I Want Work-Life Balance. Am I Doomed to Mediocrity?

00:00:00.500 | - Last month, a 22-year-old entrepreneur

00:00:03.480 | named Emil Barr wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed

00:00:07.000 | with a provocative title,

00:00:09.080 | "Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre."

00:00:12.880 | In it, Barr claims financial success

00:00:15.240 | requires sacrificing sleep, health,

00:00:17.560 | and social connections in your 20s.

00:00:21.060 | Now, this article annoyed a lot of people, including me,

00:00:24.520 | but here's a key question that has stuck around.

00:00:27.860 | Is it possible that Barr might be at least partly right?

00:00:32.260 | This is a debate worth having,

00:00:34.800 | and it's exactly what we're gonna get into today.

00:00:37.740 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is "Deep Questions."

00:00:41.380 | Today's episode, I want work-life balance.

00:00:56.960 | Am I doomed with the mediocrity?

00:00:58.920 | All right, so we should start with the actual op-ed itself.

00:01:07.740 | I'm gonna bring this up here on the screen,

00:01:09.700 | if you could do that, Jesse,

00:01:10.580 | for people who are watching instead of just listening.

00:01:14.320 | So as mentioned, the title of this article is

00:01:16.680 | "Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre."

00:01:19.580 | The subhead was "For Financial Freedom by Age 30: Optimize Ruthlessly During Your Peak Physical and Cognitive Years."

00:01:27.120 | This came out online on August 18th.

00:01:29.760 | This came out in print the next day on August 19th.

00:01:33.200 | What I want to do here is just read you a few quotes from the article that should give you an idea of what exactly the author is arguing.

00:01:42.740 | So I want to start where the author sort of introduces himself a little bit more.

00:01:46.680 | He says,

00:01:47.680 | "I'm 22, and I've built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million."

00:01:53.520 | Jumping down here.

00:01:56.360 | "When people ask how I did it, the answer isn't what they expect or want to hear.

00:02:02.420 | I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked.

00:02:06.560 | When you front load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life."

00:02:12.980 | Well, that's sort of like his big claim.

00:02:14.580 | Let's get some more details from the article.

00:02:17.480 | Here's a quote from a couple paragraphs later.

00:02:20.740 | "During my first year working on Step Up Social, I averaged three and a half hours of sleep a night

00:02:27.040 | and had about 12 and a half hours every day to focus on business.

00:02:31.180 | The physical and mental toll was brutal.

00:02:33.880 | I gained 80 pounds, lived on Red Bull, and struggled with anxiety.

00:02:38.720 | But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multi-million dollar company."

00:02:45.560 | Heady words from Mr. Barr.

00:02:48.060 | I have a couple other quotes I want to read here.

00:02:49.500 | Here's another one.

00:02:51.300 | "I steer clear of courses that banned laptops in the classroom because I couldn't be offline

00:02:56.300 | for three or more hours a day when my team and clients needed me.

00:02:59.940 | Plus, it is at $19.99 and that kind of thinking won't get us anywhere."

00:03:04.820 | Another piece of advice he has, "Every commitment had to justify its place on my calendar.

00:03:10.260 | With social events, casual hangouts, and even family gatherings weighed against business priorities,

00:03:14.660 | I constantly felt guilty about missing important moments with loved ones.

00:03:18.660 | But ironically, the relationships that mattered most grew stronger because the time I did spend with them was deeply intentional."

00:03:25.100 | That's good to hear. I appreciate that.

00:03:27.300 | He also says, "The path I chose was painful.

00:03:31.100 | There's no sugarcoating the mental health struggles, the physical deterioration, or the social isolation that came with this intensity.

00:03:37.740 | But in a winner-take-all economy, extreme efficiency during your peak physical and mental years becomes a baseline for building wealth that lasts a lifetime."

00:03:50.380 | All right. Well, there we go. There's some strong statements from a precocious young man.

00:03:57.420 | I want to play a little audio here of the Emil Barr himself.

00:04:00.620 | This is him appearing on Fox & Friends in the aftermath of this op-ed, sort of explaining why he wrote it and his inspiration.

00:04:08.460 | So let's play that clip there for a second there, Jesse.

00:04:10.500 | Tell me how you did it.

00:04:11.860 | Yeah. Well, it was a lot of sacrifice, and it wasn't easy, and that's not necessarily something everyone wants to hear.

00:04:18.740 | But the truth is, to have extraordinary achievements, I think you have to make extraordinary sacrifices.

00:04:24.100 | All right. So what was your motivation behind this?

00:04:26.900 | I saw folks like Elon, you know, that slept on factory floors to build Tesla, and, like, people like Kobe Bryant, you know, that trained at 4 a.m. even on the off-season.

00:04:35.220 | Yeah. And so I made those same decisions to grow my business.

00:04:38.020 | Elon and Kobe. This is very Gen -- this is very Gen-C, Jesse.

00:04:43.260 | As you can imagine, this op-ed generated a lot of reaction.

00:04:47.260 | The Wall Street Journal article itself has over 2,000 comments just on the article itself.

00:04:52.300 | Lots of follow-up media, lots of follow-up articles, lots of discussion on social media, on Reddit, and other types of places where people discuss these things.

00:05:01.020 | As mentioned, Barr went on Fox Business, and then that earned him a call-up to Fox & Friends on the main Fox channel.

00:05:07.500 | Much of the feedback that he generated, probably not surprisingly, given what I've read you so far, was negative.

00:05:14.540 | So here's a comment from the original article I want to read here that caught my attention.

00:05:18.540 | I checked the publication date twice, just to be sure this wasn't an old April Fool's Day prank.

00:05:25.580 | The authoritative tone of the 22-year-old author is comical.

00:05:29.340 | Does anyone over the age of 30 actually endorse a front-loading lifestyle?

00:05:33.580 | And did he really use the word "mediocre" to describe a person who earns an average wage?

00:05:37.580 | I can't help but suspect Andrew Tate peer-reviewed this op-ed.

00:05:42.940 | Here's another reaction.

00:05:44.620 | This one came from Reddit.

00:05:45.740 | "My dad was always away at the office, and I really only have a few memories of him.

00:05:50.620 | He caught a sudden illness and died in his early 40s when I was a teenager.

00:05:54.540 | I'll be mediocre and take my kids camping instead.

00:05:57.420 | Cheers, Emil."

00:05:58.940 | And finally, here's a letter to the editor from the Wall Street Journal.

00:06:02.460 | "Mr. Barr's story is no national model.

00:06:06.300 | It rests on the peculiar economics of infinitely scalable digital platforms.

00:06:10.620 | Does he really believe the country would be richer if more young Americans spent their

00:06:14.780 | peak years optimizing algorithms on Chinese social media platforms rather than studying,

00:06:19.580 | soldiering, or otherwise fulfilling their civic duty?"

00:06:23.100 | So people weren't that happy.

00:06:24.700 | I definitely got this a lot, Jesse, in my personal inbox.

00:06:27.660 | It came over my various text threads.

00:06:29.340 | This came in some, I guess, right, in our official emails as well.

00:06:35.020 | Yeah, we definitely got some emails about it.

00:06:38.140 | Yeah, this definitely generated some debate.

00:06:40.300 | You probably had a similar reaction to me, a little bit of Gen Z reaction there, right?

00:06:44.780 | A little knee-jerk, like, uh-oh, 22-year-olds telling me what to do.

00:06:48.620 | What do his businesses do?

00:06:50.220 | You know, I looked into that.

00:06:51.820 | It's a little bit tricky, which I think is always the point with sort of dorm room bro businesses.

00:06:58.060 | It's always a little tricky to pick apart what they're actually doing.

00:07:00.700 | So he started a company, as best I can tell, that was called Step Up Social, which

00:07:05.260 | did exactly what you would expect a 20-year-old's business to do.

00:07:08.620 | It helped TikTok influencers, you know, have more successful channels and connect to brands that want

00:07:15.020 | to have sponsorships on their TikTok channel, so sort of like peak Gen Z.

00:07:18.140 | And then he, it was acquired or he rebranded it or it merged with another company.

00:07:23.820 | There's, you know, our researcher, newsletter director, Nate, found some LinkedIn post somewhere

00:07:30.220 | where the guy talked about how his deal to merge this with another network involved,

00:07:34.940 | instead of money, them buying him a Porsche or something.

00:07:37.500 | So I don't know.

00:07:38.220 | Then he started this other company called Flagship Education.

00:07:41.180 | Flashpass Education, not to be mistaken for the thing you buy at Universal Studios to get ahead

00:07:49.900 | of the lines.

00:07:50.460 | It's kind of, I can't quite figure out what's going on with this thing.

00:07:54.140 | In theory, it's like a flashcard program you can use to get digitally certified.

00:07:59.500 | So do like kind of online courses on topics to give you a certification that can help you get jobs.

00:08:05.420 | But I know he won a business plan contest, student business plan contest,

00:08:09.740 | and got a grant from the state of Ohio to work on this.

00:08:12.940 | There's no actual products available on the website, just links that say book a demo.

00:08:16.780 | It has testimonials.

00:08:18.380 | But unless every user so far, a flash pass is also a model, they're clearly stock photography.

00:08:24.780 | I mean, it's like beautifully lit and posed, you know, with their backpack on the campus.

00:08:28.700 | It looks like a community college brochure.

00:08:30.860 | So I don't know what's going on.

00:08:32.060 | Look, these are, I'm sure they're, you can at that age sort of trade your youth and energy

00:08:39.820 | for essentially like weight.

00:08:41.020 | Like you can kind of hustle and like, I'm going to get brands interested.

00:08:44.620 | And hey, I'm going to match you up with this TikTok person.

00:08:48.620 | And will you pay for them?

00:08:49.740 | And I'll take a cut.

00:08:50.620 | And so I don't quite know what's going on.

00:08:52.060 | It's not, not to knock a meal bar, but it's not Bill Gates leaving Harvard for Microsoft.

00:08:58.220 | Where it was, you know, here's our clear IP on which you can build a scalable business model

00:09:02.140 | that I'm going to take on investment right away to scale.

00:09:04.060 | This is not Mark Zuckerberg leaving Harvard after he already had venture commitments, right?

00:09:08.300 | This is not the, the Sergei and Larry at Stanford saying, we've developed, you know,

00:09:15.580 | this, this page rank algorithm that is revolutionary for web search.

00:09:19.260 | And we have funding from Sequoia.

00:09:20.700 | We're going to, we're going to start Google, right?

00:09:22.300 | Like this is, it's not that it's sort of the types of businesses.

00:09:26.460 | And I've had these businesses myself when I was young that 20 year olds start as best I can tell.

00:09:31.580 | All right.

00:09:34.220 | So there we go.

00:09:35.340 | We got this guy.

00:09:36.220 | He wrote this op-ed.

00:09:37.020 | People are upset.

00:09:37.660 | It did.

00:09:39.660 | However, you know, as, as I, I hinted at earlier, it kind of stuck with me,

00:09:45.020 | right?

00:09:46.300 | Because I wanted to be careful.

00:09:47.900 | It's easy to be upset about the fact this kid is young.

00:09:50.220 | It's easy to be upset about the fact that these are like dorm room businesses.

00:09:53.740 | And no one really knows what they are.

00:09:54.860 | And it's not, I invented a new web search.

00:09:57.100 | Right.

00:09:57.660 | So it's easy to be kind of dismissive, but not everyone thinks that the,

00:10:02.460 | the basic points that the bar is making here is wrong.

00:10:06.220 | Just last week, Palantir CEO, Alex Karp said something similar.

00:10:11.180 | I'm reading a quote here.

00:10:13.100 | I've never met someone really successful who had a great social life at 20.

00:10:18.060 | Susie Welch is a well-known professor at the NYU Stern School of Business,

00:10:23.340 | wrote into the Wall Street Journal in response to this op-ed.

