Last week Jerry Seinfeld as part of the promotional tour for his new Netflix movie frosted Did an interview on the honestly podcast with Barry Weiss now. They covered a lot of territory, but there was a remarkable 10-minute run that occurred roughly between the 16 and a half minute mark in the 25 minute mark where Seinfeld peeled off Multiple deep ideas that are very relevant to the types of things we talked about here on this podcast and in particular How to cultivate a deep focused life in a distracted world So what I did here is I grabbed four of the most interesting quotes from Jerry during this period I will read each of these quotes and then I will respond to them Helping to identify the wisdom in the quote and offering a few thoughts of my own.

So we have our own sort of Seinfeld Ian Talmud session that we're doing today. I'm excited about this Now let's start with the first lesson. Here's the setup Barry asked Jerry if it's true that he still writes With a legal pad and a ballpoint pen. This is something about a decade ago that Jerry Seinfeld Noted in a New York Times interview and Barry is saying is that still true?

All right. Here's Jerry's exact quote It's nice When you write comedy and excuse this pretentious analogy, but it's a lot like poetry You don't do a lot of writing. It's 90% thinking 10% actual writing but the feeling of a ballpoint pen on a thick yellow pad is very pleasant It's like a warm bath to me All right.

I think there's a really important point lurking in here beyond just a specific tool that Jerry uses. It's his indifference To the details of the efficiency of his tools That we should really care about because it gets to the difference between two different notions of productivity on The one hand we have what a lot of us are familiar with it's what I call process productivity on the other hand You have what Jerry Seinfeld cares about which is what we can call creative productivity now process productivity is where you have a sequence of defined steps and you want those steps to occur as quickly and low cost as possible if I have a assembly line that makes pop-tarts see I'm doing a pop-tarts reference here because of Jerry's new movie if I have An assembly line that makes pop-tarts.

I want that line to go as quick as possible and as low cost as possible. So in process productivity You care a lot about the tools How exactly does this machine put icing on the pop-tarts if there's a faster way to do it, that's better How exactly do we put the little icing?

Twist on top of the main frosting. Hey, if we have a tool that does that faster or cheaper, that's better, right? That's often how we think when we're confronting Productivity tools for us as individual knowledge workers. We think like well, what's this going to make faster? Is this going to connect my thoughts to other thoughts?

Is it going to seamlessly? Let me move between formats. Will it auto fill in or correct my typing? Can it even help me think on my behalf by showing me connections between thoughts? We want the tools to be faster and more featured as a way to get more productivity.

That's process productivity Jerry cares about creative productivity, which is how do I produce the best stuff over time when it comes to creative productivity? The tools don't matter much How fast I write how many features I have in my writing software makes a negligible difference in The ultimate quality and quantity of what I write think about writing in particular This is something we've been doing professionally for a long time We've had big publishing houses in the American context since you know, the Revolutionary Period right?

This is something we've done for a long time the tools by which Writers now write are way more efficient than they've ever been before Look even in my own lifetime When I was copy editing my first books, which I wrote in the the early 2000s They would FedEx you a big printed manuscript with red colored pencils using to do all the corrections you had to learn all the copy editing marks because you had all these efficient marks that indicate what you meant and You had to go through each of these things and respond to them with a different color pencil I mean you would Check mark things you would cross things out You would make your own corrections and flag them in the margins and then you have to go to the post office I remember this so well and put this big thing in a I'd use like a priority mail Giant envelope and mail it back to Random House and hope it didn't get lost because there was no other copy of this, right?

And now of course we use Microsoft Word and track changes. It's faster Hemingway would pound out Each word of his books or a short stories on a Corona typewriter Now we can copy and paste in a word processor. It's better, right? It's more efficient But Hemingway wrote a lot and in fact if we look at how much work authors produce We don't see some major change where as the tools got better authors produced More writing as the tools got better We don't see a change that authors produced better writing because ultimately creative acts take a long time.

It's much more about the actual Thinking the construction of the original idea the original voice Jerry's case the original joke. This is what really matters This is something that is tool agnostic It is just the very last mile of creation where you actually record that on something and yeah It's a little bit easier if that's Microsoft Word instead of a typewriter and a typewriter certainly easier Then it would be writing this on a scroll, but it's the last mile of this long creative process So it doesn't in the long run affect the quality when I produce or how much I produce Creative productivity is different than process productivity.

If you are a knowledge worker You're much closer to the creatives than you are to the processes You're much closer to the Seinfelds and the Hemingways than you are to the pop-tart factory So there's a good lesson here. Do not get caught up in a process productivity mindset Updated your tools as a knowledge worker can make your life less annoying on the margins, but is largely orthogonal To how much high-quality stuff you produce and how quality those things actually are All right lesson number two from the Seinfeld interview Here's the setup Barry Weiss asked Jerry Do you have a special place?

You like to write. I so here's Jerry's exact quote in response. I Do but I could write right here. If you would all just leave me alone Give me a flat surface and I'm good to go. This is the other thing I believe in there is no writer's block There's no writer's block.

There's lazy. They're scared But there's no writer's block Just sit down and realize you're mediocre and you're gonna have to put a lot of effort into this to make it good That's what writing is But I think we can generalize this to a lot of creative or cognitive pursuits They're hard Why are they hard?

well, we can get neurological about this if we want to the human brain is evolved to do lots of things pretty well and Because we're evolved to do certain things we don't feel a lot of strain or resistance to doing them if I see a Animal in the distance that I want to hunt and I'm hungry.

I'm evolved to very accurately aim a spear There's a lot of calculations and machinations that go on within our neural circuitry But I can aim that spear especially with some practice in a way That's really quite amazing and have a good chance of hitting that animal. I don't feel resistance to it It's something I'm doing that I'm evolved to do abstract cognition what we some researchers call symbolic processing where we're taking these mechanisms that are meant to encounter a concrete world and we turn them inward and Say, let's work on an internal abstract world let's deal with abstractions like writing and concepts and ideas and theories that we're then going to try to wrench into written words or computer code or a Design for an ad campaign.

We're not evolved to do this. We're again. We're wrenching Mechanisms meant for a much more embodied physical cognition and we're reassigning them to this more abstract work Our minds not on board with this and so we feel resistance this is why if you sit down to write a report or an article or a novel You really have a hard time getting started.

So your mind's like I don't know what this is This is not throwing a spear now It gets easier because once you get going what happens is is you load up all the relevant cognitive context, right? Now your brain is activating the networks that are relevant to what you're writing It's inhibiting the networks that aren't relevant to it anymore.

