The Cure To A Mediocre Life: 3 Unexpected Ideas To Reinvent Your Life

00:00:00.000 | So what do I want to do today?

00:00:01.080 | Well, last episode in episode 268, we looked at some ancient wisdom.

00:00:07.100 | That we took out of Marcus Aurelius' meditations that seemed relevant to

00:00:10.680 | the modern task of trying to build a deeper life in today's deep dive.

00:00:15.520 | I want to look at three unexpected ideas from my own writing over the last 20

00:00:23.340 | years that turned out to be surprisingly effective for helping people escape

00:00:29.180 | the shallows and moved your life somewhere deeper.

00:00:31.840 | So these are ideas that are unexpected, not the traditional things you would

00:00:35.200 | hear, but over the years I've learned work really well, so we've shifted from

00:00:41.080 | ancient ideas from last video and episode to modern ideas today.

00:00:45.600 | All right.

00:00:46.620 | So the first idea I want to start with is something I posted

00:00:50.100 | on my website in June of 2008.

00:00:53.320 | So I have this loaded up on the screen for those who are watching.

00:00:56.880 | The title of this essay from June of 2008, back when I was young and baby

00:01:02.500 | faced and a doctoral student at MIT, is titled "Dangerous Ideas.

00:01:07.680 | Getting Started is Overrated."

00:01:11.180 | And I start off by saying, look, attend any talk given by an entrepreneur,

00:01:16.520 | and you'll hear some variation of the following.

00:01:18.840 | The most important thing you can do is get started.

00:01:24.560 | A little bit later in the article, I say, but here's the problem.

00:01:27.040 | I completely disagree with this common advice.

00:01:31.580 | I think an instinct for getting started cripples your

00:01:35.400 | chance at long-term success.

00:01:36.800 | And I suggest that on the contrary, you should develop a rigorous

00:01:39.380 | thresholds that any pursuit must overcome before it can induce action.

00:01:45.340 | So I get into this a little bit.

00:01:47.700 | Why should we be wary of getting started?

00:01:50.640 | And I nod towards survivor bias, noting that, hey, people who did

00:01:57.220 | something successful then look backwards or like, well, you know, I'm glad I didn't wait.

00:02:01.660 | So you should get started as well, because if you're also going to end up

00:02:05.760 | doing something as successful as me, why wait, let's just get started.

00:02:09.100 | So I argue that survivor bias or survivorship bias might be one of the

00:02:13.440 | reasons why we hear this advice.

00:02:15.420 | But when I looked at people in real life who seem to have been done

00:02:20.780 | impressive things, here's what I noticed.

00:02:22.920 | And I'm reading from my article again.

00:02:24.240 | I've noticed that people who succeed in an impressive pursuit are those

00:02:28.260 | who established over time, a deep emotional conviction that they want

00:02:33.600 | to follow that pursuit and have built an exhaustive understanding of the

00:02:38.360 | relevant world, why some succeed and others don't and exactly what type

00:02:42.660 | of action is required.

00:02:44.400 | This takes time.

00:02:45.500 | Often it requires a long period of saturation in which the person returns

00:02:49.380 | again and again to the world, meeting people and reading about it and trying

00:02:52.980 | little experiments to get a feel for its reality, this period will be at

00:02:56.620 | least a month, it might last years.

00:02:59.940 | So this is what I had noticed when I got more serious about studying success

00:03:06.500 | and impressive accomplishment.

00:03:07.800 | I noticed that the key was not action.

00:03:12.420 | And if anything, action seemed to get in the way, because as you launch all

00:03:15.780 | these different initiatives, not really understanding the world, not really

00:03:20.540 | with a deep conviction of this is what I I'm going to do this, this is worth

00:03:24.000 | doing those pursuits trail off.

00:03:26.760 | They trickle off and they fall apart.

00:03:29.340 | You do that enough times.

00:03:31.420 | And what do you get out of all this frenetic motion is, well, you get the

00:03:35.020 | smoke from the friction, but no actual noticeable forward progress.

00:03:40.180 | You're much more likely to get despondency than you are success because you begin to.

00:03:45.380 | Author this story that says, I don't know.

00:03:47.320 | I've tried a bunch of stuff.

00:03:48.140 | Nothing seems to work out.

00:03:49.240 | I can't imagine myself succeeding.

00:03:51.200 | Those who do really impressive things often haven't said those two other

00:03:55.180 | ingredients, they have a deep conviction that this is something that's worth

00:03:58.440 | doing and it's worth taking the time to do, and they really understand how it

00:04:02.500 | works and how people who do this actually succeed, they know the world.

00:04:06.240 | They've read about the world.

00:04:07.060 | They've met people in the world.

00:04:07.980 | They've taken little steps in the world.

00:04:10.340 | They're pretty locked in.

00:04:11.200 | Okay.

00:04:11.420 | I understand what's going to happen here.

00:04:12.740 | You need both of those things.

00:04:14.100 | If you're going to survive the ups and downs of getting really good.

00:04:17.220 | And as I argued there, that takes time.

00:04:19.460 | You have to really come back to something again and again.

00:04:23.780 | In my own practice, I think of this as the circling period where I'm

00:04:27.040 | circling a particular pursuit.

00:04:28.940 | Maybe I should be doing this.

00:04:30.420 | I'm not sure.

00:04:31.000 | Let me back off.

00:04:31.700 | Okay.

00:04:31.920 | Let me come back at it again from another angle.

00:04:33.660 | Let me talk to someone else.

00:04:34.660 | Let me gather some information.

00:04:35.560 | Now let me wait three months.

00:04:36.500 | All right.

00:04:36.680 | Let me come back to it again.

00:04:37.900 | And you circle and you circle learning and encountering until

00:04:41.260 | either one of two things happens.

00:04:42.780 | The potential pursuit becomes inevitable and unavoidable.

00:04:46.100 | And then you launch down that path with your eyes blinkered forward,

00:04:50.640 | your jaw set with conviction, or your ardor begins to dissipate.

00:04:54.860 | And you realize, yeah, this probably wasn't the right thing to do.

00:04:56.740 | This has happened to me again and again.

00:04:59.580 | It happened to me with book writing.

00:05:01.020 | Happened to me with academia.

00:05:03.460 | It happened to me with podcasting.

00:05:06.140 | And this podcast was launched in 2020.

00:05:08.300 | 2020 was not the first year I had a thought about a podcast.

00:05:11.980 | I've been doing podcasts at a regular rate since roughly about 2014.

00:05:16.860 | I've probably been on a couple thousand different podcast episodes.

00:05:20.260 | I know the field well.

00:05:21.180 | I circled this for a long time until I really understood it, really

00:05:25.060 | understood why it would make sense for me, really understood what it would

00:05:27.700 | take to succeed, which direction I would have to go, and that all took time until

00:05:32.420 | finally it became inevitable.

00:05:33.820 | I have to do this.

00:05:36.140 | There was no real doubt when the time came by the summer of 2020.

00:05:39.260 | Okay.

00:05:39.500 | This is something I definitely have to do.

00:05:41.420 | All of those pieces had come together.

00:05:44.060 | It took a long time, but that was important because I had that

00:05:47.060 | conviction in this particular case study, because I really understood the world.

00:05:50.340 | I've been interviewing podcasters.

00:05:51.740 | I've known, I've seen the ups and downs up close.

00:05:53.860 | I knew the numbers cold.

00:05:55.140 | I was willing to put in the time required.

00:05:58.020 | And this does take a lot of time.

00:05:59.700 | I mean, Jesse will tell us because he's been here as well.

00:06:02.220 | He's seen this stuff takes time.

00:06:04.300 | And we were talking about the numbers the other day, the big initial milestone.

00:06:08.100 | And we crept up to this number.

00:06:09.780 | We first started signing with an ad agency.

00:06:12.980 | I could get 15,000 downloads on an episode.

00:06:16.460 | And that took a while.

00:06:18.340 | I think it was a whole year before we signed with an ad agency.

00:06:21.100 | So we could, we could do a two episodes a week and maybe

00:06:24.420 | get up to 30,000 downloads.

00:06:25.980 | Um, we're now pitching 65,000 downloads.

00:06:28.540 | That took a long time.

00:06:30.100 | It took a long time to get to 15.

00:06:31.980 | It took a lot longer to get from 15 to 65.

00:06:34.300 | It doesn't jump.

00:06:35.020 | And in fact, it comes back down again.

00:06:36.900 | Jesse always hears me complain about our downloads graphs because to me and

00:06:40.820 | Jesse, you'll, you'll admit this is true, whatever scale I look at these graphs,

00:06:44.940 | no matter when I look at these graphs, it looks like our downloads are going down.

00:06:48.140 | I'm always like, I was like, our downloads are going down.

00:06:50.620 | And yet when we zoom out, they're up.

00:06:52.980 | And I don't know when this up is happening, but my point is that it's hard.

00:06:56.660 | And if it wasn't locked in, I'm willing to spend five years, five years to make

00:07:01.300 | this thing that something really big and impressive, if I wasn't willing to do

00:07:04.420 | that, it probably wasn't going to happen.

00:07:05.940 | And that's why it took five years for me to decide to pull the trigger.

00:07:08.700 | All right.

00:07:09.780 | So that was my first piece of contrarian advice was be

00:07:13.660 | careful about getting started.

00:07:14.740 | Here's the issue though.

00:07:15.540 | Of course, won't this lead to procrastination?

00:07:18.900 | Maybe you will never get started.

00:07:20.660 | And I do want to acknowledge that this is an issue.

00:07:23.740 | Fear of success, perfectionism, procrastination becomes a much

00:07:28.700 | heightened issue if you say, I really have to be sure before I get going.

00:07:32.460 | And I think a lot of people have faced that issue, but my argument is the right

00:07:36.700 | solution to that issue is not just get started on everything right away, because

00:07:39.780 | that's going to be just as unsuccessful.

00:07:41.460 | The place where we should be focusing, if we care about the psychology of action,

00:07:46.460 | the place we want to be focusing is on how to walk that tightrope, not getting

00:07:51.300 | started too early and yet at the same time, not avoiding starting altogether.

00:07:56.540 | That's a very difficult psychological tightrope to walk successfully, but it's

00:08:00.140 | hard and there's no way to avoid that.

00:08:01.700 | That's what we should be focusing on.

00:08:02.940 | That's the challenge.

00:08:03.860 | And we can't get rid of that challenge by saying, don't try.

00:08:07.060 | And we can't get rid of that challenge by saying, just start right away.

00:08:09.740 | Neither of those is going to work.

00:08:11.140 | We can't avoid that psychological complexity.

00:08:13.340 | This stuff is hard.

00:08:14.220 | It's hard work.

00:08:16.180 | You shouldn't start right away, but you should start eventually,

00:08:18.780 | but maybe not on this thing.

00:08:20.180 | And how do you know when it's the right time?

00:08:21.500 | You don't really, you just learn and you think, and you build that conviction.

00:08:25.420 | And it's complicated and it's difficult and we should just admit that, but just

00:08:28.980 | getting started on everything, uh, it's not going to get you there.

00:08:31.700 | There's a famous guy.

00:08:34.220 | Kaiya sock.

00:08:34.740 | Do you remember this book, Jesse guy, Kawasaki book, the art of the start.

00:08:37.820 | No, I never read it.

00:08:39.700 | It's a good title.

00:08:40.300 | Yeah.

00:08:40.820 | Yeah.

