Full Length Episode | #163 | January 11, 2022

The new year means, as is our new tradition here on the podcast, it is time to go over my reading list. So as long-time listeners know, my target is usually to read about five books per month, and we've started the habit of at the beginning of each new month reviewing the books I read during the past month.

So now it is time to talk about the five books I read in December 2021. Are you ready for this, Jesse? I'm ready. Let's go. All right. So the first book I completed in that month was How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor. This is basically a George Lucas biography that has some pop culture reporting on the Star Wars phenomenon.

Now, you might remember this, Jesse. This was controversial. We talked about this back in December when I was reading it. I asked the listeners, "Is it okay that I am skipping the chapters that are about the cultural reception of Star Wars?" So early on, the book started going back and forth.

It would be a chapter from the timeline of George Lucas's career, so biography. And then it would switch to a chapter that would be about, "Here's a group of guys that dress up like stormtroopers and who they are and what's that like." I was not so interested in the cultural stuff.

I wanted the biography. This is part of my ongoing effort to—my movie effort. I'm reading book after book about various people in the movie industry for some weird reason. So I asked the audience if it was okay if I skipped that. Jesse, you gave me the thumbs up on that, I believe, if I'm remembering.

Yeah, that was okay. That was okay. Well, so here's the thing. I have more defense for my approach because he stopped—the author, Chris Taylor, stopped doing that switching before, I don't know, two-thirds of the way into the book. And so it became straight biography, really, for the end of it.

So in the end, I probably only skipped, I don't know, 30% of the material. So I'm going to count that. So as I mentioned, this is part of my random project to really dive into the film industry. This is maybe the fourth or fifth book I've read in a row that is on that topic.

I'm not sure why this is interesting so much, but it really has been this fall. I really wanted to learn about George Lucas, having finished the biography of Steven Spielberg the month before. And a few things I learned. One, Lucas was a really good director. So in this scene, there's this scene centered around USC where there was Lucas and there was Coppola, and Spielberg wasn't at USC, but he was in their circle.

Scorsese was in their circle, among some others. Brian De Palma was in their circle. So it's this big group of directors, and they all knew each other. In that circle, Lucas was considered a hotshot. So he had this great animated student short that won a bunch of awards and put him on the map.

Like, wow, Lucas is the guy that he's the auteur. He's the guy with the vision. And then he did the student version of THX, which also blew people away. So I think people didn't realize that about Lucas. Coppola really was trying to get Lucas to direct Apocalypse Now. But Lucas decided to do Star Wars instead, basically.

So he was considered like the artistic guy. So that's kind of interesting. The other thing I found out about Lucas is, like these other guys, timing is important. Him and Spielberg came up just as the movie industry was changing, just as they were leaving the studio system. So Coppola's first movie was Finnegan's Rainbow, which was a classic studio soundstage movie.

Then he did The Godfather. So it was like right as they were transitioning away from the studio system. And they invented this idea of the blockbuster, where you could have a movie that appealed to all these different age groups and could be in 3,000 theaters and make all this money.

And so their timing was right. They were talented. And Lucas, even more so than Spielberg, had a relentless go-big ambition. So if he was going to do a movie, just like a student movie, he was going to do THX student movie, he was going to find a way to get access to an abandoned military base and push the setting, push the technology.

He was going to make a movie where you're going to say, "Wow, this is a lot bigger than I thought someone with that budget could do." And that was the approach that made Star Wars big. He was like, "We're going to invent new technology for the special effects. It's going to be bigger than anyone's ever seen." Clearly James Cameron picked up that torch from Lucas after the fact.

So anyways, that's what I learned about Lucas, is this guy was incredibly talented, incredibly ambitious. He was going to do everything bigger than anyone had ever done it before, and really, really focused. Also, very rich. I don't know if you know that. Yeah, he's like a billionaire, isn't he?

Yeah, he's a billionaire. Were you a Star Wars guy, Jesse? I've seen some of the movies, not all of them. Probably not as much as you are. Is Lucas and Spielberg friends? Yeah, yeah, they were friends. They all knew each other. And they were going back and forth. It's hard to overestimate how much money they were making.

And I think that's what made Star Wars so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular.

I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular.

I love that idea of having land with a name. I love that idea of having land with a name. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill.

I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill.

I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. - Well, somewhere there, hopefully you'd have a writing shed so that wouldn't get burned down, so you could just escape to there. - Yeah. Well, that is my dream, is I want a writing shed, and I don't have room for a writing shed.

and I don't have room for a writing shed. It is a dream of mine, so I need... I was having this conversation. For real, I was having this conversation with two different people in the last month, writers, who have a getaway plot. writers, who have a getaway plot. It's kind of an interesting model.