You get into a cognitive groove and things rolls along much better So what this tells us is don't expect it to be easy, but it will get easier as you go along So just go do it Stop thinking about the muse Stop imagining that Your cognitively demanding process that it's just the mood was just right or your skills were just right or the circumstance was just right It's gonna come effortlessly Don't obsess over Mahaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow Maybe you'll get some flow.

Probably not. It's just hard What you're doing at first isn't good and the way things become good is you put them down and work and work and work on them This is certainly my experience writing It's in particular my experience when I work on a New Yorker piece just because the demands of the language is very high There's no other way to go about those But they're just right and right and right and go back and fix and right and just trust over time You will be able to build from your natural mediocreness into something that might actually work So I think Jerry is really on to something there now This doesn't mean now here's the subtlety of this look at what his very first two words of his answer I do the question was do you have a special place to write and he said I do So this doesn't mean that location is something you should be indifferent to it can help Talk about this all the time on the show if you have a location that you associate exclusively with a certain type of deep work It will be easier to get into those deep work sessions.

Not easy easier if you have a ritual you do consistently, but before Deep work sessions. It will make it easier to do that deep work not easy, but easier But you don't have to have that and even with that it's going to be hard So I like his mindset of you should be willing to just find a flat surface and go or whatever Your equivalent of a flat surface is for the creative endeavor that you are involved in.

There's one thing I'm gonna add to Jerry's wisdom here. Hey, it's Cal I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book slow productivity the lost art of accomplishment without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talked about here in these videos You can get a free excerpt at cal Newport calm Slow I know you're gonna like it.

Check it out. Now. Let's get back to the video A writer's block is largely invented. I agree with that Writing is hard feeling harsh wouldn't be a problem There is however an interpretation of it that I think is useful if you're really consistently Having difficulties mustering motivation to work on a creative project, especially if it's a new or bold idea Sometimes this is your mind's way of telling you that your plan stinks Right is the concept we talked about often on the show is that procrastination in many cases is your mind correctly pointing out?

You don't really know what you're doing. Our mind has a way of projected into the future Simulating the plan for what you're about to do trying to get to the results of this plan so it can then Evaluate those results and say if this is positive I'll give you motivation to do what we're about to do and if this is negative I won't Right again, this goes back to the Paleolithic.

I'm in the late Ice Age. I'm hunting a mammoth. I have this idea Here's what I'm going to do I'm gonna run and jump off this cliff Onto the back of the mammoth and club it in the head with a rock until it dies and you find yourself having a hard Time actually pulling the trigger to run and jump Well, it's because your brain has simulated this pretty effortlessly and said I probably will A break my legs as I fall off the cliff and to be stomped to death by a mammoth That doesn't seem like a really good outcome.

So let's withhold motivation You know, like that's maybe not a good plan and someone else comes along and says why don't we throw a spear from a distance? Your brain thinks about that. It's like that'll probably work. We won't get stopped and I like meat and you get motivation to do it It's an adaptive and it's an adaptive reaction, but when it comes to creative pursuits, it still comes to play So you want to write a novel and you've fallen in love with like you got this like perfect Set up where you're gonna do your writing every morning with just the right tea and you just love the the accoutrements of the the novelist Lifestyle, but you don't really know anything about novel writing You don't know like what does it take to break into the type of writing you're trying to do?

Are you good at it? Have you been evaluated? What's the process? Did you have an agent first? Did you be working with an editor? You didn't really do any of that work So your brain is unable to simulate with confidence a future that it trusts. So it's like I don't think so Motivation with help.

So that is the one distinction. I'll give to Jerry's advice If you really have block on a creative pursuit Make sure first you really understand how that pursuit works and you have a plan going forward that you have some faith can actually succeed Then resistance beyond that point you gotta just find a flat surface and write All right, let's see here lesson number three Barry asked him Jerry about the importance of place Meaning like where you live.

All right, here's Jerry's response It's hugely essential cataclysmically relevant and potent to your Psychophysical well-being and productiveness the importance of place to me The analogy is the tuning fork you have a rhythm a frequency a vibration as a human being When you were in the place that your frequency vibration matches the frequency vibration of the place then you're comfortable Now this fits perfectly With the notion of lifestyle centric planning that we talk about all the time on the show now if you're new to the show You should listen to last week's episode I get into the dangers of just assuming that a singular grand goal is going to make your life suddenly meaningful and intentional We often tell ourselves this fairy tale Accomplish some singular grand goal and your whole life will be good The much more consistent way of building a life that you find meaningful and intentional is to actually figure out what are all of the elements of such a life and Then systematically creatively and flexibly work towards those properties using all of the resources to your available that you have available to you It's not as sexy It's just I've got this grand idea that impresses my roommate when I tell him and if I succeed all is going to be good But you're also much more likely to make progress One of the key things when we type talk about lifestyle centric planning is where you live I don't mean specifically necessarily like this neighborhood or this city, but the type of place you live I always talk about that when you vision your ideal lifestyle that you're going to now work towards part of this vision has to be What is the place like where you live?

Are you walking out of the cabin on to the Sun Dapple pond where you're gonna sit quietly with your coffee and watch? Like the row at Walden the ice melt as you get your thoughts going for the day Or is it going to be a sort of high energy?

You're in a city You know, you're on your way the the see a reading of an experimental play that people are interesting artistic types of of all sorts of diverse interesting backgrounds that just what what catches your attention Seinfeld here is emphasizing why that's important I always talk about resonance when we do lifestyle centric planning work backwards from what resonates He uses a tuning fork analogy.

What a tuning forks do they resonate? So he said yeah, this is really important the right type of place for you Creates a resonance. It's a rhythm. You're comfortable the wrong type of place. It doesn't work So the type of place you are matters. So again, if you follow the grand goal The grand goal theory this is the type of thing that you might neglect the grand goal theory might say, okay Whatever.

I want the highest possible achievement in the field on it I want to find a job does my passion or something like this, right? Or I want to finally succeed in you know, selling a novel and being a novelist, right? You're just focusing on one thing But if you're focusing on one thing all the other attributes your life get pulled around randomly so in pursuing that goal Hey, I got into banking out of school because it was the hardest job And if I can become a managing director and make a million five a year then that's then I'm going to be happy You're following that goal with singular focus.

You don't realize I hate cities. This is not resonating with me. I'm miserable It makes me anxious because you weren't thinking about the whole lifestyle. You're thinking about just one thing So think of the whole lifestyle location should be a big part of it Jerry Emphasizes that and in case you're wondering for Jerry, it's New York the rhythms of New York I mean, he's being nice about LA which is where he was to record this interview But but clearly his time in LA filming Seinfeld.

