(upbeat music) I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 183. I'm here at my Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, we weren't sure if we were even gonna be able to record this episode this week. I have a crazy schedule. It's not really crazy. It's just a schedule that has me on campus most days, all days.

So it gets in the way of our podcast recording. So we didn't even know if we'd have time to record this episode. So what we were able to do is we're squeezing this in. We're doing a shorter form episode. Now, I always tell Jesse, people don't know this. I tell him at the beginning of every episode, we're gonna be quick today.

We never are, but today we have to be because we have an actual sort of Damocles time limit hanging over our head here. So we're gonna be quick, 45 minutes in and out, clean, we're gonna slip this in. And then Thursday's episode, we're gonna do a classic episode from the vault.

So you will get to hear a classic episode from the vault. We didn't have time to record both, but I think you'll enjoy it. You know, Jesse, I'm noticing from my letters and the statistics, the statistics we get, that there's a lot of people now who are going back to the beginning of the show and trying to work their way forward.

So more and more people, I would say, typically like, oh, these old episodes, most people weren't around then, most people didn't hear them, but people are going back and playing through the old catalog 'cause we're honing in now on, I don't know, say around 100,000 downloads a week. But no one episode is ever gonna get more than 20 something thousand downloads in a given week.

So like, actually most of the downloads in a given week are not for that week's episode. People that are doing the trip down memory lane, but we'll select a good one from the archive to play for Thursday. - I'm always a fan when you talk longer, 'cause I think your audience wants you to talk long and wants to know what you have to say.

That was always the case even before I started, you know, helping out with the show. - Oh, I know, yeah. I don't know if going shorter is good for the show. That's just my schedule stress. I'm always like, we're gonna get this thing down short, we're gonna get the footprint small.

I think in this fantasy world in which I just sort of like walk by the studio on my way to somewhere else and Jesse puts a mic in front of me and without breaking my stride, we do the episode. No, I love it once we get going, but whenever I'm moving around the Jenga pieces on my schedule, I'm like, the more we can contain the recording, the more time we have to do innovation and writing.

And so I always joke about that. But today we actually are, Joe the engineer is on his way. We're fixing some of our sound issues. So we have to be ready. We have to be ready. So we're actually gonna stick to it. We'll stick to it this time. Before we get into the questions and I've narrowed it down to five, we're doing five focus questions today.

I thought we'd play a quick round of a new game show I came up with, which is called, Is This Crazy or Deep? All right, so you're the contestant, Jesse. I'm gonna explain one of the weird idiosyncratic things I do and you have to make the judgment, is it like a cool example of deep living or is it crazy?

All right. - Let's go. - All right, here we go. So I was reading a book. I was reading Thomas Merton's "The Seven Story Mountain" because I hadn't read it before, but it's a very influential book, especially for talking about the deep life and the things that we talk about here on the show.

It was a problem I had not read that book. It's sort of an underground classic. I don't know, have you heard of it before? - You talked about it either last week or the week before. So then I looked it up. - There we go, okay. So I talked about it before, Jesse reminded me.

And it's this story, it's the memoir of this Thomas Merton who grew up actually this interesting lifestyle. His dad was an artist and they traveled all over Europe, but then he settled into a cosmopolitan life in New York and left it all to go to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, wrote this book about it in the '40s, 1948 it came out.

And it was a big deal at the time because the whole country was in this post-World War II malaise where there was Korean conflict was starting to heat up and the war was over and there was economic issues. It was before things really got fired up again and people had moved to the suburbs and were just marching to these sort of generic office jobs.

And this book landed in 1948 and was very influential. So I was like, I need to read this book. So I was like, I forgot where I heard about it. I was like, let's just read it. I grabbed it on my Kindle. And I was having a hard time making progress on my Kindle because it felt like the wrong format.

You know what I mean? Because it's a 1940s mid-century book that changed the zeitgeist and it just, I don't know, it wasn't feeling right on the Kindle. So I went down this series of escalating conclusions. So the first conclusion was reasonable. It was like, I'll just buy another copy of the book, but a hard, like a real copy, just better than Kindle.

And I do that actually semi-often. I just did that, I'm reading right now John McPhee's "Draft No. 4," which I started on Kindle and was like, I think John McPhee should be in paper. And so I bought the paperback too. But then I was like, you know, I don't know if a paperback is gonna do justice to "Seven Story Mountain" because of the context.

