Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 102: BRAD STULBERG: How Do We Work Less?

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

In this episode, author Brad Stulberg joins me in person at my Deep Work HQ (!) for a deep dive into the topic of busyness, burn out, and the quest to craft more sustainable professional lives. For more on Brad: https://thegrowtheq.com/ or my interview from Episode 47.Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 102. So I'm trying something new with this episode. I'm going to have a guest on, but instead of doing a standard interview where we hear that guest whole story, we are instead going to do a collaborative deep dive on a single topic. This is something I want to try to do more on a regular basis. Have on guests, sometimes the same person again and again. if it's a person that we enjoy hearing from and just go deep on various topics that I think you might care about. So think of it as a new version of the deep dive, but one in which there's more than one

person talking. Now, my idea is when I do these collaborative deep dive's interviews that I'll replace that week, the listener call mini episode. So every week we will keep the standard me answering question format on Monday as the foundation for the podcast. And then some weeks will have me doing a deep dive with one or more guest and other weeks that many episode will be me doing listener calls. So we'll see how this goes, but I think especially as I can bring people into my studio, it's nice to be able to really get into interesting topics and not just have to do standard interviews. So our guinea pig, the very first person trying out this format with us is longtime friend of the show, Brad Stolberg. Brad, you may remember, was interviewed by me for a

previous episode. I've also been on his podcast a couple times recently. So if you listen to that, you will have heard me there. This time, though, he was in town. So I brought him into the Deep Work Studio, my first in-studio conversation, which was fun. And we tackled one topic, which is, how do we work less? I think as we come out of the pandemic, especially here in the U.S., this is a question on a lot of people's mind. Am I working too much? Is this what I want my life to be like, am I too busy? Should I be less busy? Why am I so busy? Am I being coerced into this by economic or cultural oppressors? That I fall into this arbitrarily? And equally important, what do I do do I redesign my work life? Should I redesign my work life? How do you try to make big changes for those

of you who are looking to make changes in terms of what work feels like? It's a complicated topic, but Brad is a complicated thinker on this. We've talked about this a lot, him and I personally back and forth. So I think it was fun to get into the weeds and do an informal discussion, see if we can make some progress on that question. So I hope you like this new format. My plan is as I get the studio finished, so get the redecoration, etc., that I'm doing done, to have people come in more often so we can have more of these discussions. All right, so before we jump in, as always, let me first thank one of the sponsors that makes the show possible. And I am talking about Optimize. Optimize is a subscription network.

It's all about helping you learn both the ancient wisdom and modern science needed to live a deeper life. And when you sign up for Optimize, you get three things. One, you get access to their collection of over 600 philosophers notes. These are book summaries written of some of the most important and wisdom-packed non-fishing books ever written. These summaries are put together by Brian Johnson, my longtime friend and family. of optimized. They're excellent. You get in your inbox each morning also a plus one, a short video starring Brian, taking one piece of wisdom from these books to help you start off your day right. You can, of course, then follow the links to the corresponding philosopher's notes.

And finally, he has a collection of 101 masterclasses where experts teach some of the big ideas covered in these books. I myself, for example, teach digital minimalism 101. So if you're looking for a way to allow the internet to help you live deeper, as opposed to using the internet to keep you away from the deep life. Optimize is something you should check out. Go to optimize.comme slash deep to learn more and use the promo code deep if you sign up. If you do so, not only will you get a free two-week trial to see if you like the service, you'll get 10% off if you go on and continue with it. So that's Optimize.me slash deep and use that promo code deep when you sign up. All right, with that, let's get started with my deep dive conversation with Brad Stolberg on the question.

How do we work less? Brad, welcome to the Deep Work HQ. It is so great to be here. You've got such a neat space. Yeah, you're going to puncture the fourth wall here, puncture the illusions of my audience that the Deep Work HQ is some massive Joe Rogan style decorated studio with teams of technicians. Brad now can see in person sitting here in front of me the reality. You're in a closet, basically. I am in a closet, but there is a very nice little independent coffee shop next door.

Yes, which is what it all comes down to. So shout out to Tacoma Bevco, who really should be a sponsor of this show. Free pub. Honestly, them sponsoring the show was still not cover what I spend there. Basically, even with a really good... It's like a free product. Now you're sounding like one of these professional athletes. Yeah, exactly.

I'm going to wear a hat. with their logo on it when I'm on video. Well, okay, so, Brad, you're the guinea pig. So the idea is once I can start having people into studio, instead of just doing straight interviews, you know, tell us about your life, tell us about your book, we could just choose a topic that seems interesting and get into it. And so here's the one I want to bother you about today.

Do we work too much? Oh, man, it depends. Yeah, which is going to set us up for a long, good conversation. Yeah. So do we work too much? The Royal We. Yeah, the Royal Wee. Not Cal and I.

Yeah. I think we have to start by defining work, right? What are we talking about? Yeah. Well, okay. I mean, let's throw out some terms. Busy. This term is under fire.

What's your take on busy? Doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff is just doing stuff. Doing stuff because it is a means to an end that you see as important can be very valuable. And then doing stuff that is an end in and of itself, meaning that you enjoy the act of doing is the whole point of spending your limited time and energy on this planet. Yeah. I mean, how do we, this is something I've been trying to figure out is why, for example, is being overloaded feel so bad and at the same time not doing enough feel so bad. And why are we, why don't we understand more basically the human, I don't know if this is psychology or evolutionary psychology. I think there's

something really complicated here that really impacts our day-to-day contentment and we don't really think much about it. I don't know if you have any theories on that. I've been trying to figure this out. Yeah, well, before that, real quick, I'm busy. I think there's a status element too. Yeah. Because I think when you hear someone say or when you say, oh, like I'm so busy, you're communicating that you're important. Yeah. Because you have all these things going on. And you're also connecting with them on a more human level, which is, ah, I wish I had more time, don't we all? Yeah. So sometimes people are really. that busy, but I think often

people are just saying, oh, I'm so busy to, again, communicate some sort of status well, at the same time saying, but I don't like it. Yeah, but isn't now, okay, so here's what I don't know if I just get ahead of things because it's my field or if culture has changed. I mean, so this is often the presentation

and some of the books I've been reading on this topic has been, we're also performatively busy. It's like a badge of pride, except for it seems as if in the circles I'm in, the idea that we're too busy and busyness is bad, it seems to be the consensus. And so I don't know if, like, is that a straw man now? Like, are we all on the same page basically like we don't like being busy? Or is it at these sort of elite circles of people who think a lot about productivity,

they've moved on, but this vanguard hasn't yet pulled? I mean, if I'm just out there in a average city talking to an average person, is that, like, is this storyline accurate anymore? Or is it, yeah, just in the bubble of people that think about productivity? Yeah. And I think that I don't know the answer. It'd be really interesting to go out and to try to empirically test that. I do think that there is a cadre of people that spend a lot of time on the internet talking about how terrible it is that everyone's busy and how busy they are, but so much of their busyness must just be tweeting because they're doing it 40 times a day.

Yeah. So it's like, are you really busy? Like you're choosing to be this busy. Yeah. So I don't have a strong take either way. I think that it's like one of these buzzwords that has such an ambiguous definition and can mean so many things that it's almost useless. So I come back to that dichotomy of you're doing something that you don't want to be doing because you feel like you have to or because you actually have to. You're doing something because it's a means to an end.

And I think some level of that is okay. I think if everything in your life is a means to an end, it's probably not a great path. Or you're doing something because it's an end in itself. Yeah. And if you're busy, like, I'm busy having sex. Okay, that's great. I'm busy lifting weights. I really enjoy lifting weights.

I'm busy in a writing groove. Yeah. Unless all three of those things are happening at the same time. Yeah, but I think it gets, I think it's important because for, you know, I only give some of these extreme examples because for the woman, I'm forgetting her name, the immigrant woman that developed the MRNA basis for these COVID vaccines. Yeah. When she was profiled in the New York Times, she was a complete lab rat.

Yeah. So she would fit the bill of, oh, I'm always so busy, but she loved the science and thank goodness that she was so busy. So I think it's very problematic when we take, again, an ambiguous term and label it as good or bad. Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, I think it's a problem that I know that scientist's Twitter handle, but not her name. So that's something we could unpack for a long time about our culture today. I think you're right about that. I mean, I should be clear.

