Don't Set Big Goals: The Common Trap Keeping You From A Life Of Purpose & Meaning

00:00:00.000 | All right, so here's a key question, maybe the fundamental question for a lot of people these

00:00:04.320 | days. How do you create a deep life, a life that is lived on purpose, a life that the people who

00:00:13.120 | know you find to be in a quite literal sense, remarkable. When we pursue this, and again,

00:00:20.880 | I think in the pandemic and post pandemic period, more people are caring about this and explicitly

00:00:26.000 | pursuing this than we've seen in a long time. When you pursue this, there are some common traps. It's

00:00:32.320 | a grand thing to go after and it's easy to get wrong. Today, I want to talk about arguably the

00:00:38.320 | most common trap faced by people trying to cultivate a deep life. I'll explain the trap

00:00:44.960 | and why it doesn't work and then talk briefly about what works better. All right, so we've

00:00:51.440 | already defined the deep life. That's my term for something that has been around for a very long

00:00:56.240 | time. As we mentioned, a life that's intentional, a life that's lived on purpose, focused on the

00:01:00.320 | things you care about, reduces to things that you don't, a life that other people find remarkable.

00:01:05.920 | Now, when people get this idea, that this is what they want to do, that they look around and say,

00:01:12.400 | what am I doing right now? This job I have is monotonous or nihilistic. I don't know why I

00:01:20.400 | live where I live. I'm on my phone all the time. I'm sort of just distracted and diverted. I don't

00:01:26.480 | feel like I have control over my life, but I want to do something interesting with it. I only have

00:01:29.920 | one life. I want to do something interested with it. When people get this impulse, which I think

00:01:34.320 | is a fantastic impulse, they realize they're not quite sure how to do it and they fall back on a

00:01:42.080 | common mistake, which I call the grand goal strategy. So the grand goal strategy says,

00:01:50.640 | if you want to make your life more purposeful, come up with a really appealing grand goal to pursue

00:01:57.120 | with the idea that if you accomplish that goal, your life will be better.

00:02:02.480 | So it really focuses your attention. There's a few different variations of the grand goal

00:02:10.880 | strategy that are common in terms of what it aims at. One has to do with the radical change

00:02:16.320 | in your life circumstance. So this variation of the grand goal strategy is let's move to the woods.

00:02:24.720 | Let's move to the island in the South Pacific. Let's rebuild my life around

00:02:35.600 | triathlon running. Some sort of major change to your life. Move to the big city is a common one.

00:02:41.600 | Move to the country is another common one. So it's often about setting, but not always. It can

00:02:46.000 | also be about just something about the circumstance of how you live your life.

00:02:51.040 | Here's another example of this. It's not setting related.

00:02:54.720 | Financially speaking, we have the FIRE movement, the Financial Independence Retire Early movement

00:03:00.720 | that picked up in the 2010s. And it had this idea that if you're very aggressive about

00:03:06.720 | saving money and living cheaper, you can reach financial independence

00:03:11.200 | after about 10 years. So maybe in your thirties, you don't have to work anymore. You can live

00:03:17.280 | cheaply and live off of the returns of investments. That's another example of a grand goal

00:03:21.760 | that's going to change everything. I don't have to work anymore. So a radical lifestyle change,

00:03:28.720 | common category. Another common category that the grand goal strategy applies to is the dream job.

00:03:35.440 | Hey, if I could follow my passion to the job I'm meant to do,

00:03:41.760 | if I could just get the job as the television writer or the standup comedian or the college

00:03:52.960 | professor, or whatever it is, but here's my passion. Here's my dream job. If I could just

00:03:57.520 | make my job, my dream job, then my life would be better. Common application of the grand goal

00:04:02.160 | strategy. Another is just achievement focus. This is very familiar to the sort of Ivy League milieu

00:04:07.920 | in which I sort of came up in. I'm actually going to my 20-year anniversary, not anniversary,

00:04:14.080 | what do they call it? Reunion? - You're going?

00:04:15.920 | - 20-year college reunion at Dartmouth College in a couple of weeks.

00:04:18.480 | - We have ours too. I'm not going. - Yeah, we're going.

00:04:21.520 | - I go to enough Tufts things like for lacrosse. - Yeah, they're for lacrosse. Yeah. I'm going to

00:04:25.200 | go to mine. But anyways, that crowd, there is this sort of pre-professionalism often of like,

00:04:30.800 | if you can just reach a certain level of achievement, that will fix everything, right?

00:04:34.560 | So now you have like a focusing grand goal to go after. It's if you can get into the good law school

00:04:41.120 | and from the good law school, get into the big firm and in the big firm, get partner and from

00:04:44.800 | partner, get equity partner, boom, life will be good. That's what, if you could just get there,

00:04:51.520 | life will be good. You get in the medical school and you get the good residency and then you get

00:04:56.480 | the good attending position, then you get the good, it's this idea of like the achievement.

00:05:00.240 | Or if I can, in banking, make it up to this level, the MD level where I'm really pulling it in,

00:05:06.720 | that's where it's going to happen. Or in academia, if I could just get to like be a full professor,

00:05:13.440 | that's it. That's when the happiness will come, right? So there's this sort of achievement version

00:05:18.080 | of the grand goal strategy, where you focus on reaching a particular achievement. And finally,

00:05:23.920 | and this is the one that comes and goes, I think most dramatically throughout the last 150 years

00:05:28.160 | or so, is this idea of, okay, if I can just fully commit to a singular ideology that can structure

00:05:35.600 | my existence and understanding of value in the world, then that's going to do it. Like a cause

00:05:40.160 | based ideology that I can just give myself over to, maybe that is going to give me a life that

00:05:47.920 | feels like it's intentional. So that's the grand goal approach. It's what most people do.

00:05:52.400 | Let's do something big. It makes sense, by the way, because A, you get reward right away with

00:06:00.080 | the grand goal approach because there is the rewards of aspiration, the thinking about this,

00:06:06.080 | I'm going after this. What's it going to be like when I move to the country or don't have to work

00:06:09.840 | anymore? Or I am allotted for my commitment to the cause or get that equity partner status, right?

00:06:17.280 | We get enjoyment almost right away just thinking about the big change. Two, focus is simple.

00:06:25.200 | Focus is nice. I'm orienting around this one thing. We like focus. There's a pleasing clarity

00:06:33.920 | to it. And often the things pursued aren't bad things. It's fine to look for a job that seems

00:06:41.840 | interesting. It's fine to achieve in your job, right? To sort of move up the ranks, that's fine.

00:06:46.960 | Having some sort of ideology that plays an important part in your life might be a big

00:06:51.920 | structuring part of your life. None of this stuff is necessarily bad too. So it's not as if in the

00:06:57.440 | back of your head, you're looking at these grand goals and say like, "This really isn't good for

00:07:00.720 | me." They're fine. They're probably not bad for you. But it doesn't typically lead to people

00:07:04.800 | feeling like they have achieved a deep life. There's a few problems with this strategy.

00:07:10.960 | One, the grand goal strategy limits our options. We're not very creative when it comes to thinking

00:07:16.000 | about sweeping goals to change our life. There's only so many ideas that tend to be out there and

00:07:20.640 | they're pretty common. It's moving to a radical place. It's here are the typical jobs people

00:07:26.000 | in my situation make and so take. And okay, I want to do really well in one of those jobs.

00:07:30.560 | When it comes to ideology, there's only usually a couple of them that are swirling around as

00:07:33.920 | being interesting. There's usually like one left-wing one and one right-wing one and maybe

00:07:39.440 | a couple others. There's not that many options. So you're actually leaving a lot of options for the

00:07:44.640 | nuanced cultivation of an interesting life get left on the table when you're looking

00:07:48.720 | for big grand swings you can take. So it reduces our imagination. It puts people into

00:07:55.040 | sort of narrow buckets of possibilities. Two, let's say you accomplish a grand goal.

00:08:02.720 | Typically that only impacts a single area of your life. There's lots of different aspects that make

00:08:10.000 | up your subjective day-to-day experience and whether that is positive or negative. The grand

00:08:14.960 | goals typically just focus on one piece of that life. So at best, they'll improve that piece of

00:08:19.840 | your life while leaving the other pieces of your life the same. At worst, they actually make other

00:08:25.280 | pieces of your life much worse. You know, in the pursuit of a particular achievement, all of these

00:08:31.360 | other things that matter to you in life get squashed or pushed out of the way as you have to

00:08:35.520 | drive for the really long hours to sort of make the achievement happen. In the pursuit of the

00:08:40.400 | radical change to move to the country, you get cut off from other people. You get cut off from the

00:08:45.200 | sort of life of the mind and energy of the city that you used to like before. The schools are

00:08:49.680 | weird. You don't get along. At worst, this is what happens is by focusing on one thing, other things

00:08:56.080 | in your life also get worse. Three, it bypasses other sort of less sexy but critical steps to

00:09:04.800 | taking control of your life because you can just fixate on, "I'm just going after this thing."

00:09:08.560 | So one of the things we talk about a lot on this show is actually the importance of

00:09:13.680 | getting your act together, developing a sense of discipline, organizing your life and your time,

00:09:18.480 | right? This is really important for sustainable changes. The grand goal strategy has you just

00:09:22.560 | bypass this because it's just more exciting to think about the big change or the big goal you're

00:09:28.000 | going for and you bypass these sort of more tactical skills that are probably necessary

00:09:33.600 | for sustainable change, which means, and this is sort of the final nail in the coffin of the grand

00:09:38.400 | goal strategy, most people don't succeed with it. Then where are you? I put all my eggs in this

00:09:44.480 | basket and then I lost the basket and I have nothing left. The pursuer go after, so it's time

00:09:51.920 | to get out my phone or start playing the video games or get lost on Instagram. You give up if

00:09:58.320 | your only conceivable path towards a deep life is doing something major. When you're unable to

00:10:04.080 | succeed with something major, what are you then left with?

00:10:07.920 | Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video,

00:10:12.800 | then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment

00:10:18.800 | Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:10:26.160 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're going to like it.

00:10:33.280 | Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. All right. So what works instead? Well, of course,

00:10:40.000 | I talk about on the show a lot, my vision for how to more sustainably and reliably cultivate

00:10:47.760 | a deep life. Let me just go through a couple of the big ideas here quickly. We talk about this a

00:10:51.840 | lot, but let's go through the big ideas quickly. Step one, before you even come up with your big

00:10:57.040 | ideas and get the aspiration of thinking about living on Maui while living off of your investments

00:11:01.520 | and surfing all day, get organized, get disciplined. That's actually the better place to start.

