Ep. 216: Boosting Creative Insight With Deep Walks

00:44:57.160 | So when I think about what we had in the age of blogs versus what we have in the age of newsletters, email newsletters, especially supported by services like Substack, I think they're quite similar.

00:45:09.160 | There's one place where blogs were better.

00:45:11.160 | There's one place where this new world of newsletters is better.

00:45:13.160 | So it's going to be an incomparable comparison.

00:45:16.160 | Where I think they're similar is that they escape the trap of algorithmic curation.

00:45:22.160 | I've talked about this on this show before.

00:45:25.160 | They escape this trap of we are going to allow algorithms maybe working in concert with manually constructed social graphs to curate what we're going to show you to look at.

00:45:35.160 | Most of the ills that we point at in our current world of social media fuel distraction really comes from these algorithmic curation strategies.

00:45:44.160 | So everything from the immense slack-jawed distraction to the polarization to misinformation, tribalization, a lot of this is generated from having algorithmic curation.

00:45:59.160 | The blogosphere didn't have this.

00:46:01.160 | The way you surfaced articles to read was typically through distributed human webs of editorial trust.

00:46:08.160 | I know this person. I like their blog.

00:46:10.160 | I see they're linking to this person.

00:46:12.160 | Someone else I like is linking to this person.

00:46:14.160 | I am now going to add a link to this in my web of trust.

00:46:16.160 | I now will trust and read from this new source.

00:46:19.160 | I'll see who they're linking to.

00:46:20.160 | Those recommendations are a little more provisional.

00:46:22.160 | I don't know this person as well yet, but someone over here I trust is linking there.

00:46:25.160 | And this guy, and you build out this web of sources you trust, and it's all human connections drawing upon our social assessment tools in our brain.

00:46:35.160 | How does this thing look?

00:46:36.160 | Who is recommending it?

00:46:37.160 | And it was actually a really good way of surfacing a variety of interesting, high-quality information from diverse sources, way more diverse than you would get with just a very narrow legacy media channels.

00:46:49.160 | I think it worked really well.

00:46:51.160 | Blog-based distributed curation worked very well.

00:46:53.160 | When you switch over to algorithmic, a lot of those advantages went away.

00:46:56.160 | Newsletters are closer to that blog model.

00:46:59.160 | It's not algorithmic curation.

00:47:01.160 | You find your way to a newsletter because you have other social capital reasons to trust the person who is writing it.

00:47:08.160 | And I think that is superior.

00:47:10.160 | In general, the more we're relying on social capital and interaction as the way of surfacing what we want to read tends to be better than just an app is doing something.

00:47:20.160 | And there's sparks and blue smoke, and then a suggestion comes up.

00:47:24.160 | I'm wary of that type of world.

00:47:26.160 | All right, so I said there's one way that newsletters are worse, one way that they're better.

00:47:30.160 | The way that they're worse is I think this distributed curation is not nearly as energetic or robust with newsletters because there's a lot less linking.

00:47:37.160 | So a real characteristic of the blogosphere was the hyperlink.

00:47:42.160 | I link to this blog, that blog links to this blog.

00:47:45.160 | There's a lot more linking, so there's a lot more discovery that could happen.

00:47:49.160 | You could start your entry point into the blogosphere could be something very specific.

00:47:55.160 | It's a sports writer, right?

00:47:58.160 | It's Simmons, right?

00:48:01.160 | And I'm reading his sports guy blog or what have you.

00:48:05.160 | That's another name I'm forgetting, by the way.

00:48:07.160 | What's going on today?

00:48:08.160 | You can go Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback.

00:48:11.160 | Bill Simmons.

00:48:12.160 | I couldn't remember Bill from Bill Simmons.

00:48:16.160 | I'm going to start calling you Jason by the time this episode is over.

00:48:19.160 | Professor Jason.

00:48:20.160 | Professor Jason.

00:48:21.160 | My professor Jason.

00:48:23.160 | But anyways, you would enter somewhere like I'm reading Bill Simmons' sports guy blog and then that leads you to other types of sports guy sports blogs.

00:48:30.160 | And then some of those over to some of these cultural sports blogs.

00:48:33.160 | And now you're kind of in pop culture land and that leads you over to a film critic.

00:48:37.160 | And now you have this world of film critics you follow.

00:48:39.160 | It was very good, this energetic linking.

00:48:42.160 | You had all the advantages of human distributed curation, but it could lead you to many more interesting places.

00:48:47.160 | Newsletters are more siloed.

00:48:49.160 | So people tend to enter the newsletter universe through non web based or non other newsletter based, let's say, social capital.

00:48:58.160 | I know this person because I've read their books.

00:49:01.160 | I know this person because I've seen them on TV.

00:49:04.160 | I know this person, you know, perhaps through social media.

00:49:08.160 | And so then I'm going to subscribe to their newsletter.

00:49:10.160 | There's very little outgoing from the newsletters.

00:49:13.160 | So it's you have to individually identify each of these newsletters to subscribe.

00:49:18.160 | So that's a place where I think it's a little bit worse.

00:49:20.160 | There's a little less serendipity, a little less diversity there.

00:49:22.160 | You're not going to stumble into as many interesting things where they're better is monetization.

00:49:28.160 | So the blogosphere was revolutionary in the sense that it did democratize the publishing of the written word.

00:49:35.160 | It did not really make it easy for the individual writer to make a living.

