Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 106: LISTENER CALLS: Art Without Social Media

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.  - Balancing work and school. [3:34] - Deep work and ADHD. [8:28] - Building career capital as an account executive. [15:15] - Do I know Naval Ravikant? P22:35] - Art without social media. [27:31] - Pursuing a PhD purely for passion. [33:53]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. 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 a deep questions, listener calls, mini episode. Quick announcements. Something I decided a while ago is that I was going to buck the standard trend in podcasting in which you bother your audience in every single episode to leave a rating or leave a review. I said it not to do that because, look, if you're going to do it, you would have done it already. So I thought what would make more sense is just to give that.

request only occasionally. So give time for new listeners to find a podcast who maybe have not heard that request before. So this is one of those moments. So here we go. If you have not done already, would you please consider rating the podcast and leaving a quick review? You use iTunes. You can do it right on iTunes. If you use Spotify, you can do it on Spotify. It really does help. I mean, essentially, I think the way my podcast is growing right now is that I will mention it in an interview. someone who discovers me for the first time of that interview might say, let me check that out and then seeing those ratings and how many there are and reading some of the recent reviews is how they make the decision about whether or not to actually listen to an episode.

So basically, you leave in a rating and review is on the core critical path of growing our tribe here. So thank you in advance for even giving that some consideration. We have a great group of listener calls to get to in today's many episodes. so let's do our opening ad read real quick right here so that we can get into the meat of the program. The sponsor in particular I want to talk about is our good friends from Magic Spoon. I was growing up a big fan of treat cereal, which we were told was healthy because it was quote unquote fortified with vitamins. So go ahead and eat those lucky charms, I guess. Well now, sadly, as an adult, I cannot eat that junk anymore.

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Be sure to use our promo code Cal at checkout to save $5 off your order. Magic Spoon is so confident that they will back their product with a 100% happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it for any reason, let's say, for example, your soul is. dark and you you know not the sweet bliss of happiness. Well, they will refund your money. No questions asked. So get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magic spoon.com slash cow and use that code cow to say $5 off. So let's get started with our first listener call and this one is about balancing work and school. Hi, Professor Newport. I'm Omar and I am a full-time electrical engineering major here in Taiwan for undergraduate,

and I'm also a part-time English teacher working for two hours each day. My question to you is, how could I balance school and part-time work, given the fact that I am having to work so be able to sustain myself financially? I want to find the perfect number, or at least the most realistic number of credit hours that I can do per semester. Well, Omar, I think this is a classic case of needing to face the productivity dragon. This is, as long-time listeners know, my term for actually confronting the reality of the existing demands on your schedule. So figure out, first of all, what work has to be done for the part-time teaching you do and figure out a way to structure that. When does that work happen? Where does that work happen? Let's put that on the calendar. Let's take up that space. Okay, next, when considering a particular course load, start asking yourself, what regular work is each of these classes going to require and how much time is that going to take? This is what I call building a student work day.

So I used to call that in my early days of my study hack blog. And let's start figuring out when that work is going to happen. You have an English course that requires you to do maybe a book's worth of reading each week. You break that down to hours. Where does that happen? Let's find here's the time, here's the place where I get that reading done. You have a lab course. How much time does it take to write up your lab report?

When does that happen? You have a math course. When is the time you're going to be working on problem set? So the regular work you know it's going to occur in each of these courses gets blocked off. figure out this is when and where I do it each week. Automate that. Then you need to add in a buffer here for the one-time time demands, term paper, studying for a major exam. And again, this is going to take you a couple hours when you're really trying to figure this out at the beginning of the semester. But actually go and figure out where are the papers, where are the exams, put them on your

calendar. Where are you going to start doing to work? You should probably start doing that preparation a few weeks in advance. We don't cram. So start blocking out some time when that's going to happen. You're basically trying to make all the puzzle pieces fit and see if you can make them fit into a day that is reasonable. That gives you a reasonable balance of work and non-work. It matches the needs you have as a person. If it doesn't work for a given load, you're facing productivity drag it and you're seeing it is too large for you to slay. Okay, now you have to confront that reality. And how do you confront it? Something has to change. And in this case, it's probably going to mean a different mix of courses and a different mix of course hours. So basically,

Omar, what I'm saying here is that there's this planning work. It's almost like you're an engineer trying to figure out the Gant chart for how this complex bridge is going to come together. This complex construction product is going to come together. It's similar for your time. It's a lot of time. Let's actually try to figure out how this work would get done, where it goes.

