Let's get rolling right away with today's deep dive. I'm calling it the two types of ambition. Now this deep dive is based off of an article I posted to my newsletter at calnewport.com just a few days ago. So the original title of the article, and I have it on my screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening.

The original title of the article was On Michael Crichton's Busy Ambition. It's from October 28th. So the motivation for this article, which I wanna pick apart in our deep dive today, was actually coming across a profile of Crichton in the New York Times archives from 1970. And I have this on the page now on the screen if you're watching, a profile that's titled For Michael Crichton, Medicine is for Writing.

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

All right, it's Michael Crichton, his last year at Harvard Medical School. He's 26 years old. He goes to the dean of the medical school, and he says, "I don't think I'm gonna practice medicine. "I've figured this out, but what I do wanna do "is publish a nonfiction book about hospital life, "in particular, the hospital in Boston "where he was doing his intern rounds." And he asked, "Can I, instead of doing "some of the normal whatever work you would do "during your final semester, can I instead "go around the hospital and gather research for my book?" And here's the actual quote I have here from this article, which was written one year after this occurred.

He said, "Why should I spend the last half "of my last year at medical school "learning to read electrocardiograms "when I never intended to practice?" All right, so he says this to the dean of Harvard Medical School. The dean replies, paternalistically, "Michael, I don't think you realize "how hard it is to write a book." Right, so he's trying to warn this young kid, like, you can't just go walk around the hospital and gather some notes.

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

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

This would win, that next year, it would win an Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel of the Year. It's a hard award to win. He also was working on The Adronoma Strain, first book he would publish under his own name, and of course would be a big breakout bestseller.

It's what really started his fame in the literary world, became a big movie back in the '70s. He had all this stuff already going on when he went to talk to the med school dean. So by the time you get to a year later when this New York Times profile is written, you see that this is a one-man multimedia operation.

So in addition to all of those projects going on, he somehow has two more potboilers, he writes under his pseudonym, by 1970. So somehow he adds two more books unrelated to A Case of Need, unrelated to The Adronoma Strain. He also, by this point, was working on what would become The Terminal Man, his second techno thriller written under his own name.

It was called something different. The profile, they're still calling it The Sympathetic Man, like the sympathetic nervous system, but Terminal Man is much better. He revealed that he was already intent on directing the movie for The Terminal Man. So he was concurrently writing a screenplay. He was also traveling to Hollywood every week on what he called, and I'm highlighting this here, a skills-building gambit.

So he was going to Hollywood. He's trying to pick up, because he wanted to be a director as well. And so he was going to Hollywood a couple days a week. So this was the year after he left medical school. So he had this sort of half-hearted post-doc at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

La Jolla, J-O-L-L-A. - Hoya. - Hoya, is it La Jolla? - Yeah. - Okay. Which is not far from LA, I guess. - Yeah, yeah. - So he was going back and forth. - It's like San Diego area. - Yep, all this stuff was going on. 27 years old, all this was going on at the same time.

The New York Times profile called his career hyperactive. And it is, can you imagine that? I mean, I do a fair amount of things. That's crazy, the amount of things he had going on. So all these different projects, he was juggling at the same time. Oh, and by the way, he also published a novel with his brother under a pseudonym between 1969 and '70 as well, an experimental novel about drug dealing, where they would pass the manuscript back and forth, and he would write an entire draft, and then his brother would edit an entire draft.

All this stuff's going on. So, busy guy. I compared him in this article, let's say apples to apples, another really successful fiction writer, John Grisham. John Grisham's younger. He really got his start in the early '90s, whereas we have Crichton getting his start in the early '70s, but whatever, same idea.

And there was a period in the '90s where they were competing back and forth, not just for the biggest book sales. Grisham and Crichton for a period in the '90s there were in a huge war on movie rights. They were breaking deals, breaking records for movie deals, and their agents would say things like, "I want whatever Crichton got for his last book plus $1." Like they were trying to one-up each other.

All right, so what's John Grisham's story? So John Grisham in the 1980s is a lawyer, small-town Mississippi lawyer. He runs for and also wins a seat in the Mississippi State Legislature. So he's a Democrat state legislature and a small-town lawyer doing both of those things. State legislator's a part-time.

Job. And he decides he wants to write a book. He gets an idea for a book from a case that he wasn't trying, but was observing. And he gets this idea for a book and he tells his wife, "I wanna try to write a legal thriller." And she said, "Okay, but do two in a row." Right?

So that way, maybe one of the ideas doesn't work. You have two shots at it right away. And if both of those ideas don't work, then you know that maybe that's not for you. So he does this. It's hard. It takes him longer than it takes Crichton. I have the numbers in here, but I think it was something like three years.

Because he's writing in between these two jobs. And you can find him in some interviews talking about, "Oh, I have my notepad while I was waiting for meetings. "I was waiting for a legislative session "to begin, I had scribble notes." But I found a really definitive interview where he said, "This is the secret.

"I woke up at five and I wrote every morning. "And it was really hard and I was often really tired. "And it wasn't like all that fun. "And that was the only way to really make progress." And it still took him three years to write the first book. He started the second book the day after he finished the first.

Good thing he did that because the first name, the first book, "A Time to Kill", he had a hard time finding a publisher. When it came out, small first printing did nothing, disappeared. But he had already basically finished his second book by that point. So he's like, "I might as well." This time, his second book, which is "The Firm", his agent leaked bootleg copies of the manuscript to movie producers.