00:10:26.700 | And she said, don't get me wrong.

00:10:28.700 | I don't consider Mr. Barr a boy genius.

00:10:30.620 | He says dumb things, dot, dot, dot.

00:10:32.540 | But I do give him points for saying something that I only mutter to my MBA students

00:10:37.740 | while also asking forgiveness for being an oldster.

00:10:41.020 | You can't well-being yourself to wealth.

00:10:44.140 | There are not, there are going to be seasons of misery, which could last years.

00:10:48.460 | That might not be fair, but it's how life tends to go.

00:10:52.540 | So there's something in this 22 year old's op-ed that I don't think we can just dismiss out of hand.

00:10:59.180 | And in particular, there's one quote I want to pull out, which to me is the most interesting,

00:11:05.260 | intriguing and impactful quote of this entire op-ed.

00:11:08.460 | And this is where Barr says the following, "I'm not suggesting that everyone eliminate

00:11:13.500 | work-life balance, but rather arguing that for ambitious young people who want to build wealth,

00:11:18.780 | traditional balance is a trap that will keep you comfortably mediocre."

00:11:23.660 | That is really the core of his argument.

00:11:25.500 | Not whether or not he's really a good entrepreneur, not whether or not his claim at the end of the

00:11:30.940 | article that he's going to be a billionaire by 30 and solve climate change is cringeworthy or not,

00:11:35.020 | but this idea, work-life balance is a path to mediocrity.

00:11:41.820 | That idea is sort of sticky and uncomfortable.

00:11:44.940 | It sort of sticks with us a little bit.

00:11:47.580 | Like, is that true?

00:11:48.540 | A lot of us who do think about more than just work,

00:11:51.820 | often in our quiet moments, maybe wonder about this.

00:11:56.460 | So I want to take a closer look at this claim because I think it really matters.

00:11:59.740 | And I think it needs a more systematic investigation than what we're getting with

00:12:03.740 | just this sort of back and forth conversation online.

00:12:06.700 | So let's do that.

00:12:07.500 | Now, I want to start by saying, "What do we mean by mediocre?"

00:12:11.740 | Work-life balance will make you mediocre.

00:12:13.260 | What do we mean by mediocre?

00:12:14.700 | I think the right way to actually answer this question is we have to flip it around

00:12:17.820 | and we have to say, "What does it mean to you to not be mediocre?"

00:12:23.820 | And of course, that's a clunky way of saying,

00:12:26.300 | "What does it mean to you to be successful in your professional life?"

00:12:31.500 | We have to answer that more refined question, right?

00:12:33.980 | So here's our more refined question.

00:12:35.180 | "How does work-life balance impact your attempts to be successful in your professional life?"

00:12:39.580 | I think that's the better way to actually get at what's going on here.

00:12:42.220 | But when we say it that way, right away, we see a problem.

00:12:44.780 | What do you mean by successful?

00:12:47.100 | There's a lot of different definitions that people have for not being mediocre,

00:12:51.900 | what it means to have a successful working life.

00:12:54.460 | And the answer to this question of does work-life balance get in the way depends on what definition

00:13:00.460 | of successful that we're actually using.

00:13:03.020 | So I want to get really systematic here.

00:13:04.780 | In response to popular demand, I haven't done this in a while, Jesse, but people,

00:13:08.700 | especially I would say fine art lovers among our audience,

00:13:10.940 | art critics, people who really enjoy seeing really good draftsmanship have said,

00:13:17.580 | "Why haven't you done your tablet recently?"

00:13:19.740 | So I'm doing it, I'm bringing for those who are watching instead of listening, and you know,

00:13:24.060 | you're welcome, I'm going to build a chart here because we are going to get way more systematic

00:13:29.660 | than the meal bar did.

00:13:30.860 | So for those who are listening, I have two columns on this chart.

00:13:33.340 | On the left, it says success model, and on the right, it says requirements.

00:13:36.380 | So what I want to do here is go through the different common models that people have for

00:13:40.540 | what it means for their work-life not to be mediocre.

00:13:43.180 | And for each of those, I want to answer the question, what sacrifices are required?

00:13:47.580 | In other words, like what is the way to succeed with this model?

00:13:49.980 | So we can see, do some of these require that we sacrifice work-life balance and others don't?

00:13:55.820 | Do they all, do none of them?

00:13:57.180 | Let's get more systematic here.

00:13:58.860 | All right, so I want to start by giving Barr his due.

00:14:03.340 | And what I mean by that is there are certainly some particular definitions of success where what he's

00:14:12.220 | saying actually does in some sense hold.

00:14:15.260 | All right, I'm going to put two in particular.

00:14:16.700 | So the first thing I'm going to write here is startup exit.

00:14:24.060 | Now, I'm not typing, Jesse.

00:14:26.860 | That's just my great handwriting.

00:14:27.900 | I like it when you draw.

00:14:29.340 | Jesse thinks it's calligraphy, but it's just my natural great handwriting.

00:14:32.620 | Startup exit.

00:14:33.340 | What do I mean by that?

00:14:34.060 | Okay, this is a very common idea that some people have for what it means to be successful in their

00:14:38.780 | career.

00:14:39.420 | And that's like the notion of I have a startup, probably a technology startup that has an exit

00:14:44.140 | that makes me a lot of money.

00:14:45.260 | I think this is what Barr has in mind when he's thinking about mediocrity and success is he's

00:14:50.220 | thinking what I want to do is have a startup that eventually is sell or acquired.

00:14:54.220 | And I make a lot of money tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

00:14:59.180 | So what is required for this model of success to have a successful startup exit?

00:15:06.380 | Well, if you're in a venture-backed startup going for this, the investors are probably going to demand

00:15:12.300 | that you grind.

00:15:12.860 | So I'm going to write that down here on what's required.

00:15:15.660 | I'm going to write the word grind.

00:15:17.900 | Whether or not you need it, this is what is expected in this particular field.

00:15:23.420 | So if your model of success is I sell a company for a lot of money, a startup, a venture-backed company,

00:15:28.380 | you probably will have to grind.

00:15:29.660 | Not as hard probably as Barr was talking about.

00:15:31.660 | We'd have a lot more heart attacks.

00:15:32.940 | But they do expect you're answering emails.

00:15:35.100 | You're having meetings.

00:15:36.300 | You're staying there late.

00:15:37.260 | You're working weekends.

00:15:38.620 | Partially, it's performative and partially because when you're in a tech startup,

00:15:42.060 | it's a small number of people doing a lot of things.

00:15:44.460 | You haven't had time to hire yet.

00:15:45.660 | And the only way to juggle everything is to sort of inefficiently try to touch on them all.

00:15:50.620 | So in that world, Barr is sort of right.

00:15:53.180 | All right, here is another world in which I think Barr is sort of right.

00:15:56.700 | I'm going to call this elite wage labor.

00:16:00.940 | All right, so these are jobs where there is a clear deal offered, no obfuscation.

00:16:08.940 | Here's the clear deal.

00:16:09.820 | If you have an elite education and you did really well in your elite education, you're a top 20 school,

00:16:17.340 | what we're going to offer you is in exchange for you giving us a large number of hours,

00:16:21.660 | so somewhere between 60 to 80 hours a week, in exchange for you giving us a large number of hours,

00:16:26.780 | we will pay you a very high salary for those hours.

00:16:29.020 | So there are certain professions that offer this deal to the small segment of the population that

00:16:35.100 | happens to have elite college education.

00:16:36.460 | So this would be working for a big law firm.

00:16:38.060 | This would be working for a big consulting firm.

00:16:40.620 | This would be working for a big finance firm.

00:16:42.860 | That's just the deal they offer, your hours for money.

00:16:46.860 | Now, the reason why they are demanding that many hours is that typically you're actually

00:16:52.620 | being billed for those hours.

00:16:54.140 | So the more hours you work, the more money they can make.

00:16:56.700 | And so our agreement will be if we've gone through all the trouble of hiring this Harvard kid,

00:17:00.140 | is to say work 80 hours a week so we can get as much money as possible out of you.

00:17:03.100 | Finance is a little bit more complicated, but it's sort of just more the culture there.

00:17:07.500 | So if you're in one of those, if that's your model of success,

00:17:10.460 | we're still in a meal bar territory.

00:17:13.820 | What's required, you're going to have to grind a lot of hours.

00:17:16.140 | That's just the way those industries work.

00:17:17.660 | But here's the thing.

00:17:19.900 | This is a very narrow band of economic activity.

00:17:25.260 | It's a very narrow band of economic activity that is open to only a very small group of people.

00:17:31.500 | To really have access to like Silicon Valley funding, especially if you're young, that is hard.

00:17:36.060 | You basically have to come out of a top technical program like MIT Computer Science and got into an

00:17:41.100 | incubator program before they'll even listen to you.

00:17:43.580 | If you want to be in one of these elite wage labor jobs, you got to be coming out of an IV or another

00:17:47.580 | top 20 type elite school.

00:17:48.940 | And even then only the best students who go through all the right work to do the interviewing right are

00:17:53.340 | going to get those positions.

00:17:54.220 | So it's a very small amount of people to which these particular jobs are actually open.

00:17:58.940 | Interestingly, even though Emil Barr I think is probably basing his approach on the startup exit

00:18:05.340 | success model, even he doesn't even have access to that world.

00:18:09.020 | You know, he is not running a venture-backed startup in the way that this model demands.

00:18:14.540 | These are, he's doing, these are more sort of, they're not solopreneur companies,

00:18:17.580 | but they're sort of like dorm room businesses.

00:18:19.020 | Like I'm trying to mix and match sponsors to TikTok influencers.

00:18:24.620 | That's different than I've taken on, you know, 5 million in series A from Sequoia because we're

00:18:30.220 | going to build out the server farm for our search algorithm.

00:18:32.300 | So he's sort of mimicking what is required of the sort of Elon Musk venture-backed tech

00:18:37.260 | company world, even though he's not himself actually has access to that world.

00:18:41.100 | Similarly, the elite wage labor world, it's pretty narrow.

00:18:44.700 | If you are in one of those worlds, you do need to grind.

00:18:46.700 | But I think those are very narrow worlds.

00:18:48.780 | And so we cannot generalize from those that in general, work-life balance will make you mediocre.

00:18:53.660 | In these industries, it's not even that work-life flight, work-life balance will make you mediocre.

00:18:57.180 | You're just not allowed to have it.

00:18:58.220 | It's just the, it's just the agreement of the industries.

00:19:00.220 | This is how many hours you have to work.

00:19:02.220 | It's just, that's just what it is.

00:19:04.060 | Okay.

00:19:05.900 | But there are other definitions I think are far more common that people have in mind when they think about

00:19:11.180 | what does it mean to not be mediocre in their job?

00:19:13.420 | And here, the answer of what's required to succeed starts to become more interesting.

00:19:20.620 | So let's put down another common one here.

00:19:23.580 | I'm going to call this impact and respect.

00:19:32.380 | So for a lot of people, when they think about successful career and avoiding mediocrity, it is,

00:19:36.700 | I am doing something that is high impact.

00:19:39.740 | It matters.

00:19:40.460 | And/or I'm highly respected for it.

00:19:43.340 | This is very desirable to a lot of people.

00:19:46.140 | And this is very much matches what a lot of people think about as success.

00:19:49.340 | So you're a respected artist or writer, you know, academic or athlete or musician or filmmaker.

00:19:54.940 | Sometimes as you're having a really big impact on the world, your books really make a difference.

00:19:59.580 | Sometimes it's just the respect.

00:20:01.420 | You're like Jiro and Jiro Dreams of Sushi, where you have this, you know, four-star Michelin sushi

00:20:06.940 | restaurant in the subway in Tokyo.

