How do I rebuild my life into something deeper? All right, so I'm gonna load up on the screen here, my notes, I'm gonna draw. So caveat emptor, Cal Newport's gonna try drawing. This never ends up being that beautiful. Be ready for it. If you're listening and you wanna watch what I'm drawing on the screen, this is episode 252.

So go to youtube.com/calnewportmedia and look for episode 252, or go to thedeeplife.com and look for episode 252. I'll also do my best to narrate what I'm drawing for those who are just listening. All right, so what you'll see on the screen here is what I call the deep life stack.

Right now I have it empty. We're gonna fill in the details as we go along. The stack has four different levels to it. I'll highlight those. You got level one, two, three, four. The way I'm conceptualizing the deep life stack is sequential. You start with developing the bottom layer of the stack.

Then you move up to the second layer, then the third, then the fourth, and then we're gonna iterate, and we'll get into that soon. All right, so what happens on the first layer of the deep life stack? This is the first big change or breakthrough, I would say, I've had when thinking about the deep life more recently.

What I'm gonna put at this bottom layer is gonna be discipline. That's gonna mean two things. But let me say what my goal is here. I'm realizing when it comes to cultivating a different type of life, any type of transformation, you have to first change your self-identification to be the type of person who is able to persist with things that are difficult in the moment in pursuit of a greater good down the line.

And I think it's very easy for people like me who give advice for a living, who've been doing this for a long time, to take for granted that that's what we do already. But this is actually for most people, maybe the most critical step is transitioning from someone who says, "Look, this is not me.

"I don't have discipline. "I'm not really able to pursue goals "unless I feel really excited about it in the moment." How do we shift that self-identity? And as longtime listeners of the show know, I really do see discipline as an identity. It is not something you do, it is an identity.

You see yourself as someone who is disciplined or you don't, that requires some cultivation. So at the very bottom of the deep life stack, and this is why I've highlighted this, you would get started by putting some elements into your life that require discipline to accomplish. And it doesn't really matter when we're first beginning here what these are.

You just wanna push them to be past what's trivial but still south of intractable. So where you're starting from might depend where how ambitious these initial bits of discipline are. So this is where you might say, "Look, I'm gonna train for a 5K. "I am going to read five books a month." You're trying to find something that's gonna require some discipline.

I'm gonna overhaul my nutrition. I'm gonna do something new. I'm gonna do this workout routine, try to hit a streak on Peloton, whatever it is. You're calibrating it to where you are. And I don't really care at first the content of these things you're pursuing with discipline. This is identity formation.

And that's where we get started. You take a couple of things in your life. You say, "How can I make progress on this every day?" And if it's too hard, you find something easier until you can move up to something harder but you're establishing discipline. The second piece here is you're going to establish your route for everything we're about to do.

A directory, a folder, a drawer in a desk where it's gonna be the one place where you keep track of everything that you've committed to do in your life, your rules, your systems, your goals. So that you're going to initialize this route to your ultimate life planning processes with these initial discipline projects.

So at the beginning, you could just have a folder on your desktop, you could have a drawer where you're just writing down, here's my disciplines. I'm working on these two things. Here's what I do every day towards them. This is going to grow as we move through the deep life stack but you're establishing here in the discipline step.

Here's where I keep track of what I commit to. And you're starting to practice having commitments that are about long-term value, not what you wanna do in the short term. So already we're a little bit different than standard thinking about lifestyle designs because we're not starting with the decisions.

We're not starting with the let's quit my job. I wanna move to the country. We're recognizing that there is some effacement that has to happen first. There's some preparation that has to happen first. We don't wanna jump into the decisions till we've developed the self first. So that's the first layer of the stack.

All right, so once that's going, I have a couple of things and I've impressed myself. I'm doing these, I didn't think I could. I am capable of discipline and I have a centralized place now to keep track of what I'm doing. We move on to the next layer. I'll write this in here.

We'll call this values. All right, so yet we're not yet the choosing to quit your job. We're not yet the moving. Values is where you are going to establish what it is that is important to you. What are the truths that exist rooted outside of just your own preferences around which you were going to structure your life?

