BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 330: How to Ditch Distractions and Get WAY More Done With Cal Newport

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

Incredible show alert! You don’t want to miss this one: Brandon and David sit down with bestselling author Cal Newport (who wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, and so on) to discuss just what makes high performers different than the rest. Cal shares incredible insight based on his research as a professor at Georgetown University, including how boredom can serve a very useful purpose, how to improve your focus to master your craft, and how building “career capital” can open doors to the life you’ve always wanted. Cal also shares life-changing advice on how starting the day in “monk mode” can supercharge your productivity, how to set better expectations with team members, and how to rebuild your digital life in 30 days. This episode is so good you’ll feel guilty you didn’t have to pay. Download it today! In This Episode We Cover: Cal’s story Improve your focus and remove distractions to increase productivity How to combine “deep work” with “shallow work” to stay mentally energized Building career capital you can then invest to build a better life What successful people do that unsuccessful people don’t How to set better expectations with team members How to start your day in “monk mode” and be insanely productive How to give your hours a job and make time work for you How to use boredom to recharge and motivate you His thoughts on social media and how it can rob you of time Taking the information you’re learning and letting it sink in  Detox and rebuild your digital life in 30 days And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Webinar BiggerPockets Pro BiggerPockets Calc BiggerPockets Podcast 329: Financial Freedom Before 30 Through Just 10 Deals With Felipe Mejia BiggerPockets Podcast 327: The “Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat” Method Made Simple With David Greene LinkedIn Moment App Realtor.com Books Mentioned in this Show Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki Lifeonaire by Steve Cook So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport The 4-Hour Week by Timothy Ferriss Deep Work by Cal Newport Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris Gates by Stephen Manes Connect with Cal Cal’s Personal Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 330. And so if you're always consuming information, but you're never actually giving yourselves the hours of just there alone with your thoughts, you really are going to be impoverished in terms of how much value you can extract from it. Time alone with our own thoughts is crucial. Bortem should be something we don't try to get rid of cheaply, but something we should let drive us to real action. Both of those things are crucial.

You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. Simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everyone? My name is Brandon Turner, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, David Green. What's up, David?

Not much, man. It's actually going really good over on this end. We've got springtime here. The sun is nice. There's a bunch of people looking to sell their houses. The market's kind of picking up in the Bay Area. And so I'm a happy camper. Nice.

Hey, I had a reporter reach out to me the other day and he was asking me questions about he said, I feel like he said he feels like his research is showing him that the market is slowing, especially on the West Coast. Have you found that to be true? Well, it did, but that was, part of that was seasonal. And coupled with a spike in interest rates. They went up like three times over a six week period or something. And it's like a body blow to buyers when they're like, oh, right?

Like my payment just went up 200 bucks. But it came back down and it's like, dude, immediately we saw a bunch of people come right back into the market. So now you all these people that think, oh, the market slowed down and houses are selling in six days again. So don't believe. A lot of the time when you read articles like that, they're just like, you know, 60 days old or something. And the market can change in two months. Wow. Very insightful.

Well, another insightful tip today is going to be our quick tip. All right. So today's quick tip. That was a horrible trend. bring that on me, bro, like, just slam that quick tip in my face before I was ready for it. I know, that's what I'm working on. All right. So today's show is all about, well, it's about a lot of stuff.

One of my favorite authors of all time is named Cal Newport. He's on our show today. And so we're going to talk a lot about building skills that allow you to achieve financial independence earlier in life. We're going to talk a lot about focusing on when you actually work, just really get into the deep work is what he calls it deep work. And then we talk about being a digital minimalist. And you might be wondering at this point, why does this matter for real estate investors?

Let me just tell you, this matters so much. And so here's the quick tip, actually, is listen to this whole show. And then after the show is done, David and I are going to actually break down a lot of what we talked about today because it wasn't a real estate related show. We're going to put it into real estate terms. We're going to talk about how we use these things in our own life. So the quick tip today is simply to make sure, no matter what, you listen to the last 10 minutes or so of this show, we're, you know, including the whole show, but including the last 10 minutes,

where Dave and I kind of break it into a real estate advice episode. So that's your quick tip. You like that, David? Again, you just threw it at me before I was ready there. It's like when I try to play catch with your daughter and I throw the ball and her hands don't come up until after it bounced off her belly or something. Yeah. Yeah, it's her face.

Yeah. I tell you, last night we went to the beach with some friends and she had a little ball with her. And she's got an arm for like an almost three-year-old. Like she can throw a ball a good. like 20 feet now. Oh, man. I can't wait. She had just kind of figured that out the last time I was there, and that was like the huge smile she'd get on her face when she made a good throw. It was awesome. Yeah, yeah, she's getting good at that, so she's my little softball player. Did you know your house gets bored when you leave? I can't actually prove that, but it probably misses out on the action,

the footsteps, the late night fridge raids. Yeah, when you're gone, your place is basically on unpaid leave. It's sitting there in the dark thinking, I could be. contributing right now. Your side room wants a side hustle. Even your Wi-Fi is like, we could be networking. You're on vacation, spending money like it's a sport while your staircase at home is fully capable of sending your income upwards. Here's the twist. You can go on a trip and actually earn money. Airbnb makes that possible with the co-host network. If you're away for a while or have a secondary property, you can hire a vetted local co-host with real hosting experience to handle it all.

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That's bill.com slash bigger pockets. Now, it's time to get on to this show. Again, today's show is with author Cal Newport. Cal is actually a professor of computer science over at Georgetown University, and he is one of the smartest people I've ever met. Incredibly insightful. And we're going to walk through three of his books that I just obsess about. We've talked about them before. In fact, here on the podcast a few weeks ago when we interviewed Dave for the Burr episode that came out, I asked you David Green here, I asked David Green here what your favorite current business book is. And he said it was so good they can't ignore you, which is the first book we talk about today with Cal Newport. So we're lucky to have Cal today.

Again, I want you all to understand this is not a real estate focus show, but this, the concepts we talk about today could benefit your real estate business more than almost anything else we could teach you. Like when people ask me all the time why, like how I seem to get so much done, like I get a lot done in life and I have a pretty busy life, but I don't work all that many hours. Like these three books are what I point people to over and over and over. It's like I do the stuff from his first book, the stuff from the second book and stuff from the third book.

And if you follow these things, you can obtain financial. freedom. As Cal says, you could probably do it in a year if you were really good at this stuff through anything, real estate or any other entrepreneurial things. So with that, it's time to get to today's show. So let's get to our conversation with Cal Newport. All right, Mr. Cal Newport, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast, man. Good to have you here. That's my pleasure. Yeah, it was okay. So as I mentioned to you before we started recording, our audience probably knows your name quite a bit because we talk about you and your books, you know, kind of an obsessive amount. Not in like creepy ways, not like I'm outside your bedroom window or anything.

But we talk about you a lot because, like, there's certain books out there that I've read. I mean, I could probably list on, you know, two hands, books that actually like change the direction of my life a little bit, right? That like tweak something about who I am and how I do things. Like, you know, books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, or even like the four-hour work week to a degree. There's a book called Life and Air. And then like all three of the books that I want to talk to you about today. Like so good they can't ignore you, deep work and digital minimalism. All three of those had a huge impact.

my life. And then I push David Green here to get involved and start reading and he loves it as well. In fact, just a couple weeks ago on our show, we asked David what his favorite, you know, current favorite business book is. And he named So good they can't ignore you. So I thought we just kind of run through those three books in order of which I read them. And I think that's the order they were published and kind of just dig in. And hopefully our audience can see like why I love them so much, why they kind of changed a lot of how I think. So other than that, I guess that's all we got. So let's get to go on. Number one, can you just, I mean, tell us who you are. What do you do? you come from? What's your story? Give us a background. Well, I'm a computer science professor. So,

I mean, that's my day job and that's what I've spent essentially most of my adult life training for or doing. But I've also always been a writer. So, I mean, I signed my first book deal right after my 21st birthday. And so I've had this sort of parallel track going ever since I was 21 where I've been computer scientist where I work primarily on theory, which means I stare at equations on backboards and try to prove theorems. And then at the same time, I write books. And these two things have been happening in parallel for years. And that's basically who I am.

I'm the professor who writes. Okay. So the first question I have is in the theory of, and it's totally kidding. We're not going to go into computer science today. We're going to go into, let's start with so good. Like, first of all, why did you write this book to begin with? I mean, what was the impetus?

Is that the word? What was the reason behind the book? So when I started working on So Good They Can Ignore You, I was going through. a career transition. So there was sort of a selfish impetus, which is I was finishing grad school and was going to soon go on the academic job market. So the idea is, if you do that right, it's the first and last job interview you ever do. And so I decided if there was any time in my life where I was going to get a lot of leverage out of understanding how do people end up really loving what they do for a living,

I was going to get that leverage right then. And so since I'd already written these other books before then, I had this advantage of not just thinking about it myself, but I could actually just sell a book. where the premise was, I'll go out there, I'll read all the research, I'll talk to people, I'll try to understand what's the reality of how people end up loving what they do for a living. So for me, it was, I want to scratch the itch I had right then, and I was able to sort of deploy book writing as my tool for doing so. Okay. That makes sense.

Now, in the book, you talk a, you kind of, I don't know if it's like, take jabs at the idea or reg on this idea of like the get rich quick, right? the or I'm going to go and achieve this wealth or financial freedom, early retirement, whatever, through, you know, some quick means. I'm going to go sell something. I don't know if you use the example, but I'm going to go quickly build up this Amazon business or I'm going to quickly go do something that's going to get me out of my job forever.

Can you explain kind of the argument there of why maybe that's not the best way to, I guess, financial independence? Right. Well, this was 2012 is when the book came out. And so like the financial independence movement was still, at least the online version, was still nascent. But certainly like Tim Ferriss's. His lifestyle design was pretty ascendant at the time.

And there was sort of a vision of this, which is actually not Tim's original vision, but there was certainly a vision that was really heavy on the internet back then that really focused on the key thing was actually just like having the courage to take some action, right? Like having the courage to move to Buenos Aires and quit your job or having the, you know, having the courage to hire the virtual assistant or whatever it was. And when I was out there studying, how do people end up loving. what they do. Autonomy played a big role. And like, this is something Tim Ferriss had pointed out in his sort of currencies of satisfaction notion that being really autonomous over what you do and how you do it was really important. But what I was finding is that the people who succeeded with that got that currency because they first got really good at something rare and valuable. And then almost

any other trait I found that led people to really love their work usually involved them first, getting really good at something that was unambiguously rare and valuable. And so what I saw happening out there is a lot of people who wanted their reward. I want a lot of autonomy in my life. I don't want a boss. I want to have geo-arbitrage or whatever. I want to set my own standards. But they skipped the step where they actually developed the skill that was rare and valuable.

And so this is what I ended up calling career capital in the book, these sort of and valuable skills really is the fundamental currency on which jobs that you really like, careers really like, huge source of satisfaction are actually purchased with. It's what you invest to get back these big returns. And so I was very skeptical about the culture that was out there that said the only thing holding you back from all these great things is that you don't have the courage to take action tomorrow. And I was like, it's not so simple. It's not just the courage to take action.

It's also the discipline to get the skills. They're going to allow that action to be successful. Yeah, that was, I think, the point you made in that in the So Good, They Can't Ignore You book that really just grabbed my attention. It was like, yes, that's what I've been feeling in my head all this time. And it just felt wrong. But I couldn't put it to words. And then when I read what you were writing, it made a ton of sense is this idea of like following your passion. which we're just being bombarded with all the time.

Like, if you're doing life wrong, it's because you're not following your passion. If you'd follow your passion, everything will just magically fall in the place for you. And the universe's job is to give you what you want just isn't necessarily the case for most people. Can you talk to us a little bit about the argument you make in that book between following your passion and building career capital and maybe the mindset differences between the craftsman mindset? Right. Well, this was definitely at the time the major advice. And I think it still is probably the major advice young people here. which is follow your passion.

That's how you're going to end up happy. If you don't follow your passion, you'll be miserable. And I try to thoroughly debunk that in so good, they can't ignore you. So what's wrong with this sort of passion philosophy? Well, there's a couple things. One, it assumes that people have these preexisting passions. So they have these clearly identifiable inclinations that point to them, what exactly they should be doing and whatever our current job market happens to be.

