Full Length Episode | #177 | February 28, 2022

00:00:00.000 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 177.

00:00:10.560 | I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined by my professor.

00:00:15.680 | Professor?

00:00:16.680 | Yeah, you don't know this about Jesse, everyone.

00:00:19.440 | My producer Jesse is also the professor who taught me everything I know about optimization

00:00:26.320 | and distributed algorithm theories.

00:00:27.880 | Is that not true, Jesse?

00:00:29.800 | It's not true.

00:00:32.000 | We are having, so we're off to a difficult technical start today.

00:00:35.040 | I think this is a fair assessment.

00:00:36.720 | We've had multiple issues as we're preparing to record today's episode.

00:00:42.320 | And Jesse, correct me if I'm wrong, but both issues had an incredibly technically nuanced

00:00:47.560 | solution.

00:00:48.560 | You're correct.

00:00:50.200 | Turn it off and turn it back on.

00:00:52.200 | This is right.

00:00:53.200 | Multiple unrelated issues were solved today by turning off different things, mind you.

00:00:57.600 | Not the same component, completely unrelated problems that we have fixed so far by turning

00:01:03.920 | it off and turning it on.

00:01:05.400 | That is why I hired the professor in the first place.

00:01:08.480 | This is his specialty, his complex.

00:01:11.480 | So we've turned it off and turned it on.

00:01:13.120 | That's why I keep, I keep, look, I'm glancing at our, at our equipment here with a trepidation.

00:01:17.520 | I keep checking that it looks like things are actually recording.

00:01:21.760 | We also had the mouse.

00:01:22.760 | Oh, our mouse died.

00:01:24.680 | Yes, our mouse died.

00:01:26.560 | I think there's a 50% chance there's going to be a power outage in the next 15 minutes.

00:01:30.320 | Yeah, there was, this was before your time, Jesse, but there was a period when I was recording,

00:01:35.920 | I was recording an episode and there was a lightning storm and so I'm recording and there's

00:01:41.800 | lightning and, and there's this huge lightning strike that was nearby.

00:01:46.080 | Like you could just hear the thunder or whatever and like immediately began hearing a hum,

00:01:52.000 | right?

00:01:53.000 | In my, my equipment.

00:01:54.000 | And that hum has been with us ever since.

00:01:56.520 | It's like the bat in the natural, something about that lightning strike has like added

00:02:00.480 | a hum to the equipment that we've been battling ever since.

00:02:02.960 | So I don't know.

00:02:04.640 | I don't know what to turn off and turn on to fix that one.

00:02:06.880 | But, but yeah, we can only go uphill or downhill.

00:02:10.680 | I don't know what's better.

00:02:11.680 | We can, it can only get better from here, technically speaking.

00:02:14.880 | Now that we're actually recording.

00:02:16.480 | Oh, well.

00:02:18.160 | All right.

00:02:19.480 | So here's what I'm thinking.

00:02:21.560 | I think we'll do a deep dive.

00:02:24.800 | I always enjoy doing those and then we'll get into our normal collection of questions.

00:02:31.720 | So for today's deep dive, the topic I want to tackle is the following provocative question,

00:02:39.200 | is ambition worth it?

00:02:42.200 | Now, let me give a disclaimer before I set up this discussion.

00:02:46.280 | The disclaimer is this is not a topic for which I have polished, evolved thoughts that

00:02:52.040 | I am now going to convey to you.

00:02:53.800 | It's instead a topic that I have found interesting off and on.

00:02:57.440 | And particularly recently I've been thinking about.

00:02:59.480 | So this morning I just jotted down some thoughts.

00:03:01.720 | So what this is, what you're going to hear today is me thinking out loud, not delivering

00:03:07.120 | well thought through conclusions.

00:03:08.680 | So this, this should be fun, you know, buckle up for that.

00:03:12.260 | So what made me start thinking about ambition recently?

00:03:15.000 | There has been recently as there happens off and on, it feels like over the last couple

00:03:20.000 | of years, a big collection of various essays and articles that have come out that are all

00:03:26.240 | taking a negative stance against the idea of ambition.

00:03:32.000 | People often send these to me and so I encounter them quite often.

00:03:35.400 | I'm cited in some of these.

00:03:37.800 | What's interesting is sometimes I'm cited as the villain and sometimes I'm cited as

00:03:42.120 | the non-villain, depending on how you think about me or what part of my writing you're

00:03:46.800 | actually citing.

00:03:47.800 | These come to me because they often, they often cite me, but it got me thinking recently

00:03:52.720 | about this topic of ambition.

00:03:57.040 | So if you look at these, what I call anti-ambition essays, there's really two pieces to them.

00:04:04.980 | There's the piece which is personal and interesting and compelling, which is often people talking

00:04:11.180 | about their own struggles with ambition and the difficulty they have with it and the attempts

00:04:19.200 | they're making to perhaps disentangle their life from this ambition.

00:04:22.760 | And then there's a, maybe the explanatory part that's saying why, why is ambition something

00:04:29.160 | that is so popular?

00:04:30.920 | Why was I as the person writing this essay so entangled in ambition?

00:04:34.080 | And in some sense, that's less interesting to me because you just see whatever frame

00:04:38.500 | that person's cultural context lies within, we'll just give them that answer.

00:04:42.280 | So if you read anti-ambition essays coming from, let's say a sub stack writer who lives

00:04:46.680 | in Brooklyn, they're going to look around their cultural world and say, well, ambition

00:04:50.520 | is, it's from capitalism.

00:04:53.300 | Let's have like an economic materialist approach to this, where we say, if we can just get

00:04:57.600 | rid of capitalism, we can get rid of these sort of disordered affectations, these disordered

00:05:05.100 | compulsions towards accomplishment.

00:05:07.240 | Whereas if you read an anti-ambition essay, let's say from someone who lives in Montana

00:05:13.680 | and is really into bow hunting or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the frame there might be a much

00:05:18.320 | more Thoreauian type frame about simplicity and focusing on things that really matter

00:05:24.860 | and getting clutter out of your life.

00:05:26.400 | So it really just depends.

00:05:27.400 | So I don't care about the explanation, but I care about the phenomenon.

00:05:31.000 | I care about the phenomenon of these essays once again, becoming something that we read

00:05:36.680 | quite a bit about.

00:05:39.720 | So I want to jump, I want to jump into this and try to actually tackle this.

00:05:42.480 | So let's define ambition.

00:05:43.720 | Number one, the drive to do things of increasing impact.

00:05:48.220 | So it's that drive to do things that are notable, that have impact, that are rewarded or remunerative,

00:05:55.680 | depending on what your metrics are, but generally that drive, and it's often insatiable.

00:06:00.540 | So if you hit one level, then that next level begins to be appealing.

00:06:06.560 | And what I want to try to do here is go over the pros and cons of ambition.

00:06:13.680 | So let's get into that.

00:06:14.680 | Let's start with the cons.

00:06:15.880 | What's the issue with ambition?

00:06:19.180 | Number one, it leads or it can lead to burnout.

00:06:23.240 | We talk about burnout often on this show.

00:06:26.360 | And if we're talking in particular about professional burnout for people who do computer screen

00:06:30.320 | and email type jobs, there's really two big sources of burnout that people suffer from.

00:06:36.040 | One is chronic overload.

00:06:37.800 | I talked about this, for example, in my writing and my core ideas video on slow productivity.

00:06:42.480 | But if you have more on your plate consistently than you can even imagine accomplishing just

00:06:46.320 | too much on your plate, that can be quite distressing.

00:06:50.880 | It can short circuit the planning parts of your circuits, it can lead to an overhead

00:06:54.760 | spiral where you spend more time tending to all of these pending tasks than actually executing

00:06:59.560 | them.

00:07:00.560 | Recipe for burnout.

00:07:02.640 | The other main source of burnout among this particular context is when you spend too much

00:07:09.040 | time in a high arousal emotional state, so high stress state, high anxiety state.

00:07:15.560 | So, you know, your work is such that there's crises happening that keeps you at a high

00:07:21.800 | level of alertness.

00:07:22.800 | You can basically just burn out those systems.

00:07:25.000 | That's too much cortisol in your system.

00:07:27.120 | Your mind gives up on it.

00:07:29.340 | Burnout can happen as well.

00:07:31.480 | One can amplify both those issues.

00:07:33.640 | Because if you're ambitious, you are putting more and more stuff on your plate probably.

00:07:39.520 | Because you see these opportunities, you want to keep moving, you want to get after it.

00:07:42.720 | So chronic overload is a real hazard.

00:07:46.880 | Also if you're ambitious, that means you're taking on responsibility and making moves

00:07:49.960 | that are more likely to expose yourself to those high arousal states.

00:07:53.720 | So I'm going to start my own business.

00:07:56.040 | We're going to build this thing big.

00:07:58.800 | That's going to set you up for a lot of situations where there's a crisis with your business.

00:08:02.160 | You can't get the funding together.

00:08:03.440 | You're not going to make payroll.

00:08:04.480 | It's going to set you up for a lot of situations where you might have that consistent stress.

00:08:08.960 | Ambition can make it more likely that you burn out.

00:08:12.540 | It amplifies our human instinct to compare.

00:08:17.440 | Compare to other people.

00:08:18.440 | Now, we all do this.

00:08:19.920 | I mean, regardless of your ambition or not, you look on Instagram, you see this, you get

00:08:23.960 | a little bit jealous.

00:08:24.960 | But when you are ambitious, it can become close to intolerable when you see the success

00:08:32.320 | you want that you're not getting.

00:08:34.120 | And I want to say I'm speaking from some experience here.

00:08:38.600 | I have ambition.

00:08:42.360 | It is an odd mistress of mine that has both given and taken away.

00:08:46.920 | But I have felt this amplification of comparison issue.

00:08:49.320 | It's almost weird how it works.

00:08:51.000 | It's like your brain is being taken over by someone else.

00:08:54.000 | Here's something that I have periodic, just to make this personal, I have periodic bouts

00:08:57.800 | of this where I'll go through a period where I will feel bad about my status as a writer.

00:09:05.000 | Like, man, I just, I didn't hit where I want to get.

00:09:11.120 | Now by some standards, that's preposterous.

00:09:12.800 | Like I'm a successful writer.

00:09:14.160 | I have multiple books, I think four books at this point that are healthily into the

00:09:18.000 | six figures with sales.

00:09:19.160 | So I can consistently sell six figure books.

00:09:21.360 | I have a seven figure or a seven figure sale number book.

00:09:24.800 | I'm relatively well known, done well financially with the books.

00:09:28.640 | I've made impact on culture.

00:09:30.040 | I've introduced new ideas into the vernacular.