And he's a monk and writing it. And it's like, maybe I should get an older hardcover copy. And then I was like, you know, if I'm gonna get a hardcover copy, you know, maybe what I really need is a first edition, first printing version of it. The first printing done in 1948.

So the exact version of the book that someone would have held in 1948 when it was first making its cultural impact. And so I found a first edition, first printed copy at a rare bookseller in Canada and had it shipped down. And I have it right here for the viewers at home.

And if you're listening, you can go to youtube.com/cummingfordmedia. And I got it, it arrived, right? First edition, first printing. So it has the nice and empty, you know, the page where you have the printings is nice and empty. I love these mid-century fonts. These are some of my favorite fonts.

It's a yellowed, good condition, little bit of spine damage. I paid well over $100 for this, Jesse. So here's the question, deep or crazy? - Deep. - Deep? - 100% deep. - All right. - 'Cause I mean, you could just put the other versions in the Deep Q library and then whatever.

- But buying the first edition and spending three figures. - You don't play golf, that's what you do. - All right. - You buy books. - That's what I'll tell my wife. Like, yes, this was expensive, but golf is worse. - Golf's much worse. (laughing) - All right, I think, see, I think this could be a hobby of mine, first edition books.

And I really love the idea that this was like the edition. When this book first hit the cultural scene, this is what it looked like. This is what someone was holding in 1948. - I mean, it just goes along with everything you talk about, like setting the ritual of getting your mind right to do whatever you're doing, and you're just trying to get through this book, which you weren't doing when you were doing on the Kindle.

- Yeah, all right, so there we go. Jesse says it's deep, so it is justified. There's limits to the strategy. So then I looked up some other books. I was like, you know what would be really cool? We'd have a first edition of this or that. All right, you gotta be selective here.

- Some of them would get real steep, right? - It gets pretty steep. - Yeah. - So I was looking at Walden. It's like, man, 18, whatever that is, 54. First edition of Walden. Now that is such an influential book on so many people that I followed and on my own work.

We're talking three large, at least. So that was a limit. I think we need a few more sponsors of the podcast before I get a drop three large. - The Hedgehog Review, they'll pay for it. - We're paying them. You forgot, Jesse. We're paying them because it would be too much of a whatever it would be, submission to the capitalist overlords.

So we pay them to sponsor us. So we'll get there one day. When I start talking about a first edition of Walden, then you know the show's doing too well. All right, well, speaking of sponsors, before we get to the questions, let's make enough money to pay for this crazy book purchase.

And let's talk in particular about our good friends at Blinkist. Blinkist is a longtime sponsor of this show, and for good reason. Blinkist is a subscription service that gives you access to short summaries of thousands of best-selling nonfiction books. These summaries, which are called Blinks, you can read them in the Blinkist app or on the Blinkist website, or you can listen to them.

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Deciding whether or not I was going to let them be a sponsor of the show, I talked to them and what really struck me and really impressed me is that they just do this one thing. They do this product, AG1, it's called, their powder, and they improve it again and again.

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Let's do some questions. Our first question here is from Madalena, who says, "Are you familiar with "perfect practice makes perfect? "When it comes to knowledge work, "how can we learn what perfect practice looks like "without practicing poorly for some time?" Well, Madalena, at a high level, deliberate practice is the activity that makes you better at complex activities, whether those activities are physical or mental.

So if you're gonna get better at a skill related to your knowledge work job, you will be, you really whittle it down to its core, need to do deliberate practice. Now, I first introduced this idea on my blog and email newsletter years ago. I then generalized it and expanded it some of my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You," where I talked about applying deliberate practice to knowledge work.

And I'll tell you, here was the complexity of doing so is that it's not easy to translate deliberate practice from the domains where we know how to do it well to domains like an office job. The issue was, and I get into this in "So Good They Can't Ignore You," I get into this in some of my articles, is that if you look at, let's say, an athlete doing deliberate practice, and that's an area in which they're very good at this technique, what you're gonna see is carefully designed exercises.

These are exercises that have been designed by coaches and honed through years of experience. This is the drill you need to do. This is the weight you need to lift in this particular type of way. And these exercises are done with direct feedback so that you're aiming yourself to be doing it just right.

And if you're getting off of the right way of implementing it you get pushed back to the right way of doing it because the way deliberate practice works is that you are stretching yourself past where you're comfortable, doing the thing right past the comfort level, and you're hardening those neural circuits so that becomes easier.

