So today, I want to tell you the story of the singer Jewel and how she became famous. Not because this story is fascinating, though it is, but because it highlights a key principle from my book, Slow Productivity, about how to move your professional life away from busyness and toward producing results that matter.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell Jewel's story and then I'm going to draw concrete lessons from her story that you can apply in your specific job. I'll give you specific examples about how you might put these lessons into practice. I'll end with a couple of common pitfalls that afflict a lot of people who attempt to escape busyness and fail to do so.

All right, so let's start with Jewel. Jewel has an interesting origin story. I went deep on this when researching Slow Productivity just because I found it fascinating. She grew up in rural Alaska, Homer, Alaska, to be more precise, and she was part of a family that were traveling musicians.

So she was part of a family traveling musician troupe. They have Swiss heritage, so she learned how to yodel at an early age, which actually gave her really interesting vocal control, which she really leveraged, I think, later on in her style. At some point, her mom leaves the family, so it's just her and her dad and her brother, and they're touring, and they're touring some pretty rough places.

These are not the Von Trapp family singers. We're talking biker bars. We're talking rural interior Alaska doing shows. We're talking not so great hotels, right? So she sort of had this rough upbringing. There's a part in her story where she's living in Homer, Alaska, and commuting to her job in town.

She lived in a cabin by a lake somewhere. She commuted to her job in town on a horse. She didn't have a driver's license, and a horse was an easier way to get over the rough terrain, right? So this is Jewel, this prodigious singer in this really unusual, rough childhood.

So in the town of Homer, she comes across someone who is visiting from the Interlochen Academy. This is a really well-known arts academy in Michigan, and he recognizes her talent and says, "Look, we have scholarships. You should come formally study how to sing at this arts academy. I'll show you how to do it.

I'll record your audition tape, and I'll walk you through the application process." This was all foreign to Jewel, and he walks her through, and she gets accepted. They raise money in the town. They don't give you money. You have to raise money just to get the plane tickets to get to Michigan to go.

It's a beautiful academy. It's spread out over this big acreage. You sort of walk through the woods between buildings. It's a beautiful place. She shows up there, fish out of water. It's an understatement. Almost immediately, the dean calls her into his office and says, "Jewel, you can't walk around with a hunting knife strapped to your leg." See, to Jewel from rural Alaska, of course, you're going to have a knife with you.

It's very useful. You wouldn't be anywhere without your knife, and he had to sort of kindly tell her, "All right, here in suburban Michigan, you don't walk around with a large knife strapped to your leg." Anyways, she gets formal training. She becomes a better singer. She becomes more exposed to music.

She can't afford to go home during the breaks, so she begins hitchhiking, doing these long trips during the breaks with her guitar, and she begins songwriting. She begins to write some songs that become some of her best-known songs from her initial debut album that will come much later, right?

So we have this interesting story. She makes her way to San Diego. Her mom's there. They're living together for a while. They lose the house. She moves into her car. She's not doing great, but she has this prodigious talent. It's rough, but this prodigious talent in singing, living out of her car in San Diego.

She comes across a coffee house, the interchange coffee house. That coffee house is sort of struggling. She talks to the owner, Nancy, and says, "Look, let me make you a deal. I'm going to perform here, just here, me and my guitar, and just give me a cut of the proceeds.

I think that could help me out, and I think it could help your store actually grow." So Jewel forms what's essentially a residency at this small coffee house, and she just goes to promote her shows. She busks on the San Diego beachfront. When people come up to hear a player to put a dollar in her guitar case, she says, "Hey, come to my show." The first show, her memory is somewhere between two to four people showed up.

Two to four surfers she met who thought she was cute on the beach, and they showed up. That was it. But she played her heart out because she had all this pain. I mean, I talk about this in Slow Productivity that Jewel is defined by these intertwined forces of talent and pain.

She can sing, but there's a real heart to it. So she begins doing these epic performances that are like hours long. It's a lot of original songs, some covers. She's really burying her soul. They're emotional. People are crying. So the word gets out, like, "What the hell? What's going on?

There's something special. It's rough, but there's something special going on here." She recalls there being basically exponential growth. There's two people, then four people, then eight people, then 16 people. After a few months, people are spilling out onto the sidewalk outside of the interchange coffee house. They have to put up speakers outside just so you can hear the show if you can actually get in.

Word gets out to the record executives, and they start showing up. They're like, "Okay, there's something special here." They begin flying her to meetings, like, "Okay, we want to talk to you about signing with us because, look, clearly you have talent, and we don't want you to go to another record label." Finally, the record executive sits her down.

This is where the story is where we're going to start to intersect with Slow Productivity here. Sits her down and says, "Okay, I'm putting this on the table right now, a million-dollar signing bonus." Remember, this is the '90s, early '90s, a million dollars is a lot of money. Still is today, but even then, a lot of money.

Jewel's living in her car, a million dollars on the table. She's like, "All right, let me go think about this." She's a fighter. She's incredibly self-reliant, right? She's like, "Hold on. Let me think about this." She goes to the library and gets out a book from the library about how to succeed.

Not even how to succeed. I think it was just how the music industry works. With the help of the fact checker with my book, we tracked down the actual title of the book. She got it wrong in the interviews, but we found the real book she was talking about.

It's like a guidebook to the music industry. She looks into this and she says, "Okay, how do these signing bonuses work?" "Oh, they're in advance. They're in advance on the royalties you're going to make, so they give you a million dollars up front. The first million dollars you make goes to paying that back.

Then after you pay it back, you get to keep any royalties beyond there. It's a standard advance set up. It's how books work as well, by the way. You get an advance on royalties and only after you pay back your advance do you actually earn any further royalties." She looks this up.

She thinks about it. She goes back to the record executive and she says, "No, thank you." She turns down a million dollars. She's living in her car. She turns down a million dollars. So what's going on here? Well, Jewel, we really have to give her credit for this. She recognized that she had real talent, but also she was rough.

