Our first question comes from Irfana, who asks, "How can a freelancer perform deep work? The freelancer has to create his personal brand on LinkedIn. You know, suppose he's a social media manager, he needs to have a social media presence." Well, Irfana, I think this is an example of an important phenomenon to discuss briefly, which is single drop social media use.

And what I mean by single drop social media use is the mindset that if there is any social media use that is necessary in your life, so something professionally or what have you, there's, you know, job applicants and you have to check for questions on Facebook or something like that, that if there is any, a single drop of social media use in the pool that is your activity time, then you have to just unrestrictedly use social media from there on out.

And that's what I'm sensing in this question, that as a freelancer, there's some stuff you might want to do on LinkedIn. Maybe you have a LinkedIn Pulse style newsletter and/or you have to keep up on inquiries from people or keep up with your network. I don't know exactly what it is, but in your mind that small amount of mandated use means, I guess I just have to be on social media all the time.

And that's not the case. In fact, this would be the challenge I would give you. Let us say I said, here's the new law under a penalty of $100,000 fine. You are only allowed to be logged into LinkedIn for 20 minutes once a week. I bet you would be fine.

I bet you would be fine. What would happen if that was the law? Well, first of all, if you were posting content on LinkedIn, you would just write it elsewhere. And during that 20 minutes, you would post, you would make it weekly. If there were requests coming in or you wanted to do some networking, just during that 20 minutes, you would answer the request and you would maybe do some pokes.

Maybe you would update your profile to somehow say, I do LinkedIn messages on Fridays or whatever day you do it. Maybe you'd miss a couple things or a couple of people would be annoyed that you were slow getting back into them, but who cares, right? This is a numbers game.

It's just over time being on there may be surfaces the occasional opportunity. So you would be absolutely fine in 20 minutes once a week, which is a negligible footprint. This is the type of exercise I want people to do when they think about unavoidable social media use. What if I was only doing this for a very small amount of time, quite infrequently?

Could I really make that work? Would I get most of the value? And I think in most cases, the answer would be yes. So do not allow the single drop of social media requirement in your life be the instigating force that gets you to endlessly lose yourself into those distractions.

All right, we have a question here from Career Opportunist who says, "Are there times where it is worthwhile to follow intimations of your career interest, even if you take non-trivial cuts in your career capital outside of the corner cases you've already mentioned in your book, so good they can't ignore you?

Are there some elaboration here?" So we can get some context to this question. So Career Opportunist clarifies that he is a backend software engineer at a large well-known internet company who has built up quite a bit of career capital in that role. He then goes on to say, "My core interest in college, however, were in front-end client-facing work as opposed to backend software.

I'm not tied to a particular job or passion. I just want to experience building user-facing software as opposed to just behind-the-scenes code." So he says, "I can either choose to become a more proficient backend engineer, but it does feel like a less interesting route for me, but I could do that and focus instead on the opportunities to negotiate lifestyle improvements." All right, so I don't have a definitive answer, but I'll tell you my instinct here.

The grudging thing you put at the end, like I guess what I could do is even though maybe front-end stuff seems more interesting, I could get better at backend engineering and focus more on lifestyle improvements. I actually think that's probably the right answer. And it might not be the answer you want to hear from me, but I think at this stage of your career, the right thing to do, I'm going to guess, you haven't told me, but I'm going to guess you're at that critical stage, this roughly quarter-life stage in your late 20s, early 30s, where you're no longer starting out, you have skill, you have talent, you begin to have some options, but you're also not at that mid-life stage where there's other things going on in your life.

I would say at this stage, this is an important time to do lifestyle-centric career planning. I'll explain what that is in a second, but what I think is going on instead is you're feeling a bit adrift, because again, you've got to that quarter-life stage where you found the job, you found the skill, you have some stability, you have some ability, and now you're thinking what's next.

