We don't talk a lot about money on this show, but today I want to touch on the topic. Why? Well, if we think about it, money can play a critical role when it comes to the goal of cultivating a deep life in our digital distracted world. Now, I want to focus here in particular on an idea that comes from my most recent book, Slow Productivity.

In fact, I'm going to even read a little segment from this book and then we're going to analyze it because it's a small concept that I think could have a big impact on how you think about money and its role in crafting a deep life. All right, so let's start with the action.

I'm going to read to you and then we'll figure out what it means. All right, so this is coming from my book. I am talking here about Paul Jarvis is his name. This is a case study. All right, Jarvis studied computer science in college, but also had a natural feel for visual design.

During the first internet boom of the 1990s, these two skills proved to be the perfect combination for success in the emerging medium of website design. Jarvis produced several eye-catching sites on his own, which soon led to job offers. Look, Jesse, I'm holding up the book so that it's visible.

They call that marketing. For those who are listening, not watching, I've realized if I hold the book up, you can see it on the camera because I'm a natural marketer. Anyways, back to what I'm reading. Jarvis produced several eye-catching sites on his own, which soon led to job offers.

Before long, he was a busy web designer living in downtown Vancouver in a quote, "glass cube in the sky," end quote. He felt the normal pressure to grow a small business. More revenue would mean a better apartment and more prestige, but even though his growing skills would support this well-trod professional path, his heart wasn't in it.

"My wife and I had just had enough of the city," he recalled in a 2016 interview. "We did our time in the rat race "and we wanted something different." Recognizing that his freelance design work could be accomplished from any location with an internet connection, they moved to the woods outside Tofino on the Pacific shore of Vancouver Island, so his wife, who is a surfer, could enjoy the sleepy town's famed breaks.

As they discovered, frugality is easy when you're living in the woods of Vancouver Island as there aren't that many opportunities to spend money. When you're remote, there's nobody to do things for you, so you just have to do a lot for yourself, Jarvis explained. Freed from the need to increase his income to keep up with city expenses, Jarvis leveraged his growing skills to keep his work responsibilities flexible and contained.

At first, he focused on freelance design contracts. Because he was in demand, he could keep his hourly rate high and his number of projects small. Eventually, tired of deadlines and client communication, he explored ways to further transform his notable skills and reputation to achieve even more slowness. All right, that is the story of Paul Jarvis.

I wanna pull a key lesson out of here, but first, let's all just get on the same page about the way, on this show and in that book, we think about cultivating a deep life. My approach is what I call lifestyle-centric planning, which says instead of just pursuing a grand goal that you hope will make everything better, like make a ton of money, break into this particular industry, become really good at this hobby, instead of pursuing a singular grand goal, lifestyle-centric planning says you should start by identifying your ideal lifestyle in all of its different elements, what it feels like, what it looks like, what it smells like, what your daily routine is like, where are you, what's it around, what's the rhythm of your days, all of the elements of your ideal lifestyle.

You then evaluate different concrete instantiations of this lifestyle, so different concrete ways you might seek a life that has more of these properties of your ideal lifestyle. You pick one that seems most feasible and you make a plan to work towards it. That's lifestyle-centric planning. Now, when evaluating potential instantiations of your ideal lifestyle, a common metric that people think about is how much would this instantiation, so this particular concrete life, how much would it cost?

What I wanna argue here, and this is where the Jarvis story is gonna point us, is that asking how much a given instantiation of your ideal lifestyle costs is not quite the right question. And the problem here is that it doesn't take into account what's involved in acquiring those needed funds.

So let me give you an extreme example to try to make this a little bit more clear. All right, let's say I'm a professor here in D.C., and I decide I wanna move to rural Pennsylvania, and I'm gonna homeschool my kids and live on a farm, and right in a barn, and that's what I really wanna do.

But there's no university there, so maybe my plan is, okay, but I can write from anywhere, so I'm gonna be a freelance writer. I'll be a freelance writer, and we'll live in the farm and homeschool my kids. If I'm just looking directly at the question of how much would this lifestyle cost, this particular instantiation of my ideal lifestyle properties, I might be very pleased.

I'm like, well, this is cheap compared to living in D.C. Maybe this is like half the expense of living in D.C. But that would be the wrong question, because it might turn out to earn that money, even though it's like half the money I would need to survive in D.C., because I'm making so much less money doing freelance writing, I might have to work all the time.

In fact, my working hours might be even larger than they are in D.C. as a professor. And so the fact that it's cheaper doesn't necessarily mean that that lifestyle is gonna get closer, that instantiation's gonna get closer to my properties. Here's a more realistic example, because this is actually based off a real story.

Imagine you're working, again, you're in D.C. and you're working at, let's say, the home office here for a big consulting firm, right? So you're working for one of the big consulting firms here in D.C. You get this idea, you have this ideal lifestyle vision that involves more nature and slowness or whatever, and maybe what you really wanna do is move to the upper peninsula of Michigan, like your family's long had a cabin and you have this whole vision of what you're gonna do up there, and you talk to your employer and they're like, yeah, that's fine, because if you move over to this group, the clients for this group are all around the country, so it doesn't matter where you're based, right?

So maybe when you're in D.C., you're dealing with political government relations clients and they're all kind of local. They're like, you know what, if we move you over to the energy group, these clients are all around, you have to be on site anyway, so it doesn't matter where you're based.

So sure, if you wanna move to the upper peninsula, move to the upper peninsula. Now again, if you just asked, great, how much does this particular instantiation of my ideal lifestyle cost? You could be led astray. 'Cause again, almost certainly it will be cheaper to live in the upper peninsula of Michigan than to live in Washington, D.C.

But the issue with this plan is now you have to travel to all these clients. When you live up in the U.P., you're not really close to an airport. You're gonna have to take a puddle jumper to Detroit, and then from Detroit, you're gonna have to take the longer flights, and you're gonna actually be working way more than you were in D.C.

So the fact that the lifestyle instantiation's actual cost is cheaper, in some sense doesn't matter that much. So what's the better metric to use? I'm gonna argue it's what I call hour cost, H-O-U-R, cost. What this stands for is how many hours of work per week does a particular lifestyle instantiation require.

That's actually the financial metric you care about when evaluating these different scenarios. When you use the hour cost in our prior examples, that's where you see, wait a second, I'm moving to the farm in rural Pennsylvania, has a really high hour cost. So maybe I'm gonna keep looking at other instantiations to get that hour cost down, because the whole point of me moving to the farm is to spend more time outside and doing farm things, being with my kids, so I need a lower hour cost.

You would have the same insight if you evaluate the hour cost of our Michigan example. You would say, man, the hour cost of my living, if we move up there, is gonna double. I'm gonna be on the road all the time. What's the point of, again, living in a place where I have access to these other things that are important to my ideal lifestyle if I'm gonna have much fewer, many fewer minutes to actually take advantage of them?

So hour cost is very important. Now, it's important beyond, however, just this particular application of making sure that a cheaper place to live doesn't actually make you work just as much, if not more. It has a more advanced application, which is what was demonstrated in the story of Paul Jarvis.

So what Paul Jarvis discovered is that once you started thinking about hour cost, instead of just using this to help evaluate different scenarios for your life, it gives you a different way of thinking about your current work. And the insight that Paul Jarvis had is that as his skills got better, he had two choices.