And if it fits, it fits, and if it does, and it doesn't, it doesn't, something has to change. And so you just do this exercise until you find a course load, credit hour load that when you do this exercise gives you a schedule that's sustainable. Then you can go for it. Now, the only extra thing you can add into this picture is your actual study habits. So once you're being

clear about when you do the work, you probably want to really leverage the key formula for my book how to become a straight-A student, which is work produced is the product of time spent and intensity of focus. So if you work with undistracted focus when you're working, the time required to get that work is done. So now you can squeeze in, you can reduce the amount of time required for each of these courses, and if you're very smart about how you do the work. So doing active recall, for example, instead of just passively reading highlighted passages, you can also get this work done faster. So really the right book to look at here is how to become a straight-day student where I get into all those details. Typically, this is going to take a little bit of practice.

So your first semester, you might be conservative in trying to balance how much time you need for doing the regular work and non-regular work of your courses. And then as you tune up your habits, you tune up your focus, you turn up your study skills, you might get a better estimate that is a little tighter as to become better at being a student. And then for the next semester, you might be able to then handle a larger load because your efficiency has gone up. So that is the way I would think about it. It is hard work. There's going to be some training involved to try to maximize how many courses you can comfortably fit, but it is work worth doing. It's much better than the standard approach a lot of people take of just diving in and hoping that they don't drown.

All right, let's do a question here that has to do with deep work and neurodiversity. Hi, Cal. My name is Juliet. I'm a full-time PhD student and I also work part-time in a related field in industry. My question is about neurodiversity. So I love your podcast. I absolutely devoured deep work, but I find it very difficult to consistently put your techniques into practice. And during the pandemic, it's become almost impossible to get any work done at all. So recently I went to a psychiatrist and was actually diagnosed with ADHD, which explains a lot. But I was wondering if you'd come across anything in your research that could help people with ADHD or with similar issues with executive function. Thanks so much. Well, Juliet, thank you for this question.

I think it's one that a lot of people are probably interested in. I'm not an expert on neurodiversity, but I have heard from a fair number of people with ADHD in particular who, have told me about their experience working with the type of ideas I write about, both in my business books like Deep Work, but also in my student books as well. So there's an interesting dichotomous relationship between highly focused work and ADHD. On the one hand, distractions are more siliant, so it can be more difficult to resist them. For someone with ADHD, it might be very difficult to just casually shift over to. a deep work mode when there's a lot of other distracting things happen in their environment.

But on the other hand, those with ADHD are able to fall into this mode that's typically called hyperfocus, in which they can stay very locked in to a particular task and really exclude the outside world. So there's this interesting tension between those two factors when trying to figure out how to do undistractive work with ADHD. The core theme of the strategies I've heard from people who have succeeded with this is that a lot of care is required. Time block plan in your day, for example, has a heightened importance because training yourself, this is what happens now, this is what I'm doing now, having that clarity, not having to continually rely on your executive functioning center to make the decision of, what should we do

now based on everything that we could do. That really takes a lot of stress off. That takes a lot of stress off your mind. That's really helpful. So just training yourself to go from block to block and that you're just committing to follow that block. Two, having hard and fast rules about the deep work blocks. A good exercise here is to actually have a visual indicator that shows that a deep work block is deep. In my own notes, for example, I like to darken the border of deep work blocks on my time block schedule. So what you can do now is have a set of ironclad rules surrounding deep work that when you see that you're in one of these dark and bordered blocks, you automatically just execute. And the key rule here is going to be basically no internet, no context switch.

