Deep Life Stack 2.0 To Reinvent Yourself: How To Master Productivity & Find Purpose

00:00:00.000 | So a lot of people right now feel controlled by their technology.

00:00:04.800 | When they're at work it's just email, it's slack, it's zoom,

00:00:08.800 | all day long jumping from one thing to another. When they get home

00:00:12.560 | they're distracted by just a different category

00:00:15.840 | of screens. It's social media, it's video games,

00:00:19.520 | it's streaming. These glowing rectangles are keeping your attention

00:00:24.120 | and making you feel as if there is no direction to your life, making you feel

00:00:29.240 | low energy, making you feel out of shape and

00:00:31.760 | unengaged. So long-time listeners know that my general prescription for this

00:00:36.200 | problem is not to try to directly treat the symptoms.

00:00:39.440 | Don't just go in and say here's my plan for using my phone less.

00:00:44.480 | Don't just go in and say here are my new rules

00:00:47.920 | for my email inbox and I'm going to have an autoresponder and batch my

00:00:51.920 | email checks and that's going to fix it. You have to actually solve the root of

00:00:55.600 | the problem, which means you have to go in and

00:00:58.720 | overhaul systematically your life into something that is so directed and

00:01:05.680 | intentional and compelling that the allure of these screens dissipates.

00:01:10.240 | So you say I am not going to just load up this video game

00:01:13.280 | or scroll social media all evening because I have things I want to get to

00:01:16.880 | that are more important. I am not going to just sit here on email

00:01:20.080 | all day in the office because I'm working on something here

00:01:22.720 | that matters and that's getting in the way of it. You

00:01:25.840 | overhaul your life to be something deep and the allure of the shallows

00:01:33.120 | becomes a lot less intense. So I call this approach

00:01:36.400 | as you know the deep life. Earlier this year I introduced a

00:01:40.640 | step-by-step plan for cultivating a deep life. I called it the deep life stack.

00:01:45.600 | Since then I have been gathering extensive feedback from you my

00:01:49.920 | listeners and viewers. I have also been extensively

00:01:53.600 | experimenting with this new construction in my own life and I have

00:01:57.440 | a major revision. It's what we can call the deep life stack 2.0.

00:02:04.160 | My new and improved evidence-based approach for how

00:02:07.200 | to cultivate a deep life. What you can use as your driving force to

00:02:14.160 | get away from a world lost in digital distractions and

00:02:17.040 | shallows. So here's the plan. Let me just quickly re-motivate. I'll start by

00:02:20.560 | quickly re-motivating why this approach of life changing is

00:02:24.560 | important. Second I'll review what didn't work

00:02:28.080 | about the original deep life stack. So what the feedback told me wasn't quite

00:02:31.600 | working. And then we'll get into the new deep

00:02:33.360 | life stack 2.0. I'll give you your step-by-step instructions for how in a

00:02:38.480 | short period of time to make drastic changes to the

00:02:41.840 | depth experienced in your own day-to-day existence.

00:02:46.160 | All right so that's our plan. Let's start by motivating this approach.

00:02:49.680 | Why do we look at screens too much? Well as I've said before it's often because

00:02:53.280 | you are trying to fill a hole. There is some sort of psychic

00:02:58.800 | pain that the screen is helping to cover over or obscure. So maybe when you're at

00:03:05.600 | home after work there's something about your life you're unhappy about.

00:03:09.120 | You're saying I'm 30 now, I'm 40 now, I feel like I'm

00:03:12.560 | I've lost direction, what's happening here, I don't I don't like what I'm doing,

00:03:16.640 | I think I could be doing more but I'm not, I feel out of shape, I feel

00:03:20.400 | unengaged. Or maybe some specifically hard bad things happen to you and you're

00:03:25.120 | having a hard time moving past that. Maybe you just have a

00:03:29.520 | really dark view or understanding of the world at the time.

00:03:32.320 | Screens can be a really good palliative in this case right. It's filling in, I

00:03:35.920 | don't want to deal with that psychic pain of these uncomfortable thoughts.

00:03:40.400 | So I have a video game. I have this Instagram feed I'm going through. I'm

00:03:44.800 | just tick-tocking again and again and again and there's there's emotions

00:03:47.840 | happening, there's chemicals moving. It's a digital form of what a hundred

00:03:51.520 | years ago we would have dealt with with a lot of whiskey at a old-fashioned

00:03:55.200 | saloon. And then we're at work there's something similar going on. I mean

00:03:58.480 | knowledge work in particular it was such a fast-moving field.

00:04:02.080 | It's such the wild wild west in terms of systems and processes that a lot of us

00:04:05.840 | just look up one day and it's like we're the character in the Mike Judge movie

00:04:10.640 | office space where we don't really know exactly what it is we do other than it

00:04:14.160 | involves a lot of screens and forms and we're constantly moving around.

00:04:17.920 | And when that consultant says what would you say you really do here

00:04:22.400 | you don't really have a great answer. You strategize and synergize

00:04:26.000 | jumping on calls in between your email calendar appointments for the doodle

00:04:30.400 | meetings. Just busyness, pseudo productivity. And we

00:04:34.880 | don't know what else to do so we just engage in that. I don't know what else

00:04:37.120 | work is going to be so at least I'm active.

00:04:39.040 | And so we just find ourselves on screens all day at work. We're filling

00:04:42.320 | in this case the psychic pain from I don't even really know what my job is.

00:04:46.000 | I'm worried about that. I don't build something I can point to. I don't write

00:04:51.280 | something I can point to. So I just need to be really busy and

00:04:54.960 | anytime I'm not busy it's a problem. So screen, screen, screens. So solution is

00:04:59.200 | something deeper that gets at that psychic pain and gives

00:05:04.080 | us something to focus towards that is more motivating.

00:05:06.960 | Something that will prevent us from being on email all day because it's

00:05:09.840 | already clear what it is you need to be doing and you want to get after it and

00:05:13.280 | jumping on another zoom call is going to get in the way of it. So you can say with

00:05:15.920 | confidence no this is what I'm doing. Judge me by my results. So at home

00:05:20.320 | you're not zoning out on social media because there are more

00:05:22.880 | appealing and important things you are working on in your life and your quest

00:05:26.080 | to have depth and make a difference and that would just be a waste and it's not

00:05:28.880 | that interesting anymore to you. It's the psychological equivalent of in

00:05:34.400 | the world of health where after having really bad

00:05:37.840 | eating habits and you change the way you eat and your exercise and your fitness

00:05:41.760 | you look at an oreo that might have before been impossibly appealing and

00:05:45.600 | then you look at it after that overhaul and say this seems weird it's chemicals

00:05:49.120 | and sugary and I have no interest in it. We won't get to the same place with your

00:05:52.800 | screens. So you want to cultivate a deeper life

00:05:56.480 | and again this is this was a fundamental understanding for me is that it was

00:06:00.320 | difficult for me to be a technology critic without being able to offer to

00:06:04.480 | people what it is that they could do instead

00:06:08.320 | when they began to unplug themselves from the constant distraction. This took

00:06:11.200 | me a while to figure out that you can't just go to people and say

00:06:15.520 | being on email and your phone all day is a problem because if you take that away

00:06:19.040 | there's nothing else there to replace it. Full anxiety at work what am I doing

00:06:23.840 | here? Full anxiety at home I don't want to

00:06:26.240 | confront these ideas. That I can't actually talk about things like the

00:06:29.520 | hyperactive hive mind and addictive attention engineering the type of things

00:06:32.960 | I talk about in my New Yorker articles that I talk

00:06:35.840 | about in my my techno criticism talks the type of things I talk about in my

00:06:39.600 | interviews and magazines on podcasts. It's hard to just talk about those

00:06:42.800 | things without giving people the positive alternative that they should

00:06:45.600 | pursue instead. That's where the deep life came out of

00:06:48.640 | and that's what we're talking about today. So I invented earlier in the year

00:06:52.560 | what we call the deep life stack which was a step-by-step way to cultivate more

00:06:56.560 | depth in your life and I think now that I've had some time to think about it it

00:07:00.160 | has some problems. But let's start with what that original

00:07:03.760 | stack was. For those who are watching instead of just listening I will

00:07:08.240 | draw a picture of one of the original stacks on my screen here.

00:07:12.720 | Again for those who are not watching but just listening everything I'm

00:07:16.320 | doing here is beautiful. I'm drawing layers.

00:07:19.920 | These are the layers of the stack. I'm putting five of them on top of each

00:07:23.600 | other. Now there's a couple different small

00:07:25.760 | variations of the stack we talked about earlier in the year

00:07:28.800 | but they're all basically more or less in this shape. All right I'm now going to

00:07:33.600 | write inside each of these layers. At the bottom, the

00:07:37.680 | first layer of the stack, the bottom layer,

00:07:40.160 | we had discipline.

00:07:43.040 | This was somewhat controversial but this is when I argued you actually have to

00:07:47.520 | start by injecting some regular discipline into your life because it

00:07:50.480 | changes your self-identity as someone who can do hard things that are important

00:07:53.680 | even if you don't want to. Then we had values. Nothing like

00:07:58.640 | drawing on an iPad upright to get your best handwriting.

00:08:01.600 | Values was when you then next moving up the stack from discipline

00:08:06.560 | is where you got clear on what was important to you in your life.

00:08:11.040 | Then you went to service, fixing in your life how you could serve

00:08:15.520 | other people who are around you or important to you.

00:08:18.480 | From there then came organization. It's going to be a long word for a small box.

00:08:24.480 | You had to get control over what's happening in your life, organize your

00:08:27.840 | obligations, organize your time. If you're going to have any hope of

00:08:32.560 | actually really aiming your energy in a good direction. Then finally you had

00:08:35.840 | vision which is where you get to the fun stuff.

