Ep. 256: Start With Discipline

00:00:00.000 | So this is today's deep question.

00:00:04.440 | Why does cultivating the deep life start with discipline?

00:00:14.080 | I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in

00:00:20.520 | a distracted world.

00:00:25.380 | So for those who are watching at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia, episode 256, or at thedeeplife.com, you'll notice

00:00:34.260 | I am back in the Deep Work HQ, the original studio, joined in person by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:44.320 | Jesse, I'm already nostalgic for this place.

00:00:46.140 | It's good to have you back.

00:00:47.140 | Now, I'm only back temporarily.

00:00:48.860 | I'm just in DC for a few days.

00:00:50.380 | We wanted to make sure that we got a recording at the old HQ.

00:00:53.500 | I'll be back in New Hampshire for most of the rest of the summer.

00:00:57.500 | So most of the rest of the summer, I will be broadcasting out of the Deep Work HQ North

00:01:02.420 | up in Hanover, New Hampshire.

00:01:03.860 | However, I am bringing back up with me quite a bit of equipment.

00:01:08.940 | So for my first stay up North, I flew up there, I had a small bag.

00:01:12.020 | I brought bare bones equipment.

00:01:13.700 | I'm driving back up this week.

00:01:16.660 | So I'm bringing some cameras and some switchers and some lights.

00:01:19.340 | So you'll see if you're watching, if you're watching at youtube.com/CalNewPortMedia, you

00:01:24.540 | should hopefully see in the weeks that come, me making Deep Work HQ North closer and closer

00:01:30.180 | to HQ South in terms of both the quality and the visual look.

00:01:35.820 | So I'm excited about that project.

00:01:38.180 | But you know what, Jesse, there's nothing better than the actual studio itself.

00:01:41.100 | And you're bringing the shirt up, right?

00:01:43.220 | I'm bringing the shirt.

00:01:44.260 | So we're going to try to replicate it, but it's never going to be the same as the DC,

00:01:48.020 | the Coma Park studio.

00:01:49.020 | It'll, it'll be a triumphant moment, triumphant moment when we return for good.

00:01:53.540 | I can tell you're determined.

00:01:54.540 | So you're going to make it work.

00:01:55.540 | I'm going to make a cool studio up there, but it's not going to be the same.

00:01:58.620 | So it'll be cool when we get back.

00:02:01.020 | You know, just in time for me to leave and go North for the summer, Jesse, the bookstore

00:02:04.340 | down the street finally opened.

00:02:05.700 | Oh, it did?

00:02:06.700 | Yeah.

00:02:07.700 | So I, just in time when I could be in there buying books daily, it opened just as I was

00:02:12.300 | leaving.

00:02:13.300 | So we'll have to, we'll have to check that out more when I get back.

00:02:15.900 | If you're in the Tacoma park area, people's books, Tacoma park, it's open.

00:02:21.340 | It's rock and rolling.

00:02:23.060 | Check it out.

00:02:24.060 | We'll have to do something there at some point, Jesse.

00:02:25.060 | Yeah.

00:02:26.060 | Yeah.

00:02:27.060 | It's a cool space.

00:02:28.060 | It's a cool space.

00:02:29.060 | Um, so what are we going to talk about today?

00:02:31.460 | I wanted to get into a question or issue that you, the listeners have been bringing up recently,

00:02:39.060 | an issue with, or a question about, I should say the deep life stack, the deep life stack

00:02:45.340 | being the, the rough organizing framework we've been using recently to think through

00:02:50.500 | the quest to escape the shallows and make your working and professional personal life

00:02:54.540 | more deeper.

00:02:55.540 | The sort of central question of this show, we've organized it more recently around this

00:02:58.580 | notion of the deep life stack.

00:03:00.980 | And there's a question about the stack that I wanted to address, but just as a reminder

00:03:04.600 | for those who are new to this, let me actually bring up on the screen here, uh, the old diagram

00:03:11.300 | of the deep life stack I drew a few weeks ago.

00:03:15.220 | So again, this is if you're watching, this is episode 256.

00:03:18.620 | That's what you should look for at youtube.com/calendpartmedia.

00:03:22.060 | So you see on the screen, if you're watching the deep life stack, we have a series of four

00:03:25.620 | layers that you move through in order as you're trying to transform your life from something

00:03:32.320 | that is shallow and reactive to something that's more intentional and deep.

00:03:34.940 | So we had this first layer was reestablished discipline.

00:03:39.000 | The second layer was build a foundation of values.

00:03:41.900 | The third layer was create calm through control.

00:03:44.860 | And then the final layer was plan for the remarkable.

00:03:48.540 | That's where you actually get to the different areas of your life, what we used to call the

00:03:52.980 | buckets and trying to overhaul them one by one to be more intentional and remarkable.

00:03:57.100 | There's an arrow at the top that says iterate, because you go back through this at least

00:03:59.540 | once a year and clean up different layers, revisit different layers.

00:04:02.860 | All right, here's the question.

00:04:05.220 | The question that I was sent from many of you is why discipline is at the bottom.

00:04:09.900 | Why is not values at the bottom?

00:04:11.680 | Why not figure out what really matters to you?

00:04:13.780 | And in there, you will find the motivation in there.

00:04:17.020 | This is the question people are asking me.

00:04:18.300 | Why not have values first?

00:04:19.940 | Because in there, you'll find the motivation to do everything else.

00:04:22.940 | That's where you'll get your orientation.

00:04:25.620 | So there's a reason why I don't have values first.

00:04:28.540 | And I want to talk about it today because I think it's just useful in general for thinking

00:04:32.260 | about the types of transformations we discuss on the show.

00:04:35.860 | So this is today's deep question.

00:04:40.200 | Why does cultivating the deep life start with discipline?

00:04:46.060 | Now here's the framework I want you to use when thinking about this question.

00:04:50.620 | When it comes to making changes in your life, there's really two types of goals, and we

00:04:56.140 | will call the one type externally powered and the other type internally powered.

00:05:03.180 | So what I mean by this is externally powered goals are changes to your behavior or consistent

00:05:08.300 | actions aimed towards an objective that are driven by a palpable sense of excitement or

00:05:13.560 | motivation in the moment.

00:05:16.420 | So for an externally powered goal, you feel motivation, you're excited in the moment.

00:05:23.140 | Yes, I want to do this.

00:05:24.860 | I like the way it makes me feel.

00:05:27.600 | An internally powered goal, by contrast, is one where these changes or consistent actions

00:05:33.300 | are driven by an internal sense of efficacy.

00:05:38.280 | You trust that you can keep going on something you deem important, even if it doesn't feel

00:05:41.980 | desirable in the moment.

00:05:42.980 | You trust yourself to make progress on what matters because you know the long term results

00:05:48.300 | is where you get your fulfillment.

00:05:49.900 | You trust yourself to be able to stick with it, even if in the moment you say, I'm not

00:05:52.700 | excited about this anymore.

00:05:54.640 | I don't really want to do it right now.

00:05:58.060 | So if we think about some examples here, I've long labeled for the aspiring novelist National

00:06:03.780 | Novel Writing Month to be an externally powered goal.

00:06:07.100 | The whole idea about National Novel Writing Month is that you get really excited about

00:06:12.780 | the idea of being a novelist and you drift on this and you surf on this motivation through

00:06:19.180 | this month with a bunch of other people all doing the same thing right every day.

00:06:22.580 | You let the excitement about it carry you through to very quickly get a manuscript done.

00:06:29.500 | An internally powered goal, by contrast, for the aspiring novelist might be the slow accumulation

00:06:35.220 | of pages.

00:06:36.220 | Maybe you want to finish four short stories over the course of an entire year, each of

00:06:41.180 | which you're going to bring to a writing group that's going to critique and give you feedback

00:06:45.000 | that you can then integrate into the next story.

00:06:47.560 | When you're on month five of this one year long plan, just putting in your pages, even

00:06:54.000 | though you don't feel like it, even though you're tired, even though the last short story

00:06:56.800 | didn't work long after the ardor for novelist life has passed, that is an internally powered

00:07:02.460 | goal.

00:07:03.460 | Another example is talking about fitness, doing that one time action because you're

00:07:09.100 | pumped up about getting in better shape.

00:07:11.520 | Maybe you had a health scare or you're inspired seeing or reading about someone who is in

00:07:15.440 | really good shape.

00:07:16.440 | You buy that gym membership or you tell your partner, I'm overhauling my eating.

00:07:21.400 | I want you to be really hard on me if you see me eating the wrong stuff.

00:07:25.140 | That's in the moment.

00:07:26.940 | You're driven by the in the moment excitement.

00:07:28.840 | Like I'm definitely going to do this.

00:07:29.880 | So let me try to set things up to force myself or to keep myself inspired to do the work.

00:07:36.440 | Whereas an internally powered goal towards something like health and fitness might be

00:07:40.760 | that actual just reshaping of your schedule that has that space every day for the long

00:07:45.440 | walk has that space most days for some type of training, something that gets you to the

00:07:49.920 | home gym and just doing it.

00:07:51.640 | And it's five months in and you just do it.

00:07:53.600 | I don't want to do it today.

00:07:55.600 | There's nothing particularly exciting that I've seen recently.

00:07:57.880 | I haven't even been thinking about fitness recently.

00:08:00.560 | I've been interested in something else.

00:08:02.160 | I still go to the garage and lift those weights.

00:08:03.880 | I still move the meetings to make sure that four to five is always clear so I can get

00:08:08.960 | to the gym.

00:08:09.960 | That's more internally powered.

00:08:12.040 | Definitely watching productivity YouTube to try to motivate yourself to work really hard.

00:08:16.000 | Wow, look at these people with these well edited clips that have all this musical montage

00:08:19.720 | is working hour after hour on YouTube.

00:08:22.160 | Now I'm motivated to try to finish this hard thing all in one push.

00:08:25.600 | That's externally powered goal versus the internally powered goal of just sticking with

00:08:29.560 | a semester, weekly, daily time block planning, multi-scale planning, just doing the work,

00:08:36.160 | making the plan, executing the plan again and again, letting results pile up over time.

00:08:40.960 | All right, so here's the thing.

00:08:42.680 | If you are not comfortable with internally powered goals, you are not going to succeed

00:08:48.580 | transforming your life using the deep life stack.

00:08:53.720 | Now think about values.

00:08:54.720 | For example, let's say instead of becoming comfortable with internally powered goals,

00:08:59.240 | you said, let me just start with my values first.

00:09:00.800 | Let me figure out what it is I care about, what should be motivating me.

00:09:04.600 | Here's the reality about this.

00:09:06.920 | A refined and powerful sense of values is based as much in experience as it is in self-reflection.