00:49:41.160 | And so because of that, people thought it was a failure.

00:49:44.160 | But it did lead to a lot of small to midsize media companies that could not have existed before.

00:49:50.160 | And I think we really overlooked that.

00:49:52.160 | We set our standards too high.

00:49:53.160 | We set our standards to like everyone could just start blogging in their basement about their thoughts on whatever.

00:49:59.160 | And that's what their job would be.

00:50:00.160 | And this should sound familiar because we hear this about every new democratized media technology that comes along.

00:50:04.160 | And that didn't happen.

00:50:05.160 | I ran a blog from 2007 onwards, very difficult to monetize at any sort of a high level.

00:50:11.160 | So where it where the blog technology really had some revolutionary impact is that it allowed the small to midsize media company to emerge to be a competitor to the large legacy newspapers and magazine companies.

00:50:25.160 | But it couldn't allow the individual to monetize the newsletters do.

00:50:30.160 | And I think that's the advantage they have of the blogs is the subscription sub stack model is a robust one.

00:50:37.160 | It is a way that you can make a living if you're a if you're a high level writer, you can you can make a good living just as well as you would as being an elite member of a news team at a newspaper magazine.

00:50:49.160 | So that is new. And I think that is an advantage is that we're used to now this notion of I will pay five dollars a month.

00:50:54.160 | That didn't really exist in the blogging world.

00:50:56.160 | Ad rates were way too small in the blogging world.

00:50:59.160 | So I think in that way, that way it's better.

00:51:03.160 | That's interesting evolution with the text.

00:51:05.160 | I mean, you know, I I still publish my essay on a blog, but I would say a lot of the energy is in people subscribing to that blog via email.

00:51:15.160 | So you can still go to Cal Newport dot com slash blog.

00:51:18.160 | That's where my essays post, but then they get sucked out of there and put into my email newsletter.

00:51:23.160 | Now, I did look at the numbers recently and there's still a lot of people, a fair number of people who actually come to the website itself.

00:51:31.160 | So we have you looked down like Google Analytics, Google Analytics.

00:51:34.160 | Yeah. So there's still two or three million people a year who will come straight to Cal Newport dot com.

00:51:41.160 | And because I think we have a lot there's a lot of old articles up there.

00:51:44.160 | There's a lot of Google juice.

00:51:45.160 | Just wait till the website gets better.

00:51:47.160 | That's coming, folks. That's coming.

00:51:49.160 | And then we have 70,000 subscribers to the email newsletter.

00:51:52.160 | So I guess we could do that. Do that math.

00:51:56.160 | The number of reads of the email newsletter is much that will add up to be, I suppose, much bigger.

00:52:02.160 | Yeah. We could do that math 50.

00:52:05.160 | Let's just do 50 weeks, 50 weeks a year.

00:52:08.160 | So 70,000 by 10 will give us 700,000 and then by five would give us three point five million.

00:52:15.160 | So at one essay a week, yeah, we get three or four million reads through the email newsletter and maybe two or three million on the on the website.

00:52:25.160 | So the newsletter, I guess, is officially generates more eyeballs than the website.

00:52:28.160 | When you went to analytics, was it two or three million on the blog page or was on the whole website?

00:52:33.160 | The whole site. But I mean, most of that is going to be I think people go to that site to listen to the podcast every once in a while.

00:52:38.160 | Yeah. So slash podcast has a good amount of visitors and the the homepage, obviously, and the deep work page, like just the page for the deep work book that just has links to where you can buy the book.

00:52:49.160 | Yeah, I guess that page has a lot of Google juice.

00:52:53.160 | Yeah. But then everything else is blog posts. It's always calnewport.com/blog is the really big.

00:53:00.160 | And then whatever the most recent article was, when I go to Google Analytics, that'll be next.

00:53:05.160 | And then there's various evergreen articles. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't been there in a long time.

00:53:10.160 | Google Analytics. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. A lot of math and a lot of forgetting names on the show.

00:53:15.160 | A lot of math is fine. I'll do the math. I just can't remember the names of people I've known for a long time.

00:53:21.160 | Though I will say the problem with the analytics is a lot of people who get the newsletter like to click and read it in their web browser on their phone.

00:53:30.160 | So there's overlap there. Yeah. So there you go. More than you need to know, Graham. All right. Let's keep rolling here. What do we got?

00:53:37.160 | So next question is from Aaron, another 42 year old. He's an attorney in Phoenix.

00:53:45.160 | I'm an attorney with a sole law practice in a large city. I thought getting out of a big law firm to do my own thing would be good for me to provide more flexibility, opportunity for deep work.

00:53:55.160 | But a lot of the time I'm just as interrupted. Now I was in the big firm. The difference now is that I'm interrupted by clients instead of colleagues.

00:54:05.160 | So let's go back to protocols. So, Aaron, I talked about this in an earlier question as well.

00:54:11.160 | If you don't give people implicit rules or guardrails or systems to use about how contact happens, they will do it in the worst possible way.

00:54:20.160 | People's default behavior when trying to reach out to people is relatively terrible from a productivity perspective.

00:54:26.160 | Essentially, by far the most common behavior. Is in the absence of a more structured way of communicating with you, what I will fall back on is getting a response from you as soon as possible from whenever it is I happen to send something to you.

00:54:42.160 | And why is that? It's because I'm disorganized. I have this thing. I have a question for my lawyer. I don't want to remember that.