00:08:39.040 | This is where you build a vision for how to move your life towards something more

00:08:41.920 | remarkable. It is when you get to this final stack

00:08:44.800 | and the sequence that you do the type of stuff that we like to romanticize like

00:08:47.760 | changing your job or moving to a farm somewhere

00:08:52.560 | in the country. There's a couple different variations of the stack but

00:08:55.520 | they're all more or less something like this. The idea was you moved up the

00:08:59.200 | stack in order starting with discipline moving all the way up

00:09:02.400 | to vision. What was the problem with this?

00:09:08.240 | It's missing some things. Here's what I discovered.

00:09:12.000 | It's missing explicit mentions of some things that are foundationally important.

00:09:16.560 | I learned from you my readers and listeners

00:09:18.720 | for cultivating depth, physical growth, intellectual growth.

00:09:22.720 | These were things that we used to talk about on the show when we had the old

00:09:26.240 | bucket-based paradigm for the deep life. Keeping your body healthy, keeping your

00:09:31.200 | mind engaged. This was not explicitly called out in

00:09:34.160 | this particular formulation. What about craft or learning to do

00:09:38.240 | things well? This idea of how do you learn to take on

00:09:42.400 | something difficult, deliberately practice it and get better at it. This is

00:09:45.760 | key to almost any direction for depth but doesn't have its own place

00:09:49.520 | in this stack. There is also some pushback on

00:09:54.240 | a lack of ambition here. When we get to vision we were talking about

00:09:59.760 | overhauling parts of your life but when people think about the deep life

00:10:03.760 | zoomed out there's also this notion of some sort of

00:10:07.360 | larger scale legacy leaving type of initiative. That's at a scale that was

00:10:11.360 | too big for this. Finally, and this was I thought

00:10:14.320 | something I found when I was just experimenting with this stack,

00:10:17.520 | is there's two different related initiatives that are mixed together in

00:10:21.040 | this particular stack formulation. There's the initiative where you're

00:10:23.840 | getting your life together. Hey quick interruption, if you want my

00:10:27.760 | free guide with my seven best ideas on how to

00:10:31.680 | cultivate the deep life go to calnewport.com/ideas

00:10:37.440 | or click the link right below in the description. This is a great way to take

00:10:41.840 | action on the type of things we talk about here

00:10:44.880 | on this show. All right let's get back to it.

00:10:47.760 | Okay if you don't have your life together and a control of things it's

00:10:50.160 | hard to do anything values driven or interesting. Then there's

00:10:53.520 | the initiative of trying to do really cool things that

00:10:56.720 | mark a life as deep. In this stack they're mixed together.

00:11:00.480 | Discipline, that's sort of getting your life together. Values is part of

00:11:03.360 | cultivating a vision of the depth. Organization is

00:11:06.560 | about getting your life together. Vision is more about how to cultivate depth and

00:11:11.040 | some of the feedback I was getting from my own experimentation is these are

00:11:13.840 | maybe two separate endeavors. Get your crap

00:11:17.760 | together. Okay I'm done with that. Now we'll turn

00:11:21.280 | our attention to how do we aim this somewhere depth. So these were

00:11:24.240 | all things that came up when I was looking at

00:11:27.200 | the original deep life stack. So we're going to try to fix that with our new

00:11:30.160 | version 2.0. Maybe I'll even type that. Let's see

00:11:34.720 | here I'm going to actually right on the screen here. Oh my.

00:11:40.080 | Jesse I have no idea how notability works. Oh I see. You know I've been thrown

00:11:43.440 | by, by the way this is not interesting, but I switched my

00:11:46.000 | note-taking software. To what? Good notes I think it's called. You

00:11:51.520 | switched it off of? Notability I was using to teach my

00:11:54.480 | lectures and then it developed some bug where when it was projecting on the

00:11:58.480 | screen and I was typing into it, it would continually jump up and down

00:12:02.880 | where it was on the screen. So I like the program but it had this weird bug in

00:12:06.000 | projection so I had to switch. Huh. All right here we go I'm typing on

00:12:10.720 | the screen the deep life, deep life Stacy, the deep life stack

00:12:14.720 | version 2.0. All right so what are we going to do here to fix all of those

00:12:19.040 | mistakes, not mistakes, but we'll call them shortcomings

00:12:21.840 | that we were missing in the prior stack. And let me uh highlight this to show you

00:12:26.960 | how good I am. Look at that. I highlighted the word the deep life

00:12:30.400 | stack. It looks good. Yeah then look good. Professional operation here.

00:12:33.760 | All right so how are we going to update the deep life stack, our systematic plan

00:12:37.120 | for escaping the shallows. To take in mind those flaws we had with

00:12:41.280 | the original version, I'm going to break it

00:12:44.080 | into two stages.

00:12:48.320 | So in the the first stage, called stage one, this oh man that's not

00:12:56.080 | how you spell stage. Stage one is where you learn to become a

00:12:59.680 | capable human being. We're going to make this its own stage.

00:13:04.960 | So we're going to say become a capable human being.

00:13:13.120 | And we're going to isolate this. Let's do this stage, do everything involved in

00:13:17.200 | this stage first before we move on to what we'll call

00:13:21.840 | stage two, surprisingly enough, which is then

00:13:26.240 | cultivate depth. So we're not going to mix these together

00:13:29.680 | anymore. Let's get our act together. Let's become a capable human being

00:13:34.560 | or what Jocko Willink called in his book The Code,

00:13:40.560 | imminently qualified human. I like that. Jocko talks about becoming an imminently

00:13:44.480 | qualified human. Well we're going to talk about becoming an imminently capable

00:13:47.920 | human being. This is going to have its own collection

00:13:50.480 | of four stack layers. Once you're done with that, stage two,

00:13:54.800 | four more stack layers, cultivate depth on top of that foundation.

00:13:58.080 | All right so this is the first place we're changing things.

00:14:01.200 | All right so let's actually draw our four stacks,

00:14:05.680 | our four stack layers over here for becoming a more capable human being. So

00:14:09.680 | we're going to have four here and then four for cultivating depth. You do stage

00:14:12.720 | one first, then you do stage two.

00:14:17.280 | All right so we're going to start as before

00:14:21.760 | with discipline, but now again this is coming from feedback.

00:14:29.120 | We are going to specify the three places where we're going to pursue discipline

00:14:34.720 | as the foundational layer of the deep life stack.

00:14:38.080 | That's going to be body, mind, heart.

00:14:45.360 | So as before, what does it mean discipline? We're going to have you

00:14:48.080 | select some keystone habits, habits you return to

00:14:51.360 | every single day, habits that you track whether or not you actually

00:14:54.960 | accomplish them. They should not be trivial, but they should also be

00:14:58.960 | tractable. Unlike before, I'm going to tell you

00:15:01.840 | specifically what the three categories are. You should have three habits and

00:15:05.120 | they should follow these three categories. Body, you need a fitness

00:15:09.040 | habit, something about making your body more

00:15:12.320 | healthy. This could be exercise, this could be involving food and drink.

00:15:16.160 | The second category is mind. This is going to be making your mind

00:15:19.920 | sharper. You have an instrument here, but you have to train it how to think. So we

00:15:24.240 | need to lay down a foundational habit probably built around reading. It's going

00:15:28.720 | to be our best bet here where this becomes a regular part of

00:15:31.920 | your life that you're tracking. And then heart by this I mean

00:15:35.200 | other people. There's something you're doing on a regular basis and it could

00:15:39.360 | just be calling or texting or emailing a

00:15:41.680 | different friend or family member every single day.

00:15:44.240 | It could be checking in with you know your partner or your kids every day and

00:15:47.600 | having a conversation with them. Body, mind, heart, keystone habit for

00:15:52.320 | each. As we iterate through the stack you can

00:15:54.880 | make those challenges harder and harder. So if you're just getting started with

00:15:58.240 | this your body habit might be pretty simple.

00:16:00.640 | It's this 20 minute walk that you do to a coffee store and back each morning

00:16:04.880 | followed by 20 push-ups. It might be simple but you're doing it every day.

00:16:07.920 | As we iterate over time that's going to get more and more

00:16:11.200 | potentially aggressive in its ambition. It could eventually end up

00:16:15.280 | a really rigorous workout routine for example.

00:16:18.320 | All right we go from here now straight up

00:16:21.680 | to control. This is what we used to call organization.

00:16:26.720 | Same idea. Control your time. Control your obligations.

00:16:30.640 | You want to do this right away. Lay down this foundation of discipline. I'm

00:16:34.640 | practicing doing things that are important to me that aren't urgent.

00:16:37.360 | Very next thing you do let's get control of our obligations. Let's get control of

00:16:41.680 | our time. This is where you're going to deploy

00:16:43.840 | things like my multi-scale planning methodology.

00:16:46.720 | It's where you're going to deploy things such as full capture. David Allen style

00:16:51.120 | full capture. Every obligation is written down in a trusted system not just in your

00:16:55.120 | head. Your time block planning your days. Those

00:16:57.360 | are based on weekly plans which are based on

00:16:59.840 | quarterly plans. No open loops. Nothing you're just keeping track of in your

00:17:03.840 | head. You have a plan for your time. You have your obligations captured. You have

00:17:07.200 | a plan for executing the obligations that need to be

00:17:09.760 | done. There's a big part about becoming a capable human.

00:17:13.760 | I only have so much energy and time to deploy each day. I want to do so with

00:17:17.520 | intention. So I'm moving this right up front

00:17:19.840 | in the deep life stack. Right after you got a taste of discipline

00:17:23.360 | you're getting your craft together.

00:17:26.560 | On top of this I'm then going to put craft.

00:17:30.640 | Just learning how to do something really well.

00:17:33.920 | This again is going to be at the core of almost any reasonable vision of the deep

00:17:37.920 | life is going to be quality. You learning how to do something really

00:17:41.520 | well and or you learning how to really

00:17:44.640 | appreciate someone else doing something really well

00:17:47.040 | but an embrace of craftsmanship and quality. So craft is where you're going

00:17:50.720 | to begin practicing two things. One getting better

00:17:54.720 | and you could jump right in with a work related skill here.

