All right, but let's do a deep dive. So I wanted to talk about this topic of tips for doing hard things. And what's going to be different about this deep dive versus past deep dives is I'm not giving my advice for doing hard things. I actually want to relay some advice that I saw in an interesting video that a reader sent to me from 2020 of an author giving a talk about this topic.

And I recently wrote an essay about this talk and I published it in my email newsletter, which if you don't get, you probably should. You can sign up for that at calnewport.com. But I figured I just wrote that this morning before we started recording. I said, I want to talk about this on the show.

So I brought in some of my notes from it. So here's the setup. The video is from 2020. It's from the fantasy novelist, Brandon Sanderson, who wrote a bunch of best-selling series. I've read some of his books. I read Name of the Wind and whatever the second book was in that particular trilogy.

And it's really good. And I'm actually now one of the books I'm reading right now is I decided I wanted to read some Ursula K. Gwynne. And I was going back and reading some of her Earthsea Chronicles, which has, that's from the 60s, but it has some ideas about the true names of elements being critical to the magical system that Sanderson plays with.

Anyways, think big, successful fantasy novelist. And he gives a talk in 2020 that was titled, let me have it here, The Common Lies Writers Tell You. But this was not really what the talk was about. The talk was about doing hard things. And Sanderson comes right out. And you know I'm going to appreciate this.

He comes right out up front and says he dislikes the fact that the media keeps telling young people that you can do anything you want to and you should follow your dreams. And he said, look, that is way too simplistic. That's not the way it works. That's not going to help anyone to say that.

It's definitely a perspective you would hear, for example, in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. And he says, OK, here is the more realistic claim. And I'm quoting him here. I can do hard things. Doing hard things has intrinsic value. And they will make me a better person, even if I end up failing.

He said, that's the right way to talk about ambitious goals, is there's value in doing hard things. You are able to do hard things. And you're going to get value out of it, no matter what actually happens, whether it makes you a famous novelist or not, or whatever that dream happens to be.

And that this is better than telling people, no, of course you'll succeed. You can do whatever you want. And then for the remainder of his talk, he said, so let's talk about doing hard things. And he gave three tips, three tips for the reality, reality-based tips for dealing with hard things.

So I thought what I would do here is I want to go through these three tips. I'll tell you what he said, and then give a little bit of my own commentary on each. So the first tip he gave was make better goals. So when it comes to doing hard things, he thinks we are not good at setting the right goals.

We don't help people set better goals. So he mentioned, for example, that in an AP literature class in high school, he won a minor contest for a story he wrote and decided, oh, my goal is to be a successful novelist. And he said that was not a good goal.

It was way too long-term, vague, and grandiose. How do you make progress on that particular goal? In particular, what are you supposed to do tomorrow to make progress towards that goal and become a successful writer? He said what you should do instead is make goals that you have control over.

And what Sanderson ended up doing was writing 13 manuscripts before he actually had a book he could sold. And he said his goal should have been focused on producing a certain number of manuscripts as an act of practice and having a commitment with each manuscript to be more ambitious than the last to push and develop his skills, because that's a goal he could make progress on.

I could write another manuscript. I can for sure make this next manuscript be even more ambitious in this way, this way, that way. Those are achievable goals. Saying be a successful author, that was too vague. All right. Now, my take on this is I write about something similar in my book, Deep Work.

In that book, Deep Work, I talk about this methodology, this business methodology called 4DX, the four disciplines of execution. And I talk about how this methodology, which was designed to help teams and companies do better, gives us some insight into accomplishment when we apply it to individuals. And one of the core ideas from that methodology is lead versus lag indicators.

A lag indicator is the big goal you eventually want to accomplish. I want my next academic paper to get into a top tier journal. The problem with lag indicators, according to 4DX, is that it doesn't give you a clear action. So they said instead, you should focus on what they call lead indicators, which are things you can track and do in control.

And they should be chosen such that if you do well with those lead indicators, you're likely to have success with the lag indicators, but it gives you something concrete to focus on. And so for that example, the right lead indicator might be, I'm going to do 15 hours of deep work per week on the paper I'm writing.

Well, that I can track. That creates friction I can push back against. Now I can actually make real changes in the intentional application of my energy, cancel things, move things, wake up early, progress can happen. So I like Sanderson's idea there, and I've talked about variations of that. All right, his second tip.

Learn how you work. So Sanderson, when it comes to writing, thinks it's a real disservice when he hears people say things like, "Real writers have an overwhelming compulsion to write." And that if you don't have that compulsion, you should do anything else. And only people who just can't help but write, and that's all they can do, should be people who should be writers.

He thinks that's nonsense. He says, "Writing is hard, and it's hard work to figure out how to get yourself to do it." He is a professional writer, and I'm quoting him here. "I love writing, but I have a hard time sitting down and writing." So even for this very successful professional writer, he says, "Writing is hard." So his advice is, when it comes to doing hard things, you have to put in a lot of effort to figure out what works for you to basically get yourself to do that type of effort.

And it could differ from person to person. Sanderson uses daily word count tracking in a spreadsheet. It's like a game for him. He likes that. But he says, "Other people thrive under the social pressure of a writer's group. Other people need a deadline." Now, I talk about this a lot in my own work.

I talk a lot about how deep, cognitively demanding efforts are unnatural. It uses a lot of energy. More ancient parts of our brain cannot immediately see what benefit they're going to get from this energy. What's the threat we're escaping? Where's the food or mate source that this thinking is going to give us right away?

And it doesn't have an answer for that. You try to convince your brain, for example, that your 460,000-word epic fantasy novel is going to help you in mate selection. Your brain's not going to buy it. It's going to see that you're talking a lot about wizards with names like Gargamel, who are passing wind spells on elves.

