24.400 | So it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor

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00:31:55.200 | All right, Jesse, let's do some deep life related questions.

00:32:00.000 | Who do we have first today?

00:32:01.200 | All right. First question's from Mark, a 38 year old sales director.

00:32:04.840 | I spend many hours a week taking care of my kids, cooking, cleaning,

00:32:08.760 | gardening, doing chores, fixing up my house and so on.

00:32:11.560 | Between this and my work, I have little to no free time.

00:32:14.600 | The same applies to my wife.

00:32:16.960 | When we do have free time, we are generally tired.

00:32:19.160 | The idea that we could each find energy and time to consistently

00:32:22.600 | take long walks, work out or read for hours seems fantastical.

00:32:26.920 | Do we need to be able to afford to outsource mundane tasks

00:32:30.720 | to cultivate a deep, deep life?

00:32:32.880 | Well, Mark, we could we could reword this question to say,

00:32:36.880 | you know, is it possible for a family with

00:32:41.160 | and he gave a little more details about his work, but, you know, a family with.

00:32:45.600 | Lower, upper middle class jobs to take walks or exercise or read.

00:32:49.880 | I don't think that's a fantastical goal.

00:32:54.000 | I think there's a lot of families in similar professional situations

00:32:59.320 | where people still take walks, still exercise and still read.

00:33:04.280 | I think that is definitely possible.

00:33:05.880 | But what I also recognize that right now in your life, it doesn't.

00:33:08.680 | I think that's important.

00:33:11.240 | And this is where I think.

00:33:13.640 | The fuller deep life stack we introduced earlier.

00:33:16.640 | Is much more helpful than the way we used to talk about the deep life

00:33:20.480 | where we would just focus on the final changes, because what's happening here

00:33:23.680 | and I'm very empathetic to this, I I've been in this situation before.

00:33:27.680 | Many are listeners in the same situation

00:33:30.920 | where your time just feels completely out of your control.

00:33:33.080 | And it puts you in a defensive mood, it puts you in a mood

00:33:37.040 | where you're just sort of down on the prospects for doing anything

00:33:40.680 | with any control, we're exhausted all the time, we're working all the time.

00:33:43.600 | When are things going to happen?

00:33:45.240 | How can I possibly think about carefully overhauling other parts of my life?

00:33:49.080 | So let's go back to the deep life stack.

00:33:50.680 | What I'm going to what I'm going to suggest here is actually work

00:33:52.720 | in the deep life stack.

00:33:53.920 | You know, this might seem like I'm giving you more work is going to help.

00:33:56.680 | So I'm going to think about the stack.

00:33:58.880 | I have it here in front of me.

00:33:59.960 | Jesse, let's load this back up on the screen.

00:34:02.080 | OK, all right. Let's think this through.

00:34:03.760 | All right, Mark. So what would this mean for you?

00:34:05.400 | Well, one discipline.

00:34:06.920 | Well, the key thing here is really going to be here's my place, my drawer,

00:34:10.560 | my folder, we're going to keep track of everything we're about to do.

00:34:13.280 | That doesn't take time.

00:34:14.640 | This is a here's a folder. Here's here's a desk drawer. That's fine.

00:34:17.520 | And we're going to throw something into our life here.

00:34:21.080 | Not super time consuming, but kind of hard.

00:34:23.960 | And we're going to maybe you're going to have to stretch a little bit.

00:34:26.480 | OK, I can do this during my lunch hour every day or before I go to work.

00:34:29.800 | It's going to be maybe a fitness thing or something else, but just something,

00:34:33.080 | something that is optional but meaningful to you.

00:34:35.920 | That you're just going to commit to whatever it takes,

00:34:38.880 | I'm going to find time to do this.

00:34:40.240 | I think that's worth doing because we're going to start changing that mindset.

00:34:44.480 | And once that succeeds, you're going to say, OK, at least it's possible.

00:34:48.280 | I am the type of person.

00:34:49.080 | It's possible that I can find time to make something happen.

00:34:52.240 | That's important to me, even though my life is busy.

00:34:54.320 | Then we get up the values.

00:34:55.240 | You're clarifying what's important to you and your wife.

00:34:57.240 | And you should do this together.

00:34:58.200 | And we'll talk more about that in a later question.

00:35:00.880 | What's our code? What's my what are the rituals?

00:35:02.960 | What are the routines?

00:35:03.600 | Keep the rituals and routines very simple right now

00:35:05.640 | because you're feeling overwhelmed, but they can still be in there.

00:35:09.520 | There can still be that moment of prayer every day.

00:35:12.640 | If you're religious, there can still be that

00:35:15.040 | meditative moment, the gratitude journaling routines.

00:35:18.920 | There can still be something you do, even if it's just look at Saturday morning.

00:35:22.760 | You there's a one hour volunteer thing or a charitable thing you just have set up.

00:35:28.160 | I give money to this cause, not a lot of money, but I do it.

00:35:30.800 | And every month we do it.

00:35:32.200 | And it's not very time consuming, but it's concrete and it's driven by your code.

00:35:36.160 | And you get that in place.

00:35:36.960 | We're not adding a lot of things in your schedule yet.

00:35:39.600 | Now you're ready for the thing I think is going to help you most,

00:35:41.720 | which is the calm.

00:35:42.720 | Layer of the stack.

00:35:44.840 | So now buoyed by your discipline.

00:35:49.600 | So the idea that you can make changes and have control over things,

00:35:52.520 | even when it's difficult, buoyed by your values that are really pushing you

00:35:55.880 | towards what matters and what's not.

00:35:57.400 | So you have a compass that gives you a very strong north reading.

00:36:00.160 | You can start to put in place some organizational system.

00:36:03.200 | What's on our plate? How do we manage our time?

00:36:05.200 | What is this load?

00:36:06.880 | And then more crucially, where should we start pruning or simplifying?

00:36:10.480 | Driven by your values, driven by your discipline, you piece by piece,

00:36:14.720 | try to take what sounds like a whirlwind in your life right now

00:36:17.600 | and make it into a much more orderly flow.

00:36:20.040 | We do this on these days, not this.

00:36:24.560 | We finish here. We do this in advance.

00:36:26.240 | We get all the paperwork for the kids done in a, you know, over lunch on Thursday.

00:36:29.720 | You would be surprised, Mark, when you're when you're driven

00:36:33.200 | by a sense of self-efficacy, when you're driven by values,

00:36:37.320 | you trust by how much control and breathing room

00:36:39.640 | even a standard busy middle class or upper middle class life can seem.

00:36:44.400 | How much room you can find, how much breathing room you can find.

00:36:48.160 | And I don't want you to go right to this.

00:36:49.960 | I mean, I want you to follow the stack.

00:36:51.400 | I think there's a the discipline stack is key because you have to have the sense of

00:36:55.120 | I'm able to do things that are hard and I have a place I keep track of them

00:36:58.240 | and I follow what I write down.

00:36:59.240 | You need the value stack because it's hard to prune.

00:37:01.720 | It's hard to take things back when you don't have the the bigger values driving you.

00:37:06.200 | But once this column is in place, then and only then do I think you're ready

00:37:09.200 | to think about the planning step.

00:37:10.520 | And I think by the time you get to the planning step,

00:37:12.240 | you're now going to have the control and breathing room necessary

00:37:14.880 | to make the changes that right now seem impossible.

00:37:17.120 | And they might not be major.

00:37:20.360 | But it might be some sort of routine, you're walking, you're exercising,

00:37:23.440 | you're reading more, I think that's going to be completely on the table.