00:09:14.880 | If you are coming to values first from a context in which you basically exist in a setting

00:09:20.400 | of externally powered goals, you go after things only when you're motivated and then

00:09:25.200 | your interest wanes when that motivation goes away.

00:09:29.000 | If you live in that type of world of reactive ambition, the values you come up with themselves

00:09:35.240 | will be warped.

00:09:38.520 | They're going to push you towards things that are maybe easier than harder.

00:09:42.160 | When you try to think about how do I put my values into action, you're going to avoid

00:09:45.800 | things that require regular, difficult, disciplined action and find things that are more less

00:09:50.760 | demanding, less in the moment.

00:09:52.640 | You're not going to have the iterative experience of pursuing hard things and seeing what matters

00:09:57.200 | and what doesn't that's needed to have more insights.

00:09:59.880 | You will come up with values, but they're not going to be true to you.

00:10:06.640 | They're not going to be in their most powerful state.

00:10:09.440 | They are going to warp themselves around your general mindset of reactivity, of externally

00:10:15.520 | powered goals, of chasing what seems exciting in the moment.

00:10:19.720 | On the other hand, if you have an internally powered goal mindset, if you're comfortable

00:10:23.340 | with that, you're going to have more rigorous values.

00:10:26.000 | You're going to have values that are more born out of experience.

00:10:28.600 | And the routines and codes and rituals you build around them are going to be more demanding

00:10:32.080 | and therefore probably more effective.

00:10:34.960 | If you don't have an externally powered goal mindset, you will fail when you get to the

00:10:39.040 | calm stack as well.

00:10:40.800 | Finding control, calm through control.

00:10:43.120 | This is where you get your systems in order.

00:10:45.280 | You organize your obligations in time, you find breathing room.

00:10:49.300 | That's all internally powered goals to do that consistently.

00:10:51.640 | So you will fail there if you're not comfortable with that.

00:10:53.920 | And if you get to the planning layer without comfort with these type of goals, you will

00:10:57.680 | also fail because your plans for overhauling different buckets in your life, if built only

00:11:04.440 | around externally powered goals, will have these flashes of motivation and then crumble

00:11:08.280 | away.

00:11:09.280 | Very little long-term or sustainable transformation will happen.

00:11:12.400 | So at every layer, every layer of the deep life stack, you are going to struggle if you're

00:11:17.640 | coming at it from a mindset of, I only do externally powered goals.

00:11:22.760 | This is what that first discipline layer is really about in the current version of the

00:11:27.360 | stack we're using.

00:11:29.000 | Discipline is on the bottom, not to have some sort of martial allegiance to rigorously defining

00:11:35.040 | your life as this is the end-all or be-all.

00:11:37.560 | What I really mean by that layer, and this is the way I consistently explain it, is that

00:11:40.880 | you start by choosing a small number of things, two or three, tied to areas of your life that

00:11:49.280 | are important.

00:11:50.280 | So you have a variety, there might be a sort of a community one here and a fitness health

00:11:53.360 | one here, maybe something related to craft or whatever is important.

00:11:56.600 | Two or three things tied to areas that are important, where you have a daily discipline

00:12:01.720 | that is carefully selected to not be trivial, but to also remain tractable.

00:12:08.480 | You're in that region of tractability that is right beyond triviality.

00:12:14.180 | So it's not simple to do.

00:12:16.920 | It's not, I'm going to touch my gym shoes every morning, but it's also not, I'm going

00:12:20.280 | to get up at four and run 12 miles every morning.

00:12:22.760 | It's somewhere in between.

00:12:24.760 | Sometimes I get my coffee and do this 20 minute walk and jump on the pull-up bar in the park

00:12:31.280 | halfway through.

00:12:32.280 | And I'm just doing that every morning before my day even gets started.

00:12:35.400 | It's not trivial, but it is definitely tractable.

00:12:39.040 | So you have these daily disciplines, two to three, that's it, covering a couple of different

00:12:42.840 | areas of your life.

00:12:43.840 | And you do them every day.

00:12:45.680 | And you mark that you did it every day.

00:12:47.960 | If you use something like my time block planner, there's a metric tracking space where you

00:12:51.280 | can write this every day.

00:12:52.520 | If you don't, you can have another type of notebook.

00:12:55.520 | There's a friend of mine who buys these oversized wall mounted calendars.

00:12:59.080 | You see all 30 day calendar on one big sheet.

00:13:02.120 | That's, I would say, you know, two feet by two feet, hangs it on his wall.

00:13:06.680 | And for his core disciplines, he marks a big X on the day.

00:13:11.400 | It's a Seinfeld method.

00:13:12.400 | Don't break the chain.

00:13:13.400 | So you're just seeing, did I do it or did I not?

00:13:15.320 | Now you can put all of your energy, not into some grand scheme, some grand overhaul of

00:13:20.600 | your life, some impossibly ambitious, I'm going to become a ultra marathoner.

00:13:25.800 | You can instead put all of your energy into just, here's a small number of tractable,

00:13:30.360 | but non-trivial daily disciplines.

00:13:31.600 | I want to mark it on my sheet every day.

00:13:34.600 | That's doable.

00:13:36.600 | That'll stretch you if you're from an externally powered goal mindset, but it's not going to

00:13:40.600 | stretch you to an impossible degree.

00:13:43.120 | And that is the main focus of that first discipline layer.

00:13:47.000 | If you do this long enough, daily disciplines, your mindset shifts, the way you think of

00:13:55.040 | yourself shifts.

00:13:56.040 | And you begin to think of yourself as someone who is capable of and attracted to internally

00:14:02.160 | powered goals.

00:14:03.440 | And now all the other layers are enabled.

00:14:05.980 | Now you can attack the values true to what really matters to you with the rigor required

00:14:10.880 | for that to make a difference in your life.

00:14:12.120 | You can track the finding calm through control with systems that you're going to stick with

00:14:16.880 | and actually benefit from that, benefit from that consistency.

00:14:20.200 | You're going to get the planning and actually trust yourself to be able to make potentially

00:14:24.120 | significant overhauls that take effort over time and diligent focus and the turning your

00:14:29.220 | attention away from distractions month after month.

00:14:31.680 | All of this becomes possible, which means the deep life becomes possible.

00:14:34.360 | So that's why I put the discipline as the first layer.

00:14:37.520 | Now there's other parts to it.

00:14:38.640 | The other thing I want you to do when you get to the discipline layer is just create

00:14:41.880 | your central repository.

00:14:43.560 | Here's where I write down all the systems and disciplines I'm following.

00:14:46.420 | You do want one place for that.

00:14:47.600 | So that's the other part of discipline is just having a place where you just say, this

00:14:51.920 | is where I keep track of the things I do.

00:14:53.960 | So I just have one place to look.

00:14:55.280 | So you set up that first folder.

00:14:56.840 | It could be physical or digital.

00:14:58.480 | I don't care.

00:14:59.480 | And then you start.

00:15:00.600 | The first thing you put in this is going to be your initial daily disciplines.

00:15:03.600 | As you move up the stack, you'll develop more systems, more routines, codes, disciplines,

00:15:08.640 | all that will go into that same folder that you created up front.

00:15:11.760 | But this is really again, why discipline is first is that if you don't shift your mindset

00:15:15.420 | to the internally powered efficacy, nothing else is going to happen.

00:15:20.040 | Everything else is going to be flights of motivation.

00:15:22.680 | And then you're going to see your intention begin to crumble.

00:15:27.360 | Now we see this in some classic tales.

00:15:29.720 | There's some classic tales, books are on the internet, internet famous or book famous figures

00:15:36.320 | who had exactly this order of operations in the transformation of their life, beginning

00:15:41.480 | with disciplined activity.

00:15:43.840 | Often times arbitrary seeming discipline that then changed their mindset and enabled a much

00:15:49.060 | more intentional transformation of their life.

00:15:52.460 | Thinking about Rich Roll.

00:15:53.460 | Rich Roll, the Rich Roll podcast.

00:15:56.420 | If you go back and read his memoir, Finding Ultra, what do you see?

00:16:02.500 | We see Rich was a college athlete.

00:16:05.900 | Actually I don't know if you know this Jesse around here.

00:16:08.300 | He swam.

00:16:09.300 | He was at Langdon.

00:16:10.300 | Oh really?

00:16:11.300 | Yeah.

00:16:12.300 | He was a swimmer.

00:16:13.300 | But a really competitive swimmer.

00:16:14.940 | Swam D1 at Stanford, had Olympic aspirations, developed substance abuse problems, went to

00:16:22.540 | law school, became a lawyer, had drug and alcohol problems, got sober, but sort of when

00:16:27.820 | he got sober, he traded it off for eating terribly.

00:16:32.140 | So he finds himself around Jesse and I's age right now.

00:16:37.660 | And he is really out of shape.

00:16:40.060 | He walks up the stairs in his house.

00:16:41.860 | This is what he talks about in his memoir.

00:16:43.620 | After eating cheeseburgers late at night and winded.

00:16:46.620 | He finds himself winded.

00:16:48.660 | And he's like, this is enough.

00:16:50.020 | Something has to change.

00:16:51.020 | He doesn't really know how to do the change.

00:16:52.940 | So what he just does, why not, is he puts on his running shoes and goes for a run.

00:16:59.140 | He lives down in Calabasas.

00:17:01.340 | Beautiful house actually.

00:17:02.340 | He goes for a run and he talks about this book.

00:17:05.020 | He ends up running some absurd distance, like 18 miles or something.

00:17:08.660 | He just sort of just keeps going and then comes back and something about that clicks.

00:17:12.620 | And he says, I'm just going to exercise.

00:17:15.220 | And he just starts exercising, which he was sort of used to from his college athletic

00:17:19.700 | days, but he just starts exercising.

00:17:22.060 | And after a while he's saying, like, I want to train and do some sort of endurance of

00:17:26.140 | it.

00:17:27.140 | This is his daily discipline.

00:17:28.140 | I'm just going to do this one thing.

00:17:30.140 | I'm going to start just training for endurance type sports.

00:17:33.700 | And that becomes the core that transforms his life.

00:17:35.820 | And of course, he becomes famously a vegan and then starts doing these really attention

00:17:41.740 | catching endurance athletic challenges and then transforms that over to his podcast,

00:17:46.740 | a ritual podcast, where now he's more of a sort of elder statesman of the self-improvement

00:17:51.700 | space and delivering life wisdom to people and has built this whole really cool career

00:17:56.740 | and lifestyle around all of this and completely healthy guy, completely in tune with himself

00:18:01.380 | and his spirit.

00:18:02.380 | But it all started with an arbitrary discipline.

00:18:03.380 | I'm going to run long distances.