Her only performance experience as a solo singer songwriter, not as playing Yodeling with her family or whatever, but as a solo singer songwriter, her only experience was really playing in the Interchange Coffeehouse and a few other shows that she had done with friends. She knew if she'd accepted a million dollar signing bonus, the record label is going to say, "We have to go all in right away.

We need that money back. Let's throw you out there and see if you can become a superstar right away and make back the money. If you don't, I'm sorry, you're gone." That would have been her chance. She thought, "I'm not ready for that yet. I need to learn how to get better at this, how to harness my craft." Her logic was absolutely right.

If I don't cost the record label a lot of money, they won't care enough to kick me off the label if I'm not doing something right off the bat. They will let me stay as a signed musician performing and recording as long as I don't cost them a lot of money.

I need that time. She had a phrase she had learned from her grandmother, "Hard wood grows slowly." She needed that time. She realized if she was going to be a real star, she needed time to get there. She said, "No million dollars." And then, oh, she's so clever. Such a shrewd sort of practicality in Jewel.

She says, "But what we can do because I know they felt bad." She's turning down a million dollars. She said, "Well, why don't we just make my back end higher? So if I do sell a lot of records, I'm going to make more money." And they're thinking, "Oh, look, she's probably not going to happen.

This is great. She's so cheap." So she gets a bigger back end than normal, which is going to pay her back handsomely in the future. Anyway, so now she's signed. Now she's signed, small advance, big back end, and she has to go record this album. And she was absolutely right.

She wasn't ready to be a star. So she's thinking, and I love the details of this because it reminds me of what it's like and the complexities of ambition and actually living up to ambition. My whole life is defined by this at a much smaller scale, the ambition and the failures to fully reach that ambition and the glimpses of real success that are followed by the frustrations.

So she wants to do something special and she turns down. They're giving her all these producers, the record labels, like, "Here's a hotshot pop producer. Here's another hotshot pop producer." She's like, "That's not what I want to do. Here's what I want to do. Neil Young's producer, whoever produced Harvest." Hey, quick interruption.

If you want my free guide with my seven best ideas on how to cultivate the deep life, go to calnewport.com/ideas or click the link right below in the description. This is a great way to take action on the type of things we talk about here on the show. All right, let's get back to it.

I love that sound. That's what I want to do. They're like, "Okay. I mean, this is weird. It's like the '90s. It's like Lisa Loeb. Pop punk is coming out of the grunge era at this point. You want to do a Neil Young? Okay." You know, they're like, "Okay, whatever.

It's not costing us much money. Whatever you want to do." And she goes actually out to Neil Young's ranch, records her album with the Stray Gators, with Neil Young's band in Northern California and his ranch with his producer, and they record her first album. It's not great because the problem is, and she was right, she was nervous.

All of her performance experience was her alone in a coffee shop, and now she's playing with the Stray Gators with Neil Young's backing band. She's nervous about this, and it shows. It's tentative, right? I mean, it's like, "Okay. The songs are okay." She had a good collection of songs from traveling and hitchhiking while she was at Interlochen, but it was nervous.

They weren't great. The album comes out and not much happens. This thing is not selling. If she had done the million-dollar signing bonus, this is where they would have been like, "You're out of here." In fact, they wouldn't even let her have this experimentation. They would have made her done probably a real poppy type of album, like, "Let's get right after it." It wouldn't have worked, but she didn't cost them any money.

It's like, "All right. We're not going to drop you. Why don't you go? I guess you can tour." She's like, "I'm going to tour really cheap. No van, no bus, a car, and I'll just drive along myself and tour really cheap." In fact, for a while, she was even performing with a group called Earth Jam that would perform, and I'm not kidding you here, environmentally-themed concerts for high schools during the day in exchange for them giving her transportation to her gigs at night.

She was costing people nothing, performing, getting experience, starting a lot of college shows, a lot of live performances on college radio, playing at colleges. Really there, that vibe is where she began to pick up her confidence. She did this for like a year of this going on, finally getting the training she needs to figure out, "How do I do this?

How do I perform? How do I be more of a star and not just a coffee shop crooner?" Then she goes back and says, "Okay, let me re-record what I think could be a really big song, 'You Were Meant For Me.' I was nervous. I was reporting this with the Stray Gators.

I feel better now." She goes back and re-records it. She has her friend from California, Flea, the bassist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, plays on that new re-recording. Now, this one's working. It's more confidence, more sultry. Finally, things start to happen. She begins with all her college touring to show up on the college charts.

From there, "Who Will Save Your Soul" starts to kind of make a move. It's kind of peaking up and people are listening to it here and there. Then she records this great video for her newly re-recorded version of "You Were Meant For Me," and that just explodes on MTV.

She's ready for it now. We're like a year and a half out from her turning down a million dollars. She's ready for it now. That album, "Pieces of You," just explodes. Remember, she's getting extra backend, so the money is flying at her. Anyway, that's what happens with Jewel. What's the lesson here?

Well, there's a principle in slow productivity that is titled "obsess over quality." Jewel's story gets to why this is important. See, when you obsess over quality, "I want to do something really well," escaping busyness and moving towards something more slow and sustainable becomes inevitable. It becomes natural. It becomes what's attractive to you.

When you're not obsessed over doing something really well, there's an appeal to the busy and the frenetic because it's something to do. You feel like, "I'm making moves. I'm jumping on calls. I have all these plans. I'm on Slack channels telling everyone things. I'm putting up videos of this over on TikTok." There is a warmth from the heat generated by the friction of freneticism, but that warmth doesn't turn into real fires.

It's not hot enough, but on the other hand, when you say, "No, no, I want to do something really well. I want to produce an album that's going to explode," I have to slow down because I need to get better. I need to get really good. So I'm going to get a small record deal to have the record label leave me alone so I can just spend a year and a half touring and finding myself, finding my voice, getting advice, going back, re-recording, tinkering.

She did a couple other versions of "You Were Meant for Me," by the way, including a real poppy version with a top pop producer that was no good. I've heard it. It's no good. She needed time and she had to slow down. So when we try to parabolize this to our lives, not as singers, but as just knowledge workers doing whatever we do, accepting the million dollars is like the busyness, just like running around and doing everything.