00:20:09.020 | And only a few hundred people have been there that year, but everyone in the industry knows you're just

00:20:13.340 | the best in the world at making sushi and there's like a real meaning that comes out of that.

00:20:18.140 | This is a very common notion of what it means to be successful.

00:20:22.540 | So what matters here?

00:20:23.820 | Is it grinding?

00:20:25.900 | Well, no, I happen to know a lot about this because it's one of the models of success that

00:20:31.020 | I have been writing about for my entire career.

00:20:33.020 | It's a model of success I really care about.

00:20:35.500 | And what I've written about in multiple books and many articles, including some that date all

00:20:39.420 | the way back to when I was in my twenties, I found these Jesses.

00:20:41.740 | So I sort of have a counterpoint to what email bear was saying.

00:20:45.500 | What matters here is relentlessly working on the things that make you better, not on what you want

00:20:52.220 | to do, not on busyness, but on the activities that make you better at your craft, sticking

00:20:57.820 | to those activities day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

00:21:02.060 | You want to be a respected sushi chef day after day after day.

00:21:05.500 | You're pushing your ability.

00:21:07.500 | You're learning more.

00:21:07.980 | You're pushing your ability at sushi.

00:21:09.180 | You want to be a writer.

00:21:10.140 | You write, write, write.

00:21:11.740 | I started writing professionally when I was 20 years old.

00:21:14.860 | I never stopped writing.

00:21:16.140 | When I finish a book, it's another book.

00:21:17.900 | When I finish that, it's another book.

00:21:19.100 | Like I am always working on books.

00:21:21.260 | I'm always trying to make myself better.

00:21:23.820 | That is what's required.

00:21:24.860 | It's hard work.

00:21:26.060 | But here's what it's not.

00:21:27.980 | Hard to do work.

00:21:31.180 | Because when you're trying to improve yourself, it requires focus and deliberate practice, etc.

00:21:35.820 | You can only do that so many hours in a day, and then that's it.

00:21:38.460 | He talks about Kobe Bryant.

00:21:41.100 | Yeah, Kobe Bryant would wake up early to practice, right?

00:21:43.180 | But there's only so much that Kobe Bryant could practice in a day before I had to worry about injury.

00:21:47.100 | You talk to any sort of professional athlete, they're like, no, no, it's not a game of who can

00:21:51.980 | practice the more total hours, injury.

00:21:53.820 | Rest and recovery is important.

00:21:55.820 | What matters is you're doing the exact right type of training relentlessly.

00:22:00.860 | Off season, what's the exact right thing to be doing in the off season?

00:22:03.660 | In the season, what's the right thing to do in the season?

00:22:05.660 | What's the exact amount of rest to get?

00:22:07.260 | It's relentless and it's hard, but it doesn't require sleeping three hours.

00:22:10.860 | It doesn't require, I don't see my family.

00:22:13.100 | Because there's only so much of this hard work you can do in any given day.

00:22:17.100 | I relentlessly work on my writing.

00:22:19.500 | I've been doing this since I was 20 years old.

00:22:21.260 | I rarely work past 5:30.

00:22:24.300 | I don't grind.

00:22:26.380 | I don't stay up late.

00:22:27.340 | I want to spend time with my family and my friends and my communities and my other types

00:22:31.580 | of interests.

00:22:32.060 | I want to put in a minimum of 40 to 50 hours a week working on Halloween display decorations.

00:22:37.100 | I think Jesse has seen what I have laid out in the other office right now.

00:22:40.060 | We'll get into that later.

00:22:40.940 | I care about hard work, but not hard to do work.

00:22:44.540 | So that's what matters if we're going to talk about being high impact or high respected.

00:22:48.380 | It's the long game.

00:22:49.660 | So I'm going to say relentless depth.

00:22:50.940 | Returning to the things that matter every day, relentlessly, ignoring the distractions

00:22:58.780 | that want to take you away from that.

00:23:00.220 | Doesn't make any one day particularly hard, but you have to have the hard work of sticking with that.

00:23:04.780 | So that is a different model than what Emil Barr is talking about.

00:23:08.620 | All right.

00:23:08.940 | There's other definitions though.

00:23:10.140 | What about remarkability?

00:23:13.580 | What I mean about this is there's a lot of people, when you say, "What is your definition

00:23:20.060 | of like a non-mediocre professional life?"

00:23:22.540 | They say, "I want it to be remarkable."

00:23:23.900 | In the literal sense, remarkable that other people remark about my life and what I do.

00:23:29.180 | Like that's really cool.

00:23:29.900 | Or that's really interesting.

00:23:30.940 | Or, "Hey, did you know what this guy does?

00:23:32.940 | Let me introduce you to him at the party or her at the party."

00:23:35.500 | A lot of people, that's the definition of not being mediocre.

00:23:39.500 | So maybe you live in a really exotic place or have a really exotic job or you have a really exotically

00:23:47.180 | sort of autonomous life.

00:23:49.020 | There's certain people like this I've written about before.

00:23:51.100 | Maybe you're like Laird Hamilton, living on the North Shore of Maui, waiting for the big waves to

00:23:55.260 | come, just sort of sitting around like exercising and bored until the waves come.

00:23:58.860 | And then you go off in your jet skis and do this sort of amazing feats of physical things.

00:24:02.780 | Or maybe you're like Paul Jarvis, who I've written about in Slow Productivity.

00:24:07.580 | We talk about it on the podcast all the time, who sort of moved from his busy web development

00:24:12.220 | life in Vancouver to Vancouver Island, to a small house in the woods near a surf break on Tolfino.

00:24:18.700 | Cut back his hours, raised his rates, made his life much cheaper, right?

00:24:24.380 | They reduced their expenses.

00:24:25.900 | As he says, there's not much to spend money on there.

00:24:27.740 | It's kind of in the middle of nowhere.

00:24:29.260 | And they surf and have this small town and have a green house and keep chickens or whatever.

00:24:32.940 | It's a remarkable life.

00:24:33.980 | It's really interesting and different than what his peers were doing.

00:24:36.780 | It might be like the Thameses, right?

00:24:39.580 | Up in, up there in Vermont, otherwise known online as the Frugal Woods.

00:24:42.940 | I talked about them.

00:24:43.740 | I interviewed Liz in my book, Digital Minimalism, where they were very frugal.

00:24:48.620 | They saved a lot of money.

00:24:50.700 | They were living right outside Boston and Cambridge, Central Square.

00:24:54.860 | And they were very frugal and saving money.

00:24:57.660 | And they bought a property up in Vermont.

00:25:00.860 | They moved up there, allowed her to stop working.

00:25:05.020 | He kept working, but in a remote capacity.

00:25:07.020 | They rented out their house in Boston, which more or less covered the small mortgage they

00:25:11.340 | had on the house up in Vermont.

00:25:13.260 | More recently, he was able to stop working.

00:25:15.660 | They have this life on this 55 acres where they do maple syruping and they have apple orchards

00:25:22.620 | and trails and all this sort of outdoor quiet living with their kids in this local community.

00:25:27.900 | That's an example of a remarkable life.

00:25:30.300 | You remark on it.

00:25:31.180 | Oh, I got to introduce you to these people.

00:25:33.100 | They're doing something interesting.

00:25:34.460 | All right.

00:25:35.180 | If that's your definition of not being mediocre, how do you get there?

00:25:38.860 | Well, it's not about eschewing work-life balance.

00:25:44.700 | It tends to be much more about build career capital, have the courage to leverage it.

00:25:49.020 | What I mean about that is you get good at something that has a sort of lasting,

00:25:54.380 | sustainable value to the market that can get you sort of a lasting, sustainable source of like

00:25:59.420 | income and stability.

00:26:00.620 | And then you have the courage to say, I'm going to build a really interesting life around that.

00:26:05.180 | The Frugal Woods, Nate was a computer programmer basically for nonprofits.

00:26:10.300 | And they sort of worked out like, this is a very useful skill.

00:26:12.380 | We can't run our organization without you.

00:26:14.220 | And he said, great.

00:26:15.100 | I don't want to try to maximize salary with you anymore.

00:26:17.020 | I want to be able to work remotely and on my own terms.

00:26:19.180 | And then we'll then have the courage to build this whole life

00:26:22.300 | up in the woods of Vermont around that career capital.

00:26:25.100 | Laird Hamilton had the capital of, I surf these crazy waves and I can get just

00:26:30.380 | enough sponsorship money out of being shown in those surfing magazines,

00:26:33.580 | surfing these waves to sort of make ends meet and I can keep doing this.

00:26:38.220 | Paul Jarvis got really good at web development.

00:26:40.620 | And he said, okay, instead of growing a big company, because there's all this demand now for me,

00:26:44.860 | I'll just raise my rates and work less hours.

00:26:48.540 | So I will use this skill as the engine to move to Vancouver Island and live by the surf break in

00:26:52.860 | Tolfino and have a greenhouse.

00:26:54.140 | So it's career capital and courage is what matters here.

00:26:57.420 | So we'll put down career capital.

00:27:03.340 | So not only is the answer not just grind, the answers differ depending on what your model is.

00:27:12.060 | So we're being more systematic about this because, you know, that's the way I like to do it.

00:27:16.620 | The final model of what people have in mind is what most people, just the average person has in mind.

00:27:22.300 | If you say, what do you, what do you think about like having a successful career?

00:27:27.580 | Really what they envision is some variation of what we can call the post-war American dream.

00:27:33.020 | I don't have family.

00:27:35.740 | I live in a neighborhood.

00:27:36.700 | I like nice house.

00:27:38.060 | I'm not worried about money.

00:27:39.580 | Like we're financially stable.

00:27:40.940 | I'm not stressed out about money.

00:27:42.700 | We go on two interesting vacations a year.

00:27:45.180 | We're close knit communities that we're a part of.

00:27:46.940 | We have good friends and hobbies.

00:27:48.300 | I have spent a lot of time in my kid's life, picket fence, et cetera.

00:27:52.140 | Starting in the sixties, we began to sort of get bored with this and say it was bougie.

00:27:56.460 | And this is not that interesting, but talk to a GI in 1945.

00:27:59.340 | They would have been like, this is like the best possible life you could offer.

00:28:02.860 | Are you kidding me?

00:28:03.660 | I'm not stressed about money.

00:28:04.780 | I'm not stressed about my, my, my, uh, town being bombed out by, you know, a world war.

00:28:10.700 | I have my own yard.

00:28:12.380 | I have a car.

00:28:13.500 | Like my friends are here.

00:28:14.620 | We can walk to the, whatever.

00:28:15.900 | I have a stable job.

00:28:16.940 | That's interesting, but not too demanding.

00:28:18.860 | That is for a lot of people.

00:28:20.060 | That's not mediocre to have something like that is the dream.

00:28:24.140 | I'm not, I, I, I have a family.

00:28:26.060 | I love to spend time with, and I'm not stressed about money.

00:28:27.900 | And my job is interesting.

00:28:28.860 | And you know, I don't know.

00:28:30.220 | I'm in the bowling league.

00:28:31.100 | That's what a lot of people are thinking about.

00:28:34.220 | So how do you do that?

00:28:36.140 | You get capable.

00:28:39.820 | It's a, it's a term I'm playing with in my new book on the deep life that I'm writing

00:28:42.380 | right now is the power, the overlook power of capability.

00:28:44.940 | What does it mean to be capable in the professional setting?

00:28:47.740 | I'm reliable.

00:28:49.740 | I do the thing I say I'm going to do.

00:28:50.940 | If I say I'm going to do this, I do it.

00:28:52.060 | I do it.

00:28:52.300 | When I say I'm going to do it, I do it at a high level of quality.

00:28:54.540 | I've got my act together.

00:28:55.500 | You can trust me.