00:18:04.380 | And it's not that there's something specific about running long distances.

00:18:10.340 | That was really important for the way he envisioned his life.

00:18:12.460 | I think it was the discipline.

00:18:15.340 | Transformed his mindset, reactivated the confidence in his ability to go after internally powered

00:18:22.380 | goals and then everything else in his life changed after that.

00:18:26.540 | Jocko Willink, I think of the same way.

00:18:28.940 | If you listen to how Jocko Willink, the former Navy SEAL and host of the Jocko podcast, if

00:18:33.940 | you talk about his story, when he joined the Navy to become a SEAL, he was a young sort

00:18:41.380 | of punk kid that was up to no good, sort of adrift.

00:18:45.260 | He sought discipline.

00:18:46.260 | And again, this is arbitrary discipline.

00:18:48.540 | I'm going to do special operations training.

00:18:51.020 | It requires incredible discipline.

00:18:53.340 | But you'll see in his story that that then transformed him.

00:18:56.620 | The discipline of, in this case, special forces training gave him this idea of I can handle

00:19:03.820 | internally powered goals.

00:19:05.060 | I can control my life.

00:19:06.060 | And now he has molded himself into someone who is the opposite of a punk kid, but someone

00:19:10.060 | who lives by a code and values.

00:19:12.140 | He was literally involved in the writing of the Navy SEAL code, the code by which Navy

00:19:18.420 | SEALs now identify that they work and operate.

00:19:21.420 | The discipline came first.

00:19:22.740 | The transformation came second.

00:19:24.620 | I think we see something similar in Cheryl Strait's book, Wild.

00:19:30.420 | I say your name wrong often, Jesse.

00:19:32.420 | We should look it up at Cheryl Strait.

00:19:34.100 | Am I saying that properly?

00:19:36.260 | That sounds right.

00:19:37.260 | Yeah, you look it up.

00:19:38.260 | Anyways, I don't know if you're familiar, you might know her from her columns and what

00:19:43.020 | she's done since, but if you've seen the Reese Witherspoon movie that was made about her

00:19:48.060 | breakout nonfiction memoir, Wild, again, what you see in that memoir is Cheryl took on a

00:19:56.660 | act of arbitrary discipline at a time when her life was all over the place and out of

00:20:01.180 | control.

00:20:02.180 | So, arbitrary act of discipline was hiking the Pacific Coast Trail.

00:20:05.820 | Straid.

00:20:06.820 | Straid.

00:20:07.820 | Yeah.

00:20:08.820 | Cheryl Straid.

00:20:09.820 | S-T-R-A-Y-E-D.

00:20:10.820 | That's how I wrote it down, actually.

00:20:11.820 | All right, I had it right.

00:20:12.820 | Cheryl Straid.

00:20:13.820 | So, it's an arbitrary discipline, but she was having drug problems and was really having

00:20:19.220 | a hard time dealing with, I believe it was the death of her mother, and there's all sorts

00:20:22.300 | of issues going on.

00:20:24.540 | Arbitrary discipline.

00:20:26.500 | But what that did was then shifted her mindset to say, okay, internally powered goals are

00:20:30.460 | something I can do, and now, obviously, as a very influential cultural commentator and

00:20:35.260 | thinker, it helped her get out of that really difficult place.

00:20:39.740 | So, we see this often in classic stories as well.

00:20:42.420 | The seemingly arbitrary discipline becomes the foundation on which all the intentional

00:20:46.140 | stuff is built.

00:20:47.820 | And that is the mindset shift I want you to do.

00:20:50.380 | Until you're used to this identity of yourself as someone who can do these types of internally

00:20:54.020 | powered goals, all of the navel gazing in the world is not going to get you very far.

00:20:58.260 | All the thinking through what really matters is not going to get you very far.

00:21:02.100 | You're going to see activity burst in flames of inspiration that then dissipate as the

00:21:10.300 | winds of everyday life and the grounding realities of normal responsibilities take away that temporary

00:21:16.940 | charge.

00:21:17.940 | And so, it's a mindset shift comes first, everything else follows.

00:21:20.220 | So, that is why I have discipline as the very first layer of the stack.

00:21:27.220 | All right.

00:21:28.660 | So, what we're going to do is I pulled some questions that all, I think, roughly orbit

00:21:34.940 | this notion of discipline and applying disciplines as the solution.

00:21:38.860 | So, the sort of using discipline to change your mindset that all roughly orbits that

00:21:41.980 | central idea.

00:21:42.980 | So, they're questions from you, the listeners.

00:21:44.620 | And then we have a something interesting segment at the end where we'll talk about an unrelated

00:21:48.420 | topic that you sent in to my interesting@calnewport.com email address.

00:21:53.980 | First I want to mention one of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

00:21:57.500 | That's our good friends at Hinson shaving.

00:22:00.220 | Jesse, I gave my Hinson blade a real workout today.

00:22:06.500 | I hadn't shaved in two days coming into this morning, right?

00:22:11.420 | Because I flew back from New Hampshire and we were working, you know, packing and working

00:22:15.340 | around the house and, you know, wasn't out and about in the world.

00:22:18.700 | And I said, okay, we got quite a bit of growth here.

00:22:21.540 | Let's see if my Hinson razor is up for it.

00:22:25.820 | And as you can see, it was.

00:22:28.100 | And here's the thing, one 10 cent safety razor blade put into this beautiful Hinson razor

00:22:35.620 | could handle multiple days, multiple days of growth smoothly, no razor burn, no nicks.

00:22:41.660 | How does this work?

00:22:42.660 | Because the Hinson razor is this again, beautifully designed precision milled piece of aluminum.

00:22:49.200 | The people at Hinson know how to do this.

00:22:51.340 | Their day job, so to speak, is designing parts for the aerospace industry.

00:22:54.980 | So they have these high precision routers that can build metals to extreme tolerances.

00:22:59.020 | So you get this beautifully milled piece of aluminum.

00:23:01.600 | You put just a standard 10 cent safety razor blade in there, you screw it on and you have

00:23:06.240 | only .0013 inches of blade extending beyond either side of the razor housing, which means

00:23:13.260 | you get no up and down flexing or diving board effect.

00:23:15.940 | You get just a very rigid cutting edge.

00:23:18.180 | And so that one blade in this beautifully designed razor can give you a very good shave,

00:23:24.740 | gets rid of clog, gets rid of burns, gets rid of nicks.

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00:23:34.820 | it quickly becomes cheaper to operate than using a subscription service or going to the

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00:23:57.480 | Visit HinsonShaving.com/Cal to pick the razor for you and use code CAL and you'll get two

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00:24:05.540 | Just add the two year supply to your cart.

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00:24:24.220 | We also want to talk about our friends at the always fun to pronounce Zoc Doc.

00:24:31.600 | This is one of those products that just makes so much sense.

00:24:35.460 | I'm surprised that it didn't exist before or I'm surprised I ever got along with out

00:24:40.500 | it.

00:24:41.560 | So Zoc Doc is a free app where you can find amazing doctors and book appointments online.

00:24:48.520 | We're talking about booking appointments with thousands of top rated patient review doctors

00:24:51.700 | and specialists.

00:24:52.900 | You can filter for doctors who take your insurance who are located near you and treat almost

00:24:57.780 | any condition you're searching for.

00:24:59.080 | You can also look at reviews.

00:25:00.320 | So this just makes it easy.

00:25:02.580 | I need a podiatrist.

00:25:03.580 | I need a new primary care physician.

00:25:05.660 | I'm looking for a dentist.

00:25:06.660 | You just go to Zoc Doc, your Zoc Doc app or Zoc Doc.com and you say, "This is what I'm

00:25:12.260 | looking for in this area.

00:25:13.940 | Takes this insurance."

00:25:14.940 | Boom, here they are.

00:25:16.400 | Which ones are taking appointments?

00:25:17.400 | Great.

00:25:18.400 | And then you can click and say, "Okay, what are the reviews?

00:25:19.740 | What do actual patients think?

00:25:20.740 | Oh, patients really like this doctor.

00:25:22.400 | It's nearby.

00:25:23.400 | It takes my insurance.

00:25:24.460 | They're taking new appointments.

00:25:25.460 | Great.

00:25:26.460 | Let's book an appointment right now."

00:25:28.540 | It really makes healthcare much easier to navigate.

00:25:33.680 | No more just asking around your friends, "Hey, do you know a podiatrist that you like?"

00:25:38.740 | And they said, "No, I've never.

00:25:39.740 | I haven't gone to one."

00:25:40.820 | It takes all that out of it.

00:25:43.060 | It is the smart way of actually finding medical care providers and then working with those

00:25:49.540 | providers.

00:25:50.540 | I've had, I guess, three different doctors now that have used, that use Zoc Doc.

00:25:54.500 | So not only does it help me find them, but also the appointment booking, also the reminders.

00:25:59.620 | When they're in the Zoc Doc ecosystem, you get great reminders.

00:26:02.020 | "Hey, appointments are coming up.

00:26:03.140 | You could do paperwork online in advance."

00:26:05.060 | I'm a big fan of Zoc Doc and the Zoc Doc ecosystem.

00:26:12.180 | I'm also a big fan of being able to say ZocDoc.com as much as possible.

00:26:20.680 | So go to ZocDoc.com/deep to download the Zoc Doc app for free, then find a book at Top

00:26:26.820 | Rated Doctor today.

00:26:27.980 | That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep, ZocDoc.com/deep.

00:26:32.020 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:26:40.260 | Sounds good.

00:26:41.620 | First question's from Fahad, a 21-year-old student.

00:26:44.580 | "I feel like I have two different personalities.

00:26:47.120 | One who's very productive and intentional, another who wants to be a slob, scroll social

00:26:50.820 | media, play video games, and watch TV all day.

00:26:53.940 | How do I stop falling into the slob state?"

00:26:56.500 | Well, Fahad, it's a good question.

00:26:58.940 | It's not a original question.

00:27:01.380 | And I mean that in the good sense of your issue is not unusual.

00:27:05.860 | Your issue is not something very specific to you.

00:27:08.260 | And in particular, your issue here has nothing to do with some sort of intrinsic character

00:27:11.980 | flaw that has been overcome.

00:27:15.500 | I think we often miss, when we talk about tales of people who diligently and disciplinely

00:27:21.380 | work through big accomplishments, we often miss the subtlety that goes into setting up

00:27:29.660 | a lifestyle or work environment in which you actually are able to maintain motivation and

00:27:34.780 | accomplish something big.

00:27:36.340 | That is a lot more subtle than we give credit to.

00:27:38.420 | It's not just about some people are able to white knuckle it and some people are weak.

00:27:42.340 | It's much more complicated than that.