00:08:41.180 | But I think, uh, at some point I wrote a book or a post call, like the art of not

00:08:45.980 | getting started or something like that, because I don't know.

00:08:49.020 | Um, that was definitely in the, definitely in the air at the time.

00:08:52.540 | All right, let's do another unexpected idea that proved in surprisingly effective

00:08:57.020 | in helping people cultivate depth.

00:09:00.260 | This idea I'm going to, I wrote about this.

00:09:03.100 | I believe I ended up writing about this in deep work, but this is where this idea

00:09:09.180 | first emerged because this post is now from 2010, July, 2010.

00:09:13.580 | So two years after the getting started post also in the summer, maybe the

00:09:17.420 | summer is when I have my best ideas.

00:09:19.340 | The title of this article from 2010, treat your mind as you would a private garden.

00:09:26.620 | Hey, it's Cal here.

00:09:28.140 | I just wanted to mention.

00:09:29.340 | If you want to have help taking action on the type of ideas we talk about in this

00:09:34.300 | show, sign up for my email newsletter.

00:09:37.300 | The link is right here below in the description, two to four times a month.

00:09:41.620 | I send out detailed articles about the types of ideas we discuss here.

00:09:46.980 | It's the best way to stay connected to me and my audience's

00:09:51.060 | quest to live a deeper life.

00:09:52.300 | So sign up below.

00:09:53.100 | Well, this is interesting.

00:09:56.100 | Where did this notion come from?

00:09:57.380 | Uh, it's not mine.

00:09:58.580 | It comes from a book that I read around this time that was influential to me.

00:10:02.300 | And that was Winifred Gallagher's 2009 ode to focus wrapped.

00:10:07.620 | R a P T.

00:10:10.020 | Now here's the thing about this book Gallagher who does fantastic science

00:10:13.460 | writing begins her book talking about her own cancer diagnosis to quote her here.

00:10:20.860 | Not just cancer, but a particularly nasty, fairly advanced kind.

00:10:26.220 | Now I'm going to read from my post here for a second.

00:10:28.900 | She realizes that this disease wants to claim her attention and that this was no

00:10:33.500 | way to live with what may be the last moments of her life.

00:10:36.740 | So she launches an experiment to reclaim her attention, relentlessly redirecting

00:10:41.180 | it towards the things that matter most.

00:10:43.620 | Quote big ones like family and friends, spiritual life and work and smaller ones

00:10:47.780 | like movies, walks, and a 6 30 PM martini.

00:10:51.460 | Gallagher comes away from the experiment with a good prognosis for a disease and a

00:10:55.380 | visceral appreciation of a surprising fact.

00:10:58.100 | Quote, life is the sum total of what you focus on.

00:11:01.660 | Yet most people expend little effort cultivating this focus.

00:11:07.660 | She goes on to suggest that you should treat your mind like

00:11:11.940 | you would a private garden.

00:11:13.140 | Carefully tending what you allow to grow in there and

00:11:16.460 | keeping out things you don't want.

00:11:17.980 | This idea was very influential to me, and I think it is more relevant today to our

00:11:23.980 | culture writ large than it was back in 2010 when I was first writing this article.

00:11:28.460 | Let's start with why this idea is important.

00:11:30.980 | There's a, almost a epistemological philosophical truth embedded in here

00:11:37.780 | where Gallagher is saying there is not just an objective world out there that

00:11:41.260 | you are observing and, and noticing things about.

00:11:44.020 | It's not, here's the world and either you're seeing it or you're not.

00:11:46.540 | Your experience of the world is constructed inside your mind.

00:11:50.340 | It's based off of in general, the types of things that you are paying attention to.

00:11:56.580 | Right.

00:11:57.740 | It's just like if you are the victim of a crime, let's say you're

00:12:02.300 | mugged on the subway for a while.

00:12:05.860 | Your view of the world is when you go on the subway again, is very much going to be

00:12:10.580 | one of, of anxiety and tension and fear and seeing everyone around you as someone

00:12:14.620 | who's like potentially going to cause trouble because it's the same people that

00:12:18.460 | you might've seen the day before you got mugged, but the way in what you pay

00:12:23.060 | attention to can really change the way you experience your world.

00:12:25.660 | And Gallagher saying writ large, this is true that even with all this terrible,

00:12:28.700 | objectively terrible stuff happening in her life with a cancer diagnosis, by

00:12:32.100 | focusing relentlessly on stuff that was good and important, it made her happy,

00:12:35.980 | made the world she was in seem much better, even though these bad

00:12:39.060 | things were happening in it.

00:12:40.900 | What you pay attention to really affects your subjective experience of life.

00:12:45.180 | So why is this very relevant today?

00:12:46.900 | More so than it was even when Gallagher's book came out

00:12:50.660 | because of phones and social media.

00:12:52.580 | So now we are seeing this effect significantly amplified because of our

00:13:00.180 | phones and social media, because of the engagement cues of algorithmic curation

00:13:06.300 | and the push towards trying to attract attention as long as possible on these

00:13:10.020 | devices, you can really be thrown into a world that is constructed algorithmically.

00:13:15.620 | Every five or six minutes, you're checking your phone and seeing news and social

00:13:19.620 | media posts and newsletters that are coming from this engagement ecosystem

00:13:24.020 | that can incredibly color your experience of the world.

00:13:26.380 | Think about people, you know, who are very online.

00:13:30.940 | They tend, for example, to be very cataclysmic.

00:13:35.420 | They think the world is, you know, a day or two away from a major civil war.

00:13:42.420 | And really the only thing that's going to get in the way is before that can even

00:13:45.660 | happen, there's going to be a climate apocalypse that's going to fuel an even

00:13:51.380 | worse strain of COVID that turned people into zombies that are going to steal

00:13:56.540 | election results as a way to try to keep certain books out of the libraries or

00:13:59.940 | something, right?

00:14:00.460 | I mean, if you're online all the time, you're like, my God, the world is falling

00:14:04.340 | apart. It's what you pay attention to.

00:14:07.180 | Colors your experience of everything in the world.

00:14:09.580 | Anything you see, innocent conversation you're having with a parent at your kid's

00:14:14.500 | school, a play, everything suddenly is colored by this.

00:14:17.540 | We should treat our minds like a private garden and say, I don't want to see the

00:14:22.300 | world as being a few days away from, you know, the, the civil war climate pandemic

00:14:28.780 | apocalypse, and we're all about the die.

00:14:30.380 | I like Winifred Gallagher, enjoy my six 30 martini friends going to see the movies.

00:14:36.620 | So this is something I think that has proven to be really effective as care,

00:14:40.020 | what you pay attention to, how much news you read, when do you read it?

00:14:43.260 | Why do you read it?

00:14:44.020 | What engagement sites you allow yourself to turn your attention towards?

00:14:48.260 | How much of your time and attention do you want Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk to

00:14:52.780 | monetize?

00:14:53.380 | I mean, at what goals you say?

00:14:54.860 | I think they have enough money.

00:14:56.660 | I have better things to do than to be involved with that.

00:15:00.340 | Why are you watching sort of YouTube videos of people crashing into things when

00:15:07.380 | you could be reading a book like Winifred Gallagher's book or reading a classic,

00:15:11.420 | trying to like put yourself into the mindset of a great thinker from times past

00:15:16.100 | to push yourself instead of again, watching though they're entertaining, you know,

00:15:20.860 | videos of people falling in the fountains because they're reading their phone.

00:15:23.740 | I mean, what if you were going back and watching great films and reading

00:15:26.860 | secondary sources on them?

00:15:28.100 | So you're prepared.

00:15:28.860 | Let me try to pull this apart.

00:15:29.940 | Understand why this movie is good.

00:15:31.220 | There's so much stuff you could be paying attention to that points out the good in

00:15:34.380 | the world that gives you appreciation for quality that makes the world seem like a

00:15:39.140 | place where the miraculous can happen and people are divine.

00:15:42.020 | And there's really interesting things are always around each corner.

00:15:44.780 | What you pay attention to matters for how you think about your world.

00:15:49.780 | And never have we had to think about that more than in an age in which there are

00:15:53.660 | plenty of companies that can reach us through that little piece of glowing glass

00:15:56.740 | in our hand and control every ounce of what we focus on.

00:15:59.820 | So we need an independence from that.

00:16:02.420 | We need to treat our minds like a private garden.

00:16:04.700 | The effect can be phenomenal.

00:16:07.420 | You say it all the time too, with like books and how long they take to curate

00:16:11.940 | those ideas and how long it takes them to write it as opposed to a post or

00:16:17.100 | something that may have taken somebody a few hours.

00:16:19.820 | Well, even a post is old fashioned.

00:16:21.140 | Yeah.

00:16:21.460 | A tweet.

00:16:22.100 | A tweet.

00:16:22.660 | Yeah.

00:16:23.180 | Or a comment on a tweet that you then obsessively check to see if that got

00:16:29.180 | engagement.

00:16:29.780 | Yeah.

00:16:30.140 | Yeah.

00:16:30.420 | I mean, here's the thing about a book as someone who's written eight of them now,

00:16:33.020 | you spend a long time thinking about those ideas and a lot of people work on

00:16:37.260 | them with you and like, are you saying this just right?

00:16:39.340 | And that's not even a great sentence.

00:16:40.660 | And let's go back and rethink the order of it.

00:16:42.540 | By the time you get to the book, you're seeing a sort of crystallized form of

00:16:45.820 | human thinking push to a level of consideration that you're not going to see

00:16:49.980 | online.

00:16:50.500 | Yeah.

00:16:51.060 | So even that can just give you hope for the complexity of human thinking.

00:16:55.820 | All right.

00:16:57.620 | One more idea.

00:16:58.300 | Third idea.

00:17:01.220 | This is from 2014.

00:17:02.860 | So we're marching forward.

00:17:04.020 | We started in 2008 with the 2010, we're up to 2014.

00:17:07.140 | This is September.

00:17:08.380 | So it's not the summer.

00:17:09.300 | So we'll break that trend.

00:17:10.300 | Now the title of this, of this article doesn't give a lot away.

00:17:15.020 | It's called, should you work like Maya Angelo or Eric Schmidt?

00:17:18.260 | But the, the quote I want to use for the title of this idea is the following and

00:17:22.500 | is buried in this article.

00:17:23.620 | Think like an artist, but work like an accountant.

00:17:28.420 | All right.

00:17:30.020 | So this came from a David Brooks column that I had read back in 2014.

00:17:33.900 | And as I say here, uh, in the top of this article, I wrote about Brooks's column.

00:17:40.700 | Ultimately Brooks's column was about geopolitics, but he began it by riffing

00:17:45.860 | on Mason Curry's book, daily rituals, which really was a phenomenon.

00:17:50.100 | I've quoted that book quite a lot in a lot of my own work.

00:17:52.780 | And this was a book where Curry went through the lives of famous creatives,

00:17:57.220 | scoured their memoirs and biographies and letters, and just point extracted

00:18:02.500 | everything he could find about their rituals for work.

00:18:05.060 | So people love this book.

00:18:07.220 | And so Brooks was just looking for an excuse to write about it.

00:18:10.220 | Now, however, what was cool about his summary was a couple of points he made.

00:18:14.780 | So let me, let me read from my article, which will in turn quote Brooks.

00:18:18.260 | To summarize these observations, Brooks quotes Henry Miller, quote, I know that

00:18:24.780 | to sustain these true moments of insight, one has to be highly disciplined,

00:18:28.540 | lead a disciplined life.