He learned that's not his place the rhythms of New York That's the place the type of place he needs to be Alright, we got a fourth and final lesson here The setup is Barry is discussing with Jerry The meaning of life the importance Jerry places on craft. They started deep things, right?

All right. So Jerry has a cool quote here It's all beautiful. He's referring here to life But I really but not really until we do something with it make something do something the hard is the good I Think I was about eight And I remember where I was the exact Street and I was on my bike just pedaling and I remember it hitting me that there Was a lot going on and I just wanted to do something really hard So I love this idea Should resonate with people who have read my book so good They can't ignore you or have read my new book slow productivity and a particular principle three obsess over quality I love this idea that the heart is good.

It's in the pursuing of something hard and Making progress in that pursuit that we do gain a lot of our meaning as humans now We know this from psychology if we look at self-determination theory Ryan and Decky for example Or they look at what are the elements you need for motivation and thriving psychologically?

one of the big ones there was mastery Mastering something and doing something. Well humans really like that. And again, I'm gonna use a lot of these sort of paleolithic Evolutionary biology just so tales but some of them are so obvious that we can just sort of Stipulate that they're true Clearly it's important for our species that mastery felt good By getting better at hard things is what allowed us to what we call Biologists would call refine our extended phenotype in other words Extend what it is We are able to do in the world beyond just with what physically we have on our body with how we're born not just our arms And our legs, but we can master throwing spears that extends our phenotype.

We can master art that extends our phenotype We can master language we can master Strategy all of this this extended phenotype this ability to gain and master new skills throughout life Is very important to human survival and it feels really good Now here's a key lesson, right? I mean, this is a podcast about Navigating the promises and perils of technology and pursuit of a deeper life technology plays a big role in thwarting The Seinfeld the envision of the heart is good Technology wants to trick you especially modern consumer facing internet mobile technologies wants to trick you Into thinking your online activities that these are hard That you're a cruel of these sort of fake followers online and the retweets means that you're a leader.

This was a hard to do It's not really that your progress in the video game That you have a higher ranking among the wizards in World of Warcraft command duty, you know, whatever Means that you've built up skill that gives you respect among your fellow tribe members But these aren't real people and these skills are easy to learn the games are set up so that you'll make progress on these skills Regularly, it's made up.

So you always feel better like you you just got a glorified participation trophy now You're even better at shooting digital Nazis on your TV screen in the basement The digital wants you to think that you're you're angry rantings on social media versus your perceived Political or ideological enemies is somehow moving the arc of progress forward that it matters that you're part of the change What they don't realize is that you're actually on the set of the Truman Show You're yelling in an empty warehouse and your sound is being bottled and monetized To help a small number of stockholders these social media companies.

You're not changing the world You're changing the number of zeros on someone like Mark Zuckerberg's annual worth All right. So technology survives in part by subverting this Instinct towards mastery. Don't let it seek real mastery Not the low-friction digital kind but real mastery. There's unambiguous stakes and reward where it's hard to make progress, but you know for sure you did This is a really important part of living a deep life in a technological world Alright, so let's pull together all four of these lessons from this 10-minute run.

This is Barry Weiss Interview of Jerry Seinfeld. All right, if I was going to summarize This sort of scripture of Jerry Seinfeld here work hard Over time on something you care about don't worry about your tools too much But just put in the work a day after day live in a location that resonates with you But don't get caught up about having the perfect immediate surroundings just to get started each day put in the hours The heart is good.

All right, Jerry I know you didn't mean the sort of right and oral self-help manifesto But you are on to something my friend and I appreciated your lessons All right, so we can move on now with our questions before we do. However, let's hear a word from some of our sponsors.

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All right. Let's move on now to some questions All right, Jesse. Who's our first question today? I first questions from Giacomo Can I take advantage of projects at work to improve my craft or is dedicated outside practice time necessary? Well jack well, that's an interesting question And it gets to I think it a key point I don't really want to say confusion But it's a little bit of a little bit of a confusion that people have around Practicing skills, right?

So your idea that you're you want to practice skills makes sense I've been talking about this for a long time that if you have a knowledge work job And you really want to build up the career capital? That's going to give you leverage over the the day-to-day reality of your working life.

You have to identify What is it that I do that is most valuable? unambiguously valuable to my organization or the market and you have to practice and improve that skill systematically and That's how you get options That's how you're going to ultimately craft a job. You feel passionate about so Giacomo is asking When when and how do I practice these skills?

No, so here's the confusion. I want to bring up when we think about practice What are the types of fields we typically think about we think about musicians we think about? Chess players we think about athletes, right? We think about the endeavors where we actually Explicitly talk about practice.

We explicitly schedule times for practice My son plays baseball. He has baseball practices. He goes to Here's the confusion. Those are really the exception not the norm when it comes to how you build skills this idea that you can have these abstract isolated practice sessions where I'm going to go for example to a baseball field and take grounders and Work in the cage in this like isolated abstract way so that later when I'm playing baseball.

I'll be better or I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to lift weights because it's going to make Me faster when I'm on the football field a sort of isolated abstract practice separate from the actual endeavor in which you want to apply it That is the exception not the rule So yes, we do that in sports.

We do that in Music we do that for things like chess, but for most endeavors, especially Complicated cognitive endeavors like almost any skill you'd be improving in knowledge work For most endeavors you're better off having the actual work itself be your practice Instead of saying let me do something Different and hope that the skills I pick up in this abstract practice carry over to my specific work Let your work itself be the practice We actually do this and by we I'm referring here to the the online course that I have with Scott Young called top performer, which we open up once or twice a year This is a course in which it's based on my book.

So good. They can't ignore you We help you do exactly this deliberately practice your job to get better at it So you can take control and we're very specific. We've done this course since 2014 so we've been doing this course for a while. We've learned to be very specific that to practice The key is to get an active project that your boss knows you're doing that you're being held accountable That matters the outcome matters that is designed Very carefully to stretch your skills beyond where you're currently comfortable.

Let the actual work itself be your practice session That's going to be your best bet especially with professional training Now this is in part just because the stakes are higher like you actually care about this. I have to do this It's part of my job. I said I'm gonna do this There's consequences if I don't but it also has to do with the actual mechanisms You're practicing specifically the thing you want to be better at as opposed to helping hoping that related skills carry over Right.

