3 Small Daily Habits To Maximize Productivity & Transform Your Life

00:00:00.000 | So I invented earlier in the year what we called the Deep Life Stack, which was a step-by-step way

00:00:04.800 | to cultivate more depth in your life. And I think now that I've had some time to think about it,

00:00:09.200 | it has some problems. But let's start with what that original stack was. For those who are

00:00:14.800 | watching instead of just listening, I will draw a picture of one of the original stacks on my

00:00:20.880 | screen here. Again, for those who are not watching but just listening, everything I'm doing here is

00:00:26.000 | beautiful. I'm drawing layers. These are the layers of the stack. I'm putting five of them

00:00:32.000 | on top of each other. Now there's a couple different small variations of the stack we

00:00:36.160 | talked about earlier in the year, but they're all basically more or less in this shape.

00:00:41.840 | All right, I'm now going to write inside each of these layers. At the bottom,

00:00:45.680 | the first layer of the stack, the bottom layer, we had discipline.

00:00:53.440 | This was somewhat controversial, but this is when I argued you actually have to start by

00:00:57.040 | injecting some regular discipline into your life because it changes your self-identity as someone

00:01:01.280 | who can do hard things that are important, even if you don't want to. Then we had values.

00:01:05.600 | Nothing like drawing on an iPad upright to get your best handwriting. Values was when you then

00:01:11.920 | next moving up the stack from discipline is where you got clear on what was important to you in your

00:01:18.640 | life. Then you went to service, fixing in your life how you could serve other people who are

00:01:25.680 | around you or important to you. From there then came organization. It's going to be a long word

00:01:31.760 | for a small box. You had to get control over what's happening in your life, organize your

00:01:36.880 | obligations, organize your time. If you're going to have any hope of actually really aiming your

00:01:42.880 | energy in a good direction. And then finally you had vision, which is where you get to the fun

00:01:46.880 | stuff. This is where you build a vision for how to move your life towards something more remarkable.

00:01:51.920 | It is when you get to this final stack and the sequence that you do the type of stuff that we

00:01:55.600 | like to romanticize, like changing your job or moving to a farm somewhere in the country.

00:02:02.240 | There's a couple of different variations of the stack, but they are all more or less something

00:02:06.400 | like this. And the idea was you moved up the stack in order, starting with discipline,

00:02:09.920 | moving all the way up to vision. All right. So what was the problem with this?

00:02:16.880 | It's missing some things. So here's what I discovered. It's missing explicit mentions

00:02:23.200 | of some things that are foundationally important. I learned from you, my readers and listeners

00:02:27.760 | for cultivating depth, physical growth, intellectual growth. These were things that

00:02:32.560 | we used to talk about on the show. And we had the old bucket based paradigm for the deep life,

00:02:38.320 | keeping your body healthy, keeping your mind engaged. This was not explicitly called out in

00:02:43.280 | this particular formulation. What about craft or learning to do things well? This idea of how do

00:02:49.360 | you learn to take on something difficult, deliberately practice it and get better at it?

00:02:54.320 | This is key to almost any direction for depth, but doesn't have its own place in this stack.

00:02:59.440 | There is also some pushback on a lack of ambition here that when we get to vision,

00:03:07.920 | we were talking about overhauling parts of your life. But when people think about the deep life

00:03:12.000 | zoomed out, there's also this notion of some sort of larger scale legacy leaving type of

00:03:18.880 | initiative. That's at a scale that was too big for this. And finally, and this was, I thought,

00:03:23.360 | something I found when I was just experimenting with this stack is there's two different related

00:03:28.560 | initiatives that are mixed together in this particular stack formulation. There's the

00:03:32.320 | initiative where you're getting your life together. Okay. If you don't have your life together and

00:03:36.560 | a control of things, it's hard to do anything values driven or interesting. And then there's

00:03:40.720 | the initiative of trying to really cool things that mark a life as deep in this stack. They're

00:03:45.760 | mixed together. Discipline. That's sort of getting your life together. Values is part of cultivating

00:03:51.600 | a vision of the depth. Organization is about getting your life together. Vision

00:03:55.360 | is more about how to cultivate depth. And so the feedback I was getting from my own

00:03:59.920 | experimentation is these are maybe two separate endeavors. Get your crap together. Okay. I'm done

00:04:07.040 | with that. Now we'll turn our attention to how do we aim this somewhere depth. So these were all

00:04:11.600 | things that came up when I was looking at the original deep life stack. So we're going to try

00:04:16.080 | to fix that with our new version 2.0. Maybe I'll even type that. Let's see here. I'm going to

00:04:22.960 | actually write on the screen here. Oh my, Jesse, I have no idea how notability works. Oh, I see.

00:04:29.840 | You know what I've been thrown by? By the way, this is not interesting, but I switched my

00:04:33.120 | note-taking software. To what? Good notes, I think it's called. You switched it off of?

00:04:39.920 | Notability I was using to teach my lectures and then it developed some bug where when it was

00:04:44.800 | projecting on the screen and I was typing into it, it would continually jump up and down where it was

00:04:50.400 | on the screen. So I liked the program, but it had this weird bug in projection. So I had to switch.

00:04:54.240 | All right, here we go. I'm typing on the screen, the deep life, deep life, Stacy, the deep life

00:05:00.880 | stack version 2.0. All right. So what are we going to do here to fix all of those mistakes,

00:05:06.640 | not mistakes, but we'll call them shortcomings that we were missing in the prior stack.

00:05:11.360 | And let me highlight this to show you how good I am. I highlighted the word, the deep life stack.

00:05:18.240 | It looks good. Yeah, that looks good. It's a professional operation here. All right. So how

00:05:21.360 | are we going to update the deep life stack, our systematic plan for escaping the shallows?

00:05:25.760 | To take in mind those flaws we had with the original version, I'm going to break it into two

00:05:32.160 | stages. So in the first stage called stage one, this, oh man, that's not how you spell stage.

00:05:44.080 | Stage one is where you learn to become a capable human being.

00:05:48.640 | We're going to make this its own stage. So we're going to say, become a capable human being.