00:18:30.420 | He then offers his own more bluntly accurate summary, quote, great creative

00:18:35.780 | minds think like artists, but work like accountants or to put it in study

00:18:42.660 | hacks, lingo, deep insight requires a disciplined commitment to deep work.

00:18:46.340 | So what was I getting at here?

00:18:49.660 | An idea that I think has pervaded my thinking about what we do here on this

00:18:55.100 | podcast and in my writing in the years since, which is there is a paradox at the

00:18:59.220 | core of organizational productivity, right?

00:19:03.020 | So that's the term I'm going to use here for productivity that is focused on

00:19:07.060 | organizing the obligations in your life so that you have more intentional

00:19:10.060 | control over how you spend your time.

00:19:11.660 | I'm trying to separate this from outcome-based productivity, which has

00:19:15.540 | more to do with maximizing output per each unit of input.

00:19:19.620 | Right?

00:19:20.900 | So for organizational productivity, there's this paradoxical observation.

00:19:24.820 | That the better you are at that, the more free, creative and relaxed you can be.

00:19:31.620 | And this goes contrary to a lot of people's instincts.

00:19:33.780 | People think, wait a second to be organized is in some sense

00:19:38.900 | where creativity goes to die.

00:19:40.820 | I'm going to have my planners and my systems and it's so rigid and there's

00:19:46.140 | no room for me to be creative.

00:19:47.820 | There's no room for me to just go on a flight of fancy and the following idea

00:19:51.540 | or to go into the field with my fields note notebook and have that big insight.

00:19:54.940 | If I structure my life, I'm going to be a boring executive.

00:19:58.220 | I'm a creative type.

00:20:00.300 | I don't do that, but what Brooks is pointing out here, his lesson

00:20:04.700 | from studying Mason Curry, his lesson that he quoted Henry Miller making

00:20:09.740 | is that actually this organization supports creativity, relaxation, and freedom.

00:20:14.740 | To have your arms around, here's the things on my plate.

00:20:18.540 | Here's what needs to be done.

00:20:20.580 | Here's when I'm going to do things on them.

00:20:22.460 | Here's what I need to take off because this is too much.

00:20:24.580 | That gives you the breathing room needed to relax.

00:20:27.700 | That gives you the breathing room needed to be creative because when you can trust,

00:20:33.060 | okay, I have things captured.

00:20:34.580 | One of the things you can do is like, great, I'm going to spend all day today,

00:20:37.220 | just working on this creative pursuit.

00:20:38.620 | And you can do so without distraction or guilt because you're not just.

00:20:41.140 | Randomly pushing stuff to the side and hoping nothing bad happens when you can

00:20:45.540 | control your times and obligations.

00:20:47.220 | You can realize with precision, the impact of everything you've said yes to.

00:20:51.740 | And have the courage to pull back.

00:20:55.260 | When you realize exactly what happens with your time and how long things take,

00:20:58.300 | you're much more realistic when you say yes and no.

00:21:00.420 | You say, no, no, no.

00:21:01.900 | I know how this story ends.

00:21:03.780 | If I say yes to this, this, and this, that's going to put this many things on my schedule.

00:21:07.420 | I've seen that before because I have a pretty good sense of my time.

00:21:09.700 | That's going to be too crowded.

00:21:10.620 | I know I need to pull that way back.

00:21:12.300 | I need to stop doing this.

00:21:13.420 | No longer do these gigs, leave this position, rechange this.

00:21:16.780 | It gives you this type of autonomy over how your time actually unfolds.

00:21:23.100 | So I like the way Brooks put it, think like an artist, but work like an accountant.

00:21:27.060 | So when you're thinking, be creative, be deep, be free, but when structuring your

00:21:32.540 | work, be much more structured, like an accountant, and you'll be able then to

00:21:36.620 | get more out of your time.

00:21:38.420 | If you do things like a multi-scale planning, you have a quarterly, weekly,

00:21:45.660 | daily plan, time block plan makes a big difference combined with full capture.

00:21:50.460 | When you're making a plan for your time, as opposed to reacting, when you have

00:21:54.100 | sequentiality, when you have heuristics and quotas for how much, when you say yes

00:21:58.780 | and how much work of each type you let on, when you're able to see clearly how long

00:22:01.940 | things took and then go back and make decisions about what to do going forward.

00:22:04.860 | All of this actually frees up more creativity and more relaxation.

00:22:08.540 | It leads you to the possibility of a freer life.

00:22:11.460 | And if you really want to significantly simplify your life, there's really no

00:22:15.300 | better way to start on that path than to get control over everything.

00:22:18.540 | So that like a surgeon, you can start incising and scapling off all sorts of

00:22:22.740 | different things that have the biggest footprints and make sure the things that

00:22:26.060 | remain get done at the highest level.

00:22:27.500 | That's an unexpected idea, but it's one that has proven unexpectedly, I think,

00:22:33.300 | effective in thinking about living a deeper life.

00:22:35.900 | Think like an artist, but work like an accountant.

00:22:39.180 | So obviously there's a lot of more classic ideas I talk a lot about on the

00:22:44.180 | show, but I thought it'd be cool again, to go back and look at the other

00:22:47.020 | ones that seemed to hold the test of time.

00:22:49.060 | So let's just summarize all three.

00:22:50.500 | Getting started is overrated.

00:22:52.620 | Treat your mind like a private garden.

00:22:55.900 | Think like an artist, but work like an accountant.

00:22:59.860 | All of these are a decade old or more, but I think they hold up.

00:23:04.780 | So there you go, Jesse.

00:23:06.860 | That's old flame throwing Cal and his blogging days, just

00:23:11.060 | throwing ideas out there.

00:23:13.260 | That book, um, that Brooks reference sounds pretty cool.

00:23:16.300 | Oh yeah.

00:23:17.060 | Mason Curry, the daily rituals.

00:23:18.580 | That book was a phenomenon.

00:23:20.340 | It was so cool.

00:23:21.700 | It was just, here's a lot of famous creative minds from history.

00:23:24.300 | Here's how they work.

00:23:25.140 | And just went through it.

00:23:27.220 | Everyone was writing about that at the time.

00:23:29.700 | I talked about it in digital minimalism.

00:23:32.980 | I think I cite some stuff from it in slow productivity as well.

00:23:36.740 | Yeah.

00:23:36.940 | Mason Curry was a cool idea for a book.

00:23:38.380 | It was actually a blog, like everything was back then.

00:23:41.660 | It was a blog that he turned into a book.

00:23:43.300 | Um, really cool project.

00:23:45.100 | All right.

00:23:46.700 | So I want to move on and do some questions roughly on these, this

00:23:49.380 | general topic of sort of escaping the mediocre life and finding depth.

00:23:53.060 | Before we do, I want to mention real quick, a sponsor that

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00:26:14.740 | Speaking about health, hard to find a doctor these days.

00:26:19.420 | How do you do it?

00:26:20.820 | You ask people for recommendations, you know, people like, I don't know.

00:26:25.020 | How about this guy?

00:26:26.060 | You go there, they have no appointments.

00:26:28.700 | They're not going to be able to get you a prescription.

00:26:30.700 | You go there, they have no appointments.

00:26:33.060 | You ask someone else, they're like, I don't know this.

00:26:34.860 | She's pretty good.

00:26:35.780 | You go there, they have an appointment, but then it turns out they don't take

00:26:38.700 | your insurance and you just wasted your time.

00:26:40.540 | It really is quite primitive how we find healthcare providers.

00:26:44.100 | That's why you need ZocDoc.

00:26:47.460 | ZocDoc is a free app where you can find amazing doctors and book appointments

00:26:52.540 | online, we're talking about booking appointments with thousands of top rated

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00:27:03.500 | near you and treat almost any condition that you are searching for.

00:27:08.660 | It just makes sense, right?

00:27:11.580 | I need a doctor, pull out the ZocDoc app, go to ZocDoc.com to get it.

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00:27:23.140 | Hey, people really like this one.

00:27:24.780 | That seems good.

00:27:26.820 | Here they say, look, he does pretty good treatments, but also has a tendency

00:27:30.860 | towards spontaneous cannibalism.

00:27:32.340 | So be careful about him.

00:27:33.420 | So maybe you don't go with him.

00:27:34.580 | All the information's right there.

00:27:36.540 | You avoid spontaneous cannibalism.

00:27:38.820 | You get the good doctor.

00:27:39.980 | You don't have to find, find out they don't take your insurance.

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00:27:43.820 | And once you find the doc you want, you can book them

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00:27:47.780 | No more waiting awkwardly on hold with a receptionist.

00:27:52.220 | So anyways, go ahead.

00:27:56.100 | Sorry.

00:27:56.660 | I was thinking, I was thinking Jesse about speaking of cannibalism.

00:27:59.660 | Sure.

00:28:00.540 | ZocDoc loves this.

00:28:01.420 | One of my kids was going on a field trip today.

00:28:05.180 | He does not get my sense of humor.

00:28:06.340 | Going on a field trip today to a skyline caverns, the caves.

00:28:09.580 | Okay.

00:28:10.340 | And I told him, cause I thought this was good advice.

00:28:12.380 | So I said, look, if you notice something, uh, something seems to miss, like the,

00:28:17.140 | the, your tour guide looks nervous.

00:28:18.860 | Like he might be lost or like some of the lights are going off.

00:28:21.220 | Your best bet is to start cannibalizing someone right away.

00:28:26.540 | So like you keep your nutrients up, you know, you can get to like probably the

00:28:30.820 | person, it just, just get right to the cannibalizing right away before, you

00:28:34.060 | know, uh, there's competition or whatever.

00:28:36.260 | And he thought about it for a second and was like, dad, I think it's unlikely

00:28:40.020 | we're going to get lost in the cave.

00:28:41.220 | So I guess you could probably say the same about if you're worried about your,

00:28:47.260 | uh, about your doctor, um, being a cannibal.

00:28:52.700 | ZocDoc will help you avoid that.

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00:28:56.380 | Forget cannibalism, good doctors, take your insurance nearby reviews.

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00:29:03.380 | Go to ZocDoc.com/deep and download the ZocDoc app for free.

00:29:07.660 | Then find a book, a top rated doctor today.

00:29:09.860 | That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep.

00:29:13.380 | ZocDoc.com/deep.

00:29:15.940 | All right, Jess, let's do some questions.

00:29:18.100 | That kind of got me reminded of a side rant that Mad Dog had last week about,

00:29:23.500 | uh, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey.

00:29:25.940 | Were they, is Taylor Swift involved in a cannibal scandal with

00:29:30.340 | Taylor, with a football player?

00:29:32.700 | There's just like, there's just this big rant that he went on that was

00:29:36.380 | hilarious and it kind of reminded me of the same.

00:29:38.140 | Speaking of Mad Dog, I was listening to Bill Simmons being interviewed

00:29:41.940 | on the Smart List podcast.

00:29:43.300 | They were talking about why he got in the podcasting and he said his

00:29:46.380 | biggest influence was Mike and the Mad Dog.

00:29:49.140 | Oh yeah.

00:29:49.740 | Yeah.

00:29:49.940 | They were big.

00:29:50.460 | Yeah.

00:29:50.780 | They were real big.

00:29:51.300 | And he's, um, where's Bill Simmons based?

00:29:53.900 | Has he been in Connecticut?

00:29:55.380 | He, I mean, he was from Boston.

00:29:57.180 | Okay.

00:29:57.620 | Then he moved to Connecticut after his parents got divorced in high school.

00:30:01.820 | Okay.