So if there's research that you need before you work on something, then put an admin block before the deep work block to get that research done. If you're a computer programmer, you have to basically spend some pre-programming time to figure out what you might need to go. go onto Stack Overflow and figure out before you actually start the programming. It's a little bit difficult, but I think it's crucial because the context shifting is really can be a problem for everyone, and in particular with ADHD, that if you have to keep context shifting, there's a tug-a-war that happens with your executive center that can be really draining or difficult to have to do. And then three, really leaning into

ritual and setting can be very, very useful. Okay, when I switch to my deep work, I go to the attic office, which is not super comfortable in the dormer up there. It's not where I want to spend all day and do my Zoom calls, but when I'm working on writing or doing code or thinking strategy, I go up there. And maybe there's even a computer up there that's non-internet connected, or I work on notebooks and come down and type it up later. And I only go up there to do deep work. And there's a ritual I do first. I go for a walk around the block while my water's boiling and I brew a certain type of tea before I go up there. All of these things are important for everyone. Everyone has a struggle with their executive sinner trying to be hijacked by other distractions and being

exhausted by context switching. Both ADHD, all that can be heightened. So if you're really careful about these aspects that I recommend for everyone, it's not really fair because you have to be more rigorous about it than maybe someone else has to. If you do that, you can be very successful with those deep work blocks. You might even flirt with that hyper-focused state during those deep work blocks and find yourself able to out depth those around you who are maybe more neurotypical when it comes to those particular functions of their brain. So there is definitely nothing that says deep work can't be done if you have HD HD. And it is clearly just as important for you as anyone else. And so it is worth taking care in applying the type of advice I talk about

really carefully and you can get some good results. There's one other caveat I want to throw in. I used to do a lot of work with students back when I was writing student books and there was a lot of advice in those student books that's reminiscent of deep work. And I worked with a fair number of students

who had ADHD. The other thing that seemed useful is that the people, like a psychiatrist they worked with often would help them develop very specific, ADHD-specific plans for studying. I think this is a really well, a well understood area, and that made a big difference.

And there were some plans that came particularly to how to study for academic things. There were very particular things. And I don't remember all the details. I remember one involved putting note cards on the wall. So because you're a PhD student, I would also recommend you lean into that expert advice. This expert advice on how to do academic work, how to do studying, that is tailored exactly to ADHD. So my advice can give you a useful structure. Let's time block.

Let's clearly delineate focus time from non-focus. time. Let's use ritual and setting so that we can give our executive center a break. That's all going to be useful. But you really want to throw in there as well the help from the experts. Here is what we recommend. Here's how we specifically think you should organize the work you're going to do. If you're going to study, you want to study in this way because it's going to be better suited for the way that your brain operates. Medication might enter the picture there. So think about my advice as a adjunct to the expert ADHD specific advice. So apply my advice with care and use that as a foundation for also then implementing specifically what the in this

case psychiatrist you're working with recommends. All right, shifting gears here slightly. Let's do a question about careers. Hi, Cal. My name is Fate. I'm out of Austin, Texas. Really like your work, man. I'm really happier in this podcast, too. The issue I'm facing is I just finished so good they can't ignore you. And I'm currently in account executive slash. sales manager for the entry level people at a startup here in Austin. And I've been doing it about three years. And I think I'm good at it, but I'm trying to figure out how do I do this deliberate practice and build up the career capital in this career.

And I'm just curious if I should move into something different, right, where it's kind of more laid out. Well, Fade, I always appreciate a chance to get into the weeds on the career capital theory I lay out in my book, so good they can't ignore you. Now, one of the arguments I make in that book is that there's two different types of markets for the career capital you build up. And of course, for listeners not in the know, career capital is my term for the rare and valuable skills you develop in your job. These are what, in turn, you invest to get in your careers to things that make great careers great.

So there's two different markets in which this investment can happen. I called them a winner-take-all market and an auction market. In the winner-take-all market, there's a clear competitive structure. So it's pretty clear what it means to be at level one versus level two versus level three, and what advantages become available to you as you get to each level, plus also, of course, what demands are put on you. And typically these are competitive, so it's actually difficult as you go up this ladder. It's difficult to move from one thing to the next.