The common choice was, I will make more money. I'm in more demand. I can have a bigger list of clients. I can be a more prestigious firm. I can make more money. But that didn't necessarily, by itself, reduce the hour cost of living in Vancouver Island. And if anything, it could actually increase the hour cost because maybe he would have to travel more.

So he said, my other option is I could just charge more money for what I'm already doing. I can get to the amount of money required to support this particular instantiation of my ideal lifestyle that I have in mind in Tofino and Vancouver Island. I can bring the hour cost of that lifestyle down.

So instead of making more money, I'm going to work less to make the same money. I'm going to drive the hour cost down. And you don't think about this dynamic when all you think about is raw revenue, right? When all you think about raw revenue, in the worst case, you just begin trying to maximize that number and now you're just in the singular grand goal theory.

In the best case, you just say, okay, I make enough to support this lifestyle instantiation, so let's go for it, but your hour cost might be much higher than it really needed to be. Jarvis's lifestyle, which really is cool, and I go on in the book and I detail what it's like on his property and the greenhouses he has and how he doesn't own an alarm clock and what their daily schedule is like, what made this instantiation really cool and close to the values that they identified when going through their ideal lifestyle is that he brought the hour cost of this lifestyle down.

So that is kind of where the magic becomes. If you want to bring down the hour cost of your lifestyle, you can go somewhere cheaper, but that's only half the battle. You can also use your skills not to make more money, but to work less for the same money.

That also drives down hour cost. So that's why I think it's a cool metric is because it opens up approaches to thinking about money in the deep life that you might not have otherwise thought about. You avoid traps, but you also find new opportunities to build a life that's even cooler than you might have imagined is possible.

And it doesn't require some grand windfall. It doesn't require what I really need is this book I write to become the next "Atomic Habits." And then with the riches I have from that, now I can finally live on an island and work on my gardens and surf and only work a couple hours a day.

It turns out if you care about hour cost, you find ways of getting those goals that don't require the windfall. It's wait, I'm really good now at web development. So I'm gonna triple my hourly rate, cut my number of clients by a factor of four, just have a few clients, but I have a really high hourly rate, boom, I'm good.

So the hour cost metric really gets you to some interesting places. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, "Slow Productivity, "The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout." This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're gonna like it, check it out. Now let's get back to the video. A key point about this, it requires hard work to do any interesting things here. This is not a bypass around my maxim from my 2012 book, "Become so good they can't ignore you." Bringing down your hour cost is something you can do if you keep getting better.

It has to do with how you apply your career capital as you get better. It's when you make the choice as you get more talented to say, "I don't want more work. "I wanna do less work for the same amount of money. "I wanna go to three days a week "and get 2/3 of the income." Like it's using your skills to gain leverage.

You still have to build up skills, but it helps you aim your skills in directions that you might not have thought as possible if you were just using standard ways of thinking about money, your job, and your life. Now, how does this connect? I like to connect this all back to the general theme of this show, which is more technology-centric.

As we talked about a couple of weeks ago in my Tao of Cal episode, the general unifying principle for this show is to look at ways in which our Paleolithic brain and Neolithic culture conflicts with our modern digital environment and then come up with solutions to those disorders. So how does this fit into that general theme?

Well, we talked about this a little bit in the Tao of Cal episode. One of the big disorders that comes from these mismatches is that as work gets more digital and abstract, so it's just moving information around on a computer screen. It's not tangible. It's not connected to a location.

It's often what you're doing is disconnected even from a particular outcome. It's emails and Zoom and PowerPoint slides, like this abstract thing we all do. And as our time outside of work increasingly gets colonized by algorithmically optimized distraction and diversion delivered through screens, life can turn into this relatively dull slurry of just, I don't know, I'm manipulating the digital and being manipulated by the digital until it's time to go to sleep.

In that circumstance, which is unique, or at least superpowered by our current digital conditions, in that circumstance, we've lost track of how to build an intentional life, how to figure out what's important to you and to pursue those. We're too distracted. We're too numb. Our lives are too abstracted and screen-mediated for us to be good at intentional living.

So that's why we talk about the deep life here, not just because it's a good thing to do. You only get one run, right? You only get one run here on this planet. Might as well make it interesting. But because it is a direct response, we have to get much more systematic about lifestyle crafting because we've lost all the cues and wisdom that we used to have about how to do that.

All right, so that's how we can connect things like hour cost and lifestyle-centric planning back to the central theme of this show, which is the disorders of the modern digital environment. So there you go. Paul Jarvis, from the book I will hold up, teaches us about hour cost. I'm thinking now, so Jesse, you always discover these things when you write and then you talk about what you write.

Hour cost kind of sounds like, oh, you are cost. You don't necessarily, on paper, it's perfectly clear. - Yeah. - But when you say it out loud, and I have this issue, like the word minimalism, perfectly clear on paper. Actually kind of hard to say without practice, minimalism, but hour cost with an H.

- Yeah. - My latest catchy idea. - What was the monster book before "Atomic Habits" in the nonfiction? - "The Subtle Art," Mark Manson's book. That's even bigger than "Atomic," though "Atomic" might catch up. But I think "Subtle Art of Not Giving a Bleep Word" is, oh, it was like 12 million copies.

It was insane. Yeah, you should see, if you like that book, check out my, I went on Mark's show. It's on YouTube. Yeah, he's got a cool YouTube show. - I'll put a link in the show notes. - Filmed it out there in Santa Monica. It's nice out there, Jesse.

Hanging out in Santa Monica and LA, and Rich rolls out in Calabasas, and Mark Manson's in Santa Monica. Oh God, who else was I doing out there? Anyways, it's nice out there. - Your hour cost might go up if you move out there, though, 'cause your expenses would go up.

- I think the hour cost of, yeah, I would have to write, if I do the math, like to live in Mark's house, I think I'd have to write four books a year. Is that sustainable? I'm just gonna take the graph on my end. Can I just extrapolate that up?

If we just do four episodes of this show a week, and I write like four books a year, what's the problem? I could live by the beach. All right, we got a bunch of cool questions coming up to cover a lot of topics, but first, let's talk about a sponsor.

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New customers on first three-month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on the unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Who do we got first? - First question's from Joseph. Whenever I try reading a book, within a couple of minutes, my mind drifts off to something slightly relevant or completely irrelevant.

Is experiencing this just part of a process for a person who is cognitively out of shape and trying to cultivate his ability to focus? - Yes. You telling me, and I'm quoting you here, my mind drifts off to something slightly relevant or completely irrelevant within minutes of starting to read, that's the same, from a cognitive perspective, that's the same as you telling me I get winded when I walk up the stairs.

I'd be like, yeah, you're out of shape. No surprises. Also, the solution's easy. Get in better shape. You're gonna have to eat better, you're gonna have to exercise. That's all that's going on here, right? You're out of practice with reading and you're doing the cognitive equivalent of smoking by being on your phone all the time.

So you gotta practice, practice, practice to get better at it. There's the obvious things to do. The biggest thing you can do is rewire your phone when you're at home. Treat your phone like an old-fashioned hardwired landline by plugging it into an adapter in one place in your house when you get home.

If you need to look something up, you go to where your phone is. If you need to check your text messages or do a text conversation, you go to where your phone is. If you wanna listen to something, well, you can put on wireless headphones. So like, if you wanna listen to my podcast while you clean the dishes, that's fine.

