from Loyad from India. I often take on multiple projects, but then they, as they become hard, I abandon them halfway. How do I stop doing this? - All right, so we have a very consistent type theme today. I think the reader could, or the listener could almost answer this question on their own now, which is my goal.

I really want to hammer this point home as much as I can. So Loyad, why are you abandoning projects when they become hard halfway? - Well, as you can imagine, I'm gonna have two parts to my answer here. One is mindset. If your mindset is one that depends on external power for you to get through goals, you are not gonna get very far in hard projects because the external power, which in this case is that actual emotional feeling of motivation, excitement will die down as projects go on, as they get harder, and then you'll stop doing them.

So you need to reshape your mindset towards one and seeing yourself as someone who can handle internally powered goals. Guess I'm gonna suggest you do that. Layer one of the deep life stack, two to three daily disciplines, non-trivial, but tractable, everyday mark 'em. Just train your mind. I do things that are important for me, even if they're hard, even if I'm not excited in the moment, and there's a deeper satisfaction I get out of that.

That's why I trust myself to do this going forward. Secondly, the issue here is gonna be similar to what I talked to both Fahad and Jacob about. You might just have too many projects and they might just actually be too hard. So be very careful about that. I think one project worked on consistently and slowly over time is gonna, in the end, open up more opportunities and have more impact in multiple projects that you're trying to tackle in a frenzied burst.

So it's sort of a key slow productivity principle here, work on fewer things. So you might just have too many projects. Again, you have this impatience of I'm young and there's so much I wanna do and I have to make my mark, and you don't realize just choose the one thing that you patiently start building your skill on.

It's frustrating maybe now when you're 22, but by the time you're 24, 25, and that's bearing fruit, the fruit is gonna be so much riper and sweeter than if you had spilled that time instead, just jumping from thing to thing, trying to jump from the latest idea to the latest interest.

I mean, I knew someone like this in college, Jesse, and I kind of remember his name, but I'm not sure if I have his name right. And maybe I should anonymize it anyways. But I knew about him because he was my year at college, maybe he was a year younger, and he was the only other person I knew who was trying to write a book.

And so he had interest in books, but he had all these other interests as well. Like he was interested in politics because Dartmouth is in Hanover, which is in New Hampshire. So when the presidential season would come through, which happened twice when I was there, everyone comes to New Hampshire because of the primaries.

You get lots of political figures coming through. So he was also getting really involved in helping to like organize, I believe it was a debate for the 2004 presidential election and he had this other project going on. And so there was this real sense, I remember, man, he's doing a lot of things.

Book writing was one of them, all these different projects. It's the excitement of, he was very capable, very capable in all these different things that could make my market. I was not that way. I wanted to, I was just writing. I was doing my CS work and writing. And I just, that was my main thing outside of my schoolwork was just writing.

And I just, I wanted to write this book and do it well and then immediately turn around and sell another. But I just wanted to make my writing better. And I was willing to put my time, just focus on that. And so there's this point early on, we're both kind of working on books and he had a lot of other stuff going on, but all that stuff, I don't know what happened to it, but I just kept focusing on books.

And I wrote another book and I was a little bit better. And then I took some time and wrote a third book, which was much better. And then it set up my fourth book, which was a hardcover. And now that has borne much more interesting fruit. I have actually, it took me a long time, but I've developed myself into a writer who can have a career as a writer.

So in the moment when I was 20 or 21, it seemed maybe naively slow, like I'm just gonna work on this book and try to make it good. I don't wanna be distracted. But looking back as a 41 year old, I said, man, I'm so glad I stayed focused on that because how much interesting stuff has making writing one of my two core focuses of my life really opened up.

So Llyod, slowing down, doing less things, sticking with that in a sustainable pace over a long period of time, that's typically what you wanna be doing if your goal is either impact or opening up interesting opportunities in your life or some combination of those two. That slow productivity approach is probably better.

So that might be what's going on as well, is your mind is so overwhelmed, this is too much. So we got mindset and we have your mind being reasonable. So your mindset might be off. You need external power. We fixed that through practice. Your mind might be working perfectly fine and is making the reasonable observation that now this is too much work.

We have too many things. We can't possibly be making a difference in all of these. They're beginning to conflict with each other. So you might actually just have to think about doing less. - Actually focusing is one of the main messages in your student books, like where you tell people not to do like a thousand activities and stuff like that.

- Yeah, in fact, I was reminded that, so I'm back at Dartmouth and I didn't really remember this till I got up there. I was like, oh, I've been back a bunch of times over the course of the last couple of decades to give talks. And one of the first talks I gave, there's an old poster of this I have somewhere in my basement, I'd forgotten about this.