A place they go... It's not like a large cultivated land, and it's not nice, it's quiet. and it's not nice, it's quiet. And they have a place to write. So I have a writer I was talking to who lives right outside New York City in a town that's kind of like Tacoma Park, and about 90 minutes up 87, he has some land, I guess that'd be like the southern Cascades.

There's a little writing shed. And then another guy, a good friend of mine, was telling me, he lives in Chicago, in the city in a row house, and they just bought a plot that is four or five acres, near one of the... I don't know what the Great Lake is, near there, but whatever that is, Lake Michigan.

It's not on the water, it's one lot in from the water. And it has like an old barn, and they're planting an orchard on it, and they can get there in 90 minutes as well. And he's building, he was showing me these plans, like a fireman forest fire watch tower.

You know, like you would build, they used to build to look for forest fires, and at the top of this tower, so it's like an elevated gazebo. And that's where he's going to do his deep work, because you can see the lake. How does he get up there? Does he take an elevator?

It could be a ladder. It's like icy up there. Well, you know, a little bit of danger gets the heart going. So I'm excited about that. So I don't know, maybe this is, I like this notion of having a getaway plot, that it's not super hard to maintain, you don't need like a really big house, but the key to a getaway plot is, I think it has to be non-trivially sub two hours away.

If it's two hours or more, you can't go and write for a day and come back. Yeah, I see that. Two quick points. I, there's no doubt in my mind that you'll find something like that. I've been listening to your stuff for a long time, and I think you'll find it eventually, because you talk about it a lot.

And then, secondly, in terms of self-help books, I was listening to Ferris' podcast recently, and he quoted you on giving him a suggestion for the self-help book that he read when he wasn't even going to read new books. So that was kind of cool. I just listened to that recently.

Yeah, that's a good book. So it's Oliver Berkman's book, "4,000 Weeks." I talked about it, I told Tim about it, and then Tim read it, and then Tim did the thing that I think every publisher wishes would happen. I said, "Tim, I believe he, you listen to this, he released the first chapter, the audiobook version of the first chapter of Oliver's book on his podcast.

Is that right? Yeah, I just listened to it, actually. Man, could you imagine having the first chapter of your audiobook on Ferris' podcast? So "4,000 Weeks" is a cool book. I read it a long time ago, because I blurbed it. I read it back before it came out. And it's a great concept.

It's called "Time Management for Mortals," and 4,000 weeks is roughly how many weeks you live. Oliver's whole point is most things you're not going to get done, you have a very limited amount of time. All these wild dreams you have, most of them won't happen. And be okay with that.

And spend more time enjoying what you do have and what you can do, and don't be so aggressively goal-oriented. It was that book hit a nerve well before Ferris mentioned it. That thing was, yeah, that thing crushed it. I think it's one of the better-selling in our world of the people we know that write the sort of New Yorker-style self-help.

He's a Guardian guy. He's a very smart guy. I think that book is the one that really crushed it this year. I'm very happy for Oliver. I've always loved his stuff, and he's been very kind to my stuff. So, circle goes around. All right, one more book. I finally read some Wendell Berry.

So I don't know, do you know any... He's not as well-known as I thought. Have you heard of Wendell Berry? No. Cool guy. He's old now. He's in his 80s. But he went... grew up in Kentucky on a small farm. Went to New York City. Got educated. I don't know, Columbia or NYU or something.

Got sort of overly educated. Got a writing job in New York City. He wanted to be a writer, and he was going to do the whole modern cosmopolitan writer thing, where you live in a city. You're not from somewhere. You're just observing things around the world. And for whatever reason, he's like, "I don't like this.

I'm from Kentucky. I want to go back to Kentucky. I want Kentucky to be my muse. I want to be from a place and write about the place. I don't want to be just this abstraction writer that just is commenting on the world from a cosmopolitan detached place. I want to go back." So he moves back to Kentucky, gets a professorship at a small Kentucky college near where he grew up.

Him and his wife buy... I think it's 12 acres. Like a hobby farm. He grew up farming, but this is not a production farm. He's like, "We're going to live on 12 acres. I'm going to be a professor, and I'm going to write about Kentucky." And then another plot became available.

"We should probably buy that." And then another plot became available after that. "We should probably buy that." And he ends up with a real production farm, 100-plus acre farm. And this is why he's awesome. He's like, "I'm not into this whole gasoline thing. I'm going to farm the way I learned to farm, which is teams of horses." And he still...

I mean, he doesn't farm. He's 80 now. But all throughout his career, he never went to tractors. He farmed with horses. This guy's awesome. So he leaves New York to farm with horses this farm in Kentucky, rural Kentucky, and is a novelist poet, but mainly an essayist. And he writes essays.

He writes a series of essays, Bill McKibben-style essays about the economy and the environment, and a very influential writer. And writes it from this farm where he doesn't own a computer and you can't read. If you want to talk to him, you have to call the farmhouse and come out to the farm.