Turning down the million dollars and taking your time to figure out how to be a performer, that's slowing down. So that's the first lesson from Jewel's story. Once you begin prioritizing doing something really well, the only thing that feels natural then is being less busy. The focus of quality is the antithesis of freneticism.

But there's a second lesson in here as well. So if we return to Jewel, what happens? Well, that album "Pieces of You" is just crazy. She makes a lot of money. How do we know she makes a lot of money? We know because for an unfortunate reason, there's this unfortunate side note to Jewel's story that her mom comes back into her life and basically takes over as her manager.

We've heard this story before. This is the Colonel and Elvis. Look, there's nothing here that's that unusual. Anyways, she steals a lot of Jewel's money. She steals a lot of her money. Eventually, there's a lawsuit. Jewel steals her mom. The only reason why that's relevant to us is in that lawsuit an amount is named.

So we get a sense of how successful Jewel was with these initial albums. The specific number she cited that her mom stole from her was $200 million. So if it's possible for someone to steal $200 million for you, you're probably doing from a financial perspective. And again, I'm not an expert on this, but I would say pretty well.

Okay. So she's getting very successful. There's this whole mechanism now that surrounds her. The better you get at doing something you love, the more the world conspires to try to prevent you from doing that thing. That's an axiom that all creatives know. This happens to Jewel. So they send her on an international tour, exhausting, a Taylor Swift type thing.

She comes back from the tour and now her agents are saying, "Okay, you're young and attractive. You need to do movies too. So move to Hollywood. Get her in the Devil's Backbone and Ang Lee movie. Here's the plan. Move to LA. We're going to do international tour movies. International tour movies.

You're going to be a multimedia mogul star." And Jewel says, "Well, wait a second. What do I want to do? I want to produce great music. I don't worry about money. I have plenty of money. I want to produce great music." "No, thank you." Never does an international tour again, leaves the movie business, does not settle in LA, goes to a ranch in Texas with her boyfriend, who was a rodeo rider, and just writes music.

So there's another lesson in there. And again, I'm trying to parabolize this and the lessons are going to be relevant to us who are not really fancy and successful movie stars. The lesson here is that by getting really good at something, Jewel was able to gain autonomy over what her work was like.

So getting good at something enables slowness. So as you quest to get good, lesson number one, you crave slowness. As you get better at things, lesson number two, you gain the autonomy to actually enforce more slowness in your life. Jewel is a very successful musician, so she could basically say, "No, I don't want to do this other stuff.

I just want to write music. I have enough money. I have enough F.U. money to say, 'No, I'm going to shape what my life is like,' and I want it to be slow." So we've got these great two lessons in here. Quality makes slowness something that is necessary and appealing.

The pursuit of quality also eventually makes slowness something that you can more easily enforce or maintain in your life. So we have a virtuous flywheel here. It's why I call this last principle, obsess over quality, the glue that holds all the other principles of slow productivity together, because it makes the other ideas possible.

The other ideas are about doing fewer things and working at a more natural pace. The obsession over quality really makes that much more possible. All right, so let's try to apply this to a normal knowledge work job. What is the template we want to apply if you're a marketing director or a programmer and not a music superstar?

Well, think about it this way. One, figure out what you do best or what you could do that's going to be the most valuable for your sector or organization. We often skip over this step, but it's really hard sometimes to figure out what really matters. What is our equivalent of Jewel's performance singing ability?

It's not always obvious in non-specifically creative careers, so we have to go find it. And then once we find up, we have to create our equivalent of Jewel's training regime. She spent a year and a half on the road figuring out, "How do I perform? How do I find my voice?

What is my voice? How do I translate what I was doing in the interchange coffeehouse into something that translates to a CD that's going to MTV? I'm going to work on that craft." Well, you have to have a similar training regime where you haven't just identified, "Here's what matters in my job," but you know how you're getting after that, how you're improving that.

And then three, as you get more successful, cash that in to gain more autonomy over your work so that you can have whatever level or definition of slowness appeals to you. So you can step away from busyness and keep your work crafted around the things that really resonate. That's hard as well.

That's hard as well because, well, as you get better, people aren't going to be offering you to do less. So you're going to have to actually make that call yourself. So let's look at some concrete examples here. Let's go back to I mentioned marketing director. What might this dual strategy look like, obsessing over quality, look like if you're a marketing director?

Well, maybe what you realize is, okay, when you get measurement-based, you can really get fine-tuned about figuring out what marketing efforts work and what don't, how to lean in heavily on the things that work and away from the things that don't. And so maybe you decide, "I'm going to become ruthlessly measurement-based in designing of my marketing strategies, even if this is kind of scary because I'm not just doing here's a standard mix of things.

You can't really get mad at me. I'm doing sort of the right things." Like, "No, I'm ruthlessly measurement-based. I'm learning these measurement tools. I'm trusting the data. I'm pushing the things that are working well beyond what is normal." And maybe as a result, by doing this, your campaigns are unusual and innovative and very successful.

So you figured out what's important. My campaign's working and a training regime for getting there. I'm going to do this sort of leaning into evidence-based in this example. Now you have to use that success to gain autonomy. So now imagine you say, "Okay, I'm really desirable in this sector.

I'm leaving my company to go freelance. You can hire me to run the marketing for your particular whatever it is, product or launch or whatever. And I'm going to charge a good amount of money because I'm really good at this. I can back it up and I'm going to do this eight months a year.

Four months a year, I don't take contracts. That's just the deal. So if your contract overlaps those four months, I just can't do it." Imagine that now. Now you've created this really nice sort of slow rhythm where you're doing great work. You have four months a year, you're not working at all.

I mean, you could just imagine in this daydream here how you've escaped just being like a lower-level marketing director that they don't really trust. They're bothering you with emails and you're working all the time and you're always worried about your job. All right, what about if you're a programmer?

Let's give another concrete example here. Maybe you really look around and say, "Oh, this particular specialty is incredibly valuable right now." Maybe it's like API development for platforms, or maybe it's something in the AI space, like you're very comfortable working with the ML libraries for Google. I'm very comfortable working with doing efficient training code for neural nets or something like that.