And in our culture, and especially American culture, I say our culture, we have this instinct that the content of our job is going to be the key driver of our satisfaction. So when you feel that initial tinge of malaise, because you've reached a plateau, your culturally trained mind immediately says, well, maybe if we shifted a little bit the content of our work, we would no longer be adrift, we would break through the malaise.

So maybe it's back-end software is the issue, and the reason why I'm feeling this malaise is that I really should be doing front-end software. I think if you make that shift, it would be kind of interesting, but you'd be back in the same place in a couple of years.

So now is the time to do lifestyle-centric career planning, which is what I think is the answer to that feeling that so many standard knowledge worker types feel around this part in their life. Now, I've talked about this before, but the basics of lifestyle-centric career planning is that you identify what do I want my day-to-day life to be like in all of its attributes, not what do I want my work to be like, what do I want my actual life to be like?

And I want you to think about things like, where am I living? Am I in the countryside? Am I in a skyscraper? Am I in a small town? Am I helping my neighbors build a barn? Or is it I am having people over, commonly just shooting the breeze out on a front porch while people walk by?

Or is it I'm at a underground bar scene where there's interesting new poetry being done, whatever. What is my day like? What am I doing? Where do I live? How much am I working? Am I getting after it? Or is work a small part of my job? Am I seasonal?

Am I spending six months a year not even working at all and doing other types of things and traveling around? These type of questions. What am I doing with my time? What about my character? What is my role in the community? What is the philosophies by which I live?

How deep is my existential grasp of my life? All of these type of questions. You fix this lifestyle. You feel it and you taste it and you imagine a typical week or day and something that really hits those intimations of, yes, this is right. And then you say, great, what are the paths to get there?

And that's where you build your plan. And work then fits into that plan. And work then becomes a mechanism by which you make progress towards this lifestyle that pushes all of these right buttons and really resonates. And that is where as you enter this quarter-life period, your focus goes.

Aiming the ship that is your life towards the port that is a lifestyle that is deeper, that resonates with you. Whatever those answers might be. And again, I keep emphasizing different people have different answers to these questions. It could look very different depending on the people. That's where I'd want you to put your energy.

Now, if you do this exercise, eight times out of 10, you're gonna find, oh, if I have a lot of career capital in something like back-end software design, massively increasing that capital, because it's easy to take good capital and make it great than it is to go from no capital to good capital.

Massively increasing that capital quickly and using that as a lever to take control of aspects of my life and career is almost always gonna be the right thing to do. An example comes to mind from my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which you mentioned. There was a very similar character in that book.

Someone in a very similar situation to you. This was Lulu, and she was a back-end programmer. I believe she was databases, more like a database programmer designer, but similar idea. Not front-end facing, worked for financial sectors. As she got better and better at that, she said, "What did I want my life to be like?" And she used that as a lever to build a really cool lifestyle where she did six months on, six months off.

So she left the company where she was. She went to a consulting role. She was heavily in demand because she was great on this. She would do six months on. That's roughly enough time to do one or two engagements. She lived relatively cheaply, right? With her wife in Jamaica Plain.

It was a cool, it's a cool neighborhood outside of Boston. They had this cool old house that they were renovating. And they weren't living lavishly. They weren't living in, let's go buy a really large, expensive house. So then you could spend the other six months doing interesting things and scuba diving.

She got a pilot's license. Her family was from Thailand. So she would go do extended visits there. And it was just a really interesting lifestyle. But she figured out what she wanted. And then she said, "What's the best way to get there?" "Oh, I'm a great database developer. I can wield that to get where I want to get." So that is what I'm going to suggest for opportunities is do the lifestyle-centric career planning thinking and work backwards to say, "How do I get there?" And then see where that takes you.

So again, it's likely it might take you, will tell you almost certainly take the skill you have out for a spin and use it to build a cool life. It might tell you, however, when you do this, like you want to be running a small startup that's front-end facing and you live kind of cheap and you're living somewhere kind of cool.