Use wireless headphones, but keep the phone wired. This means when you're at home, it cannot become a default distraction crutch. So you're watching TV or you're reading a book and you have that twinge of boredom, it's not there for you to pick up. And the friction of getting up and walking to another room and picking it up where it's plugged in, that's too high for you to do that.

So you overcome that moment. And in doing so, every time you overcome that urge and keep doing what you're doing, that's like doing another pushup in the physical space. That's like walking another quarter mile. It adds up. You're gonna get into better shape. All right, so rewire your phone.

That's a big one. Two, keep pushing yourself to read books. Start with books that you absolutely are fascinated by. Right, so whatever that is for you. It could be sports nonfiction. Like I just read the Agassi memoir, open. Yep, that was fun. So if you're into like sports nonfiction or like techno thrillers, I've read three so far for Thriller December.

Just dumb, fun, techno thrillers. Just don't read "Eruption" by Michael Crichton. And Patterson, don't read that one. But whatever it is, or maybe it's like romance fiction or business advice books or self-help books like David Goggins, whatever it is, start with books that you love and you're most likely to keep reading because all you're practicing here is just the literal act of keeping your eyes on the page and going.

So whatever makes that easier is gonna be better. You can read Ulysses later. Let's just get used to books. So read more, but start with stuff that you really like. And then spend more time doing thinking walks on a regular basis, go for a walk without a phone. You have no choice, but to get used to your own head.

What's in the world around me? What am I thinking about? Having thoughts, exploring thoughts. You just get more comfortable in your own interior cognitive space. It's gonna make it much easier to tackle hard thoughts later in books, all right? So do those three things, you'll get better. It takes time, but you'll get better.

Rewire your phone, read more books, but start with fun ones and do thinking walks. You'll get stronger, Joseph. - The ghost writer for "The Agassi" was J.R. Moringa, right? He wrote "The Tender Bar." - Oh, really? - Pretty sure. He wrote an article about it in "The New Yorker" not too long ago either.

- Oh, yes. But was that the article about, he also, the ghost writer for "Prince Harry's." - Yes. - It's the same guy? Interesting. So he's good at capturing emotional realities. It's an interesting book. Man, "Agassi" had a- - Did you read "The Tender Bar?" - No, I heard it's great though.

- That's good, that was a movie too. - Yeah, yeah. Well, anyways, who do we got next? - Next up is Adam. I'm a real estate agent, receive calls, emails, and texts randomly throughout the day. The faster I respond, the happier the client. What is the best process to be effective in my work if I still need time blocks for non-distracted work?

- Real estate is a good case study. Funny story about real estate and distraction and deep work. When I bought, when we bought our current house in like 2018, we bought our current house in Tacoma Park. I remember, because at some point when you're buying a house you have to like disclose assets and like income that's coming in.

And it's obviously for me that looks different than most people because I make a lot of money from like books. So it's not, here's my W-2 and here's how much money I make a year. It's like, I just got this huge check the other day because it's like the advance payment for like some new book or whatever.

So my real estate agent figured out, oh, this guy writes books. He wrote a book called "Deep Work." After we handed in those financial disclosures, then she began talking to me about how distracted she was with clients always trying to contact her and what her life was like and what it's like being a real estate agent.

So it was, Adam, I understand. I've heard this story before. My rule here, my general rule is that clarity trumps accessibility. The problem you're solving for your clients is that they encounter something that they need your input on. Like, what about this listing? Is this something we should be looking at?

Or is this price, I'm thinking our price for the house we're selling is too low. Like, you know, you have something that you want their feedback on. Because this is outside of like your normal cycle of work, it's also something that you're gonna pretty much be keeping track of on your own in your own head until you get an answer back.

So you kind of would just like an answer right away so you don't have to worry about this anymore. But you can solve their problem just as easily if they have clarity about how they're gonna hear back from you and how they're gonna get information. And if they have clarity, they know what to expect and you meet those expectations, they'll be just as happy.

So in the lack of any expectations, just get back to me right away because otherwise I don't know how long it's gonna take till I hear from you. And what if I forget? And what if I forget? Just get back to me right away so I don't have to think about this.

But imagine instead you have like a really clear, very optimistic forward policy where you say, I'm here for you. Here's my number for texting, in fact, like you have a question, you see a listing, you think I should care. Send it to me by text, that's even faster. Every two hours I clear out my text inbox so you will, I guarantee you'll hear back from me within two hours at the most when you text me.

That actually solves the same problem because there's clarity about the policy here. Your client knows if I send this text, like I send this listing to my agent, I can trust I'm gonna hear back from the agent and I'm gonna hear back from the agent really soon, right? Like within an hour or so.

So like really timely, I can let this go. I don't have to keep track of this anymore. I'm gonna hear from you in like an hour or so, that's fine. So if you have clarity, you don't have to be completely accessible. And now you've built yourself like a nice system.

Like yeah, every two hours I sit down and I go through my text messages and I answer them all in one batch and I'm less distracted. And in between I can work on the other things I'm doing without having to be distracted. And most people end up okay. The 5% rule applies here, which says about any policy like this, about 5% of people won't like it.

That is a fair tax to pay for reclaiming your attention. For those of you who are not real estate agents, this same thing applies if you have any sort of client situation or even a situation where you're dealing with a boss, people only want you to reply immediately if they have no other structure expectations for when they're gonna hear back.

With no other structure expectation, it's up to them to keep track of this in their head until they hear from you. So they'd rather you be as quick as possible. If they have other expectations, oh, I'll hear back at noon. This is when they don't do email in the morning.

They have an office hours that afternoon. I can just call them and I know they'll be there and I'll get the answer. You're solving their problem of I know what to do with this and I don't have to keep track of it. So expectations often trump accessibility or clarity that is often trumps accessibility.

That would be, actually, that'd be a bad shirt. I think if we put that on a shirt. - You could make it an acronym. It could be like one of your Russian spy acronym. - An acronym would be better. I think if I put it on a shirt, the problem is accessibility also means, like from disability studies, like making more services accessible to a wider range of people.

So saying like clarity trumps accessibility, it kind of seems like an anti-disability statement or something like that. But yeah, acronym. See, clarity trumps CTA. That means a lot of other things. The call to action, I don't know about that. CTA all day. CTA all day. All right, what do we got next?

- Next question's from Vishal. I'm a knowledge worker and a young father. I started my journey with David Allen's Getting Things Done framework and successfully emptied my mind into a digital tool. It's working. However, I'm having a hard time coming up with quarterly goals as I'm so focused on getting things done week over week.

How do I think in terms of a quarter as it relates to my personal and professional life? - Well, this can be the danger of getting things done is it feels like it's a totalizing system, like it's an approach to productivity. But I often argue that it's just one piece of many that you need to actually fully take control of your time and your obligations and time.

So what Getting Things Done gives you is this notion of full capture. This is its biggest idea. It was an idea that David adapted from Dean Atchison, who was a business consultant who Allen knew and had pioneered this idea, and then Allen then developed it further into the Getting Things Done methodology.

Full capture says, and it's correct, do not keep track of obligations only in your head. If it's only in your head, it's gonna generate stress because your mind worries about forgetting it, and it's gonna take up cognitive resources because your mind is so focused on not forgetting it that those are cycles that can't be spent doing something else.

