Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 103: What is the Relationship Between Order and Well-Being?

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - How do you do deep work when you're not in the mood? [3:48] - How do you mange time for side hustle projects? [13:38] - What future technologies will have the biggest positive impact on focus and attention? [16:51] - How do I avoid prioritizing other peoples' task needs above my own? [24:28] - How do I build career capital without guidance? [30:12]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How do I stop my social media relapses? [43:50] - How do I remain committed to the deep life? [48:28] - What is the relationship between order and well-being? [52:56] - How do I (Cal) track my values? [1:00:45]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 103. I have no quick announcements today, so maybe I'll fill in this time with a quick advertisement for myself. If you found me through this podcast, as opposed to the other way around, you found me through my books and my articles and then came to the podcast. I want to put in a quick plug for my weekly newsletter. you can sign up at calnewport.com. Since 2007, every week I have been sending out a essay to that newsletter about all the types of topics we talk about here on the podcast. It's also where I send out the link every few months for you to submit your own questions and other types of announcements that I don't like to put out too publicly. All happen on that email newsletter list.

So if you like deep questions and you're not signed up for the newsletter, sign up at calnewport.com. we have a great show ahead of us. As I've been saying, the question quality in recent weeks has been so high that it has taken me a long time to get through my backlog of questions because there's very few I'm actually skipping now. So I'm excited about the show. We've got a good collection of deep work and deep life questions. Before we get started, though, as always, we need to say thanks to one of the sponsors that makes deep questions possible. And I am talking about our friends at Blinkist. You've heard me talk about Blinkist since almost the beginning of this podcast, and for good reason.

I am a big believer in ideas. I'm a big believer that books are the best source of ideas. The big problem is your time is limited. How do you figure out which books are worth you invested in? Well, that's where Blinkist comes into play. When you subscribe to Blinkist, you get 15-minute summaries that you can either read or listen to of thousands of important and best-selling non-fiction books. You can dive in quickly to whatever the big new book is of the month, see what the ideas are, and decide, ah, is this worth me diving deeper into or do I need, do I already have what I need to know?

For example, let's look right now at the top book list on Blinkus for the technology and future category. Category I'm interested in. One of the top books there is Nick Bostrum's Superintelligence. this is a philosophical sort of ontologically exhaustive approach to trying to understand the threats of artificial intelligence. I haven't read that book yet. I will start with the blink to get a better picture of what he's talking about, so I understand how to place his thinking into my general understanding of artificial intelligence and its impacts. And then if that really hits a nerve, I'll buy the book and go deeper.

And if it doesn't, at least I know what it is. I'm missing. A perfect example of blinkist in action. So with Blinkist, you're going to get unlimited access to read or listen to a massive library of condensed nonfiction books, all the books you want for that same fixed low price. Now, right now, for a limited time, Blinkis has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to try it free for seven days and save 25% off your new subscription. That's Blinkis spelled the B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial

and you'll also save 25% off, but only when you sign up at blinkus.com slash deep. All right, with that, we can start our show. As always, we will get going with questions about deep work. Our first question comes from DiPam, who asks, what you do in deep work sessions when you're not in the mood? Sometimes I have scheduled a deep work session to work on X,

but when the time for the session comes and I sit down and try to do X, if I'm not in the mood or don't feel fresh, I can't concentrate on X. Well, Diapam, this is a common issue. It's also an expected issue. Something I emphasize is that deep work is not natural. And what I mean by that is as a species, This was not one of the tricks our brain evolved to execute well. There is, on an evolutionary time scale, not that much pressure on preserving the ability to do cognitively demanding abstract reasoning for extended periods of time.

Now, we can do abstract reasoning. This was very important. It allows us, among other things, to make plans. We can simulate what's going to happen in the future and create good plans. We can also create abstractions that we can manipulate. to help better understand our world to better coordinate and collaborate. This is one of the key ideas in Yuval Harare's book Sapien. So we can do this.

But something like Euclid coming up with the axioms of geometry is a stretch of our human neural apparatus. So deep work is difficult. And we shouldn't expect to just say, hey, it's on my schedule, let's go, that we can just slip into it that easily. Now, there's some things we can do about this. there is tactical and strategic responses. So tactical is short term, short term, what you can do to make a particular deep work session

more likely to be productive from a cognitive outpoint preview. And strategic is about how you even choose what to work on in the first place. So let's start with the tactical. The things that I preach, when I go out there and give my deep work keynote, I always talk about you need to have a scheduling philosophy. This makes a big difference. I have committed to when I do my deep work. There's different philosophies.

In the book, deep work I give four. Let's see if I can even remember these offhand. Rhythmic, monastic, bimodal, and journalistic. We'll go down the rabbit hole of all the details. The idea is it's not so important what exactly your scheduling philosophy is. What is important is that you have a philosophy. You want to take away from your brain

the need to answer the question, should I do deep work right now. So if you're doing something like the rhythmic philosophy, that means it's the same time on the same days. You don't even think about it. That's when I do my deep work. If it's the bimodal philosophy, you do drastic changes in operating modes.

So either you're in a deep work mode for maybe for one or more days. You do nothing but work hard on some cognitive demanding task. And if you're not in deep work mode, then you're doing no deep work and you're completely open. So there's different ways to do this, but have some sort of scheduling philosophy. do not just leave this up to your mind assenting to the in the moment proposition of who,

I wonder if I should think hard now. Because I'll tell you what, in the moment, the answer will almost always be no. Because again, from a evolutionary perspective, this is an unusual activity. The second thing I always talk about in my deep work talks is setting. What is the context in which you do your deep work? Having a unique context for deep work helps your mind overcome that barrier to get started and ramp up its concentration farther. I suggest people go pretty radical

to the extent that is possible. Reclaim spaces just for depth. If you have some money to invest, this is a really good thing to invest money in if your job or your happiness is going to really reward deep work. I profiled some of these examples on my blog, especially during the pandemic.

I talked about people who used during the last spring when their kids were home and you couldn't go anywhere. use tents in their backyard to do deep work. I've talked about people who've renovated their garden sheds. I think this is an under-appreciated idea. I have to say this, quick aside, in the real estate market where I live, like a lot of places near cities, but outside of cities, the market's been really crazy.

