So what I would like to do is I would like to talk about how I've been applying so good they can't ignore you since I read it like a long time ago, actually. But then I feel like I kind of messed up somewhere along the way. So after after I kind of summarize, I would like us to go into kind of like, where did I go wrong and where do I go from here?

Sounds good. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 220. So if you're new to the program, it is where I answer questions from my audience about the theory and practice of working and living deeply in an increasingly distracted world. We're recording today on Halloween, which I think is exciting.

Jesse thought it'd be a good idea, producer Jesse, to wear a costume, which I which I encouraged. I think he went a little bit too far, though. I'll let you be the judge. If you're if you're listening, you'll have to go look for the episode 220 video at YouTube.com/CalNewportMedia to participate here.

But you be the judge. I think Jesse went a little bit too far here. So I really got into the costume. So what do you think about that? I mean, it's pretty elaborate, Jesse. Well, what is a skeleton's favorite plant? I don't know what. A bonsai. I mean, I think I have to fire you at this point.

I think that's clear. All right, fair enough. Oh, my. All right. Enough nonsense. Actually, I take it back. If you're listening, don't go to YouTube to watch this. This will be a waste of everyone's time. All right, well, we get the the real producer, Jesse, back into his seat.

I got a couple of announcements to make. Look, we can even look what he look what I've read for Jesse. I have on camera now. Oh, my. I'll tell you, Jesse, before I do the announcements, this felt like a good idea when I was walking out of my house.

As I got to the HQ, I began to have doubts. And I'll tell you why. Right next to our office in the HQ is a legitimate documentary video production company, right? And we're talking about a company that does serious issue based documentaries. Now they know who I am, like they know my books, but I think they're they're confused why I have an office.

And in their minds, it's probably some sort of weird, you know, grown man's clubhouse. And I just was having this thought as I was walking down the street carrying a fluorescent skeleton. That if they see me right now, I'm not going to be disabusing them of their impression of what's going on in here.

So fortunately I did avoid them, avoided our super, did run into my neighbor carrying the skeleton, but yeah, could be worse. For those not watching, it's good to know that the skeleton is, you know, probably five feet tall. It is a short. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, we take it seriously.

We take it seriously. Our, our Halloween decorations have a lot of skeletons in them. So we got a good show. So there's, there's two blocks of questions coming up early in the first block. We have our very first live caller. Jesse had promised us by the end of October, this episode has been recorded on the last day of October.

So that's exciting. So we'll actually have me talking live with a caller going back and forth about their issue. Also have a good deep dive. I want to get into before we get into all that, a couple of quick announcements. First, I want to mention the live event. Come see Jesse and I live Monday, November 14th at 7:00 PM at the East City Bookshop here in Washington, DC.

That's on Capitol Hill. There is a book of it. My friend David Sacks has a new book out called The Future is Analog, and I'll be moderating a conversation with him. So sort of like me interviewing David, but I haven't really done or been to an event just for my readers and listeners since pre pandemic.

So if you're in the DC area, come by November 14th, 7 PM East City Bookshop. Other reminder, submit your questions. There's a link right in the show notes to do so. You go right to a survey, you fill in the questions. If you're interested in doing the question live, you can also put your email address there at the end.

While we're still early in this new survey, it's your best chance to get your question on a show. So definitely go submit your questions. All right. Well, that's our news for now. Uh, let's get rolling right away with today's deep dive. I'm calling it the two types of ambition.

Now this deep dive is based off of a, an article I posted to my newsletter at calnewport.com just a few days ago. So the original title of the article, and I have it on my screen here for those who are watching, instead of just listening, the original title of the article was on Michael Crichton's busy ambition.

It's from October 28th. So the motivation for this article, which I want to pick apart in our deep dive today was actually coming across a profile of Crichton in the New York Times archives from 1970. And I have this on the page now on the screen, if you're watching a profile that's titled for Michael Crichton medicine is for writing.

There's also a picture of a young Michael Crichton there. So what struck me when I read this profile recently was the busyness of Michael Crichton at this very early stage of his career. So let me set the scene for you. This is the scene that I, I opened the article with.

All right. It's Michael Crichton, his last year at Harvard medical school. He's 26 years old. He goes to the Dean of the medical school. Uh, and he says, I don't think I'm going to practice medicine. I figured this out. But what I do want to do is publish a nonfiction book about hospital life in a particular, uh, the hospital in Boston where he was doing his, uh, intern rounds.

And he's, and, and he asked, can I, instead of doing some of the normal, whatever, uh, work you would do during your final semester, can I instead go around the hospital and gather research for my book? And here's the actual quote I have here. From this article, which was written one year after this occurred, he said, why should I spend the last half of my last year at medical school learning to read electrocardiograms when I never intended to practice?

All right. So he says this, the Dean of Harvard medical school, the Dean replies, paternalistically, Michael. I don't think you realize how hard it is to write a book. Right. So he's trying to warn this young kid, like you can't just like go walk around the hospital and gather some notes.

This is when Crichton did his mic drop and revealed to the Dean of Harvard medical school that he had already published four books during his first three years at medical school. He had been doing so under the pen name, John Lang, L A N G E. Not only had he written those four books, but he had multiple other projects in action, not just this nonfiction book idea, which he had already started by the way, but his first two, I would say serious publication efforts, his first four books are potboilers.

I've read them. You can buy them. They reissued them under Michael Crichton's original name. They're Clive Kustler, James Bond style thrillers with some techno flavor added in. But he was also by this final year of his med school deep underway with some more serious books. The first being a case of need, which he published under a pseudonym as well, but it was really the first thriller he wrote that got medicine more deeply involved.

This would win that next year. It would win an Edgar award for best mystery novel of the year. It's a hard award to win. He also was working on the Adronima strain first book he would publish under his own name and of course would be a big breakout bestseller.

It's what really started his fame in the literary world, became a big movie back in the seventies. He had all this stuff already going on when he went to talk to the med school dean. So by the time you get to a year later, when this New York times profile is written, you see that this is a one man multimedia operation.

So in addition to all of those projects going on, he somehow has two more. Pot boilers he writes under his pseudonym by 1970. So somehow he adds two more books unrelated to a case of need, unrelated to the Adronima stream. He also, by this point was working on what would become the terminal man.

His second techno thriller written under his own name. It was called something different in the profile. They're still calling it a sympathetic man, like a sympathetic nervous system, but terminal man is much better. He revealed that he was already intent on directing the movie for the terminal man. So he was concurrently writing a screenplay.

He was also traveling to Hollywood every week on what he called, and I'm highlighting this here, a skills building gambit. So he was going to Hollywood to be trying to pick up because he wanted to be a director as well. And so he was going to Hollywood a couple of days a week.

So this was the year after he left medical school. So he, he had this sort of half-hearted postdoc at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, uh, La Jolla, Lajolla, J O L L A. Coya. Coya. Is it La Jolla? Yeah. Okay. Which is not far from LA, I guess.

Yeah. So he was going back and forth community. San Diego area. Yep. All this stuff was going on. At 27 years old, all this was going on at the same time. The New York times profile called his career hyperactive. And it is, can you imagine that? I mean, I do a fair amount of things.

That's crazy. The amount of things he had going on. So all these different projects he was juggling at the same time. Oh, and by the way, he also published a novel with his brother. Under a pseudonym between 1969 and 70 as well, an experimental novel about drug dealing, where they would pass the manuscript back and forth.

And, uh, he would write an entire draft and then his brother would edit entire draft, all this stuff's going on. So busy guy. I compared him in this article, let's say apples to apples, another really successful fiction writer, John Grisham, John Grisham's younger. Um, he, he really got a start in the early nineties, whereas, uh, we have Crichton getting a start in the early seventies, but whatever, same idea.

And there was a period in the nineties where they were competing back and forth, not just for the biggest book sales Grisham and Crichton for a period of the nineties, there were in a huge war on movie rights. They were breaking deals, uh, breaking records for movie deals. And their agents would say things like, I want whatever Crichton got for his last book, plus $1.

Like they were trying to one up each other. All right. So what's John Grisham story. So John Grisham in the 1980s, uh, is a lawyer, small town, Mississippi lawyer. He runs for, and also wins a seat in the Mississippi state legislature. So he's a Democrat state legislature and a small town lawyer doing both of those things.

State legislators, a part-time job. And he decides he wants to write a book. He gets an idea for a book from a case that he wasn't trying, but was observing. And he gets this idea for a book and he tells his wife, I want to try to write a legal thriller.

And she said, okay, but do two in a row. Right. So that way, you know, maybe one of the ideas doesn't work. You have two shots at it right away. And if both of those ideas don't work, then you know that maybe that's not for you. So he does this, uh, it's hard.

It takes him longer than it takes Crichton. I have the numbers in here, but I think it was something like three years. Because he's writing in between these two jobs and you can find them in some interviews talking about, oh, I have my notepad while I was waiting for meetings.

I was waiting for a legislative session to begin at scribble notes, but, but I found a really definitive interview where he said, this is the secret. I woke up at five and I wrote every morning and it was really hard and I was often really tired and it wasn't like all that fun.

And that was the only way to really make progress. And it still took him three years to write the first book. He started the second book the day after he finished the first. Good thing he did that because the first name, the, the, uh, the first book of time to kill.