He's an awesome guy. And they just released the first definitive essay collection where they pulled together. It's called "The World Ending Fire." This came out in 2019. If you get it, you'll love it. And I think Nick Offerman, who I also love from Parks and Recreation, Ron Swanson, who by the way is a guy who lives in LA, is a working actor, but also has a giant woodworking wood shop in a light industrial warehouse in LA.

And he spends a lot of time building canoes. Like Ron Swanson, he does the intro or the prologue. So on the audio book, Nick Offerman reads it. Anyways, so I read my first collection, full collection of Wendell Berry essays. Are you going to take a field trip out there and check it out?

I should, man. This guy's awesome. He has an essay in there that I might write an essay about for my newsletter that's called "Why I Didn't Buy a Computer," which is cool. And I think this was the '80s when he wrote this essay. And he's like, "Look, here's my rules for technology." And it's very much like I wrote about in Deep Work, where I go and I talk to a farmer, Forrest Pritchard, and say, "Farmers care.

Farmers have pretty strict criteria for when they're going to spend money on a new tool, otherwise they'll go bankrupt. And we should have that same strict criteria when thinking about technology. We shouldn't just say, "I don't know. I heard about TikTok. I should probably use it." We should have a farmer's mindset.

That was my point in Deep Work. It'd be like, "What's the value? What's the cost? Is there better ways to get that value?" Wendell Berry wrote this essay about this in the '80s. I didn't know about this. He gave this whole list of, "Here's how I decide whether or not to use a new technology, and the computer doesn't pass that test." He published it in Harper's.

But what's cool about it is he got in trouble. The whole thing is in the essay collection. He wrote this essay. He's like, "I don't need a computer. See if you can see the part here we got in trouble." He's like, "Yeah. I write my things longhand, and my wife types them up, and we're good." That got him in a lot of trouble.

In the essay collection, Harper's published a lot of these letters, and they published the letters in the essay collection. Then a lot of people got mad about that. They say, "Oh, well, you have a great technology called Wife, and that's how you actually blah, blah, blah." Then he wrote an essay in response.

This is like analog Twitter. You're like Twitter, but if Twitter was in Harper's magazine, and there was a week between every ... He writes this thing in response, and he's like, "Basically, screw you. You don't know our family. You don't know how our marriage works, or this or that." He goes on this big, long, whatever.

He's like, "Why are you all so defensive? I must have touched a nerve saying I don't need a computer, and you're all so mad at me. You're all techno-determinists, apologists." It's really interesting, this heated back and forth. This was kind of interesting. He introduces this very grounded in farming idea of home economics, which is quite different than what you would see in suburban D.C., where it's all salary, job, dual-income government families.

He's like, "We have a home economy." It's a very farmer way of thinking about it, and that we all are ... Everyone in the family, me and my wife, we're all part of. We have this farm we run, and there's all these different things that have to happen, and this fence has to get repaired, and the milking has to happen, and the horses have to be fed.

I don't know how it works. We're all just working on everything as part of keeping this very incorporated, this household economy functioning, which is a very pre ... When you're not thinking about salaried work, but I'm producing from land, it's the way you think. It's like we have endless things that have to happen that we're all working on and trying to keep collectively our farm running.

He thought of his article writing, he just placed it in that same context. He's like, "Yeah, these articles that go out as part of what keeps the household economy running, we're all just part of it. I do some writing, she does some editing, we do some whatever. It's just like I put the staves on the fence, and you whitewash them." It was really interesting to see this clash that was happening.

It's like a culture clash. He was coming from a world where you owned land, and that was your source of income. It was very ... You're a ... I don't know what the right term is, but like yeoman farmer type thing. I'm trying to make a living off of ...

Our family's trying to make a living off of our land. We all work together to try to do it. He was coming from that mindset, but in the '80s, everything was shifting towards most people weren't on farms. Most people weren't running their own small businesses in town, where just the whole family works at it, the donut shop to keep it running.

It was salaries, and it was typically dual income salaries. This whole discussion about work and meaning and who's working and not working, all of that was just beginning, and this "Why don't buy a computer?" came out, boom, right as that was happening. You could see in that frision this is when this huge cultural shift was happening.

That was a cool part of the book, is in this essays and the letters and the back and forth, you can see these worlds colliding. In the collision, you actually got more insight than what any individual essay or letter was saying about. It was a very dialectical thing. It was really cool.

In the collision of Barry with these letter writers in the '80s, you got more insight into the changing culture than you got from just reading any one individual essay about that period. I just wanted to point that out. It was a pretty cool part of the book. You should send him a letter, because earlier you were talking about how your friend saw you mention on Twitter, but this way you only get in touch with him if you send him a letter.