I think it was a year out of college. I came back to Dartmouth and gave a lecture to students there about navigating their student career. And this was one of the big points I was making was do fewer things. Do fewer things, do 'em really well. You are much better off, for example, being the best student in the computer science department than you are being the student with the hardest schedule on campus.

I have three majors and I'm doing these impossible. You're much better off saying, I'm only a computer science student. And in fact, I balance my computer science courses with easier courses and I take full advantage of independent studies and thesis studies where I can reduce my course load, but still get credits.

And so, my course load is very, very manageable. And what I do is I take that energy to become the best student in those computer science classes. That is way, way more valuable than I did a triple major or I had really hard semesters. No one cares how hard your semesters are.

Similarly, I wrote a book. I wrote a book for Random House. It's gonna get you much farther than I. I had six different clubs. You know how hard that was? I was a treasurer here and I ran this. I did this initiative. No one's keeping track of that. No one cares.

I mean, they're like, yeah, you seem like a go-getter, but it doesn't catch their attention. People care about the thing you do best. So, you're almost always better off making your best things as good as possible, which almost always requires doing less. And this was, again, this came out of my advocacy about student stress, which I did this 2004 to 2007 period.

I did a lot of this, a lot of talks all over the country about this. And at the core of my advocacy about student stress was students need to do much less. There's only so much that tactics and strategies and time management, they can only get you so far if you have too many courses and activities.

And then as a college student, there's no real reason to do a lot of things because no one in your future is gonna care about that. There is no college admissions officer type figure in your future who is going to pore over what you did at college and say, how hard was their schedule?

Let's get letters. They say, this person was really impressive. They worked on all these things. How hard were their course load? No one looks at that after college. If you're trying to go to grad school, it's gonna be a professor evaluating your application. And what do they wanna know?

Where'd you go to school? What grades did you get in your major? Have you demonstrated you can do research? That's all they care. It's all they care about. They're not gonna look at your, oh my God, they had three, this was a really complicated schedule or look at these activities.

They could care less. You're gonna work for a company. Typically, they wanna know, where'd you go to school? What was your GPA? How'd they do in the interview? That's what they care about. And again, we're gonna see this again and again. Go to law school. What do they care about?

Here's LSAT's GPA. You can look up the grid school by school. This LSAT requires this GPA to have a high chance of getting in for basically every school except for maybe Yale. That's what you need to do. I have this grade point average. I need this LSAT score. Practice till I get it.

Now I can get it, right? No one is gonna be pouring over your resume to see how hard your schedule is or how stressed you were. So that became a big core of my student advocacy, stress advocacy, was avoid unforced error, students. Create schedules and loads that are very manageable and then do what you do really well.

Do a small number of things well is such a more sustainable strategy. And in the end, opens up more opportunities than I did a lot of hard. I had a hard schedule and did a lot of things okay. So that was a big part of my schedule. You know, the other part of my, this is going off tangent, Jesse, but I was talking about this at a student event the other week up at Dartmouth.

We kind of brought up all this. I dredged up all of this stuff I used to do around student stress advocacy way back when. And I remember the other thing, the other thing that came up often was when student stress became a big issue, especially at the high school level, the response, and I think this is still sort of an instinct we have right now, the response was all of these Ivy League educated commentators who are writing about this, thinking like Alexander Robbins or Denise Pope would then turn to these aspirational students who were stressing themselves out trying to get into like an Ivy League school and say, guys, there's more to life than going to a good school.

You know, just chill out about it. And this was completely falling flat because here they were with their Stanford and Yale degrees saying like, well, I did it. And I'm doing this kind of cool stuff and I'm kind of famous, but like, just go to the, you're so, you're kind of, in fact, you're flawed and especially your parents are flawed for pushing you to actually wanna come here.

Just temper your ambition. So it was very much this pull up the drawbridge behind you type of mentality that just wasn't working. The students who were most stressed, if you came to them with your Ivy League diploma on the wall and said, there's more to life than going to an Ivy League, they would 100% tune you out.

'Cause they would say, I disagree. You look like you're doing something cool. I wanna do something cool like that. If the only thing you can offer me is be less ambitious, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna ignore you and go back to whatever's caused me all the stress and causing all these troubles.

And so I was also back then, this 2005, 2006 period, this lone voice out there in the student stress debates. And this is when they really picked up speed. When the millennial demographic bump hit up against limited college admission slot, when the common application became widespread and now you could apply to 50 colleges pretty easily.

This is when acceptance rates plummeted, right? So the 2000s, early 2000s, this is when it became a real problem. And I was out there as a lone voice among these other voices saying, what you have to offer students is an alternative path to their ambitions. You have to keep the ambition in the question.

Okay, you wanna go to a really good school. I'm not gonna try to talk you out of that. I mean, I want you to know it's okay if that doesn't happen, but I'm not gonna tell you you're bad or your parents are flawed for thinking you wanna go to Harvard or whatever.