00:37:25.760 | More importantly, you're also now well set up if you discover

00:37:28.640 | what's really holding us back here is maybe the nature of our jobs,

00:37:32.000 | maybe the demands of this jobs.

00:37:34.080 | Maybe that's making things impossible to really overhaul

00:37:37.960 | the other areas of my life the way I want.

00:37:39.640 | Or maybe it's to have these jobs. We have to live here.

00:37:42.000 | The schools here aren't good.

00:37:42.920 | So our kids have to go over to this private school.

00:37:44.760 | The private school means we have to work more.

00:37:46.240 | And the private school is really difficult to get to.

00:37:47.800 | And we're driving back and forth.

00:37:49.000 | And that's what's stopping us from overhauling these other parts of our life.

00:37:51.960 | Oh, this is all really clear now.

00:37:53.440 | And we're driven by our values and our sense of self-efficacy

00:37:56.160 | and our control over what's going on.

00:37:57.560 | So we really can understand what's causing our time famine,

00:38:00.520 | what's causing our issues with our schedule.

00:38:02.440 | With all of this in place, you might get clarity that you wouldn't have right now.

00:38:06.200 | We should move and take a different job.

00:38:09.480 | Oh, we need to leave the city.

00:38:10.880 | Let's go here.

00:38:12.360 | They could go to this public school.

00:38:13.880 | They could walk to the middle school.

00:38:15.960 | And the cost of living here is cheaper.

00:38:17.960 | And actually, I could go down the halftime and do my old my old job remote

00:38:21.520 | while my wife still did full time.

00:38:22.640 | But now we have a lot more.

00:38:23.440 | Now there's someone here after school.

00:38:24.760 | Oh, my God, all the pieces fit in the place

00:38:26.800 | and I can overhaul these other parts of my life and everything is deeper.

00:38:30.760 | But you can't get to that type of clarity without the other pieces first.

00:38:33.680 | So I feel your pain, Mark.

00:38:37.120 | I also think that you you can.

00:38:39.040 | Find more depth and by control and intention and satisfaction with your life,

00:38:44.560 | you can find it and you should.

00:38:46.920 | And I think work to full stack.

00:38:49.280 | My apologies for presenting this earlier in past episodes

00:38:52.480 | as just start overhauling, you know, your fitness routine,

00:38:54.720 | work the whole stack and have confidence.

00:38:57.680 | More intentional, satisfying, meaningful life is absolutely available to you

00:39:01.440 | and in your situation, this is not something that's unovercome.

00:39:04.080 | You're not a refugee in a war torn nation.

00:39:07.000 | You're not scrambling for jobs just to try to keep the heat on.

00:39:10.400 | You actually have.

00:39:12.520 | A foundation, more leverage than you think,

00:39:14.480 | but it's also much harder than we often let on to take advantage of that leverage.

00:39:18.440 | So hopefully the stack there is going to help.

00:39:20.440 | By the way, send me a note.

00:39:22.920 | If you start making some changes, I want to hear what's going on.

00:39:25.000 | You can send the note right over to interesting account, Newport dot com.

00:39:27.600 | Keep me posted in terms of the mundane tasks like outsourcing those.

00:39:32.000 | I mean, that's all going to happen in calm.

00:39:35.240 | Yeah, but I think his point is he's frustrated that I have no time.

00:39:40.560 | So I can't imagine anyone reading or exercising or doing anything else

00:39:45.120 | unless I suppose there's just someone I hired to do all these things.

00:39:48.240 | And my point is most people don't outsource all that stuff.

00:39:51.160 | And yet many, many people who don't have I don't even know

00:39:54.560 | who you outsource most of the stuff to.

00:39:55.880 | They still exercise and walk.

00:39:59.600 | We have more.

00:40:01.040 | It could feel as if your obligations are leaving no time right now,

00:40:06.640 | and it could be the case that without having to majorly change

00:40:09.480 | a material situation, you could feel three times better

00:40:12.800 | by just how you control and track the situation and keep track of things

00:40:16.600 | with some strategic pruning, et cetera.

00:40:18.560 | So I don't think I mean, maybe in the calm step, though, they'll realize.

00:40:21.640 | Because again, having.

00:40:22.800 | Having this precision understanding of where your time goes

00:40:27.160 | and how different things interact with each other

00:40:29.520 | allows you so precisely to see where the pain points are.

00:40:32.240 | So if there is going to be a little bit of outsourcing that happens,

00:40:34.920 | the calm layers, what's going to give you that precision to say,

00:40:38.040 | you know, the thing that's screwing this all up

00:40:40.120 | is driving back and forth to this school across town.

00:40:42.800 | Well, the thing that's making the schedule impossible

00:40:44.840 | is this terrible giant yard we have with all these beds.

00:40:47.280 | And we're always out there.

00:40:48.640 | And, you know, if we stop doing this and use that money for a yard crew,

00:40:52.720 | everything else becomes possible.

00:40:54.440 | Or that's where you say we need to move.

00:40:55.720 | We have to get a different job.

00:40:56.640 | It's again, an interesting point that doesn't come up as much

00:41:01.000 | in lifestyle design is organizing yourself.

00:41:04.280 | Tracking your time, being intentional about the deployment of time,

00:41:08.040 | getting that sophisticated awareness of your time

00:41:11.920 | is often critical for actually making decisions

00:41:15.000 | about what you want to change in your life.

00:41:16.560 | People really don't realize when you're chaotic,

00:41:18.280 | they don't really realize what actually is causing the trouble.

00:41:20.880 | And they might flail in different directions or think I have to have a nanny

00:41:24.000 | in a full time, whatever, to ever get anything done.

00:41:25.880 | And they don't realize, no, the problem is actually the commute.

00:41:28.040 | The problem is actually you live in the wrong house.

00:41:30.720 | Why do you have two acres?

00:41:32.440 | And, you know, whatever it is, you don't live near your parents.

00:41:34.960 | You're always having to drive over there.

00:41:36.960 | We don't always know the problem until we actually get a good awareness

00:41:39.920 | of how our time is actually being spent. Mm hmm.

00:41:42.080 | I mean, that's one of my insights is a book on the deep life

00:41:46.560 | actually has to talk a lot about time management,

00:41:49.040 | which for me was a bit of a breakthrough to think about.

00:41:51.720 | All right, let's keep rolling. What do we have next, Jesse?

00:41:54.080 | All right. Next question is from Mike, a 67 year old retiree.

00:41:57.400 | One thing I regret has been my focus on my personal development

00:42:00.800 | without involving my spouse in retirement.

00:42:03.480 | We have enough to live extremely well, but lack any ability

00:42:06.080 | to create a shared vision for our future.

00:42:08.600 | Any thoughts on how to co-create a deep life with your partner?

00:42:12.240 | Mike, I think it's really important.

00:42:14.600 | I'm glad you brought this up.

00:42:15.720 | If you're married or in a committed relationship.

00:42:19.080 | You need to work the deep life stack with your partner.

00:42:22.240 | It really makes.

00:42:25.840 | Not only makes a difference, it's what enables, in my opinion,

00:42:28.680 | a sustainable deep life, because what is the alternative here,

00:42:31.240 | which is very common,

00:42:33.160 | especially in these sort of dual income,

00:42:36.400 | close in city suburb type places where Jesse and I live.

00:42:40.560 | It's very common to see an approach that says

00:42:43.880 | we're essentially business partners with kids.

00:42:45.920 | And we each need to work our own individual visions about a career,

00:42:52.600 | but also other things like physical health and

00:42:55.200 | because we shouldn't have to compromise.

00:42:58.640 | So I have my own vision of what I want to have with my wife.

00:43:00.200 | You have your own vision.