Recently, houses have been selling for a lot of money. A few months ago, there was a house that sold in nearby Tacoma, D.C., a really large amount of money. This was hundreds of thousands of dollars beyond what it would have sold for. a year before the pandemic. And I am convinced one of the reasons that house sold so much is they took their garden shed and they converted it to a very nice working chamber out in their backyard. It's really appealing. I think that's really cool to have a place to go just to do deep work. Remember, David McCola wrote all of his books on a typewriter in a garden shed.

I even profiled at some point during the pandemic someone in Europe living in a city in an apartment, so no outdoor space access. He built a cabin in his apartment. I put pictures on the blog, calnewport.com. You can find it. I think it was from May or June. He actually built a cabin in his apartment that he would go into just to do his deep work. So the physical context matters. Attic renovations, the other one, people going up to their attic and renovating under an eve, a place you can work.

It's worth it. Why? Because your brain doesn't want to do deep work. So if you have a place you go just for deep work, it unlocks something. It unlocks something. It unlocks motivation to get. going in a way that if you're just at your desk, let me shut down my email, put aside these bills, and in the same context, same setting, say now it's time to think harder, much harder proposition.

Ritual can also help here. So again, if you have a ritual you do before you begin deep work every single time, that helps you slip into that mode. I talk about, for example, drinking four-sigmatic coffee right before deep work because it has a unique physiological signature. Going for a walk on a set path, This was a habit that Darwin did at his estate, the downhouse outside of London. Anyone can do this. Just do it in your neighborhood or on your corporate campus or on your university campus. Set, walk, exact same places before you do deep work every time. So even if you end up at the same physical location, your same desk, having done that ritual, can help your mind shift.

So all of these tactics matter. And we briefly touch on the strategic. Another major source of having a hard time actually committing the deep work is that your brain's not on board with the thing that you are trying to accomplish with that deep work. I'm a big believer in this notion that one of the major sources of procrastination is that our brain is wired to be a great plan evaluation machine. It's one of the things that allow humans to succeed where other animals do not. We can come up with a plan, we can think about it abstractly, and we can evaluate if it's going to be successful or not, and if it seems like a good

plan, we can feel motivation, and if it seems like not a good plan, we feel demotivation. That demotivation sounds a lot like procrastination, and I think it is in a lot of cases. So I see this in particular where people are doing self-initiated grand projects. So I'm going to, you know, start, write a novel, or I'm going to start a podcast, or I'm going to master this new skill. And they jump real quickly to the, I just want to do work every day, because there's something romantic about it. Stephen King,

Bud and seat, let's go. And they find themselves having a hard time concentrating. Well, sometimes what's going on is their brain

says, you haven't fully thought this through yet. I am not convinced that this effort you want me to do right now is going to lead to something positive

in the future. You want to be a novelist, but you don't know much about it. You haven't talked to novelists. You don't know how you build to write skills, how you know if your writing's on track, how you actually hone those skills.

What actually is the path that a new novelist? You don't know any of that. So when you just sit down and say, man, let's write. It's national, you know, novels writing month. Your mind's like, well, I don't think just sitting down here and opening up Scribner and getting after it, I don't really know if this is how people end up being novelist. Your brain is calling you out. You haven't done your work.

You haven't convinced yourself that this, this is an effort that's going to succeed. So that's the other thing I don't talk about as much, but you have to be very careful when you have the option of choosing what it is you want to focus on deeply. That's why it's easier for me if I'm let's say as a writer, if I'm sitting down to work on a book chapter, or a proposal for a book, let's say, because a book chapter, by then you've been paid for the book and you have incentives, and this is true actually for a lot of professional deep work. If the deep work you need to do is crucial to your job, your mind's on board. Yeah, we want to keep the job.

But let's say I'm writing a book proposal, completely autonomous, you know, there's no pressure to do it, I've been paid to do it. I'm probably going to have a, at this point in my career, having written seven books, I'm going to have a much less of an issue convincing my mind that this is an effort worth doing. Then if it's your very first book proposal and you don't really know much about it, you're just sort of getting your ideas down on paper. You've just told yourself, let's write 1,000 words a day until we have this book proposal ready. My mind says we've been through this before. Writing is important to us.

A good proposal will sell for money is financially important. And it's something we've done before. We know the drill. Whereas for the new writer, their mind might say, is this really the way it works? Do we know what we're writing? Should we be writing this yet? Are you sure we shouldn't have an agent first, et cetera? So that's the strategic thing I want to say,

is step back and make sure you're convinced that what you're doing is important and that you have done your homework and know how your efforts will translate in the progress. You have confidence that what you're doing is useful. And then throw all those tactics at it. All right, DiPam, thanks for the quick question that helped me get an excuse to give a long answer. Our next question comes from Mike. Mike says, how do you suggest managing time on your side hustle projects around your work hours? Do you do it before, after, before bed, only on weekends.

Mike clarifies that at the moment, at least he is a remote worker. Well, Mike, from a productivity perspective, I recommend that you manage and organize your side hustle projects indistinguishably from your other professional obligations. And what I mean by that is when you do your weekly plan, you need to, in that weekly plan, address the work you're going to do on your side project. And when you do your daily time block plans, you should be time blocking the time that you are going to work on that project during your work day, right? So the whole point of this weekly, daily style planning is that you're moving around your

obligations like chess pieces on the chess board if your time availability, trying to figure out the best time to do what and to figure out what you can fit in. your side hustle work should be a part of that calculus. Now exactly how much time you can put aside for it, well, that's going to depend on what's going on in your work life. Now, if you're a remote worker that's really dialed in with the type of productivity habits I talk about and you have perhaps one of these virtual part-time jobs,

so you can basically get your work done in two-thirds of the time during the day. You might have a lot of time to time block off for this work, but you might be in another position where that's not the case. And the time you have available is very small. At least you're confronting it and try to make the most of what's actually available. Early morning, evening, these weekends, I think all that's on the table as well. I mean, again, if your main job is really eating up most of your normal time-blocked hours, that's fine.

Maybe at first that's where your side hustle has to live. Your weekly plan is still the right place to make that decision. So in your weekly plan, you can say, this is what we're doing Saturday, and I'm going to do Tuesday and Thursday evenings. I'm going to work on this. Now, that's time you might not be time blocking. But you'll see that on your weekly plan. So when you're doing your schedule for the day and time blocking for the day,

you might be able to append at the bottom. I'm not going to time block this, but remember, tonight I'm working on the project. When you look at your plan for the weekend, where again, you're not going to be time blocking every minute of the day. Your weekly plan tells you, yeah, make sure that, you know, Saturday morning, we get after it on the side hustle. So that weekly plan, when you're thinking about your professional work, think about your side hustle work.