You figure out like, "This is the thing that's really valuable. We don't have a good person for this. These people are really desirable." And you just work an hour a day. You train yourself. You read and do sample projects. You're just doing this, forcing yourself to get better and better and better at this.

And as you get better and better, you eventually be considered a 10X programmer. Your salary jumps up. Maybe you begin to dictate more the terms of how your work happens. I do one project at a time. I take sabbaticals every three years. They're just happy to have you because they don't want the other team to have you.

Completely different, less busy life. You can dictate the terms. Those are just some concrete examples of what I'm trying to show you here is that this dual strategy of figuring out what matters, systematically pursuing it, leveraging success to gain autonomy and to move away from busyness and towards something more meaningful really can apply to many different jobs.

All right. So what are the pitfalls here that you want to avoid? I have three real quick I want to mention. This first one actually came up in my conversation with Ryan Holiday when I did his podcast recently to talk about slow productivity because it was actually an idea of his that we sort of riffed on.

And this was this idea of you want to make sure that you're not playing the wrong game. So one of the biggest pitfalls is like, look, I want to do really well, but you're doing well at the wrong game. And the example he gave, which I think is a good one, is focusing on pleasing over impressing.

And he said, OK, here's what I want to do is I'm going to be super responsive. Like I make everyone else's life easier. You need something, I'll do it. Even if I have to stay up late, I'll answer your emails right away. Like my job is to reduce stress in everybody else's life.

And people will love you for that. But they won't respect you for that. You're not going to gain yourself autonomy or leverage doing that. You're going to you're going to gain yourself a lot more work. Now, consider the other game to play, which is I want to impress all these people.

It's not impressive to be super responsive and to do what it takes to get these small things done. It's not impressive. It's useful to them. Impressive is I can program these transformer matrix manipulations for this AI thing better than anyone else, you know, and it gives us a 10x speed up in the training when I do it, when I'm on the team and I'm like fine with email.

I'm kind of you know, I'm not like a jerk about it, but I'm I'm not like great at the small things you give me, but I can do this really well. And that's really impressive. That is much more valuable. Playing the game of being impressive instead of playing the game of pleasing people.

Pitfall number two has to do with the training aspect. Right? So these pitfalls, by the way, correspond to the three part lessons of the first part was figure out what you do best. Playing the wrong game is a pitfall about getting that wrong. The second part of our three step system was create a training regime.

So the pitfall here is what I call going on fun runs instead of interval training. Right? So like when people want to become a better runner, they're amateur runners, they want to just like go for 5k runs and blast music and kind of like go fast at the end and work up a sweat, but never really do anything that hard.

Right? Whereas like serious runners like no, no, no, I'm either doing 10 mile runs to build up my aerobic base, or I'm doing vomit inducing intervals to get my speed up. It's not fun. Right? The professional runners are doing the stuff you really need to do to get better.

The amateur runners are doing the stuff that they they want to do. So they kind of tell the story that that's what's important. Same thing happens with knowledge or professional skills all the time. We write a story about what we want to do, because we like the idea of like, I spent 30 minutes doing this you to me course on programming every day, I can find time for it.

It's not too hard, but it makes me feel productive. We write stories about what we want to be important. Instead of figuring out the things that actually matter. And almost always the things that actually matter aren't fun, you have to learn to actually get the pleasure out of doing the hard thing other people won't do.

Athletes know this. You have to you have to alchemize intense discomfort of certain training, I can't understand this math, but I'm going to crack it. alchemize that into fulfillment. Yeah, other people are going to give up. I'm not. I'm not going to give up here. All right, the third pitfall here.

So when it comes to using success to gain more autonomy, the pitfall here is what I call the control trap. This was in my book so good, they can't ignore you. The control trap. The control trap basically says, as you get good enough to gain control over your career, and the potentially use this to gain more autonomy to gain more slowness, that is exactly the time where you're going to be presented with all of these really flattering opportunities to get paid more and get more whatever respect, I guess, like more clout in your field, in exchange for having a busier, more frenetic job.

Like as soon as you get good enough to be able to demand slowness, people will start offering you fastness on the most appealing platters you've seen. Hey, good news. You could be a managing partner at our law firm. Like, oh, man, that's hard. And that, you know, that pays a lot of money.

Yeah, that's definitely what I want to do. By the way, it's twice to work, you know, so as you get really good at something, people don't come to you and say, hey, you're really good. You want to like chill? Like we'll pay you the same amount of money and you can work half the time if you want.

They don't say that. They say, how about we double the money and double the amount of work you do? That's the control trap. So you're going to have to fight against the grain. No one is going to hold your hand, applying your hard won leverage in the market to try to make your life slower.

No one wants you to be slower. You have to be the one to demand it and have faith in yourself. All right. So this is a pitfalls. All right. So anyways, there we go. That's the story of Jewel. I think it's a really cool story. I tell it in detail and slow productivity, but those are the lessons to pull from it.

Obsessing over quality makes slowness seem absolutely necessary. Obsessing over quality eventually gives you more options than you thought you ever had to actually put slowness into pursuit. So quality and slowness are intertwined. If you want to escape overload and crushing busyness, paradoxically, focusing on what matters and sometimes working harder on what matters is going to make your life easier.

All right. So we have some great questions to get to. First, however, I want to talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. That is our good friends at Shopify, the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launcher online shop stage to the first real life store stage, all the way to the, did we just hit a million dollars in order stage?

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And then they're confused and they kind of walk by and that's the type of fun you could have. Anyways, when we open our store to sell that shirt, we would of course use Shopify. Basically everyone I know in this game who sells their own things, they use Shopify because it makes it easier and it works well.

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And I can tell you, Huberman and I mixed up some Element to stay hydrated for, I believe our episode was, and I'm checking this here in the notes, 17 hours long. Look, I get dehydrated not just from exercise, but from talking all the time. Element is absolutely what I drink to get those electrolytes up without having to have sugar and all the other weird stuff.