00:43:01.000 | We have to get together to make sure that, you know,

00:43:02.680 | we're doing the kid thing right.

00:43:04.920 | That doesn't work.

00:43:05.920 | And the reason why that doesn't work is that your individual visions

00:43:10.360 | for a deep life are going to clash with each other.

00:43:13.800 | They're almost certainly going to be incompatible with each other.

00:43:16.520 | And now you're an antagonistic relationship with your partner.

00:43:18.920 | Actually, you are getting in the way of mine.

00:43:20.680 | And then you get into these weird sort of one for you, one for me type

00:43:24.200 | interleaving swap relationships.

00:43:26.440 | Well, you can do this with your job for a year

00:43:28.040 | and then you have to pull back and I'll do this for my job for a year.

00:43:30.320 | Or you got to spend three hours in the gym.

00:43:32.600 | So I need to get three hours this week in the gym, too.

00:43:34.800 | It's it's business partners that are trying to negotiate

00:43:37.560 | some sort of equitable access to resources.

00:43:39.760 | And that clashing visions of a deep life do not add up.

00:43:43.440 | Do not add up to a coherent whole.

00:43:47.160 | If you marry someone, for example.

00:43:49.960 | You are.

00:43:50.680 | In some sense, giving up the option of

00:43:54.120 | I'm just going to focus on me and make my life as good as possible.

00:43:57.160 | What you're focused to is trying to build a dual life,

00:44:00.680 | a family life that's as good as possible.

00:44:02.280 | So you have to work to stack together.

00:44:04.800 | The discipline together, we all keep we've done our things,

00:44:07.400 | we keep track of our things here, the values together.

00:44:10.120 | What are our shared values?

00:44:12.000 | What's the code we live by and are going to manage our life by?

00:44:14.960 | What rituals and routines do we have to put in there?

00:44:17.240 | The calm together?

00:44:18.440 | How do we organize our lives as a couple?

00:44:20.680 | How do we make decisions together about what's working and not working?

00:44:23.360 | And then you go through the planning stages together.

00:44:25.240 | It's not to say that there's not going to be

00:44:27.080 | individualized things that come out of it.

00:44:29.080 | When you're looking at Constitution, I might end up doing something different

00:44:32.760 | with fitness than my wife, but we thought about this together.

00:44:34.920 | And it feels scary in the moment, especially if you'll see

00:44:38.840 | you got married a little bit later in life.

00:44:40.280 | Like I don't want to give things up.

00:44:41.960 | I don't want to sacrifice.

00:44:43.080 | But if you're together with someone, I really do think a deep life

00:44:48.480 | that is designed together is so much more fulfilling

00:44:52.040 | than trying to do it yourself.

00:44:54.000 | Trying to stay separate.

00:44:55.720 | It turns out just trying to optimize whatever career respect on my own

00:45:00.280 | and see my partner as an obstacle is not going to make you happier in the end.

00:45:04.000 | They're trying to figure out a lifestyle that can keep into it

00:45:06.520 | values if I want to do high impact work, put my training into practice,

00:45:09.920 | but also keeps other values in play and everyone's on the same page.

00:45:14.160 | It's really going to be more satisfying in the end.

00:45:15.760 | I'm a big believer in that, you know, especially if you're married,

00:45:20.120 | business partner with kids doesn't work.

00:45:22.760 | It doesn't work out very well.

00:45:24.200 | All right, Jesse, what do we got next?

00:45:29.200 | All right, next question is from Sadie, a 37 year old writer.

00:45:34.080 | Do you think there is a genetic component to be able to consistently follow your methods?

00:45:38.680 | My partner organizes life similar to you.

00:45:41.440 | His parents are successful academics who, like him, are very organized and productive.

00:45:45.840 | My parents are the least organized people in existence.

00:45:49.000 | I'm currently struggling to complete a book revision.

00:45:52.520 | I get bored easily and my penchant for procrastination still borders on self-destructive.

00:45:57.720 | Why does it feel like this is so much harder for me than it is for other people?

00:46:01.200 | When it comes to organized

00:46:05.320 | organization, deeper living, these type of life related disciplines,

00:46:10.640 | you know, I've come to believe it's most useful to think about this

00:46:14.560 | as a practiced ability.

00:46:18.080 | So what I mean about this, let's say, for example, you are used to

00:46:22.440 | the cognitive difficulty of certain types of organizational activities.

00:46:27.640 | The subsuming of the appeal in the moment

00:46:30.840 | towards the longer term accomplishment of a system or a plan.

00:46:34.520 | And let's say you've done this throughout much of your life.

00:46:37.200 | So you have a lot of reward.

00:46:38.920 | I've seen this work. I know long term.

00:46:41.080 | This makes me feel better.

00:46:42.360 | So I'm much, much easier, much more easily in the moment able to say,

00:46:46.040 | put that phone back down.

00:46:48.840 | I block this to work on this. I'm going to work on this.

00:46:50.880 | That is a practiced capability.

00:46:54.840 | That's something you get better with as you train your mind

00:46:57.520 | to get used to a particular sensation.

00:46:59.560 | And as you add more reward stimuli so your brain gets used to.

00:47:03.120 | No, there's something good coming from sticking to the schedule.

00:47:05.680 | I'm going to feel better at the end of the day.

00:47:06.800 | I've been doing this for a while.

00:47:08.520 | That's a practiced ability.

00:47:10.840 | So if you weren't raised with this.

00:47:13.520 | You're missing a lot of practice right out of the bat, right out of the gate,

00:47:16.040 | you're missing a lot of practice.

00:47:16.960 | If you weren't raised with this, if you're raised with parents

00:47:19.080 | that were more haphazard and were more disorganized, you got no practice.

00:47:24.600 | And let's say you go on the college for, yeah, I'm going to I'll cram at night

00:47:28.200 | and kind of make it work.

00:47:29.040 | And that can often work. You're still getting no practice.

00:47:31.720 | And then you find yourself out there in the in the real world.

00:47:34.120 | You're the entry level job.

00:47:35.200 | You've moved up to a medium level job.

00:47:36.880 | And now you look over to your partner who is from a completely different situation.

00:47:41.720 | You say, my God, I must not be an organized person because why are they so organized?

00:47:45.320 | But what if they had the exact opposite situation?

00:47:47.720 | Their parents were very organized from a young age.

00:47:50.360 | They were exposed to structuring and organizing your time.

00:47:54.480 | Subsuming instinctual distraction, the moment towards the longer term

00:47:57.920 | goal of figuring the schedule, they were seen models of that be successful.

00:48:01.520 | They were doing it from a young age.

00:48:03.360 | They've been building up a rich bank of experience

00:48:06.080 | where this leads to long term reward.

00:48:08.720 | When they're now 28, this comes very easily,

00:48:12.640 | much in the way that if you grew up with athletic parents

00:48:15.120 | and were on long walks and running involved in sports your whole life,

00:48:17.880 | running a 5K comes very easily.

00:48:20.240 | Not because you were wired to be a runner,

00:48:22.640 | but because you spent your whole life working on that.

00:48:24.520 | So I think that's both good news and bad news, Sadie.

00:48:28.360 | It's good news because it means,

00:48:30.800 | no, you're not wired to be disorganized and that's just your fate.

00:48:33.280 | The bad news is if we're going to return to our analogy here with running,

00:48:38.680 | if you're out of shape, it takes a while to get a good 5K time.

00:48:42.040 | You're going to have to exercise and train.

00:48:45.480 | You might have to overhaul your fitness.

00:48:46.800 | It could take a little while. It's not going to come overnight.