Any of the side hustle work that takes place during your work hours needs to go right into your time block schedule. Anything is not going to happen in work hours. Figure that out on your weekly plan, so you see it every day when you check that plan. So treat it with that same respect that you treat your professional obligations. It's not only make sure that you make progress on your side hustle, but it makes sure that you're making the best possible progress given your constraints of the week. That is the context of what you want to be thinking about this work is when you're having

this larger holistic view of your week and trying to figure out what am I doing here and what am I not? The specific decisions of exactly when this works, that's up to you, that's up to your schedule. There is no right or wrong answer there. But again, if you're doing weekly, daily planning, you're in the mindset of answering those questions. You're good at answering those questions. And you're going to come up with much better answers than someone who just says, man, maybe I should throw some work at this project today. Roan asks, what current or future technology do you see having the potential to increase our attention and the ability to focus. Well, I like this question because it flips the normal script on technology and focus.

Typically, we're thinking about technology as a source of distraction. It's obviously something I have written quite a bit about. But the other side of this productivity coin is also relevant, which is how might technology help us make better use of our attention and focus more? particular, let's think about in the professional sphere. So, Roan, there's two things I've been thinking a lot quite a bit in recent years on this topic. The first is something I've talked about before. I've written about before on my blog, which is immersive single tasking. I am very interested in the role that high quality virtual reality is going to play in helping

people do much more focused and concentrated thinking. Roughly speaking, the idea with immersive single tasking, and again, this is a term I coined, I don't know if it's the best term, but it gets at what I'm getting at here. The idea is, okay, it's time to think about something really hard. You're trying to solve a math proof. You're trying to crack the structure for a book chapter. You're trying to come up with a brand new business strategy. You're at your office.

It's the same desk with all the distracting multipurpose. computer screens with your web browsers and your phones there. And this is not a great context to do it. So you put on your high quality virtual reality helmet. And now you're thrown into a visual and audio context meant to induce states of increased concentration. And I don't know exactly what the cognitive science is here that's going to be most relevant. But I think touching on the awe centers of the brain helps. I think we know this that when you're looking at a grandiose view or you're in a scenic place, that you're more open to insight. I'm not sure. why, but there's some sort of neuroscience happening there.

Quiet and calm, I think, can also put you there. So if it's a calming sound, a calming landscape, that might also help calm down elements of your relational nervous system so that there's less distractions. And I mean neurological distractions here. Networks vying for your attention that are unrelated to the task at hand. I could imagine, for example, that suddenly you are on a temple, you know, the side of a Himalayan mountain and you can see the snow outside billowing and there is some creaking boards and sensors with sensor style lamps swinging softly in the breeze and you're

sitting there. There's some tinkling bells or something and you can sit there and think or that you're in something like the library at Christchurch and it's multiple levels of old wood and you can occasionally people walk by or maybe it's fantastical. you know, you're in Hogwarts or something like this, whatever, right? I think that might be an environment that could induce sharper thinking.

I mean, I don't know for sure we need to study this, but I'm curious, and I've written about it a lot because I'm curious about it. To me, the real key with this is idea capture. So what is the input channel for you to actually capture the ideas have when you're in that mode? So if you're doing, for example, proof work,

maybe it be nice that when you are in the live, at Christchurch or this or that, you can reach over to a virtual blackboard and write on it with your hand. And it's clear enough and the resolution's high enough that you can actually see your thoughts and you can kind of save it and swipe the new pages or you have parchment in front of you, you can write on. So you can look out the window and see something aspirational and look around and hear that sound and then go back and write thoughts. It'll be captured for you. The other thing I've talked about recently is voice recognition might be the key here. Kind of hit a button on your controller when you want to capture your thoughts.

And I think seeing in the scene, somewhere your voice being transcribed when you have that button held down so you can sort of see your thoughts being captured and whatever might be useful. That's kind of the interesting piece here is how do you actually capture? Capture the insight you have in that mode.

So anyways, immersive single-tasking, I think could potentially pull a lot of productive when you need to get really high-level thinking. And you're basically simulating what universities classically did there's a reason why university campuses, classically speaking, and by classically,

I mean, the last 500 years that the modern university's been around, they tend to be beautifully architected. Why? Because you're trying to put the academics in a mode of concentrations. You're sort of taking that idea

and you are generalizing it. So, okay, that's idea one I'm interested in. Idea two I'm interested in is automated shallow work. I think this is one of the big impacts of artificial intelligence that we're not, discussing enough. AI is being honed right now to help take off our plate a lot of the interaction that makes up the hyperactive hive mind workflow. Imagine a future where you have an AI chief of staff, a digital West Wing Leo McGarry that interacts with other people that you

work with digital chief of staffs, then figure out what you should be working on to make sure you have what you need. And now your day becomes more, if you're a creative knowledge worker. Hey, you should be working on this campaign. Here's the materials. I have the background research materials pulled up. There's a meeting.

I've scheduled for you. Don't worry about it. There's going to be a meeting later in the day where you're going to get together with the other principles to talk through your talks. And then after that, there's some decisions we need from you, but don't worry, I'll hit you on them. When we do decision time, I'll show you one by one by one.