It's like we hear this sometimes from people. Here's a common example. I hear Should I do? meditation or like play a game like chess So that I get more comfortable with sustained concentration when I'm doing my work and To that my answer is always the better way to practice Concentrating on your work is to practice Concentrating on your work to actually sit there with a stopwatch schedule out the time We're gonna do 20 minutes at a time until we're comfortable Then we're gonna do 30 minutes if my attention wanders I'm gonna stop the clock and I'm gonna start over like it's better to actually practice Specifically what it feels like to concentrate on specifically what you do for your work Feeling the specific distractions that are unique to your workplace the slack channels the email than it is to do something unrelated and hope Concentration skills carry over this carries over for lots of other skills.

You want to be a better computer programmer. Don't do Sudoku Give yourself harder computer programming challenges that makes you harder at it. You want to be a better writer Don't do crossword puzzles give yourself increasingly challenging writing assignments for work and really push yourself to meet the bar So almost always that's going to be the right thing to do Use your work itself to practice the key is When finding a work project to double as practice the key is typically two things Stakes slash accountability like it needs to matter Someone's going to see this work if it's bad It's gonna be a problem my boss is waiting for it like you want stakes or accountability and to design the project This is the hard part, but you have to design it to require you To stretch your current abilities beyond where you're currently comfortable to succeed This is why this is hard.

Is that it's easy to go too little or too far It's easy to have a project that doesn't really stretch your abilities You're not getting much practice from that or to be way too ambitious Right. So if you're the computer programmer way too easy is like yeah, I'll I'll write the library calls for the UI and it's something you've done all the time You can just do this automatically.

You're not getting any better. But on the other hand if you say yeah, I'll go through and I'll rework all the algorithms in a dynamic programming paradigm so that we can you know, cut down our Asymptotic efficiency here by a linear factor and you don't really know much about dynamic programming that you're gonna be in trouble So you got to kind of find that sweet spot of like this is like something I know how to do But I'm pushing it to a higher level I've written the first drafts of the client reports, but then someone has edited it now I'm gonna say let me write the full draft, right?

So you're pushing yourself not too little not too far So yes use your activities to get better. You don't need abstract training when it comes to complex cognitive activities like your job It's hard to believe we're a decade out from so good. They can't ignore you I have a hard time that was like my first real hardcover idea book 2012 so it's been More than a decade that books important because it was my first hardcover idea book it was I it came out right when I started as a professor right before I had my first kid so like that's such a Turning point that kicked off an era that I feel like just ended with Just recently with Getting full professor I'm out of promotions, right?

So I started my professorship there. I'm like out of promotions My oldest kids going to middle school next year like leaving elementary school like there's all these things sort of symbolically My writing is at a different level and I don't know it's interesting. There's some sort of period here.

That's ending All right. Who do we got next a fan just sent a a hard copy Right picture of our old So good. They can't ignore you like a really worn cover. I saw that. Yeah, I've seen a few of these I Wonder if this has to do with the inks or something So, alright, so for people who don't know so good they can't ignore you I don't have a copy in here to show you I think my copy looks okay out there Yeah, but it's a it's like a red orange like a very dominant color Cover, I've seen a lot of covers people bringing them to get signed and a fan sent it to us as well Yeah, super faded When I was up at Dartmouth someone brought me a copy to sign that was like you could barely read it It was like bleep now.

He told me he had left it in the back of his car So I got a lot of Sun, but I think there's something about the inks in that cover That it can fade Something about it. So if you have an unfaded so good, they can't ignore your cover.

I guess that's extra rare. Nice. I suppose. Yeah Alright next question from Sharma I'm a developer Software developer, but I also want to become better writer and reader working on both simultaneously would do too much with my current job Should I focus on reading first? All right. That's a That's a good question.

Okay, I think that's fine. I Mean, that's fine. All right. So here's the let me can't make this more general the the the issue here is Let's get beyond the specific things to Sharma's trying to get better at she has a few things she wants to get better at and It feels like pursuing them all at the same time would be too much and what I'm saying is that's fine Don't pursue them at the same time There's a principle in here that sort of suffuses my new book slow productivity which is this idea of slow, but steady like what you want to avoid is sort of Disengagement with your work disengagement with trying to work on something important you want to avoid sort of long periods of Full disengagement, but you also want to avoid overload overload is like the one of the central villains of my book It causes a lot of problems.

All right, so yeah do one thing at a time Because here's the thing. It's all about timescale If for the next six months you might feel like oh, man I'm only working on in this case reading but not my writing and I really want to be good at my writing I wish I was just better at all of them fast forward to six years Spend some time on your reading spend some time on your writing come back spend a year on your reading spend another year on your Right fast forward six years like oh, wait, I'm good at both of these things This is the thing about accomplishment about skill building about endeavors.

They aggregate and Over time you aggregate more and more things I can do more things than I could before I know more things than I did before I produced more things than I have before and Overtime and aggregates, right? So think about all this on a larger timescale and you can be easier on yourself in the shorter timescale Back in the day.

I used to write about this when I was just dealing with students I had this phrase for this the paradox of the relaxed Road Scholar This is of course a much more compressed time frame example, but even among college students. There is this phenomenon where if you would look at the resumes of national or international scholarship winners They seemed sort of impossibly full and I know about this because my very first book how to win at college the whole premise of that Book is that I interviewed international national scholarship winners I interviewed Road scholars and Marshall scholars and Goldberg scholars and a few others and they were the source of the wisdom for how to win at College, right?

So I really got to know these resumes Students would often be intimidated They'd read the resume of a Road Scholar and said they did this and they did this and they did that I couldn't imagine doing all three of those things But if you talk to the actual Road Scholars, they'd like well, I didn't do them at once I did this and then I did that and then I did this other thing And then when we zoom out and look back we say oh my god, you did all these things I get this in my own life, right because I have this book out about slow productivity and sometimes interviewers will say well Wait a second, but you do this and you do that and you do this that feels like it would be very busy.

How can you Fulfill your first principle of the book to do fewer things If like you're writing books and you're doing this and you're doing that and it seems like you would be very busy What I often say is yeah, but I don't do those things at the same time.

I'm very seasonal Right, if I'm writing a book, I'm not doing other things if I'm working on a lot of academic ideas I'm not doing other things if I'm promoting a book. I'm not writing a book or working on academic ideas Everything has its season. I feel like I work at a pretty slow pace in the moment But when you fast-forward out and said what happens between as we just talked about so good They can't ignore you in 2012 and slow productivity in 2024 a lot happened, but I didn't do all of that stuff at the same time.