I think we are too busy and it's a problem. I think, however we define the term, I do pick this up for my readers. You probably pick it up from your clients and your readers. I guess just the change is everyone knows it and hates it now. I mean, I'm wondering if that's what's going on. I throw into the mix of why we're too busy also because work sucks. And by work sucks, I mean the way that, you know, we actually organize knowledge work today and all my typical spiel about unstructured, ad hoc, improvisational, hyperactive hive mind,

completely overloads the amount of work on your plate, not because this is squeezing more productivity, you know, out of the proletariat drone, but because it's just a terribly unorganized and haphazard way of actually working, which is my twist on it too. But it seems, I guess my point is everyone seems to know it now and not like it. Like we're right for solutions. Yeah. And also I think, you know, are we working too much? I want to ground this conversation in individuals that are knowledge workers have white-collar jobs or our creatives. So I think it's a completely different situation for the person that is working, you know, days at McDonald's and nights at the Amazon fulfillment center because they have to be able to

pay their rent and put food on the table. Yeah. That person is, yes, that person is too busy. Probably too busy to be healthy, perhaps too busy to be happy. My guess is that our readerships and our listenerships generally don't fall into that bucket. Yeah. So we're talking about, like, are we working too much for individuals that are knowledge workers, white-collar workers, doesn't mean you're wealthy, it doesn't mean that you don't have financial pressures, but you're not working very manual jobs that are paying around minimum wage.

Yeah. See, I think this is important, too, because in a lot of the narratives around this issue, and I'm glad there's a lot of narratives now, those two worlds, they'll be mixed together, and I think it complicates things. So I'll see this a lot in sort of the discussions about busyness and productivity is that the conversation will start with, you know, white collar, city, millennial knowledge workers, but then throw in Amazon warehouse workers and mix it together to try to equate the same forces that are pushing the big hours, which I think are much more economically identifiable and analyzable and, oh, we can see exactly the capitalist dynamic at play in if we can get more hours out of an Amazon worker, whatever.

It is completely intellectually lazy to conflate. those two things. Right. So the around minimum wage worker that's doing wrote manual labor is such a different thing than the knowledge worker, even if the knowledge worker is making quote unquote only $60,000 a year, they have more autonomy and choice. Yeah. Yeah. And so maybe this is the bigger issue is, you know, I've been a college professor for about a decade now, but I've been in universities my entire adult life, I guess, right? I mean, I never left. And obviously, though it shifted recently, there's a really long thread of analytical tools in university based, comes all the way back from Marx, but sort of these economic materialist arguments

to try to understand the relationship between the owners of capital. And, you know, Marx started this, but it became a very sophisticated school of thought. I think the project right now is to try to apply that to knowledge work. And maybe what's going on is it's an uneasy fit. I think it's an uneasy fit. And I think that in And, you know, to cite another intellect came after, excuse me, Marx, but Eric Fromm, right, the humanist, psychologist, philosopher, sociologist, he spoke about in the 40s and 50s the personality marketplace. Okay.

Where basically your personality is something that you put out on the marketplace. Yeah. And to me, when we hear about cultivating a quote unquote personal brand or when I see some of these tech bros tweeting that, you know, I look on Twitter to hire people and the number one way to get hired is to have a bunch of Twitter followers because that shows that you're important, then technically every minute of your day is developing your personal brand, and then everything is working, you always feel busy. So if you're even in more of a traditional workplace, but you think of yourself as you need to respond to that email at night hive mind, it's not just the cultural

pressure of work, but well, my brand is being responsive. And I need to pose for the perfect picture on Instagram because to have capital in my friend group, I need to look really pretty for this picture. That's work. So the more that everything, if you are treating yourself on a marketplace of personality or having a brand, then technically everything becomes work. Yeah. So I personally in my own life, and I don't, I don't, this isn't better or worse, it's a

choice that I've made. I do have a Twitter account, as you know, Cal. I am public with the things that I have to be public because I'm a writer, but there are certain areas of my life that I just keep absolutely private because I never want them to feel like work. So any of my strength training, private. I don't post videos. I don't post my training. My family life, totally private. Whereas if I did the exact same working out, walking the dog, being with my son, eating dinner, going out to eat, same restaurant, same amount of time, same energy. But at the end, I posted it on social media or I shared it with colleagues. My guess is the texture of how that feels.

it would start to feel a lot more like work. Yeah. And then your life is work. And then everything is work. And then, of course, you're working too much because everything is work. Let's see. This is interesting because... Can I say one more thing?

Oh, yeah, please. Please, yeah. Tracking your sleep. Think about that. Like, you know how many people like track and obsess about sleep? And now sleep is work. I refuse to do it. Oh, me too, because, but literally it makes sleep work.

And then sleep is this metric that you have to hit and then you're worried about sleep. So back to everything is work. You have these sleep trackers that upload to the computer. And then even your non-weeking hours, work. So yes, and these people are all working too much. And they're choosing to. Not only are they choosing to, they are paying to. Those sleep tracking programs are expensive. Yeah. Well, and you get the, yeah, I have a friend who's been pushing one on me. I said, look, I have a hard enough time with sleep now. If I knew that it was going to be tracked and quantified, I would sleep half as much.

Yeah. How do you sleep? There's research there, too, that shows that when people start using sleep trackers, their sleep quality and quantity goes down that up. Yeah. I mean, if you're a great sleeper, I guess it's great. You're like, great. I can quantify what I'm doing. But, but everything you're just say now, abstractly speaking, is an interesting sort of approach or analytical tool to understand. We need different theories and ideas to understand this current point. So a from inspired view of the personality market and then how that changes your relationship with the world. It feels like this is probably what we need is new, more sophisticated application of theories and new theories because let's take that same outcome of what you're talking about, which is

life is performance for a lot of people. I was having some conversations recently. I was talking to a reporter recently who's writing a piece on this, and there's this standard take that the reason why life has become performative in work is because we've internalized capitalist narrative that we should always be producing. And so now we're always trying to produce more output. But it seems like the from approach, like, no, maybe the better way to understand it is the market right now has shifted in such a way that personality is commodified,

or we feel like it's commodified. So it's like a different type of work arose. So it's almost as if there's a new dynamics are needed to understand. Just like in the, why do we answer so many emails question? You know, I spent five years writing a book saying this is really complicated. The reason why I, all I'm doing is answering emails or all a normal knowledge worker's doing to answer emails. It's not so much, we can't quite put the dynamic of the screws are being put to them.

And we're getting like, you know, six more box packed out of this worker's shift. It's this whole other complicated philosophy of technological determinism and these tools came in and it changed the way we worked in an unsupervised way and the autonomy trap and Drucker. And it's interesting. And so maybe that's maybe that's the meta point we're coming to is. Yeah. The old tools might not be enough. The old tools aren't working and it's worth reiterating. And we said it, but I'll say it, you know, even more bluntly that you cannot conflate the double minimum wage worker that is too busy or working too much with the person that feels like they need to take a really good.

picture of their veggie burger to put on Instagram is working too much. And I think that is getting conflated or even the thinkers out there on social media that are constantly writing in their substacks 19 times a week about how they're working too much. Well, then try writing 17 times a week and that night. Like those are choices. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is why, okay, that's interesting. And so if there's different explanations, different things going on, that means solutions look different. So when you're trying to deal with the Amazon worker being exploited, there is a very different toolkit of sort of political action there that's going to make a difference than, let's say, worried about being too performative. And that's actually a different toolkit than how do you

worry with email overload as a worker? Because I'm thinking like the difference between my last two books. So like digital minimalism was very individualistic in its, in its recommendations. Like to me, the issues that book was getting at. A lot of it had to do with you need to change your philosophy and relationship the tools, right? If you're on these phones all the time or this or that. Whereas the world without emails is much more systemic. All right, organizations need to really get down into their underlying workflows and realize that, okay, we're doing this way too haphazardly. And you're burning out employees and nothing valuable is being produced.

And it was a completely different type of prescription. And they're all kind of under the same umbrella of like we're busy, I suppose. And I think the individual approach, and I have. I love both your books, as you know. I think digital minimalism in the individual approach is the more practical thing for most people. Is our mutual friend, Ezra Klein, told me we were emailing back and forth about your book that his biggest critique of a world without email is that everybody agrees that the current

system is suboptimal. Everyone even agrees that it kind of sucks, but it works good enough. And if a corporation or a big organization feels like that, change is going to be really slow. But if you're a person and you're like, this kind of sucks, but it's good enough. It's a lot, it's a lot easier to make that change. You have more autonomy, more agency. It's not to say that they're not both really important books, but I think this is going to have to start from the ground up. Yeah. And I think it has more of an opportunity to because of COVID and knowledge work changing where people work, how people work, you actually do have more agency to create norms from the

ground up. Yeah, except for COVID also exhausted everybody. This is what we're, we're, Was this going to be good or bad for the book was the question, right? Okay, everyone's going to be thinking about work and reinventing it or this or that. So maybe it'd be good. But on the flip side, everyone was so overloaded trying to figure out how to work among COVID that the last thing anyone wanted to do was think about. Right. How do I change my work? Right.