00:11:07.360 | Discipline is an identity, not a trait. It's something you see yourself as someone who can

00:11:13.120 | make progress towards important but non-urgent things, even though you don't want to or it's

00:11:18.080 | hard. This is something you get used to doing, starting small and pushing up, increasing the

00:11:23.760 | ambition of what you pursue. It changes your identity until you see yourself as a "disciplined

00:11:28.720 | person," a prerequisite for any interesting, sustainable change in your life. You got to get

00:11:33.280 | organized, have some notion of control of your obligations and time on different scales so that

00:11:38.960 | you can direct your limited resource towards stuff that's important to you in your life.

00:11:44.560 | There's this pushback right now against thinking about time management and organization. There's

00:11:51.360 | this pushback that says, if you think about these topics, you're going to be some weird

00:11:54.800 | Frederick Winslow Taylor, time optimizing, science bro, hack obsessed, noob, weirdo.

00:12:02.000 | Or it could be, I want to have some structure to my time so I can do cool things with it.

00:12:10.560 | Part of that structure might be reducing the amount of time I feel busy, de-optimizing.

00:12:17.040 | The right binary here is not optimization versus some sort of chill, relaxed, aren't

00:12:26.960 | you intellectual and smart. It's not optimization versus chill. It's like control versus non-control.

00:12:33.760 | Non-control is not a great place. Non-control, where it's like, yeah, I don't, my life is out

00:12:40.800 | of control. Things just sort of happen. That's not a great place. It's not a relaxed place.

00:12:47.200 | It's a stressed place. You're busier than before. And you tend not to make traction

00:12:51.520 | on the stuff that really matters. So you don't want to become some sort of over-obsessed,

00:12:56.160 | Frederick Winslow Taylor, optimized nerd. But most people actually don't go there when they

00:13:02.080 | begin to embrace some notion of structure organization. All right. So that's the first

00:13:05.440 | thing you have to do. Next, you got to, instead of working forward towards grand goals, find a goal,

00:13:12.560 | work forward to that, everything will be fixed. Work backwards from the detailed vision of your

00:13:16.720 | ideal lifestyle. Directly address what are all the elements of what I want a day in my life to

00:13:21.840 | look like five years from now, 10 years from now. And let me directly reverse engineer these specific

00:13:28.240 | parts of my life. Now you're making progress towards specifically the things that matter,

00:13:32.480 | as opposed to hoping that a big goal will, as some sort of side effect, unintentionally improve

00:13:37.360 | these things. You work backwards from a rich featured vision of ideal lifestyle, as opposed

00:13:42.560 | to looking forward towards just a singular grand goal. Now, here's the thing. If you're doing this,

00:13:48.560 | it's like, I want to have this sort of rhythm to my life, this type of place. This is the role I

00:13:53.440 | want work to have in my life and the type of impact it has. My community, what do I want that to be in

00:13:59.680 | my life? How do I want to think about my health and how I'm spending my time outside of work?

00:14:05.200 | And you have these sort of visions and you're trying to build towards this. And it's very

00:14:08.960 | systematic and it's very evidence-based. Given the opportunities and obstacles I have right now,

00:14:12.960 | how can I most make progress in the next six months? It's very systematic. Doing this seemingly

00:14:18.240 | incremental work towards the actual lifestyle you want, not only is it going to more reliably

00:14:24.560 | improve your life because you're just directly improving specific things you know resonate,

00:14:29.040 | cool opportunities will arise. But these are going to be much more bespoke and sustainable

00:14:36.480 | than what you come up with from scratch. If I just grab a 23-year-old and say, come up with

00:14:40.560 | how you're going to change your life. Again, they have five things they're going to choose.

00:14:43.440 | I'm going to become financially independent. I'm going to be an influencer. I'm going to move to

00:14:50.240 | the woods. It's these very common, not very creative options. But when you're instead,

00:14:56.560 | really know what you're about, what you're trying to get towards, systematically moving your life

00:15:00.480 | towards these things that matter to you, that's where the really cool bespoke grand goals emerge.

00:15:06.960 | Oh, I have an opportunity now to move here, to do this work. And it connects over here.

00:15:14.160 | And you begin to actually, you know what you're trying to achieve. More often than not,

00:15:18.240 | when people are systematically pursuing the deep life by looking backwards from the lifestyles,

00:15:22.000 | they end up having these really cool radical opportunities emerge. And they're things that

00:15:28.000 | no one had ever thought about before. They're bespoke, they're specific to exactly what they

00:15:33.520 | care about. That's where the cool radical changes happen to make people say, remark,

00:15:40.000 | "Ooh, you've got an interesting life going on." You don't start with them. It's like you get

00:15:44.000 | rolling towards, I know what I'm about. I'm in control. I'm systematically improving my life

00:15:48.720 | piece by piece. If I'm married, I'm doing this with my partner as well. Then the really cool

00:15:53.680 | opportunities, that's when they emerge. You don't start there, they emerge. So in the end,

00:15:57.120 | you can end up doing pretty grand things, but it comes naturally as you much more systematically

00:16:02.400 | get in touch with what you want and as you move towards it. So be wary of the grand goal strategy.

00:16:10.320 | It's unlikely that a single goal, no matter how grand, is going to make your life sustainably

00:16:15.040 | better. This more incremental systematic approach, not only is it going to start delivering results

00:16:21.280 | more quickly and more effective results at that, it probably will lead to some pretty radical things.

00:16:27.440 | I never pursued a single grand vision, but as I've systematically worked backwards for my evolving

00:16:35.600 | picture of ideal lifestyle, we've ended up in some pretty remarkable places. It's like where we are

00:16:39.840 | right now, Jesse, we're in this cool HQ in the small town, above the restaurant, down the street

00:16:46.560 | from the bookstore where I know the owners and the coffee shop where I spend sort of half of every

00:16:50.800 | morning. In the summers, we spend in New England and I get to write books and it's all really cool.

00:16:56.160 | There's some really remarkable things that in my life right now. I didn't sit down when I was 22

00:17:01.360 | and sketched that all out, but I did have an evolving understanding of my ideal lifestyle

00:17:06.560 | that my wife and I were always, okay, how do we move towards this in the current season of life

00:17:10.640 | we're in? And as we did that over time, we ended up in some pretty cool places. So there you go.

00:17:15.920 | Be wary, be wary of grand goals. It's interesting, I kind of wrote about this 10 years ago in a very

00:17:23.520 | narrow way and so good they can't ignore you, but specifically about the grand goal of following

00:17:28.560 | your passion and why that specific grand goal doesn't work the way you think it's going to work.

00:17:33.120 | So I didn't really realize then I was on to sort of a broader observation of

00:17:36.960 | skepticism surrounding grandness. All right, so we've got some good questions coming up,

00:17:43.120 | but before we get there first, let's hear from a sponsor.

00:17:46.400 | This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. So we're talking here about trying to cultivate a deep

00:17:57.760 | life. It's hard to build a life that is intentional and meaningful if you're really struggling with

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00:18:14.080 | distracted, that you can struggle with thoughts, you can struggle with emotions, you can struggle

00:18:19.120 | with feelings. So as you think about constructing the ideal life, systematically improving the

00:18:25.200 | relationship with your brain absolutely needs to be on our proverbial menu here. And this is going

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00:19:46.960 | step in cultivating a deep life is getting your act together, getting your own life organized

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00:21:03.040 | So there you go. So a couple of stats here. The wait time, the typical wait time to see a doctor

00:21:08.160 | booked on ZocDoc is only between 24 and 72 hours. That's it. Now I'm going to clarify this copy

00:21:15.600 | here, Jesse. This doesn't mean the typical waiting room time. Correct. Is 24 to 72 hours. That would

00:21:22.960 | not be as impressive. You show up at the doctor and 72 hours later you get in. No, no. They mean

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00:21:32.800 | within a day or two, often even same day. So you don't have to stress out about, oh, my foot. I

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00:21:54.240 | ZocDoc.com/deep. All right, let's do some questions. First question's from Ahmed. I had

00:22:03.520 | some setbacks in my early twenties. Now I've regret for those wasted years. Do you believe

00:22:07.760 | it's too late for me to start living a deep life at the age of 27? I think Ahmed read the hidden

00:22:14.240 | fourth principle of slow productivity. Drink heavily. He really lived the fourth principle

00:22:19.360 | and now has regrets. Jesse, we're old now because you probably have the same reaction I do. He's

00:22:26.160 | like, "Is it too late at the age of 27?" We're like, "You're just getting started, man." I mean,

00:22:32.000 | that's like the starting line. So no, of course not. Of course not. And I would not think about

00:22:37.360 | your years in your early twenties as wasted, right? You learned, you grew, you lived, you sort

00:22:44.640 | of figured out what you're about and what you're not about. You got things out of your system. You

00:22:48.080 | had experiences. Okay, this is not making me happy. Or I got caught in some grand goal to follow my

00:22:57.040 | passion to be like a professional dog sledder and it didn't work out. That's not wasted. That's you

00:23:02.160 | learning and developing as a human, learning about yourself, developing your sense of self at a time

00:23:07.440 | where you have the flexibility to do that without much consequences. That's a great use of your

00:23:11.840 | twenties. Not everyone was so sort of, you know, bow tie and blazer locked in as I was in my twenties.

00:23:18.160 | Like that's one way to do it. But let's be honest, most people don't do it that way. All right.

00:23:24.080 | Now, one of the ideas I'm having around deep life and, you know, I'm working on like an annotated

00:23:28.000 | outline for a book about this. Like one of the ideas is a chapter I'm tentatively calling grow.

00:23:33.760 | And a big idea from that chapter is your conception of the deep life. That is the

00:23:39.200 | ideal lifestyle that you're working backwards from changes through the different seasons of your life.

00:23:43.680 | It might be one thing in your twenties, a different thing in your thirties, a different thing in your

00:23:48.320 | first half of your forties, a second thing in the second half of your forties, your fifties

00:23:52.560 | are going to look different than your forties. This is going to grow with different and change

00:23:56.320 | with different seasons of your life. Probably the vision that is the least important in terms of

00:24:03.840 | like your long-term experience of life is the vision you have in your twenties. So I don't mind

00:24:08.240 | that, you know, you weren't thinking about that in your twenties. Now's the time to think about it.

00:24:12.880 | Think about this period, like age 27 to like, let's say 32 is like the next season of your life.

00:24:18.800 | You've learned, you've grown. Now it's time to get serious. Let's build that lifestyle vision.