00:17:58.080 | As you go through this stack let me choose a skill that I am going to

00:18:00.640 | deliberately and systematically improve on but maybe it's going to be a hobby.

00:18:05.360 | You know I think some of the the more bro oriented

00:18:09.040 | really big podcasters that are out there have gotten some flack because they all

00:18:12.960 | seem to be picking up the same sort of seemingly

00:18:16.480 | anachronistic or arbitrary hobbies such as bow hunting. Why is

00:18:20.240 | Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink and all these people bow hunting

00:18:24.640 | and it seems so random but you know what there's a logic behind that

00:18:28.800 | which is learning to do something really well

00:18:32.000 | teaches you how what it takes to do things really well. You can then

00:18:35.360 | translate that to other things to come up that are more important. In other

00:18:38.000 | words learning even if it's learning how to play guitar or shoot an arrow

00:18:42.560 | but systematically building up that skill gives you the type of muscles you need

00:18:47.840 | mentally speaking to say okay now when there's something else I want to learn

00:18:50.960 | to help transform my career there's something else I want to learn to make a

00:18:53.680 | big impact over here you know what that feels like and what

00:18:56.240 | that takes. So when it comes to this craft stack when

00:19:00.720 | you first get there you're going to learn a skill.

00:19:04.000 | It could be a hobby it could be professional. I also want you to

00:19:06.960 | appreciate other people who do skilled work because that helps motivate you to

00:19:11.360 | get better. I write about this a lot of my book

00:19:14.480 | coming out in March Slow Productivity this idea of being exposed to people

00:19:19.200 | doing really good work makes you want to do really good work so as part of your

00:19:23.360 | first time through this craft layer I'm going to recommend that you build

00:19:28.320 | up an appreciation of some sort of craft. So I'll put two arrows here get better

00:19:36.320 | and then we'll say appreciate better.

00:19:43.040 | All right so then our final building block we're going to put for the

00:19:46.080 | first stage simplification.

00:19:50.880 | Final step to get ready to cultivate depth we got to clear out the dead weight.

00:19:58.080 | So this is where you go through now that you have some discipline you're in

00:20:01.120 | control of your time you have an appreciation for and trust and craft as

00:20:05.440 | the way forward now you can say let's start slashing

00:20:08.000 | some of these obligations. Let's change the way you know what

00:20:12.480 | we're doing at work and I'm going to put all my chips onto this over here and

00:20:16.320 | no longer get involved in this or I'm going to simplify or shift laterally to

00:20:19.680 | something that's more focused or is more accountable.

00:20:22.080 | It is also critically where you can do your first attempt to simplify your

00:20:25.360 | technological life. It's the first time you can step back

00:20:28.080 | and say okay I'm starting to get my feet under me

00:20:31.520 | why am I on TikTok all the time? Why am I on Instagram? What tools do I really need

00:20:35.120 | here? Maybe I should do some digital minimalism work backwards from what's

00:20:37.920 | important to me use those to select value so you can

00:20:40.320 | start simplifying out your habits. Like the single most important

00:20:44.400 | techno-simplification small step you could take at this step

00:20:47.520 | would be let's do phone foyer method. When I'm at home the phone's plugged in.

00:20:51.760 | If I need to look something up I can go to the phone to look at it. It's not with

00:20:54.400 | me when I'm in front of the TV. It's not with me

00:20:57.120 | when I'm trying to read. It's not with me at the table when I'm trying to eat

00:21:00.480 | dinner. I do not have the option of just looking at that.

00:21:03.920 | So you could begin to simplify these parts of your life as well.

00:21:07.200 | All of this sets the stage for stage two which is now let's start cultivating

00:21:13.120 | depth on top of this foundation. So we're going to have four

00:21:19.200 | boxes over here as well. This is where the fun stuff happens.

00:21:24.160 | This is where the stuff that catches people at people's attention happens. You

00:21:27.520 | do the first stage people are going to say yeah you got your act together.

00:21:30.960 | Yeah they got their act together. Stage two is where people say wow

00:21:34.480 | this person is interesting. All right so I'm going to put as the

00:21:38.160 | let me draw arrows by the way so we see the order here.

00:21:41.920 | Beautifully drawn arrows.

00:21:45.120 | Bob Ross does happy trees. I do crappy arrows.

00:21:50.080 | All right so first stack layer over here in stage two.

00:21:56.000 | Now we get to the values. You figure out your code what you're all about.

00:22:01.120 | You figure out the rituals that connect you

00:22:04.320 | on a regular basis to these things you care about.

00:22:07.520 | This is where if you're religious or interested in being religious is you

00:22:11.840 | really lean into that. It's where you really

00:22:14.880 | recognize that faith traditions actually depend on

00:22:18.480 | action for you to gain insight. You can't just figure out in advance

00:22:21.760 | is this religion right. You do the religion and say

00:22:25.360 | how does it make me feel. All that happens here. Now this feels really late

00:22:28.880 | but again I'm convinced that when you come to

00:22:32.080 | these higher order decisions in your life from a

00:22:34.640 | foundation of capability it's more meaningful and it's more

00:22:39.040 | effective. So I push this later. People often say

00:22:42.640 | let's just start with this but if you have no

00:22:45.280 | foundation in a code or rituals or a faith-based tradition

00:22:48.400 | it's hard to start there. You're throwing darts at a board. You don't even know

00:22:52.560 | what you're capable of or have the capacity to follow in a

00:22:56.800 | disciplined way what's required to actually gain

00:22:59.280 | insight. So let's become capable first. Now we're getting to the bigger stuff. So

00:23:03.920 | values now comes next. This is followed by service. You need to

00:23:09.440 | be a leader. You need to serve other people.

00:23:11.120 | Community. Without it you're nothing. Now you're ready to actually be a leader.

00:23:15.280 | Before you weren't capable enough. You could

00:23:17.200 | kind of be a leader but you're going to drop the ball and people weren't you

00:23:20.480 | weren't going to have a big effect on people. You weren't going to move the

00:23:22.720 | needle. Now you're an exceptionally capable person. Let's put that to work.

00:23:26.000 | Serve other people. Non-trivial sacrifice on behalf of

00:23:29.120 | other people that are important to you. Family, friends, community,

00:23:32.960 | larger civic society at large. You can move up these layers as far as

00:23:37.760 | you want. Make this a key one thing, a tier one

00:23:40.960 | thing now that you're starting to work at in your life.

00:23:44.560 | Then we get transformation. The crazy thing is of all of these stacks this is

00:23:49.200 | what the one place most people think when they

00:23:51.440 | think about cultivating a deeper life is this one stack.

00:23:54.400 | Transformations where you make the big values-based changes.

00:23:57.920 | You get a clear vision of what you want your lifestyle to be like

00:24:01.200 | and you begin making concrete changes to move you towards this lifestyle.

00:24:05.120 | Preferably there's some element of remarkability in these visions.

00:24:08.320 | It's where you change your job. It's where you move to the countryside.

00:24:12.080 | It's where you become the surf instructor in Tolfino on the west coast

00:24:15.920 | of Vancouver Island. It's where the big kind of cool stuff happens but look at

00:24:19.200 | how many layers. How many layers we had to go through. I

00:24:23.040 | even have a laser pointer I can show you right.

00:24:26.240 | All the way up, all the way up before we move to Vancouver Island, before we

00:24:31.040 | quit our job because you're not ready for that yet.

00:24:32.960 | When you're not capable, if you try to make a big change,

00:24:36.960 | God knows what's going to happen. If you are capable but you're not

00:24:40.880 | have a sense of your values, if you're not sacrificing on behalf of other

00:24:44.640 | people, filling that deeply social leadership

00:24:46.880 | itch that all humans have, then your transformation is going to be

00:24:50.160 | shallow. It's going to be selfish. It's not until this point that you're finally

00:24:53.040 | ready for that. Then we can add the final thing which is

00:24:56.320 | legacy. That's where you begin thinking about

00:24:59.840 | what's the impact I want to leave on the world even after

00:25:02.400 | I'm gone. The sort of bigger picture orienting mission for

00:25:06.240 | your life. This is so big I would say you could probably go all the way through

00:25:10.960 | the stack and stop at transformation the first time through.

00:25:15.280 | You might go through this stack a few times

00:25:18.480 | iterating, tweaking, and improving each of these layers before you really get

00:25:21.680 | into legacy. You don't have to get there right away.

00:25:24.640 | In fact you probably aren't ready to get there right away because you haven't

00:25:27.360 | done all this other cool stuff yet. So how do all these pieces come together?

00:25:30.960 | Well you actually move through this stack and give yourself

00:25:33.600 | one to three weeks for each of these layers to get that part of your life

00:25:36.800 | going and making sure it's going well. You move your way through the stack

00:25:41.600 | you could end the transformation if you want at first. Legacy can come later.

00:25:45.520 | Then live with this for six months to a year then come back and iterate. All right

00:25:49.360 | let's go back to the stack. How are things going with discipline? I want to

00:25:52.480 | upcharge this. I want more aggressive physical discipline. I

00:25:56.400 | want to do better with my relationships. What's going with control? Well it was

00:25:58.880 | going well but I left finances out of there. I want to

00:26:00.960 | fix that up. So you iterate six months to a year. You iterate through

00:26:04.400 | go through each layer. Give it time to improve what's happening there.

00:26:08.080 | You iterate every six to twelve months and improve on each of these layers

00:26:11.680 | again and again. Each time you make it through to transformation maybe you're

00:26:14.400 | thinking about a different thing you want to transform in your life.

00:26:17.120 | After you've done this five years in a row you may have had several major

00:26:20.240 | transformations. You've also tightened up all these other

00:26:22.800 | things and now your life is really humming.