He had a hard time finding a publisher when it came out, small first printing did nothing disappeared, but he had already basically finished his second book by that point. So he's like, I might as well. This time, his second book, which is the firm, his agent leaked bootleg copies of the manuscript to movie producers.

So before they had even sold the book, Paramount came in and said, we'll pay you $600,000 for the movie rights for the firm. So then once the publishing industry heard that Paramount had paid 600,000, they're going to do a big movie, which they eventually did with Gene Hackman and Tom Cruise.

Double day snapped up the book rights for a lot of money. That book got a lot of coverage, went on to sell a lot. The number I quote in the article, 7 million copies. I couldn't really source that well. It might be less than that, but anyways, it's sold.

It's sold a lot of copies instead of his whole career. This is where, and I say in the article, Grisham's path diverges from Crichton. Grisham does not look at the buffet of appealing opportunities that is generated by his initial success and say, let's start feasting. He does something very different.

He says, I now have the leverage and money needed to simplify my life in a way I couldn't before. Stops practicing law, leaves the legislature. Based on the advice he heard from a bookseller that all the big fiction names published once a year, he said, that's what I'm going to do.

One book a year. That's what matters, especially in the beginning. I need a book every year to solidify my audience. And he basically retreated into just a writing routine of one book per year. And I have some of the details of it because he's talked about this before. Here's how he eventually perfected this.

I would call it almost monastic writing routine. He starts writing on January 1st. He works three hours a day, five days a week. He used to write in their Oxford. Then he moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. They have a farm. He has an outbuilding on that farm that they renovated for him to write no internet connection there.

First thing in the day, three hours. He basically writes till lunchtime, five days a week, not on the weekends. All right. That rhythm has him finish the first draft usually by March. The editing begins. He wants to have the manuscript completely locked in by July. Starts in January, six months later, done with the manuscript.

Now that's it for writing until the next January. Now he'll think and do research about what his next book is going to do at his own pace. He will do clearly publicity. He usually does fall releases. So when that book comes out in the fall, he'll do publicity, but he's not a big publicity guy.

He does limited tours. He'll do the big shows and interviews and then retreats again back to his farm. And that's kind of it. He doesn't do these other projects. He doesn't want to direct. He doesn't want to do 17 different types of books like Crichton was doing. He wasn't trying to establish a production company or get involved in television.

They would sell the movie rights to his books, but that was about it. 15 hours a week, six months out of the year. Uh, the rest of his energy goes to other things. When he had younger kids, they were really, he was really into little league baseball. And so he built, uh, it's not, he doesn't want, it's not officially associated with little league, but a youth baseball, uh, complex five, really great fields.

They started their own youth baseball league. He was the commissioner of the league. He loves baseball. He loves coaching. He thinks it's great. You know, for kids, I know he's heavily involved in political fundraising as well. It just has other stuff that he does. So I found an article and I can't, I can't excavate this anymore, but I remember finding this and reading this and I wrote about this somewhere.

I can't find where, so I can't find the original source, but you'll have to take me, take me at my word for this. Uh, at some point, this was an article from probably the last 10 or 15 years. His longtime assistant retired. And he realized, according to this article, I found that he didn't need to hire a replacement because there was no work for her to do.

I mean, his agent has his number. His editor has his number. They know his routine. He's not involved in a lot of projects. He's not involved in a lot of schemes. So there was nothing for the assistant to even organize. He writes from January to March edits from March to July does a one week publicity tour in the fall.

So it was very different than Crichton. Crichton says, I now have success. I want to go do lots of different things. Grisham says I have success. I want to simplify my life. So what I did in this piece and what I want to do right here is try to put names to these two different approaches to ambition.

So what I write in the article is the first model exemplified by Crichton is what I call type one. It craves activities and feasts at the buffet of appealing opportunities that success creates. The other model exemplified by Grisham is what I call type two. It craves simplicity and autonomy and see success as a source of leverage to reduce stressful obligations.

Medical school wasn't sufficiently stimulating for Crichton. Life as a lawyer was too hectic for Grisham. They therefore reacted to their success in much different ways when it respectively arrived. Now, my argument is this is a spectrum, but most people fall towards one end of the spectrum or the other, the type one Crichton end or the type two Grisham end.

And that it's important to understand where you fall on the spectrum because it will have a big impact on not only do you, how you plan your professional or aspirational endeavors, but how you react to successes when they come. If you don't have this figured out, you can end up in a mismatch situation.

If you're a Grisham that allows the pressure of your success to push you into a bunch of Crichton style projects, you're not going to be happy. If you're a Crichton and you use the, the, you know, your first book taking off to move to the middle of the woods, I can finally now live in the house in Maine, overlooking the water.

You might be bored. You might be depressed. You say, what I've just isolated up here. This doesn't make me happy. So understanding where you fall, I think is important. And that was the call I made in that article, recognizing those are two very different types. And they're both valid, I think is in itself, very validating for people.

So when you're doing something like lifestyle centric career planning, you have some clarity. So the final question is where do I fall? Well, in the article, I was really clear. Grisham is what resonates with me. I got some pushback though. People say you say Grisham resonates with you, but your life looks more Crichton-y to us from the outside.

And I think that's a very good point. And I guess what I would say is that I'm aspirationally Grisham. I mean, to me, being able to work autonomously on a hard project on my own terms and my own timings to disappear for a while and just come back into the public eye occasionally, that really resonates when I read that profile of Crichton, it stressed me out, made me anxious.

So I think I resonate more times Grisham-y. Now it looks like I'm doing a lot and partially that's true. I'm probably a little bit more in the Crichton spectrum than where I need to end up. But partly it's an illusion because I do things sequentially. I work on things a little bit at a time.

This is classic slow productivity, a little bit of time, but with great focus. Do that long enough and things begin to pile up, but I'm not necessarily working on all those things at the same time. I think the, the podcast newsletter video portion of my empire makes it, makes my activity seem really multiplied.

But as Jesse will attest, this is a half day venture for me. So the way I see all of this, like what you're hearing right now is unlike Grisham, I'm a web 2.0 guy. I grew up with the internet. So I do like to be able to connect directly with my readers and listeners.

To me, that's really important, but I keep it confined. And so I just have a burst each week of let's do a bunch of stuff to connect with our readers, but it's confined. It's not a lot of ongoing projects that are eating up a lot of my time throughout the week.

So if you put that aside, it's basically writing in CS. And if I had to pick an ideal, where would I be when I sell, you know, 7 million copies of the firm or whatever my equivalent is, honestly, to me, an ideal would be, I'm always writing. I'm always thinking sequentially though, one thing at a time, you know, I'm finishing this book chapter, then I'm writing this New Yorker piece that I'm writing this academic article that I'm writing a couple more book chapters.

With a half day every week where we do this nonsense so that I'm not just living in a cave. To me, that would be great. I'd be happy with that. I don't need to be directing or whatever the equivalent is of all of Crichton's busyness. So anyways, type one, type two, know where you are.

Use that knowledge to help direct how you approach both your ambitions and your successes. And I think it would make people a lot happier. Do you think Crichton's still like that? Well, he's dead. So he's the ultimate. Oh, right. I was thinking, yeah. Yeah. So Crichton died in '08 maybe?

Cancer. Yeah. He's older. By the way, I'm always surprised by how old he was. Well, we talked about this before on the show, but you read his first book under his own name, The Adronoma Strain, which again, reads so modern. You think this book was from the nineties. And yet in the book, no one's landed on the moon yet.

So that's a long career. So he, when he first started writing these things, there were, there were no personal computers. We hadn't landed on the moon yet, you know, uh, because he's, he was born in 1942. Yeah. I was getting confused with Moneyball. Oh, Michael Lewis. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah.

I wonder what his deal is. He, so he has a podcast with his, his buddy Gladwell's network. He writes, uh, usually he's always working on a book. I thought he had a, one of these sort of visiting like professorship things at Tulane. Yeah. For a while. I mean, I know that's what Isaacson's doing.

I think Meacham is doing that. A lot of these writers, like these sort of that generation of came out of magazines. Yeah. They're in their sixties, uh, Pulitzer winning writers. A lot of them have these positions at universities. But yeah, I think Lewis is a good example. You know, I think he's just like, I just want to write.

Yeah. I know both the whole time. I was just thinking about Lewis for some reason. I don't know why. Yeah. Why don't you go down that rabbit hole too. Um, all right. So we're almost to our, our very first live call. Uh, I first want to mention a sponsor, actually two sponsors that I'm very excited about because this is just coming straight out of my own life.

So this will be, these are two things I really want to recommend that it will be easy to recommend because this is just pulling from my own life. The first is our friends at 8 Sleep. The 8 Sleep Pod is the only sleep technology that dynamically cools and heats each side of your bed to maintain the optimal sleeping temperature for what your body needs.

You can sleep as cold as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. Jesse, I missed my 8 Sleep so much. I just got back from Georgia. I really missed it there. I was staying in a hotel in Georgia, the Marriott. And here's what happens at a hotel. And I think it happens other places too.

Is I sleep hot. I make the room cold. I had that thing rock and rolling at 65 degrees. 65. 65 degrees. So when you're first getting in the bed in a hotel room at 65 degrees, you think I'll never be warm again. Like maybe I'll need extra blankets. Like it's freezing.