00:27:45.260 | There's a couple of things I want to focus on here as being important.

00:27:49.060 | One has to do with how you choose what you work on.

00:27:51.420 | One has to do with how you build a lifestyle or approach actually working on it.

00:27:56.220 | So let's start with the choice question.

00:27:57.980 | And then the second piece will cover more.

00:28:00.080 | That's going to overlap more with the central theme of today's episode about cultivating

00:28:04.180 | discipline as a mindset.

00:28:05.340 | But let's start first with the choice of project.

00:28:09.020 | Oftentimes, especially for young people, and Fahad, you say here you're 21 years old.

00:28:14.140 | So that counts as you.

00:28:16.360 | You're half Jesse and I's age, which is its own psychological issue for Jesse and I to

00:28:21.620 | deal with.

00:28:22.620 | But don't worry about that.

00:28:23.620 | For someone who's young like you, you have to be very careful in what you choose to work

00:28:28.900 | on.

00:28:30.480 | So there's a couple of things that is going to potentially short circuit your motivation.

00:28:34.460 | One is you just set too much stuff on your plate.

00:28:36.220 | Yeah, I'm gonna do this and this and this because I can't wait to get started and I

00:28:40.180 | want to work on all these things.

00:28:41.900 | And I just want to get really motivated and go for it.

00:28:43.940 | And your mind gets exhausted and says, we can't be starting a business and AC in our

00:28:48.300 | classes and writing a book and training to be in really good shape.

00:28:52.660 | It's just too many things.

00:28:54.320 | The energy involved in trying to keep up with these things is too much.

00:28:59.140 | And it just seems intractable and forget it.

00:29:02.260 | Motivation is gone.

00:29:03.260 | The other type of issue that happens here is that your mind, you maybe have one or two

00:29:06.500 | things.

00:29:07.500 | It's not the quantity, but your mind doesn't trust your plan for execution.

00:29:09.580 | You're like, yeah, I want to look like Thor, but all you're doing is sort of just randomly

00:29:14.220 | going to the gym and sort of lifting weights.

00:29:16.220 | And your mind's like, you don't know what this is not going to lead to Thor.

00:29:20.340 | We're not going to look, we're just doing random stuff.

00:29:22.060 | Or you say, I want to be a famous writer and you're sort of writing every day and your

00:29:25.100 | mind says, this is not how this works.

00:29:27.740 | Just you're writing kind of random stuff or with no guidance, no structure.

00:29:32.620 | What's going to happen with this?

00:29:33.620 | We're not going to become a famous writer doing this.

00:29:35.060 | So once your initial, just general excitement about being a writer dies off, we're going

00:29:40.820 | to withhold motivation and then you're going to find yourself falling off.

00:29:43.900 | So being careful about how you choose what you work on a reasonable load and then study

00:29:48.820 | what you work on and make sure that your plan for approaching it is evidence-based and logical

00:29:53.020 | that your mind will trust.

00:29:54.020 | Yeah, we're going to get results with what we're doing.

00:29:56.380 | And to get there, especially if you're young, might mean bringing your ambition down and

00:30:00.180 | aiming at a much closer milestone.

00:30:02.220 | So it's not, I want the Pulitzer Prize.

00:30:07.580 | It's I want to be a regular contributor to the college magazine.

00:30:12.260 | So you bring it down to a more proximate goal.

00:30:15.320 | You have a plan to get there that your mind trusts.

00:30:17.300 | So the choice of things matter if you want to have your motivation be sustained.

00:30:22.060 | All right.

00:30:23.060 | The second big category here comes to that mindset we talked about earlier during the

00:30:27.300 | deep dive earlier in the show.

00:30:30.180 | Does your mind think of yourself as someone who is able to handle and stick with internally

00:30:35.220 | motivated goals?

00:30:36.420 | It sounds like right now, no.

00:30:38.300 | So when I hear I get going, I'm reading you here, I'm very productive and intentional,

00:30:42.980 | and then it sort of falls off and I become a slob.

00:30:46.220 | If I had to guess, this productivity and intentionality might be aimed in part at externally powered

00:30:51.820 | goals.

00:30:52.820 | You're working because you're very motivated about some particular outcome.

00:30:55.780 | You got yourself excited about it, watching YouTube videos or reading something and something

00:30:59.780 | got captured you and got your attention going.

00:31:02.820 | And that's what's motivating you to do the work, to return to the books, to return to

00:31:06.920 | putting in effort.

00:31:08.180 | And when that external power begins to dissipate, then social media TV comes back.

00:31:14.640 | So seeing yourself instead as someone who finds pride in sticking with internally powered

00:31:20.200 | goals, you're going to have less ups and downs.

00:31:23.100 | How do you do that?

00:31:24.100 | I go back to the deep life stack.

00:31:25.700 | I would start with the discipline layer.

00:31:27.260 | I would choose two to three daily disciplines covering a couple of different areas in your

00:31:30.540 | life that are non-trivial, but are also tractable and start marking on a sheet, on a time block

00:31:36.540 | planner, on a calendar, on your wall, wherever you want to do it.

00:31:39.420 | Did I do each of these each day?

00:31:41.340 | And really do that for a whole semester.

00:31:45.500 | Then return to, okay, what's my more ambitious goals for what I'm gonna do with my time?

00:31:49.200 | You will find that it's easier to stick with it.

00:31:51.000 | Your mind is much more comfortable with, we believe in this, these are carefully chosen.

00:31:54.980 | We stick with things even when they're hard.

00:31:57.000 | That is what Fahad does.

00:31:58.460 | That is who we are.

00:31:59.740 | You change your self-conception by training your mind to think about what you're doing

00:32:03.620 | differently.

00:32:04.620 | All right.

00:32:05.620 | So there's nothing, there's nothing wrong about you Fahad.

00:32:09.460 | What's wrong is some of the details of your approach towards your very admirable goal

00:32:14.100 | of doing intentional, remarkable things with your time.

00:32:16.220 | So choose carefully and spend some time developing a mindset of discipline, a comfort with internally

00:32:22.900 | powered goals, and I think you're going to find that this up and down whip sign between

00:32:28.340 | I'm working 10 hours a day and I'm on social media all day, that's going to start to even

00:32:32.740 | out.

00:32:33.740 | All right, Jesse, what do we got next?

00:32:37.980 | Okay.

00:32:39.140 | Next question is from Jacob, a 20 year old from Colorado.

00:32:43.580 | I seem to have contracted a case of what I call seasonal discipline, where I'll be very

00:32:48.340 | actively disciplined on following my habits and systems for a few months at a time, and

00:32:52.780 | then fall off really hard for a few months in an endless agonizing loop.

00:32:56.900 | I'm wondering if you have any tips for cultivating a more consistent commitment to discipline.

00:33:01.300 | You got a lot of young people today, Jesse.

00:33:03.540 | I know, I was thinking the same thing.

00:33:05.060 | Makes us feel old.

00:33:06.060 | You know, when you were doing the Henson Reed, I was thinking, you know, you haven't shaved

00:33:10.940 | in two days and I was like, mine, I go back and forth a lot, but mine's white now.

00:33:14.900 | Oh, mine is too.

00:33:15.900 | Yeah.

00:33:16.900 | Yeah.

00:33:17.900 | I don't mind it.

00:33:18.900 | I don't mind it, but my beard is, well, it's salt and pepper.

00:33:20.700 | But it's definitely white and I can see it at my sideburns as well.

00:33:24.700 | Yeah.

00:33:25.700 | My hair is still mainly brown, but, oh, that's coming.

00:33:30.780 | That's coming.

00:33:31.780 | We need, we need to balance these 20 year old questions.

00:33:33.060 | I'm telling you, Jesse, next we'll get, I don't know, a 41 year old question is going

00:33:35.820 | to be, uh, like a combination of wanting to know about, uh, tax filing.

00:33:42.740 | You know, I'm doing my schedule C deductions and wondering if this is, if this is the right,

00:33:46.380 | you know, line item to put that deduction.

00:33:48.060 | So it's a mixture of talking about, um, yeah, tax filings and then also, I don't know what

00:33:54.980 | else to.

00:33:55.980 | Potential hair surgery.

00:33:56.980 | And like, yeah, hair surgery.

00:33:57.980 | I am thinking about getting like this hair surgery for that hair surgery.

00:34:02.260 | And I would kind of a tax question and also I'm tired all the time and I need to, should

00:34:07.860 | I get like hor, like testosterone treatment?

00:34:10.580 | Yeah.

00:34:11.580 | Meanwhile, these young kids are, yeah.

00:34:14.140 | I was up 12 hours, 20 hours straight working on my screenplay and we're like, I only get

00:34:20.900 | two hours of working in the morning before I fall asleep and take a nap.

00:34:25.060 | Um, all right, Jacob, I'm sorry.

00:34:27.500 | Let's get back to your question.

00:34:28.500 | Seasonal discipline.

00:34:29.500 | You, you, uh, some, some periods do well, some periods you do not so well.

00:34:33.620 | All right.

00:34:34.620 | Very similar to Fahad.

00:34:36.300 | So I'm going to have again, two solutions here where this is going to overlap with what

00:34:39.340 | I talked about with Fahad is just the mindset training piece.

00:34:43.980 | So the very same thing I recommended Fahad that I recommended at the beginning of the

00:34:46.980 | show, I'm going to recommend as a starting point for you as well.

00:34:49.980 | That discipline layer, that very first layer of the deep life stack two to three non-trivial

00:34:55.580 | and tractable, non-trivial, but tractable daily disciplines covering multiple areas

00:35:00.060 | of your life that you track every single day and put most of your productivity, intentionality,

00:35:04.100 | focus, all that willpower on just doing those every day, not breaking the chain.

00:35:08.200 | You want to market every day on a calendar.

00:35:09.900 | It's a good tune-up just to get your mind back in shape as I don't need external power

00:35:15.260 | to do things.

00:35:16.260 | I don't need to be in a season where I'm excited or things are going well to make progress

00:35:21.300 | on important things.

00:35:22.300 | I can also make progress in the hard seasons, in the proverbial winters when other things

00:35:26.420 | are going on or the work itself is not going so well.

00:35:29.380 | See there's a mindset tune-up and I think that returning to that discipline layer can

00:35:33.940 | help with that.

00:35:35.940 | And then just like with Fahad, but with slight differences in specifics here, I would say

00:35:39.140 | let's also think about what this, what you're calling here habits and systems, what these

00:35:45.860 | habits and systems are.

00:35:48.540 | So even if you have the right internal conception of yourself, it is still the case that if

00:35:55.180 | the particular habits or systems you've put in place, if those particular habits and systems

00:36:01.620 | aren't sustainable or if they have a lot of friction, they work but they have overhead

00:36:07.260 | that don't need to be there and your mind senses that, you are going to accumulate stress

00:36:13.180 | fractures, right?