00:24:24.320 | Where do you want to be in the first half of your thirties? What does your day look like?

00:24:28.000 | Not just work, but all parts of your life. What are the obstacles and opportunities for moving

00:24:33.760 | closer to that vision? And let's start getting systematic about it. It's a perfect time to start.

00:24:39.200 | So I'm excited for you Ahmed. You're ready to start getting after that lifestyle vision.

00:24:45.920 | So put that together and get rolling. What were you like in your twenties?

00:24:50.480 | Were you locked in or were you Ahmeding it? I was a little of both. I went to grad school,

00:24:58.320 | then I was figuring out where I wanted to live. And then I settled on DC,

00:25:02.720 | started coaching, kind of like, you know, piecing together stuff that I wanted to do

00:25:07.360 | for a long term. So that's how I ended up in DC. Grad school stretches out that period.

00:25:11.840 | Like a lot of people, I was in grad school in my twenties too. Like Ahmed is not behind the

00:25:15.840 | eight ball here. So like if you're doing graduate education, you're kind of just extending your

00:25:20.000 | college experience. Like you're thinking about your studies and it's really not until you're

00:25:24.080 | done with education often that you're like, okay, now what am I trying to do here?

00:25:28.320 | I knew I wanted to move somewhere where I could establish my life.

00:25:32.080 | Yeah. Man, our twenties. Well, I was in grad school, but like the situation at MIT was

00:25:38.800 | you are here. It's like you're at a NFL training camp. You are here to become a professor.

00:25:44.240 | So it was kind of a focused grad school. You're like, this is what you're here for.

00:25:48.400 | This is the lofty goal. If you fall short of this goal. Not great. So we were very focused,

00:25:56.080 | you know, on like developing this very narrow set of skills,

00:25:59.520 | which was a lot of people would drop out. Yeah. I mean, it's not, they don't call it dropping out,

00:26:03.680 | but yeah, they don't get their PhD. Yeah. Masters. Yeah. There's a lot of that or they'll,

00:26:09.440 | they'll get it, but then go to, you know, industry, which, which again, people get wrong.

00:26:16.320 | People think about, oh, the best thing to do would be to go to like Google and get a lot of money,

00:26:20.480 | but not in that environment. Like Google hires hundreds of people every year. You're going to

00:26:25.040 | have to program if you go there. No, no, no. Tenure track professorship. Like that was,

00:26:29.680 | that was the vision. So I had an unusually locked in twenties. All right. What do we got next?

00:26:35.920 | Next question is from Joe. I've consumed most of your content, which includes reading some of the

00:26:41.680 | comments on your YouTube videos. I see a bunch of comments of people talking about how to create deep

00:26:46.720 | life while at work. For example, a truck driver commented that it's difficult to do anything,

00:26:51.280 | but listen to music while driving as everything else is a distraction. Is this related?

00:26:55.440 | It's an interesting question, Joe. I think this probably is coming down to a definition

00:27:01.680 | issue. So you're seem to be relating or conflating the deep life with, I guess, like the structured

00:27:12.320 | consumption of information, the sort of exposure to books and big ideas and not spend as much time

00:27:17.840 | with just narrow distractions, which could be a part of it. But let's, let's expand our terminology

00:27:22.800 | here so we can deal with this issue better. Right. The deep life is a life that's intentional,

00:27:27.680 | lived on purpose, the type that sort of seems remarkable to you and people around you. There's

00:27:32.160 | a lot of aspects of the deep life, including your work and what in the deep life you, you,

00:27:38.800 | you have all the different things you're doing. You hopefully are moving towards your ideal

00:27:44.000 | lifestyle vision as opposed to moving away or being sort of unrelated to it. Work can play a

00:27:51.120 | lot of different roles in that. Right. So, you know, there's jobs, for example, that yes, are

00:27:56.160 | very attention demanding. So maybe truck driving is like that. If you need to be focused on what

00:28:01.280 | you're doing, clearly, if you're like an emergency room doctor is going to be like that, like I'm

00:28:05.280 | focused on what I'm doing for the work and that's fine. Right. That could be very much a part of

00:28:09.920 | your ideal lifestyle vision. It, this job helps give us the right flexibility about where we live.

00:28:17.920 | I support my family on this job. It's like, it's, it's important work. I do well, right. I I'm

00:28:23.760 | building towards owning my own sort of company here, which is going to help us then do X, Y,

00:28:28.640 | and Z like the, the there's no specific type of job that you need for the deep life. There's no

00:28:34.880 | specific experience of work that you have to have to achieve the deep life. What you need is intention

00:28:40.960 | and working from a clear lifestyle vision. So yes, there's this other aspect of the deep life where

00:28:47.280 | we talk about where people are, yeah, I'm reading interesting books and I'm being exposed to

00:28:50.960 | interesting sort of podcasts and ideas. I think that's also a key part of it as well. But that

00:28:55.920 | can be a separate part of it. And maybe that's not what you're doing during your job, but you have

00:29:00.400 | like a really nice library or reading nook you've built at your house. And when you're not out there

00:29:05.120 | driving the truck or what have you, you have like systematic reading time, whatever,

00:29:09.760 | there's lots of ways to think about it. So let's, let's expand, let's expand our definition of like

00:29:14.720 | what goes into the deep life. Many, many different types of jobs are part of building towards

00:29:20.320 | whatever lifestyle vision you might have fixed as being ideal. All right. Who do we have next?

00:29:28.560 | Next question is from Arjean. I watched your video on how to reinvent your life in four months

00:29:34.320 | where you talk about the deep life stack 1.0. Then shortly after I watched another video that

00:29:39.440 | talked about the deep life stack 2.0. What are the differences? The value of one. So like to go

00:29:46.320 | from 1.0 to 2.0, the difference is one. No, okay. Here's what's going on. I've been, we talk about

00:29:52.720 | the deep life on the show a lot. You know, I coined a term, God, it might've been in the very

00:29:56.880 | first episode of the show. We'd have to go back and check, but in the summer of 2020, four years

00:30:01.120 | ago, I've been experimenting of those times with different ways of thinking about, you know, how

00:30:07.120 | do you actually pursue this goal, including lots of analogies like stacks or like hardware versus

00:30:13.520 | software. Let's put aside for the second, those specific analogies and touch base with the broader

00:30:19.680 | program here. There's the broader program here is that I got this sense from my listeners and from

00:30:26.720 | my readers that this is a very important question. The pandemic really put this question to the

00:30:31.200 | forefront of a lot of people. And they felt like they weren't controlling their lives. They were

00:30:34.720 | just sort of bouncing around. Like, what am I doing here? I want to be in control of like what

00:30:38.080 | my life is like. I want it to be remarkable. Like, look at this life I've designed. It's like really

00:30:42.160 | cool focused on what I care about minimizes what I don't. Right. So it became clear during the

00:30:47.520 | pandemic that lots of people were grappling with this issue. Now, what's my approach to it? Right.

00:30:54.640 | I'm not a philosopher. I'm not a theologian. I'm not like a social psychologist who studies

00:30:59.840 | happiness. Like, so what is my approach here? Well, my, my, my approach to this topic is we

00:31:05.680 | focus a lot on the what, but what sort of things does a life well live have in it? We don't focus

00:31:13.760 | enough on the how, the mechanics, the nuts and bolts of actually engineering or re-engineering

00:31:20.400 | what your day-to-day existence is like. We sort of take that for granted and focus on like,

00:31:23.840 | here's what you need in it. And it's important that you have, you know, whatever, like community

00:31:28.960 | or that you have this or that we list these different attributes where we get inspired by

00:31:32.720 | these stories of my God, like, look at David Goggins is grinding after it. But we don't often

00:31:38.080 | get into the nuts and bolts mechanics of like, okay, but how do I get from here to something

00:31:41.600 | that's different? How do I get from the current life I have right now to a vision of the life

00:31:46.800 | that feels much better. And so everything I do about this topic is sort of centered on like,

00:31:51.120 | let's get into the nuts and bolts. That's why I play with very specific analogies to try to put

00:31:55.520 | structure around the, the, the behaviors and the strategies and the frameworks you need to actually

00:32:00.560 | get to make change. So those stacks were something I was experimenting with. There's other things I

00:32:06.400 | experimented with as well. Um, where I am now is I'm sort of working on an annotated outline for a

00:32:12.640 | book on this sort of focus on the, how, instead of the, what, when it comes to engineering a more

00:32:17.120 | intentional life, I've sort of simplified it more. I've moved away from having to kind of cutesy of

00:32:24.880 | analogies, you know, like I kind of trust the reader, like, let me give you the ideas and

00:32:29.520 | here's, here's kind of like the sequence, but I don't need to, I don't need to use, you know,

00:32:33.520 | metaphors to, uh, computational structures, et cetera. So like in my current form, I kind of

00:32:40.880 | have this breaking down into five parts. You sort of have to go through these five parts in order.

00:32:45.920 | I don't say it's a stack anymore. It's like, these are the things that kind of matter for doing this.

00:32:50.880 | Uh, I start with, and again, this is, I'm working on this, so don't, don't, don't lock this in

00:32:56.160 | either, but starting with preparation. So this idea of before you get too caught up into the

00:33:01.040 | fun part of thinking through what your life could be like, get organized, get disciplined, right?

00:33:08.400 | You know, like, again, we always, we often look past this or sort of like, uh, my, my elite

00:33:13.600 | brethren are used to being disciplined and organized and they think it's unnecessary,

00:33:18.320 | but people really, you need to start here. Okay. Two, get in your vision. This is like my big idea.

00:33:24.800 | We just talked about the deep dive, working forward to a singular grand goal is unlikely

00:33:29.280 | to sustainably change your life for the better. Working backwards from a broad and detailed,

00:33:34.160 | ideal lifestyle vision, that's going to make changes that are going to directly impact the

00:33:39.520 | stuff you care about. Like that's what's gonna allow your life six months from now to be better

00:33:43.040 | than it was six months, uh, before. All right. Um, implementation is like, so how do you actually do

00:33:49.760 | this? How do you make progress towards a lifestyle vision? It's not trivial. You got to deal with

00:33:56.400 | rituals. You got to deal with projects, one-time projects that you pursue. You have to deal with

00:34:00.560 | changes. Let me change where I live. Let me change the nature of my job. How do you do rituals,

00:34:07.520 | projects, and changes? How do you navigate those properly? Well, you know, you can't just take wild

00:34:12.720 | swings at it. You have to do evidence-based planning. You have to sort of, um, slowly build

00:34:17.840 | up to things there. There's a creativity to this to try to find, well, if I do this, it can affect

00:34:23.680 | three different parts of my vision in a positive way. There's a real art to the actual mechanical,

00:34:28.000 | like here's what I'm now doing to make progress towards the vision. It's not so simple.