00:09:32.600 | Like I am a successful writer by most standards, but then I'll say, but here's what I'm not.

00:09:37.120 | I've never had a book where right out of the gate, it is on the New York Times bestseller

00:09:41.360 | list for a while.

00:09:43.680 | Notice how I'm subtly shifting the goalposts.

00:09:46.480 | My last two books have been New York Times bestsellers.

00:09:48.380 | So my mind shifts it.

00:09:49.640 | I've never had a book that stays on the list.

00:09:52.320 | I've never had one of those books where it's just on that Amazon chart, top 10 for six

00:09:56.960 | months when it comes out.

00:09:58.380 | Now we're talking about in my space, there's like five people who do that, but my mind

00:10:03.320 | will say, why aren't you one of those five?

00:10:07.160 | And then I'll come back to earth and be like, oh, that's crazy.

00:10:08.960 | I feel great about what I'm doing, but I'll have those bouts.

00:10:11.800 | And I point out that personal example, just to talk about the way that ambition can rewire

00:10:16.320 | your mind in these ways that are malformed as far as the outside world is concerned,

00:10:20.320 | that is crazy talk, but it'll hit you hard.

00:10:25.720 | Another issue with ambition is that it can keep you from other things that are important

00:10:29.080 | in your life.

00:10:30.080 | If you're not careful, this is often one of the big points that's hit when you read the

00:10:33.320 | modern anti-ambition essays is that, you know, if you're all in on, I am going to start the

00:10:38.260 | next Uber, you're not spending time with your kids.

00:10:41.480 | You're not spending time out in nature.

00:10:43.660 | Your mind is probably always moving.

00:10:45.320 | You're probably not very involved in your community and becoming a leader and sacrificing

00:10:48.960 | time and energy on behalf of people you care about.

00:10:51.200 | You're doing this one thing.

00:10:53.080 | So this is a real danger of ambition.

00:10:55.960 | It's easy to fall there, to get very out of balance in your life.

00:10:58.880 | This is why, when I talk about the deep life and my bucket system for the deep life, we

00:11:04.160 | have these various aspects you should focus on to try to keep that balance.

00:11:07.960 | And the final thing about ambition, the piece we don't talk about, even when we encourage

00:11:13.020 | people to follow their dreams or do whatever they want to do, is that you probably won't

00:11:18.280 | succeed.

00:11:20.280 | So the things that we are ambitious about are very hard.

00:11:22.720 | That's what makes them a target of ambition.

00:11:24.600 | Most people won't succeed.

00:11:26.800 | So you go to a really good school, you worked really hard to get there.

00:11:32.680 | You take an elite job, like I'm going to be a writer, going to move to New York, I'm going

00:11:37.040 | to be a writer.

00:11:38.420 | Maybe I'll be the next Joan Didion, and most people won't be.

00:11:43.860 | And so 10 years later, you're writing essays about, well, ambition is stupid anyways.

00:11:50.840 | So it's hard, man.

00:11:52.440 | It's hard.

00:11:53.440 | Most people don't get anywhere close to where they're going.

00:11:56.480 | There are also pros of ambition.

00:11:58.880 | Let's lay out the other side of this.

00:12:01.520 | So first of all, the pursuit of big goals is life affirming.

00:12:05.800 | I mean, this is the one thing I don't think the anti-ambition people acknowledge enough,

00:12:10.680 | is that there are few results that are better understood in human psychology than if you

00:12:15.160 | take away people's sense of efficacy, take away their sense of here's something you're

00:12:19.720 | in charge of that's important that you're working on.

00:12:23.060 | They will just wither.

00:12:24.700 | There's almost nothing worth you can do to a human than put them in a situation where

00:12:27.860 | they can't do anything.

00:12:30.040 | There's nothing I'm working towards.

00:12:31.400 | There's nothing I'm taking care of.

00:12:32.640 | There's no challenges I'm facing.

00:12:36.000 | That makes humans miserable.

00:12:38.080 | They need that and they need sociality.

00:12:39.840 | You take away either of those two things and it's a problem.

00:12:41.800 | So there is something life affirming going after something that's important or ambitious.

00:12:47.600 | It gives a focus, your energy.

00:12:49.680 | The human brain does not want to do nothing.

00:12:53.360 | For very brief periods, it gets uncomfortable with doing nothing.

00:12:57.360 | Also, accomplishment does make people feel good.

00:13:00.360 | Again, the anti-ambition essays tend to downplay this, but actually it feels good to accomplish

00:13:06.120 | something.

00:13:07.120 | There's like the burst of chemicals in the moment.

00:13:08.320 | Yes, that goes away.

00:13:09.320 | You're not going to have that opioid style high permanently, but there is a background

00:13:13.920 | hum of confidence and satisfaction that does come from accomplishment.

00:13:17.520 | And I think that is worth acknowledging.

00:13:19.600 | If you're doing something at a high level and you're recognized for it, you get a steady

00:13:23.880 | state sense of pride, of self-worth.

00:13:28.680 | You have more confidence.

00:13:30.760 | It feels good.

00:13:32.920 | So it's not all invented.

00:13:34.600 | So it's not all just constructed as part of a conspiracy to help certain groups exploit

00:13:38.800 | others.

00:13:39.800 | There are real benefits that you get there.

00:13:41.320 | And of course, society needs at least some people to be ambitious.

00:13:46.160 | That's what moves forward whole technologies and industries.

00:13:50.320 | You take someone like Elon Musk and when he is discussed in sort of elite cultural circles,

00:13:55.640 | everyone's just focusing on, does he believe the right things?

00:13:58.760 | Does he talk about things properly?

00:14:00.360 | Is he on our team?

00:14:01.360 | Is he on the other people's team?

00:14:02.900 | And I say, I don't know.

00:14:03.900 | I don't really care about that.

00:14:04.900 | He's kind of a weird guy.

00:14:05.900 | Yeah, I think we all kind of acknowledge that, but he single-handedly made basically every

00:14:10.040 | automaker in the country have a serious electric car strategy.

00:14:14.740 | He single-handedly reduced the cost of space flight by a factor of 10.

00:14:20.800 | That's crazy ambition.

00:14:22.440 | I don't want to live Elon Musk life.

00:14:25.000 | It's brutal, but I'm glad there's people living Elon Musk's life because we have cool electric

00:14:31.720 | cars now.

00:14:32.720 | And you can do this again and again with medicine and science, with the practitioners there.

00:14:38.320 | We wouldn't have relativity if it's not for the fierce ambition of Einstein.

00:14:42.440 | His whole family broke apart about this.

00:14:44.240 | His hair went white.

00:14:45.960 | Einstein's hair went white at a younger age than mine from the stress of trying to make

00:14:51.080 | these theories come together.

00:14:53.480 | His family life got terrible because of this.

00:14:56.480 | His health faltered because of this.

00:14:59.000 | I wouldn't want to do it, but relativity was absolutely foundational for understanding

00:15:03.840 | the modern world.

00:15:04.840 | So we also need ambition in the world, even if not everyone is doing it.

00:15:09.240 | All right, so we have pros and cons.

00:15:10.240 | So we get to the conclusion then.

00:15:11.480 | All right, so who wins?

00:15:13.520 | If the question is, is ambition worth it?

00:15:15.360 | We have two possible answers here.

00:15:17.400 | A, no, it's just an invention.

00:15:20.680 | It's a cultural construct that is exploitative of you.

00:15:26.560 | Stop it.

00:15:28.560 | Focus on just being present.

00:15:30.080 | Do less.

00:15:32.120 | And we'll just get rid of capitalism or whatever, or move to Montana, and we'll be OK.

00:15:37.320 | The other answer is, no, no, it's critical to feeling good.

00:15:40.120 | It's critical to self-affirmation.

00:15:42.320 | It's critical to the society growing.

00:15:43.840 | So what answer is right?

00:15:45.640 | I'm going to say neither.

00:15:48.520 | And I'm going to say both.

00:15:51.320 | Because this is where I'm beginning to fall on this issue.

00:15:55.000 | And beginning is the key word here.

00:15:56.440 | I do not have a comprehensive take on this yet.

00:15:58.920 | But where I'm beginning to fall on this issue is that ambition is novelistic.

00:16:05.760 | It's novelistic in its scope and impact.

00:16:08.160 | When I say novelistic, I mean messy and human and tragic and inspiring all at the same time.

00:16:16.600 | I think ambition gets to core contradictions in the human experience.

00:16:21.600 | We're miserable when it's removed from our life, but as we pursue it, it takes out of

00:16:25.520 | our life other things that we need to not be miserable.

00:16:28.920 | And there's tragedy in that.

00:16:31.200 | But there's also great inspiration in that.

00:16:33.240 | That's why I say it's novelistic.

00:16:34.880 | It's not something that we look at through an economic lens.

00:16:37.840 | It's not something that we necessarily look through a philosophic lens.

00:16:41.720 | It is messy.

00:16:42.720 | And it's very human.

00:16:46.040 | And just like when you read a deep novel, a deep, good piece of literature, you're able

00:16:51.360 | to actually revel in the complexity because that's part of what you try to get out of

00:16:55.520 | a good novel.

00:16:56.520 | We need that mindset, I believe, when we're thinking about ambition.

00:17:01.240 | Now I think there's probably an evolutionary explanation we could put behind this messiness.

00:17:07.200 | I never hesitate to throw in some ill-conceived, ill-thought-through pop evolutionary psychology.

00:17:12.600 | So let's do that real quick.

00:17:14.540 | And if you really were going to pull back the covers here, here's what you're going

00:17:17.020 | to find.

00:17:18.200 | In the Paleolithic, you have humans living tribally.

00:17:21.060 | We evolve a strong drive to be a respected member of our tribe that is critical to survival

00:17:27.780 | and passing on your genes.

00:17:28.900 | We know this is true in part because nothing makes us feel more immediate, uncontrolled,

00:17:37.300 | positive feelings than when we encounter a story of someone sacrificing on behalf of

00:17:43.300 | their tribe.

00:17:44.820 | It just hits us at a core, like, yes, that is right.

00:17:48.060 | Look at this person who stood up and took the arrows on behalf of his or her people.

00:17:54.420 | That instinctively feels well, and nothing makes us feel more uncomfortable and squirrely

00:17:58.540 | and weasely than hearing a story of someone who betrays their tribe or is weak or cowardly.

00:18:06.900 | Those are deep instincts.

00:18:07.900 | Deep instincts mean deep evolutionary paths.

00:18:10.940 | This thing has evolved.

00:18:12.420 | The issue, of course, is the Paleolithic gave way to the Neolithic, and suddenly we had

00:18:16.980 | cities and city-states and eventually nations.