00:26:25.600 | Now the idea that you're just going to go to a cubicle and check email all day

00:26:28.480 | and then be on TikTok all evening might seem laughable.

00:26:31.120 | Maybe you're ready to even really jump into this legacy stack at this point

00:26:35.120 | and start to have some really exciting long-term visions about what you're

00:26:38.480 | going to leave in the world.

00:26:41.840 | So this is the DeepLife stack 2.0. Stage one become a more capable human. Stage

00:26:47.920 | two cultivate death. Then iterate and repeat, iterate and

00:26:51.920 | repeat. As mentioned it seems very far away at

00:26:55.600 | first from the the proximate concerns of I'm distracted

00:26:58.880 | by my screens but if you don't have a shining destination

00:27:02.880 | to aim towards that's more interesting than the glow

00:27:07.280 | coming off those pieces of glass those pieces of glass are going to win.

00:27:11.760 | And so we have to talk about our lives if we're going to talk about

00:27:14.800 | our technology. So this is DeepLife stack version 2.0.

00:27:20.640 | Let me know how it goes with you. You can submit a question or case study or

00:27:24.400 | question at thedeeplife.com/listen or you can send us an email at

00:27:29.040 | jessie@calnewport.com if you want to tell us about it.

00:27:32.320 | I'm working with this new version of stack right now in my life. I want to

00:27:35.120 | hear about how it goes with you as well. Let's all get deeper

00:27:40.320 | together.

00:27:42.800 | We got to get like a graphic artist Jesse. That's the

00:27:46.480 | you got it down though it's from your professor stuff.

00:27:49.680 | I do write I use a tablet to teach. Yeah. Yeah.

00:27:52.720 | Yeah. So so uh you know I like this is geeky but it's a control control

00:27:58.800 | layer of the stack. I really like writing on my

00:28:01.680 | remarkable much more than on an iPad. Because remarkable was one of the big

00:28:06.560 | things they engineered was friction. So you get friction. iPad's very

00:28:10.720 | slippery. There is a way I think to project your

00:28:14.960 | remarkable onto a screen. But I like having colors and

00:28:18.960 | yeah the other types of things. But that laser pointer was cool. Oh the the other

00:28:22.560 | note-taking program I'm using now the laser pointer leaves a trail for a

00:28:25.680 | couple seconds. It's like if you circle something it

00:28:28.240 | like stays circled for a couple seconds and then it kind of fades out.

00:28:32.000 | Future is now Jesse. Officially arrived. All right so we got a bunch of questions

00:28:36.400 | calls and case studies about all this type of

00:28:38.720 | deep life deep work type issues. Before we get there though let us hear

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00:32:17.440 | Yeah. I think we as popular as Oprah's. Yeah. Problem is I'm so like curmudgeonly

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00:33:38.400 | All right let's enough of that let's do some questions.

00:33:42.080 | Who do we have first? All right first question is from Alan.

00:33:45.520 | I'm always excited to see how you guys how you answer these questions because

00:33:48.640 | I'm always sure but this one I'm excited about.

00:33:51.600 | Interesting. It seems like prioritizing deep work

00:33:54.800 | means that to-do list can only increase as time passes because

00:33:58.480 | deep work can never be completed faster than shall work.

00:34:02.480 | If you agree that this is true how should we respond to this reality?

00:34:07.280 | I think we have a couple questions like this this week. That when we're thinking

00:34:11.040 | about deep work as part of the our vision of the deep life

00:34:14.800 | it comes to mean some pretty weird things for people.

00:34:18.160 | It becomes this um amorphous extra demanding

00:34:24.880 | almost like selfish commitment that's in addition to all of your other normal

00:34:29.360 | work. It comes through that way so you hear a

00:34:31.760 | question like this it's like well if I'm doing deep work

00:34:34.320 | uh then that's taking away time for all these shallow tasks people need me to do

00:34:37.680 | that those will pile up. Here's the thing about deep work it's not

00:34:40.800 | an extra thing you add on your plate it is an

00:34:44.160 | approach to how you execute the things that are already on your plate.

00:34:48.480 | If you have a non-entry level job in knowledge work there are some things

00:34:51.760 | that are cognitively demanding like writing a report or analyzing data

00:34:56.000 | or coming up with a new marketing campaign there's some things you do that

00:34:58.560 | are not so cognitively demanding it's you know answering emails or filling out

00:35:01.920 | forms. What's the right way to do the

00:35:04.800 | cognitively demanding stuff? The deep work

00:35:06.960 | hypothesis says you should give it your full attention

00:35:11.200 | so you're working on something cognitively demanding give it your full

00:35:13.920 | attention and you'll be able to do it faster and

00:35:16.640 | better than if you instead interleave your cognitively demanding task with the

00:35:20.000 | shallower task. If you keep going back and forth

00:35:21.920 | it slows everything down. So to say I I'm committed to deep work it doesn't

00:35:27.200 | mean I am now adding to my job these extra activities I call deep work it

00:35:31.200 | just says I'm going to be much more aware of how I tackle my work. I'll do

00:35:35.840 | the shallow stuff all together deep work all together

00:35:37.760 | it'll all take less time. So your to-do list will get smaller

00:35:42.000 | if you context shift left less and better segregate

00:35:46.080 | different types of cognitive demands in your daily schedule.

00:35:50.640 | All right so deep work is not some extra thing you're adding to your normal life

00:35:54.000 | it's a way of taking what you're already doing in your working life

00:35:56.960 | and doing it more efficiently and doing it better.

00:36:00.880 | Man the deep deep work really becomes a boogeyman for people sometimes.

00:36:04.960 | Yeah it's like you know I'd love to do deep work

00:36:09.600 | but I have to feed my children or something you know like people are like

00:36:14.000 | uh it's this thing I think people see it as like some ritual where you put on a

00:36:17.520 | hood and like your kids are crying hungry at

00:36:19.840 | home because you're around the fire in the woods with your hood like chanting

00:36:24.160 | uh making chants about whatever Hemingway's writing strategies I mean

00:36:28.400 | it's weird it it represents for a lot of people a lot

00:36:31.440 | of stuff that I think it's kind of boring I mean it's

00:36:35.440 | don't switch your attention back and forth when working on the hard stuff

00:36:37.760 | you'll do it faster and it'll be better. Yeah.

00:36:39.600 | It's a better way to do the hard stuff than to switch it back and forth.

00:36:42.720 | All right well we got let's do I think the next question is similar so let's

00:36:45.200 | handle that one. Yep next question is from Eric. I want

00:36:48.800 | to ascend to a management position in order to have more complex challenges

00:36:52.320 | and responsibilities. I've been told that I need to work on

00:36:55.440 | my soft skills. Are deep work principles potentially

00:36:58.640 | harmful to collaborate the soft skills needed to get to the next level

00:37:02.160 | and that they encourage a monk-like individualistic approach to work?

00:37:07.120 | Well as I point out clearly in the book Deep Work I say okay

00:37:11.200 | principle one of deep work uh when you're working you now have to make

00:37:16.720 | a a long pilgrimage to a monastery or a monastic-like

00:37:22.560 | location. It needs to be not unlike Luke Skywalker

00:37:26.880 | that island he goes to in whatever that Star Wars movie is where they filmed it

00:37:31.280 | on Skellig Island in Ireland. So you're on some deserted island where you need

00:37:34.640 | to go and you need to be wearing a robe and you need to be there minimum and I

00:37:38.320 | just want to be realistic here minimum 135 days

00:37:41.680 | and during that time you may not speak or communicate with the outside world.

00:37:45.760 | You can drink warm water and bread crust as all of your attention

00:37:50.640 | is focused on just summoning summoning from the spiritual depths

00:37:56.000 | the excel spreadsheet that you're trying to write. So yes I mean if you're going

00:37:59.760 | to do deep work we're talking about hundreds of days living on Skellig

00:38:03.040 | Island eating only bread crust because that's what the principles demand.

00:38:07.520 | Now clearly I'm being very very very sarcastic because again

00:38:11.920 | deep work is about how do you handle cognitively demanding tasks when working

00:38:15.280 | on those tasks give them your full focus don't context switch back and forth.

00:38:19.760 | Now I think this is actually relevant here because there's a flip side to it

00:38:22.640 | that if you're giving work let me categorize my work into

00:38:27.120 | different types of cognitive categories so I can

00:38:30.560 | tackle work each type of work with the right

00:38:32.960 | type of environment or approach it goes the other way as well. So the

00:38:37.680 | flip side of okay when I'm working on this complicated excel spreadsheet I'm

00:38:40.880 | just going to focus just on that without context switching.

00:38:43.360 | The flip side is okay but then when it comes time to do talk to people in the

00:38:47.280 | office let me give that my full attention and just focus on the soft

00:38:50.640 | skills and doing that really well. Let me consolidate all of the sort of

00:38:54.560 | walking around and talking to people and planning so that I'm not doing that in a

00:38:58.240 | a harried way in between other hard things or I'm just trying to clear my

00:39:01.680 | inbox. I can actually give the attention necessary to come sit down with people

00:39:05.040 | look them in their eye. So when you give each type of task its

00:39:08.880 | own time and therefore you can treat each type of task in the way that it

00:39:13.680 | best needs to be treated. You do everything better. So not just

00:39:17.440 | deep work stuff gets done better but the soft skill stuff can get done

00:39:20.880 | better as well. And the logistical stuff it's less

00:39:24.000 | mistakes and it goes faster. Okay this is the time I'm doing logistical stuff

00:39:27.600 | now that's all I'm doing I'm in that context and I can I can go quicker and I

00:39:31.040 | can build some systems and and I can realize I don't need to do

00:39:33.920 | this. I mean everything is better when it's done

00:39:36.240 | in its own context and not all mixed together and that's really what's being

00:39:40.080 | pushed for in deep work is the cognitively demanding stuff

00:39:43.200 | needs to be isolated from the other stuff.