00:34:32.240 | So we got to get into that thinking about rituals, projects, and changes and the, the,

00:34:37.920 | the subtle art of pursuing those. Um, then comes amplification. This is this idea that we talked

00:34:43.680 | about again, during the deep dive that once you're systematically moving towards your lifestyle

00:34:47.920 | vision, opportunities for the remarkable will arise and they will not be things you could have

00:34:53.920 | predicted in advance, and they will be bespoke to your current situation and the current things you

00:34:58.320 | care about. This is where things get interesting. How do you seek out those opportunities? How do

00:35:02.960 | you vet them? How do you pull the trigger on them? Right? This is where the really cool stuff

00:35:07.840 | happens, but it happens kind of late in the progress. And then finally growth. This is this

00:35:13.200 | idea that you're, you need to keep maturing your vision of the ideal, what your ideal lifestyle

00:35:19.680 | is. This will mature over time, but you need to fuel this maturing process. Uh, you getting older

00:35:25.200 | will help, but you also have to systematically try to just mature your understanding of the world.

00:35:30.800 | Like when we talk about building a vision of the ideal lifestyle, I talk a lot about seeing what

00:35:37.200 | resonates with you. Well, you can mature over time, even your mechanisms for resonance,

00:35:41.680 | like the sophistication with what, uh, with what you detect things that appeal to you or not,

00:35:46.320 | or what's important or not. And we get philosophy here and we get theology here. Um, we get, you

00:35:51.920 | know, hard one wisdom here. So there's this whole sort of process of growth over time. It's just

00:35:55.920 | sort of becoming a, um, a more mature person, a more value-driven person. You get better at that.

00:36:02.720 | So you don't have to be there full form when you start this process. So that's,

00:36:06.000 | that's how I think about it. Now we can put this, we could call this a stack, but I don't bother

00:36:09.200 | with that anymore. So again, the summarize, you prepare that you build your vision,

00:36:13.280 | then you implement with care. You look for opportunities to amplify and you grow over

00:36:17.280 | time. This seems to be more of what putting aside the specific things you end up pursuing.

00:36:23.120 | This really gets to the how of how to pursue that in a way that's sustainable.

00:36:26.560 | So I don't know. That's where I am now. That could change. Maybe I'll go back to being like super

00:36:33.520 | cutesy analogies. Again, depends, depends what mood I am. Uh, as I'm, as I'm writing my book,

00:36:40.240 | maybe I'll have like a pyramid that's on a circle. So you have to have the pyramid of values that

00:36:44.880 | rotates on the wheels of lifestyle. Um, and then on, on top of that, you have the flavor

00:36:52.240 | of remarkability. And then as you combine these into a matrix, that gives you a probability that

00:36:57.680 | you put into a machine learning model that then spits out a graphical representation of your

00:37:02.640 | spirit animal. That might be where I end up instead. We'll see. Simplifying. All right.

00:37:10.000 | What do we got next? Next question is from Marie. How do my husband and I design a deep

00:37:14.720 | life with four children at or under the age of kindergarten for children at kindergarten age or

00:37:20.720 | below? All right, Jesse, this brings me back again to the last principle for slow productivity,

00:37:26.320 | drink heavily. That's the, that's your solution right there. Um, this is an absolutely critical

00:37:33.040 | time to be thinking about the deep life, but this question is also critical because it really,

00:37:39.440 | again, helps us clarify what the deep life really can mean. So I'm assuming the tension in your

00:37:47.200 | question is that the vision of the deep life matches some of the things we talked about,

00:37:51.760 | where, uh, there's all of these aspects of your life in which you're sort of doing interesting,

00:37:56.240 | very intentional things, and you're in very good shape and reading all these books and your job

00:38:00.800 | is in this interesting way. And you're connected and you have these interesting hobbies and you're

00:38:04.720 | like, how is this possible with four kids at kindergarten or below? And of course like that

00:38:08.800 | stuff isn't, that's a fire alarm type of situation. That's an all hands on deck situation,

00:38:14.000 | but let's just back up a little bit. What, what really do we mean by the deep life? Well,

00:38:19.920 | intentional lived on purpose. So you can apply, you're in a hard, interesting, wonderful, but

00:38:26.400 | difficult period of family life. You can absolutely, and should absolutely be living

00:38:32.320 | on purpose during this period. It's just what your purpose is. The intention, like what's our

00:38:37.600 | intentional vision for what these years should be like, um, is going to look very different than

00:38:41.760 | how a 27 year old will answer that question. It's going to look very different than how like a 47

00:38:45.680 | year old whose kids are older is going to answer that question right now. It's going to be focused

00:38:49.520 | a lot on, okay, we want to, um, develop these like little things into like reasonable humans.

00:38:56.480 | We want to, um, do this without sort of being completely exhausted. We want to be able to

00:39:02.720 | find joy in this young age. The kids will never be at again. We want to be able to

00:39:08.960 | have space to find joy in that, to avoid like complete stress. Um, you get really clear about

00:39:13.840 | like, what do we want this sort of young kid period to look like? And then you work backwards

00:39:18.080 | from that vision. And then that could lead, that intention can lead to lots of interesting things.

00:39:22.240 | It might be little things in terms of just how you're thinking about like activities for the

00:39:28.720 | kids or how your balance, the, the, the format of childcare, what you're doing with, um, what type

00:39:34.400 | of preschool the kids are going to, like these things you begin to get intentional about the

00:39:41.280 | match division you have. Now this could lead to even larger changes. Like we're going to change

00:39:45.120 | something about our work setups here, right? It's, it's a absolutely like fantastic application of

00:39:52.080 | the deep life methodology that you can imagine the role of work during this period of life is

00:39:57.120 | going to be very different than it was and what it's going to be six years from now.

00:39:59.920 | There may be like a holding pattern thing we want to do here. I'm going to reduce to this.

00:40:04.880 | You're going to do this. Yeah. We're not like getting ahead, but we want to make sure we keep

00:40:09.200 | these jobs, but this is going to allow us to then, uh, have much more intentional about how we deal

00:40:14.400 | with where the kids are and when we pick them up or how this happens, right? This is the time you

00:40:18.320 | have to be intentional. And when you're intentional here, you have to see the full picture, all of the

00:40:24.000 | aspects of your life you care about. This is a dangerous period. Like what happens sometimes

00:40:29.840 | during these kid period is that when people are not intentional about the full vision of like,

00:40:34.480 | what is our ideal lifestyle through this season of our life? And they don't, they ignore that

00:40:40.720 | they, they focus then sort of randomly on other things. Like, well, what matters to me is just

00:40:45.280 | like, I want to advance my career as fast as possible. Uh, and then like your partner says

00:40:49.760 | the same thing and then everyone is just resentful of each other and stressed all the time. It's not

00:40:53.200 | working out well, right? You just focus on like one random thing or one person is focusing on

00:40:58.080 | something about the kids. The other person's focused on something else and you're, you know,

00:41:00.640 | you're not on the same page and it's not working out. Like this is the time you have to be on the

00:41:04.480 | same page and say, what does this five year period? And I would, I would say this period

00:41:09.120 | ends once all of your kids basically are in elementary school. That's the next period.

00:41:12.320 | I remember this period. Well, I'm in the next period now. How do, what do we want to do in

00:41:17.360 | this period? Like what, what do we want this to be like all parts of your life really matters.

00:41:23.520 | It might change the communities you get involved in. Uh, it changes. Maybe it changes something

00:41:28.560 | more drastically. Like now it is time. This is the time we're going to move. We want to be closer to

00:41:32.800 | family. We want to move to a place where we can be more deeply enmeshed in these communities that

00:41:36.160 | matter because we're going to need the support. We want to live cheaper so we don't have to be

00:41:39.600 | working so much because we have four kids and they're young and they're similar ages. And

00:41:43.120 | that's just going to require a lot of time. So let's reconceive our conception, not around

00:41:47.120 | a particular career trajectories, but around a full lifestyle trajectory. That's more interesting.

00:41:51.360 | This is also a good time to think ahead. Where do we want to be in the next days? Like when all of

00:41:57.200 | our kids are in elementary school so that we can be making the moves right now with that in mind as

00:42:02.400 | well. We don't get caught off guard when we get there. Uh, my wife and I thought a lot about this,

00:42:08.400 | a like how we wanted life to be when our three kids were young, but also we really early on,

00:42:13.280 | I mean, I remember these discussions were really clearly articulating the properties of the, the

00:42:19.680 | family lifestyle we wanted during the elementary school age that we're in now. And all,

00:42:24.480 | all of our kids are sort of of that age. You know, my, my oldest is starting middle school

00:42:28.080 | next year, sixth grade, but I came from New Jersey where we had junior high that starts in seventh

00:42:32.560 | grade. So I don't really count sixth grade. It's not an elementary school, but they're all,

00:42:36.640 | they're all, it's a completely different phase, but you know what, this thinking we did.

00:42:40.240 | I remember doing this thinking when the third kid hadn't even been born yet. And the other two were

00:42:45.920 | like an infant and like a kid just starting preschool. I remember like where we were doing

00:42:49.680 | this thinking, really checking in on this, not how, not specifically, like here's specifically

00:42:54.000 | what we'll be doing in 2024, but just thinking about where we wanted to be like made a big

00:42:58.960 | difference. And it shaped a lot of decisions. And I really, we're, we're like reaping that

00:43:04.240 | benefit now. Like we've been working backwards from that, not working forwards towards a ground

00:43:08.320 | goal, not working forwards from like, all that matters is like this happens in my career.

00:43:12.240 | So this is like the critical time to be thinking about the deep life, but you just have to be

00:43:17.680 | super expansive and flexible about what that means. It's intention. It's not any particular

00:43:21.760 | mix of things. So yeah, do this planning, do it often. This is what's going to make the

00:43:28.800 | difference between the sort of sustainable, tight, sort of wonderful family life going

00:43:33.520 | forward. And one where it's stressful and resentful and random, like you have to be

00:43:38.400 | thinking through what our lifestyle wants to be like, not this is what I'm doing. And sort of

00:43:43.760 | the other stuff is a burden or an obstacle that I'm sort of annoyed exist.

00:43:50.080 | That's a good question for, for kids at or under kindergarten, that's tough.

00:43:53.120 | So do you do a lot of post analysis after they're out of elementary school?