00:18:21.180 | And so now we have this drive to be respected and be a leader, except for the people in

00:18:24.860 | our immediate surroundings are no longer 15 people that we have lived with intergenerationally

00:18:29.740 | for 15 generations.

00:18:31.060 | It's 15,000 people in a city-state.

00:18:33.580 | And that gave rise to this new type of Neolithic ambition, which we weren't evolved for.

00:18:39.100 | It is the evolved instinct to be a leader in the tribe applied to a much bigger context,

00:18:44.860 | and that's what gives you suddenly political ambitions.

00:18:48.740 | You have the pharaohs.

00:18:50.600 | It's what gives us intellectual ambition.

00:18:52.300 | You get Aristotle, you get Socrates.

00:18:54.500 | What gives us these theological ambitions, you get Siddhartha, you get Jesus Christ,

00:19:00.360 | you get people who are trying to think through religious thoughts that are going to impact

00:19:06.060 | the entire world.

00:19:07.260 | This is a parochial instinct applied on a scale that was never evolved for.

00:19:13.460 | And so I don't know if this is true, but I would wager it is that tension between an

00:19:17.780 | instinct that was evolved to make sense among 20 people, applied to a world of 6 billion

00:19:23.780 | that we now can communicate with and see and have an audience amongst, that creates this

00:19:29.580 | weird tension that we feel in our life, where this ambition to keep going farther, and yet

00:19:34.620 | that ambition is taking us away from the things that are important to us, like being with

00:19:37.700 | our family and with our community, and that's because there was a time when that was all

00:19:40.780 | the same thing.

00:19:42.660 | That time was 100,000 years ago.

00:19:44.380 | I don't know if that's true, but I think that's one way of trying to get at this fundamental,

00:19:49.060 | novelistic, tragic, inspirational tug-of-war that is at the core of so many people's life,

00:19:55.820 | which is the fight over ambition.

00:19:58.180 | So I don't have a nice, clean story to give you.

00:20:01.260 | I don't have a nice, clean answer.

00:20:02.740 | This is what you should do.

00:20:03.740 | You do these three steps, put this card on your Trello board, and use a time-block planner.

00:20:08.620 | Boom, you're good with ambition.

00:20:09.820 | I don't know the answer here yet, but I'm increasingly feeling that the answer is going

00:20:13.780 | to evolve, cutting each other some slack, and seeing ambition as this complicated, wonderful,

00:20:20.420 | terrible, interesting piece of the human condition, and not just a simple football we can kick

00:20:27.940 | back and forth.

00:20:28.940 | It's good, it's bad, that team likes it, this team doesn't.

00:20:32.100 | Something interesting going on here, and we should be okay with that nuance.

00:20:38.700 | So those are my thoughts on ambition.

00:20:42.700 | So there we go.

00:20:45.900 | All right, Chelsea.

00:20:47.900 | Well, I'm ambitious to get onto some questions, but we should probably take a brief moment

00:20:54.140 | to talk about a couple of our sponsors.

00:20:57.380 | Let's start with Blinkist, longtime sponsor of the show.

00:21:03.700 | Blinkist is a subscription service that allows you to get short summaries, 10 to 15 minute

00:21:09.060 | summaries of best-selling nonfiction books, important nonfiction books.

00:21:14.700 | You can get these short summaries called Blinks of thousands of important nonfiction titles.

00:21:22.300 | Now there's a lot of ways you can use Blinkist.

00:21:25.060 | What I've been talking about for a long time is that it is a great way to try to figure

00:21:28.780 | out which books are worth reading and where just a summary is enough.

00:21:34.020 | I read a lot of books, but there are way more books out there than I can possibly ever handle.

00:21:38.300 | Blinkist gives me a way of wading through these opportunities.

00:21:40.540 | If I'm interested in an idea, I can look at the Blinks for multiple books in that idea,

00:21:47.960 | get the lay of the land almost immediately.

00:21:50.340 | Here's the main topics, here's the main theories, and decide if there's any particular books

00:21:54.860 | in that genre that now I should actually go out and buy and dive in more deeper.

00:21:59.220 | I'm no longer flying blind.

00:22:00.740 | I can move through the world of books with some guidance.

00:22:06.420 | So I was looking at Blinkist just the other day, in particular, looking at the technology

00:22:11.020 | and future category, because this is a space I care about, and there's a lot of big ideas

00:22:15.820 | and it's impossible to figure out which books you should and shouldn't read.

00:22:20.040 | But just to give you an example here, if you're interested in Yuval Harari, who wrote Sapiens,

00:22:27.140 | and you see he has this follow-up book, Homo Deus, and you're trying to figure out, should

00:22:31.100 | I read this or not?

00:22:32.140 | What's it about?

00:22:33.820 | Here it is right here on the list, technology and the future.

00:22:37.380 | Ten, 15 minutes later, you have the main ideas.

00:22:43.100 | So Blinkist is a must-have tool for those who want to play in the world of books and

00:22:49.260 | ideas.

00:22:50.260 | So right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience.

00:22:54.420 | If you go to Blinkist.com/deep to start a free seven-day trial, you will get 25% off

00:23:02.020 | a Blinkist premium membership.

00:23:06.060 | That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial.

00:23:15.020 | That's Blinkist.com/deep.

00:23:19.780 | Let's also talk about Athletic Greens.

00:23:22.820 | Now Jesse, you can confirm you have heard me talk frequently about my Athletic Greens

00:23:27.500 | habits.

00:23:28.500 | I do indeed take Athletic Greens every morning.

00:23:30.240 | Can you confirm this, sir?

00:23:31.240 | I can confirm it.

00:23:32.240 | All right.

00:23:33.240 | So Jesse is the official voice of confirmation.

00:23:35.580 | What is Athletic Greens?

00:23:36.820 | It is, let me use their, I'll use their exact wording here so that I don't get it wrong.

00:23:43.660 | So it is a powder that you put into a drink.

00:23:46.820 | I add it to 12 ounces of waters that includes 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, whole

00:23:53.220 | food source, super foods, probiotics, and adaptogens.

00:23:57.980 | You drink it once a day, you drink it in the morning, and it makes sure that you have all

00:24:03.420 | of the different vitamins, minerals, super food, probiotics, adaptogens, all the stuff

00:24:07.460 | you want to get out of your diet, you make sure you have it all.

00:24:11.460 | You can try to eat clean, which I do, but you're not going to get all the things you

00:24:15.700 | need.

00:24:16.700 | So you do one scoop of Athletic Greens every morning, you are covered.

00:24:20.300 | Jesse, a couple of weeks ago we were trying to figure out what adaptogens are.

00:24:24.780 | I looked it up.

00:24:26.500 | Do you have a guess?

00:24:27.500 | Or do you, you might already know.

00:24:29.020 | You don't know, do you?

00:24:30.020 | I don't know.

00:24:31.020 | All right.

00:24:32.020 | So what's your guess as to what adaptogens do?

00:24:34.140 | Recovery, assist with recovery.

00:24:38.540 | That is incorrect.

00:24:39.540 | No, they give you the power of flight.

00:24:42.660 | So I don't know if you know that.

00:24:43.660 | So then I can dunk?

00:24:44.660 | Yes, you can dunk.

00:24:45.660 | No, actually, I heard it helps with anxiety.

00:24:50.860 | So I think this is a good selling point for these current times.

00:24:56.840 | So that is Athletic Greens.

00:24:57.840 | So I take it every morning.

00:24:59.820 | What I like about them, and I've said this before because I talked to them before I agreed

00:25:02.760 | to be their sponsor, this is all they do is this one product.

00:25:06.000 | And every year they call it a new version.

00:25:08.020 | They upgrade it again and again to make sure that the quality of the ingredients is better.

00:25:11.720 | They obsess about this, right?

00:25:13.540 | Getting just the right, best sourced versions of these things.

00:25:18.140 | Jess and I talk about this all the time.

00:25:19.580 | I cannot go into GNC to try to figure this out on my own.

00:25:22.540 | If I go into GNC, I will be immediately punched in the face by a bodybuilder.

00:25:27.900 | Athletic Greens allows me to avoid that.

00:25:31.800 | So to make it easy for you, let's see what we got here.

00:25:35.340 | Athletic Greens is going to give you a free one year supply of their immune supporting

00:25:41.600 | vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase.

00:25:46.820 | I will just say briefly the vitamin D they figured out needs to be in solution to be

00:25:52.580 | stable.

00:25:53.580 | So you add the vitamin D with a dropper at the last minute.

00:25:55.420 | So it's the only thing not in the powder that just shows how much they care about getting

00:25:58.260 | this right.

00:25:59.260 | They will give you a free vitamin D addition for your athletic greens and five free travel

00:26:04.500 | packs with your first purchase.

00:26:05.840 | All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/deep.

00:26:11.220 | Again that is athleticgreens.com/deep to take ownership over your health, to pick up the

00:26:15.880 | ultimate daily nutritional insurance and to gain the power of flight.

00:26:21.300 | So I think that's pretty good offer.

00:26:24.940 | I think there's probably a note on here somewhere that says, do not claim that this product

00:26:30.260 | gives people the power of flight.

00:26:32.260 | We've just created a lawsuit there.

00:26:35.500 | But you know, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

00:26:37.420 | All right, Jesse, I think we should do some questions.

00:26:40.780 | I have so many papers these days.

00:26:43.340 | Our show is becoming too complicated.

00:26:44.820 | I have so many stacks, so many stacks of paper in front of me these days that...

00:26:48.740 | It's a good thing the printer worked today.

00:26:50.900 | Yeah, this was one of the big additions to the HQ is when Jesse brought us a printer.

00:26:58.240 | We use that thing.

00:26:59.240 | Yeah, good printer.

00:27:00.240 | Good printer.

00:27:01.240 | Black and white.

00:27:02.240 | All right, let's do some questions.

00:27:04.640 | Let's start as always with questions about deep work.

00:27:09.960 | Our first question comes from Brandon.

00:27:14.000 | Brandon asks, does adopting a slow productivity mindset mean you should ditch your to-do list

00:27:21.620 | and capture systems?

00:27:23.180 | Am I doing too much if I need a full-fledged capture system?

00:27:27.380 | Well, Brandon, in an ideal world where you had complete control over what your working

00:27:33.900 | life looked like and you had no concerns about money, you were independently wealthy, so

00:27:37.940 | you could completely control your working life, I would say, yeah, it would be great

00:27:42.680 | if you didn't need all the things I talk about when I talk about time management.

00:27:47.440 | You don't need complicated capture systems.

00:27:50.120 | You don't need weekly and daily time block plans.

00:27:54.560 | That would probably actually be ideal.

