(upbeat music) - All right, the next question is about balancing and balancing ambitious with everyday life. - Hey, Cal, this is Saheem from India. Thanks for your podcast and I really enjoy it. My question to you is that how do you balance ambition with life? I see many entrepreneurs and leaders say that they are overly ambitious and have very little time available for life and health related tasks.

On the other side of the spectrum, I see more people having regrets about not meeting their potential. So how should we find this ambition life balance? Thank you. - Well, it's a critical question. And I think it's one that we're not necessarily dealing with in a sophisticated manner right now in our cultural moment.

The way I read our current moment is that in the first decade of the 2000s, we had a emphasis on crushing it, right? I mean, this was a time where we were, especially in American culture, lionizing the new wave of tech entrepreneurs and that burst of the whole like Zuckerberg, Musk, that whole world, Bezos, et cetera, right?

So we were like into like these people who got after it up all night, moving fast, breaking things, building fortunes, changing the world. This was also the period of like Sheryl Sandberg and Lean In. And so there's definitely an emphasis of we were pretty activity oriented. And then we whipsawed.

So now more recently, we have the anti productivity movement. So we've gone hard the other direction and we can look at things like Ginny O'Dell's book, or which was, I always mix it up. It's How to Do Nothing, or I think it's How to Do Nothing, or the Art of Doing.

I think it's the How to Do Nothing. And then Chelsea Headley had Do Nothing. There's Berkman's book, which I really enjoy, 4,000 Weeks. But there was a pushback in the other direction, which was we shouldn't really be doing things like productivity in general is constructed. And depending on who you talk to, you get different extremes on this.

So like, I think Berkman has a much more milder setup to this, which is just like, hey, in general, we're excited about doing two things, but we set our aspirations too high. And on the other extreme, you have the commentators to think like all of productivity is basically exploitative mythology created by capitalists to oppress the new digital age proletariat.

So it gets pretty extreme, but it's more of let's normalize this idea that the drive to do action is all kind of fake anyways, and you should be okay just chilling. Do nothing, how to do nothing, et cetera. So we've kind of gone too far in the other direction.

That's not really working either because humans like to do things, and we like accomplishment, and we like to make long-term plans and execute them. You can actually point to the specific sectors of the brain that evolved in humans that we don't share with our primate ancestors that actually help us make those plans and reward them.

It's what helped our species differentiate. So there's a deeply human aspect of having goals that you then make a plan for and execute and see your intentions being manifest concretely in the world. So just telling people like, let's just chill, it's important that we normalize that you don't have to be a superhero, but that doesn't do it either.

And I think this question gets right at that tension. So my answer here, this is where I become a bigger believer in this term I've been trying to popularize, slow productivity. And this is a concept that's still in development. It's embryonic. I change what it means each time I talk about it.

So you're seeing this in real time. But critical to slow productivity is this idea of, yes, seeking out accomplishment, but on larger timescales. Over the next few years, I care about what I produce over the next few years that I've produced some things of real value. When you're focused on execution at that slower timescale, it gives you a lot of breathing room and flexibility on the small timescales.

When you're trying over the next two year period to produce something that you're proud of, a product or a piece of writing, that allows you next Tuesday to just be with your kids and do nothing. Because on the larger timescale, that one day is not that important. It allows you to have a month where you're really pushing it and then a month where you're taking a breather.

Three months where you're just doing research and a summer when you're at a cabin and writing six hours a day. It's seasonal, it's varied, it's diverse. It fits the rhythms of the human condition. Slow productivity feeds into all of that. I think this is probably the ideal setup for satisfying the human desire to accomplish is that you are working on a small number of important things.

You return to it and you hone your craft and you try to be so good they can't ignore you. But this is work that is diligently applied over long periods of time. And when you look back five years later, you're proud of what you produced and you don't care so much about what happened in the last five hours.

That I think is where you get that balance where most people are gonna be happy. So how do you introduce this all into your life? Well, again, this is where doing the multi-scale planning is important. Have your semester plan that feeds into a weekly plan, which feeds into a daily time block plan.

That semester or quarterly plan, whatever you wanna call it, helps you see what you're working on in this big picture for the next three or four months. And then that can filter into your week where you say what days we wanna work on this, if any. And then that filters into your day.

And it allows you to have clarity but adapt your execution of that clarity over the realities of what's really going on in your life and the busy times, not busy times, et cetera. So basically my advice here is be ambitious but slow down your execution of those ambitions. Be proud of what you produce five years from now, which again is gonna require your planning at multi-scale so you don't just do nothing for months, but be really easy on yourself about what you do this week.

Because it's a hard week because your kid's homesick and there's a deadline for another work-related project that's annoying you. And it's okay to be annoyed. It's okay not to get much done that week. So be ambitious, but slow down the execution of that ambition. For most people, I think that's gonna be the sweet spot.

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