So as I'm recording this episode, it's August, which means if you ask me, this is the right time to start thinking about any major changes you want to make in your life. Now I know culturally speaking, January 1st is when people like to think about making changes. That's new year resolution season.

I think that's nonsense. Fall is the right time to make changes. Why? Because summer is a natural break point. It is quieter for almost anyone, school is out, offices are less crowded as people are on vacation, the intensity of work dies down, it's a perfect sort of break between one year and the next.

So I always think late summer is when you begin to gear up for changes to make in fall because fall really is, as far as I'm concerned, the functional start of the new year. All right, so here's the problem that I hear from a lot of you, my listeners, is that even if you have this sense, you are unhappy with your situation right now, you're mired in digital distraction, you're numbed with digital diversions, you know you want more out of your life.

The hard part is figuring out what is it that I want to get towards? What are the changes I actually want to do? I can't pursue a target that I can't see. So this is what I want to talk about today, take a break from our typical discussions of technology and distraction and focus, and instead cover a key skill for clarifying what it is exactly that you really want in your life.

Look, it's hard to fight back against high-tech distraction when you don't know what it is you're fighting for instead, when you don't know what it is you're losing, the vision of the life you want that this is getting in the way. So let's get in the weeds today and talk about how do you figure out what you want your life to actually be like.

All right, first things first, we have to do some preliminaries here, cover some ground that we briefly covered before. Let's remind ourselves of my main strategy I pitch on this show, the main strategy I pitch for pursuing a deep life. The strategy says you should be wary of simply going after a singular grand goal.

This is what most people's instinct is, they say, let me just have some romantic goal that I'm going to pursue and that will fix everything. So we're talking about like, I will finally find quiet if I can just figure out how to move to the coast of Maine, or if I could just get ripped, like everything else would be good.

Or if I could just get to the equity partner level at this law firm, then I would be made, then I would be happy. This is the grand goal approach to shaping your life. It's popular because it's easy, right? You just kind of come across an idea. Typically the ideas people pursue for their grand goals come from a relatively limited pool of like kind of obvious things you hear people talk about or hear about online.

So it's easy just to pick up on one of these. They're good inspiration engines. You can daydream being on that coast of Maine. You can daydream having that promotion. And every time you daydream it, you get a little bit of inspiration. You feel good. And it's simple in terms of technically, how do I pursue this?

Because you just have one thing you have to go over. So you're like, let me just get after this, right? So that's the grand goal approach is what most people do. As I've talked about before on the show, just pursuing a grand goal tends not to be too effective.

They only impact one area of your life. Whereas there's usually many aspects of your life that come together to form your subjective day-to-day experience. And so just fixing this one aspect of your life doesn't change the other parts. So it's not going to deliver as much satisfaction as you think.

If anything, you sometimes have the reverse problem where in pursuing a goal that's relevant to one part of your life, it actually steps on other parts and makes those worse. To get the equity partner promotion, the time you're able to spend at home with your family, the connection you're able to have to your community, the time you're able to spend exposing yourselves to interesting ideas, all of that gets trampled on and you end up even worse than you were before.

And of course, big accomplishments don't tend on their own to actually make your life better. As many people have found, I'm sure there are right now quite a few recent gold medal winners over there in the Paris Olympics that talked to them in three months and they're going to be suffering from a bit of a letdown depression.

All right. So what do we talk about on the show as the alternative lifestyle-centric planning? Work backwards from a more general master narrative of what you want your life to be like. This is something that should be more general than specific jobs, accomplishments, but focus more on the properties of this ideal life.

And so what we're going to get into today is going to be how do you come up with these master narratives? First however, by popular demand, I wrote up some examples. So people who hear the lifestyle-centric planning approach say, "What do you mean by master narratives? I wrote up three examples." So let's actually start with that.

I'm going to read through three sample master narratives. These are ideal lifestyle visions towards which you could imagine someone working backwards from to make their life deeper. I want to give you a sense of what these sound like and the variety that's inherent. Okay? All right. Here we go.

And notice, these are all going to be in first person. I think writing these narratively first person is a good way to do it. All right. Example number one. I live somewhere quiet in the country, a pastoral view from my porch where I can read as the sun dips.

I work from home in a renovated barn, which also features a wood shop. I'm my own boss. I'm very good at what I do, but only work roughly three to four hour days to earn enough to live comfortably where we are and travel somewhere interesting once a year. I'm done with work by the time kids are home from school.

I spend copious time in the afternoons working on projects and reading. Maybe I have a more serious creative side hustle that I'm systematically nurturing. I'm thickly connected to the local community. It's rare that more than a few days go by without someone stopping by to visit. It's a master narrative of a lifestyle vision.

I'm not saying in this narrative, I live in this town and here is my job. But you get the sense that the rhythm of the days, what work is like, what your time is like, family, hobbies, physically, aesthetically, what you see. Okay. Here's an example. Number two of one of these narratives.

I live in a major city in a loft. I'm an artist and living among other artists. I'm part of a cutting edge scene. I go to interesting places. I know interesting people. Days are hectic, but also inspired. We're all pushing each other to create ever more impressive art. Also a master narrative first person, not super specific.

Like I live in exactly this city does exactly this type of art, but it gives you a sense a different kind of rhythm to life. All right. Example number three. I'm living out my own childhood, quaint house in a quaint town. My kids walk to the local school in the summer.

We send them outside to entertain themselves. They bike to the pool, whereas teenagers, they will have lifeguarding jobs. I work a lifestyle job, normal hours out of a home office, but plenty of time left for family and hobbies. The neighborhood social life is rich. All right. So these are all three evocative first person narratives of a lifestyle you can imagine yourself in.

That's why they're first person and descriptive. You place yourself in that described lifestyle and it resonates. Okay. These are kind of the properties I'm looking for in my lifestyle. Working towards a more general lifestyle vision gives you way more options than working towards a grand goal because there's a lot more flexibility.

You have many more options on the table for how you take the career capital you have here and let me change my job here and I'll move here. We can do this. And you see the way these pieces all fit together and opportunities, pursuits of these strategies for pursuit emerge that you may have never come up with before.

And it really gives you so many different ways to navigate your obstacles and opportunities to get closer and closer to these lifestyles. Is this more effective way of finding depth than simply saying, if I can make it to Maine, I'll be happy. Okay. So now we get to the today's topic.

How do you figure out what to put in those narratives? I mean, I had this conversation just yesterday with a friend of mine and they were talking about the difficulty of what goes into this narrative. So I want to give you a specific technique here. This is something that I've more or less been doing for 20 years, but only now, as I'm working on my book about the deep life, am I trying to actually work through the details and the motivations and the contours of the strategy.