You make your decisions. I'll take care of it for you. I'll make sure the people who need to know your decisions, get your decisions, et cetera, and you're just focusing on what you do best as a human, is the creative, deep thought. We're moving towards there. And I'm very interested in investments and tools to get us there. And there's some interesting implications about this. Of course, we're so unproductive that when you actually automate most of the context switching and logistical work that makes us so unproductive, we're going to have a productivity boom in the creative and knowledge sectors. Now,

that could be negative, right? It could be negative, like, in the sense that when we get machinery, the automated loom in the 18th century meant we needed less skilled weavers. Okay, that had economic ramifications for the skilled weavers that led to the Luddite revolution. So it could mean we're going to lose a lot of these skilled jobs because we don't need the same number of people to produce the same amount of work, or it could unleash new sectors of the economy where we're opening up a lot more. creative knowledge work brain power, the economy will find places for it. So there could be very

interesting new places where we're plugging in more creative and smart thinking. This is a huge question, too big to talk about now, but that's the other trend that's going to really help our focus in the future is that this hyperactive hive mind nonsense is just a terrible way of human brains to collaborate. I think it's the early Neolithic revolution equivalent of when we used to pull plows ourselves through the fields. Hey, it works a lot better when you have a horse do it for you. Well, I think that's coming when it comes to cognitive work. So that's also a trend that's going to be huge. So immersive single tasking, I don't know. It's still maybe pretty niche, but I'm interested in it. Automated shallow work is going to be a massive

revolution and I don't think we're quite ready for what that impact's going to be. Our next question comes from Phil. This really could have been in either the deep work or the deep life question category, but I figured I'd put in deep work coin flip. Phil says, how I prevent defaulting to minor tasks for other people? 20 years in corporate offices has honed my mind to prioritize the needs of others and I can't break the habit. I often get anxious thinking, what do I need to do instead of what do I want to do? This year, for example, I'd like to write a couple of self-published books and start a blog. How should I approach shifting towards a deeper life? Well, Phil, I think fundamentally what's

going to help this shift is getting away from what I assume you're doing right now, which is more of a reactive approach to structuring your day. You look at email, you look at your calendar, you look at your to-do list, you just think, what should I do today? What should I do next? What am I, what should I work on? Oh, this person needs something, that person needs something. You can easily fill your day based on other people's priorities when you're just reacting. Now, if you go the other way and say, I want to be intentional about my time. So use the multi-scale planning I talk about, where you have your strategic plan for the quarter or semester

that influences your weekly plan for the week ahead. Your weekly plan influences your time block plan for that day. You are now making explicit decisions separate from the moment. So before you actually get to the moment where you're executing, you're making explicit decisions about what I want to work on. And now you can figure out exactly what mix of tasks on behalf of other people, useful things to other people, helping other people and stuff you want to do for yourself. You can make sure the mix there is where you want it to be.

You can control that mixture. You instead wait until you get to the day or even worse to the moment itself within the day and say what's next. It's not the time to be making those decisions. Making those decisions on the fly for someone who has your corporate training to prioritize others is going to find themselves really skewing the ratio towards other people and away from yourself. So you have to control your time. To control your time, you need space and intention, strategic plans on the quarterly scale, then weekly, then daily plans. That's going to give you back control over how you want to mix these different demands.

Now, I want to give you one other caveat here, not caveat, I would say, suggestion. You mentioned you want to write a couple of self-published books and start a blog. I'm going to try to inflate your ambition here. I think that probably, and again, I'm doing this with no other background about who you are, what these self-published books are about what you're trying to do. That sounds like to me that you're trying to walk this line on what seems tractable, but hard. You're probably imagining, okay, self-published book, it's hard, I'd have to do a fair amount of writing, but it's safe and tractable.

There's no competitive structure I have to go through. if I do the writing, I can publish the book, there's no gatekeeper there. I will succeed if I just put it in the time. It feels safe. It feels tractable. I want to inflate your ambition there. Perhaps your goal should be to publish a real book with a publisher. Now, that may seem not at all possible, right?

But it might be more possible than you think. And if it's not possible, then self-publishing a book on the topic is probably not worth your time either. So what I would immediately do is try to find some people who are roughly in the same situation you're in. The general topic you want to write about, people who came to that topic and wrote a book and published it for a real publisher in that rough space, not full-time writer, someone who just decided they want to publish a book, and take them out for coffee, take them out for a beer, get them on the phone, and just find out what worked, what mattered, how that happened. Build up that reality check muscles of how are books actually published in the

space, how do people come to it later, what you need, what hurdles you have to pass, what makes it tractable, right? So we talked about it in an earlier question response. Actually, in the response to the first question, we talked about how your brain, if it doesn't trust that you understand what you're doing, is going to withhold motivation. So give your brain confidence, you know what you're doing. So you can kind of find out, oh, maybe this is possible. I see, I would have to build up a bit of a platform to do this, and I'd have to shape this topic to be closer to my own experience and expertise. And actually, I might need to spend a year first honing that expertise, honing a point of view, getting the message out there about that point of view,

establishing myself there, and then going to sell the book. But now you're actually building out a plan. It's going to require deep work and be fulfilling and interesting, but is based in reality. And then get after that plan. So I'm going to try to inflate your ambition here. Don't just go for what seems hard but safe. Go for what seems tractable and exciting. So again, I'm saying this without really knowing anything about your situation, but I have seen a lot of people who have those similar ambitions. And I always try to inflate the ambition. And again, if you turn out like, oh, I'm never going to be able to publish a book on

this topic. I'm not the right person to write it. I don't have the right expertise. Maybe my writing skills are so far from where they need to be. It's never going to get there. Learning that information is great because now you can pivot your attention to something else that's equally exciting and interesting. Maybe it's going to be a company.

Maybe it's going to be something video-based. Maybe it's going to be whatever, right? But at least you have this evidence-based. ambitious pursuit. So inflate those ambitions, Phil, become intentional about your time, quarterly, weekly, daily plan so you can control the ratio of what you work on for yourself versus others. I'm excited for you. It sounds like you're just getting started on this shift from a reactive, frenetic life towards a deeper life. I think you're going to love it once you're there. All right, let's do one more deep work question. I always try to get at least one question about

careers and career building, especially recently. You know, I've noticed there's been an increased interest in my 2012 book So Good They Can't Ignore You, which is about careers and building a career that you're passionate about. In fact, Apple chose it this month. It's their self-improvement audio book of the month or something like this. I don't know the exact wording, but basically if you buy So Good They Can't Ignore You through Apple, the audio version is very cheap. I think it's like $6.99. So definitely check that out. So because of that, I'm trying to make sure that we touch on career stuff at least once per episode. So with that in mind, this question comes from Clarissa. She says, how do I build career capital if I don't want

a particular position or don't know anyone to look up to for guidance? I'm a lawyer working for a nonprofit organization and would like to build career capital. I don't have a dream position, but she does say in parentheses here, I'm done working for law firms and corporations. And I don't know anyone I would like to follow. So I am not sure how I can do the journalist style of asking people how to get where they are. I want to pay my own way, and I also want to be better at certain skills. Well, first of all, for the uninitiated, there's two things. Clarissa mentions that we should briefly elaborate. First, she talks about career capital. That's the core idea from so good they can't ignore you. It's this notion that the way people cultivate passion for their work is that they get good

at rare and valuable skills. Those give you more of this metaphorical substance I call career capital. and then, and this is crucial, you invest that career capital to get traits in your working life that resonate with you. So you invest career capital to transform your career increasingly towards something that becomes a source of passion. This whole foundation of skills first, use your skills as leverage to make your working life better, runs contrary to the common advice to follow your passion, which argues that you were born with an innate passion, an innate inclination for a particular career, and the source of passion, the key to passion is matching your job to that pre-existing inclination. My argument is, no, you have to cultivate passion.