This is committing to what is important to you. There's three pieces to figuring out what your values are gonna be. I'll write them all three down and then we'll talk about it. Code, rituals, routines. So code is actually figuring out, this is my code that I live by. I strive to do this.

I will never do this. I have integrity. I am honest. I will prioritize the protection of others, whatever it is. This is where you make that clear. I have a code by which I live and all of my decisions are gonna come back and make sure that they satisfy this code.

All my big decisions, all my short-term actions will live by this code. The code should be something that forces you on occasion to do things that are hard or scary in the moment, to move away what might be in your best interest, but you have a code written down.

Then you have rituals recorded, some sort of rituals that you commit to that help just reinforce in your life what it is that you value and take seriously. Finally, you're gonna have routines, things you do on a regular basis that ensure that you are supporting these values that are encoded in your code that make sure that you are pursuing them, reflecting the things you value in your everyday life.

Now, of course, the most obvious pre-packaged answer to these three things would be a traditional religion. So if you are already religious, that's gonna make it very easy for you to figure out code or rituals and routines. For if you're religious, the ritual is gonna involve, for example, let's say you're a Muslim, it might involve daily prayer ritual as a way of reinforcing and reminding yourself of your relationship to God.

Routines might involve things that your religion asks you to do, such as some sort of charitable giving on a regular basis to go out and serve others in the community, but you don't have to have a religion to fill in code rituals and routines. You can do so on your own.

The thing I wanna emphasize here is don't worry so much about getting this exactly right, because when we're done with this stack, we're gonna add one final piece, which is iterate. So you come to the stack where you are in your life right now, and you can expect that might change and evolve as time goes on.

Now, everything you're gonna figure out here for values gets recorded in that system you set up during the first level of the stack, during discipline. That's why I'm drawing an arrow back down there. That's where you record, here's my code, the things I value, things I don't, how I plan to live my life.

That's where you record your rituals. I meditate every morning. I read a book of philosophy, one book per month. I observe Shabbat as a time to reflect, whatever it is. It's where the routines go in. I volunteer every month. I, whatever it is actually gonna be, and I go to services, whatever it is, this is all written down, and you have a central place for it because you set that up in discipline.

These two things, these first two layers of the stack, discipline and values, this now becomes our safety net foundation. Before we go up, the things that are gonna follow are gonna be a little bit more complicated and ambitious, but if everything else falls apart in your life, your professional system goes apart, there's health or sickness issues, your life takes a turn, there's some sort of disaster, the two levels that will always be there for you to fall down on will be discipline plus values.

So this is very important. The idea that I can do things that are hard when it's in my long-term interest or the interest of my values, even if I don't want to, I'm capable of doing this, and I know what I'm all about, what is my code, and I'm able to build my life around it, that is your insurance for disaster.

That is your insurance against everything else going wrong. If everything else we're about to talk about unravels, you will be able to fall back on that, and that's gonna give you a soft landing, and it's gonna give you a foundation in which you will eventually be able to rebuild.

All right, so now we're gonna head towards a layer where we're getting a little bit more into the traditional design, life design type waters, and that's gonna be what I call calm. So the goal with calm is to gain control over your life and to leverage that control to give yourself breathing room.

So it's the calm level of the stack where you are actually going to start thinking about organizational productivity systems. How do I keep track of the different obligations in my professional life and my personal life? How do I plan? How do I manage my time? This is all about I have control.

I'm not just stumbling reactively through life. I have some control of what's going on. Now, once you have control, I'm organizing things, I can build out smart plans, I can now see much more clearly the relationship between my implicit workload, my tacit obligations and my schedule. Now you have a really good sense of, is this reasonable or not?

Or how much can I actually have on my plate before I begin to get stressed out? And you can leverage this control to start doing some minimalism, to start taking some things off of your plate, to simplify aspects of your commitments in your personal life, in your family life, in your professional life.