So maybe it would put you to front-end facing work, but it would be pushing you there for a reason. This is part of a big picture, not just an instinct that maybe this would make me happier. The final thing I will say, if you're interested in front-end design just as an intriguing intellectual challenge, even if this exercise has you stick with back-end programming and using that as your main leverage, your main career capital lever, do some front-end work as a hobby.

Build a front-end facing website that you do as a side hustle or a side project that you build up and build up those skills, build it around something you're really interested in. Like you're some sort of super fan of "The Matrix" or something like this. I just watched that movie last night, that's why I'm thinking about it.

Jesse's shaking his head. You're a super fan of "The Matrix" or something like this, and whatever, or you're really into some, I'm not good with this, "Dungeons and Dragons" or something. I don't know, but you know what I'm saying? Like, okay, build it about something interesting, fun, a community that you get some depth out of, whatever it is, and you could get that experience as well.

All right, so that's a long answer to a short question because I really wanted to get to that bigger point, which is I'm increasingly a big believer in this idea that stage one of your career is figuring out how to be a adult in the world who's dependable and gets things done and starts to develop a real skill, to get real career capital.

Stage two, deploy that capital towards a vision of the ideal lifestyle. And then stage three is actually probably gonna be much less career-focused. You're in this lifestyle, it's gonna be much more about yourself and self-discovery. I mean, I think it sets you up for the classic midlife crisis, for it not to be a crisis, but to be a time of actual discovery.

So that's my advice, lifestyle-centered career planning, underrated, can't emphasize it enough. All right, we have a question here from Groupmate. Groupmate asks, "How do you effectively manage group projects in college?" You don't, you know, Groupmate, group projects in college are pretty hit or miss, usually pretty bad. You elaborate here that, 'cause you're a Cal Newport type, you are organized, and therefore you basically end up doing a lot more work because you're not on board with the typical college strategy of, hey, this is due tomorrow, why don't we stay up all night and do something kind of crappy?

You actually wanna plan your work out in advance, and so you end up doing most of the work. That is the price you pay to have your act together in college. You're not gonna love group work. The only two pieces of advice I can give is, A, avoid it when you can, because it's not gonna go well for you.

B, work with the very best people you can. I remember having this experience as an undergraduate computer science student with problem-set groups, and I was good at computer science. I'll put this the humble way. I was good at computer science, as you might've predicted based on my later career trajectory.

I learned pretty quickly that there was a lot of people who wanted to be in problem-set groups with me because they would get all the right answers. It wasn't very useful to me though, right? I would basically just do the work, and eventually I found one or two students who were really smart, and these were the students I would come back to to work with again and again, and we complimented each other, and it made these problem-set groups really effective.

I actually got a note like a year or two ago. It was actually pretty cool. I'd forgotten about it, but it was a group mate I worked with in a lot of courses who I really liked working with, and he came across on my writing or something recently. So this is 15, 16 years later, and he sent me a note about, "Hey, I remember working on problem-sets "with you back at college." So that was pretty cool, but that was really useful.

So pick the smartest people, the most organized people you can when you can. Avoid group projects when you can't, and when all that else fails, I'm just gonna validate your frustration. I'm not a big fan of group projects in college, and so you're not doing anything wrong. It's just kind of the price you pay.

All right, moving on here, we have a question from Rodrigo. Rodrigo asks, "Do you recommend listening to music "while doing deep work?" Well, it's up to you. Some people do, some people don't. What I always tell people when they ask about this is that music can help you drown out other distractions and get into the mood of deep work if you practice first doing deep work with that specific type of music.

So it is a trainable thing. If you listen to the same Mozart sonatas every time you do deep work, the first few sessions, you might actually find it a little bit distracting, but after a while, your brain learns to filter it out and it can be effective. So that's the only caveat I would give.

The people who use music have practiced working with that music. This can get pretty extreme. I do tell the story sometimes of a novelist I interviewed years ago who had four kids at home. It was a very noisy home, and he had to work there, and he wrote a lot.

