I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, episode 188. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ joined by my much older producer, Jesse, who is in a completely different decade of life than I am. I am young and sprightly and in my 30s. Jesse is old and decrepit and in his 40s.

I don't know how we even communicate with each other, Jesse. It's like completely different generations. I find it funny how you always call me professor on accident. You're my professor. Here's what type of day, by the way, for the viewing audience, is what type of day it's been. If you're not watching the YouTube version of our podcast, I'm holding up two different coffee cups.

The first one is episode 187 coffee cup and I'm on the episode 188 coffee cup. I'm tired today so I got to power up. So hat tip to Bevco. I don't know, Jesse, how have we not figured out some sort of dumb waiter system with the restaurant below us?

It could be coffee during the taping and then immediately afterward, drinks. Just completely have those things. Yes, you usually have coaching to do after we record, but it's just going to make you more energetic. We should have that worked out. It's just they know when it's coming. If we make them our sole sponsor.

Deep work HQ happy hour. Exactly. Then the show would get lively. All right. Well, anyways, we've got a listener calls episode. Looking forward to it. But we're also now in April, which means we can do our tradition of reporting on the books I read the month before. So I want to report on the books I read in March.

Twenty twenty two. As longtime listeners know, generally my goal is to aim for five books per month. And that's what I read in March of twenty twenty two. I mix genres. I mix difficulties. I want a variety of different books. So let's go through it. Here are the five books I read in March of twenty twenty two in order of completion.

The first was Travels with George. This was written by the popular historian Nathaniel Philbrook. So Travels with George is a allusion to Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie. So if you're a Steinbeck person, you know, travels with Charlie Steinbeck is traveling with his dog, Charlie. Well, in Travels with George, Nathaniel Philbrook, who's written a series of books about the revolutionary era in America, went on a travel with his dog.

And in particular, the dog was not named George. In this case, George is George Washington. And Philbrook and his wife and his dog trace the post inauguration tour of the newly formed country of America that George Washington went on. So he did a tour all the way through New England, and then he later did a tour all the way through the South.

And Philbrook retraced the steps of that tour in modern times and then went to these went to the spots and then mixed it in like with Steinbeck ask anecdotes about the journeys and his dog being a pain, etc. So I mean, here's the thing. The book was fine. I think the the contemporary the contemporaneous pieces about the dog, I didn't care.

I mean, it's like two to upper middle age people with a dog and the dog gets dirty and it's hard to find hotels for them to stay. Like it wasn't that interesting. But the history is great. I'm a big fan of Philbrook's history. I mean, I would have been fine if this book really was just about George Washington's post inauguration tours and just honed in right on that.

I kind of read pretty quickly in the in-betweens. I'm a big Philbrook fan. Here's what I like about Philbrook. I love writers who live in cool places and write full time and Philbrook who came to writing late. When I mean late, I'm talking about like Jesse's current decade of life.

I'm talking about someone in the fort in their 40s. Right. Jesse is all of one day being 40. So we're talking people who largely we would rightly say have very little productive life left. But somehow at that point, and it's you know, it's hard for someone like me in my 30s again to really understand what that's like.

But somehow at that point, he began writing in his 40s and his first book was Heart of the Sea about the ship Essex. So this was the ship that was the model for Moby Dick. So it was a fishing, a whaling boat that was rammed and sunk by a whale.

And I want a great book. And some people survived in a life raft, like a boat, a whaling boat, and they were at sea forever and they ended up on an island. It's all a true story. That's how he like burst onto the scene of doing historical fiction writing.

But he lives in Nantucket and that's what I think is cool. He lives in Nantucket where he's just a writer on this windswept, you know, island. And I always found that very romantic. But he was a great writer because he's a good he's a good archive guy. And you get a little bit of insight in this book about his methods, because in the contemporaneous parts, he's often hanging out with librarians and historical society curators.

And you get a sense into what life is like writing that it's all about finding primary sources going to historical archives, going to libraries, pulling out these books that no one has seen in 75 years to try to piece together the context in which history happened. So I thought that was cool.

So there you go. Good book. Guy lives on Nantucket. If you're going to read any Philbrook, start with Heart of the Sea. I also thought Mayflower was very good. Valiant Ambition is very good as well. So there are some recommendations for you. All right. Now we get a little bit weird.

Not weird. But fantasy. And so we got to be careful here, Jesse, that I get all the names right. So I don't know exactly what path led me to this. I think because I had heard this book was appropriate for younger audiences. I might have been testing this out for my oldest son.

But I have never read Ursula K. Le Guin. And I read her first Earthsea book, A Wizard of Earthsea. So it's a fantasy book written in the 60s. It has a lot of prescience towards Harry Potter, right? I mean, there's a young boy who goes to a school for wizards.

But it's much more psychologically astute and sophisticated. It's not the tale of a boy who's meant to be a hero and has to discover it. But actually, the whole metaphor of the book is that through his pride, he unleashes essentially like a demon force in the world that is hunting him.