So anyways, Element has a fantastic offer just for us. Go to drinkelement.com/deep to get a free sample pack with any purchase. That's drinkelement, L-M-N-T.com/deep. All right, let's get back to our show and do some questions. Our first question comes from Claire. Look, I always, for those who are watching on the video, by the way, you see, I keep checking over here.

There's no Jesse. So it's up to me to make sure that we're actually still recording. I believe we still are. All right. Our first question comes from Claire. Claire says the following, "I am judged based on productive output, where I have to complete seven or eight reports per day that take an hour each.

So instead of being able to do a few hours of deep work and take a break, I am working eight hours and a half deep work state. I need to focus, but not that intensely. I have a number of side projects I want to work on in my off time, but I'm tired.

Should I try to find a job that's not too hard?" Well, Claire, maybe, but let's talk first about what you could do with this current job. And then maybe that will help you think through a little bit more critically about whether it's worth trying to change this job or not.

First, I want to just point out seven or eight hours of semi-deep work on reports is actually still a lot better than what a lot of people have, which is zero deep work hours, plus about 10 hours of partial continuous attention, non-deep context switching, overload nonsense. A day full of meetings and email and Slack, which is all administrative overhead generated by the too many tasks that they've agreed to and are on their task list, leading them to a nihilistic sense of absurdity that all I ever do is talk about work and almost never, nothing actually gets done.

Few exhaustions are more deranging than that of having to switch your attention every few minutes and yet never feeling like you're making progress. All this to say, "Hey, this kind of sounds nice that you could work on one thing at a time and aren't have to be on email and chat." So look, there's some silver lining here, but here would be my first suggestion.

Why can't we change this to five to six reports per day? Wouldn't that make your life a lot easier? Now, look, I don't know the setup of your job. Maybe that would mean having to take less money. That might be worth it, by the way, but I wouldn't offer that right away, less money.

Just do the reports better and just say, "Look, this seven to eight is too many. My quality is flagging. I want to do five or six. Hey, but check my quality. These are going to be great. They're going to be better. And I think this is better." And just do it.

And they might end up being like, "Okay, fine. These are better." Maybe you didn't need to be doing seven to eight. You just set that arbitrary standard. Now, maybe they say, "No, no, no. Even if they're better, we're going to pay you less." That still might be worth it.

That still might be worth it because even if they're paying you less, five to six reports a day means five hours of work maybe, and you could be done. I like the sound of that. All right. So let's think about this some more. Instead of doing one hour per report at a half state of deep work, I want you to consider doing 30 to 40 minutes of really intense deep work supported by rituals and a structured process for how you go through these reports.

So it's not just haphazard thinking that gives you 30 to 20 minutes of rest in between each report, or allows you to do two reports, take an hour off, two reports, and an hour off. I want to find a way that you're not going constantly, but you have more of a rhythm of intensity and non-intensity.

Now, if you're working 30 to 40 minutes and then taking a break, you're going to want to make those breaks. You have to be careful with those breaks. You have to take what I call deep breaks, which means you need to be careful not to have this break be a hard context shift.

You don't want to look at email or unrelated, highly emotionally salient information. You're going to want these other breaks to focus on things that don't really change your context too much so that you can 20 minutes later, get back into the next report without having to start from scratch.

So try those two things. And I think this could be better. Okay. Those who are watching the video see I keep looking around because I have a mysterious buzzing happening in my ear here. Hold on a second. I'm doing some live debugging. I don't think this is showing up on the recording.

It's driving me crazy. Hold on one second. All right. Well, that's exciting. Podcasting right there is what you get for solo podcasting. By the way, we're pretty svelte with one producer here. Some shows are like that. A lot of other shows I've noticed where really they have a lot of pretty large teams.

So I think we're pretty svelte here. All right. Our next question comes from Evan. Evan says, I'm in the early stages of my career and realized that a disproportionate amount of success in the corporate world depends on your ability to sell yourself. I've seen competent, quiet managers get fired while talking heads get steadily promoted.

How do I sell my skills better? And if needed interview better. Well, Evan, this is a key place where I want to bring up one of the pitfalls that we discussed when talking about the story of Jewel in the deep dive, which was the fun run versus interval training pitfall, which says the key here is to not to write your own story about what matters, but to learn what actually does matter.

All right. So it's very tempting in this type of situation to come up with what you want to be important. This is what I want to work on. And if I do this, then I'm going to get more notice. I'm going to be more successful because I like the sound of it.

I like the sound of it. It's tractable. It's not too hard, but it sounds good. No, you need to go figure out for the people who are good at what you see as being needed for success to people who are good, who are getting steadily promoted. What specifically are they doing that matters?

This might mean actually talking to them. I want to learn from you. How did you get this promotion? What about this one? What was key? What were you doing that other people who are up for that promotion didn't do? Learn what really matters. You might discover, for example, that actually it's not about them selling themselves.

Like maybe it turns out, and I've been down this road before in my own life, where I thought it was a marketing thing mattered. And it turned out like, no, actually the thing they were doing was just better than what I'm doing. So it might turn out, oh, this is the skill that really matters.

It's very hard. I'm doing that. Okay. They're doing it better. This is not about them selling themselves, or maybe it is about selling themselves, but you learn out what that means. What aspect of selling themselves is it that in the end really matters? So you've got to get to the bottom of what matters.

Don't write your own story. And then you can decide, do I want to do that or not? And if so, what's my training regime? And let's get after it systematically head down relentlessly. And if not, at least, you know, why not? Oh, this is harder or requires sacrifices that I'm not right now willing to make.

And by the way, that second answer is fine as well. So there's a technological piece to this because a lot of people have this sense about social media promotion. I think what matters is that professor, that manager, that writer, it's what they're doing on social media that matters. So maybe I need to do more of that.

If I just did more of that, I'd be more successful, right? It's a common story that we tell ourselves when we're looking at self-promotion and success. But when you dig deep in a lot of these cases, it turns out it's not the key. The key is what they're doing is good.