Career capital is the key. The second thing I need to elaborate here is Clarissa mentions journalist-style question asking. This comes from the online course top performer that I did with Scott Young. this is a course that's based off of my book so good they can't ignore you. And one of the exercises in that course is to find people who represent where you're trying to get in your career asking them for advice. But instead of saying, tell me your advice for getting ahead, instead interviewing them about their story. So you interview them like a journalist and then you go back and extract from their story

the relevant advice for what you should do in your career. The whole idea here, just like I talked about with Phil in the previous question, is to ground your efforts and evidence-based objectives. That you're not just doing what you want to be useful for your career. You're doing the things that actually matter, even if the things aren't what you want them to be. It's often a reality check when you do this journalist-style approach to career crafting. You find out the things that matter aren't the things you want to matter.

You already have an idea in my note. What I want to do is write a thousand words a day. What I want to do is master social media. What I want to do is become a super networker. And then I'm going to get ahead in the entertainment industry. And then when you actually talk to the people who got where you got, you might find out, oh, no, shoot, that's not what matters. Actually, I need to master this information system. I need to figure out how to use R.

I have to get my acting level to a place where I'm so good. I can't be ignored. Oh, I want that bigger book deal. I have to sell this many books first. it's all numbers based. It's not about some magical marketing plan I have for my platform, etc. All right. So that's the foundation for Clarissa's question.

Now to the meat of the question, she doesn't have someone to interview. She can't identify someone in the nonprofit legal position she has that represents where she wants to get. So where does she get the evidence-based objectives for building career capital, in the absence of having a predetermined past, someone else who did what she wanted to do this so that she can learn from it. Well, there's two things I want to suggest here. First, broaden your search.

Now, I think probably the issue here is that you have a niche position, right? So you're in some nonprofit organization, maybe you're the one lawyer in this organization, and you're saying, well, there's no other lawyers in this organization. There's no one ahead of me that I can follow. So look beyond your organization. organization. The example that you're going to study that it's going to give you information about

what's important and not important to focus on might be at a different organization. It might not even be a nonprofit organization. I mean, expand that network, expand the possibilities of the targets you're looking for. And even if you find a just roughly congruent example, here's someone in a different type of company, a lawyer who's doing something really interesting, perhaps not exactly what I want to do, but in the same ballpark. There's a lot to learn by studying that person. How do they gain their autonomy? What mattered? How did they find their opportunities? What you might find some slightly more generic advice that you can apply to your particular situation. The other thing I'm going to suggest here is pivot a little bit harder towards more pure

lifestyle-centric career planning. So in lifestyle-centric career planning, as I've talked about in some recent episodes, you're working backwards from a really clear vision of what you're life is like. Let's say five years from now, 10 years from now. Where do you live? What type of house? What type of town? What's your relationship like with your friends and family? What does your time feel like? You have a lot of free time. Are you working on something important? When you're thinking about your work life, are you imagining the high-powered lawyer in the Jean-Grischen book where you're out there making moves, making a difference? You're taking on the forces that be or something like this, or do you imagine the small town

Mississippi lawyers from the John Grisham books, where you have your small office on the main street and you spend your morning with the locals in the diner, and, you know, by four, you're out there coaching the Little League team, like, what is, what is resonating with you? Do you imagine yourself exercising a lot? Do you imagine yourself building things or gardening? Do you imagine having being out in the country or instead in the city and being part of the cultural life. Fix a lifestyle image. A lot of details that resonates. And then you say, okay, given the career capital I have now, what are some higher probability paths of building on and investing this capital? So acquisition and investment strategies for my career capital that will get me to

something more or less like that lifestyle. So even if you don't have a particular person to follow, you have a particular target. And you can start to think this through. Now, you might discover, and this would be exciting Clarissa, oh, I have sufficient capital. I just need to make some better investments. I need the shift to remote and 60% time. And therefore I can then move to another location that's going to hit some more of these buckets

that I'm thinking about, some more of these things I want, and can completely recraft my life. Brad Solberg was talking about this in our interview in the last episode. You know, he talked about when they moved, him and his wife moved from the city to Asheville and his wife was a lawyer and went down the 60% time and remote. And it made a really big difference.

She had the career capital already to implement this other vision they had of their lifestyle that they're now successfully implementing over in Asheville. So you may already have the capital. It's just a matter of, oh, I'm not making the right investments. Or you're saying, oh, I don't really have the capital for what I want to do because what I want to do is, you know, have a house by the water and I work only half the year or something like that. that. And you say, okay, well, how would I get there? Well, let me see how much that land would cost. Well, if we bought it over here, I'd have to save up this much money. So actually, what I need to do now is acquire more career capital. And so I'm going to build up some more in-demand skills, and I'm going to actually do some work on the side and we're going to do a two-year savings thing.

We're going to make this shift. Whatever, right? I don't want to get too much in the hypotheticals. But you lock in the lifestyle that seems really resonant. And then you say, okay, let's come up with the career capital acquisition and subsequent investment strategy, it seems like it has a reasonable chance of getting me there. And now you're pursuing a lifestyle, not a particular professional configuration. And that can be very successful as well. The key is to know what you're aiming for.

I would really recommend going back and listening to episode 102, where I did a deep dive with Brad Stolberg on how you craft your career. In particular, we were talking about how you craft a career away from busyness and towards something that's more resonant. He coaches on this, so he had a lot of really specific structures to think about in doing this work. And I threw in more of my intuitions. But I think you will find that episode useful when you're thinking just more generally about how do I continue to cultivate or craft my career towards something that is more meaningful and more satisfying. Let me take a quick break to thank one of our sponsors, Four Sigmaatic Coffee.