And in the end, he has to hunt it down. So it's much more literary, much more using language and scene to try to convey a deeper reality. Not so plot-focused or expository as like a J.K. Rowling or like a George R.R. Martin. So actually like a really well-crafted book in the fantasy genre.

And I thought it was quite good. I saw echoes of it. You certainly see echoes of it. To me, it wasn't Harry Potter. I was thinking more of Love Grossman and the Magicians, which has a similar sort of literary metaphorical darkness where they sort of unleash this creature from the magical-- I don't know.

I forgot, dimension or something that literally like kills one of the kids at the breakbeaks at the school for wizards. And so clearly, Grossman must have been channeling Ursula K. Le Guin. But anyways, I liked it. I'm not going to let my son read it. I think it's a little more too sophisticated and dark for him.

He's reading Harry Potter instead. But it was a good change of pace. I did enjoy it. Lots of good old-fashioned wizard names. It's all like these weird, crazy Dungeons and Dragons names. All right, copy refill. All right, book number three. Let's zig in a different direction. Every Good Endeavor by Timothy Keller.

So Timothy Keller is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. And he's a public communicator, effective public communicator. He's written a bunch of books that have done pretty well. At some point, someone sent me a bunch of his books. So I have a stack of his books. I pulled this off of the stack.

The reason why I read it is Every Good Endeavor is coming from a Christian perspective. But it is a biblical perspective on work, the point of work, finding work that's significant to you. And I thought this would be something I should probably know. I should probably have this club in my bag, understanding biblical perspectives on work and passion and vocation.

Because obviously I've written about this in the past. I'm doing this work now on the deep life. And so I was like, let me get the Christian biblical perspective on work. And so that's why I dived in that book. There's some good things in there. I mean, it was the pick and choose.

But I mean, I think there were some interesting threads of thought that I hadn't come across before. And here's the most interesting, here's the headline, like a headline idea that comes out of that book, which probably puts it at odds with a lot of sort of elite discourse around work right now, is Keller finds like a really strong biblical justification for work as an intrinsic good.

This is quite different than I think a lot of the anti-ambition, anti-productivity type philosophy that's going on now, which sees work as mainly like an exploitative activity to be tolerated at best and in a utopian society to be minimized. Keller comes at it basically saying God worked in Genesis and that's an argument for work as important.

He also has a reading of Genesis that says the seventh day of rest. So God worked and then he rest is basically a biblical mythological recipe for human satisfaction in which you have the seasonality you need to, you need to work, but then you need to not let work be all consuming.

You need to step back and rest and it's in that dance. And that's what God did during the first seven days. And that's supposed to be an instruction manual for life. And you see what Adam and Eve and like basically Genesis is like a whole manual for work. I mean, I think, you know, Karl Marx's head would explode if he read this because it's, you know, it's, it seems really different than a lot of sort of economic materialistic analyses from today, but wait, cool.

It's cool to see. I love people taking big, like big swing thoughts on things that are drawing from interesting sources. So that was an interesting one. Then I read the abolition of man by C.S. Lewis. It's arguable. This is a book. I thought it was a book. I read it on Kindle.

It's really a collection of three lectures delivered during the world war II. So it's pretty short, but let's call it a book. And I forgot how I came across this. I came across it somewhere. I was like, I should just read it. I just bought it and read it.

You know, it took me two days just sort of reading it. It's not a long thing. And it's interesting. So supposedly this is this book quotation marks collection of speeches is, was very influential in the 20th century. It's a, it's an argument for values, basically having rooted values on which you build cultural soul social systems.

It's an argument against subjectivism. This notion of all value is constructed. So it's basically like a preemptive rejection of what 30 years later would emerge in French postmodernism before that even existed. So I'm sure this book is not well appreciated by the modern Academy, but I think that's what made it interesting to read.

And it's, it's, it's jargon free and very approachable, but I mean, you can basically really crudely summarize the argument. I hate to summarize it crudely, but he's basically making an argument that we have to be careful of the heartless man. The, the, the, by the heartless man, what he means is, or no, the man, not the heartless man, that's not the right wording.

No, the right wording was the man without chest. But what he means by that is heartless. He says without a foundation of values, which the heart you, so in other words, like the values that you have, these moral intimations about these moral intuitions, that this seems right. You're just trying to use your brain to think through ethics and mediate, like, and control your gut, which is like, let's go, I'm mad.

Let's go kill this person. I want that to have your, your animal instincts. And if you try to just tame that with just your brain, let's just come up with what makes sense from scratch. Let's do the, let's be like Kant and just try to construct a moral system from scratch.

He's arguing that's not going to work. You have to ground it all in what you feel in your heart, this sort of these underlying truths. Lewis is a real, obviously a Christian apologist, but he writes this book outside of the context of Christianity. So he's trying to be religion agnostic.