Yeah. But yeah, that's fair enough. It's easier to be, it's much more likely for an individual to go through a period of like, okay, I'm feeling energized and discipline. I can make changes in my life than it is for an organization. Yes. To go through a period of disciplines that's change. because it's one person versus 30,000 that are spread over 17 offices. 100%.

And then the other point to address from your last little rant is the performative piece. It can be very performative, but it doesn't even have to be performative. It can be real in just the act of feeling like you need to capture it and then share it with someone or even just capture it and rate it yourself, then makes it feel like work. So I think in the knowledge worker white collar space, I think it is a lot of people that are choosing to measure, observe, share, track all these elements of their life that feel like they're too busy and they're working too much, where if sleep could just be sleep, if a workout could just be a workout, if dinner could just be dinner, perhaps they'd feel differently. And I think that's, again, where digital minimalism is so powerful because if you extend it beyond a smartphone and you start talking about smart watches and all these tracking things, well, if you wipe all that stuff away, then these very basic parts of human life can return to very basic parts of human life that feel that have a texture that feels very different than working. And I always go back to the example because I've toyed around. People are always like, you know, you talk about training often on your podcast. Why don't you ever post videos?

And because I could do the exact same workout, but if I posted a video, the texture, of how I'd feel about the situation would just be different. Yeah. Because I am vain. I would probably reposition the camera. I might do the set again if the rep wasn't perfect. And now suddenly this thing that I love that is private becomes work. So what if, okay, thought experiment, just to try to understand this point.

Let's say nothing else changed in the world of work. But suddenly everyone became digital minimalist. They all became Cal Newports and stopped doing, let's say, optional, performative, social media posting. So as part of your point is, even if nothing changed about their work day, you would feel qualitatively less busy. Oh, 100%. I've seen this in executive coaching clients. I coach a partner at a big law firm in Canada who felt like completely overwhelmed and busy.

Yeah. And 20% of that like subjective rating went down when she got off Instagram and her Instagram had nothing to do with the law. Yeah. It was just that like Instagram felt like work. It's like an addiction. And we cut that addiction over time and it freed up all this time and energy. Huh.

And the context shifting cost. Yes. Which turns out is fatiguing. Yes. It creates cognitive fatigue. Yeah. Now, is it the only problem? No, of course not.

Are you going to tell a working mom or a working dad that wants to be really involved with their kids' life that is also working 60 hours a week and most of it is deep work and they're shuttling kids to like that person. So again, like all white collar workers aren't too guilty. This is like the nuance here. So we've talked about a specific person, which is kind of choosing to engage in all of these things that they think are going to be a benefit. it, but ultimately is either performative or building this personal brand or measuring because you're addicted to that sense of achievement. I go back to sleep because I don't think anyone's sharing their sleep scores on Twitter yet, but maybe.

But even it's like an addictive nature. It's like, I need to achieve this. I need to accomplish this goal. If we could just be more often in some areas of our life, then yes. I think if everyone adopted digital minimalism, everyone would immediately feel like they're working less, even if they change nothing about their formal work. Yeah. Okay.

So the fact that I don't use any of them still feel busy, I mean, I got to care about my... So you're in like a different lane of nuance. Yeah. But okay, but, okay, so now here's, we'll get your sage advice. All right. I don't know of the sage, but... Let's say you're in the fortunate situation.

You're, it's very standard. You're a millennial knowledge worker, a little overeducated, you know, have some options, have some skills. Yeah, you're an attorney. You're in finance. You're living in a physician. Maybe you're a creative doing work that we do. You're making... You're in L.A., a suburb of L.A.

You're making over 70K a year. Yeah. Okay. And let's say you, you're coming through the pandemic. The pandemic's winding down. You're feeling, man, work has always been a grind. It became more of a grind. I want to do some sort of reset here, right? I want to, okay, you have done things like this in your own life. How could, I'm this person, right? And I'm 35. I'm making 170 and my creative job in the suburbs of LA and I'm burnt out. I don't know if you haven't answered this. I'm putting you on the spot. What's the thought process here? Like should, should there, should there? be a radical change, a non-radical change? Do you work backwards? Do we all go back to Tim Ferriss 2007 and identify the currencies? Like, what? Do we sell striped shirts on the internet? Like, what's the, uh, how do you start that process of all I know is this is grinding me? And I'm getting old enough now to be like, I don't want to just be ground. How do you start rethinking, radically reshaping work? I have, I have two, um, two approaches that I like to use. Okay. So the first is to identify your core values. So these are the guidepost or the principles that you want to most embody

in your life. And when you think of your best self or enjoying life the best, these are the things that you're shooting for. They can be things like creativity, family, intellect, community, spirituality, health. The type of terms you're using are nouns. So think of it like nouns. Yeah. Nouns. So it starts with a noun. Yeah. And after you identify that value, then you have to define it because anyone can come up with cool sounding words and put them on a poster up on your wall, right? So what does health mean to you? What does family mean to you? How do you turn that noun into a verb? Like what is the act of putting family first? What is the act of prioritizing creativity? And then from those definitions that are very intimate and personal,

you think about, well, what are the practices? How can I practice this in my day-to-day life is a starting point? Yeah. Right? And then you have this list of these are the things that I know that when I do, even if they can be hard to get started on, I feel good and I want to do, these are the ways that I do them. Then the question becomes, okay, how can I start to build a life where I can prioritize these values? Okay. So that's one basic approach, and we can come back to it. Okay. Another approach is imagine yourself 30 years from now and the future. Again, if you're a 35-year-old, so take your age plus or minus, but you're 75 to 80. You're sitting. You're sitting. in your library, you're sipping on a bourbon or a martini, maybe you're with your partner,

maybe you're with a grand kid, a kid, and you're kind of looking back on younger you. Well, what kind of younger you do you want to look back on? Yeah. And again, for someone with flexibility, is it the younger you that is just staying in this job because they have to? Is it a younger you that's doing, that's staying quote unquote really busy because ego is driving you to hold on to a position? Yeah.

And this is called self-distance. And the theory there is when we're actually in a situation, we get really close to it emotionally. Yeah. And there's like very little space between the situation and our awareness of it. Yeah. So thoughts, feelings, observations just become us. Yeah. And when you self-distance and you take a view of an older version of you or a friend looking at you,

you can create some space between what's happening and your awareness of it. It allows you to think a little bit more clearly. Okay. All right. So can we run through, let's do a scenario. Like let's invent, let's invent a go with our sample person here. I guess we'll have to invent some values, but I like this idea. It's a partner track attorney, whatever.

I don't know the math very well. Fourth year associate, you know, 180, living in a kind of expensive suburb of L.A. It's kind of a drag in the pandemic, one kid. All right, feeling ground. All right, let's work through this experiment. So what are, I guess we have to come with some values here. So, like, family would be one. Let's see here, creativity.

Let's see. I basically want to work through a scenario. Like, let's walk through. through, like what someone in this situation might think through and then how it might change their position. Yeah. So, okay. So what are the core values?

Like, you tell me, let's pretend you're the person. Let's do. They don't have to be your core values because now you're not 35 and you're not a lawyer. But, like, yeah, put yourself in that person's shoes. Okay, let's say it's pandemic winding down. So family and community becomes, they're realizing this is more of a value thing they've got. And another piece of context, because I think we're going to try to set this up as like the every person.

This is someone that pre-pandemic was kind of feeling busy, but was just pushing. Yes. And the pandemic was like this big time, like, shock. Maybe they lost a grandparent. Yeah. There's some kind of loss, some kind of change that's making this person think, like, whoa. Yeah. Like what I was doing is not necessarily what I want to be doing, but I kind of feel stuck and I don't know how to get out.

Yeah. So, okay, right. So let's say after that, family community seems more important. So, A, their own family because they, let's say they have a kid or two and they felt very protective about their own family. I'm just taking on a notepad to write this down, yeah. Yeah. So let's say they felt very protective about that. So being able to support and protect their family, but also maybe extended family, you know, hey, I didn't, I didn't get to see my parents for a year, like this type of thing, and they're realizing that's an issue and my parents are getting older. So then let's

define family. So then family, as you said it, is maybe time, time and energy for my partner and my child. Yeah. And also for parents, brothers, and sisters. Yeah. People close to me that I care about. Great. That's a much more concise definition.

Time and energy for people close to me that I care about. Yeah. Now let's say there's an intellectual value here. They were smart. They went to a good law school. It's something that they've got a sharp mind. They like that. They like intellectual challenge.