The goal here is I have control of my time. I've pruned my schedule to the degree that I have some flexibility and breathing room. And I am now ready to start thinking about some bigger picture changes. 'Cause if we get to the final stack, which is where you do the fun stuff, where you move to the farm, if you get to that final stack and your life is chaotic and you're overwhelmed and you're busy and exhausted and fatigued, there's not gonna be room for you to do what you need to do.

There's not gonna be room for you to reflect. There's not gonna be room for you to pursue the disciplines and values that lay under it. And there's not gonna be room to actually make the big changes. If you don't control your life, you also are not gonna be able to build up the career capital you'll probably need to execute some of these ideas.

The more you're killing it at work, because you control your time and your obligations and you can give things the time they need, the more options you're gonna have to transform that work. This is true in a lot of different elements as well. And so this is again, something you don't always see when the discussion of lifestyle design, but I think it's foundational.

I'm throwing it in there. Calm, I'm under control. These three things, if you're starting from scratch, might take a while, by the way. This might be the work of six months to a year to build the first three layers. But once you have, you get to the final stack here, the final layer of the stack, which I call plan.

And this finally is where we get back to more familiar territory. This is where we get back towards the deep life buckets territory. This is where you divide your life into the major areas that are important to you and start to think through, what does my life look like in each of these areas?

What changes do I want to make? And you don't have to overhaul everything at the same time, but maybe you look at community, so your relationship with your family and friends, those who are important to you and say, "Okay, let's start overhauling this. "What do I want this aspect of my life to look like?

"Where does it fall short? "What type of changes would I need to make "to better fulfill my values here?" And this is where you might make the bigger change. You move to be closer to family. You commit the community organizations. Maybe craft, of course, would be a big one here.

Your job, "Okay, let me really think about my job. "What's going on here? "Is it overwhelming me? "Is it compatible with the other things I care about? "Maybe I want to hatch a plan to transform this job "into something that's gonna better support "my vision for my life." All of this happens here.

The buckets, lifestyle, center, career planning, all of this is squeezed into the top layer out of four in the deep life stack. And this really is the big innovation between the way we used to talk about it and the way we're talking about it now. If discipline, values, and calm is foundational, and if we ignore that, whatever we do up in plan is gonna be haphazard and be very likely to fizzle.

We try to make some big change, but if we don't have anything else nailed down, we're building this big change, this new conceptual structure for our life on top of sand. That foundation is not strong enough. I'm gonna add a couple more arrows here because again, throughout each of these stacks, where do your decisions go?

Back into that central repository you set up during the discipline level. These are my organizational systems for calm. This is what I'm working on right now. I'm working on my craft bucket, and here's my vision. So in that discipline step, that all got set up. Now the number of disciplines, the things that you are pursuing regularly that you're committed to, that also increases as you move up the stack.

Values adds rituals and routines to your list of disciplines. Calm adds organizational systems to your list of disciplines. Plan might add bucket specific keystone habits to your list of disciplines. So everything down there grows. The description of your systems, the descriptions of your discipline commitments, that all grows as you move up the stack.

So I have these arrows pointing back down. And then finally, once you've made it through the whole stack, I'm gonna draw one last arrow here, you are going to iterate. Which means you return back towards the bottom and refactor, focusing on what needs the most work. So you've made it through the whole stack, enjoy that for a while.

Then you're gonna iterate back down again. Okay, let's go back down the discipline. How is this going? If I cleaned up my description on my systems and my disciplines, are there stuff hanging around here I don't do anymore? Let me clean that up, make sure the way I'm tracking this goes well.

Am I committing discipline to the things I said I am? If I'm not, do I have too many things in here? Do I need to clean that up? Okay, we're good, let's move up the values. Am I liking my current code? The rituals I have in place to help reinforce the code, the routines I have to put that code into action in the world.

Am I ready to tweak that? Do I wanna make a major change? Am I maybe at first earlier in my life, these were self-imposed and in middle age with a family, they're gonna be more tied to a formal theology. So you're going back and checking that out. You're going up to calm.