00:27:57.560 | There are some people who do actually more or less accomplish this.

00:28:01.320 | The example that I like to give comes from probably the first article I wrote that began

00:28:06.000 | to scratch the surface on some of these ideas.

00:28:09.240 | It's also one of the favorite articles I've written in the past two years.

00:28:12.880 | It was for the New Yorker, and it was called The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.

00:28:19.960 | The narrative spine of this article was Merlin Mann.

00:28:25.160 | This name is familiar to a lot of Deep Questions listeners, but Merlin Mann in the 2000s started

00:28:30.000 | this blog called 43 Folders that was all about using modern technology to build these hyper-optimized,

00:28:39.040 | digitally enhanced productivity systems.

00:28:42.400 | He had a job as a project manager that he took in the '90s that as we fell into more

00:28:48.720 | and more of a culture of constant communication and constant email and constant work overload,

00:28:53.640 | the culture I talk about in my book, A World Without Email, he got more and more overloaded,

00:28:58.280 | and he stumbled across David Allen and Getting Things Done, and he was a real tech guy.

00:29:02.360 | He was like, "Man, I think if we could just build the right tools, I could stop feeling

00:29:07.840 | this way where I'm completely overwhelmed and completely stressed out."

00:29:13.240 | He started writing about trying to build those tools, and a lot of other people felt the

00:29:16.160 | same way, so that website got very popular, and he became a real leader of the productivity

00:29:21.520 | movement.

00:29:22.520 | Eventually, he was doing that website full-time and giving talks about it, and then he got

00:29:25.760 | a book deal to write a book about it, and that's when the wheels came off.

00:29:31.040 | This is the narrative that was the spine for that article, is that Merlin Mann eventually

00:29:37.000 | figured out, "I can't fix this problem by organizing better the deluge of things that

00:29:45.720 | are coming towards me, by having better tools, having better systems, better processes for

00:29:52.200 | dealing with the deluges coming with me."

00:29:54.160 | He said, "Ultimately, I can fix this problem by reducing the deluge, that instead of having

00:29:59.960 | a better system for having too much to do, what if I changed my notion of work so I didn't

00:30:04.080 | have that much to do, so that having these productivity systems that are so complex would

00:30:09.200 | be unnecessary?"

00:30:10.200 | That's roughly what he did.

00:30:12.880 | He shifted into podcasting pretty early on.

00:30:16.400 | This is just what I'm going to do.

00:30:18.000 | The way he explained it to me when I talked to him about it for the article was he doesn't

00:30:23.200 | really need those systems because his life is really simple.

00:30:25.720 | He has a recording schedule.

00:30:27.960 | This is when I need to be in the studio to record my podcast, and that's kind of it.

00:30:33.640 | He keeps to-do lists for household stuff.

00:30:37.440 | What do I need to buy at the grocery store, whatever, but he basically simplified his

00:30:40.580 | working life down to the point where he didn't really need to manage it.

00:30:44.920 | I think, yes, kind of ideally, a slow productivity ideal would be such that you're working on

00:30:49.000 | a small number of things one at a time.

00:30:50.720 | It's clear what you're working on.

00:30:51.760 | There's not that much to track.

00:30:53.520 | You don't have to squeeze as much as possible out of an eight-hour day because you're juggling

00:30:57.800 | 16 different tasks and projects, and you have to make progress on each without losing your

00:31:01.400 | mind.

00:31:02.400 | You don't need six Trello boards each for different roles because you only have one

00:31:05.240 | role.

00:31:06.240 | There's only one thing you need to do right now.

00:31:08.320 | You're writing or you're recording.

00:31:09.840 | So, yes, I think, Brandon, you're onto something.

00:31:12.440 | Ideally you would not need all of these systems.

00:31:14.200 | Now, in the real world, it's hard to get all the way to that point.

00:31:19.000 | If you can't get all the way to that point, then having all these systems is what you

00:31:22.280 | absolutely need.

00:31:24.880 | This weird step function here.

00:31:27.600 | So if you've simplified things, but there's still a non-trivial amount of work on your

00:31:30.960 | plate, by taming that with systems, you can actually get closer to the slow ideal.

00:31:38.440 | So having more systems is actually important when you're close to the slow productivity

00:31:43.440 | ideal, but not quite there.

00:31:45.920 | I've been working through some of these thoughts recently about slow productivity.

00:31:48.600 | I mean, I think, for example, part of what you can do with systems, if you're trying

00:31:54.040 | to be, embrace more slow productivity, is you can be much more automated about your

00:31:59.640 | small tasks.

00:32:01.780 | With the right systems, you can push these small tasks into certain times on certain

00:32:05.600 | days so that they're not weighing on your mind elsewise.

00:32:08.360 | So you can't get rid of them, but you can tame them, you can automate them and control

00:32:12.160 | them and move them into certain places where they only take your time three hours a week

00:32:16.160 | at these set times.

00:32:17.360 | That requires a lot of systems, but that's compressing the impact on your schedule.

00:32:21.440 | It's compressing the impact so your mind can be free in other times.

00:32:26.280 | I think being very careful about tracking what you're working on is critical if you're

00:32:29.280 | going to reduce that, because you can figure out what is my limits?

00:32:33.440 | What is the limit of work that I can handle easily?

00:32:36.880 | You can't figure that out if you're not carefully tracking this and tracking your time.

00:32:41.120 | So systems are critical for slow productivity.

00:32:45.320 | If and when, until you reach the slow productivity ideal, then maybe you don't need them anymore.

00:32:49.640 | Most of us aren't going to get there.

00:32:50.640 | So Brandon, most of us need systems.

00:32:51.960 | We want to be careful about our time so that we can protect that time.

00:32:56.360 | And then if we're lucky, we'll end up in a Merlin man type situation where we don't need

00:33:02.000 | the systems anymore.

00:33:03.000 | So until we get there, I think systems help make you do the best with what you can.

00:33:08.400 | All right, we got a question here from Steven.

00:33:13.800 | Steven says, "Hi Cal, I'm a software engineer and I struggle to stay focused anytime I have

00:33:19.560 | to wait for something to happen.

00:33:22.280 | For example, I may be waiting on a test suite to run or PR checks to pass or a service to

00:33:26.200 | start up.

00:33:27.200 | And these can take anywhere from two to 10 minutes.

00:33:30.480 | Is it okay to context switch these scenarios?

00:33:32.480 | And if not, what should I do with my attention given my next action will be dependent on

00:33:36.040 | the outcome of whatever I'm waiting for?"

00:33:38.240 | Steven, I hear this a lot from developers.

00:33:41.160 | They have all these pauses.

00:33:42.160 | Yeah, well, you're waiting for a compiler for your for your checks to complete.

00:33:47.200 | From a context switching perspective, there's two extremes that you should stick towards

00:33:52.760 | here.

00:33:53.760 | Very, very related activities are very, very unrelated activities.

00:33:58.240 | Don't go in the middle.

00:34:00.660 | So by very related activities, I'm working on this code, I'm running these checks on

00:34:05.920 | that, it's going to take four minutes.

00:34:07.680 | All right, during that four minutes, I'm looking at similar code, the next thing I'm going

00:34:13.400 | to test or I'm going back and trying to clean up some code I just wrote.

00:34:17.520 | So you stay, you're staying entirely within the context of the thing you're working on.

00:34:21.720 | That will minimize the context switching overhead because you're keeping most of the context

00:34:25.560 | the same.

00:34:26.560 | The other option is to go way far away from work altogether.

00:34:29.780 | So you say, "I need to go check Jesse Rogers' Twitter account to see how the player union

00:34:37.540 | management MLB union discussions are going today.

00:34:42.140 | And are we getting closer to an agreement on the collective bargaining?"

00:34:45.660 | Actually, their issue is with the competitive balance tax.

00:34:48.260 | Let's see what's going on there.

00:34:49.500 | That's so different from your work.

00:34:50.940 | But yes, it's a context shift, but it's not going to have nearly the same capture effect

00:34:55.580 | as something that's work related, but different than what you're doing.

00:34:59.020 | So what is this work related, but different what you're doing?

00:35:01.060 | What's the middle of the spectrum that's going to kill you?

00:35:03.740 | That's going to be things like email.

00:35:06.180 | Let me go look at other work related stuff, expose myself to questions I need to answer,

00:35:11.740 | responsibilities being put on my plate, stuff that people need from me, but I can't respond

00:35:15.460 | to all of them right now.

00:35:16.860 | And then turn my attention back to what I'm doing.

00:35:19.880 | That gray zone is what's killer.

00:35:22.280 | That gray zone, if you look at an email inbox, I'm seeing work stuff, but not super related

00:35:25.800 | to exactly what I'm doing is what's going to give you 20 minutes of sluggishness until

00:35:29.420 | you get your mind locked back in.

00:35:32.020 | That's the gray zone that if you keep going to it again and again throughout the morning

00:35:34.700 | by 2pm, you're done because that's a painful context shift.

00:35:39.460 | So either stick with what very close to what you're doing or go very far away from what

00:35:42.860 | you're doing.

00:35:44.460 | But don't go in somewhere in between.

00:35:46.120 | So unrelated work stuff, email is killer.

00:35:50.340 | Social media is killer.

00:35:51.820 | If it's emotionally arousing, that's also a problem.

00:35:54.060 | So I'll put that as a caveat.

00:35:56.180 | Don't look at information about the war, the Ukraine during your five minute check.

00:36:02.700 | That's also going to be quite diverting.

00:36:03.980 | So nothing emotionally arousing, nothing that's related, but not exactly related to what you're

00:36:07.660 | doing and it's the best you can do.

00:36:09.820 | All right.

00:36:10.820 | So we've got a question here from Tom.

00:36:15.780 | Tom says, "What do you do when you get tired?"

00:36:21.980 | He elaborates he's extremely good at sticking to time blocking, not going on social media,

00:36:26.700 | doing Pomodoro at the beginning of the week, but as the week goes on, I get a bit tired

00:36:29.820 | and burnt out and it's easier and easier to lose focus.

00:36:32.380 | I wonder if you can relate at all.

00:36:33.980 | Of course not, Tom.

00:36:36.300 | Tiredness is equivalent to cowardice.

00:36:38.060 | You should be ashamed.

00:36:39.060 | Don't do tiredness.

00:36:40.060 | No, Tom, of course people get tired.

00:36:44.100 | And there's two answers to this, right?

00:36:46.500 | I mean, one, if you're tired at a given day for whatever reason, sleep, sickness, et cetera,

00:36:53.620 | do less, do less that day.

00:36:56.260 | I mean, what are you doing during the day?

00:36:58.260 | You're taking energy and you're converting it into output of value.