He was a self-published novelist who did a lot of word count. And what he did in the end was got NASCAR-style headphones. So they're heavily insulated, and you can also play audio through them. Because I guess at NASCAR, what you do is you wear these really insulated headset headphones, but you want the audio of the commentary playing.

And he would put Metallica, would blast Metallica into these heavily insulated headphone speakers. So there was literally no sound from his kids. That's what it takes. And I have three kids, so I can attest to this. That is probably what it takes to actually eliminate the sound of your kids from your life if they're home and you are trying to work at home.

That's what it really takes. He learned to write pretty productively with Metallica blasting in his ears. If I tried this now, it would be incredibly distracting. If I did this consistently for two weeks, my mind would easily tune it out. It would actually probably be pretty effective. So, Rodrigo, it's all about practice.

All right, let's do one more question about deep work. This one comes from Mr. S. Mr. S asks, "What do you do when your boss has allocated you to a team half time?" All right, he elaborates, "I worked full-time on one team for my current employer. My boss has decided that we need to start on a new effort and has put me and one other person to work on this new effort.

We were supposed to spend half our time on this new project and the other half on our old team, but I feel like I'm still allocated 100% to both teams now. It's exhausting." All right, Mr. S, here's my suggestion. Ask your boss specifically which half of my hours do you want me working on the new team?

50% as an abstract number means nothing. Should it be the mornings? Should it be the afternoons? Should it be two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon? I want the fix down, boss, the hours when I'm working on team A and the hours in which I'm working on team B, and I am going to completely segregate these two efforts.

You can give a good reason for it. I'm a Cal Newport fan. Context switching is better to treat these like two separate jobs as opposed to mixing them together in one job, but then do that and then stick to that. If you want to have a meeting related to team A, it has to be scheduled in team A hours.

If you want a meeting having to do with team B, it has to be scheduled in team B hours. If you're going to work on team A, it has to be in team A hours. If you're going to work on team B, it has to be in team B hours.

It could be splitting the day in half. It could be splitting the week in half. Thursday, Friday is team B. Monday, Tuesday is team A, and we split Wednesday down the middle. But what you want here is specificity. When should this work happen? Now, there is a bigger point here I want to briefly emphasize, which is that in knowledge work writ large, a real issue we have is this push model of work allocation, where anyone can push work onto anyone else's plate where it's up to them to figure out what to do with the mess.

This is a disaster for overload. We get way too much work on our plate because there's no one regulating this. There's no one looking at how much is on your plate. There's no one saying what is reasonable. So we end up with way too much work on our plate.

Can't make progress on all of it at the same time. So that is stressful, but it's not just stressful. Each of these things that's now on your plate brings with it some amount of fixed overhead. Emails about that work with people checking in, weekly meetings, you've had to schedule to make sure that progress is being made.

And so when your plate gets full enough, the fixed overhead itself can take over most of your hours, squeezing out almost any of the time to actually get work done. So it's a huge problem. I'm a big believer in having a much more explicit allocation of work where we think through how much can you do?

How much are you doing? Does it make sense to give you something else? I call this a pull-based method because you're basically pulling work into time you have available. So you're never oversubscribed, as opposed to a push method where any amount of work can be pushed towards you. This is roughly what I'm getting at, Mr.

S, when I suggest that you ask your boss, what hours, what days do you actually want this 50% work to be done? 'Cause what you're doing here is actually forcing work to account for when it's gonna get done. Well, where are the hours where this is gonna get done?

That hour is already spoken for. You wanna have a meeting here, but that hours have already been put aside for this other work. So now there's no time for your meeting. You're making explicit, things take time. What time do you want me to give to this? And honestly, I think there should be a bigger effort to do this with more work.