This has been something that the work of the law was challenging, though. It's overwhelming them. But they like that it's hard and that's interesting. and doing doing deep work that challenges me yeah maybe that's the core

maybe it's called intellectim in the core of it and then the definition is doing deep work the challenge is yeah and then

and then maybe in the pandemic less though when they're thinking presence or mindfulness because they had all these force

moments where they were just there and doing something and it was slow and they were around the fire pit or whatever

and they're realizing they didn't normally have much of that in their life so somehow they now have these

images of you know it's the Gilmore girls you're in the town square you you know, you know the mayor and this quirky

and you're kind of just chatting with people. So some notion of community. Community, but slowness and presence and maybe being in wilderness could be it too, but just a sense of, I don't know how to put into a value. I mean space. Space, calm, quiet.

Yeah. Like having that, some of that back. Yeah, let's call it space. Okay. And then let's say, time with no goal or objective. Yeah. Yeah, because they're driving all the time.

Hours trying to rack it up, driving back and forth to their offices. They're getting their kid to this practice and bringing over this code. Yeah, that's why I like space. So it's time with no goal or objective. Yeah, and they got a lot. They got more of that during COVID. Yeah, like last March or something. And now they realized.

And then let's throw in health because I think a lot of people are rethinking what it means to be healthy, how they need to take care of themselves in different ways. I know a lot of people that took COVID and took that extra time to really develop a physical practice and get in better shape and prioritize health. And I know people that completely fall off the bandwagon and are now saying, oh, my gosh, like I need to get healthy again. Yeah. Okay.

So like 35 means that, let's say, pre-COVID, they had kind of known that they had lost their ability to just sort of do whatever. They're getting less healthy and then COVID made it worse. Yeah. So then for health, let's call it, move my body regularly. Yeah. And attempt to avoid processed foods. Those are like very basic kind of principles for healthy living.

Yeah. Okay. Great. And I think that... But wait, that's a... So now we're at an action. So is that like an action? No, that's my definition for health.

I see. Move my body regularly in attempt to avoid process fits. Okay, I see. And now we're going to get even more concrete. Okay. Because the whole point of this exercise, anyone come up with values. Anyone can define them.

But like, now let's make them really concrete. So I'm glad you wrote it down because I forgot. So we started with family, so family, time and energy for people close to me that I care about. Yeah. So let's say that one practice is computer off, because this person has a young kid, computer off from 630 to 830.

Computer and phone off, right? That's like nuclear family, dinner time. We're doing concrete practices now. Putting the kid to bed. I think it is call parents for 45 minutes once a week, and then maybe call sibling for 45 minutes once a week. Now, what's interesting about this is that what you're coming up with here, the approach you've been working on for a while actually is incredibly congruent with, you know, deep questions

listeners will know when we talk about the deep life and the deep life buckets. We end up kind of doing something similar. You identify the areas that are important. And then the starting point is a keystone habit in each. Okay. So it's a sort of a concurrent evolution thing. Yeah. And like the all the old ancient wisdom, like the stoics, the Buddhists, the top, like everyone's pointing to this. So we're now it's it's not surprising that these approaches run congruent in a line. Because we're all pointing towards like what does it mean, like how do you define having a good life? And then how do you take that definition that you intellectually know and sometimes push against the cultural current to make it real? Yeah. So jumping ahead where I usually go and then now we'll get your expertise is

the keystone habit. So here's the one thing. Call the parents once a week 45 minutes. A phone computer goes off at this time every night. It's in part about signaling to yourself, this is important to me and I'm willing to make non-trivial sacrifice on behalf of it. Then what comes next is that, okay, now you're going to take some time with each of these buckets, and it may take a whole year to do, and think the bigger questions about overhaul. Is there a bigger overhaul I need to do to better serve this bucket? When you think about this, where's that fall? Like, what happens next?

So, like, let's say we, now our person has a collection of these sort of keystone habits in each of these things, which is going to demonstrably improve their life. So if I was coaching someone, I would never say, you know, this person then says, all right, I can't do this being a lawyer. or what should I do. I wouldn't say quit your job tomorrow. I'd say, all right, like, then let's rank each of these keystone habits. Let's rank each of these practices.

And then based on the rank, we're going to try to do them all, but let's do them. And then we're going to see where we fall short and record where we fall short. And we're going to figure out how much of a gap is there between you executing, I call them core values. So how much of a gap is there between you practicing your core values in what you're currently doing? Yeah. And how much of that is because, quote, unquote, work is getting in the way.

Now, nothing that this person said in this particular instance has anything to do with living in L.A. Unless families in L.A. Doesn't have to do with enjoying Hollywood. Doesn't have to do with climate or weather. So one question that I have for this person immediately, let's say that they find a lot of friction, is, is there a universe in which more law firms, my understanding, are hiring remote workers, or at least allowing current, even stay at your law firm? Is there a universe in which you move to a place with the lower cost of living that allows you to cover?

back on your billable hours and just do that deep focus work and still have more time for these other buckets in your life. Because the idea here is as you go through this analysis and this hypothetical client, it might be they can't even execute the thing they decide for each of these categories because, let's say just the hours they're working, they're a commute or something. Right. And this is top of mind. I just had a coaching session with this woman in Canada who is, she's not a 35 year

millennial. She's what, 48, 49 year old partner at a law firm in Canada. She has three kids. She wants to live a values-driven life. She felt completely overwhelmed. Just another way of seeing busy like she's working too much. And she's already gone down from 100% to 80%. She had this story that financially her family wouldn't be able to survive.

And she's like, actually, now I'm confident I can get down to 60%. Because I realize, like, we don't actually need all this money that we thought that we needed. And the next evolution is her learning that she does a lot of work that is not really valued at the firm because it's not billable. So things like associate development. And these torts of things tend to fall on women, like the kind of like grunt work of the organization because they're caring. And she doesn't want to let people down, but she doesn't really like doing it. So, you know, let's call her Rachel. It's not her real name. And said, like, okay. So Rachel, like, you know what you have to do. You just basically do, like stop the bullshit administrative work. And then you can just

focus on the billable hours. And that's the path that we're on. And this is someone that went from being extremely overwhelmed, as I said, to now someone that feels like they're in a really good vibe. they go camping on the weekends, just because they lowered the expectation. I mean, how many part, and I don't know, because I don't know your listenership, but not many people, most partners at big law firms pull in between $600,000 and a million a year. Not many people need that to live. Certainly if your values are the ones that you just rattled off, you do not need that

to live. Yeah. So some of it is just like the jolt to kind of say, hey, again, these are my values, this is what I'm shooting for. Here's the gap. Yeah. Okay. So like in this example here, like the easier case when it came to changing the job situation would be here are my values.

And let's say we didn't go through them all, but maybe for space there's going to be taking time. And for fitness, there might be like time or not for the health, like time you take in addition to exercising formally four days a week. And if this person is saying, I just can't, I'm not getting to all of these things. Like I miss the 830 bedtimes a lot because we have client calls and whatever in Japan. and I miss, and I can't get to the work, I got to get up early and I'm commuting and I miss it a bunch of times. And so this would be a case

you say, great, if you change your working situation, let's say to something that fit within like nine to four or something like that. Like, oh, suddenly all of those things, all those things are possible. What about the situation where, let's see you go through this exercise and you have these things?

And I know some people like this. They're very organized, very structured. And they're like, great, they make it fit. But so they're doing the things. I'm getting the time for the workout. I stop work at 830. I am doing, you know, whatever. Sure, and they still feel really busy.

And they still, yeah, so how do we? Well, space was a value. So it'd be pretty, in this case, it'd be pretty hard to do this and execute on space. But let's pretend space wasn't a value. Yeah. So they're still doing everything. Something else I want to say because my understanding is that your audience has a lot of students, graduate students.

Sure. So like any problem that we're diagnosing, the best medicine is prevention. So if you're someone that's listening and thinking about a career, Like the first thing I would say is do not define success financially. Do not define success as some position unless your core values or have the most money or be a partner. But define success based on what are your core values or in Cal Newport speak. What are the components of your deep life? And then build everything around that and success is having a life where you get to execute on those things.

So that's like the easy cop out is someone that's not already in the pit. The harder thing is someone that's in the pit but can then get out. and the hardest is what you're saying is someone that's in the pit is doing all this, saying, I'm executing my core values, but I still feel terrible because I'm so busy. Yeah. Okay. So then what's, what do we do there? It's tough.