So here in a winner-take-all market, your deliberate practice has to be very focused on what is the next level in this career, what are the key skill or skills required to get there? And how can I stretch myself to get better at those? How can I push myself in those areas? Pass for I'm comfortable, get direct feedback about what's working and what's not. Integrate that feedback to get better. If you are, for example, a writer or a computer professor, these have clear competitive structures.

You know, as a professor, is really clear as you move up, not just the rank, you move up your ranks at your school. You can also move up to higher rated schools themselves, and the key skills has to do, they all surround the publications of high impact papers. Writers, it's pretty clear. There's sort of different levels of sales and influence in your writing career that you can move your way up.

It's usually pretty clearly delineated by advance amounts. But other fields, yeah, it can be more ambiguous. So this leads us to the second market for your career capital, which is what I call an auction market. And here is where you take an assortment of skills and one by one you get past the amateur level, you push each skill to a place where you're definitively good at it compared to, let's say,

the average person who maybe is just dabbling with it or the average person with that job. And you do this with a few other skills, and even though you can't project in advance exactly what is the job that is going to use some unique combination of these skills, you're going to bet that such a combination exist. And so here what you're trying to do

is bypass direct competition in a well-defined competitive structure and instead say, huh, if I have a close to unique combination of skills, then this will open up opportunities that need that combination of skills, and there's not very many other people with that combination. So now I just have to be good at these things. I don't have to be the best. So that's the advantage of the auction market is that you don't have to fight to try to become the best at something, because, hey, you might not become the best if your career vision involves an endowed,

share in computer science at MIT. The problem is you probably aren't going to end up with an endowed share of computer science at MIT. If your vision involves selling 10 million copies of your book, it's possible. The problem is you probably won't. But on the other hand, if you have some interesting combination of skills that no one else has really ever had before and it lets you start a company or get hired in a position that really needs those skills, then you've probably done a lot less work and you have a lot higher chance to succeeding. The downside of the auction market, though, so you're not quite sure in advance, will there be a way I can take advantage of this unique combination?

Usually there is, as long as you actually get good at these skills, you can't just be dabbling, but you are rolling the dice a little bit. So in the book, one of the examples I give of an auction market was the example of my longtime friend, Mike Jackson, and he trained in environmental science, and then he did a startup where he was really trying to understand the carbon offset market in California so they could help companies navigate those carbon offset markets.

The combination of these two skills, he had a sort of rigorous scientific background that was good. It was from Stanford, right? And he had a entrepreneurial background. He understood the business market and actually also understood this particular carbon offset market, which itself was kind of complex and interesting. Those two skills came together and actually opened up a a good position in an environmentally focused venture capital firm. Wasn't his plan from the beginning. How do I get hired at this firm five years for now or six years for now? But he did a couple different things well.

Wasn't trying to be the best at the world of them. Wasn't trying to win a Nobel Prize in Environmental Science. Wasn't trying to build a unicorn company. But did the things he did well. And they combined in a unique way to actually open up a really cool, interesting job. All right, so that's a huge backstory on career capital markets from So Good They Can Ignore You. So Fait, when it comes to your situation, that's what you have to decide. Are you in a winner-take-all market or are you in an auction market?

It's possible you're in a winner-take-all market. You just don't realize it. So the way you would figure that out is to actually study people in your company, your industry-related industries, and try to understand is there a path out-of-account-executiveness that is a, something that gives you a lot of career capital. It's something really desirable. Something's really going to give me a lot of options. Like if you get really good at this, you can get hired away to a bigger firm to do this,

and then you can whatever, right? I don't know. But make sure that's not the case. And what you want is concrete evidence if it is. Like what are people who went from here to somewhere that's desirable? You can't really find those paths or the paths you find aren't that interesting to you. And then you might have to treat this like an auction market and say, okay, what are the most valuable skills involved in what I do?