Most people don't actually have this, right? The second thing it gets wrong is it assumes that the key to work satisfaction is matching what you do to a preexisting inclinition. That if you like this subject and then your work involves that subject, it transfers. And it'll really like your work. But we don't have a lot of evidence that that's true either. So what seems to be the case? Well, the case seems to be that passion for one's career is something that tends to be cultivated. It has very little to do with this trying to solve this mythical matching problem, where you're wired to do one true thing.

And if you get it right, you'll love it. And if you get it wrong, you'll hate it. has very little to do with that. It's something that's developed over time. It usually comes from more general traits like autonomy and mastery and impact and sense of connection to people. And all of these traits typically require that you first get really good at something just rare and valuable, that you follow Steve Martin's advice and be so good they can't ignore you, which is the quote that the book title came from. And so I shifted it. And so if you want to end up passionate about your work, step one is probably become really good at things that are valuable.

Step two, take that currency and invest it to take control of your career and move it towards things that resonate. But you can't skip the first step if you want the second step to succeed. Can you give an example of what you mean about rare and valuable? So it's got to be something that the market unambiguously finds valuable. It's not just something you think is valuable. And rare means it's something that not very many people can do. So it's easy to get just one of those things right and not the other. And so like I could teach myself maybe some very esoteric type of woodworking.

which is very rare, but the market for the most part maybe doesn't value it. Or there could be something that's valuable, like let's say, you know, be social media brand managers or something. Okay, okay, maybe this is useful in companies need it, but it's not at all rare because every 23-year-old knows how to manage a whatever, an Instagram campaign. So what you want is something that's both. So like, let's say you're a 10x coder, right? You can write really, really good C-sharp code.

That's rare and valuable. You know, you now have a lot of leverage in your career. let's say you can successfully make profit off of real estate investments. Okay, that's both rare and that's valuable. So you can write really well. I mean, that's actually really hard to do. But anything where there's not a lot of people who can do it, and the marketplace says this is valuable. Once you have that, which I call career capital in the book, I use this investment metaphor.

You can then start investing that career capital to get back the type of returns that makes great work great. But you have to have that capital to invest just because you want a ton of autonomy and impact, and mastery in a sense of connection, just because you want it, doesn't really matter. If you don't have the career capital that it cost, you shouldn't expect to get too much of it into your life. So I teach our live webinar every week on Bigger Pockets. And on this, every single class,

I say the exact same thing, that the number one of the most important, if not the most important skills an investor can have, is learning how to really analyze a deal. Because once you know how to analyze the numbers of a deal and you'll project your future profit and all that, once you're really, really good at that, everything else becomes easier.

And really what I'm saying in that, to use your language is you have a skill that is incredibly rare and incredibly valuable when you just really know how to run the numbers on an investment property. Right. I mean, you should be thinking about that all the time, essentially, in your career. It's like, what can I do this hard that other people can't do? If you don't have a good answer for that, then you don't really have a lot of options.

I mean, you're basically going to be knocked around by kind of the fickle finger of fate. You really have no autonomy. And so what you should be doing, especially if you're young, in my opinion, is relentlessly honing skills. Yeah. you know, finding holes in the marketplace. Here's something that other people don't bother to do. Here's something that's hard so people bail out before they get there.

Here's something that is really in demand that almost no one does it. Then say, I'm going to Robert Green style, you know, be the apprentice and really go after this thing, master this skill. That is the foundation, almost everything good in careers. Yeah, I love that. I think that having a passion for whatever it is that you're going to work that hard at is pretty crucial because it will be what motivates you to continue through that process. I mean, if you want to master anything, it's a difficult process. It's going to be painful. You're going to mess up a lot.

It's going to take a toll on your pride. And so you really have to love it. And a lot of our listeners, they love real estate. They want to be around it. They're drawn to real estate. But they don't understand that it's not enough just to kind of hang around that world. You actually have to learn how to solve people's problems, you know, how to find distress deals, how to analyze a deal very quickly.

Those skills that you build up become something that, like, bring deals to you and make you successful. And that's one of the reasons, Cal, that we wanted to talk to you is, you kind of crack that code of this is what successful people do. They're all successful and this is what they all have in common and this is how they got there. What advice can you give us to those who are listening to this who hate their job and are maybe looking to real estate as a way to get out of it? Well, okay, that's it.

So there's two different things going on there. So one, the hatred for the job. So the way I look at it is there's two sources of hatred for the job. One is that it is completely incompatible with you. right? So let's say you don't like the people. The work itself doesn't open up options you find interesting. It goes against your values. In that case, you have to get out of it. If it's work where that's not true, it's just I don't like what I'm working on. You should also keep in mind building career capital might open up other options. You always want to be doing this inventory of what can I do that's rare and valuable. And if your answer is very little, then what you want to do is build up those stores. And so if you're thinking about, let's say, real estate investing as a way to gain more autonomy. or maybe even get out of a job, you have to be ruthlessly honest about, well, how much career capital do I have right now in that area? And if the answer to that question is, I've been to one of Brandon's webinar, I've read one book or something, right? Like, you don't have the capital there yet.

You don't want to, you don't, if you make a jump into a new area without the career capital, the rare and valuable skills to actually give you an advantage, then you shouldn't expect the market, which is very efficient to reward you. I mean, if anyone could just wander into a market and make a lot of money off real estate investing. Guess what? Everyone would be in that market making a lot of money off a very easy real estate investing. And so I think having the career capital mindset is crucial here where you say, I see this as a potential source of autonomy. That's step one. Step two, how do I build up my skills here as fast as possible into a sufficient enough level that I feel like I actually have enough capital to get returns from this move? And that requires a little bit of ruthlessly honest self-reflection,

which is something that a lot of us try to avoid because there's the fantasy, which is, well, I have my checklist. So I'm going to go off. And the reality is you should actually get energized by the skill building because every hour you spend doing the hard work of skill building is an hour that someone else is probably not spending. And so you can sort of feel that competitive advantage growing. Yeah. That's fantastic. And I think that, and I guess I'm too, David, but like a lot of people come to us at bigger pockets. They don't like their job. They're not totally throw with it. My own family members, my friends, people don't like their job. And so what people tend to do, and I see this pattern over and over and over is they,

they say, I don't like my job. So I'm going to put as least effort as possible into that job. I'm going to do the bare minimum to survive in this job until I can do something else. Where I, especially after reading this book, like I definitely shifted how I think of that. I was like, instead, how do you become the best at that job? How do you gain the skills that you can demand more things? And how do you get that rare, like, you know, that social capital. Sorry, the career capital to be able to negotiate better things.

I mean, here's a perfect example of this. And I did this before I read the book, but when I read it, it was like, yeah, put words to this. So to use a non-real-sit example. So I started working with Josh Dorkin, here at Bigger Pockets, who he's the founder of the site seven years ago. And I knew, I mean, I hardly had a computer before that time. Like, I mean, like when I was a kid, I had a computer, but then for years, I didn't. I knew nothing about internet marketing and technology, nothing like that. But when I started working with Josh and working at Bigger Pockets, I got really, really, really good at one thing.

and that was writing guest blog posts for other sites. So over the course of like a year, I were like a hundred of them. And then from there, I got really, really good at podcasting. And that's a very rare thing. So I started podcasting.

And then from their webinars. And so like each step of those things, now each, as I got better at that, like when I told Josh, I'm moving to Hawaii, like I had the negotiation power that he's not, I mean,

like, I'm so good at what I do in the company that he can't really do. anything about it. Not that he wants to, but like, that's kind of the negotiation as I achieve, if I wanted the four-hour work week, I could have the four-hour work week, but it didn't come from a side business I built in an afternoon. It came from six years of getting better and better and better at everything that I did. Well, I mean, I think this was the, this was the key piece missing from the lifestyle design formula is that talked about these sort of currencies that matter

for your life to be one that you like. But what you also have to have in that equation is the currency that's necessary to actually get those back in return. And that's the skills. Like one of the examples I give in the book was a developer named Lulu. And she was started at a company basically doing quality assurance type testing for software, right? She'd come out of a small liberal art school. She didn't have a huge computer science background. So it was at this low level.

And she basically got after it. And so she figured out the languages and she figured out more complicated languages and she built an automated suite of testing tools. And then that pushed up to another level. And then she mastered databases. And then she became their top database person. And three years later, her setup was, I work six months, six months off. I work six months off. And the six months off were all about various adventures.

So one of these segments she used to learn scuba diving, another to get her pilot's license, another to go back to her native Thailand, you know, the C family. You look at that and you say, well, that would be an ideal foundation if you wanted to, let's say, then put real estate investing into your portfolio, right? And so as like capital gains you access to things. The other way to look at it is the sort of the currencies of a great. life are valuable. And no one's going to give them to you for free. You have to have something to offer in return. And so that's what you should always be thinking about is, you know, you have to be

great to get great things in your career. So it's like, where are my career capital scores? Which involves among other things trying to figure out, like in your field, what's your batting average? Like this is something I often talk to people about where if you're a baseball player, it's really clear to measure how good you are. You have a batting average. Oh, mine is 240. That's not so great. This guy is 280. That's better. The trick is essentially figuring out what's the equivalent of your batting average and what you do. What's the thing you can track? The thing is going to be honest. It's going to be ruthlessly honest that you can see get better. But you can also see where you are. Like what's the metric you can be trying to push? You know, once you have that and

you can relentlessly push after it, that's where you get the really fast accumulation of this freedom buying capital. Yeah. That's really good. Really good. All right. So you want to build more skills, let's say. Let's move on to the next kind of segment here. You want to build more skills. You need that practice. You need that deliberate practice to get better at these. skills. And that, I'm assuming, is kind of the, to use that word, to get, impetus, right? For the next book, like I want to talk to you about is deep work, which also had just a profound impact on my life. Would you say, like, that's why you wrote deep work? Is that kind of where that came from? Right. So it was readers of so good that said, okay, if I buy this premise,

that I have to become really good at hard things. All right, how do I do that? Right. And so that, that was in part where deep work came from. It also did track with my own life. So if we fast forward to 2016 when that book came out. So I started right in 2014. I'm a professor now. And what's on my mindset is getting tenure. So I'm really caring about, okay, how do people do elite level work in knowledge work situations? At the same time, I had all these so good they can't ignore your readers saying, okay, how do I do elite level work in my various, these various types of careers. And it was there that led to the basic premise of deep work. Perfect. Okay. So let's let's talk about maybe just the definition. What is deep work? And how does that compare to what's

Call it shallow work. Yeah. So deep work is my term for the activity in which you are focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. So it means you're all in doing something this hard. And there's zero checks of inboxes, zero checks of phones. It's 100% locked in without context switching. Shallow work, I just define us everything that is not deep work.

Okay. Okay. Now, I think a lot of people feel like multitasking is actually more. productive and it's better to be a multitasker. Like I'm also here people brag about the fact that, oh, well, I'm a multitasker so I can blah, blah, blah. Can you tell us with your research, what you found is the difference between multitasking

and what you're talking about when you say deep work, which to me kind of sounds like getting in the zone. Well, yeah, and it is sometimes getting into the zone. And sometimes it's not, I mean, the interesting thing about deep work, it's a little bit of a broader umbrella. And so if let's say you're applying a hard one cognitive skill that you know really well, you can get into a flow state like, you know, Mahaley, Chick-Sit-Mehi talks about. But there's other types of deep activities, such as learning something

new, that sort of deliberately practicing something new, which actually definitively does not put you into a flow state. In fact, you don't lose track of time. You know every damn minute that passes because it's really, really hard, right? When you're trying to learn a new lick on the guitar or something, you know, it's really hard. So sometimes you're in the zone. Sometimes you're not. But what deep work always shares is that you are you're focusing intensely and you're engaged your mind fully. And so we have multitasking. Then we have deep work. We also have in between what we could think of as pseudo single tasking or pseudo deep work.