So you have to be guided very carefully. You have to be doing it right, and you have to be pushing past where you're comfortable or there's no actual growth happening. Well, how do you do that if you're the new associate marketing manager at a pharmaceutical company? How do you do that if you're a computer programmer?

How do you do that if you're a young professor? There's no coach, there's no one there to run you through drills. So I got really into this question. After So Good They Can't Ignore You came out, I got into this question because I was designing this online course with my friend Scott Young that eventually was called Top Performer.

And at the core of this online course, Top Performer was let's teach you how to do deliberate practice in the workplace 'cause this is what people wanted more details on after reading So Good They Can't Ignore You. So So Good comes out in 2012. We launched the first version of this course in 2014, and we have had thousands of students.

I forgot the exact count, but it is multiple thousands of students go through this course over the years since then, and we keep evolving it. So that experience has really helped us get hands-on knowledge about how do you make deliberate practice work in the knowledge work environment. And I don't mean this to be a plug for Top Performer.

It's not actually open right now. We typically just open it once a year. I think I have a link where you can find out more on my website, but it's not like it's open right now I'm trying to get you to sign up for Top Performer. I'm just saying this was the foundation of me learning about how do you actually make these principles work in the office.

Here's three things we learned. One, identifying the skill that you want to deliberately practice is often not obvious. This was a surprise to Scott and I when we were working with real students in all these different industries is that they didn't know what they should get better at. Knowledge works jobs these days can be quite ambiguous.

It's kind of amorphous. I don't know, I'm on email. I'm involved in a lot of different things. There's a lot of different things going on. And I can't tell you exactly what I do here. I don't shoot baskets. So I can't tell you what it is I'm trying to get better at.

So identifying the skill that actually matters is complicated. And what we ended up eventually recommending people do is pretend to be a journalist. I'm gonna go out there and discover what are the skills that matter in my field. And you're gonna do this by interviewing people who are more successful than you in your field, but not just successful in a generic sense, but successful in the sense that something about their status in your field, what their work is, their position is, what they do on a day-to-day resonates.

There's a target. If I could get to where Bob is, the way he's here half time and he's a consultant or he's the CFO or whatever it is, but you have someone like that's where I wanna get, there's my aspiration. You interview them. Can I talk to you about your career?

Over coffee or whatever. And then when you interview them, this is the other critical thing we learned, do not ask them for their advice. I'm telling you this as someone who writes advice as a professional. This is what I professionally do for a living. People when put on the spot are terrible at giving you advice.

It is a fraught, stressful situation when you say, what's your advice? And what people will do is their mind will seize on, we need something that is coherent and sounds smart. And it doesn't matter how real it is or not real it is or how important it is or not important it is, they will fix on something because you have to deliver some advice in those situations or they will use it as an excuse to give a implicit sermon about something they don't like about kids these days.

But what you're rarely gonna get is actually good advice because good advice is hard to develop. It's a scale you have to get good at and you have to actually look at a lot of data and really get a sense of what matters and what doesn't. So what should you do instead?

Ask them for their story. I wanna know beat by beat how you move through your career. All right, when you got from here to here, when you got this first big responsibility, what was the thing that allowed you to make that step? And if possible, ask them this question in a differential way.

There was other people in your same position. You're the one who got promoted to be editor. What do you think you were, what was it that you were doing different than the people who didn't get promoted at that point? So you're really trying to understand at every step what mattered.

And then you go back and think about what you learned like a journalist, like an advice guide writer. And you say, what's the important pattern in here? Oh, this thing came up again and again. These other steps forward were generic like most people could make them, but this is where the big leap happened is because he was good at X.

And that X now is a skill you've identified as being really important. So yeah, it's a pain that it's not obvious to identify what skills matter, but it's also a good thing because no one else is gonna do this effort. No one is gonna take people out for coffee.

No one else is gonna interview them like a journalist and go back and try to extract what really matters, not just what they want to matter. No one else is gonna do this. So advantage to you. All right, the second thing that matters for deliberate practice and knowledge work, the best way Scott and I could figure out to design practice activities is to suggest that you commit yourself to a project carefully designed to require you to stretch your ability on the skill in question to complete.

I cannot complete this project without getting better at this core skill that I identified. Project-based skilled improvement seems to be the best. We ended up at some point completely redoing that top performer course to be built completely around a project you identify and try to work on because it was too hard to improve these skills in the abstract.