I mean, it's interesting. I mean, it's something for sure. I'm surprised we don't read it like it in a sort of standard, heavily postmodern influence academic culture, be a nice thing to assign to people to is like, and here is like a, like a very straightforward standard critique. And this is the, this is the tension between those two, the tension between those two things.

Because of course the postmodern view would say there is no underlying value system that you're picking up through your metaphorical heart. It's all just constructed. It's all just systems that are constructed to support various supremacies and power relations. And C.S. Lewis, if he had been alive, would probably have an issue with that.

So it was interesting to read, quick to read, no jargon, very approachable. All right, final book. And I mentioned this last week in last week's episodes. I actually drew some insights from this book was John McPhee's the fourth draft. So I'll point you towards last week's episodes. I think maybe one 85.

I got in, I got into some details of some things I learned from the book. It's great. It's a John McPhee book about writing a little bit of memoir, a lot of craft, very interesting. You'll be impressed by McPhee. After you read it, you'll also be insanely jealous. Like, wait a second.

You could have spent eight months just thinking about an article and then, you know, maybe at some point write it when it all feels right. Like it feels like a very, it feels like a very cool life. Like I can't be jealous. I can't complain. I write for the New Yorker.

They're very generous in giving me flexibility and timing when I need it. And so I'm not, I'm not complaining. I'm saying this awesome. And John McPhee's awesome. It's a cool book. So if you're into nonfiction writing, you can get in a look inside the mind of a master. All right.

So that's it for my five books. People like to know what you read. Give us one book, Jesse. What's one book you've read recently we should know about. I'm almost done with 4,000 weeks. Pulled it off your bookshelf actually. Oh yeah. All right. Well, what's your almost done with it review?

I like it. I've been, you know, thinking about it. I think about time a lot anyway, but it's, it's good. I mean, you hear it mentioned all the time. Yeah. Ferris talks about it. You talk about it. Other podcasts talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, I think that's, I think that's great.

Ferris always forgets his name. Do you notice that? What does he call him? He just always like 4,000 weeks and. Well, I messed up the book on Ferris's show, so I called it 4,000, like 40,000 days or something. So Oliver, we're all sorry. I don't, there's nothing particularly hard to remember about your name or the, actually a book title, that's a number can be difficult.

Once you're like in the four digits, that can be difficult. So I'm going to give myself a, give myself a break. But yeah, that's a great book. It's blurbed by me. So, you know, it's good. Yup. That's how you can tell. All right. So we got some calls, right, Jesse?

We sure do. All right. What do we got first? All right. First call. He actually, speaking of which, he came across you and your Ferris interview a couple of months ago. And he has a question about your frameworks. Hi Cal, this is Mike. I've been listening to your podcast ever since your interview with Tim Ferris.

I'd be interesting knowing the origins or the frameworks and how they were built since some of them seem familiar based on my work with the seven habits of highly effective people from the nineties. Thanks. Well, Mike, it's a good question. Covey is very influential, I would say on my thinking.

Seven habits of highly effective people, by the way, has sold, and I believe this is the official term, all the copies. It's like 20 million copies or something. It's a crazily good selling book. And one of my arguments is the reason why that book sold so well is not because it was the first book to talk about productivity or time management.

Those books have been around. In fact, I have in my collection, I went back and tried to find the earliest business oriented time management book that I could. And I actually have, I don't know if it's a first edition, but it's a 1950s edition of a book that's called, I don't know, time, something time power or something like this, but it's like one of the very first books to introduce the idea that time is something you have to have a strategy for managing.

So this idea had been around for a while, seven habits of highly effective people. This is the eighties, I think late eighties. I don't think it's early nineties. I think it's late eighties. I could be wrong on that, but somewhere around them. And it came in and sold all the copies.

And I think it's because it was not that it was a big time management book, but because it was connecting productivity and time management to values and the life well lived. People miss this about Cubby. They're like, Oh, it's a big seven. So it must be like tips, you know, one of those type of books, 19 ways to maximize your effectiveness, right?

So it's dismissed by people who don't know it well as a tip guide, something that got a really good title, just like people will dismiss Tim Ferriss by being like the four hour work week is just like this really catchy name as if like that name alone is going to sell 4 million books, you know, like as if Ferris wasn't touching on something deep and what Cubby gets to in that book.

And which I think is Mike is pointing out is reflected in my deep life philosophy is he has one of his key ideas is start with the end in mind. He has you figure out what your values are, what matters to you in your life, and then use that trickle down from that to actually guide how you execute in your life.

And if you read first things first, which is the followup book, which elaborates on some of these ideas, he gets really specific about like, what are the roles in your life? You're a father, you're an executive at this company, you're a leader at your church or like whatever they were.