I got to get under covers. It's like uncomfortable to be outside. It takes 10 minutes before you're uncomfortably hot, because what happens is your body heat builds up in those comforters and in the mattress and you're hot. And I had those covers kicked off by the time I was waking up in the middle of the night.

This is what the 8 Sleep does. It's not about, Oh, I want it to feel really cold on my skin. It's that it takes the heat away. So that really comfortable feeling you get when you first get into a warm bed on a cool night, before your body heats, warmed it up, you keep it all night long.

The 8 Sleep is just pulling that heat away through its capillary system. And so it always stays comfortable under the, under the comforters. So, I mean, 8 Sleep has basically ruined me for travel. Cause I, I really notice it now. I'm like, man, I miss my 8 Sleep. It would be pretty eccentric to bring it with me though, Jesse.

It's a, you know, it's, you have this big mattress cover and this cool, like spaceship looking pod that maybe is going too far, but you know, this is my evidence that I love my 8 Sleep is now I have a hard time when I'm not with it. Uh, they have a lot of data, but I'm not even going to quote the data.

Take it from me. I love it. I'm a negative one on their temperature scale. I think my wife is a negative two. You can set each side differently. You control it with an app. Uh, I am a big 8 Sleep fan. So go to 8sleep.com/deep to save $150 on the pod.

So you do that slash deep 8sleep.com/deep to get that $150 savings. 8 Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. We have a new sponsor today. Again, something that I have been using for a long time before they sponsored the show, and that is Masterclass.

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Let me tell you, I've been a subscriber to Masterclass for a while. I'll tell you three classes I've done on it. So, you know, as people know, I'm a amateur cinephile. I really like movies and movie appreciation. So I did a class with Ron Howard, which is filmed, by the way, the set they filmed Ron Howard's class on is itself cinematic.

They have like a 30 foot LED wall where he can like show what he's talking about. Uh, that was really good because he did scene deconstruction. Let's look at this scene from one of my movies. Look what the camera is doing. Fascinating. Then I found a class from Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, Oscar award-winning and Emmy award-winning Aaron Sorkin.

The cool thing about that class is that there was this extra. So some of these classes have extras where it was him teaching a screenwriting seminar with students and the students would present their screenplays and Sorkin would give feedback on the screenplays. Like that's how you get to the guts of like how does screenwriting work?

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So I highly recommend you check it out, get unlimited access to every class. And as a deep questions listener, you can get 15% off that annual membership. Go to masterclass.com/deep now. That's masterclass.com/deep for 15% off masterclass. All right. We're gonna start our first question block with a something we've been excited about for a while now, a live caller.

So I can actually talk to someone back and forth. Uh, we have video on the live caller too. So if you're a YouTube listener, youtube.com/counterpartmedia, you can actually see both of us on the screen. Our first live caller is Spiros who has questions about lifestyle centric career planning and concerns about falling into the second control trap with his current career that may be going too well.

And because of that, it is steering him, the pressures of that, or perhaps steering him away from a deeper life. All right. So let's go to our phone line and talk with Spiros. All right. We have our next caller here. Spiros, thank you for calling into the deep questions podcast.

And now for what I understand, you actually have a case study you want to share with us of some of the principles I talk about actually put into action. Yep, exactly. Yeah. So what I would like to do is I would like to talk about how I've been applying.

So would they can't ignore you since I read it like a long time ago, actually. But then I feel like I kind of messed up somewhere along the way. So after, after I kind of summarize, I would like us to go into kind of like, where did I go wrong and where do I go from here?

Sounds good. All right. So, uh, I moved to the U S from Greece in 2012, like literally 10 years ago to do a PhD in robotics. Uh, and I read your book a couple of years later. So in 2014, and I was like, Whoa, okay. I see what I'm supposed to do.

So I started applying it first to research, but then I got the opportunity to participate in the 2015 DARPA robotics challenge. So then I started applying the principles to robotics software, as opposed to just robotics research. That went pretty well. I got really, I got really into kind of like the more the software side of robotics.

Uh, I decided to take a leave of absence to join a robotic startup and that dropping out of the PhD program with a master's did really well in that startup. I was the first software engineer. I hired the team eventually, uh, followed the startup to Austin, Texas in 2016.

Uh, then moved to San Francisco in 2017 to work for another robotic startup. Again, did really well, got promoted, got to travel to Hong Kong and China for manufacturing purposes. And now since 2018, uh, I've been working for one of the top three, perhaps the top, uh, self-driving car company here in San Francisco.

Uh, again, I've been doing really well. Uh, I've gotten very high performance reviews. I've gotten promoted. I'm on track to get promoted again. Uh, I I'm considered very reliable, high performer, all of, you know, all of the good stuff you would expect from somebody, you know, following these principles.

Uh, I have tons of options. Like, I don't mean to like sound, I don't mean to brag, but like, I get so much recruiter email these days that it's like spam. So I do have options. Um, now the, the reason there now, this is where this is turning from a case that is more to a question.

I feel like, like to put it in terms of your book, I think I fell for the second control trap. I think I got too excited about the, you know, the performance and the promotions and the compensation and the recognition. Uh, that I've kind of become too busy to, I have too many responsibilities.

I'm too busy. My compensation is too good to ignore if you will. Yep. So, uh, that's kind of where I would like to focus the question part. Excellent. Excellent. Well, let me, let me, first, I'm going to back you up to the beginning of your case study, uh, just for the edification of our audience.

I want to go back to you as a PhD student. You read so good. They can't ignore you. Now you, you, you glossed over a little bit. Oh, I put those principles into play. And started becoming very successful in my studies. Let's go back and try to make that concrete.

So like, can you identify what did you start doing that let's say other students in your cohort who weren't as successful or you, uh, the passwords yourself weren't doing, let's try to do some differential analysis here, because I'm curious in this beginning point first, and then we'll get to you now.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think so. B because of your, your own case study in the book, you were also a PhD student and eventually a postdoc, et cetera. I was like, Oh, I'm just going to do exactly what Kyle talks about here. Kyle talks about, you know, getting a, like a very fundamental research paper and kind of like going deep into the research paper, trying to understand the proofs, trying to understand the results.

So that's something that I did a schedule some time every week to go through either fundamental papers in my field. So I was in a formal methods in robotics, which is like formal verification, formal sentences. Anyway. Yeah. Um, which by the way, I'm happy to geek out with you about that.

We can talk about your improvers and, and we would, uh, we would lose all of our audience, but just let me know. I'm restraining myself right now. You know, I'm tiptoeing around it on purpose. Cause yeah, cause this can be a rabbit hole. Yeah. So that's one thing that I remember very distinctly doing.

Um, then when, once I got the opportunity though, to participate in the DARPA robotics challenge, I was like, okay, I can apply this here as well. So then it shifted from like reading research papers as my, as my deliberate practice, let's say, to learning, uh, learning C plus plus learning Python, which are like some fundamental languages for, uh, for this kind of thing.

And then something called the robot operating system, which is like a middleware for robotics applications. So I knew, I knew that these things existed and I knew some programming of course already. But I was like, okay, these are the three fundamental things I need to know. If I want to write robotics software and like get the robot to actually do something.

By the way, we go to work like my team for the DARPA robotics challenge, go to work with those like Atlas humanoid robots from Boston dynamics. So yeah, pretty, pretty crazy platform to be working on. Also terrifying, but yeah, go on. Yeah. And so that's another way I applied that.

So like I was, for example, I remember very distinctly scheduling blocks at the very beginning of my day, like before I even went to into the, you know, the grad student cubicles or whatever, like I would, I would, let's say, go to a coffee soap or something like that.

And I would spend like, let's say two hours just going through tutorials, you know, writing code, you know, just deliberate practice. Okay. So just to clarify for the audience, the first thing you did was it's hard to understand these fundamental papers. Having that knowledge will be useful. Quick follow up here, because I get this question a lot.

How did you actually structure the reading of hard papers without a formal forcing function? Like I need this for a project I'm working on. You just had a system quota. How did you do that? So, yeah, so, so the way I motivated myself was that, Hey, I'm, I'm seeing that I'm having a hard time with like the very formal aspect of writing.

So I was able to write research papers, but they were kind of like, they weren't going very deep on the, on the math, on the, on the proof side of things. So I was like, okay, I'm going to motivate myself by saying that by understanding the fundamental papers and how these proofs work, I will be able to do that myself eventually.

Then in terms of like how I structure that, I think it was something like, you know, kick off a note in Evernote, you know, pick a, pick a, pick one of these papers and then schedule time within the week. You know, as a grad student, I, you know, you have, like, I, I kind of like reminisce about the flexibility I have in my, I had in my schedule as a grad student.

I remember scheduling like, yeah, once a month, at least once a month, I have a moment where I just insanely nostalgic for that. But anyways, go on. Yeah. Yep. And so I was, I was, if I recall correctly, this was like eight years ago at this point, I was scheduling time, like on a weekly basis.

To make sure I get in at least a couple of hours. So it's kind of like go over the paper. And then the other thing I was doing, which I think you also mentioned in the book is when I was reading like papers around what I was writing around, like papers I wanted to reference, I wanted to cite in my own paper, I wouldn't just like, you know, skim through them or read them and then forget about them on a pile.

I would actually take notes, like in a, in a, I would take digital, I would take notes on the paper and digital notes. And I would kind of sketch out what this paper is trying to do and how the, and how it, you know, proves the results. Yeah. Right.