And how can I push those skills to a notably good level? Not to be the very best at them, but to a notably good level. And then you can say, okay, what's another related skill I can build? Don't start from scratch here. If you can do it in your current position or find a position that actually takes advantage of what you know how to do, but also gives you new challenges and helps you build new skills. That's fine too. And just do one interesting thing after another, all related and hope that there'll be some unique

combination there that's going to open up some really cool opportunities, even if you can't predict it in advance. The key to that strategy, though, is you got to get good. You don't have to be the best, but you have to have a definitive, unambiguous skill for it to really be useful in that auction market. All right, let's do a quick question here from longtime friend of the show. Jesse. Hey, Cal, how's it going? This is Jesse. I was reading one of Navelle's books, and he said that he went to Dartmouth around the same time that you did. So I was just wondering if you guys were friends or if you know him, if you care to share any thoughts about that.

Take care. Hey, Jesse. First things first. Go, Nats. So you're talking about Naval Ravikant, I assume. I haven't read his book, which is actually a collection of his thoughts, though I should because I think it's free. But I have come across a lot of Naval.

He's a really interesting thinker. I would love to meet him at some point. I think we would have a good discussion. There's some things we agree on a lot we disagree on. So I think it would actually be in a dialectical sense, a really fruitful conversation. He too is a Dartmouth computer science grad, just like me. Alas, he's a little bit older. He graduated from Dartmouth five years before I arrive. So so far, we have not crossed paths, but hopefully that's something that will change. Before we go any farther, I want to take a brief moment to talk about another sponsor that makes this show possible, and that is ExpressVPN.

You've heard me explain VPNs before. Here's the basic idea. If you want to connect to some server somewhere on the internet, instead of just connecting directly to that server so it knows exactly who's talking to it, with a VPN, you instead create a fully encrypted connection to a VPN server, and that server talks on your behalf to the ultimate destination that you want to interact with. Therefore, the server on the other end that you're talking to doesn't know who you are. It just knows it's talking to a VPN server, and your connection to that server is quite secure. I have long used VPNs, and when it comes to VPN's, ExpressVPN really is the best in the business. Two things that makes them really good.

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I also want to take a moment to talk about grammarly. Now, you can check this, but I'm pretty sure that grammarly was actually the very first advertiser on the deep questions podcast. And for a good reason, I make a living writing about ideas, be them computer science ideas or ideas for the wider world of book writers. Being able to express myself clearly, therefore, is something I take incredibly seriously. I have been fortunate enough to have some training from great editors and copy editors and fact checkers along the way. But for most people who don't have access to that type of training, grammarly premium can help you.

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Here's a phrase to simplify to make readers more engaged. This is the type of stuff you would get from an editor. Now you're getting it from a Grammarly Premium subscription service that's working on all the different tools you use to write on all the different devices that you run those tools. So I am a fan of Grammarly Premium. I think it's a great way to help sharpen up how clearly you express yourself.

And of course, this is just a critical thing to be able to do in our current culture. So do more than just spell check and say what you really mean with Grammarly Premium. You can get 20% off Grammarly Premium by signing up at Grammarly.com slash deep. That's 20% off at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep. All right, returning to our listener calls, we haven't done one yet. about social media, so let's solve that issue right now. Hi, Kel, thank you for this opportunity to ask you a question. So I'm an artist, and I put off pursuing my art career since graduating from college about eight years ago. But last year, I started learning about business, marketing,

and sales, so I can really pursue a career in the arts. And I've had Facebook, Instagram, started doing Facebook ads, networking, and events. virtually because of COVID. And some of the art I've sold is to people that I've already met in person who are friends on social media. But I'm realizing that social media isn't really in alignment with my values and how I feel about things. And I just don't want to be on it anymore. So I want to shift to blogging, YouTube, networking in person, and live events. But I'm kind of afraid of letting go of social media.