00:37:03.900 | And you're doing that mainly by putting this energy through the circuits in your brain

00:37:08.100 | to add value to information if you're a knowledge worker, but you're converting energy to value

00:37:11.500 | if you have less energy, there's less value you can produce.

00:37:15.540 | So I think that's fine.

00:37:17.500 | The key, however, is to remain intentional about it.

00:37:21.980 | So the thing that you don't want to do is as you get tired, if you're tired in a given

00:37:26.380 | day or you get tired as the week goes on, you don't want to just become ad hoc and lax.

00:37:32.140 | Like, eh, I'm sort of falling off my time block schedule and going down rabbit holes

00:37:38.220 | online, and I sort of limp in for a finish on that day or limp in for a finish that week.

00:37:41.820 | No, don't do that.

00:37:42.820 | If you see you're less energy, say I'm going to work less today, but I'm going to make

00:37:45.060 | a plan for this less work day.

00:37:48.100 | I'm going to end it early.

00:37:49.900 | I'm going to put a two hour break in the middle.

00:37:52.580 | I'm going to move things from this week to next week, but I'm still going to stick to

00:37:56.260 | the plan.

00:37:57.260 | I'm just going to make a plan that better fits my energy.

00:37:59.420 | That is the key.

00:38:00.580 | That is the key to energy and time management is intentionality, intentionality, intentionality.

00:38:05.620 | If you are giving your time a job that is based off a realistic assessment of what's

00:38:10.260 | going on in your current context, you're winning.

00:38:12.800 | If you are letting other factors in your mind and context just push you around like a leaf

00:38:18.600 | on a turbulent stream, you're in trouble.

00:38:22.860 | The exhaustion is going to amplify.

00:38:24.700 | You're going to feel bad.

00:38:25.700 | You're not going to end up in a place that's good.

00:38:28.540 | So it's always the best thing to do is to be intentional.

00:38:30.780 | And the main point I want to make here, Tom, and I think it's a good one, and I'm glad

00:38:33.760 | you asked it.

00:38:34.760 | The main point I want to make is that some days you have more energy than others.

00:38:39.460 | That means there's less work you can produce and that's fine.

00:38:41.540 | But what I want to see again is a plan that reflects a lower energy day.

00:38:46.660 | Here's my lower energy day plan.

00:38:48.420 | I finish at two.

00:38:50.540 | I take an hour lunch or I don't work.

00:38:52.980 | I replace this hard thing with an easier thing, whatever you need to do.

00:38:56.860 | So be intentional about it, Tom.

00:38:58.860 | All right, let's see what else what we have here.

00:39:01.940 | I've got a question from DK.

00:39:05.420 | DK is asking if I have any suggestions on what habits to add and improve when going

00:39:13.700 | from a PhD to a postdoc.

00:39:16.860 | Yeah, postdocs are highly autonomous as compared to PhD programs.

00:39:22.460 | It's all about research.

00:39:23.980 | Build your whole day around research.

00:39:26.620 | That's what it's about is doing research, doing research well.

00:39:30.940 | You will find that you probably have more free time than you're used to because if all

00:39:37.180 | you're doing is research, there's only so much of you doing the research during the

00:39:39.620 | day.

00:39:40.620 | That's fine.

00:39:41.860 | Just build a schedule that doesn't require as many hours.

00:39:43.980 | I'll tell you what I did, DK, when I switched from my doctoral work to my postdoctoral work

00:39:49.540 | is I was looking ahead to when I was going to become a professor after being a postdoc.

00:39:54.060 | And I said, when I'm a professor, my time is going to be way more limited than it is

00:39:58.780 | right now as a postdoc.

00:40:00.060 | I'm going to have classes, I'm going to have committees, and I have students to supervise.

00:40:05.460 | And so I don't know, in addition to practicing research as a postdoc, I want to practice

00:40:12.220 | being effective at doing research even if I have reduced time.

00:40:15.500 | So I added artificial constraints to my schedule.

00:40:18.980 | I had a dog at this point, lived about a mile from campus.

00:40:22.660 | I've talked about this before, across the bridge in Beacon Hill.

00:40:26.420 | And so I built a schedule where I'd start at 9, but I'd take a two-hour block out of

00:40:30.740 | the middle of every day.

00:40:31.740 | Where I'd take my dog, Bailey, we'd go for a run.

00:40:36.060 | We'd run from the east campus there of MIT down the Charles, we would go down to the

00:40:42.060 | Mass Avenue Bridge.

00:40:43.780 | We'd cross at the Mass Avenue Bridge, come running back on the Charles on the Boston

00:40:47.140 | side.

00:40:48.140 | We'd exercise calisthenics on one of the docks that's out in the Charles River off of that

00:40:52.460 | exercise.

00:40:53.460 | And if it was winter, we would dig out a spot on that dock out of the snow to do our push-ups.

00:40:58.260 | We were hardcore about it.

00:40:59.500 | Then do our pull-ups.

00:41:01.220 | And so we would do this long run, weather didn't matter, I had gear.

00:41:05.220 | Go back to my apartment on Beacon Hill, I would have lunch, I would take a shower, and

00:41:09.780 | then I would walk back to campus, now crossing the Longfellow Bridge.

00:41:14.740 | This is like a two-hour plus thing.

00:41:17.460 | But I wanted to put an artificial constraint in my day to say, "Okay, I not only need to

00:41:21.300 | get used to doing research, but getting a lot of research done when I only have a limited

00:41:25.140 | amount of time."

00:41:26.140 | So I felt like I was training.

00:41:28.100 | I also wrote a book.

00:41:29.900 | So I wrote most of Sogo, They Can't Ignore You during my postdoc as well.

00:41:34.660 | So that's what I would suggest.

00:41:35.660 | It's all about research, get used to research, making progress on research.

00:41:39.100 | Don't worry about having too much time.

00:41:40.460 | In fact, this is a good time to do something else so you can practice doing that research

00:41:44.180 | with some constraints.

00:41:45.340 | It's an awesome job, basically, DK.

00:41:47.380 | It doesn't pay well, but it's otherwise an awesome job, so enjoy it.

00:41:51.020 | All right, we got a question from Jeff.

00:41:54.900 | Jeff wants to know about diet.

00:41:57.380 | Can you please discuss how you approach your diet?

00:42:00.660 | Have you experimented with what specific foods best facilitate deep work, and how do you

00:42:04.460 | balance this with realities of life?

00:42:06.300 | Jeff, I'm not super strict about this, but I would say that the person I default back

00:42:12.340 | to following on food is probably Mark Sisson.

00:42:16.460 | I like the way Mark Sisson talks about things.

00:42:19.260 | There's different ways to describe what he's talking about.

00:42:21.860 | It's keto adjacent.

00:42:25.220 | So he talks about metabolic flexibility.

00:42:28.040 | So it's not that you want to be in ketosis all the time, but you have the ability to

00:42:32.900 | tip over into ketosis a little bit and come back.

00:42:35.060 | But what that means for people who don't follow that type of stuff is not a lot of simple

00:42:39.580 | sugars, not a lot of carbohydrates.

00:42:41.180 | It's not carb-free, but you're not eating a ton of bread.

00:42:44.020 | You're not eating a ton of pasta.

00:42:47.300 | Healthy fats, vegetables, proteins, what you would think.

00:42:52.740 | And I've fallen back on him as a default.

00:42:55.420 | I try to eat that way to the best of my ability.

00:42:58.260 | Jesse, I know you think about this more.

00:43:01.580 | Again, my understanding of your diet is you eat once every two weeks.

00:43:05.620 | Is that right?

00:43:06.620 | But what do you do?

00:43:07.620 | What do you do for your food?

00:43:08.620 | Because you care about this more than I do.

00:43:11.100 | I'm actually just looking up Mark Sisson.

00:43:12.540 | I've never heard of him.

00:43:13.620 | He's jack.

00:43:14.620 | Yeah.

00:43:15.620 | And he's 65 now, I think.

00:43:16.620 | Yeah.

00:43:17.620 | Yeah.

00:43:18.620 | I'm going to start following him.

00:43:19.620 | So do you know the Mark Sisson story?

00:43:23.100 | No.

00:43:24.100 | Okay.

00:43:25.100 | He's an endurance athlete.

00:43:26.260 | He was an endurance athlete.

00:43:27.260 | He was a professional triathlete when he was younger.

00:43:31.420 | And destroyed his body.

00:43:32.580 | He was sick all the time.

00:43:34.580 | I think he got prediabetes at some point.

00:43:36.540 | Because back then, it was like carb, carb, carb.

00:43:40.380 | And it's not like you're going to look fat if you're a professional athlete.

00:43:43.860 | You're burning it all up.

00:43:44.860 | But it was just ripping up his body.

00:43:46.420 | He was having immune responses or whatever.

00:43:49.140 | And so he shifted.

00:43:50.140 | He was one of the early sort of paleoprimal type people.

00:43:52.740 | He's like, you know what?

00:43:53.740 | I'm just going to eat the junk that was around for hundreds of thousands of years.

00:43:57.380 | And he sort of switched over to no more grains, no more processed food.

00:44:03.900 | And he did that early on.

00:44:04.900 | And all of his issues went away.

00:44:06.860 | His knee problems and his joint problems and his prediabetes.

00:44:11.100 | And he got really jacked.

00:44:13.100 | He's a big guy.

00:44:14.940 | And then he started a company eventually.

00:44:16.180 | So he had an early blog called Mark's Daily Apple, where he would talk about this stuff.

00:44:20.140 | And he had a cool book called The Primal Blueprint.

00:44:21.740 | Because it wasn't just about food.

00:44:23.180 | It was like, you need to live like a caveman type stuff.

00:44:25.940 | He was early to that.

00:44:27.740 | But more accessible than like a Rob Wolf type.

00:44:30.540 | And then he started a company called Primal Kitchen that was doing mainly salad dressings.

00:44:36.620 | That were made with avocado oil.

00:44:40.020 | So it didn't have the junk seed oils.

00:44:42.020 | And didn't have sugars in them.

00:44:43.380 | And so if you liked what he was doing, he had mayonnaises and salad dressings or whatever.

00:44:47.980 | And about four or five years ago, Kraft bought that for $200 million.

00:44:52.140 | So then he peaced out of California.

00:44:54.740 | And he lives down on Miami Beach now.

00:44:57.220 | And is tanned and ripped.

00:44:59.180 | And is doing well for himself.

00:45:00.940 | But anyways, I like him.

00:45:02.940 | He's accessible too.

00:45:03.940 | He doesn't get weirdly doctrinaire.

00:45:07.580 | Some people, like paleo people can get weirdly doctrinaire.