You need a public commitment to this project. So you've told your boss, they're expecting it. Someone's waiting for it. Someone's going to evaluate it. If it's bad, they'll be upset. You need those public stakes 'cause that's gonna simulate the coach feedback. It's gonna push you, okay, I'm gonna push myself to try to stretch and do well because I don't want to embarrass myself.

I don't wanna renege on the promise I made to my boss. I don't wanna upload this thing in the GitHub like I claimed I would and have people laugh at the code. So publicly commit to a project that will force you to stretch with the skill in question. It's the best we could come up with for simulating the type of practice a coach would run you through for another type of skill.

And then finally, put aside regular time for this or have a scheduling philosophy that makes regular time same time, same place, the same day for working on this project. So it's a protected thing. Just like if you're training, I gotta get back in cardio shape for spring training, you're gonna have regular times you're out there doing cardio.

You don't just leave it up to, hey, if I'm in the mood to run as a professional baseball player, I'll go for a run. It's no, I do my runs at this time on these days. So you put those ingredients together, a well-identified skill designed with a publicly committed project to stretch it, executed in times that are set aside and protected like a dentist appointment or parent teacher conference with your kids that time is unviolatable.

Do those three things, Madalena. You can in like a three or four month period become significantly better at something that's gonna have a significant impact on your career. All right, so I appreciate that question because I've thought a lot about that. All right, so we got here next, we have a question from Charles.

This is a question that will get my fellow nerds in the audience fired up. The same people that ran me over the coals for missing out Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rufus. The same people are about to get upset again. So beware, Jesse. Charles says, "Kel, does the experiential difference "between writing code in a modal editor like Vim or Emacs "versus doing so in a GUI editor "like MFT Visual Studio or Eclipse "inform your thoughts about context continuity "versus context shifting?

"Your views on context inform any best practices "for using source code editors?" I'm gonna send that as a book proposal to my agent. Just because I think it'd be funny if I was like, "Lori, I've got a great idea for a book. "I'm gonna blow the lid off "the contextual context continuity impact "of modal source code editors "versus GUI source code editors.

"We are gonna blow the roof off this thing. "Think like Seymour Hersh, "but like if he was a really specialized computer programmer." I think she'll enjoy that. Speaking of, okay, and Charles, I'm gonna get to this in a second. And audience, I'm gonna generalize it to not be about source code editors, so don't worry about this.

But speaking about sending agents bad proposals, I appreciate it. I was listening to an interview with Michael Pollan and he was talking about his agent who is supposedly famously brash or blunt. And he was talking about years ago, Pollan had written "Second Nature," his first book, big success. They gave him a big advance for a second book.

Second book becomes "Place of Your Own." I like "Place of Your Own," but it didn't do well. It was about architecture and him trying to build a cabin. So his third book is really important because at this point he had left his editorship at Harper's and was making a go at being a full-time writer.

And they left New York and moved to a dilapidated house in Cornwall, Connecticut, like all the stuff I love. And so this third book needs to be good. And he sent a pitch to his agent that was about, he was gonna move to Celebration, Florida and live there for a year and be like, what's it like living in this weird plastic, you know, fake, blah, blah, blah.

And he says his agent called him, didn't say hello or hi, Mike, or whatever, just started going, "Boring, boring," until he got the hint. So I think I would have that reaction if I pitched a book on source code editors. All right, but Charles, let me get to your question.

You know, by the way, I was asked this question, a version of this question, my interview at Georgetown a decade ago, not modal versus GUI, but within the modal world, I was asked VIM or EMAC. So it's like a, it's a key question. And the thing is the answer I gave them, which is the answer I will, the immediate answer I'll give you, Charles, is that I'm a theoretician.

So I don't know. I don't write code. I mean, I know how EMACs works, but I don't write code. I don't do useful things with computers. I solve theorems. And so I'm worthless to that. But there is a more general question lurking that I find really interesting, which is when we're talking about software tools, writ large, there is a tension that I don't think we understand or talk enough about between easy and effective.

So for non-computer code people, these modal editors like VIM or EMACs, like in particular VIM are not easy to use. You know, it's a, they're line-by-line editors, they're text-based and yeah, EMACs is a little easier, but with VIM, you know, if you wanna write, like you actually have to do a command that says I'm inserting text right here, like a keyboard command.