That's literally how you get in touch with him, by the way. I know. You should do it. That's how reporters do it. That's how this essay book came together. You have to send him a letter, and then he may answer. He's very old now. Probably doesn't get much mail.

Yeah. I wonder what that's like. If you only do letters... He probably liked getting mail. But it's the Internet age. Does he get a lot of... I'm sure he gets a lot of stuff from publicists, like books, where you blurb this, that type of stuff. Anyways, Barry's a cool guy.

I'm going to read some more Barry. That's what I read in December 2021. I'm deep into working on January 2022 books, and we will check in at the end of this month with how my current reading is going. With that, why don't we go answer some listener questions. We'll start, as always, with some questions about deep work.

We did a pretty long opening segment, so I am going to be pithy. Of course, I've said that before. We'll see if that actually works out. Our first question comes from Clarissa. Clarissa says, "I'm writing my dissertation, and I am struggling. As a clinician by trait, I struggle with this phase of my PhD program.

I'm somewhat traumatized by my advisor who criticized my ability to write two years ago. I always received excellent grades during course work, but now in dissertation phase, she is beginning to compliment me, but I'm still insecure. I've hired an editor and a communication coach. I buy all the books on how to write a dissertation, but I still struggle with the writing process." Well, Clarissa, what I'm going to do first is de-emphasize the writing aspect of you putting together your dissertation.

This is a complaint I've often had about the rhetoric around dissertations that I used to voice a lot when I was early in my professor career because I had a background in productivity advice. I was asked to come to a lot of what are known as dissertation boot camps, where you get together a bunch of grad students at a school who are working on their dissertations, and they all work together to try to get progress, and they bring in speakers.

I spoke at a lot of these, and this was the point I often made. Stop making writing the only verb you use to describe working on a dissertation. Stop making the whole focus on, "Did I get my pages in? How often am I writing? How many hours of writing am I doing?" Because when it comes to academic work of this type, 80% of the effort is thinking, figuring out what you want to say and making it something worth saying.

Now, what this actually means depends on the field. If you're in a more humanities-based field, you're doing philosophy or something, this really might be the framework you're trying to put together. If this is more of a clinical research-based dissertation, which sounds like might be your case, figuring out what to say is actually doing experiments, looking at what you discovered, coming up with better experiments, understanding the literature, figuring out the thing you want to say is 80% of the work and where almost all of the value comes from.

20% is just getting that down in a way that people can understand. The writing is a small part. I'm saying that, Clarissa, because I want you to feel better. You are not trying to get a Pulitzer for a book of fiction you're writing. You are not trying to pitch to New York or to do some long-form piece where what's really going to matter is the craft and the poetry of your writing.

No, what you're trying to do is take lots of deep thinking on something that's new and important and just express it in a way that people can understand. You need to be clear and you need to be grammatically correct. You need your writing to not get in the way of what you're really trying to do, which is deliver the idea.

So clear writing, well-constructed, simple sentences, good grammar, great. Everything else goes into actually figuring out what you want to say. So, look, you hired an editor, that's fine. They can help you with the clarity. And that's all you need to worry about. Have them look at a couple chapters and they can "Hey, you're using word repetition and be careful with your commas.

Great." They'll help you with that. Your writing will be clear. That problem is solved, and I don't want you to worry about that anymore. Again, you're not Joan Didion. You're not thinking "Can I create poetry with my sentence rhythm?" So don't worry so much about the writing. On the other hand, be very systematic when you think about "What do I want to write about?" Experiments, reading the literature, working over what you want to say, checking that with people.

"Does this make sense? Do you buy this argument?" Let me just give you this argument in words. Just do you buy this argument? Workshopping your ideas. Be much more relentless on thinking about what you're going to say. And once that's right, again, the writing, when it comes to dissertation, is just "Can I get this information from my head to your head without roadblocks wrong the way?" And Clarissa, I think you already can do that.

And the editor will give you a little bit of extra confidence, but you're there with that. All right, let's move on to a question from Kavindra, who says "Cal, I have been implementing ideas from digital minimalism in a world without email, and I have found that my work day has so much extra time in it.

Aside, everyone finds this when they actually begin being much more intentional about their time allocation, when they become much more intentional about the processes by which they collaborate, they realize that I only need this much hours to get my work done. It's a little bit of a secret." All right, going back to the question, "I only need less than three-fourths of my work hours to be completely on top of my duties.

Now that I have this time, I am realizing that there is much in my not work buckets that I can tackle. However, I do not want to mix non-work things with being at the office for my own mental clarity. I also don't want to look like a slacker. Do you have examples of how people handle this in between time?" So, Kavindra, my standard suggestion here is that you should take a phantom part-time job.

So this is my terminology for the very common occurrence among my listeners and readers where they get very intentional about their time, realize that end processes, time and processes, realize they have a lot of extra time in their day. They can stay on top of their job with a lot of extra time, which again is not surprising because most people are terrible at the mechanics of what they do for a living.