00:48:48.960 | This is why you've probably had this experience of I read a Cal Newport book

00:48:53.600 | and it made sense.

00:48:55.000 | And you saw your partner use those ideas.

00:48:57.560 | But then you tried them and it didn't work.

00:49:00.400 | And you're like, oh, this is frustrating.

00:49:03.000 | I mean, again, that's similar to I've never run a day in my life

00:49:06.520 | and I watched Chariots of Fire.

00:49:08.520 | I said, man, I want to do that.

00:49:09.880 | Let's go run a mile. Let's go run a four minute mile.

00:49:12.280 | It's not going to go well the next day.

00:49:14.120 | Right. You probably got a year or two of training

00:49:15.600 | before you're happy about what you're doing with your mile time.

00:49:18.240 | So that's sort of the bad news.

00:49:20.400 | But my my recommendation, I guess, would be let's start training.

00:49:23.680 | And let's do so in a way where you're easy on yourself.

00:49:27.360 | Organizational activities will not feel natural if you haven't trained.

00:49:31.240 | It will and you won't do very well at first,

00:49:34.200 | and you have to start simple and build up from there.

00:49:37.400 | A couple simple disciplines like we talked about the deep life stack,

00:49:40.920 | a couple basic disciplines that you get used to,

00:49:43.800 | and then you make a slightly more complicated addition to your system

00:49:47.280 | than another more slightly complicated addition to your system.

00:49:52.000 | So let me get specific here.

00:49:53.240 | Back in the day where I did a lot more writing,

00:49:56.440 | especially at Cal Newport dot com about specifically organization,

00:49:59.920 | I was often somewhat dismissive

00:50:03.280 | of an organizational strategy called MIT Most Important Task.

00:50:08.520 | And this was a very simple organizational strategy

00:50:11.400 | where the first thing you did every day was write down the one.

00:50:14.200 | And in some variations, the three most important things

00:50:17.000 | you wanted to get done that day.

00:50:18.040 | And you would do them first.

00:50:20.120 | I did that thing first, and I was derisive about this

00:50:24.560 | because I was a time management snob.

00:50:28.000 | Right. I am the time management.

00:50:29.760 | What you know, Mozart was the piano.

00:50:31.960 | He was raised from a young age practicing all the time.

00:50:34.080 | I was raised from a young age.

00:50:35.320 | I was reading time management books when I was young.

00:50:38.040 | I knew this genre inside and out.

00:50:41.400 | I was still a college student, sold my first book talking about these ideas.

00:50:44.480 | I mean, I'm a time management nerd.

00:50:46.040 | So to me, I look at that like this is so simple.

00:50:48.120 | Like, what do you mean most important?

00:50:49.520 | You do one thing. No, no, no, no.

00:50:51.040 | Look, you got to you got a time block.

00:50:52.680 | You got to have good capture.

00:50:54.040 | But what I didn't realize at the time.

00:50:56.560 | Is it was as if, you know, I had been a track runner

00:50:59.720 | all throughout high school and I get to college and I'm scoffing at people

00:51:03.120 | that say, OK, you want to get in shape, let's start by going on a good,

00:51:06.080 | long walk every day.

00:51:07.280 | What do you mean a good, long walk?

00:51:08.320 | No, no, you got you got to be doing 800 meter intervals.

00:51:11.520 | Right. So you can get your your leg, whatever the fast twitch muscles going.

00:51:15.800 | And then you have to marry that with the seven K days.

00:51:18.240 | And but that's because I've been training for a long time.

00:51:21.000 | And this is what the most important task.

00:51:23.920 | Method, this was the gap it filled.

00:51:25.800 | You're just getting started.

00:51:27.320 | So here's one thing you can do.

00:51:28.760 | I write down the most important thing every day in the morning and I do it.

00:51:31.920 | Then I open my inbox.

00:51:34.360 | This is not the system five years from now, you'll still be using,

00:51:37.360 | but for the first week, what's this going to do?

00:51:39.600 | I have a little bit of structure.

00:51:42.480 | I do it. I get a little bit of reward.

00:51:45.320 | Now you're starting to build some circuitry that says, OK,

00:51:49.000 | do this little bit of structuring.

00:51:50.080 | It's not, you know, it's more easy to look at my email.

00:51:52.000 | I did this hour every morning.

00:51:54.200 | It feels good. I'm actually making more progress on things.

00:51:56.160 | I feel a sense of the cognitive burden of doing this type of things

00:51:59.600 | a little bit less.

00:52:01.040 | I have reward and a sense of self-efficacy.

00:52:03.640 | You know, OK, if I do this, these type of things, I get more done.

00:52:07.640 | Then you can start layering up the system to be a little bit more complicated.

00:52:11.800 | Say, OK, you know, I'm feeling really disorganized.

00:52:13.520 | The next thing I'm going to do is just a full capture.

00:52:15.240 | System, why don't I just start

00:52:16.760 | putting everything in the Trello columns and Trello boards

00:52:19.240 | and just have them in there?

00:52:20.640 | And all I want to commit to is at the end of every day,

00:52:22.600 | making sure nothing's in my head.

00:52:24.920 | I don't even have to do anything with these things yet.

00:52:27.400 | Let's just get them into a Google Doc or a Trello board or workflow

00:52:31.240 | or whatever you're using.

00:52:32.040 | That's your second step.

00:52:33.960 | So now in this thought experiment, you've been doing most important things,

00:52:37.800 | the most important thing every morning first for a few months,

00:52:40.200 | and now you're just getting everything written down.

00:52:42.680 | You're not even doing anything with the things you're written down.

00:52:44.680 | You're still being haphazard about it, but nothing's being kept in your head.

00:52:47.240 | You have that discipline going.

00:52:48.280 | You do that. And now we're six months in.

00:52:50.200 | Again, you've built a stronger circuit, you have more reward,

00:52:54.320 | you're feeling better, you're feeling more self-efficacy going on now.

00:52:57.680 | Now you might start some rudimentary time blocking.

00:53:00.920 | Time block my day, but very loosely.

00:53:03.680 | And I know that my estimates are going to be bad.

00:53:05.720 | And so I'm not going to hold myself too much to it.

00:53:07.680 | But let me get used to seeing where the free time is

00:53:11.080 | and maybe assigning some work to some of that free time.

00:53:14.080 | And maybe now I'm going to start taking things from these task lists

00:53:16.280 | and assigning them to some tax blocks within my time block schedule.

00:53:20.160 | And, you know, you work with this and you get better with it.

00:53:22.880 | Now you have that in your life.

00:53:23.920 | Now, once you have that in your life, you can start adding in some weekly planning.

00:53:28.320 | I'm going to start thinking about my week now.

00:53:30.400 | And now let me add some strategic planning.

00:53:32.080 | And a year in.

00:53:33.320 | You're like, oh, the seven minute mile my partner ran, it's not so impressive anymore.

00:53:38.560 | I can do this sort of thing now.

00:53:42.040 | Now, that exact sequence, who cares?

00:53:43.440 | That doesn't have to be the exact sequence of things you do,

00:53:45.440 | but that's the right progression of magnitudes,

00:53:48.120 | the complexities of trying to add some organization into your life.

00:53:50.920 | So, Sadie, you're not wired to be organized or not, but you might.

00:53:55.120 | You can't you can't assume by default you're an organizational shape.

00:53:59.160 | It does take some work.

00:54:01.640 | Now, are there genetics in here somewhere? I don't know.

00:54:04.160 | I mean, I think epigenetics is probably more interesting than genetics.

00:54:07.800 | And the idea is there's like a particular gene that just directly expresses itself

00:54:11.440 | and pinch it towards organization.