00:43:57.600 | Well, we just keep thinking about the next. Okay. Yeah. It's like, what do we want to,

00:44:00.800 | what's working, not working now? Where do we want to be in the next, like the next phase?

00:44:05.680 | And they're each different. And then we have to revise a lot because you learn things like you

00:44:10.560 | don't, you don't know that, oh, this is what this is really going to be like. But the key is,

00:44:15.040 | and this is like a key part of the deep life methodology in general, lifestyle focus,

00:44:18.800 | like the properties of life is what you're focusing on. Not specific, like where I want

00:44:25.120 | to be is this position in this job, or like we have to live in this place. When you're thinking

00:44:32.000 | about properties of lifestyle, you get flexibility and options. There's a lot of different ways we

00:44:37.120 | could get there. And then these, as I talked about these interesting opportunities for the

00:44:40.560 | remarkable come up, you're like, oh, I never even knew that opportunity existed, but you know what,

00:44:44.240 | if we did that, we could get these three things working pretty well. And you could do this and

00:44:48.640 | it, there's a flexibility to it, you know, and then this is how you're able to sort of

00:44:53.520 | construct these bespoke intentional lives. All right. Oh, it looks like our next question.

00:45:00.320 | Is this our slow productivity corner? It is. Let's get that music.

00:45:12.080 | As long time listeners know, we try to have one question per episode that's related to my new book,

00:45:16.960 | Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. You can find out wherever books

00:45:22.960 | are sold or at calnewport.com/slow. All right, Jesse, what's our slow productivity corner

00:45:28.160 | question of the week? This question is from Sean. In slow productivity, you discuss limit your

00:45:35.760 | missions. If I only have a single day job, do I have exactly one mission? And the advice is just

00:45:41.680 | for super hustlers out there. Uh, it's a good question, right? So in the principle, do fewer

00:45:48.000 | things. I talk about, you need to reduce to accomplish this. You often have to reduce what

00:45:54.400 | you're working on at various levels of abstraction. So if you just come to like your day and it's like,

00:46:00.640 | I want to do fewer things today, that might be impossible because you have a lot of things that

00:46:05.200 | need to be done, right? Because maybe you have many projects you're working on and each of the

00:46:10.480 | projects has a lot of things they need you to do. So you have to also limit your projects so you

00:46:14.640 | don't have too many things being generated that have to be done, but it might be hard to limit

00:46:19.040 | your projects. If you have a lot of bigger missions or initiatives you're working on,

00:46:22.080 | each of which have to generate projects, you can't limit projects. So you have to

00:46:26.000 | move up even higher and limit the, uh, the missions or initiatives you're working on.

00:46:29.920 | So you have to sort of limit from the top to have this reduction carry through all the way to like

00:46:35.200 | what you're actually doing on the day to day where it makes a difference. So that's what limit your

00:46:39.360 | missions means. Um, a single day job can have multiple missions, right? All this is, is just

00:46:46.560 | major initiatives that you're pursuing. Like this is something I'm pursuing and trying to do well

00:46:50.400 | and want to be known for. In some day jobs, it's really clear, like this is just what you're doing.

00:46:54.960 | You're in sales. You're trying to move sales numbers. That's all that matters. But a lot of

00:46:58.080 | jobs, there's a lot of opportunities to take on multiple big initiatives. Maybe some are internal

00:47:03.440 | facing reform in your organization. This is like a product strategy. This is like a technology

00:47:08.480 | strategy. Limit those, right? This is what I'm doing in this job. If at all possible. Like this

00:47:15.840 | is the thing I'm really working on. Hold me to it. I'm trying to get this product line big.

00:47:22.480 | I'm trying to overhaul the way we do digital marketing plans, whatever it is,

00:47:27.680 | try to keep that simplified. That will generate fewer total projects, which means there's fewer

00:47:33.920 | total tasks that you have to work on. Your days can give you more breathing room, and then you can

00:47:38.640 | focus on doing that work really, really well. Of course, the double-edged sword of limiting

00:47:43.200 | your missions is you actually have to deliver. You're basically saying, this is what I'm doing,

00:47:47.520 | but hold me to it. The appeal of having many missions is you can be like, I'm really busy.

00:47:52.720 | And I have, I'm doing a lot of things. I just seem in a pseudo productive sense is like,

00:47:56.160 | I'm a useful person here. You lose that comfort of freneticism standing in for actual value

00:48:01.840 | production when you say, no, no, look, this is what I do. I want to focus on this. Hold me to

00:48:05.040 | it, but I want to focus on this. That's the double-edged sword. You are going to be accountable.

00:48:08.880 | But on the other hand, it gives you breathing room. And when you have breathing room,

00:48:13.040 | I don't have the administrative overhead of 20 tasks at the same time. You can actually

00:48:17.920 | get work done at a high level of quality and do so in a way that's much more sustainable,

00:48:22.080 | much less frenetic and stressful. That's a good question. It doesn't matter.

00:48:26.320 | Knowledge work is so flexible, like day job, non-day job, entrepreneurial, big organization.

00:48:31.920 | We can get overloaded in all of those situations. And in all those situations, limiting missions can

00:48:37.440 | really matter. All right. That's our Slow Productivity Corner.

00:48:40.720 | All right. Do we have a call today, Jesse? We do have a call.

00:48:53.440 | Excellent. Let's hear this. Here we go.

00:48:54.960 | Hi, Cal. My name is Christina, and I work in finance. I took five years off to have children

00:49:00.800 | and keep them at home, and I'm just now back at work full-time this year. I've noticed that my

00:49:07.680 | ability to focus has really taken a hit since having young children. I don't do any social

00:49:13.200 | media or anything like that, but I really am struggling with keeping focused for long periods

00:49:18.800 | of time, not just on complex concepts, but also on those little detailed things that you have to

00:49:24.800 | keep track of, whether it's like data validation, things like that that are just really hard to

00:49:32.800 | concentrate on. So any tips would be very much appreciated. I really would like to get very,

00:49:41.360 | very good at my job and make up for some of that lost time. Thanks so much.

00:49:46.880 | Well, Christina, this is hard.

00:49:48.400 | Hi, Cal.

00:49:48.900 | This is hard. It is a common problem. We had an interview about this, a professor from

00:49:56.320 | Brown who worked on psychology and work. Yael, I forgot her last name right now.

00:50:02.640 | Anyways, we had this really interesting interview. And Christina, this reminds me of what you're

00:50:06.560 | talking about here, because I had this question. I asked her, I said, I don't know if it's pushback,

00:50:13.040 | but just frustration, especially from listeners who are moms, who are frustrated about the idea

00:50:21.600 | of deep work. And well, who's taking care of the kids while this person's doing deep work?

00:50:29.360 | And I was like, I don't understand this. Deep work, this is a very abstract thing,

00:50:33.280 | very computer science systemic way of non-emotional way of thinking about this.

00:50:38.720 | When working on knowledge work, you can do it with uninterrupted focus

00:50:42.400 | or with context switching. And if you're context switching, your brain doesn't work as well

00:50:45.920 | and you don't produce good stuff and it takes longer. So we should, in knowledge work in general,

00:50:51.440 | recognize that uninterrupted focus is important and try to protect that, et cetera.

00:50:54.800 | It's like, what is this? I don't understand what, what could you be upset about this,

00:50:58.240 | this like abstract concept of focus produces more than uninterrupted focus. I'm not saying,

00:51:03.040 | not making any prescriptions of like how much of this you should have or how you should find this,

00:51:08.320 | whatever. And the guest, the psychologist from Brown, she was like, yeah, but there's a,

00:51:14.320 | the frustration is like, especially if like you're a mom, but in this context is like,

00:51:19.040 | you just have a much harder time finding unbroken focus. Even if it's not, you have the,

00:51:26.480 | you can literally block off the time. You're thinking about the kids, you're thinking about

00:51:31.600 | the school you're thinking about, and whether this is like cultural or whether this is, you know,

00:51:36.640 | just it's genetic it's in our species who knows, but it's like, if you have a much harder time,

00:51:41.520 | just putting your focus on something. And it's frustrating. It's frustrating that you can't

00:51:46.000 | focus as much and the focus really matters. And now people that you're probably smarter than and

00:51:52.240 | more capable than are going to be moving ahead just because it's, they just don't care as much

00:51:56.240 | that the men don't, it's just not grabbing their attention as much. And it's frustrating. That's

00:52:00.240 | why they're frustrated. It's not a fundamental, it's not a mistake in the idea, just the abstract

00:52:04.880 | idea of how cognitive processes unfold. This idea that context, switching produces less capacity

00:52:09.680 | than focus. It's like, it's a, it's a frustration about particular group of people that are like,

00:52:15.520 | I can't do that as much. And yet no one is acknowledging enough that like, this is different.

00:52:20.880 | This is hard, which is all to say, Christina, like what you're going through is very common.

00:52:25.200 | Something I've learned. If you have young kids at home, yeah, it's harder to focus.

00:52:29.440 | That's probably evolution. It's probably a good thing for the history of our species.

00:52:34.800 | That you're, I mean, it's bad for you, but probably a good thing for our history of our species that

00:52:39.440 | I just having a hard time focused on data analysis right now because, you know,

00:52:43.920 | human kids are hard to keep alive. It grabs our attention. Okay. So, I mean, that's validating,

00:52:51.760 | but it's not solving your problem. But I just wanted to start with that because it took me a

00:52:55.520 | long time again, with my, my approach to the world, which is very non-emotional, very private

00:53:02.240 | talking about abstractions. And this is the way things unfold can hit up against other ways and

00:53:08.240 | other things going on in the world. All right. So what, what can you do about this? First,

00:53:11.520 | you can go easier on yourself. It's just, you know, look, I'm a different person.

00:53:14.640 | I have young kids and I really care about, and I have to keep them alive. That is a very hard job.