So when you're not terrible, you realize you don't need as much time. And what I recommend is this idea of you really treat it like I have a part-time job and that's what I do in that extra one-fourth, in your case, one-fourth of my time that's free. And you schedule your work for this phantom part-time job just like you're scheduling your work for your main job and it happens during the workday and you can decide if you want to, let's say, end your workday implicitly at 3 and then switch to your phantom part-time job or interleave your phantom part-time job during the day or like a lot of people will do their phantom part-time job first thing in the morning, then switch over to their other job because there's lots of meetings and stuff that happen more in the afternoon the morning, however you want to do it, but you really treat it systematically like I have two jobs.

You call the second one a phantom part-time job because you don't make it visible and you don't talk about it. Now, what do you do with your phantom part-time job? You have three options. One, you use it to move to the next level or open up new opportunities in your existing work.

So you could be dedicating this time to let's say cultivating a new rare and valuable skill that's going to give you a lot more options or control or autonomy once you do it. Two, it could be a side hustle. I am starting, I want to write a novel. I'm starting a business on the side.

I'm starting a podcast or whatever it is. So you're working on a side hustle that may just be for interest or it may be that you wanted to eventually generate enough income that you can renegotiate your main work situation to be maybe part-time itself or three, your phantom part-time job is a completely non-professional personal interest.

I want to master you know, coffee appreciation. I want to master a genre of fiction or whatever. Just something high quality leisure that you really want to invest in and get better at. The key thing here about the phantom part-time job is that it's focused. You are putting this time towards one thing repeatedly and carefully planning when it happens.

That is going to get you away from this weird scattered feeling of just I'm slacking or doing lots of hobbies and work and or getting lost in rabbit holes on the internet. So I love the focus of the phantom part-time job. Choose one thing. I am going to do this thing over the next six months during my work hours in the one-fourth of the work hours I have free.

When you're that consistent and focused, you can do really cool things with that time. Alright, moving on. We have a question here from Lisa. Lisa asks how can I take regular eye breaks for eye strain in a way that accommodates deep work? Well, Lisa, I want you to do more productive meditation.

Make this a bigger part of your habit that is in almost any circumstance where thinking has to be done. Alright, I'm putting together this strategy memo. What is the outline I want to use? I've received an email from a client or my boss and it's going to be pretty tricky.

How do I answer this right? I got to really think this through. What I want to propose here. I have computer code I need to write, but I really don't know what type of object do I need here? What's the right algorithmic approach? Whatever it is, whenever you come across what should be if you're non-entry level on a regular basis, some contemplation that has to be done.

Do that on foot away from a computer screen. This is what I call productive meditation. Working on a professional problem in your head while walking. This will be hard at first, but you'll get better at it with practice. Bring a notebook with you. When we walk, take notes. Walk, take notes.

You're away from a computer. Notebooks do not cause eye strain. And then you come back once you've thought it through and are essentially transcribing that thinking back into your computer world. If you do most of your non-trivial contemplation on foot, your head, walking and notebook, this will automatically induce a regular rhythm of breaks from your computer screen that really should handle the eye strain, but also I think make you more effective at your work.

All right. We have a question from Sophie. Sophie asks, "How do you manage long research projects while reducing anxiety?" And Sophie has some elaboration. She says, "I'm a PhD researcher in economics. From the start of a research project to publishing the paper usually takes three to four years." Wow.

How do I manage this type of long and draggy research project, perhaps intertwined with other concurrent projects? All right. Well, that's long. Three to four years is quite long. I'm assuming at that duration what happens is three to four years of work and then a bunch of papers you produce at the end of it.

If not, make that the case? I don't know economics well, but I do remember Adam Grant explained this to me at some point. I was talking to the author Adam Grant, who's also a professor at Wharton. And he talked about this, that in their work, which is very data analysis oriented, he's very economics oriented, even though he's a business professor, there's a long period of trying to get access to data sets that are good.

And then once you have those data sets, you've really learned them, you pluck a lot of fruit from them. Paper, paper, paper, paper. So that might help, by the way. You might amortize here when you're doing these long projects, think about getting lots of papers out of the project.

The other things I'll suggest, this was sort of an approach I used a lot in academia, the two plus one rule. So have two big projects you're working on at one time, but in different stages. So you have a project that's really in the hardcore, we're analyzing the data, we're starting to write stage.

Have another one that's in the very early stage. I'm negotiating with the French Census Bureau to try to get the data I'm going to need to do my big Thomas Piketty style economic growth analysis or something. So different stages. So the early stage project requires sporadic attention and you can put it on hold for a couple weeks at a time, it's okay.

You feel better about that because your second project is much closer to completion. And once that's done, your first project gets closer to completion, you can add in another early stage. So that's the two of the two plus one rule. The plus one is do something small that ships at least once every four to six months.