So everything you need to do needs to exist in a system that your mind trusts, you're gonna check on a regular basis and it won't be forgotten. This gives you peace. This reduces stress. And that, I think, is the brilliance of Allen's system. But then Allen goes on and says, let me tell you now how to control your attention, which is what you need to do in your day is basically have this list of things you need to do organized by context, like places you might be, and then whatever context you're currently in, just pull up the list and start executing things.

And there's this real, he calls it mind-like water, this almost factorization of knowledge work of like you're just cranking widgets, executing next task, and you don't have to think about anything, just execute, execute, execute. It was a way to reduce the stress generated by overload that Allen was correctly pointing out in the early 2000s was becoming a real issue as we had the email revolution and they got much worse with the mobile and then smartphone computing revolution that followed.

That's not, however, a sufficiently advanced system for controlling your attention. So what I argue is you need full capture for all the reasons that David Allen says, but you need to couple this with multi-scale planning. So you got to make decisions about what to do with your time at multiple scales.

What's my goal for the quarter? How does this influence my plan for the week? How's that influence my plan for the day? How's that influence what I'm doing right now? So you have this link of connections that expands in scope so that your actions right now has at least some sort of tangential connection to your bigger picture goals.

So you need something like time block planning in the day, but time block planning has to be supported by a weekly plan that you do every week and that weekly plan has to be informed by your quarterly plan. That combined with the full capture of David Allen's system is what I think is table stakes for sort of non-trivial complexity knowledge work today.

I wish it wasn't the case, by the way. I had this conversation with Oliver Berkman. I wish it was the case you didn't have to do that in most knowledge work jobs. I'm jealous of the fact that him, for example, just doing writing full-time doesn't have to plan like that.

That's probably more natural, but in a standard job where you have a desk and an email inbox and more than a few Zoom invites coming at you every day, this is sort of table stakes for not losing your sanity and for building career capital. So if you're struggling with your quarterly planning, that's just practice.

What I would argue is what's more important is that you're actually following the framework of multiscale planning is more important than the content of those plans at first. That will come if you build some sort of quarterly plan, and it really could just be keep up with the big contract I'm working on this quarter, right?

It could start simple. And then you build an actual weekly plan and look at that quarterly plan when you do so. And then you build a daily time block plan and look at your weekly plan when you do so. The rhythm of working at multiple scales is what matters.

Those plans will become more complicated and more meaningful through experience, so I wouldn't worry about it. But if you don't have the full framework in place, it's not gonna work very well. If you're running a David Allen system of just churning through next actions based on your context and you're somewhere else, like I wanna write a quarterly plan, there's no connection between those two, and so that's not gonna be as successful.

So use multiscale planning, care about the mechanics at first more than the content, and the content of those plans will improve with experience. - I need to look at my quarterly plan more. - You should look at it every week, yeah. And then we have a big update coming up.

I mean, I recommend people do an update during the holiday at the end of December 'cause you have a week off at least, which is a good time to think about the winter quarter. So if you're hearing this podcast, you should be planning to do a big update of your winter quarterly plan within a week or so after hearing this.

- And you have a personal and a professional one, right? - I do, I've been messing around recently with combining them. So we'll see how that goes. So I'm doing a big update right now, and in the current edition of the update, so the drafts of my new plans, I'm combining the personal and the professional.

So we'll see how that goes. Part of the way I, so this is, all right, this is kind of in the weeds. I often have, it's like hypertext plans. So like in my, I call them strategic plans instead of quarterly plans, but in my strategic plan, there might be a link to another document that elaborates like a piece of it.

So I was like, as long as I'm doing that, I probably should just have one. One unified plan. Because I can just link to another document if I wanna have more, like a more detailed strategy laid out for like our media empire or something like that. So I am thinking about combining them, but yeah, traditionally I've had a personal and professional.

All right, who've we got next? - Next question's from Sirtak. My sole focus has been to work hard and build a career in aviation. The idea of achieving more constantly occupies my mind. No matter how hard I push myself, I feel like it's never enough. - Well, Sirtak, it's a common, it's a common issue.

And it's an issue that comes out of using as your philosophy or strategy for constructing a good life, the grand goal strategy. But the grand goal strategy says you pick something that's important to you, you put all of your energy into mastering that thing, and in that success, your life will become good.

That's what's going on now. You've implicitly put all of your eggs in the aviation basket. And because of that, your mind is like, well, this is gonna be the key to us feeling like our life is meaningful, is succeeding in this goal of aviation, then why are we doing anything else?

So of course, your attention keeps coming back to this, and you're having a hard time enjoying or being present for anything else, because you have set this up in your mind as the key, the thing you were doing to make your life better. What is the contrast, as we talked about in the deep dive, is lifestyle-centric planning, where you say, what I wanna build is a vision of my ideal lifestyle in all of its elements, not just professional, but in all of its elements, what is the general properties of my ideal lifestyle?

And then you work backwards, asking, how do I get there? And you do that by coming up with different instantiations, like different concrete scenarios that move you closer to that, and you see which of these is most feasible, and then you begin pursuing the one you choose very systematically.

When you do this, almost certainly aviation will be a big part of the instantiation that you care about. Is that my phone, Jesse? Guys, I gotta take a phone call, so I'll be back. Would that reduce the quality of the show if I took phone calls and checked social media in the middle of it?

Now, the reason why my phone, there's actually a reason why my phone is on. I was expecting a call back from my doctor's office about something, and I forgot that I had it. I had it with me and on so that I could take that call when it came, then I forgot I had it with me.

People don't know that in front of me right now is a screen that I've split between it's TikTok and YouTube shorts. And the whole time I'm talking to people, I'm just furiously swiping. That's where the money is made, watching TikTok videos. Now, going back, aviation will probably be a big part of whatever instantiation you hook into because you really like it, there's elements you like of it.

So probably your lifestyle-centric plan, the instantiation you come up with will involve a aviation career. But when you look at all of the properties of your lifestyle that might control, for example, or influence how that aviation career looks like because of the other properties that are important to you, where in the country are you flying out of, what type of flights are you doing?

Is it working your way up at one of the big airlines, or is it doing some private jets, or is it doing, like your navigation of the possibilities, even within the world of aviation in your career, will be influenced when you're thinking about the impact of your various paths to that career, their impact on the other properties you care about in your ideal lifestyle.

So lifestyle-centric planning is the approach. Now, once you've done the lifestyle-centric planning, a couple of things happen. A, you're just much more likely to pursue and enjoy the other stuff that's part of that plan right away. You're not gonna push the stuff aside that you've just identified as important just to focus on this one thing because they're part of what you want in your life, that time with friends, the outdoor hobbies, the community leadership, whatever it is.

Like, well, that's part of my plan, so I'm gonna give that attention now. It makes no sense for me not to do that just to work on this one thing because this one thing, the aviation career, is just part of my bigger vision. The other thing it does is it reduces this pressure from I gotta just crush this to I wanna succeed in implementing my plan.

And what you need to do in aviation to implement the particular instantiation you care about might be challenging but not crazy hard. And so you're very comfortable with a reasonable amount of work towards it. The final thing you can do is once you know what the particular target you're aiming for in aviation and why is you can care about process.