They're doing something different. They got lucky, you know? So anyways, reality is more complicated. You got to actually confront the reality. Let's move on here. We got Mike. Mike says, I'm an animator and I have good productivity and focus in the office. However, I struggle to work on my personal projects at home.

I only do tasks that have the least resistance, such as organizing files instead of doing the actual work. How can I do the hard tasks for my personal projects? Well, Mike, first of all, the stuff you're mentioning as least resistant, such as organizing files, maybe this is not so unimportant.

A lot of what's important in household labor is actually pretty organizational. It's keeping the household as basically a pseudo business running well, which is often less about big leaps of deep work or Bravo performance and more about actually keeping a lot of balls very carefully moving in the air so none of them fall.

Also, you might consider just doing fewer projects and making the projects you do better. So when it comes to personal projects, there's a couple of reasons why you might not be coming back to them. There's a couple of reasons why you might be looking to lesser resistant alternatives. One could be you don't really love the project.

It was just like, I want to do this. I want to learn Spanish. And you don't really love the idea. You're not that excited about it. And you're tired because you have a hard job and you're trying to take care of your house and maybe your family and that limited time and energy.

If it's a project you don't love, your mind might say no moss. See what I did there? That was Spanish. Here's the other problem. Maybe you do love the project, but your plan stinks. Like I want to be a novelist. And so like, why don't, why am I just not going down to my writing room and writing?

Because your mind says that's just not, that's not enough. You go into that room and writing is not going to produce a novel. That's going to sell. We need to learn more about this. We've got to get better at writing. We need an editor. You know, this is not a good plan.

Your brain knows it's not a good plan. And so when you're saying maybe I should go spend some hours writing at the library, whatever your brain says, let's organize the files. Come on, let's get real. It's a good future plan evaluator. All right. So maybe you need fewer projects and the projects you choose need to be better, but also just ease up.

You know, I came across like several in recent weeks meeting impressive people while working on book promotion who had the same thing. They told me the same thing. They don't really have a lot of hobbies right now. They're trying to do something professionally. It's really important. They have families.

They're trying to keep their health up because they're reaching middle age and it matters. A lot of people, my age and my situation, for example, just don't have a lot of personal projects. That's fine too. You don't have to have a lot of personal projects. Having a good job, staying, like keeping your body running, being a leader for your family, like that's a lot, that's a hard job.

So if you're not feeling it right now in your current stage of life, you're not out there doing the complicated hobbies or whatever, you can ease up on yourself a little bit. I think that's okay. We don't always have to be doing that, especially if our setup is not one that makes that easy to do.

If we don't have a highly autonomous setup with a lot of time or it's an activity that we've done for a long time and really love. All right, we've got a question here from Elena. Elena says, "My day consists of waking up at 5 a.m., getting ready for the gym, reading for 15 to 20 minutes, returning from the gym by 7.30, finishing showering, having breakfast by almost 9.

Currently, I can't say that I have rare and valuable skills to offer and I have a job from 9 to 6 that doesn't offer that many opportunities to develop those skills either, although it pays very well. In this scenario, how can I do less at a natural pace but at least include a chunk of deliberate practice into my day to learn rare and valuable skills that allow me to build a remarkable life without falling into busyness?" Oh, Elena, you got a lot going on.

I mean, look, I'm very impressed by your drive here, but let's slow down a little bit because I worry that you're approaching the problem of wanting a slower work life by pushing more fast activity into it. And that might not be the right way to solve this. Let me be specific here.

This is hypothetical. I don't know the exact details of your situation, but let me give you a sense about this. What if we instead said we're going to make these changes? Your goal is to end your day at 4.30, instead of 6, you're going to go to the gym at 4.30 instead.

Hold on to the complaint for now. I'll never get my work done if I finish at 6. People will notice that's too early. Hold that aside for now. It's going to be our goal to finish work by 4.30, go to the gym then. Now, this means you don't have to wake up at 5.

Now, you can actually sleep, get more sleep, sleep to a more reasonable hour. Using that extra time, even sleeping later, you're going to be able to start your workday earlier. Because we've gotten rid of this time in the gym and the morning reading. So you can start your work earlier and do it in a very demonstrable way.

The key idea from slow productivity is that we use a lot of pseudo productivity right now. This idea of using visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. So lean into that a little bit, take advantage of that, be visibly starting your workday a little bit earlier, but spend the first hour of that workday doing deliberate practice on a skill that you want to get really good at.

So going back to the JUUL example, you've isolated a rare and valuable skill you do want to develop. You have the first hour of every day you're doing deliberate practice. Your bosses don't necessarily know that's what you're doing. They just know that like, "Hey, Elena's here. It's 8 or it's 8.30 and she's getting after it." And they don't know what you're really doing is training more than answering emails or doing something else.

Now, because you're starting work earlier, it's not as big of a deal that you're ending earlier. Now you also still have to get better at your work itself. Like if you're working from nine to six, like probably I'm going to guess this is a pretty haphazard day. So you know the stuff we talk about on here.

You need a multi-scale planning. You probably need to reduce, this is a key idea from slow productivity, reduce the number of things you're actively working on at once. It's like, here's the three things I'm working on right now actively. These five things I'm waiting to work on as I finish one of these, I'll pull one of those in.

This reduces the administrative overhead you're facing at any one moment, which allows you to actually move faster with completion. There's a whole chapter in slow productivity that gives you specific step-by-step tactics for how to do this in your job in a way that people will tolerate and will really work really well.

You do these things so that you're able to get more work done, the right work done more effectively. And you'll be producing more by 4.30 than you were by six. And your bosses think you're starting work early anyways. And you know, they're like, "Oh, Elena's really into exercise and she comes in early.

She leaves a little early. She does really good work. This is great." But you've transformed your life in this plan. Now you're not waking up at five, you're getting an hour of deliberate practice in, you're ending your workday with an exercise, which I do. I think it's a great way to transition from work mode into after work mode.

By six now, when you used to finish work, you're done with your exercise and you're done with your work. You got some sleep, you did your deliberate practice, and you can read at night. That could be like a really good activity is that you read instead of watching TV show.