I call it structured journaling, all right, here's how it works. You keep with you at most times, a small notebook, something that could be in your bag or maybe even in your pocket. There's two things, two brands I recommend that you can choose your own adventure. Some people like to use field note notebooks.

These are very skinny. So it's just a thick paper cover and maybe about 30 pages. These can fit in a pocket. So they can fit into like a normal shorts or jeans pocket. I use the small size Moleskine journals. I use the line paper Moleskine journals. That brand I started using in 2004.

So at my 20 year anniversary of using typically the black oil skin, black elastic closure, standard small size lined Moleskine notebooks, I've been using those for basically my entire adult life. A little big for a pocket, but easy to fit into a bag. I clip my pin to the elastic enclosure.

The pin is just clipped on there and then the pin is always with the Moleskine. So you want to have with you some sort of small notebook at most times. All right, now here's what you do. Anytime something you encounter resonates with you. By resonates, I mean there's something about what you're encountering where if you imagine yourself in a similar situation, that seems very appealing to you.

So lifestyle resonance. You make a note about it in your notebook, right? So this might be something you read about. It might be something you see in a movie or a TV show or a documentary. It might be something about someone you meet, their setup, their lifestyle, or just the way they are.

It could be a situation or a setup in like a novel you're reading, or maybe it's a place you visit on vacation or on a business trip, or maybe just a random thought that emerges. But these things that resonate, you write it down. Hey, this thing really captured my attention.

This seems really cool to me. I wonder if I have a lot of notes like these in my Moleskine. It's poised as a question. Why am I so attracted to this town that we just visited? Something about this is really capturing my attention. Something about this guy I saw in this documentary, like what is it about their life that's really, this has really captured my attention.

Here's the things in particular that seem appealing, I don't even really know what to do with this. So you're capturing resonance in your notebook. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos. You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're going to like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. Next, roughly once a month, create a new list of values and properties that seem to matter to you based on the stuff you've been writing down.

So you're distilling. About once a month, you're distilling. Okay. So here's the things I think I care about, what I'm looking for in my work and life. So this is where you process what you've been writing down. You look for patterns. Hey, these three examples all seem to involve quiet.

They all seem to involve mastery. They all seem to involve people that are highly respected and doing creative output, or they all involve people who have a lot of time outside and a lot of flexibility. You begin to sort of distill what you've been writing down and refine it to like, I think these are the things I care about.

Now, of course, if you're doing this every month, you'll have the prior list from about a month or so ago, and your new list might not be that much different, but it's going to take into account your reflection since the last month and the new things that have caught your attention and have resonated with you.

Now this month to month rhythm is not necessarily something you're going to do throughout your whole life, but certainly during periods of searching or transition, you should be pretty disciplined about this. I was very disciplined about this, both early in my grad school experience, like as soon as I was an adult for the first time living on my own, and later in my grad school experience as I was trying to figure out like what was going to happen to my life once I left schooling, I was very methodical with these things.

I have a lot of sense memories of sitting in various places and working on these lists. All right, so you keep doing this, right, kind of in the background, always writing down things that resonate on a regular basis, distilling it again and again. Here's the list of, and I call it values and properties, so I behave this way, I want these things in my life.

You're distilling this again and again. When your notebook fills, you buy a new notebook, and all you copy into the new notebook is your very last list of values and properties, and you keep going from there, making more notes about stuff that resonates and updating that list as you go on.

Now one thing you might do here is, as I mentioned, during some parts of your life, you might be doing this more regularly than other parts of your life. A good steady state discipline here, so like maybe you're not in a period of transition. Instead of completely abandoning this strategy, you might just maintain a certain time of year where you do this more frequently for a few months, and then other times of the year, maybe you're not.

So like you have a period each year, even when you're relatively set in what you're doing, you're not looking for major changes, that you're still checking in on this, and maybe you're not doing it all the time, but you're doing it for a set time each year. You could tie this to your birthday, that's something I've talked about.

I think the fall is good. You know who actually has a really good schedule and way of thinking about this is actually the Jewish religion. So this podcast is coming out on the 9th of Av, which is the beginning for the Jewish tradition of this period of introspection and teshuvah and sort of self-development that lasts through what's called the Days of Av, but from the 9th of Av through Rosh Hashanah, the Yom Kippur, and then ending this year somewhere in October with Sukkot.

But it's like a dedicated period of like two months or so each year, in which it's all about getting acquainted with what's important with life. Life is short, where are you falling short? Where can you get better? And it's like a set period where Jews really think about this, and you reflect and make changes and try to come to grips and remember what's important, and then you have the rest of the year.

So I kind of like that, to have a few months each year, even when you're in a steady state, where you're really going through this exercise a lot, to kind of refresh. And then during periods of big change, you might be doing this month after month while you're really trying to get a grip on things.

So structured journaling. Over time, you get a better and better understanding of what it is that matters to you. That can then become what you build your master narrative around. The only other key caveat I'm going to give is this is supposed to change. I think people get paralyzed sometimes thinking, "How can I figure out now at 24 what I want my life to be like when I'm 54?" And the answer is, of course you can't.

But you're not really doing that with your master narrative. You're figuring out at most the decade ahead of you. Like early in your 20s, you're figuring out your 20s. Early in your 30s, you're figuring out your 30s. Early in your 40s, you're figuring out your 40s. Of course, this will morph over time as your life circumstances change, as your opportunities and obstacles change.

That's fine. So let's take the pressure off. What you want is to have a working understanding of what matters to you and have a master narrative you're working backwards from that reflects more or less where that is right now. And expect for that to change majorly as your life goes on.

That's not a big deal. So don't be paralyzed by trying to get this perfect. But structured journaling is a great way in because you're leveraging your sort of internal mechanisms for discerning things of value. That sense of resonance is something deeper within you saying, "There's something here that matters to me." You're leveraging and clarifying these internal intimations of what matters to you.

Over time, that vision is going to get stronger and clearer. That master narrative is going to get more and more compelling. Forget the grand goals or the radical impromptu changes that you lose your energy for. You are going to have a target for your life that really is going to sing.

And those are the targets that it's easy to keep your eyes focused on. So there you go. Structured journaling. Buy those notebooks. Buy your Moleskine. Late summer is the right time to do this. I have my right here. Let's see what we got. All right. So let's look. So Jesse has a leather-covered.

Is that Moleskine? Which brand is this? The book is Moleskine, but the holder I got on Amazon. Oh, interesting. So you have more of like the field note style Moleskine. I like those as well. The holder is fantastic. A listener sent me, man, I wish I remembered the name.

They sent me a link to a company that sells exactly this. Like a very nice leather cover plus a notebook inside. And they hand-stitched the leather. Everything is handmade. Each one looks different or whatever. And the notebooks, everything is sort of hand-constructed. They're kind of ridiculously expensive, but there's this sense of like you're really signaling to yourself the importance.