How are my systems going for organization? Oh, maybe they're going well. What about my load? You know, I feel overloaded. Great, so as I revisit that stack, I'm gonna make some more cuts on the things that I'm committed to or pursuing. And you can back up the plan. You might say, I'm gonna look at another bucket more carefully.

I looked at craft last time, but I really wanna now think about celebration, sort of quality in my life. That's iteration. You go back through the whole stack, checking at each layer, spending time on the layers that need time before moving on to the next. You probably wanna do this once a year.

I recommend using your birthday as the anchor for this. Different years, you're gonna stop and spend more time on different layers than others. Sometimes everything might be rock and rolling, so you're just tweaking on your way up and it takes you a couple of weeks, no problem. Sometimes you're gonna lose the next six months of your years of really reflectively rethinking your life, but this structures the way you think about that.

It structures the way you go through trying to refactor or tighten up what's actually going on in your day-to-day existence. So this is what I'm thinking about now. This is my generalization of what used to just be the deep life buckets, the deep life stack. It's equal parts psychology as it is practical habit, as it is visionary planning.

All of those things are now mixed together in a more structured way. This also reflects more carefully or closely, I should say, what I actually do in my own life, the way I think these things through, the way I order these things. So I'm interested in your thoughts. Are we improving or have we overcomplicated?

I still have time to think about this, so feel free to send it through. I don't know, Jesse, am I adding too much complication or are we getting to some levels we actually needed for thinking about this topic? - I think it goes in hand with what you've talked about before in terms of stacks and discipline and metric tracking.

So like the metric tracking on the time block planner would be in that level. - Yeah, it becomes a discipline. Right, the time block planner is something you might introduce as calm. The metric planning is installed in the discipline stack. - Yeah. - Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the things I was underestimating, so in addition to just the psychological preparation, was I take for granted structure and organization in my life.

And it's something we hear from listeners a lot, is if you are not organized and structured in how you manage just even the minutia of your life, it's actually really difficult to do anything big. - Yeah. - It feels impossible or if you try it, it's not gonna go well because you're just throwing a big change in an already chaotic situation.

- Yeah, you've had that in place for a really long time. - Yeah, and that's why I take it for granted. - Yeah. - But I think for a lot of people, I was thinking, if I'm gonna write a book about the deep life, I can't jump into, let's overhaul your job, when there's someone who has never actually had any sort of coherent organizational system to any part of their life.

It's impossible, until you feel that you control your life in that breathing room, it's very difficult to imagine making a big change. And we're gonna see that, the questions I chose for today's episode are all deep life related. So issues and questions about people pursuing the deep life. And we're gonna see some of that in the questions.

There's at least one I have in mind where someone is, they're coming to what you would think about as the plan level of the stack, with the other levels not in place, and it just feels impossible to them. - Yeah, I mean, a lot of that has come down to your time management system.

- Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, how do you keep track of your time? Then how do you manage your obligations? And how do you then prune those obligations, right? It's very difficult to keep breathing room in your life, if you can't control the stuff that's taking away the air.

If you don't control it, you're just grabbing. It's very hard to get at things or organize things or move things out of the way. It's very paradoxical, 'cause people say, "I don't wanna be so, I don't have time to do all these systems and be so rigid, and then my whole life will be planning." But it's exactly the people that make a structure for the stuff in their life that have the flexibility.

- Yeah. - That have the breathing room, that have their feet up by the lake and are reading. It's this misnomer that somehow having organization will mean your time is more filled. It's actually the key to actually gain back time, to find time affluence, to take some flexibility. - It's your boy, Jaco, discipline equals freedom.

- Yeah, well, that term is, yeah, definitely motivating or an inspiration here, discipline at the base. - Provides the freedom to do other things. - It does. - Read five books a month. - And that was the other breakthrough I'm thinking, because I've found this working with people, just finding that one or two things, that's the place to start.

I'm doing this thing, I'm working on it every day, it's hard, it's optional, I don't wanna do it in the moment. Long-term, I did it, I succeeded. That psychological switch, that's so important to everything else. So we'll see, so I'm working on it, but it's one idea for how I might structure my deep life book.