00:39:46.000 | And you need to do that because it's the stuff that ultimately is going to

00:39:48.240 | matter in your career more to almost anything else because if you're not

00:39:50.800 | producing something valuable then where is your value for the organization.

00:39:55.040 | So have a equivalent to the deep work mindset for your soft skills is what I

00:39:58.480 | would ultimately advise here. I actually talked to someone I know let

00:40:02.240 | me be very specific here who did this recently this exact situation

00:40:07.760 | Eric I forgot I forgot the name of the person asked the question Eric

00:40:11.600 | someone I know was telling me about this the other day where they got this

00:40:14.960 | specific feedback they're very good at the skills they the

00:40:19.920 | cognitively demanding skills to do they weren't their soft skills

00:40:22.480 | were lacking yeah you got to talk you got to be

00:40:25.520 | uh better connected to the people in the office 30-man office

00:40:30.160 | so he got systematic about it and I don't remember all the details but I

00:40:34.240 | believe he was doing something like um he was working remotely most days and

00:40:38.240 | I was like actually I'm going to come into the office three days a week

00:40:41.120 | and every time I come into the office these people this is a checklist this

00:40:44.880 | is the way I would handle it too I'm very introverted I'm going to talk to

00:40:47.120 | each of these three people I'm going to have a conversation with them

00:40:49.840 | and yeah it's a checklist that I'm coming into the office these days and

00:40:53.600 | during this time I'm going to go talk to people

00:40:56.000 | but day after day week after week those soft skills are getting better those

00:40:59.760 | relationships are getting better so by giving each type of task its own

00:41:03.040 | isolated context where you can tackle that task

00:41:05.520 | with exactly what that task needs to be done well you can get better at all the

00:41:08.800 | different parts of your job so not just your deep work gets better but your soft

00:41:11.600 | skills get better your logistical work gets done faster

00:41:14.000 | you find more efficiencies so no deep work will not keep you from your soft

00:41:18.000 | skills treat it with the same respect that you

00:41:20.640 | treat the the cognitively demanding work and I think you'll do better

00:41:26.160 | I could probably use some soft skills help professors are not known

00:41:31.440 | for soft skills because we have no feedback function

00:41:35.120 | well you talk to the students all the time that's true but we don't have to be

00:41:38.320 | good at that I mean we don't have a feedback function

00:41:41.120 | right so if you're like a normal job and acted in the way let's say

00:41:46.880 | 50 percent of professors act in a faculty meeting the boss would be like

00:41:50.240 | my god you're fired this is this is a crazy way to behave as

00:41:54.240 | like a grown adult but you have tenure you're a professor there's no feedback

00:41:57.600 | function right you're not being hired so there's no one

00:42:00.400 | to fire you so people just get weirder and weirder professors get strange

00:42:07.280 | let's put it that way not all I think I'm a pretty normal guy but we get

00:42:10.080 | strange let's be honest all right let's keep rolling here

00:42:13.200 | all right next question is from josh how do I deal with having to stop working on

00:42:17.760 | something that is still in progress and not a clean checkpoint and not at a

00:42:22.160 | clean checkpoint in my job I work on longer term less

00:42:25.680 | well-defined larger tasks which means that on many days I find at the end of

00:42:29.520 | the day when I'm still very much in the middle

00:42:31.680 | of solving a particular problem I'm stuck and don't know what to do

00:42:36.000 | josh I feel your pain on this because I was in that same spot

00:42:39.680 | earlier in my career the same spot where I found myself with

00:42:42.960 | essentially endless cognitively demanding work to do that had no clean

00:42:46.320 | shutdown points and the evenings were difficult the

00:42:49.120 | particular spot where this happened for me and I remember this clearly is when I

00:42:52.400 | was working on my doctoral dissertation at MIT it's a very large sort of

00:42:58.000 | mathematical project and I made the in retrospect maybe not so smart

00:43:03.280 | decision that when it came to my doctoral

00:43:05.600 | dissertation I was going to do all new work

00:43:08.400 | so typically in computer science if you're a doctoral student you're

00:43:10.880 | publishing a lot of papers and I was and when your dissertation comes around

00:43:14.480 | you're taking you know these five papers in which I explored this theme I'm going

00:43:19.120 | to build my thesis around it I didn't do that I said I already wrote

00:43:23.120 | those papers I want to do something new so my doctoral dissertation was all new

00:43:26.400 | mathematics I was doing from scratch because I thought it would be boring

00:43:28.880 | just to go back and stitch together papers I already did

00:43:31.360 | so it was uh happening again and again I would get to the end of the day I'd be

00:43:35.520 | in the middle of a proof like the big thing for me is

00:43:37.680 | I'm not getting this proof to work really hard to shut down there

00:43:42.240 | because imagine the train of thought I don't have this proof working

00:43:46.480 | what if I never get this proof to work if this proof doesn't work

00:43:50.080 | this whole approach for this chapter my thesis will fall apart

00:43:53.200 | if I don't have that chapter I'm not going to be able to submit this thesis

00:43:57.440 | I'm not going to get my degree you could see how the do

00:44:00.320 | right down the line so I was like man I need some way

00:44:03.360 | of quieting my brain when I'm ready to stop working for the day

00:44:07.760 | there was very rarely would I finish a nice proof at five o'clock

00:44:11.600 | that is when I invented my shutdown ritual the shutdown ritual we talk about

00:44:15.280 | all the time on this show the shutdown ritual that is encoded into my time

00:44:18.560 | block planner the shutdown ritual that I talked about

00:44:21.520 | in my book deep work I invented it for exactly this issue so

00:44:26.320 | there's two aspects to a shutdown ritual one I think is the more common

00:44:30.240 | thing we talk about and it's going to be less relevant for you Josh but that's

00:44:33.040 | the thing where you just close open loops this is

00:44:35.440 | was there stuff that came up today that I need to write down or put on my

00:44:39.200 | calendar is there like an urgent email I need to answer

00:44:42.000 | it's the making sure there's not something that you're just keeping track

00:44:44.720 | of only in your mind you get that all into a system

00:44:47.520 | it's where you check on your plan for the next day like okay everything is

00:44:50.160 | good I'm not missing something but the other aspect of my shutdown

00:44:53.920 | ritual which was very big for me then but I don't talk about as much now

00:44:59.360 | was reflecting on the work in progress putting a cap on it for the day okay

00:45:04.880 | here's where I am here's where I'm stuck here is two things

00:45:08.720 | I'm going to try tomorrow that might get me unstuck

00:45:11.440 | doing that work which could take anywhere between 10 to 20 minutes

00:45:15.360 | and when I shut down the work it's not that I had solved it but I had

00:45:19.440 | built from scratch a hasty checkpoint I this isn't working but let me write

00:45:25.440 | down I remember so clearly writing down here's why this is not

00:45:29.200 | working you know the summation has a xenos paradox issue here are two things

00:45:34.080 | I might look at tomorrow go read the the proof from such and such

00:45:37.440 | paper they did something similar maybe there's something there that could help

00:45:39.840 | me or see if there's you know talk to so and so about if there's like a simple

00:45:43.360 | uh concentration bound I could put here instead like you write down a couple

00:45:46.400 | things you could do you can't do them right now they're take an hour or so but

00:45:49.360 | you're writing them this is what I'm gonna do next

00:45:50.960 | that's all you need to get a clean checkpoint and your brain says okay

00:45:55.840 | we know where we are we have a plan we'll get back to that plan tomorrow

00:45:59.760 | it's just as good starting that plan in the morning as it is doing it right now

00:46:03.280 | and it will release that ongoing work in fact it's not even a bad thing to do

00:46:08.880 | this it's I mean it's not okay I'm dealing with a bad situation

00:46:12.400 | it's a bad situation that I'm not at a clean checkpoint and I have to invent

00:46:15.600 | this hasty checkpoint I wish it didn't have to happen but it

00:46:18.320 | did that's actually not the situation it's beneficial

00:46:21.760 | to have these hastily created checkpoints a lot of writers do this

00:46:26.080 | we joked about Hemingway earlier but but this is something that Hemingway

00:46:29.440 | himself actually did is he liked to be in the middle if he

00:46:33.040 | was in a role writing kind of in the middle of a paragraph

00:46:36.080 | even in the middle of a sentence and shut off

00:46:38.800 | so that the next day he'd be picking up in the middle of something where there

00:46:42.640 | was some momentum that was already going he could just read up to that point and

00:46:45.360 | get going much easier place to start than at the

00:46:48.880 | start of a new chapter so if anything what you're going to get

00:46:52.480 | by stopping in the middle of ongoing work

00:46:55.920 | is a fresh legs or fresh arm the next morning

00:47:00.320 | so you're going to be able to continue working on that with a fresh brain

00:47:02.880 | instead of trying to drag it through and perhaps some unconscious processing

00:47:07.520 | you've clarified the problem what you're going to work on you're not thinking

00:47:10.640 | about it because you have a clear shutdown routine but your brain might

00:47:13.040 | in the background and you get there the next morning you're like man actually

00:47:16.320 | yeah this works pretty well so see this as a feature not a bug do a

00:47:20.640 | clean shutdown routine every day work is done when the shutdown routine has been

00:47:24.080 | completed if your mind bothers you say i'm not

00:47:26.560 | going to get into your rumination we're not going to think about work because we

00:47:29.360 | did the routine i'll see you in the morning

00:47:31.120 | that routine should close open loops but also create temporary checkpoints

00:47:34.400 | where needed here's where i'm stuck here's i'm going

00:47:36.400 | to work on the next day let your mind take a breather you'll hit the ground

00:47:39.600 | running the next day josh it saved me so much anxiety that it turned off made

00:47:44.800 | the rest of my ill-fated decision to write a dissertation from scratch