00:28:56.140 | I'm capable, right?

00:28:58.060 | I've got my arms on what's going on.

00:28:59.500 | I don't take on too much work.

00:29:00.780 | I choose to write projects that matter and I get them done.

00:29:02.860 | And I'm professional and I'm nice and people like me.

00:29:06.300 | We overlook how valuable capability is, but if you are capable, almost any profession,

00:29:11.260 | almost any job you have, what are the managers going to worry about?

00:29:14.460 | Losing you.

00:29:15.340 | Oh, we have a capable person.

00:29:16.540 | They get stuff done.

00:29:17.420 | They're good.

00:29:17.820 | They choose the right products.

00:29:18.620 | They don't get overloaded.

00:29:19.420 | They're nice.

00:29:19.820 | They're a leader to the other people.

00:29:21.740 | Capability gives you the post-war American dream.

00:29:24.700 | It gives you that sort of stable job.

00:29:26.300 | It's what allows you then also to be careful about your money and not to overspend and

00:29:30.220 | to stay in shape and to care about like, okay, I want to make sure that I do things with my kids.

00:29:34.860 | This school's not working for me.

00:29:35.980 | I'll make the change so that like things are okay.

00:29:38.540 | We deal with you.

00:29:39.420 | All of these things that are necessary for this, like, hey, we just sort of have

00:29:43.020 | a good rich life is built on a foundation of capability.

00:29:46.780 | What Gen Z sometimes refers to sort of derogatorily as adulting.

00:29:51.500 | I call it capability.

00:29:52.940 | You build up those abilities.

00:29:54.380 | This is boring stuff technically, right?

00:29:56.060 | It's time management systems.

00:29:57.100 | It's productivity systems.

00:29:58.060 | It's strategic plans.

00:29:59.100 | It's having an explicit workload management system.

00:30:01.580 | It's all the stuff I talk about in books like deep work and slow productivity, but it matters.

00:30:06.300 | I don't know why I put a slash there.

00:30:07.500 | Capability.

00:30:11.580 | All right.

00:30:13.260 | People who are listening, what you're missing is just cape, but cape a bit.

00:30:17.740 | I don't know what I'm writing here, Jesse.

00:30:19.740 | Cape a bill.

00:30:22.940 | You should hire me if you need like a fancy sign.

00:30:25.020 | I'll just free hand it for you.

00:30:26.220 | All right.

00:30:26.540 | Boom.

00:30:26.860 | There we go.

00:30:27.820 | So here's what I mean about this.

00:30:30.620 | Like, I don't want to get too much in the weeds here of exactly what these models are or exactly what

00:30:37.500 | is required.

00:30:38.060 | But my point is you got to get more systematic here.

00:30:42.780 | What do you mean by success?

00:30:44.220 | When you say you want to avoid mediocrity, what does that mean to you?

00:30:48.060 | And then you got to get specific what is really required to get there.

00:30:52.380 | Sometimes it's like, be ready to grind.

00:30:54.380 | If you're at a big tin law firm or you just got, you know, funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

00:30:59.900 | Like we want our return on your weird web three idea.

00:31:04.060 | But for most people in most models, this sort of like, I'm just going to stay up real late and

00:31:08.540 | burn it and be pretend like I'm in, you know, like the West Wing and have all these calls and

00:31:12.700 | emails and slack and I'm going to drink Red Bull all day.

00:31:15.100 | Like, you know, that's not going to short term.

00:31:17.260 | It doesn't, you know, whatever.

00:31:18.300 | But that's not what it's going to matter in the long term for your definition of success.

00:31:21.260 | So it does really matter.

00:31:22.460 | So let's wrap this up.

00:31:24.780 | Let me, let me read again that key quote from Barr's piece, the quote that sort of gave us some

00:31:29.020 | uneasiness.

00:31:29.580 | I'm not suggesting that everyone eliminate work-life balance, but rather arguing that

00:31:34.380 | for ambitious young people who want to build wealth, traditional balance is a trap that will

00:31:39.100 | keep you comfortably mediocre.

00:31:40.780 | All right.

00:31:41.980 | So in the final accounting, was Barr right?

00:31:45.900 | I think in this case, Barr was asking the right question, but his answer was to narrow.

00:31:54.220 | You need to get specific about what you mean by success, and then you need to learn specific

00:31:58.380 | strategies to reach that specific definition.

00:32:01.100 | Barr's mistake was to think that all definitions of success require these performative 15 hour days

00:32:06.060 | and hustle, but they don't.

00:32:07.980 | In fact, the definitions of success that do require that type of narrow hustle are very narrow,

00:32:14.700 | and they're open to only a very small number of people, and most people could care less about them.

00:32:19.020 | Most definitions of success, by contrast, don't actually require wrecking your health

00:32:23.020 | or your social relations.

00:32:24.460 | But here's the thing.

00:32:25.180 | As we just saw, these other definitions of success aren't necessarily easy either.

00:32:31.180 | They require hard work and focus work, just not all the hours of the day.

00:32:36.700 | So why are we talking about this topic on this particular show, right?

00:32:39.660 | Well, look, in my roles as a computer scientist and a digital ethicist,

00:32:43.180 | I talk a lot about technology's impacts on our lives and how we should react to these changes.

00:32:49.100 | And one of the most common vectors that new technologies use to colonize your life,

00:32:54.620 | to keep you zonked out in video games or social media, to keep you doing mindless streaming or

00:33:01.580 | stewing in nihilism and outrage, is to take advantage of aimlessness.

00:33:06.700 | When you're working actively towards a definition of the deep life,

00:33:11.020 | something that's compelling to you, suddenly TikTok and Call of Duty doesn't seem that attractive,

00:33:16.300 | and rage bait on YouTube starts to look childish.

00:33:18.540 | But when you're instead drifting aimlessly through your life, especially when you're young,

00:33:22.060 | you become a target for these technologies.

00:33:24.780 | If you don't get in the game, the tech companies will play your turn for you.

00:33:31.260 | So my real fear about Emil Barr

00:33:33.980 | is not that he's going to trick a bunch of 22-year-olds into like giving up their sleep and

00:33:39.020 | working 100-hour work weeks, right? Most people see through that bravado.

00:33:44.620 | My real fear instead is that people will look to Barr and be so turned off by the idea of work,

00:33:51.740 | oh, is this what it means to be successful in work, that they throw up their hands and give in the nihilism.

00:33:56.700 | And then the technologies can creep in and ossify them in that position of aimlessness.

00:34:03.740 | So you can go ahead and ignore Emil Barr, but we have to keep his underlying claim in mind,

00:34:08.940 | creating a deep life does require hard work, just not the simplistic performative type of hard work

00:34:13.740 | that Barr talked about. So there we go. It may seem like a non-technology related issue, Jesse,

00:34:19.740 | but kind of is. It's like people like that make you anti-work. And when you're anti-work, you don't have

00:34:25.820 | focus. Well, you don't have focus. That's when, you know, TikTok kind of crawls in and is like,

00:34:31.420 | hey, look at me. There's something interesting going on here. Also, Barr kind of looks like a 16-year-old

00:34:36.060 | Bond villain in some of the videos I found. So it doesn't help. There's a video where he had a

00:34:41.020 | mock turtleneck and a blazer and was holding a cat, like Blofeld from a Bond movie, but like,

00:34:47.900 | he looks like he's 16 years old. So I was like, that's not helping your cause. Not helping your cause.

00:34:53.820 | So there we go. How do you go about playing with the word capability for the section in the book?

00:35:01.100 | So I'm working on this notion of a crash course in becoming a more capable human. So the idea is,

00:35:10.940 | you know, the book's about the deep life. How do you, how do you really create a brief life? We use

00:35:14.620 | lifestyle-centric planning. We talk a lot about that on the show, but a lot of people, I've discovered

00:35:18.700 | this on the show. A lot of people, when it comes time to do lifestyle-centric planning, to transform

00:35:23.900 | their life into something cool, to follow one of these like definitions of success, what they realize is,

00:35:28.060 | I don't even know how to get started. Like, I don't trust myself to even like do the basic work

00:35:34.380 | of transformation, or I'm in a place where I'm feeling so stuck, I can't even imagine what a more

00:35:41.260 | deeper life would even look like. And the issue there I've come to realize is just lack of basic

00:35:45.500 | capability. So to be capable means you kind of have your act together in the basic ways. You have some

00:35:49.660 | control over your time. You have some control over your mind. You have sort of a basic reserve of

00:35:53.900 | discipline. I can do a hard thing, even if it's optional, knowing that there's a longer-term goal,

00:35:57.580 | that this is going to give me. It's these type of basic level capability that allows you to have

00:36:03.420 | confidence. Oh, I can do stuff. Oh, lifestyle-centric planning? Let me give that a try.

00:36:08.460 | That's the type of thing I could and maybe make progress on. And so I'm toying with a structure

00:36:14.060 | to the book where you learn all the ideas of the deep life. And then I have this four-month crash course,

00:36:18.780 | based loosely off of that really popular video of ours. Four months, two things per month, do these

00:36:24.060 | things. You'll come on the other side, recharge, and then you can get back to lifestyle-centric

00:36:28.300 | planning if you're struggling. So I'm just realizing these things kind of they all intertwine. It's

00:36:33.660 | all complicated. That's why I like simple op-eds. I can't complain though. I wrote op-eds in my 20s for

00:36:38.380 | major papers that also had like declarations about I've done this and this and this. And so I got to be

00:36:44.060 | careful about the pot calling the kettle black here a little bit. So there we go. All right. We got some

00:36:49.340 | good questions. Also, it's the first episode of a new month. So we have the books I read in August

00:36:54.060 | coming up. But first we have to get to what you all came here for, which was a word about our sponsors.

00:37:01.180 | All right. So Jesse, I got to tell you about the newest thing I'm obsessed with. I'm going to hold

00:37:05.900 | it up here to the camera for those who are watching. See this right here? This is my Ridge wallet.

00:37:14.380 | It's two slim pieces, I'll tap it here by the mic, of quality metal attached with strong elastic. My

00:37:21.340 | credit cards and my IDs are right in here. There's this little notch here so you push it so they can

00:37:26.460 | come out and you can grab whichever one you want and then you hit them back in to be here. It's secure,

00:37:31.580 | it's strong, and it's small enough I can put it in my pocket. I don't have my- I had one of those George

00:37:36.780 | Costanza wallets. Remember that where he got like back injuries from like having this thing in his back

00:37:41.500 | pocket and I would have to keep it in my backpack or my wife would have to carry it in her bag,

00:37:45.180 | which he wasn't very happy about. This just fits in my pocket and I have all my cards and IDs in there.

00:37:49.740 | I mean, this is a game changer. I'm really happy about it. This is a true story. Tuesday, we're

00:37:54.540 | recording this on a Friday. Tuesday, I went out to dinner with some friends, including a friend of mine

00:37:59.260 | who works at a major tech company. We go up the pay at the counter, both pull out our ridges, right?

00:38:05.500 | I was like, Ridge? He's like, Ridge. And then we did like a Dutch style clog dance.

00:38:09.660 | That's what you do when you meet another ridgers. Anyways, I love Ridge, but here's the thing.

00:38:14.060 | This is crazy, Jesse. Ridge does these sweepstakes. I didn't know about this. Legendary sweepstakes,

00:38:19.900 | like crazy prizes. Their fifth one, they're doing this for the fifth time right now. Here are the prizes

00:38:26.380 | for the sweepstakes that Ridge is currently doing. Two lucky winners get to choose between a $280,000

00:38:34.220 | Lamborghini Huracan Starato or a $100,000 Hennessy Velociraptor, which is where Hennessy Automotive

00:38:43.420 | takes a Ford Raptor pickup truck and like soups it up to a crazy amount of horsepower. Or you could choose

00:38:50.940 | a hundred dollars in cash, a hundred thousand dollars in cash. If two people get to choose between those,

00:38:55.260 | Jesse, your truck should be in there. That's what I thought. You can also choose Jesse's a

00:38:59.660 | 1974 Ford Rustmaster. What's it called? Something like that.