I wrote about this in "A World Without Email," that when it comes to, for example, service work among professors, that there should be a specific budget. Here is how many hours of service work you are allowed to do max per week. And when things get assigned to you, you actually have to estimate how many hours you're gonna spend on it.

In fact, put those hours aside. Here they are on my calendar when I'm working on this. If you wanna talk to me about this, it's on my public calendar. And when those hours are filled up, nothing else can come to you. Yes, this would create a problem at first because there's all these people that want you to do things.

Like I know your hours are full, but this is important, but you know what? That back pressure reforms the system. And less of these requests are allowed to be generated. And more of these requests generating entities have to figure out other ways to get their work done. So I don't mean to go on a big rant here, but the unregulated allocation of work and knowledge work is a disaster.

It's convenient, it's flexible, but it is a terrible way to get work done. It's like running a car factory where everyone comes in and you just say, "Guys, there's a bunch of parts "around here, you do you, "like we're just gonna kind of build cars." Yeah, it's convenient, it's flexible, but nothing's gonna get done.

Or if it does, the cars are gonna get built terribly and it's gonna take a long time. So it's time to start pushing back against the unrestricted allocation of work. Mr. S, if your boss wants you to spend 50/50, make him tell you what that 50/50 is, make him live by that decision.

They're now hours he cannot get you to do work for team A because it's team B hours, et cetera. And if he wants to put another thing on your plate, where are those hours coming from? It's time to get explicit. Don't just push stuff on my plate. I'll pull in what I actually have time for.

And what we don't have time for is more questions about deep work. So let's move on now to some questions about the deep life. Our first question comes from Clarissa. Clarissa asks, "I do a daily schedule, "but how do I avoid feeling like it's redundant? "Sometimes I don't need to change things around "and I skip scheduling my time block "and then it snowballs into one day "and then two days, the next thing you know, it's a week." Well, Clarissa, let's focus in on this issue of falling off the habit of daily time block planning and how that can snowball to many days without it.

Typically, it's a sign that you're overworked. There's too much going on, your mind is exhausted. So I think it's actually an important signal. It's not a failing, it's an important signal that maybe we need to pull back on commitments so that the amount we're doing each day is less and try to get more time off.

Your mind needs time off and it's getting it informally by just refusing, mentally speaking, to do any planning. The thing I'm gonna recommend that you do persist with, even during these periods, is some sort of bare bones tracking. So for me, it's the metric tracking space in my time block planner.

There's certain key metrics I write in there every day. I never skip that, that's sacrosanct. Now, this takes 20 seconds and you just do it at the end of the day, right? But it keeps you at least in a mindset of I am being intentional, I'm keeping track of my life.

I have not just given up on intentionality in my living altogether, even though it only takes 20 seconds and even if what you're writing down is really bad. So if there's things you track, like, did I read today? Did I eat well today? Did I exercise today? And you're not doing all of it, you're writing that down saying that you didn't do it.

Bad or not bad, that is like a bare bones fallback plan that I'm always doing that, even if I'm not getting around to my time block planning. And then it makes it much easier to say, okay, well now let me actually go back to doing my time block plans.

So do the fallback mode, so I have the very basic behavior, the metric tracking, you never stop doing, so you never leave the mindset of I control my life and I care about what's happening in my life, even if it takes 20 seconds. And then two, if you're consistently skipping time blocking, take that as a signal that you have too much going on.

That's okay, it's an important signal. You need a day off, you need earlier shutdowns, you need to take three things off your plate. It's useful information, not a sign that you're doing something wrong. We have a question here from Patrick. Patrick asks, how would you approach including non-work activities into my workday?

Well, if it's during the actual hours of your workday, so after your time block plan begins, but before you do your shutdown ritual for the day, you just time block it. You just time block it like any other thing you would do. In fact, time blocking it allows you to find the best times for scheduling this non-work related activity.

You have some control over where that's gonna fall, so it's not just happening randomly. You're more likely to get more of it done. I do this, for example, with exercising, and for sure with book reading, where I'll just block off a time for book reading. The other thing you can do is to shut your days down earlier on some days.