And for each of these, you're trying to figure out what are your values and what are your important and then you work backwards from that to make sure that those values are reflected in how you're spending your time. And this is a lot of Stephen Cubby. A lot of it is how do you allocate your time to support the things that you care most about so that your life is one that reflects your values.

That's why that book sold all the copies. Because this landed in the eighties when we were in this weird interstitial period out of the post-war boom, just out of the Carter era malaise. It was very materialistic. This was the era of Wall Street. This was the era of high consumerism and people were adrift.

And then he came in and said, we should care about what you want to do, what's important to you in your life. And that should percolate all the way down to what am I doing today? And so I think that's why that book is effective. Clearly that influenced me.

The deep life owes its foundations to that Cubby-like perspective. Start with the end in mind and then use that to work backwards to engineer your life. Of course, all the details that matter, I'm much more systems oriented. I've sort of merged some Covey value-based thinking with some David Allen systems-based thinking.

I'm kind of merging those two worlds and then thrown in some neuroscience and psychology to boot. So I've created my own brew, but I do give Covey a lot of credit. So Mike, that's a good point you noticed because I think that's accurate. Certainly Covey played a role. All right, before we go to the next question, I figure we should probably take a moment to thank one or two of the sponsors that allows us to keep talking about these things.

I have a stack of sponsor reads on the ground. That's how you know we're a high class production here. Okay. I had thrown them on the ground in a fit of anger. I threw my sponsor reads on the ground, but I now have them back. But I'll tell you what's one sponsor I'm not angry about, but actually quite excited about.

And that is Workable. As we talked about in Monday's episode, there are a few things more important in running your company or business than hiring the right people. I know this from experience. There has been nothing worse for our company than when I hired Jesse. It's all been downhill.

You know why? Because I didn't use Workable. This is what happens. I end up with an old man, 40 plus years old, the fourth decade of his life, not a young go-getter with energy. And that's because I didn't use Workable. So that's the- You used the net. I put a net in the bookstore next to business advice books.

If someone picked up a Stephen Covey book, it was like a snare release. And then the net caught you. The first two people that sprung on, I ended up accidentally strangling with the net. So then, but I perfected it by the time I got Jesse. No, Jesse is not, he is a valued part of the team, but he would have been even easier to hire if I had had Workable.

Workable makes it easy to hire. They do a lot of things to make the process go smoothly. So you get your job posting out to all the top job boards with a 200 with just one click. But then, and this is the key to Workable, they have all these tools to make what happens next more efficient.

They have video interview tools. You can schedule interviews automatically with tools, e-signature tools, like all the stuff that's annoying. The 100 back and forth emails Workable makes faster. So you don't have to waste time on the details. You can focus on just finding the right people. So you can start hiring today with a risk-free 15 day trial.

And if you hire during the trial, it won't cost you a thing. Just go to workable.com/podcast to start hiring. Speaking of hiring, if you are worried about potentially being, let's say, accidentally strangled in my net at the bookstore, you probably need some life insurance. And even if you're not worried about that, you definitely need life insurance.

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Warning people about being strangled in a net. Maybe that's not how we should start our ad reads. I'm learning on the fly here, but this is my guess. We're working on it. I didn't actually strangle people in a net, and PolicyGenius is great. All right, so now what I have is a giant, this is a giant pile of papers.

We're so old-fashioned here. So people who are watching the video just see that I am swamped in paper, essentially. Everything here is run on paper. I guess that's what you'd expect, perhaps, from someone like me, a digital minimalist. But I think we're good. All papers have been organized. Jesse, let's do another question.

What do we have here? - Hi, this is exciting. We have a pro golfer who's a fan of you, and he's been time blocking during his work and training sessions, but he has a question of whether he should time block outside of that. - Hi, Cal. My name is Naveed Kaur.

I'm a professional golfer. I have started using time blocking after reading your book, Deep Work. And I just wanted to ask, do I use time blocking only for my work, or can I use it for the other small things throughout the day? For example, when I'm practicing or training, during that time, I don't have a problem with focusing on the target hand, but otherwise, like if I'm on the way to the shower, let's say, and I'll just stop, pick up the phone, and start scrolling.

So do I use time blocking to schedule, like I'm going to shower from this time to this time that I'm going to like work out from this time to this time? I hope that's good. - All right. Naveed Kaur. Jesse, we should look him up. - I did, yeah.

- Yeah. - He's on tour. - Yeah? - Yeah. - PGA? - Yeah. - So Jesse knows all of his success, the time blocking? Is that a fair read of the question? - Probably. - I think we can count that. - I mean, what you do talk about does apply to training.

- Yeah. Well, I think I'm popular in golf after Mickelson was preaching digital minimalism at the Masters a few years ago. Mickelson was named, he talked about me and Holiday, right? He's like, "Newport and Holiday's books have been really useful to me." And he was having a resurgence then.

