This may sound stupid at first, because we all think all the time. Our minds are worrying all the time. If anything, our problem is getting away from our own thoughts. But when I say "think" here, I mean something very specific. I mean giving sustained attention to potentially complicated or ambiguous information with the ultimate goal of building a new conceptual structure that has value to yourself or to the world.

This is what I mean by "thinking." Here's the thing, most people are very bad at this brand of serious thinking. The way most people go through their lives is as follows. First, they outsource any sort of normative or ethical thinking to online tribal vibes and approval. I don't know, what does my team think?

Do they like this? They don't like this? What's going to get me not yelled at? What's going to get me approved? That's about as far as I want to go trying to actually build up some sort of framework for understanding what I stand for, what's good and what's bad.

Most people prioritize a sort of high-energy emotion in the moment over the subtler satisfactions of real understanding and appreciation. They want to just feel something, and often their phone can give them that something quite easily. They don't want to do the work for actually deeply engaging with something beautiful.

Most people also gravitate when it comes towards the realm of accomplishment, towards checklist productivity. Just give me a list of things I can follow where the key here is that the information is scarce, and I have a special list of things to do, and then I'll be in great shape, or then my web business will take off, or then I'll make six figures per month.

Just give me checklists. I want secret information that I found online as opposed to seeking out to produce things that are unambiguously valuable. Serious thinkers live differently. They have a deep and evolving understanding of the world, what's good, what's bad, and what it means to live a good life.

They appreciate the beautiful, they appreciate the quality, and they find inspiration in it. Their output is often slower, but when it does come out, it's more impact, and it engenders more respect. So if you're interested in the deep life, serious thinking needs to be a goal that you are pursuing.

So here's what I want to do today is help you become a more serious thinker, and I want to do that in a practical way. I have five different practices. Each of these are concrete that I want to run through. These are all things you can start doing right away in your own life that if you stick with them, you will find after a month, your cognitive abilities are much better than they were before.

After six months, the experience of your day-to-day life is going to be notably different and richer, and after a year or so, you're going to find yourself actually able to produce ideas for yourself and the world that have real value. Really, you're going to unlock major options. So it's worth becoming a serious thinker.

Let's go through five practices for how to do it. I'm going to illustrate for those of you who are watching instead of just listening. By popular demand, I will illustrate what we're doing here. So on the screen, I'm going to put in the center my world-famous picture of a brain.

So what we got here is a cerebellum, and we got some wrinkles and folds in the brain. So I have a brain in the center, and I'm going to illustrate around this. I'll put one expertly drawn icon per practice we are going to discuss. All right. So the first practice that I want to discuss is to improve the quality and decrease the quantity of information that you consume.

So to illustrate this with an icon, I'm going to expertly draw here the Twitter T. I know they've switched to X, but I sort of am boycotting that. So I'm drawing a T, and I'm putting a circle with a line through it. I'm going to indicate consuming better quality and less quantity of information.

So what does this mean? I'm talking particularly here about news or other information you use to learn more things about the world. Stop using social media algorithms to curate your news flow. Social media algorithms are bad curators. Their interest is not making you as informed as possible. Their interest is making you as engaged as possible to make you as engaged as possible.

They are going to push you to places that are not emotionally healthy. It's also not going to lead you to the most nuanced understanding of issues. I want you instead to focus on a multi-scale news and information consumption. So I want your news and information consumption to be divided over three scales, daily, monthly, and seasonal.

And here's what I mean by that. Daily have a very small number, probably just one sources of quality, non-algorithmically curated news and information. This could be one of the growing number of daily news roundup newsletters. I like, for example, if you're a subscriber to the New York Times, I think David Leonhardt's daily news summary is a fantastic one.

I'm saying this mainly because they featured my profile from the New York Times Magazine from last year. They re-featured it recently in that newsletter. So we know that's expertly curated. It could be a daily news roundup podcast. It could be a physical newspaper that you pick up or have delivered.

Okay. At the monthly scale, you spend the time to go through a collection of, let's say, two to six in-depth long-form magazine articles. So now this is still relatively current, but not day-to-day current. This is now information where enough time has passed for a professional journalist or writer to actually spend some time to really digest information about what's going on in the world and produce and have edited a long-form piece.

Now we're at a lag of a month or so from what's actually going on. This is where, for example, you can pull out a few selected articles from my own journalistic home, which is the New Yorker. Maybe you pull out some long-form articles from the Atlantic or Foreign Affairs or the National Review or the Wall Street Journal's Sunday issue.

Whatever it is that you particularly follow, could be print, could be not print, tablet magazine. I'm just thinking of different things I've pulled from before. And you're like, "Here's my six articles I've gathered throughout the month, 3,000, 5,000 word beast. I'm going to go to a coffee shop somewhere.

I've got these printed out." And let's just engage at this slower scale, deeper understanding, slower scale. Now we jump up to the seasonal scale, and this is books. When there's something going on in the world you care about, you should get a book written by an expert, someone who has spent years working on this artifact based on many more years of actually engaging with this topic.

And you get this beautiful artifact here that you can hold and consume in about a week or two that is going to give you as deep or nuanced as an understanding of a topic as you're ever likely to get outside of actually studying that topic professionally yourself. So you should, at the seasonal scale, have a book that you're reading on whatever thing is going on in the world that is most important to you.

So let's take this multi-scale information consumption plan out for a spin with a particular topic, and let's compare it to what most people would normally do. Let's talk about fears about AI. Now what you could do, which is what most people do, is let me read a lot of tweets and histrionic YouTube videos and short articles on the online news sites.

