All right, so this will be question number eight. Do a little mental math here. Question number eight comes from Matt. Matt says, "It seems to me that a lot of your views "that you're most famous for are contrarian. "This seems to have served you pretty well. "Do you often reflexively adopt these contrarian views?

"If so, does it ever end up backfiring? "And if you are selective in adopting "certain contrarian views, what factors do you weigh "when deciding to go against a grain?" Well, two points, Matt. One, not all of my views are contrarian. I would say there's really three large categories, the type of stuff I write about.

So I do have some well-known contrarian views. In particular, my pushback against the idea that you should follow your passion and my pushback against using social media. Those, at least in the moments in which I articulated those, were quite contrarian, not so much anymore. A lot of my other popular ideas, however, I would put in a different category.

I would say it is structuring and articulating clearly things people already believe. They just need someone to help them organize their pre-existing feeling. So with contrarian ideas, you're often trying to convince someone to change their mind about something. You think following your passion is the right thing to do.

I wanna convince you of something different. Here's a secret. It's hard to have a really successful nonfiction book convincing people to change their mind. What's much more effective is giving structure and voice to something they already believe. So a lot of my popular ideas fall under that category. "Deep Work" is an example.

It's not contrarian. That book didn't do well because people picked it up and said, "No way! What do you mean 'Deep Work'? I want more email. What are you talking about?" And then they read it and they were convinced. No, that's not how that book was successful. People were overwhelmed.

They knew something was wrong with the way work was unfolding. And this gave voice to it. That's why that book was successful. Slow productivity is like that. People feel this discomfort with burnout. They feel the ambiguity and lack of specification around our notions of what we even mean to be productive.

And when they hear slow productivity, just that term, when they hear the three principles, do fewer things, working at a natural pace, obsessing over quality, it sounds right from moment one. Structure articulating things people already believe. Same with a lot of my work on the deep life. I'm convincing people that deep life is worthwhile.

They know that. Trying to give some structure to that already existing impulse. And then the final category of stuff I write about, it's like a lot of my New Yorker writing. It's more just observing and explaining trends. It's an expository. So I would say most of my stuff actually is not contrarian.

I do like contrarian ideas though, Matt, and I think it comes from my appreciation of the Socratic dialectic. A lot of people think this, you think that. Two opposing views collide. Truth aburges. Big believer on hitting one view against another, taking something you believe in and getting the best articulation to get someone to believe something different.

In that collision of opposition, the roots of deeper understanding are grown. So when I do go towards the contrarian, it's probably motivated by the dialectic. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)