00:39:03.340 | Pretty much.

00:39:04.940 | Yeah. You get a Lamborghini, uh, Starato or Jesse's 1974 Ford Rustmaster now with occasionally working

00:39:12.460 | air conditioning. So I think that's the one that's going to be chosen. Um, anyways, this sweepstake is

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00:42:12.380 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:42:15.340 | First question is from Joel. My work requires me to get a text message through Microsoft Authenticator

00:42:24.780 | multiple times per day. This has me on the phone more than I want. How should I deal with the

00:42:29.180 | distraction to always look at my text messages? Interestingly, as part of his employment with me,

00:42:35.660 | Jesse has required once every three minutes to call me on a landline to sort of check in his,

00:42:40.940 | to give me his 20. He has to say, this is a big bird over my 20 years and he has to give me the 20.

00:42:46.620 | Um, I got to keep an eye on my people I work with. Uh, okay. Well, it's kind of terrible that you have

00:42:51.900 | to answer these text messages throughout the day. I don't buy, however, that this means you must now

00:42:56.300 | go into all of your text communication multiple times a day if you don't want to. So you got three

00:43:02.220 | things you can do here. One, don't look at the other text messages when you get the Microsoft

00:43:08.460 | Authenticator text. Just, you see things come up and you say, I don't care. This is when I do my text

00:43:14.940 | messages. This is not one of those times. I will just pretend I didn't see that. That might seem

00:43:20.380 | impossible. Practice it for a few days. Won't be so bad. Two, if you're really not, you know, sure about

00:43:25.660 | your capability to do that. You can set up a custom, do not disturb mode that allows messages

00:43:30.540 | from that particular number to come through and not others. And you just put it in that mode and

00:43:34.780 | only those messages will come through. Or I bet if you talk to it, there's other factors to use in

00:43:40.940 | this two factor authentication. There's like, yeah, that's the default, but we could do other ways.

00:43:44.060 | It can call or like an email and you could find another way to do it. Just say, I don't want to do

00:43:48.620 | with text messages. 80% chance there, they'll hook you up with something else. So do not use this.

00:43:53.260 | It kind of looks like you're angling for this answer. Do not use this as an excuse to like,

00:43:57.820 | I guess I just have to like be involved in text messages all day. You can get around that. All

00:44:02.540 | right. Who do we got? Next up is Emily. How did your experiment with summer schedules work out?

00:44:07.820 | And what is your, what are you planning for your teaching schedule?

00:44:10.300 | So something I'm really trying this semester, Emily, and we'll see, we'll see how it goes. I have not been

00:44:17.420 | in recent years as I guess, I'm trying to be accommodating. I have not been as firm as I

00:44:23.660 | should be with just, these are my deep work hours and I do deep work. And that's just that, right?

00:44:29.820 | And a lot of people will be annoyed and that's just what it is. I mean, I'm the guy who wrote the book,

00:44:35.100 | Deep Work. So you can't say you weren't warned. I'm trying to hold the line on that this year.

00:44:39.820 | First thing in the morning, I do my deep work hours. There are two exceptions I have to work

00:44:47.100 | around. Our faculty meetings are once a month, but they're held in the morning on Fridays. But I've

00:44:51.820 | worked it out that I can get up and start writing right away and make it to the faculty meeting having

00:44:57.180 | got in like a reasonable deep work block. So I don't have to break that chain. So now I'm really down to

00:45:02.940 | just the end of semester school events for my kids, because they often hold those right after school

00:45:09.500 | starts. So parents can come in and do that before work. That makes it impossible. Obviously,

00:45:13.500 | I want to be at those. But if I'm down to just those, when I have like a presentation of my kid

00:45:19.740 | at school is the only time I don't start with deep work, I'm going to be happy. So I'm going to try

00:45:22.940 | to hold the line on that. The problem is by the time I made that decision, I already had a non-trivial

00:45:27.820 | number of things scheduled in the morning for the next month or so. So I'm holding the line now,

00:45:33.900 | but it might not be for another few weeks until I'm in a territory where that's being preserved.

00:45:39.500 | The other thing is I'm trying to do what I call a studio day, where I dedicate an entire day,

00:45:46.460 | the same day every week, just to doing the stuff related to the outreach to the public. So working

00:45:51.980 | on podcast scripts, writing my newsletter, any of the sort of stuff that surrounds that. Instead of

00:45:58.460 | making that ad hoc, have a day. And I've announced this. I've told like my department chair, like I have

00:46:03.420 | a studio day. This is part of my job as a digital ethicist and in the Center for Digital Ethics to do

00:46:07.900 | outreach about technology and its impacts. There's a day where the office I'm working out of is my

00:46:12.460 | office here in Tacoma Park, where my studio is. And I don't schedule any other meetings on this day.

00:46:16.060 | And that I'm trying, but as Jesse knows, I've been struggling with this because as soon as I declared

00:46:21.340 | that, I already had for the next couple of months, stuff that fell on every day. So again, it won't be

00:46:26.220 | until October, until any of this becomes steady. And I might actually have to change what that day is.

00:46:33.420 | This is another conversation, Jesse, but I might have to change. It's hard stuff. So anyways, Emily,

00:46:38.940 | I'm working on it, but my resolution this fall is I'm just going to be more annoying about it. This is

00:46:45.020 | just my thing. And then, here's the thing. I get chirped at so much now by so many people from so many

00:46:50.860 | different walks of life, from like national level commentators, to just random people that we know,

00:46:55.260 | to random strangers. I'm kind of used to it now. So this is what I want to do. I want to make sure that

00:47:00.860 | I'm writing every single day and that the outreach part of my media company gets a full day of my

00:47:05.820 | attention. That's just my standard. And then I'll make everything else fit. And if it doesn't fit,

00:47:09.020 | then I'll reduce it. So that's what I'm practicing this year is, and I'll report back how it's going,

00:47:13.500 | is just, I'm going to hold the line more. And again, it's easy to say, and then be really accommodating,

00:47:19.100 | and then the whole thing falls apart. I'm actually going to be less accommodating.

00:47:21.500 | But for the summer, you wrote all the time, didn't you?

00:47:25.020 | Yeah, I just wrote all the time.

00:47:25.980 | So that worked out well.

00:47:26.860 | That worked out fine. Yeah, we travel, we go up north and the writing didn't go well,

00:47:32.700 | but the schedule went well.

00:47:33.980 | Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:47:35.100 | So the schedule was fine. So the summer, I just write every day for the first half of the day,

00:47:39.100 | and we just built a whole summer around that.

00:47:40.540 | But realistically, now you're on schedule to where you

00:47:42.700 | hope to be like going into the summer, right, with your writing?

00:47:45.740 | Yeah, it's complicated.

00:47:47.740 | I'm reworking some things. We'll get there. We'll get there.

00:47:52.860 | I mean, you wrote a lot of New Yorker articles.

00:47:54.460 | I wrote some New Yorker articles. Oh yeah, I was doing a lot of stuff. I'm never not writing.

00:47:58.060 | It's like we talked about in the deep dive. I'm never not writing.

00:48:00.460 | The newsletter is looking great.

00:48:02.380 | I want to, yeah, you know, and shout out to, so we have a weekly newsletter,

00:48:05.660 | shout out to Nate. He handles all the formatting and it actually looks professional.

00:48:10.060 | So I think all that's good. But I want more of the summer flavor in my regular year.

00:48:14.940 | I can't write as much, obviously. I have more obligations, but I want to write every day.

00:48:17.900 | And then what about deep work for like research? Is that like in the afternoon?

00:48:22.780 | Well, it depends what we're talking about for research. So if it's the things I'm working

00:48:27.580 | on in my writing blocks in the morning is it's like books and articles. And so if I'm

00:48:31.340 | doing research for a book chapter or an article, that can happen during that time. Like this week,

00:48:37.020 | I was, you know, I spent one of the writing blocks just finding sources and then the next

00:48:40.700 | two blocks like working on writing about it. All of the other type of stuff I'm working on,

00:48:45.580 | yeah, afternoon. And by afternoon, I mean, sometimes I can get this block in, I'm done by 9:30.

00:48:51.900 | So it might just be like a normal work day is kind of starting, right? If I need to start early,

00:48:56.460 | I'll start early, but I'm getting the hours. Yeah. And I'm using the old meta productivity trick,

00:49:02.780 | fixed scale to productivity. These are my hours. This is when I deep work. These are the studio days.

00:49:07.180 | Everything else fits in. And if I'm not getting this, then I'm not getting to this. Something has to give.

00:49:12.220 | So that's something I'm tuning myself into more this semester. All right. Who we got?

00:49:20.380 | Next up is Larry. I went back to episode one, where you introduced the idea of the deep life.

00:49:25.580 | It's been almost five years since that episode aired. And I'm curious, what did your ideal lifestyle

00:49:31.180 | look like back then? How has it evolved since? And what changes do you make to where you are today?

00:49:36.620 | Does some of this get answered in your upcoming book?

00:49:38.620 | Yeah. It's an interesting question. I haven't gone back and listened to that episode in a while

00:49:44.460 | because the mic wasn't great and the audio is a little live. So where I recorded that first episode,

00:49:53.740 | this would have been late spring. It was like May, 2020.

00:49:59.660 | Right in the middle of COVID.

00:50:00.780 | Right in the middle of COVID. And the county we live in, in Maryland, Montgomery County

00:50:08.220 | was all in on like, if you even open your blinds, you probably should go to Guantanamo.

00:50:14.060 | Like it was very much like just locked down and everyone was trying to out lock down each other to

00:50:19.420 | like, I don't, I guess, signal their worthiness or whatever. So like, this is, this is terrible.

00:50:25.740 | Right? So we, we rented a house down in Southern Maryland where no one, no one cares about anything.

00:50:32.540 | Like it's just, it's empty, whatever. It's not like we were there all the time. It was like,

00:50:37.820 | we temporarily had a second house we could go down to. And it was a weird piece of property

00:50:42.860 | because it was like a, just a modest house. And then not making this up, uh, an airstrip.

00:50:48.780 | It's like a runway, but it was all grass, but like cut out of the trees, runway, like so really long.

00:50:54.620 | And at the end of the runway, it was on water and you can, there's a fire pit down there and there's

00:51:00.380 | like water and they had, uh, golf carts cause it was so far away. So you would ride the golf carts down

00:51:04.940 | to the end of this runway. And there was like water down there. It was, we just wouldn't,

00:51:08.140 | we just spend more and more time at this crazy property. So we've got to have space and be outside.

00:51:11.900 | Um, and they opened up stuff there like way sooner. So I could go back to like museums and stuff.

00:51:17.020 | We've talked about this before, but I went to five museums in like three weeks when they opened up

00:51:20.780 | again in, you know, that's where I recorded the first episode on a table in that house,

00:51:25.580 | a hard table on a hard floor. It was a little live. That's what I was trying to get to live, meaning,

00:51:29.580 | um, echoey. So that's why I haven't listened to it. Uh, I will say in the pandemic is when I set

00:51:35.340 | like a lot of the pieces that became part of my ideal lifestyle vision

00:51:41.180 | that I've made huge progress on, but continue to pursue a lot of those pieces came down in the

00:51:45.100 | pandemic. So that was a definitely a face shift point in like whatever my, my ideal lifestyle

00:51:51.180 | vision was. I'm sure pre pandemic, it was much more, I don't remember exactly all the pieces of it. It was,

00:51:56.620 | it was much more just, you know, functional. I, I just moving forward to my academic career, um,

00:52:04.060 | having a book that was successful, getting the family, I had a family still relatively young back then.