Once a quarter when you're doing your quarterly plan, go back and review my process for working on this career, like how I'm studying, how I'm training, how I'm trying to, like, how is that going? Just like I advise students do at college where I say my famous advice was to study like Darwin.

Always go back and evaluate all the things you're doing as part of your academic activities. Get rid of the stuff that's not working and prove the stuff that is. You evolve your study habits over time. Do the same thing with your process. Okay, here's a good process that I think is gonna keep me on track for my goals in aviation, which is part of my bigger lifestyle vision.

Let's try this for a quarter. At the end of the quarter, I will evaluate and maybe we'll make some changes. Then during the quarter itself, you can just execute. Yeah, I'm just focusing. I have a process I execute. Here's how much time it takes. I just trust this is right.

If it's not right, within a few months, I'll notice that and we'll change it. It's not the stakes aren't so high. And again, you're able to pay attention to things outside of it. So you become more process focused as well. Lifestyle-centric planning is really at the key of navigating this tightrope that we talked about in the in-depth episode, I guess it was last week.

Man, my time might've been the week before. Jesse, when was the in-depth episode with Kendra? Did that come out last week? - Yes. - Okay, so last week's in-depth interview episode with Kendra Adachi, we're talking about- - But when they hear this, it's gonna be Monday. - So two weeks ago.

- So it'll be like 10 days ago. - 10 days ago, that's right, that's right. 10 days ago, the in-depth episode with Kendra Adachi. Oh, we have another one of these coming out too. I like these in-depth things. - Yeah. - Yeah, we have another cool interview coming up.

Anyways, I keep diverting myself because I'm looking at TikTok on my tablet right here. We got into this tension between greatness and everything else and the pursuit of greatness and why that can be very motivating, but also the other stuff that matters in life. Navigating that tension is critical for cultivating a deep life.

Lifestyle-centric planning helps you do it. Singular grand goal theory doesn't. If you say this is all that matters is succeeding in this career, how are you ever gonna do anything else? It's illogical. But when getting to this place in this career by this point as part of this overall vision for a lifestyle, you're much more likely to say, well, I have a process I trust for getting there.

And this process says I'm done working now, so let me go to enjoy something else tonight. All right, so Sirtak, give lifestyle-centric planning more of a focus in your aspirations. And I think you're gonna find, I don't wanna say balance, but you're gonna find something more sustainable. All right, what do we got next?

- We have our corner. - Ooh, excellent. This is where each week we play a question that is related to my book, which I'll hold up 'cause I'm an awesome marketer, "Slow Productivity." We call it the "Slow Productivity Corner," and we do it so that we can play this theme music.

(upbeat music) All right, go ahead. What's our "Slow Productivity" question of the day? - It comes from Howard. I'm a product manager who was laid off in September. In light of how many, so many businesses use pseudo productivity to measure work, how do I, as a job seeker, show actual productivity?

- Well, Howard, that's a good question because it addresses pseudo productivity as introduced in the Globe and Mail's, one of the Globe and Mail's best business books of 2024, "Slow Productivity." I don't know if I'd focus on that as my main accolade I give the book, but I'm trying to give it more accolades.

Let me, first of all, give a key reminder for the audience who didn't read the book. Pseudo productivity is the idea that visible activity is a proxy, a reasonable proxy for useful effort. It's what most knowledge work managers actually manage for because it's too difficult to manage in the moment for actual productivity.

They focus on pseudo productivity. The more activity I see you doing, the better. And I argue in the first part of the book why that became common and why it's actually also a disaster. All right, but here's what's important about this question. What's happening to Howard now, and Howard, I'm sorry to use you as like a cautionary tale, but what's happening to Howard now is something that you should keep in mind every day of your current knowledge work job.

You look at what you're actually doing. What you should ask is, is what I'm doing right now going to help me get the next job? Because this is the reality of pseudo productivity, and it's what makes it sort of insidious. In, that's not how you say that, is that how you say that?

- Insidious? - That's not right. - I was just gonna look it up. (laughs) - I pronounced that, I pronounced that dead wrong. - I was literally just about to look it up. - I mean, I can spell it. Again, I'm a writer, not a speaker. That's what makes it dangerous.

Let's use simple words here, insidious. That's not how you say that. Well, anyways. - Insidious? - Maybe, insidious? No, oh my God, we're going down a rabbit hole now. - We're gonna get a lot of emails on this. - Oh my God, we have to distract people from this so they don't email us about this.

Brandon Sanderson wrote "Name of the Wind." See, I'm trying to distract the audience so they forget about insidious gate. (keyboard clacking) I just, blocking on things. But here's what makes pseudoproductivity dangerous is that within a current job, it feels like what's giving you good attention. It feels like this is what matters.

Visible activity, my boss sees, I respond to those emails so quickly. I am on that Slack channel so fast, like you're not even done sending your Slack message and you see the dots that indicate that I'm typing back in response, right? In the moment, this feels like the most important thing you can do to help your career.

But as soon as you're left that job and someone says, "Why should we hire you?" None of that matters. Pseudoproductivity doesn't actually directly create value. You are not going to impress an employer if you say my average interval between inbox checks is only four minutes. I was a Slack champion.

I was on Slack all the time. I forced us, I was the employee that forced us to have to upgrade our Zoom package, enterprise package, because I did so many Zoom meetings. None of that actually matters to an employer that you're trying to get hired by because none of that directly produces value.

So that is what's dangerous about pseudoproductivity. In the moment, it feels like the most important thing you can do for your career, but from a distance, it's meaningless, right? So the stuff that is gonna make it easier for you to get a job is less comfortable in the moment because it's that I'm not answering this email right away.

I've said no to more things. I keep an active waiting list, so my active projects are much reduced at any one moment, but I'm finishing stuff that has objective value, the stuff I can put on my resume and talk about. I finished this project. I introduced this new technology.

I innovated the way that we do this approach, and it increased customer conversions by 15%. That's the stuff that matters when you're trying to get hired for your next job, and that stuff has nothing to do with how fast you answer emails, how quick you're on Slack, or how many Zoom meetings you do.

So there's like a lesson in this, right, is that pseudo productivity is empty calories from a business value perspective. Feels good in the moment, but doesn't give you what you need in the long term. All right, Howard, now that I'm done using you as a cautionary tale, let's get to your actual question.

The key is to focus when you're trying to get hired on concrete value that you're gonna add to their life. There's this cool book written by Jeff Fox years ago, Jeff Fox, who wrote "How to Become CEO," which was the inspiration for my first book, "How to Win at College," which I pitched to Jeff's agent, or no, it was Jeff, the editor who bought that book for Jeff who became an agent, Lori, my longtime agent.

I pitched to her. I said, "I wanna write 'How to Become a CEO,' "but for college kids." He then wrote a follow-up book called "Don't Send a Resume" about getting hired, and he had this sort of extreme idea that's more relevant to sales than other places, but I think the core of the idea is critical.

He said, "Here's how you get hired. "If you get your resume, "quantify how much money you're gonna bring in "above your salary, right? "I'm gonna cost you this much money in salary. "I'm gonna bring in this much money. "The second number is this much larger, "so by hiring me, you're getting this much money." So that's ultimately what matters.