Yeah. I mean, I haven't paused too much in this conversation. It's just like, look, there's a major part of your life that's making you unhappy. So there's almost, there's two different things going on here. There's the things you value, how do you construct a life to support them, which is what I often talk about. But what I'm thinking about here, too, is like there might be this other component of, hey, you have a thing. in your life that's making you unhappy. Not just because it gets in the way of corporate,

but it just makes you unhappy. You don't like law in this scenario. But I guess maybe that's the easier case in some sense. Well, you don't like law, then it's how can you, I mean, there's two ways. You do the bare minimum. Or you don't like life at a big firm. You don't like the, I've done some events at law firms.

And it's, when you talk to the young associates afterwards, there, some of them are just glassy-eyed. Yeah. And then I think it's, okay, then like leave the big law firm. if you can. And a lot of people say, well, I can't because I have to pay rent. And in this example, I have this child. So then the question is like, how much can you job craft so that you like it more?

And that might, again, it's rejiggering the goals. So if you don't want to engage in the office politics bullshit associate development, this, that, and the other lunch and learn department meetings, you don't have to. I know one thing about law firms. If you do the work and you do a good job, you're going to get slapped on the wrist and that's it. So you might not be the head of committee. you might not one day be the managing partner of the practice. But you can build a pretty good legal practice if all you do is focus on your billable hours.

Yeah. Because I know this. My wife's an attorney. Billable hours, I don't need the exact number, but it's not more than 40 hours a week. So what happens is a lot of people get caught up in the political part of being in a big law firm and what do people think of me and what's my reputation. And that drives a lot of the time. If you can get really efficient, follow the deep, deep work program, the time block planner and just say, hey, here's how I'm going to start. stack my billable hours. I'm going to build in space for administrative work, responding to emails, calling back clients. My guess is you can actually do the law in a way that not only takes

less time, but is more enjoyable. Because very few people dislike working on thorny, challenging legal problems if they went to law school. What they dislike is all the bullshit. There's going to be some minutia. If you're a first-year associate, a lot of what you do is just proof rate, and that's just a cost of being an attorney, and that doesn't last very long. But as you get older, the stuff that people don't like isn't the challenging legal case. It's the BS. Yeah. So the job crafting thing seems that that's an interesting component here too. Because when we do this bucket stuff, here's the deep life, here's the bucket. It's like one of the big buckets that comes up a lot is craft, we call it. It's like a lot of people, that's really important. You know, I want to do something hard and

impressive and impactful and and remunerative to the point. I think there's a scoreboard piece to it, but also like I want to feel like I'm good at this or it's something. Yeah, mastery. Yeah. the mastery piece of like self-determination theory. But there's probably what I'm hearing here, and I agree with, is there's a big element of job crafting that people often leave out where they'll say, okay, I want mastery, it's important to me, I'm good, I want to do well. And therefore they say, so I want to be the best partner to law from I can, but they don't define what that means.

Yeah. And you're thinking like, wait a second, you could craft, you know, and we used the terminology from so good they can ignore you as career capital. You could take this career capital and invest it to try to, that was the whole point of that book is that people use skill to completely craft their job in interesting ways. That's the step that's often missed, that you can, you can then rebuild what you're doing. So this aspect, I like intellectually thorny challenges. Without all this other stuff I don't like, okay, it's half the money maybe, but I don't need that

much money. Or in the case of a firm, it's not the prestige of being the partner of it everybody talks about. Let's take a quick break for my conversation with Brad to think, another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible, and I am talking about public goods. Now, public goods is the one-stop shop for sustainable, high-quality, everyday essentials made from clean ingredients and sold at an affordable price. So public goods sells everything from coffee to toilet paper to shampoo to pet foods. Public goods is trying to be your new everything store, thoughtfully designed for the new conscious consumer. Now, it's that thoughtful design part

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If you mention deep questions when you sign up, you will get $50 off your first month. Say hi to Adam for me when you do something. sign up. So that's $50 off your first month if you mentioned me and the Deep Questions podcast when you sign up. And now, back to my conversation with Brad Stolberg. That's hard, though. Well, so, so loss, and money is hard. So how do we deal with the money aspect? Because there's a, it's associated, I mean, it's easy to dismiss, right? If like, there's more than life to money, people often, you know, will, we'll miscite the whoever

did the research on after the set point of $70,000, you don't get happier anymore. I don't know if that was Angus Deacon or Conaman did that. Yeah. Okay. Actually, it turns out if you look at that research, it's not so simple. If you ask the question another way, it actually could people continue to. This is in my forthcoming book. The research there is mixed. Yeah. So it's very much based on how you ask the questions. Because there's stress reduction. There's option. I think during the pandemic, if you had some extra money, it was very helpful. Uh, you feel like, okay, but there's also diminishing. So that's all complicated. Yes. So then that, I, I think, I, something out you have to work that out I mean is now is there something like a minimum

numbers that's the way that that's what coneman was getting to so that like the way that the way that I treat that research in my forthcoming book is exactly that I don't know if it's 60,000 75,000 80, 100,000 I do firmly believe that there is amount of money that allows you to meet your basic needs have what feels like safety to you and live a good life and I do not think that's over a hundred twenty thousand dollars for most people Now, if you live in downtown Manhattan, it might be. And then, well, now there are questions about core values. Like, why do you live in Manhattan if you don't have to?

Especially now at a time when so many places are more open to people working remote. Something that can just take so much pressure out of the valve is just moving to a place that's a lower cost of living unless you really value being in a place that's a higher cost of living. I am biased because my family recently moved from Oakland to Asheville. This was a decision we actually made pre-pandemic, but for this reason. But it was a blank slate decision, right? is interesting. It was we could go anywhere. We could go anywhere. The driving forces were my wife's families in D.C. She wanted to be closer to her family. She's an attorney. She did not want to be a partner. So some of these examples hit close to home. So it's a place where she wouldn't have to be a

partner at a law firm, but could still do interesting work. And it's a place where I could continue writing and coaching and feel like even if a book flops, I'll be financially okay. Yeah, but also. And it wasn't going to happen in the Bay Area. Good community, outdoor stuff. Public schools, because we didn't want to pay for private school. A pace of life. that was more, I mean, it was very intentional. Yep. Yeah. And we found a place like that.

And some people, but there were real sacrifices. I left like my two best friends in the world in Oakland. Yeah. I left a very good routine. Like, so there's no free lunch. Yeah. And I think that back to that defining the floor of what you actually need financially, not what you think you need, but what will allow you to live your core values.

If one of your core values is adventure travel and you want to go to safari in South Africa every year, then you need a lot more money, and that's totally fine. So there's nothing wrong with having more money. It's just that we have this default scoreboard of prestige, title, and money, and those can be completely separate from someone's core values and what actually makes them happy and feel fulfilled. Yeah. It's the Diamondbacks effect, I call it.

Yeah. Because for professional athletes, fans are often baffled. Like, you love it here, we love you, we love you, you love it here. going from 300 million to 330 million to, you know, go from here to Arizona, like, who cares? But for the athletes, it's the back of the baseball card. Yep. If my lifetime average is 319 versus 305 is a big deal. If my deal was 330 versus 305, that means I was here.

That's their scorecard. That's my scorecard. Yeah. Except for people don't have, most people don't have baseball cards. Like most people actually aren't going to. So, okay, that's interesting. So having a number. So you understand, here's my values and my picture of my life.

I sometimes call it lifestyle-centric career planning. Like it's really vivid. You're really imagining like the things and what a day looks like and like what's valuable. And you figure out what that means. And I like the idea that, look, that could be expensive by people's standards, right? Just know. Yeah. Like the rabbit hole, I go down these aspirational rabbit holes, right?

Where I hook up onto the stories of individual people. And then I research them too much and just find out about their lives. And so I've been going down a Sebastian Junger rabbit hole. Oh, yeah. What a neat guy. You're familiar with his near death experience? I just heard about it. Yeah, wild.

But anyways, he's a neat dude, yeah. But so he lives in New York, and I think he co-owns a bar there, even though he doesn't drink, which is interesting. But he also, his family used to always vacation in Turro, Truro, I might be saying this wrong, Cape Cod. Okay. Which is Upper Peninsula right below Provincetown. It's far away from the sort of compounds and kind of rich people stuff, and it's off the beaten track. If you're driving by on the one highway on Cape Cod, you just see. roadside stands, but there's these, and it's a community with a lot of artists and

writers. And they spend a lot of time there in this house. It's not on the water or anything, but it's down a long road. It's where he had his near-death experience. It's in the woods, and it's quiet, and you can hear it, and you can bite to the ocean in the bay. And, and he spends a lot of time there with his family, and they write, and he writes there, and then he goes back and forth to the city or something. And that could be an incredibly aspirational image for someone like, this is what I would love this life, or kind of in a city, kind of into countryside or whatever. That's going to take more money.