So multitasking is where you literally are doing multiple things at the same time. This was really popular in the late 90s and early 2000s. A lot of research came out that basically cemented what is obvious, which is if you're trying to write while you're doing emails while you're talking on the phone, you used to all of them poorly. Yeah. And that message is kind of getting out there. We kind of understand that intuitively, okay, I'm really just switching rapidly between

these and I'm not doing any of them very well. However, a lot of people who think that they have moved on from multitasking are doing something that turns out to be almost as bad, which is you're doing one thing at a time, only one window open, no notifications. But every 10 or 15 minutes, you do that quick check. Let me just see my email inbox, then back to what I'm doing. Let me check the phone real quick and then back to what I'm doing. And it feels like you're doing deep work, right?

You're like, I don't have multiple things open. I'm not multitasking. But we know from the latest psychological research that the context switch, turning my attention from the thing I'm trying to write to my email inbox and then back again. Even if I only look at my inbox for one minute, that context switch creates a large cognitive cost. And that can take a while to clear out. And so a lot of people who think they're single tasking are doing these quick checks every 10 or 15 minutes. And they are without realizing it, putting themselves in a persistent state of reduced cognitive performance.

by context switching enough that their brain never actually recover. So that's why crucial to deep work is this notion of no distractions. So even a glance at something else means you're not really doing deep work, you're doing pseudo deep work. And the effectiveness is markedly reduced. How long do you find that most people can stay in a state of deep work and hold their concentration on one task before they feel like mental fatigue? So with some training, the standard knowledge worker can do 60 to 90 minute session. with what I call deep breaks in between. So if you do what I call a deep break,

which is a break in which you don't expose yourself to similar work, you also don't expose yourself to open loops like emails you can't answer, but just go for a walk or look at the sports scores, you can then string a few of these together. If you look at elite deep workers, like professional musicians, they can do maybe three or four up to a maximum of five hours straight, but these are people who essentially spend their entire life doing deep work. Chess players can do the same thing, professional golfers.

I mean, we can ask Tiger Woods about this. they can sustain it for much longer. But for like the average mortals, like 90 minutes, deep break, 90 minutes, and then a much more substantial break is probably about where you should be aiming. So here's what's fascinating about that is that you're basically saying you can be,

it's a skill, like deep work is a skill that you can get better at. And a lot of people are just like, well, I'm not good at focusing or I am who I am, you know, but you're saying you can actually improve at this. And that's the key thing. I mean, it's a skill that you have to train. And the fact that people don't realize that actually causes a lot of issues because what happens is, is most people, especially in today's technological

context, have been trained to be terrible focusers. And so they try it. They're like, okay, I put aside some time. I had no distractions. And it's terrible. It feels terrible. Very little gets done. And then they just conclude, I'm not a deep worker. But it's actually, this is a nonsense conclusion once you actually think about deep work as a skill to be cultivated. So if you've never hit a golf ball and you walk onto a golf course and you take a swing and the thing goes into the trees, you want to conclude like, oh, man, I'm just not a golfer. You would say, say, I've never practiced this before. I don't know. I don't know how good I could be at golfing. So it's the same thing with concentration. It's an incredibly practiced skill. But the good news

about that is almost no one practices it outside of really rarefied fields like professional athletics, professional music, and professional chess players, for example. So if you're one of the few in your field to actually cultivate the skill, you don't have to genetically be incredibly gifted at focusing because no one is practicing. Everyone is so far from their potential. If you just do a little bit of practicing, you're already going to start to feel an edge as compared to everyone else. And so there's a lot of blue water here. So those who practice their deep work pretty quickly start to get these competitive advantages over their peers that really pay dividends. Well, and then it becomes fun because now you're seeing results right away, right? And you're

seeing, like, when you're talking, Kyle, I'm thinking about like if you were out of shape and you went for a run and you gave it a try for five minutes, you're like, oh, I'm winded. This is not for me. I'm not a runner. That we would never. ever accept, yeah, you're just not a runner. You're just out of shape, right? And if you continue to keep running, eventually you would get better. And then your example earlier about how if you take a break every 15 minutes to check your phone, you never really get in a rhythm. That's like when you stop to tie your shoe in the middle of a run. And it's horrible when you try to get going again because you took yourself out of the flow. So you're stopping every 15 minutes to try to tire

your shoe, right? But when you get to the point where you can run long distances and you start getting that like dopamine or serotonin releasing from your brain to keep you going. And you start seeing everybody else got tired and I kept going. And then you start getting opportunities that other people didn't get because you were running. It becomes addicting and fun to be practicing this. And that's this, you know, the sad part of the people that don't actually commit to that process. Well, and it also feels better. I mean, there's a whole chapter in the book about how a deep life is a good life, right? Because there's something about when you spend more of your time focusing on a smaller number of higher value things.

When you're really like a craftsman, trying to do a small number of things really well and giving undivided attention to something for a long period of time, that's something we're wired for. Our brain appreciates that. You feel calm or you feel more engaged, you feel more resilient.

What most people do instead, which is this constant frenetic communication and information intake, is incredibly artificial. It's something that our species has not evolved for. Our brain doesn't know what to do with it. And so the vast majority of people are walking around not only much less productive

than they could be, but in this state of persistent background anxiety that they've just gotten used to because they're abusing their brain in a way that it was never meant to be used. So not only do you, does it become fun and you produce more. And I've got to say the metric I keep seeing when I study serious deep workers is 2X. If you take what's valuable in their field, they tend to produce about 2X more than other people. So it's not just about a little increase in your productivity. It's actually almost like a superpower. Like you really get huge gains and how much you can produce in the quality.

So not only do you get much more productive and it gets kind of fun, it makes your life feel better. So it's almost like an elixir of sorts for upgrading your professional life. That's why this is so valuable because what you're saying is here's the secret sauce to being more productive. When you become more productive, you build career capital much faster if you're outperforming everyone else to X, right? When you build career capital, you can go have the life that you want. And it's like a very clear roadmap for how to get out of where you are to where you want to go. It works.

I mean, look at me, right? I've never had a social media account. I don't web surf. I don't, I don't read news online. What do I do? When I'm working, I write, I do computer science. That's what I do. I do it with deep focus. I do it every day. I've been doing it for years. It has built up a lot of career capital for me. So now I have a sort of huge amount of autonomy and what I do for a living and how I do it. I have a lot of options in life. And I find my working day quite satisfying. It's not unusual for me to spend hours out walking in the woods, trying to solve theorems or whatever. I'm a living example of these two books

being put in the practice, which is, you know, you focus on a small number of things that are valuable. You do them with intense concentration. You avoid the distractions on both the day-to-day and the career-level scale. You just work, you get better, you build capital, then you start investing that career capital once you have it. The formula works. I mean, it's not as fun as, you know, if I just hire a virtual assistant tomorrow, I could be, you know, in Buenos Aires the next day, it's all going to work out. But, I mean, it's pretty consistent in its success. So what about those who say, you know, Cal, that sounds. sounds great. I should focus more. But you know what? I got kids at home. I got a busy,

you know, an open office space. I got employees everywhere that are running around. I got people. I can't deep work. Like what do you say to those type of people who just say that it's impossible to get into those moments? Well, I mean, there's a couple different things going on. One, there's certainly jobs for which deep work is not beneficial. And so I talked about that in the book. There's certain types of jobs where you get almost no advantage out of concentration. But I also have discovered that people vastly are vastly more likely to categorize their job in that. Categorize their job as one of those jobs that's really true. That is, there's a small number of jobs which that's true, but there's a ton of jobs for which people think that's true.

And it's not. So I'll make that first point. Two, what I talk about in the book, and this is a piece of advice that I've heard from readers after the book came out has been quite successful, is if your job situation makes it very hard for you to do deep work just because, let's say, expectations of connectivity. expectations of accessibility. A strategy that works well for a lot of people is to actually talk with, let's say, whoever's in charge of you, or if you're an entrepreneur, have this conversation with yourself, and say, here's what deep work is, here's what shallow work is. Hey, they're both useful.

Like, we need both of this for me to be successful and the company to be successful. What's the ratio I should be going for? What ratio of deep to shallow work hours in a typical week is going to maximize the value I produce for my company or for this organization? And you figure it out. And the answer is going to be different depending on what you do, but you'll have an answer. Then you go out and you measure and you come back and say, hey, if we're falling really short, like, hey, we decided that this ratio like 50-50 or something was going to maximize the value I produce for us.

I'm at 10%. So what can we do to get to this target that we thought was going to produce the most value? You're coming at this positive, right? Here's something we agreed on to try to produce more value. And I keep getting these reports from readers who are saying, I was convinced that my organization was never, ever going to budge from me needing to be on Slack all the time. or you need to answer every email, I had this conversation with my CEO, three weeks later, massive changes. Yeah.

Right. Our entrepreneurs have said the same thing to me, right? They had the conversation with themselves and realized, oh, if I did this ratio of deep to shallow, is going to maximize the money I make. And so you'd be surprised about how many entrepreneurs have come back and have said things like, I now do a monk mode morning, which is the default and my employees know this is Intel 11, 100% inaccessible. Can't contact me.

Don't schedule me. After that, I am. And now they're doing four hours of deep work every morning. Profit goes up, right? And so you'd be surprised by how much actual malleability there might be in their situation if you come at it from this positive direction. Deep work is good, shallow work is good. Let's find a ratio that's going to maximize the returns.

And then you work backwards from that to say, how do we make it? Well, it's funny is I had to do the same thing with my own wife, my own spouse, right? So my wife, Heather, you know, I work at home all the time. I'm always here, right? And so it's hard to get into deep work when you're at home. home, right? Because there's always something I can help with or the toddler is running around. Rosie's running around. Need something. And so a couple of things that worked really well for me. And this is one, just explaining that's my wife in that exact same way. I say, you know, honey,

I know it's really like, I mean, and this worked, I thought fantastic. It's like, I'm not present. And I know that. That's one of my, like, I'm always on my phone. I'm checking Slack on my phone because I got to make sure there's no emergencies happening. I'm talking to different real estate people all the time. And I say, like, I don't like that about our relationship that I'm never really So here's a solution. Like I just, I want to have more time of just deep work. I need this time where it's just dedicated deep work. And that's going to free me up the 50, 60, 100 hours a week of being present.

If I just get this a little bit of time. And that makes perfect sense to most everybody. Oh, like a little bit of like focus time can mean a massive difference throughout the week. And so we kind of have that routine kind of set. Now I get certain times that I go. And she does as well, actually, she takes it as well to do her job stuff. Yeah. Well, clarity, this is something I found time and again, is that.

that clarity trumps accessibility. And so a lot of people think what's demanded of me by my boss for my spouse, for my employees is accessibility, right? But really what they want is clarity. And so one of the reasons why people, you know, get upset if they can't reach you is if they don't know, like, when am I ever going to be able to read you? Then all they need is like, I guess you just have to get back to me. I just hate the uncertainty of, you know, I don't know when I'm going to hear from you. I need something from you. But when you have clarity, like to give you a concrete example, right? One of the people I talked to after the book came out was a essentially like, a, he wrote white papers for a tech startup.

So it's basically high-end marketing material, right? It's like technical white papers about their product. This is something that requires a lot of concentration to do well. He goes to the startup. It's a Slack culture, right? And if you're not on Slack, if you don't answer, the assumption is you're slacking off, right? That was the irony of it.

And he's like, this is terrible. He's like, you're paying me a good six-figure salary to produce these white papers. It was really hard. And I'm doing it terribly. So he sat down and had the deep to shallow work ratio conversation. with the CEO. He said it was immediately clear that it would be nonsense for the CEO to say, well, I want you to do zero percent, you know, deep work, right? As they actually put it there. They decided 50-50, made the most sense. And so the CEO's like, here's what we're going to do.

Two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. She went and talked to the engineering team he was embedded in. It said, okay, these two hours in the morning, these two hours in the afternoon, you can't talk to him. But after that, you can. He said it took him like two days to adjust. And then it was fine because it turned out they didn't necessarily need him to always be accessible, but they really need you to know when will you be accessible? When can I expect to hear? If I know you're going to be gone

these two hours and I know I have to get this to you before those two hours happen or get you right after those two hours have occurred. And so now he's spending half of his time in deep concentration. And the change was sort of trivial to make. And so this comes up again and again, accessibility is not as important as we think.