I like the cover because you can put your pen in there. Yeah. It was cheap too. It was like under $10 on Amazon. Yeah. That's awesome. All right. So Jesse and I have ours. You need yours. You need your values document. Yes. So over time, your values document, the values piece of what you're reflecting on, that's what you're modifying.

And then the properties go into your master narrative. So we haven't talked about the values document as much recently, but it's part of my sort of core system philosophy of having your, what are your core documents for everything you're doing with your systems? And here are my values, like the things I care about, my code, that's really critical.

My Moleskine structured journaling is how I worked on that. So that's why I say values and properties. So the values help your values document, but you know what? They also end up influencing, I've discovered, the properties. Like the stuff, like this is what I want in my, the properties I want for my life.

They get really influenced by the things you value in your life. And so it's really useful to be keeping these things side by side. It's what prevents like your properties from just being like, I want to be able to swim in a vault full of money, like Scrooge McDuck, you know, and it's just like cocaine on hookers.

Like let's roll. Right. Like it, it, it kind of grounds the, it grounds the properties basically in a way. Properties are the, what you listed in the examples, right? Yeah. So those narratives are kind of built on the properties, but they're so grounded in the values that it's kind of hard to pull those two things apart, but you really should.

That's what you should be aiming for is you should have your master narrative for the next decade that you're, now you have a target for what you're thinking about, which is how do I get closer to this narrative? And that is a completely different objective than trying to come up with like a grand goal that's going to change your life.

It's very strategic. Sometimes it's tactical. Even it's these little small changes and this aspect of your job and what you're doing here. And I'm going to cut back on this. I'm going to move this here and I'm going to, we're going to, we're going to shift to this house over here.

We're going to start going to this, this school instead of that, like the changes can be small and strategic and tactical sometimes when you're pursuing one of these narratives. It's just like a very different feel than just trying to find like the thing that's going to change everything. I mean, I'm working through a lot of this now.

I'm in the early stages of this deep light book. I mean, I'm still in part one, which is like get your act together. And within part one, I'm still in get more discipline. So like I'm at like the very beginning of this thinking. So it's not even until you get to part two that you get into things like structured journaling and trying to figure out your narrative.

And it's not until part three that you're going to really get to in that book. All right. Now, how do you work backwards from these? Like, how do you strategically pursue these master narratives? Are there three parts to the book? That's the idea right now. Yeah. Probably this first part to get your act together is going to be the longest.

I think it's going to be of standalone value probably as well. You know, it kind of captures a lot of stuff we figured out here since my last books. I mean, it's, this is where you're systematically becoming more disciplined, you're getting your act together, you're getting organized and control over your time and attention.

You're quieting your mind, you're, you're, you're just some digital minimalism in here, right? Like it's just not you and your phone and constant distraction. You're comfortable with your own mind and with your own thoughts and are keeping track of what matters to you and not, and are able to discern what's important.

Like you come out of that first part ready to change your life, but your life will be changed to some degree when it's done. Now you're like super capable as like Jocko calls it, the eminently qualified human, you'll be an eminently qualified human. And then you can aim that towards like, great, now let's, now let's get after changing our life.

At least that's the idea right now, but it might change. All right. So we've got our questions coming up all kind of deal with some of these more heady questions, but first take a moment to hear from one of our sponsors. I want to talk in particularly in particular, rather by one of our, about one of our longest running sponsors here on the deep questions podcast.

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That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/podcast. Easier said, done. I also want to talk about our longtime friends at Roan. In particular, I want to talk about their commuter collection. Here's the thing. Men's closets were due for a radical reinvention and Roan stepped up to that challenge. Roan's commuter collection is the most comfortable, breathable, and flexible set of products known to man.

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That's 20% off your entire order. When you head to rhone.com/cal and use that code CAL, it's time to find your corner office comfort. All right, Jesse, let's get some questions. All right. First question is from Adam. I'm curious about Cal's thoughts on goal planning notebooks and systems. I use the Best Self Journal.

The premise is to set 13-week goals because they're just enough of a stretch to be challenging and move the needle, but not so large as to be ambiguous. I always find myself super excited about getting a new one and setting my 13-week goal, but find myself tapering out after about three to four weeks.

What do you think of this? Well, I think of specific goal-setting systems like Best Self Journal, I think of them like a particular exercise or a particular piece of exercise equipment, right? They're useful. They're a way to work on a particular muscle. They can also just help you enter into the mindset of now I'm someone who exercises, but we would rarely say this is the only exercise you ever need to do.

This is the only piece of exercise equipment you ever need to use. So that's the way I think about these systems is like they're great to get you motivated about goals. They're great for helping you pursue the specific type of goal that the system is curated for. But no one system like this on its own is probably going to be enough to get you through the myriad variety of challenges and goals and difficulties you're going to face as you go through life, right?

Some goals are going to require more time than these systems are tuned for. Some are going to require less. Some of them, what you really need is to do a lot more work on the front end before you even pursue it in the first place. You need to better understand what you're pursuing.

Other goals, it's the issue is not the plan, but you don't have the discipline for it. So what you really need to do is work on your discipline first or work up to it on a ladder. Pursuing goals is complicated. You know, I'm working on a whole book that's kind of about this, like all the goals and the goal of having a better life, what's involved in this, and it's complicated.

So use these systems strategically. Use the systems that resonate with you. Do not think that any one of these systems is all you need to do to pursue goals in your life. Respect the complexity of actually trying to do things, right? So don't be, in other words, don't be upset if, hey, sometimes this worked, but sometimes it's not working for me.

That's great. None of these systems are supposed to cover everything. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Alvin. I heard you on the James Altucher's podcast. Can you elaborate if there are any additional things you've learned that aren't in your books on how students can cultivate a deep life?

Nice pronunciation. I always mess that up. Did I do it right? I think you did it right. Altucher. I was like, I did it right. I thought I did it wrong. I sometimes say Altchuler, which is wrong. I think Altucher is right. I love James. I've been going on James's, God, I've been going on his, but we talked about it when I was on his show for the Slow Productivity.

I've been going on his show for a long time. I mean, I think like 10 years or something like that, like early day podcasting. I need to listen to him more. Yeah. He's an interesting guy. Yeah. He's good at chess. Okay. So what's this? So what should I add about how students can cultivate a deep life?

All right. I used to write about this a lot. I'll been on my blog before it was even a newsletter on my blog at calnewport.com/blog back in like 2007, 2008 into 2009. If you go back into the archives, if you go to calnewport.com, click on essays, see the archives link.