Now, it's not going to take a ton of money. It's not like, okay, I need to make unlimited money. I don't think, you know, Junger is not, he's the opposite of someone who's trying to maximize his income as a writer. But it's an example of a vision like, okay, well, that's going to be more than the Thoreau experiment of like, in theory, I could be a writer living incredibly cheaply in Birmingham and I found out or whatever, right?

But it's not great. So the number, I guess the point is the number could be higher or lower. Yeah, and it's completely values neutral. I think that the issue is when people are chasing the number and not the values. And that's where you have this friction

of just like you said, feeling miserable whether you're working too much or not. And Junger's an example of someone who he had a big score with the perfect storm, which is because I went down the research rabbit hole.

Not surprisingly, this house was bought. After that book. One in a year after that book. It went big. But since then, He has not been income maximizing. He kind of just writes what he's interested in.

And there'll be long gaps. He did a lot of time doing wanting to go and report on Afghanistan and doing Restrepo and the books he did there. And he came back and wrote Tribe. Tribe was a good book. Tribe was a good book. Yeah. But these are not, you know, life-changing. He's not on the speaking circuit.

He doesn't have a, you know, podcast, you know, which I'm looking at us on two microphones here thinking about Cape Cod. But it's interesting, right? So it was, it's not a cheap thing to do, but it was, he's like, you know, I had one hit book. It was just enough to probably make this reasonable. And if I stay writing books I like and it just all kind of, I don't know what his wife does, but it just kind of works out. And it's cool. So I think there's something to this of figuring out.

And here's another layer that I think is worth pointing out. I think that creative people, and I'm going to put Sebastian Younger in that bucket. people that make an income with very little organizational help. You're a writer, you're an artist, you're a musician. I think there, there is a lot of how do you react after the first thing does really well because there's a lot of path dependence, right? So do you buy the big house and then suddenly you're paying the mortgage or do you say, like, great, I'm going to put all this in the bank.

So if the next 10 things flop, I'm fine. A lot of writers do the latter. Yeah, which is smart. I won't mention his name. I know a writer who is in a lot of money. money, right? And to the defiance of all of his financial advisors, the very first thing he did is like, I want to make sure that like where I live is like paid down to the dime so that if all the money goes away, I have no mortgage and I have no debt or whatever. And I'm like, man, that money's not going

away. But we're all refugees. We're all, we all, not all, but I think this is a thing about writers. Like if we have a hit, like, I don't trust that's ever going to have. Yeah, we're very fatalistic. Let's pay down all the debt. And I'm probably soon going to be, you know, kicked out of the country And I think the more traditional workplace professional is often caught up in like some kind of professional keeping up with the Joneses. I think that is real. And I think that if you just have the guts and the courage to opt out and say, nope, I don't need this. And have your scorecard and how you judge yourself not be where you stack up in the firm or are you a VP or a manager, but be, hey, am I living in alignment with these values? then that gives you a lot of freedom to make decisions that are values maximizing.

Yeah, I was talking to a DC lawyer friend. DC lawyer, Big City Lawyering. As you know, it's almost impossible that he was telling me about this. But it's not because once my wife, and I hope she's not listening, she doesn't listen to anything. If you stay in the area. Yes, but even if you do, once my wife decided that she could care less about being a partner, she'd just like doing the work and she didn't really care what anyone at the firm thought of her, she just wanted to do a good job.

work became very easy because she just stopped responding to emails about all the BS. Well, that's inspired. But see, that's inspiring because the way he was telling me about it was like it's like, it's so hard because here's what happened. It's the cultural pressure of like, oh, you're still driving the, still driving the Odyssey, hey, you know, and you're like, they should have the whatever, you know, SUV, whatever. Oh, your kids are in the public school, you know, this comes show you Georgetown prep. Like, you know, it's a nicer campus in Georgetown University and you don't have a second house

and you don't, and you're living over there and not here. And in the end, he was like, okay, the, I don't know the terminology, maybe this is the situation your wife is in, but the like the non-partner specialist so the sort of the council track. Council track, right.

And he was telling, he's at a big firm in D.C. And he's like, yeah, our council track people they make like 600,000 a year. And he's like, they can't make ends meet. And he was walking me through the math of it too. He's like, yeah, there's three kids and these private schools and then these two houses and these whatever.

And it just, boom. you know, goes away. But on the same time, here where I live, which is not the fancy part of Maryland. So that's already one choice. Yeah. Not the fancy part.

And we don't have two houses. And we know a law partner who it is, from what I understand, is considered odd that he lives here. Because it's not the fancy part of D.C. where the, where the law partners live or what have you. And,

but odd to do. I don't know, he seems like a happy guy, to his partners. Because I met one of the other partners in his firm. And they think the whole town is quirky and weird that anyone would even live here who had a choice. Yeah. So this is where I...

I'm just gossiping basically now. This is what... And maybe this is like... I don't know. This isn't appropriate, but this is where I just throw up middle fingers. I'm like, a few, a few, a few. Like, I'm happily married.

I walk my dog for an hour a day. Yeah. I drive a beat down CRV and life is great. And like, here's my book. It speaks for itself. So to the attorney, it's like, here's my work. It speaks for itself.

Yeah. And the more that we chase into the writer, It could be like, oh, I don't need to have a million Twitter followers. Here's my work. It speaks for itself. So I think that, again, we often chase indicators of so-called success that aren't the success that we want. The success that we want is often, sound like a broken record, understanding our values, doing

what we can to craft our work in our life in alignment with those values. And there will be busy seasons. Getting back to the original question of, are we working too much? Yeah. There's a level of acceptance, too. If you've got two kids under five and you're at a key juncture in your career, then guess what? You might not have time to train for an hour day and meditate for an hour day. And part of your issue might be that your expectations are way too high.

And I think what often happens, and I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but I know we can rant on this podcast. Yeah, no one's listening. So you're in the clear. My rant is this. So many of the white collar folks that bitch about being too busy have no right to bitch. about being too busy. They are making a choice. There are tradeoffs in life. You can't drink your kombucha and be a partner at the law firm and have two kids and qualify for Iron Man Hawaii. And that's why I think the Amazon stuff gets conflated because it makes them feel better about their

situation, whereas the Amazon worker, if it's bitching about being too busy has every right to bitch about being too busy. And they're not because they don't have the platform because they don't have the time to sit on Twitter all day and bitch about how busy they are. So it's like the loudest people complaining about how busy they are often causing this to themselves and it's completely masking the issue, which is the people that are truly so busy that don't have time to have these conversations about how busy there. Yeah. Okay, I take that.

I agree with that. Yeah. And so if you're feeling that way, for example, like, okay, what have I learned? I've learned I don't like this feeling. Great. That's a catalyst for action. Which also, if I'll add my addendum to the rant, is it's why I've been somewhat critical recently about it is maybe intellectually enjoyable or status.

seeking to throw sort of large theoretical frameworks at issues whose only actual way to take action on is in the end to completely change the nature of the economy or whatever. But how is that helping anybody? Right. You know, it's like, okay, here's the other, yeah, the other observation. My brother calls this

intellectual masturbation. Yeah, which is by the way, it's academic that's literally our job. I mean, we're professional intellectual masturbators. It's what we're paid to do. But we have like a whole culture around how it works. We mainly keep it confined to these journals and it's all just sort of internal facing. I guess Twitter allows you to have larger audiences. But yeah, like, okay, busyness, this feels bad. I think again, this is pretty universal. I think it's become more of a straw man, this idea that like, oh, everyone is lionizing busyness. And I'm so insightful for

pointing out that like maybe that's not so good. It's like, no one's lionize anymore. Like everyone's complaining about it. Right. It's just trying to figure out why. But if you know it's negative, it's like, okay, what are our options here? And are you actually busy or just hit your job? And this is back where again, like we have to get a little bit, like our, to quote Robert Persig, who resented the art of motorcycle maintenance, like our knife has to be a little bit sharper as we make these cuts to do any kind of good analysis. Yes, and embracing that sophistication, I think is important. I mean, this is the why I for so long railed against just telling like young people,

follow your passion, for example. This is such complicated stuff crafting a life. But yes, this is all mixed together. So to summarize some of the things we said, sometimes the issue is, it's not that the content of your job you hate is that it's, it's, it's, it's, taking away time from other things that are important. So the life is out of balance. I don't want to use balance in the trite way.