00:47:48.080 | a little bit less onerous i was also writing a book at this time

00:47:52.320 | don't get me started the shutdown ritual really helped

00:47:55.920 | so add that component to it josh i think you'll find it's going to uh it's going

00:47:59.280 | to make a big difference

00:48:02.080 | all right let's see we have some calls right yeah all right i'm excited about

00:48:05.680 | calls uh here we go

00:48:09.040 | hey cal an issue that i often have during periods of deep work or attempted

00:48:13.360 | deep work is um dealing with intrusive thoughts

00:48:16.400 | about you know other things that i could be

00:48:18.480 | doing with my time so i might be reading an academic paper

00:48:22.080 | and you know these thoughts keep popping in my head like oh i

00:48:25.280 | should be working out or i should be practicing piano and

00:48:29.040 | it just feels that i'm always um you know thinking about the next task or

00:48:33.520 | something else that i should be doing so i don't know if part of the problem

00:48:36.800 | is that i haven't you know properly prioritize my

00:48:40.160 | activities during the day but um you know it i would describe it

00:48:44.080 | almost as fomo for all my uh given given tasks and

00:48:48.320 | activities in a day so just curious what you know your

00:48:51.760 | thoughts are and um you know if this is something that's

00:48:54.480 | common for people trying to engage in deep work thank you i'm glad you

00:48:59.600 | bring you bring this up because i i think it's a common issue

00:49:03.360 | that we don't talk about enough we talk about here's the mechanisms you use to

00:49:07.600 | plan your day but we don't necessarily talk about well

00:49:10.080 | how do you figure out the plan for your day

00:49:12.320 | that's almost always a given right like yeah you know what to do it's just a

00:49:15.600 | matter of sort of marshaling your activity better

00:49:17.840 | it's actually really hard especially when you're new to it

00:49:21.040 | especially if you're a student or you're new to the working world

00:49:24.560 | it's an endless array of things that you're trying to pull from

00:49:28.240 | both in work and both in life outside of your work and this idea of

00:49:32.560 | productivity fomo if i can coin a term is a real one so there's two different

00:49:39.040 | parts to my answer here one is just clarity right so i have a

00:49:43.360 | time block plan for my day that gives you clarity you thought

00:49:46.800 | about the plan you made the plan now your mind says it's not my job to do

00:49:51.600 | any more planning my job for the rest of the day is to

00:49:54.320 | execute this plan so clarity really helps that's why i'm a

00:49:58.000 | big proponent of time block planners it's why i have college students do

00:50:01.520 | this where they schedule out all the school work they're going to do on a

00:50:04.640 | regular basis i don't want you planning any more than

00:50:07.600 | you have to 10 minutes in the morning should be enough

00:50:11.360 | that's fine here's my plan and then all you're focusing on

00:50:15.280 | is following the plan the best you can fixing it if you need to

00:50:18.560 | so when you're writing the paper you're writing or reading the paper like in

00:50:21.200 | your example you're doing so because that's what the current block says on

00:50:23.840 | your schedule doesn't say work out workout is later

00:50:27.040 | it's not on this day now if you couple time block planning

00:50:30.160 | with weekly planning if you couple the weekly planning with

00:50:33.120 | quarterly or semester planning then you're going to get even more

00:50:36.480 | confidence in your clarity because you're looking at multiple time scales

00:50:39.520 | because your weekly plan is where you figured out here's when i'm going to

00:50:42.000 | work out this week so that when you get the tuesday and

00:50:44.720 | it's tuesday at 3 30 and you're writing your paper

00:50:47.360 | there's no reason for you to say should i be working out right now because you

00:50:50.160 | already know you're working out on monday wednesday and friday when you're

00:50:52.560 | doing it that's a part of your weekly plan

00:50:54.720 | and when you have the bigger picture FOMO like should i be uh

00:50:57.840 | working on a different research topic why am i even reading these papers

00:51:00.960 | your quarterly plan kicks in says no that's what i'm doing this season

00:51:04.800 | we're trying to learn this area of machine learning and see if we can write

00:51:08.080 | a paper and we'll check in at the end of the season

00:51:10.720 | so clarity at multiple scales gives you confidence in the moment

00:51:14.320 | of the thing i'm doing is as reasonable a thing as there is to do i don't need to

00:51:17.760 | be thinking about it again right now the second thing i want to throw in here

00:51:22.240 | is grace grace for yourself you say yeah i'm

00:51:26.480 | building a reasonable plan i want to execute it

00:51:29.360 | maybe it's the best maybe it's not sometimes we better than others

00:51:32.720 | sometimes it's a dead end it's okay i don't have to be a scheduling

00:51:38.320 | genius i'm not you know pushing 10 in an air

00:51:41.600 | traffic control center somewhere where if i make a mistake a 747 is going to

00:51:45.280 | crash into the golden gate bridge you're building a schedule for a college

00:51:50.000 | student you're building one week schedule for a 40 year career you're

00:51:54.400 | going to have in the world of work so you you do your

00:51:59.120 | best with multi-scale planning some some days are no better than others

00:52:02.880 | some plans will work better than others you'll get better at it through

00:52:05.120 | experience and just give yourself some grace

00:52:07.840 | the binary flip here that matters is reactive

00:52:12.000 | proactive disorganized intentional that's the binary flip you should be

00:52:16.960 | proud of i'm marshalling my energy i'm not letting it dissipate randomly or

00:52:21.680 | in other people's agendas i have a plan at different scales i do

00:52:25.120 | my best to execute it sometimes better than others

00:52:27.520 | the plans will get better as i go along and now i've done my shutdown routine

00:52:32.240 | and i'm gonna have a margarita get out of my face you know you just can relax a

00:52:35.600 | little bit about it so clarity plus grace and just trust over

00:52:40.240 | time you'll you'll be fine you'll get you'll do better at this

00:52:42.880 | just by having a plan at all you're doing much better than

00:52:46.800 | 98 of the other people around you you're going to get that

00:52:50.400 | cumulative it's like having you know aggregate

00:52:53.600 | compounding interest over time that advantage is going to build and build

00:52:56.640 | and build 20 years in your career you're just

00:52:58.640 | going to have control over everything where other people are still bouncing

00:53:02.880 | around frenetically from thing to thing and mad at everyone everything's not

00:53:06.480 | fair you're just going to be like i control my life

00:53:08.320 | you know you're going to have compounding interest of that intentional

00:53:11.760 | aim of your energy even if it's not always super accurate

00:53:15.200 | is better than random dissipation so it's a good question i'm glad you asked

00:53:18.640 | it clarity plus grace you'll be fine we have another call we have another call

00:53:24.000 | two call show yep two calls here we go

00:53:28.320 | hi cal i'm brett i'm an adjunct instructor at a private university in

00:53:32.720 | the southeastern united states and a long-time

00:53:35.200 | acolyte of your approach to productivity i'm hoping you can answer this question

00:53:39.520 | with the speed of hermes you've mentioned the working memory dot

00:53:43.200 | text file you use for impromptu ideas while concentrating on other work

00:53:47.600 | the question do you clear out everything in this file every day

00:53:51.520 | and start new the next day or is the file a semi-permanent collection of

00:53:55.280 | those ideas a good question also good greek reference

00:54:00.000 | just see i don't know if our new listeners know about this

00:54:02.880 | no i mean that's this is like a deep hole

00:54:06.240 | back when i used to do the call-in show once a week

00:54:09.280 | um i don't know how to describe it other than the callers back when we did a lot

00:54:13.200 | of calls decided that the more superfluous

00:54:16.960 | references to greek mythology the better so this is like a pull from the past i

00:54:21.360 | really do appreciate that it makes no sense to people listening now but that's

00:54:24.240 | okay that's between us and the uh the old timers

00:54:27.200 | also a really good question um if i'm able to do a full shutdown which

00:54:32.480 | is my goal almost every day some days i don't get

00:54:35.520 | there part of my shutdown routine is clearing my working memory dot txt

00:54:40.160 | so i am a huge believer of the working text working memory dot txt file just

00:54:44.720 | have a blank unformatted text file on your desktop

00:54:48.480 | that you add to things throughout your day no

00:54:50.720 | matter what you're doing is where you offload stuff out of your

00:54:53.680 | brain temporarily because you can only store so many things

00:54:56.800 | you're on a call that's where you're taking notes you're you're going through

00:54:59.360 | your inbox it's where you're writing the the things over here like the dates you

00:55:03.200 | go to your calendar and then you can see if those dates are free

00:55:06.000 | you're creating a task list for a task block you do it right there

00:55:09.840 | you're you're copying text that you're going to paste into something else you

00:55:13.040 | copy it into the working memory dot txt it's the most useful

00:55:16.160 | most commonly used digital tool i uh in my life

00:55:19.600 | in terms of my professional life and it's a it's a blank text file but yes

00:55:22.880 | you should clear it down to empty this is an extension of your brain it is not

00:55:26.560 | a storage system it's not a planning system

00:55:28.880 | you should have a separate place to keep track of obligations your priority

00:55:31.760 | obligation list you should have a calendar for appointments

00:55:34.400 | you should have planning documents for plans planners

00:55:37.920 | daily planners for daily plans it's not it's not part of your permanent storage

00:55:41.760 | uh systems think of it as like sand that's going to get shaken

00:55:45.120 | fresh at the end of every day and monica can use that when she's

00:55:49.360 | in deep work sessions too right yeah yeah yeah so if you have thoughts during

00:55:53.040 | deep work sessions like oh what about this what about that

00:55:55.600 | uh it's a great use for it drop drop drop drop drop and then once you're done

00:55:58.560 | with your deep work session and and shutting it down you can process hey

00:56:01.680 | what did i write down during the session yeah it's a fantastic tool all right

00:56:06.960 | let's uh let's do a case study i've done one of

00:56:09.520 | these or we've been doing these more recently is what i mean to say we have