00:05:58.160 | And we're going to isolate this. Let's do this stage, do everything involved in this stage first,

00:06:04.720 | before we move on to what we'll call stage two,

00:06:09.120 | surprisingly enough, which is then cultivate depth. So we're not going to mix these together

00:06:16.240 | anymore. Let's get our act together. Let's become a capable human being, or what Jocko Willick

00:06:22.560 | called in his book, The Code, imminently qualified human. I like that. Jocko talks about becoming an

00:06:30.480 | imminently qualified human. Well, we're going to talk about becoming an imminently capable human

00:06:34.720 | being. This is going to have its own collection of four stack layers. Once you're done with that,

00:06:39.920 | stage two, four more stack layers, cultivate depth on top of that foundation. All right. So this is

00:06:45.120 | the first place we're changing things. All right. So let's actually draw our four stack layers over

00:06:53.520 | here for becoming a more capable human being. So we're going to have four here and then four for

00:06:57.680 | cultivating depth. You do stage one first, then you do stage two. All right. So we're going to

00:07:05.360 | start as before with discipline. But now, again, this is coming from feedback. We are going to

00:07:16.640 | specify the three places where we're going to pursue discipline as the foundational layer of

00:07:22.960 | the deep life stack. And that's going to be body, mind, heart. So as before, what does it mean

00:07:33.360 | discipline? We're going to have you select some keystone habits, habits you return to every single

00:07:38.640 | day, habits that you track, whether or not you actually accomplish them. They should not be

00:07:44.080 | trivial, but they should also be tractable. Unlike before, I'm going to tell you specifically what

00:07:49.520 | the three categories are. You should have three habits and they should follow these three

00:07:53.120 | categories. Body, you need a fitness habit, something about making your body more healthy.

00:07:59.920 | This could be exercise. This could be involving food and drink. The second category is mind. This

00:08:05.120 | is going to be making your mind sharper. You have an instrument here, but you have to train it how

00:08:10.800 | to think. So we need to lay down a foundational habit, probably built around reading. It's going

00:08:15.840 | to be our best bet here, where this becomes a regular part of your life that you're tracking.

00:08:20.240 | And then heart by this, I mean other people. There's something you're doing on a regular

00:08:25.760 | basis. And it could just be calling or texting or emailing a different friend or family member

00:08:30.000 | every single day. It could be checking in with your partner or your kids every day and having

00:08:34.880 | a conversation with them. Body, mind, heart, keystone habit for each. As we iterate through

00:08:41.040 | the stack, you can make those challenges harder and harder. So if you're just getting started

00:08:45.200 | with this, your body habit might be pretty simple. It's this 20 minute walk that you do to a coffee

00:08:50.880 | store and back each morning, followed by 20 pushups. It might be simple, but you're doing it

00:08:54.400 | every day. As we iterate over time, that's going to get more and more potentially aggressive in

00:09:00.240 | its ambition. It could eventually end up a really rigorous workout routine, for example.

00:09:05.360 | All right. We go from here now straight up to control. This is what we used to call organization.

00:09:13.280 | Same idea. Control your time, control your obligations. I want to do this right away.

00:09:18.960 | Lay down this foundation of discipline. I'm practicing doing things that are important

00:09:23.120 | to me that aren't urgent. Very next thing you do, let's get control of our obligations. Let's get

00:09:28.240 | control of our time. This is where you're going to deploy things like my multi-scale planning

00:09:32.880 | methodology. It's where you're going to deploy things such as full capture, David Allen-style

00:09:38.240 | full capture. Every obligation is written down in a trusted system, not just in your head.

00:09:42.720 | Your time block planning, your days, those are based on weekly plans, which are based on

00:09:46.960 | quarterly plans. No open loops, nothing you're just keeping track of in your head. You have a plan

00:09:52.000 | for your time. You have your obligations captured. You have a plan for executing the obligations that

00:09:56.240 | need to be done. There's a big part about becoming a capable human. I only have so much energy and

00:10:02.640 | time to deploy each day. I want to do so with intention. So I'm moving this right up front

00:10:06.960 | in the deep life stack. Right after you got a taste of discipline, you're getting your craft

00:10:11.360 | together. On top of this, I'm then going to put craft, just learning how to do something really

00:10:19.200 | well. This, again, is going to be at the core of almost any reasonable vision of the deep life is

00:10:25.440 | going to be quality. You learning how to do something really well and/or you learning how

00:10:31.280 | to really appreciate someone else doing something really well, but an embrace of craftsmanship and

00:10:36.240 | quality. So craft is where you're going to begin practicing two things. One, getting better.

00:10:40.640 | And you could jump right in with a work-related skill here as you go through this stack. Let me

00:10:46.480 | choose a skill that I am going to deliberately and systematically improve on, but maybe it's

00:10:50.160 | going to be a hobby. I think some of the more bro-oriented, really big podcasters that are out

00:10:58.000 | there have gotten some flack because they all seem to be picking up the same sort of seemingly

00:11:03.600 | anachronistic or arbitrary hobbies, such as bow hunting. Why is Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink and

00:11:09.440 | all these people bow hunting? And it seems so random, but you know what? There's a logic behind

00:11:15.120 | that, which is learning to do something really well teaches you what it takes to do things really

00:11:21.200 | well. You can then translate that to other things that come up that are more important. In other

00:11:25.200 | words, learning, even if it's learning how to play guitar or shoot an arrow, but systematically

00:11:30.560 | building up that skill gives you the type of muscles you need mentally speaking to say, okay,

00:11:36.640 | now when there's something else I want to learn to help transform my career, there's something else

00:11:40.080 | I want to learn to make a big impact over here. You know what that feels like and what that takes.

00:11:44.480 | So when it comes to this craft stack, when you first get there, you're going to learn a skill.

00:11:48.240 | It could be a hobby. It could be professional. I also want you to appreciate other people who do

00:11:55.040 | skilled work because that helps motivate you to get better. I write about this a lot of my book

00:12:00.560 | coming out in March, Slow Productivity, this idea of being exposed to people doing really good work

00:12:07.040 | makes you want to do really good work. So as part of your first time through this craft layer,

00:12:12.560 | I'm going to recommend that you build up an appreciation of some sort of craft.