00:52:09.660 | We had just moved, uh, like my books were just starting to take off. So I'm sure it was just,

00:52:14.860 | I don't know. It was a little bit more prosaic. And then it got a little bit more interesting.

00:52:19.020 | Um, during the pandemic, even doing the podcast itself came from driving that golf cart back and forth,

00:52:26.140 | listening to, uh, mainly the rewatchables podcast with Bill Simmons and just like hearing what they

00:52:31.260 | were doing. And I was like, Oh, this is interesting. Like what people are up to in this medium and trying

00:52:34.780 | to like, imagine what it could be. I read a bunch of Disney books during that period. I still, as we'll

00:52:40.300 | see at the end of this episode, I'm still reading a lot of Disney books, but I was reading a lot of

00:52:43.980 | Disney books back then that during the early pandemic is when my, that weird obsession. And,

00:52:47.660 | and I began thinking about the media side of what I do and a lot of ideas that now we see today and

00:52:53.020 | you know, the deep work HQ and the, and the, the podcast, the video and the newsletters and the way

00:52:59.580 | things are progressing now. And there's the footprint it has in my life and in my career. Like a lot of

00:53:04.060 | those seeds were planted back early pandemic. Um, thinking about like what I wanted to do with my books

00:53:09.820 | and what I wanted, uh, the work to shallow ratio, the shape of my career. This is when like my, my,

00:53:16.620 | I began to change beyond just the simple path of just, you're a computer science professor who

00:53:22.380 | goes to these conferences and publishes these papers and has these students. That's when I

00:53:25.580 | first started shifting towards a more ambitious and idiosyncratic vision for my academic impact.

00:53:30.220 | So without getting into too much details, a lot changed right around the time I did that podcast,

00:53:36.140 | early pandemic. And I made a lot of progress actually on a lot of those ideas.

00:53:39.660 | that, that, um, that came up then. So still going well. All right. Who do we got?

00:53:45.260 | Next up is Kerry. I have enough time in my morning hours to focus on deep work and projects that matter

00:53:50.540 | to my work. I also get the inbox zero most days. However, I want to start using my afternoons for

00:53:56.620 | other pursuits. My problem is that I obsessively check my inbox for new emails.

00:54:00.700 | Well, you do that because you, you worry about bad things that could happen.

00:54:06.540 | And so when you do that type of obsessive checking, you worry about bad things that are happening. But

00:54:11.660 | when you're actually doing the checking, what you're looking for is the positive feeling of relief when

00:54:16.540 | you see nothing is there. So your mind is like, what if there's something there? What if someone

00:54:21.020 | needs you? What if there's something urgent? You know, like, do we need to do something? And you're

00:54:24.220 | like, you know what? If I check and there's not, I'm going to feel good. And I kind of want that good feeling. You can get addicted to that positive feeling in the same way you can get addicted to the positive feeling of, you know,

00:54:28.540 | eating a donut or smoking a cigarette. It really can be a donut or smoking a cigarette. It really can be powerful.

00:54:36.780 | So we have to break you out of that cycle. And the way I often suggest in these situations that people do that

00:54:44.300 | is commit for one to two weeks saying I am going to make lots of bad things happen.

00:54:50.220 | Even if things go terribly awry, I can always apologize my way out of like one week. I could be like,

00:54:57.740 | sorry, like it was a hard week. I wasn't feeling well or whatever. But for one week,

00:55:02.380 | I'm not going to try to convince myself that nothing bad will happen if I don't check my inbox in the

00:55:07.180 | afternoon. I'm going to say, let the bad things happen. I want to see how many bad things happen if

00:55:12.220 | I don't do that. My new rule is going to be do an emergency check at 4:30, just to make sure there's

00:55:18.620 | nothing really urgent. If there is, you can like give your quick apology, like I'm on it, I'll get to it

00:55:22.460 | tomorrow so people aren't stressed out at the end of the day. And that's it. And be like, I'm sure bad things

00:55:26.940 | will happen. People will be upset, things will get missed, but it's not going to jeopardize my job

00:55:31.340 | because it's one week and I can be like, hey, it was a hard week. So make that commitment. Your mind

00:55:35.340 | will be on board with that. If you try to convince your mind, it's fine, nothing bad will happen. It's

00:55:38.700 | like, I don't believe you. That is a wrong thing. And because that's a wrong thing, I am not going to

00:55:44.780 | base my activities on it. But if you're like, no, no, no, bad things will happen, but we won't get fired

00:55:49.260 | for it because it's just one week. Your mind's like, okay, fine. This is a stupid exercise, but we'll do it.

00:55:52.700 | And here's what you'll find. Bad things don't happen because no one really cares.

00:55:56.860 | : And if you're on the ball and you're responsible and you can, you can, you know,

00:56:00.940 | touch base at 4:30 when you need to, when people send you a message, it's off their head, it's off

00:56:05.820 | their plate. Like, great. There's one less thing I have to stress about. Now I'm going to pay attention

00:56:09.660 | to the next 500 things. It is not as people imagine when they see an email sitting there in their inbox,

00:56:16.220 | and it's like 4:30 and it's been there since like 1:00 PM. What they imagine is that that sender since 1:00 PM has been sitting there staring at

00:56:26.780 | their inbox slowly pouring slugs of bourbon, gripping the glass as it shakes and being like,

00:56:34.860 | where the hell is your answer? And slug back and they slam it down and then looking at the clock and

00:56:40.620 | there's like a wildly ticking second hand behind them. And another half hour goes by and they pour

00:56:45.740 | another slug. It's been 30 minutes. So you imagine that's what's happening. That everyone is just sitting

00:56:51.660 | there like, I cannot believe this guy has not answered my message. I am probably going to have

00:56:58.140 | to dismember him with an ax because like, this is unconscionable. No, they have a thousand messages.

00:57:01.980 | They're just glad they got this one thing off their plate. They don't want you to answer right away

00:57:05.100 | because then it's back on their plate again. So it's like, great. We'll let all the terrible things

00:57:09.020 | happen. Oh my God, it's gonna be so terrible. And then it won't be in your mind. Like, okay, fine.

00:57:12.380 | You're right. This is okay. And then you'll stop worrying about it as much. Then the relief you get from

00:57:16.620 | checking will be less. And if the relief is less, the positive signal is no longer so salient. And

00:57:21.660 | then the addictive loop will degrade. So just tell yourself, yeah, mind. Let's just see how many bad

00:57:26.700 | things do happen and then see what really happens. So much of problems with work communication, Jesse,

00:57:31.900 | is what we imagine other people are doing in terms of tracking our behavior.

00:57:35.100 | It's kind of amazing. They really think that there's a war room where everyone is sitting there

00:57:40.220 | with like real-time graphs. It's like the Apollo mission control from Apollo 13, except for it's like

00:57:45.900 | graphs of your inbox. You know, like they check in on all the people in the control stations at

00:57:49.820 | mission control, like polymetry, go, you know, whatever life support, go that you have everyone

00:57:55.580 | that's like response time, go number of committees. They agreed to go. Like they're all sitting here

00:58:00.540 | with these charts, like trying to figure out what's going. No one cares. Be reliable, get your stuff done.

00:58:04.700 | No one's, no one's charting your email response times. And if they, if they are, you know,

00:58:09.740 | get out of that job. That's stupid. All right. Who do we got? Next up is Maureen. Can you summarize how

00:58:15.580 | values and strategic planning documents, birthday projects and lifestyle centric planning combined

00:58:20.860 | together? Nobody knows. Just leave it at that. It's just the way it is. No one knows how they

00:58:27.500 | fit together. We just accept it. Yes. All right. This is like a Cal Newport potpourri. All right.

00:58:35.900 | Let's put these, let me go through these all here. Okay. So lifestyle centric planning

00:58:42.060 | is an approach to transforming your life in which you work systematically towards a holistic picture

00:58:47.100 | of a better lifestyle, as opposed to assuming that one radical change or accomplishment will

00:58:50.940 | make everything better. So it is an approach to transforming your life.

00:58:54.540 | Your values, having a clear description of your values in a values document

00:59:00.540 | can help you when creating your ideal lifestyle that you're moving towards. It also just helps you day to

00:59:07.820 | day and trying to figure out like, how do I react to particular situations as they come up? It's a good

00:59:11.740 | reminder. Your strategic plan is a tool you use to move closer to your ideal lifestyle, among other

00:59:18.220 | things. So that might be useful towards that as I, you know, how do I make sure I'm making progress on

00:59:21.820 | these various things that moves me closer to my ideal lifestyle? Your birthday plan, that just means check

00:59:26.780 | in on all this on your birthday to make sure that you don't fall into stasis. Hey, let me look back at my

00:59:31.100 | ideal lifestyle. Do I like this vision? Do I need to change anything? How do I want to change my approach,

00:59:35.820 | my plan for this year to move closer? So I think that covers it all. Strategic planning,

00:59:40.380 | birthday projects, external planning, and values. There you go. In my new book, which right now feels

00:59:46.700 | like it'll come out in 2035, but no, I'm making progress on it. It will come out on time.

00:59:49.980 | In my new book, I get into some of this. So you'll definitely get into lifestyle-centric planning.

00:59:56.140 | Why that's the better way to do it, as opposed to hoping for one radical change.

01:00:01.180 | How do you build these lifestyle plans? How do you figure out what even matters to you?

01:00:06.300 | How do you write a good, ideal lifestyle plan? What's the process? How do you go from like your

01:00:11.740 | notes with your intuitions about what resonates to like an actually usefully formatted plan?

01:00:15.820 | How do you then build a plan to systematically move closer to that vision?

01:00:22.620 | Because I'm all about it's idiosyncratic. And it's making very careful, like if I do this,

01:00:27.820 | it could help four things at the same time. Then if I combine it with this, it'll prevent this from

01:00:31.500 | backsliding. It's more of a puzzle than it is a key. That's a big, big argument in my book.

01:00:35.980 | Changing your life is sometimes fitting together the puzzle pieces of your obstacles and opportunity,

01:00:40.140 | not finding the one key that unlocks everything. It's not as dramatic as that. So we'll get into that

01:00:45.420 | as well. As well as like the advanced techniques that you throw in to sort of help make that

01:00:49.900 | progress. So that's where we might hear about like birthday plans and values documents, et cetera.

01:00:54.540 | And then another big part of that book will be like, wait, but what if all of this is just,

01:00:57.980 | you're like, I can't even do any of this? Crash course in capability. And maybe you want to do that.

01:01:03.180 | And I imagine that being something that you do throughout life. Like I have a hard period.

01:01:08.620 | I got knocked on my, you know, knocked on my butt a bunch this quarter, life, work or whatever.

01:01:13.980 | I need to kind of re get the engine of capability going here. Crash course.

01:01:17.420 | Or maybe you've never gotten there. You're 27. And it was like straight from college to video games.

01:01:22.700 | You know, like I got to just get started, you know, crash course. Right. Or you really have your act

01:01:28.620 | together, but then you went into a new phase of life management position, started a family or something.

01:01:33.020 | You're like, oh my God, bought a house. You're like, I don't know how to like keep the walls up.

01:01:37.660 | Crash course. So these are the pieces I'm working with, working with now.

01:01:41.900 | All right. Who do, is that our last question? All right, great. So we have,

01:01:46.140 | uh, do we have a call this week? Yeah, we have a case study.

01:01:48.860 | All right. Which one should we do first, Jesse? You can choose.

01:01:50.620 | Do the case study first. Do we have our fabled case study music?

01:01:55.820 | I think we do. All right. Do I, do I read it?

01:01:58.140 | Is it a one time music or do I read within the background?

01:02:01.580 | Pretty brave. I see.