So it's not just a GUI, like Microsoft Word type editor, and you have to memorize lots of complex key combinations to do almost anything. But it's this very direct connection between like, I wanna put this line of code here now, good, and locked it. Now I wanna do this.

Like it's very bare bones, but powerful, but you have to know what you're doing. It's very intentional. And then there's these modern code editors like Visual Studio or like Eclipse, which are like Microsoft Word on steroids. It's everything is visually around your code and all the different files that are dependencies while you're writing code.

It's trying to make suggestions about what you're trying to type and underline things. Like, could you put better code here? I can automatically fill this in for you. Like, it's all about making the individual things you might do as a coder as easy as possible in terms of like reducing friction and making everything visual and available.

And there's a big war, Charles calls it an editor war about these things. But we see the same issue in a lot of software. A shift away from software that is focused like a laser on doing one thing towards these sort of bloated packages where everything is possible and there's all of these automated tools to sort of help you and hold your hand and pull you along.

You should be able to just sort of stumble into the software and pretty quickly be able to make some progress. So I think about easy as meaning the software simplifies the energy and concentration required to execute individual desired actions while effective means the software is lined up with the way your brain operates to try to extract as much value as possible from your brain.

I don't care if it's easy, what's gonna let you write the best code in the end? I think easy is overrated, effective is often ignored. I think we need more effective software, software that is pared down, software that does one thing, software that has a high learning curve. But if you learn that curve, if you actually follow that curve, you're able to really intensely extract value out of your brain.

If you look at a product like MATLAB or something like this, you know, it's kind of a pain to learn how to use MATLAB, but for mathematicians or physicists or engineers who learn it well, they can extract a lot of value out of that tool. That is effective software.

Trying to have something that just makes it natural and easy to fall into everything else, I'm less impressed by, I'm less impressed by. Because here's the thing, and this is maybe a slow productivity principle being applied to software, trying to get rid of little bits of friction, who cares?

Right? We're not computer chips, where what matters is how many op codes we can execute per second. We're not, we're gonna make more money for our company if I can do 15 quick things instead of 10 quick things. Like all that really matters in the end is what have I produced a value and how quality is it?

What is the value of the things I produce? And that is often something where friction could be beneficial. Having to slow down, take things step by step, laboriously move things from here to here, that could be actually what you need to do to produce the best quality thing. So why is easy more and more what we see, especially in business software?

Well, I think it's overload. I think in a world of chronic overload, where we all have more on our plates than we know what to do with, we've created this weird simulacrum of work in which all we do is try to get through little things as quickly as possible and get that churn rate up.

So all we don't want any friction, we're just emails back and forth. I got to print this thing. Let me grab this PowerPoint slide. Let me expand that. Can I shoot that over here? Can I do a quick invite for people to come share this Google doc because that'll save me some time versus actually sending it to them one by one.

It's all about just churning through overhead activities quickly because we're overloaded and there's more than we know what to do with and we're stressed. And the only metric we have for progress is we're churning through things. But in a world without chronic overload, I'm working on one thing at a time.

I don't have too many things on my plate. And I don't care if it's slow to change the format of this thing. I don't care if it's slow to get a copy to the three people that need to see it. Who cares? Is the thing I'm creating really good?

And so effective is not the same as easy. And I think that is a principle that we need to think more about. And if we embrace slow productivity in general, then this is a specific consequence when we look at the world of software. So I like old school software.

You know, John McPhee has this crazy old software called K-Edit that he uses to write his articles. And he explains it in draft number four. And it's like them. It's this weird, there's no formatting, no balding, there's no underlining or searching or grammar checks. And you like, it's a line by line editor and you have to learn these key commands and it's monochrome as far as I can know.

And he has an old unsupported version he runs on like a Windows machine and nothing about it is fast, but it matches his process. And nothing about his process is fast. He spends a long time writing his pieces, right? And we look back at him and say, he's very productive.

So effective is not the same as easy. I don't know. I think we get that wrong. (keyboard clicking) All right, 31, doing well. Let's do a question here from Matt. Matt says, like many of your listeners, I'm a pastor of a small to medium-sized church. Sometimes leading this can be a Herculean task.

Beyond your go-to productivity staples, like capture, time blocking, daily, weekly and quarterly planning, what would be your best bits of advice for juggling the people and planning demands that come with being a church minister with very few paid staff? Thanks, Cal. And at the risk of mixing metaphors, I hope you'll be the Athena to my Odysseus.