They're all like, "Oh my god, Google Gemini is doing this. ChatGPT just did that. Sam Altman just said this." And there's this sort of just frenzied sense of, "I'm just like very uneasy. I don't know what's going on, and I'm kind of stressed all the time." What would it look like to engage this topic with a multi-scale information consumption approach?

Well, you would be getting daily information. When something important happened, it would be covered in whatever your high-quality, non-algorithmically curated source of news would be. When Sam Altman, for example, got fired and then rehired, David Leonhardt's newsletter covered that. So you would get the main points. You're subscribed to Axios's daily news roundup.

You would get the main points. Then on the seasonal scale, you could actually say, "Let me sit down with, for example, the New Yorker's recent AI issue and read some of these longer form pieces. Let me sit down and listen to..." Ezra Klein had a fantastic AI podcast recently with Kevin Roos and Casey Newhoff, I think.

"Let's spend an hour and 20 minutes just walking through what we know. Maybe you go back and finally read my New Yorker piece on the guts of how Chats GPT actually works. This is not so frenzied. This is more digested information." "Okay, I'm getting some deeper sense of what's going on." On the scale of a season, you say, "I'm going to read a book about artificial intelligence, maybe about the alignment problem or how people are thinking about its role in society and now get a really measured, deeper understanding of it." That is how multiscale information consumption works.

Serious thinkers are going to consume information that way. They have no interest for algorithmically curated social media information. The same thing, though, applies, I'm going to say this, in improvement of quality, decreasing of quantity. We can think of this also applying to other types of information as well. Think about shows or movies you watch on streaming services.

To increase the quality of that, simple heuristic, one-to-one ratio, fun smart. If I watch a movie that is just pure fun, I want to watch something that's going to challenge me, either artistically, this is a well-respected movie, or informationally, it's a documentary on something that's complicated, but I want to know about it.

One-to-one ratio, so that the quality of what you're engaging in the streaming media gets better. You can do the same thing with podcasts. Here's a fun podcast, one-to-one ratio with something that I'm learning from, etc. Practice number two, increase your comfort with boredom. Let's draw a picture for this one as well.

What I'm going to draw here is a rock. All right, there we go. Sitting on this rock, we see someone contemplating. Jesse appreciates my artwork. Increase comfort with boredom. What is the idea here before we get even more specific about the practices? If your brain is used to this idea that it is never bored, that when it lacks novel stimuli, you will always feed it a shiny digital treat in the form typically of your phone, or an iPad, or a browser tab that's going to give you something emotionally salient.

In the moment, it can't tolerate serious thinking. Because serious thinking requires you to keep your attention sustained, this inner eye of your attention sustained on a single abstract topic. That's boring, because there's not a lot of novel stimuli. Your brain has to be comfort with boredom. So by increasing your comfort with boredom, you're just teaching your brain it's not that you're bored all the time.

It's also not trying to put too much of a positive value on boredom. It's just teaching your brain sometimes we're bored and sometimes we're not, and I'm comfortable with that state of boredom. So how can you do this? Two things I'm going to suggest. One, actually have every day a particular outing, or chore, or task you do.

It can be short, but a particular thing you do without your phone. Go to the drugstore, go put in your laundry. It doesn't have to be long. Taking out the garbage and do it with nothing in your ear. So you're like, okay, I'm just doing this activity. There's no novel stimuli here.

I'm just kind of having to be alone with my own thoughts. A lot of people who take this advice will also typically add a longer outing on the weekends, hour plus, no phone. You can ramp that up over the weekend. The other really important thing you can do is the phone foyer method.

The idea here is when you're at your home or your apartment or wherever you live, you keep your phone plugged in in one place. If you have a house with a foyer, it's in the foyer or it's in the kitchen. If you have an apartment, whatever, but it stays plugged in when you're at home in one place.

If you need to look something up, you go to where it's plugged in and you look it up there. If you need to receive or text with someone, you go where the phone is plugged in and you receive and do text there. Same with phone calls. You have to go to where the phone is.

It is not where you are. Now, this is going to be annoying at first, but what you're doing here is severing this permanent accessibility of the distraction. So now when you're watching something or doing something in your own house or in your own apartment, you can't pull out the phone.

It's somewhere else. You still have the benefits of ID to look this thing up, but you have to walk 10 feet to go do it. You're going to get more many moments of boredom during your evenings and mornings at home. Very important if you want to prepare your brain to be a serious thinker.

All right. Third thing I want to suggest here, third practice for becoming a more serious thinker, cultivate your ability to pay attention. So illustrate this here. You won't know at first what this means. So provocatively, what I'm drawing here is a stopwatch. Is there something on the top, Jesse?

I don't know. Let's do this. Perfect rendition of a stopwatch. Why am I drawing a stopwatch? Because one of the first things I'm going to recommend for cultivating your ability to pay attention is interval training. So actually increasing the timed intervals at which you're comfortable giving sustained attention to a single target.

These intervals should be intense. You only increase the time of the intervals as you get comfortable with the current duration, right? So what we're trying to do here is get your mind comfortable with sustaining attention. So the previous practice, getting a comfort for boredom, we think of that as the table stakes, the foundation.

Your mind has to be okay with not having a lot of stimuli. This practice now about focusing and practicing the actual activity of focus, the actual activity of sustaining attention. So you have to be able to do it, and then you have to actually practice what this actually feels like.

So with interval training, you can do this with multiple activities. It could be a difficult work or school activity. It can also be, and I think this is critical, a high quality leisure activity, like watching a movie, which a lot of people, especially young people right now have a very hard time doing for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time without actually looking at their phone.