00:54:50.160 | I don't have a time block planner or I can add it to another day or this or that. I just want to send it to you and get an answer back and then it can be done.

00:54:57.160 | And so I'm just going to want full responses. And then you as the lawyer now find yourself having to respond to people immediately whenever they whenever they get in touch with you, because that's their default and you've given them no alternative.

00:55:07.160 | So the whole game here is putting in place an alternative that's better for you without shoving that alternative into their face, without having to give them a big lecture on productivity.

00:55:16.160 | And so I don't know exactly how that should happen for law, but just put some structure in place. People want clarity.

00:55:23.160 | They don't need full accessibility, but they do need clarity in the absence of accessibility. They do need clarity.

00:55:29.160 | So it could be office hours. It could be here's the portal where you send your questions.

00:55:35.160 | You can go and look on the calendar like when I'm checking questions every day. So, you know, like when I'm going to get back to you.

00:55:41.160 | It could be you have the ability to, you know, grab a paid slot to talk something through with me at various times in the day.

00:55:49.160 | I don't know. Just get people structure. So they know here is how I get in touch with Aaron. Here's the system. Here's my expectations about when I hear back.

00:55:56.160 | They adjust their expectations to you. They could care less. They have other things going on in their life, but you have made your life much easier.

00:56:03.160 | So if you have no systems or structure in place, you're going to get swamped.

00:56:06.160 | Put the systems and structure in place without preaching, and you might be surprised by how little people actually care about the details.

00:56:13.160 | It won't be the imposition you fear it is, except for maybe one or two people, but there will always be one or two annoying people.

00:56:19.160 | And you really need them as clients anyways.

00:56:23.160 | All right, let's keep rolling. All right. Next question is from Sam. He's a 19 year old software developer from Sweden.

00:56:30.160 | And he says, in episode 212, you mentioned how you think consumer facing computing will go to the cloud and how we will be in how we will be streaming screens.

00:56:40.160 | I think this is a hellscape. If the company you work for is in control of your screen, they can mandate email notifications and pop ups.

00:56:48.160 | Well, so what Sam is talking about here is my longstanding prediction for the future of consumer electronics, where I think most computation will happen in the cloud.

00:56:58.160 | The only real consumer electronic device device that you'll own your primary device will be AR glasses.

00:57:05.160 | Screens will just be virtually inserted into your environment. So if you need a phone, a computer, a television, you just create that screen and you have it right there in front of you.

00:57:14.160 | We won't own separate laptops and computers and phones. I think this is an inevitable transition.

00:57:20.160 | The economics make sense, and it's where everyone's investing money right now.

00:57:24.160 | So Sam says that's going to be a hellscape. It might be, Sam, but I don't think for the reason you mentioned.

00:57:30.160 | She said, look, companies could control your screen and mandate email notifications and pop ups. They can do that now.

00:57:39.160 | That capability already came about as we shifted towards networked computers in the front office.

00:57:47.160 | I mean, my laptop from Georgetown, when I use it, it's a problem because there's all sorts of things they can just do that I have no control over, including these very aggressive resets, the update security, whatever patches that you have no control.

00:58:03.160 | They'll just warn you like, hey, in 40 minutes, your computer is going to restart and you can't do anything about it. Why is this a problem?

00:58:09.160 | Because you might be minute one into an hour long lecture in which you're using your computer to show slides.

00:58:16.160 | They already have control. There's all sorts of software on my Georgetown computer when I use it that monitors things and sends updates and is checking things in the background.

00:58:25.160 | So that ability is already here shifting to a virtual screen model. I don't think it's going to change that ability much more.

00:58:32.160 | Again, the software is going to exist virtually. It's not as if your company, the IT firm you work for, is going to then be getting their fingers into whatever, you know, Microsoft Word installation that's streaming from the cloud and changing exactly what it shows you.

00:58:49.160 | The other thing I would point out about this having already happened is more and more work is done on cloud based software as it is.

00:58:55.160 | Google workspaces, for example, are very popular. I spent all morning editing a New Yorker piece in Google Docs.

00:59:03.160 | That's a stream screen. It's streaming to a laptop instead of AR goggles, but that doesn't matter. The end of the road, last mile doesn't matter. So we're already there, Sam.

00:59:13.160 | The hellscape you worry about is already possible.

00:59:16.160 | So that's not going to be the issue. The two issues I think with this shift towards a world of virtualized computation and screens is, well, one, there's a phenomenological, philosophical concern,

00:59:30.160 | which is what does it mean for the human condition when many elements in our world that we perceive at any one time are not real? Some are, some aren't. You can't really even tell the difference between the two.

00:59:43.160 | This screen over here, it looks as real as an iPad would today, but actually that's virtual being inserted to my field of vision. But this camera over here is real.

00:59:51.160 | And the mixing of the real and the virtual, it feels from a philosophical perspective that there is some sort of fundamental shift here happening in the human experience where the digital, where the invented is on a phenomenological par as the real.

01:00:05.160 | So smarter philosophers than me can actually grapple with that. The second issue I think we need to worry about here is economic.

01:00:11.160 | Huge industries will go away when we no longer need to own expensive, carefully designed things with planned obsolescence, devices and objects for all of our different consumer electronic consumption.

01:00:26.160 | Apple computer is not going to exist if we don't need to own nice looking phones and laptops.