00:12:16.800 | So I'll put two arrows here, get better,

00:12:20.480 | and then we'll say appreciate better.

00:12:25.600 | All right, then our final building block we're going to put for the first stage, simplification.

00:12:39.680 | The final step to get ready to cultivate depth, we got to clear out the dead weight.

00:12:44.160 | So this is where you go through. Now that you have some discipline, you're in control of your time,

00:12:49.600 | you have an appreciation for and trust in craft as the way forward. Now you can say,

00:12:54.240 | let's start slashing some of these obligations. Let's change the way, you know, what we're doing

00:13:00.080 | at work. And I'm going to put all my chips onto this over here and no longer get involved in this,

00:13:04.800 | or I'm going to simplify or shift laterally to something that's more focused or more accountable.

00:13:09.200 | It is also critically where you can do your first attempt to simplify your technological life.

00:13:13.680 | It's the first time you can step back and say, okay, I'm starting to get my feet under me.

00:13:17.360 | Why am I on TikTok all the time? Why am I on Instagram? What tools do I really need here?

00:13:22.400 | Maybe I should do some digital minimalism, work backwards from what's important to me,

00:13:26.000 | use those to select value. So you can start simplifying out your habits.

00:13:29.120 | Like the single most important techno simplification, small step you could take at

00:13:33.920 | the step would be let's do phone for your method. When I'm at home, the phone's plugged in.

00:13:38.080 | If I need to look something up, I can go to the phone and look at it. It's not with me when I'm

00:13:42.000 | in front of the TV. It's not with me when I'm trying to read. It's not with me at the table

00:13:46.960 | and I'm trying to eat dinner. I do not have the option of just looking at that. So you could begin

00:13:51.680 | to simplify these parts of your life as well. All of this sets the stage for stage two,

00:13:56.960 | which is now let's start cultivating depth on top of this foundation.

00:14:03.440 | So we're going to have four boxes over here as well. This is where the fun stuff happens.

00:14:10.320 | This is where the stuff that catches people's attention happens. You do the first stage,

00:14:15.280 | people are going to say, yeah, you got your act together. Yeah, they got their act together.

00:14:19.600 | Stage two is where people say, wow, this person is interesting. All right. So I'm going to put

00:14:24.480 | as the, let me draw arrows, by the way. So we see the order here. Beautifully drawn arrows.

00:14:32.720 | Bob Ross does happy trees. I do crappy arrows. All right. So first, first stack layer over here

00:14:40.720 | in stage two. Now we get to the values. You figure out your code, what you're all about.

00:14:48.240 | You figure out the rituals that connect you on a regular basis to these things you care about.

00:14:53.760 | This is where if you're religious or interested in being religious is you really

00:15:00.080 | lean into that. It's where you really recognize that faith traditions actually depend on action

00:15:05.920 | for you to gain insight. You can't just figure out in advance, is this religion right? You do

00:15:11.520 | the religion and say, how does it make me feel? All that happens here. Now this feels really late,

00:15:16.080 | but again, I'm convinced that when you come to these higher order decisions in your life from a

00:15:21.760 | foundation of capability, it's more meaningful and it's more effective. So I push this later.

00:15:29.200 | People often say, let's just start with this. But if you, if you have no foundation in a code

00:15:33.440 | or rituals or a faith based tradition, it's hard to start there. You're throwing darts at a board.

00:15:39.120 | You don't even know what you're capable of or, or, or have the capacity to follow in a disciplined

00:15:44.480 | way what's required to actually gain insight. So let's become capable first. Now we're getting to

00:15:50.240 | the bigger stuff. So values now comes next. This is followed by service. You need to be a leader.

00:15:57.120 | You need to serve other people, community without it, you're nothing. Now you're ready to actually

00:16:01.840 | be a leader before you weren't capable enough. You could kind of be a leader, but you're going

00:16:05.440 | to drop the ball and people weren't, you weren't going to have a big effect on people. You weren't

00:16:09.440 | going to move the needle. Now you're an exceptionally capable person. Let's put that to

00:16:12.640 | work, serve other people, non-trivial sacrifice on behalf of other people that are important to you,

00:16:17.760 | family, friends, community, larger civic society at large. You can move up these layers as far as

00:16:24.880 | you want, make this a key one thing, a tier one thing. Now that you're starting to work at in your

00:16:29.920 | life, then we get transformation. The crazy thing is of all of these stacks, this is what the one

00:16:37.280 | place most people think when they think about cultivating a deeper life is this one stack

00:16:41.600 | transformations where you make the big values-based changes. You get a clear vision of what you want

00:16:46.880 | your lifestyle to be like, and you begin making concrete changes to move you towards this lifestyle.

00:16:52.320 | Preferably there's some element of remarkability in these visions. It's where you change your job.

00:16:56.880 | It's where you move to the countryside. It's where you become the surf instructor in Tolfino on the

00:17:02.560 | west coast of Vancouver Island. It's where the big kind of cool stuff happens. But look at how many

00:17:06.880 | layers, how many layers we had to go through. I even have a laser pointer I can show you, right?

00:17:12.160 | All the way up, all the way up before we moved to Vancouver Island, before we quit our job,

00:17:18.720 | because you're not ready for that yet. When you're not capable, if you try to make a big change,

00:17:22.800 | God knows what's going to happen. And if you are capable, but you're not

00:17:28.000 | have a sense of your values, if you're not sacrificing on behalf of other people,

00:17:32.160 | filling that deeply social leadership itch that all humans have, then your transformation is going

00:17:36.720 | to be shallow. It's going to be selfish. It's not until this point that you're finally ready for

00:17:40.560 | that. And then we can add the final thing, which is legacy. And that's where you begin thinking

00:17:46.720 | about what's the impact I want to leave on the world, even after I'm gone, the sort of bigger

00:17:51.040 | picture orienting mission for your life. This is so big, I would say you could probably go all the

00:17:57.760 | way through the stack and stop at transformation the first time through. And you might go through

00:18:03.200 | this stack a few times, iterating, tweaking and improving each of these layers before you really

00:18:08.640 | get into legacy. You don't have to get there right away. In fact, you probably aren't ready to get

00:18:13.280 | there right away because you haven't done all this other cool stuff yet. So how do all these pieces

00:18:17.600 | come together? Well, you actually move through this stack and give yourself one to three weeks

00:18:21.440 | for each of these layers to get that part of your life going and making sure it's going well.