So I can end my day at 3.30, full schedule shutdown complete, 3.30 to 5.30, I'm doing my leisure activity I'm really into. That's a great period. I love that end of the day period where other people are working, but you're done because you're organized and you're in control, and you can end that day early without it being a crisis because you've controlled all of your time, you've controlled your weeks, you've controlled your semester plans, and so you might try doing that as well.

But just time block that like anything else. All right, so we have another question here. This is also from Patrick. Patrick says, "How do you structure your time "if you love what you do?" I wonder if this is the same Patrick as before. It probably is, actually. Here's a little bit of an elaboration.

Patrick says he's a PhD student, and that he enjoys my work. Thank you, Patrick. He really loves what he's doing, but some of his leisure activities are related to his work. So Patrick says he's researching AI, but is also interested in the epistemology of knowledge discovery from data. So he's reading philosophy and trying to write some epistemological short papers.

He's also taking some MOOCs, massively online courses, to improve his science writing skills. He's doing that in his free time after he does schedule shutdown and complete. He also reviews academic papers and tries to eat healthy foods and reads a lot. And he's trying to figure out, here's what he says.

"As you can see, some of these leisure activities "are also work-related, although not that closely. "I emphasize that I enjoy doing these activities. "Do you think this is a sustainable approach, "or do I need to focus more on another bucket of my life?" All right, so basically, Patrick, you have a cool job, and you have a lot of things you're interested in, and there's a lot of overlap between the things you're interested in and your job.

And I think that's all great. And I'm not going to advocate for significantly reducing this energy and just leaving more time free in your schedule. You're doing nothing because you're being energized by this. What I would, I think what I would moderate here is commitment activities. See, I'm gonna draw a clear distinction.

Here are things I have to do as part of a long-term commitment, versus here is something I'm going to do right now because it's interesting. But it would be no problem if I didn't do it. I'm interested in it. I'm taking this online course at my own pace because I want to be a better science writer.

I'm reading this book because I'm interested in the topic. I have a hobby AI project I'm monkeying around with because it seems like it's interesting. I think it's fine to have a bunch of stuff like that, that you're using to free up, to fill up your leisure time, because it's not gonna cause stress if it's not commitments.

It's not gonna cause stress if you know that you can put the break down as needed. If something in work comes up that's urgent, you can not take that course for two weeks. If there's a family emergency, it's not a big deal if you stop reading the book. So make that distinction.

Keep the stuff that you are committed to, what you're doing in work, the academic projects you're working on, the mentoring, the stuff that you have to come back to and you have no options, keep that reasonable. Control that, keep that footprint small. And then if you want to explore whatever in the time that remains, that's great.

I think that is good. So just make that clear distinction, filling your time with things that you can pause as needed is I think completely fine if you find that energizing. All right, we have a question here from Jenny. Jenny says, "How do you suspect that you're thinking "about living a deep life will change in retirement?" Well, I don't think it will change at all.

And what I mean by that is I don't think my general framework for thinking about the deep life has to change in any substantial way as you shift from full-time work to retirement. The decisions and activities that this framework generates will of course change as you shift from full-time work to retirement.

So just as a reminder, my framework for the deep life says you identify the buckets that are important to you and your life and your vision of a life well-lived and you give each of these buckets independent attention. You start with keystone habits and then you overhaul that part of your life.

And so you make sure that you're seeing holistically all the elements of your life that are important and that you're giving intention to each of those and making sure that they have a expression in your life and they're an important part of your life. So what happens when you retire?

It just changes what you're doing in some of those buckets. In particular, you have what I call the craft bucket, the bucket that's dedicated to work. That's gonna look a lot different after retirement. Craft is still important, producing things of value, skill is still important, but you'll probably then be pushing that part of your life towards more non-professional type craft.

