- Hi, next question is from Jim. How do you know if a big, slow productivity idea is good enough to warrant the daily effort? Background, I'm a full-time online writer and I have a book idea. I think that I might find an audience, but I don't know if it will work.

- Well, this is very important. Jim, we talked about this with the final law of less during the deep dive, but this gives us a specific case study to tackle. So let's go back and remember what I said in that fifth law of less, and we'll apply it to your particular situation about working on a book idea.

So first of all, you're going to want to work up to bigger size projects. You might not wanna start right away with just I am writing a book, right? What is actually happening here is, okay, can I write? Have I actually published some writing before? All right, that's a step.

Do I have an agent? Well, that's gonna be another first step. If I can get an agent, that's gonna be a justification or validation that my idea is good. There's someone else who's a professional who thinks I'm the right person to write it. So let me make that the next step.

Now I got that done. Now I feel a little bit more confident. Now I'm writing sample chapters for the proposal. I can write two sample chapters. That's hard, but that's more tractable. My agent likes these sample chapters. Oh, now we've sold the book. Now we've actually can go, now when I'm going ahead and writing this book, I've done some writing, I've gotten an agent, I've written some sample chapters.

Those sample chapters convinced the publisher. Now you're gonna find motivation to finish this book. This is all very different than just saying, let me just start writing. I think I could produce something really good. The executive functioning center of your brain is gonna look at that plan and says, says who?

How do you know that anything, that this at all is gonna turn up? We have no evidence. We have no background experience with just writing every day and it turns out producing a book. So I would say you really wanna ladder your way up to this bigger, longer project.

Now the foundation to what I'm talking about here that sort of underscores all of this is to be ruthlessly evidence-based and figuring out your plan for the thing you want to accomplish. So again, I'm really worried when I hear about, for example, a writer saying, yeah, I'm just gonna start writing every day because that tells me you haven't talked to someone in the publishing industry.

You don't understand how the publishing industry works or you do understand and you reject it. You're nervous about talking to an agent 'cause they might not like your book idea. So you're gonna have the circuitous approach where well, write it myself but then I'll be very clever about the marketing and we'll do this and that and then the agents will come to me later and wanna buy my book.

You're inventing your own story about how the industry works because you either don't know or you don't like or you're afraid of what the actual story really is. You have to be ruthlessly evidence-based when coming up with what you're gonna work on and how you're gonna work on it for one of these diligent, disciplined, long-term project endeavors because it's a really big investment of time.

Your brain has to trust. You know what you're doing and this has a chance of succeeding. So do not skip the step of ruthlessly gathering evidence about how your field actually works. Now, I see this all the time. There's a lot of other common examples where people will write their own stories instead of actually figuring out how a field works.

This happens in tech startups a lot. I talk to people that like the idea of having a technology startup but don't actually want to talk to, let's say, funders or investors or get a sense of what would make a company attractive to an investor that would allow an exit, that would allow growth or acquisition.

They don't want those stories. They want it just to be the fun stuff that I have a Slack account set up and I'm jumping on calls with people to get their ideas about things and paying web developers to set up a website. They don't want the reality of what is the technical skill required?

What is the work that actually goes into producing something that is good enough that has the potential scalability that can actually attract funding? How much talent does that actually require? I don't know how many times I've heard someone say, "Yeah, I just need to find a programmer type "to build the thing, but I've got this great idea." They want just the fun part, not the hard part.

And there's other fields too where you'll see the same thing. You'll see it in podcasting. But what actually, talk to a successful podcaster. How does a podcast become financially viable? It's rare. So what are the elements that makes a podcast financially viable? How do you, what is required to actually get there?

What type of audience or content and what differentiates a successful one from a non-successful one? People don't want to hear that too. They just say, "I just want to start recording "because you never know, maybe I'll be Joe Rogan." Even though that's not how it actually happens. So ruthlessly evidence-based approach to these big ambitious projects, it sounds at first like a downer, but it is the fuel that will allow you to actually continue and get something big done.

The bad news is, it might take a lot of things off the table at first. Things that you want to do for your big projects, you gather the evidence and you realize, "I'm not in a good position to do this." And that is a downer. But what it does mean, and this is the side, the benefit, when you do find a thing that is reasonable for you to pursue that feeling of motivation you have, when the evidence is there to back it up, you've built your way up to this, your mind believes that that feeling of motivation is really powerful, and a lot of people don't even recognize it until they get it.

And then they say, "Oh, this is what it feels like "to go after something big "in a way that is deeply grounded in reality "and has a real chance of succeeding." It just feels very different than the, "I'm writing every day, I'm doing my thousand words, "I'm having Zooms with people about my startup idea, "I bought a USB mic and now I'm a podcaster." It really feels different once you have that foundation of evidence.

So I'm glad you brought this up, Jim, because I think that's, it's downplayed too much when we talk about these big, ambitious, long-term projects. All the prep work is often ignored, and we just say, "Well, have the courage "to follow your passion and just go for it." No, don't go for it, until you're so convinced that you'd be dumb not to that you have no other choice.

All right, Jesse, I don't know, Jesse, I kind of feel now like I'm temporarily back in that beginner podcast phase. I have a USB microphone, I'm in a basement, I'm not in the HQ, I feel like we're taking steps backwards here, though actually, I think, this is what's gonna be fun, I think listeners are gonna see and viewers are gonna see, I'm slowly going to evolve my setup here as the summer goes on, because I flew up here and I'm flying back to drive up with my family, so I'm gonna be bringing more equipment up in a couple weeks, nice cameras, some nice lighting.

My goal is by the time we get to mid-August, that this house here at Hanover is gonna be producing a really slick looking podcast. I think it's gonna be a fun project. I'm gonna build a cool setup here. It really will be the Deep Work HQ North once I'm done.

So that'll be a fun progression to watch as the summer unfolds. Yeah, baby. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)