So there's there's a power here too slow, but steady Relentless, but reasonable that pacing over time is incredibly powerful. It's like compound interest with money It's boring this month, but you fast-forward to 10 years and you have a lot more money in your account. It's the same thing slowly, but steady Relentlessly, but reasonably you keep making progress on things you don't have long down periods, but you also don't overload yourself That's where that's kind of the sweet spot.

I think for where things really things really stack up All right, who'd we got next next questions from JJ? What are your tips for the grind part of studying like getting through massive amounts of practice problems and flashcards? It feels like more like slogging than flowing. I fall behind even if I take one or two days off Well, we got first of all a correction to make here be very careful in how you think about flow and This was something I got into With my interview with Andrew Huberman and I think this particular discussion sort of made the rounds because I think it's an important one Is that I think we?

Over generalize or over apply flow as a desirable goal All right. So let's be you know, we can set a little bit of context here. What do we mean by flow? Flow is a specific psychological state The name was coined and the phenomenon was primarily studied by the late psychologist.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and The idea about flow is when you're in this state You lose track of time you get lost in what you're doing. It feels almost effortless so it's really important and he wrote a cool book about flow and When we get in when we don't get it and it's a very real state and it's a very nice state Here's the problem about flow It's hard to get into and there's a lot of things we do that are cognitively important that Will not generate flow and we can't expect him to generate flow So I think there was this over generalization.

Not my Haley was not saying this but there's been this over Generalization of this concept where people feel as if this is the goal of all cognitive work to get in the flow It is very nice. But there's a lot of stuff you can't get in the flow. So what is one of the distinct Cognitive activities that is resistant to flow Deliberate practice so deliberate practice now.

This is named for also now the late Performance psychologist Anders Erikson deliberate practice is our best understanding about how people get better at Complicated tasks be them physical or cognitive It requires you to have a clear target the stretch yourself past where you're comfortable to have clear feedback to make sure that you're directing Your actions in sort of like the correct way This is how you stretch Be it a muscle memory or an actual cognitive concept how you stretch and get smarter how you get better at a particular physical activity Anders Erikson was very clear about this.

He knew my Haley and you know, I had the privilege of actually talking with both of them too before Before they pass I've sort of talked to both of them about this as well Anders was very clear deliberate practice is different than flow In fact deliberate practice is the opposite of flow in the sense of you don't lose track of time when you're deliberately Practicing you feel every you feel every minute.

It's really hard. You're stretching yourself past where you're comfortable That's a really hard thing to do and it requires sustained Intentional concentration on what you're doing is often not pleasant. You don't get lost in it it turns out like a better way to Understand the distinction between deliberate practice and flow is to think about preparation and performance because they often fall along those lines In my book so good.

They can't ignore you For example, I spent time and I tell the story in the book sitting there with a professional guitar player named Jordan watching him practice and it was almost excruciating like he was so focused on speeding up the speed of the lick that he would forget to breathe and then he would have these Sudden intakes of breath the sharp gas because his body was thinking we need oxygen because that's how focused he was on trying to Get the speed faster on what he's doing.

That's deliberate practice. He's not lost in what he's doing there He's every minute is requiring intentional focus But when that same guitar player got on stage to play and he played at our wedding And that same guitar player would get on stage to play and perform what he had practiced these hard one skills Then he could get lost in what he's doing Then he could get into a state of flow So deliberate practice is different than flow.

Alright, so here's the bad news JJ Learning new things like you're doing as you talked about here studying from flashcards That's deliberate practice world That's you trying to rinse your brain into a new understanding of something It didn't understand before you are not going to get lost in a flow state learning flashcards Alright, what can we do about this?

Well, here's how I used to approach this type of work and this is relevant beyond academic work as well for anything that sort of Deliberate and tedious at the same time, right? So a couple things that matter One you need to control your time as a student, right? This is how I'm going to study for this test I used to recommend that you would in the beginning of your semester find all your major exams put them on your calendar and Then mark on your calendar way in advance when you were going to create your study plan for that exam And I would say do this three weeks in advance and when you get to that day you would see it on your calendar And you're laying out the whole thing putting that time on your calendar.

I have three weeks to prepare for this exam I'm not waiting until hey, what's due tomorrow? Oh my god. I have an exam tomorrow Let me try to learn all this stuff You're giving yourself time to spread this out when you spread this out. You can be very strategic about the deliberate practice demanding grind behaviors Like memorizing things from flashcards, you can make those sessions short.

You can make them intense. Let me get in 30 minutes here 30 minutes there I'm gonna spread this out over a week or two So that it's much more reasonable than trying to sit down and do it all at once where your brains probably gonna cry uncle at Some point you're gonna have to give up.

I Also then recommend for the actual activity of learning things from flashcards to make sure that you're doing successive refinement now all these ideas I'm talking about are actually in my book how to become a straight-a student, but I'll just give you the the cliff notes here The successive refinement is very simple, but it makes a big difference what you want to do If you're going through a stack of flashcards Create two piles Got it, right got it wrong Then when you do your next pass just use the pile that you got wrong again What did I get right?

What did I get wrong? So you're successively reducing? You're refining the things you're looking at to only be the things that up to this point. You've still gotten wrong It's a very efficient way to go through flashcards because it ensures that the things, you know Get a minimum of time.

I saw it once I knew it I don't want to look at it again the things you're having the most trouble with you're gonna be seen again and again and again It's a much more efficient allocation of your deliberate practice concentration than going through the whole stack again and again I was an art history minor little-known fact about me.

That's a lot of memorization Artist names dates of work you had to memorize that for just hundreds and hundreds of paintings And this is how this is how I would do it Alright, so our general point here deliberate practice is different than flow So you want to be structured and organized you want to schedule this time in advance?

You want to keep the time reasonable and then more specifically you want to do successive refinement during these sort of grind flashcard session So they don't they don't become too overburdened some All right, what do we got next? All right next questions from Denny I have a fledgling YouTube channel in the real estate area.

You talk a lot about building your craft I specifically want to build my craft making YouTube videos. How should I do that? Well, look, here's my first question. Be sure you really do want to do that Right YouTube is an interesting beast It's different. I would say it's different than other even social media products, right?

So if you have a business and you're thinking Look, I want to have a social media presence. I have a presence on Instagram It kind of helps I can have this audience and it's like people subscribe to it and they can see the things I'm doing And maybe it helps us get a couple more Customers or these videos we're doing about like what's happening with the house prices might get sold YouTube is even more brutal than that, right because you can have as a As a real estate, I guess you're probably like a real estate agent or something You can have like an Instagram account That the people who follow it they're coming to follow it.

