"Do you have any book recommendations aside from your own "that will compliment cultivating a deep life "outside of work? "So far from the past, I've heard you talk about Walden "and designing your life. "I'd love to hear more you consider good reading "before you release your next book, "which is the 'Deep Life' book." So Mark, I want you to read nothing until my book on the deep life comes out.

Everything else compared to my book is garbage. No, there's a lot of good books. So I'm gonna zig here, right? There's two ways of thinking about books about the deep life. There's books you can imagine to be actually instructive, right? So like "Designing Your Life" or Tim Ferriss' like the four-hour work week, right?

What's the Arthur Brooks book? We had Arthur on his book with Oprah, you know, building the life you want. So you have straight up instructive books. My book on the deep life will fall into that instructive bucket. Like here's the way to think about this. Here's what to do, try this out.

But I'm gonna recommend something different for you now. So the other piece about reading about the deep life is not the instructions about how you construct a deep life, but instead your internal exploration to understand what the deep life means to you. Like what is depth? This is actually the big question that people have.

Now, you know, on the show we say, first of all, life is too ambiguous of a term. Break your life into the different areas that are important to you. We sometimes call these buckets. So let's do that first. And, you know, so you might have craft and community and constitution and contemplation, celebration.

At different ways we talk about this, but the areas of your life that's important to you. So now life is something more general. Then what you wanna do is seek out in each of these areas of your life, examples that resonate. So it could be something you read about.

It could be something you hear on a podcast or something you see in a movie or a documentary or read in a magazine article, but you're trusting your own body's intuition. You're using your body as a depth detector. It knows. Like if it sees something that feels right in some way to me, I'm gonna feel that.

And so you start to capture these examples. And then once you have these examples and you're categorizing them, like the different parts of your life. Once you have these examples, then you can distill them into properties. Oh, so what are the properties that these examples have? Let me distill those.

These are the properties I'm looking for in the working part of my life. These are what resonate to me. I've distilled at the properties. Here's the properties I'm looking for in the community aspect of my life. I had these sort of examples of people and things and these books I read that really spoke to me.

What are the properties they all shared that I want in the community part of my life? Once you have those properties, now you have a portrait of your own goal as a deep life that you can start working on pursuing. And that's gonna be sort of fundamental to the book I'm writing on the deep life, the sort of lifestyle-centric planning.

So with this in mind, though, this means this is another way to think about books is you're looking for things that resonate. Then you're recording the things that resonate under the right categories, and then later you try to distill properties out of them. So you don't necessarily need to just be looking for instructions, but instead the raw material you'll later need to construct a deep life.

So Mark, that's what I might recommend. Read things that speak to you. And when you get that feeling of like, whatever this person is doing, why I'm reading a book about Lincoln and something about Lincoln is resonating with me, what's happening with the way he's dealing with X, let me write that down.

I'm watching a documentary about Laird Hamilton, big wave surfing on the North Shore of Maui. I don't know what about this is resonating, but something is, I'm gonna write this down. So think about books in that way as a source of intuition into what matters to you. And then of course we can later use that information to help construct a life that has those properties in it.

And that's the whole lifestyle-centric planning, it's its own thing. But anyways, I wanted to make that distinction. Books and the deep life is not just about how do I build this, but it's what do I wanna build, discovering what it is you wanna build. All right, what do we got next?

- Next question's from Scott. Do you think handwriting has a positive effect on cultivating a deep life? He provides a link that we'll take a look at. He also goes on to say, you use your remarkable tablet and that implies that you like writing by hand. Do you use it for reasons suggested in the article?

- All right, Scott, so we loaded up the article you sent to us. I'll put it on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. So the article that Scott sent us is titled Why Handwriting is Good for Your Brain. It's a picture of someone writing at some sort of colonial-looking desk.

All right, analysis. Research over the years has pointed out that there are many advantages and benefits to writing by hand. All right, so there's some cool pictures in here. I'm just kind of scrolling through this thing. Look at that thing. This is like a writing device, Jesse, this weird thing here.