I was talking a lot about how students can cultivate deep lives. I didn't use the terminology deep life, but I had these methodologies that I was developing for students to try to make the undergraduate experience meaningful and deep and interesting and sustainable while also making sure that they were opening up really interesting opportunities after graduation.

Because this is the world I was in. I came from an Ivy league school right to MIT. I was surrounded by high achieving elite students and so many of them were burning out. And I thought this was a waste. Like college is cool. Grad school is cool. This could be a fantastic period of your life, especially if you're intellectually precocious.

This is like a fantastic period of your life and why waste it burning out. And they've sort of just told themselves, like, I don't know if I grind, it's just going to maximize my opportunities. I don't want to waste this. I want to make sure like whatever job or grad school I want to do is available, but they didn't really understand even how the job market worked or how the grad school admissions process worked.

It was sort of generically trying to transmute pain and difficulty into accomplishment. It was sort of masochistic in some sense. Like this is how, if I'm not hurting, I'm not living up to my potential. If I'm not hurting, I'm somehow wasting this opportunity that I was given by getting into this school.

And that didn't sit well with me. So I wrote a lot about this. If you go back to those archives, you'll find first me talking about a methodology I called the Zen valedictorian. And this is where I began to write about how to do really well academically in school, why this didn't mean you should grind.

And in particular, I lasered in on what are the real sources of stress and overload and burnout for college students. And it's not the hardness of the hardest courses they take. It's their schedules are too crowded typically, too many hard courses, too many students trying to do two or three majors, trying to say, what's like the maximum number of courses that I can actually fit into a schedule at once?

I call them heart attack semesters. Like that was the problem. Too many activities, too many courses, and no one cares about this. There is no college admissions officer in your future when you're an undergrad who is going to look at the difficulty of your transcript. There's no one who's going to say, oh my God, you're in four clubs and double majoring and you're taking three hard science courses at the same time.

I'm so impressed. No one cares. The job recruiter says, where did you go to college? What'd you major? What's your GPA? And then they're on to doing their specific interview test. They don't care how hard your semesters were. I have been on many grad school admissions committee. We do not go through and try to understand how much pain you went through to get through your schedule.

We say, where'd you go to college? What grades did you get in the classes we care about? Do your reference letters say you're sharp? Right? So a lot of the Zinn Valedictorian was saying, look, you guys have all this unnecessary stress by making your schedules too hard and then having really bad study habits.

That then evolved to a second methodology called the romantic scholar. Just Google calnewport.com romantic scholar, you'll find these articles. Romantic scholar then got into more of not just how to avoid burnout, but now how to seek meaning, how to seek meaning in what you're doing in college, how to make it a positive thing.

So Zinn Valedictorian, how to do well without burning out. Romantic scholar, how to do well and like love the experience of being a student. So here's where I began talking about, okay, you simplify your schedule. You invest psychologically in what you're studying, which means you read books and go to talks related to your field of study that have no connection to any class or grades.

Like you begin telling yourself the story, intellect, academic computer science, academic philosophy, academic government. Like I'm really interested in this and the people and I'm aspirationally hearing these scholars who are coming to give talks and I'm reading books on the topic and I really like this. So I talk about the romantic scholar about changing where you study, make it more adventurous or aesthetic or interesting.

So studying itself becomes this something you look forward to. I was in grad school, but I was like, if you're an upperclassman, I had this article called Heidegger and Hefeweizen. You go to like the pub where there's a fireplace and that's where you read your philosophy textbook in the same way that the Oxford Dons would have done a hundred years earlier over in England.

You go hiking into the woods, I posted these pictures of people studying philosophy by waterfalls or the astronomy student who would sneak onto the roof of the astronomy building so she could see the stars when she was reading it. So you try to make this, you slow down, you connect to the subject matter, you lean into the subject matter, you get pretentious and interesting and annoying to everyone else around you who's not in college and it's fantastic when you're young.

And so anyways, there's a whole series about specifically how to live a deep life in college. Here's a little insider information, a little like Cal Newport trivia. I wanted to write a book about this back in like 2008 and I was going to call it the Zen Valedictorian and I wanted to write this book about the deep life at college.

My publisher was like, that's too narrow and like we can't use the word Zen, that's like really overplayed. And that's what actually morphed into my third book, which is sort of the least known in my catalog, the one of the more interesting books I've ever written. It's called How to Become a High School Superstar.

We kind of turned all this attention instead to like, okay, well what about if you're in high school, how do you do this? Like get into a good college without stressing out. This was a really big deal back then. It's a big deal again right now, but it was a big deal back then.

And that book kind of became more narrow and instructive, but I always had, and it's a cool book because you should read that book by the way, even if you're not a high school student. It's called How Come Gladwell Meets A for Admissions. It's a fantastic, weird, wonderful book.

But that was my original idea that they talked me out of, was the deep life at college. So maybe I should go back and write that someday. But anyways, thanks Albin. Google calnewport.com romantic scholar, calnewport.com Zen of Electorian and read basically all of that high school superstar book because a lot of the DNA of these ideas that I formed thinking about college students made it into that book.

So there's traces of these top, this topic all throughout my, my deep back catalog. That's cool stuff. It's in valedictorian. I like that phrase. I used to think of speeches about this at colleges, like how not to stress out. Those were the days. I guess, I mean, call students, I guess they're still stressed out.

Um, it became a big, it was a big problem back then. Like our generation was like super stressed out and I felt somewhat new. Yeah. They're probably still stressed out. They are. They're also on their phones a lot too. It's a different type of thing. All right. Let's see.

Who'd we got next? All right. Next question's from Tucker. I always thought I would go to law school after college. However, after looking at the demands of corporate lawyers, I shifted my undergrad focus to philosophy. The goal was to get my PhD and then an academic job. Next I learned the slim chance of actually getting that type of job.

So then I took the L stats and did very well. How can I pursue a deep life with these two different paths? All right. Great question. Because we got to go back and do a little exercise in lifestyle centric planning. Let's put aside now the paths. So I think what you're doing here, this is sort of grand goal thinking is very common.

Like do I want to be a philosopher or do I want to be a lawyer? Now your goal is not a particular job. Your goal is to live as close as possible to your ideal lifestyle. Lifestyle centric career plan is what you need to do. So what you need to figure out, and this will be a great time to do some structured journaling to help this.

What you need to figure out is what is my master narrative for what I want my life to be like in my twenties, especially like in my late twenties. So if I can look ahead to after whatever training I do is actually over, what attributes do I want of that life?

You need a narrative like one of the ones I wrote before. Again, this is a narrative for your twenties. It doesn't have to be the narrative that you have to stick to for the rest of your life. Then you work backwards and say, okay, what are my different options for getting there?