Well, okay. So just to summarize that before we jump now to the current moment, just to summarize that for the listener, what Spiros is doing here, which is straight out of So Good They Can't Ignore You is identifying the thing that is actually valuable in the field where you are, not what you want that answer to be, not what matches how you want your day to go, but what is actually valuable.

So first off for him, that was understanding how to do this more fundamental theoretical work. And then later on, okay, understanding how to use all the different programming language tools that are relevant to the DARPA robotics challenge. So I can be as useful as possible. And in both cases, what you did, which I think is right, is said, okay, that's the reality of what matters.

What do I actually have to do to learn that? Oh, it's hard. I have to read these hard papers and, you know, I'm in the same place. Theoretical computer science is the same as early in your grad student career. Understanding papers is how you advance. Understanding papers is incredibly hard.

And those two things are true at the same time. And it was a big differentiating factor when I was coming up. Those who would wrangle papers and those who would just look for what's easy. So I think that's a great example of the principles in action. And it worked.

Okay, so it worked too well. So now we jump ahead. You're suffering from the second control trap. So for people who haven't read that book, the first control trap is trying to get a lot of autonomy in your career before you built up the skills to actually justify it.

That's where you are 23 and you quit to start your nonprofit that's going to change the world, but you don't know what you're doing. The second control trap is when you get enough leverage and skills and power in the marketplace to actually have control of your career is exactly when all of the pressure in the marketplace is going to be to stay, to move up to the next level, to take the higher salary.

So it's when you're most able to be autonomous is when it's hardest. And that's what you're hitting now. So why don't you explain to us a little bit more? What is your job like now? What is your, what is your day to day like now? Is it managerial? Is it technical?

Let's get a sense of where you are. It's yeah. So I'm a, my title is a staff software engineer. So it sounds like I'm a software engineer, like I'm writing code every day, but I'm not actually writing code every day because at a certain level in the individual contributor, like a real ladder, as we call it, you kind of like fork into different archetypes.

So there is the software engineer archetype, and this is the person that like writes really good code. There is the domain expert archetype. This is the person who has like, you know, three PhDs in convex optimization or, you know, machine learning or whatever. So domain expert. And then there is the archetype that I think I better fit into, which is kind of like high level tech lead is what we call it.

And so this is the person who is able to kind of see, understand how the system works end to end and kind of, you know, coordinate this team with this other team and this other person over here and get this, you know, other subsystem to do the right thing.

And then you get the entire project or the entire effort to do the right thing just by understanding the system end to end and leading the integration efforts. So to put it more concretely, I do everything from, you know, analyzing kind of like metrics to see kind of like where we have, you know, gaps, writing project proposals, writing design documents.

And then once we kind of move into the execution part of the project, I'm usually maybe, maybe I'm running some meetings or not, depending on whether we have a proper program manager support or not. I'm coordinating all of these different individuals, you know, software engineers, systems engineers, test engineers, sometimes operations teams that are like, you know, handling the self-driving cars on the road.

So what's a day look like? Is it, how much of it is Slack and email? How much of it is? That's, that's exactly where you hit the nail on the head. It's very much, you know, hyperactive hive mind modes all the way. Like I have to fight really hard just to block out like two hours at the beginning of my day.

And maybe if I'm lucky, I will actually, you know, get to actually do, do deep work on those two hours. Like today I'm on call, for example. So like for all I know, once my on-call, you know, shift starts, I will be completely derailed by like a, by like, you know, like an issue coming in on pager duty.

There is a lot of activity on Slack. I've, I've done all sorts of little tips and tricks, you know, applying some of the stuff from, from your books and your podcast to minimize that. I only check email like one, I try to check only once a day. I once experimented with going a week without checking work email and nothing terribly happened.

So I'm very much inclined to keep doing that again. Yeah. But, but like email is okay. Slack is where most of the hyperactive hive mind is kind of like operating. There are lots of meetings. It got much worse, you know, during the lockdown. So I'm sure I'm sure others are saying the same, like, it's like, sometimes I feel like, when am I supposed to like use the restroom and like make coffee?

Like there's no time in between these meetings. Yeah. Which is a first. So there is a lot of that. Yeah, exactly. There is a lot of that. Um, like I, I, one of the things I talk to with my manager the most often is like, Hey, I need to feel, we need to figure out a way for me.

I need to carve out time to do proactive work as opposed to waiting for a problem to arise and then doing reactive work and then fixing the problem. Like the reactive work, part of the problem is that reactive work is actually gets recognized a lot. So there is like, it's really hard to motivate proactive work when there is tons of reactive work to do and it gets recognized too.

So that's one challenge. But why do you care about it being recognized? Um, Ooh, wow. I was not expecting that question. Um, when I say recognized, I mean, okay, there's the, there's a recognition in terms of like, you know, like performance reviews and stuff, but there is also the, like doing what the company, the business thinks is most, you know, valuable, you know, right now, this, this, this quarter, this month, you know, this, this year, whatever.

Uh, and it's often the case that what, you know, the business priorities are to deal with their, with the reactive problems. They are not to go and, you know, do proactive work. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm going to give, uh, I'm going to give a two part answer here and I'm going to be terse because the second part of this answer is something that's probably going to take you weeks of actual thinking to do right.

So you'll have to check back in. I'm going to give you a short term, a short term thing to try and a longterm thing to consider. Uh, the short term thing to try is I think this might be a good setup for a deep to shallow work ratio conversation with your manager.

So I talked about this some in deep work, but then got a lot of feedback from people after that book came out about this particular strategy working well. So it's pretty well road tested. Uh, and it's where you, you have a conversation like the type you're already having with your manager, but it's a little more quantitative, right?

You say, okay, um, this is what deep work is. This is what like reactive work is. You're in a tech company in San Francisco, so they probably know the term already. Um, and you say, what ratio of this sort of reactive shallow to deep proactive do you think is optimal for my position?

Like what ratio of those two is going to produce the most value net for the organization? So we got to get a number on it and when you have to get quantitative about it, uh, they're not going to come back with the answer. I want you to do a hundred percent reactive shallow, right?

Because you have this other value, you, you have this training, you can produce new things. Um, so when you get a number that they agree to, this often leads to the dissolving of ossification in business culture. So it lets let loose a lot of innovations. They might say, okay, maybe it should be 50 50.

So what we're going to do is, you know, mornings now are for you to do proactive work. No calls start till you're not on call till the afternoon. We tell the whole team, don't expect responses. That's just an example. I don't know your exact situation. It might be, you know, Tuesdays and Fridays.

Uh, you work from not at the office and maybe from somewhere else and you're just doing proactive. The quantitative nature of that really makes a difference and the positive orientation makes a difference. So it's you coming to your manager saying, how do I produce more for the company? Not you coming to the manager and saying, I'm fed up with you slacking me all the time.

You know, you're terrible. The latter conversation doesn't go well. The former conversation I have report after report of that working. This, there was a short term solution. Try that, see how it helps. And that might be it. My longterm solution. I'm going to, I'm going to ask that you, you probably are at a good point.

And let me actually ask you, how old are you? If you, if you don't mind sharing. Yeah, I'm 34. Okay. So you're, you're in this sort of heart of the millennial generation approaching middle age. It's a perfect time to, to start thinking through these questions of, okay, let me step back.

How are things going in my, my life? What reconfigurations are looming on the horizon? It's a good time to go through a serious lifestyle centric, uh, career planning exercise where you really look out. I would look at 40 and 50 as age targets. And like we talked about on the show, have this really clear vision of, of all aspects of your life in an ideal world at that point, not just work, but where you live, what you're doing with your time, who you're around, see it, smell it, taste it.

We like to say, uh, get that vision for 40, get that vision for 50. And then look backwards and say, how do I get there? And in answering that question, you may end up saying, okay, my current career trajectory, that's fine. I just have to do this deep to shallow work ratio.

Maybe do a lateral move at some point into more, you know, you could maybe figure it out, or you might end up with an answer. You say, I have a lot of skills. I am a, an ML robotics expert engineer. Okay. Why don't I take that out for a spin?

And I can actually maybe do something drastically different. I'm on contract. I work six months out of the year. I live on Vancouver Island. You know, I mean, you could, you have a lot of flexibility. So short term, I would do that ratio conversation long-term. I would say, let's, let's go through that exercise in detail and just see where it leads you and don't be afraid if it leads you to, I'm more or less close.

I see to make some tweaks or if it leads you to, you know, I'm about to buy a ranch outside of Austin, you know, it could, it could lead you in a lot of different directions to be open to all of that. How does that, how does those as a one, two punch, how does that sound as a potential way forward?

I'm glad the conversation went there because I kind of anticipated this and I've already like, I've already done the first draft of what you just described, knowing that it was, you know, it could come up, but should I, should I actually go into it? Yeah. Okay. Give us the, give us the, the, the brief summary of the, the ideal lifestyle picture you're playing with.

So the brief summary is that I, so I'm originally from Greece, right? So I want to, I want to get to a point where I can, I can spend more or less every summer in Greece. Working, not working doesn't really matter. Um, spend, you know, about six months out of the year in the U S and then spend another quarter, you know, just working from somewhere else.