01:02:04.700 | That'd be funny if the case, after that music, the case study started with,

01:02:13.660 | Well, yesterday I killed a man.

01:02:15.020 | Ryan, you from prison. Must be nice. How do I do deep work when I'm in prison

01:02:24.060 | for killing a man? We need different music for that. I like that music. We'll play it again at

01:02:28.540 | the end. It makes it kind of talked over it. All right. Today's case study. I like this one's from

01:02:31.900 | Nick. It's about household admin, which is something I've been working a lot on recently.

01:02:35.980 | Nick said, I started using your idea of using a mail sorter to organize household admin.

01:02:42.380 | When I first heard this mentioned on the podcast, I was drowning in household admin work. The concept

01:02:47.580 | of a mail sorter really clicked with me. So I immediately put a cardboard box on the kitchen

01:02:51.260 | counter with all my pending paperwork in it. I also told my wife that if she had any paperwork for me to

01:02:56.460 | handle, she could just dump it in that box as well. This instantly made both of our lives a lot easier.

01:03:01.900 | For the first few weeks, I was still in the habit of handling admin stuff as it came in.

01:03:06.060 | So it was easy to slip back into the habit of following up on the stuff every night. But over

01:03:10.700 | time, as I built up the routine of checking the mail sorter weekly, I started to trust the system

01:03:16.220 | and I got to the place where I could rely on it. After a month or two of using the cardboard box,

01:03:22.060 | I decided it was time to over-engineer a more permanent solution. What I came up with was a real

01:03:27.420 | mailbox, the style that goes on a wall with a lid on the top, and I mounted it on the kitchen wall

01:03:32.380 | with two magnets. This frees up space on the kitchen counter and keeps all the housework paperwork out

01:03:37.180 | of sight. It's just the right size to hold a week or two of paperwork. And with the magnets,

01:03:41.100 | it's really convenient to pull off the wall when it's time to process. For a long time,

01:03:45.180 | I had a weekly reminder in my calendar to process the mail sorter. However, the system was working so

01:03:49.020 | well that I recently reduced the frequency to every other week. So using a mail sorter to manage my

01:03:53.580 | paperwork has dramatically reduced my household admin burden, and keeping that in check is an

01:03:57.660 | important piece of my journey towards the deep life. Nick, fantastic case study. Having a place

01:04:03.420 | where stuff goes, where you trust that you're going to get to it, this is a David Allen idea,

01:04:06.300 | is like the best stress-reducing drug you can find. Because your mind doesn't worry about it.

01:04:14.300 | It's in that box, and I look at that box on Fridays, and I trust that I'm going to look at that box on

01:04:18.540 | Fridays. And so if I put the thing in the box, it'll be seen on Friday. And what you're gaining

01:04:23.740 | here, it's not a time thing. It's what people get wrong about time management or productivity. It's

01:04:27.020 | not a time thing. It's not, "I got the total minutes dedicated, the paperwork is smaller."

01:04:32.620 | It's not the game. The game is a psychological relief game. You don't have to worry about it.

01:04:37.980 | It's all in one place, and then you can get it done all at once. And it might not be faster,

01:04:43.740 | but it is cognitively more pleasant because as we've also talked about on the show,

01:04:47.740 | when you do a big batch of, let's say, household paperwork, you can transform your mind into the

01:04:52.220 | cognitive context of household paperwork, and then do all of these things in that context.

01:04:56.060 | And once you're in the context, these things are much easier to do from just a psychological effort

01:05:00.380 | required perspective. Whereas if you take the same household admin things and do them in an ad hoc on

01:05:05.900 | demand pattern, just in the middle of something else, "Oh, let me do this now," you're never in the right

01:05:11.420 | cognitive mindset. So it's like pulling cognitive teeth, right? You're like, "Oh God, I got to do

01:05:15.580 | this paperwork, but I was just thinking about this thing I was doing over here," and it constantly

01:05:19.180 | creates friction and it constantly creates sort of mental strain. So it feels better to do it that

01:05:23.660 | way as well. So I think that is a great example. And the key is trust. Yeah, put the weekly calendar

01:05:28.700 | thing. You're never going to forget it, but it gives you peace at first because it's like, "Oh,

01:05:33.420 | my calendar will remind me to check this." You'll remember, but it just gives you peace to know that,

01:05:38.060 | like, it's on my calendar. I won't forget it. So I think that's a fantastic way to do it.

01:05:42.300 | When we bought our first house, it was like kind of my job because my wife would go to work early.

01:05:46.700 | I'd have the first shift with the kids. And so I just had this mail sorter and a 30-minute block

01:05:51.980 | every morning right after the nanny came, I think is how I did it, before I'd kind of get started with

01:05:57.900 | Georgetown work. And it was like, just do house, because there's so much household stuff to do when you

01:06:01.900 | buy a new house. Like, I don't have this. The water bill is not working right. Or we need this type of

01:06:07.500 | insurance that we didn't have before. Or like there's snakes in the faucets. It's always something,

01:06:12.060 | right? And so I was like, just every day for 30 minutes, I work on this stuff. And when stuff came

01:06:15.900 | in, I just put it in there. And man, I was just on top of it. So that works. Trusted systems do work.

01:06:22.060 | Can we play the music to play us out here? I enjoyed it.

01:06:35.260 | All right. We got a call? We do. Now let's hear it.

01:06:39.260 | Hello. My name is Dave Curlin. I'm a real estate salesperson. And my question is in regard to the

01:06:47.020 | capture and review parts of your productivity system. I know you use Trello. And I personally

01:06:52.620 | have adopted using it myself. But as the number of Trello cards get bigger and bigger, the list gets

01:06:58.380 | longer, I find it difficult to effectively look at them and make decisions about what to do and not to

01:07:04.060 | do. You have alluded to David Allen's system in the past, and I'm familiar with his method of capturing

01:07:09.580 | things in context categories. Is there a reason you don't create more columns in Trello and use this

01:07:15.500 | method? It seems like it would be a more efficient way to review these tasks, etc.

01:07:20.860 | When doing daily and weekly planning and dealing with a really big list of possible activities and

01:07:26.300 | projects. Love your podcast. It's been so helpful. And the time blocking method has helped me immensely.

01:07:33.900 | Thanks. Well, for my professional task, when organized in Trello, I do have many columns. I also have many

01:07:40.780 | boards. You need to organize information in various scales of context helps you make better use of it.

01:07:47.820 | Right? So I tend in the professional context to have a board for each major role. So I'm director of

01:07:54.060 | undergraduate studies for the computer science department. That's a different role than say a role

01:07:58.220 | working in the Center for Digital Ethics or my role working as an algorithm researcher. So give them

01:08:03.740 | a separate board. I only want to see things related to a given role at one time. And so when I want to

01:08:11.500 | service that role, that's what I'm doing this afternoon, then let me just see those things. And

01:08:16.300 | then within those boards, I have a lot of columns. And there's like classic columns, like make sense

01:08:21.500 | of, I haven't processed it yet. There's like sort of urgent working on this week, but I have a lot of

01:08:25.740 | like waiting to hear back from is in there. I sent an email to someone I'm waiting to hear back. Let me

01:08:30.460 | remind myself of what that is and what I'm going to do when I hear back to discuss that next meeting for

01:08:35.180 | like any regular meetings in my life assigned for that role. I'll have a column, right? So my director of

01:08:40.300 | undergraduate studies, there's, I have meetings with my associate director every week. And then

01:08:44.540 | every other week I meet with my department chair. I keep track of, for both of those things, things I

01:08:50.380 | want to talk about at that next meeting. That saves me a ton of email, by the way. So instead of like

01:08:55.020 | just sending the people's instinct is as soon as I think of something, let me email my department chair.

01:08:59.500 | Hey, it's off my hands. But now you've just added another email to the thousand that she's going to get

01:09:03.500 | and she's responds. And now like you have to work this out, not at the time you want to, but whenever

01:09:08.940 | these emails move back and forth. So instead you put on a card, talk at next meeting. When you get

01:09:12.380 | to the meeting, you go through them all. It gives you relief. You can have columns for like particular

01:09:17.980 | projects that are going on. If it's like, this is like a time sensitive, complicated project that I,

01:09:22.140 | you know, we're trying to get this conference together. Great. Here's a separate column over

01:09:25.500 | here. So I can just keep track of those things. So create as many columns as you need

01:09:28.780 | and create different boards for different contexts. I think all of this helps. So lots of things together

01:09:35.820 | that have unrelated contexts, you all have to look at the same time. That can be,

01:09:39.260 | that can be really overwhelming. So I'm not sure where you got the idea that I have a very small

01:09:43.100 | number of total columns I use. I have a ton in my, in my Trello universe. All right. We got our final

01:09:52.140 | segment coming up. The books I read in August, but first something even more exciting, a word from

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01:13:14.620 | and use deep at checkout for 20% off your first order. All right, Jesse, let's go to our final segment.

01:13:24.220 | So like I like to do, our first episode of each month, talk about the books I read in the previous

01:13:30.860 | month. We should get theme music for this, Jesse. Yeah, we should. That's a good idea. It's only

01:13:35.260 | once a month. I think it'd be funny if it was something that like made no sense. Like it was really

01:13:38.860 | incongruous and we just don't mention it. It's going to be funny. Like girls just want to have fun.

01:13:47.900 | I won't be the craziest thing. La Bamba. It'd be great. So we're going to do that next time. We're

01:13:55.020 | going to have incongruous theme music and we're just going to roll with it. That's what we do. All right.

01:13:58.380 | So in August, it's a weird month. I'm looking at my books here. I was on vacation in August for a lot of it.

01:14:08.860 | So I was reading. I was on vacation. I was writing a lot. I was struggling with my writing.

01:14:14.460 | I didn't want to read. It's an interesting set of books. Let's just say a judge. That's what I'm

01:14:19.420 | trying to say. These are the books that someone odd like me reads when on vacation and is just like,

01:14:23.980 | I'm not interested in hard new ideas right now. So let's just keep this in mind. This is a summer list.

01:14:29.020 | All right. This first book, I don't know how to even explain this book. It's called Boundless Realm

01:14:35.020 | by Fox Nolte. It is a book. I think it's regularly published. Maybe it's self-published. I read it on

01:14:42.060 | Kindle. It is a book about the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World, not the Disneyland version,

01:14:48.300 | but the Disney World. But it's the craziest book, Jesse, because it's not here's a history of the ride.

01:14:54.140 | It is, here's a history of the haunted house in the American Gothic imagination. Let's start there.

01:15:02.380 | All right. Now we're going to have like a history of like, it's like cultural trends that surround

01:15:08.300 | the very notion of like haunted spaces. Now let's get a whole history of the dark room attraction,

01:15:14.700 | starting in these like small amusement park attractions, where it would literally just be a

01:15:19.420 | dark room that you're on a track and then how things were added. It's like strands of sociology

01:15:24.060 | and history all wind together. And then it's like a beat by beat examination of this ride.

01:15:30.060 | And it goes like on each section, it kind of like goes deep and like what's there and how it's

01:15:35.820 | represented the artistic cultural impact, but also like historically speaking, like when something

01:15:41.500 | got changed and at this year they came, I mean, it's the craziest thing. It's like the level of

01:15:46.780 | detail you would write if you were writing about like a presidential assassination, like that level of

01:15:53.020 | research, but about this ride. And it was fascinating. And he has another one out. He has,

01:15:57.580 | I think he writes a bunch of these books. So I don't know. It's a labor of love.

01:16:00.940 | How long is the ride? Like five minutes? I was on it like 30 years ago.

01:16:03.980 | Yeah. Yeah. It's like five minutes. And I've only been on the one at this, I went to Disneyland this

01:16:08.300 | summer and that's the only one anytime I've ever been to any Disney. And this is about the Disney World

01:16:12.060 | one, which is a little bit different. And you find out exactly how it's different.