00:36:14.340 | You're going to accumulate over time this friction and grinding of the system's not

00:36:17.860 | quite right, it's too big, it's too hard, it has steps we don't need to do.

00:36:21.260 | It's like the system's going to start building up these stretch fractures until the whole

00:36:24.060 | thing eventually breaks apart and that's maybe why you can only make a few months.

00:36:28.860 | This is very common in the world of productivity systems that if the system is not compatible

00:36:35.760 | with your life and streamlined and believable, you can last with it for a while but it gets

00:36:39.940 | this clunky.

00:36:40.940 | I'm typing these notes and it goes into this note system that then automatically populates

00:36:45.060 | these type of systems and every day I have a generative AI bot take these and generate

00:36:50.260 | a schedule and then I use that schedule to sort of schedule my hours.

00:36:53.980 | These type of high overhead, high friction systems, they begin to just accumulate too

00:36:59.100 | much wear and tear until all of the gears get jammed and then you just say enough with

00:37:02.780 | this and you fall back to doing nothing until doing nothing after a while gets you so stressed

00:37:07.780 | out or overwhelmed by being disorganized that you go and build a new system and that starts

00:37:11.940 | generating friction until its gears mesh and then that could also be the source of what

00:37:15.460 | you're seeing here.

00:37:16.720 | One season up, one season down, one season up, one season down.

00:37:19.740 | So you also want to really check out your systems here.

00:37:23.020 | Streamline them.

00:37:24.020 | The simplest possible thing that actually helps you get your work done sometimes is

00:37:27.540 | the right thing to do.

00:37:29.260 | Get rid of unnecessary things.

00:37:30.980 | Have a core document where you keep track of here's what I do and how I do it so you're

00:37:35.260 | not just trying to keep track of things in your mind and you can see where there's overlap

00:37:38.580 | or redundancies or your systems are sort of out of control.

00:37:41.360 | You want something that fits very naturally into your life.

00:37:44.620 | So if you're starting from scratch here, I would say something like multi-scale planning.

00:37:49.340 | You have a strategic plan, a weekly plan and do some sort of daily time block plan during

00:37:52.940 | work days but not the weekends.

00:37:55.020 | Have some sort of good system for capture of your tasks so that you don't have to keep

00:37:59.220 | track of those things in your head.

00:38:01.700 | Put those two things together, maybe mixed in with some sort of fixed schedule productivity

00:38:07.260 | mindset of this is my work hours and everything else has to fit into it.

00:38:11.940 | That's a good start for organizing all the professional things in your life.

00:38:15.460 | Use very simple tech tools for implementing this.

00:38:18.820 | I'm talking, you know, you have a paper time block planner and then a couple of Google

00:38:23.420 | Docs to keep track of strategic plans and weekly plans.

00:38:27.580 | You could use Trello to keep track of tasks or even just a long text file where you're

00:38:31.140 | typing things.

00:38:32.380 | Simple technologies that are easy to get in and easy to get out that you can access from

00:38:35.580 | multiple platforms.

00:38:36.640 | That makes a big difference.

00:38:37.940 | As you add in other structures or goals around your personal life, keep it simple, you know.

00:38:43.220 | So again, let's go for simplicity, accessibility.

00:38:46.480 | Let's try to minimize friction.

00:38:49.500 | Let's just make the general rhythm of your life something that's very sustainable.

00:38:53.140 | That'll help too.

00:38:54.140 | I don't know in your case, Jacob, which is the bigger problem.

00:38:56.940 | So I don't know if it's a mindset issue that your systems are fine, but your mindset just

00:39:01.780 | needs right now external fuel for you to work on hard things, or if it's a systems problem,

00:39:06.540 | your mindset's fine, but your systems have too much friction.

00:39:09.780 | So look at both.

00:39:11.120 | But between those two things, I think you're going to find the seasonality of following

00:39:16.140 | systems is going to go away.

00:39:20.420 | One epilogue I will add to this as well is don't reject seasonality outright as an issue.

00:39:27.500 | I think it's an issue if your systems are seasonal.

00:39:30.580 | I stopped being organized during some months versus others.

00:39:34.180 | I think it's completely fine if your workload is seasonal.

00:39:37.740 | In fact, in my new book, Slow Productivity, which is coming out in March, there's a whole

00:39:41.420 | principle is about working at a natural pace, and it really gets into seasonality and how

00:39:45.940 | natural and well suited humans are for that.

00:39:48.080 | So I do want to throw that in there.

00:39:50.060 | You might just be getting exhausted, right?

00:39:51.580 | Like a professor, by the time the professor gets to the end of spring, traditionally,

00:39:55.140 | they're exhausted because they've gone through a full school year.

00:39:58.220 | So to actually pull back some in the summer makes sense because you need to recharge.

00:40:01.420 | If you try to go all out in the summer after a hard spring and after a hard fall before

00:40:06.060 | that, you might just run out of steam altogether.

00:40:07.940 | So I think seasonal workload could be fine as well.

00:40:10.020 | So let's throw that in here, not just as an epilogue, but I'm going to throw this in,

00:40:12.940 | Jacob, as my third part of my answer.

00:40:14.940 | Make your workload seasonal, but keep the systems the same.

00:40:18.340 | You're still multi-scale planning, but when you get to some months of the year, the amount

00:40:22.620 | of stuff you're putting into your week and the complexity of your daily time block schedules

00:40:25.940 | are much easier.

00:40:26.940 | And you get that relief of, man, this feels great.

00:40:28.580 | I can really control my time.

00:40:30.140 | I'm taking Thursdays completely off because why not?

00:40:32.700 | I'm using planning so I can move pieces around.

00:40:35.260 | This is great.

00:40:36.260 | I can actually extract a lot more relaxation and recharging because I have some structure.

00:40:40.500 | So I think a seasonal workload could be excellent, but you don't want your systems to come and

00:40:44.060 | go seasonally and you want to make sure that your mindset is one that doesn't require external

00:40:50.020 | power.

00:40:51.020 | So there we go.

00:40:52.020 | I upgraded this from two parts to three parts, Jacob, and hopefully you will find that useful.

00:40:56.420 | All right.

00:40:57.820 | Let's keep going here, Jesse.

00:40:59.380 | Yeah.

00:41:00.380 | And then the time management video on our YouTube channel is definitely something you should

00:41:04.740 | check out.

00:41:05.740 | Yeah.

00:41:06.740 | So look under the, what's it, Core Ideas is the playlist?

00:41:07.740 | Right.

00:41:08.740 | So youtube.com/calendarportmedia.

00:41:09.740 | Look at the playlist.

00:41:11.740 | There's a playlist called Core Ideas.

00:41:13.980 | There's one titled, a video titled time management, right?

00:41:17.500 | I talk about that multiscale, multiscale planning.

00:41:21.380 | Yeah.

00:41:22.380 | Shows up, shows up right in there.

00:41:23.380 | It's a good place to start.

00:41:24.380 | All right.

00:41:25.580 | Next question is from Loyad from India.

00:41:28.620 | I often take on multiple projects, but then they, as they become hard, I abandon them

00:41:33.460 | halfway.

00:41:34.460 | How do I stop doing this?

00:41:35.460 | All right.

00:41:36.460 | So we have a very consistent type theme today.

00:41:40.380 | I think the reader could, or the listener could almost answer this question on their

00:41:42.940 | own now, which is my goal.

00:41:43.940 | I really want to hammer this point home as much as I can.

00:41:49.940 | So Loyad, why are you abandoning projects when they become hard halfway?

00:41:53.900 | Well, as you can imagine, I'm going to have two parts to my answer here.

00:41:59.120 | One is mindset.

00:42:01.000 | If your mindset is one that depends on external power for you to get through goals, you are

00:42:06.340 | not going to get very far in hard projects because the external power, which in this

00:42:09.860 | case is that actual emotional feeling of motivation, excitement will die down as projects go on

00:42:17.740 | as they get harder and then you'll stop doing them.

00:42:21.220 | So you need to reshape your mindset towards one and seeing yourself as someone who can

00:42:24.660 | handle internally powered goals.

00:42:26.100 | Guess I'm going to suggest you do that.

00:42:28.620 | Layer one of the deep life stack, two to three daily disciplines, non-trivial, but tractable

00:42:33.780 | everyday mark them.

00:42:35.580 | Just train your mind.

00:42:36.580 | I do things that are important for me, even if they're hard, even if I'm not excited

00:42:39.660 | in the moment and there's a deeper satisfaction I get out of that.

00:42:43.060 | That's why I trust myself to do this going forward.

00:42:45.900 | Secondly, the issue here is going to be similar to what I talked to both Fahad and Jacob about.

00:42:50.920 | You might just have too many projects and they might just actually be too hard.

00:42:55.820 | So be very careful about that.

00:42:57.300 | I think one project worked on consistently and slowly over time is going to in the end

00:43:02.440 | open up more opportunities and have more impact than multiple projects that you're trying

00:43:06.200 | to tackle in a frenzied burst.

00:43:08.300 | So it's like sort of a key slow productivity principle here, work on fewer things.

00:43:13.860 | So you might just have too many projects.

00:43:16.060 | Again, you have this impatience of I'm young and there's so much I want to do and I have

00:43:20.420 | to make my mark and you don't realize just choose the one thing that you patiently start

00:43:24.580 | building your skill on.

00:43:26.540 | It's frustrating maybe now when you're 22, but by the time you're 24, 25 and that's bearing

00:43:30.900 | fruit, the fruit is going to be so much riper and sweeter than if you had spilled that time

00:43:35.420 | instead just jumping from thing to thing, trying to jump from the latest idea to the

00:43:41.180 | latest interest.

00:43:42.180 | I mean, I knew someone like this in college, Jesse, and I kind of remember his name, but

00:43:46.940 | I'm not sure if I have his name right.

00:43:48.300 | And maybe I should anonymize it anyways.

00:43:49.980 | But I knew about him because he was my year of college, maybe he was a year younger, and

00:43:54.140 | he was the only other person I knew who was trying to write a book.

00:43:57.340 | And so he had interest in books, but he had all these other interests as well.

00:44:01.020 | Like he was interested in politics because Dartmouth is in Hanover, which is in New Hampshire.

00:44:07.260 | So when the presidential season would come through, which happened twice when I was there,

00:44:12.860 | everyone comes to New Hampshire because of the primaries, you get lots of political figures

00:44:15.700 | coming through.

00:44:16.700 | So he was also getting really involved in helping to like organize.

00:44:18.980 | I believe it was a debate for the 2004 presidential election and he had this other project going

00:44:24.660 | on.