It's gonna be a high quality leisure activity or a difficult work activity. It could be reading a book, even anything that requires focus. You start with an interval that you're comfortable with, keep it small at first, maybe even just 10 minutes, you use a real timer, set that timer, and might as well do it on your phone, by the way, because you want your phone right there in timer mode.

So you know for a fact if you use your phone, because you've left the timer mode on your phone, set the timer for 10 minutes and work on that work task, watch that movie or read that book with as much concentration as you can muster, zero checks of anything screened outside of your target until that timer goes off.

If you break that concentration, I just have to check Twitter. I just have to see what's going on my text messages. You have to start that timer and start it over. It doesn't count. Once you're able to consistently hit the current time duration, you increase it by 10 minutes.

So this is just literally training the thing you want to be better at, sustaining attention on cognitive tasks, the absence of stimuli, sustaining the attention. You got to train your brain what that feels like. Okay, another thing you can do when it comes to cultivating your ability to pay attention is more passive, which is care about ritual, care about environment.

Set up, this is where I go to read. And it's different than where I just sit and work or watch TV. I've set up like a very special chair and I have this light here and it's by like a warm radiator in the winter. This is where I go to work on deep work challenges versus just regular work or email.

I have a separate part of my house. I went up to the attic and I've renovated an eve there and that's where I go to do deep work. And it's different than where I do my email and where the printer and all the filing cabinets are. I have a ritual I do before I watch a hard movie.

I do a thing to get my mind into that mode. I listen to a movie podcast while walking for 20 minutes. Ritual and environment will help you fall into that deeper attention mode. Combine that with interval training. All right, let's go to our, let's look at my list here.

Let's go to our fourth idea to help you become a serious thinker, our fourth practice, I should say. And this is going to be strengthen your working memory. So I'm going to draw here is a person very determinedly walking, because he loves my art. And this person is thinking about all sorts of things.

Why am I drawing a person walking? Because my number one tip for increasing your working memory is productive meditation. It's an idea that goes all the way back to my 2016 book, Deep Work. With productive meditation, you take a professional problem, or it could be a complicated personal problem, but a clear complicated problem.

You go for a walk, and you try to make progress on that problem only using your head. The walking helps you do this. If you're just sitting and thinking it's much more difficult, but the walking actually quiet some noises in your cognitive circuit. So it's a little bit easier to focus.

And every time you notice your attention wander away from the problem that you're trying to make progress on in your head, you notice that wandering and you move your attention back to the problem. This forces you to get very comfortable holding lots of information in your head and trying to manipulate it and generate new information based on it.

You can make these walks longer and longer as you get more comfortable with this exercise. This is directly increasing your working memory strength. Your working memory strength is critical to being a serious thinker. Serious thinking requires you to pull multiple pieces of information and hold onto them in your mind's eye.

This piece, but also this piece and this piece is over here. And how do these things relate? And then how do I connect that to this other thing I thought before? Working memory is at the core of deep thoughts. Most people have a bad working memory, however, because we're not used to holding a lot of stuff in our head in a way that we can actually access them with our mind's eye.

Productive meditation is direct and intense practice for exactly this problem. It gets exactly to the heart of what you're trying to do here. All right, we got one more practice to help you become a serious thinker. I'll draw one more picture. So this final practice, I'm going to say it this way, practice being intellectual.

And so let's see, let's draw our stick figure person here. So how do we know this person is intellectual? Oh, it's not going to work. I'm going to draw him in a turtleneck, but he needs a neck, Jesse. That's the problem. So let me give him a neck. My stick figure person, there we go.

Give him a big neck. - Your French accent. - I probably will give him a beret as well. - And a pipe. - Yeah, so there you go. Turtleneck, because he's an intellectual. All right. Beret, because he's an intellectual. And a pipe. There you go. Practice being an intellectual.

Now, I joke by drawing this picture of like sort of a pretentious Frenchman with a pipe, because intellectual is often used in modern conversation as a pejorative term, but there's also a very specific and positive meaning here. It's a stance towards the world of information in which you are seeking out nuance and subtlety.

You're also seeking out integration of information into complex understandings that you already have. So to be an intellectual is that you are engaging with the world of information, trying to master it and integrate it. Now, if you do this for a living, like I do, if you're a professor, they teach you how to do this.

I mean, this is what you do for a living, but we don't talk enough about everyone else. How do you practice this intellectual stance, an intellectual approach to the world of information? I'm going to give you two very concrete ideas that I think almost anyone can do. And it's going to make you literally seem much smarter.

The first is pairing primary and secondary sources. Pairing secondary and primary sources. Okay. Here's what this means. It's most obvious with books. So you want to read a great book. Let's say I want to read The Odyssey. I want to read Joyce. I want to read Epsilon Epsilon. The typical approach that I think professional intellectuals have, which is flawed because they forgot their own training, is they say, just read it.

Just expose yourself to the ideas and then pretend like it's really changed your life. But that's not actually the way you learn how to engage information and draw out nuance and complicate it. What you should do instead is say, okay, let me now get, before I read this hard book, a secondary source.

A secondary source means it's a book about the book. So here is a book about why Faulkner is important or why Epsilon Epsilon is important. Here is a book about the heroic Greek world in which Homer wrote The Odyssey and why this is such an important book. I'm going to read about the book first and then go and read the actual primary source itself.

You are now approaching this primary artifact with a framework for how to understand it, what you're looking for, what's important about it. And this gives your brain practice seeing things at a new level. You might not understand everything you saw in a secondary source and you might not come away saying, I completely understand this book or it's changed my life, but you've practiced reading multiple layers below the surface.