Clarity is crucial. And if you're really clear about here's why I am, here's when you can get me, here's what I'm doing, here's when you can't. You absolutely understand it. And they can trust it. people let you get away with a lot.

That's fantastic. I know it was either in digital minimalism or in deep work where you talk about the professor or maybe it was like an office hours. Like every day at like 530, you can reach this person. And so everyone just knows that this is the time that that person is available. I guess like a lot of professors do that as well, right? They just have their office hours. So it's a good strategy.

Or, you know, I did something similar with my email as an author. Like I essentially got rid of my general purpose email address. They said, okay, here's very particular addresses that you can send information for particular purposes. Here's the expectations about responses, which is typically essentially, I'm not going to respond. You would think just would upset people. I'm now less accessible, but people didn't mind because it was clear. Clarity is the problem. If you just throw up an email address and then just randomly don't answer people, they'll get much more upset than actually having a note that says,

I don't have an email address or you can send this information here, but I'm not going to respond. And so, yeah, emphasizing clarity over accessibility opens up a lot of options. Oh, that's great. So I want to move to the next book. Before I do, I want to make a point of why this is so important for real estate investors and why I absolutely love this book and how it changed a lot of how I do work is because at the end of the day, and I say this a lot, it doesn't take 40 hours a week to invest in real estate type activities. It doesn't take 50 hours a week, 100 hours a week. Oftentimes, like, you can build a pretty good sizable real estate investment business in like a few hours a week if you were focused at it. Like if you were doing deep work, it doesn't take that much time. to run the numbers on a real estate deal and then go make an offer. It doesn't take that much time to apply for a loan, maybe a half hour of just concentrated work. So like what people think it's going to take me the next several years to get good, you know, to get into real estate or I got to spend all this time and I'm really, no, set aside two hours a week, a world of just real deep work and you'd be amazed at how much further along than everybody else you are.

Yeah, I find it's not true. Cal, let me ask you something. The very first book you wrote, how long did it take you to write that book? That's a good question. it was a student advice guide, and I purposely made the format easy, but I don't know, I probably spent six months on it. And then your most recent book, how long did that one take you to write? Well, it's an interesting question because my books now are much more. Yeah, I probably should have clarified, like your first really, like, good book that sold a lot of copies and was like really,

like, acclaimed. I think that the right answer to your question is probably the total hours required, not the time. Yes. What I do now is I stretch it. I use a lot of. I use a lot of amount of time. And then I just within that time, though, so I don't believe in my book is doing six weeks. Now I'm going to disappear and write every day. That produces bad books, right? I give myself a year now, but I just work on it deeply and not every day. But when I work on, I work on it very deeply. And so if you look at a book like Deep Work, for example, because I actually have numbers on that. When I was writing that book, my output as an academic, so peer reviewed papers published doubled, which gives some sense of how efficient I was getting as, I mean, people ask

me about this university. Well, how do you write books at the same time you do these other things? And I say, it's not really an issue. I mean, when I write, I'm incredibly intense. I do a few hours here, a few hours there. Spread that out over a year. It takes up less time than like a hobby. Yep. But you produce a really good book on the other end, right? And that's depth, right? You can produce more quality output per hour spent, the more intensely your focus. And that's the point I was getting at is that like, to Brandon's point, it's not time that you need. It takes, it takes time in the beginning because you don't know what you're doing. You're very inefficient. But as you do it more and more, like now, I mean, I buy houses with maybe a total of like 17 minutes of my time that's put

into it because I have systems in place and my mind already automatically knows how to analyze it very quickly. It's not strenuous or stressful. But oh my God, the first time you could hem and haugh for three weeks over the first step of the deal. And I liken it to someone who's like, you're in a fight. You don't know how to punch very hard. You got to punch a lot. It takes a lot of energy. It's a horrible experience versus the guy like, you know, the black belt martial art master who can in one punch knock somebody out and it barely even burned a calorie because he's so efficient with what he does. That's what you're aspiring to be is the person who's so good at the thing you're doing that it doesn't take a lot of time and it doesn't take a lot of effort and it's not strenuous and it's

not a pain like what Brandon was saying. And that's, it's very encouraging because that's how we work. The more you do something, the better you get at it, the more fun it becomes and the less work it is. Yeah, no, I would agree with that. I mean, I think a good case point is, my blog post, which I write a blog post every week. I can do that in about 60 minutes now. I mean, I can do, I can do eight or 900 words, like relatively sophisticated idea with citations, but that's just turns on its focus. I know what I'm doing, right? For a novice blocker, a novice blogger, that could be a half days worth of work. Yep. So I found the same thing, yes. Yeah. So how much do you implement time blocking, like scheduling? How much of your life do you schedule?

How much do you just leave up? Like, to use the example of you're writing your books, right? Do you know I'm going to write every Thursday and every Friday for two hours? Or is it more like, I'm feeling it right now. I think I'll do it right now. Well, I do neither of those. So if, I mean, if you wait to feel it, you'll get basically no deep work done because we're not actually evolved to do intense concentration. And so you rarely just feel in the mood to, I just want to sit here and concentrate really hard. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who use a sort of regular schedule strategy for their deep work, which is not a bad idea.

I do something a little bit differently is I plan my time at the weekly scale. So I look at the challenge of the week ahead because for me, my weeks can be pretty different from week to week. So if I say Thursday mornings when I write, well, that's fine except for the Thursday that I need to go into the city for an interview or the Thursday where I have a meeting with or whatever. But the one thing that is common to people who are pretty consistent deep workers is that they have some sort of scheduling philosophy. There's some sort of system they use that make sure that they're doing this sort of deep concentration on a regular basis. And so for some people, it's a heuristic they can apply every day. I'm up at five or I'm muck mode morning until 11 or it's Thursday and Friday afternoons or whatever it is. And some people do more of the mode I do, which is let me spend some significant time to take in the challenge of this week and understand how I'm going to move the chess pieces around on this week and get the most deep work out of it.

But the common denominator is having a scheduling philosophy that you use to make sure the stuff gets in your schedule. That's fantastic. Yeah, I do a Sunday evening. I call it weekly battle plan. It's like every Sunday evening. Sometimes it's Monday, you know, it depends on the week. but like generally once a week, I sit down and I go, what does my week look like ahead? And I schedule, like I even schedule it.

I'm going to analyze two deals at this time on this day because I know that I have the whole morning free and I know I can deep work. Then I tell my wife, hey, I'm going to be disappeared for these two hours. I'm going to be in monk mode, right? Working on this thing in deep, deep work there. And because of that, that's how I get stuff done. And a fairly small number of hours, I work on my real estate every week. Well, I mean, this is just something common with high performers.

They give their hours a job. So just like in investing, right, in budgeting, you should give your dollars a job as opposed to just sort of spending it as you have something you want to spend it on. Incredibly common with elite performers, they take their time very seriously. They see it as this finite resource, and they like to look at the chessboard and say, how do I move these pieces around into an optimal strategy?

If you do just that, in the same week, you're going to end up getting two or three times more done. The person who just says, okay, it's Tuesday, like, let me go in my inbox, let me go online for a while, let me get out a to do-do list and be like, what do I want to work on today?

It's an incredibly inefficient way to deploy cognitive resources. So high performers almost always give their hours jobs. This morning I'm going to work on this. This afternoon I'm going to work on this. I'm going to move this thing over here. And they move the pieces on the chessboard. It makes a big difference. And then, of course, if you can get two to three to four times more work done,

you can choose if you want to back off the workload. And that, I mean, you could get to relay it back to so good they can't ignore you. You can negotiate and get the four-hour work week that you want. And it's because you've got the career capital and you're applying deep work to it. So kind of full circle here. Did you know, your house gets bored when you leave? I can't actually prove that, but it probably misses out on the action. The footsteps, the late-night fridge raids.

Yeah, when you're gone, your place is basically on unpaid leave. It's sitting there in the dark thinking, I could be contributing right now. Your side room wants a side hustle. Even your Wi-Fi is like, we could be networking. You're on vacation, spending money like it's a sport, while your staircase at home is fully capable of sending your income upwards. Here's the twist. You can go on a trip and actually earn money.

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Can you explain what that is? And again, why you ended up writing that book after Deep Work? Right. So Deep Work bridged me to digital minimalism. So, I mean, one of the big ideas in Deep Work was not only as focus becoming more valuable, it also happens to be, for other reasons, becoming more rare. And the reasons that was making focus more rare are technological reasons. So innovations like email and Slack and things in the workplace, low friction digital communications were making us more distracted. It was reducing our ability to focus.

And so that's actually the premise of deep work is it's supply and demand. So not only is focus becoming more valuable, but it's also becoming more rare. So the price is going to be really inflated. So one way to think about deep work is that it was about unintentional consequences of tech in the workplace, like what you could do about that. And so a lot of readers when I was out there talking about deep work started saying, okay, maybe again, I buy that premise, but what about the unintentional consequences of tech in our personal life? Because there's different forces going on there. But it was people who are noticing, you know, in my life outside of work, I'm looking at this

thing all the time. I'm looking at this growing rectangle all the time. Like it's taken away the quality of my life. Like I'm with my kids. I'm looking at it. I'm on a walk. I'm looking at it. I'm in the bathroom. I'm looking at it. There was this sense of something was going on. It was making people uneasy. And it wasn't really about utility, right? The argument was not everything I do on my phone is useless. It's cigarettes. I just went out of my life. It wasn't utility that the argument people were having was about autonomy. I'm using this too much. I'm using it more than I know it is healthy. I'm using this more than I know is useful. I'm using this to the exclusion of things I know I value more. And so it was this growing sense of diminished autonomy in people's life outside of work because

of tech, this kept coming back again and again and again. I began to notice this reaction too, where if I would write about this stuff three years ago, people think I'm a crank. Two years ago, suddenly people are applauding. So the shift was happening in the culture about these consequences of tech and our personal life are significant. We need to do something about it.

That's what got me really going down deep on this topic, and that's what led to the new book. So just to clarify here, because I know this isn't the case. You're not just saying all technology is bad. Let's be Luddites and start smashing everything. everything, right? That's technology, right? That's not what you're saying. Right, because this was the big discovery when I talked to people about this on ease, is this not utility. They don't think what they're doing when they're looking at the phone in that moment is particularly bad. It's autonomy.

That's what's getting people upset. It's like, I'm losing control of my life. I want my time back. I want to be more in control. And it has very little to do with this tech is evil and this tech is good. It has much more to do with, well, what's your relationship with technology? how do you integrate technology and they're trying to cultivate a good life or a life that you really like? And these are questions that we haven't been asking recently. And so now everyone's looking up

and realizing that they don't have answers that's starting to cause problems. Yeah. You know, there's this app called Moment. You've probably heard of it where it tracks your time on your phone. And now Apple actually tracks your time on your phone for you.

But I really, I've been using a moment now for a year. When I first started using it a year ago, I was averaging five hours a day of screen time on my phone. And a lot of people listening to this right now are probably laughing and thinking that's ridiculous.

But like a lot of people average five hours a day or more. Because every time you pick up that phone to text, every time you look at the screen to check something for a minute or whatever, it adds up over the course of a day. Over the last year, I've gotten that down to about an hour a day. So I'm saving about four hours a day that I'm not staring at a computer screen.

Add it up over the course of a week or a month. I mean, it's incredible amount of the time I'm saving. But it's not, and here's what made a big impact on my life of this book, is you're not saying, here's some tips and tricks. Like, hey, try this, right? I'm not opposed to tips and tricks. There are some cool things like take your screen and turn up black and white. That actually helped me quite a bit because now it's like I just noticed my black and white screen.

I'm like, oh yeah, I'm not as fun to look at my screen. But why aren't tips and tricks enough? Well, I think the social and cultural pressures are just too strong. We've been trying these for a few years now. It's not working. People, they go grayscale, they turn off notifications. They do these digital Shabbats or whatever. It really doesn't make any lasting change.

It's like exactly what we saw with the rise of highly palatable processed food. in the 20th century, right? Everyone started getting obese because we figured out how to make these, you know, fast food and junk food. And it was incredibly appealing and it messed around with our sort of natural palettes. And we all over ate. And we tried to make people healthier by saying, eat your greens, you know, move more. We put food pyramids up at the elementary schools.