So I think that seeded some of my work among professional golfers. That's a hard, man, can you imagine a harder sport? Because if you are a professional basketball player or baseball player, like you have to be, of course, just freakishly athletic. And like most people can't get there. But if you're at, let's just say, what is the hardest sport once you have normalized for you have the right genetics and training that you're playing it, right?

So not what's the hardest sport to get into, but like the hardest sport once you're there to perform. And if you're doing football and basketball, it's very hard, but it's not like if you lose your concentration for five seconds, like the game has been lost. You know, like you'd be like, "You know what?

I ran a bad route. I'm a cornerback and I lost a step." But it's fine. They didn't even throw it to them. Or worst case, like they threw it to them and the secondary had to tackle them and they gained some yards. But if you're a golfer, that's your game.

You lose your concentration, you hit into the water, you're not winning the tournament. You know? Or if you're a basketball player, it's like, "I missed a shot." It's fine. You get 50 more attempts. Baseball is somewhere in between because now it's like these at-bats, but you can have a bad swing.

But anyways, it just seems like the hardest sport of professional sports to actually do once you're good enough to do it. It's like the one I would least like to be in. >> Well, one of the things that happens with these guys that are so good is they get so many birdies.

So the birdies can make up for a mishap, like a bogey on a certain hole and things. >> Like a bogey, but you can, you see these guys melt. >> Oh, yeah. >> Yeah. Triple bogey. That's right. So I mean, I guess they have some leeway. You know, my uncle wrote a cool book about this.

John Paul Newport wrote a book when I was a kid called The Fine Green Line. So he was a very good golfer, and he made a go at trying to get on the tournament and wrote a book about it. So he was like doing the, what they call it, Q school or the qualification tournaments.

Because he was like a really, really good golfer. And the fine green line that he talks about in that book, it's mental. So it's like, yeah, he's a very athletic guy. He was a star quarterback at Harvard, you know, like athletic guy. And he complains, like, I have the physical ability to do the shots that a top golfer has.

I can, I mean, not like winning the tournament, but like of a PGA player, like I could have a PGA caliber round. But the biggest, there's a lot of people that that's true of, like very athletic people who train really hard. It was the mental. Because you can't make a mistake.

It's like, I know I can do it, but I have the next four hours, like I can't make a mistake, you know? And it was just so then that was what the book was about. That's the fine green line. Who can, who can put up with that mental pressure?

Who can Tiger Woods it and just be like lasers? Well, actually, when this episode airs, the Masters will begin and a lot of times you're going to see the storyline of the people competing. So that's where you see like, you know, where those errors make extreme, you know, difference in the thing.

But in terms of qualifying and earning some money and stuff like that, like getting on tour, like these guys just did so many birdies and sometimes that can make up for the birdies can make up for the bogeys. But like even the hit the birdies like just consistently and like to read every green.

And I mean, you see it in the top players. They're just, you know, I'm going to destroy this hole and I'm going to destroy you and I'm going to make it was like Woods in his prime. I'm going to make this putt and like from over here, like I just, this is mine.

I own it. This green is mine. Just like that, that energy. All right. But Navid's question. So here's the thing. Professional athletes, Navid, you're a professional athlete. You're in it. You're in an unusual situation because like a lot of what you do is training, which is structured for you.

I mean, it's effectively time blocked, but time blocked by your coaching and training regimes I'm assuming. And so in that type of job, really kind of my job is I have this like really prescribed training. I would say you have to basically invent what I would call a pseudo job.

And I would divide my life into now three things. So most people it's like I'm at work or I'm not at work, but for you, it's like I'm training. I'm in my pseudo job, which is like administrative stuff that needs to get done for your life to function. And then I'm in leisure.

And I would differentiate between those three things. Your training is already highly structured. I assume the pseudo jobs, you're like, technically I'm not training. I'm not on the course. I'm not in the gym. I'm not going to work. I need to pay these bills and get this information to my sponsor and go by the bank.

Time block that because you don't want to waste too much time on the pseudo job. Time blocking is great for this. How do I make the most out of the time I have? So yes, time block your pseudo, your pseudo job, and then have a clear distinction between that time and leisure time and don't time block the leisure time because you have to have unblocked time or you're going to burn out.

But if you don't block the administrative kind of work stuff you need to get done for your life to function, it's going to eat up all your time. And it's going to be a source of distraction. It's going to maybe even hurt you on the course. So you need a tri part type definition of your life, training, pseudo job and leisure.

Time block to pseudo be much more flexible in the leisure. All right, that's cool. Professional athletes. Who do we got next? Okay, next up we have a question about full time studying, but basically that's his job is studying and he does it eight hours a day and he's got a question about that.

Hi Tom, I'm a second time software developer intern. My job now is to basically study full time and I'm working from home so I can decide how to structure my schedule. So my question is, do you think studying is considered a deep work? Because I know that the maximum deep work hours per day is around three to four, but now I have to study around eight hours.