See, when we just tell people, read the great books, go to the museums, and you'll just be inspired. We really are selling them short because that experience of inspiration requires you seeing multiple layers below the surface. And you got to practice that. Secondary sources first. Same thing with museums.

I do not like this idea when parents have of like, all that's important is that we expose our child to art museums and then they'll love art. They're not going to come away from that loving art. What you're really just teaching them is how to be comfortable in the social context of an art museum.

So they'll seem cultured if they're around other people. Staring at paintings does not make you a lover of paintings. Reading about those paintings, who was this artist? Why was this important? What was happening before when this artist came along? What was the historical context or turmoil created by this painting?

And then you go and see the artifact, you have a completely different relationship with it. So you could teach kids even, let me give you some basic information. Who was Jackson Pollock? What was going on with the abstract expressionist? What were they fighting against? Why was this so exciting if you lived in Soho in 1942?

What was happening here? And then you see this artifact and it's a different experience. It's like when you go to the Smithsonian and see Judy Garland's Ruby Slippers, what's exciting about the Ruby Slippers is not just they're shiny, but it's like those were the things in Wizard of Oz.

That was a really important movie and this famous person wore them. That context helps. So you get in the habit of doing this. You can do it with art, you can do it with books, you can do it with movies. I do this all the time. Let me read five reviews about this movie.

Not like contemporary, but people looking back, it's a great movie. People looking back and writing essays about this movie. Roger Ebert did a lot of this. Later on, he went back and wrote this series of essays about the great movies. The Guardian over in the UK does a lot of this.

They'll write these retrospective essays about movies that might be decades earlier. And then you go and watch the movie. It's a completely different experience. It could be modern movies, it could be older movies. You read about, for example, center focusing, and then you watch George Miller's Mad Max Fury Road.

It's a completely different experience and appreciation when you just put the movie on without that type of knowledge about the cinematography. Secondary sources paired with primary sources. This is what academics do during their training. They read and write their own secondary sources based on these primary sources. So it becomes second nature, seeing levels below the surface on all sorts of things.

But if you're not going to a doctorate program, you're not getting this training, you have to do it yourself. It really makes your intellectual world a lot more interesting. Here's the other thing I want to recommend for practicing being intellectual. Maintain idea documents. These are actual documents you maintain like a Microsoft Word file, just in your own personal files, or if you're a good handwriter, you could do this in journals.

And you have particular topics that you are recording and updating a summary in your own words of your best understanding of that topic. Now, these can be just general, timeless topics. Like I'm interested in Stoic philosophy, and I have this document I build out and add to about what Stoic philosophy is, who the thinkers are, what their major thoughts are, your current summary of how you're thinking about Stoicism being in your own life.

You are, through writing, consolidating information, structuring information. Now, again, this is something that real intellectuals get good at doing naturally, but you have to practice it. So writing and updating these summaries is a good way of doing it. You can do the same thing with current event topics as well.

There's something going on in the world that you care about. I don't know, this scares me or interests me, or just it feels important to me. Create and begin maintaining a document of how you feel about this and why. This is a fantastic way to free yourself from the emotional ping pong game of just let me expose myself to social media or algorithmic content.

Let me choose a tribe and make that tribe make me feel good or scared and help me get mad about the other tribe. It gets you out of that trap and allows you to begin building your own understanding of things. You're worried about AI. Start building out this document.

Here's what's going on. Here's the main types of AI. Here's where things are. Here's a list of thinkers and where they stand. And this thinker is against this thinker. You organize your thoughts. You're really worried or upset or conflicted or uneasy about conflict in the Middle East. Build out a document.

Shut down Twitter. Build out a document. Here's what's going on. I mean, this is why I'm trying to articulate my concerns here. I really worry about this, but this, I don't know how this is making me feel bad as well. And there's this argument doesn't quite work. And here's why you're talking about arguments and where it falls short for you, where it resonates.

Build idea documents as a way of structuring to write is to think. So the right about what matters is to help you think about what matters and your brain gets used to organizing information in the conceptual structures. So actually I have to practice being an intellectual. All right. So if you do these five things, all of which I've beautifully illustrated here, you begin, uh, improving the, the quality and decreasing the quantity of the information that you consume.

You get comfort, uh, comfort with boredom. You do interval training for just maintaining your concentration. You do particular training, the strength in your working memory, and you actually practice engaging information as an intellectual. You can become a much more serious thinker. It's not something you just choose to do.

It's not something you're just born to do or not. It's something you cultivate. And hopefully if you're a listener of the show, you do agree that this is worth cultivating because I think it is, you see someone who's doing something cool. They're probably a serious thinker. You see someone who's done really well for themselves.

They probably have the way to do serious thought. And in this case, maybe it's applied to a business issue, a strategy, but there's serious thought going on there. You see someone who just has a really interesting, engaged life. They're probably a serious thinker. They appreciate this. They can go to the movies and, and love the experience.

They have things they're deeply engaged in. Your brain is your number one portal to the world. And if you train that brain to be a serious thinker, your experience of the world changes the technicolor, the font gets smaller. The, uh, clarity gets much increased. It's just a different sort of improved experience with life.

So train it, train that thinking, and you will get better at it. I'm struggling to be social and confident. What can I do to speak more articulately and gain confidence and impress more people? Well, Tanya, it's a good question. And I can tell you a lot of this is practice, right?

The more you're around people in different situations, the more comfortable you get in those situations. The more you spend talking about things or explaining yourself or talking to people, the more comfortable and articulate you get in those types of conversations. I mean, I talk pretty, you know, here on this podcast, but in part, because I've been professionally speaking since I was in my young 20s.