You have a lot of, you have this evening free now. You don't have to go to bed at nine because you're waking up so early. So, you know, I don't know if for your particular situation, that particular reconfiguration works, but it's a good sample reconfiguration because it highlights the possibilities here.

It highlights the possibilities that you have when you think about slowness, that structuring your time, being more careful about when you do things. You can produce a lot and be very successful. You have more options than you think about how you produce a lot, how you're successful. You can take the reins a little bit more to make your life more sustainable.

All right, let's do one last question here. This one's from Cameron. Cameron says, I have a hard job and I'm trying to use the deep life stack 2.0 to balance everything. For my discipline stack, I take daily walks, go to the gym and read. How is this different than the value stack where I create rituals and routines for hard work?

Well, Cameron, I wanted to end with a little bit of deep life pontificating, I guess I would say. The bigger picture here of living a deep life, which encompasses a lot more than just work. We talked a lot in today's episode specifically about knowledge work and using quality to slow down and getting away from busyness and strategies to get there.

But I like to bring it back in the end to the broader goal here, which is work is one part of an overall deep life. And that's really our goal in the show is in this world that's increasingly defined by technological forces, by email, by social media, by artificial intelligence, all these forces that are shaping our lives and reshaping our lives and destabilizing things that we know and making things harder or weirder or newer.

How do we build a life that's deep and rooted, that's really human, that we like, that's meaningful, that's sustainable. And this has a lot more to do than just work. So I want to end on that question. Now, Cameron, I think the issue here is you're mixing things up.

So when we talk about values in the context of the deep life, when we talk about rituals and routines for values, these are not rituals and routines for hard work, as you write here. They're rituals and routines for reinforcing your values and your values have nothing to do with work.

Your values are the underlying things that you think are critical to a life well lived. These are the things that if there was an apocalypse and you were starting over and you're escaping from the vampire cannibals, the things that you would rebuild from, the respect for other individuals, the being of infinite worth, leadership and character, integrity, that are trying to be someone who produces things of impact, showing up when people need to be there.

I mean, these are values. Routines and rituals are about reinforcing these, these most fundamental atoms of what actually comprises the human life well lived. Nothing to do with hard work. So what are routines and rituals that reinforce these values? I mean, rituals are things that you do on a regular basis that helps reconnect you to these things you care about.

And it could be the gratitude walk you do through the woods to reconnect to the wonders of the world. It could be a ritual built instead around prayer that connects you to the divine as a source of strength to go through the hardships of life. Routines here could be things you just do on the regular to help make sure that you're connected to your values.

Things that actually have practical values. Rituals have no practical values other than just to reinforce a value. Routines are things you do to put those values regularly into your life. I volunteer two days a week because that pragmatically puts one of these things I value into my life on a regular basis.

For example, I read five books a month because the life of the mind as like this Aristotelian theological goal of the human existence is important to me, but this routine of reading every day. So I read five books so I can get to five books a month because that puts my value into action.

So rituals is just about reinforcing psychologically the importance of a value to you. Routines are about pragmatically putting values into actions on a regular basis into your life. And this is not about hard work. It's not about going to the gym. It's really about the things that make humans, humans.

And why this is so important in the context of a deep life is that work comes and goes and it goes well and it goes bad. And sometimes it's in your control and sometimes that's not. And sometimes you get sick and you can't work the way you used to work before or you thought you're going to be really good at this.

And people come along and say, no, you're not, or you have the big plan and it fails and you lose all the money and you have to start over. And it's kind of humiliating. So it can't just be work that you're trying to build this whole edifice on. It's got to be something deeper, more fundamental, more human.

And that is, that's what I mean by values. But Cameron, I appreciate the question because it allowed us to talk deeper about the deep life. All right. So speaking about the deep life, I mentioned reading as part of it, which means I want to talk about the books I read in February.

First, I want to briefly mention another sponsor that makes this show possible. That's our friends at My Body Tutor. I've known Adam Gilbert, My Body Tutor's founders for many years. He's my go-to guy for fitness advice. His company, My Body Tutor is a fantastically smart idea because it is a 100% online coaching program.

So you can get a coach like the Hollywood stars have when they prepare for a role in a movie. But instead of having to have someone come to your house at great expense, you can interact with them online. So you get that consistency and tailored help, the accountability that comes with it without the expense of having to have someone in your home gym telling you to use the combat ropes.

So the way it works is you get assigned this coach. You tell them what you care about with your health journey. They help you figure out like, what are we gonna do with your diet? And let's come up with a plan here that makes sense for you and your circumstances.

What are we gonna do with your exercises that makes sense for you and your circumstances? And then every day you check in with that coach using the easy online app and they see and they respond every day. And if you have questions like, hey, this isn't working for me, like let's tailor that so it does.

You have a one-off situation. The holidays are coming up. What do I do about this? They give you one-off specific advice for your particular situation. And you build a relationship with your coach. It's not just tailored advice, but it's the accountability of knowing they're looking at what you did and didn't do.

It's miraculous how well it works. If you really wanna get healthier, this is the way to do it. You go to MyBodyTutor, T-U-T-O-R. Go to MyBodyTutor.com. And when you do mention deep questions when you sign up and Adam will give you $50 off your first month, just mention that podcast when you sign up and it'll give you $50 off.

MyBodyTutor, it is the way to get healthier. I also wanna talk about our longtime friends at Blinkist. Blinkist is an app that gives you more than 6,500 book summaries and expert-led audio guides to read and listen to in just 15 minutes per title. You can access best-in-class actionable knowledge from 27 categories such as productivity, psychology, and more, and also get entertained at the same time.

The way Jesse and I use Blinkist is as a triage tool for the books we read. If there's a book that we think might be important, we will put it on a list. And to help make the decision about whether or not we buy that book, we will read the Blink, which is what they call the 15-minute summary of the book.

I'll sometimes listen to them. Jesse likes to read them. This gives you a really good sense about the book. Sometimes once you get that 15-minute summary, you're like, "Okay, this isn't quite for me. I get the gist of it. I don't wanna spend a week with this book." But I got the main ideas.