00:53:20.000 | I'm not talking physically, I'm talking cognitively. So you can just kind of,

00:53:23.200 | there's, there's a sort of going easier on yourself here of like, yeah, this is,

00:53:26.640 | this is a different me than it was pre kids. And just being okay with that. It's not 29 year old

00:53:33.200 | me where I could just go at it eight hours a day, concentrated on spreadsheets. Like I can't do that

00:53:37.520 | anymore. And it's for good reason. So it's not a bad thing. It's just a new reality. You know,

00:53:44.480 | it's like when the baseball pitcher, women are going to love this analogy, Jesse,

00:53:54.160 | when the baseball pitcher gets older in their career and they can't throw 95 miles per hour

00:54:00.000 | anymore. And it's like Trevor Williams for the nationals. You change the way you pitch. It's

00:54:07.600 | like, okay, so I can't do that anymore. But I'm, I've been doing this for a long time. I'm kind of

00:54:12.560 | like I'm more mature and I'm wiser. So now I'm going to, I'm going to throw good, you know,

00:54:18.160 | 89 fastball is going to play up because I've got my, my splitter is really working. Yeah. I've

00:54:23.680 | learned by the way, like what, um, women who are frustrated about men, what they really love is

00:54:29.600 | to have this explained in terms of analogies to Trevor Williams, somebody else's analogy about it

00:54:35.120 | earlier too, for the love of the game with Kevin Costner, he's on the mound, like clear the

00:54:38.800 | mechanism. Is that that movie? I, it was either you talking about or somebody else within like

00:54:44.400 | the last couple of days for love. I think that's for love the game. Yeah. Yeah. Clear the mechanism,

00:54:51.760 | clear the mechanism, Christina. All right. Um, so yeah, you're different than you were before.

00:54:54.960 | And we all are like, here's an interesting, like I'm different than I was before. It's weird.

00:55:00.080 | You know, I'm super generalizing, but as like a dad of young boys, all my kids are boys.

00:55:06.160 | Like for me, the like real change and sort of my ability to just lock into work actually came when

00:55:11.600 | they got a little bit older, like closer to elementary school age, because the boys needed

00:55:14.960 | this sort of dad time all the time. Like they needed specifically dad time as part of their

00:55:18.960 | development as humans. That was a huge sap on cognitive energy that would have otherwise,

00:55:24.720 | you know, um, gone into work. So again, like babies were more survival mode for me. Like,

00:55:30.000 | how do I just like help keep these alive and like keep my wife from going crazy? Like young boys,

00:55:33.920 | it's like, Ooh, they need this. Why am I at work? So we, we different people get these different

00:55:38.960 | things at different times, but families can change who you are and how you actually approach the

00:55:43.920 | energy, uh, of your work. So I think that's good. So what we have to do is like, what I'm trying to

00:55:50.080 | do is what you have to do is the knowledge work equivalent of the older pitcher learning to use

00:55:57.680 | obfuscation and deception to keep his ERA low. And there's a term for this. And I wrote a whole

00:56:05.600 | book about it. Slow productivity, right? Slow productivity is my way of thinking about how

00:56:11.920 | do you still like produce stuff that moves the needle and matters when you can't just get after

00:56:17.920 | it and just be locked in busy and outwork everyone out, energy, everyone out, focus everyone. That's

00:56:22.080 | kind of what that book is about. And I've talked about it, like my three boys getting to this age

00:56:26.400 | where they needed all my time and that sort of shift in my, um, understanding of the world.

00:56:31.520 | Like that was a big inspire inspiration for working on the ideas that became slow productivity. I

00:56:35.200 | needed it for myself, right? It was partially why I worked on that book. And so what are these

00:56:39.680 | ideas and slow productivity? Well, okay. We need to work on fewer things at the same time. This

00:56:43.840 | doesn't mean accomplish fewer things, but acknowledging we already have a lot of things

00:56:48.960 | on our heads. We need to minimize administrative overhead. We need to minimize multitasking and

00:56:53.520 | context switching. So let's be more sequential. Let me do this, do this really well. Now I'm

00:56:56.880 | going to work on this. Let me work on this. Well, there's a lot of things on my plate.

00:56:59.760 | Let me divide between the small number of things I'm actively working on and the things I'm waiting

00:57:03.600 | to work on. And the things I'm waiting to work on, I'm not entertaining administrative overhead on

00:57:08.000 | emails and meetings. I'm not doing on these things yet. They're here. You can see their status.

00:57:12.720 | You can see it marching down the line. And when it gets to active, then I'll work on it.

00:57:17.440 | So we need to work on fewer things. We need to work out a more natural pace,

00:57:20.800 | be much more realistic about how long things are actually going to take and be okay with that.

00:57:25.920 | Be okay with the idea that, you know, I might not be super frenetic on Tuesday, but at the end of

00:57:30.960 | this quarter, I can point to, I did these three things and these three things really matter.

00:57:35.040 | That brings us to the third principle, which is what all of us sort of family adult knowledge

00:57:40.000 | workers have to super embrace is obsess over quality. We are going to earn flexibility.

00:57:45.200 | We're going to earn freedom from frenetic accessibility. We're going to gain autonomy

00:57:52.160 | by getting really good at the things that matter. This is, I'm specializing on this. Hold me to it.

00:57:58.640 | I do this really well. So we have to break our relationship to our jobs out of the grips of

00:58:05.760 | pseudo productivity, which just says activities. What matter? If I could see you doing a bunch of

00:58:10.640 | stuff that I know that at the very least, you're not, not productive. We want to escape that

00:58:15.280 | and be measured instead on output outcomes over time, really valuable stuff that other people

00:58:21.040 | can't do when you're seeing. And again, you're not new to the job. You were in this job before

00:58:26.000 | you took time off, right? You're more mature. You understand what matters, what doesn't matters.

00:58:30.560 | You're not sort of, you know just young and energetic anymore. You can begin to carve out

00:58:35.760 | what we're all trying to do. I do this thing really well. I do it better than these people.

00:58:39.600 | I deliver. I can do that by working on fewer things at the same time, more natural pace,

00:58:45.280 | like all of this matters. Slow productivity is, if anything, a game plan for parents

00:58:50.800 | to rebuild their relevance, be a useful pitcher, even when they can't do the young man or young

00:58:56.560 | woman's game anymore of just throwing a lot of pseudo productivity at it. All right. So there's

00:59:01.360 | like a lot of things we're talking about here, Christina, but I think it's a good discussion.

00:59:04.000 | So one, we have the validation of the frustration mothers in general in knowledge work, that

00:59:09.280 | frustration of, I can't do the focus I used to be able to do. And you know, like the new dads can,

00:59:16.320 | and that's frustrating. We're not talking about that's frustrating too. So yeah, we are different

00:59:21.520 | families. Other types of things can change us. It's not, it's not bad. It's just, this is,

00:59:26.160 | we're now a different person. How do we still build a good game? And that brings us number

00:59:29.680 | three, slow productivity. We've got to figure out how to shift ourselves and how other people

00:59:34.560 | see us from activity-based notions of productivity to outcome-based notions of productivity.

00:59:39.200 | If your field makes that impossible, if your employer makes that impossible,

00:59:44.320 | that's just not the way they operate, but you know what you want. You have this vision of like

00:59:50.000 | what working life, the slow productive version of working life, it's not a bad motivation to

00:59:54.720 | look for changes. So how do I shift over to a change that does make that happen? This part

01:00:02.160 | of finance, not here, but here, my own thing or here, or the lawyer. I know a lawyer who did this

01:00:08.800 | really good at the type of laws she does saying, I am not interested in the partner track.

01:00:14.080 | So we're going to, I'm going to leave the partner track and now I can actually control my hours.

01:00:19.920 | And so instead of trying to build a maximum number of hours, I'm going to build 35 hours.

01:00:24.800 | Okay. Yes. I've lost the, like, I'm on my track to be an equity partner,

01:00:29.280 | but I make a lot per hour. And we moved over here to the mountains where it's much cheaper

01:00:33.120 | because this, this work can be done remotely. And this works out really well. I'm doing really hard

01:00:38.720 | super skilled work. It's very valuable to my clients. I'm just doing half as much as I would

01:00:41.920 | have to do to be on the partner track. But I'm not thinking about maximizing like salary. I'm

01:00:47.600 | thinking about having a good salary for those hours is a great salary for those hours. And we

01:00:51.200 | can live like Kings over here. Right? So there's, there's it. Once you know what you're trying to do,

01:00:55.920 | I'm a different person. I need a slow productivity as opposed to a pseudo productivity approach to my

01:01:00.240 | work. There's a huge number of options there where you can still be doing stuff that matters,

01:01:04.000 | supporting your family, being engaged, but these other parts of your vision,

01:01:07.760 | the ideal lifestyle can also be preserved. So this is like a good approach to these questions,

01:01:12.160 | as opposed to just drastic changes. Jobs are bad. I don't want to, I don't want to work anymore,

01:01:18.400 | or I shouldn't have to change anything then from what I was when I was 26 or whatever.

01:01:22.480 | So like, whatever, I'm just going to, you know, grind it out and we're going to make this happen.

01:01:26.400 | We have like subtlety here. We understand the problem. We're working towards a broader vision,

01:01:31.600 | the ideal lifestyle. We have a sense of what craft can be post kids, the slower productivity

01:01:37.040 | notion of craft and saying, can I get that in my job? And if not, what's the closest thing

01:01:42.240 | to preserve as much of my career capital as possible, where I can get that. I mean,

01:01:45.360 | all of this is about clarity and specificity and what's going on, why it's going on, what we want,

01:01:50.400 | how we can change it, how we can get there. The more clear and systematic we are, the better

01:01:54.480 | decisions we make, the better changes we make. We avoid the drastic grand gestures. We avoid the

01:01:58.560 | regrets of making the big change that didn't really fix things. So Christina, there's a lot

01:02:02.960 | packed into this simple question. I think it was, it was good to unfold, but I think the main point

01:02:07.920 | is, and again, I can't emphasize this enough for the women in your life, try to analogize all their

01:02:13.360 | problems to like obscure baseball things. That is, that is always a winner, Jesse.

01:02:18.240 | It was a Yale Sean Braun.

01:02:20.720 | Yale Sean Braun. Oh, I liked that interview. What episode was that?

01:02:23.120 | I found I was searching. It was a while ago.

01:02:27.120 | It was a while ago. Yeah, that was a cool, that was a cool episode because if I remember correctly,

01:02:32.000 | she studied, she's a Brown professor, psychologist who studies psychology and work.

01:02:35.920 | And among other things, the psychology of gender and work. And it was fascinating interview.

01:02:42.560 | All right. We've got a case study. Case studies are where people send in like a report on how

01:02:50.720 | things are going with applying the type of advice we talk here about the show to their own life.

01:02:55.200 | We like these, please send them in. How do they do that, Jesse? Just go to the question submission

01:03:01.280 | form. And one of the options is case study. Yeah. Go to the deeplife.com/listen. And then at top,

01:03:07.120 | you can click on the survey link and then. Yeah. Send these in.

01:03:10.640 | There's an option for case studies. Or they can just email me.