So I'm sort of used to it. The cadences of speaking, the pacing, the coming up in your head with what you're going to say next, it all just sort of comes with practice. So social stuff really can be practiced. You can start with very low key social stuff early on stuff that you're already pretty comfortable with.

I know this person, I don't mind hanging out with them. So we go to, you know, a restaurant or a bar together or go to movies together on a fairly regular basis. I'm just used to in a comfortable situation, being out in the world with people and talking to them and interacting, but the stakes are low.

Then you can build that up to bigger things. Okay, I'm going to go to bigger social events or parties at first, you know, small ones. Here's my friend, that's their birthday party, and you get more confident with that. So a lot of this is just practice. Now, one of the things I think that is often left out of this conversation is the role of anxiety.

Anxiety gets really intertwined with socializing in ways that I think it's hard for people who don't feel that same anxiety to understand. They don't understand how these really get mixed in together. You really can start to build up a sort of dread or anxiety around different situations. It's why one of the outcomes of pretty severe anxiety disorders would be an agoraphobia where you don't leave your house anymore.

It's because often those two things can go together. The same circuits that are related to sociality are often the same circuits that are short-circuiting when you're suffering from anxiety. So if anxiety is a real issue here, Tanya, it's not just, "Oh, I'm out of practice. What do I do?" It's, "I really feel physically dread and concern and panic when I'm in these situations." I would look towards ACT, ACT-based techniques.

They're very good for exactly this situation. So ACT, otherwise known as third wave psychotherapy, stands for acceptance commitment therapy. It's a very effective evidence-based type of psychotherapy that does really well with anxiety, social anxiety, panic-type anxiety around other people. It's really based upon separating feelings from your actual actions.

It really helps train you to recognize the physical symptoms of something like anxiety and say, "Yes, but I'm still going to commit to do this thing that I think is valuable, and I can still do that even if this feeling comes and goes." It helps you avoid labeling that feeling as, "This is really important.

Something really bad is happening. It's really bad to be feeling this way." It breaks that loop of you labeling your feelings and just seeing them as feelings themselves. We talked about this a little bit in last week's episode. We read Marcus Aurelius' meditation. He had some actually stoic ideas that are connected to modern acceptance commitment therapy.

But I just want to point that out there, Tanya, that there's a more serious training you can do with the tools of ACT that are there and available. And so if the anxiety is really holding you back, that's not permanent. You have to think about that like knee pain.

You had knee pain. The doctor's going to help you fix it, though it might take some PT and a little bit of time. Same thing here. Look into acceptance commitment therapy. There's some good books on it. I think it's The Happiness Trap is one of the famous public-facing books on ACT.

That's a good entry place into it. Harris, Russ Harris, maybe. You can look that up, Jesse. It's The Happiness Trap. But I just want to throw that out there because it can be frustrating if you're on the anxiety spectrum. I'm on that spectrum. It manifests for myself in interesting ways.

I have to do a lot of training on it. Depending if you're on that spectrum, it can be frustrating to just be around someone really social. It's like, what's the problem? Just come to the thing. What could go on? And they don't realize that you're feeling immense dread. So there's a lot of things you can do there, Tonya, that train.

Do the work. It is worth it. Sociality is very important. Yeah, you got it right. It was Russ Harris. Russ Harris, OK. The Happiness Trap. Yep. Yeah, it's a good book. All right, what do we got next? All right, next question is from Ben. In what ways can being ordinary be good in life?

This was an interesting question, Ben. I had to think about it a little bit. It resonated a little bit because I think what you're getting at here is this interesting trade-off when you're thinking about the deep life and how you want to shape it. Because one way you can go, of course, is towards exceptionalness.

I want to do something exceptional. I want to be noted for it. I want to do something noteworthy, have some fame for this thing that I'm doing that's important. That's one particular path for the deep life. The other path for the deep life is I want to build a life around my values, start with discipline, figure out my values, organize my stuff, sacrifice and be a leader on behalf of others, and then find areas of my life to be remarkable.

And you could sort of have this quiet, deep life where you really matter to a lot of people and you find and extract out of life a lot of joy and appreciation of stuff that's fantastic or great or remarkable, all without having to be I am an exceptional X and people recognize it.

You have sort of two paths towards depth here. There's kind of pros and cons of each, especially when we look at that exceptionality path, right? Because there's good there and we shouldn't turn down the good. Why do people want to try to be great at things? Well, first of all, you do gain more autonomy, right?

You do something really well. There's more demand for it. You often gain more financial reward and or more control over how you live your life. There are several things I do at a pretty high level, and I do have a lot of flexibility in my life. We get to mess around in this playhouse, deep work HQ.

You know, I go away in the summers. I have very high control over my schedule. I don't worry about money, really. That's not really an issue. So there's great autonomy that comes from doing some things really well. Also, it feels good to be respected in the moment. We're wired for that.

This is the whole tribal leadership thing. We tell ourselves it doesn't matter, but there is ego. And you do feel if something goes really well, you'll feel good about that for a while. There's a reason why people chase it. That is the stimulus that is perverted when we see workaholism, right?

So with an addiction, there's usually some sort of very powerful stimulus that becomes the driver for the addiction, the feeling of intoxication, right? Workaholism is really that feeling of, wow, I did this thing well, and people recognize that my boss rewarded me. That's a very strong stimulus. That's why you can build a whole addiction around it.

On the flip side, though, it can be very stressful and anxiety-producing to try to do something exceptionally well. It's hard to do. And it puts you into bigger, more stressful circumstances you have to navigate. You get more people, perhaps, who want your time than you have nearly enough time to actually give.