They sort of know you people are used to this There's an interpersonal aspect as social media. I live in the same town I I was looking for houses in this town and I found this there's more of this regionalization the social localization You can have like a nice size audience That's actually like maybe a reasonable audience and some good stuff might come out of it YouTube is way more winner-take-all Right.

We don't have that same habit of there's someone like in my town that has a YouTube channel I'm gonna go subscribe and watch their videos in the way that like with social media we might Right. So then what happens with YouTube? It's algorithmic driven curation, which means your videos will be watched by approximately nobody unless you can have all of the pieces that have to be in place to play well with the audience and algorithm and Then an audience can build but it's unclear even what that audience will be.

Even if you want them. It's a very complicated world So here's what you would have to do. First of all, let's talk about the actual content itself. It has to be super compelling because it has to be something that makes someone say I'm gonna sit here and keep watching this video if they don't do that the Algorithm is gonna say goodbye.

It doesn't matter what you do, right? So it has to be very compelling which means either You have to you have to promise something really big up front and really deliver it Or the content itself has to be really unique and deep and something that you're you're well-suited to deliver The delivery itself has to be just right you have sort of like two options for YouTube delivery Either you have to do the YouTube editing style like you would see personified in a mr beast video where it's cut every 10 to 12 seconds so that like it moves moves moves moves moves and the viewer is Never has that moment of boredom in which they'll leave it or you have to be a professional talker Right, so you can do what like Andrew Huberman does or I do but we're professional talkers, right?

And we're coming from a place of authority. I've been you know, the public eye writing for a long time I've sold millions of books. I you know, I can speak for a long period of time You're either a professional talker. You have to do that YouTube editing, right? These are all just table stakes then you got to get all the details, right?

You know like one of the things we have a YouTube guy who does our thumbnails and does our headlines I've gotten a little bit more involved in the headlines I was like, I want to make these a little bit more accurate a little bit less YouTube II That these little tweaks that's 10,000 views gone right away Like these little things matter a huge amount and if any of these things aren't done, right like nothing works So I don't want to scare you away from this.

I just don't want you to waste your time Like if you have a play here, I have a super unique super compelling thing to do I can make these videos super compelling but like an audience feels like they have to keep watching and I'm willing to do all the right work with the thumbnails and the Headlines that this could grow but then even then you have to say is the audience that it's going to grow going to be useful For what I'm doing This is different than other social media where you can build a more localized regionalized audience.

I think it gets more directly to The you know, hey, I want people in this town To encounter me and you know, we're giving the housing report for this neighborhood like that can work on Instagram It's not gonna work as well on YouTube. I don't know what Jesse is that you've been seeing the other end of this It might be a little bit too pessimistic or no, I agree with you.

Yeah, it's pretty brutal. Yeah. Yeah I think for us what we like is It's there's a segment of audience that I want this to get to that. I don't think we're reaching with the audio It's like we have a very specific reason There's a sort of a younger band of an audience That we can we can get to with YouTube and then we have the secondary reason that I do think video is going to be Critical for shows like this in the future.

I don't think through YouTube necessarily but video delivery is going to be critical And so we want to make sure we're good at it So sort of like when the time comes like oh, here's this network this app this video network Whatever, however this unfolds we want to make sure that we're good at it But if I just had a small business and I really want to be online, I would look at other social media before YouTube All right.

Who do we got next? We have our corner slow productivity corner. Here we go. Let's hear some music So Daniel has to say you have mentioned something to the effect that after getting tenor and after your kids were in school It became more relevant to think about getting setting a sustainable pace for your work I am just starting as an assistant professorship at an r1 institution and have a 16 month year old Can you comment on the mindset you applied to productivity as an assistant professor and how it relates to and differs from the slow productivity mindset?

All right. Good question for those who don't know the slow productivity corner is the one question per episode that we think is Directly connected to my new book slow productivity, which you should check out if you haven't seen it alright, so what Daniel is referring to so he's a Let me decode everything briefly for the audience Assistant professorship at r1 institution in the US system r1 institution means you're it's a Carnegie ranking But it basically means categorization, but it means you're a research institution.

So it's a professorship If you have a professorship at an r1 University It's you're expected to produce a lot of research research will be the foundation on which ten-year decisions will be made Assistance professorship is the first level of professorship in the American system. So when you start as a professor, you're an assistant professor Typically associate professor is the promotion you get along with 10-year and then later there's full professorship Okay, and I've talked about how like this stage of my life.

I'm in the third stage as a professor There's my assistant professor stage. There's my post 10-year associate professor stage. And now I've just entered the full professor stage as Daniel pointed out when I was an assistant professor, I had a lot of young young kids was sort of the What was going on right because my I think I there's babies around for like all of my assistant professorship I became an assistant professor in 2012 that fall my first kid was born.

My second kid was born in 2014 And then I got tenure in 2016. So I always had someone within two years of birth All right. So here's the things I did differently in that period Daniel as compared to now or other times One I was certainly very careful about time block planning and fixed schedule productivity meaning These are the hours I have to work I have to make the most of them right because the the child care schedule made anything else impossible We were working With a nanny at that period so there's a lot of like hey, you gotta be home at this time This is when the nanny has to go home Right, like you can't be working at this time because the nanny won't be there yet And you know your your wife has to go early here.

And so the schedule was everything and limited hours I had to make the most of those hours So this was I was really big on time block planning like really thinking through what do I want to do with each day? To get the most out of it. The other thing I did during the young kid early tenure period is I simplified I was like, okay professional goal one two and three Papers published in good venues to get a lot of citations.

That's everything for tenure, right? Confidential letter writers from the field evaluating your research productivity. That's what I focused on To the exclusion of almost everything else. I wasn't launching a lot of other endeavors a lot of other ideas I wasn't starting initiatives on campus like the type of things I'm involved in now with digital ethics and starting new programs and none of that super focused This is why I had strict quotas on academic service Only this many program committees and this many peer reviews will I do per semester because I had the focus on research above all else You definitely see this in my general audience book writing.

So I had a book come out in 2012 right before my first kid was born That whole assistant professor period Four or five years. I published one book the deep work So you could there's this year the first two years of my first kids life I did zero writing altogether because I was like I've got to take care of this kid and I got to publish papers and then I slowly wrote one book During that period and that's it Right, so I deeply simplified during that period Post ten year and as my kids got a little bit older this sort of began to get some breathing room I wasn't on the treadmill of like I if I don't get this many papers I'm not gonna get ten year and things do change Daniel, but I think that's a good way to think about it Be very careful about your time.