Well, Matt, I think there's a lot of people in your situation, not necessarily a pastor of a small church, but someone in charge of a modest size organization in which they do not have a lot of administrative or support staff to lean on. So a lot of things fall on their shoulders.

So it is very easy in that situation to get overloaded and overwhelmed. So how do we get out of that beyond just tuning up your productivity, multi-scale planning, the stuff I normally talk about, the stuff I talk about in my time management core ideas video, what else matters when you're in this situation?

I'm in charge of a lot of things, I'm overloaded. All right, so there's two things I'm gonna recommend that you add to your toolkit here, Matt. One is to get more of an obsession about context shifting, especially when it comes to dealing with people. So dealing with your parishioners, dealing with the various committees that help run the church, moving away from a environment in which communication is ad hoc and unscheduled.

'Cause you have a lot of people you have to communicate with. You have to be in touch with your flock, so to speak. You have to be in touch with the other people who help run the church. You don't have the ability to say, I don't do that anymore, I'm not there for my parishioners, I'm not gonna talk to the stewardship committee.

No, you have to talk to all these people. If it's ad hoc and unscheduled, you will be forever context shifting, forever. I have to get back to my email, there's asynchronous back and forth conversations happening that I have to keep moving, my phone is ringing, people are stopping by.

And in that flurry of unpredictable but constant context shifts, you're gonna feel completely overloaded and as if you're never making progress on anything of substance that you're stuck in a whirlwind of distraction. So what you need to do is consolidate those context shifts. You're not gonna reduce the people you talk with, you're not gonna reduce what it is that you offer to those who need you, but you are going to consolidate when this happens.

You're gonna do this through well-advertised processes. Now I can give you some off the top of my head suggestions, but you're gonna have to customize this for your own situation. But now you might have twice a week parishioner office hours where you can come to my office, I have Zoom on, I have a chat open, this is it, and I wanna hear anything, any issue you're having, any question you have, anything you want guidance on, Tuesday, Thursdays, let's go.

Parishioner office hours, or maybe Sunday after services too there's a two hour window there. You're taking a lot of necessary communication with your parishioners and now consolidating it. Are they gonna be upset? No, they want clarity. Clarity is better than accessibility. Oh, great, it's a Pastor Matt. Yeah, so I'm gonna swing by his Thursday office hours because I wanna tell him about this thing I'm worried about or get his advice on this, or I'll give him a quick call at that time.

You also should use a scheduling tool. So when something requires a longer one-on-one conversation, have some blocks of time split up into half hour slots. And when your stewardship committee, your youth director, the assistant pastor, like needs you and need to talk something through, you're like, grab, yeah, absolutely grab a slot.

Grab a slot, you know the link, grab a slot, let's talk. I'm here, I wanna look you in the eye. You can even use a justification here, like, look, I'm a leader of this organization. I wanna be here to help people. I wanna look you in the eye. Like, let's get out of email.

Let's sit down in my office and we'll talk things through. It'll actually make you seem more accessible, but you're consolidating. And all of that asynchronous back and forth communication, drop-ins and random calls that are requiring 15, 20 contact shifts every six to 10 minutes throughout your day, all of that goes away.

And now there's just periods where you're in your office and you're like, I'm just, people are here, people are coming in and I'm working on shallow stuff when people aren't here. It's predictable, you know what's gonna happen. People feel like there's structure, people feel like there's control, but you're not constantly running around.

So I think that's gonna make a really big deal. Two, I'm gonna suggest be very wary about chronic overload. So you're gonna get the sense of chronic overload, that despairing feeling when your mind perceives there's more things it needs to plan for and execute than it can easily imagine doing.

So you wanna fight against chronic overload. And to do that, a few tricks you can do if you can't just drastically reduce what's on your plate is one, you can, to the extent possible, automate regularly occurring small things. This person does it, this system does it, I always do it in this half hour on these days.

It doesn't make those tasks go away, but it takes it out of that status in your brain where you feel like you have to plan and make a, or it's gonna require a plan, it's gonna require you to think about at some point. It changes it from an open loop to a background activity.

If you walk your dog every morning before you go to work, you don't think about walking your dog as one of these things on your plate that you have to schedule, it's just something that you do. So you automate to the extent possible the small things so they can't lay claim to the planning portion of your brain and say, I don't have to worry about that, that's taken care of.