And the other buckets of your life remain unchanged, just as important as they ever were before. Probably most of the stuff you were doing the day before you retired in those other buckets, you'll be doing the day after. Your constitution bucket for your health and wellbeing, that's still important, obviously.

Community, what you're doing with your friends and family and those who live around you, gonna be just as important, doesn't change when you retire. Contemplation, thinking through philosophical or theological issues is just as important before and after. So I think if you're living with this bucket-based approach to the deep life, it will be a seamless transition to retirement.

When you do your normal introspection on each of those buckets, your craft bucket will change, the other ones won't, and you keep going, you keep living deeply. All right, I think we have time for one more question. This one is from Nicholas, who prefaces the question by saying, "Not sure if you wanna answer this." Well, Nicholas, I will try to answer this.

You ask, "Which habits are needed to be an MVP "in the academic world?" That's a good question, Nicholas. Adderall and Lyon? Is that what I wasn't supposed to say? No, it's okay. The formula is not super complicated. If you wanna be a star academic, there's three things that are preconditions.

They're not sufficient. This won't necessarily get you there, but they're necessary. So at the very least, you'll have to do these three things. And typically, it's A, read, and by read, I mean you do the work to keep up with the latest literature in your particular specialty. If you're a theoretician, you are reading what people are doing in the topics you study and mastering their techniques.

If you're a lab scientist, you're looking at the innovations in lab scientist techniques, and you're learning from it. This is really hard work. Reading academic papers is hard. Trying to figure out what academics is doing is hard. The top people spend a lot of time on this. Two, you're working relentlessly.

You're always working on research, carefully chosen projects. You're always working on it at a faster pace than other people. And when you finish one thing, you move on to the next. The total number of hours top academics put into their research is typically much bigger than their peers, where it's more seasonal.

They're working on something. They kind of do other things for a while, and then they work on it. Star academics are relentless about it. It's priority one. They try to fit in the other stuff, the teaching, the whatever, when they can. But the time is gonna be on the research.

And then three, you attach yourselves to stars. If you wanna produce MVP caliber work, you have to be training under MVP caliber people. It's very consistent. It's very difficult to break up to a higher level than you studied under. It typically goes the other way. There's a reason why star academics are stars.

You have to learn from them how they do it, how they work, what they focus on, their techniques, their work ethic. So you have to work with the very best people. Now, you could do those three things and not end up a star. There's raw brain power and luck play a big role in this.

I mean, especially in mathematical fields or other types of fields, there's just horsepower that matters. And I don't know how you develop it and how much of it you're born with and how much of it is the training you've done throughout your whole life or whatever, but there's a certain just type of ability to do spatial reasoning or internal numerical manipulations.

And that's just, you probably have to have, and some people don't. And then there's this luck. The topic you're working on works. You can't always predict that. But you're working on, let's say it's 2018, you're starting a postdoc. Like I'm gonna do a postdoc at the, wherever. And what I'm gonna focus on is the phenotypic expressions of coronavirus genotype point mutations.

And then the coronavirus pandemic comes. Wow, you're gonna get a lot of grant money. You're gonna get a lot of demand. Like what you're doing is really, really useful. That this would be a really good time. Whereas at the same time, if in 2019, you were an epi professor at Johns Hopkins that had just published your first book, which was "A World Without Viruses, Why We Will Never Again Face a Big Pandemic Because of the Miracles of Modern Technology and the Ability for Populations to React Nimbly and Quickly." Now you're in a bad place.

You're not gonna do as well. So there is luck involved as well. But those are the necessary. Like at the very least, you have to be mastering the literature, working relentlessly and working with stars. And it's a focused, intense, deep work effort every day, reasonable amount. You could probably only do four hours of this a day and just repeat, repeat, repeat.

All right, well, speaking of repeating, I think I'll have to repeat the idea that we are out of time for today's episode, but it is good to be back after my break to be back in the studio. And we will wrap up today's episode there. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)