So do you think this is deep work and this is possible to do? And how will you structure full time studying? You know, this is the thing that's going around now. I'm not very internet savvy, but when I talk to people who are more YouTube-y and kind of know what's going on, there's this whole culture meme out there, especially on YouTube of these super studiers that like, look, I'm going to study for 12 hours.

They have like a time lapse camera on them doing it. And there's a lot of this out there. I guess it's hustle porn, which again is a whole thing I don't know much about. But suppose on Instagram and on YouTube, there's a bunch of this like, you got a inspirational, over the top hustle type affirmations or videos or whatever.

And this is one of them. Like I study for 12 hours. People are like, my God, that's awesome. Could you imagine? And I think that whole thing is nonsense. You should not be studying eight hours a day. And you're probably not doing productive work for eight hours a day.

There's nothing that requires that much studying. I think it's, and I don't mean to be accusatory here, but I think it's often like oddly performative and I don't quite understand it. So yes, studying done right is deep work. It's cognitively demanding. Three or four hours in a day is probably a good limit.

What you should do with studying is make sure that you're doing the actions that actually matter. What do you need to learn? What's the best way to actually learn it? So you want your energy to go where it actually matters. Usually for studying that's active recall. So you're trying to recall the information from scratch without looking at notes.

That's what helps stick it in your head. Be wary of transfer theory, study the actual things you need to know. The specific knowledge you need, not kind of knowledge in general. So in the specific form you're going to be doing it. Sample tests are always better than just reading textbooks.

Like yeah, these types of things matter. You can read like my book, How to Become a Straight A Student for more details about study tactics that really matter for multiple different types of courses. You can look at the first two years of my blog at calnewport.com. The first two years I really focused on advanced study tactics.

So there's a lot you can do, but you should be doing two, three, maybe four hours in two sessions. That's it. And then do other stuff with the rest of your time. I mean, I really think when you see a lot of this, I study eight hours a day, I study 10 hours a day.

Part of it's performative. Part of it is guilt. Like I'm somehow not properly putting in the effort to live up to my potential. If I'm not just doing this all day, this should be like a normal job. But I'm saying put that aside. You're not going to effectively study that long.

Use good techniques, a reasonable amount of time each day, and then use the rest of your time for something else that's important, that's meaningful, that's values driven. Don't be one of those hustle porn guys on YouTube that's like, look, I'm an hour 12 of studying and everyone's like, wow, how do you do it?

That's not impressive. It's weird. It's a David Blaine stunt. That's not the right way to learn things. All right. So hopefully that's a relief for this person asking the question and not like an accusation, but I've seen these things. It's a whole thing. Like it's time-lapse videos of people just studying like ridiculous hours.

And I guess it's supposed to be impressive or something like that. But the video is getting a lot of views. Yeah, maybe we should do it. Yeah, we should do. I would be, I can't see, look, I'm lazy. That's why I do all this like focus and be organized because I can't just like grind it out or whatever.

So it'd be a pretty, pretty boring video. Well, you have 17 jobs. I don't think you're lazy, but you just have a lot of those things. I just, I'm not a good grinder. Yeah. All right. What do we got here? Next question. The next question is about embracing boredom.

Howdy, Cal. Erica here. I've been listening to some of your older episodes again, and you would talk about boredom at times. I'm curious how you are bored. You read a phone book, watch clouds in the sky. I'm kidding. But I am curious about what you do to be bored so that way you can embrace the boredom as opposed to feel like you want to climb up walls and escape.

Love your work. Thanks a lot. Take care. Bye. I'm curious about this, but have you heard of these podcasts, Jesse, where it's people reading the phone book? No. They're popular. They're popular. So my wife and I were listening to an NPR thing that was talking about these podcasts. Like this is a real thing.

You could probably find one if you search. Like it'll read from a phone book for like a couple hours. And with like a nice voice, a good mic. And NPR was trying to argue this long, complicated argument about like overstimulation and blah, blah, blah. And no, it's people trying to fall asleep.

So some people like to hear just a voice just kind of reading. There's no actual, the content triggers nothing in your brain, but you're just kind of like hearing it. And for some people find it relaxing. So there's like a lot of these podcasts. I mean, some of it might be ASMR too, but there's a lot of these podcasts and it's really just people reading.

Which, by the way, would be much easier for us to produce. All this nonsense. I mean, I'd still have you in the studio. So we would just cut to you. I would just be reading names. Like I could still make my 200K a month. Exactly. I'd be like Erica, Alex, Donald, Jesse.

What do you think? You'd be like, good names, good names. Then I would just go back and keep reading names. It'd be easier. But what was the question? How do I embrace boredom? Okay. So here's the thing about boredom. I'm not a boredom booster. So I argue in deep work embrace boredom, but I don't argue like, let's go seek out staring at the wall and that like we're going to get inside or whatever.