01:03:13.520 | Or email jesse@calnewport.com. Especially deep life stuff, because I'm thinking about a book on

01:03:18.400 | this. Send in those case studies about you systematically cultivating a deep life. I love

01:03:22.960 | those. All right. Today's case study comes from Mark. It has a hidden question inside of it. So

01:03:27.200 | it's a case study plus bonus question. Mark says, firstly, thanks for all your work that you have

01:03:34.000 | put into your books and podcasts. I discovered you very late at the end of 2023 and have implemented

01:03:40.000 | a lot of your ideas into my life since then, including the digital declutter en route to

01:03:46.640 | embracing digital minimalism, time block planning, deep work, intentional living,

01:03:53.600 | reading as default entertainment. This has improved my life immensely, both in and out of

01:04:00.160 | work. Since your work has had such an impact on my life outside of work, I'm always excited by the

01:04:05.360 | deep life segments on the podcast and learning more about it. On that note, do you have any book

01:04:10.480 | recommendations aside from your own that would compliment cultivating a deep life outside of work?

01:04:15.520 | So far from past recommendations, I have two books, Walden and Designing Your Life. I'd love

01:04:20.320 | to hear more. You'd consider good reading before you release a deep life book in the future.

01:04:25.440 | Yeah, Walden's a good one. I increasingly think about Thoreau and Walden as the original person

01:04:32.240 | in early modernity grappling with this question of how do I design my life? Not within an existing

01:04:39.600 | structure of meaning, but feeling like you had to come up with that from scratch and

01:04:43.440 | systematically experiment with what do I want to do with my life? Thoreau and Walden is sort of

01:04:49.200 | patient zero for that type of thinking. Here's the thing, looking for books that are about

01:04:56.960 | how to build a deep life, specifically about a deep life, will only get you so far. I mean,

01:05:02.800 | my book, when I eventually write it, of course, will be must reading. But really, what you should

01:05:06.880 | be focusing on much more than that, Mark, is books that give you intimations of what your own deep

01:05:12.400 | life should include. What you're looking for is resonance. I am reading about this person.

01:05:18.720 | I'm reading about this thing. It's not a book about specifically how to make your life better.

01:05:24.240 | It's a book about someone's life, and it resonates. You want to write that down.

01:05:28.720 | Then you watch this documentary. Something about that resonates. You write that down.

01:05:33.120 | You come across an article in a magazine. Why is this resonating? You write that down.

01:05:36.400 | An Instagram picture. Why is this particular Instagram story capture my attention? You

01:05:40.960 | write that down. Have one notebook that you're writing all this down, and you're trying to

01:05:44.160 | capture these intimations of what's important to you. Then eventually, you can take these

01:05:48.320 | observations of all these things that resonated and extract more general properties.

01:05:52.080 | Oh, the things that resonate tend to be slower living outdoors or craft or energy and the

01:06:04.800 | freneticism of the city and the tales of people living in brownstones in New York and going to

01:06:11.600 | the club. Whatever it is, you begin to extract the general properties from these specific examples of

01:06:17.040 | things that resonate. That's how you begin to craft your ideal lifestyle vision. I would care

01:06:21.440 | more about that, Mark, than reading specifically about how to think about your life or how to

01:06:25.520 | change your life. Read broadly, look for what resonates, write it down, and then extract

01:06:31.920 | properties. It can be surprising. I've mentioned before, for myself, there's some Hawaii stuff

01:06:39.360 | that's resonated. Laird Hamilton's house in Malibu and how he lives out there and how his

01:06:46.080 | days structure while he's waiting for the big waves to come. That resonated with me, not because

01:06:51.920 | I want to live on a pineapple plantation in Malibu or not because I want to surf big waves or not

01:06:56.160 | because I want to even live in Hawaii, but there's deeper things in that about seasonality,

01:07:02.320 | deep to shallow work ratio, the work to other parts of life, variation and intensity,

01:07:08.560 | followed by times with intense focus and things that aren't work. There's subtler properties that

01:07:12.800 | resonate. Why did I come across that? Watching the documentary, a combination of there's a

01:07:20.960 | Laird Hamilton documentary, which is great. I recommend it. And the Susan Casey book, The Wave,

01:07:25.760 | which is like half of that book is a biography of Laird Hamilton and the other half is about

01:07:30.320 | the science of big waves. Fantastic book. I recommend it. But anyways, I don't know why

01:07:34.640 | that resonated at the time, but I just made a note of that. And then over time I extracted,

01:07:38.000 | oh, there's some general properties in here that are important to me. So that's what I care about

01:07:41.840 | more. Mark is finding things that resonate, then care more about that than finding a specific

01:07:47.840 | instruction about shaping your life. Just wait for my deep life book and that'll solve that for you.

01:07:53.120 | In the meantime, figure out what that vision involves. All right, we got, we're coming up

01:07:59.600 | to our final segment. We're going to talk about the books I read, but first hear from another

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01:08:47.760 | very bespoke and useful, right? I mean, in my book, A World Without Email, I talk a lot about

01:08:52.400 | having processes for how you manage repeated work. So it's not just free-for-alls with attachments

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01:09:01.760 | Our ad agency, for example, built a really cool way of tracking ad reads in Notion,

01:09:10.800 | where it connected information to these different views. So we could see, for example,

01:09:14.880 | here's the ad reads for this upcoming podcast episode, but then we could click on a particular

01:09:21.120 | ad read. Okay, here's the advertiser, like here's the script for it. We could go in there afterwards

01:09:26.240 | and say, here's the link and timestamps for exactly when we did these ads. But then we could

01:09:31.200 | have another view and say, why don't you show me all the ads we did for this advertiser? And

01:09:34.240 | then a different view shows us all of that. Oh, here's everything we've done for that advertiser.

01:09:38.160 | You could change the view, you could manage this. It gave us a workflow that allowed us to

01:09:42.240 | have a very complicated advertising rhythm for our show without it having to just be like chaos of

01:09:49.920 | everyone just emailing things back and forth and getting things wrong. So you can build these sort

01:09:53.840 | of custom data-driven things. The AI power to this, though, just brings it up to the next level.

01:10:00.080 | Now, one of the things I like about the new AI tools is you can just type right into there.

01:10:04.080 | Oh, I'm looking for, in our case, an ad read we did for this type of company. I forgot its name.

01:10:11.840 | I think we did it a couple, like last year. And the AI is like, oh, here's where it is. And it

01:10:16.160 | brings you over there. Or where's our marketing reports from last quarter? I forgot where those

01:10:20.400 | here they are, right? So like AI is now being integrated to this. So not only can you create

01:10:25.600 | these custom ways of working with your data, you can find data conversationally. It just makes

01:10:30.160 | these tools all the more powerful. So whether you're a Fortune 500 company or a freelance

01:10:34.720 | designer, whether you're starting a new startup or a student juggling, like some clubs you're

01:10:40.160 | running, Notion is for you. You can manage your work and your workflow. So try Notion for free

01:10:46.160 | when you go to Notion.com/cal, but do that in all lowercase letters. That's Notion.com/cal

01:10:54.080 | and start turning your ideas into action. When you use our link, you'll be supporting our show.

01:10:59.280 | So make sure you go to Notion.com/cal. I also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN.

01:11:06.560 | Look, using the internet without ExpressVPN is like having a first aid kit, but not keeping it

01:11:12.320 | stocked up. You know, most of the time you'll probably be fine. But what happens when you get

01:11:16.320 | into that horrible accident and there's nothing there in that first aid kit to help you stem

01:11:21.600 | the bleeding? That's what it's like to use the internet without ExpressVPN because every time

01:11:26.880 | you're connected to an unencrypted network, like at a cafe or hotel or an airport, any hacker on

01:11:33.680 | the same network can gain access to your personal data. It doesn't take much technical knowledge to

01:11:40.160 | hack someone. A cheap piece of hardware that like any smart 12 year old could use is all you need.

01:11:45.840 | And trust me, people are looking for this data. Hackers can make up to $1,000 per person selling

01:11:52.560 | your personal information on the dark web. ExpressVPN can protect you from that. And the

01:11:58.640 | way it works is ExpressVPN runs on your computer. And so instead of you, you know, connecting to

01:12:03.680 | that wireless access point at the airport, instead of just talking to that access point, okay,

01:12:09.600 | here's the website I'm going to, you know, here's my password, whatever. When you use a VPN like

01:12:14.000 | ExpressVPN, it encrypts what you're saying right there on your local machine. And it sends in an

01:12:21.920 | encrypted, unbreakable message. It sends to a VPN server. This is what this person really wanted to

01:12:28.320 | do. It unencrypts the message and the VPN server talks on your behalf. So that the hacker that's

01:12:32.080 | sitting there at the airport or at the hotel or at the coffee shop, all they can learn is that you

01:12:37.440 | have an encrypted connection, what they call an encrypted tunnel to a VPN server. They can't steal

01:12:41.520 | your information. So maybe nine times out of 10, no one's trying to hack you, but it's that 10th

01:12:47.200 | time where really bad stuff can happen. ExpressVPN protects you. So secure your online data today by

01:12:54.800 | visiting expressvpn.com/deep. That's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-vpn.com/deep. And you will get an extra

01:13:04.000 | three months free, but only when you go to expressvpn.com/deep. All right, Jesse, let's

01:13:10.560 | get to our final segment because this is our first episode in June. As I try to do at the beginning

01:13:16.960 | of each month is I want to review the five books I read in the month preceding. So I want to go over

01:13:23.520 | the five books I read in May, 2024. The first book I read was Science and Human Values by J.

01:13:33.200 | Bronowski. J. Bronowski, who wrote, I believe he's most known for The Ascent of Man. Anyways,

01:13:40.560 | 20th century philosopher of technology more than anything else, who was one of the well-known

01:13:47.920 | thinkers and critics on technology and how it impacts society, how it shaped human civilization

01:13:56.080 | over the years. So a really respected thinker in that social aspects of technology space.

01:14:02.240 | This is one of his well-known, a shorter book, dense book, Science and Human Values. Interesting,

01:14:08.400 | this was really written, I believe this was like mid-20th century. And he's really talking about

01:14:13.360 | what was then a very central tension between science and the humanities. And was sort of

01:14:18.080 | getting at the value science broad and trying to address some of these concerns of thinking of

01:14:24.960 | these two things as being either very separate or one being able to replace the other. So some

01:14:31.920 | of it's very of the times, but also there's some really deep ideas in there. So it's interesting

01:14:36.080 | book. Then I read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. The Hot Zone, this was a nonfiction book,

01:14:46.400 | huge bestseller written by Richard Preston about a strain, an airborne strain of Ebola that got

01:14:55.040 | loose in a primate holding facility in suburban Virginia, Reston, Virginia. So not far from where

01:15:02.000 | we are right now. Classic example of narrative nonfiction. Preston wrote this first for The

01:15:09.520 | New Yorker and then developed it into a full book. Classic example of narrative nonfiction.