00:54:13.360 | That's probably too simple.

00:54:15.040 | It probably has some sort of genetic component combined with your early exposures

00:54:20.480 | could have some impact in how your brain develops, maybe.

00:54:23.640 | But for most of these complex psychological traits

00:54:27.000 | that aren't talking about just fundamental skills,

00:54:29.240 | that type of early development, epigenetic development

00:54:32.960 | tends to express itself more in extremes that like that could become malformed

00:54:37.560 | and you could be sort of obsessively hyper organized

00:54:40.160 | or it could be malformed in a maybe like an attention to disorder way

00:54:43.880 | that requires a more careful structuring of how you deal with

00:54:47.880 | how you deal with obligation.

00:54:50.720 | So you could have these some again, that the genetics,

00:54:53.200 | the epigenetics tend to show up in extreme cases.

00:54:55.880 | And most people are not extreme cases.

00:54:57.720 | And when you're in the middle,

00:54:59.280 | you're not trying to be the most organized person in the world

00:55:01.400 | or not fighting a sort of a really notable deficit in certain types of skills.

00:55:05.600 | Then it doesn't really matter.

00:55:07.400 | What matters is training.

00:55:08.440 | What matters is practice.

00:55:09.520 | And that's where most people actually fall.

00:55:10.840 | Training to be organized, I used to I really was dismissive of MIT

00:55:16.120 | because I not like school, but most important task, I was like,

00:55:18.960 | this is so simplistic. Yeah, as a snob.

00:55:21.520 | It's got to be the nerdiest type of snob is a time management snob.

00:55:26.840 | Well, when you're right, when you're in book writing mode,

00:55:29.280 | that's pretty much what you fall, right? Yeah.

00:55:32.120 | But, you know, also full capture, multi scale planning, you know,

00:55:37.200 | that day was informed by that time block plan,

00:55:40.200 | informed by a weekly plan for my strategic plan,

00:55:42.880 | and I have full capture and shut down routines built around it.

00:55:45.280 | So most important thing always seems so simple to me.

00:55:48.960 | I had rudimentary time block planning in my second book

00:55:51.680 | in how to become a straight A student.

00:55:54.200 | I was recommending that college students do.

00:55:56.560 | That was the original me talking about it.

00:55:58.600 | You need to do something like time block planning.

00:56:00.840 | Don't just say what's due and what do I want to do next?

00:56:03.720 | So how much more writing do you do outside of book writing?

00:56:07.120 | Like when you're just writing articles and stuff,

00:56:10.480 | articles take a lot of time.

00:56:12.480 | Yeah. So if I'm not working on a book like a New Yorker piece,

00:56:15.080 | it's a lot of it's a lot of work.

00:56:17.760 | I write academic papers, a lot of work.

00:56:20.160 | I don't know. I spend a lot of time writing.

00:56:21.560 | So it's pretty much always has a place in your calendar.

00:56:23.920 | Yeah. I mean, there's there's periods where I'm taking a break.

00:56:27.240 | But yeah, these days, if I'm not book writing,

00:56:30.440 | I'm New Yorker writing or academic writing.

00:56:33.280 | So like last last year on this time when you were writing your book.

00:56:36.200 | Yeah. And every day you're writing or I guess six days a week. Yeah.

00:56:39.520 | This year is like the same

00:56:43.040 | allocation of time on your calendar.

00:56:45.880 | Yeah. Yeah, I've been writing most days.

00:56:49.200 | Yeah, I've been writing most days.

00:56:51.680 | I'll be interesting to see what my summer plan is going to be like

00:56:53.720 | since I'm teaching this summer.

00:56:55.280 | You're probably more inspired up there.

00:56:57.120 | I might be. I think New Hampshire is going to be.

00:56:59.200 | You'd be in the woods.

00:57:01.080 | Be surrounded by mountains.

00:57:02.000 | So Dartmouth, you can see mountains all around, which is kind of cool.

00:57:04.520 | So which I appreciate up there.

00:57:07.760 | I think it'll be good.

00:57:09.000 | I think there's some good spaces because we're living on campus.

00:57:12.000 | There's some good spaces on campus.

00:57:14.000 | I'm thinking a particular the tower room in Baker Library.

00:57:16.720 | I'll send you a picture, Jesse.

00:57:17.760 | But it's like what you would imagine.

00:57:19.640 | You should send it out to the audience.

00:57:21.320 | It's what you would imagine a collegiate studying environment should be.

00:57:24.480 | It's this wood paneled old library room where you sit in this

00:57:28.960 | multi-hundred year old building and look out these old

00:57:31.080 | windows over the green and armchairs.

00:57:35.120 | They're like musty.

00:57:36.880 | They have these armchairs with these wooden boards, basically.

00:57:40.680 | So you put the board across the arms and then it's a desk.

00:57:44.000 | That's cool.

00:57:45.000 | Yeah. So I want to write there.

00:57:47.480 | That's my plan.

00:57:48.880 | Though maybe.

00:57:49.160 | Are you going to eat in the cafeteria?

00:57:50.520 | I want to.

00:57:51.520 | Do you get a meal pass?

00:57:53.040 | I'll get, I'll, I want my kids to have one.

00:57:55.040 | Oh, that'd be awesome.

00:57:55.720 | Right.

00:57:56.040 | They could just bike down to the cafeteria and like.

00:57:58.120 | They're going to love it.

00:57:58.840 | I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

00:58:00.840 | Yeah. That's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to that.

00:58:02.120 | Well, and by the way, if you're wondering what I'm talking about,

00:58:03.800 | we'll get more into this next week because, yeah, the show is going to relocate

00:58:06.920 | to New Hampshire for a couple of months this summer.

00:58:09.080 | It won't affect your experience as the listener.

00:58:11.120 | I can record from anywhere.

00:58:13.080 | Jesse, we'll we might not be in the same room, but we'll still make it work.

00:58:15.800 | But you'll you'll be hearing a lot about sort of,

00:58:18.480 | I guess we'll call it Deep Work HQ North.

00:58:21.400 | Yeah.

00:58:21.760 | It's what we'll call it where I'm working this where I'm working this summer.

00:58:24.120 | And if you by the way, if you're at Dartmouth College,

00:58:27.920 | this summer, if you're a sophomore, sign up for my class about writing

00:58:30.400 | for technology, we do have space.

00:58:32.960 | All right. Let's go. Let's do one more question.

00:58:34.920 | I sounds great.

00:58:36.200 | Question from Matt, a 35 year old professor.

00:58:40.080 | Your discussion of the deep life reminds me of a book I came across

00:58:43.320 | about designing your life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

00:58:46.720 | I wonder if you might comment a bit on this book and its approaches.

00:58:50.200 | How compliments your emerging deep life approach.

00:58:52.960 | Well, that book, which I do believe is called Designing Your Life.

00:58:56.440 | I think that's right.

00:58:57.680 | By Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, that came out similar.

00:59:01.640 | The same year as Deep Work was very successful.

00:59:04.600 | So it and Deep Work have both been very successful books from that year.

00:59:09.720 | Burnett's the executive director of the Stanford Design School.

00:59:12.880 | And Evans, I think, is a professor there.

00:59:15.160 | So they wrote this book based off of a course they taught at the design school

00:59:18.840 | about using design principles of the type they would teach at the design school,

00:59:24.000 | but applying them to your life.

00:59:26.680 | How to more systematically design your life.

00:59:29.000 | And, you know, this look, the timing for this book was good.

00:59:31.480 | A few years earlier, I had published So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I was.