00:18:26.160 | And you move your way through the stack. You could end the transformation if you want it first,

00:18:30.560 | legacy can come later, then live with this for six months to a year, then come back and iterate.

00:18:36.240 | All right, let's go back to the stack. How are things going with discipline? I want to

00:18:39.600 | upcharge this. I want more aggressive physical discipline. I want to do better with my

00:18:44.400 | relationships. What's going on with control? Well, it was going well, but I left finances out of

00:18:47.520 | there. I want to fix that up. So you iterate six months to a year. You iterate through, go through

00:18:51.840 | each layer, give it time to improve what's happening there. You iterate every six to 12 months

00:18:57.440 | and improve on each of these layers again and again. Each time you make it through to transformation,

00:19:01.120 | maybe you're thinking about a different thing you want to transform in your life. After you've done

00:19:04.880 | this five years in a row, you may have had several major transformations. You've also tightened up

00:19:09.440 | all these other things and now your life is really humming. And now the idea that you're just going to

00:19:13.920 | go to a cubicle and check email all day and then be on TikTok all evening might seem laughable.

00:19:18.240 | And maybe you're ready to even really jump into this legacy stack at this point and start to

00:19:22.720 | have some really exciting long-term visions about what you're going to leave in the world.

00:19:26.960 | So this is the DeepLife stack 2.0. Stage one, become a more capable human. Stage two, cultivate

00:19:35.760 | depth, then iterate and repeat, iterate and repeat. As mentioned, it seems very far away

00:19:42.640 | at first from the proximate concerns of I'm distracted by my screens. But if you don't have

00:19:48.640 | a shining destination to aim towards, that's more interesting than the glow coming off those pieces

00:19:55.360 | of glass. Those pieces of glass are going to win. And so we have to talk about our lives if we're

00:20:00.800 | going to talk about our technology. The way most people think about learning these type of master,

00:20:10.320 | getting mastered these type of different topics is that everyone has a fundamental limit determined

00:20:15.760 | by their brain. So the common mental model says for this one individual here, maybe when they

00:20:23.120 | are thinking about, hey, I want to really master some element of music, they can do that. Put some

00:20:31.360 | earphones on them in my picture here. Like, this is great. I'm capable of doing it. But maybe this

00:20:35.840 | same person, when they say, OK, what I really want to master is mathematics. So I can do like

00:20:41.520 | mathematics proofs. And our common mental model, we might say, oh, that's just beyond this person's

00:20:47.520 | brain. So they can't do that. So we have this notion of the complexity of what you have

00:20:52.480 | mastered is just a direct reflection of how smart you are. Oh, this academic has a really

00:20:59.280 | PhD in literature, has a really subtle understanding of these books that I don't

00:21:04.080 | even know how to approach. They're smarter than me. I understand music. That makes me smarter

00:21:10.880 | than this 22 year old who's like main interest is YouTubers. Right. That's the way we think about it.

00:21:17.680 | This model is wrong. So this idea that your brain is determining.

00:21:23.920 | The level of complexity of stuff that you're able to comfortably master,

00:21:28.720 | completely misunderstands how learning happens. So what I want to do here is present to you the

00:21:34.560 | reality, and I'm going to present to you the reality here in two parts that we can think of as

00:21:39.600 | the good news. And the bad news, the good news and the bad news about how people actually learn

00:21:46.720 | complicated things. Now, the good news is most people are cognitively capable of learning things

00:21:52.160 | that are pretty high up on that imagined hierarchy of complexity.

00:21:56.160 | That you can learn complicated literature. You can learn mathematical things. You can learn

00:22:04.080 | an appreciation of a complicated sport or music. Most people can learn most things.

00:22:12.480 | Now, is there a brain power difference that comes into play here? Well,

00:22:17.040 | there's stuff that shows up. I mean, I think certainly by adulthood,

00:22:20.480 | you get a sense people have different RPMs going on with their brains. I tend to believe that a lot

00:22:26.080 | of this is less genetic than it is just what you did as a child. If you're a heavy reader as a

00:22:31.840 | child, for example, your brain has just been trained to be stronger, much in the same way.

00:22:35.760 | If you're Arnold Schwarzenegger and your dad made you do pushups and squats before you would

00:22:40.960 | be given a meal, you're going to be stronger by the age of 19 than someone else.

00:22:44.560 | So, I tend to think the RPMs you have going is as much nurture as it is nature. But yeah,

00:22:50.800 | there are some differences, but that difference is where is this going to affect learning

00:22:54.160 | complicated things? The upper end, which is not going to be relevant to most people.

00:22:59.120 | It's like almost anyone can learn calculus. Yeah, maybe not everyone, however, is going to be a

00:23:05.440 | Fields Award winner, but most people don't care. They're not trying to become Fields Award winners.

00:23:08.800 | You might also see it in some speed differences and how fast you make progress towards learning

00:23:14.000 | things. There are some epsilons there depending on how used to that your brain is. But again,

00:23:20.720 | for most people, no one knows exactly at what rate you mastered something. So,

00:23:24.080 | it doesn't really matter. So, I think for the most part, I'm going to argue most people can learn

00:23:28.160 | most things. So, you can learn almost anything. Part two of the reality, and this is the bad news,

00:23:34.160 | you can learn almost anything, but you can't learn everything. So, I think what is obscured

00:23:40.960 | when you encounter people who have a mastery of something really complicated, what is obscured

00:23:46.480 | is that it took them a really long time to get to that place. We jump ahead and just imagine them

00:23:53.120 | a month ago, just picked up the math textbook and was like, "Oh, this just makes sense to me." And

00:24:00.480 | then everyone kind of applauds and they're really good at math and they're obviously smarter than

00:24:03.280 | you. No, there's a long process that we're going to unfold here in a second of how they build up to

00:24:08.560 | that expert knowledge. The reason why this means you can't learn everything is that it takes time.