It's a writing device that Nietzsche used. Okay. In a study carried out almost two decades ago, subjects were presented with words carrying a positive connotation, such as sweet, or negative, such as rubbish. Subjects had to indicate whether a word was good or bad by moving a joystick. Half the subjects were told to indicate that a word was good by pulling the joystick towards their body, and the other half were told to indicate good by pushing it away.

To indicate that a word was bad, they made the opposite movement to good. A consistent correlation was observed between meaning and movement. The quickest responses were produced by the subjects who were told to indicate good by pulling the joystick towards themselves, and indicate bad by pushing it away. The direct involvement of the body and senses and mental processes can explain how writing by hand helps us learn letters and words.

This is backed up by the results of various studies, which they then go on to summarize. All right, well, it's a good question. Do I use a remarkable notebook specifically to get benefits of handwriting? Not really. Not really. There's two advantages I like to it. Portability. Handwriting is portable.

You just need a surface, right? Keyboards take space, and I can type much faster than I can write. I mean, I take a lot of notes on my computer typing, so I can type much faster than I can write, but it's not portable. So I like portability of handwriting.

I also like flexibility of formatting. So in my remarkable, I underline things, I draw boxes, I draw arrows. There's a lot of information that can be captured diagrammatically, right? Like I can draw things, captures information. I can underline things, box things, connect things with arrows. There's a lot of extra information you can add with drawing in addition to just pure text.

So I like both those things about handwriting. I don't know that I understand or remember information better when I write. I'm frustrated that my writing is slow compared to my typing. My handwriting tends to get sloppy. Usually when I'm typing, just because my speed is better, I can get out more ideas.

I can develop them better. I mean, I actually like typed thinking, I feel like is more flexible for me than writing speaking, but there's advantages to the handwriting, the portability and the ability to add diagrams. So I'm not a big booster of these notions that it will change my understanding if I write it as opposed to type it.

In my book, I talked about this, I'm remembering this now. I talked about this in my straight A student book from years ago about how to be a student. And I argued in that book like, hey, if you're able to bring a laptop, if you have a laptop and are able to bring a laptop in the class to take notes, that's probably better because you can type faster.

To me, it was all about keeping up, getting the information down that you can then later study from. And so I think from, if I'm thinking back, even from my early days, I was a big fan of speed, speed and efficiency. So I like typing, but I do handwrite because it has its advantages.

If I had better handwriting, Jesse, I would do it more. Like some people have beautiful handwriting and there's like a draw, it's really nice. They have these bullet journals that look very artistic. My notebooks, if you looked at them, sort of look like you're capturing someone having a stroke in real time, just in terms of like the handwriting and the, so I get frustrated, like I wanna go faster.

- Other than your $50 notebook back in the day. - That one I wrote carefully in, that one slowed me down. - That was in the book. - I get frustrated I can't type faster. I type myself off of my keyboard. I go so fast, I type myself off, I wanna go faster.

My thoughts move so much quicker than I can get information down, but that's true. So in my high quality notebook, which I talk about in slow productivity, I spent a lot of money on this notebook when I was a postdoc. So I would take my thoughts more seriously. My handwriting is very neat in there.

So I did go slower in that notebook and I did produce better ideas. So maybe there's something in that. - How's your keyboard holding up that you bought over the holiday season? - I like it, my Mechanical. - Yeah. - Yeah, so by bouncing up the fingers, I'm faster, I can type faster.

But I still type myself off that keyboard. I go faster than I can actually keep up. - So you still use it all the time? - All the time. - Yeah. - Even in the HQ, when I use our new sort of beastly studio computer setup, I'll bring my Mechanical and plug it in.

Yeah, I really do like writing on it. - That's cool. All right, next question's from Josh. I have struggled with learning in school and work my whole life. I struggle with comprehension and my analytical and communication skills are terrible. I'm 33 and this inability to move up in life and grow is affecting every aspect of my life.

I feel like I'm always working hard to no avail. Should I get a brain scan to prove I have a low IQ? - No, I don't think you need to measure your IQ. I don't think you need a brain scan. You know, I think what we need to do here is lifestyle-centric planning, all right?

So this is like my key idea about the deep life is instead of fixating on particular specific goals that are appealing to you and hoping that those goals, if accomplished, will bring in their wake and appealing lifestyle, focus directly on the lifestyle that's appealing to you and see how do I engineer it.