00:59:35.360 | Laying some of the first cracks in the foundation of the dominant

00:59:39.280 | career philosophy of the first part of the 2000s,

00:59:42.720 | which was the passion philosophy.

00:59:44.360 | So so most of our career vision was built around through self-reflection,

00:59:49.080 | discovering your true passion and then having the courage

00:59:51.760 | to match your job to that passion.

00:59:53.400 | So it was all about building the courage to match your job to a passion

00:59:56.360 | was the dominant career advice that was failing as the millennials

01:00:00.400 | who were raised with this were first leaving college

01:00:03.160 | and the financial crisis hit and we realized it's more complicated

01:00:07.880 | than just I'm meant to be a sports marketer.

01:00:10.440 | I can tell from self-reflection if I do that, I'm going to be happy there on out.

01:00:15.280 | So this was.

01:00:15.760 | Part of this revolution and thinking about careers more systematically.

01:00:20.800 | So they design problem to solve, not a sole alignment type problem.

01:00:25.800 | So that idea, of course, aligns well with the way I often talk about careers.

01:00:31.000 | And I'm sure that book has been influential to me, even in implicit ways.

01:00:36.000 | So it shares a similar notion of intentionality and design

01:00:40.360 | in terms of differences.

01:00:43.280 | Well, first of all, I would say that book is more traditional

01:00:47.840 | in that it's starting with decisions, not the person.

01:00:52.280 | Right. So the deep life stack is you're overhauling yourself

01:00:56.560 | before you overhaul your life.

01:00:58.120 | And this book, I think, Design Your Life gets more towards let's just start.

01:01:01.040 | How do we systematically make decisions?

01:01:03.080 | Which to me, I think, comes a little bit later in the process.

01:01:07.200 | I also think it's more career focused, probably in the deep life philosophy.

01:01:12.320 | Career is a big part of it.

01:01:15.200 | It's one of the tools you have to reach your ideal vision of a life.

01:01:20.920 | But there's other tools that matter just as much.

01:01:23.640 | And so I would say the deep life philosophy is much broader

01:01:26.960 | where this philosophy, a lot of this really is about figuring out the right job,

01:01:31.320 | experimenting with different jobs, gathering data.

01:01:33.600 | So it's it's, I guess, a little bit more bloodless in that sense.

01:01:36.760 | There's more of a sense of, you know.

01:01:39.080 | In the deep life philosophy, there's more of a, I don't know,

01:01:43.280 | philosophical core of trying to build a life of meaning,

01:01:46.240 | satisfaction of value and discipline and connection,

01:01:48.560 | where a career is just one of the knobs that's in there that you turn.

01:01:51.120 | Now, for a lot of people, it's a major knob.

01:01:52.880 | And it's one of the determining most important determining factors

01:01:56.240 | of the quality of your life.

01:01:57.200 | So it's, you know, not wrong to underscore that like they do.

01:02:01.360 | But if I'm if I'm going to point out differences, I would say that.

01:02:03.600 | All that being said, I would say, read the book.

01:02:05.480 | If you like my conversation in the deep life, if you like Soga,

01:02:09.120 | they can't ignore you if you like deep work.

01:02:11.200 | I think design in your life is a good.

01:02:12.960 | Augment to that type of thinking, you will probably like that as well

01:02:17.440 | if you like the type of things that we do here.

01:02:20.320 | All right, speaking about what we do here, I want to get soon.

01:02:25.120 | To our final segment, something interesting, where I talk about something

01:02:29.120 | interesting that you have sent me to my interesting account, Newport.com address.

01:02:32.760 | First, however, I want to mention another one of our sponsors.

01:02:36.280 | That is our friends at 80,000 hours.

01:02:40.880 | This is a nonprofit that aims to help people find careers.

01:02:43.920 | That helps solve the world's most pressing problems, right?

01:02:47.680 | So we just talked about Bill Burnett and Dave Evans's book.

01:02:50.320 | 80,000 hours actually is a great compliment to that

01:02:53.240 | because they help people get past just saying, what is my passion?

01:02:57.280 | And instead have them ask the question, what is something useful?

01:03:00.920 | I can do with the time I spend working.

01:03:05.160 | Most career advice is pretty cookie cutter.

01:03:08.760 | It doesn't take into account up to date evidence, a more quantitative

01:03:13.120 | or systematic way of thinking about what exact impact is the job

01:03:16.640 | choices you have going to make.

01:03:17.960 | That is where 80,000 hours enters the pictures.

01:03:21.360 | It'll help you find a career that's fulfilling,

01:03:24.360 | but also helps you make a big difference.

01:03:26.400 | So where does that name come from?

01:03:27.960 | Well, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 40 years.

01:03:30.280 | Multiply those together, you get 80,000 hours.

01:03:32.680 | That's the amount of time you have to try to make a difference in the world.

01:03:36.400 | The team at 80,000 hours have done over 10 years of research

01:03:39.320 | alongside academics at Oxford University, all focused on the question

01:03:43.360 | of how do you build a career that is both fulfilling

01:03:45.560 | and does the maximum amount of good?

01:03:48.400 | Turns out what they've discovered might not be exactly what you think.

01:03:52.760 | So if you care about what the evidence actually says about having a fulfilling

01:03:56.680 | and impactful career, if you want real advice that goes beyond aphorisms

01:04:00.200 | and empty cliches like follow your passion, then 80,000 hours can help.

01:04:04.840 | Oh, and because they're a nonprofit.

01:04:07.200 | Everything you provide is free forever.

01:04:09.640 | Their only aim is to help solve global problems

01:04:13.000 | by helping people find impactful careers.

01:04:16.160 | So I'm going to recommend that you go to 80,000 hours dot org slash deep.

01:04:23.160 | That's 80,000.

01:04:24.920 | The numbers, the digits followed by the word hours dot org slash deep

01:04:30.240 | to find out more.

01:04:31.880 | They have their articles there.

01:04:33.200 | They have their newsletter there.

01:04:34.400 | They have their job board there.

01:04:35.480 | They have their podcast, their imminent thinkers thinking about the same problems.

01:04:39.720 | I've known these guys for a long time.

01:04:42.160 | When I was writing So Good, They Can't Ignore You.

01:04:43.960 | We had a lot of conversations because we really were on the same page.

01:04:46.680 | So if you want to figure out how to be useful with your work and not just.

01:04:50.280 | Wander or seek ambition or follow cliches, check out 80,000 hours

01:04:55.560 | dot org slash deep.

01:04:58.000 | I also want to talk about our good friends at Zok Doc.

01:05:04.000 | Zok Doc is the only free application

01:05:06.800 | that lets you find and book doctors who are patient reviewed.

01:05:10.800 | Take your insurance and are available when you need them

01:05:13.280 | to treat almost every condition under the sun.

01:05:16.120 | I have multiple doctors who have either discovered through Zok Doc

01:05:21.520 | or they use the Zok Doc software to keep track of my patient records

01:05:25.760 | in a way that allows me to check in in advance and get reminders.

01:05:28.480 | I am a big Zok Doc fan.

01:05:30.120 | It's one of these apps that just makes sense.

01:05:33.280 | Let's just say you need a particular type of doctor.

01:05:36.000 | You need a dentist.

01:05:36.840 | You need to do primary care physician because your other one left.

01:05:39.480 | You never had one in the first place.

01:05:41.080 | How do you go about finding them?

01:05:43.200 | This is actually a big question, especially for newly minted adults.

01:05:46.320 | Most people just ask people or Google it.

01:05:49.560 | And you're sort of just rolling the dice here or you're setting yourself up

01:05:53.800 | for the frustration of calling five doctors in a row to find out

01:05:56.600 | they don't have any openings for new patients.