00:44:25.660 | And so there was this real sense.

00:44:26.660 | I remember, man, he's doing a lot of things.

00:44:29.740 | Book writing was one of them, all these different projects, just the excitement of, he was very

00:44:33.100 | capable and all these different things that could make my market.

00:44:37.520 | I was not that way.

00:44:39.700 | I was just writing.

00:44:40.700 | I was doing my CS work and writing.

00:44:43.340 | And that was my main thing outside of my schoolwork was just writing.

00:44:46.860 | And I just, I wanted to write this book and do it well and then immediately turn around

00:44:51.340 | and sell another.

00:44:52.340 | I just wanted to make my writing better and I was willing to put my time, just focus on

00:44:56.780 | that.

00:44:57.780 | And so there's this point early on, we're both kind of working on books and he had a

00:45:00.340 | lot of other stuff going on, but all that stuff, I don't know what happened to it, but

00:45:05.100 | I just kept focusing on books.

00:45:06.420 | And I wrote another book and I was a little bit better.

00:45:08.460 | And then I took some time and wrote a third book, which was much better.

00:45:11.180 | And then it set up my fourth book, which was a hardcover.

00:45:13.900 | And now that has borne much more interesting fruit.

00:45:17.300 | I have actually, it took me a long time, but I've developed myself into a writer who can

00:45:21.100 | have a career as a writer.

00:45:22.560 | So in the moment when I was 20 or 21, it seemed maybe naively slow, like, I'm just going to

00:45:29.500 | work on this book and try to make it good.

00:45:31.020 | I don't want to be distracted.

00:45:33.060 | But looking back as a 41 year old, I said, man, I'm so glad I stayed focused on that

00:45:37.880 | because how much interesting stuff has making writing one of my two core focuses of my life

00:45:42.380 | really opened up.

00:45:44.740 | So Lloyd had slowing down, doing less things, sticking with that in a sustainable pace over

00:45:50.320 | a long period of time.

00:45:52.300 | That's typically what you want to be doing if your goal is either impact or opening up

00:45:56.800 | interesting opportunities in your life or some combination of those two.

00:45:59.420 | That slow productivity approach is probably better.

00:46:01.260 | So that might be what's going on as well as your mind is overwhelmed.

00:46:03.900 | This is too much.

00:46:04.900 | So we got mindset and we have your mind being reasonable.

00:46:08.320 | So your mindset might be off.

00:46:09.760 | You need external power.

00:46:10.760 | We fixed that through practice.

00:46:11.980 | Your mind might be working perfectly fine and is making the reasonable observation that

00:46:15.800 | now this is too much work.

00:46:16.800 | We have too many things.

00:46:17.920 | We can't possibly be making a difference in all of these.

00:46:20.380 | We're beginning to conflict with each other.

00:46:22.220 | So you might actually just have to think about doing less.

00:46:27.660 | Actually focusing is one of the main messages in your student books, like where you tell

00:46:32.020 | people not to do like a thousand activities and stuff like that.

00:46:35.380 | Yeah.

00:46:36.380 | In fact, I was reminded that, so I'm back at Dartmouth and I didn't really remember

00:46:42.460 | this till I got up there.

00:46:43.460 | I was like, oh, I've been back a bunch of times over the course of the last couple of

00:46:46.220 | decades to give talks.

00:46:47.660 | And one of the first talks I gave, there's an old poster of this I have somewhere in

00:46:52.100 | my basement.

00:46:53.100 | I'd forgotten about this.

00:46:54.100 | I think it was a year out of college.

00:46:55.820 | I came back to Dartmouth and gave a lecture to students there about navigating their student

00:47:02.380 | career.

00:47:03.700 | And this was one of the big points I was making was do fewer things.

00:47:07.540 | Do fewer things.

00:47:08.540 | Do them really well.

00:47:09.780 | You are much better off, for example, being the best student in the computer science department

00:47:17.140 | than you are being the student with the hardest schedule on campus.

00:47:20.060 | I have three majors and I'm doing these impossible.

00:47:22.980 | You're much better off saying I'm only a computer science student.

00:47:25.380 | And in fact, I balance my computer science courses with easier courses and I take full

00:47:29.380 | advantage of independent studies and thesis studies where I can reduce my course load

00:47:34.180 | but still get credits.

00:47:35.400 | And so my course load is very, very manageable.

00:47:38.260 | And what I do is I take that energy to become the best student in those computer science

00:47:41.900 | classes.

00:47:42.940 | That is way, way more valuable than I did a triple major.

00:47:46.820 | Or I had really hard semesters.

00:47:47.820 | No one cares how hard your semesters are.

00:47:49.620 | Similarly, I wrote a book.

00:47:52.220 | You know, I wrote a book for Random House.

00:47:53.620 | It's going to get you much farther than I, you know, I had six different clubs.

00:47:56.740 | You know how hard that was?

00:47:57.820 | I was a treasurer here and I ran this.

00:47:59.500 | I did this initiative.

00:48:00.500 | No one's keeping track of that.

00:48:02.220 | No one cares.

00:48:03.220 | I mean, they're like, yeah, you seem like a go getter.

00:48:05.100 | But it doesn't catch their attention.

00:48:07.220 | Like people care about the thing you do best.

00:48:10.020 | So you're almost always better off making your best things as good as possible, which

00:48:13.980 | almost always requires doing less.

00:48:16.740 | And this was again, this came out of my advocacy about student stress, which I did this like

00:48:21.100 | 2004 to 2007 period.

00:48:22.780 | I did a lot of this, a lot of talks all over the country about this.

00:48:25.740 | And at the core of my advocacy about student stress was.

00:48:30.460 | Students need to do much less.

00:48:33.020 | This is a there's only so much that tactics and strategies and time management, they can

00:48:36.900 | only get you so far if you have too many courses and activities.

00:48:40.860 | And then as a college student.

00:48:43.460 | There's no real reason to do a lot of things because no one in your future is going to

00:48:47.020 | care about that.

00:48:48.020 | There is no college admissions officer type figure in your future who is going to pour

00:48:54.060 | over what you did at college and say how hard was their schedule?

00:48:57.620 | Let's get letters.

00:48:58.620 | They say this person was really impressive.

00:49:00.460 | They worked on all these things.

00:49:01.820 | How hard were their course, their course load?

00:49:04.140 | No one looks at that after college.

00:49:06.460 | If you're trying to go to grad school, it's going to be a professor evaluating your application.

00:49:11.340 | What do you want to know?

00:49:12.340 | Where did you go to school?

00:49:13.340 | Have you done your research in your major?

00:49:14.340 | Have you demonstrated you can do research?

00:49:15.700 | That's all they care.

00:49:16.700 | It's all they care about.

00:49:17.700 | They're not going to look at your oh my God, they had three.

00:49:19.420 | This is a really complicated schedule or look at these activities.

00:49:21.660 | They could care less.

00:49:22.660 | You're going to work for a company.

00:49:23.660 | Typically, they want to know where did you go to school?

00:49:25.140 | What was your GPA?

00:49:26.780 | How they do in the interview.

00:49:27.780 | That's what they care about.

00:49:29.820 | You know, and again, we're going to see this again and again.

00:49:33.220 | Go to law school.

00:49:34.220 | What do they care about?

00:49:35.220 | Here's LSAT GPA.

00:49:36.460 | You can look up the grid.

00:49:38.580 | School by school.

00:49:39.680 | This LSAT requires this GPA to have a high chance of getting in for basically every school

00:49:44.680 | except for maybe Yale.

00:49:47.380 | That's what you need to do.

00:49:48.380 | I have this grade point average.

00:49:49.380 | I need this LSAT score practice till I get it.

00:49:50.840 | Now I can get it right.

00:49:51.840 | No one is going to be pouring over your resume to see how hard your schedule is or how stressed

00:49:55.700 | you were.

00:49:56.700 | That became a big core of my student advocacy.

00:49:59.120 | Stress advocacy was avoid unforced error students.

00:50:04.060 | Create schedules and loads that are very manageable and then do what you do really well.

00:50:08.040 | Do a small number of things well.

00:50:09.040 | It's such a more sustainable strategy.

00:50:11.640 | And in the end, opens up more opportunities than I did a lot of hard.

00:50:14.120 | I had a hard schedule and did a lot of things okay.

00:50:16.120 | So that was a big part of my schedule.

00:50:18.680 | You know, the other part of my, this is going off tangent, Jesse, but I was talking about

00:50:23.560 | this at a student event the other week up at Dartmouth.

00:50:26.320 | We kind of brought up all this.

00:50:28.240 | I dredged up all of this stuff I used to do around student stress advocacy way back when.

00:50:33.400 | And I remember the other thing, the other thing that came up often was when student

00:50:40.760 | stress became a big issue, especially at the high school level, the response, and I think

00:50:45.480 | this is still sort of an instinct we have right now.

00:50:48.640 | The response was all of these Ivy League educated commentators who are writing about this thinking

00:50:56.680 | like Alexander Robbins or Denise Pope would then turn to these aspirational students who

00:51:03.000 | were stressing themselves out, trying to get into like an Ivy League school and say, guys,

00:51:06.560 | there's more to life than going to a good school.

00:51:09.320 | Now just chill out about it.

00:51:11.600 | And this was completely falling flat because here they were with their Stanford and Yale

00:51:14.960 | degrees saying like, well, I did it and I'm doing this kind of cool stuff and I'm kind

00:51:18.760 | of famous, but like, just go to the, you're so you're kind of, in fact, you're flawed

00:51:23.240 | and especially your parents are flawed for pushing you to actually want to come here.

00:51:26.840 | Just temper your ambition.

00:51:28.040 | So it was very much this pull up the drawbridge behind you type of mentality that just wasn't

00:51:33.160 | working.

00:51:34.160 | The students who were most stressed, if you came to them with your Ivy League diploma

00:51:37.720 | on the wall and said, there's more to life than going to an Ivy League, they would 100%

00:51:42.160 | tune you out because they would say, I disagree.

00:51:45.520 | You look like you're doing something cool.

00:51:46.760 | I want to do something cool like that.

00:51:48.440 | If the only thing you can offer me is be less ambitious, I'm sorry, but I'm going to ignore

00:51:53.080 | you and go back to whatever's caused me all the stress and causing all these troubles.

00:51:56.520 | And so I was also back then, this 2005, 2006 period, this lone voice out there in the student

00:52:02.080 | stress debates.

00:52:03.080 | And this is when they really picked up speed when the millennial demographic bump hit up

00:52:07.480 | against limited college admission slot, when the common application became widespread and

00:52:12.000 | now you could apply to 50 colleges pretty easily.

00:52:14.800 | This is when it acceptance rates plummeted, right?

