(upbeat music) - All right, what do we got next? - All right, the next question's from Drew. He's in a gap year and he has a question on what activities he should pursue. - Hey, Cal, loving the show. I'm Drew from the Philippines and I'm currently in a gap year before college.

I've applied to elite universities in the US and I'm pretty confident I'll get into at least one of them. Hopefully, but in the meantime, I'm trying to make the most of my time during my gap year. My country is still in the dying throes of the pandemic, so going outside is still a bit restricted.

So I've started developing a lifelong habit of reading books at a more frequent level, averaging at least one or two nonfiction books per week by employing your method of making it a default activity. And it's been working effortlessly so far. I have approximately 10 months before college and by the end of my gap year, I want to come out of it becoming the best possible version that a 19 year old like me is capable of actualizing.

What activities should I pursue and what kind of mindset should I employ going forward? Thanks, Cal. - So given that you're somewhat physically stuck, that's gonna change the way we think about this gap year. Because often gap years is built around experiences. You go to interesting places, you meet interesting people, which I think is really important, but now you're gonna be limited there.

I think what I'm gonna advise is that you actually develop a curriculum. So instead of just, which by the way is great, but instead of just encountering and reading a lot of books, let's have a curriculum that has maybe three goals that you're gonna make consistent effort towards. So you might have a curriculum for reading.

I'm trying to get through these particular books and I'm gonna read these secondary sources about each of these books to try to fill in a particular subject matter that I wanna know a lot about. And I don't care about the details so much here as it is just doing some sort of consistent intellectual exploration.

I mean, for example, I'll give you an example from my life. When I first came down to Washington, DC to take a professorship at Georgetown, this is before we had kids, so I had a lot of free time on my hand. My wife worked a normal person job. Professorship's not a normal job.

So she had to actually go to work for normal hours and I didn't, I was a first year professor. I did a self-imposed curriculum. I had come across this book, a book of philosophy called "All Things Shining" by Dreyfus and Kelly. And it was an interesting book. It went back through the classics and extracted ideas from the classics about the sacred and finding meaning in life.

We actually talked about this recently in my appearance on the Tim Ferriss podcast. I guess Tim tried to read it and he didn't actually like it much. And the reason Tim didn't like it is he said, "I didn't know all the references. "I hadn't read Aeschylus. "I hadn't read Dante." And so what I did, I said, "Here's what I'm gonna do.

"I'm gonna use 'All Things Shining' "'cause it's talking about all these books "and drawing interesting lessons about them. "And as it gets to each of those books "that it references, I'm gonna stop and read that." So I'm gonna go, I started with "The Odyssey" because they started with the classical heroic Greeks and I read "The Odyssey" and then I read "Aeschylus" and then I read "Dante" and I read "Augustine." And so I followed this book and I would read the things and then read them talk about it, then read the next things and read what they talked about.

And it was like an organized curriculum and it was actually really interesting to go through these. And the book ended up with David Foster Wallace. So we went from Homer to David Foster Wallace. And there was an organized reflection here as the book went on. So do something like that, just to get in the habit of I can on myself autonomously dive into an intellectual pool and make sense of it just because I want to.

And there's a lot of different topics you can do this on. If you wanna steer this, you might consider subscribing to the great courses and let one of the great courses, you pick a topic from there and let that course, actually watch the lectures and then read the books, like actually follow a great course if you want a little bit more structure.

So that should be part of your curriculum, some sort of focused intellectual exploration where you learn to just love doing focused intellectual explorations. The second thing in your curriculum should have you building or creating something. And I don't know if it's physical, if it's digital, if it's written, if it's code, but it's just you're building and honing a skill and creating things, making intentions manifest concretely in the world, just to get in the habit while you have the time of developing a skill and creating things, being able to actually add new things into the world.

I think that's quite fulfilling. And then the third part of the curriculum I would add is something physical. Get in really good shape. Not that you need to be in really good shape to go to college in America, but just that it's an outlet for the energy. It will calm intellectual anxieties and it's self-mastery and efficacy.

I'm the type of guy that can structure my time and get after it. I'm getting in really good shape. It just makes you feel like you have control over your own life so that when you get there, when you get to college, you have all this confidence. I can control my life and create something here that's really interesting.

And I'm not at just the whims of, oh my God, my classes and I'm stressed and I'm just up drinking all night. You feel like you're actually in control. So I would do those three things. That's my three-part curriculum I would suggest for your semi-homebound gap year. The fourth thing I'm gonna say, which is not part of the curriculum, but this is just a substrate.

You need to socialize and connect as much as the Philippine pandemic restrictions allow. You need to connect to other people. You need to sacrifice on behalf of other people. You need to be a leader in your community and among people you know. That's just gonna be the foundation that stops you from going crazy.

If you're allowed to see people outside, see people outside. If you're not allowed to do that, then do it virtually until you can. But as soon as you can, do that. Be around people, see people, communicate with people, help people, bring stuff to people who need help. Make the social aspect of your life really amplified.

And this is not about your gap year. This is about you're going through a period of pandemic restrictions that we all went through before. And it's the thing that you have to push over the top to counteract the isolating negative impacts of pandemic restrictions. And so I just want you to see that as medicine.

That is your, I don't wanna get anxious and depressed medicine for this very specific circumstance. It is, I'm gonna become more socially engaged and sacrifice more time and attention on behalf of other people than I ever have before in my life. And that's just your daily medicine. All right?

So Drew, hopefully things will calm down there soon. Hopefully you'll find your way to a nice school soon and really enjoy that. But in the meantime, that is my prescription. It's kind of weird, Jesse, to imagine there's still, I mean, I guess it's true, but there's places where you're dealing with lockdown type things.

- Yeah. - Yeah, I mean, I think we've been done with those here for a while. I think the populace basically just said, you gotta find a better way. You gotta find your way. Though, I don't know where we live. You see it every time you come here, compared to where you live.

Montgomery County, Maryland is not exactly chill, chilled out about the virus. - Yeah, I mean, I'm in Virginia, but it's only seven miles away and it's different. - Yeah, interesting times, but hey, we can go outside. So I feel bad for Drew. - When you were doing that All Things Shining project, how long did it take you to do all the, read all the books and everything?

- I don't remember. Semester maybe, more. I mean, I don't know if I read every one. Maybe I skipped a couple, but I just remember doing it for a lot of that academic year and then I do other things and I'll come back to it. Yeah, it's vague memory, but I have all those books still.

And I remember, by the way, I remember so much from that, that it was very useful. Like I have all these references now and these understandings of all these different books. I know these cultural references was actually a pretty cool, it was a pretty cool experience actually. That's what I should have told Tim on the podcast.

So Tim was saying he tried to read it, but found it really academic, which it kind of is if you haven't read the books, you're like, what the hell are they talking about? So I probably shouldn't have suggested to Tim, go back and try the book again, but read the books along with the writers.

And so long time fans will recognize the reference because I talk about it in deep work. (upbeat music)