Now, 4Sigmatic is a wellness company that's well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Its mushroom coffee is real organic, fair trade, single origin, arabica coffee with lion's main mushroom for productivity and shaga mushroom for immune support. Now, as I talked about in one of the answers to an earlier question in this episode, I like 4Sigmatic's coffee in particular as a key part of my deep work ritual. the coffee has a unique taste because of that mushroom. It's a little bit more nutty and smooth. It's a little bit lower caffeine too, so it doesn't make you as jittery. But that mushroom component gives it an interesting physiological signature.

So I drink this coffee before deep work session so that my mind can learn. Ah, that feeling that you get when you drink that coffee means it's time to work. Now, of course, you don't need a deep work ritual to enjoy four-sigmatics mushroom coffee. it is just by itself a great cup of Joe. So here's the good news. I've worked out an exclusive offer with 4Sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee. It's just for Deep Questions listeners.

You can get up to 40% off plus free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles. To claim this deal, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This offer is only for Deep questions listeners and is not available on their regular website. So here's the details again. You'll save up the 40% and get free shipping. If you go right now to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com slash deep and fuel your productivity and creativity with some delicious mushroom coffee.

I also want to take a moment to talk about policy genius. I feel like a lot of people, during the pandemic, the heart of the pandemic, you were probably thinking, look, my finances is the last thing I want to obsess about. I'm more worried about my health. I'm more worried about getting my kids educated. More worried about getting toilet paper. There's a lot on our mind.

So now, at least in the U.S., as the pandemic is winding down, a lot of people are saying, okay, we need to tighten back up our habits, get careful again about our money. Well, one place to keep in mind when doing this financial housekeeping is your home and auto insurance. If you're like most people, your home insurance is probably whatever you signed up for when you got your mortgage and your auto insurance, you just chose something when you were buying your car. But this is a place where you could be spending way more than you need to. This is where policy genius enters the scene. They make it easy to compare home and auto insurance in one place. They help you find coverage.

It's similar to what you already have, but is cheaper. This really works. They've saved customers an average. of $1,250 per year over what they were paying for home and auto insurance. So you can really save some non-trivial money here. The great thing about policy genius is they make it real easy. They make it easy to find better rates and to sign up. Their team will handle the paperwork to set up your new policy or switch over your current

one. Getting started as easy, you just go to policygenius.com. You answer some questions about yourself and your property. Policy Genius then takes it from there. They compare rates from America's top insurers to try to find lowest quotes. They'll also look for bundle opportunities. Bundling your home and auto insurance can sometimes make it much cheaper. If they find a better rate, they will switch it over for you for free.

They keep it dead simple. So head to PolicyGenius.com to get started right now. Policy Genius. When it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right. And with that, let's get back to our show by turning our attention to questions about the deep life. Our first deep life question comes from Sparsh, who asks, how can I stop my social media relapse?

My question is specifically related to YouTube. I've tried your advice where you use YouTube as a library instead of a TV. I've installed DF YouTube on my desktop, and I've deleted YouTube from my phone. However, every one to two weeks, I find that YouTube always finds my way back on my phone. This also happens to some sites like Reddit. What can I do?

Well, I have both a defensive and offensive-based suggestion for you. From the defensive perspective, first of all, is have a line in the sand, no YouTube. YouTube, you're analyzing it and your... life. It's a source of issues. It's not something that you're able to or interested in just using strategically. It really can capture your attention. So we need a hard line in the sign. No, YouTube. I would suggest bringing in an accountability partner here, someone who will actually ask you every week. Did you use YouTube this week? You need that accountability. That might

really help. So you know that you're going to have to answer that question. You don't want to lie to the person. You don't want to answer it negatively. So that might help you in the moment. we need however, and I think this is key to digital minimalism in general, we need to move past just the defensive posture and also look at the offensive options. The biggest thing that I think drives people back to low quality, highly palatable digital distraction is a lack of alternative targets for their attention. You're bored, you don't know what else to do, YouTube can offer that for you. Just like if you are really hungry and you're not satiated with the food around you and there's junk food around, you'll eat that junk food. So what you need to do here is begin to focus pretty intensely on what you do fill your time with. Developing high-quality leisure activities, developing hobbies, self-education projects, self-improvement projects,

Community connection projects, community improvement projects, join things, have regular standing dates with people, have books you're trying to get through, go through the top 10 AFI movies, and you're going to watch each of them, do a little bit of research first on why that movie is great, then you're going to watch it. You're going to become great at these movies. Add some structure to your evenings. I typically talk about not time blocking your time outside of your working hours, but you might benefit from saying, I have a bit of a routine on the weekday, I have a Friday routine, I have a Saturday routine and a Sunday routine. And they're each different, but I know how my day goes.

Right after work, I go do this, and then I have a meal with a friend, and then I watch this movie, and then we read outside, and I like candles, whatever it is, make it incredibly appealing, make it very high quality, make it touch the things that you really care about in your life. And then you're on high quality autopilot. Your time is spoken for in ways that is highly enriching. And once you get used to those routines, you're going to say, well, where is the time for YouTube in there.

Where is the attraction of YouTube? Here I am on Friday night and I've been taking this cooking class and I've just constructed this meal where I went to the fishmonger to get the fish and I'm kind of excited about it and I'm pairing it because I got really into the beer and food pairing and the track down the perfect beer to have with it

and I put the record on. I'm going to really enjoy this meal. And then I'm going to go for a thinking walk and journal and then I'm on movie number seven in the top 10 list in the AFI that I'm trying to study. and then I have a online community where I'm going to go share my thoughts about the movie

and have some discussions and then going to whatever, take a bath with reading a more interesting book before bed, right? I mean, when you have a schedule like that, the attraction of let me let YouTube's recommendation algorithm take me for a ride, it's just not there. You know, after you've spent a lot of time in Alice Waters' kitchen, the Burger King you drive by is no longer that appealing. So do the defensive stuff.

I think that's important, but the offensive stuff is where you're going to get lasting change. That's why the digital minimalism philosophy, the way I spell it out in that book, is really all about experimentation and reflection to figure out what you want to do. Then you put tech to use strategically on behalf of the positive vision of your life.