Well, these concerns are not unique. Artists in general have a pretty complicated relationship with social media these days. I talk about some of this in my book, Digital Minimalism. So rest assured, you don't have to blaze new ground here to address this issue. So the first thing I'm going to say is that if you find social media to be a dark part of your life right now, that you just don't even want to look at it, you have other associations with it, there's parts of it that have just caused, you a lot of pain, you can absolutely be a successful artist without a big social media presence. Essentially, social media introduced new ways to both grow an audience and advertise

your work as an artist. So it's great to have new channels. However, the idea of there being artists who build audiences and sell art has been around for longer than since 2012, which is when social media really became mainstream in the commercial sphere. there's other ways they did it. Those other ways aren't gone. So there's this replacement theory with social media that I think gets us into a lot of trouble where in a lot of different commercial sectors, we mistake the fact that these new technological tools have opened up new ways

of executing a position or promoting a position or growing a position. We confuse that with it replaced all other ways with this new ways. but in almost every case, those old ways are relatively alive and well. So I don't understand the art world well. I don't know it well, but other artists do. And I wouldn't be surprised that if you found some artist out there, maybe they're a little bit older or what have you, more established, but do not rely heavily on social media for their art

because maybe they've been doing this since longer than 2012. You can just learn from them how did they do it? How did they grow? How does growth work if it's not using Facebook ads? How does growth work if it's not constantly posting pictures of yourself on Instagram. Those old channels are still there. Those old methods are still there. And you absolutely can leverage those. And if anything, you might get some counterculture credibility if you are really clear about how you avoid those newer tools. And I'm speaking here from some artistic

personal experience. The other thing I want to mention, though, is that if your relationship is just mixed, if the real thing you're upset with is you don't like how much time you spend on social media. You don't like what it takes you away from. You don't like the way it makes you feel. There are ways to engage with social media professionally without having to fall into these traps personally. The idea from my book called Use Social Media Like a Professional, you basically isolate. What are the core activities that I get business value out of using social media? So as an artist, it could be both with consumption and production. From the consumption point of view, there might be an inspiration you get by following work posted by other artists in your genre on

social media, maybe on Instagram, okay, and maybe commercially you're doing advertising, or maybe you're trying to build an audience by posting your works in progress every day or something like this. That's great. So you figure out what's useful. And then you figure out a way to execute that consistently and regularly with a minimal negative impact on your daily subjective state of being. So I get this example a lot in my digital minimalism talks, but I met a lot of artists who use Instagram for inspiration. But once they realized that was the main reason they used Instagram, they took it off their

phone. They reduced who they were following down to five artists whose work they really spoke to them and who do regular updates. And they checked it once a week. How often do you need the inspiration? So now once a week they're able to sit down, it's an experience they enjoy, you put on some music, you go on to Instagram. It takes you about 20 minutes to see what's been.

posted and you've got this visual inspiration that's going to help your creative work going forward. It took 20 minutes of your time. Net positive, right? Similarly, if the main thing you decide that's valuable for social media is advertising, again, you don't have any of these things on your phone, you're not on there yelling at people, you're not on there really worried about the thing you quipped is, is it getting a good response or a bad response or do you offend some or whatever it is that's causing the negative mood, it's on your desktop and you have a tool or maybe even a virtual assistant to do this for you and it's once a week you calibrate your ad buys. You're not even interacting with people or if you need to post to build community, you're using one of these

desktop tools that schedules your post and they go out regularly. It's not on your phone. You're not going back and forth and interacting with people. So it's all about just figuring out what are the high value things, put fences around that, execute professionally, not on your phone. Don't get involved otherwise. Keep your personal separate from the business world. And you can have social media deployed as a tool on your behalf without it actually turning you into a tool of this attention economy conglomerate profit extraction machinery. So again, this just depends exactly how negative your relationship is with social media, but you have many choices that don't involve just throwing up your hands and saying, I guess I should just

submerse myself into this ecosystem of social media and just make it the digital shadow world in which I have to exist. you can engage with these tools or avoid these tools on your own terms. All right, we're running a little along here. So let me just do one more quick question. And this has to do with rethinking the standard advice I give about whether or not to pursue a PhD. Hi, Carl. My name is Mila.