01:00:32.160 | Their software will get eaten up by some conglomerate somewhere and they can stream the Apple experience through your VR goggles.

01:00:40.160 | Samsung is going to have a hard time existing when we don't need to buy physical television screens.

01:00:47.160 | Sony is going to have a really hard time. There'll be one factory that remains.

01:00:52.160 | Whatever factory makes the really leading in AR goggles. So I mean, I think this is going to be a huge economic disruption.

01:00:58.160 | Whole industries on which economies are partially propped are going to consolidate massively.

01:01:04.160 | So that's going to be something we're going to have to definitely look forward to.

01:01:07.160 | I learned more about this, by the way. I recently read Matthew Ball's book, The Metaverse.

01:01:12.160 | And actually, he has some really good technical numbers in there about some of the issues with doing this.

01:01:18.160 | The biggest issue right now really is latency. Right.

01:01:22.160 | So you have to you have to have a really fast connection to whatever is doing this computation in order to get screens streamed to you and displayed on your glasses fast enough.

01:01:32.160 | But this work is being done. So I'm not going to go down this path too long, Sam.

01:01:37.160 | But where this work is being done is for streaming video game industry.

01:01:40.160 | There's this idea of there's a couple of products like Google study of this working on this.

01:01:44.160 | This idea of you don't need to own a PlayStation. We should just run the game on our high end server and just stream to you the screens that you're seeing from the game.

01:01:52.160 | And you can just get your joystick or mouse commands back to the server.

01:01:56.160 | Why do you need a supercomputer at your home? That could be in the cloud.

01:02:00.160 | You just need something to display the image that our supercomputer is generating.

01:02:04.160 | This is a really hard problem because you need 30 to 60 frames per second.

01:02:09.160 | It's a lot of fast back and forth, back and forth computation.

01:02:14.160 | And if it's interactive, we can't buffer that up ahead of time.

01:02:17.160 | So they're getting better at this. Games are pushing it. But that is really a problem.

01:02:21.160 | The other issue is 3D is a problem. 3D is not good for cloud.

01:02:27.160 | There's a big issue with the metaverse vision is 3D graphics like you would see in a video game where you would see in a virtual reality world.

01:02:34.160 | Those are generated on GPUs, these special chips that do nothing but generate a bunch of polygons to make 3D shapes.

01:02:41.160 | You can't distribute those well. So if I am having my 3D world or my 3D game being computed in the cloud, somewhere in the cloud, there has to be a GPU chip that's doing nothing but working for me.

01:02:52.160 | So you don't get these nice distributed economies of scale where we can use the same hardware for 50 different people.

01:02:58.160 | So there's a lot of issues. It's not trivial, but I do think it's inevitable.

01:03:03.160 | Screens are not going to be real. They're going to just be projected on our glasses.

01:03:08.160 | Zuckerberg talked about that a lot with Rogan when he was on there.

01:03:11.160 | Yeah, my Facebook knows about it. Facebook's more VR heavy, but they're investing heavy in AR.

01:03:16.160 | Yeah, they have the Ray-Ban deal. So they're working with Ray-Ban on trying to develop goggles.

01:03:23.160 | Facebook's big. Magic Leap is big. Magic Leap is basically Google. Google's a huge investor. Magic Leap is big AR.

01:03:30.160 | Amazon's investing. They're investing more in the cloud piece of it. Apple's investing big because they're screwed.

01:03:36.160 | Apple has the most to lose.

01:03:38.160 | Do a lot of your computer science friends talk about this stuff?

01:03:42.160 | Well, my friends are theoreticians, so they don't understand computers.

01:03:47.160 | They're talking about Martingale bounds on weekly correlated distributions.

01:03:52.160 | Got it. Type of stuff we talk about.

01:03:55.160 | We'll take a quick break, talk about a sponsor, and we'll get back to another block of questions.

01:03:59.160 | Jesse, let me quiz you here. On the walk from my house to the studio today, as you know, it's about five minutes away.

01:04:05.160 | How many people do you think stopped me to compliment me on my shave?

01:04:10.160 | Three. Twenty seven people.

01:04:13.160 | It took me one hour and 15 minutes to walk here because people were so impressed by my shave.

01:04:18.160 | And what I told them is this is courtesy of Henson shaving.

01:04:24.160 | Now, some of these products have actually been raving to to people unrelated to the show.

01:04:30.160 | I love this concept. So here's the story.

01:04:33.160 | When you shave. What you really want is a blade that's held very firmly.

01:04:41.160 | So if the blade's not firm, you have a diving board effect and you get nicks and miss spots and you want it to be just enough of it exposed.

01:04:49.160 | If you have too much blade exposed, you get the diving board.

01:04:51.160 | Expect you want a very firm with just a little bit of the blade actually exposed.

01:04:56.160 | That's hard to do. So what the subscription services and disposable razor people do is they put a bunch of blades in a piece of plastic.

01:05:02.160 | So you have all these different blades shaking around and they think.

01:05:05.160 | But somewhere between the seven or eight blades now that they have, you'll get a shave.

01:05:10.160 | But what Henson's figured out is one standard blade that cost a dime to manufacture is enough to give you a really good shape.

01:05:18.160 | If you have a good razor to hold it. And that's what they manufactured.

01:05:22.160 | So this company was specializing before they started building these razors, the Henson razors.