00:24:13.440 | Time is finite. So, there's only going to be so many complicated things you can learn because

00:24:20.560 | you only have so much time to put into it and it takes a lot of time to actually get there.

00:24:25.920 | So, this is the big mental model shift I want to start us making right now is thinking about

00:24:32.960 | learning the complexity of what you learned, shifting this away from brain power and towards

00:24:40.560 | time investment. More time means more complexity can be learned. Less time means less complexity

00:24:46.880 | can be learned. Brain power is sort of orthogonal to all of this. So, let's fill in this mental

00:24:52.960 | model. I'm going to draw another picture here that I think captures well what the process really

00:24:57.680 | looks like when you're trying to learn something hard. So, for those who are listening instead of

00:25:02.160 | watching, what you'll see I'm drawing here is a bunch of stair steps and we can put some goal

00:25:09.120 | at the top. So, you know, I'll put a music note at the top. You're trying to master have a good

00:25:15.520 | understanding of jazz music or something like this. The way you actually progress towards hard

00:25:20.960 | understanding is up stairs, level by level. Now, here's what's important. When you're at a given

00:25:29.680 | level of understanding, so like let's say you're right here, your brain is only capable when you're

00:25:35.840 | moving up your level understanding of making a relatively small step at a time. That's why these

00:25:41.840 | steps are small. We have multiple steps to get from down here where you know in this example,

00:25:47.120 | nothing about jazz music, many steps until you get up here to being able to talk really

00:25:52.480 | intelligently about it. So, it's from your current level, you move up to the next level.

00:25:59.360 | Now, how these steps are actually made. So, how does this actually happen here and here and here?

00:26:03.760 | Deliberate practice. Carefully designed exercises that push your understanding to the next level

00:26:14.080 | in a way that takes you out of what you're already comfortable with. There has to be some strain into

00:26:18.880 | that. So, in order for this step to be successfully had at each of these levels, you have to stretch

00:26:25.040 | past where you're comfortable. It's the kind of practice aspect of deliberate practice. It's not

00:26:30.480 | fun. I'm not comfortable. I don't really understand this thing and I'm stretching myself to try to

00:26:36.800 | understand it. And the activity you're doing is carefully designed. This is the right next level

00:26:43.920 | to actually move up to. That's the deliberate piece of deliberate practice. So, when you see

00:26:53.440 | someone like, wow, this person has a lot of expert knowledge of complicated things in their past,

00:26:59.600 | they have done these stair steps. Now, there's various cultural professional structures that help

00:27:06.240 | drive you through these stair steps, right? So, if you're an academic, I mean, I'm an academic.

00:27:10.800 | One of the things I do is theoretical computer science. I write mathematical proofs related to

00:27:14.800 | algorithms and computability and complexity. If you encounter a paper I wrote, you might say,

00:27:21.440 | I don't understand any of this. I can't imagine just like sitting down and learning all of this.

00:27:26.320 | But what you have to realize for me is that that process started when I was about 16 years old.

00:27:31.520 | And the education process, as you move up the ranks, high school to advanced high school,

00:27:36.560 | to undergrad, to grad school, into young professoredom, is it's designed to push you

00:27:42.320 | step by step by step with literal tests. You know, okay, you're now taking AP computer science,

00:27:47.920 | right? I took that when I was young. You're taking literal tests. In order to master that test,

00:27:54.240 | you had to gain new knowledge. It pushes you to the next level. Then after AP computer science,

00:27:58.960 | because I was good at this stuff, I started taking some college courses in computer science.

00:28:02.880 | That had, okay, that's pushing me a little bit farther. Now I go to college and I can

00:28:06.720 | take the more advanced courses. It's pushing you farther. I get to MIT and now these courses are

00:28:11.360 | much harder. But I've gone up 17 steps before I got to taking, you know, theory of computation

00:28:17.120 | with Mike Sipser, step by step by step. And by the time you encounter me at the age of like 35,

00:28:22.400 | like, ah, you know, all this stuff. Like, yeah, it was a really long climb up the steps,

00:28:27.360 | really long climb up the staircase. Same thing when someone has this,

00:28:31.600 | how does this guy know so much about music? Well, probably he was exposed to it early on

00:28:35.360 | and his dad or mom really got him into it and step by step they got knowledge.

00:28:38.800 | So if you want to cultivate expert knowledge now in your life, you have to replicate all

00:28:43.280 | of these steps. Your goal is on what is the next step of understanding I can take,

00:28:48.240 | not how far am I from the top, the consistent stair step upwards. This requires patience

00:28:57.200 | because the ladder up is long and it requires expert help because choosing the right activities

00:29:05.360 | that move you to a new level and are tractable, but not trivial. This is the key dichotomy for

00:29:12.880 | deliberate practice to be effective, tractable, but not trivial. You can accomplish this next step,

00:29:17.520 | but it can't be super easy because you're not actually stretching that could require expert

00:29:22.720 | help. And that can be found by actually working with real experts that can be found in courses

00:29:27.600 | that can be learned, found in books. It can be found in choosing careful goals for what you want

00:29:33.040 | to do next and then seeking out help anywhere you can online in person courses to get to that next

00:29:38.720 | step and accomplish that goal. So just the careful choices of goals can get you there.

00:29:43.600 | But it's patience and this careful expert guided design of how you move. That's how people get

00:29:51.600 | smarter and smarter or seemingly smarter and smarter. It just takes time and it takes care.

00:29:58.160 | So is this worth it? Well, I think the answer is yes. The brain is what distinguishes humans.