As Erica was hinting at here, the reason why I think you should become comfortable and familiar with boredom is that otherwise your mind is going to demand stimuli. When you're doing something like deep work, which is devoid of a lot of diverse stimuli, just doing the same thing, it'll be comfortable with it.

And if you're not, if you always look at your phone when you're bored, your mind won't tolerate the lack of stimuli and doing something like deep work. But here's the thing. My answer is hidden in like my solution is hidden in that answer. Like the reason why I say embrace boredom is so that when you're doing deep work, which is boring, you won't feel that urge to look at something else.

So that means the type of quote unquote boredom I seek is actually just doing monofocus things that can be of value and have interest, but just aren't super stimuli that don't have a lot of stimuli. Right. So just reading for a long time, it can be really interesting, but then there's also parts of your mind's like, can we look at something else?

Can we look at our phone? And you're like, you don't, you know, so reading can do it. Walking is another big one for me. Don't put on the headphones when I do the walk. Now I'm not, again, I'm not trying to induce boredom. I'm not meditating. I'm not staring at the sidewalk.

I'm thinking about things. I'm reflecting, I'm trying to have ideas, but I'm avoiding the really highly super palatable digital distractions. Going into a store, you know, just going to the store and see what's going on. So for me, this is how I'm defining boredom is absence of highly palatable digital distraction.

So it doesn't mean you have to be doing nothing. To me, it just means you have to be doing something that you could have done 25 years ago. It's like you're trying to simulate whatever, 1995, or I'm not reading from the phone book, but I can't look at my phone while I'm waiting in line, you know, or I'm on a walk.

I don't want my walk, man. And so that's what I'd recommend for everyone is that on a regular basis, you want to do things where you've not, you have no highly stimulating digital distractions, even though you feel the urge for them. Like, can't I just take this out? Even watching TV can accomplish this.

I'm watching TV and my instinct is, can I look at my phone at the same time? I'm not getting enough stimuli and you don't. So you know, again, I'm not staring at clouds. I'm not reading a phone book. I'm watching TV. But by removing highly palatable digital distractions from many different points of your life, you get used to being in situations where you don't have access to those highly palatable digital distractions.

So maybe I need a different word. Instead of boredom, it's like stimuli freedom or 1995 mode. It's getting away from that and being okay with getting away from that, where that is for listeners, me holding up a fake phone. That is the key. All right. Let me talk for a second here about the key to understanding books, which is our sponsor Blinkist.

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That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T. Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off and a seven day free trial. That's Blinkist.com/deep. I also want to talk about Athletic Greens. So we worry like, are we getting the right nutrients? Do I have the right minerals? Am I getting enough vitamin, whatever, right? I mean, these are things we worry about, especially as we get older.

I worry about this a little bit, but I'm still in my thirties. Jesse is in his forties. So this is all he thinks about because his body is falling apart on him. How are you going to get the right things you need? Well, as I've always said, you have two choices and only two choices.

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You have to choose. Let me tell you why I think you should choose Athletic Greens. In addition to you not getting beaten mercilessly by a steroided bodybuilder, it is the top, in my opinion, the top supplement source on the market, because what they do is say, we will figure out for you what you need, but also where the very best sources of these different things are.

We will put it together in just one product, this powder. It's all we do is this powder. We're always improving it. They have different versions. They upgrade it every year. Can we get a better mineral? Can we get a better adaptogen? And all you have to worry about as the consumer is one scoop once a day, put it in water in the morning, drink it, you're done.

They obsess about getting the right ingredients in here. They obsess about getting the right form that's going to be the most effective so that you don't have to. You don't have to go to the GNC. You don't have to get punched by a bodybuilder. You just take the Athletic Greens powder every morning and you can trust it's done.

So I take Athletic Greens. Jesse will attest to this. I have told him about it. I have sold him on it. I take it each morning so I don't have to worry about anything else. And I recommend you do too. So right now it's time to reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient daily nutrition, especially now that we're in flu and cold season.

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All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/deep. Again, that is athleticgreens.com/deep to take ownership over your health. All right, Jesse, I think we have time. All right, we have time for one more. So the viewing audience doesn't know is I'm running a big search committee meeting imminently. And so we're sort of podcasting under the wire here.

One of my 17 jobs is running the faculty search committee. So we've got to switch from Athletic Greens to a question to faculty recruiting. This is why I have two cups of coffee. So let's fit in one more, Jesse. We can fit in one more. All right, sounds good.

This is a fitting one. We got a question about deep work in YouTube. Hi, I'm Daniel, a high school student from Toronto. My question for you was, how do I ensure I'm doing deep work when I need to be connected to a distracting source like the internet? I'm trying to learn web development, so HTML, CSS, and soon JavaScript.

And the best way I found to do so, and from talking to other people, the best way to do so is through YouTube and the internet, which is also an incredibly distracting source that you've mentioned as a killer of deep work. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how I can reconcile those two things.