01:05:59.440 | Zok Doc solves all this problem.

01:06:02.320 | You say I need a doctor in this area that takes this insurance

01:06:04.640 | is taking new patients go.

01:06:06.600 | Oh, here's three.

01:06:08.280 | Well, what do people think about them?

01:06:09.480 | Here's the reviews.

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01:06:13.560 | Zok Doc dot com to get the app that you need

01:06:18.120 | to help organize the medical care in your life.

01:06:20.920 | So go to Zok Doc dot com slash deep and download the Zok Doc app for free.

01:06:25.400 | Then find a book, a top rated doctor today, many within only 24 hours.

01:06:30.240 | That's a ZOC, DOC dot com slash deep.

01:06:34.120 | The Zok Doc dot com slash deep.

01:06:37.120 | All right, Jesse, let's do something interesting.

01:06:40.560 | This is the segment where I go into my interesting at Cal Newport dot com

01:06:44.920 | email address.

01:06:46.040 | I look for interesting things that you have sent in and I pick one

01:06:48.920 | to talk about on the show.

01:06:51.720 | I'm going to load up.

01:06:53.200 | Oops, Gmail, you know, load up a website now to bring up on the screen.

01:06:57.240 | Let's see here. OK, so here's the thing I want to talk about today.

01:06:59.800 | I wanted to return.

01:07:01.840 | To something we mentioned, we previewed in an early something interesting segment,

01:07:07.040 | so there's an earlier segment where I talked about

01:07:09.000 | Apple was going to release this new augmented reality

01:07:13.360 | virtual reality set called the Vision Pro, and I had some thoughts

01:07:17.920 | about why that's more important than you might think.

01:07:19.680 | Well, they've done it now.

01:07:21.280 | They have the official announcement.

01:07:23.320 | The product is available.

01:07:24.480 | We have our first looks at it.

01:07:26.360 | A bunch of you sent this to me, so I want to just revisit this question

01:07:29.560 | because I have a big claim here I want to make.

01:07:31.680 | What Apple is doing here.

01:07:36.160 | Is just as important as a lot of the big investments

01:07:39.440 | companies are making right now in A.I.

01:07:41.760 | Apple is lagging in that battle.

01:07:44.320 | And I don't think that's actually a bad decision.

01:07:47.360 | Their emphasis on A.R. over A.I.

01:07:49.720 | is not necessarily a mistake, and so let's just look at this together

01:07:53.200 | and I'll try to justify why I think that's the case.

01:07:56.360 | Again, if you're listening, you can watch it.

01:07:58.320 | YouTube dot com slash Cal Newport Media Episode two fifty two.

01:08:01.800 | All right, Jesse, I have on the screen here a picture of the Vision Pro.

01:08:05.080 | We see someone wearing these.

01:08:08.200 | We say like ski goggles.

01:08:09.760 | Yeah, like, yeah, more or less.

01:08:11.040 | OK, so this is the Vision Pro.

01:08:13.040 | There's a cable out the back that goes down to a battery pack

01:08:16.440 | that you have to keep in your pocket.

01:08:18.760 | Right off the bat, let me say this.

01:08:22.560 | What you're seeing here is not going to become ubiquitous.

01:08:24.800 | You're not going to see a lot of people wearing the Vision Pro.

01:08:27.280 | Critically, what you see in this picture is eyes, right?

01:08:32.040 | So you're imagining these are like goggles.

01:08:34.080 | They're opaque.

01:08:35.360 | What you are seeing there is actually a screen on the front of opaque goggles

01:08:39.680 | that is showing you an image of the person's eyes.

01:08:43.000 | So these are actually virtual reality goggles.

01:08:45.880 | They actually have no pass through.

01:08:48.440 | And yet if we look at this demo and I have it up here on the screen,

01:08:51.280 | we see a gentleman putting on the goggles.

01:08:54.400 | He's looking at his room.

01:08:56.600 | Right. And then we see elements like a menu pop up right in front of him.

01:09:01.720 | So what's actually happening here is called pass through augmented reality.

01:09:04.920 | There's a high definition camera pointing out from the front of these goggles.

01:09:09.160 | So what he is seeing when he looks through here

01:09:12.000 | is actually a video of what's in front of his eyes.

01:09:15.920 | So you're seeing a video of the world around you.

01:09:18.760 | Why is this? Why would they do this?

01:09:22.520 | Because it allows them from a technical standpoint

01:09:26.000 | to do much cooler things in terms of adding digital elements to their world.

01:09:30.560 | So if we look at the video I have up on the screen now,

01:09:32.720 | you see someone scrolling a website and they have it as a giant screen

01:09:38.440 | just floating in front of them in the space.

01:09:40.520 | When you're adding that into a video of the world around you,

01:09:45.160 | just from a computer science perspective, it is much, much easier.

01:09:50.320 | The standard AR technology has you looking through glass

01:09:53.560 | and actually seeing the world in front of you.

01:09:55.640 | And inside this glass and standard AR, there's something called a wave guide.

01:10:00.840 | It's essentially a transparent piece of plastic that you're looking through.

01:10:04.160 | And these wave guides allow them to in classic AR to actually put an image,

01:10:09.960 | make an image appear in this wave guide.

01:10:11.920 | So you're seeing that image in the real world that you're actually seeing.

01:10:15.400 | So it's mixing the photons from the screen in with the real photons

01:10:18.800 | from the world around you.

01:10:20.000 | This is how Magic Leap works, for example.

01:10:22.800 | It's how the Microsoft HoloLens works, for example.

01:10:25.560 | That's ultimately the way AR needs to work.

01:10:28.320 | But it's very hard because those wave guides are hard to make work.

01:10:32.120 | And one of the big issues you have is that they're small.

01:10:34.800 | As you have a limited field of vision.

01:10:37.200 | So if you're looking through a Magic Leap,

01:10:39.120 | you might be able to see your whole world.

01:10:40.600 | But there's actually only a smaller box inside of the world

01:10:43.160 | where they can add digital elements.

01:10:44.680 | And so as you turn your head, for example, the screen clips off.

01:10:48.400 | The screen can't be that big.

01:10:50.000 | If I'm instead just taking a video of the world around me,

01:10:52.560 | I can fill the entire video with something.

01:10:54.640 | Right. So technologically, that makes it much easier.

01:10:56.640 | So what Apple is doing here is saying, why don't we master the experience

01:11:01.600 | and then we'll figure out later how to make technology more mass usable.

01:11:07.200 | And so they're they're perfecting this fantastic experience

01:11:11.640 | where I don't need screens.

01:11:13.760 | I don't need a laptop. I don't need a TV. I don't need a phone.

01:11:16.680 | I can just make a screen wherever I am and use it.

01:11:18.880 | They're perfecting that experience now with this.

01:11:21.080 | More adaptable, but clunkier technology.

01:11:24.520 | Then once they have the experience mastered,

01:11:27.520 | hopefully the technology will catch up to get them where they need to get

01:11:30.320 | the end game here that is going to make this ubiquitous

01:11:32.720 | is this pair of ski goggles you see in this video on the screen right now

01:11:36.760 | gets replaced with a pair of glasses, standard looking glasses

01:11:41.000 | with a really good wave guy technology.

01:11:43.080 | And you're getting the same experience.

01:11:45.520 | But these elements are being added to the real world.

01:11:47.480 | They're not in a virtual reality screen.

01:11:50.200 | And that's going to be the tipping point, I believe, in which we're going to see

01:11:53.160 | the dramatic reduction in the need to manufacture individual consumer

01:11:56.800 | facing screens because I have a nice pair of glasses on

01:12:00.080 | and I can make a screen anywhere I want.