00:30:06.640 | Our brains distinguish us from other animals. We have this ability that, you know, Aristotle talks

00:30:13.360 | about in the Nicomachean ethics. We have this ability that no one else has to contemplate

00:30:17.440 | deeply to aim our brain at abstract ends. Dogs don't do this. Cats don't do this. Parakeets

00:30:23.280 | don't do this. Humans can't. So Aristotle would say this is perhaps the ultimate teleology of

00:30:30.960 | the human experience. The thing that we are wired to do ultimately is to use our brain in these

00:30:37.760 | exalted ways because that's what defines us as human. So we want to push our humanness.

00:30:42.160 | It is a key element of life you're missing if there are not things in your life that you know

00:30:48.560 | that are hard, that are complicated, and you can do very well. To have that in your life in some

00:30:54.160 | sense, in the Aristotelian sense, is to be more human. So what I recommend, especially for younger

00:30:59.040 | people, is here's what you want almost to be aiming towards right away. Something in your

00:31:03.920 | professional life that's complicated that you do well, better than anyone else you know at your

00:31:08.320 | company or organization. Right out the bat, what is a complicated skill really good at programming

00:31:14.400 | these type of data systems? We're an SAP company, like being able to build advanced models using

00:31:20.240 | statistical analysis, a type of art, you know, you're a graphic designer for a video game company

00:31:26.480 | and pushing whatever the latest is and doing some sort of 3D modeling. Something that is really

00:31:30.960 | complicated and valuable that you know well. Just set that standard right away. In your personal

00:31:36.720 | life, you should have the same. Everyone should have one thing that they're working towards just

00:31:41.120 | being really good with. I really understand movies. I really understand wine. Not like a casual,

00:31:49.040 | I kind of read about this, but I got a sommelier certificate. Not just like I go to the theaters,

00:31:54.800 | but you know, I could write and I do sometimes contribute reviews to community online

00:31:59.360 | publications about movies. There is something deeply satisfying in feeling the mastery of

00:32:07.200 | complicated things. It's uniquely human. I think a lot of people avoid it. A lot of people do not

00:32:13.520 | have this in their life. And it leads to this distinction as people who do that stuff. And I

00:32:19.200 | don't know how to do that stuff. And either that leads you to feel down on yourself unjustifiably

00:32:24.800 | or it makes you real reactionary and angry. These elites think they're so smart.

00:32:28.720 | Neither is great. Neither is healthy from a mental health perspective.

00:32:32.880 | We all should be trying to master at least some complicated things. Now this could take years.

00:32:37.920 | You're going to see progress along the way, but you want to get really good at something hard.

00:32:43.280 | It could take years. Start right now. You will get benefits along the way. You'll get better and

00:32:48.560 | better, but don't, don't pull yourself up short. I know a little bit more about this than just the

00:32:53.680 | average person. That's great. Keep pushing. You want to push some knowledges to this connoisseur

00:32:58.880 | level. It really is, I think, a key part of the deep life because it unlocks in you an understanding

00:33:03.840 | of what your brain is capable of. The final question is where are you going to get the time?

00:33:08.400 | Where are you going to find the time to have one or two of these projects you're working on?

00:33:13.600 | And honestly, and look, this is a show about technology and how it impacts our lives.

00:33:17.520 | This might be non-surprising, but this is where you're going to find the time.

00:33:22.320 | Stop spending time on the phone. If you have nothing in your life that you feel like you're

00:33:27.920 | a real expert on, I'm going to guess without knowing for sure that your screen time statistics

00:33:32.800 | aren't great. That you're getting that, that, uh, that dopamine push towards the screen where

00:33:38.800 | there's going to be something funny or outrageous or distracting or whatever on there. And this is

00:33:44.080 | eating up time after time, after time, put that phone into the foyer phone for your method.

00:33:51.040 | New year is a great time to do this. The phone is plugged in, in my kitchen or the foyer. If

00:33:54.640 | I need it, I can go there to look something up, but it's not with me as a default. It's not with

00:33:58.320 | me at the couch. It's not with me at the dinner table. It's not with me, God forbid in the

00:34:02.560 | bathroom. Now your brain gets some freedom. It wants something to do. Let's give it something

00:34:06.560 | to do. We're moving up the next stair level on this work skill. We're moving up the next stair

00:34:11.120 | level on this personal life skill. This really will. That's why I wish it for everyone in the

00:34:16.640 | New York new year is really going to change the way you feel about yourself, your efficacy,

00:34:21.120 | your ability to actually do, uh, important, useful things with your brain. So you can't,

00:34:27.520 | you can learn anything. You just can't learn everything. So choose a few things that are

00:34:30.960 | worth learning and trick a lot of people into thinking that you're smarter than you actually

00:34:35.520 | are, because the more complicated the stuff goes, the more they're going to just think that you're

00:34:38.720 | a big brain. And I think it's worth it. So there you go, Jesse. I think too many people think

00:34:44.640 | they're stupider than they are because of this image of, you know, for some people, this quote,

00:34:51.280 | unquote comes easy. There is no coming easy. It's the exact same as muscles. Yeah. Yeah. Some people

00:34:57.440 | grow faster than others, but it takes a really long time. A lot of cycles of cutting and building

00:35:02.080 | to look like a superhero. It just takes time. What's something that you work on in your

00:35:06.800 | personal life? Movies. I've been, I'm working on, uh, movie knowledge. I want to get to,

00:35:13.840 | and I'm working on this systematically. Um, I want to get to a level where I can contribute reviews.

00:35:19.280 | Oh, I feel like you'll be able to do that. Don't you think like good reviews, you know, like really

00:35:23.920 | understand, uh, really understand the, the art and form of cinema, like what's going on. I also,

00:35:30.960 | another way of looking at it is I don't want to be surprised by the good reviews. Like in other

00:35:35.200 | words, I want to be able to predict, Oh, I, I know kind of what Anthony Lane's probably going to say

00:35:40.320 | about this movie and not have to, and I'm getting closer at that. Like, I know David Dems, I know

00:35:45.200 | what David Demby is going to write about this, like getting closer to that. Um, as opposed to

00:35:50.000 | like, I don't know, is this a good movie? Let's read the reviews. Oh, they really love this movie.

00:35:53.040 | You know? So it's like, I want to be able to be non-surprised by the really good reviews.