00:30:02.300 | And now he's, um, based in LA.

00:30:04.220 | Oh, okay.

00:30:04.860 | Yeah.

00:30:05.060 | But he said what he liked about Mike and the Mad Dog was when they would veer

00:30:08.940 | from sports to talk about like culture issues.

00:30:12.020 | Yeah.

00:30:12.140 | They'd have authors on stuff.

00:30:13.300 | Yeah.

00:30:13.580 | So that still does.

00:30:14.460 | And that's where Bill Simmons, you know, really adopted this idea, which is his

00:30:18.540 | of bringing pop culture and intersecting that with sports.

00:30:21.660 | So it's not just pure sports.

00:30:23.180 | It's the pop culture stuff is just as important.

00:30:25.180 | So there you go.

00:30:25.860 | A dog.

00:30:27.500 | All right.

00:30:28.060 | First question is from Tanya.

00:30:30.580 | I'm struggling to be social and confident.

00:30:33.580 | What can I do to speak more articulately and gain confidence

00:30:36.900 | and impress more people?

00:30:38.300 | Well, Tanya, it's a good question.

00:30:40.300 | And I can tell you a lot of this is practice, right?

00:30:43.540 | The more you're around people in different situations, the more

00:30:46.980 | comfortable you get in those situations.

00:30:48.820 | The more you spend talking about things or explaining yourself or talking to people,

00:30:53.300 | the more comfortable and articulate you get in those types of conversations.

00:30:57.540 | I mean, I talk pretty, you know, here on this podcast, but in part, because

00:31:03.340 | I've been professionally speaking since I was in my young twenties.

00:31:05.900 | So I'm sort of used to it.

00:31:07.220 | The cadences of speaking, the pacing, the coming up in your head with

00:31:11.260 | what you're going to say next.

00:31:12.020 | It all just sort of comes with practice.

00:31:15.660 | So social stuff really can be practiced.

00:31:17.460 | You can start with very low key social stuff early on stuff that you're

00:31:20.300 | already pretty comfortable with.

00:31:21.580 | I know this person, I don't mind hanging out with them.

00:31:23.540 | So we go to a restaurant or a bar together or go to a movies

00:31:28.540 | together on a fairly regular basis.

00:31:30.020 | I'm just used to in a comfortable situation, being out in the world with

00:31:33.420 | people and talking to them and interacting, but the stakes are low.

00:31:36.220 | Then you can build that up to bigger things.

00:31:39.340 | Okay.

00:31:39.620 | I'm going to go to bigger social events or parties at first, you know, small ones.

00:31:44.620 | Here's my friend, that's their birthday party.

00:31:46.220 | And you get more confident with that.

00:31:47.700 | So a lot of this is just practice.

00:31:49.300 | Now, one of the things I think that is often left out of this

00:31:52.660 | conversation is the role of anxiety.

00:31:55.380 | Anxiety gets really intertwined with socializing in ways that I think it's

00:32:00.820 | hard for people who don't feel that same anxiety to understand, they don't

00:32:04.620 | understand how these really get mixed in together, you really can start to build

00:32:11.180 | up a sort of dread or anxiety around different situations.

00:32:14.140 | It's why one of the outcomes of pretty severe anxiety disorders would be an

00:32:19.300 | agoraphobia where you don't leave your house anymore.

00:32:21.180 | It's because often those two things can go together.

00:32:24.740 | The same circuits that are related to sociality are often the same circuits

00:32:28.460 | that are short circuiting when you're suffering from anxiety.

00:32:31.300 | So if anxiety is a real issue here, Tanya, it's not just, Oh, I'm out of practice.

00:32:35.780 | What do I do?

00:32:36.260 | It's I really feel physically dread and concern and panic

00:32:41.140 | when I'm in these situations.

00:32:43.460 | I would look towards ACT, ACT-based techniques.

00:32:47.940 | They're very good for exactly this situation.

00:32:50.420 | So ACT, otherwise known as third wave psychotherapy, stands for

00:32:54.180 | acceptance, commitment therapy.

00:32:55.700 | It's a very effective evidence-based type of psychotherapy that does really

00:33:02.700 | well with anxiety, social anxiety, panic type anxiety around other people.

00:33:08.420 | It's really based upon separating feelings from your actual actions.

00:33:14.500 | It really helps train you to recognize the physical symptoms of something like

00:33:19.940 | anxiety and say, yes, but I'm still going to commit to do this thing that I think

00:33:22.820 | is valuable, and I can still do that even if this feeling comes and goes.

00:33:25.700 | It helps you avoid labeling that feeling as this is really important.

00:33:29.900 | Something really bad is happening.

00:33:31.220 | It's really bad to be feeling this way.

00:33:32.740 | It breaks that loop of you labeling your feelings and just seeing them as

00:33:37.980 | feelings themselves.

00:33:39.220 | We talked about this a little bit in last week's episode.

00:33:43.180 | We read Marcus Aurelius' meditation.

00:33:45.780 | He had some actually stoic ideas that are connected to modern

00:33:49.140 | acceptance, commitment therapy.

00:33:50.900 | But I just want to point that out there, Tanya, that there is a more serious

00:33:53.740 | training you can do with the tools of ACT that are there and available.

00:33:59.420 | And so if the anxiety is really holding you back, that's not permanent.

00:34:02.820 | You have to think about that like knee pain.

00:34:05.220 | You had knee pain.

00:34:06.540 | The doctor's going to help you fix it.

00:34:07.780 | Though it might take some PT and a little bit of time.

00:34:09.740 | Same thing here.

00:34:11.020 | Look into acceptance, commitment therapy.

00:34:13.260 | There's some good books on it.

00:34:14.340 | I think it's the Happiness Trap is one of the famous sort of public

00:34:19.660 | facing books on ACT.

00:34:20.780 | That's a good entry place into it.

00:34:22.220 | Harris, Russ Harris, maybe.

00:34:24.700 | Well, you can look that up, Jesse.

00:34:26.140 | It's the Happiness Trap.

00:34:27.220 | But I just want to throw that out there because it can be frustrating

00:34:31.540 | if you're on the anxiety spectrum.

00:34:33.460 | I'm on that spectrum.

00:34:34.420 | It manifests for myself in interesting ways.

00:34:36.220 | I have to do a lot of training on it.

00:34:37.820 | Depending if you're on that spectrum, it can be frustrating

00:34:41.500 | to just be around someone really social.

00:34:43.060 | It's like, what's the problem?

00:34:44.420 | Just like come to the thing, like what could go on?

00:34:46.340 | And they don't realize that you're feeling a minced red.

00:34:49.340 | So there's a lot of things you can do there, Tonya, the train.

00:34:51.420 | Do the work. It is worth it.

00:34:53.340 | Sociality is very important.

00:34:55.700 | Yeah, you got it right.

00:34:57.540 | It was Russ Harris.

00:34:58.740 | Russ Harris. OK, the Happiness Trap.

00:35:00.700 | Yeah. Yeah, it's a good book.

00:35:01.700 | All right, what we got next?

00:35:04.420 | Next question is from Ben.

00:35:06.460 | In what ways can being ordinary be good in life?

00:35:09.500 | This was an interesting question, Ben, I had to think about it a little bit.

00:35:13.100 | It resonated a little bit because I think what you're getting at here

00:35:17.020 | is this interesting trade off when you're thinking about the deep life

00:35:21.060 | and how you want to shape it.

00:35:22.380 | There's one way you can go, of course, is towards exceptionalness.

00:35:27.660 | I want to do something exceptional.

00:35:30.180 | I want to be noted for it.

00:35:31.660 | I want to do something noteworthy, have some fame for this thing

00:35:34.740 | that I'm doing that's important.

00:35:36.060 | That's one particular path for the deep life.

00:35:38.060 | The other path for the deep life is I want to build a life around my values,

00:35:43.100 | you know, start with discipline, figure out my values, organize my stuff,

00:35:46.660 | sacrifice and be a leader on behalf of others and then find areas of my life

00:35:50.380 | to be remarkable.

00:35:51.340 | And you could sort of have this quiet, deep life

00:35:53.660 | where you really matter to a lot of people and you find and extract out of life

00:35:57.700 | a lot of joy and appreciation of stuff that's fantastic or great or remarkable,

00:36:02.620 | all without having to be I am an exceptional X and people recognize it.

00:36:06.220 | You have sort of two paths towards depth here.

00:36:08.060 | That's kind of pros and cons of each,

00:36:11.420 | especially when we look at that exceptionality path, right,

00:36:14.100 | because there's good there and we shouldn't turn down the good.

00:36:16.740 | Why do people want to try to be great at things?

00:36:18.900 | Well, first of all, you do gain more autonomy.

00:36:20.940 | Right, you do something really well, there's more demand for it,

00:36:25.260 | you often gain more financial reward and or more control

00:36:28.740 | over how you live your life.

00:36:30.540 | There are several things I do at a pretty high level,

00:36:32.620 | and I do have a lot of flexibility in my life.

00:36:34.380 | We get to mess around in this playhouse, deep work HQ.

00:36:37.300 | You know, I go away in the summers.

00:36:41.060 | I have very high control over my schedule.

00:36:44.100 | I don't worry about money, really. That's not really an issue.

00:36:47.340 | So there's like great autonomy that comes from doing some things really well.

00:36:50.420 | Also, it feels good to be respected in the moment.

00:36:53.260 | We're wired for that.

00:36:54.220 | This is the whole tribal leadership thing.

00:36:56.500 | We tell ourselves it doesn't matter, but there is ego.

00:37:00.220 | And it's and you do feel if something goes really well,

00:37:02.780 | you'll feel good about that for a while.

00:37:04.060 | There's a reason why people chase it.

00:37:05.780 | That is the stimulus that is perverted when we see workaholism. Right.

00:37:10.340 | So with a addiction, there's usually some sort of very powerful

00:37:14.180 | stimulus that becomes the driver for the addiction,

00:37:16.780 | the feeling of intoxication, right?

00:37:19.140 | Workaholism is really that feeling of, wow, I did this thing well.

00:37:23.420 | And and people recognize that.

00:37:25.540 | And my boss rewarded me.

00:37:26.620 | That's a very strong stimulus.

00:37:27.700 | That's why you could build a whole addiction around it.

00:37:30.340 | On the flip side, though, it can be very stressful and anxiety producing

00:37:33.980 | to try to do something exceptionally well, it's hard to do,

00:37:36.100 | and it puts you in a bigger, more stressful circumstances.

00:37:40.340 | You have to navigate.

00:37:41.380 | You get more people perhaps who like want your time

00:37:43.860 | than you have nearly enough time to actually give.

00:37:46.060 | And you have to start saying no to people.

00:37:47.540 | And people think that you're being, you know, snobby or elitist.

00:37:50.740 | High stake things are just anxiety producing.

00:37:53.340 | And you have to figure, is this worth the anxiety, is this one not?

00:37:56.860 | Things can fall apart.

00:37:58.940 | It's hard to do things at a high level.

00:38:00.380 | So there's negatives that come with it.

00:38:01.820 | I mean, I constantly have to make these decisions.

00:38:03.780 | There's things I, you know, television, things I've turned down, for example,

00:38:08.540 | that may be an isolation, you say, well, that's cool.

00:38:10.300 | Like I know that show.

00:38:11.100 | That would be really cool to go on.

00:38:12.260 | And it's like I can't do all of these things.

00:38:14.340 | And if I did, it's going to overwhelm me with time constraints.