01:16:15.900 | Trust me, you get into it. It's a cool, I mean, I think it's a cool ride. I did it a bunch of times.

01:16:22.060 | Um, it was just like a, I was reading that one up in Vermont. Interesting book. All right. Then I read,

01:16:27.500 | uh, Collisions by Alec Navala Lee. Oh, this is a legitimate book. This is a, it's a biography of a

01:16:34.380 | physicist who named Alvarez and he, he was, uh, involved in the Manhattan project. So he, he designed

01:16:43.740 | the instrument that the chase plane that chased, like, so, you know, there's a, the Enola Gay dropping

01:16:51.500 | the atomic bomb, but there was, you have like a couple of planes with you. And one of the other planes

01:16:56.060 | dropped a, you know, a piece of equipment on a parachute to try to measure the blast and other

01:17:00.860 | things and then like radio it back. And so he was up in the chase plane because he designed this thing.

01:17:05.660 | Um, he went on to win a Nobel prize for his, he was a, he was a, a, a sort of, um, experimentalist

01:17:10.860 | physicist, big, famous physicist. And he won a Nobel prize for his work on something, I don't know,

01:17:14.380 | cloud chambers or particle, something, something. So there's a kind of an interesting guy. Like what

01:17:18.540 | made the book interesting is that his life went in, he got, he got involved in like a lot of weird or

01:17:24.540 | interesting different projects. So that he was heavily involved, not heavily involved, but he got

01:17:29.180 | involved in a Kennedy assassination debunking. So debunking the conspiracy theories about the Kennedy

01:17:36.300 | assassination from a physics perspective. Like he did a lot of work on, um, using rules of physics

01:17:42.300 | to understand things like the timing of the shots and the, like how a head could go backwards if it

01:17:48.700 | was shot in this direction. So he got really involved in that. Um, and then most famously later in life,

01:17:54.460 | working with his son, who was a geologist or something like this, he, they were the ones who

01:18:00.540 | advanced the asteroid killing the dinosaurs theory. So this was their working together, really made this

01:18:08.540 | argument based off of, uh, the iridium and the KT layer. They really began to, they pushed the argument, which,

01:18:16.700 | you know, we grew up with it, you and I like, yeah, the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid.

01:18:22.780 | What I don't think we realized growing up, that was a brand new theory when we were growing up.

01:18:27.580 | Like in the early nineties, late eighties, that was still being debated. So like we grew up and

01:18:32.620 | they're like, yeah, like the asteroid killed the dinosaurs. That wasn't like, yeah, we've known this

01:18:36.780 | since the 1950s. In the nineties still, they are like actively making this argument. So anyways,

01:18:42.780 | I thought it was cool. So that was interesting. It was interesting to hear about him. Um, Alvarez,

01:18:47.020 | interesting guy, did a lot of deep work. Also, let me turn this off. I lost my list here. Let me go back.

01:18:56.060 | Uh, then I read, it's another Disney book, Jesse. I was on vacation. This is the mindset I was in.

01:19:02.700 | I was reducing my stress. I, I got really into people writing ridiculously detailed books about

01:19:09.900 | a very narrow thing involving Disney. So this is a similar, this is a more legitimate book.

01:19:15.020 | Um, no, the Fox Nolte is a legitimate book too. I just don't know if it's like traditionally published

01:19:19.180 | or not. This one was called Before the Birds Sing by Ken Bruce. Ken Bruce is, um, an animator,

01:19:24.460 | director, like a Hollywood guy. And it's all about the enchanted tiki room in Disneyland one.

01:19:31.020 | And because that was like the first animatronics, uh, there was the Lincoln animatronic, but it was

01:19:36.220 | really like sort of the first sort of, uh, audio animatronics in Disney. And it's the whole history

01:19:41.500 | of the technology, the room, like beat by beat, how this came together. This, this, this, uh, author,

01:19:48.300 | Ken Bruce was like deep in the Disney archives. He got access to them. So he's like looking at

01:19:53.580 | annotations on notes about like, Oh, they moved like the tables around for this or that. It's

01:19:58.220 | like a, again, it's a micro history of this one ride, which by the way, I've never seen.

01:20:03.180 | It was closed when I was at Disneyland. So I don't know anything, but I'm interested in audio

01:20:08.300 | animatronics. And so you, uh, you just get this like really, really deep history, including like,

01:20:13.180 | why was it the tiki room? So you get a whole history about the tiki craze and about, uh, the South

01:20:18.300 | Pacific really coming to the attention of like the American people. And there was this craze of all

01:20:22.780 | of these, like over the top themed tiki restaurants in the first half of the 20th century. Like in Los

01:20:27.820 | Angeles, there's this one that the whole outside is a volcano with like lava coming on. You come into

01:20:32.620 | these tiki restaurants and it would, they had like rainstorms inside and, and volcanoes and giant tanks.

01:20:39.500 | It was all really themed. Then it was this whole mania. So, uh, you have to understand that to

01:20:44.300 | understand like, why is there a tiki room at Disneyland? Like it was really big. And then

01:20:48.460 | it got even bigger after world war II, because a lot of American GIs went to the South Pacific.

01:20:53.420 | So then they came back and they had seen all this stuff and had these stories and Hawaii was just

01:20:57.500 | about to become, uh, the 49th U S state. And so it was like this moment. So you get like that history in

01:21:04.620 | it, but then you get the whole history of audio animatronics, which comes out of technology. They, they,

01:21:09.980 | they purchased surplus technology that was used in the Polaris, Polaris, uh, nuclear ballistic missile

01:21:16.780 | program. Cause like the way audio animatronics work, not to get too much in the detail here,

01:21:21.980 | but it's how do we, in an age before we have digital computers, how do we store like all the movements

01:21:29.580 | we do, we want like one of a bird to do and not only store those movements, but sync it up exactly with

01:21:34.940 | like the sound we're going to be playing. And in audio animatronics, they said, what we'll do is,

01:21:39.420 | uh, for each movement, we'll have like a tone. And if we have a multi-track tape, we can fit a bunch

01:21:45.580 | of tones on here. In fact, we can overlap some tones on the same tape because there are different

01:21:49.100 | frequency bands that, that are, um, they don't, they constructively, we can kind of furrier transform

01:21:55.100 | them back out again. Like we can, we can store multiple frequency bands on the same, uh, channel and

01:21:59.980 | then still isolate both of them. Um, and so what the, what they then had is, so you're recording

01:22:04.860 | these tones on audio tape for all the different motions. You want these, uh, it's valves opening

01:22:11.180 | and shutting to move things. Then they had these things that Motorola had invented for their, uh,

01:22:16.460 | push to talk radios called tone reads. So you have the sound that's kind of like wired,

01:22:22.220 | it's going over an analog cable into these tone reads and it vibrates, different frequencies,

01:22:27.580 | vibrate different reads. And when it vibrates, it closes a circuit. And that circuit can then,

01:22:32.220 | when it closes, can open and close a valve to move something. So they've, the, the program for

01:22:37.660 | these birds was on an audio tape. And you, this tape is playing and they have these huge banks of

01:22:43.820 | tone reads that are vibrating different frequencies that are opening and closing valves. And they could

01:22:49.260 | fit something like 128 or 200 different kind of sub tracks of tones on there. And it's exactly

01:22:55.420 | synchronized to the sound because one of the tracks is just like the sound. So like it's exactly

01:22:59.180 | synchronized to it. So they kind of invented that was, they were using this to control missiles.

01:23:03.180 | Um, and they, they use this for this, but then for Pirates of the Caribbean, there's too many figures

01:23:08.540 | for this, right? So Pirates of the Caribbean, now we're talking like 62. There's too many figures

01:23:14.140 | and they have audio tape and it's constant. It's not like shows like they're constantly moving

01:23:18.700 | and they're like, we can't just constantly be playing this audio tape. And there's too many figures to try to

01:23:22.620 | program. So they went to something more simple there. It was each of the feet and their motions

01:23:27.900 | were much simpler because you only passed them briefly. So they made physical discs that have

01:23:33.260 | like bumps up and down. And when the bump happens, like different valves open and close. And they just

01:23:39.260 | had like these, you'd have these big racks full of discs with bumps, like big records really. And they

01:23:45.340 | would just turn and push a stylus up and down, or there would be holes and you would, they would have a

01:23:49.660 | photo thing under it, but just physical discs that would turn. And each one would have like,

01:23:53.820 | it would take two minutes to go around. And that's like two minutes of activity. So you would have a

01:23:58.300 | whole stack of these discs for all the different motors on one Pirate. And it was like a much more

01:24:02.380 | durable thing because it was really physical, right? And then by like the seventies, you could just have

01:24:07.980 | zeros and ones on a computer, just loading the memory and the computer could just do it.

01:24:11.660 | So like this type of stuff is really interesting to me. My wife thought it was crazy. Like, what are you reading?

01:24:15.820 | Actually, this book is beautiful. It's a hardcover, beautifully produced. It's hard to get. I had to order it,

01:24:21.740 | you know, not through Amazon, through some other means. Beautiful hardcover, uh, embossed hard, uh,

01:24:28.300 | cloth hardbound, you know, with like the Tiki bird in or this or that self-published as far as I can tell.

01:24:32.940 | It's a labor of love. Really? Yeah. There was no publisher. I think this, this, uh,

01:24:38.620 | Brad Bird, the director wrote, wrote the introduction. Like this is the guy who wrote

01:24:42.460 | it is like a real Hollywood is an animation insider. All right. Then I read a fun novel,

01:24:47.500 | which I got in Bethany. There's a good bookstore in Bethany called Beach Reads, which they don't

01:24:52.780 | carry my books, but they do have, uh, beach reads a novel, a lot of novels or this or that. Um,

01:24:58.620 | and I got a book randomly off the shelf impulse by desperation reef by T Jefferson Parker. It's like a

01:25:05.660 | procedural thriller family. They're surfers. There's like, I don't know, intrigue and their

01:25:13.500 | criminal syndicate like burns down their restaurant. And it was fun. It's interesting.

01:25:20.140 | Um, and then finally I read, uh, shift by Hugh Howie. So I mentioned my, one of my kids read the

01:25:25.900 | Hugh Howie trilogy, which is the, on Apple TV, the series is silo, but he wrote the wool trilogy

01:25:31.340 | back in the day. That was big, like last decade. Anyways, he read them and I promised to read along.

01:25:36.060 | So I, I, I read the first one the month before and this month I read the second one shift and I

01:25:40.780 | guess I'll read the third one sometime soon. So there you go. Those are my five books for August, 2025.

01:25:46.620 | If you know of any obscure Disney books that go way too deep on a very narrow topic,

01:25:51.180 | I'm in man. Now you gotta just tell me, I got to read them all. There's a whole world out there.

01:25:55.500 | So let me know, send those recommendations or just send me the book to, uh, Jesse.

01:26:00.860 | We're gonna get a lot of really, we're gonna get a lot of really narrow books. I love the

01:26:04.780 | technology, the technology side of like the Disney park stuff. That's really what I'm kind of interested

01:26:09.500 | in this year. Like that's my interest during the pandemic. I was really interested in like

01:26:13.820 | the media business brand. Now this year, because it's like relaxing to me, I'm really interested

01:26:19.820 | in the technological side of Disney parks. I've been the one one day. All right. That's all the time

01:26:27.340 | we have for today. We'll be back next week with another episode until then, as always stay deep.

01:26:33.580 | If you liked today's discussion of work life balance, you'll also like episode 356, which is

01:26:39.100 | titled how much should we work? I go deep on that question in a sort of unexpected way. Check it out.

I Want Work-Life Balance. Am I Doomed to Mediocrity? | Cal Newport

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