So you feel like there's some progress happening. So hey, every semester I'm going to write, I'm going to publish a book review, I'm going to do a short paper, I'm going to go back to this data set I really analyzed and wrote some epic papers about let me take a month and put half of my research time on to extracting an additional cool little insight that's going to be a short note or a conference talk or something like that.

So there's some wheel of public production that spins at a faster rate. So two plus one is a good rule for these type of research fields. All right, let's do one more question about deep work. This one appropriately enough comes from deep academic. I think if your parents named you that it would be, you know, would be a shame if you became like a YouTube influencer.

So I guess you didn't have many options about what your job was going to be once your parents named you deep academic. Here's the question. How do you handle paper rejection as an academic? How do you help your students get over it? Yeah, it's a good question. I struggle with it.

Non-academics don't realize this. They don't realize how incredibly competitive academia is, especially sort of tenure-track R1 research institutions. There's these venues in which you can publish your papers that are very stratified. And it is incredibly hard to get your papers published in the good venues. It's very competitive. Most things get rejected.

So you're constantly in this competition. I think the public sometimes has this view of academia where A) they call it teaching, which again, research-oriented academics is a source of frustration that their job is described as teaching. It's like if you're a professional basketball player and people were like, "Oh yeah, you do leg pressing." You're like, "Well yeah, I do leg pressing in the gym as part of my training for being a really good basketball player," which is incredibly competitive and hard.

The hardest thing in academia is trying to publish in these competitive venues. It's intellectual warfare, the very smartest people in the world fighting for a small number of slots. 10 to 15 percent of what is submitted is going to get accepted. It's very difficult. So you get a lot of rejections.

It's competitive and it's difficult. I struggle with this. I've gone through different phases in my career. So when I was a graduate student, my pace of publication would be much less. Maybe one or two papers a year when I first got going. It would hit me hard when a paper would get rejected because it's all I had worked on for a few months.

I have notes in my Moleskines I can go find of me reacting to rejections. I took them hard. Then as I hit my stride as a junior faculty member, the wheel started to click and I published a lot. I really got a lot of stuff accepted. There's a nice golden period where I published a ton of papers, got tenure early, got a distinguished professorship.

Things were really rolling well. I was publishing four or five papers a month. Then I more recently, I've talked about this on the show, the pandemic knocked me back to the world of not submitting as much, way more rejections for the small number of things I was submitting. I'm back into that world of rejection.

Briefly, what happened there for people who are non-academics, again, because it's so competitive, there is an incredibly high quality threshold. What happened to me during the pandemic is two things happened. One, I got knocked out of my collaboration cycles because I have collaborators around the world and we meet in person twice a year.

They're top-notch collaborators. I've known most of them since I was 22 years old at MIT. They're all over the world, but we meet twice a year. Usually, there's a time in the summer, there's a conference we all go to. One of my close collaborators, longtime collaborators, comes back to DC every summer.

His family's here. We bring in other collaborators. We all get together. That's where most of the ideas were generated that we then write papers on. Turns out, if you don't have those meetings, as happened during the pandemic, you don't have the good ideas to work on. Two, I just didn't have the time.

It was the typical impacts a lot of people had, especially people with kids with the pandemic. I didn't have as much time to spend on research. I went to about 50% effort. The issue is, in competitive academia, 50% effort doesn't mean, "Oh, you publish 50% less papers." It means any paper you write, the quality falls just enough that they're all below the acceptance threshold.

I did that for a year. I basically didn't publish anything. Then I realized, "Oh, I should probably just put all of my energy into less papers." Last year, I published a very nice paper where I put my energy just, "If I can't have as much time to spend on this, let me put all the time into one paper because I can't fall below it." Anyways, I've been really struggling with it.

It's the lowest publication year last year. It was the lowest publication year I've ever had as a professional academic because of the pandemic. I still struggle with it, the academic. I think it's hard. The best thing you can do is tune up your process. After some hard rejections, tune up the process.

What's missing here? What would I need to do to not get rejected as often? Do I need better collaboration, more work, more whatever it is? Figure out how do I tune up my process? By the way, you can decide, "I don't want to do that. I don't have time to do that.

That's not where I am in my career," but be clear about it. Then two, do the real work. There's no shortcuts around it. You probably just have to do the stuff that's hard. Read the papers, understand what's going on, push your ideas farther than you think they need to be pushed.

Do the work that's required. Tune up your process. It's the best you can do. Then keep in mind there's some stochasticity too. There is going to be some luck. That should even itself out. Anyways, I'm with you. I came off a five-year period of hotshot publishing down to nothing.

Now, I'm crawling back out of that, but carefully because I don't know that I want to go back to hotshot computer science publishing. There's so much other interesting stuff happening in the world now, especially my involvement in digital ethics and some of the public-facing writing I'm doing. I'm rebuilding my life from scratch academically.