00:38:17.820 | The anxiety have to be careful about how I make my path.

00:38:20.020 | So it's tricky.

00:38:21.900 | So I think it's a really good question, Ben,

00:38:25.300 | if you're going the route of let me just be exceptional,

00:38:28.780 | you can build depth around that.

00:38:30.380 | And there are some real positives you're going to get, but there's also negatives.

00:38:33.180 | And I say that because I think that then when you get the scale between

00:38:36.540 | the quiet, remarkability approach

00:38:40.220 | versus the exceptional, notable, famous remarkability approach,

00:38:44.740 | when you put the cons with the pros on this ladder, the scales become about balance.

00:38:48.940 | And so you really, if you're going the quiet, remarkability approach, a life that,

00:38:54.740 | you know, it's. Lorelei Gilmore and the Gilmore Girls,

00:38:59.060 | not famous outside of Stars Hollow,

00:39:02.500 | not like exceptional at anything, but in that world,

00:39:06.420 | you know, is really well known and has built this really interesting life

00:39:09.980 | and people really know her and appreciate her and she's involved in people's lives

00:39:13.540 | and is having a positive impact on that town.

00:39:16.140 | But she's not famous outside of that small little town.

00:39:18.740 | That's quiet, remarkability, not so bad of a path.

00:39:23.220 | And again, I don't want to say the other path,

00:39:24.780 | the sort of exceptional remarkability is bad.

00:39:26.460 | I'm just saying when you have the pros and the cons, it's no longer like,

00:39:28.900 | well, this is clearly better if you have the skill, you know, you have the whatever.

00:39:32.020 | I can shoot a really good jump shot. I could go that way.

00:39:34.300 | If you have the possibility to go that way, it's not bad,

00:39:38.180 | but it's also not a no brainer.

00:39:40.300 | And if you don't see an obvious way to get to the exceptional remarkability,

00:39:43.220 | you shouldn't feel bad about it, because again, these things balance out.

00:39:46.060 | Steph Curry versus Lorelei Gilmore, that old famous comparison like there's

00:39:51.500 | there's I don't know, there's plus and minuses to both.

00:39:54.460 | So neither should be dismissive of the other.

00:39:57.940 | That's a weird I might be the first person in history

00:40:01.580 | to make that particular comparison, probably.

00:40:04.580 | I mean, I can't imagine it's come up in the locker room.

00:40:09.180 | The NBA finals, Steph, man, this is your it's your Lorelei moment, buddy.

00:40:14.340 | This is it. You got to just get out there.

00:40:17.340 | I want you to man up and Lorelei this. All right.

00:40:19.740 | I mean, you got to your dribbling should be like the fast speech

00:40:24.380 | cadence of Lorelei Gilmore confusing people with as you move back and forth

00:40:28.860 | verbally through various things.

00:40:30.660 | And this is the Kirk of your town.

00:40:33.060 | But you need to get the ball to Luke.

00:40:35.060 | I just probably some basketball strategy metaphor.

00:40:38.300 | The end of that speech would be like, hold on one second.

00:40:41.700 | Someone's hand me a piece of paper and oh, yeah, I'm fired.

00:40:43.660 | And then the coach just walks out.

00:40:45.860 | And so that story ends like, yeah, it makes sense.

00:40:49.180 | And I was fired. All right. Nonsense. Stop the nonsense.

00:40:51.620 | Let's move on. What do we got next?

00:40:53.180 | All right. Great. Next question is from Samantha.

00:40:55.180 | How important are having friends in life?

00:40:58.180 | If it is important, how would you recommend an introvert go about finding some?

00:41:01.820 | Also, can you provide some advice on moving on from certain friendships

00:41:05.820 | that could be holding someone back?

00:41:08.220 | So it's a good compliment to Tanya's questions

00:41:11.780 | about being more social and confident friends, as I mentioned,

00:41:14.780 | there are critically important.

00:41:17.580 | And for a friendship to be real, it has to involve non-trivial sacrifice

00:41:21.060 | of time and attention.

00:41:22.140 | Otherwise, your brain doesn't treat it as real.

00:41:24.620 | So just texting someone all the time doesn't count.

00:41:27.420 | Commenting on the social media doesn't count.

00:41:29.900 | Being active in a WhatsApp channel with them also does not count.

00:41:34.620 | As far as your brain is concerned, they're not a friend

00:41:36.260 | until you're going places and doing things with them, doing things

00:41:39.540 | you might not otherwise want to do, but you're doing it because they're your friend.

00:41:42.340 | That's when your brain begins to take the relationship seriously.

00:41:47.420 | So this should be a regular part of your weekly planning,

00:41:49.420 | especially if you're trying to build up friendships as something

00:41:52.620 | that's more important than a regular part of your weekly planning should be.

00:41:55.620 | What am I doing this week to strengthen or develop friendships?

00:41:58.540 | You have to be pretty systematic about it.

00:42:01.020 | Especially if you're sort of getting back in the saddle, so to speak.

00:42:04.500 | So fortunately, I can point you towards a resource here.

00:42:07.780 | There was a segment we did a few episodes back

00:42:11.780 | on this notion of the friendship recession, this idea that Americans

00:42:16.220 | in particular have less friends than ever before.

00:42:19.260 | The segment where I had my friend Jamie Kilsing come on and talk about

00:42:23.420 | what he went through to gain a new group of friends in his 40s

00:42:28.660 | as a male, where this is kind of difficult.

00:42:30.380 | So we got into the weeds in that episode about specific things

00:42:33.580 | you can do to actually find and cultivate friends.

00:42:35.980 | So I won't repeat that all, but I will say find that segment

00:42:39.580 | on the friendship recession.

00:42:42.020 | That was a final segment on a relatively recent episode.

00:42:45.100 | Maybe Jamie, you can look or Jesse.

00:42:47.460 | Yeah, Jesse knows whenever Jamie's on, I begin just furiously messing up their names

00:42:51.420 | because and as Jesse has pointed out, is maybe it's because

00:42:55.420 | Joe Rogan's podcast producer is named Jamie.

00:42:59.580 | So it's just in the collective conscious of like Jamie is what you call

00:43:02.980 | the other person on a microphone when you're podcasting.

00:43:05.980 | So it doesn't take much to tip me into that.

00:43:08.020 | He'll look that up.

00:43:09.260 | But anyways, I think it was 266, 266.

00:43:12.020 | Take control of your technology habits.

00:43:14.460 | Right. Episode 266, deep life dot com slash listen.

00:43:18.420 | You'll find that in the video for it's there as well.

00:43:20.620 | So look at that discussion with Jamie, because I think this is critically important,

00:43:23.740 | especially if you do not have a robust group of friends.

00:43:26.340 | Think about that like getting in shape.

00:43:29.140 | It's going to require a lot of work on a regular basis with some tried

00:43:31.820 | and true tactics, but it is absolutely, absolutely worth doing.

00:43:35.860 | All right, Jesse, see, I almost had Jamie there.

00:43:40.700 | I'm telling you, it's like very difficult once you start thinking about that.

00:43:44.340 | Jesse, what is our next question?

00:43:46.420 | All right, next question is from Evelyn.

00:43:51.340 | I had been a high school teacher for over a decade

00:43:53.540 | and then moved into a non classroom role, still in education.

00:43:56.340 | Now, a couple of years in, I can confidently say it makes me miserable.

00:43:59.780 | The work environment suffers from all the symptoms you describe

00:44:02.780 | about knowledge, work and from lack of management.

00:44:05.340 | Ultimately, I decided to return back to the classroom, taking a pay cut.

00:44:09.380 | But I wanted to radically shift, radically shift how I approached the job.

00:44:14.580 | I'm curious if you have any advice for re-approaching this type of work

00:44:18.300 | in a way that guards against burnout and prioritizes craft,

00:44:21.380 | deep work and slow productivity.

00:44:23.380 | Well, Evelyn, first of all, I like your intention here.

00:44:26.100 | You're trying to actually craft your life to match the vision,

00:44:29.020 | your vision of your ideal lifestyle.

00:44:31.940 | Let me briefly mention the pay cut piece as well,

00:44:34.540 | because I think this is something that often leads people astray.

00:44:37.540 | People often do a style of budgeting with their income

00:44:43.140 | where they just think about any reduction in that income

00:44:45.220 | is having stuff taken away from them.

00:44:47.180 | When you're doing lifestyle centric career planning,

00:44:49.620 | you got to go the other way and you have to do zero based budgeting,

00:44:53.060 | which is implicitly what Evelyn is doing here.

00:44:55.780 | What are the things that are important for us to live our life

00:44:59.620 | in the way we want to live it?

00:45:00.660 | How much of those costs? Good. That's how much money we need.

00:45:02.900 | And so if this pay cut for Evelyn still keeps them able to, you know,

00:45:07.540 | we can live where we want to live and do these things and not have undue stress,

00:45:12.300 | then they're golden.

00:45:14.340 | The money becomes just one of the other tools you have to craft your ideal lifestyle.

00:45:18.700 | It doesn't become the primary metric by which you measure

00:45:22.260 | the success of your lifestyle.

00:45:24.260 | So this is a critical point to make for those who are cultivating a deep life.

00:45:28.500 | Money has to become a tool.

00:45:30.940 | It could no longer become the object.

00:45:32.900 | And this opens up this type of flexibility.

00:45:34.580 | Evelyn did not like her job.

00:45:37.100 | And so this job might be better for me.

00:45:41.060 | I have to lose the money. Who cares?

00:45:42.300 | I don't see this losing money.

00:45:43.300 | I see what is the configuration of my life in this new job?

00:45:46.340 | Do we have enough money to afford what we need?

00:45:47.700 | Yes. What else matters about this job?

00:45:49.260 | And you see the money as one part among others.

00:45:51.620 | That's a nice little tidbit hidden in this bigger question.

00:45:55.500 | All right, let's get into the details, though.

00:45:57.700 | Evelyn is saying now I'm returning to the classroom.

00:46:00.940 | How do I keep this deep?

00:46:03.460 | How do I keep slow productivity at play here?

00:46:05.140 | How do I avoid burnout in the classroom?

00:46:07.660 | I have a few things to recommend just based off the many teachers

00:46:10.860 | I've spoken with over the years and my own experience as a academic teacher myself.

00:46:15.580 | But first of all, organization systems really matter when fighting off burnout.

00:46:20.740 | Multiscale planning control over your time matters.

00:46:24.460 | If you are semester weekly, then daily time block planning,

00:46:29.060 | you're making use of the full 40 hours you have every week.

00:46:31.900 | And when you're making use of the full 40 hours, you can avoid the pile ups.

00:46:35.820 | You can avoid the oh, my God, I got to work late tonight

00:46:39.220 | because I have to prepare for parent teacher conferences and get all these tests

00:46:43.100 | graded and all this has to happen by tomorrow.

00:46:45.460 | That's the the scheduled deadline.

00:46:47.700 | Collision long work hour days is a real source of fuel for burnout.

00:46:52.220 | Multiscale planning helps you avoid that because now you see, oh, I'm going to start

00:46:56.940 | working on the parent teacher conferencing a week early in this Tuesday.

00:47:00.460 | This block, I'm going to finish it and the test prep can start this day.

00:47:03.940 | You see the time you have and you can move the proverbial chess pieces around there

00:47:08.060 | much easier, so you have to care more about organizational productivity.

00:47:10.860 | Second, tailor your curriculum more to minimize.