But let's talk about how you do that. And actually this path of overloading yourself and just trying to grind it out is not very successful. Here's alternative paths where you could be very interesting and have a good shot at these schools, but your life is very sustainable. And I used to call it the Zen Valedictorian Strategy.

And I wrote a lot about it, talked a lot about it. My third book is actually about this strategy. I followed five kids who got into really good schools without being stressed and deconstructed. How in the world did they do this, right? And so I was the lone voice out there often that would say, I think it's completely fine.

You have to recognize and accept people's ambitions and then start giving them more sustainable strategies for pursuing those ambitions. We're way off Loyal's question at this point. But anyways, I was just thinking about this. I was talking to all these college students the other day. We did a student dinner and I was talking to a lot of them about, 'cause they had just gone through this to get into Dartmouth.

I believe Dartmouth's acceptance right now is negative 2%. Like they actually kick out a certain number of people each year. I think to get into an Ivy League school today, you have to work really hard in STEM classes in high school, get to the head of those classes, use those technology to invent a time machine, then bring yourself back to 1997.

It's negative acceptance. You actually have to go back in time to be accepted. I think they try to reduce the number of students there every year. I don't know. That's all neither here nor there. I'm just in this mindset. I don't know why I'm in this mindset again, but I guess Jesse, you caused all this by saying, I talk about focus in my student books.

And I was like, yeah, like in my student books, I really was trying to just be very clear about, here's how a lot of students do really well. And a lot of it's not doing too much, being organized about what you do, but keeping your load manageable and actually it's a very sustainable path.

- Yeah. - Not completely out of nowhere though, because I think we'll see this final question. I think it's gonna be relevant to this final question. - All right, last question from a CS student. In a previous podcast, you mentioned not to work for 10 hours at a time, like many productivity YouTubers do.

Can you explain why not? These YouTubers are often the biggest names in YouTube productivity and seem like they're excellent students and are creating long-term deep life habits from it. As long as you make sure to avoid shallow work, I was wondering why is working 10 hours a day a problem?

- Have you seen these videos, Jesse? - No. - People have been sending them to me. - I've taken your advice like even before I knew you about like the no, you can't see any other videos on the homepage. - Yes. - So I only-- - The plugin that takes the recommendations off of YouTube.

- Yeah. - By the way, I'm a big believer in that still. YouTube is a great library, it's a terrible television channel. That's what I always say. So to use it as a library, I wanna learn how to do this thing. And I can search and find videos on how to replace the oil in my very particular type of car.

It's an excellent library. Or I wanna look up, I've heard about Cal Newport, I like Cal Newport, I know his podcast is on YouTube, so I can have that bookmarked. And I'm going there to look up Cal Newport videos to see his podcast, that's great. To use it as a TV channel, let me just click on a recommendation and then see if the recommendations are more interesting than what I'm watching and click on those recommendations and sort of following those rabbit holes, that is more dangerous.

But anyways, there's a whole productivity YouTube where these YouTubers do these over the top, I think of it as a sort of nerd version of David Blaine productivity endurance challenges. I guess it's time-lapse, but 10 hours studying straight. And they make it sort of heroic. This often works well on YouTube.

If the thing you're doing is over the top, you take whatever emotional reaction that is relevant to that topic. So you see someone well-organized and studying well, and you're like, "Oh, I kind of have an affinity for that. I wanna be a better student." And then you show someone doing it for 10 hours, you push it over the top, it takes that emotional response and pushes over the top, that's engagement.

And people watch these videos and get really into it. So it's a classic YouTube strategy being applied to the topic of productivity. So why not study for 10 hours a day? You can see in the student's question, these are big names on YouTube. These people are YouTube famous. They seem like they're really good students.

Why? There's a clarity to it. There's an extremeness to it, a sort of monastic discipline to all I do is study all day. And I guess my answer to the CS student, it would be to turn the question back on you and say, "To what end?" So what are you trying to accomplish if you're working 10 hours a day on schoolwork?

Well, you might say, "Well, then for sure I'll get into med school." Okay, so then what? Well, okay, I guess I would study 10 hours a day in med school so that I could graduate top my class and get a really good residency. Okay, well, then what? Well, then I would work 10 hours a day so I could do research.

I could be the very best resident and get sort of an academic clinical position. Okay, well, then what? Well, then I'd really wanna do 10 hours because if I could fill every hour working on my medical research and clinician practice, I could move up really quickly and become an attending and get tenure at the associate university very quickly.

It was like, all right, well, then what? If I really worked 10 hours all day long, then I could probably become chair of this particular medical department and bring in all this different money and we could really expand the hospitals. And then what? You keep following this out and you look back and say, "All I've done is just work really hard." What about all the other elements of life?