And you have to start saying no to people, and people think that you're being snobby or elitist. High-stake things are just anxiety-producing. And you have to figure, is this worth the anxiety? Is this one not? Things can fall apart. It's hard to do things at a high level. So there's negatives that come with it.

I mean, I constantly have to make these decisions. There's television things I've turned down, for example, that may be in isolation. You say, well, that's cool. I know that show. That would be really cool to go on. And it's like, I can't do all of these things. And if I did, it's going to overwhelm me with time constraints and anxiety.

I have to be careful about how I make my path. So it's tricky. So I think it's a really good question, Ben. If you're going the route of, let me just be exceptional, you can build depth around that. And there are some real positives you're going to get, but there's also negatives.

And I say that because I think that then when you get the scale between the quiet remarkability approach versus the exceptional, notable, famous remarkability approach, when you put the cons with the pros on this ladder, the scales become about balanced. And so you really, if you're going the quiet remarkability approach, a life that, you know, it's Lorelei Gilmore and the Gilmore Girls, not famous outside of Stars Hollow, not like exceptional at anything, but in that world, you know, is really well known and has built this really interesting life.

And people really know her and appreciate her. And she's involved in people's lives and having a positive impact on that town. But she's not famous outside of that small little town. That's quiet remarkability. Not so bad of a path. And again, I don't want to say the other path, the sort of exceptional remarkability is bad.

I'm just saying when you have the pros and the cons, it's no longer like, well, this is clearly better if you have the skill, you know, you have the whatever, I can shoot a really good jump shot. I could go that way. If you have the possibility to go that way, it's not bad, but it's also not a no brainer.

And if you don't see an obvious way to get to the exceptional remarkability, you shouldn't feel bad about it. Because again, these things balance out. Steph Curry versus Lorelei Gilmore, that old famous comparison, like there's, I don't know, there's pluses and minuses to both. So neither should be dismissive of the other.

That's a weird comparison. I might be the first person in history to make that particular comparison. Probably. I mean, I can't imagine it's come up in the locker room, you know, the NBA finals stuff, man, this is your, it's your Lorelei moment, buddy. This is it. You got to just get out there.

I want you to man up and Lorelei this. All right. I mean, you gotta, uh, your dribbling should be like the fast speech cadence of Lorelei Gilmore, confusing people with, as you move back and forth verbally through various things. And this is the Kirk of your town, but you need to get the ball to Luke.

And it's probably some basketball strategy metaphor. The end of that speech would be like, hold on one second. Someone's handing me a piece of paper and oh yeah, I'm fired. And then the coach just walks out. That's how that story ends. Like, yeah, that makes sense. And I was fired.

All right. Nonsense. Stop the nonsense. Let's move on. What do we got next? All right. Great. Next question is from Samantha. How important are having friends in life? If it is important, how would you recommend an introvert go about finding some? Also, can you provide some advice on moving on from certain friendships that could be holding someone back?

So this is a good compliment to Tanya's questions about being more social and confident friends. As I mentioned, there are critically important. And for a friendship to be real, it has to involve non-trivial sacrifice of time and attention. Otherwise your brain doesn't treat it as real. So just texting someone all the time doesn't count.

Commenting on their social media doesn't count. Being active in a WhatsApp channel with them also does not count as far as your brain is concerned. They're not a friend until you're going places and doing things with them, doing things you might not otherwise want to do, but you're doing it because they're your friend.

That's when your brain begins to take the relationship seriously. So this should be a regular part of your weekly planning, especially if you're trying to build up friendships as something that's more important than a regular part of your weekly planning should be. What am I doing this week to strengthen or develop friendships?

You have to be pretty systematic about it, especially if you're sort of getting back in the saddle, so to speak. So fortunately, I can point you towards a resource here. There was a segment we did a few episodes back on this notion of the friendship recession, this idea that Americans in particular have less friends than ever before.

It's a segment where I had my friend Jamie Kilstein come on and talk about what he went through to gain a new group of friends in his 40s as a male, where this is kind of difficult. So we got into the weeds in that episode about specific things you can do to actually find and cultivate friends.

So I won't repeat that all, but I will say find that segment on the friendship recession. That was a final segment on a relatively recent episode. Maybe Jesse knows whenever Jamie's on, I begin just furiously messing up their names. And as Jesse has pointed out, maybe it's because Joe Rogan's podcast producer is named Jamie.

So it's just in the collective conscious of like, Jamie is what you call the other person on a microphone when you're podcasting. So it doesn't take much to tip me into that. He'll look that up. But anyways, I think- It was 266. 266. Take control of your technology habits.

Right. Episode 266, deeplife.com/listen. You'll find that and then the video for it's there as well. So look at that discussion with Jamie, because I think this is critically important, especially if you do not have a robust group of friends. Think about that like getting in shape. It's going to require a lot of work on a regular basis with some tried and true tactics, but it is absolutely worth doing.

Friction can be a real problem. Notetaking, I think, is one of those cases. When information is coming at you, your time to act, your energy to think, both are probably pretty limited. So if I have a relatively complicated system, I have to boot up and start using markup code to take this article I just randomly came across and enter into my system and cross-reference it with the right Zettelkasten categorization system.

So it will semantically link to other related articles. I'm probably just going to say, forget about it. That friction stops me from taking action. Or if I have friction over something I need to do, like reading a book, I have an elaborate way of how I'm going to copy every note from this book into my system, I might not just read that book because I only have so much energy for reading, and I might be taxing every last bit of energy I have just to tackle this book.