01:05:27.160 | They were specializing in doing very precise manufacturing of parts for the aerospace industry.

01:05:35.160 | They have these highly precise routing CNC routing machines.

01:05:39.160 | And so using that technology, they built this beautiful aluminum metal, incredibly precisely calibrated razor that you can put standard 10 cent blades into.

01:05:50.160 | And you screw the handle into this top piece of metal and it holds it firm with just a little bit of blade sticking out of the edge.

01:05:57.160 | I have the number here, point zero zero one three inches of blade coming out of either end.

01:06:03.160 | Incredibly firm. And you get a great shave with just one blade using this beautifully manufactured razor.

01:06:11.160 | I think this makes a lot of sense. So, yeah, you spend money up front to get this beautiful piece of this tool.

01:06:17.160 | But then over time, all you're replacing is these 10 cent blades.

01:06:22.160 | And so quickly, you're going to come out financially much better off after a few months because, yeah, sure, you can you can join a subscription service for cheap.

01:06:30.160 | But every month you're paying for the 19 blade things that come in the cheap plastic.

01:06:34.160 | And so you quickly make back your money by having this beautiful tool and using just standard 10 cent blades with this beautiful metal razor.

01:06:41.160 | So this is why I'm a big fan of Henson. It's the only it's the only razor I use right now.

01:06:46.160 | So it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime.

01:06:50.160 | Visit Henson shaving dot com slash Cal to pick the razor for you and use code Cal and you will get two years worth of blades free with your razor.

01:06:59.160 | The key here, though, is to make sure that you you add the blades to two year supply of blades to your cart when you're at Henson shaving dot com.

01:07:07.160 | And then when you check out and use code Cal, those will be changed to be free.

01:07:11.160 | So you have to add them to the cart, add the two years worth of blades to your cart to actually get them for free and definitely go to the slash Cal and use a promo code Cal.

01:07:19.160 | That's the only way they know you came for me.

01:07:22.160 | So you'll get 100 free bright blades when you head to H.E.N.

01:07:26.160 | S.O.N. S.H.A.V.I.N.G. dot com slash Cal and use that code Cal.

01:07:35.160 | I also want to talk about one of our original and longest standing sponsors of this show, and that is Blinkist.

01:07:42.160 | Actually, Jesse can attest to this before we recorded today, I was on the phone with one of the ad agencies we work with, and the person I was talking to was saying, you know, I talked to you a long time ago when I first joined this company.

01:07:56.160 | The very first call I had with a podcast host years ago was with you.

01:07:59.160 | And it was about Blinkist. I said, you know, that was your first call at a podcast agency.

01:08:04.160 | That was probably my first call as a podcast host.

01:08:07.160 | Learning about a new sponsor because Blinkist was one of our very first sponsors.

01:08:11.160 | There's a reason why they continue to be one of our most steady sponsors, because what they offer makes so much sense for our audience.

01:08:19.160 | As I say, when it comes to ideas.

01:08:24.160 | Ideas are power.

01:08:26.160 | And the best way to expose yourself and master new ideas is books.

01:08:30.160 | It's not tick tock.

01:08:32.160 | It's not Twitter.

01:08:34.160 | It's not funny captions under Instagram images.

01:08:38.160 | You want high quality ideas. They come from books because it's where experts have spent years trying to get their thinking just right.

01:08:44.160 | The problem is figuring out which books to read.

01:08:46.160 | This is where Blinkist comes in.

01:08:48.160 | It's a subscription service that gives you 15 minute text and audio explainers called Blinks for over 5000 nonfiction books spread over 27 categories.

01:09:00.160 | They also now have short cast, which are blinks for podcasts.

01:09:04.160 | You can get quick summaries of long podcast episodes.

01:09:09.160 | So what I recommend is if you're interested in a topic, download the blinks for a collection of related books.

01:09:16.160 | Right away, you will get the main ideas of those books of this topic.

01:09:22.160 | That might be enough.

01:09:23.160 | If it's not enough, you'll now know which of those books is worth actually buying to read further.

01:09:27.160 | So if you're a serious reader, serious about the ideas from book, Blinkist is the tool you need to help guide you.

01:09:35.160 | So right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience.

01:09:38.160 | If you go to Blinkist.com/deep to start your free seven day trial, you will get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership.

01:09:48.160 | That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T.

01:09:52.160 | Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off any seven day free trial. Blinkist.com/deep.

01:10:01.160 | It's been a while. I don't know when I started advertising.

01:10:05.160 | The podcast is summer 2020. I know that for sure. May of 2020, late May.

01:10:10.160 | I don't know when I, I think it was like nine months in.

01:10:13.160 | That might make sense.

01:10:14.160 | Because I was just a fan then and I was listening to every episode and.

01:10:18.160 | Before I started doing advertising. So you remember, you remember when I added them.

01:10:22.160 | From the very beginning.

01:10:23.160 | Yeah. Interesting.

01:10:24.160 | I think it was like nine months in, something like that.

01:10:26.160 | Because you explained it on the show at the time.

01:10:28.160 | Yeah. It's interesting. I do remember Blinkist was very early. Grammarly was very early.

01:10:34.160 | I don't know which was first, but one of those two was first.

01:10:37.160 | Well, time marches on.

01:10:40.160 | All right. Let's see. Check my handy analog watch here.

01:10:45.160 | Let's do a call. I want to hear another voice.