And this is where you can confront the reality of your opportunities and obstacles. This is where in this type of planning, you can say, look, I did well on my LSAT, so there's an opportunity here where I could go to one of these good law schools and scholarship and I could avoid getting too much debt and it would open up these type of positions.

Of the different positions this might open up, here's a particular type of position that I've sort of researched and knows exist that would actually be a fantastic step towards this ideal lifestyle vision I have. You're working backwards from the vision. Or maybe like actually this philosophy track, now I'm kind of figuring it out.

This vision I have really is going to be best fulfilled if I could be like a philosophy professor and okay, now I need to really figure out how reasonable is that? How hard is it to do this? Well, okay, I don't need to be a philosophy professor at Rutgers, which a lot of people don't know actually, Jesse, is like one of the number one programs.

You want to guess it? Really? Rutgers, yes. If you hear someone say, I'm a philosophy PhD from Rutgers, that's a little bit of swagger going on right there. It's like someone saying, I got my computer science doctorate from MIT. They're kind of like doing a little swagger. Not that I've ever actually seen a computer science student from MIT actually swagger.

I don't think we know how. I think if we swaggered, we would accidentally crack our glasses and pull a muscle. Ow, my goodness. We don't swagger, we don't swagger. Anyways, so then maybe when you're doing this exercise, like, no, no, no, if I could, what I want, I want to be like a tenure line philosophy professor, but it can be at like a tier two liberal arts school, but in a college town.

This makes this whole vision work. And then again, you can work the math there. All right, do I have the grades? What type of grad school could I get into? What would it take to sort of stand out enough in that grad school to get one of these positions?

Like, now you have specificity that you can deploy on your site. And that's how you come to your answer to this question. If you don't do this, then what you're doing instead is just like pursuing a grand goal and hoping it works out. And this is where you get into trouble, right?

With law, man, so many people get in trouble this way. They say, I don't know, I'm smart. Law school is kind of hard. I did well on my LSAT. It's kind of impressive to get into a hard law school, and I don't know what else to do, but they're not thinking through the ideal lifestyle they want.

So then they get to law school and like, well, what's the impressive thing to do here? Well, they make it on law review and you make it on law review. Like, that was impressive. I'm proud of myself. Like, what's the next more impressive thing? Well, these top firms in the big cities, these are, you know, I got one of the internships.

Those are hard to get. I feel really good about myself. Oh, now this firm is offering me a position. These are hard to get. I'm getting paid well. This is great. And then six years later, like, oh my God, I'm miserable. All I do is work all the time.

I don't like working all the time. Like it's, this is, what am I doing here? Because you never had in your mind fixed, this is the lifestyle I'm heading towards. You're just working forwards towards what's interesting or impressive. Same thing happens with a lot of academics, like, I don't know, maybe I want to be a professor.

That's hard. And you don't take in the reality of what's life like a professor like, but also the type of professorship you want. How easy or hard is that to get? I mean, I mentioned Rutgers because I was, you know, on a hiring committee. We hired a philosopher. He's fantastic at Georgetown.

He's has his doctorate from Rutgers. It's just like a superstar. And it's like, that's just to like get a philosophy role at Georgetown. It was like, you have to be a superstar. I think he was at Harvard and then Rutgers and is in like a hot area, you know, it's like you, they don't, you don't confront that reality.

You're just like, I don't know, I'm going to grad school. It should be fine. And then, you know, that all fizzles. So work backwards, get that lifestyle image really clear. And then start saying, is there a path through law to this lifestyle? What would it be? Is there a path to this lifestyle through philosophy?

What would that be? Maybe you end up like you really like philosophy, but you find this path through law where you're low debt and you take this, you're like an estate will lawyer on like the Cape Ann, north of Boston. And you have a shingle up and you've kind of worked out like I could do X amount of income pretty flexibly and it's not too stressful.

And I could foster this interest in philosophy and actually I'm going to systematically build up my ability to write books on this and going to be like a popularizer of this. And you could, you might build this like fantastic life where you're, you know, you're living in Rockport and you jog on the beach and yeah, you have like this, this sort of like flexible work that like pays enough for you to get by while you work on these books.

And it's this like really interesting lifestyle, but none of these solutions come up with grand goal thinking. They only come up when you do lifestyle centric planning. So you're in a fantastic position to apply this. You're going to come up with a lot of cool options, but I can't tell you what the right one is until you've actually done this exercise.

All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Suresh, I've optimized my workflow to the point where I can complete all my weekly work tasks in a single day. Working remotely. This leaves me with a lot of free time, which no one seems to have noticed. Moreover, my bosses have been so impressed with my work that I've been promoted and received a raise.

Is it unethical to pursue other creative ventures on the side while I'm still on the clock? So cool. I mean, that is like the apotheosis of the stuff we talk about with digital knowledge work is that they're in a lot of these jobs. There's so much nonsense and so much just like communication and meetings that if you're really organized, the actual work itself doesn't take that much time.

And this is an extreme. I love this one day a week. She's done one day a week. That's it. Right. Uh, and no one notices. That's the thing I love. No one notices that four days a week, uh, I'm not actually, I'm not actually working. Um, this is, this is possible now in this age of remote work that it was like, not as possible before.

I mean, this is why Tim Ferris has booked a four hour work week, which was basically pitching this. Like, how do you get what Suresh has? Step one in that book was like, you have to figure out how to get a remote work agreement because you know, if people see you not there, they know you're not working.

All right. Is it unethical? I say no. If you have a contract that specifies the days and hours that you are supposed to be working, what matters is, are you, uh, satisfactorily producing the work that they expect you to produce? Are they happy with what you're producing, right? If they are, you are sort of satisfying your implicit contract there.

If they're unhappy with what you're producing, uh, then they'll let you know. And then if you have to work more time to do that, then you do. I am completely fine with this idea. Uh, knowledge work is very autonomous. It's not a time card job. It's like, we want you to be doing enough stuff and be useful enough to us in a sort of generic way.

And if you are, you are so for the sake of the rest of us who are jealous, please take full advantage of this situation, right? Do something cool with these other four days. And what that cool thing is depends on your master narrative for your lifestyle centric planning. It could be something that is very non-professional and it could be some fantastic project you're involved in or some really cool thing you do with like where you live or some hobby or you get into like some sort of like crazy shape.

And I don't know, like that would be really cool. It could be a fantastic professional thing that, you know, like you become a genre novelist or start this side hustle business. I don't know why you would start another business, by the way, when you're making a good living working one day a week with no stress, but you know, whatever, do something really cool with this opportunity.

And the best way to figure out what that cool thing is, is to have a great master narrative. You can make aggressive steps towards an ideal lifestyle vision when you're completely comfortable financially and have four days a week free. So that's really cool. Good for Suresh. And I guess I kind of do that to some degree.