01:15:15.360 | So it goes back and forth between the history of Ebola, the first times it emerged and just

01:15:22.880 | destroyed people with the narrative of what was happening in Reston, Virginia. It's kind of a

01:15:28.160 | cool book. So basically what makes it scary is it was spreading through the air. It was a very,

01:15:34.080 | very dangerous virus. Makes COVID seem like a skin to me. We're talking at least where they

01:15:41.920 | were measuring in Africa, like 70, 90% fatality rate, and it was spreading through the air.

01:15:46.880 | Fortunately, and this is not a spoiler because most of the Eastern seaboard didn't die of Ebola

01:15:53.360 | in the 1990s. So you kind of know the ending. It wasn't really well adapted for humans.

01:15:58.640 | But anyways, it gets through. It's a cool book. And it gets through the characters,

01:16:02.080 | classic narrative nonfiction writing. Richard Preston's great. Used to live actually until

01:16:06.080 | recently near where I grew up in New Jersey at this cool big farm that he owned in Hopewell,

01:16:11.840 | New Jersey had some cool land, but he moved up the main more recently. All right. Anyways,

01:16:16.560 | great book. If you haven't read it, classic example of narrative nonfiction.

01:16:19.840 | Then I read, because I was on a Preston, I guess I was on a Preston streak, Richard's brother,

01:16:27.840 | Douglas Preston. I read his new novel extinction. We went for like a long weekend to sort of like

01:16:35.840 | an off season beach resort and I wanted like a summary fun book. And so I read this book extinction.

01:16:42.400 | I don't know. I don't want to spoil too much of it. Like, okay, I'm not going to spoil it.

01:16:47.840 | It's kind of high concept. There's this sort of ice age Jurassic park, right? So they've de-extincted

01:16:57.120 | not dinosaurs for 65 million years ago, but sort of ice age animals from 30,000 years ago,

01:17:03.280 | like woolly mammoths, right? These types of animals. And there's this sort of isolated park

01:17:08.400 | in Colorado and this sort of valley that's hard to get in and out of where they've de-extincted

01:17:14.800 | these animals, grizzly murders start happening. And it soon unfolds a sort of like shocking

01:17:22.240 | reality that they were doing more than just de-extincting animals, you know, harmless animals,

01:17:28.720 | stuff ensues. Kind of a cool book. It's kind of dark at the end too. It was, it was fun.

01:17:33.600 | So Douglas Preston, Douglas Preston is an interesting guy. Interesting guy. Also writes

01:17:39.520 | for the New Yorker, like his brother, Richard, occasionally also writes thriller novels. It's

01:17:44.880 | like the main thing he does most of them with his coauthor, Lincoln Child, but also solo novel,

01:17:49.760 | novels like extinction does also write some nonfiction. He's done a bunch of adventuring,

01:17:55.600 | like the lost city of the monkey gods. He almost died, like getting these parasite infections,

01:18:01.120 | going to explore this lost city in the Amazon. Really interesting guy. Douglas Preston story

01:18:06.240 | that's interesting to me is that he got a job out of school with the national history museum.

01:18:13.440 | Is that what it's called? The big one in New York, the big like block, big national,

01:18:18.160 | like where they have the dinosaurs and stuff like that. I don't know if it's called American

01:18:23.760 | museum of natural history. I'll look it up. Yeah. American museum of natural history,

01:18:27.360 | which is like this huge complex funded in the 19th century. It's like a full,

01:18:32.160 | like multiple city blocks or whatever. And he was working there

01:18:35.760 | and he wrote a book called dinosaurs in the attic. It was the American museum of national

01:18:41.200 | history. He wrote this book about a nonfiction book about, this is this, this cool, weird place

01:18:45.600 | where, you know, there's all this stuff from 200 years ago, stored in nooks and crannies.

01:18:51.680 | And he was writing this book, I think for, I don't know who he's writing for,

01:18:55.840 | maybe Simon and Schuster, maybe it's for St. Martin's anyways, his editor,

01:18:59.120 | Lincoln child, like came with him to see the museum and said, you know what? We should write

01:19:04.880 | a thriller that takes place in this museum. It's like such a crazy, cool setting. So him and his

01:19:09.520 | editor for his nonfiction book wrote the relic, which is like this fantastic thriller about a

01:19:17.040 | sort of monster loose in the American museum of natural history. And they became a writing duo

01:19:22.640 | and started writing all of these thrillers together, just Lincoln child thrillers.

01:19:26.080 | And then both Lincoln and Douglas write their own books at the same time. And anyways, I think he's

01:19:29.920 | a cool guy. He lived a cool life. Extinction was kind of a cool book. It was interesting.

01:19:33.680 | All right. Then I read when the shooting stops dot, dot, dot the cutting begins.

01:19:41.840 | So I am a, as you know, a sucker for these books about specific people in the movie industry where

01:19:49.040 | they talk about their career and all the movies they worked on. This is yet another book written

01:19:54.640 | by an editor. This is the second book I think I've read this year about a film editor. And this is

01:20:01.120 | Ralph Rosenblum had a real distinguished career, did some really famous stuff with Cindy Lumet,

01:20:07.280 | and then did a bunch of Woody Allen stuff, including Annie hall. And so this is really

01:20:12.000 | interesting. He's a older generation. I mean, you know, he was really working in like the sixties,

01:20:17.040 | he was working in the seventies. And again, it's cool to learn about the art of editing.

01:20:21.680 | It's interesting to hear these stories, his story on Annie hall in particular is really

01:20:27.040 | interesting because that movie was filmed to be something completely different.

01:20:30.240 | The original name of Annie hall was a hedonia and it was all of these different,

01:20:36.880 | it was supposed to be sort of inside the mind of the Woody Allen character and just showing all

01:20:42.400 | these different aspects of his life and all the different stuff going through his mind.

01:20:45.520 | And it was supposed to be like this sort of psychological realism. The Annie hall relationship

01:20:51.440 | was like one of multiple plot lines that was going to, this movie was weaving together to

01:20:57.280 | show the complex psychological life of this, this main character. And in the editing,

01:21:04.400 | they rebuilt it to be about Woody Allen's relationship with Diane Keaton. And at one

01:21:08.320 | best picture. So that was probably the coolest story in the book to hear about that. So if you

01:21:12.240 | love the sort of, if you're a movie cinephile type, this was a great one. All right. Final

01:21:16.640 | book I read in May, 2024, the great partnership by Jonathan Sachs. I referenced this in a recent

01:21:23.920 | episode. Um, you know, I really liked Jonathan Sachs writing. This is about the values of

01:21:30.000 | science and the values of religion. And it, it takes a sort of historical theological look at it.

01:21:36.800 | And there's this big distinction between what he calls the values of Athens and the values

01:21:41.760 | of Jerusalem. It's like two completely different ways of like processing the world and thinking

01:21:46.240 | about things. And he basically makes the argument that they're very complimentary and you need both.

01:21:50.160 | Right. Uh, he thinks this is interesting points in it. Right. Keep in mind, this book was written

01:21:57.920 | in the first decade of the 2000. So this was a, or maybe like 2012, but it was a response to the,

01:22:02.800 | the new atheist, right? It was a response to Dawkins and Hitchens, et cetera, who, uh,

01:22:07.600 | were, he sets them up as trying to, um, have the mindset of Jerusalem take over the mindset of

01:22:16.800 | Athens. Like there was, they're like at odds and the new atheists were saying that the Athens mindset,

01:22:21.680 | the sort of left brain scientific mindset, that's what works. And this other thing is

01:22:25.840 | mythological and fiction and doesn't work. And in the book, he's trying to show like,

01:22:29.680 | they got that wrong. These are like two separate ways of seeing the world.

01:22:32.240 | But he argues the reason why we mix this up is because starting with Pauline Christianity going

01:22:39.280 | forward, you had these Greek ideals, the sort of Athens left brain way of thinking was increasingly

01:22:45.200 | actually integrated into theological thinking. And for a while, Christianity tried to, to combine

01:22:50.080 | these two and that didn't work well. And that's what made them seem like they were somehow

01:22:53.680 | intention. Anyways, it's classic sacks where he somehow takes really complicated topics,

01:22:59.040 | like the history of Western philosophy, the development of the Abrahamic faiths,

01:23:04.000 | and he can just talk clearly and simply about them. Like, Oh, I get it that they're there.

01:23:08.480 | These mixed together real skill to do that type of intellectual, uh, intellectual survey

01:23:14.320 | with narrative momentum in a way that's very accessible to a non-specialist audience. He was

01:23:19.760 | the best at it. So I actually learned a lot. And again, I use this sort of Athens, Jerusalem

01:23:25.360 | analogy in a deep dive a few weeks ago. So I already got some value out of it. Um, so I enjoyed

01:23:29.840 | that book real quick note in the show notes. We have Bram's notion directory link of all the books

01:23:35.760 | that you've read. Oh yeah. Speaking of notion, our sponsor. Okay. So, so Bram is the name of

01:23:41.040 | the listener, right? Yep. All right. So a listener is created, uh, uh, he's keeping track of all

01:23:45.680 | these books from the books I read segment, and he's using notion to build up this sort of flexible

01:23:52.080 | data-driven view of what I've read. So, oh, right. So links in the show notes. Yep. It's in all the

01:23:55.680 | show notes. Perfect. All right. So you can always find that link in the show notes to keep up with

01:24:00.080 | the books I've read through many months past. So Bram, thank you for that. All right, Jesse,

01:24:06.240 | I think that's all the time we have. Thank you everyone who sent in their questions or case

01:24:10.320 | studies or called in with their calls. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show.

01:24:14.640 | And until then, as always stay deep. Hey, so if you like today's discussion of the deep life and

01:24:19.840 | the danger of grand goals, I think you might also like episode 297 called the deep life hardware,

01:24:26.320 | where we give a another way of thinking about cultivating a more intentional life. I think

01:24:31.280 | you'll like it. Check it out. So today I want to diagnose one of the major causes of this type of

01:24:36.160 | failure to get your ambitious plans off and running. We'll then use this new understanding

01:24:42.640 | to try to come up with some systematic advice for overcoming it and having more success,

01:24:47.120 | introducing more intention into your life.

Don't Set Big Goals: The Common Trap Keeping You From A Life Of Purpose & Meaning | Cal Newport

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