Um, other things I want to be doing, I want to be able to be near the water. I love swimming. You know, I love, I love water sports and whatnot. So I want to be able to do that. Uh, I wanna, I want to start writing. I wrote a few blog posts and articles back in grad school.

Um, and I really enjoyed that, but I gave that up later on to focus on my career. So when I get back into, uh, into writing, maybe eventually actually write a book, we'll see about that. Um, I want to, uh, so I I'm currently single. So eventually I want to be able to meet somebody now.

I feel like I'm so busy or so exhausted that I don't even like make enough time in my schedule for dating. So I definitely want to, uh, you know, uh, like the connection back at the suffering essentially to put it in deep life terms. Um, other things in there, funny, you mentioned Austin.

It's actually Austin is on that roadmap because I figured that if I were to move to Austin, which is central time, but I work Pacific time hours, then I get two extra hours in the morning when I still have energy and willpower to do things like deep work, to do things like writing before I engage with the hyperactive hive mind.

So Austin is actually on the trajectory, uh, potentially. Well, okay. Um, I mean, it sounds like to me, uh, you're, you're heading down the path towards changing your career situation. If that lifestyle sounds like either a, a, uh, greatly reconfigured job at your current employer or a different setup altogether, that's maybe more freelancer contractor based.

Is that a scary thought for you? Or is that where you you've led yourself already? I will. Exactly. You you're, you're spot on again. What is scary is I don't want to, in my attempt to escape the second control trap, I don't want to accidentally veer all the way to the first control trap.

Cause it'd be easy to say, you know, screw all of these. I have enough money in the bank to last me, you know, X many years. I'm just going to quit. I'm just going to say, you know, screw Silicon Valley. I'm going to go to. You know, Mexico and work on my book or whatever, but then I would be probably falling for the first control trap if I go so extreme.

Yep. So the, like the scary challenge is bridging the gap between like where I am right now and kind of this vision for my, for when I'm 40 or when I'm 50. Yeah. Well, okay. This is great. So, so in the first answer, we got to, I got to give some generic advice about deep to shallow ratios as a first step and lifestyle center career planning.

Now we get an example of lifestyle center career planning. So I can give you a, a, a piece of advanced advice that goes to lifestyle center career planning implementation and, and you're spot on about, you don't want to fall back into the first control trap. You're not going to be happy if you say, I'm going to go to, you know, rent a house in Cabo and just work on my book.

It that'll last a month before you start to get antsy. So what I'm always looking for in this situation is concrete exemplars. I'll often talk about the rule of three. So you want to find a real person who has your background, who has a professional setup that resonates, Hey, that works.

Okay. Here's how they did it. Oh, I, they're a, a, they're a contractor that works on this type of ML project or whatever, like it's concrete. This is someone, and it's a, it's a, a job that they do. It's a six month a year job. It's a flexible enough job that they take summers off.

They go up to New England in the summer. So real people doing with your skillset, what you want to do. Rule of three is if you want to be really secure, find three different people doing something like that. So now, you know, it's not a one-off it's actually a viable path, but have a specific, a specific target that you're working backwards from this guy, her and him did this set up with my type of skillset.

How do I move there? I mean, I will say I'm doing that in some of my own lifestyle centric midlife career planning I've been doing. I don't share a lot of details about exactly what I'm thinking about because there's a lot of stakeholders involved, but this has been my approach is what I'm seeking is examples.

I'm seeking people with similar backgrounds who have already figured out a configuration that seems to work. That's how I think you can avoid the first career trap. I think you're there right now. The seeking stage. Go see out these examples, meet the people also, by the way, say, can I call you?

Can I take you out for coffee? If they're local, people are happy to share details of their experience and get concrete with them. How did you make this change? What are the hard parts? What advice do you have? I don't know if you ever talk, you probably didn't, but in that top performer course I did with Scott Young, we talked a lot about this, this journalistic approach to career development where it's like you're off that course, but I haven't taken it.

No, we have students actually go through this. It's like you're writing a article on how this specific type of job transition works. You're out there doing research, gathering real information, always concrete. Always like this is something that people are actually doing. Um, and I think you were ready to start looking for those exemplars, which is also an exciting part of the process because you get all the aspiration without actually having to yet do anything to scary.

So, you know, good for you. I think you're in the fun part. Uh, but I would. No reason why you can't start just trying to find people right now who come out of your background, who have a setup where they, they work eight months a year. They work six months a year.

They're location independent. I'm sure they're out there in your field. Uh, there may be an academic affiliation. There may be a nonprofit affiliation. Maybe they're a fellow at the open AI, whatever. And there's so many options out there for your field. I think you're ready to start looking for concrete examples.

This makes a lot of sense and really resonates. Yeah. I didn't, you've mentioned this before, but I never, you know, pieced it together. You're right. Yeah. That's what I need to do. Excellent. Well, Spiros, keep me posted. I want to know what you end up doing. Uh, and maybe I'll, we'll follow up and we'll share that with the audience.

But in the meantime, you know, thanks for the case study. Thanks for the questions. And also an excuse for me to go through a lot of different advice. So I find that useful as well. Yeah. So, all right. So good luck for you. Thanks very much. Thank you, Kyle and Jesse.

Bye. All right. So there we go. Our first live call. I enjoyed that. We have more of those to come, so stay tuned. And if you have feedback, of course, you can always send us notes to, uh, jesse@calnewport.com. All right. So let's move on now with, uh, some written questions.

Let's see, Jesse, do you have the, uh, the written questions? Yeah. To me now we've got kind of a culture shock here. We've just talked to someone live and now we're going to written questions, but we do it all on here. All right. What's our first written question? Of the day.

Uh, first question is from Philip. He says you got started by blogging, but what are your thoughts about using private journaling or building creativity or even a writing career? Like, so what are your thoughts for using journaling to, you know, build that? Well, so Philip, my thought on becoming a better writer is the best way to do this is to write, but in particular to write for audiences where there's feedback.

So you have some sort of feedback function that is going to apply pressure to your craft to try to improve it. So that could mean writing for editing. So there could be an editor that needs to either accept or reject your piece. And if it's not good enough, they'll reject it or they've commissioned the piece, but they're going to be editing it.

And you, you have that feedback in your mind of, if this is not good, they're going to be disappointed. There's going to be a lot of work to do. I want to impress them. It can also mean writing for an online audience. If you have other metrics to look at, such as it could be views or clicks.

It could be more the direct feedback you get from your readers, the comments, they leave the emails, they send you, was this thing clicking or not? Did this, if you're a tech writer, get picked up on hacker news and do well, how is the subscribers to my email list doing?

So you can get online metrics now as well, but what you want is writing for an audience with feedback. It's that stretch to want to optimize or improve that feedback function that you get better. That's where you get the deliberate practice effect. Writing to a private journal is not going to generate that.

So as a source of making you a better writer, writing your private journal, it's not going to directly improve your craft. There are other benefits to it. I see here in the elaboration of your question, you mentioned that the book, The Artist's Way, talks about private journaling as a way to increase creativity.

And that might be the case. If you're a novelist, doing private journaling on ideas might surface more random recombinations and connections of ideas in your mind and help you pull out more grist for the creative mill. So I could believe that if you're a nonfiction, like idea writer, I think taking notes on thoughts you have, different theories or connections between ideas, you don't want to lose that.

So having a place to take notes that could help as well. So my summary is as grist for material. That material, then yeah, private journaling could help. I don't, but it could help for making you a better writer. You have to write for people who care and you have to care about how they feel about what you're writing.

That's what's going to push you to improve. All right. What's our next question. All right. Next question is from Alessandro, a 24 year old from Italy. What are some examples of keystone habits for the community bucket? Yeah, I've got this question a few times, a really brief review for those who are new to the show.

One of the methods we talk about on here for developing what we call the deep life is to divide your life into these different categories that we call buckets that cover different aspects of what's important for you. And the method we often propose is you start with a keystone habit in each of these buckets.

Just something you do every day to signal to yourself that you take each of these parts of your life seriously to single self-efficacy to yourself. I am able to do things that's not required or mandatory just because I think it's important. And then step two is you rotate from bucket to bucket and spend a month or two on each overhauling that part of your life.

All right. Alessandro is saying, and I've heard this again from multiple people. The community bucket. So the bucket where it's you sacrificing non-trivial time and intention on behalf of other people or people who are important to you, it's not always obvious. What's a daily habit to do there in the same way that it might be more obvious for craft, it might be something like I do an hour of deep work every morning or for constitution, it might be, I walked in thousand steps a day.

What's the equivalent for community. I wrote down three ideas here just to get you thinking, Alessandro. Um, write, text, or call someone, you know, every day, you know, it could just be, Hey, a friend there, I was thinking about you. You thought my things was interesting. Calling your parents as you're driving home from work, seeing what's going on with the sibling, but just in this discipline, if I take a little time out of every day, just to keep touches on different people in my life, see what's going on.

Idea number two, perhaps there's an online community that you're involved in. That's very important to you. People that share a certain interest or a philosophical or theological orientation, or they're involved in, uh, a niche hobby, whatever it is, right. But maybe you have an online community. Hopefully that doesn't exist in a massive public.

Mind warping social media platform. Hopefully this is in something that's more controlled and niche and more of a long tail social media type environment. And maybe you do something every day on that community. You post something or another type of useful effort. You do 20 minutes of moderation on their forum, whatever it is, whatever helps keep that community up and running.