I'm doing research on a PhD level. And my inquiry is of a philosophical kind. I really love your work because I've always cherished deep life since I was a kid. But there is one piece of advice you are giving often, which I do not completely comprehend. I'm referring to the instances where you discourage people from pursuing a PhD if there is no particular job which requires it. It seems to me that you're coming from a premise

that everyone's ultimate goal is career advancement and a good salary. But what if it's not? For example, I've decided to pursue a PhD knowing in advance that this endeavor will neither improve my financial situation nor help me to lend a good job. Well, this is a good discussion because we can add some nuance to my standard advice. For those who haven't heard me say this a half dozen times at this point,

typically what I advise to people thinking about a PhD is make sure you know concretely why you're getting that PhD. So you need to say, this is the whatever, the type of position I want to get, to get this position from where I am now, I need a degree, a PhD degree in this type of program at this caliber of school. Now, I want to nuance this here in response to your question.

My point with this advice is not to essentialize job advancement as what's most important. What I'm actually trying to do here is to help prevent people from mistakenly thinking what they're going to do is going to advance their job, and then it doesn't. So the particular thing I'm pushing back on is that it is very common now for people to embrace graduate school with this ambiguous career. advancement mindset of, well, in general, I think this will help my career. I'll get this master's degree here online or I'll grab this PhD because, you know, I might want to teach one day or something like that. They're ambiguously, they're ambiguously and implicitly claiming that this degree is going to open up better opportunities.

And my pushback is like, well, a lot of times it won't. So if you think that's what's going to happen, make that opportunity concrete. So make sure that you don't get that master's degree or that PhD. is going to open things up and all it really opens is your checkbook and waste a lot of your time and a lot of your money and you're back where you started and you're frustrated. So that's what I'm trying to help people avoid. What you're talking about, I think, is different but also important, which is, let's say you have the time, you have the space, you have the money if required, to pursue a degree concurrently or unrelated to orthogonal to whatever you're trying to do for work

or whatever you're trying to do for your career. Maybe, for example, you have a lot of free time on your hands. You served. You have the GI Bill. You can get this degree at the same time that you're doing your job, and you're just interested in the topic, and honestly, you feel like you have too much free time on your hands. Or maybe you have other sources of money or wealth.

You can say, look, I can take six years and really do this, and it's fine. It's not going to interrupt a career that I need to pay the bills. okay, that's great too, or maybe you're young and you say, look, I'm going to get this PhD. I'm willing to wait six years before I really enter the world of work. I don't really want to get serious about work until my 30s anyways. I want to spend some more time with this topic. I mean, whatever that type of scenario is, where you're thinking about this program and you're being really clear, this is not related.

There's not a particular career benefit I'm tricking myself into ambiguously think I'm going to get. Then, okay, that's fine. That could be a part of a deep life. I mean, often what defines a deep life is sometimes people do something somewhat radical. Like I'm going to just go away for six years and learn literature or something like that. If you can make it work responsibly, then I'm completely for that. You know, everyone builds their own path. But the main thing I don't want people to get tricked into thinking is that if you just get these degrees,

somehow magically really cool things will open up because a lot of people, too many to count, get on the other side of these degrees and realize, oh, there's not really these careers I thought they were going to open up. up. There isn't really new jobs opening up. It is not transforming my life in the way that I sort of ambiguously thought it would. So let's just clarify this advice then. If you're pursuing a master's degree for professional reasons, if you're pursuing a PhD for professional reasons, be incredibly concrete about that reason. This position requires this degree from this type of school. On the other hand, if you're pursuing these degrees for purposes orthogonal to your work, you can fit them into your life in a way that's not going to destabilize your livelihood and you think it's

going to be a real source of interest or passion or options or just interestingness in your life outside of work, then, hey, that's completely up to you and I have no problem with that. I also don't have much time left in this episode, so let's wrap it up. Thank you for everyone who submitted their calls. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you too can submit your listener calls. Thanks to Mark Miles for the help on mastering this episode, and I'll be back on Monday, as always, with the next full-length episode of the podcast. And until then, stay deep.