Like, this didn't it work. That didn't solve the problem because tips and tricks weren't enough. The cultural forces pushing towards this food, the hyper-palladability of the food, it was just too powerful. And so what made people healthier when it? came to food and fitness, well, the healthiest people you know probably have some sort of philosophy, right? Like they're vegan or their paleo. They have something that they believe in, that they can built on their values that allows them to make consistent decisions. And so it became clear to me,

that's what we need with tech. The forces are too powerful to just read a wired article or a life hacker article and you're going to be fine. You have to build from the ground up a philosophy based in your values that you can get all in behind if you're going to have a chance at actually taking back control of this part of your life. that's that's incredibly insightful what do you say to the to the argument people make that they use social media or texting to keep in touch with family and friends and that's the most important thing in my life is my family well i mean this is the this is the dialectic the social media companies like they want the discussion to be social media is worthless versus there's some use to social media because they say hey we can win that we can win that argument every day right i mean there's a reason why people signed up for social media What they hate is when you say, okay, but why don't we answer the questions of how and when

to use social media to get the benefits we get out of it? Because it turns out, for example, with something like Facebook, most people could get 99% of the true benefits they get out of Facebook using it, let's say, twice a week, 20 minutes at a time on their desktop. That is a game over devastating move for Facebook as a company. If people went from 50 minutes a day to 20 minutes twice a week, like they're gone, right? That company's gone. And so they want the debate just to be useless versus some utility.

Digital minimalists think about it differently, right? Digital minimalists say, okay, here's what I really care about. Here's what I really want to spend time doing. For each of those things, they look for tech that can really boost those things. And so they want to find ways to use tech that amplify the things they care about so that they can do those better than they could have, let's say, 10, 20 years ago. But then they put fences around that and say, okay, well, how and when is the best way to use this tech to get those benefits without too many costs. And so you have a lot of people who maybe deploy social media, particular products, and particular ways to stay in touch with people.

But they're using it not on their phone. And it's on their desktop. And it's on a schedule. And they have a news feed blocker so they're not being distract or whatever it is that they're doing. They're being incredibly intentional. They're deploying these tools like tools to get big wins and avoid the cost. That's really the minimalist mindset.

What matters to me? What's the best way to use tech to boost these things I really care about? And then just be happy missing out on everything else. Yeah, and that's what I'm like, I loved about this is it's not saying technology is bad, let's get rid of it. It's like, what you're saying is like it's a whole like underlying foundation to how we approach technology. And it's not, hey, there might be some use here in this new social tool. Let's do it, right? It's do I really need that at all?

Is there a better way to obtain that outcome? Well, and here's what happened, right? So I think the reason why we feel this unease is because of this, this, this, this, great re-engineering that occurred when we weren't paying attention, right? And so this was led by the social media companies, but essentially what happened is we entered the smartphone era back around 2007, let's say, because that's when the iPhone was released to the public, the first sort of non-business focused smartphone that was sort of widely adopted. Social media was around at this point as well. But the experience of social media and smartphones back then was very different

than it is today. It wasn't a constant companion model where you looked at it all the time. The original iPhone was a tool. You listened to music. You made calls. You would occasionally look up directions. You wouldn't look at it all the time, right? That came later. So where did that come from?

Well, it's when the major social media companies had to transition from user acquisition mode, which is where you're spending venture money. And all you're trying to do is get users. So you're just trying to make your service as interesting as possible into IPO mode, which means, okay, now we have to get revenue numbers up so that we can succeed in IPO and get the 10x return to the original investors. And so Facebook took a lead on this. They said, how are we going to get our revenue numbers massively higher?

And what they figured out is we're going to put all of our attention on the mobile. And we're going to re-engineer the social media experience. So it's no longer about I post and you post and we look at each other's post. It's instead about a constant stream of social approval indicators coming at you in your phone. This is when we got the like button. That wasn't there in original social media. There's a reason why it spread like wild. just didn't need a like button. Facebook needed the like button, right?

True story. One of my friends worked at Facebook invented the like button. You knew Leah? Yeah, it was, well, he said it was on the team, I should say. I don't, I won't call him by name, but people hate him. But yeah, he was on that group. Right. So I went back and read the whole history. It's very interesting, right? Like they, and actually in his credit, when they originally were working on the like button, the original team actually had a really mundane idea in mind, which was just, there was a lot of redundancy in comments. People would say, great.

It's like, oh, we can make that a little bit easier. But then they saw the potential. And by them, I mean, the company as a whole saw that it really increased engagement. And so it spread everywhere. And increased engagement because now when you clicked on the app, you could see if you got likes for something you did. And sometimes you did. And sometimes you didn't.

And this was incredibly irresistible. That social approval indicators. This is why Instagram spent so much money to crack facial recognition so that you could auto tag people in photos. Why would they spend all that money for auto tagging in photos? Because that was a new stream of social approval indicators. Now I can check. Hey, did someone tag me in a photo, right?

This transformed the experience of social media into something where you had to check it all the time. It was 100% engineered. That's what retrained us to think about the phone is something we looked at all the time. And then once the phone became something we looked at all the time, all these other apps and services became things we began to engage with all the time. And it snowballed on itself. And this is what people have been waking up.

to. It's not that they think Facebook is bad. What makes people upset is they signed up for Facebook in 2005 because they wanted to know the relationship status of their roommate's old boyfriend or something like that. In 2015, they wake up and realize they're looking at it 150 times a day. Like, well, I didn't sign up for that. I have no interest in doing that. And so this whole experience of looking at your phone all the time is not at all fundamental to the technology. It's not at all fundamental to the value proposition of the social internet, social media, or smartphones. It was something that was contrived and engineered because a small number of investors did the IPO succeed for these companies. And so a lot of digital minimalism is stepping back and realizing,

well, what's the actual stuff I want to do on here? That's going to produce a lot of value for me. And why in the world am I looking at this thing 150 times a day? Was that digital minimalism? Was it your book that talked about how like even the swipe down from the middle to refresh your your your feed is like trained in our brain the same way you just swipe on like a on a gambling thought machine right it's the same thing yeah well so the big companies the attention engineering gets a little bit it gets a little bit dark actually if you go down this rabbit hole like so one of the things that that has come out of from whistleblowers in silicon valley is that some of the companies and again i haven't 100 percent confirmed this but but there's a couple whistleblowers who say this

is true. They looked at the research that was developed in Las Vegas when the slot machines went digital. So when the slot machines went digital, you could program in precisely the reinforcement schedule. So at exactly what rate you get single cherries and double cherries and whatever. And so in Las Vegas, they commissioned a lot of research to figure out, what's the reward schedule that's going to keep the little old lady at the slot machine all night long? Like, we're going to figure that out maximally. Social media companies looked at that research because they think about swiping the refresh or hitting on the app as pulling the slot machine panel. Instead of getting coins as rewards at social approval indicators.

Oh, I got some more likes. Both Tristan Harris and Adam Alter accused Facebook and Instagram of artificially batching likes and favorites to get more intermency, which magnifies the compulsive effect of having to go back. This is the type of thing that's upsetting people, right? And so Facebook wants the argument to be, is Facebook useless or is there some use? that's not why people are upset. They're upset because they re-engineer their experiences that they were going to look at this

when they're trying to have dinner with a friend, that they can't help but look at it when they're with their friend, that they're looking at this thing 150 times a day, that they're waking up in the middle of the night to check it. That's what people are upset about. It's the how and when I'm using these services. And people are willing to, they want some independence. They want their autonomy back.

Yeah. Well, if you can be the person who can overcome that hurdle, because what you're describing is very, very powerful cycle. political pull that these things have over us, similar to what fast food can do and some other parallels that you made that were really good. But if you're that person that overcomes this, gets that time back, then uses that time in deep work to be more productive, you can blow away your competition with minimal effort. I mean, I don't know if I should be saying this right now, but I was a police officer as a certain department, and I moved to a different department.

And the second apartment I went to had, let's say, like a much lower work ethic of the officers. right? And I remember being new. And in like half of a shift, I had done the work that the average officer was doing literally in a month, right? And these people were talking about me like I'm an animal. They're like, this guy is insane. Like, where did he even come from? How does he possibly do this? And I was feeling every day like, I'm such a bum. Like, I worked half of the time, right? And like, to your point, Cal, I had all of this career capital with very little work. And then it was, oh, you can be an instructor for this and you can have the special assignment and we're going to use you for this cool thing. Stuff that you had to work your tail off for years at my old department.

I was just like a bear at salmon season as they were just jumping into my mouth, right? And I realize what you're talking about is like in this place, if I can just stay focused when everybody else wants to not be focused, the tiniest little bit of work will give me such a huge, I don't know, like result in turn. And you can build capital really quick. And it's easy to fall into this like I'm a victim. Social media is stopping me for being successful. And like there's all these things against me. But man, if you're the person who can overcome it when nobody else is even trying because you actually read Cal's book and listened to this podcast, the world's your oyster.

Well, I mean, let me let me make this more concrete like for your particular listeners. Like here's based on my experience, I think what I'm about to say is probably, probably true, right? which is, let's say as a listener to this podcast, bigger pockets, you take all of your social media, you take it all off your phone. I'm not asking you to quit anything, but let's just say, you say, okay, when there's important things I need to do on social media, I got to go to my desktop and don't save the password, so you have a little bit of friction. So you can still, anything important, you can still do.

But it's not on your phone as a distraction. I think for a lot of people, especially people under a certain age, this will free up easily two hours a day, right? In part because if you're not doing all those checks while you're working during the day, you're going to get your normal work done faster. So you can just sort of implicitly, essentially end your work day earlier,

even without your boss doing. It also frees up a lot of time out of work when you're not looking at these things all the time. Take that two hours a day, put it towards real estate investing, right? Going deep, learning how to make a deal, learning how to read the specs, learning how the financial, whatever it is, right?

All the information you know you can get from this service. Do that for one year. I mean, look, I don't know the numbers, but you do that for one year. You're probably going to be financially independent. Yeah. Yeah, it does not take. And so that's the stakes we're talking about, right? So I'm not even asking you to leave social media.

But this is a question. Like, this is kind of what's on the table. Like the difference between you being financially independent next year and not is how important is it to you that you can see a hot take while you're, you know, while you're on the can at work. Yeah. Like, this is the type of tradeoffs we're talking about. Okay. So here's my question.

A lot of people might be wondering. Yeah, but there's a lot of times where I'm just bored. I mean, Cal, I'm sitting on the John, right? I got 10 minutes free, right? I'm sitting on the line at the grocery store. I'm at Costco in the trying to get gas at Costco and it's like a 20 minute wait. What's the big problem with me pulling up my phone and scrolling through Instagram? When I'm not doing anything, I'm not going to be analyzing a deal during that time anyway.

Well, we need boredom. We need boredom. Like, so boredom is an incredibly powerful drive, right? Like, we don't like feeling bored. It's something that feels bad. So typically any sensation that feels bad, there's a drive behind it, right? So what's boredom meant to do?

It's meant to drive us to do productive work, right? It's meant to drive us to do the thing that's hard that's going to require the expenditure of energy, which we otherwise try to conserve, but it's going to make some intention manifest in the world. It's boredom that got us to figure out how to make fire and to make the spear and to go out after the mastodon. And boredom is a driver, right, of human ingenuity and production. What ubiquitous internet and algorithmically optimized entertainment on a phone does is it subverts the boredom drive.

So now you can sort of temporarily assuage this feeling of boredom by hitting this thing on the phone. Just like when you feel hungry, you can eat a Big Mac and it's going to take away your hunger, right? But you're going to end up really unhealthy. And so if you subvert your boredom drive, you get rid of all boredom by looking at this phone all the time, you're left with a sort of anxious empty feeling. Why is that? It's because you've subverted the boredom feeling, but you're not getting that primal drive to actually make your intentions manifest in the world. There's this existential void in your life, or you know you want to be getting after it and doing something and making fire and holding up the spear after you kill the Macedon.

You want to be doing that. You know you want to be doing that. And you're not, but you've papered over this boredom just enough that it's like barely tolerable. And so this is actually one of the hardest things people had when they went through my, in the book, I talk about people like taking these 30 days and stepping away. from the technology to figure out what they're all about. Figuring out what to do instead, this was like really uncomfortable for people. That's the hard part. It's like, what do you do when you take away the escape?