00:52:17.040 | So the two thousands, early two thousands, this is when it became a real problem.

00:52:20.940 | And I was out there, you know, as a lone voice among these other voices saying, well, you

00:52:25.960 | have to offer students is an alternative path to their ambitions.

00:52:30.280 | You have to keep the ambition in the question.

00:52:32.680 | Okay.

00:52:33.680 | You want to go to a really good school.

00:52:34.680 | I'm not going to try to talk you out of that.

00:52:37.120 | I mean, I want you to know it's okay if that doesn't happen, but I'm not going to tell

00:52:41.020 | you you're bad or your parents are flawed for thinking you want to go to Harvard or

00:52:44.280 | whatever, but let's talk about how you do that.

00:52:46.880 | And actually this path of overloading yourself and just trying to grind it out is not very

00:52:51.800 | successful.

00:52:52.800 | There are alternative paths where you could be very interesting and have a good shot at

00:52:56.400 | these schools, but your life is very sustainable.

00:52:57.880 | And I used to call it the Zen valedictorian strategy.

00:53:00.900 | And I wrote a lot about it, talked a lot about it.

00:53:02.760 | My third book is actually about this strategy.

00:53:04.840 | I followed five kids who got into really good schools without being stressed and deconstructed.

00:53:10.800 | How in the world did they do this?

00:53:12.160 | Right.

00:53:13.160 | And so I was the lone voice out there often that would say, I think it's completely fine.

00:53:17.320 | You have to recognize and accept people's ambitions and then start giving them more

00:53:21.560 | sustainable strategies for pursuing those ambitions.

00:53:25.000 | We're way off Loyal's question at this point, but it was this all, I was just thinking about

00:53:28.440 | this.

00:53:29.440 | I was talking to all these college students the other day.

00:53:30.440 | We did a student dinner and I was talking to a lot of them about, cause they had just

00:53:33.840 | gone through this to get into Dartmouth.

00:53:36.520 | I believe Dartmouth's acceptance right now is negative 2%.

00:53:39.960 | Like they actually kick out a certain number of people each year.

00:53:43.400 | You have to get, I think they get into an Ivy league school today.

00:53:47.920 | You have to work really hard in STEM classes in high school, get to the head of those classes,

00:53:53.880 | use those technology to invent a time machine, then bring yourself back to 1997.

00:53:59.280 | It's negative acceptance.

00:54:00.920 | You actually have to go back in time to be accepted.

00:54:03.840 | I think they try to reduce the number of students there every year.

00:54:06.840 | I don't know.

00:54:09.120 | That's all neither here nor there.

00:54:10.720 | I'm just in this mindset.

00:54:11.720 | I don't know why I'm in this mindset again, but I guess Jesse, you caused all this by

00:54:15.680 | saying, I talk about focus in my student books.

00:54:17.680 | I was like, yeah, like in my student books, I really was trying to just be very clear

00:54:22.200 | about here's how a lot of students do really well.

00:54:25.840 | And a lot of it's not doing too much being organized about what you do, but keeping your

00:54:29.840 | load manageable and actually it's a very sustainable path.

00:54:33.960 | Not completely out of nowhere though, because I think we'll see this final question.

00:54:38.120 | I think it's gonna be relevant to this final question.

00:54:39.840 | All right.

00:54:40.840 | Last question from a CS student.

00:54:43.240 | In a previous podcast, you mentioned not to work for 10 hours at a time.

00:54:46.680 | Like many productivity YouTubers do.

00:54:49.040 | Can you explain why not?

00:54:50.680 | These YouTubers are often the biggest names in YouTube productivity and seem like they're

00:54:54.320 | excellent students and are creating long-term deep life habits from it.

00:54:58.480 | As long as you make sure to avoid shallow work, I was wondering why is working 10 hours

00:55:02.320 | a day a problem?

00:55:04.480 | Have you seen these videos, Jesse?

00:55:06.600 | No.

00:55:07.600 | People have been sending them to me.

00:55:08.600 | I've taken your advice even before I knew you about the no, you can't see any other

00:55:15.260 | videos on the homepage.

00:55:17.360 | So I only come-

00:55:18.360 | Yeah, the plugin that takes the recommendations off of YouTube.

00:55:22.320 | By the way, I'm a big believer in that still.

00:55:24.800 | YouTube is a great library.

00:55:25.920 | It's a terrible television channel.

00:55:27.360 | That's what I always say.

00:55:28.880 | So to use it as a library, I want to learn how to do this thing.

00:55:32.640 | I can search and find videos on how to replace the oil in my very particular type of car.

00:55:37.680 | It's an excellent library.

00:55:38.840 | Or I want to look up, I've heard about Cal Newport.

00:55:42.760 | I like Cal Newport.

00:55:43.880 | I know his podcast is on YouTube, so I can have that bookmarked.

00:55:48.080 | And I'm going there to look up Cal Newport videos to see his podcast.

00:55:52.340 | That's great.

00:55:53.340 | To use it as a TV channel, let me just click on a recommendation and then see if the recommendations

00:55:58.160 | are more interesting than what I'm watching and click on those recommendations and sort

00:56:00.800 | of following those rabbit holes.

00:56:02.180 | That is more dangerous.

00:56:03.680 | But anyways, there's a whole productivity YouTube where these YouTubers do these over-the-top,

00:56:09.120 | I think of it as a sort of nerd version of David Blaine productivity endurance challenges.

00:56:16.400 | I guess it's time lapse, but 10 hours studying straight and they make it sort of heroic.

00:56:22.880 | This often works well on YouTube.

00:56:24.440 | If the thing you're doing is over the top, you take whatever emotional reaction that

00:56:30.080 | is relevant to that topic.

00:56:31.520 | So you see someone well organized and studying well, and you're like, "Oh, I kind of have

00:56:35.320 | an affinity for that.

00:56:36.320 | I want to be a better student."

00:56:37.320 | And then you show someone doing it for 10 hours, you push it over the top.

00:56:40.480 | It takes that emotional response and pushes over the top.

00:56:43.240 | That's engagement.

00:56:44.880 | And people watch these videos and get really into it.

00:56:46.960 | So it's a classic YouTube strategy being applied to the topic of productivity.

00:56:53.040 | So why not study for 10 hours a day?

00:56:55.040 | You can see in the student's question, these are big names on YouTube.

00:56:59.160 | These people are YouTube famous.

00:57:01.120 | They seem like they're really good students.

00:57:03.320 | There's a clarity to it.

00:57:04.320 | There's an extremeness to it, a sort of monastic discipline to all I do is study all day.

00:57:09.200 | And I guess my answer to the CS student, it would be to turn the question back on you

00:57:14.600 | and say, "To what end?"

00:57:18.400 | So what are you trying to accomplish if you're working 10 hours a day on schoolwork?

00:57:23.360 | Well, you might say, "Well, then for sure I'll get into med school."

00:57:27.520 | Okay.

00:57:28.520 | So then what?

00:57:29.520 | Well, okay.

00:57:30.520 | So I could study 10 hours a day in med school so that I could graduate, top my class and

00:57:34.720 | get a really good residency.

00:57:36.120 | Okay.

00:57:37.120 | Well, then what?

00:57:38.120 | Well, then I would work 10 hours a day so I could do research.

00:57:40.120 | I could be the very best resident and get sort of an academic clinical position.

00:57:46.000 | Okay.

00:57:47.000 | Well, then what?

00:57:48.000 | Well, then I'd really want to do 10 hours because if I could fill every hour working

00:57:50.520 | on my medical research and clinician practice, I could move up really quickly and become

00:57:55.480 | an attending and get tenure at the associate university very quickly.

00:57:58.920 | It was like, all right, well, then what?

00:57:59.920 | Well, then I could, if I really worked 10 hours all day long, then I could probably

00:58:05.360 | become chair of this particular medical department and bring in all this different money and

00:58:10.840 | we could really expand the hospitals.

00:58:12.800 | And then what?

00:58:13.800 | You keep following this out and you look back and say, "All I've done is just work really

00:58:20.560 | hard."

00:58:21.720 | What about all the other elements of life?

00:58:24.680 | So like the, what, where is there in this point, some sort of victory where you say,

00:58:29.840 | now I can have a full, rich experience of life.

00:58:33.680 | It's just working for the sake of working because of what's next.

00:58:36.680 | Putting aside the fact that it's completely unsustainable and these YouTubers don't work

00:58:39.680 | 10 hours all the time.

00:58:40.680 | They do, again, it's like looking at David Blaine, frees himself into a block of ice.

00:58:44.520 | He doesn't spend most days frozen to a block of ice, but it got a lot of engagement when

00:58:48.040 | he did that as a stunt for a television special.

00:58:51.400 | They're not spending their day doing this all the time.

00:58:53.560 | It's not a sustainable way to live, but even if it was in general, this is like, let me

00:58:56.680 | grind and work all of my hours so I can get the next thing really, you know, get to the

00:59:02.080 | next level at the very highest level.

00:59:04.360 | It's not sustainable because it keeps going.

00:59:06.880 | Now there are some exceptions to this.

00:59:08.160 | Like sure, some professional caliber Olympic athletes do this, but they're doing this for

00:59:13.120 | a very narrow window because they have until they're what, 33 before they have to move

00:59:17.280 | on and live the rest of your life.

00:59:18.580 | It's very different if you're training for the Olympics like this with this level of

00:59:21.880 | intensity because it's a in dated thing.

00:59:24.960 | But if you're talking about your career as a student and your professional career, there's

00:59:28.400 | nowhere there, there's no place where that ends essentially until you die.

00:59:33.000 | What type of life is that?

00:59:34.080 | So why don't you work for 10 hours a day?

00:59:35.700 | Because it's not living.

00:59:37.840 | It's a sort of parody of a workism if I'm going to take a term from Derek Thompson.

00:59:45.660 | So what works better?

00:59:47.800 | Social productivity, working with good focus and good organization on things that matter

00:59:54.440 | consistently and systematically over time.

00:59:57.680 | This can produce work of real impact of real meaning.

01:00:00.200 | It can open up all sorts of interesting opportunities in your life.

01:00:02.600 | It can allow you to do and accomplish very competitive things.

01:00:05.920 | And it's compatible with a well-rounded life.

01:00:07.920 | And it's compatible with I don't just work all the time.

01:00:09.720 | I'm not just always stressed out.

01:00:11.080 | I'm not just always overwhelmed and trying to keep up or, or compete with someone else.

01:00:16.620 | It often also produces in a lot of fields, better results, right?

01:00:22.680 | You don't see the very best novelists that are winning all the awards getting there because

01:00:28.040 | they spend more hours working on their novel every day.