When you focus on the aspects of your lifestyle that are appealing to you first and work backwards, it opens up many more ways forward. You have a huge diversity of ways forward and most importantly, you can mix and match your ways forward towards this desirable lifestyle to actually conform to your opportunities and obstacles which are very specific to you.

So I think lifestyle-centric plans is what's gonna be good here because I think in your mind, it sounds like you probably have these particular goals. I don't know, I wanna be higher up in this job or I wanna make this much money in this role and there's obstacles to it.

You're like, I'm having a hard time getting there. Whereas in lifestyle-centric planning, you say, well, what do I want? What do I actually want in the different parts of my life? It's not the specific job. It's that I wanna have this type of security and live in this type of place and have this sort of engagement with the community and spend this type of time.

You build this image of your life. And now you can say, what are my best ways to get there? So if like this particular type of work you're in, maybe it's involving certain types of like very stylized business communication and lots of like fast analytical thinking about analyzing things.

And if that is not fitting well with your skills, okay, let's find a different way to get towards what you're looking for. The other thing you'll get out of lifestyle-centric planning is now you're working with your opportunities and obstacles. You can sort of work systematically to expand opportunities and reduce the obstacles.

So if you're having difficulty with, you know, reading comprehension, for example, there are things you can do to make that better. Typically reading, building up a reading habit, starting with books that are incredibly appealing and easy and then sort of slowly pushing yourself on the complexity. That changes your mind.

As your mind becomes a reading mind, it changes it. Spending a lot less time with really high distraction, high salient attention economy tools, like things on your phone. Spend a lot less time with that and more times with slow information and slow entertainment like books, like watching full movies.

That'll rewire your brain in a way that will help. If there's particular analytical skills, practicing those skills will help. I wanna actually practice doing this type of analysis, getting feedback, doing it better next time. So you can actually reduce obstacles and increase opportunities. But all of this, I think, should be in the context of what do I want out of my life?

Okay, what do I have available? What opportunities do I have available? What are my obstacles? How can I expand those, reduce those? Fine, but let me work with what I can do well and figure out how to get closer and closer to these properties in the various parts of my life that appeal to me.

So I think the flexibility of lifestyle-centric planning is critical here because otherwise you might lock in on this is what I need to do, this job and this position and this job. And if that's not working for you, all you're gonna feel is frustration. So that's what I would suggest there.

Lifestyle-centric planning, LCP. You know me, LCP. That's a good question. All right, what else do we got? - All right, next question's from Esteban. Do you recommend using ChatGPT for reading recommendations? - No. I mean, ChatGPT has just digested a lot of information from people and then it is going to be remixing that in sort of arbitrary ways, unpredictable ways to try to produce a simulation of how real people it encountered online would be recommending books.

I think it's better just to go straight to the source material that ChatGPT trained on. People whose taste you find interesting or congruent, what type of books are they recommending? Trusting your own intuition, right? Like what am I interested in right now? What are the parts of my life I want to understand better?

What are the parts of the world that seem interesting to me that I want to know more about? What are good books there? I feel like choosing nonfiction books, it's like this, especially nonfiction, it's this really subtle act. You know, I'm constantly, it's a very subtle act when I'm choosing what I want to read next.

And a lot of different things in my life come together to choose this book versus that book and it's really enriching to me and even the selection process itself is an act of self-development, self-definition. So there's certain things like, yeah, this is great. We can use a language model to make faster.

This is not something we need to make faster. The more you have to find and understand what you want to read and why you want to read it, as you get better at finding and making these selections, you are going to improve your own understanding of yourself. So do not fall back on ChatGPT for this, because again, you're just getting, right, it's a token generator.

So it's like, what would people that I've seen talking about books, what are the types of things they would say here? That's not going to be better than just actually going to people who talk about books and seeing what they're saying. 'Cause there you have a real mind with coherent agency on the other end of it that you can actually relate to as a human being and figure out how to place the recommendations into some sort of larger sociocultural context.

It's a very human thing. I think it's something that's worth keeping more human. Hey, if you liked this video, I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out