01:10:47.160 | What do we got? We have a long call. Don't we? I remember that.

01:10:50.160 | Yeah. This is a long call from Joanna.

01:10:53.160 | So we'll take a listen.

01:10:57.160 | Hi, Kel. This is Joanna from Germany.

01:11:00.160 | I'm a legal scholar and I have a question about having an online presence.

01:11:05.160 | So three years ago, I read your book, Digital Minimalism.

01:11:09.160 | And after that, I deleted all of my social media accounts.

01:11:13.160 | And I even deleted my WhatsApp.

01:11:15.160 | And I'm really happy with that decision.

01:11:17.160 | Since then, I was able to establish a daily yoga practice.

01:11:20.160 | And I successfully completed my legal studies,

01:11:23.160 | even including a clerkship at the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany.

01:11:28.160 | And I recently got accepted into an LLM at Harvard Law School.

01:11:32.160 | And especially I had the time to really put in deep work and pursue my research.

01:11:39.160 | Yeah. So now I face a new challenge.

01:11:43.160 | Recently, my work on the persecution of animal cruelty crimes in Germany

01:11:49.160 | has gained a lot of media attention, which is great.

01:11:53.160 | But yeah, I'm not really sure now how to proceed.

01:11:56.160 | So I have an online presence on the university website, but it's really unreliable.

01:12:01.160 | It gets kind of deleted every two weeks. I don't know why.

01:12:05.160 | Yeah. So it's difficult for people to contact me.

01:12:08.160 | So I set up again a LinkedIn account, but yeah, I'm really not happy with that decision.

01:12:14.160 | And I want to delete it again.

01:12:16.160 | And instead decided to put up a website.

01:12:20.160 | Yeah. But I really want to think that through and be really mindful about, yeah,

01:12:26.160 | what to put in there and especially on how to contact me.

01:12:30.160 | And now my question for you.

01:12:32.160 | On the one hand, I want media like serious media outlets to be able to contact me.

01:12:39.160 | And also I want other young researchers to contact me to get in touch, have coffee, discuss the law and other topics.

01:12:48.160 | Yeah. So I want to invite others to contact me.

01:12:53.160 | But on the other hand, I'm really afraid to get a lot of messages.

01:12:59.160 | I can't and don't want to respond to that's already the case, actually.

01:13:04.160 | But I think it's going to be even more if I write on a website, you know, get in touch, contact me.

01:13:11.160 | Yeah. So I would really like to have your advice on how to proceed, like on how to invite on the one hand,

01:13:18.160 | other interesting people I want to get in touch with.

01:13:21.160 | But yeah, be clear on. Yeah, I don't want to respond to all these weird, crazy messages you also get.

01:13:31.160 | I really like your approach. You know, the interesting at calm.com with the just giving a lot of clarity.

01:13:39.160 | But I feel for me, being a young researcher, it would maybe seem weird if I write, you know, I get so many messages.

01:13:47.160 | I can't respond to all of them.

01:13:49.160 | And also, I feel I'm maybe not that interesting yet, that people would contact me even if I wrote on a website.

01:13:58.160 | I don't respond to messages. So yeah, I would really appreciate your advice.

01:14:02.160 | And thank you for your amazing work.

01:14:06.160 | Well, your decisions are all right. Let me just emphasize what you did right so that other people in similar situations can learn from this.

01:14:13.160 | So one, not returning to social media. Very good. Do not go on social media.

01:14:19.160 | Do not have an urge to try to promote, quote unquote, your legal work on social media.

01:14:25.160 | I once wrote an article for my website based on an interview with a professor, law professor, maybe at Harvard, last name Posner.

01:14:34.160 | Another first time I forgot, Jesse, but where I excerpted a speech he gave where he said, my advice, young legal scholars,

01:14:42.160 | do not go on Twitter. Your job is not to be on Twitter. That's going to get in the way of doing good legal work.

01:14:47.160 | So good for you. Do not return to social media, even if your work is getting attention.

01:14:52.160 | Number two that you did right. Another good decision. Start your own website connected to your own name.

01:14:58.160 | An online presence that you can control and that is going to be one of the primary places people are pointed if they search for you.

01:15:06.160 | Like me and Cal Newport dot com. You want it to be your name dot com if possible or dot net is OK.

01:15:14.160 | You want your name in the title. You want your name in the page so that Google sees this is where this particular person resides.

01:15:22.160 | This site can be simple. It allows you to present yourself to the world.

01:15:26.160 | So what's your one paragraph self-description? I'm a legal scholar here who specializes in this.

01:15:32.160 | There you go. Then you can have selected press. This is social proof.

01:15:36.160 | So you have some press here. The pieces about you. Now you have social proof that you're a scholar,

01:15:40.160 | that people actually listen to and have publicized your work.

01:15:44.160 | Then you might have some selected academic work there. You can have a link to a university page or to a CV for a more detailed presentation of your work.

01:15:53.160 | And then you have contact information. All right. So let's get to the contact information.

01:15:57.160 | I think you're too worried about what's going to come in and what you have to do to deal with it.

01:16:02.160 | I mean, I think you're probably fine having two addresses for media inquiries, interview requests, etc.

01:16:09.160 | Contact here. Academic related inquiries. Contact here. That's probably fine.

01:16:17.160 | Maybe a third category if you want. You want like for all other requests, proposals or whatever.