I want to use it in the way of our harmony. Harmony with you have these different things that are important that you want to build a good life out of. Sometimes it's a mix. There's elements of this job I really enjoy. There's also other elements that are making it a real drag. And I really don't like those. And then there's the complications of money and prestige. So money like, okay, I need to figure out how to have about this much money realistically

to be in harmony in a way that I'm imagining. And there's the prestige issue of how big of an ego hit. Am I willing to take? How much am I going to feel like I'm falling short of my potential? And all of that's complicated. And so much of my executive coaching work is giving people permission not to chase those last two things. So not to chase money and prestige. And literally like going through this with them and taking responsibility.

Like if you lose your house, I'll feel really bad. You can blame it on me. If suddenly you wake up one day and you have existential distress because of, of your ego hit. We'll talk about that. You can blame it on me. Yeah. And everyone freaks out for two weeks and then they come back to me and they're like,

oh my gosh, the biggest weight is lifted off my shoulder now that I'm not chasing, you know, this 24-carat diamond instead of just the 20-carat diamond. And this is true even for people that are going from 100K to 120K. Yeah. So I really think that's an important thing to point out. So you have to pull these bits apart. And then there's the expectation piece too, which is sometimes people are. are just have expectations that are out of alignment with reality.

If you choose to have a child in an intense time in your career, you will not regret it because most people, most people don't regret it because you look back, you have this beautiful child, but those two years might be hell. Yeah. And if you know that and have that expectation going in, then there's a lot of research that shows that your happiness is a function of expectations in reality. So I think some of it is that you can't have your cake and eat it too. Yeah.

And I think where the discourse, especially on the internet is so polarizing is there's the tough guy you can't have your cake and you to all these millennials are just complaining and there's the capitalism everything about capitalism is broken yeah you know these millennials are overworked nothing is their fault and like most nuanced topics it's neither nor yeah yeah it's culture shifts in complex ways and then you have to react to it and the reaction is complicated i mean the baby boomers had to go baby boomers had like a terribly complicated well so did their parents the great okay the greatest generation had a war to fight, but then also a whole new configuration of culture where we're like, okay,

we live in suburbs and this is very different and we're not multi-generational anymore in the same townhouse that my grandfather owned. And so we have to figure out like how this works. I think that generally speaking, we're not farming anymore. Unless you're an academic that really studies generational differences, I think all the banter on generational stuff, it's just intellectually lazy. Every generation has good people.

Every generation has bad people. But it is true. The cultural challenges change. is because it shifts. So like that, yeah, it's not, it's, yeah, the idea that somehow, like baby boomers ruined everything for everyone. That, I never got that. I guess I, I'm not, I'm not online enough.

You'll have to explain it to me. There's like a lot of boomer hate going on out there. Why? I saw, I'm not online enough to know why. I don't, I don't get that. What, do they do something bad? I mean, I don't want to get political, but it starts with a T and ends with an ump. Oh, yeah.

If you look at how people vote. But that's a lot of people's opinion. I see. I see. So that's associated. Okay, so that's on them. But yeah, the cultural challenges change, right? And so, yeah, the grace generation had to figure out this whole new, like, social hierarchy and dynamic.

And the baby boomers had to do something completely different because there was a lot of that wasn't sustainable in the way it was. The economy was changing. There's these shifts to whatever. We skipped Gen X because, you know, they're not big enough. Let's get right to us, the millennials. And then, yeah, yeah, so right, right, there's different cultural challenges, which means we need very sophisticated. responses, right? And I'm just going to, I'm just going to totally non-sequitur because they keep coming back

to this thought and it's what this conversation has really helped me to clarify in my own thinking. And there is additional layers of nuance, but generally speaking, it's the people that are actually overworked and too busy that have no time to even realize that they're overworked and too busy. And it's everybody else that is navel gazing and virtue signaling that actually does have some choice and will have to face hard trade. And the truly overwork double minimum wage people, they don't have tradeoffs.

They don't have a choice. Yeah. So to the attorney making $600,000, you're not working at Burger King during the day in the post office overnight. Yeah. Or the ER doc who's too busy to think about it because they have COVID patients filling the hallways. Yep.

They also don't have time. Or the soldier, you know, you're the special ops guy that's been deployed to whatever. And yeah, I don't have time to, yeah. Yep. And I mean, I have my best friends of physician, my brother's a physician. my brother's a physician, but I always do carve out physicians because I think they're the one highly paid profession that is still on balance and many specialties underpaid. Yeah.

Especially residents. I think residents should unionize, but that's a total tangent. Yeah. Yeah. My sister just came off that a few years ago. It's terrible. You make like $45,000 a year to work 80 hours a week. Yeah.

And doing a very skilled job. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I hope that this has been, I hope this is helpful. I know we kind of got away from your. your initial question. It all ties though, right? I mean, like, but I think the first thing for the, for the individual listener saying,

I'm too busy or we're working too much, I think the first thing is to, to separate those three buckets. Am I doing stuff because I have to? And then test that assumption. Do I really have to do this? Or is it just inertia? And the second bucket is,

am I doing this because it's a mean to an end? And then the question is, how much do I care about the end? And if my whole life is a means to an end, that's not good. Yeah. And then the third question is, am I doing this because I enjoy it? And if I am, then the feeling of working too much, you're probably not actually working

too much. Now, sometimes your eyes can be bigger than your stomach and you can enjoy all the food while you're eating it. But afterwards, you're like, oh my gosh, there wasn't any space in my day. Yeah. And as you pointed out, the best feedback there is how you feel. Like your mind-body system will tell you if you're feeling totally overwhelmed, great. And that person doesn't need any major life overhaul.

They might just need to cut back at the margins. Yeah. And then the second big thing that we discussed was changing the metric of success away from ego attachment, title, brand, personality marketplace, salary to, hey, what are my core values or what are these keystone habits that I really want to prioritize in my life? First, how can I job craft to do it? And most knowledge workers can. Everyone that comes to me for coaching tells me that they can't.

And six months later, they've all done it. Like, I've never had someone just quit their job and start a podcast. I actually advise against that because generally that doesn't work or be if you can't then how do you slowly transition to something that makes more sense. Yeah, okay, I like that.

It's complicated. I'm thinking out loud here, but that makes sense. So now I'm going to reword it my Yeah, this is interesting. Now we have the framework. So now the way I'm thinking about is, okay, you figure out the parts of your life that are important,

like what I would call the buckets, what the values are, maybe you even, you have the keystone actions in each. Like these are things I always want to do, but also maybe a broader vision, aspirational vision of what a life of harmony would look like.

That should and could include craft and craft could include some notion of prestige in the sense of I want to be whatever, I want to be producing things that are important. I want to be respected in my field or this or that. I think prestige often is separated from the things that produce prestige are often separated from busyness.

Like actually doing a lot less is usually the best route if you wanted to maximize prestige. I mean like the very best scientists do nothing but think about like one problem. Different subject. Right. I was just going to say I struggle personally with prestige being the end. I think prestige is a byproduct of mastery. So, okay, so this is a, this is an interesting distinction we should make. Yeah. So, so you're saying don't, when thinking about, let's say this craft bucket, um, the craft is mastery. Think of it as, you would say, think of it as

mastery. I'm doing something at a high level and I'm proud of my skill and like what I'm able to produce. Prestige is a side product. Don't get caught up into it. Not a side product to buyproduct. You'll get the prestige and in a lot. And non-linearly. It might be not as much as you think. And this guy over here gets a much more because of some some random thing and then six years later it switches whereas if you're just focused on the craft yeah um it's like all the science all the

journalist where like basically this journalist is his topic just was well suited for COVID and now they're very famous and getting all this prestige but we were working just as hard and why is my beat on you know so an example that I use in the groundedness book that's coming out later this year is Tanahasi Coates everyone knows his name phenomenal journalist writer he worked like a dog for 16 years writing great stuff.

And I don't know the reasons why, but no one noticed. And his quote-unquote, overnight breakthrough, he was between 38 and 42. He was focused on mastery. If he was focused on prestige, he would have quit. Yeah. Okay. So then two-faults.

So then, because I'm trying to systematize everything, when thinking about how to then reshape or craft your life to fit that harmonious image, this was something I riffed on the podcast the other day, but maybe we can apply it here, is that there's a few factors that matter there. I mean, you have to think about the role of location, the role of autonomy, the role of money, right? So, like, roughly speaking, what combinations of, like, where I live, because that often plays a big role, especially, like, with family and space or outside. There's a lot of values for which that plays a big role. What role does that play?

What role is autonomy play, like, how much autonomy I need over my time to execute this? And then what's, like, the income level to make this happen, to have the house in Cape Cod to go to. And now you're like, there's various combinations of these three things that makes this possible. let's start crafting and figuring out. And then the final part I'm going to throw in because I'd love to make things too complicated because that's what I do is that crafting is not always just the

this is like the Coates example. It's not just the rearrangement of pieces. It also is sometimes, okay, I see how I could get those. I can't do this today, but if I did got here, I could do it. It's going to take me about five years of focused work. And that to me falls under aligning expectations with reality. Yeah.