So where is there in this point some sort of victory where you say now I can have a full rich experience of life? It's just working for the sake of working because of what's next. Putting aside the fact that it's completely unsustainable and these YouTubers don't work 10 hours all the time.

Again, it's like looking at David Blaine freezing himself into a block of ice. He doesn't spend most days frozen to a block of ice, but it got a lot of engagement when he did that as a stunt for a television special. They're not spending their day doing this all the time.

It's not a sustainable way to live, but even if it was, in general, this is like let me grind and work all of my hours so I can get to the next level at the very highest level. It's not sustainable because it keeps going. Now, there are some exceptions to this.

Like sure, some professional caliber Olympic athletes do this, but they're doing this for a very narrow window because they have until they're, what, 33 before they have to move on and live the rest of your life. It's very different if you're training for the Olympics like this with this level of intensity because it's a in-dated thing.

But if you're talking about your career as a student to your professional career, there's no place where that ends essentially until you die. What type of life is that? So why don't you work for 10 hours a day because it's not living. It's a sort of parody of workism if I'm gonna take a term from Derek Thompson.

So what works better? Slow productivity. Working with good focus and good organization on things that matter consistently and systematically over time. This can produce work of real impact, of real meaning. It can open up all sorts of interesting opportunities in your life. It can allow you to do and accomplish very competitive things.

And it's compatible with a well-rounded life. And it's compatible with, I don't just work all the time. I'm not just always stressed out. I'm not just always overwhelmed and trying to keep up or compete with someone else. It often also produces, in a lot of fields, better results. You don't see the very best novelists that are winning all the awards getting there because they spend more hours working on their novel every day.

No, it's this sort of slow and steady work on their writing. They're very careful and intentional about their time. They think, they read, they walk, they integrate, and they come back and write. And you get really great, you know, it's where you're gonna get a sort of wholesome whitehead, is out of the slow development of real talent, not out of, I wrote 12 hours each day and the other writers are only writing six hours each day.

Now, I think there's a comfort in this for very ambitious young people, because it makes you think, it gives you a very simple framework. I turn this knob of hours. The higher the knob you turn up on hours, the more successful you'll be. Most people aren't gonna turn the knob past this point because they're weak.

I'm not weak. If I'm willing to take the pain, it's very simple what I need to do. It's just hard. It's just keeping my hand in a metaphorical ice bucket longer than you did. I like this. I'm gonna do 10 hours. You're only gonna do four. I'll be more successful.

So it makes success seem much more controllable. It's just a matter of raw will. But again, that's not the reality. Great work, innovative work in academia, in the arts, in business or business strategy has its busy periods, but is not built upon, I have to be working all the time.

So I just think it's no real way to live. I just say, this is why I come back to my original question, to what end? What comes next after your 10 hours a day as a student? What comes next after your 10 hours a day as the investment banker junior associate?

Because you took that job because it was the most competitive, the hardest one to get. What comes next after you get managing director at the investment bank? What comes next after you go off to start your own hedge fund? What comes next after you hit the billion dollar valuation?

I mean, there's always things you could be overworking yourself towards, but again, to what end? What comes next? These are the questions I always come back to. So I think it's a stunt what these productivity YouTubers are doing. I've spent my entire life in professional academia. The smartest people don't do that.

They work hard, and undergraduate, they don't, right? I mean, because it's not that hard. They work hard in periods and other periods. They're in thinking periods. They have other types of things going on. So I'm just not, this idea that you're gonna somehow just, I love the simplicity of it, but this idea that you're gonna somehow just out-raw number everyone else and that's where your success is gonna come from.

It just is not sustainable. It goes against the deep life that we talk about here. It's way out of balance, over the top, and really not the right way in my mind to build a life of intentionality and depth. All that's new, Jesse, this like work 10 hours thing, it's because it worked on YouTube.

- Yeah. - And I think for young people, they see it, they don't realize how new it is. If someone just figured this out a few years ago, that it's very compelling content to be like, man, I just studied 10 hours. You watch them doing it, you're like, man, they did it.

They stuck with it. And look at, that's great. It just seems so simple. I don't know. It's like the productivity equivalent of David Goggins doing, just ran all day long or did pushups till my arm fell off. - It's like when we heard Mr. Beast talk about, if you want a compelling video and you don't have a lot of money, you can put together paperclips for multiple football fields and people will watch it.

- Yep. Or what was his, how high can he count? - Yeah. - He counted to like a million or something and it took him 12 hours. Yeah, it works on YouTube. It's not actually a strategy for productivity. It's a strategy for getting good views on a YouTube video.

So I don't know. Maybe our YouTube videos will be the counterpoint for the youth out there or old man videos.