That's useful. And sometimes the Blink, it's like, "Oh, that's exactly what I wanted. That's what I was looking for. Great. Let me definitely buy this book." And it makes your success rate with nonfiction book buying, the rate at which you actually love and get something out of the books you buy, go from what would normally be for most people like 50/50 to more like 90 to 95% success rate.

Now, there's other reasons why I'd use Blinkist, sort of to learn about a whole new field without having to read all the books or just because they're entertaining. A lot of ways to use it. People blink in different ways, but I like to use it as a triage tool for the reading life.

However you use it, it is a really useful tool. They also have a new feature called Blinkist Connect, which will allow you to give another person unlimited access for free. It's basically a two-for-one deal. So that's cool as well. So right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience.

Go to blinkist.com/deep to start your seven-day free trial, and you will get 40% off a Blinkist premium membership if you sign up. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T. Blinkist.com/deep to get 40% off any seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com/deep. And now for a limited time, you can even use Blinkist Connect to share your premium account.

You will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one at Blinkist.com/deep. All right, final segment of the episode. At the beginning of each month, I like to review the books I read in the previous month. So we're in March, so I need to summarize the books I read in February, 2024.

As usual, my goal is to read five books a month. So here's what I read in February. Number one, The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. I wrote a newsletter post about this. You can find it at calnewport.com/blog from a month or two ago from February when I finished it.

Worth reading because I think it's an interesting, fantastic book. There's a secular message in this. It's not just Jewish theology. There's a secular message in this about work and what there is outside of work. It's not just about like the day of rest captures not just preparation to work better, but ancient Jewish scripture tells you the day of rest is about actually anticipating the kingdom of God to come, which is a way we can secularize that as thinking about rest sometimes is about rest itself, about admiring and having gratitude for the other parts of life that are unrelated to work.

It's a short book, beautifully written from the fifties. I really enjoyed it. I also really enjoyed the second book I read, which was Making Movies by Sidney Lumet. Fantastic, just nuts and bolts book about how you make a major motion picture. Sidney Lumet, of course, being this fantastic director.

I went back and watched several of his movies after reading this book. I watched Murder on the Orient Express, the Kenneth Branagh version, not the Kenneth Branagh version. That's the new version. His version, Sidney Lumet's version is from the 1970s as Sean Connery is in it. I also went back and I'd never seen before Dog Day Afternoon, which I really enjoyed.

It's a fantastic movie, but cool book because basically each chapter is a different part of the movie production process and he gets into it. But a lot of examples from his own experiences and you really get a sense of what it's like to make a movie. If you're a cinephile or you like movies, you sort of have to read this book.

I kind of embarrassed it took me this long, but I'm glad I got to it. Speaking of being embarrassed it took so long, I went ahead and read Killers of the Flower Moon by David Gran. So each year I try, my wife and I try to watch all of the movies nominated for best picture.

There's 10 of them now, so it could be hard, but this year we succeeded. We saw all 10. After we watched Killers of the Flower Moon, I wanted to read the book because I had some questions about what happened in the movie. And it's classic David Gran. David Gran's a great New Yorker writer.

He's very good at these types of books where he goes to the archives for a couple of years and pulls out these narratives with interesting, weird, flawed characters, and then lets them unfold with the pace of a mystery novel. It's a bravo performance in writing. Great book, great movie too.

Very epic. I read Orthodoxy by J.K. Chesterton. I didn't like it as much as I thought. I was thinking that in his argument for the power of orthodoxy, so this is sort of Christian apologia, there would be something interesting in there about ritual and routines. It was okay. It wasn't as powerful of an apology as I expected.

It was fine. It's a short book. Smart writer, but it's not punching the gut apology, so maybe worth passing on. Finally, I read The Good Shepherd by C.S. Forrester, 1950s book about a convoy crossing the North Atlantic in World War II. It takes place entirely, entirely follows in real time the commander of a destroyer that's helping to protect this convoy.

They made a movie about this recently, Greyhound, starring Tom Hanks. Fantastic movie. I recommend it. This is the book it's based on. I love this book. This has to be one of the original techno thrillers because what Forrester does here is he just throws you into this world. You never leave.

It's third party, third person omniscient, right? The narrator. So you get access to the thoughts of this captain, but it's the only character that it follows. So he's always in the scene. You see nothing where the command, the captain is, it's a commander, I guess, as a destroyer. Nothing where the commander is not there.

And the only thoughts you get access to is the commanders. The third person omniscient, but focused on a single character. And it just throws you into this like technical world. All the lingo, no explanation. You just sort of piece it together as it goes along, like what's going on.

And it's nail biting. And he really does capture the sort of the physical stress, the psychological fatigue of what it was like to be under attack by a U-boat wolf pack as you're trying to direct these convoys across. And you begin to learn and the rhythms of like how this works.

But it's techno thriller at its finest. It's a proto techno thriller. I'm probably going to buy a first edition of this. I think it'd be a cool thing to have in my collection because I love techno thrillers. And this is like a prime example of it. Fast paced in the world, surrounded by it.

You begin to learn and the feeling of being in that world is transmitted. And then you make it through the other side, you get a sigh of relief. The Tom Hanks movie, by the way, does a fantastic job of capturing the feel of this book. I recommend watching Greyhound.

I think it's on Apple TV plus. Probably my favorite. That and The Sabbath were my two favorites. Making movies, killers. They were all, except for Orthodoxy, which was fine. The other four books I read, this was a good month, were really fantastic. So I'd recommend all of them. All right.

Well, speaking of fantastic, what is more fantastic than me being back at my Deep Work HQ? Next week, Jesse will rejoin me. We'll be back to our normal type of episodes and our normal type of topics, et cetera. I'm just really happy to be back. Check out Slow Productivity, my new book.

If you like the type of things you hear about at the show, you can find it anywhere that books are sold. I'll be back next week. Until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, so if you enjoyed our discussion today, I think you might also like episode 275, which gives a general system for achieving hard goals.

So check that out. So the question I want to dive into today is, how do you follow through on transformative goals?