Because if you expect to be a, but any reasonable person would say, hey, you can get to A, but it's going to take five years. Then for those five years, you'll be a lot less miserable if you say, all right, these five years, I am going to feel overworked and busy. But there's an end date. And if things don't start to change as I approach that end date, then perhaps I have to make more dramatic shifts. Yeah.

So if book writing's involved in this or something, it could take about a decade sometimes. It took me about a decade to get good enough at book writing to try to integrate it as a blah, blah, blah. I think being a dad is an example. Yeah. I don't know very many dads that love. zero to two years. Yeah. And if you think you're going to love that I got this advice from another writer named Adam

Alter. He told me that, and I hope Adam, I hope your partner's not listening. But Adam told me, if you think you're going to... I want a divorce? That's what he told you. Oh, Adam. If you think you're going to love zero to two years, you're going to be miserable and you're going to be judging yourself for why you don't.

Yeah. If you understand that, hey, if you're in a heterosexual marriage and your wife's got all these hormones and it's a whole different ballgame and she can love the crap out of the baby and ignore you and you can be like what the hell did I just do how do I send this thing back if that's your expectation you get through two years and then the kid turns two and a half and three and they're your best friend in the world and life is great yeah and I took that and that was my experience but it was much easier because I didn't expect to love the first two years and now my kids like my best friend in the world yeah it's the baseball threshold like once you can start playing

catch so that's a very extreme example but I think that that that aligning expectations to reality does apply and I'm again I don't want to grad students have this sometime in a lot of fields. Writers have it all. But also, okay, then the final, the needlessly complicate this all. But it's important to differentiate, okay, the zero to two period,

the period of like, oh, I have to build this skill to make this very carefully crafted vision become a reality. That itself is not necessarily negative affect because there's a difference between hard work

and hard to do work. There's a real distinction between maybe I'm really busy and overwhelmed to not doing things I'm important at versus I have to write every day and I focus on it

maybe just for an hour and a half it's not like this it's taken up all my time but I'm just doing the work and it's sort of just it's hard like in the moment it's hard though it's fulfilling

to see your skills get better that you don't have to conflate the acquisition of what you need to build the image with your life is going to be overwhelming or busy and it's one of my earlier essays he ever wrote was about hard work

versus hard to do work Yeah I've read that Hard work gets you places Yeah hard to do work it might make you more money in the short term, but it just exhaust you. Yep. And actually, if you're less busy, the hard work is actually easier to do. And so actually the right plan might be I'm going to really do the throat.

We're really going to simplify now because I want to get here as quickly as possible. And if I could spend more time just thinking about my writing or my research as a grad student or whatever, just doing that. Yep. I'm all the more closer to my image of being a book writer who lives in Cape Cod or being an academic in a teaching town and a cool college town where I live in an old Victorian house. and it's not that expensive and I'm on the campus and whatever, right? So sometimes, yeah, the hard work of getting to the career capital you need to actually build the right ratio of those things to implement the harmony, that itself actually requires you to become less busy. Yes.

Might actually be the right way to do that. Yeah, to get really, as you said, simplified, there's a chapter in peak performance called being a minimalist to be a maximalist is how I'd frame it. Yep. So if you really want to optimize in one area and really hope. craft. The easy example for me is you want to make an Olympic team. Well, for those two to three years in that cycle, you should start planning on saying no to just about everything else in your life, maybe save one or two buckets, and then go there. And if that's your expectation, as you said, it doesn't have to be miserable. Yeah. Okay. So the answer to the question then,

are we too busy? A lot of people are. It is a problem. If you feel that way, if it's a persistent problem, it is something you should think about solving. Solving. Solving. is a little bit more nuanced than quitting your job or starting a podcast or overthrowing to capitalist order. But it's, we just broke it down. Like, there's ways to do. There's some systematic thinking to it.

There's some, basically, you need Brad to coach you, is the secret. No, my coaching roster is full right now. Everyone, I got to get your phone number. Yeah. His books are like a coach and paper format. That's what I mean to say. And I think the other thing

back to like the higher level to point out is that I think that, again, these are problems of privilege. And I don't use that word in the political sense. You have privilege you don't. But I use it very concretely that by definition, if you have a lot of time to think about this and to worry about how busy you are and how overworked you are,

you are likely not falling into the bucket of multiple around minimum wage jobs. And societally, to me, that is the more pressing issue. Yeah. Because that is the stuff that's associated with poverty, with health, with educational attainment, all these things. And I think that most people have more choice.

Like I have very little sympathy for the $600,000 attorney that says the money went poof. The money didn't go poof. You spent the money. You made choices to spend the money. You can make choices to live a different lifestyle and the money won't go poof. And for all the students that are out there listening, you guys have it the easiest. Because again, prevention is the best medicine. it is so hard once you are on a path to change.

You can change it, but it requires a lot more work. It's a lot more painful. So if you're currently at a juncture where you're at a transition point because of COVID, you're just entering the workforce. My biggest thing to walk away with would be really think hard of how are you defining success for life. Don't think about work life balance. As we said, think about harmony. So what is a successful work life harmony or integration look like?

And then how can you create that and know that you're not going to, to be able to have every single, you might have to take a salary hit or a prestige hit. Or maybe salary and prestige are super important. You have to take a family hit. But I think those three things I mentioned are also adjustable. So you're like, okay, if I can get more autonomy, then I can not need as much location. Or if I have the location, right, I can. Yes, you don't need them all.

There's different packages, different configurations, yeah. Oh, and get honest feedback about how to do it. I often, this happens a lot with my listeners. It's very easy to craft your own narrative of now I know what I want. here's how I want it to work. I want this to be what it involves. That I do this thing every day for 20 minutes and then everything changes. Make sure that you have the honest truth.

And by the way, the truth might be, oh, I am not going to do that. Right. So this is not the right path. I got to find another path to get to this harmony because once I get the reality of this path, I realize I'm never going to succeed there. Or if I do, it's brutal in a way like you can't have a family, whatever it is, but don't invent your own story about how you actually acquire the very specific specific things you think you're going to use to craft a harmony. Yep, and then be values neutral.

So there are people that are $1 million a year partners that are very happy with their lives. And there are people that are creatives like Cal and I that make tradeoffs and we're super happy with our lives. And there are people that work nine to four as accountants doing what I would consider very boring work. But then they get to spend four to ten with their family, playing golf, doing whatever, not thinking about work. And they're very happy. And I think there's a lot of judgment that happens here. And unless you're harming someone, like, what works for you is going to be very separate than what works for me. I would be miserable is that accountant working nine to four. But I know people that work nine to four.

And if they heard that I was on a family vacation right now recording this podcast with you, they'd be like, why aren't you out riding your bike? Why are you recording a podcast with Cal? Well, it's an interesting fun. What do you mean? It's interesting. It's work. So there's different paths. I think that it's also helpful to eliminate the judgment.

Yeah. That's great. All right. We've solved it. or you could just replace this all with following your passion. Because then also will just, you're wired for a particular job and everything will be perfect. Everything will be perfect once you have the job. All right, Brad, well, this is good.

I think we should wrap, we should wrap this up for now. But I think this was a good inaugural deep dive, a collaborative deep dive we can call it. Yeah. And I think we solved all the problems. I'll have you back to talk about the new book when it gets closer to coming out because that'll have all the answers you need. But in the meantime, this can be the appetizer. Yeah, this was a blast. It's a wonderful way to spend some time on vacation because one of my core values is creativity

and another one is community and it's great to be in a creative community with you. So listeners, thanks for tuning in. Hopefully we provided at least a little bit of clarity on this topic. And growth equation HQ. Do I have that right? If you want to... Ah, no, www. VgrowthEquation.com.

Is a little platform that houses most of my writing as well as a clear. collaborative partner, Steve Magnus is writing. And you can find about the podcast there. We also have a podcast there. And if you are 90% Kel Newport, but 10% not. And you're on Twitter like I am, I'm at Beast Aldberg. And I try to keep Twitter a sane, more intellectual place. Yeah.

You won't find pictures of my veggie burger there or my dudlifts. Okay. So what's the point? I don't even know. All right. Thanks, Fred. All right. Bye, Kyle.

All right, there we go. our very first of this new format of collaborative deep dives. Hope you liked it. I'm going to try to do some more, mainly just because it's fun for me to have people I know coming here in chat. I'll be back on Monday with a normal full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.