00:45:09.860 | Where they're arguing about what nuts a Neanderthal in this region of France would have had access

00:45:17.500 | to during the early place.

00:45:19.420 | No, he's not super doctrinaire.

00:45:20.740 | He's like, guys, just don't eat a bunch of flour and sugar and crap that didn't exist.

00:45:24.500 | And healthy fats are good.

00:45:26.380 | And be outside a lot.

00:45:28.140 | And don't just be in a gym.

00:45:29.700 | He's all about play.

00:45:31.780 | Do sports and stuff with people.

00:45:33.540 | Or when you're outside.

00:45:34.540 | So that's Marxism.

00:45:35.540 | But anyway, so back to your diet.

00:45:37.700 | So once every two weeks, you eat one gallon of athletic greens.

00:45:44.260 | Is that how it works?

00:45:45.260 | You just have a giant bucket of athletic greens that you sit there and you spend an hour and

00:45:51.020 | you eat it once every two weeks.

00:45:52.220 | Do I have that about right?

00:45:53.220 | Yeah, more or less.

00:45:54.900 | Actually a good resource is Tom Brady's TV 12 book.

00:45:58.420 | They got a good chapter in there on food and diet.

00:46:00.980 | I looked at that book.

00:46:01.980 | A lot of it's like, not that it's weird, but a lot of it's about flexibility.

00:46:08.500 | It felt very specific to being a 40 year old quarterback.

00:46:12.820 | Like aggressive work to make tendons more flexible.

00:46:16.820 | There's a chapter though in there about nutrition and what he buys at the store.

00:46:19.660 | And there's some good stuff in there.

00:46:20.740 | Is that what you do?

00:46:24.140 | It seems like Mark and Brady, they eat pretty much the same stuff.

00:46:28.220 | It's pretty simple.

00:46:29.220 | They just eat the sugar and other...

00:46:32.020 | Why is there this, I don't get this pushback on the paleo world.

00:46:36.340 | There's a huge pushback on it.

00:46:38.420 | And I think it's just personal.

00:46:42.100 | People don't like the paleo people are kind of annoying.

00:46:45.140 | And so they're like, well, we're going to dunk on you and say there was grains of certain

00:46:49.500 | types that people ate or this or that.

00:46:50.980 | And the whole thing to me seems pretty crazy because what could be more self-evident than

00:46:55.420 | at the very least, you can't possibly be doing harm by focusing mainly on foods that humans

00:47:03.300 | ate for a long time.

00:47:04.540 | Now you could debate like, okay, maybe bread's not as bad as you think it is or something

00:47:09.100 | like this, but you can't possibly be doing harm by not eating bread because that's whatever

00:47:15.540 | it is, 10,000 years old or something like that.

00:47:17.860 | You can't possibly be doing harm by not eating cane sugar because we barely ate that until

00:47:26.900 | recently.

00:47:27.900 | So that's what I don't get about is the pushback is if you avoid stuff that is new, you're

00:47:34.500 | avoiding processed food, you're avoiding sugar, you're avoiding a lot of processed carbohydrates,

00:47:40.660 | can't possibly be bad.

00:47:43.100 | So then the debate is about like, well, maybe not doing that isn't as bad as you think,

00:47:49.380 | or maybe these things you're avoiding maybe aren't as bad as you're thinking.

00:47:51.580 | Yeah, maybe it is.

00:47:52.580 | But I think a lot of it's just they don't like how annoying, which they do get annoying.

00:47:55.860 | The paleo people get so doctrinaire and weird about it because people like to be doctrinaire

00:47:59.700 | and weird about things.

00:48:00.700 | But this is general idea of like, you're not going to go wrong eating meats and vegetables

00:48:07.380 | and fruits in moderation, like roughly what you might've eaten 20,000 years ago.

00:48:12.500 | It's not going to be unhealthy.

00:48:15.420 | Yeah.

00:48:16.420 | I mean, the food industry does such a good job of marketing.

00:48:19.340 | You walk into any grocery store, like the whole middle of it is all well-marketed, really

00:48:24.580 | good tasting stuff that's not good for you.

00:48:28.300 | I mean, what Sisson does, I think is he calls it a big ass salad, but his first meal of

00:48:34.020 | the day, he makes a huge salad with all sorts of crap in it.

00:48:38.020 | And he has these salad dressings, which because he's all about healthy fats, so they're avocado

00:48:41.500 | oil dressings, like get fat, right?

00:48:43.580 | But healthy fats.

00:48:44.580 | He has this huge salad and it makes him full and then he does a good dinner.

00:48:50.580 | We have lean steak and we eat broccoli and whatever, like stuff he likes and doesn't

00:48:56.180 | think about that much.

00:48:57.180 | And spends a lot of time outside and exercises in various ways and hangs out with people

00:49:02.020 | on the beach.

00:49:03.020 | The other thing too is like going to restaurants and stuff.

00:49:06.140 | I mean, it's hard to eat well in restaurants, any restaurant really.

00:49:09.460 | I mean, the food tastes really good and it's super salty.

00:49:12.140 | Yeah.

00:49:13.140 | Got a lot of butter.

00:49:14.140 | Yeah.

00:49:15.140 | I hear you with that.

00:49:16.140 | All right, Jeff.

00:49:17.140 | So I don't know.

00:49:18.140 | I don't know if that was helpful, but at the very least, look at pictures of how ripped

00:49:21.180 | the 65 year old man is because it's almost disturbing.

00:49:26.260 | It's like a little bit disturbing because he's old, but he's my hero from a food perspective

00:49:32.620 | and read the primal blueprint.

00:49:33.620 | It's a cool book.

00:49:34.620 | All right, let's do one more question here.

00:49:36.900 | What are we at?

00:49:37.900 | We're rolling along here.

00:49:39.140 | Let's do one more deep work question.

00:49:40.860 | This one is from Sparky.

00:49:43.220 | Sparky says in a 2014 blog post, you talked about temporary plans.

00:49:50.700 | As I am a professor as well, these longer two to three week plans seem more useful than

00:49:55.460 | a purely weekly plan for occasions like into the semester or a period before spring break

00:49:59.180 | or big conference travel.

00:50:00.380 | Do you have any updated tips or advice for these?

00:50:03.660 | I do Sparky.

00:50:04.780 | So when I used to talk about temporary plans, these were either habits you were temporarily

00:50:11.780 | trying out or work heuristics or plans that apply to a time delimited period, like the

00:50:18.380 | next month or the next two or three weeks.

00:50:20.020 | And I used to email these to myself.

00:50:21.700 | They'd be in my inbox, temporary plans.

00:50:25.300 | So I could see them in there.

00:50:27.220 | The main change I've made Sparky is I don't do that anymore.

00:50:29.580 | I just have the temporary plans live on my weekly plan.

00:50:34.260 | And when I redo my weekly plan, I'll be like, yeah, this temporary plan is still in effect.

00:50:37.500 | So I'll just keep it there.

00:50:40.240 | And I used to email my temporary plans to myself, my weekly plans to myself rather.

00:50:43.820 | Now I print them out.

00:50:44.820 | Now I just keep, I don't want to have to look in my inbox at any occasion when I don't have

00:50:49.540 | to.

00:50:50.540 | So that's my one change is just have that live on your weekly plan at the top of your

00:50:54.180 | weekly plan.

00:50:55.960 | You can even label them as like ongoing or temporary plans.

00:50:58.940 | And I just have a Word document where my last weekly plan exists.

00:51:02.760 | And I just update it.

00:51:04.340 | When I update it, there's a lot of these bigger picture, temporary plan or heuristic type

00:51:08.500 | things that I just keep there.

00:51:10.500 | So that'd be my only change.

00:51:12.140 | All right.

00:51:13.620 | So that's what we have about deep work.

00:51:16.600 | Before we go on to questions about the deep life, however, I want to talk briefly about

00:51:22.100 | another sponsor that helps make this show possible.

00:51:26.700 | That sponsor is Mark Sisson.

00:51:27.980 | So thank you, Mark Sisson.

00:51:30.500 | Mark Sisson, weirdly ripped.

00:51:32.500 | All right.

00:51:33.500 | So that's one of our sponsors.

00:51:35.140 | No, but actually this is a nutritional sponsor.

00:51:37.260 | So it's relevant.

00:51:39.660 | And that is Just Egg.

00:51:43.580 | So Jess and I were just talking about diet, right?

00:51:45.820 | As part of talking about diet, we talked about how we eat clean, avoid a bunch of processed

00:51:51.740 | food, avoid a lot of carbohydrates and sugars.

00:51:55.340 | And this is why often for breakfast, I'm an eggs guy.

00:51:59.660 | Good healthy fat eggs bought from the farmer's market is I love it, but that's a lot of eggs.

00:52:06.420 | If you're going to have that every single day, and this is where Just Eggs enters the

00:52:10.020 | picture.

00:52:12.280 | Just Eggs is a company that's going to help you cook the best omelets you'll have all

00:52:17.460 | year round, all while changing the world one egg at a time.

00:52:20.580 | And the way they do it is with their product, which is a cholesterol free plant based egg

00:52:27.580 | that will give you the most decadent quiches of your life, the fluffiest scrambles and

00:52:32.660 | the easiest egg sandwiches of all time.

00:52:36.420 | It has about the same protein as a chicken egg, but less saturated fat.

00:52:39.580 | Plus Just Egg is packed with cholesterol, lowing polyunsaturated fat.

00:52:44.580 | Chicken eggs wish they were this healthy.

00:52:48.340 | And because Just Eggs comes from plants, you're also helping to save the planet.

00:52:54.580 | This is why I like Just Eggs is sure I like chicken eggs, but I get a little bit uncomfortable

00:52:58.740 | eating them every single day.

00:53:01.260 | Throw Just Eggs into the rotation.

00:53:04.580 | They taste great.

00:53:05.580 | They're based on plants.

00:53:07.540 | It feels lighter.

00:53:09.340 | I am a fan.

00:53:10.580 | So Just Eggs, really good eggs.

00:53:14.500 | That's a good tagline.

00:53:16.140 | Just Eggs, really good eggs.

00:53:17.740 | So keep your eyes peeled for Just Eggs.

00:53:20.980 | I also want to talk about New Relic.

00:53:26.700 | So New Relic is a company that is very relevant if you are a software engineer.

00:53:32.840 | If you're a software engineer, you've probably been there before where it is 9pm, you're

00:53:38.420 | finally unwinding from work, your phone buzzes with an alert, and something's broken.

00:53:45.940 | So your mind begins racing trying to figure out what could be wrong.

00:53:49.580 | Is it my server?