So you feel connected to that online community. You're giving it energy every day. Idea three, I talk about this in deep work, something, whatever your equivalent is of daily Torah study. I thought this was a really cool example from, from my book, deep work, uh, in the Orthodox Jewish community, there's this tradition of you read Torah every morning.

There's a page a day, there's a way to break this up. So it's a page a day. I don't know page means that there's a scroll, but whatever it's, you know, one reading per day. Um, and there's a tradition where you do it with a partner. Probably say the word wrong.

Uh, Shavrusa, Shavrusa. I'm saying, I'm not saying that right, probably. But, uh, what, what they do is they, it's usually early in the morning before people have to get to work and you have a partner and you sit there and you study a page of Torah every morning. There we go.

That's just an example or whatever the equivalent is in your faith community of every day doing something with someone else. There's a bunch of us in the same room connects you to that, connects you to that community. All right. Those are just examples, Alessandro, but that's the type of thing that have to be major, but it's not trivial.

It's tractable. It might take some sacrifice some days, but you can almost always get this done. Uh, but it's not over the top. It's not, I have to spend four hours a day, you know, hosting a live event or something like that. So those are the type of keystone habits I have in mind for the community bucket.

All right. What do we got next, Jesse? Uh, next is from JP, a 43 year old from Montreal, and he's looking for a deep dive with concrete examples of a template of a quarterly plan. Yeah, I like this. Let's stay nuts and bolts. All right. So background here, I'm a big proponent of multi-scale planning.

So you have a quarterly or semester plan that you look at. Each week when you build your weekly plan, you look at your weekly plan each day, when you build your daily time block plan. So you're controlling your time and energy on multiple different scales. That's what allows you to take advantage and mold your time, uh, optimally at different types of levels.

You need all three of those levels in there. There's a lot of variety for what people put into these quarterly or semester plans. Uh, the prepare for this, I went and just looked at mine before we went on the, before we went on the live stream. I looked at mine before we went on the, before we went on the air today, I maintained two, one for my professional life and one for my life outside of work.

And the thing that struck me about my professional life on when I was looking at it, my plan for the fall, the semester we're in or quarter we're in right now is it's pretty brief, honestly, like a normal weekly plan. I have more text in it than my plan for the entire fall semester.

I mean, so when I was looking at it, basically it was, um, there's three things in there and I'm talking sentences with a few bullet points under them for each. So there is a Georgetown academic work. It's at least so, you know, it's not that many things to say here.

Like this is, uh, I'm working on these two academic papers and, um, you know, there's a administrative type thing I'm working on. The details don't matter, but just boom, boom, boom. Right. Writing. It's not that complicated. Uh, this is where I want to be. Like I'm writing my book.

I'm working on my book, slow productivity. Uh, this is where I want to be by the end of semester. Here are some miles. I broke it out month by month milestones for the semester that's there. And I'm doing some New Yorker stuff and I know what's coming up and I have a couple of notes there on how I want to interleave it.

All right. That's it. And then for, uh, I always call it the online empire, but the, the media company, the podcast video and newsletter, we have things, just to have some things we're working on. I have some bullet points to remind me of like the objectives, like where do I want to be by the end of the fall?

We're talking about, it doesn't take up a whole page. My Google doc, like if you printed it, it could fit on one page. Right. So these, these aren't essays. It's not complicated prose. It's not Gantt charts. It's not spreadsheets full of different milestones. It's like get three chapters done and get this article done in between.

And make sure you look into the possibility of shifting, like for the summer doing X. Like it's, we're talking about that level of detail. It seems like that's not enough information to help, but it makes all the difference in the world because now you have that in mind. You're doing your weekly plan.

You're like, well, okay, if I'm going to finish this chapter by the end of this month, then this week, I really Tuesday of this week, I need to maybe take that over for writing because the Thursday and Friday are busy, this little bit of information unlocks a, a large volume of decision guidance about all this other stuff that happens in your life at smaller scales, right?

So JP, it does not have to be complicated. In fact, the higher scale you go, the simpler these things get, because you're talking to such a big granularity. You can only get so many things done when you're talking about pretty big objectives. So these things get simpler. Uh, don't overthink it.

Don't overwrite, don't over detail it. You just giving your energy for the next few months, some guides that the roughly guide it down. Trust your weekly daily habit to then focus that. So with your personal quarterly plan, is that just kind of keeping an eye on things outside of your time blocking for the day?

Cause you do that outside of work. Yeah. So like that'll have, um, objectives and goals. So like, let's say you're changing, you have new objectives, fitness wise, or something like that. Like that would be on there. Um, it's like health and fitness stuff would be in there. A lot of family stuff, you know, you know, we want to do what's coming up.

This, you know, this fall while we got a bunch of birthdays, you know, the fall is always complicated for our family. Cause we have Halloween, which we, we have high Holy days. Yeah. So then Halloween really kicks off the busyness because we take Halloween seriously and then I have a son has a birthday the week after Halloween.

Um, then we have, uh, Thanksgiving and then another son has a birthday right after that, then you get into the whole holiday season. It's like, we're constantly buying gifts. We're constantly doing decorations. And so just having a reminder of that, I might pull back on other things. The winter, I typically will have like some more ambitious plans for the kids.

Like, okay, we're going to set this up. We're going to learn how to do this. We're going to, we're going to have these projects, you know, because the winters are otherwise dark and less crowded. So all that type of stuff goes in there. So for the, for the technicalities of when you look at your quarterly and you're doing your weekly plan, like every day in the time block that that's outside the time blocking for your working hours.

So, right. Most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, uh, I mean, sometimes it's not right. I mean, personal stuff, if it happens during my work hours, it has to be, it'll be integrated the time block plan, but it's also a very effective way, by the way, to make progress on like annoying personal things, like, ah, I got to do the family budget or I got to go, you know, uh, I'm, we're doing financial planning stuff right now.

Like I got up, up some insurance. I have to change the retirement deductions or whatever from like Georgetown. And like, that's actually a good thing to maybe capture. Uh, here's an hour on Wednesday from two to three, like use time block energy for that stuff. So I'll often like grab those things inside it, but yeah, for the evenings it'll be, um, it's the beginning of the week.

I'm looking at my strategic plan, looking at my personal plan for the semester. I see like, oh, we are, uh, we're one of our objectives for January is to get to this new milestone with our maker lab. So like, okay, I'm looking at my week. Why don't I choose an evening this week that we can go here and then that'll go into my weekly plan.

Like, yeah. Tuesday after, after pickup from the bus stop, let's go straight to the, the maker lab or whatever. Yeah. Yep. So there's the nuts and bolts. All right. What do I got next? All right. Next question is from Jay. How do you choose what book to read next?

Good question, Jay. There's two main ways that books come onto my radar of things I need to read. Uh, it's either functional. So I need it for research. Maybe I'm working on an article or I'm working on a book chapter and I need to read something because I need to know that information.

So there's functional ways that things come onto my, uh, onto my list of things to read, everything else is inspirational. That looks interesting. Let's get that and read that as soon as possible after I get it. So it's sort of like spontaneous or functional or inspirational and functional. Uh, so I just looked here.

I have four books I bought. I bought four books in the last week. So I thought I would just go through those and I'll for each let you know, uh, what the motivation was. These are four books that hopefully I'll probably read these all within the next three or four weeks.

That'd be the idea. Um, so I bought first man by James Hansen. So James, it's a biography of Neil Armstrong. It's because I was watching Damon, uh, Damon Chazelle's movie first man, which by the way is underrated. I think it's a fantastic movie, especially if you can watch it on a good screen with a good sound system.

I don't want to geek out about, you know, his use of 16 millimeter film and the cockpits, and there's like a lot of really interesting decisions he makes. Uh, it's Ryan Gosling and, uh, Claire Foy from the crown, whatever. So I was watching this movie, which is great. And the guy I want to write, I want to read the book it's based off of.

So that was just inspiration. Yeah. Let's do this. Karen Armstrong's new book, sacred nature. I love Karen Armstrong's work. I talked about the case for God and the history of God a lot on this podcast. He has a new book out about the ways that people have found, uh, sacredness and nature throughout history.

I mean, of course I'm on board for that type of thing. I saw that just mentioned in the New Yorkers roundup of the best books of the year so far. Boom. Just ordered that short book. You know, I'll read it in a few days. Very excited for that. Uh, I also bought super intelligence by Nick Bostrom.

This is an AI ethics type book. Uh, it's for an article, right? So that's more like homework. I'm reading a chapter every morning of that. And then there's 15 chapters. I'm reading a chapter every morning as a baseline, and then I'm going to throw in here and there extra sessions to read a couple more chapters here and there.

So, so I can get it done within 10 days would be nice. And then, uh, I also just bought right before I came here, John Meacham's new Lincoln biography. I am a big, uh, I'm a Lincoln fan. I read a lot of Lincoln stuff, but I'm particularly excited about Meacham's new biography for a lot of reasons.

I read a great review of it in the Washington post book world this weekend. And so that's on its way. That's a big book. I'll find, I'll find time to read it. I want to get that done in November if I can as well. So there you go. It's a mix of inspiration and functionality.

And if I get inspired, I buy it. I want to get into that book before the inspiration dies down. When you're reading enough, you can get through a lot of books. So on a given month, how many books do you read or how many books do you buy? Sorry.