Thanks. Well, Daniel, first of all, don't trust anyone who puts content on YouTube. Because I can't. Someone who... It's all garbage. And anything that's on YouTube, I would not trust if I was you. Hold on, Jesse's handing me a memo here. We're on YouTube. Uh-oh. No. But you know what, Jesse?

But we're not very popular on YouTube. So I think that means that we are not being distracting. So we can... Keep the YouTube channel alive. Yeah, keep the YouTube channel alive. Yeah. No, Daniel, you need to watch our channel. And you need to ring that bell and smash the subscribe button.

And once we start giving away briefcases full of money to our guests to try to get people to watch YouTube... Oh, man. Okay, Daniel, it's a good question. So I hear this a lot, this general point a lot, especially from high school students, which is like, "I have to use...

There's something I need from the internet that's part of this bigger work I'm doing. How could I possibly not just be endlessly distracted on the internet?" And I think you can separate the two things. You can separate the two things. So you're learning how to code. And you're getting information from the internet.

Makes sense. A lot of good information on there. You can Google commands that you don't understand. You can watch a YouTube tutorial. And you're saying the problem is when you look for those other things on the internet, you also end up doing other types of distracting things. You go to look up a YouTube video about CSS, and you see like recommended a Cal Newport video where I'm giving briefcases of money to professional golfers.

And there you go. You have to click on that, and then you have to watch that. My advice is don't click on the other things. I think there's this helplessness a little bit of like if I'm on the internet and I see things that are appealing, like I have to click on it.

And I don't think we're so helpless. I mean, at least if we're talking about very specific context, you're like, "This is a specific thing I'm doing. I'm trying to learn how to code, and I'm spending the next hour working on it." Just say, "I'm not going to look at non-coding related things, even if I see a link." So I know in general, it's very difficult if I say, "I'm just going to try not to use the internet." Like, come on, you have all these different times in your life, you're bored, you're watching TV.

Fine, that's very difficult. But in the specific context of I am doing this activity, I don't think that's a hard rule to follow because it's very clear and it makes sense. Like I'm trying to learn something right now. I'm not going to go on the internet, right? Like I think just being clear and tough lovey about that might be all you need.

If you're serious about learning how to code, don't click video recommendations. And yeah, you can do plugins and do a distraction-free tube plugin that gets rid of the recommendations when you're on YouTube. I can tell you, treat YouTube like a library, not a television channel. So you search for the specific things you need.

You don't surf serendipitously to see what's interesting. I could tell you all those rules. I could talk about putting on blockers on your internet that you can configure so you can't go to other types of things. But I think it's just simpler to say when you're programming, don't click on anything else.

You know, have a little...and that act of individual discipline, I think is actually going to empower you. Because you're like, you know what? I don't have to click on this nonsense when I don't want to. And I'm learning something because it's important to me and I see these links and I don't click on it.

I have power over that. I mean, I think feeling that power, feeling that efficacy, I'm in charge of what I look at. This algorithm doesn't run me. These links don't run me. I'm constructing my world. Is a very important thing to have. And this might be a place as a high school student, so you're new to this, to say, yeah, I might be a teenager.

You know, I'm not an old man like Jesse. I'm much closer to like a young in his 30s type personality like Cal. But so you're a young man. This is the time to say, I'm an adult. I'm about to become an adult. I can use the internet without losing control.

And I know a lot of adults can't do that, but I think you can, Daniel. So that's my tough love thing. Just don't click. Just don't do it. See the recommendations. Don't click. It's a simple rule. I'm not saying your whole life, but when you're doing programming, just do programming, block off that time, look up what you need to look up.

Don't follow links. You're going to come out on the other side of that invigorated like, oh, I guess I am kind of in control of this. And that could snowball to more and more feeling of efficacy, more and more discipline with digital distraction. So it actually could be the entry point, the entry point to a much better relationship to these technologies.

So we'll skip all of the plugins. We'll skip all of the blockers. We'll skip all of the rhetoric and just say, don't buy into that narrative of helplessness that you have to follow distractions because you're young and young people are out of control on the internet and they can't help themselves and they live on YouTube.

You can do what you want to do. And I think what you're doing is cool. Learn hard school, learn hard skills, build cool things, connect to people who are interesting, expose yourself to ideas. You know, all the interesting stuff to make a good life, go to your age, do those things.

And you can, you can leave the going down YouTube rabbit holes for a time when you have nothing else to do. All right. Well, I think that's all the time we have. I have to go run a meeting. Thank you everyone who sent in their listener calls. If you like what you heard, you'll like what you see on our YouTube channel.

I feel weird saying that after just telling Daniel not to click on YouTube links. So if you go to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia, ignore the recommendations, treat it like a library. Go there just because you're, you specifically are coming to listen to some Cal, not because you are web surfing.

If you like what you heard, you'll also like what you read at my newsletter, sign up at calnewport.com. We'll be back next week on Monday with our next episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.