00:53:50.580 | Is there a network connection down that I misconfigure something in my cloud setup,

00:53:54.540 | you have a whole team now scrambling from tool to tool and loading up this web interface

00:53:58.960 | and running this kludge together script that someone wrote messaging person after person

00:54:03.900 | trying to fix the issue.

00:54:05.060 | So this is a very large problem that you will not face if you use New Relic.

00:54:13.260 | So New Relic combines 16 different monitoring products that you'd normally buy separately.

00:54:17.440 | So engineering teams can see across their entire software stack in one place.

00:54:22.300 | There's a problem, load up New Relic, look at the dashboard, boom, there it is.

00:54:27.520 | There's the issue.

00:54:28.620 | So you can pinpoint issues down to the line of code.

00:54:33.260 | So you know exactly why the problem happened, and how you can resolve it quickly.

00:54:38.300 | That's why the dev teams and ops teams at places like DoorDash, GitHub and Epic Games

00:54:43.780 | rely on New Bug to debug and improve their software.

00:54:47.060 | I was blown away.

00:54:48.060 | I talked to someone from New Relic.

00:54:51.620 | I'm blown away by how widely used this is.

00:54:54.620 | Jesse, if you had to guess, and I know if there's one thing you know about, it's debugging

00:54:58.420 | real time issues with software stacks.

00:55:00.060 | But if you had to guess, how many companies do you think are using New Relic right now?

00:55:05.380 | 1500.

00:55:08.020 | More than 14,000.

00:55:10.660 | So if you're in the world, if you're a dev teams or an ops team, this is like hearing,

00:55:15.980 | I don't know, Microsoft or something.

00:55:17.780 | It is the player that you have to keep in mind.

00:55:21.460 | So whether you're running a cloud native startup or a fortune 500 company, it takes just five

00:55:25.780 | minutes to set up New Relic in your environment.

00:55:29.780 | So that next 9pm call is just waiting to happen, get New Relic before it does.

00:55:34.860 | You can get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100 gigabytes of data forever

00:55:39.460 | no credit card required if you sign up at New Relic.com slash deep.

00:55:44.540 | That's any w r e l i c.com slash deep New Relic.com slash deep.

00:55:55.580 | You're only if you don't get New Relic, your alternative is to have Jesse debug your software

00:55:58.700 | stack.

00:55:59.700 | That's your options.

00:56:01.420 | New Relic, 16 tools all in one place, or Jesse, who will turn it off and turn it back on.

00:56:09.820 | That fix your problem.

00:56:10.820 | Did you try unplugging it?

00:56:13.740 | Yeah, that's all I would be able to offer to you.

00:56:16.060 | I am a terrible at software.

00:56:17.940 | Computer scientists use terrible at software.

00:56:19.620 | But what I can do is answer questions about the deep life.

00:56:22.660 | And that's what we're gonna do right now.

00:56:24.900 | We got one here from Andrew, writing all the way from Australia.

00:56:31.540 | He says Morning Cal, I started my PhD late last year, and stumbling on your books and

00:56:36.940 | podcasts has helped me focus and work deeper.

00:56:40.100 | I love trail running and doing Ironmans, but I'm struggling to permit myself to continue

00:56:44.100 | training and competing in these while undertaking the biggest deep work of my life so far my

00:56:48.940 | PhD.

00:56:51.940 | Can I do both or should I just focus on the PhD?

00:56:54.500 | Andrew, I think you should do both.

00:56:57.380 | Do not inflate the PhD in your mind to be this incredibly difficult hell week at Navy

00:57:07.180 | SEAL training, taking the beach at Normandy type of massive trial that some people do

00:57:14.900 | and say this is a relatively easy job.

00:57:18.660 | I have some classes and the classes are done and then I mainly focus on research and research

00:57:22.540 | is hard, but it only takes up so much of your time each day.

00:57:25.380 | So I say do the hardcore athletic training if anything is going to help balance you out

00:57:29.260 | so that when you get worn out intellectually, your confidence gets shaken.

00:57:34.580 | Oh, man, I'm not getting this my paper got rejected, you have something else to do.

00:57:39.360 | And so do those two things.

00:57:41.380 | For most programs, again, a PhD program is not this huge, life consuming type of position.

00:57:47.340 | I know this in part because when I was writing about student stuff, PhD student myself, I

00:57:53.980 | was writing about a lot of student stuff, I had noticed there was this disturbing subculture

00:57:59.780 | of people at this point largely blogging, sort of pre-social media, blogging about life

00:58:06.620 | as a grad student.

00:58:07.900 | And they would inflate it into this like terrible thing that was the hardest burden that anyone

00:58:13.380 | would ever do and these things had titles like dissertation hell and you would read

00:58:18.280 | these things and you would think, you would think that these students had been deployed

00:58:25.900 | to war torn countries in which they had to run life threatening commando raids through

00:58:31.980 | terrible conditions or something like this.

00:58:33.700 | And what I finally figured out was happening is that being a doctoral student, A, is a

00:58:38.100 | really weird job.

00:58:39.180 | It's not like a normal job.

00:58:40.500 | There's big periods where you don't have much to do or the things you do is non-standard.

00:58:45.900 | It's not people giving you tasks to accomplish.

00:58:48.700 | You don't have a nine to five schedule.

00:58:50.860 | That makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

00:58:52.740 | Like is this really a job I have?

00:58:54.420 | So by inflating it to be this big, hard thing, I think it somehow helps people counter that

00:59:00.460 | feeling of like, I don't really have a real job.

00:59:03.260 | So I thought that was part of it.

00:59:04.940 | Another part of it is there is an anxiety or intellectual insecurity that a lot of people

00:59:09.460 | rightly would suffer from.

00:59:11.020 | When I say rightly, I mean it's justified because it's a weird world.

00:59:13.580 | It's a job that's all about your brain and people posturing who's smarter and it helps

00:59:19.520 | you feel better.

00:59:20.520 | I can justify this anxiety I'm feeling about intellectual issues, like can I keep up or

00:59:26.180 | whatever by just describing what I'm going through as this big, terrible thing in general.

00:59:32.460 | And then your anxiety makes sense.

00:59:34.540 | But I'm going to say resist that.

00:59:36.800 | It's a pretty easy job.

00:59:38.940 | And again, I wrote two books during my PhD that had nothing to do with my PhD, just as

00:59:49.820 | something to do on the side.

00:59:51.580 | And I ran study hacks where we were doing three posts a week back then.

00:59:54.920 | And I was still bored because it's kind of a fake job.

00:59:57.340 | So Andrew, keep training for Iron Man at the same time.

01:00:00.340 | All right.

01:00:01.660 | Jennifer asks, at what age will you allow your kids to have phones and access to social

01:00:06.620 | media?

01:00:07.620 | Well, we'll see, Jennifer.

01:00:09.500 | I mean, I think the culture around this, as I talk about, is changing.

01:00:12.380 | So by the time it's relevant, the culture on this may have already changed.

01:00:16.900 | But in general, right now, the way I think about it is I'm fine with flip phones, like

01:00:23.140 | whatever age it is that it becomes convenient for you to be able to text your kid.

01:00:27.820 | You know, they're at sports practice and can you come pick me up or they want to text their

01:00:31.780 | friends like, are you coming over today?

01:00:33.540 | I don't know what age that becomes relevant.

01:00:36.980 | But a flip phone is fine.

01:00:37.980 | I have no problem with text communication and I recognize that it's useful.

01:00:42.980 | Giving a kid, however, access to a full smartphone where they have unrestricted access to the

01:00:47.380 | internet and social media, sanctioning your kid having social media accounts, I would

01:00:52.140 | say 16 at the youngest, 18 from the psychology perspective is probably better.

01:00:56.980 | Hey, when you leave this house, you do you, but nothing good is going to come from an

01:01:01.380 | adolescent brain having access to it.

01:01:03.660 | This doesn't make me popular among a lot of teenagers.

01:01:06.500 | However, as I've written before and talked about before, the culture is changing on this.

01:01:10.660 | I think the idea that teenagers should be using social media is something that we'll

01:01:14.660 | look back on six or seven years from now and say that was not a good idea.

01:01:19.860 | Teenagers themselves are also increasingly turning on this.

01:01:22.380 | They have moved most of their socializing out of tools such as Snapchat and into instant

01:01:27.340 | messenger and text messaging.

01:01:29.060 | So social media does no longer really plays as critical of a role in their social life.

01:01:33.460 | So it's much easier for them to not be on, say, Instagram or to not be on Snapchat because

01:01:37.940 | they're using text and WhatsApp type tools.

01:01:41.700 | Now the role these tools play in young people's lives is increasingly more cultural and entertainment

01:01:47.780 | related.

01:01:49.060 | So like TikTok is very popular with young kids, but not being on TikTok is not nearly

01:01:54.860 | as big of an issue as seven or eight years ago, not being on Snapchat because people

01:01:59.780 | aren't using TikTok to talk to each other.

01:02:02.460 | People aren't using TikTok to discuss with other people in their schools, the party that

01:02:07.820 | went on or to see where people are going or to be plugged into a social scene.

01:02:11.420 | They're largely consuming content on TikTok.

01:02:14.820 | So if you're not using it, who cares?

01:02:17.420 | You're communicating with your friends on text.

01:02:19.520 | They might be using TikTok.

01:02:20.520 | If you're not, what do you miss?

01:02:21.520 | There's some cultural theme that you don't know about.

01:02:24.040 | So I think things are getting better with that.

01:02:25.660 | But honestly, that is my read of the psychological literature right now is be very, very wary

01:02:30.140 | of giving the adolescent brain unrestricted access to social internet tools.

01:02:35.380 | All right.

01:02:36.940 | So we have a big question here from EA.

01:02:40.900 | EA asks, "Is Cal Newport's outlook on the future too positive?

01:02:48.340 | Cal often compares social media and digital technology addiction to cigarettes, claiming

01:02:52.420 | that it will probably end up with bans and less tolerance as happened with cigarettes.

01:02:56.980 | It seems to me that everything is pointing towards the opposite."

01:03:01.780 | Here are six examples that EA gives.

01:03:04.500 | One, it is almost impossible to go to a restaurant and not see kids on a phone.

01:03:09.260 | Two, schools are becoming lax in their rules.

01:03:12.100 | Three, proving that cigarettes are harmful is way easier than proving that social media

01:03:15.860 | is harmful.

01:03:16.860 | Four, this troubling rush for remote work indicates that people want more digital interactions,

01:03:21.420 | not less.

01:03:22.420 | Five, I contend that cigarettes actually prove that people want more addiction as long as

01:03:27.220 | it's less visible.

01:03:29.320 | And six, something could also be said about energy drinks.

01:03:32.820 | I'm not sure if I get point six.