Here's the hours. I have to work. I want to make the most of them Be very protective about your time what you agree to do keep first things first, which is publishing papers that matter Low profile just publishing is what matters keep your life simple Just when you're working make that what you're working on as much as possible be very effective efficient with your time during work And if you do that, then it works out, but I'm not working.

I'm not working and I'm you know Taking care of kids and all the other stuff that comes with that period it can work out But you got to focus you got to simplify you got to take care of your time as carefully as possible I'll tell you when it's all going to go down the drain is when that kid well 16 month old Yeah, once they start going to preschool because then you're gonna be sick half the year But that's a you'll see that soon enough Daniel learn how to work when you have a cold All right.

Let's let's do a quick case study here This comes from M M says Professionally, I use your ideas to plan my next career move within my organization in the foreign service We rotate assignments every two to three years and I had a feeling a bit burnt Oh, I had been feeling a bit burnt out with my current position and not motivated to start looking for my next job Using your lifestyle centric planning.

I set criteria for the type of positions. I would target I wanted to move back to DC and avoid positions involving emergency or after-hours duties I had accepted that this could be a career detour and not great for my promotion But to my surprise, I found many intriguing positions that matched my criteria last month I happily accepted an offer at the State Department's Diplomatic Training Institute.

I'll be leading a medium-sized team So it'll still be a substantive role, but it offers an element of seasonality flexibility and hopefully no after-hours Emergency. All right, so we get a good example there of lifestyle centric planning We talked about this last week in last week's deep dive You're not going to build a deep meaningful intentional life just by pursuing a singular grand goal That'll fix all your problems.

You got to figure out directly. What are all the elements of the lifestyle? I want and then flexibly think about all of your options for taking advantage of opportunities and avoiding obstacles to move closer to that vision It's not as sexy as saying I have this big goal that will fix everything But by looking directly and identifying directly These are the parts of my life and what I want them to be like you come across really interesting solutions That make your day-to-day existence more meaningful and intentional.

So that is a great example All right, we got a cool final segment coming up. But first briefly, I want to hear share a word from another one of our sponsors particular I want to talk about our longtime friends at Blinkist an app that gives you over 500 book summaries and expert-led audio guides to read or listen to they each take just about 15 minutes to Consume you can get best-in-class actual knowledge from over 27 categories such as productivity psychology and more I just checked out the blink for my latest book slow productivity and it was quite good The way Jesse and I use Blinkist is as a triage tool for our reading life for interested in a book We'll listen to or read the blink first before deciding whether or not to buy and read the full book.

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Let's move on to our final segment. I Will just bring this down to our final segment where I typically like to react to something. I Have encountered over the internet in the past week now this week instead of reacting to a specific article or a specific clip I'm going to react to a particular internet figure and Spoiler alert there is going to be an apology for me at the end of this reaction All right.

So who's the figure I want to talk about the youtuber James Scholl's S-c-h-o-l Z now, let me give you a little bit of background on how my path has Intersected with that of James Soules since I chose since I talked a lot about Productivity typically in the context of trying to push back against digital distraction, but I talk about productivity I have a book out that has productivity in the title.

I'm often asked in interviews about hustle culture and The dangers of hustle culture. So this seems to be this this big Concern is that everyone is subscribed to hustle culture and this is a bad thing Now I often got a little bit confused about this, right? Because what would happen is someone would read something like Oliver Berkman's fantastic book 4,000 weeks Which is about life being short and there's only so much you can get done and it's really good meaningful pragmatic philosophical reflections but they'll read something like 4,000 weeks and they'll say finally a Book that's pushing back against hustle culture and this idea that you can get everything done and you should do more Finally and I would always be confused because I said look I've been a professional book writer for the last 20 years Where are these books that are saying something different?

What are the what are the best-selling? productivity books quote-unquote of the 2010s it's essentialism About doing fewer things. It's a deep work about doing fewer things. It's one thing right about doing fewer things It's it's Oliver's book itself 4,000 weeks go back to the 2000s you get Tim Ferriss.

How do we stop working so much? How do we work less? How do we have more vacations? We get David Allen's getting things done, which is not about getting more things done But trying to survive the onslaught of work so that at least you can find some peace It's the opposite of a call to get things done.

So I would always say I don't know what this hustle culture is where it is That we're so afraid of so then people would say what's online It's like okay. I don't know the online world as much. I don't use social media I'm not a big person. I don't spend a lot of time on YouTube My podcast if you're watching it now is produced put on YouTube, but I don't spend a lot of time on YouTube It's like okay, maybe there's this hustle culture out there on Line and that's what people are talking about And this is where I first heard the example of James Scholes because in the first year of the pandemic what James did famously Was basically every day for a year would record himself a live stream himself studying Not for 20 minutes not for an hour, but often 10 11 12 hours at a time He's just sitting there in his apartment Studying usually Pomodoro style 50 minutes on 10 minutes off or hour on 10 minutes off He'd do a little bit of narration the breaks, but it's really just him just studying People would tune in they would study with them and you can still see all these videos on the James Scholes his original YouTube channel And so I was like, okay Yeah maybe that's that's our good example of hustle culture like the guy that like studies for 12 hours at a time because look I wrote some Books about how to study when I was young and the right way to study is the opposite of studying for 12 hours at a Time that's that's just gonna burn you out.

I was like that maybe that's hustle culture. I just sort of used James as a Canonical example of like yeah online there's this hustle culture thing But those of us who are writing books about it and we're thinking about this more Expansively, I wasn't the only one to make those connections.

I'm gonna read a couple quotes here from an article from 2022 About James, I won't link to the article because I don't like the non-famous writers I don't like to throw under the bus, but let me just read some quotes from this article about James it talks about Watching a lot of James then getting disillusioned.

So the article says Yet another part of me felt disappointed that this had become my measurement of time Well spent ceaseless hours in a brightly lit room staring at a screen whilst listening to YouTube videos boredom Begin to feel like the culmination of many things that had been brewing in my mind about productivity the hustle and what it all meant This article goes on to say lots of nice things about Oliver Berkman Let me see.

I have a couple other quotes. I want to read from towards the end Productivity gives the false impression that we can do everything we want. We can become an all-conquering person never again subcoming to the limitedness Limitedness that time imposes upon you but this is simply not right the day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control Berkman writes later.

This author says having everything under control is the glistening of the productivity diamond We're constantly attempting to master time to channel ourselves into a position of dominance and control Over unfolding lives so that we might finally feel safe and secure and no longer so vulnerable to events Protection from vulnerability is now learning but impossible state So James Schultz represents this hustle culture that has an unobtainable Belief of like what's possible through productivity?