And you have to confront, I'm bored. I'm not doing things. I'm proud of. I don't have anything to do. You know, having to confront yourself and your thoughts and what's bad about your life is incredibly difficult. But that's also the foundation in which you say, well, I'm going to get up now. And I'm going to start hitting Flint to steel.

I'm going to make the fire. I'm going to build the spear. Right. And so I think. boredom is one of the most important drives we have. You don't want to screw around with that with some algorithm, some guy in Silicon Valley put together that's reduced you to a data vector that's going to show you like exactly the picture you need to see that's going to make you a little bit happy.

Be bored. Don't like, you know, feel it. Be uncomfortable. Like let that be what drives you to say, okay, I'm getting up out of the couch and I'm going to go do X, Y, and Z, like the real stuff that matters. So a couple real life stories about this that perfectly showcased this. So two and a half years ago, maybe two years ago, probably two and a half, my little girl Rosie, who's now turning three when this show comes out, she was like six months old or whatever,

and she got sick. And she was sick all night. My wife was up all night with her. So at three in the morning, I pick up my daughter and I say, okay, Heather, my wife, you go sleep now. I'll take her from three on. And she was just crying every few minutes. And I put her in the car and we drove around. Now, because she's going to, she's waking up at like the smallest, like if I go over a bump too fast, right? All I could do is drive from 3 a.m. till about eight. And so we drove for five hours and I just drove up. I couldn't listen to music. I couldn't do anything. I was just bored for five hours. And like I had so many ideas and things that came to me, like things that fundamentally changed my business forever, like from both bigger pockets and from my real estate during that

five hour stretch that it, like I got done with that and I was like, oh my gosh, I should do this every week. Like I should just drive with my kid every week. The same thing is true now when I moved to Maui now. I travel back to the mainland all time. It's six hours and there is no, you know, there's no Wi-Fi in that playing. And like I can't, I got my daughter sit next to me anyway. And so I can't like get totally distracted in a movie. So I have six hours of just sitting there in silence, pretty much with a notebook. And again, some of the best moments of just focus and like deep thought, like even just ideas come during those times. So yeah, totally true. Yeah. Well, I mean, and the other factor at play there is that so solitude, right, boredom, which are kind of interchange, basically where you're not

processing input. Yep. Right. When you're not processing input, you're just observing. and with your own thoughts, in addition to boredom driving you do really big things, what you're pointing out is something I talk about in depth in the book, which is your mind has two modes. There's the mode where it's processing input, and then there's the mode where it's actually trying to do something with it, and they're different. And so if you're always consuming information, but you're never actually giving yourselves the hours of just there alone with your thoughts, you really are going to be impoverished in terms of how much value you can extract from it, which is why so many great thinkers historically, for example, are big walkers. They would just go

out there and they would walk and this is a time for their brain to just bounce around thoughts, figure things out, make use of all this information. So yeah, so what you're talking about is is absolutely common and backed up by the research. Time alone with our own thoughts is crucial. Bortem should be something we don't try to get rid of cheaply, but something we should let drive us to real action. Both of those things are crucial. I've never, ever, ever heard anyone make that argument, but you just sound so smart saying that. I mean, that's like the most incredible thing I've heard is that boredom has a use, right? Like C.S. Lewis is one of my favorite authors, very, very brilliant thinker. And he used to take walks all the time.

And, Cal, you have me thinking of all the people that are constantly attending seminars and conferences and listening to podcasts and going to meetups. And they're always around real estate investors listening to what they're saying, but they never actually make any progress. And I'll bet you it's because they don't ever just sit down and let what they've been learning sink into their brain and actually say, of the 400 things I just heard, what are the two that I might actually do something with and put a plan together to go to? do that. Yeah. Well, like, I love podcasts, but I think the right rule for podcast is the one-to-one rule. One hour of nothing in my ear for every hour of listening, right? So I listen to this 90-minute

interview. Like, I should plan at some point to have another 90 minutes where there's nothing in my ear. And so you're exposing yourself to information, but you're giving yourself about a one-to-one ratio of sort of thinking time to consumption time. That really works well. That's cool. You know, one thing I tried recently. My wife got me a gift certificate for massage envy. You know the massage place, so I have a membership. Every month I get like an hour long massage. That hour long, like I don't, I actually don't, I mean, massages are fine, but I don't look forward to the massage. I look forward to the one hour where I have nothing in my ear and it's just silent and I'm thinking. And like, I'm literally, like I just told Ryan, who's on my like real estate team and

my bigger pocket team anyway, he lives on here, why with me? Like for a company perk, like I'm getting a, I want to have a massage person come like once a week for everybody in the company. And just like an hour where you just like during the work day, you get a massage. because it's just time where you're forced to sit there in your thoughts and think, and it feels good. Yeah. Well, I grew up near Princeton, New Jersey, where the Institute for Advanced Studies is. This is where, like, Einstein came when he left Europe, right? So it's big thinkers. If you're there, you have no responsibilities but thinking. And the reason I knew it as a kid is because it's built among a massive network of trails in the woods.

So as a kid, I used to go play in these woods, but there's no coincidence that this place is hidden in the middle of the woods because the whole idea is go out there and walk. Walk in the woods, be outside, have nothing pulling out. you just think that's where the big thoughts are going to come from. Yeah. There's a lot of studies, too. I just show like when you're doing some kind of physical exercise after working out, like it retains in your head better and all this. I've read a ton of stuff on that. You guys are helping me understand myself so much better because what will happen, Cal is I will fly to Maui and I'll hang out with Brandon and we'll have 30 minutes of insanely intense conversation of very high level things that feels like a mental workout. And then I'm like,

I just want to get away for two hours and go walk by the ocean. Yeah, you'll just like leave and disappeared and like Brandon's cool. He lets me do it. And I just feel guilty like, why am I a jerk? I don't know why I'm doing this like, but now I get it, right? Like I just had all this stuff get like a like sand in the ocean. Like it all floats up in the water and now it has to kind of filter back down and I got to see what sticks. Yeah. Like I'm in the early stages right now of writing a new book. And so like I can tell you what's on my schedule after this interview. It's walk and think about the book. And I'm doing that all the time right now because that's what I do in the early stages of a book is like literally I know that the hour amount like I probably need 50 hours 50 hours of just thinking and walking before I can really

figure out okay now I see a skeleton that makes sense right and so that's what's on my schedule next it's the title of the book slash walk you know that's funny that's awesome all right so what should somebody do who wants to be more a more of a digital minimalist who wants to take back control and have some control over that. What's a good tactic? Well, so what I suggest is a 30-day process. Right. And again, like, that's not something,

it's not normally my style to have advice. It's like 30 days to whatever, right? It sounds like a diet or something like that. But I can tell you the reason why it's there is because it's what works. Like, it absolutely works. I've run about 1,600 people through this process, and it works.

You need a 30 days. So here's the idea. So what I suggest is you take 30 days. During those 30 days, you essentially take a break from any of these sort of options. technologies in your personal life. So like social media, online news, video games, YouTube, anything that you don't absolutely need, you'd be okay without having it for a week. And if there's things that you have some work responsibility surrounding, try to put some fences around it.

Like, okay, I still need to do X, Y, and Z on Facebook for my job, but I'm just going to do it these times on these days and that's it, right? What do you do during these 30 days? Well, at first you're going to get a detox effect. Like the first 10 to 14 days, depending on how much you use your phone, you might feel the sort of compulsion to check something. And, after about 10 to 14 days, that'll clear out, which is in itself useful. But the real purpose of the 30 days is that's how much time you need to really get out the question of what do I actually want to be doing with my time, especially outside of work. Like, what do I want to get after?

What's a valuable to me? What do I want to spend my time on? And this just requires reflection. Like, you're out there, you're walking, you're thinking. It requires experimentation. Like, you try it. Like, well, why don't I try bringing the surfboard out there and seeing if I hate this or if it's something that seems like I might like?

Like, you figure out this is what I really want to do with my time. The experiment reflect. It takes a while. When the 30 days are over, the idea is you don't just go back to all the tools you are using before you start the experiment. You actually figure that you're rebuilding your digital life from scratch. And so now if something wants to come back into your life, it has to earn its way back into your life.

And the rule should be, hey, if this tech is going to really help one of these things I identify during the 30 days that I really care about and I really want to do, then great. I'll bring that back in. I'll put some fences around it. I'll actually answer the question of how and when I want to use it, but that's great. If the tech does not directly support one of these things I think is really valuable, I don't need to know about it. I don't want to play the maximalist game of like if there's some convenience or some value, I better have this in my life. It's like, no, this is what I want to do.

These are the five things I want to do with my time. So tech that can help that. Okay. I'm going to bring that back in to amplify it. Everything else, happy to miss out on. And so you're basically starting from scratch and rebuilding your digital life much more intentionally. Is this the same principle that people do when they do like one of those 30-day cleanses from food? Like you just get rid of it.

and you get rid of the urge and then you choose what food you bring back. Yeah, it's pretty similar, right? You only add back into things that don't make you feel bad. You sort of rebuild your diet. Or the same thing like Mary Condo talks about with a closet, right? You take everything out and you only put back into things that, I mean, I don't really understand this notion about like shirts making me joyous or whatever. But it's the same minimalist notion, right? You go down to empty and then you put back in the stuff you really want.

As opposed to what most people do, which is let me come from the top down and try to nibble around the end. edges, right? So you don't see Marie Kondo say like your goal should be like every week or so, maybe find something that you don't want your closet and take it out, right? Or go to your garage and like, you know, occasionally see if there's something in there you don't need and take it out. Like you're never going to clean the closet. The garage is always going to be a source of stress. No, you cleaned the whole thing out. You empty the whole thing. And then just bring back in in, same thing. You're taking everything out of your digital life, getting back in touch with what you really care about. And then you only bring back into things that are really important.

That's so good. So good. Yeah, I, uh, right for reading your book, I kind of did this. I ended up to like LinkedIn. I no longer have a LinkedIn because I was like it's not actually adding any value to my life. Like it's everyone feels like you should have a LinkedIn. I deleted mine. I do not I don't have Facebook or Instagram on my phone, but I do install Instagram once a week for about now half hour and I'll go and upload a post or two and then I'll delete it again and my browser. They hate that. They hate that. I know. It's the worst fear. They don't want people thinking about how and when they use the apps. He just wants you to go into the ecosystem and never look up. Yep. That's so true. And also one other thing you, you mentioned. in the book, this thing called the light phone, which is like a phone, it fascinated to me. Sent me out on this long trail of research under like how to, how to get, could I get rid of my phone? And like, part of me says I can't fully get rid of my phone. And there's so many things that I still use it for and work and business or whatever. Maybe. So you mentioned this light phone, which is super cool. It's like this phone that basically all it does is text and call, right? And they've got the light phone two coming out soon, I think. So what I actually found is I had another idea.

And this came on actually like, I think I got this during a massage. I thought, wait, isn't there an Apple watch that can do calls and texts? And so I looked it up and sure enough, you can buy an Apple watch that has cell technology. So I bought the Apple watch that has the call and text. Because what this does is I can still, if I really need to, I can text with people on it. And I can, people can get in touch with me. They can call me and it's awkward. I can talk onto my phone.

But what I could do with this one is I can leave my phone at home. And so I do a lot now. I plug my phone into a home. I leave it at home. And I just go and do my entire. day with my Apple Watch. I can't check Instagram on it. I can't check Slack on it. All I can do is awkwardly respond to text and calls if I absolutely need to. And this has made the biggest change of my life. Ironically, more technology made it maybe used technology less. No, but it's true. So

killing the constant companion model of the smartphone opens up massive improvements. And there's all sorts of ways that people do it. So I mean, there's the double phone people. So I have my smartphone. My smartphone. I have my dumb phone. Then I bring the dumb phone with me, kind of like you're doing, but they'll just have like a flip phone or something. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, basic text and call phone called a doro that has a cult following, including among hedge fund managers who can quantify the impact of distractions at the level of millions of dollars of lost revenue because of what they're doing with their trading.