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

Doubled A snapped up the book rights for a lot of money. That book got a lot of coverage, went on to sell a lot. The number I quote in the article is 7 million copies. I couldn't really source that well. It might be less than that. But anyways, it sold a lot of copies instead of his whole career.

This is where, and I say in the article, Grisham's path diverges from Crichton. Grisham does not look at the buffet of appealing opportunities that is generated by his initial success and say, "Let's start feasting." He does something very different. He says, "I now have the leverage and money "needed to simplify my life in a way I couldn't before." Stops practicing law, leaves the legislature.

Based on the advice he heard from a bookseller that all the big fiction names published once a year, he said, "That's what I'm gonna do. "One book a year, that's what matters. "Especially in the beginning, "I need a book every year to solidify my audience." And he basically retreated into just a writing routine of one book per year.

And I have some of the details of it because he's talked about this before. Here's how he eventually perfected this, I would call it almost monastic writing routine. He starts writing on January 1st. He works three hours a day, five days a week. He used to write in their Oxford, then he moved to Charlottesville, Virginia.

They have a farm, he has an outbuilding on that farm that they renovated for him to write. No internet connection there. First thing in the day, three hours. He basically writes till lunchtime. Five days a week, not on the weekends. That rhythm has him finish the first draft, usually by March.

The editing begins. He wants to have the manuscript completely locked in by July. Starts in January, six months later, done with the manuscript. Now that's it for writing until the next January. Now he'll think and do research about what his next book is gonna do at his own pace.

He will do, clearly, publicity. He usually does fall releases. So when that book comes out in the fall, he'll do publicity, but he's not a big publicity guy. He does limited tours. He'll do the big shows and interviews and then retreats again back to his farm. And that's kind of it.

He doesn't do these other projects. He doesn't wanna direct. He doesn't wanna do 17 different types of books like Crichton was doing. He wasn't trying to establish a production company or get involved in television. They would sell the movie rights to his books, but that was about it. 15 hours a week, six months out of the year.

The rest of his energy goes to other things. When he had younger kids, he was really into Little League baseball. And so he built, it's not officially associated with Little League, but a youth baseball complex. Five really great fields. They started their own youth baseball league. He was the commissioner of the league.

He loves baseball. He loves coaching. He thinks it's great for kids. I know he's heavily involved in political fundraising as well. He just has other stuff that he does. So I found an article and I can't excavate this anymore, but I remember finding this and reading this. And I wrote about this somewhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I read that profile of Crichton, it stressed me out, made me anxious. So I think I resonate more times Grisham-y. Now it looks like I'm doing a lot and partially that's true. I'm probably a little bit more into Crichton spectrum than where I need to end up, but partly it's an illusion because I do things sequentially.

I work on things a little bit at a time. This is classic slow productivity, a little bit of time, but with great focus, do that long enough and things begin to pile up, but I'm not necessarily working on all those things at the same time. I think the podcast, newsletter, video portion of my empire makes my activity seem really multiplied, but as Jesse will attest, this is a half day venture for me.

So the way I see all of this, like what you're hearing right now is unlike Grisham, I'm a web 2.0 guy. I grew up with the internet. So I do like to be able to connect directly with my readers and listeners. To me, that's really important, but I keep it confined.

And so I just have a burst each week of let's do a bunch of stuff to connect with our readers, but it's confined. It's not a lot of ongoing projects that are eating up a lot of my time throughout the week. So if you put that aside, it's basically writing in CS.

And if I had to pick an ideal, where would I be when I sell 7 million copies of "The Firm" or whatever my equivalent is, honestly, to me, an ideal would be I'm always writing, I'm always thinking sequentially though, one thing at a time, I'm finishing this book chapter, then I'm writing this New Yorker piece, then I'm writing this academic article, then I'm writing a couple more book chapters with a half day every week where we do this nonsense so that I'm not just living in a cave.

To me, that would be great. I'd be happy with that. I don't need to be directing or whatever the equivalent is of all of Crichton's business. So anyways, type one, type two, know where you are, use that knowledge to help direct how you approach both your ambitions and your successes.

And I think it'll make people a lot happier. - Do you think Crichton's still like that? - Well, he's dead. So he's the ultimate. - Oh, right. I was thinking, yeah. - Yeah, so Crichton died in '08 maybe, cancer. Yeah, he's older. By the way, I'm always surprised by how old he was.

Well, we talked about this before on the show, but you read his first book under his own name, "The Adronoma Strain," which again, reads so modern. You think this book was from the '90s. And yet in the book, no one's landed on the moon yet. So that's a long career.

So when he first started writing these things, there were no personal computers. We hadn't landed on the moon yet, because he was born in 1942. - Yeah, I was getting confused with Moneyball. - Oh, Michael Lewis. - Yeah. - Yeah. Yeah, I wonder what his deal is. So he has a podcast with his buddy, Gladwell's Network.

He writes, usually he's always working on a book. I thought he had one of these sort of visiting, like professorship things at Tulane for a while. I mean, I know that's what Isaacson's doing. I think Meacham is doing that. A lot of these writers, like these sort of, that generation came out of magazines, now they're in their 60s, Pulitzer-winning writers.

A lot of them have these positions at universities. But yeah, I think Lewis is a good example. I think he's just like, "I just wanna write." - Yeah, I know both. The whole time I was just thinking about Lewis for some reason, I don't know why. - Yeah, why don't you go down that rabbit hole too?

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