My problem is I just get other jobs. I just take one of these jobs and work one day a week, but instead I do other jobs. All right. What do we got next? I added an additional question because I was actually curious about this too, so I love it.

All right. An unprepared question. All right. Well, no, it's we have six questions today. That's what I was getting at. Oh, I see. Five. Excellent. My question is, I was listening to your recap of July books in episode 312. How do you keep track of the books you want to read?

At five books a month, I would imagine your reading list is quite long. I don't overthink it. I don't overthink it. I'm exposed to a lot of books. I love books. I will often like randomly buy a book, even if I'm not going to read it right away. Like this book was cool.

Let me buy it. Just off Amazon or at people's books here or at Politics with Pros, wherever I am. So I'll just have kind of stacks of books like, "Oh, I think I want to read these one day." But I have no formal list. I don't have some formal order.

I don't overthink it. And it's because a big part of my method for reading five books is love what you're reading. It's like, what mood am I? I finished this book. I want to add another book to my rotation. I don't know. What am I in the mood for right now?

And I like, I ride that interest. I'm really thinking about this. Great. Let me grab a book like this one. I'm so excited about it and read it over the next few days. So I have no list and I have no system for how I do it. And books come into my life and they leave my life and they come back into my life.

My, uh, my oldest, Jesse stole the book. You got me. So now I'm waiting. Baseball one? Yeah. Oh, that's cool. He's because he, you know, he likes baseball and, uh, on vacation he was, whatever it was, having trouble sleeping or something, or he was reading, I guess he was reading a book.

So he's, he's reading the James Corey expanse sci-fi novels, which get kind of, um, scary, I guess. Right. And it's like this solar system devouring virus. And it's like, I don't know, I don't really understand it, but it's kind of apocalyptic or whatever. And it was like getting them fired up before bed, read it before bed.

And I was like, no, no, no. You got to read something that is interesting, right. But doesn't like get you worked up about anything. That's what you have to read right before bed. And so I had brought the baseball book to read. He, he stole that from me because like the history of New York city and baseball, like sports journalism is like fantastic for that.

Like, it's really interesting. Uh, but it's historical. And you know, baseball is like, it's calming as soon as he's working through it. So I have to wait for him to finish because like me, he'll read two or three books at a time. So I have to steal it back from him.

That was a suggestion from that dog, so we can thank him. I recommended it to someone the other day, by the way, and they're excited, they're excited about it. Longtime Mets fan, longtime New York's baseball fan. Uh, anyway, so back to the list though. Um, so don't overthink it, right.

Reading should be non-professional reading. You should be reading for the joy of it, you know? And so I've just, that's why my reading list are so weird. I read rant, it's like, I'm just in the mood for something and I'll read it or I'll go on like a long riff of like, I'm reading a bunch of like rabbi's books now, or now I'm reading like a fantasy science fiction book.

And now I'm reading a book about the ocean. Um, if you don't love what you're reading, it's hard to keep up with it. And I'm just a big believer is like reading is better than non-reading it's you get more familiar with your mind, your mind gets more familiar with you, your mind gets exercised.

So I don't do formal systems. Um, I don't do like, I'm not, I'm not really part of like book club culture where it's like, okay, like what's the next, like good book, like everyone is supposed to read. I don't do, I just, I'm all over the place. You know, I have not yet read Kristen, Hannah, and also Lincoln in the Bardo instead.

I'm, you know, I don't know, reading pretty random stuff. I'm reading like an intellectual biography of Thoreau. Uh, but I also just finished the latest Lincoln child thriller that I found in a supermarket in upstate New York, I'm, I'm all over the place. So don't overthink it, Morgan. Just read what looks wonderful to you in the moment, uh, and Cal Newport books.

I don't care how you feel about those. My philosophy there is it's good to buy fresh copies too. You know, once a month or so you got to buy some fresh copies just to kind of keep it going. But other than that, just read what you love. All right.

What do we got next? We have our slow productivity. So for those who are unfamiliar once a week, we have a question that ties to my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. If you haven't bought that book, you should. It's sort of the Bible for like a lot of what we talk about here on the show, but mainly as an excuse to play our slow productivity corner theme music, Jesse, let's hear that music.

All right, what's our question? Question is from Dr. V. I'm a professor with a packed teaching schedule. When school isn't in session, I go to conferences. I also have multiple other jobs like you. I'm having a hard time cultivating a deep life that balances everything. I do not know whether I have a case of elite laziness, if my time management is flawed, or if I'm simply burned out.

I suspect the lack of seasonality in my work is partly responsible. How do I cultivate a deep life in such a busy career? Well, I'll tell you, my instinct here is to say do less, all right? Don't mimic me in this. I do not mean the fact that I have these multiple jobs.

That should not be an example you follow. The right example to follow is how I treat any one of those jobs. You isolate like how I treat my job, like just specifically as a professor, and I keep that like relatively constrained. I focus on deep work, protected on the things that matter.

I have systems around the shallow work. I'm very careful about like workload. I'm very careful about communication patterns, and it keeps that job like relatively well constrained. And that's what allows me to then have like other jobs added on. But for most people, the right answer is just take one of those jobs and make it more reasonable.

You know, part of the reason why I get away with like doing the multiple jobs is I have some flexibility because the multiple jobs I do are sort of all tied to sort of like elite institutions, right? It's, you know, a professor, but a professor at like an R1 well-known university.

My books are New York Times bestsellers. My magazine writing's for The New Yorker. That gives me a little bit more flexibility than a normal person would have. The elite institutions tend to give you more like flexibility around things. I'm drawing from probably like a well of talent that helps me like kind of pull these things off.

But I would recommend like the right thing to do here is simplification driven by lifestyle-centric planning. Like even I'm not going to keep up these three jobs much longer. I got to simplify things. So like what do you want in your ideal lifestyle? How do you get there? How do you use like this career capital you've already built up as a professor to get there?

You know, that's the way I would think about it. So you're probably going to end up taking some things off your plate, simplifying what you do, do doing that in a more interesting way, simplifying other parts of your life. That's what I recommend. All right, let's play us out.

I tell people sometimes, Jesse, part one or principle one of my slow productivity book Do Fewer Things is written for myself. So it really like the original name of the chapter was Cal comma Do Fewer Things. So you're going to stop writing books? I don't know what I'm going to do.

I think, yeah, I think I'm going to full time just work on my accent impersonation work. Yeah, just be like the Paris one. Just do like a lot of French accents. That would do well over there in the Olympics. I'm sure I'd be very popular. Yeah, they'd be like productivity guru and computer scientist Cal Newport found dead baguette through his orbital socket in Paris earlier this week.