Now, in sales, you can actually do that calculation. You can say, "I expect to bring in $3 million in sales "per year, here's my salary, "so this is how much profit you're gonna make off. "I'm gonna increase the bottom line by this much." But you can hint at this in non-sales jobs as well by focusing relentlessly on the things you can do that directly brings in value to the company.

That's what matters. Not generic skills, not your people skills, not your character, not what you're owed. None of that really matters to them. What matters is, does our bottom-line number, our profit number, get larger or smaller once we have you on board? We have to take away the expense of your salary?

Is the value you bring push us more to the other side? Money as a neutral indicator of value. So that's what you wanna focus on. Here's what I did at my last place, here's what I can do here. Let's see, Howard is what, a product manager? All right, so here is how I have a product management methodology that increases the value of what we produce.

I can handle these types of projects, which you need. These are higher, these types of projects are higher profit margin. I know how to manage those, so you can immediately expand the pool of your projects that are here. You know, I can expand this business you have on this side.

I know how to, you know, double the speed with these things get done because I use like Newportonian non-overload style workload management. Whatever it is, what you wanna pitch when you're trying to get hired is how much more money they will have after they hire you. And you wanna remember that.

How much money am I bringing in? And how is this current activity helping the bottom line I bring in? That's really the right meta mindset for evaluating how you're spending your day. And it goes back again to the dangerous nature of pseudoproductivity is that it feels so useful in the moment, but it does nothing in the long term that really matters.

So Howard, I appreciate your question because it gives us an excuse to talk about that bigger principle about the real subtle danger of pseudoproductivity. All right, should we play a theme music again? - Yes. (soft music) - All right, sufficiently relaxed from insidious gate. That's just how I'm gonna pronounce it from now on.

I don't care. That's how I pronounce that word. I'm old enough now that I can decide how I wanna pronounce words. All right, what do we got next? - We have a call. - Ooh, let's hear this. - Hey Kel, last time we chatted at your meetup in Washington this past March, I mentioned that I had my first child on the way and he's here now.

Not gonna lie, it was a lot to handle at the start and I even took your advice from an earlier episode to take some time off. I actually took a month off work and business to help with the new transition. Now that I'm back at work, how do I continue to work on being so good I can't be ignored whilst raising a new son?

I have a feeling your main advice might be to just scale back and go a lot slower, which I've started to do as per slow productivity. But I'll be honest, going this slow makes me feel like I'm not moving at a fast enough pace that I'm used to. And maybe I need to be more patient, I'm not sure.

Any advice you can offer a new father who wants to be both an excellent husband, excellent father, and a skilled data analyst with multiple business goals ahead of him? Looking forward to your answer and keep up the amazing work you do. - Well, good to hear from you again.

I guess he's probably talking about, we had a couple of meetups in Washington. We had the Politics and Pros. - He came down from Toronto, it's Kobe. - Oh, from Toronto. Gave me a copy of a Michael Crichton book. Yeah, Kobe, good to hear from you. Okay, so I would say new kid at home, first of all, there's two different phases.

The first four months, in my sort of three-time experience here, the first four months is basically all hands on deck, right? So first four months is kind of survival mode, scale back. It feels like in the moment forever. Like, I guess I have just stepped out of the world of work.

I guess I have given up all ambitions. This is it, my life has changed, but four months is nothing. In retrospect, it's nothing. So just give yourself a break and be much more useful to your partner for about three to four months. All right, after four months, you're not in survival mode anymore.

I typically use that threshold because it's the point at which you have consistency in schedule, especially if you're careful about it. This is like when in the US context, a lot of maternity leaves have ended, sleep training is done, you have your childcare, your childcare setup for the next couple of years is kind of in place and you can begin to build like, oh, this will be my routine for a while.

In those first few months, you're not in your routine that you're gonna have for a while. So that's why I think of that as like all hands on deck. Okay, so after three to four months, I do recommend, yeah, you scale back longer term, slow down for a bit.

This is a big transition. But I think this helps people who struggle with this, don't just messily do less, use this as an excuse to clean up what's going on. So after you get out of that first all hands on deck period so I don't wanna go back to super busy-ness, let me start cleaning out the stuff I don't wanna be doing in general.

Maybe this is a good time to say no more X, no more Y. Like I wanna take this off my plate to focus more on this. Maybe I wanna tighten up my processes a little bit more so that the work I'm doing is more contained or more predictable or a little bit less interruptive, has less of an overlap with the other stuff that matters in my life.

This is an important transition that most people go through with their working life when you're younger. Like, why am I demanding, you know, to have other people have more structure in how we work together? I have time, I'm around, I just wanna be useful. I'm on my way up.

But then once you have your first kid, now you can start to say, okay, I also care about me as well and how work affects me. So clean things up. Get rid of the dead weight. Get in place, like better processes. The other thing I recommend so that that ambition itch doesn't turn into like an all-out metaphorical rash, as part of sort of cleaning things up and simplifying what you're working on and getting your schedules tighter and not taking on too much work, make sure you have a slow but steady project in there that's just straight up ambition.

Slow but steady. So something where there's not a deadline, no one's waiting for this. It's not a source of stress, but that you're making regular progress on some sort of bigger timeframe goal that you're excited about. And maybe prioritize that like first thing. Like first thing I do every morning after we, you know, get the kid to daycare or whatever's going on is I spend this like first hour working on learning this new skill.

That's gonna be part of my vision for two or three years from now of like mastering the skill and completely changing my work life. Or we're gonna move to Vancouver Island and this is gonna be a thing that's built off of. So have this aspirational thing you're working on.

That scratches your ambition itch in a way that's gonna be much more sustainable in this moment than just trying to take on lots of stuff. You don't wanna be overly busy. You wanna avoid overload for at least the first year if possible. All right, so let me put all this advice together.

First three to four months, all hands on deck. It's okay, it's gonna go faster than you think. Rest of that first year, you still wanna be going slower than normal. It's a huge adjustment. You're also, you're changing you. You're a dad now. That's like a completely different type of role you're adding to your life.

But to help support that, so you don't just feel like you're giving up business or being irresponsible. Clean up, get rid of dead weight work that you've been meaning to get rid of. Clean up the processes for what remains and keep that ambition itch scratched by having a slow but steady, non-urgent but exciting project that you're working on regularly.

Those things all together, that's the right way, I think as like a new dad, to go through this sort of period of new kiddom. I mean, I remember this with all three kids, but especially the first two. In that first three to four month period, like walking my dog and having this thought, like this is chaotic now, but don't extrapolate now is what your life is like.

Think ahead to four months, the four month mark where we are gonna have our, we're back to a new routine. And that new routine is gonna be different but sustainable. We're getting there and it's gonna be better when we get there and it always was. So I remember clearly thinking about that.

I don't really remember our third at all. By that point, it was just too chaotic. Two other boys who were older that I was thinking, it's all a blur to me, I don't know. I know he was a baby at some point. And I know, I mean, COVID came, I don't, I just.

- You started a podcast. - Yeah, well, he was older then, he was older. Well, I guess he went to, oh man, I just, I was so busy with the other two kids by then that the baby stuff was going on, but I was just like driving toddlers places and then COVID came.

All right, got a call, oh, we have a case study. All right, so case studies where people write in to talk about how they have applied the type of ideas we talked about on the show in their own life. If you have a case study you wanna share on the air, send it to jesse@calnewport.com.