If you're doing that, all of the other tech pulling at you becomes a lot less palatable. Our next question comes from A, B. who asks, how can I be confident in my values around which I center my deep life? Every now and then I keep questioning whether what I value, which happens to be values related to the deep life, are justifiable. Sometimes I feel like maybe I'm missing out on life, and I should instead pursue hedonistic lifestyle or just chase after money and what would make me rich.

However, I'm a person who likes to think about deep subjects and who likes to spend his time away from screens and I feel like I don't value money as much as my intellectual interest. Well, A, B, I think the issue here is that you are conceiving of the deep life as being a primarily ascetic pursuit. Something characterized by strict self-discipline, the philosophical equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts is what's good for you, but it stands in contrast to what is pleasurable or fun. this is not the right way to understand the deep life. The deep life is your vision of the best possible life you can build for yourself.

Now that vision of the best possible life you can build for yourself can have plenty of things that seem hedonistic or pleasurable, for example. I mean, if you're a gourmand, you might have a deep life bucket labeled celebration in which you really want to indulge in exposing yourself to great food and having a wine cellar that you build out and making that maybe travel to restaurants. This is a big part, really good restaurants around the world. And it's like a really big part of what you enjoy in your life. I mean, maybe that's hedonistic or not, but that could absolutely be in your deep life bucket.

In your deep life bucket for craft. Making a lot of money might be critical to the vision that you have there. Maybe you have a vision in which you want to switch back and forth between living in an expensive city and living in an expensive house by the water for six months out of the year. Maybe you like European cities and you want to be able to travel and see art and it's going to take money to do that.

So when you're thinking about your vision of craft, making a certain large amount of money might be a critical piece of that bucket. So again, there's nothing about the deep life that says there are certain things that are bad and certain things that are good. The good things are hard, but do hard things just for the benefit of doing hard things.

But here's the thing about pursuing a deep life. there's also going to be other buckets there that are going to really plug you in the things that are important to you and your soul that aren't going to be necessarily hedonistic and are going to require self-discipline but are going to give you that deep resilient satisfaction of my life is aligned with my values. And I think a deep life mixes this all together. The key is A, intention. So when you live in a deep life, you're clear about what you want to do and why. And B, making sure that all of the aspects of life are addressed so that if you go all in and say all I care about is making money, yes, you might satisfy that one component of your

vision of the good life or you have the money to live in the city and live by the water, but you're sacrificing all the other components, the contemplation, the community, the celebration, and because of that, the life is out of balance. Similarly, you could focus a gist on the gourmand aspect of your interest and your whole life could become dedicated to just eating and finding good food and drinking good wine, sort of an Epicurean type approach to life, but if you don't have the other elements of your deep life in check, it's out of balance. It's not going to be as satisfied, it's not going to be as resilient. So deep life is about intention, and it's about balancing all of the aspects into a harmony, to borrow a term that Brad Stolberg used in last week's episode,

to find a way to get them all into harmony. So you're focusing your intention intentionally on getting all the aspects of your life that matter into some sort of good harmony. So I would say, A, B, stop thinking about the deep life as being dichotomous with a fun life. Deep life should be fun. It should include things that are really important to you, but it doesn't let you ignore the other things either. And it makes you be very clear about what each of these things are, how you're going to pursue them, and why you're going to pursue them.

This exercise is worth it. Your vision may evolve over time with experience and insight that gathers with age. but the key here is to have a constant intention on where you are actually aiming your energy so that you're not just all over the place jumping from one thing to another. Our next question comes from Suzanne, who says, what are your thoughts on the relation between order and well-being? Well, Suzanne, that's a timely question. I just finished yesterday reading Sebastian Younger's new book, Freedom.

he talks about this relationship in the context of civic life. He focuses in particular on colonial American frontier America. This is a particular interest of younger. And he talks about in the colonial period, it was common to have groups of pioneers living closer to the coast, say, I do not want to be told what to do by the government. I want freedom from all of these constraints and strictures of the local government, the laws, the obligations. So I am going to go into frontier territory. I'm going to bring my family into frontier territory.

We're going to go through the Cumberland graph. We're going to get to the other side of the Appalachians. We're going to go to the Alleghenies over the Alleghenies into the Ohio River Valley. And there we're going to live free from constraint, government constraint. Now, what Junger talks about, though, is that those... they were getting freedom from those governmental constraints, in other ways they were losing a lot of freedom because when you're out there on the frontier during the colonial period, it was a very dangerous place to be. So suddenly you did not have freedom from violence. There was a lot of violence. There was a lot of sickness and accidents, so your health became

way less out of your control. And also just to survive out there, families had to ban together. and they had to live in very rigid ways. And the only way they were going to survive is these very rigid ways. You didn't have much say about what you did. You had to be involved in defense. If you were a male without a gun and a tomahawk on you for protection at any point, this was going to be a problem, you were going to be ostracized. You actually had very little say in what your life was like.

It was highly constrained, not by a government, but just by the reality of trying to survive in this particular difficult and dangerous environment. So the question is, is that more freedom or not? Now, I think we can take a similar paradoxical mindset to personal freedom, the constraints that you do or do not add on your own life by yourself. So now we're moving from the civic realm to the individual realm. And here, I think, Suzanne, this gets to the core of your question. There is this tension often. if I have more constraints as represented by discipline,

am I restricting my freedom? Is my life, I'm cutting off opportunities like A, B, was worried about in the previous question. Am I making my life more ascetic? You know, what is the cost of this discipline? Maybe I would be freer by living freer. I don't have this structure. I don't have this self-discipline. And we sort of just let life and my days take me where it's going to take me.

And here, I think a similar analysis, at least similar in spirit, applies. Yes, well, if you do not have a lot of discipline in how you approach your life, if you don't have your deep life buckets with keystone habits and each, and you go through and carefully do an overhaul of each aspect of your life, and you're tracking metrics and your time block planner and your time block planning your days and weekly plan your weeks and have value documents and strategic plan documents to figure out what you should be worked on, And you're thinking a lot about your life and what should happen when.