All right, do we have a call? We do. I love the calls. Let's hear it. Hey, Cal. Hey, Jesse. I hope you're very well. I'm currently working a job in finance and accounting, and I love it. It is fully remote and perhaps more importantly, it is fully results driven.

I have not had a single team meeting ever since I started this job, and it's incredible. Everyone just checks on what everyone else is doing and their progress on shared spreadsheets to make sure all the accounting and finance work is getting done. That's great. Here's the issue I might have in order to get professional certification.

I might have to find another job, maybe in addition to this one or to replace this one. Hopefully not, but let's see. The way I found this perfect job was very lucky for my next job. I don't want to rely on luck. So how can I filter out or select for jobs that have this ideal results driven culture that allows me to work deeply and focus and not waste time on, well, time wasting activities?

Any advice would help a lot. And thank you for all you do. I love all your books and they've been life changing. Take care. All right, good question. I think there's three things I want to point out here. One, I think the job you have now is what many more jobs should be like, right?

This is the right way for knowledge work in a modern digital economy. This is the way I think it really should function. Very results oriented, very clear, very structured collaboration. This is what you're doing for us. You're doing this work. This is how we collaborate. Like, make sure that we have the information we need.

Then you just get after it and do the work. And when and how you do it is kind of up to you. We don't care. Like that really is for so many jobs is what it should be. I think that job is way more compatible with like a more sustainable lifestyle.

It's it gets rid of a lot of time wasting. The deep to shallow ratio is really high. You have a lot more flexibility. It's much more mentally engaging. There's a lot more options here too, right? Because now this gives you a knob you can turn. So like, I want to do about this much work.

Great. That's a job that we pay you this much for. I want to do this much work. That's a job we pay you this much for. You can see this sort of knob turning where now you have this capability, which doesn't really exist in the job market. Now we're in the knowledge work job market is really about just saturating your time.

But now you have this opportunity where like, I can do this thing that's really well, and I can do this at sort of like 50% time. And that money is fine for where I live. And just all these options would be fantastic. More jobs should be like that. My second point is be sure that you need the certification that you need to change your job.

Like, make sure that you have thought this through. You have your lifestyle centric plan. And there's some clear vision for why getting the certification and a different type of job is necessary for getting closer to what's in this plan. And that it's not something just because it's there, it's harder.

It's what comes next. Like, make sure there's not a vision of your ideal lifestyle where you can really just build it around what you're doing now. I'm not saying that there is a problem with your plan. I just want to make sure that you've really thought that plan through.

And then the third point is the answer to your actual question. How do you filter a new job to make sure that it's not going to be a hyperactive hive mind sweatshop? I would ask them, I would ask them, like, what is your philosophies around workload management, communication, collaboration?

And what you're looking for here, it's not even a specific answer, but the ability for them to give an answer. If they don't really have a specific answer to this question, it's a hyperactive hive mind shop. It's, I don't know, we rock and roll. Like, we just say, can you do this?

What about this? Let's jump on a call. Let's just zoom. I'll slack over what's going on with this. And there be dragons, be wary. If they have an answer, like, OK, like in your current job, what will you spread? Here's how it happens. There's these spreadsheets where we keep track of what's been accomplished and who's working on what.

And we kind of check in on that each day. We have these sort of status meetings we use. If they use terms like Agile or Kanban, we use a sort of scrum based methodology. Now your ears can perk up. Because it's a place that actually thinks systematically about workload, communication, collaboration.

And the cool thing about that is even if you don't love their exact system or you just have never seen it before, you don't know if it works well or not. A place that has a system is much more open to systems. Now it's much more open to like, you know what?

Here's what I'm doing. I just read Slow Productivity and I'm doing an active waiting list to have a sort of personalized pull versus pile workload management system like I talk about in my book. This is a place you're like, cool. Tell me how that works. I'm curious about it.

Right. Places that have systems are more open to new systems. So I think it's a fantastic thing to filter for. I have long said this, like this comes out of my book, A World Without Email. A place that is like a full hyperactive hive mind shopper, it's just like everything's worked out on the fly with like back and forth messages.

A place that embraces what I call in Slow Productivity, pseudo productivity. Visible effort is what we care about. Activity is our proxy for useful effort. You should see that as negative as them saying like this place is going to have a 90 minute commute. You should think about that just as much you think about as like what this place is in an industry that I don't even, you know, conflicts with my values.

Right. Like that should be one of the tier one things you think about because it has some of the biggest impact on your day to day satisfaction in the work. So it's smart to filter for it. So I always say it's not the details of the specific idea that matters when you ask about these things.

It's the fact that they have a specific answer that indicates that like they're. There are deep questions, brethren. Here we're on the same page and you'll have the opportunity to do something cool. We're gonna move on now to a case study. This is where people send in accounts of putting the type of things we talk about on the show into action.

Remember, if you have a case study to share, the easiest way to do so is send it to Jesse at Cal Newport dot com. We're always looking for more case studies. Are we getting some more, Jesse? Yeah. OK. Now that we put out the word, people are sending them in.

I keep those coming. We love the case studies. All right. So today's case study comes from Patrick. Patrick says, I am thirty five and have an associate's degree in engineering. I have worked repairing lab instruments for 10 years. With this job, I was able to afford a small apartment with my wife.

A decision point came when we recently had our first child. I was considering getting my bachelor's degree or changing my career for a job that would pay more since I was concerned about how much it would cost to raise a child. It was during this time that I read your book So Good They Can't Ignore You.

The idea about career capital stood out to me. Instead of leaving my current job for a new field or going back to school, I decided to focus on learning the parts of my job that other technicians avoided. One example was a software system we used to bill for our repairs.

Coworkers felt it was a waste of time to learn this and only focused on how quickly they could repair instruments. But after spending two weeks learning the software, I became the go to person to fix issues with it. I was then able to use my expertise in this to get a promotion.

This allows me to reduce the time I spend repairing instruments and have dedicated time to work on learning new software or improving processes at work. A couple of years later, my family hasn't had issues with affording our necessities. That work capital idea ended up saving me a lot of time and money, and my family is all the better for it.

All right, Patrick, I love this story, this is music to my ears, career capital theory in action. Again, we fall back, this goes back to the deep dive. We fall back to our instinct. It's a very American instinct. I want to fix something about my situation. This job is fine, but it seems like it has a cap.

I have a new child on the way. I worry about affording it. Our instinct is to say I got to throw some big change or goal at it. I'll go back to school. I'll take on the debt, but like somehow this will probably make things better. Like we just want to kind of do something.

We want to take action. It feels good. But career capital theory says, well, wait a second. All that matters is how valuable are the things you can do. And let's get like really specific about it. What's valuable in your field? What's valuable in your job? If you can get better at something that's valuable, you will have more options.