Um, I mean, five. Probably. So last week you bought a lot of your quota. Yeah. Yeah. I have all I need for the next month. But sometimes I, I mean, sometimes I buy in books. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I need like this chapter and that chapter for an article or book research and like that's worth 25 bucks to me.

Yeah. If I can get a good example out of something, but, but yeah, I bought a lot of my quote in a big burst. And then you take trips to the library too every once in a while too, right? Yeah. And, uh, we have little free libraries in my town.

They're really big. My town is really big on these little free libraries are everywhere. And I get a lot of good books out of those. It's just a take a book, leave a book type system. Are those on the side of the road? Yeah. Okay. I've seen. Have you seen them to like, they look like mailboxes.

Yeah. I walked by one. Yeah. You can, I mean, this is like Willy Wonka's factory for me, for my personality is this town. It's like, just wander around and just pick up free books from these like well-educated people's, like their professors, little free libraries and just walk around and just like pick up free books.

So when you're done picking up free books, go to like one of our mini coffee shops to just sort of like sit and drink coffee and read. And it's a cool town. It's a good, it's a good match for me though. I should stop promoting it because we don't want too many more people to move here.

It's getting expensive. So yeah. Do not move here. Helps your house value though. It does help the house value. There's a cool town. It's quaint. It has a lot of books and good coffee shops. That's all good. Infested with werewolves. So just, you know, caveat emptier, otherwise great. Good books, good coffee.

You may have your flesh be devoured by a lichen trope, so you just got to balance that out. All right. We've got another good block of questions here. Let me just take a quick break to talk about another sponsor that makes this show possible. And that's our good friends at ZocDoc.

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They can look at those. They'll get it swabbed. ZocDoc has what you need. I mean, this just makes sense. Look, I need a dentist. How do I find a dentist? I could ask a few people and then try to get on the phone with them, or you could go to ZocDoc.

Here's the dentist in my area. Let me read the reviews. Let me see if they take my insurance. Let me sign up right there on the website. This makes a lot of sense. I currently have two doctors in my life that use ZocDoc, my dentist and my primary care physician.

So that makes things really easy. I really like how I can fill out paperwork online. I don't have to do it on the clipboard when I get there. So I am a fan of ZocDoc because of all of those features and also because I like reading out their URL.

ZocDoc.com, my favorite URL to read. So go to ZocDoc.com/deep and download the ZocDoc app for free, then you can start your search for a top rated doctor today, many available within 24 hours. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep. ZocDoc.com/deep. Say it three times fast and they'll give you a hundred thousand dollars. This is where I have to do the, the advertiser disclaimer voice and say a hundred thousand dollar prize, not guaranteed.

One other sponsor I want to talk about, this one I'm excited about. It's called Giving What We Can. This was co-founded, if it sounds familiar, it's co-founded by William McCaskill, the effective altruist philosopher at Oxford who, who did 80,000 hours, which we talked about on the show as well.

So he has this co-founded this new group, which I'm, which I am excited about called Giving What We Can. So this helps you answer the key question of which charity should I give to you? Which charity is going to be most effective in spending my money? This is what Giving What We Can, where it enters the picture because they've done this research for you.

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You see a bumper sticker. You're like, Hey, why not? Why don't I give to this charity? What is this? You know, over here, it's the, the Deep Work HQ Skeleton Fund or something like that. And then you realize I just gave a hundred thousand dollars to this charity so that Cal and Jesse can do nonsense with skeletons in their, in their ad, in their HQ or something like this, right?

You don't want to make that mistake, but you also don't have hundreds of hours to research in detail how effective charities actually are at converting money to good. So you go to Giving What We Can, they've done the research for you. Now you can put not only your money to use, but put it to use as effectively as possible.

Um, so over 20,000 donors worldwide right now, trust Giving What We Can. You should join their group, go to givingwhatwecan.org/deep to maximize the impact of your donations this giving season that's givingwhatwecan.org/deep. Don't forget the slash deep. That's how they know you came from us. All right. Well, I think we have time.

Let's do a couple more questions. Jesse, what do we got? All right. Sounds good. Question from Aaron, a 30 year old from Boston. Cal's alluded to sleep issues and often mentions caffeine consumption, Bevco, et cetera, stuff like that. The coffee shops around Tacoma Park. I'm curious about his philosophy on caffeine.

Well, first of all, Aaron, uh, I don't know where you get this idea that I drink a lot of caffeine. For those who are watching or listening, instead of watching, you will see what is, uh, one of the world's largest coffee cups in my hand, not as big as the coffee cup from the HBO show, Veep, the chief of staff's coffee cup, but this one is actually branded from our ad agency that does all our podcast ads.

I think this is their way of trying to keep me sharp so we can, we can sell more ads. Um, here's my, my caffeine philosophy. Uh, a, I drink a lot of it. So here's the backstory. I got, I got started drinking coffee in high school. So I went to high school at a public school in Mercer County, New Jersey, which is the county that includes Princeton, New Jersey.

And I, I blew through this, not gonna surprise people, but I blew through all of the available computer science instruction. By the time I was a sophomore, I took the AP course when I was a sophomore, got a five, I was sort of like out of computer science stuff to do.

And they had a agreement with Princeton university that they could send students from the high school who were sort of bored in certain topics to Princeton. Tuition free to take some courses at Princeton. So, uh, in high school, I started taking the, the computer science sequence at, at Princeton, and I would stop at the tiger Mart on route 31 and pick up flavored coffee and those cheap styrofoam cups.

And so early on, I built an association between coffee and intellectual work. By the time I got to MIT, that got much worse. The theory group at MIT is fueled by coffee. They have these giant, uh, crafts and professional brewers. The things you see in Starbucks, like the really big brewing machines up on a big stand.

And I was often tasked, I was the person who would brew it a lot of Pete's coffee. I drink a lot of coffee at MIT. And so that's just been a part of, I associate coffee with doing intellectual work. Um, I do cut back. So my philosophy is I don't drink after one 30 or so it is one 27.

So by the time we finished taping the show, that's why I literally, I have this with me because it'll be too late to drink coffee after taping the show is over. I try not to drink after one or so, but I don't really limit what I do before then.

I probably drink a lot too much, but stopping at one seems to prevent it from really affecting my sleep right now. So there we go. Coffee is like a liquid manifestation of my type one ambition. The type one piece of my ambition to reference the beginning of today's show.

That's sort of like, let's get things done. It sort of manifested in my coffee. I probably should drink like three cups max in the morning, be done with it. I should do that. I don't, but I honestly think the key to doing that is having it's it's it's all somatic.

I need a alternative ritual to associate with doing deep work. I mean, that's, that's what this serves. And so there we go. That's everything you need to know, Aaron, about Cal and coffee. You always drink it black, right? Oh, I used to get black. Cause that's what I learned.

I like cheap flavored coffee because it's what I associate with being in that lecture hall at Princeton. And, uh, you know, that was the first exposure to like, Oh, I see. This is what college level. And that's sort of a weed out class too. It was like, okay, I see what like college level work is like, it's much more mathematically demanding.

It moves much faster. So I just have these associations from that. I have family members who are real coffee snobs and roast their beans and, you know, carefully extract one drop at a time from a, you know, a bag made out of the wings of a certain type of moth or whatever.

And for me, I was like, I don't care. I'm drinking right now, Trader Joe's pumpkin spice, harvest, whatever holiday coffee. I just associate that acidic cheapness with time to think. And you never drink tea? I'll that's what I do when I need the deep work after one 30, I'll drink herbal tea.

Cause you get half the associations. It's, it's bitter and it's hot and actually works pretty well. That'll work pretty well. You're probably way more, you're more controlled about nutrition. What's your coffee philosophy? Um, no caffeine. No, I drink coffee. Wait, you had, you had a coffee cup when you came in here today.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I like to have cream with it, but ideally I would drink a black, but sometimes when I treat myself, I put cream in it and I was listening to someone somewhere, which is not a very useful description. All I know is it was on a podcast and it was within the last month.

That's all I can locate it. And he was saying, uh, like full fat cream and coffee is like much better. Then butter or other types of things, because there's something about the way the fat is encapsulated in dairy that works well with the coffee and blah, blah, blah, metabolism, blah, blah, blah.

Something, something is like you get energy out of it and it doesn't just store the fat away. But if you have other sources of fat and coffee, cause I guess the keto people or the, uh, paleo people put like butter in their coffee, actually, it's not so good like that it becomes, it's not as good.

Like that just gets sucked right into cells to be stored or something. So he was a big proponent. Whoever this guy was, some guy I heard some time on something was a really big believer in just like full cream, full fat cream, heavy cream, like is actually much better for you.

Got it. Yeah. Well, with that type of detail about who he is and his credentials, I don't see how you could not listen to this advice. Some guy on something I heard at some time. I think he ran a heavy cream factory. All right, let's do one more question.

What do we got? Okay. Questions from K man. Do you have any recommendations for my 16 year old son who is now reading your books and listening to your podcast? He would like to create multiple streams of income and enjoy a deeply satisfying life. Let us know. We'll be listening.

Well, I mean, first of all, good for your son. They let that be the, the underlying piece of this answer is just to have someone at that age who is thinking so intentionally about their life is like a superpower. When you're 35 and starting and thinking really intentional about your life, it's like, welcome to the club.