01:00:31.120 | No, it's this sort of slow and steady work on their writing.

01:00:34.280 | They're very careful and intentional about their time.

01:00:37.680 | They think, they read, they walk, they integrate and they come back and write and you get really

01:00:42.640 | great, you know, it's where you can get a sort of wholesome whitehead is out of the

01:00:46.040 | slow development of real talent, not out of I worked, I wrote 12 hours each day and the

01:00:50.640 | other writers are only writing six hours each day.

01:00:52.400 | Now I think there's a comfort in this for very ambitious young people because it makes

01:00:57.680 | you think, it gives you a very simple framework.

01:00:59.800 | I turned this knob of hours.

01:01:01.800 | The higher the knob you turn up on hours, the more successful you'll be.

01:01:05.200 | Most people aren't going to turn the knob past this point because they're weak.

01:01:07.840 | I'm not weak.

01:01:08.920 | If I'm willing to take the pain, it's very simple.

01:01:11.160 | What I need to do is just hard.

01:01:12.400 | It's just keeping my hand in a metaphorical ice bucket longer than you did.

01:01:15.600 | I like this.

01:01:16.600 | I'm going to do 10 hours.

01:01:18.280 | You're only going to do four.

01:01:19.280 | I'll be more successful.

01:01:20.400 | So it makes success seem much more controllable.

01:01:23.920 | It's just a matter of, of raw will.

01:01:27.800 | But again, that's not the reality.

01:01:29.680 | Great work, innovative work in academia, in the arts, in business or business strategy

01:01:34.560 | has its busy periods, but is not built upon.

01:01:38.240 | I have to be working all the time.

01:01:39.800 | So I just think it's no real way.

01:01:41.320 | It's no real way to live.

01:01:42.320 | I just say this.

01:01:43.320 | So I come back to my original question to what end, what comes next after your 10 hours

01:01:48.280 | a day as a student, what comes next after your 10 hours a day as the investment Baker

01:01:53.680 | junior associate, because you took that job because it was the most competitive, the hardest

01:01:56.680 | one to get.

01:01:57.680 | What comes next after you get managing director at the investment bank?

01:02:00.960 | What comes next after you go off to start your own hedge fund?

01:02:03.840 | What comes next after you hit the billion dollar valuation?

01:02:05.960 | I mean, there's always things you could be overworking yourself towards, but again, to

01:02:11.800 | what end, what comes next?

01:02:13.120 | These are the questions I always come back to.

01:02:14.360 | So I think it's a stunt what these productivity YouTubers are doing.

01:02:17.960 | I've spent my entire life in professional academia.

01:02:20.160 | The smartest people don't do that.

01:02:22.240 | They work hard and undergraduate.

01:02:24.000 | They don't, right?

01:02:25.000 | I mean, because it's not that hard.

01:02:26.480 | They work hard in periods and other periods there and thinking periods, they have other

01:02:29.160 | types of things going on.

01:02:30.840 | So I'm just not this idea that you're going to somehow just, I love the simplicity of

01:02:34.760 | it, but this idea that you're going to somehow just out raw number everyone else.

01:02:38.600 | And that's where your success is going to come from.

01:02:40.080 | It just is not sustainable.

01:02:42.480 | Goes against the deep life that we talk about here.

01:02:45.840 | It's way out of balance over the top and really not the right way in my mind to build a life

01:02:52.840 | of intentionality and depth.

01:02:56.160 | All that's new, Jesse, this like work 10 hours thing.

01:02:58.320 | It's because it worked on YouTube.

01:03:00.160 | Yeah.

01:03:01.160 | And I think for young people, they see it.

01:03:03.000 | They don't realize how new it is.

01:03:04.200 | It's someone just figured this out a few years ago that is very compelling content to be

01:03:08.320 | like, man, I just studied 10 hours.

01:03:09.880 | And they, you watch them doing it.

01:03:11.320 | You're like, man, they did it.

01:03:12.320 | They stuck with it.

01:03:13.320 | And look at that's great.

01:03:14.800 | It just seems so simple.

01:03:15.800 | I don't know.

01:03:16.800 | It's like the productivity equivalent of David Goggins doing, just ran all day long or did

01:03:20.360 | pushups till my arm fell off.

01:03:21.760 | You know, it's like when we heard Mr. Beast talk about, if you want a compelling video

01:03:25.760 | and you don't have a lot of money, you can put together paper clips for multiple football

01:03:29.720 | fields and people will watch it.

01:03:31.160 | Yep.

01:03:32.160 | Or what was his, how high can he count?

01:03:34.000 | Yeah.

01:03:35.000 | He counted to like a million or something and it took him 12 hours.

01:03:37.640 | Yeah.

01:03:38.640 | It works on YouTube.

01:03:39.640 | It's not actually a strategy for productivity.

01:03:42.560 | It's a strategy for getting good views on a YouTube video.

01:03:46.000 | So maybe our YouTube videos will be the counterpoint for the youth out there or old man videos.

01:03:52.640 | I want to move on to something interesting, but first let me mention a sponsor that makes

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01:04:20.560 | been sweating a lot because you live in DC, but the humidity is roughly all the percent,

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01:04:49.920 | I'm a big element fan.

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01:06:21.040 | Speaking of exercise, and I also want to talk about our friends at my body tutor.

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01:07:02.240 | There's another human in the loop who you feel a responsibility to, to follow the plan

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01:07:17.260 | results.

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01:07:36.100 | All right, Jesse, our final segment is something interesting.

01:07:40.860 | This is where we talk about something interesting that you, my listeners have sent into my interesting

01:07:45.540 | that calnewpork.com email address.

01:07:49.940 | So I want to load my password.

01:07:52.100 | So I'm going to load up now a short post that one of you sent in that I thought was interesting.

01:07:59.300 | Okay, so here we go.

01:08:01.420 | Here's the post.

01:08:02.420 | This was posted on I suppose, LinkedIn.

01:08:06.500 | I have it up on the screen.

01:08:07.500 | So if you're watching youtube.com/calnewporkmedia episode 256 or the deeplife.com episode 256.

01:08:13.860 | All right, this is about Harrison Ford.

01:08:15.980 | I thought this was appropriate because there's a new Indiana Jones movie in the theater.

01:08:20.060 | So I'll be taking my boys to shortly.

01:08:22.780 | Here's what this post says.

01:08:24.780 | Before he was Han Solo or Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford was a carpenter.

01:08:29.740 | In 1964, Ford moved to Hollywood to become an actor.

01:08:34.000 | But I arrived on a metaphoric bus full of people who had the same ambition, he said.

01:08:39.020 | So he came up with this plan to prevail over the competition.

01:08:42.580 | As Ford spent time around the other aspiring actors on that metaphoric bus, he became aware

01:08:45.860 | of something.

01:08:47.100 | Most of them were in a hurry.

01:08:49.380 | They're in a hurry to make it or to make lots of money, or to prove something to someone.

01:08:54.380 | Whatever the reason, most run a tight timeline.

01:08:56.300 | So Form's plan was to do the opposite, to lengthen his timeline.

01:08:59.100 | To do so, Ford said, I had to have another source of income.

01:09:01.940 | So I became a carpenter.

01:09:02.940 | By doing carpentry, he explained, I was able to wait it out.

01:09:06.140 | As the years went by, the attrition rate eliminated many of those people from the competition

01:09:09.660 | pool until finally, there were only a few of us left on the bus from the entering class.

01:09:15.060 | I always saw life that way.

01:09:17.300 | You just have to find a way to stick it out to prevail.

01:09:20.060 | All right, I like that story because it's a great vignette of slow productivity in action.

01:09:26.460 | There's something that's both effective and sustainable by working on a small number of

01:09:30.980 | things over a long period of time consistently.

01:09:34.620 | This is the definition of internal powered goals, the theme that unifies this episode.

01:09:41.100 | I'm sticking with this, even if I'm not excited about it every moment, even if my motivation

01:09:45.500 | goes up and down, even if my success or failures have periods where one is big and the other's

01:09:50.300 | down and that's flops back and forth.

01:09:52.420 | I'm going through a hard period now.

01:09:53.980 | I consistently make progress.

01:09:56.740 | And not just working blindly, but really getting feedback, adjusting.

01:10:00.540 | You can imagine Harrison Ford struggling with roles early on, pivoting when he sees a different

01:10:05.460 | type of role, seeing he needs a special type of training.

01:10:08.300 | It's this relentless return.

01:10:10.840 | What can I improve here?

01:10:11.900 | What's not working?

01:10:12.900 | How can I adjust my trajectory?

01:10:15.060 | You're making adjustments.

01:10:16.400 | You're letting evidence come in.

01:10:17.400 | You're learning more, but forward momentum always continues, steps every day.

01:10:21.940 | So you're moving in the right direction, adjusting your path, always moving.

01:10:25.560 | This more often than not is what unlocks really interesting impact and interesting opportunities.

01:10:30.420 | This slow productivity approach, a small number of things that through internal power you

01:10:35.140 | keep pursuing over time, just relentlessly.

01:10:39.860 | I'm sticking with this, updating how I do it, but sticking with it over time.

01:10:45.580 | Small number of things done really well, a reasonable sustainable pace really is, I think,

01:10:50.420 | a very sustainable strategy for a deep life, a very sustainable strategy for eventually

01:10:55.860 | doing achieving deep accomplishments.

01:10:58.500 | So I thought that was a good story to end on.

01:11:02.020 | Productivity doesn't have to be fast.

01:11:04.180 | Productivity doesn't require constant intakes of motivation, inspiration.

01:11:09.580 | Productivity doesn't require these 10-hour YouTube productivity, YouTuber style binges

01:11:15.780 | of I'm just out white knuckling everyone else.

01:11:18.860 | Sometimes it's as boring as Harrison Ford said, "I'm just going to take my time and

01:11:23.100 | keep working on this craft, taking feedback, adjust, taking feedback, adjust, having a

01:11:27.660 | second trade to support myself until finally American graffiti happens, then Star Wars

01:11:33.460 | happens, then Indiana Jones happens, and the whole thing breaks open."

01:11:36.500 | So sometimes slowing down is the right way to actually make it farther down the path,

01:11:41.620 | as paradoxical as that can seem.

01:11:43.620 | All right, so that's all the time we have for today's episode.

01:11:48.060 | Thank you for tuning in.

01:11:49.060 | We'll be back next week with another episode.

01:11:50.380 | I'll be returning to the Deep Work HQ headquarters north for another month or so, but the show

01:11:56.380 | will, as they say, go on.

01:11:58.060 | So I look forward to doing the next show and seeing you then.

01:12:01.140 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:12:03.540 | [MUSIC]

Ep. 256: Start With Discipline

Chapters