I will have more publications than I just had, but maybe not as much as I used to. It's hard. I feel your pain. Tune, process, do real work, recognize there's luck, and otherwise, try not to obsess too much about it because man, paper rejections is tough. All right. That's all the time we have for questions on Deep Work.

Why don't we try to do a few questions now about the deep life? Moving on with questions about the deep life, our first one comes from Loves Deep Work. Good name. This question is, what are your thoughts on fasting and deep work? Well, I will say I do this accidentally quite a bit, as my wife will tell you and complain about sometimes when I'm really locked in on a deadline.

I will just work all day and not eat. And I'll be honest, it doesn't seem to affect my work, though it does make me a real annoying person to be around afterwards. That's why she does not like that. My producer, Jesse, though, knows more about fasting. Jesse, do I have this right?

You don't eat, what, lunch or you don't eat breakfast? You have some fasting thing going on. You probably know more about this. I eat basically just dinner every day. But I started, I discovered it through Tim Ferriss' podcast when he was interviewing Terry Crews. Terry, I saw a picture of him, he looked jacked anyway.

And he's like, "Yeah." Ferriss asked him if he could do one thing. He's 50-something at the time. What would he do? He goes, "I would have fasted earlier." And I immediately started doing that. But I started an eight-hour period. I did that for a year. Then I just narrowed it even more.

So now I just eat dinner. So what do you get out of that? What was Terry Crews pitching? If you do it, you get cut. Oh, interesting. Because you're, it all kind of calories in and calories out. So I mean, I wanted to get more cut. And I work out a lot anyway.

And it was amazing. It was like, I immediately, well, not immediately, but over time, I got a lot more cut, more cut than I've ever been. And I've been doing this now for four or five years. By the way, those are all phrases you would never hear at a computer science faculty meeting.

I wanted to get more cut. I'm working out a lot anyways. These are all phrases you wouldn't hear. But what about your concentration ability? Do you get hungry? Do you find that you're not able to think as clearly? Do you get the opposite? When it comes to this question about deep work, what do you think the impact would be?

I think you actually think more clearly. Are you hungry? Do you get hungry? Yeah, I definitely get hungry. But every day is kind of like a battle. So every day you kind of just get through it. And eventually you get to the evening and you can eat. The other thing about it too is you can't really gorge at night either.

You still got to eat healthy, especially as you get older and stuff. So that's one thing I realized. But the healthy food, just the nature of that food also probably just regulates what you can eat, right? Because if you're eating vegetables or whatever, there's only so much you can eat.

Whereas if it was like a bag of tortilla chips, you could probably crush three of those. Yeah, you can't eat any processed foods for the most part unless you're cheating. I was just reading, I just revisited Tom Brady's TB12 book where he has a nutrition chapter in there. And it's simple stuff.

He doesn't do anything that crazy. He just eats healthy foods. And you have to do that most of the time. But in terms of thinking and doing work, I think it really helps. And plus it doesn't, it limits the cognitive strain of buying a lot of stuff and think about getting food all the time and stuff like that.

All right. So it sounds like maybe if this listener wants to experiment, experiment start with the eight hour. So skip breakfast or something. Yeah, I've had a lot of buddies because I've been doing it for a while and some of them do like eight and eight and a half hours, which I did for a year.

And then I was like, I think I can crank this up even more because sometimes in the evenings and stuff, I want to still be able to have beer and stuff every once in a while. So I wanted to have more flexibility. So then I was just like, let me experiment with narrowing the number.

And then it just became basically like an hour and a half to two hour, pretty narrow window. So I think we now have a bestseller here. Here's the diet. Only beer for eight hours. And then you go to food for the four hours that remains. The one thing I have heard, I've tried this before informally, I might try this more.

I do know a couple of buddies who swear by they do like Laird Hamilton's coffee creamer or something like this, like a coconut oil, like a healthy fat in their coffee for breakfast and no other food. And they swear by that really giving them mental clarity. So it's like the caffeine, I guess there's a couple of things that goes on.

One, the fats they use in these sort of high fat creamers slows down potentially the spread of the caffeine. So it spreads it out. And I don't know if there's a ketone situation or just an energy situation, but I do know people who swear by that, that they do one of these, I don't know how you call them, clean fat coffee creamers.

And the one I've tried is Laird Hamilton's. Yeah, I've tried that too. I like it. Most of the time I try to drink my coffee black, but three times a week, I give myself the flexibility to have some cream. Yeah. That's something you could try. Maybe the, what's his name?