You make that 20% harder, I might not just read the book. Or I'll read it and say, forget it. I'm not taking notes on everything, and that information then is lost. So when it comes to actually capturing information from all the stuff that's out there, unlike say writing a long New Yorker piece, friction is a problem.

So you want your note-taking systems to lower that friction so that you can actually capture effectively as much of the important information as is possible. Another problem with elaborate systems is that they often aim to take everything out of your brain. It should be in this external system. The system will organize the information.

You don't have to remember anything. When you want to know about something, you can dive down in the system and it will unearth for you everything you've encountered that's relevant to it. I actually think when it comes to the big things in your life, be it big work projects or be it things about just the way you live, keeping some of this in your brain is not a bad thing.

Because what your brain is doing with this information is updating its internal schemas that it used to make sense of the world. And if information is useful, if it's in your brain, it's going to get integrated into these systems. And then when you apply these systems to try to make decisions, you'll remember this information or at least some of it, "Okay, this is relevant to me.

This idea sticks." In other words, when it comes to big ideas and important information, you want your brain to be part of the curation filtering system. You remember, "Yeah, this book, it stuck with me. It had these examples I remember were really important for X." Now, you might have to still go to your notes to see what those examples are.

But the fact that your brain remembered that book was important, that I think is crucial. We don't want to outsource everything out of our brain. We want it to be involved in filtering and prioritizing, curating, and trying to make sense of information in the background. Simple systems allow that because they're not trying to capture everything relevant to the information you come across.

All right, so let's actually talk about my systems. I'm going to break this up into three sections. The first, let's deal with books. I read a lot of books. Hopefully, you read a fair amount of books as well. There is information in books that's relevant to your work. There's information in books that's relevant to your life.

The last episode, we had a big, long thing about how to actually encounter self-help information of various levels of quality that's important. How do you take notes on books? Well, I'm going to show you my method. I'm going to draw here. Jesse will bring up, for those who are watching, if you're listening, go to thedeeplife.com/listen episode 287.

The video will be at the bottom. I'm going to draw a picture of a book page here, Jesse, so I can show you. We'll pretend like this is a real book page. Then, I'll take some sample notes on it. I'm putting some words on here. The method I use for taking notes on books, I call it the corner marking method.

It is as low friction as you can possibly make note-taking on books, while still actually being useful. Here's what I do. If there's something on this page, like the page you see here, that is interesting to me or I want to remember, first thing I do is I mark the corner like this.

Just mark a line across the corner. Now, I know if I'm flipping through this book, that that page has something important on it. What do I then do with the information on this page that is actually, I want to remember? Simple marks in the margins. I might, for example, put a little box.

Let's see here. I might put a little bit of a box around text that's important, or I might just put a little bit of a check mark next to a line, or I might put a curly brace next to a paragraph that I want to remember. Just small marks in the margins to indicate what lines are important.

Occasionally, I might scribble a little note to myself as well, if there's a particular thing that reminds me of. That's it. This barely slows you down as you're going through a book. Mark, mark, mark. You'll see me. I'll have a pencil in my teeth as I'm reading. I'll pull it out.

Mark, mark, mark. That's all it is. So it barely slows you down. But here's the reality of the corner marking method. If you go back to that book way later, so it's out of your working memory. It's a year later. It's five years later. I've done this before. And you start going through that book, looking for the pages that are marked in the corner, and then reading the sentences or paragraphs that have been marked in the margins, you will, in about five minutes, reconstitute all the important ideas from that book.

So it's a very effective way of capturing that information. It's not in some fancy system where it'll automatically show you all the quotes, but you get to them almost as fast. It takes a little bit longer to go through the book, but the information is there. So the low friction here is important because it doesn't prevent you from reading.

In other words, if the effort required to read, you're just there in terms of what you have available, corner marking note-taking barely changes that effort. So it's not going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. You'll still read that book. On the other hand, it is still going to be effective for getting the information you need.

The one shortcoming, which I don't think is really a shortcoming at all, is that you still have to remember, oh, that book, vaguely speaking, had some important ideas about X. So later when you need some important ideas about X, you do have to remember to go back to that book and then use the corner marking to very quickly hone in on where those ideas are.

But as I mentioned before, that's not a problem. I want you to have to try to remember that book is useful. If you don't, it probably wasn't that useful. And remembering that book is useful allows you to then, and I do this all the time, even without remembering the specific quotes, use the gist of what I learned from that book in the schemas of knowledge that I'm constructing and modifying and growing in my head.

So that's not really a bug, but a feature. You do have to remember some about what's in what book, but you can do that. You'll become a better reader. You'll become better at remembering and connecting books without having to reference your system. And when you need the specific examples, this very simple system will get you there very fast.

All right, so that's the part one. Part two, projects. Now, typically what I'm thinking here is professional projects, but we'll see this can apply to personal projects as well. So think about my life. I write books. I write articles for popular press, like magazines. I write academic articles. All right.

Where do I keep notes relevant to these things? It's like I have a book that maybe is due in three years. I'm not going to start writing it for another year. I come across a podcast interview, and I'm like, ah, this is relevant to that book. Where do I put this?

Where is my magic system that I put it? My approach is to store notes relevant to projects in the location where you will one day work on that project. So for example, I write my popular press articles using Scrivener. So if I have an idea for an article, I'll create a Scrivener document for it.

If I come across an article or a link or even just a brainstorm that is relevant to that article, I will go to the Scrivener project for that article. I will go to the research folder for that particular article. I will add it right there. I write my books in Scrivener.

So I'll have a Scrivener project for a book, be it a book that I've already been paid to write or a book I haven't even pitched yet, but I'm thinking I might one day want to write. And as I have ideas, I go to the research folder in the Scrivener project for that book.