That is your main thing you can hand in. That might mean going back to school. If you can identify this specific skill has huge value, and I can build a career on it, that's going to give me lots of options. But sometimes like we see in Patrick's case, those opportunities are right in front of you.

If I master the software, I become the most valuable person on my team. I can write my own ticket. Less time in the field, my income goes up just much. And now this makes our financial burden like very salient, like very tractable. So that's career capital theory in action.

You have to keep that in mind when you're doing lifestyle-centric planning. Like once you have your master narrative, your vision of your ideal lifestyle, one of the big tools you have to work with when figuring out how to get there is just career capital. I already know how to do this.

If I could leverage that to learn this and this, that would give me these capabilities, which would move me closer to this part of my vision. Like often career capital theory plays a big role in pursuing your master narrative. It's not as sexy as like, let me make this big change and hope it shakes out into something cool, but it tends to be very effective in a sort of concrete on the ground tactical type of way.

All right. So that's all we have for questions. We've got a final segment coming up. I want to react to some audio I heard recently, but first take a brief break, hear from another one of our sponsors. I want to talk about our friends at MyBodyTutor. I've known Adam Gilbert, MyBodyTutor's founder for many years.

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So when you sign up with MyBodyTutor, you get connected with one of their on-staff trainers and they figure out your goals. They help you come up with a plan. Here's what we're doing with diet. Here's what we're doing with exercise. Custom fit to exactly what's going on in your life, your challenges, your obstacles, your opportunities.

And then, and here's key, you check in with this tutor every day. They have a simple app. I've tried it out. You can do it right from the app at the end of each day. The trainer sends you back a note. If you have a question, "Oh my God, we're traveling.

What should I do with this workout? I'm going to be away from my gym for a week." They give you custom information. But mainly you have this consistency. If someone is doing this journey with you, you're reporting to every day, it's that consistency that works. It's why people get results from MyBodyTutor.

If you want to get healthier, I think this is the investment you should make. Now, here's the good news. When you go to MyBodyTutor.com, this T-U-T-O-R, MyBodyTutor.com, mention DeepQuestions when you sign up and you'll get $50 off your first month. The time to get healthy is now. Do it at MyBodyTutor.com and mention DeepQuestions sends you to get $50 off.

I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do your thing. However, you cha-ching, look, Shopify is the global commerce platform that can help you at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage, all the way to the, did we just hit a million dollar stage?

Shopify is there to help you grow. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, it is there. They sell everywhere. They have e-commerce, they have point of sales systems you can have right there in your actual physical store. And this is like the big company in this space.

If you're selling things, they make it so much easier. They even have now Shopify magic and AI powered assistant to help you convert to even more sales. When we start our long awaited DeepQuestions store, there's no question we're using Shopify. We still know what we're going to sell. Though, Jesse, don't we have some hats coming from someone?

We do. I'm excited about those. Zach is sending Jesse and I some VBL CPP hats, which I'm psyched about. I think they actually were delivered yesterday, but I wasn't home. So I'll get them today. Okay. I got to get those before we go on vacation. I want to wear mine on vacation.

But anyways, the demand clearly will raise for these hats once people see how awesome they are. And then when we end up having to set up a store to sell them, Shopify will make this easy for us. So Shopify is who you should be using. If you are selling, they're already powering 10% of all e-commerce in the US.

So, you know, they get the job done. You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period. If you go to Shopify.com/deep, you have to type that all in lowercase for this to work. Go to Shopify.com/deep now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com/deep.

All right, Jesse, let's get to our final segment. So I want to bring up on the screen here for people who are listening instead of, or watching instead of just listening, an article that someone sent me. One of you sent me from NPR. This is an article about the director, John M.

Chu, the director of the new Wicked movie. There's an interview he did on Fresh Air. So the headline for this interview to have up right here is Wicked director, John M. Chu says, "Creativity isn't magic, it's hard work." So there's a particular segment from this interview I want to react to.

Let's see if we can load that up. Jesse, can we play that audio here? Yeah. All right, let's load this up. It's not about red carpets. It's not about this press tour. It's not about any of that. It's about doing the work and it's hard. And creativity, even though some people are like, "Oh, creativity is a creative genius.

It comes out of the air." No, it's hard. I got to schedule my time. I got to put time into when I ruminate and when I come up with something. And it's a routine. It's not-- the secret is it's not magic. It's work. John Chu, it's really just been such a pleasure to-- All right.

Fantastic quote from someone who knows what he's talking about, revered director. I wanted to play it because I think it gets to a common mistake that people make. And I want to correct that mistake. So you will often hear from people, especially like the current chorus of cultural critics who talk a lot about the problem with productivity.

They will set up this dichotomy between organization and creativity. You can be this structured automaton trying to optimize everything, or you can spend more time watching birds and be open to things and be creative and bohemian and that you have this dichotomy between structure and organization and creativity. This is not right.

If you talk to any professional creatives like John M. Chu in this interview, you realize, no, no, the real dichotomy is between creativity and distraction. That's what you should care about if you care about creativity is distraction, diversion, fighting against your ability to actually give focus thought, focus creative thought to the things that you're actually trying to create.

Focus internal thought to get those intimations of the sparks of the new idea. The focus constructive thought required to take that spark and actually build it into the screenplay, to build it into the novel, to build it into the original piece of art. It's distraction versus creativity that matters.

How do you keep distraction at bay? That's organization. That's productivity. This is why John M. Chu is talking about, I structure my time. I have to schedule my time carefully. I have to put aside time just to ruminate and have open thoughts. The type of structure we talk about, the planning, the time blocking, et cetera, is a bulwark against chaos and distraction.

It's what enables creativity. It's what enables ex nihilo creation. All right. So that is the right dichotomy. It seems natural to feel like, no, no, I don't want to be super structured. I'm going to, I want to be free, but the people who are free are not free. Those who don't control their time are enslaved by the things that are out of their control.

So I think this is a great example of it. John M. Chu is very structured and careful in his time because he has to be, to be very unstructured and creative in what he actually produces. So I thought that was a cool example of a point that I'd like to come back to again and again.

All right. So anyways, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you everyone for listening. We'll be back again next week. We might actually be soon. Look out for this. We might be airing a few classic episodes of the show. So keep your eyes open for that, especially when just in our vacation might be an excuse to hear the best episodes you never heard in the first place, but we'll be back after that with new episodes and until then, as always stay deep.

So if you like today's discussion about structured journaling, I think you'll also like episode 303, which talks about the problem of making grand goals, your main strategy for building a deeper life. It's a great compliment to today's discussion. Check it out. When people get this impulse, which I think is a fantastic impulse, they realize they're not quite sure how to do it.

And they fall back on a common mistake, which I call the grand goal strategy.