For the large projects, you have to be way more careful about being sequential about these. How many large projects can you actually handle at a time and stick to that? You can have a big queue of them, but you say I only do two at a time and I have two going on right now.

So yes, I love this project, but it's on my queue because I can only do two big things at a time, right? So these are the type of things you need to do. And then for the medium size, one or two week long projects, again, throw processes at it.

If you have a meeting with a committee and you're gonna revamp X, here's how we're gonna do it. Make a plan for it so it's not ad hoc back and forth communication. These things are gonna help. The final thing, Matt, which is specific to your position that I'm gonna recommend is one day a week or at least one half day a week, but I would prefer one day a week that's your sermon day, sermon reflection contemplative day.

Just work backwards from that goal. Hey everyone, Fridays, I'm not on screens, I'm thinking and writing about my sermons, I'm walking, I'm reflecting, I'm reading, I'm bettering myself and my soul so that I can better serve the flock. I think it's a great example. You do it on Saturdays, this is when God said to rest, you're gonna rest on a Shabbat day.

I think that's gonna be a great example for the congregation. You can work around losing that one day with all the stuff I talked about and it's gonna refresh you, it's gonna make you better at what you do, it's gonna keep you connected to why you do it. So I know that might seem radical, but that's my past year specific advice, but one day aside for sermon writing.

All right, well, speaking of sermon writing, this has nothing to do with sermon writing, I'm talking about ads. A sponsor I wanna mention real quick before we move on, we're at the 38 minute point, so here we go. I'm gonna do rapid fire questions after this. The sponsor I wanna talk about is ExpressVPN.

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That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-VPN.com/deep, ExpressVPN.com/deep. I also wanna talk about New Relic. So I think all of my listeners who enjoyed the recent question I did about source code editors is going to know what I'm talking about here. If you're a software engineer, you have had this happen to countless times where you think you're done with work, you're at home, you've put on the Deep Questions podcast, you're looking to relax and your phone buzzes, something in your system has broken.

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No credit card required. If you sign up at newrelic.com/deep, that's N-E-W-R-E-L-I-C.com/deep, newrelic.com/deep. All right, Jesse, we are down to a couple minutes to my promised time, and I'm gonna do it. And I'm gonna do it by being very fast with my questions. And to make that even more exciting, somehow lost my questions.

Oh, here we go. Behind the scenes, guys, I have so many papers. We're very old fashioned. My desk is just full of papers. All right, rapid fire. Got a question here from Kobe. Should I solely focus more on developing my skillset as a stock investor to the point where my skillset cannot be ignored, or should I build my skillset as a stock investor and at the same time continue to teach live courses on stock investing?

It's getting to a point where I feel like I have to convince people to join my program and that's getting draining. All right, Kobe, my general answer is focus on the stocks. All right, focus on the primary thing you're doing, which sounds like it's stock investing. The course is a side hustle that do it at this point only if it was entertaining or relaxing.

You're finding it draining. Focus on the stocks. Presumably, if you're good enough at the stocks to be able to teach a course on it, you should be making more than enough money from the stocks to not need the course financially. If you need the course financially, then you're not good enough at stocks to teach that course.

So I think we've got a great self-referential solution here. My tough love specific answer, however, Kobe, is you're not gonna teach yourself to beat the stock market. Let me tell you this as someone who comes out of elite Ivy League schools where I've watched people go off to prop trading desk at Wall Street firms.

The very smartest people in the world are incredibly well compensated to do nothing but spend all day training and executing the best possible plans to make money on the stock market and even they can't consistently do it. I had a friend in college, I remember talking to him about his job a few years out of college.

All he did was had CEOs, a small number of CEOs of publicly traded companies and his whole job was to listen to every public announcement or discussion or conversation they ever have and really learn the nuances of this individual person so they could pick up just subtle edges and what's going on with this person's company.

You're not gonna learn some momentum trading technique on the internet that's gonna have you consistently build the market. You are probably the sucker there. And so that's my tough love thing. Invest in index funds, put your time and energy into other ways of making money. All right, one more question.

Poseidon's Trident says, "You mentioned a lot of concepts "and influences from the military. "Is there anything you agree with from the military, "modern military relating to lifestyle design "or disagree with? "Who else do you look for? "What else has influenced you from the military world?" So I've jotted down here, Poseidon, four things I've seen in the military world that have had some influence on me.