01:12:02.320 | Why would I mount the screen on my wall

01:12:04.640 | when I could make a screen appear on any wall that I want?

01:12:07.040 | So this is what Apple is doing, and I think it's smart

01:12:10.320 | because essentially what Magic Leap discovered after wasting,

01:12:14.080 | not wasting, but spending tens of billions of dollars

01:12:17.680 | is that the wave guide is hard.

01:12:20.760 | And so they couldn't deliver the experience they wanted

01:12:23.480 | because the technology was harder.

01:12:24.840 | So Apple's coming the other way.

01:12:26.000 | Let's get the experience right, and then we'll figure out how to make

01:12:29.360 | the delivery of that experience more and more palatable.

01:12:31.960 | I think that's the right way to do it.

01:12:33.600 | I think Apple is smart to invest in that as opposed to going all in on A.I.

01:12:38.160 | And I think they're smart for two reasons.

01:12:40.520 | One, it's going to be a massive economic space.

01:12:44.760 | If your one device can deliver basically every screen someone owns,

01:12:48.040 | that is going to be a massively ubiquitous device,

01:12:51.520 | probably one with a very high profit margin.

01:12:53.560 | And two, investing very heavily in A.I.

01:12:56.520 | right now is risky, right?

01:12:59.040 | Because Open A.I.

01:13:01.640 | with the support of Microsoft, Google, on the other hand,

01:13:04.160 | they're spending huge money to try to build these new models.

01:13:07.840 | It's a very expensive game.

01:13:09.480 | They're scrambling to try to figure out how to make enough revenue

01:13:11.680 | just to even pay for these server costs.

01:13:13.840 | Meanwhile, you have these second tier large language models that are free.

01:13:17.120 | They're academic models.

01:13:19.120 | It's the Lama model that Meta released for free back in February.

01:13:23.720 | They're not as big as GPT-4.

01:13:26.680 | We might be talking about 20 billion parameters instead of a trillion

01:13:30.240 | parameters, but they're free and they do really well.

01:13:33.240 | And they're only going to get better.

01:13:34.560 | So it's going to be this incredibly competitive space for A.I.

01:13:38.040 | because software doesn't cost money once you have it.

01:13:40.600 | These things are expensive to train, but not expensive to run.

01:13:43.080 | It'd be very hard to dominate that space.

01:13:46.400 | Having an A.R. device that's beautifully designed and perfected

01:13:50.640 | over 10 years of R&D, where you've worked with the experience

01:13:54.480 | starting with the Vision Pro, and now you have these nice Ray-Bans

01:13:56.920 | where I have all my screens on it.

01:13:58.120 | That's a market you can dominate.

01:14:00.560 | That's a market where you can do

01:14:02.360 | $500 billion of sale every year and put Samsung out of business.

01:14:05.640 | So I think Apple is smart to say, let's not put all of our resources

01:14:08.600 | in doing a GPT clone, because large language model

01:14:12.080 | A.I. support is going to be cheap and ubiquitous and cut rate competitive.

01:14:15.440 | And everyone's going to be cutting and slicing each other's throats.

01:14:17.720 | This is the other big thing that's coming is the end of screen.

01:14:20.600 | So anyways, now that I've seen the announcement, Jesse, I think Apple,

01:14:23.920 | I think what they're doing is smart.

01:14:26.240 | I would say ignore the snark right now.

01:14:28.240 | There's less snark out there like I don't want to wear these things.

01:14:30.520 | Well, you're not supposed to wear these things.

01:14:32.560 | Apple's seen where the puck is going and decided we have to start

01:14:35.920 | experience engineering now, even before the technology catches up.

01:14:38.840 | So I'm still bullish on what they're doing.

01:14:41.440 | I'm still bullish on us getting to a future with minimum screens.

01:14:44.800 | I'm not saying moralistically whether that's good or bad.

01:14:47.800 | I'm just saying this is where I think we're going. Mm hmm.

01:14:49.840 | What if we get a free pair of those from them?

01:14:53.680 | Probably not. Just call Tim.

01:14:55.840 | Hey, Tim, it's Cal.

01:14:57.720 | It's C, C-Dog.

01:14:59.400 | Hey, Timmy C. I call him TC.

01:15:01.760 | I don't know. This is kind of a colloquial thing,

01:15:04.040 | but I haven't actually ever spoken to him.

01:15:06.400 | But I think if I did, it would be understood that I could just be like,

01:15:09.800 | hey, TC, C-Dog,

01:15:11.880 | hey, why don't you sling me a pair of those vis pros?

01:15:15.440 | All right, man, you keep that.

01:15:17.840 | You keep that real.

01:15:18.920 | He probably makes like 75 million a year, don't you think?

01:15:21.320 | Yeah. So you can afford to send me one.

01:15:23.320 | I think they're four thousand dollars. Oh, really?

01:15:25.960 | Yeah, because they're for developers right now.

01:15:28.440 | OK. Yeah, they're just trying to master the experience.

01:15:30.640 | They're not meant for everyone to use them.

01:15:34.520 | I would like to try it, though.

01:15:36.760 | A lot of people say he's like one of the best CEOs.

01:15:39.000 | Yeah, I don't know.

01:15:40.640 | I heard he's really good with like supply chain stuff, which is

01:15:43.080 | critical for what they do.

01:15:44.680 | I mean, just keeping the lights on is hard.

01:15:46.520 | A company that produces things that are so precise.

01:15:49.360 | You must like the work.

01:15:51.200 | Yeah, those guys like for a long time.

01:15:52.480 | Those guys like to work.

01:15:54.280 | It's also power.

01:15:55.280 | You know, it's nice to be in charge of everything.

01:15:57.800 | Yeah. And I don't begrudge them.

01:15:59.000 | All right. So look, if you work for Apple.

01:16:00.720 | Write us a note and let us know how we can get a free pair of the Vision Pro.

01:16:06.200 | I will wear them on this show.

01:16:07.840 | Then you'll give them a time block planner.

01:16:09.800 | I like an edition. This is the trade.

01:16:11.720 | A second edition time block planner.

01:16:14.040 | USRP, $30 for a pair of Vision Pro goggles.

01:16:18.480 | But I will wear those goggles on the show.

01:16:21.040 | OK, and this is this is expensive advertising, right?

01:16:23.840 | I mean, honestly, the cost of an ad slot on the show is probably not that different

01:16:28.480 | than the cost of a pair of goggles.

01:16:31.080 | So I think this is really good organic advertising.

01:16:33.360 | So Apple ball is in your court.

01:16:36.240 | I think the people want to see Cal Newport wearing Vision Pro goggles,

01:16:40.360 | just repeatedly knocking into the microphone and talking

01:16:44.640 | to the wrong camera angle for an episode.

01:16:47.160 | You can make that happen if you send me a pair of goggles.

01:16:50.800 | All right, just which probably wrap this up.

01:16:52.280 | Thank you, everyone, for listening.

01:16:53.440 | We'll be back next week for another episode.

01:16:55.480 | Actually, it'll probably be our last episode.

01:16:57.760 | Standard studio episode before we go to the Deep Work HQ North,

01:17:02.480 | and we're going to have a different backdrop for a couple of months.

01:17:04.440 | So there's our last before the summer change is our last episode

01:17:08.360 | in the studio before we return again in September.

01:17:10.120 | So definitely tune in for that.

01:17:12.320 | And until next time, as always, stay deep.

01:17:14.920 | [MUSIC]

Ep. 252: The Deep Life Stack

Chapters