Next question, EJ, a 39 year old software engineer from Australia. How do you balance an ambitious plan for a future deep life while finding contentment in the life you have right now? Well, this is a complicated one. And I say complicated because I can speak from my own experience and my own struggles with this issue.

I was reflecting on this and I realized there's been different periods of my adult life where I've had different relationships with this issue. There's been periods of my adult life where I am very focused on the now. What's going on in my life right now, finding gratitude in it, finding enjoyment in it.

And those are actually pretty meaningful periods of my life. I do look back at those with nostalgia. And there's other periods of my life where I'm very future focused. Things are happening and it's harder for me to get to the now, which has its own issues with it. So let me be more specific.

Thinking back on my life, my postdoc years at MIT, my postdoc years at MIT, I remember as a time where I was very focused on my life in the moment. So Julie and I lived on Beacon Hill during my postdoc years. I really liked it on Beacon Hill in Boston.

I mean, it looks like a movie about colonial America. It's cobblestone streets. They have gas lamps and like fogs would come in off of the river. I mean, you really feel like you're living in Dickensian novel. And I really enjoyed that. It was like you're just this interesting, intellectually interesting place.

I wasn't that caught up in work. I was writing a book. I was writing So Good They Can't Ignore You and enjoying that. My first year of a postdoc, I was just postdoc and I was writing research papers. I wasn't even really doing academic job searching yet. For some reason, I wasn't very worried about academic job searching.

I probably should have been more worried, but it wasn't a source of stress for me. And I just had a lot of time where I would just focus on enjoyable things in the moment. Like let's read The Transcendentalist by the Banks of the Charles. So I did a lot of that.

I ran every day year round for lunch along the Charles. Snow, heat, throughout. I got really into monitoring the seasons on my walk to work. So the same walk over the Longfellow Bridge. Okay, now this tree has leaves. Now this doesn't. You can tell I was reading a lot of Thoreau at this time.

So that was often coming in. I would get lost. I'd read or listen to fantasy novels and just kind of get lost. Like what a cool world. Wouldn't that be interesting? I had a dog at this point. Was just spending a lot of time like training the dog and going for walks.

Because I had a fake job as a postdoc and Julie had a real job. I had a lot of just alone time. Just a lot of time to fill doing whatever I thought might be interesting. And so that's just how I remember that time. Was really, really seeking out just things that were interesting or things I was enjoying about the moment.

Now compare that to right now. I feel very different right now because there's a lot of interesting developments happening. Not in a period of stasis. We have the sort of online media company. Jesse knows about this. Like a lot of interesting stuff is happening, right? I mean, a lot of things are on the horizon.

Things are moving. That's interesting. Interesting stuff's happening at Georgetown with the research I'm doing now, the research I'm shifting into, some of the public facing work I'm happening. Professionally speaking, there's just a lot of places where I'm hitting on all cylinders. Interesting opportunities are coming and going away. And so it's very difficult not to be focused on all these things that are developing or potentially coming.

And I've noted like, I kind of miss the just extended gracious enjoyment of the moment that I've had at other parts of my life. But this is all trade-offs. So I would say during that period back on Beacon Hill, yeah, there was a lot more just, "Hey, I'm enjoying the spring sun by the Charles and reading a copy of Thoreau." But I think also there's probably more anxiety in that period.

I mean, everything felt a little bit uncertain. There's this kind of background current of uncertainty, this little, some nagging stuff in the background. Whereas right now, there's a lot of excitement and stuff that's happening. I'm proud of things that are happening. There's a lot of long efforts starting to pay off.

So like, that's a nice thing about now. And so they have their pluses, they have their pluses, they have their minuses. But these things kind of ebb and flow. Anyways, here's my solution, and I'll offer this to you, is that when you're in those periods where you're just present, you're Paul Jarvis on the island and you have some course you're working on, but mainly just spending time in your greenhouse, like working on your garden, have something that you're working on in the background to be excited about.

Values driven, would open up interesting opportunities in your life or have an impact on the world, sticks within your vision of your lifestyle, but it's something new that you're heading towards. So that's how you offset the anxiety of unstable stasis. If you're instead in a period like me now, do hard work shutdowns every day, shutdown complete.

Planning, even if it's exciting, I'm not going to do any more planning thoughts about a new segment for the show or what's going to happen with this new book chapter, this new research paper, working on hard shutdowns and make them hard, trust them. And then do a source of gratitude every night.

I am going to go on a walk or do something with the kids or go see this movie where I'm going to sort of force myself to just be gracious about the moment, to try to generate that physical sensation of gratitude. And it's like a muscle you're trying to get those grooves in your brain engraved.

That's what I've been trying to do. Some periods I'm better than that at others, but when I really get in that pattern, it really does help. So that's my advice. You have these yin and yang periods and whichever one you're in, you need to properly offset it so that you don't fall too far, too far into that particular, that particular direction.

Here's a quiz, Jesse, what famous, I don't know why anyone would know this, but what famous, uh, thriller writer has long lived on Beacon Hill? Brandon Sanderson. It is where Beacon Hill is where Brandon Sanderson wrote name of the wind. So little known fact, Robin cook, Robin cook, who writes the medical thrillers.

Okay. Because Beacon Hill is right next to Charles MGH. So a really good hospital in Boston and he was a ophthalmology, I think, resident or fellow. So he was living on Beacon Hill. So there's doctors, which is another cool thing about Beacon Hill. I mean, the houses are really narrow.

They're kind of small, but they're awesome. And there's doctors from the hospital who live there. And when you get the big snow storms in Boston, they cross country ski to the hospital. So you would see them, not like tons of them, but there's at least one or two doctors.

We knew that when cross country ski down to the hospital. Anyways, he was living there and then he hit it big with his, uh, whatever his first thriller was. And so he's just been there ever since. So he quit medicine because he was killing it on the books. But I went to see him speak when I lived there because of the Beacon Hill civic association.

He would like once a year, like come and give a talk. And it was actually fascinating. He was like, he gave a talk about how he became a thriller writer and he basically like took a bunch of existing thrillers and broke them all down and wrote on index cards, like all the different types of beats you would see in these thrillers.

Like I don't know, uh, being chased through a whatever the reversal, the whatever. And then just like took out all these index cards and just tried to figure out how many of these can I get into my book. And he would just organize them and then write his book along that way.

So I thought that was interesting. And the other thing we learned from him is he was involved in, he was in the Navy and was involved in submarines. It was like a ship's doctor on submarines and also was involved in scuba, early scuba experimentation with decompression chambers and everything.

And so there was periods of times where he was on submarines and when he was in decompression chambers for a week after doing deep dives, he brought his typewriter with him. So ultimate deep worker right there is he, he said I had nothing to do, but basically when I was in the decompression chamber, the internet with a typewriter, it's kind of like the shiny that I'd be worried about it.

Anyways, interesting guy. He wears like weird pants. That's what you need to know. He wears pants with patterns on them. (upbeat music)