All right, let's end with a deeper question here. This comes from Kevin. Kevin said, I've recently been reading the classic seven habits, a highly effective people and are wondering what the seven or choose the appropriate number principles of deep life are of the deep life are a, what are the fundamental truths that have universal application to cultivating the deep life?

Well, Kevin, I don't have a full, fully developed answer to that yet. I will, by the time I'm done writing my deep life book, but I'm writing my slow productivity book first. So for now, I'm just playing with ideas in the background, but let me give you three right now, extracted from some of the notes I've been taking as I, as I look ahead to the process of writing my deep life book in the future, right?

Idea number one, this is my current tentative formulation for what the deep life requires. The deep life requires the radical alignment of your daily existence towards things you value and away from things you don't. All right. There's three pieces to that formulation. All right. One, you have to shift your life, where you live, what you do for work, how you work, how you fill your time, whatever.

You have to shift major elements of your life towards things you really care about. So there's this intentional shaping of your life towards things you care about. Two, the shift should be radical. So there's something deep and meaning generating about making big shifts. So it's not just, I'm trying not to work on weekends.

It's you radically changed your job so that you're working half days, four days a week. It's the radical shift. It's not just, I want to hike more. It's I moved the Vancouver Island where I live among the woods, right? The something about the radicality helps unlock depth. And the third piece of this formulation is to focus more on the things that value, you have to pretty severely reduce all the things that don't.

So there's a simplification that seems to come with the deep life. The, the, the focus on one thing, you have to excise more of the other things and not just getting rid of the things that are bad, but also being willing to step away from the things that are fine.

Just not as good as the things you really care about. So you can't have all the different things. All right. Idea two, that transformation requires practice. So it's hard to make big changes in your life. It's hard in two ways. One, just building up the muscle and the discipline of controlling.

Being very efficacious about directing your life. That's why on this podcast, I often talk about the deep life bucket exercise. You identify the buckets of the deep life and you do the keystone habit in each. And then you spend six to eight weeks dedicated to each bucket, doing a transformation of that piece of your life.

A big part of that is practice. Getting used to intentionality and discipline in the shaping of your life. That actually does take some work. The other thing that benefits from practice is insight. Insight on what matters to you and what doesn't and the nuances of how something matters is often extracted as a side effect of action in doing something, trying something, making this change, taking this month off, putting on this routine, praying five times a day, whatever it is to change you make it's in the actual friction generated by taking that action that you gain, oh, our timer went off, Jesse, that you actually gain insight.

And by the way, for those who are watching at home, you hear me reference a timer. I'll hold it up to the camera here. A reader or a listener sent us this. Dave Z. Dave Z sent us this, what's it called, Jesse? A focus timer. Focus timer. So free plug.

Uh, for those who are listening, it is a plastic hourglass. Yeah. It's basically to avoid using your phone for a timer. Yeah. And it has, I haven't quite figured it out. We just opened the box before the episode, but it has led lights to indicate how full it is or not full it is.

And when you twist it, it does something and you turn it over and it anyways, once you learn how to use it, you can basically set a timer and run it and just watch led sand move down to a, to a hourglass so you can time yourself. Without having to look at digital numbers on a, on a phone.

So was it Dave Z? Dave Z. Dave Z. Thank you very much. That's what went off for those who are listening, uh, just went off during our recording here. Uh, but the point I was making before the, the focus timer went off is through action, you gain insight. In fact, action is often a better route to insight than mere reflection.

It's why a lot of the great wisdom traditions of the world have so much ritual involved. You can't just sit, you can't just sit and think about Torah. You actually have to do the five time daily or whatever it's three time daily prayer, you have to go through the rituals of the days of awe that do ritual through activity, through commitment, you gain insight.

That applies to life transformation too. So you're not just going to sit here and watch documentaries and read books and get inspired and figure out, you actually have to take action at a smaller scale to get the insight needed to take successful action at the larger. Third idea, Kevin, uh, career capital theory is often the fuel of the deep life.

So the universe doesn't care about your values and dreams. And so if your radical change is not practical or sustainable, the stress and uncertainty that it creates, let's say financially or otherwise is going to counteract the potential benefits. So deep life transitions are most successful when they're made with a.

Foundation of confidence, financially speaking, I don't healthcare, education, connection, whatever the things are you worry about that you're able to make this with confidence, career capital is going to be your buddy in this mission. Becoming so good. You can't be ignored at skills gives you leverage. You can use that leverage to shape your career towards things that resonate and away from things that don't.

Shifting towards a deep life is the ultimate example of shifting your life towards things that resonate. You might need to build up a pretty big pool of career capital to make that ha ha happen. So this goes contrary. A lot of times when people think about something like the deep life, it's all about the inspiration and the boldness, but it's actually often the, the, the focus of getting really good at something valuable, that's most important.

That's what opens up the options for you to sustainably try something different. All right, Kevin, that's tentative, but that's some of my recent thoughts on. Successfully identifying and transitioning to a deep life. Now, if only my book will sell as many as Stephen Covey, seven habits, I think we will all be happy.

That might be one of the best selling advice books of all time. Yeah, probably. I think so. It's like 30 million copies or something. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, look, I don't want to be greedy. I'd be okay with a half that. It's a good title. Yeah, it's a good title, but I think people give too much credit to titles.

It sells more books, right? Yeah. But if the book is not, I've been in the business long enough to know books sell a lot of copies because they, they hit a chord with people. They just hit the right chord and they, people pass them on to other people, pass them on to other people.

The titles can help, but this idea that, you know, Mark Manson sold 18 million copies of the subtle art of not giving an F word because the F word was in it. It's crazy. It's because the book was the perfect tone on the perfect topic to reach a perfectly large audience.

Seven habits is great, but everyone wrote books with seven in the title after that. It's not the title. It was a values driven approach to productivity, which is as relevant today as it was back then. And it's, it's, it's a really good book. Deep work sold a lot of copies.

I mean, I think the phrase deep work is good, but it's also just hit the zeitgeist at a time where people were intuiting something negative about the distraction and the freneticism of their, of their working life, and they couldn't quite put their finger on it and the book put their finger on it in a way they could then articulate to others and, you know, million copies later that thing spread.

So I'm a believer titles kind of matter, but a title cannot make a book into a massive seller. That makes sense. Yeah. That's my theory.