01:16:23.160 | Contact here. Have those addresses if possible. This is like the only bit of technical work to do.

01:16:29.160 | Don't have any of those addresses be your name is Johanna.

01:16:34.160 | Johanna. So don't have any of them be Johanna at website dot com. Have each of them be some other non-personal words.

01:16:41.160 | So media, you know, I guess it could be your academic email address is fine for academia.

01:16:46.160 | And if you have something other, it could be other interesting requests, something like that.

01:16:49.160 | So you're depersonalizing the addresses. They become channels for communication,

01:16:54.160 | not a window you can open to talk directly to this human being. And then that will be fine.

01:17:00.160 | I don't think you're going to get overwhelmed with a lot of weird stuff, but this makes it easy to deal with.

01:17:05.160 | I think the expectations for a media request inquiry email address is that you're going to get ignored a lot of times.

01:17:10.160 | You can ignore messages in there that are crazy or weird.

01:17:13.160 | You can ignore messages, your academic address that are not academic.

01:17:17.160 | If you get a lot of weird stuff there, just put a note for academic use only.

01:17:22.160 | We can't respond to other types of requests. That's fine. You probably have to put that note.

01:17:26.160 | And if you have another third address for like other things like you could basically just ignore everything that comes there.

01:17:31.160 | And that's fine. And I don't think you're going to get too many messages.

01:17:34.160 | And I think the expectations will be set straight. And I love the fact that you can control your presentation.

01:17:39.160 | You can control how people what they learn about you.

01:17:42.160 | They have the ability to find you and contact you directly and that you are not being corrupted or distracted by the wasteland that is social media.

01:17:49.160 | So you're doing all the right things. And hopefully other people can learn. Learn from your lesson.

01:17:56.160 | All right. I'm going to go rapid fire here. Let's do a few more questions.

01:18:01.160 | I'm going to have quick answers, Jesse, because I know we're running a little late. So I'm going to be pithy.

01:18:05.160 | Sounds good. Next question is from Shabozo, a health administrator in Nigeria.

01:18:12.160 | I find that I'm always excited to start things, but struggle with finishing them.

01:18:16.160 | I'm constantly having competing overdue tasks on my assant. Where do I begin to stop this habit?

01:18:24.160 | Ah, typo. I think that's a sauna. They got typoed in there.

01:18:28.160 | OK, so he must be using the sauna for for his tasks. All right. If you're not completing things on time.

01:18:35.160 | There's two issues. Either your plans are unrealistic. So you're giving yourself too much to do or your execution is too unfocused.

01:18:44.160 | So you have a reasonable load of things to do. You're just not doing it. Two different types of solutions.

01:18:48.160 | Unrealistic plans. You want to do multi scale planning. Here's what I'm working on this quarter of those things.

01:18:54.160 | Here's what I'm working on this week of those things. Here's what I'm working on today. So you can see the whole ballgame.

01:18:59.160 | You're not just bouncing around randomly. You also should use doubling heuristics.

01:19:03.160 | Whatever list you think is reasonable for you to do today, cut it in half.

01:19:08.160 | However much time you think you should give yourself to complete a project, double it.

01:19:14.160 | So if you use those doubling heuristics. Because people are bad at estimating how long things take place and you use multi scale planning,

01:19:21.160 | you'll get a better grip over what are we working on? What's the reasonable load?

01:19:26.160 | If your issue is unfocused execution, you need the time block plan.

01:19:30.160 | Otherwise, you're just bouncing through the day emails here, they're hoping that your energy carries you through execution.

01:19:35.160 | That's not sustainable. That's not scalable. Give every minute of your workday a job, make a reasonable plan for the time you have available.

01:19:43.160 | Force yourself to actually make decisions about given this time. What do I actually want to do and when's the best time to do it?

01:19:48.160 | That's how things get done. Not just going randomly through a day with seven inboxes and WhatsApp open and just continually asking yourself,

01:19:55.160 | what do I feel like doing next? All right, let's roll. What do we got, Jesse?

01:20:00.160 | Next question is lost in technology. A 55 year old from Texas.

01:20:05.160 | He says, I'm an older master's degree student and I cannot keep track of all the literature reviews and research.

01:20:11.160 | I don't have a quick way to look at the information I've collected.

01:20:14.160 | I tried keeping track and obsidian tried writing in Scrivener, liquid text, notability and good notes.

01:20:20.160 | How can I consolidate everything I'm learning and calm my brain?

01:20:24.160 | Well, I think what you need here is a recalibration of your mindset and expectations, not a recalibration of your tools.

01:20:34.160 | This is the type of terminology that I would come across a lot back in the golden age of productivity prong.

01:20:43.160 | When there is this belief that if you got the digital tool just right, work would become effortless.

01:20:48.160 | I think what your brain is seeking here is that if we get just the right digital note taking setup,

01:20:54.160 | I'll be able to effortlessly capture information and pull forward what I need just when I need it.

01:20:58.160 | And it's going to make the process of writing my master's thesis seamless.

01:21:03.160 | And you're finding that it's just not happening no matter what tool you use.

01:21:07.160 | Well, spoiler alert, it's never going to happen. Taking notes is hard.

01:21:11.160 | Remembering and finding the information you need is hard. That hardness is part of the job.

01:21:16.160 | It's like being a runner and saying it hurts my legs to run long distances.

01:21:21.160 | Like, yeah, that's part of the job is that you put up with your legs burning.