00:35:59.440 | And I want to be capable of, Hey, I could provide a review for, you know,

00:36:03.520 | an online site. And this is an insightful review. We should probably put a movie and show site on

00:36:10.640 | the deep life.com. So I think we should. Cause there's a lot of times I'm, I have like my own

00:36:15.440 | list, but, well, we should keep track of all the books and we should keep track of like movie

00:36:19.920 | recommendations. Um, cause it'd be a good place for people to go if they wanted something good

00:36:25.120 | to watch. Cause oftentimes, um, two movies I just watched was, uh, I had never remembered seeing

00:36:30.640 | Kurosawa seven samurai also just watched Jeff, uh, got Tim gun, not Tim gun. What what's the,

00:36:39.120 | not the guy from the movie maker gun, but I just forgot if it's James gun, I think it's James gun.

00:36:47.600 | The, the director who did guardians of the galaxy was temporarily canceled. And now, uh, DC has

00:36:54.640 | brought him back to play the Kevin Feige role for the DC extended cinematic universe. I believe his

00:37:00.000 | name is James gun. Whereas Tim gun was the fashion designer from project runway. I often mix up those

00:37:06.160 | two names. I think it's James gun. Um, yeah, the suicide squad 2021 fantastic. Like Tarantino is

00:37:14.000 | the CEO of DC studios. Yeah. Watch the suicide squad 2021 Tarantino ask comic book movie,

00:37:21.280 | completely plain with the B movie format over the top violence, but also, um,

00:37:28.160 | visually completely novel, hyperactive camera, throwing in actual deep themes and interesting

00:37:33.200 | characterization against this backdrop of craziness. It is, if as you had said,

00:37:37.440 | the Tarantino make a comic book movie completely off the wall. Fantastic movie. I really liked

00:37:41.920 | that. Do you watch all your movies in the same like TV, et cetera, with like surround sound or

00:37:48.240 | yeah, I have a good TV. Yeah. Yeah. Surround sound. Yeah. We, we set that up during the subwoofers

00:37:52.960 | and everything too. We set that up during the pandemic. Um, and I see a lot of movies. I mean,

00:37:56.800 | we're recording, not the, not to pull back the curtain, but we're recording this before Christmas.

00:38:02.000 | Uh, this week I'm seeing tonight, I'm going to see maestro with a friend of mine. And then later in

00:38:06.960 | the week, another friend of mine, we're going to go see big screen diehard in honor of Christmas.

00:38:11.680 | So how many movies do you watch a week? That just depends too. Uh, it depends on what's going on

00:38:16.800 | with like the evenings and childcare and stuff like that. And my schedule, I like, if I have a

00:38:21.680 | light schedule, I like to take a day and do a lunchtime movie watching at home. But so if I have

00:38:26.320 | freedom in my schedule, I'll take a day and watch a movie over lunch. That helps. All right. Anyways,

00:38:31.920 | um, I talk about this by the way, in the new book, slow productivity coming out in March,

00:38:36.720 | I talk about my growing interest in movies and how, uh, for anyone who does creative work,

00:38:43.840 | studying and building up a good appreciation for an unrelated creative field actually can really

00:38:50.720 | help what you're doing. And I write about a slow productivity about studying films as helping my

00:38:54.880 | writing. If you study, if I study good writers, it's too close to home. And it's kind of a more

00:39:00.720 | of a stressful workman. Like it's not inspiring. It's more, uh, I should do more of that or it's

00:39:06.000 | more anxiety producing, but you study art in another format. You can come at that. It's like,

00:39:11.040 | I don't do that art. So you can just appreciate it with open eyes and it gives you an injection of

00:39:15.840 | creative energy for what you're doing. So I'm a big, I've talked about this a lot. It's not a lot,

00:39:19.920 | but I do talk about it in slow productivity, studying an art. That's not what you do will

00:39:25.040 | make you more inspired for what you do actually do. How can I actually train those deep focus

00:39:30.640 | muscles to actually get tasks done in less time and actually focus deeply. Thank you.

00:39:36.320 | Uh, well, so Hill, I appreciate this because it's a mix of a case study and a good question.

00:39:41.120 | It was a nice case study there. This goes back to what we were just talking about with students

00:39:45.760 | being terrible at being students and how, if you're not terrible at being a student, you have

00:39:49.120 | this huge advantage. Here is another example. So Hill said, I was not a good student. I returned

00:39:55.920 | to work actually caring about the mechanics of being a student and got a, began getting four

00:40:03.040 | O's perfect GPAs and got a job at a Fang company, Fang company. These are the, uh, um, the big tech

00:40:08.960 | company. So Facebook, Amazon, Google, and what's the in and Fang. I think Microsoft, but that's an

00:40:15.440 | Netflix, right? Netflix. Okay. Yeah. So see, it works caring about how you work works, by the way,

00:40:21.840 | the same thing happens in the world of work as well. It's a little bit less pronounced because

00:40:25.360 | the floor is higher. So in the world of students of college students, the floor on people's work

00:40:31.920 | habits is so low, so low. Like I'm surprised that like you aren't walking in the walls low,

00:40:39.280 | that if you're a little bit organized, you have this huge relative gap in the world of work.

00:40:43.440 | The floor is higher, right? If you worked at a normal job, like most college students work at

00:40:48.240 | their, at their work, you would get fired pretty quickly, but the floor is not super high. And a

00:40:53.440 | lot of people are just throwing stress and anxiety and just hours at raising the floor. So again,

00:40:59.600 | being systematic about how you organize yourself in the world of work, it still opens up a gap with

00:41:05.600 | most people that you can get a big reward out of. Um, let's get to the actual question though.

00:41:10.080 | So saw Hill worries. We're not very comfortable with long periods of intense focus. So as a

00:41:16.320 | student, he could just take a lot of time doing half focus. He's not gonna be able to do that in

00:41:20.960 | his job. How do you get better at actually training your ability to concentrate for long periods of

00:41:25.680 | time? So I'm going to give you three pieces of advice. One is interval training. Do you literally

00:41:31.600 | practice hard concentration using a timer? So you take a piece of work you're going to do. You set

00:41:38.000 | a timer maybe for 30 minutes and you say for that 30 minutes, this is full out intense concentration.