And it's going to say, "This is not going to get us children. This is not going to get us food. Why are we doing this?" And this is generally true when it comes to doing cognitively demanding work. It's unnatural. So a lot of effort is required to trick yourself into doing it.

So I like what Sanderson talked about. I would also add scheduling philosophy and ritual. That's why this plays such a big role. Get rid of any decision your mind has about when you're going to do this work. Instead, you have a philosophy. It's always these days at these times.

Or at the beginning of the week, I put it on my calendar, and it's right there in the same color as meetings I know I can't skip. That time is protected. I don't always feel like I want to go to a meeting, but if it's on my calendar, I'd go.

I don't always feel like I want to write, but it's there on my calendar. That's what I'm doing next. And this is also why ritual matters. Writers will build out these spaces that seem over the top or go to weird places, like I wrote about in my New Yorker piece last summer about working from near home, where writers will leave perfectly nice and good homes to go to weird, eccentric locations to write just because they associate that transit.

They associate that new environment just with writing. That's why Peter Benchley left his bucolic carriage home on East Welland Avenue there. Actually, no, he's on Curliss Avenue. Curliss Avenue there in Pennington, New Jersey, to work in the back room of a furnace factory. That's why Steinbeck would balance a legal pad on a boat in Sag Harbor.

It's why Maya Angelou would go to hotel rooms and take everything off the walls. So there is zero distraction. And Wright laying down on the bed, propped up on an arm, doing this so often that she built up deep calluses on that arm that she was supporting herself. Because it's hard to do this work.

You've got to figure out how to get your mind into there. So scheduling philosophies and rituals, especially over-the-top rituals, play a big role. And I'll say when it comes to writing, there's a quote I've said a few times, has bounced around a few times, which is basically what some people call writer's block.

By some people, I mean amateurs. It's actually just the physiological feeling of what writing, the writing experience is. That feeling of, I don't know what to say. I don't feel inspired. I don't know what to say. I'm stuck. It's like, great, now you've started writing. That's what it feels like.

All right, Sanderson's third tip, break it down. Maybe his most prosaic tip out of the three. But basically, if you have a big goal, break it into manageable pieces so you have something to go after. He noted that the book he was writing at that time was longer than the entire Hunger Games series put together.

So he's saying that's such a big, hairy, epic goal because he'll write 400,000 word plus books, which is crazy. By comparison, my books are usually 70,000 to 90,000. So it's like five deep works. He's like, you've got to break that down. That can't be your goal. I'm writing this book.

It's no, no, I'm trying to finish the chapter cycle that establishes the backstory for the wizard Gargamel that passes the wind spells on the elves, or whatever it is. I obviously know a lot about fantasy books. So I think that's good work. I think the key part about this final tip is that he says in figuring out what those goals are, that's where all the magic happens, is that we don't give people enough training, especially in creative fields, to figure out what those smaller goals are.

He said this is a particular problem in writing, where if you talk to a professional writer and say, look, I really want to do what you do, what's your advice? They'll just look at you and say, well, you got to write. He says, that's too vague. No, no, what you need to tell me is it's going to take about six manuscripts before you get your chops down.

And those manuscripts have to be successively harder in this way. And here is the level, type, and source of feedback you need on each to make sure that you're gaining particular skills. You do one on your own, you do one with two with a writing group, for the fourth, maybe you want to hire an editor a day of their time to come back and give you a harsher, the fifth you want to submit and get notes from the publisher that you submit to.

We need that type of detailed roadmap. It's non-trivial and it's non-obvious. You don't just tell people, if you want to write, write. If you want to be a musician, play music. You want to be an artist, paint. No, these are big, hairy goals that you need to break down, and it's not obvious how they break down.

And the thing I talk about a lot on this show in particular is that if you're going to get this information, you have to go get it. And by what I mean by that is you have to go to people who know what they're doing. And don't just say, what's your advice?

Because they'll just say, write. They'll just say, paint. Say, I want to hear your story. How did you get there? What was the first thing? Then what was the next thing? Oh, oh, Sanderson, you wrote 13 manuscripts? Oh, I didn't realize that. So you mean I can't just do National Novel Writing Month and have the name of the win be the book that comes out of it?

Oh, OK, now I get that. I don't like that that's reality, but that's reality. OK, I have to write 13 manuscripts. How long is that going to take? You know, maybe I'm going to need much more time on this than I think. You get the reality, not what you want to be true.

You get the reality of what actually matters for the endeavor you want to do. You get that reality from people who came before, not by asking for advice, but asking for their story. You look at that, and you find out what really matters. I talked about this. If you want to see a more extensive conversation about this, when I was on the Tim Ferriss podcast earlier in-- whenever this was, January, I guess I was on his podcast-- we get into how I got started in writing.

They go into detail of the story about how, through connections with my family, I got in touch with an agent, a literary agent, who I promised, I'm not going to try to sell you a book. And I had that agent walk me through step by step what exactly would a 20-year-old need to do to get a book deal with a major publisher.

And she walked me through, here's what matters, here's what doesn't, here's the process, here's the steps. And it was not at all what I would have guessed, and it's not at all what most young people I've met who say, I want to write a book do, but it was the reality.

And it took me two years, but I followed that plan and sold that book and wrote that book as a senior, and everything else unfolded from there. So that's my advice there is, yes, you need to break down your goals, the more manageable goals. It's not always obvious how to do that.

Ask the experts, but not for their advice, but for their story, and you can extract from their story the reality of what matters. All right, so Sanderson, thank you for giving that talk. Excuse me for my wizard elf jokes. Obviously, you're very good at what you do, and I am of great awe, but that's good advice.

Don't just follow your dreams. Focus on doing hard things for the meaning of doing hard things, and treat doing hard things like a complicated endeavor that requires a lot of nuanced feedback.