00:47:16.180 | Negative impact of my curriculum here, I don't mean the content,

00:47:19.740 | I mean the way in which you deliver and assess material.

00:47:22.940 | Do we have the students do quizzes every single day?

00:47:26.340 | Do they bring things home and I check them and then they go back

00:47:28.820 | and they work on them?

00:47:30.540 | Anything involved in how you actually deliver the content

00:47:34.220 | so that the logistical curriculum look at this, among other things,

00:47:38.660 | through the lens of what's going to make my life easier.

00:47:41.220 | And what you do here.

00:47:43.300 | What you do here is you keep the floor being, well, what's first of all,

00:47:46.140 | what's going to work well for the students, but within the realm of the equivalence

00:47:50.300 | class of many different ways that you could actually implement

00:47:53.820 | the details of your class.

00:47:56.100 | If you lean towards the things

00:47:57.500 | that are going to make your life easier versus harder,

00:47:59.420 | there is no difference to the students or the parents.

00:48:01.500 | They don't know.

00:48:02.100 | But for your life, it can make a difference.

00:48:03.740 | This is a real endemic issue with junior professors.

00:48:07.900 | They come into planning their class and really don't want to think about.

00:48:12.300 | Easiness for themselves, what's going to be tractable or not, like, no, no, no.

00:48:16.940 | It's all has to be about what I do, I think is best.

00:48:19.780 | And so we're going to do these interactive exams every single day,

00:48:23.260 | and then they're going to comment on the class blog

00:48:25.300 | and I'm going to come in and comment on their comments.

00:48:27.260 | And then we'll have a scribe and the scribe is going to take notes

00:48:29.540 | each week on the comments, on the comments,

00:48:31.180 | and then the scribe is going to give it to me to review so we can post it.

00:48:33.820 | But I'm going to do a video wrap where I go to I go to give the best highlights

00:48:37.220 | there, but I got to film each one on a different high point

00:48:40.300 | from a different U.S. state because there's a metaphor there.

00:48:42.540 | You have all these ideas like I just got to do the best ideas

00:48:45.060 | and your life is incredibly difficult.

00:48:47.940 | Or actually, the students would get the same pedagogical effect if it was

00:48:52.060 | we have these problems that's posted on the board when you come in

00:48:56.540 | and you do each of these reaction problems for the first 10 minutes.

00:48:59.980 | And there's an hour every day on Friday where you go through them

00:49:02.580 | and use check plus grading because you don't want to get into the weeds.

00:49:05.220 | And and it solves the problem, but it's much easier for you.

00:49:07.860 | I learned this the hard way as a teaching assistant at MIT.

00:49:12.100 | Oh, my God, the details of how I run this class makes a huge difference

00:49:15.660 | on my life and the students could care less.

00:49:17.620 | They don't know the difference between this or this or that.

00:49:19.820 | But for me, it can make a big difference.

00:49:22.340 | So I think teachers don't do that enough.

00:49:24.540 | They don't consider the impact on their own time and schedule enough.

00:49:27.500 | But if anything, it is negligent as a teacher

00:49:30.180 | to design things that overwhelms you because your time and attention,

00:49:34.940 | you only have a limited supply.

00:49:36.820 | And it's sort of part of your responsibility to make better use of that.

00:49:39.540 | So care about how you tailor the logistics of your curriculum.

00:49:42.460 | Communication systems matter, especially with parents.

00:49:46.260 | And one of my kids has a teacher, for example, that runs parent office hours,

00:49:50.820 | which is such a good idea.

00:49:51.940 | These two hours on this day, you can always just call me.

00:49:56.780 | Any question about your kid or what's going on, just call me.

00:49:59.580 | I'll tell you about it.

00:50:00.620 | You know how much back and forth email that solves?

00:50:02.700 | The parents don't care. They just want clarity.

00:50:04.340 | Oh, my God, I worry about this thing with my kid.

00:50:06.420 | What do I do about it? Oh, Tuesday. Great.

00:50:08.940 | I'll call them then. Parents just want clarity.

00:50:11.100 | But by having that good system, this teacher has

00:50:14.300 | this context switching footprint has been reduced.

00:50:17.740 | And then finally, I've heard this from a lot of teachers,

00:50:20.620 | especially at like the secondary level.

00:50:22.140 | Be very wary about the extras.

00:50:26.420 | Be very wary, especially at first, to say yes to things

00:50:28.780 | that you don't necessarily have to, hey, will you help run this thing

00:50:31.580 | at the school or do this extra initiative or be the assistant advisor

00:50:35.340 | for this new club? Just be really wary about that.

00:50:37.740 | Like those things have a huge cost

00:50:39.860 | and you want to be really wary about making those costs.

00:50:42.220 | You might even at first feel like I'm not really taking on new things

00:50:44.820 | for the whole first year.

00:50:45.820 | I'm getting the lay of the land here.

00:50:48.220 | And then I got to choose something I really want to put my energy into extra.

00:50:51.860 | OK, the theater production.

00:50:53.340 | And that's kind of my thing.

00:50:54.260 | And I don't I don't do other things.

00:50:55.860 | And I'm not particularly apologetic about it.

00:50:58.060 | And the people who ask me, I say, no, just move on to the next person

00:51:00.740 | to ask right away.

00:51:01.500 | I'm not trying to become, I don't know, the teacher rep

00:51:03.940 | to the union or the principal.

00:51:05.140 | I'm just trying to do my job.

00:51:06.300 | Don't be apologetic about it.

00:51:07.820 | All of those ideas, by the way, could adjust to many different

00:51:10.300 | knowledge worker jobs.

00:51:11.420 | Being organized, tailoring how you design

00:51:16.620 | the work you do to minimize the footprint.

00:51:18.740 | Being careful about your communication systems

00:51:21.620 | and being wary about taking on extras.

00:51:23.740 | I think that applies to almost any knowledge worker job

00:51:25.900 | and can really help reduce overload.

00:51:29.180 | If I'm going to summarize these ideas, I'd use the term slow productivity

00:51:33.100 | like my new book, Man on Mars.

00:51:34.340 | This is a slow productivity mindset.

00:51:37.020 | All right, let's do one more quick question here.

00:51:39.180 | Jesse.

00:51:39.980 | All right, next question is from Samir.

00:51:42.980 | I like the idea of a deep life, and I've replaced passive Internet

00:51:46.460 | use with activities that I really care about, such as mathematics, botany

00:51:49.900 | and playing guitar.

00:51:51.140 | My problem is that I discovered these hobbies, and he's actually in med school,

00:51:55.300 | his medical pursuit through YouTube.

00:51:57.500 | I follow Andrew Humor and other math channels.

00:52:00.460 | Is it OK to still use YouTube to get innovative ideas?

00:52:04.340 | Always a good chance to review my thoughts on YouTube

00:52:07.500 | because it's a complicated platform.

00:52:09.940 | Video and independent produced video, I do strongly believe,

00:52:14.540 | is the future of independent content.

00:52:17.340 | For whatever reason, video has a stronger hold over the human psyche

00:52:20.740 | than either audio or text.

00:52:23.220 | And yet it can also be a source of major distraction

00:52:25.780 | because of recommendation rabbit holes.

00:52:28.260 | So my advice is always YouTube is fine if you use it in the right ways.

00:52:33.140 | And I say you should use it like a television and a library.

00:52:35.660 | What I mean about that, I see, use it like a television.

00:52:39.260 | I mean, there's particular shows you like.

00:52:41.940 | That you might turn on on the TV to watch Seinfeld's on tonight.

00:52:45.020 | I want to watch it.

00:52:45.700 | That's fine to use YouTube that way.

00:52:47.020 | Andrew Huberman could be your Seinfeld.

00:52:49.180 | I like Andrew Huberman.

00:52:50.500 | It's very high quality content.

00:52:51.980 | It's interesting.

00:52:52.900 | It's better than anything I watch on cable.

00:52:54.780 | He posts the video on, I don't know when he does it,

00:52:58.020 | but let's just say for the sake of example, on Monday.

00:52:59.860 | So to load up the YouTube app on your TV on Monday night

00:53:04.340 | and say, I'm going to watch Huberman

00:53:05.700 | or I'm going to watch him as I eat lunch on Tuesdays

00:53:07.540 | is an absolutely fine use of YouTube.

00:53:10.180 | It's like a television where you have very niche channels

00:53:13.460 | that have shows on that you really like.

00:53:15.620 | Use it like a library is also fine.

00:53:18.860 | I have this hobby now, botany, like you mentioned,

00:53:21.220 | and I want to look up how to take care

00:53:22.420 | of a particular type of orchid.

00:53:23.740 | Look up a video of that on YouTube.

00:53:25.300 | Could be a fantastic way to learn how to do it.

00:53:27.260 | Visual is better than text.

00:53:28.340 | There's a lot of great how-to stuff on YouTube.

00:53:30.300 | Use it like a library.

00:53:31.340 | What you don't want to do is use it

00:53:34.180 | as a default source of distraction.

00:53:35.900 | So you don't want to use it as I'm bored.

00:53:39.300 | Let me go to YouTube to be entertained.

00:53:41.140 | That's where the danger is.

00:53:42.780 | You start following these weird videos

00:53:45.380 | until eventually it's like someone in a weird costume

00:53:48.620 | opening a box as they fall into a fountain

00:53:51.180 | that gets full of money from Mr. Beast or something.

00:53:53.580 | I don't know, things get weird

00:53:55.260 | when you go down the just maximizing engagement rabbit hole.

00:53:58.260 | So use it to watch particular things you like.

00:54:01.900 | Maybe you like my show, you like Huberman's show, great.

00:54:04.380 | Think of it like you're watching a show on CNN or NBC.

00:54:06.860 | It's just an internet delivery channel, fine.

00:54:09.140 | Looking up stuff, how do I do this, how do I do that?

00:54:11.500 | Use YouTube, fine.

00:54:12.340 | Just don't use it as a default source of distraction.

00:54:15.700 | That's not so hard if it's on your TV,

00:54:17.580 | if you're using the app on your TV,

00:54:19.020 | because there you're just searching for a particular thing.

00:54:21.540 | The recommendations, what's next is not as,

00:54:23.580 | that UI is not as powerful on TV.

00:54:25.900 | If you're using it on your computer to look something up,

00:54:28.140 | just get one of those common plugins

00:54:29.740 | that can wipe the recommendations off the side.

00:54:32.580 | So you can look something up in the search bar,

00:54:34.620 | click on something to watch, and that's all you see.

00:54:36.260 | You don't see those rabbit hole recommendations.

00:54:38.020 | Do that and YouTube can actually be a plus to your life

00:54:43.020 | and not a negative.

00:54:44.500 | So it's this weird thing that could go either way,

00:54:47.140 | depending on how you use it.

00:54:48.540 | TV and a library.

00:54:51.020 | All right, well, we got a final segment we wanna get to.

00:54:54.900 | I wanna read some of my own readers' reactions to my ideas.

00:54:58.340 | First, however, I wanna mention another sponsor

00:55:00.900 | that makes this show possible.

00:55:02.980 | That is our friends at Hinson Shaving.

00:55:06.900 | Hinson makes this beautiful precision-milled aluminum razor.

00:55:11.460 | Hinson's other business, the other thing they do

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00:55:37.220 | edge of the blade extend beyond the edge of the razor body,

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00:55:48.260 | using this beautifully manufactured razor.

00:55:51.180 | That's a true story.

00:55:53.300 | I don't wanna speak ill of other competitors.

00:55:57.220 | I won't use particular names, Jesse, but this is true.