Dave Asprey has something too. The Bulletproof guy, they have some other, but it's all the same thing. It's like coconut fat style MCT oil. You know, you give that a try and then just wait till at least lunch. The only thing I know for sure is true is that high carb or processed food crashes your thinking.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, the food marketing industry is like, does one of the best food marketing campaigns of all time convincing us that we need to eat? Go to any grocery store and you can see aisles and aisles of stuff that you should just avoid. Yeah. So I mean, if you're eating, you know, a burger and fries for lunch, you're not deep thinking that afternoon.

All right, we'll go on to the next question here. This is from Cal Fan. All right, so this must be someone who went to school in California. How do you maintain a healthy body posture while being at computer throughout the day? Don't be at a computer all throughout the day.

It's much easier than you know, having to buy one of those Twitch streamer style jet engine jet fighter pilot gamer chairs to try to get your posture just right. Just don't be at your computer all day. In response to an earlier question this episode, I suggested anytime you have actual non-trivial contemplative thinking to do, do it on the foot.

Just have that rule and you're gonna do better thinking but you're also gonna be up a lot more. So that's the key. Make the posture I mean, have good posture, but make it somewhat irrelevant because you're not at your chair long enough at a stretch that non-perfect posture is gonna cause a problem.

All right, a question here from Monkey Mind. Hi Cal, what do you suggest to people who pick up habits and suggestions you give but not stick to them for more than a few days? I tell them they're losers. I tell them they need to give up and just watch TikTok videos.

No, this is, here's the thing, you're probably you're probably bringing on too much at a time it's probably unrealistic and your mind is probably not on board with all the different things you're doing. So if you have all these big plans there's a deeper part of your mind, the planned evaluation center is probably saying I don't know Monkey Mind this stuff is not all gonna work, this is too much and we're not gonna do it.

You kind of overloaded that planning. What I usually tell people is the foundation to any of these type of professional style habits is daily metric tracking. That's the one thing you have to do. It takes seven seconds at the end of each day or you can do it each morning and you have some metrics you track and you always do it.

That's the thing you have to commit to. It's why my time block planner has this metric planning section on every daily page is you do that. Now these metrics then can point towards the habits you're trying to do through the day and you keep track of it with the metrics.

Did I time block plan? Check. Did I do my whatever, my morning deep work session? Check. Did I do my exercise section? Check. How many chapters did I read? Whatever you're tracking and you track it there. The key thing is you track it even if it's zero, even if it's no.

And even if it's again and again, no, I didn't do this, I didn't do this, I didn't do this. That's fine. But you're tracking. Here's what actually happened. That's the foundation for any consistent habit formation when it comes to professional habits. Then you begin to experiment with, okay, what is the right first step collection of habits that my metric tracking, I eventually actually start positively marking those things down on a consistent basis.

And you start small. All I want to do is a good morning planning session. And I'll give a check if I do that. Okay, I'm doing that. I'm doing that. Now all I want to do is time block plan my day. Let me check if I'm doing that. Then you slowly start seeing what works and what doesn't.

If you try something and you have the evidence in your metric tracking, you're not doing it, you pull it back, let me try something else. You slowly build up these habits. But you have to have that foundation of I'm keeping tabs on a record every day of what I did or didn't do.

Your mind knows it's being tracked. It's embarrassed if you blow things off that you could do. That is the foundation. So do the metric tracking even if you're embarrassed by what you're tracking. And then slowly and experimentally add things into your life. Once something sticks, move on to something else.

Give this a year of work and you'll come out on the other side with a pretty good set of carefully tested habits that work really well for you and your situation that you consistently follow. But it takes work and you can't do that work without tracking metrics. I will do one more question here.

This one's from Alexander who asks how does a digital minimalist find interesting books to read? Well, my advice here is don't overthink it. Books are interesting just by definition. It's someone who has thought a lot about something, be it a fictional world or an idea or a period of history or event, have put a lot of effort into getting their thoughts on the paper.

Just read. Don't overthink what you read. You're more likely to do more reading if you don't care so much about what it is exactly that you're reading. Go back and listen at the beginning of this episode or from last month or the month before the segments I do on the books I read each month and you will see it is all over the place.

I'm not trying to impress anyone. I'm not trying to rigorously expand my knowledge of some niche area. I just wander all over the place. I've been obsessed recently with Hollywood figures. Why not? Let's read a bunch of books about that. I'll read random fiction. I'll throw in straight up self-help, but then I'll mix that in with essay collections and journalistic nonfiction.

I don't care. I grab stuff. I finish. I need a new book. I grab stuff. I don't overthink it. You shouldn't overthink it either. Reading is like calisthenics for your ability to understand and think about the world. Don't sweat exactly what grip you're using on this metaphorical pull-up bar.

Just get on that bar most days and do some exercising. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Remember, if you like what you hear on this podcast, you will like what you read on my longstanding email newsletter. You can subscribe at calnewport.com. We'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode.

And until then, as always, stay deep.

Full Length Episode | #163 | January 11, 2022

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