01:21:25.160 | Taking notes is slow and annoying. Finding the notes you need is slow and annoying.

01:21:30.160 | Reset your mindset and expectations for that to be slow and annoying.

01:21:33.160 | That's part of the job, not something that you have the possibility of eliminating.

01:21:37.160 | Once you recognize that, I don't care what technology you use.

01:21:40.160 | Use a Google Doc, use a spreadsheet, use Obsidian. I don't care.

01:21:45.160 | You know, have a place where you put your notes. Take your time to take good notes.

01:21:50.160 | Be comfortable with the fact that most of the notes you take you're not going to use.

01:21:53.160 | Be comfortable with the fact that it's not always easy to go back and find what you need.

01:21:59.160 | Factor in that overhead into your scheduling. Slow and steady, slow and steady.

01:22:04.160 | Keep working bit by bit on thinking, writing, collecting, moving forward.

01:22:08.160 | Slow and steady, slow and steady is how you produce dense, interesting academic work.

01:22:14.160 | No bit of technology is going to save you from that.

01:22:17.160 | All right, let's do one more question.

01:22:20.160 | All right. Final question is from Mike, a stand-up comedian from Boston.

01:22:24.160 | I'm trying to write a novel. I could always sit down and write as a kid,

01:22:28.160 | but I still send social media and Internet distractions.

01:22:31.160 | It's hard for me to focus on completing one book. How can I work better?

01:22:36.160 | Well, the first thing that comes to mind is this could be a situation,

01:22:41.160 | which is common for aspiring novelists, where your brain doesn't trust your plan.

01:22:46.160 | So one of the real sources, one of the major sources of procrastination around this type of first-time creative work

01:22:51.160 | is that one part of your brain just likes the short-term satisfaction of I'm writing a novel

01:22:58.160 | and the sitting down with Scrivener on your air book and like doing the typing.

01:23:03.160 | It kind of lights that excitement. There's another part of your brain,

01:23:06.160 | the part that's really good at long-term plan evaluation that's saying, wait a second,

01:23:10.160 | I don't think we're going to succeed with this effort. We know very little about writing novels.

01:23:15.160 | We don't know anyone who has done it. We don't even really know the process.

01:23:18.160 | We don't have taste to figure out like what makes it good or bad.

01:23:21.160 | I can't even look at this chapter. I'm writing and saying, am I on track for something that's sellable or not?

01:23:26.160 | I don't know about this whole thing. I think we're burning calories.

01:23:29.160 | We need those calories to run away from Sabertooth Tigers.

01:23:32.160 | Shut it down. And you experience that as, you know, I have a hard time getting motivated to write.

01:23:39.160 | So this might be a situation where you need to trust your brain.

01:23:43.160 | Having confidence in how something works will give you trust in whatever process you're doing.

01:23:50.160 | If your process actually has a good chance of success, that trust will give you motivation.

01:23:54.160 | So I would almost say my recommendation is stop writing for a second.

01:24:00.160 | And go and learn more about how this would work.

01:24:02.160 | Find other people who had written novels of the type you're trying to write in your situation.

01:24:06.160 | Learn how it worked. How did they sell it? What was important?

01:24:10.160 | What differentiates a good from bad novel? Are you writing at that caliber?

01:24:14.160 | You're not sure? Join a writing group.

01:24:16.160 | Pay to hire a freelance editor for just one week to look at the chapters you've already written to get that cold hard feedback.

01:24:22.160 | This seems like you're slowing yourself down because you're stopping the typing every day.

01:24:26.160 | You're stopping the I'm in the cafe with a beret and the striped shirt, which is what all writers wear when they write.

01:24:34.160 | You're stopping that fun part to go do stuff that might make you feel bad.

01:24:37.160 | Like where you find out, oh, I'm nowhere near ready to write this. I'm not good enough at this.

01:24:41.160 | I don't know this style. I don't know what I'm doing. This agent says I'm not interested.

01:24:45.160 | This freelance editor says your writing is no good, but you're getting the information you need to trust a process.

01:24:52.160 | If you come across the work to actually trust that process.

01:24:54.160 | So it feels like you're taking a step backwards, but the only way you're actually going to be able to eventually get all the way down,

01:24:59.160 | take steps all the way down this path is if you trust what you're doing.

01:25:04.160 | So go build trust, become an expert on what it takes to be a comedian who succeeds with writing a novelist.

01:25:10.160 | Feel like your first goal is to write a book about how comedians can succeed at writing novels that you're doing research for that book.

01:25:16.160 | Make that be what you're doing right now. Do those efforts now.

01:25:20.160 | Spend a month doing those efforts and you'll be rewarded in many months going forward.

01:25:26.160 | Trust is motivation. All right.

01:25:31.160 | And with that, Jesse, I think we should wrap things up.

01:25:36.160 | I thank you, everyone who submitted their questions.

01:25:39.160 | If you want to be a part of the show, you can use the links in the description or go to Cal Newport dot com slash podcast for instructions how to submit your own queries or calls.

01:25:49.160 | If you like what you heard, you will like what you see.

01:25:51.160 | Videos of full episodes and clips of popular segments can be found at YouTube dot com slash Cal Newport media.

01:25:58.160 | We'll be back next week with a new episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:26:03.160 | The.

Ep. 216: Boosting Creative Insight With Deep Walks

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