Okay Here's the thing. I recently went down more of a rabbit hole on James. I listened to some interviews with him and listen to him talk about himself and why he did these videos and I no longer think it is correct to make him the patron saint of hustle culture.

I Don't think that's what he's doing at all. Let's look back to this discussion of hustle culture again from this article What are the properties they point out about hustle culture? It's about the impression. You can get everything you want. You can be all-conquering You'll never succumb to the limitlessness of time that you can have everything under control You're caught you can master your times.

You can channel yourself to a position of dominance. Where is that in? The quiet video of James Schultz just sitting there studying all day long Where is he talking about you can get everything done? Where is he talking about you can have full control over your life? Where is he saying you can get into a position of dominance and I will show you how he barely talks He just sits there and he quietly studies So what is really going on with James Schultz?

Well as becomes clear if you listen to some interviews with him He is not promoting to people that What he is doing this extreme is somehow Something that everyone else should be doing that people should be studying for 12 hours. Trust me I wrote books about studying you don't have enough stuff to study for 12 hours I don't know what he was studying for 12 hours.

That was not the goal of these videos. They had two purposes One small one big the small purpose was to be live This was early pandemic Many places were in current lockdowns Right, so people were stuck at home and in particular students were stuck at home learning online So he was offering this idea that whenever it was you happen to be studying You could go and this live stream was probably going on and you wouldn't feel alone It's not a video that someone recorded before of studying He would be studying when you needed to study other people would be watching him You could see how many people are watching them.

It was creating a sense of digital community So why was he studying 12 hours to make sure he covered as much of the day as possible? so as many people as possible who we're gonna study for an hour that day would have a chance of Being able to intersect with this ongoing live stream.

I think that was the small reason right not you should study 12 hours But to make sure whatever hour you do study, there's a good chance. My live stream will be going on The bigger version here though is I think this is an exemplar of something we've seen in other areas of well We could call it these sort of monastic prototype where there's a there's an issue that's afflicting a population and the monastic Right the monastic of this example Goes in in a very public and showy way does the opposite to an extreme not because the monastic thinks that the whole population should have an aesthetic lifestyle and Move to the caves and meditate under the tree all day But to make the point clear That what they are doing is hurting them and there's power in the opposite, right?

So the monastic Removes themselves from everyday life and does things to an extreme so those who are still in everyday life can find and draw inspiration. I Think this is another big part of what James Schultz is doing again. He's talking to other young people He was young when he did this he was aiming these videos largely at students They were finding their lives overcome with distraction procrastination.

They were stuck at home. They're on their phones all the time and It was a dark and bleak Sort of soul-sapping existence I saw this among my own students at Georgetown is that first year the pandemic wound on is that you could see the light going? Out of their eyes.

They're just stuck at home. And so he went hard the other way. I'm not gonna look at my phone I'm gonna use retro equipment. He had these old-fashioned computers retro equipment And I'm just gonna sit here and concentrate for hours all day long and in doing so I'm going to sort of make the point That there's power in the opposite of what you're doing So there's power in the opposite of staring at a screen and being lost in an algorithmic rabbit hole.

It was a monastic behavior we see this play out a lot in the Internet age the Internet age has Made this type of monastic behavior this inspiring monastic behavior more common another example Internet age example David Goggins Right. David Goggins is a character that for those who don't understand What he's responding to he's mystifying right Goggins has this very hard upbringing Really hard troubled childhood Grows up a little bit out of shape right going nowhere and gets his act together eventually becomes a Navy SEAL right getting after it Navy SEAL leaves Navy SEALs and starts doing in a sort of documented online sort of way just extreme feats of endurance athletics Extreme feet ultra marathons running every day He got the record for most pull-ups in a 24-hour period these type of things He started making these videos and then this would spread he began becoming a guest on a lot of Podcasts that has sort of male audiences where he was just saying, you know, hey get hard be disciplined.

Just do it You got to get out there. Just do hard work He's puzzling to a lot of people like this guy's crazy Like he is a little bit crazy. I'm just like obsessive doing the physical activity all day long To like the point of almost nothing else his knees had been completely destroyed like his body is probably falling apart Like what's the point of this?

We're not gonna no one's gonna go and do this I'm not gonna run a hundred miles like twice a week. I'm not going to you know, do a thousand pull-ups I'm not going to just run around and curse and say get hard like I have a family do other sorts of things But that was not the port-a-goggins.

He was monastic. He was responding to there was a subset of sort of American Western male culture That was feeling Unengaged was feeling on efficacious was feeling sort of out of shape and useless. They were drinking too much They were out eating too bad food. They weren't being good fathers.

They weren't being good husbands, but they were sort of lacking discipline and So seeing this extreme monastic aesthetic example of discipline was inspiring for that subset of guys It confused everyone else but for them they didn't go off and do the same elite Endurance athletic events, but they got in better shape.

They got their finances under control. They became better fathers They cared more about their kids and their family. They stopped drinking right? It really turned a lot of lives around So when you do this sort of extreme example of something that's in reaction to a problem It really helps other people leave the problem.

That's all I think is going on with James Schultz. It's just for a younger audience So I think I was wrong. I think others are wrong to label him as a paragon of hustle culture is really the opposite He is actually a prophet or saint or monastic in the digital era From the young generation speaking to the young generation.

Don't be lost in your phones all day There be dragons and I'm going to sit outside decay for hours at a time. So you learn how to resist it So that's an apology at James Schultz. He's a much more rich interesting cultural Character and I think we made him out to be So I'm still searching.

I'm still searching for the core of hustle culture. I need another example now Again, it really does feel like almost everyone I talked to even people who are really in this world of productivity They want to be organized but typically because they don't like the stress of being disorganized They're often worried about doing too many things They want to be good at what they do, you know, but we're the the group out there.

That's really pushing I have the hack that's going to allow you to conquer everything in the world That group wherever they are needs to be louder because I'm not running into them a lot and I think that's a good thing But anyways James, I think what you did was cool and interesting and as much performance art as it was anything else And so, you know my hat actually now is tipped to you All right.

That's all the time we have for today. Thank you for tuning in We'll be back next week with another episode of the show and until then as always Stay deep. Hey, if you like today's episodes about Jerry Seinfeld's advice for living a deeper life I think you'll like last week's episode episode 303 where I talk about the danger of trying to use Grand goals to find depth spoiler alert.

It doesn't work. Take Jerry's advice instead. Check it out I think you'll enjoy it. How do you create a Deep life a life that is lived on purpose a life that the people who know you find to be in a quite literal sense