So I'll just go through them real quick. One, have a creed. So military, especially elite military units are really big at, let's be clear, this is our code, this is our creed. This is what we do and what we value, even if it is hard and they clarify it so they can work off of it.

I think Jocko was actually involved in crafting the Navy SEAL ethos in the 1990s. I think it was Jocko, maybe it was Mark Devine. But knowing what you're all about so that you can stick to that. I think that's a critical idea, especially when times get hard. You can fall back on your creed and get value out of, I stuck to my code and my creed.

Otherwise, you're bouncing all over the place and just sort of taking each moment as it comes. Two, serving others is everything. This is the main lesson of anyone you talk to that fought in any war. Go back and read about World War II for more modern conflicts, read Sebastian Younger's book, "Tribe." Talk to anyone who has been in active warfare.

They say, "It's all about the people around me." Risking my life, everything is around the people in my unit, the people in my unit and protecting them, trying to be there for them, trying to serve them. It's incredibly powerful. It goes deep into our wiring. It's something I think we could all learn.

Serving others is everything. Way more important than accolades, way more important than getting a lot of likes, way more important than your TikTok video, picking up or trying to impress people. Serving others is what we're wired to do. War makes that really clear. Idea number three, embrace the suck.

This is a Navy SEAL idea. Brent Gleason wrote a book with that title. One of the core things they teach you in Navy SEAL training is to be very comfortable with being incredibly uncomfortable. So I can be very uncomfortable and that's okay. I can be sleep deprived, my skin's abraded, I'm exhausted, my muscles are barking, I maybe have a stress fracture, I'm not telling anyone about it and I'm still gonna execute.

I can still compartmentalize and execute. Obviously that's critical if you're gonna be a special operations operator, but I think it's important for life in general because hard stuff happens. And you kind of have two choices. Either you are going to obsess about it and fall apart or say, "Okay, this is hard, I feel bad, what's next?" Hoo-yah or whatever it is that the SEALs say.

I don't know if you heard about this, Jesse, earlier this year, it was terrible at BUD/S training in Navy SEALs. One of the things they do that make you really uncomfortable during Hell Week is you, they call it getting wet and sandy. You go into the ocean and they make you roll in sand until every inch of your body is covered in sand.

And then you have to go and do a lot of exercises and terrible stuff. So you're just completely uncomfortable. And so your skin is all just ripped up and abraded. Well, there was a unplanned release of sewage or some contaminant got into the water off a Coronado. And the whole SEAL team was hospitalized.

They all got terrible staph infections from the water. And one of them even died. It was terrible, that happened this year. Because the reason why their whole bodies was abraded and bloody was because that's the core of the training. Little known fact is I have Jesse do that once a week just to try to make sure that he's completely sharp for doing the show.

I say, come on, Jesse, get wet and sandy. Oh man. Okay, and the last thing, and you've heard me say this before probably, is discipline is freedom. This pops up in a lot of places. That's Jocko's phrase, but Admiral McRaven has "Make Your Bed," his best-selling book. You see this a lot in military context, which is discipline in the moment seems like you're placing arbitrary restrictions and wouldn't your life be happier if people just left you alone?

But discipline is the foundation for freedom. It's how you teach yourself that you have efficacy, that you have control over your life. It's what allows you to uncover and pursue options that are important and stick away from the things that are going to hurt you. The discipline life is often a life where you feel more confident, you feel better about yourself, you feel more resilient.

Obviously, you don't wanna push it to an extreme. If you're David Goggins, it gets a little bit out of control. But discipline should not be demonized. And I think the military is great at that. You're gonna do arbitrary things in a disciplined fashion because when it comes to the non-arbitrary things, you need that foundation.

And there's a reason why they do that, why they shine their boots and make their beds. It matters. All right, Jesse, I have five minutes late, but that's pretty good for me, right? 50 minutes? - Great. - Pretty tight. - Good stuff. - All right, so we gotta wrap this up.

Thank you, everyone, who sent in your questions. We'll have a classic episode on Thursday, but then God willing, I will be back as normal the week after. If you like what you heard, you'll like what you see at calnewport.com, no, not calnewport.com, youtube.com/calnewportmedia, video of this full episode and every question that I answered.

You can also read my weekly newsletter that you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Until next week, stay deep. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)