00:56:12.640 | done these more recently a case study is where one of you my

00:56:15.680 | listener sends in a story of how they've been using this advice in their

00:56:19.360 | specific details of their own life this case study comes from logan

00:56:24.800 | logan says my wife and i moved from suburbs the suburbs of the denver metro

00:56:29.520 | area to build a house on my parents land in

00:56:33.040 | the foothills in a relatively rural environment

00:56:36.240 | we did this to have a deeper life and focus on raising our children in a slow

00:56:40.000 | and outdoor environment there's a lot of interesting deep life

00:56:44.560 | related trade-offs that went into making that choice but the actual interesting

00:56:47.920 | case study to me relates to slow productivity

00:56:50.800 | in order to reduce cost and be able to afford the house

00:56:55.280 | build without a mortgage we reduced the contractor scope

00:56:58.480 | to stop at texture drywall with us doing uh painting final electric final

00:57:03.600 | plumbing flooring door install cabinets kitchen all

00:57:07.520 | the trim ourselves an avid listener of your show i decided last minute to take

00:57:10.640 | a slow productivity approach that is for the month of april i am

00:57:14.000 | taking two hours off of work every day and have drastically reduced my other

00:57:17.280 | hobbies and commitments this has enabled me to get about four hours of

00:57:20.240 | construction done each day with my wife helping for two to three of

00:57:23.680 | that granted we are only halfway through april as i write this but i'm shocked

00:57:26.720 | and pleased at how much progress we have been able to make with this approach

00:57:30.080 | and how little exhaustion or burnout i have felt consider me a slow

00:57:33.040 | productivity convert one thing at a time no individual day

00:57:36.240 | is incredibly important and let the results

00:57:38.560 | stack up i love this because it is an example that is relevant to the

00:57:45.280 | world of work that's coming from the world

00:57:47.360 | outside of work the world of housework this is a very common experience among

00:57:51.760 | people who do big projects outside of their professional life

00:57:54.480 | man it was so fulfilling to just work slowly but steadily on this thing

00:57:59.280 | and i really love the way that logan described this no day is important

00:58:03.520 | but every day adds up so it's not there's no stress

00:58:07.200 | in this particular wednesday i'm spending three hours working on trim you

00:58:10.880 | could be sick and not do trim for three hours on that wednesday

00:58:13.440 | nothing bad happens but you have enough of those wednesdays and all the trim

00:58:16.960 | gets done and you have this concrete accomplishment

00:58:19.440 | that is what we are wired to appreciate as humans

00:58:23.600 | the slow sustainable aggregation of effort towards

00:58:26.880 | well-done high quality results that we're proud of

00:58:30.160 | now fast forward to the typical computer knowledge work job

00:58:34.000 | it's the opposite all day long frenetic back and forth activity we've taken all

00:58:38.240 | these different projects that we interleave with each other and we're

00:58:40.240 | just trying to keep the plate spinning by answering this email and sitting off

00:58:43.200 | this just in turn you can respond to this and jumping on zoom over here and

00:58:45.680 | back and forth and it's just as frenetic i can't even

00:58:48.720 | tell you all the things i'm working on i'm barely working on it work has been

00:58:53.280 | devolved to like emails back and forth or sometimes some

00:58:56.480 | you know decisions get made in a meeting and some drastic writing it is the

00:59:00.160 | opposite of the slow but sustainable work it's not slow it's very fast it's

00:59:05.040 | not clearly defined we have multiple things that we have

00:59:08.240 | unspecified roles on that are they're coming in and out of our scope of

00:59:12.480 | activity and it's not sustainable if i if i'm

00:59:16.560 | sick and i have these hidden projects i'm

00:59:18.560 | emailing all day it's a real big issue everything grinds to a halt

00:59:21.680 | so it's a constant source this sort of background anxiety

00:59:24.880 | so logan working on his house is the epitome of slow productivity my idea

00:59:28.560 | this is the idea of my book slow productivity that comes out in march

00:59:32.320 | is we need to port this over to work the world of our jobs the world of

00:59:36.080 | knowledge work this is what work should be

00:59:38.480 | slowly but steadily on wildly important stuff

00:59:41.920 | it's like this is what we're wired to do it's how you can maximize the value

00:59:44.800 | produced for yourself and for the world we're so far from that right now and we

00:59:48.800 | shouldn't be so i really appreciate that case study

00:59:51.520 | logan slow productivity is the future i'm really

00:59:54.160 | excited for my book to come out too because i want to talk a lot more about

00:59:56.960 | it i want all these details to be out there so we can go big

01:00:00.160 | on slow productivity all right we have a final segment coming up i want to react

01:00:04.880 | to something i read about that i thought was quite interesting but first let's

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01:03:37.280 | all right let's get to our final segment here this is where i react to something

01:03:40.080 | that came across on the internet or in my email inbox in

01:03:44.160 | particular i want to talk about a book the book that came out in february but

01:03:49.120 | it's proven popular the author has done a lot of interviews so

01:03:52.080 | people have been sending me clips of this author very interesting

01:03:55.280 | story very interesting book i want to talk about some of the ideas in

01:03:58.800 | the book and give you maybe my own take on these same themes which is a

01:04:03.200 | little bit different than where he comes down

01:04:05.200 | so i'll load the book here up on the screen for those who

01:04:08.320 | are watching at home the book is called burn

01:04:13.200 | the boats toss plan b overboard and unleash your full

01:04:17.840 | potential is written by matt higgins who has a really cool story

01:04:22.240 | let me read you a little bit from the book jacket

01:04:26.320 | in this gripping rags to riches instant classic matt higgins provides the

01:04:30.720 | blueprint he used to go from a desperate 16 year old high school dropout

01:04:35.440 | caring for a sick mother in queens new york to a shark on shark tank and the

01:04:38.800 | faculty of harvard business school told with raw

01:04:42.560 | emotion radical transparency higgins writes the definitive tome on the oldest

01:04:45.600 | life hack in history burn the boats

01:04:50.800 | from sun tzu to julius caesar the ancient israelites to ukrainian

01:04:54.960 | president vladimir zalinsky was vladimir zalinsky i say that wrong

01:04:59.360 | there's a bold and highly effective tactic seen throughout history when

01:05:02.480 | leaders want to motivate their troops for success they destroy all

01:05:05.280 | opportunities for retreat and fully commit to the mission

01:05:08.880 | they burn their boats its win or perish and the clarity of sheer desperation

01:05:13.680 | propels them to victory skipping ahead here the

01:05:17.280 | book jacket says burn the boats is the manifesto for

01:05:21.040 | anyone looking to level up their life while navigating risk each chapter

01:05:23.840 | includes clear actual advice that readers can immediately start applying

01:05:26.640 | to their own lives this book will give you the courage to

01:05:29.360 | confidently go all in on your life's true purpose so matt has a he's a very

01:05:35.120 | impressive guy and has a very cool story really came out of a hard situation to a

01:05:38.560 | lot of success and he used this idea and he's been telling this idea a lot

01:05:42.160 | and he's been getting a lot of play so i wanted to talk about this because

01:05:46.800 | a very similar concept came up as a major theme when i was working on my

01:05:53.520 | 2012 book so good they can't ignore you

01:05:58.960 | so so good they can't ignore you was a book that was looking at career advice

01:06:02.000 | and so the idea that i was in uh engaging with from the world of

01:06:06.960 | career advice in so good they can't ignore you one of the big ideas i was

01:06:09.680 | engaging with is what i called courage culture

01:06:13.120 | and at the time so this is the the 2000s the first decade of the 2000s when i was

01:06:16.800 | working on this courage culture had a really big

01:06:20.000 | footprint in the career advice space and that the theory behind courage culture

01:06:24.320 | was straightforward it said the most important thing

01:06:28.960 | in terms of transforming your work into something that you're passionate about

01:06:33.360 | is having the courage to go after that thing you love

01:06:38.800 | so courage culture uh prioritizes courage as the the key issue so look i'm

01:06:44.240 | going to draw a picture here and again my apologies for people who

01:06:46.960 | who are actually seeing this um but but in courage culture i'll draw this this

01:06:50.960 | rough picture um what it's saying is okay the the the

01:06:55.040 | path all right so i'm drawing a squiggly line here at the end of the squiggly

01:06:59.600 | line is a person smiling jesse will tell you

01:07:03.840 | for the listeners expertly drawn holding their hands in the air

01:07:06.800 | triumphantly um and what is the what is the obstacle

01:07:11.440 | here is you have this this obstacle up front this big

01:07:15.600 | jude is like a red squiggle and it's fear

01:07:21.120 | so this great illustration on the screen so courage culture said here's the issue

01:07:24.400 | is if you can overcome that fear which is

01:07:27.360 | built and there's all sorts of sources of it

01:07:29.120 | parental expectation conformity to society

01:07:32.720 | you can overcome that fear you have a pretty easy path to being very happy

01:07:36.400 | so we have to build up courage to find happiness i push

01:07:40.000 | back on this as i went out there and i studied people who

01:07:44.240 | were very passionate about their careers and i studied their actual lives not

01:07:47.440 | just what they said and what i saw was a different picture

01:07:51.760 | so the path that they took if you're looking at the uh

01:07:56.160 | screen now you'll see this the path they took was uh

01:07:59.520 | uphill so now my picture it's a pretty arduous

01:08:04.160 | uphill path right so it's like going up a mountain

01:08:08.000 | and so what is uh what is stopping them here

01:08:11.600 | so what's in the way of this uphill path is an expertly drawn

01:08:16.000 | brain oh god i'm getting creative here jesse

01:08:19.600 | an expertly drawn brain that is seen oh man changing color this is

01:08:26.320 | getting my i'm really impressed by my drawing uh

01:08:28.960 | is seen as drawn by these orange dots

01:08:33.280 | the hardness of this path

01:08:36.640 | and saying okay i'm going to preserve energy

01:08:40.320 | pretty good right jesse yeah it's great all right

01:08:43.920 | so if you look at these two different interpretations you get two different