Today's case study is from Sarah. Sarah says, "I hope this message finds you well. "My name is Sarah and I'm a commercial photographer "based in Texas." All right, "As a photographer, "the freedom of working for myself has its perks. "No tedious busy work or endless meetings "like when I worked for a company.

"I've been able to set a high enough rate "that a few shoots a month keep me afloat. "The flip side though is that without a boss "or external structure, I fall into the habit "of only doing the bare minimum to get by. "I hardly market myself, never pitch "and don't prioritize networking.

"While inbound inquiries have kept me going, "I know there's potential for so much more, "probably double what I'm making now. "With my current workload averaging just 15 hours a week, "I have so much free time "that I can take month-long sabbaticals "going on meditation and therapy retreats. "While this might sound like a dream setup, "I often feel like I'm at the mercy "of whatever comes my way "rather than actively shaping the life I want.

"I lack the discipline to work on my business "rather than just in it, "and I know there's so much untapped potential. "With all this extra time, "I decided to go back to school "to pursue a degree in mental health counseling. "I'm about halfway through my three-year program. "I'm passionate about healing "and want to make a slow transition into this field.

"While commercial photography feels like "it has a limited shelf life for my age, "I can see myself running a private therapy practice "well into my 50s and beyond." All right, so I'm going to cut that there because there's some observations I want to make about this. So Sarah, thank you for sharing.

There are some positive things I want to say about this and some lessons/advice to give. On the positive side, I love the idea here of there's intention in how Sarah's crafting her life. I like that she's thinking ahead, right? She's thinking about in her 50s, in her 60s. Okay, being a commercial photographer might not work then, but if she gets a therapy license now, that is highly autonomous.

I know several people my age are going through this now. That could be highly autonomous because once you're licensed, you can decide how many clients you have. There's only so many jobs in which you can transmute education, like an undergrad degree and a graduate degree, into something with a high hourly rate and a lot of autonomy.

Therapy, mental health counseling is one of those things. So I like that way that you're thinking. I also like the fact that your lifestyle, you have a lifestyle right now where you're working until you went back to grad school, 15 hours a week and showing that's a possibility, depending on where you live and what your expenses are and if you're careful.

All of that's really cool. The thing I would add, like the lesson I would draw out of this and the advice I would give is that I would lean in more into a lifestyle-centric planning approach. It sounds like to me from reading this that this is more ad hoc.

Photography is fine. I like doing it. It doesn't take you much time. It seems to meet my expenses. So you can go in and you're able, it's flexible enough, you can do other things like these retreats. But you also have this vague unease of, "I should probably be doing more of this.

I could probably double this. I feel guilty that I'm not, like in creating this business or making it longer. I'm going to grad school because like, I think maybe it'll be better to be a counselor in the future." All of these instincts can be structured and understood better in the framework of lifestyle-centric planning.

Like figure out now your ideal lifestyle in this sort of decade that you're in right now. Do this same exercise for your 60s and 70s. Like what are the elements that matter? This will give you a lot of clarity about things like the therapy practice that you're thinking about creating.

It'll allow you, for example, like does this make sense? And if so, I know exactly what I need out of this. Let me talk to real people and see, is that possible? And if it is possible, what do I have to be doing now to set that up for 10 or 15 years from now?

So make sure that you have evidence-based pursuits here, not just dream-based pursuits. A lot of people in this situation don't want to talk to real people because they don't want to know the reality, because the reality might mismatch with their dream of what's possible. Get the real information. It will also help you better make sense of what's going on right now.

Is it a problem that you're working 15 hours a week and not 30? I mean, what are you not able to do in your lifestyle-centric plan? Is there something you can't do that that will unfold? Like you might turn out like, "Actually, this is great. The amount of money I'm making now is enough because my instantiation and my lifestyle-centric plan survives on it." Or maybe you realize, "Oh, I'm really held back.

If I made this much more, then it would unlock all of these other things. I could move to this part of Texas from this part, and I could start doing this thing that matters to me and be closer to family." Maybe you'll realize like, "If I had this much more dollars, I could have a much better instantiation." It would give you clarity.

And with this clarity could come clear plans. So if you found out like, "Actually, if I could make this much more money, I could shift to this instantiation of my ideal lifestyle, which is gonna be much better." Now, hearkening back to our deep dive from today, you could start doing hour cost computations.

"Well, with the current rate I do in professional photography, the hour cost of this is pretty high. But if I increased my rate, I could get the hour cost down to this, which would make this lifestyle instantiation much better. How do I get my rate up to this? Oh, I got to learn this skill and that skill.

I got to invest in this equipment. Good, I have a plan to go after." Or, "Okay, I have this instantiation of my ideal lifestyle vision, which I'm not gonna be able to get to with commercial photography. I see a way with counseling I could get there. And I have hard evidence.

Like if I had this practice with this many clients, I did it this way, I could do it. Okay, this will work. Now I have my crystal clear vision. How do I get to this type of practice as quickly as possible?" On the other hand, if you're like, "This is fine what I'm doing." It gives you structure for what else to do with your time, because you've identified the other things that matter to your ideal lifestyle vision, so that you can with confidence do these things with your time that you're not working.

And not just feel generally like, "I guess I should work more or go on a month-long meditation retreat." You can have a structure to your everyday life that's meaningful and intentional. So you're in a perfect position, Sarah, for lifestyle-centric planning to take this great setup you have and all these options you have and structure them and get the most out of them, both right now and in the future.

So fantastic case study, but also a fantastic example of where lifestyle-centric planning can make a big deal going forward. All right. Well, we got a final segment coming up where I react to the internet. But first, hear from another sponsor. Look, the holidays are here as if there wasn't enough to worry about, as if this wasn't enough to worry about, rather, that you know that there's a heightened risk of data theft and fraud this time of year.

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But with ExpressVPN, not even Santa will know what you've been browsing. Well, we don't know for a fact, Jesse, that Santa doesn't have a 2048-bit quantum qubit computer that could break factoring problems at a sufficient scale to break public-key encryption. He probably has one. He probably does. I am going to assume Santa might have a 2048-qubit quantum computer with which he can run Shor's quantum factoring algorithm.

Therefore, foiling the public-private-key encryption of Ravesh, Shamir, and Edelson. Which is to say, we got to take down Santa. All right, but outside of Santa, no one will be able to actually observe what you're doing when you use ExpressVPN. I like ExpressVPN because it's easy to use. It takes just one click.

You can use it on up to eight devices simultaneously. So you can protect your whole family on your laptops, phones, tablets, and even your smart TV. It's no wonder that ExpressVPN is consistently rated the number one VPN on the market by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge.

Plus, there's never been a better time to stay safe than the holiday season. Because right now, you can use my special link to get three extra months of ExpressVPN for free. Just go to expressvpn.com/deep to take advantage of the special deal. That's expressvpn.com/deep for three months absolutely free. Our next sponsor is, uh-oh, Santa Claus.

He's upset because we talked about his quantum computer. Only during an ExpressVPN ad do I feel okay being sufficiently nerdy to talk about qubits and Shor's algorithm. My people out there who know what both those things mean know what I'm talking about. No, but I also want to talk about our friends at PolicyGenius.

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And why not? It's not expense. Term life insurance is not that expensive. It's because of complexity. Where do I even start? Who do I even talk to? That is where a service like PolicyGenius enters because it makes it simple to cross the amount of life insurance you know you need to get that task off your list.