01:03:36.220 | So here's what I'd say, EA.

01:03:38.260 | You might not be correctly portraying my views on this.

01:03:43.680 | So here are the two claims I actually make, which are similar, but I think they've become

01:03:49.700 | twisted a little bit in the way that you're talking about them.

01:03:53.220 | So one, when it comes to cigarettes and social media use, the claim I've made is that teenage

01:03:58.520 | social media use will be seen in the future like we now see teenage smoking.

01:04:06.020 | So we realized teenagers are particularly vulnerable to the addictive properties of

01:04:13.060 | nicotine, so we should find it to be inappropriate for a 16-year-old or a 14-year-old to be smoking

01:04:21.380 | cigarettes.

01:04:22.380 | Cigarette companies should not advertise towards them.

01:04:23.380 | The culture shifted on that.

01:04:25.340 | And obviously, some teenagers still smoke.

01:04:27.460 | It's not like it once was.

01:04:28.580 | We're like, look, this is if you're cool is what you're doing, and it was much more prevalent.

01:04:32.420 | So I've made that argument, not that digital use in general culture-wide, population-wide

01:04:39.800 | is going to go the way of cigarettes, where cigarette usage, after staying stable at about

01:04:44.060 | 30% for a long time, has in more recent years been falling.

01:04:47.620 | Two, I've been arguing that the age of having a small number of social media platform monopolies

01:04:55.700 | that everyone feels cultural pressure to use, universal social media tools, like we were

01:05:01.980 | five years ago with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, that that age is going to go away.

01:05:07.860 | And that the tools we use to communicate and to be entertained is going to fragment and

01:05:13.380 | become more bespoke.

01:05:15.500 | And so you might be using TikTok, and I might be listening to this podcast, and you might

01:05:18.820 | be into this streaming service, and I use that streaming service, and you might be on

01:05:23.060 | this social network platform that's specifically aimed at athletes.

01:05:27.260 | And it's going to become much more fragmented and bespoke.

01:05:29.700 | This age of, if you're not on this one or two platforms, it's weird that we look at

01:05:34.580 | you with concern in our eyes, that you get the same type of blowback I used to get in

01:05:39.700 | 2014 or 2015 or 2016 when I said, "I don't use social media."

01:05:43.980 | That type of pearl-clutching gasping, "What do you mean?"

01:05:49.580 | That's all going to go away for a lot of reasons I've talked about before.

01:05:53.140 | However, none of this claims that people aren't going to be very distracted looking at screens

01:05:58.240 | all the time.

01:06:00.260 | I don't know if that's going to change broadly anytime soon.

01:06:04.900 | I just think we're not going to have 14-year-olds with unrestricted social media access.

01:06:10.340 | I just think that we're not going to have two companies that everyone has to use their

01:06:14.580 | service.

01:06:15.580 | And I think that's good, and I think that is optimistic, but I do not have a view that

01:06:21.020 | is so optimistic that it says, "Oh, we're not going to be distracted by the digital

01:06:26.100 | in the future."

01:06:27.100 | I don't think that's going to be the case.

01:06:28.660 | I think if anything, it might become more distracting, and we have to talk about the

01:06:31.260 | metaverse and augmented reality and virtual reality, and it's a whole complicated picture

01:06:36.360 | that I can't see clearly through.

01:06:38.820 | So I think I'm a lot more narrow in what I claim EA.

01:06:41.620 | So for better or for worse, my optimism is more focused than the brand of optimism that

01:06:48.220 | you're pushing back against here.

01:06:49.500 | I will say one thing, though.

01:06:51.060 | Your point number three, proving that cigarettes are harmful is way easier than proving that

01:06:55.140 | social media is harmful.

01:06:56.460 | I'm not sure that that's true, and I'll just point you towards a New Yorker piece

01:07:00.500 | I wrote in the fall, last fall.

01:07:02.900 | I wrote a New Yorker piece that asked the question, "Should teenagers be using social

01:07:06.580 | media?"

01:07:07.580 | And one of the points I made in there is we often forget how long it took to convince

01:07:16.380 | ourselves that smoking was harmful.

01:07:18.680 | And I went back and I found the original articles.

01:07:22.340 | I mean, I have scientific articles from early 20th century where people are saying there

01:07:30.020 | might be a lung cancer thing going on here, and there was a lot of pushback about it.

01:07:35.100 | When did we get to the point where we had a sort of consistent message from, let's

01:07:38.740 | say, the surgeon general that smoking caused lung cancer?

01:07:41.100 | You had to get to the '50s or '60s.

01:07:42.100 | I mean, it took decades.

01:07:44.300 | And I talked about it in that article.

01:07:46.300 | I was looking at the research and I was talking to experts about the social psych research

01:07:50.140 | on social media use among adolescents and harmful outcomes.

01:07:53.980 | And I was saying, "Yeah, it's a messy literature.

01:07:56.500 | These literatures are messy."

01:07:57.740 | And even when it says clear-cut as smoking and lung cancer, it wasn't clear-cut, and

01:08:02.100 | it took decades to really be confident about it.

01:08:04.580 | So my point there was don't expect the "science" to come in and have a clear answer.

01:08:11.140 | We couldn't do it for smoking.

01:08:12.820 | It's going to take a long time to get an answer like that for social media.

01:08:15.100 | So we have to move beyond the science and depend more on our own experience, the testimony

01:08:21.620 | of the people using these tools, our own instincts as parents and educators, that this is a cultural

01:08:26.140 | problem, not one that we can look to the science to solve.

01:08:28.700 | So anyway, it's interesting aside, it took a long time to figure out that smoking really

01:08:32.900 | was harmful.

01:08:33.900 | All right, let's do one more question here.

01:08:37.980 | I have one from Matt.

01:08:40.820 | Matt says, "In college, I had a couple influential role models tell me to follow my passion.

01:08:48.340 | This led me to get my bachelor's in cultural anthropology.

01:08:51.140 | Now I'm in a PhD program.

01:08:53.580 | Only after I started my PhD did I read your book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, and I

01:08:58.660 | became convinced of your philosophy of acquiring career capital rather than following a pre-existing

01:09:04.020 | passion to attain career fulfillment.

01:09:07.400 | Now I've committed to a path based on a philosophy that I no longer believe in.

01:09:10.780 | How would you adjust the advice that you give in So Good They Can't Ignore You for people

01:09:14.180 | who have already committed to a passion-based path and now see it as a sunk cost?"

01:09:19.300 | Well, Matt, there's no adjustment you need to do because here is the reality of my advice.

01:09:24.780 | I say, when it comes to figuring out what path you set down, you can lower the bar.

01:09:32.940 | There's lots of paths that you can transform into a life, a professional life that's a

01:09:37.620 | real source of passion and fulfillment.

01:09:41.460 | So what really is going to matter is once you fix one path, for whatever reason you

01:09:44.700 | chose that path, is what you do once you chose it, which is focus on building rare and valuable

01:09:48.300 | skills, use the career capital that generates to take control of your career, move it towards

01:09:52.660 | things that resonate and away from things that don't, have a clear lifestyle in mind

01:09:57.620 | that you use to help guide these decisions.

01:10:02.040 | So the key to that philosophy is I don't care that much how you chose your current path.

01:10:06.880 | So the fact that you chose your current path because you were using passion philosophy,

01:10:11.440 | that's fine.

01:10:12.880 | If you thought, described this as a passion, that means it's something that was interesting

01:10:16.640 | to you, that probably had interesting opportunities associated with it and that you had some sort

01:10:20.600 | of inclination for.

01:10:21.600 | So great, that's a perfectly good reason to choose a path.

01:10:25.480 | So the idea is not, let's be really clear about this, that if you follow your passion

01:10:29.000 | that that will lead you to a bad career.

01:10:33.560 | That's not true.

01:10:35.000 | The issue I have is if your only strategy for getting to a good career is matching a

01:10:41.480 | job to a passion and then sitting back and saying, my work here is done, I should love

01:10:46.360 | this now.

01:10:47.360 | I'm saying, no, no, no, your work is just beginning.

01:10:50.160 | So I don't care much about how you chose your career.

01:10:53.540 | You chose it because you thought it was your passion.

01:10:55.880 | Great.

01:10:56.880 | Good way to do it.

01:10:58.360 | What matters is what you do next.

01:11:00.800 | What you do next is you focus with deliberate practice on becoming so good you can't be

01:11:04.280 | ignored.

01:11:05.280 | Take the career capital that earns you to have leverage over your career.

01:11:08.080 | This is where you're going to need courage, not in choosing what to do, but choosing to

01:11:11.000 | change what you do to be different than what other people are doing.

01:11:14.020 | This is where you step back and say, I'm going to not take a professorship or I'm going to

01:11:18.800 | be a professorship at this school and still write books, or I'm going to do my own thing

01:11:22.760 | or whatever it is.

01:11:23.760 | But you're, you're, you're investing your career capital to create a career that pushes

01:11:27.880 | towards things that resonate and away from things that don't.

01:11:30.120 | And again, the way you, you hone those instincts of residence and anti-residence is lifestyle

01:11:34.640 | centered career planning.

01:11:36.440 | Fix in your head, a really clear image of what your life is like, where you live, what

01:11:40.440 | you do, who you're with, what your time is like, how you feel, fix it, fix an image.

01:11:45.540 | You can taste that.

01:11:46.540 | You can smell that just touches something right in you and let that be your guide to

01:11:51.400 | figuring out, I want to go more towards this in my career or more towards that.

01:11:56.580 | And the thing that allows you to make those choices is career capital.

01:11:59.700 | It is being good at things that are rare and valuable.

01:12:02.020 | So Matt, you're in a great position.

01:12:04.740 | You've already chosen a good path.

01:12:06.820 | It's a good match for you.

01:12:09.160 | Now let's focus on actually navigating that path as effectively as possible.

01:12:14.540 | All right.

01:12:17.220 | Well that we went a little over today, but we had some good questions.

01:12:21.100 | So I appreciated that.

01:12:22.100 | Thank you everyone who wrote in.

01:12:24.220 | As I always say, if you liked what you heard, you'll like what you read.

01:12:28.580 | If you sign up for my email newsletter at calnewport.com and let me add for that.

01:12:32.220 | If you'd like what you heard, you will like what you see.

01:12:35.180 | If you go to the YouTube page for the show at calnewport.com/calnewportmedia, you can

01:12:42.900 | get videos of full episodes, as well as videos of each individual question and deep dive

01:12:47.420 | that I do on this show.

01:12:48.820 | We'll be back on Thursday with a calls episode.

01:12:52.100 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:12:54.460 | [MUSIC]

Full Length Episode | #177 | February 28, 2022

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