01:08:46.800 | ways to go forward so courage culture says this first picture is what's

01:08:49.600 | happening so you got just get really inspired so

01:08:52.240 | you have this moment of courage and overcome your fear

01:08:54.720 | and once you leap over to the other side you have this easy path that was

01:08:57.600 | waiting there all along just going to get you to happiness

01:09:00.080 | this other uh approach which i said was more realistic is the reason why you're

01:09:04.880 | you're hesitating to get going is that often it is really really hard to get

01:09:08.880 | the success with something really cool and

01:09:11.840 | your brain recognizes that and it sees how hard it is

01:09:14.800 | and it says hey buddy i like the guy at the top of the mountain

01:09:18.560 | with their hands in the air but you're not ready to do this

01:09:22.480 | you don't really understand how to hike this long

01:09:25.760 | you don't know how your compass works you don't have enough water i checked

01:09:28.240 | your boots they're pretty bad you haven't checked the weather do you

01:09:31.120 | have a jacket and so your brain says we're not going to engage on this

01:09:35.360 | long-term plan until i'm more confident that you know

01:09:39.040 | what the hell you're doing now last week on the show we got into

01:09:42.480 | the neuroscience of this this actual process is called episodic

01:09:46.000 | future thinking or eft it is your brain actually trying to

01:09:50.160 | project into the future and understanding of what's going to happen

01:09:53.040 | based on your experience and expertise that you already have stored in your

01:09:56.400 | hippocampus and seeing what it projects and if it

01:09:59.200 | likes what it projects then it's going to give you motivation

01:10:02.640 | and if it doesn't it's going to withhold it so if when your brain that the

01:10:06.320 | centers that are working on the eft the episodic future thinking are looking at

01:10:09.600 | what you understand and your plans and your past experiences and says you don't

01:10:12.560 | know how to get up that proverbial mountain you're not going to get

01:10:14.880 | motivation so my approach was it's not about getting

01:10:20.640 | the courage to just go for it it's filling up that hippocampus with

01:10:26.240 | enough evidence-based expertise and understanding of what you want to do

01:10:29.520 | that your brain when it projects in the future says yeah i

01:10:31.760 | see how this is going to happen that's cool we're going to get up that

01:10:34.480 | mountain that guy's hands in the air that's going to be us that

01:10:37.040 | ties to our values let's get after it and you're not at war with your brain

01:10:42.240 | you're co-opting your brain to get on your side

01:10:45.600 | i think we we over emphasize this idea of part of ourselves being afraid and

01:10:52.000 | we're trying to overcome that i think we've we've given that too much power

01:10:55.840 | and we have not given in our culture enough power to

01:10:59.040 | how effective eft really is at helping us make decisions about what to do in

01:11:03.040 | the future and when we switch our attention from

01:11:05.600 | the courage culture to the episodic future

01:11:08.160 | thinking approach it really changes the way we

01:11:11.920 | the way we strategize to go after something cool

01:11:15.760 | we don't burn the boats we say how quickly can we learn enough about this

01:11:20.640 | make enough little bets get enough expertise talk to people who know what

01:11:23.600 | they're doing how quickly can we convince our brain that this is

01:11:25.920 | something we can do there's still a little courage after that

01:11:28.640 | that might be required if what you want to do is quite different

01:11:32.320 | than what's expected people are correct to point out as they

01:11:36.720 | did when i was researching my book that you know it could be hard

01:11:40.320 | don't leave your law job don't leave your tenure track position don't become

01:11:44.000 | an artist when you should become a doctor you know that that is hard but

01:11:48.320 | not nearly as hard as we think when your mind is on board with a plan

01:11:52.080 | that leads to something that's true to its values it takes a little courage to

01:11:55.200 | tell your parent i'm not going to med school

01:11:58.240 | but it's not as much as you think if your brain is really on board with the

01:12:02.240 | alternative that you're going to do so this idea that you're going to burn

01:12:06.960 | your boat so you have no plan b that that's going to motivate you

01:12:09.840 | motivation doesn't get you up the hill equipment does skill does training does

01:12:15.120 | so you're you should not be looking to get rid of plan b's

01:12:18.240 | you should be looking instead to build better plan a's

01:12:23.040 | a little bit of courage might still be involved but it's not going to be that

01:12:26.640 | hard if you've gotten your mind on your side

01:12:28.960 | so see your mind not as an arbitrary obstacle but as your ally

01:12:32.880 | it is really good at saying hey do we have a good plan for what we're doing

01:12:36.560 | that's why humans are so successful as a

01:12:38.800 | species it's why we can invent things and build the pyramids and everything

01:12:41.920 | else we've done trust a human brain don't avoid plan b

01:12:46.560 | write a better plan a that's uh that's what i have i have seen

01:12:50.800 | to be successful i don't know if you remember that

01:12:55.440 | rhetoric from like the 90s and 2000s jesse but man it was

01:12:59.040 | everywhere you see it a lot in sports too

01:13:02.640 | yeah i just have the courage to go for it yeah yeah well it's

01:13:06.400 | okay can i i'm going to bring up an old man rant

01:13:10.240 | this nothing makes me seem older than this i've said it before on the show but

01:13:13.200 | i'm going to bring it up again cars three the pixar movie

01:13:18.080 | cars three because the the whole plot line of cars three

01:13:22.160 | centers on the fact that the the one car anthropomorphic car who's helping

01:13:28.480 | whatever his name is lightning mcqueen lightning mcqueen

01:13:31.280 | um train for his return because so lightning mcqueen's an old style stock

01:13:36.160 | car and now they have these new uh sort of

01:13:39.280 | computer design cars they're just faster it's better technology

01:13:42.480 | and he's going to train like i want to train to like overcome these

01:13:46.000 | technologically more superior calls cars the the whole plot line is the

01:13:51.520 | person training you know lightning was someone she always

01:13:55.440 | wanted i don't know how you gender a car but

01:13:58.240 | whatever it's a she in the show um she had always wanted to be a race car

01:14:02.080 | driver but had you know didn't have the courage to do it because

01:14:05.200 | you know i i guess she was a girl car i don't know how this i don't know how car

01:14:08.960 | gender works um so that was kind of the plot line

01:14:11.920 | like okay that's you know that's interesting right there's this interesting

01:14:14.320 | dynamic of like this is something she always wanted to do but couldn't

01:14:17.520 | um and now she's helping this other person do it the way the movie ends

01:14:22.160 | is they're on the racetrack and there's a super computer design cars

01:14:25.440 | lightning mcqueen by the way is like was one of the top stock car racers like top

01:14:29.120 | of the heap before this new technology came in

01:14:31.280 | so like whole life training to do this and at the very end the uh the the

01:14:36.240 | trainer gets the courage to say i'm just going to get on the track i don't care

01:14:38.880 | what people tell me i'm gonna race and she beats all the high tech cars

01:14:43.920 | no training no like how did how did her old technology overcome it no

01:14:48.320 | like so it was the courage culture personified that the only thing that was

01:14:52.240 | holding you back from beating these like super precision

01:14:55.520 | cars that had been trained this really well was just having the courage to

01:14:58.080 | compete for it and they're completely missing the part

01:15:00.400 | where you actually have to become good good at the thing so it was like courage

01:15:04.880 | culture personified was the trainer from cars three

01:15:08.800 | beating the high tech hyper cars because she had the courage to actually get on

01:15:12.160 | the track like what message are we teaching

01:15:14.800 | what message are we teaching kids it's like rookie of the year you know like the

01:15:18.240 | secret you could be pitching in the major leagues it's if you broke your arm

01:15:20.880 | in a weird way then that's it and then you're gonna

01:15:22.800 | you can't throw 100 mile per hour fastball it's like where's the training

01:15:26.960 | so i'll tell you i mean i stood up and gave that room full of kids in that

01:15:29.680 | theater an earful i'm like let me tell you about

01:15:33.040 | deliberate practice you know how many hours it took on

01:15:36.320 | average for a chess grandmaster to get there it's not just about overcoming

01:15:40.160 | fear you have to learn like how to be the world's best race car like most

01:15:43.280 | people can't be and if you want to be your whole life has to be dedicated to

01:15:46.560 | it and while you're at it let me tell you

01:15:48.720 | about dr no and fleming's like misplot yes and like and let me tell you about

01:15:53.440 | the torture tunnel and dr no all right kids i got a problem with that

01:15:59.040 | as well so they stake this broad to the to the

01:16:03.600 | volcanic rock so the crabs would eat her but crabs don't eat people you see what

01:16:07.680 | i'm saying i'm not welcome back in that theater

01:16:11.120 | again uh yeah that's the that's the moral of

01:16:14.160 | that story i'm not welcome back in that theater

01:16:16.400 | nor have my applications to join the writing staff at pixar

01:16:20.080 | been responded to or approved i want like dark gritty movies where they

01:16:24.880 | train really hard and in the end it's like you really

01:16:27.600 | you gave it your best but like you don't have the right vo2 max for the sport

01:16:32.320 | and that's kind of the ending of it

01:16:35.760 | oh my goodness all right enough of this nonsense all right thank you everyone

01:16:38.800 | uh for listening or watching to this week's episode

01:16:42.000 | and we'll be back next week with uh another show

01:16:45.520 | and until then as always stay deep so if you like today's discussion about

01:16:50.480 | the new version of my deep life stack you might also want to go back and check

01:16:54.160 | out episode 252 where i introduce the

01:16:58.400 | original version of this tool for transforming your life

01:17:01.840 | check it out but i thought this would be a great time to beta test my my more

01:17:04.960 | complete understanding of the deep life so we'll call today's deep question

01:17:09.840 | how do i rebuild my life into something deeper

Deep Life Stack 2.0 To Reinvent Yourself: How To Master Productivity & Find Purpose | Cal Newport

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