00:55:59.580 | I was traveling recently, had disposable with me.

00:56:02.860 | I don't even know if it was a disposable.

00:56:03.860 | I think it was from a subscription service.

00:56:05.140 | I don't know, but it's a plastic

00:56:07.140 | with 70 different blades in it.

00:56:08.980 | And because I threw it in the bag to travel

00:56:12.980 | because my Hinson's on this beautiful stand

00:56:15.100 | in my bathroom or whatever, nicked me right off the bat.

00:56:18.980 | Nicked me.

00:56:19.940 | - Just before you're about to go on stage?

00:56:21.540 | - Basically, it wasn't, but might as well have been.

00:56:23.300 | - Yeah. - Nicked me.

00:56:25.620 | Not gonna have that with the Hinson

00:56:26.580 | because it's precisely milled.

00:56:27.780 | So you have no diving board effect, no nicks.

00:56:29.620 | Anyways, I love really well-made technology

00:56:32.260 | that's durable and you can just use it forever.

00:56:34.220 | And it's just a much more, I don't know,

00:56:36.180 | reasonable way to engage with tools.

00:56:38.460 | And so what'll happen with the Hinson

00:56:39.820 | is you pay more upfront for the beautiful razor,

00:56:41.780 | but because you're using these 10 cent blades,

00:56:43.620 | it does not take long before the upkeep cost of this thing

00:56:47.140 | is so much cheaper than a subscription service,

00:56:48.940 | so much cheaper than going to the drugstore

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00:56:54.460 | It's just a nice, beautifully crafted way

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00:56:59.300 | So it's time to say no to subscriptions

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00:57:17.140 | That's 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com/cal

00:57:22.140 | and use the code CAL.

00:57:29.460 | I also wanna talk about our friends at My Body Tutor,

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00:57:36.740 | Used to be the fitness advice guy on my study hacks blog.

00:57:40.060 | His company, My Body Tutor, is a 100% online coaching program

00:57:44.740 | that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness,

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00:57:59.580 | and training, and then you check in with this coach online

00:58:03.180 | every single day.

00:58:04.820 | Here's what I ate, here's my exercise,

00:58:06.900 | here's what's going well, here's what's not going well.

00:58:08.820 | There's a problem, they say, great, let's rethink this.

00:58:10.860 | Let's change this.

00:58:11.700 | Oh, you're going on a trip.

00:58:12.660 | Here's what you're gonna do in the hotel.

00:58:14.340 | So you have someone following you every day,

00:58:17.300 | every step of the way.

00:58:18.540 | Now, because it's done online,

00:58:20.420 | you're communicating through the internet and not in person,

00:58:24.180 | you're getting this trainer experience

00:58:26.060 | without the expense of having a sort of live-in,

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00:58:37.740 | It's just a fantastic idea.

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00:58:43.620 | I've got a coach, they help me and I can afford it.

00:58:46.340 | So I'm a big believer.

00:58:47.180 | You're trying to turn around your health,

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00:59:09.700 | and mention deep questions to get $50 off.

00:59:13.580 | All right, we're on our way now to the final segment.

00:59:17.300 | I wanna try something kind of new.

00:59:19.020 | I call it Readers React.

00:59:21.780 | So I'm gonna load up on my screen here

00:59:24.820 | a recent essay I wrote for my newsletter,

00:59:29.260 | which you can sign up for at calnewport.com.

00:59:31.220 | You can also read all my essays at calnewport.com.

00:59:33.980 | Just click on the essays link.

00:59:37.260 | So on September 29th, I published a short essay

00:59:40.300 | called "On Tire Pressure and Productivity."

00:59:44.260 | It was based off of a small but important event

00:59:50.060 | or encounter that I had with my car.

00:59:52.820 | So earlier that day,

00:59:54.060 | I had these low tire pressure warning lights on in my car,

00:59:57.060 | and I knew my tires weren't flat,

00:59:58.420 | 'cause I checked them out.

00:59:59.620 | It was probably a cold snap.

01:00:00.980 | You know, you lose pressure somehow, the air compresses.

01:00:03.220 | I don't know how that works,

01:00:04.060 | but this happens as the fall goes on.

01:00:06.460 | Your pressure drops down, you get that indicator light on.

01:00:08.660 | And it stresses me out because, you know,

01:00:10.620 | when I see that low pressure indicator,

01:00:12.580 | I now start imagining every time I turn

01:00:15.540 | that the car is slipping and sliding

01:00:18.100 | and that I'm losing whatever traction on the road.

01:00:20.340 | So I don't like it.

01:00:21.700 | And I was late.

01:00:22.540 | I was going to see a movie.

01:00:23.660 | I went to see "The Creator" actually.

01:00:26.060 | AI dystopian movie.

01:00:28.140 | I have thoughts.

01:00:29.660 | Mixed review, but a story for another day.

01:00:32.180 | By the way, I was going to a movie

01:00:33.540 | in the middle of the day because I told my wife,

01:00:35.860 | I write about AI sometimes.

01:00:38.300 | So I have to go see this movie 'cause it's about AI.

01:00:42.140 | I don't know if she bought it or not, but.

01:00:43.940 | - But you do that normally, like,

01:00:44.980 | it's preemptible time to see movies,

01:00:46.260 | like, throughout the month, right?

01:00:47.220 | - I try to, yeah.

01:00:48.060 | I mean, usually at home.

01:00:48.900 | It's more rare for me to actually,

01:00:50.380 | usually for me to go see a movie

01:00:51.900 | at a theater during the day.

01:00:53.220 | Usually December I'll do that.

01:00:55.020 | So after the semester ends,

01:00:56.180 | but while my kids are still in school.

01:00:57.500 | And then in May I'll do that as well.

01:00:59.620 | When the semester ends,

01:01:00.580 | but like my kids are still in school.

01:01:01.820 | I'll always pick a day at the end of each semester.

01:01:04.660 | I'll go buy a book and then go, go see a movie.

01:01:07.940 | But I digress.

01:01:08.780 | The point of the story is, I was like,

01:01:10.460 | you know what, I'm just going to do this.

01:01:11.500 | And I got out my tire pump and I pumped up the tires.

01:01:13.820 | And one of them was pretty low.

01:01:16.260 | Dry off to see the movie and the indicator light goes off.

01:01:18.460 | And I noticed, like,

01:01:19.300 | I felt this really non-trivial sense of accomplishment.

01:01:23.420 | This thing was broken and I did something physical

01:01:25.580 | and this thing here went away.

01:01:27.740 | And I'm, it's better.

01:01:29.540 | And I felt good.

01:01:30.500 | And I told that story to emphasize a fact that we forget,

01:01:35.260 | but I think it's important,

01:01:37.180 | that we are wired to get non-trivial satisfaction

01:01:40.220 | out of setting a plan for something,

01:01:41.980 | doing physical activity,

01:01:43.300 | making our intentions manifest concretely in the world,

01:01:46.700 | to quote Matthew Crawford,

01:01:48.460 | and to then see the result,

01:01:51.580 | we get satisfaction out of that.

01:01:53.180 | Well, this is known, right?

01:01:55.220 | This is the planning execution loop

01:01:57.860 | in the human psychology.

01:01:59.060 | We know about this.

01:01:59.900 | It's probably part of the drive

01:02:02.180 | that humans have to be more innovative.

01:02:04.580 | A lot of animals don't have this drive.

01:02:06.540 | A cat is perfectly happy, as I always say,

01:02:09.460 | to lay in the sun until hunger makes it get up

01:02:12.020 | to go get some food.

01:02:13.180 | But humans get antsy because we get that high out of,

01:02:16.260 | you know what, I'm gonna change this rock into a hand ax.

01:02:18.580 | And I can use that hand ax to actually

01:02:20.940 | cure this caribou hide.

01:02:22.420 | Why would we bother doing that?

01:02:24.100 | What's the drive is we feel good when we do that.

01:02:26.540 | So we do have this drive towards actual accomplishment.

01:02:29.780 | So I was talking about slow productivity

01:02:31.740 | in this post a little bit and saying,

01:02:32.900 | you know, it's complicated.

01:02:34.420 | Productivity is complicated.

01:02:36.900 | So I'm gonna read here briefly.

01:02:39.700 | Let's go back here.

01:02:42.940 | Okay.

01:02:44.020 | "I've been thinking a lot recently

01:02:45.260 | about how both the promises and perils of productivity.

01:02:47.580 | It's easy to dismiss interest in this topic

01:02:49.660 | as pure artifice propped up by an exploitative hustle culture

01:02:53.540 | orchestrated by the logics of late stage capitalism.

01:02:56.540 | Such sentiments, of course, are not entirely unwarranted

01:02:59.060 | as there are subtle but urgent truths

01:03:00.980 | buried within these general analytical broadsides.

01:03:03.460 | But my experience with my tire pressure

01:03:06.220 | complicates the discussion.

01:03:08.100 | Our brains find deep satisfaction in seeing a problem,

01:03:10.820 | devising a plan, then witnessing its successful completion.

01:03:15.100 | We're wired, in other words, to enjoy getting things done,

01:03:17.180 | to flee this impulse is to alienate ourselves

01:03:19.140 | from our basic nature."

01:03:20.060 | So where does this leave us?

01:03:21.420 | The right question regarding productivity

01:03:23.740 | is not whether it's good or bad,

01:03:25.700 | as it's both a reflection of our humanity

01:03:27.700 | and a target for exploitation.

01:03:29.820 | The better query is how we can more fully reclaim it.

01:03:32.900 | All right, let's see what the readers thought.

01:03:36.180 | There's a couple comments down here.

01:03:38.220 | All right, so Carl,

01:03:41.540 | in the comment I have up on the screen here,

01:03:44.780 | quotes where I said, "We're wired, in other words,

01:03:46.660 | to get things done."

01:03:48.240 | And he said, "I also am addicted to functioning

01:03:50.500 | and getting things done.

01:03:51.640 | But while I don't believe in the need to flee this impulse,

01:03:54.060 | I'm not so sure that this is our basic nature.

01:03:56.780 | Perhaps we're only hypnotized into believing this."

01:03:59.700 | I think there's a similar sentiment below.

01:04:02.880 | Close that, sign up.

01:04:05.740 | I'm already signed up for this, Ease Mail.

01:04:07.820 | There's a response here from Adrian to Carl

01:04:10.700 | that says, "We have a tendency to rationalize

01:04:12.620 | anything we do and usually do it subconsciously.

01:04:15.260 | And the claim that this would be our basic nature

01:04:17.240 | may very well be one such attempt."

01:04:19.480 | I got revolt here.

01:04:21.520 | Brian says, "You raise a good point

01:04:24.740 | about what is basic to our nature.

01:04:26.140 | I would argue, however, that Carl would likely respond

01:04:28.020 | in two ways, just based on his podcast.

01:04:30.980 | First, the notion of doing things is certainly drawn

01:04:33.220 | from a much richer philosophical account of agency,

01:04:35.900 | one that can be found in the work

01:04:37.100 | of the philosopher, motorcycle mechanic, Matt Crawford."

01:04:39.260 | Ooh, Brian knows me well.

01:04:40.660 | I just quoted Matt Crawford.

01:04:42.380 | "Doing things puts us into a relationship with the world,

01:04:45.180 | not our own making,

01:04:46.000 | and that we should submit to as what'sness."

01:04:47.940 | Let me skip here a little bit.