Like everyone at that point is starting to think through like, Oh, what works for me? What does it, how should I organize my efforts? What do I want to do at 16? Almost no one's doing that. Or if you're doing that, they're doing it in a very simplistic formalism, like the millennial obsession with following your passion, like some notion of like, well, there's one job I'm meant to do.

And my job is to figure out what that is. Very few people your age are thinking so systematically. So that by itself is going to yield lots of benefits. Irregardless of any particular advice I now give you going forward. Now, uh, let me provide you, I took some notes on this.

I was looking at this question before. So I'm going to try to provide some off relatively rough advice for you as someone who was young to lay a foundation of support of sorts that will support a deep life as you enter adulthood. Now, the, the main thing I want to say to set up this foundation before we get to these specifics is be wary about getting too specific right now at your age at 16, about what your sort of post schooling adult life is going to be like in terms of specific sources of income, et cetera.

It's very difficult as a 16 year old, for example, to get 23, what your life's going to be like at 23 to get those details. Right. Cause you're not, you're not, you don't have knowledge yet of what you're going to be exposed to and what opportunities are going to be open to you.

So this is really the right time to be much more, um, laying a foundation for being able to take advantage of opportunities and build this lifestyle when the time comes, uh, as you enter adulthood. So I would say, don't worry about the specifics yet. Let's work on you right now to make you into a deep life generation machine so that you four or five years from now is going to be well suited to start crafting a really cool life.

So here's a few things I wrote down. Number one, be 10 times more organized and intentional about your academic work than everyone else. You know, most students are terrible at study strategies. Most students are terrible at time management as a student. If you are not, you can reduce the amount of time it requires for you to perform your schoolwork a certain level by a factor of three or four.

It really is almost like a magic trick. I learned this from experience. You start treating your student life like a job, like a 35 year old would treat their job and it becomes significantly easier. It's footprint on your life becomes significantly easier. The amount of stress it causes will reduce down to very little and you will be able to perform academically at the very height of your potential without grinding it out, without overloading or overburdening yourself.

So, you know, I wrote a book about this, How to Become a Straight A Student. That's for college kids. I wrote another book called How to Be a High School Superstar. If you look at the part one playbook for that book, I adapt a lot of those study and time management advice from college to the high school context.

So you might find value in both of those. So the Straight A Student book and the part one playbook from How to Become a High School Superstar. The story I always tell is I was a reasonable student my first year of college. At the end of the first year of college, I got serious about my academic strategies.

I started treating the problem of how do you do well as a student like a entrepreneur would treat the problem of how do I learn how to market? How do I find a new audience? Because I'd run a business, I was used to that way of thinking. I brought that way of thinking to my academic work and I jumped from a good student, B plus, A minus student to four O's starting my sophomore fall every single quarter till I graduated, except for one A minus in my senior spring.

Ended up graduating with a three point nine five GPA. If I had done this one quarter earlier, I probably would have been the valedictorian of my class at Dartmouth. I did not get smarter between the summer of my freshman year, my sophomore year. What made me unique is I was one of the only people on that campus to start experimenting with what's the right way to take notes, what's the right way to study for a math test, what's the right way to study for an art history test.

How can I manage my time so I don't have to ever work past 8 p.m.? It was much easier than you would think. All right. So be 10 times more organized and intentional about your academic work. Number two, introduce some discipline into your life. So you get used to the idea of having a disciplined life.

There's things that are important but hard, and you're willing to do that work over time and see the results in the long term. You probably should have some sort of physical discipline, so some sort of sports or training, something that you do that will put you in better health or shape than just sort of the average person you know who's not a serious athlete.

You should have some sort of mental discipline in there built around the reading of hard physical books. I'd probably recommend that above all else for someone your age, that you have some sort of systematic program of study involving real books that you read, you have set times you put aside.

Have two or three things like this just so you have a self-image of someone who is disciplined. And again, the details don't matter because you just need to when the time comes, you know, when you're 24 or whatever, the time comes for your discipline is going to unlock something awesome.

You want to already have that tool sharpened. All right, number three, be very wary of video games, of social media, your time is very valuable right now. Because you get leverage, interesting moves or developments or opportunities you unlock when you're young, have the maximum amount of time to actually earn experiential interest and start generating really cool things.

So don't waste your teenage years, your early 20s, your college years. Don't waste 40 percent of your discretionary time in call of duty. Don't waste 40 percent of your time on TikTok. Maybe that's OK for some people, but I can tell right now that this is a kid who is awesome at it, he's on it, he's listening to deep questions, he's reading my books, he's intentional, he's already thinking about multiple income streams.

So be very wary of those devices. Be the guy who's weird about like, yeah, I just don't really use my phone. Let that be your thing. All right, number four, expose yourself to bulk positive randomness. That's a term that comes from my longtime friend, Ben Casanoka, who wrote about that in his memoir of being a teenage entrepreneur prodigy.

So like starting companies as teenage years, the startup of you is what that book is called. And he talks about this a lot. Expose yourself to lots of interesting stuff all the time to see what clicks, what sticks, what ends up resonating and holding your attention the next day or the next week.

Go hear speakers read interesting things, go to interesting documentaries, go to conventions. You know, expose yourself to bulk positive randomness. This is how you get eventually something really interesting clicking in your life. And now to pull from my book, How to Become a High School Superstar. Once there is something that catches your attention.

That you're pursuing, you want to pursue what I call the failed simulation effect, which is you want to get to a place where that activity, if you're a young person. Where people say, I have no idea how he did that and the way you generate that effect, which is incredibly powerful and opens up all these interesting opportunities, is you just keep leveraging up.

You do one thing that's kind of explainable. You use that to get access to the next thing. You use that to get access to the third thing. That third thing you use access to get to the fourth thing. And by the time you get to that fourth thing, that might be interviewing Supreme Court justices for my podcast as a 17 year old.

That thing seems like I have no idea how a 17 year old does that. But if you look the three steps before that started with you being exposed to a court reporter for the at a whatever, an internship, yes, the path makes sense. But not when you see the final thing.

Maybe that's a confusing explanation. I have a whole chapter about this in my book. I also wrote about this, interestingly enough, for Tim Ferriss's blog. Way back in the day when I first met Tim. So it's on there somewhere. We're talking 2007, 2008, probably. I wrote an article for Tim Dot blog back when that was his main online platform about the failed simulation effect.

So you can actually find my article on his blog. I probably just search for my name and Tim Dot blog or something like that. But anyways, you expose yourself to interesting stuff. When something clicks, you keep going, keep going, keep going. The first six months you're working on something, it's interesting to you, but not to the outside world.

You get to a year plus six months and you might be at a place now with that interest where people have no idea how you did that at your age. And that's when really cool opportunities open up. Number five. Steady character and leadership. Expose yourself to examples of people who live with great character, who act as great leaders, even during difficult times, read biographies, read profiles, watch documentaries, maybe if they have a social media presence, so maybe like a Jocko Willink type, if that resonates, maybe you're listening to his podcast and the military professionals he has on the Tales of Valor, whatever it is that resonates, you want to be imprinting young, a real affiliation or affinity for character and leadership, especially during difficult times.

That is going to be a North Star or a guiding light through all sorts of different ups and downs and competing pressures and diversions you're going to experience the next, let's say 10 years of your life. Now's the time to start building up those examples. And number six, serve people one way or the other, be doing that now.

And it's just setting the habit of, and it could just be volunteering. It could be this is this cause or online. I go and I help, I'm in this community just to help these people, whatever it is. You also want that imprinted into your soul at a young age that serve other people, because that's what you need to fall back on when the other pursuit you have isn't going well, this company failed and I lost this job.

And I really am feeling down on myself because I had these ambitions that I was going to be Michael Crichton at 27. And instead I'm at, you know, I'm getting to that age and, and, uh, I'm short on money and my, my plans didn't work. You fall back on helping others.

Well, you know what, let me just put that energy to helping others while I also am trying to figure myself out. The more you can fall back on how can I serve or help other people, the more. Uh, emotional and psychological resilience you're going to have for all the ups and downs that are going to come.

It's what's going to prevent you from ending up instead 26 and bitter and on Twitter and just mad and yelling at people and, uh, medicated seven ways to Sunday and just not even sure what to do with your life. You'll end up maybe like a, you know, an ideological groupie for some weird, whatever, and just be miserable.

You don't want to be there. So falling back on serving others as a default is that buffer is that protection, be useful to the world, be useful to others. Let that also be a guiding light. All right. So those are my six pieces of advice, but good for you for thinking about this stuff at such a young age, you do these things, you're going to be a rock star.

You're gonna be a rock star in college. You're going to come out of college and be living a life that you are going to have a full control on the reins of this life. And when you start doing lifestyle centric career planning seriously, but you know, you really should wait till a little bit later in college to do so.

You are going to have options and whatever comes out of those initial lifestyle centric career planning exercises, you're going to be able to shape your life there of a deep life and a useful life. So I'm glad you asked that question. That's my advice. And that is also all the time we have.

So thank you everyone who sent in your questions, click the link in the description. If you want to submit your own, we're looking for questions, please submit. We're also looking for people to do live calls. You can do that at that same link. You can express your interest. We'll be back next week with a new episode.

And until then, as always stay deep.