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That's policygenius.com/deepquestions. All right, Jesse, let's go to our final segment. So one of the final segments we'd like to do here on the show is me reacting to stuff that you, my listeners, have sent me that have been making the rounds on the Internet. Here's something that many of you sent me, which is that Oxford has named their annual Word of the Year for 2024.

Jesse, you might be surprised to learn that word is insidious. And they say that's how it's pronounced. Anyone else who says it's wrong. No, the Word of the Year is brain rot, which actually created some controversy because grammar people are saying that's two words. I thought it was two words.

Two words. But I guess the Word of the Year can be two words, whatever. This is interesting. Let me read a little bit about it. I have the article up here on the screen for those who are watching instead of just reading. Here's from Oxford University Press. Brain rot is defined as the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material, now particularly online content, considered to be trivial or unchallenging.

Also, sometimes something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration. Our experts noticed that brain rot gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. Its usage has increased by 230% between 2023 and 2024.

That's a cool concept, brain rot. It's a good way of describing what I argue you have to avoid en route to cultivating a deep life in our modern digital environment. This is one of the biggest disorders of the modern digital environment, is that these empty calorie, highly alluring, algorithmically optimized digital diversions that have billions of dollars of market capitalization invested behind them being irresistible conflict with our Paleolithic brains.

And our brains rot in some sort of symbolic way when we immerse them in the world of the digital trivial. And it's not just a bad habit. It changes your brain. It rots your brain. I love this term. It rots your brain. It makes your experience of the world worse.

It makes your understanding of yourself impoverished. And it makes the subjective feeling of your day-to-day degraded. So what is the solution to brain rot? I talked about it earlier. Rewire your phone. Plug it in when you get home. If you need it, go to where it is. Don't have it with you as a default crutch.

Read more books. Spend more time walking and reflecting outside with no digital connected devices with you. Do those three things in 2025. So instead of brain rot being the word of the year, it can be like brain recovery. Which is absolutely possible when you disconnect from the constant drip of the digital.

So brain rot. What would you have chosen for the word of the year? I was thinking about this. Brain rot's pretty good. What do you think? Slow productivity is two words. If we're going to do two words, I'm in business. If we're able to do two words, I'm in business.

I'm the king of two words. Yeah, slow productivity. Or as we now refer to it, Globe and Mail's best book of the... What is the award it got? One of the Globe and Mail's best business books of 2024, slow productivity. That should be a word of the year. I agree.

I like that. Actually, there's a term that a lot of young kids use. Sigma. What does that mean? I give a young kid a lacrosse lesson. He always talks about that. Like it's sigma. Do your kids use that term? You tell me sigma and I'm thinking of the Greek letter.

Like I'm thinking capital sigma, which I'd use for summation or lowercase sigma, which I'm thinking about standard deviation. Is it possible that the student you're giving lacrosse practice to was referring to a statistical standard deviation? The people I give lessons to, that would be what they're... That might be what they're...

He uses it all the time. I was like, and he said, it's used by everybody. What's the content? Give me like a context. It's kind of like cool. So you would say, for example, here's a new way to hold a lacrosse stick. And he would say like that's sigma.

Kind of, yeah. All right, hold on. I'm looking it up. If we use more slang, Jesse, people will think we're much cooler than we are. All right. Sigma is a slang term used by Generation Alpha to describe a person or thing as cool, confident, or independent. A sigma is a lone wolf who prefers their own company and isn't trying to be the most popular.

They are confident, but humble and earn respect for their actions rather than words. Oh, we could start using this. It's used a lot in the younger generation or Generation Alpha. I'm a sigma, right? I'm going to call myself a sigma. Is it sigma to refer to yourself as sigma?

What I'm going to refer to myself as is sigma squared, right? Because if you square sigma, well, then you're super sigma. Yeah. So that's how you know I'm sigma is because I'm going to put my, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put my sigma designation in a power law.

I'm like, yeah, man, I'm like two to the constant factor times sigma. Lone wolf, am I right, buddy? And then we do like you do a wolf call. I'm glad we're figuring out how to be cool. All right, here's another article about it. Reddit, what does sigma mean in middle school slang?

Ooh, look at this answer. Interesting. Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, right wing machismo BS. Laugh in their face and tell them to can it or get it written up. Oh, so there's like a controversial interpretation. This is a fun discussion. Now I'm into this. If eighth graders are comfortable enough around you to use ironic, goofy slang, but respect you enough to be nervous to tell you that the urban dictionary definition of it, you've hit that sweet spot, carry on shoulder.

Nah, this is toxic little boy BS and needs to be addressed. JP and AT to use at work. Someone else says, I swear to God, this Tate guy is some folks. Oh my God, look at this. They're really getting into this. Here's what I'm learning from Sigma. And someone else is like, it's a harmless, ironic joke and telling eighth graders not to say it is most def not going to make it work.

Oh, so I bet. Okay. It's even before eighth grade because the kid I gave a lesson to is in six or fifth. Here's what I think is happening. So I think there was like originally a way it was used sort of like manospherically, somewhat like straightforwardly, like maybe it's better than being an alpha is being a Sigma, right?

So that's like the Andrew Tate reference, right? Like guys our age with like big biceps doing videos about like whatever. And that younger kids are ironically using the term because it's cringeworthy the way that it was being used. So you can kind of like reappropriate it and be like, yeah, I'm Sigma.

Is that what, maybe that's what's going on here. But this is complicated enough, I guess we shouldn't call ourselves Sigma. We will invent our own. Can we invent our own term? I know all the Greek letters. I do a lot of mathematics. Well, I think we should be, we could be Epsilon.

That was my fraternity in college. Yeah, we could be Gammas. Psi. PSI. Hey man, that's really Psi of you. All right, we're going to invent our own term so it doesn't have all this baggage. We are Epsilons, which means like a small degree of improvement over a term. All right, so forget Sigma.

The new thing Generation Alpha is to be Epsilon. And that's our word of the year, I guess. And what I'm really learning reading Reddit about this is how much brain rot you get reading Reddit about things. This is like people fighting about Andrew Tate and going back and go do something useful.

Be a leader in your community. Read a book, learn something hard. This is crazy. The internet's crazy. Brain rot indeed. All right, that's enough nonsense. Thank you everyone for listening. I guess next week, yeah, it's going to be like a Christmas Eve episode. What's a week from Monday? Yeah, the 20th.

All right, we recorded the week before. Maybe we'll have to get some decorations in here for that one. We'll go crazy on that one. No one listens to the Christmas episode because they're all off on vacation. So like we're going to go crazy on that one. I'm going to think of something interesting to do.

We are going to get Sigma in here with our Christmas episode, which I guess means like we'll be shirtless and doing creature curls. With lacrosse sticks. I want to start every podcast with me doing creature curls and looking up and saying, "Oh, I didn't see you come in. Oh, hi there.

I didn't see you come in here." All right, everyone. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a crazy episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you like today's discussion about our cost and want a more general discussion about cultivating a deep life, check out episode 329, the Tao of Cal, where in 10 minutes or less, I summarize all of my big ideas.

I think you'll like it. Check it out. So I thought it might be fun to try to do something sort of crazy today to try to summarize most of the main ideas I talk about in five minutes or less.