00:41:43.360 | If my mind wanders or I zone out, I stopped that timer. I'll come back and try this again later.

00:41:47.280 | So you have a clear indicator of success or failure success means I maintained full concentration for

00:41:52.960 | basically the whole period. Once you're comfortable with a given duration, you up the time by 10

00:41:58.560 | minutes. So just straight up practicing hard concentration. If you're roughly at a rate,

00:42:05.600 | which is what I've observed when I've done this with students of increasing the duration roughly

00:42:09.280 | once every week or two, you can in about two or three months significantly improve your comfort

00:42:14.880 | level with intense concentration. So practice directly what you want to practice. Two, reading.

00:42:21.200 | That's your cognitive calisthenics right there. Reading hard books, books that have difficult

00:42:28.080 | information or complex theories. You could read a complicated primary source like I'm going to

00:42:33.920 | read Nietzsche concurrently with a secondary source about that primary source. You can kind

00:42:39.600 | of go back and forth and to have this framework for trying to understand the primary source that

00:42:43.760 | you're trying to read. Reading is just direct exercise with sustained concentration on abstract

00:42:49.200 | symbolic concepts. Big thinkers are big readers. So that needs to be your training. And then three,

00:42:55.440 | you need to spend a regular time completely away from distractions. This gets your mind very

00:42:59.920 | comfortable with itself. Combine this with something interesting, I would suggest hikes,

00:43:05.120 | walking through nature, long walks, your phone is turned off in the back of your

00:43:09.920 | backpack just for emergencies. There's nothing in your ear. It's just you and the world around you

00:43:14.160 | and the world between your ears. It's just comfort. Your mind gets more comfort just being with its

00:43:19.760 | own self-generated thoughts and not just reacting to digital inputs. That's a slower gear.

00:43:27.920 | And it gets comfortable with that slower gear. It gets more comfortable than when it comes time

00:43:31.760 | to do concentration on something hard, because that's slower gear than what you get when you

00:43:35.200 | get a bunch of those distractions. Just combine that then with the digital hygiene you already

00:43:39.680 | said you're doing, which is being careful about not having too much of algorithmically engineered

00:43:43.920 | distraction. Being sure not to have too much of that in your life. That is your metaphorical

00:43:50.320 | equivalent of smoking cigarettes while you're training for the marathon. It's kind of productive

00:43:54.000 | to what you want to do. So continue to be very wary about, "I'm on my phone all the time. I'm

00:43:59.440 | looking at TikTok. Stay away from TikTok." Use the phone-foyer method. Don't have your phone with you

00:44:04.560 | when you're at home. Have it at the foyer. You can go there if you need it. It's not a constant

00:44:08.960 | companion. All the stuff we talk about, keep up that digital hygiene as well. And it's practiced.

00:44:14.000 | You will get better. You will get better at deep thinking the more you practice. At first, you'll

00:44:19.440 | catch up to good deep thinkers around you. Then after a while, you'll be notably deeper with your

00:44:23.280 | thinking than other people around you, and you'll reap those rewards. Before we get to our final

00:44:28.720 | segment, I want to do a quick case study. I like that this is where someone sends in a brief summary

00:44:34.000 | of how they've used my advice. This case study comes from Don. Don says, "I just wanted to share

00:44:40.160 | details about the end result of deep work and time-block planning practices that I learned from

00:44:45.280 | you. I first heard your ideas on an episode of NPR's Hidden Brain. At the time, I was beginning

00:44:50.880 | the research for a book about the chimpanzees used during the first space race, and your approach

00:44:55.280 | helped me reframe my expectations for writing and research sessions. My goal shifted from producing

00:45:01.760 | X number of words or finding X new sources to investing concentrated time in the work.

00:45:08.960 | Your time-block planner and podcast were regular reinforcers of best practices. As a side note,

00:45:14.160 | the book just received a starred review from Kirkus, and the review noted the book's meticulous

00:45:19.760 | research. That meticulous research happened during deep work sessions, and I can't thank you enough."

00:45:24.480 | Jesse, he also sent around the citation. So the book, which comes out in February,

00:45:29.840 | is called The Astro Chimps, America's First Astronauts. Well, Don, I appreciate that case

00:45:36.560 | study. What that gets to, and I think this is important, is that we have to, and this is

00:45:42.800 | one of the whole points of the book, Deep Work, you have to value the intensity of concentration.

00:45:49.200 | Like, intense concentration is itself an intrinsically valuable activity,

00:45:53.440 | and it produces extrinsically much more valuable results than less concentrated focus.

00:45:58.960 | So just saying, "I want to make sure I write a thousand words," or "I spend three hours on my

00:46:03.760 | book," is not the same as saying, "I want to spend three hours concentrated deeply on my book."

00:46:08.800 | When you're doing high-level knowledge creative output, like creating a book,

00:46:13.120 | you're doing, this is alchemy, right? You're trying to have this brain take in information

00:46:17.680 | and congeal it into something that is more valuable than the information that came in.

00:46:21.600 | The harder you concentrate, the better this result is. And so the intensity of concentration

00:46:27.680 | should be a really key variable when we think about doing high-level knowledge work,

00:46:30.960 | but it's often not. And we know it's not, because in the same companies that we make our money off

00:46:37.200 | of people doing high-level knowledge work, we also say you should be on Slack. You should be

00:46:41.200 | contact-shifting to email back and forth. You should be doing seven or eight meetings a day,

00:46:44.880 | because that makes my life more convenient as a manager. A complete disregard for the actual

00:46:50.320 | goal of trying to get intense concentration, even though intense concentration is behind almost any

00:46:54.320 | major value production in knowledge work. So I appreciate that case study, Don. It's not just

00:46:58.400 | words. It's not just hours. It's not just task list. It's concentration and the quality of the

00:47:03.200 | concentration that matters, and we should talk about that more. Hey, if you like this video,

00:47:08.560 | I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.

3 Small Daily Habits To Maximize Productivity & Transform Your Life | Cal Newport

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