You're careful about how you eat and you're exercising. And maybe like I talked about in my answer to Sparsh's question earlier, you know, you have the structure for your evenings because you're trying to fill them with more quality leisure and get away from hyper palatable, lower quality leisure. You know, you might think if I step away from all of that, I can breathe easier, just relax, let the day unfold. I can stand out there in the field and just do nothing. Now, the issue, I think, is that this is, if applied broadly, a false freedom. Without an organizational discipline, what ends up happening is that your life becomes perhaps more chaotic. Last minute things that need to get done, emergencies, fires that keep having to get put out.

you might have imagined a life in which you're just in the hammock and thinking big thoughts, but instead that time is spent trying to run to the post office, the mail, and your taxes that are laid and dealing with last minute emails and client deadlines you forgot about, you end up more disorganized. Now, without discipline around, let's say, your health, you feel more tired, you're hungover more because you're not thinking much about how much you want to drink or this or that. You're often not feeling good. You're getting sicker.

you don't feel good in general. Okay, that's a loss. That's a loss there. Without a self-discipline about cultivating your soul and connections to communities and things that you find to be important, right? Then you're going to feel more adrift. You're going to feel less resilient to life's hardships. You're sort of just going from one fleeting entertainment to another. One thing that catches your attention to another, you feel adrift.

Without a discipline about high-quality activities or leisure. you are going to be perhaps just lost in whatever's most hyper-palatable. You're on YouTube all the time, you're on social media all the time. You're doing binging on shows while you look at your tablet, while you also have text messages going on your phone, and you never really fill up that craving for entertainment in a way that is really satisfying. The whole thing just feels kind of empty and you're staying up late.

None of this sounds like a really free life to me. And finally, without a discipline about pursuing big projects, professional or personal that are important to you, you're going to feel a lack of autonomy. I don't know. I'm just a blur of email and slack and work and constantly being behind on things, being disorganized outside of work,

and I feel out of shape, and I'm always just kind of distracted, and I have no resilience. I don't know how I'm going to deal with something hard when it comes along because I'm not cultivating my soul. All of this stuff is going to lead you to a place where you say, okay, I just don't have a lot of control over things here. That's a false freedom.

On the other hand, if you start from the key question, So not just discipline for the sake of discipline. How rough can I be at myself, but you start from the place of what matters to me. What are the key disciplines they're going to help protect and promote those things that matter to me? When you start from that place, the discipline frees you the craft of life you want to craft, that have control over what your life is like and what's important to you. To me, that seems like the type of freedom we're going for. So Jaka Willink has this phrase, discipline is freedom.

He's 100% right about that. On a basis of, let me just qualify it, intentional discipline, discipline aimed intentionally at things you care about as identified through extensive reflection experimentation, that type of intentional discipline is the foundation of freedom. On the foundation of what allows you to craft a life that you want to craft, this meaningful to you that's under your control. The absence of that freedom is chaos, loss of autonomy, distraction, and unresilient malaise. That is not freedom.

You are now being pushed around by the whims of all of these different stakeholders, attention economy platforms, priorities that other people have for you and just baser instincts in the moment. That's not true freedom. That's something shallower. All right. So let's fit in one more question. here because I think it's relevant to what we were just talking about. This question comes from Fernando.

He says, you have talked about your word doc where you keep your values in personal philosophy, and in your book, Digital Minimalism, you mentioned, quote, the plan, end quote, that you write in your notebooks that includes these personal values. Could you elaborate more on these documents? Are they quotes you gathered, lessons you have learned, or what are they? Well, Fernando, I have my computer here in front of me, so let me get specific. My foundational document for all of this is labeled roles and values. Now, what this document has is a list of the different roles I play in my life.

So I think I have five here. There's a role as father and husband, as being part of a family, role as a man, I have a role as a professional, I have a role as a community member, and I have a role as a spiritual philosophical being. For each of those roles, I have a description of my values for that role. The way I list those values now, and I've done it different ways before, but for the last few years, the way I talk about it is with I want to be, sentences. So it's almost narrative under each of these roles. I have sentences. I want to be someone

who X. I want to be someone who Y. I'm laying out a vision for what it would mean to live that role in a way that aligns with my values. It's a little different than how I used to do this. I used to just have a list of values. I value X. I value Y. I value Z. But I found it to be more concrete for me to say, okay, in this role, this is what it would look like to be executing that role with respect to my values. This seems more concrete to me, because I can now compare myself in that role, what I'm actually doing, my actual behavior in that role with what my vision is. So that's the way I've been doing it. Also in this document is what I call a personal code of conduct. These are the things, look, I never do this. I never do that. I always do this. It's really important to have hard and fast rules.

again, inspired by your value. So I think what the key thing is to say about this document is that it's not, it's not just a list of things I value. It is a projection of those values into action. A personal code of contact is based on my values, these are things I always do or don't do. And I'm either following my code or I'm not. When I look at my roles,

this is what it would look like to be living this role with respect to your values. I want to be someone in this role that does X. I want to be someone in this role that does Y, making it concrete. I review this every week. I produce each week what I call a value plan. So as part of my weekly plan, there's a section called a value plan where I'll hone in on something from this document that I think I need work on. A role in which I'm falling short, a part of my personal code of conduct that I'm wavering on and I'll highlight it.

Sometimes I'll give myself experiments or new rules or disciplines just for that week to practice it. So there's a practice of trying to live up to those values. and every week there's something I'm focusing on to help get there. My notebook, my Moleskin notebook I always carry with me, that is for, among other things, keeping notes about this. As you have moments of insight from people you encounter, things you read, things you watch,

insights that just pop up out of nowhere, I have a notebook to capture that discussion. It's a discussion about what's important in my life, what that should look like, and notes on that in the fly get captured in that mullskin. These roles and value, then influence my semester plans. So I have these semester plans,

one for my personal life, one for my professional life, which is really about, here's the specific things I'm doing during the semester, the projects I'm working on, the self-disciplines I have in place. It's all about putting those visions of a value-driven life into action. And then, of course,

those semester plans more concretely, influence my weekly plan, my weekly plan influences what I do each day and my time-block daily plan. So that's how this all connects together. So it all comes back to this one document. There's different ways. There's different ways that you can define this document.

There's different ways you could format it. But Fernando, you should have something like this. Some ultimate root of all of the different planning and strategizing and execution you do in your life where you say, this is what's important to me and this is what it looks like. And what it looks like to me right now is that I should wrap up this episode. I'll be back on Thursday with the new mini episode. Last week we did a deep dive with Brad Stolberg as our mini episode this week. I'd probably be back to listener calls.

Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can submit your own questions. Until the next time, as always, stay deep.