And so they really care a lot about this. The original light phone was a tether, which is really interesting. So the, so the idea was you still have your smartphone. you can tether this simple phone to it. So it's your same number. So when you have your original light phone with you, if someone calls your normal number, text your normal number,

it goes to the simple phone you have with you. And if you call someone from it or text them, it comes from the simple phone. That's basically what the Apple Watch does. Yeah, the light phone too, I think, is standalone, but whatever. So there's that. And then there's just the notion of more people

just get comfortable just being without their phone more often. And that's another movement that's out there. It's like the 1980s babysitter movement, right? Because if you grew up in the 1980s, like I did, when your parents would go out to a movie, they would tell the babysitter, we'll be back later, you can't reach us. Like, if there's an emergency, here's the neighbor's phone number. And it was fine. Like, very few of us, you know, died in fires, right?

So there's more of that, like, realizing, like, oh, it's okay. Or I can buy, you know, if I get lost, I can ask someone for directions. But everyone has seen that same effect. Like, as soon as people get away from the constant companion model of a smartphone. The other thing I talked about in the book is that, The original motivation for the smartphone was for business users, which is when you're on the move, like laptops backed in were huge. Yeah.

And so like when you're on the go and you might need to check in on work, you could do it on a phone. Like this was going to be, this was a huge win. It meant that you weren't completely disconnected when you're out of business meeting. But laptops aren't huge anymore. I mean, you can get a $400 Chrome book that's like really small and really thin and it's much easier to do work on than your phone. And so this notion that you need a fully featured phone no longer has its original motivation. And so the only motivation that's left to keep everyone buying these very expensive Samsung and Apple phones is sort of it plugs you into this distraction economy and you can take good pictures.

Like the camera is now the main feature. Yeah. Your Instagram photos or yourself will look really good. I mean, I think the smartphone companies are trying to figure this. They sense this. Like, we are not as vital as we used to be. We're not necessary for work. We're not necessary for calls and texting.

And people are getting fed up with, you know, how many different angles can I take a picture of myself and post it online? Yep. Yeah. You know, the funniest thing about going, becoming, I'm not a purest digital minimalist yet, but I'm working towards that, right? And I've gotten a lot better. But the funniest thing I've noticed is just how much everyone, like how much now I notice everyone else uses their phone.

It's below, like, you must always notice that because you've probably been a minimalist longer than I have. People are always on their phone everywhere you go. Like, you're in an elevator and there's nine people around you and everyone's on their phone. And I'm like, can you not sit still for 30 seconds as we go up one floor? No, nobody can. Oh, yeah.

And it's my mind. here's what's going to happen if you become a purist. Then you'll start to get very guilty about what you do. Even for like really important reasons. Like I need to look up the location of this restaurant. I'm lost or something like that. You're going to get to this point where you're like, ah, I feel like really exposed and guilty looking at my phone.

Yeah, this is great. So you get both smugness and guilt when you become a little less. What else do you need? That's all you need to live. Very cool. Well, last thing I want to talk about before we let you go is this idea of high quality leisure. because this is something I really, really enjoyed about the book, because it talks about, like, what do you fill your time with?

And your answer is high-quality leisure. Can you explain what that is? Right. This is something, you know, we crave. So it's activities you do that's non-work related that you do just for the sheer quality and pleasure of the activity itself, right? So maybe if you're really into cooking or something like that, right? You cook a good meal, not for an instrumental purpose, but just because you really

just appreciate good food or if you're in the whiskey, like, you know, you get a good whiskey and you just really appreciate the, you just really appreciate the, quality. Like, you're not doing it to get X, Y, and Z. You're doing it because you really like doing it. High quality leisure makes us really happy. It also gives us a lot of resilience. This Aristotle even realized this, that there's a lot of ups and downs in your life. There's a lot of stuff you can't control. But when you have activities you do just for the sake of their intrinsic quality, it somehow buffers you against this and makes life seem kind of more interesting and meaningful and beautiful. And so high quality leisure is crucial. It goes away

when you just satisfy your boredom drive looking at the phone all the time. And so one of the key things that digital minimalist refill back in this newly found time with when they get much more intentional about their technology is they refill it back with high quality leisure activities. The irony is that they often find that modern tech allows them to do these analog activities much more often and much better. And so it all entangles. Like you can use the internet, for example, to find friends to go trail running with or

something like this. So technology actually helps non-technological activities in a way this kind of an interesting connection. But high quality leisure is crucial and less time on your screens, more time with high quality analog leisure is a recipe that's going to leave you much more satisfied. Yeah, it's a really, really good point. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of that, like, picking up skills, things like trying to learn the guitar. I'm trying to learn the ukulele right now, like better. Like, it's a cool. I mean, it doesn't add any value to my life in terms of like, I'm not going to make more money from it. But like, I just enjoy those times. Surfing, I kind of picked up that.

I've been running way more often, swimming. Like those high, quality leisure activities, which now I have time for because I'm saving four hours a day. I'm not glued to my screen. Yeah, I'm going to tell you, like, this is the digital minimalist lifestyle. Like, they often don't have their phones with them. When they're working, they're working really intensely. When they're not working, they're playing the ukulele, right? Or they're out there trying to learn how to serve or they're learning how to like woodwork or play.

This is what they're doing. And it's a calmer life. It's a much more satisfying life. I mean, these people are happier. They're getting much more satisfaction. Everything seems more meaningful. I mean, this is much bigger than. tech is good or tech is bad or tips about this or that.

It's really a lifestyle that's about finding much more quality in your day-to-day experience. And I got to tell you, the people who report back to me who are doing these things, it's significant. It's a significant boost to the quality of their life. Yeah, fantastic. All right, well, before we let you go, I got a series of four questions we ask every guest every week. This is time for our... Famous Four.

Cal, these are the same four questions we ask every guest every week. I'm going to tweak them slightly because the first one's more of a real estate-related one. instead. The first question, normally say, what's your favorite real estate book? But in this case, I'm going to go with, what's your favorite, like, I'll call it productivity slash minimalism slash, you know, like that style book. We're going to go to that because that's kind of the focus of today's show. What's your favorite book on that, on that vein, or current favorite? Like in the, in the productivity-type minimalist space, actually a book that was very influential to me was not meant to be in that space, but it's actually the rise of Theodore Roosevelt.

I think it won the National Book of Lord or the Pulitzer back when it came out. I mean, it's a brilliantly written biography, but its focuses on Roosevelt's young years is a profile in incredible minimalist deep work. And it's incredibly inspiring. Like he had this this way of just, I'm going to do this incredibly intensely. Now, I'm going to do this incredibly intensely. He was a minimalist who was obsessive about concentration. And because of it, he crafted this incredibly impactful, useful life. And so that's my favorite productivity book.

And on the surface, it has nothing to do with productivity. Awesome. Cool. Okay. What is your favorite business book? Business book? Let's see. I don't know.

That's a good question. See, this is the thing that got me, this is the reason I never signed up for Facebook is that I was always bad at listing favorites. And that was what early Facebook. That's what early Facebook was. I don't know. I'll tell you this. When I was a kid, when I was a teenager, this was during the first.com boom, and I had my own. Dotcom business.

And I remember reading, so it was very influential to me at the time. I remember reading, his name is maybe Paul Mainz's biography of Bill Gates called Gates. And then there was also this big business biography of Apple that was out back then. This was before Steve Jobs returned. And I remember reading those two books in the late 1990s. And it made me into sort of like a hardcore, put me into a hardcore tech startup mode. So I don't know if I would say those are the best business books I've ever read, but they're incredibly influential, at least in my own life. I'd say they did a good job.

Perfect. All right. Since you're not on your phone very often, what are some of your hobbies? That's a good question. Well, I do play guitar. And I've been trying to get back into the I used to play in bands. Beyond that, I mean, between CS writing and my three kids, I would say, I wish I had more hobbies. Guitar is cool.

Guitar is cool, though, yeah. Yeah, what do you play? Who stick, electric, both? Oh, I have both. I have a beautiful sunburst American Standard Stratocaster that I've had since I was a teenager. It's a beautiful guitar. I was a big clap than Hendricks fan that have a nice Taylor acoustic. Oh, cool.

I have a Taylor acoustic as well. Maybe you can fly out to Maui with us and you and Brandon can jam on your ukuleles and guitars. And I will sweat bullets trying not to look at my phone when I don't have anything to be playing. Well, you guys do it. We'll all go for long walks afterwards. Okay, true. This is not one of the famous four questions, but I'll ask it anyway. Do people get awkward around you because they know you're the guy who's like writing the books about not using your phone?

Like, do people like, oh, I'm so sorry. You put the down. Some people do. Like, people swear around me and they always apologize because they know I'm like, I used to be a youth pastor. Like, they're like. Journalists do sometimes when I do in-person interviews because journalists always look at their phone. And they always catch themselves. Yeah.

It's really funny. All right. Number four. What do you think separates successful people? in general, like high achievers from those who give up on their dreams, they fail once they get started, or they just never get started whatsoever. So I think diligence is really important where I used the definition that Steve Martin used in his memoir. So in Born Standing Up, which is where I got the, actually, that's not where I got to be so good. They can't ignore you quote.

That actually was from a TV interview. But in his memoir, Steve Martin talked about diligence being the key to his success. And his definition of diligence was less about continuing to work on one thing. but more about being willing to say no to everything else again and again and again going on in time. And I noticed that trait a lot about people that end up doing interesting, successful, or impactful things is that once they get their teeth into something, it's not just that they're willing to keep working on it. They're willing to keep saying no to all the other things to start coming up over the years

to try to take your time or distract your attention. And so they get that compound interest effect of effort, effort, effort, effort, effort, and starts to compound. And so diligence in my experience is a huge separating factor between impact and busyness. Perfect. Perfect. Well, Cal, this has been a fascinating conversation. I'm going to listen to this about four more times to pull everything out of it than I can. Can you tell us where people can find out more about you?

Well, not on social media, I suppose, but I do have a website, Kelnewport.com. I'm a big fan of blogging. I've been blogging there for over a decade. And so it's a good place to find out about me and the sort of weird thoughts to come out of my head. It's all well documented on that particular domain. All right. All right. Well, dude, we'll send people there.

We'll put links to that in the show notes, of course, at biggerpockets.com says show 330. All right, Cal, thank you so much for joining us. It's been fantastic. Well, thank you. It's my pleasure. All right. That was our interview with Cal Newport. Unbelievable.

I mean, I love those books, but I love me able to pick his brain on those things and kind of the notes I'd had. ball reading them. And I just, it's so smart and it makes so much sense, doesn't it? I think sometimes when I read a book by a guy like that, in the back of my head, I'm like, does he really know this stuff? Or did he just have a research assistant go put it all together? But when you listen to Cal Talk, you're just like, oh my God. And he lives it.

Yes. That whole point he made about how like boredom is a necessary function and it's actually productive. Yeah. Blew my mind in the middle of the podcast. I had never, ever thought about it. I had looked at boredom like it was the enemy and you have to fight it at all costs. and what have I been robbing myself of while doing that?

Yeah. Yeah. So we want to take a few minutes here before we get out of the show. And like I mentioned in the quick tip today and talk about how some of the stuff relates to real estate investors. Because again, I wasn't going to go and drill Cal on like, you know, like, well, tell us how you can do this when you're analyzing a deal. Because at the end of the day, like he's a computer scientist and he's teaching us about

the principles that we can apply. So let's apply them right now. So David, I'm wondering, first of all, you're in love with this book, just like I am, but so good, they can't ignore you. Like, how do you see that applying to the. average real estate investor. Ooh, this is really good. Okay, so the fact is there are deals out there because there's somebody buying deals all

the time, right? Like, we hear, you and I hear, oh, there's no deals. I can't find anything, right? But we, then you and I find deals or people we know are finding deals. So it's not that there's not deals. It's that there are people that don't know how to get them, right? And that means it's like a skill problem. Your network isn't strong enough.

Your analyzing isn't strong enough. Your understanding of how other human beings work is the problem. problem. Deals come to me still in today's market because of the reputation I have or the skill that I have or the work that I've done in the past to where wholesalers and agents think of me and they bring a deal right away, right? That was because I embrace the concepts and so good they can't ignore you. When I have a conversation with someone, they can very quickly tell this guy's the real deal. He's not going to jerk me around. He's going to buy the house if he wants to, right? If something goes wrong, he's not going to panic and make my life hell. He can handle a couple bumps in the road.