That's where I put it. Then when it finally comes time to work more seriously on an article or a book, everything potentially relevant that I've come across is right there, ready for me to use it. Low friction. I'm not gathering it. I'm not navigating a system and hoping to encounter interesting ideas.

I'm not hoping my system is going to write the book for me. Hey, just give me all the ideas. No, no, no. Ideas are hard. You have to think really hard about what's going to make sense. The information needs going to be there when you get there. It's not an elegant system.

An article might find its way to a couple different projects, but it works. Same thing for my academic articles. So as a theoretical computer scientist, my papers are largely mathematical. So we write them using a rendering engine called LaTeX, L-A-T-E-X. Any scientist knows about this. I use software for it called Overleaf.

It's web based software for writing these articles because it's collaborative. So my collaborators and I can write at the same time. I just put relevant notes for potential papers, create an Overleaf project, start adding sections and subsections. Any ideas or notes I have about that project goes right into the document.

And then when it comes time to write that paper, we start adding sections to the beginning of this document, pulling stuff from later on. And at some point when the paper takes shape, we hide all the notes and we're left with just the polished paper. You can do the same thing for personal projects.

Wherever you plan a project, and this could be just like a folder in Google Drive, that's where you should go and put the inspiration pictures, the ideas, the recommendations for contractors. Put the notes immediately into the place where you're going to one day do the work. Big believer in that for making effective use.

And bonus, there's always a bonus to all these approaches. The bonus here is that every time you come across something new for one of these projects, I come across a link that's relevant for an article. When I go to add it to the Scrivener research folder for that article, I encounter again and again, everything else I've already found.

And that refreshes a mental picture of that project in my head and my head can do some more background processing. You know when some of the best ideas for my books or articles come, like six hours after I add something new to the research folder, because it loaded all that stuff up again.

My mind was like, "Oh yeah, I forgot about that." And then it's thinking about it and some new cool angle comes up and now you're rock and rolling and you get a real insight. So I think it's an effective system, but minimal friction. It's the easiest possible thing. Load, type it in, out.

All right, final thing. What about ideas about your life? Big ideas about living a more meaningful, sustainable, deep life. I'm inspired by what I saw in this movie. Maybe I should get really into this particular hobby. Where do you store ideas not connected to work or projects, but to your own life?

Here, I think you should have an awesome notebook. This is where having a notebook that's actual form is cool and aspirational and just interesting to you is I think important. This is where having a really cool pen is really important. So all of that fetish that surrounds note-taking and systems, most of that is not applicable to your work.

It can't keep up with the volume of stuff relevant in your work. You can bullet journal until your fingers bleed. You're not going to keep up with working on six New Yorker articles and three academic articles in a book per year. There's probably 400 or 500, maybe 1,000 different notes to get taken for that.

You're not going to keep up in your paper notebook with that. But your life, you can. Ideas about your life, you can keep up with in a physical notebook. That's where you want the cool one. That's where you want the form of the notebook to matter. For a long time, I used Moleskins.

Long-time listeners know this. Earlier this year, I switched over to a Remarkable. So it's a digital notebook, which I really love. Again, it's ridiculous because it's like $500 or something. It's stupid. Um, but I love it because I have like 15 different digital notebooks in there now, and I could just go to any of them at any time.

And I really love the technology. We did a whole thing about it on the show. Uh, but whatever the point is, it's cool and aspirational. To me, it's interesting. That's where you have your cool notebook for keeping track of ideas about your life. And all you need there is some sort of semi-regular process of reading through these.

The very simplest thing you can do if you're using a physical notebook is when you fill it, put aside an hour to review it, and to only copy into your new notebook, short summaries of the most important or lasting ideas from your previous notebook. So there's a very natural triage you can do that way.

See what sticks, uh, and what you lose interest in over time. So that's my approach. It is low friction. It is simple. Very little custom software is required. One cool notebook and whatever else you're already using for your work, but because you're adding very little friction, you can keep up and the stuff that matters will get captured and put to the place where it matters.

And then of course you get all the bonuses. So again, for books, the bonus is having to remember which book had, what is a feature, not a bug. It allows you to continue to work with and build on these ideas after you first encounter them. When it comes to your projects, having your notes where you want to actually do the work is not just efficient, but it allows you to re-encounter the gestalt of what you know about that project again and again, as you grow those notes, allowing your mind to work more with it.

And cool notebooks put you into that mindset of a cultivator or crafter of your own life. So we're sort of hacking the brain here. We want the brain to be involved in the process of dealing with information, but in ways that doesn't overload it or overtax it. So that's my system.

It's not as exciting as other systems. Some other systems, people actually make this clear disclaimer, like building systems and that's fine. I mean, if that's like your hobby, I think that's fine. If you like building the complicated system because you get enjoyment in the system, you might actually take more notes because you really love the use this cool system you built.

It's like when you build a pool and you customize it, you really want to have a lot of pool parties, right? So I get that. But if that doesn't appeal to you, don't worry. You do not need a super complicated system, but you do need something. So this is my suggestion.

At least that's one place to start. It doesn't really give us Jesse, like a complicated software package we can sell. That's the only problem. - On our new Shopify store. - Yeah. Our new Shopify store is going to have like a Moleskine, a Uniball micro pin for marking like the corners of book pages and like a Scrivener subscription.

I don't know. It's not as fun. I, you know, I would, I could rabbit hole on that stuff pretty hard if I wanted to. Like note-taking systems, you know, I could get going down there. Hey, if you liked this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.

Check it out.