01:04:49.020 | "Second, there's the question posed by Joseph Piper

01:04:51.860 | in his book, 'Leisure and the Basis of Culture.'

01:04:53.740 | And the question is this,

01:04:54.900 | what will we do when all else is done?

01:04:56.380 | What happens when there's nothing left to do?

01:04:57.860 | Then what?

01:04:58.680 | Certainly Aristotle's notion of completion

01:05:00.220 | plays a significant role in Carl's response."

01:05:02.460 | All right, so what do we get here?

01:05:04.520 | We have two readers who right off the bat

01:05:06.340 | are suspicious of the idea

01:05:08.380 | that we have a sort of instinctual wiring

01:05:11.340 | to find satisfaction in accomplishment.

01:05:14.220 | And then we had a third reader come in and say,

01:05:15.660 | "I don't know.

01:05:16.500 | I think this point actually has some merit.

01:05:19.140 | It's complicated,

01:05:20.180 | but the whole discussion of agency and purpose

01:05:22.940 | requires or involves somehow actually doing things,

01:05:26.340 | and this is a bigger discussion."

01:05:28.000 | All right, that's interesting.

01:05:31.340 | I think it's interesting, the skepticism,

01:05:33.220 | because I do encounter it quite a bit.

01:05:36.480 | And so here's the real question.

01:05:38.080 | What is the actual thing

01:05:40.800 | that's being constructed from discourse?

01:05:43.740 | It's one or two things here.

01:05:46.380 | Is it the idea that there's something natural

01:05:49.140 | in a attraction to productivity?

01:05:50.740 | Is that just entirely artifice?

01:05:53.260 | Or is it the idea that

01:05:56.260 | productivity is completely non-natural

01:06:00.220 | and that anything that is productivity is artifice?

01:06:02.180 | Right, there's two ideas here,

01:06:03.460 | that the drive to do things

01:06:04.900 | is entirely constructed by discourses and is fake.

01:06:08.600 | And then there's something else that says,

01:06:09.600 | "No, no, there's something real to this

01:06:11.500 | that just can get us out of control

01:06:13.660 | if we're not careful about it."

01:06:14.580 | So we kind of have these two,

01:06:15.900 | the readers are pointing out

01:06:16.860 | we have these two different alternative interpretations.

01:06:20.820 | I'm still leaning towards the first.

01:06:22.500 | And the reason why is because this idea that,

01:06:24.740 | no, I think the critical theory approach

01:06:27.780 | and the sort of classical, like new school,

01:06:30.120 | early 20th century critical theory approach

01:06:31.820 | that says any drive towards productivity

01:06:34.460 | is really just part of a sort of superstructure

01:06:36.620 | meant to help reinforce the exploitative logics

01:06:40.380 | of capitalism, that's a really new idea.

01:06:42.860 | And a lot of ideas that came through

01:06:44.580 | this sort of brainiac post-Marxism,

01:06:48.000 | brainiac extension of Marxism,

01:06:49.820 | a lot of these ideas are very smart and intricate

01:06:52.420 | and a lot of them don't work.

01:06:54.580 | Whereas this other notion,

01:06:56.460 | man, there's some satisfaction in doing something hard,

01:06:59.540 | seeing it done.

01:07:00.460 | This has been with the human experience

01:07:02.180 | for a really long time.

01:07:03.940 | And it's been with the human experience

01:07:05.300 | well before we had sort of the

01:07:07.460 | modern industrialized capitalism.

01:07:10.020 | I mean, we see it, God, in the book of Genesis.

01:07:13.380 | We see it in the way farmers think about things.

01:07:15.640 | We see it in the transcendentalist writing,

01:07:17.940 | the 19th century and rural Concord.

01:07:20.060 | I mean, this idea really seems to pervade

01:07:21.660 | the whole human experience.

01:07:23.340 | If I lean towards, there's probably something there.

01:07:27.620 | Also, I think the evolutionary story is strong.

01:07:29.620 | I mean, humans do need a drive towards

01:07:32.280 | having their complex ideas made

01:07:34.460 | manifest concretely in the world.

01:07:36.020 | Otherwise, we don't take advantage of our brain.

01:07:38.020 | We build all sorts of things

01:07:39.180 | and invent all sorts of things.

01:07:40.220 | Something has to drive that.

01:07:42.380 | Other animals don't do that.

01:07:43.780 | Whales have big brains,

01:07:45.700 | but they don't build complex mechanisms.

01:07:48.740 | So there's gotta be some sort of drive there.

01:07:50.060 | So there is an interesting evolutionary story there as well.

01:07:52.820 | And it just matches our experience.

01:07:55.420 | I don't know.

01:07:56.460 | I don't know that I've been tricked

01:07:58.220 | into thinking the tire pressure indicator

01:07:59.980 | going off was good.

01:08:00.940 | It just feels that way.

01:08:01.900 | Why is it on campouts?

01:08:03.160 | Okay, here's another piece of evidence.

01:08:04.740 | Getting the fire to work.

01:08:06.620 | Why is that like the most satisfying thing

01:08:08.180 | you can ever do in your life?

01:08:10.300 | Is it because like that's gonna help Exxon Mobil

01:08:12.560 | or something?

01:08:13.400 | No, because it's like this primitive,

01:08:14.820 | we made fire where there wasn't fire before.

01:08:16.740 | We're wired for it.

01:08:17.620 | That doesn't let us off the hook though, of course.

01:08:20.580 | So if I'm right about this,

01:08:21.780 | it does not let us off the hook

01:08:23.220 | because we have many examples of base human instincts

01:08:27.020 | that in the modern world get completely corrupted.

01:08:29.500 | Like we don't doubt that hunger is real.

01:08:32.780 | That's not a artifice of cultural construction.

01:08:35.260 | We get hungry because our body needs food

01:08:37.780 | that can also be exploited and make us very unhealthy

01:08:41.500 | to help benefit other people.

01:08:44.180 | Same thing can happen, of course,

01:08:45.580 | with this drive for, I like the fire to be started.

01:08:48.380 | Hey, I made the fire happen, yay.

01:08:50.420 | An employer can completely exploit that

01:08:52.660 | to try to create a culture that gets you working

01:08:54.820 | double the time your salary really says

01:08:56.960 | you should have to work.

01:08:57.900 | And say, it's your passion, you should just do it.

01:08:59.540 | There's all sorts of opportunities here for exploitation,

01:09:04.140 | but we don't need the drive to accomplishment

01:09:07.740 | to be entirely artifice for us to be wary of

01:09:10.340 | and point out the exploitation of an instinct.

01:09:12.320 | I think if anything, recognizing that

01:09:14.380 | there's a deep human instinct here

01:09:15.700 | makes us more wary about how we think

01:09:17.820 | about work and production.

01:09:19.500 | Knowing that we're playing with a fundamental human instinct

01:09:22.780 | means we're playing with fire.

01:09:24.300 | You can do much more damage with fundamental human instincts

01:09:26.840 | than you can with stuff you have to construct from scratch.

01:09:29.400 | Why do you think the attention economy

01:09:30.780 | is delivered through our phones is so successful?

01:09:32.620 | Well, in part because boredom

01:09:34.380 | is an incredibly strong instinct.

01:09:35.940 | We don't like it.

01:09:37.180 | And the promise of we can get rid of boredom right away

01:09:39.900 | is in part why META is worth $800 billion in its market cap.

01:09:44.900 | That's really valuable.

01:09:46.320 | So I think these comments are great.

01:09:48.680 | There is a cool debate here.

01:09:50.180 | And I'm still falling on one side of this debate,

01:09:53.720 | but I like that my readers are also sticking up

01:09:55.760 | for the other side of the debate.

01:09:57.160 | This is the type of conversations

01:09:58.800 | we should be having about productivity.

01:10:01.160 | What are the instincts at play here?

01:10:02.860 | What is construction?

01:10:03.760 | What is biological?

01:10:04.600 | How is the biological being exploited?

01:10:06.100 | I think the more complex view of this we have,

01:10:08.120 | the better, we've ignored this too long.

01:10:10.240 | We've simplified productivity too long.

01:10:11.820 | So I'll keep writing and talking about it.

01:10:13.820 | I hope you, my readers and listeners keep arguing about it.

01:10:16.820 | And we have a ongoing good debate.

01:10:20.240 | I always say, Jesse,

01:10:21.080 | I've got the smartest readers on the internet.

01:10:22.980 | - Yeah, baby.

01:10:23.820 | - I love the comments on my blog.

01:10:24.940 | We got a little world here.

01:10:25.940 | It's not huge.

01:10:27.220 | We don't got the trolls.

01:10:28.100 | We don't got the weirdos.

01:10:29.900 | We don't got the yes posters.

01:10:31.760 | It's people that have been with me for a long time.

01:10:33.340 | We got the smartest commenters on the internet

01:10:34.940 | over here at calnewport.com.

01:10:36.340 | So. - That was cool

01:10:38.240 | how you responded to their comments.

01:10:41.460 | - But I recognize these names too.

01:10:43.560 | They comment a lot.

01:10:44.720 | So it's cool.

01:10:45.720 | So I'm glad to be able to throw that in there.

01:10:48.480 | Hey, if you just listened to this podcast

01:10:50.160 | and you wanna be a part of that discussion,

01:10:52.680 | calnewport.com, you can sign up

01:10:54.040 | to get these essays sent to your inbox.

01:10:56.240 | What a lot of people do, like these commenters here,

01:10:58.140 | here's what I've learned.

01:10:59.500 | They wait till they get the essay in their inbox

01:11:01.320 | and then they click over to the website

01:11:02.720 | to see the comments.

01:11:04.040 | And I know this because when we switched email providers

01:11:06.660 | a couple of years ago,

01:11:07.760 | the format of the messages changed

01:11:10.980 | and it had the title of the essay at the top.

01:11:13.480 | But in the old email provider,

01:11:14.980 | that title was linked to the blog post.

01:11:17.140 | And in the new one, it was not automatically linked.

01:11:19.700 | And I heard it from a lot of readers.

01:11:21.220 | 'Cause they said, no, no, no, I love the comments.

01:11:23.380 | So after I read your essays in my inbox,

01:11:25.320 | I wanna go to your website to see what people are saying.

01:11:28.180 | Where's the link?

01:11:29.020 | Where's the link?

01:11:29.840 | So we had to change it.

01:11:30.820 | And figure out how to change the templates

01:11:32.260 | that the title was linked.

01:11:34.300 | And by the way, how we changed the template,

01:11:36.380 | quote unquote, is I just do it manually.

01:11:38.380 | Because it was that important.

01:11:39.940 | People wanted to see the comments.

01:11:41.120 | So you can sign up there at calnewber.com

01:11:43.700 | and become a part of this conversation.

01:11:45.700 | All right, well, that's all the time we have.

01:11:48.160 | Thank you for listening.

01:11:49.360 | We'll be back next week with another episode of the show.

01:11:52.420 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:11:55.260 | Hey, so if you liked this discussion today

01:11:57.340 | about some modern ideas to cure your mediocre life,

01:12:01.280 | then I think you'll also like episode 268,

01:12:05.140 | in which we look at some ancient ideas

01:12:07.540 | taken from Stoicism to help you accomplish the same goal.

01:12:11.620 | I want to go through the ideas

01:12:13.460 | from this classic Stoic treatise

01:12:17.100 | and point out those that I think

01:12:18.540 | are most relevant to our goal here.

The Cure To A Mediocre Life: 3 Unexpected Ideas To Reinvent Your Life | Cal Newport

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