So that makes people like me. It makes people want to bring me those deals, right? I became in that world so good that those deal finders cannot ignore me, right? So you and I can be out on the beach hanging out or out in the ocean surfing. And when I come back from that, I can have a message on my phone that says, hey, do you want this deal? That's a really good deal that other people could be spending months and months and months trying to find. But it came to me because they're approaching it with a different mindset than I did. Right.

So that's just one way right there where approaching or embracing the philosophies in that one book have led to me having a much better life. Yeah. Yeah, so good. So good. They can't ignore that advice. I mentioned this in the show, but I'll emphasize again here. I say all the time, like learning how to analyze a deal or at least run the numbers, knowing what makes a good deal or not a good deal is is so important. So if you're new, if you're new to real estate right now, which a lot of our audience is, they haven't done a deal yet, right? Guess what? It doesn't cost any money. to sit down and go on realtor.com or talk with a real estate agent and get some leads and start figuring out what would make it a good deal, right? Like play with the numbers. And if you, I mean, it might cost you the cost of a bigger pockets pro membership if you want to use our calculators, which you should because they're awesome. But it doesn't like take a lot of effort to build that skill. It just takes time and repetition and doing it over and over, right? So if you become so good at knowing how to recognize a good deal, all of a sudden, everything else becomes easier.

right i say this a lot about the deal delta i put this in the uh in how to invest in real estate that to put together any deal you really need three things you need knowledge to know how to do things you need hustle to actually get the work done and you need the money to put it together but you personally do not need to have all three of them and all i'm saying when i talk about the deal delta is you just need to have one or two you can and if you're really good at that one or two you can find the other ones because those people need you in other words if you're really really really good at raising money let's just well then you don't necessarily have to know how to find a good deal because you're really good at raising money go find somebody who's really good at finding good deals and they will love you i mean i will

love you right like to be somebody who raises money for me now maybe you're somebody who just hustles better than anything you know a few weeks ago on the show we had a Felipe on here he's a hustler right he can hustle like crazy and he's so good that that's why i want to work with him while we're working together in a deal because he's so good at that one skill of hustling and he also has the knowledge and he's got some money too right he's got a lot of of it, which is, again, the more skills you have, the more career capital, which is how Cal put it, the more other people want to work with you, the better chance you have a put-together deal. So maybe spending a little bit less time on Facebook or Instagram, less time watching TV

and Netflix, watching Game of Thrones, maybe more time becoming amazing at a certain thing. And Alask Cal says, you're not necessarily going to always love it. You're not going to always fill in the zone when you're sitting down watching another replay of a Bigger Pocket's webinar that David hosted teaching how to, you know, talk to sellers or whatever, right? Like, you're not always going to love those moments, but it's those times of deliberate practice that are going to make the biggest difference on your life long term. You know, as you were talking there, I started thinking about a lot of the people that fall prey to gurus and scams sell really, really expensive multi-tens of thousands of dollars of programs.

And I'm wondering how many people do that because specifically they're trying to avoid having to put in the work. And that makes them vulnerable to being taken advantage of. Like, oh, I don't have to commit to learning this and do it myself. I'll take his program and the information will automatically, like through osmosis, get in my brain and I'll know everything. Like you're in the Matrix and they just downloaded this book of how to jump start a motorcycle without having to put the time into work, right?

And it just had me thinking like how many people are paying a price literally through money because they don't want to commit to the process of becoming great. But when you do, the world just opens up to you. Absolutely, like everything becomes so much easier. Yeah, it's so true. Well, and then, of course, moving on to deep work a little bit. I mean, I think it's obvious there how a real estate investor can use deep work, right? I mean, if you're trying to analyze a deal, if you're trying to network at the same time

you're doing other stuff, if you're trying to do 10 things at once, so you're just not going to be effective at it. Look, if you got a full-time job right now, which most of our listeners do, and you want financial freedom, you're going to need to find a few hours every week of deep work. You're going to need that time, especially in the beginning. I mean, yeah, as you go, like David said, David can make an offer and buy a real estate deal in 17 minutes of time, right? But in the beginning, you're going to need more than 17 minutes.

So go to your calendar right now, like right now, pause this podcast, go to your calendar and put in an hour or two this week or three or four hours spaced throughout the week where you're going to be head down deep into something that's going to benefit your investing and then do it next week and the week after. And like hell said, build that system so that, every week it gets done because it's not going to happen naturally. Jim Rohn says life doesn't get better by chance. It gets better by change. Right. So you're not going to naturally just end up with real estate, right? You're going to have to work at it. You have to time block it in there and schedule

those times of deliberate practice through deep work. Anything you want to add on that? Just that that's the same way that everything else in life works to, the people that have the best bodies do that. They practice that. People that like Cal, he didn't get to be as smart as he did by not doing that, right? He completely commits 100% to mastering whatever he's got in front of him. But we have this like, I don't know, it's like a cheat code with real estate because we love it so much. That's why we're listening to podcasts. That's why we're talking about it. That work doesn't suck. Like if you made me learn computer science and I had to sit there and learn computer coding, oh, can you imagine? Right. Like how much I would hate that. But learning how to be a really good

cop didn't suck. I loved it, right? So work doesn't have to necessarily equate to bad. just because you don't like the work you're doing right now, it doesn't mean that it will feel the same way when you commit to mastering something that you actually do enjoy. Yeah. Hey, what do you think about like, let's say somebody's starting to learn real estate and they're just kind of overwhelmed.

They're reading a couple of books. Maybe they picked up the new burr or the buy rehab, rent, refinance repeat book. And they're like, I'm feeling kind of overwhelmed. I'm not feeling it. How do they know whether or not, like, it's not fun for them yet, right?

How do they know they should stick through it until it, you know, it's the passion versus whatever? Like, how do they know if they should stick through that book? and finish and just get really good of it or switch strategies or something else. What do you think? I don't, well, the strategy won't feel fun no matter what you're doing

because you won't be good at it. And there's hardly anything that's fun that you're not good at. Like there's snowboarders that love snowboarding. I bet you their first couple trips just were not fun. Surfers are in love with surf. I don't like, yeah, I don't like snowboarding because I'm not good at it.

Did you have a blast your first time you went surfing and you were crashing and paddling and tired and exhausted the whole time? No, it was there you go. But is there anything you like more than surfing right now? Yeah, right? But it was rewarding that first time. Like I like the challenge, but I like the difficulty of it, but I wasn't fun because

I never wrote a single wave. The first three times I went surfing, I didn't ride away. There you go. And you stuck through it because you're Brandon Freakin Turner and you got the reward, right? But what pulled you through it was the site, the visualization of seeing others out there surfing and you wanted that so bad that it pulled you through that bad part. People are listening to us because they want financial freedom through real estate. They already have the desire, right?

You have to look at it like, am I willing to do this for three, trips in a row without even having one ounce of fun, but make the reward, like, the challenge that I didn't quit. If you can get a little bit of juice out of like, hey, I'm still working at this, it will pull you through that part that's difficult. And then you caught your first wave and you're probably hooked, right? You were fine to wipe out 10 times in a row because you knew, but that one wave makes it so worth it. That's what it was like for us when we first started buying real estate. Like, man, I screwed up on a million things, but that that passive income check that comes in every month made it worth it that I'm willing to do this, right?

it's very similar to other things in life. For some reason, we have this idea that real estate is supposed to be easy. And if I have to work hard at it, I must be doing something wrong. And that's not necessarily the case. Yeah, so true. So sure. Lastly, digital minimalism. Like, how does this apply to real estate investors, do you think, David?

I think that it can trick your brain when you're constantly reading articles or listening to webinars or podcasts into thinking that you did something that you didn't. You just collected information, but you didn't actually take any action, right? So I think that like if you're forced to stop collecting information until you're acting on what you already know, it will expose, do I really want this or not? Whereas when you could just stay in that information collecting phase, you can trick yourself into thinking, oh yeah, I want to be a real estate investor. I'm making progress when you haven't written an offer in two years. You don't want to be a real estate investor. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I think for me, a lot of it is like, it's, it's, there's this word I use a lot called, I just say default. Like, what is my default? And what I mean by that is anytime I have a moment of breaking, like a break in the day, anytime I have a time where whatever I was working on is over, what is my default? What do I, what do I naturally start doing? And when I catch myself defaulting to something like Facebook or Instagram or checking my email or Slack or whatever, watching TV or, you know, eating nachos, right? Like those are all things that we default.

And they're not necessarily inherently bad. But I try to manage my default very strictly. I'm always looking at what am I defaulting to in my life right now? And is that benefiting my long-term goals in life? And so my default, if it becomes Instagram, like it did for a while, I deleted Instagram from my phone. And now I just install it when I want to update a thing and I delete it again. When I defaulted, there was Facebook for a while.

There was, I mean, there's other things that I default to. So people default to alcohol and drugs, right? So what are we defaulting to? I want my default to be more often boredom. Like I want to be defaulted. Like that's just what I do. I want default to play with my kid. Talk to my wife and have a deep conversation.

Those are things I want to, I want to default to. So I guess that's how I would apply this as well to real estate investors is like what's the fundamental like foundation of how you view technology and where is your default lie? and maybe your default should instead be, I'm going to go listen to episodes of the Bigger Pockets podcast, right? I mean, that's not a bad default. Now, if you're not taking action,

then it's a horrible default, right? Does it help? So, yeah, there you go. I think that's incredible. Anyway, especially like, ask yourself, what is your insecurity? Like, we all know subconsciously what's holding us back. If we're like, okay, I'm really just not good with numbers

and I don't know if I should buy the house or not, that's a criteria issue. You just don't know what your criteria are, right? You solve that. You're going to feel confident. you're not going to put it back. Your defaults are usually bad specifically because they're preventing you from fixing the problem that's actually keeping you from what you want in life. If you're checking Instagram every time you pull up your phone, instead of learning whatever the thing is that you need,

that's what's holding you back. It becomes an enabler that prevents you from or allows you to stop moving forward. And I think that's what's so brave about kind of what you're doing, Brandon, is you're removing all those little things that are crutches in your life and you're forced to stare like who is Brandon in the face. And that will make you better. better, right? Like you're making your life like harder on yourself, but that will make you stronger. And I think that's what so great about what Cal's saying, because this can work for anyone. We're all humans. We all are built the same way. We're all designed the same way. We're all going to have a very similar result if we take the same steps. There you go. It's so good.

All right, well, we got to get out of here. But I want to encourage you all to go get these books. I mean, again, I don't have any benefit of saying that. I don't get any kind of kick back. Like they really did change my life, all three of these books. So good they can't ignore you. deep work and then his newest book, has newest book, digital minimalism. You can get them anywhere, books are sold.

I got mine on Amazon, I think. But let me just end with this. I want to end with this quote from the book. I pull up my digital minimalism book that I got here. And it says this. This has to do with digital minimalism.

By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalist transform these innovations from a source of distractions into tools to support a life well-lived. And I love that. Basically, again, it's how do we look at technology? Is it assisting us in our goals so we can live a life well lived?

And that's really what bigger pockets is all about is how do we live a better life? And then how can our technology and the tools around us support that? Not us supporting them, not us playing victim to their lordship in our life. So with that, go out there, turn off your phone for a while, go spend some time with your family, and then go crush it in some deep work with your real estate investing, gaining skills so you can be so good they can't ignore you. Like that? Like how I wrapped that all in there? You did that so nicely. I almost feel bad that I have to talk now. That's been a good mic drop. Thank you, Brandon. Well, you can take us out. Thank you for putting this together, man.

You did a lot of work here to get Cal on the show and talked about all three books. I think this was a fantastic episode. This is David Green for Brandon, the Amish Wonder Turner. Signing off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. Simplifying Real Estate for Investors Large and Small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, with how much all the hype, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. Thank you all for listening

to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by E&K. Copywriting is by Calicoe Content, and editing is by Exodus Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.com. The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own. Investment in any asset, real estate included involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing. You should only risk capital you

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