Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 113: How Do I Become a Deep Life Radical?

Episode Date: July 12, 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.BOOK REPORT: The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin [1:30]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - How do I eliminate the hive mind from interaction with other departments? [13:36] - How do I capture small tasks so I don't forget them? [23:23] - How do I (Cal) feel about career counselors? [29:31] - Are there professions for which time blocking doesn't work? [33:42] - How do I organize my tasks without using task boards? [37:55] - Should I build a radical setting to support the deep life? [39:50] - How do I become the right person to write a book? [42:52]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - Can a digital minimalist use a fitness tracker? [54:33] - When should I switch from work to leisure? [56:27] - How do I get back on track with a deep life after a hard pandemic? [59:24] - What is my (Cal's) top piece of parenting advice? [1:02:04] - Cal's Curmudgeon Corner: How do I find meaning beyond simply expressing myself? [1:05:01]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 the question. Episode 113. Quick announcements. As you are listening to this podcast, I am on my way out. For the remainder of July, I have a combination of travel and vacation that will keep me on the move until we get to August. I'm giving a couple talks, going out to California to give a talk, going up to Boston to give a talk. It's my first on-the-road speeches I've done since early 2020. So this is exciting.

And we're also going to spend some time in Maine get away from the Washington, D.C. summer heat. Never fear I put episodes in the can. So the Deep Questions podcast will continue even while I am away. This includes two interviews I did in advance. I thought I would try to put in two different interview episodes, these sort of collaborative deep dives where we go. deep on a specific topic with other people, put a couple of those in the cans to keep things interesting while I'm away. All right, we have a good show.

We've got some good questions, but before we get into them, why don't we try to take another swing at one of the new segments I'm enjoying, which is the book report? Because I spent so long in Boston when I was at MIT, I got really into colonial American history and I began at some point this tradition that around July 4th every year, I get a new book of academic or semi-academic colonial, American colonial history and read it. So for the Fourth of July weekend that just passed, I read Gordon Woods book, early 2000's book, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. Now let me just give a brief endorsement for Gordon Wood.

He is one of my favorite writers of that period. I think of the public-facing writers who cover figures from colonial America, which includes, let's say, David McCullough, and Ron Chernow, they come to mind quickest. Gordon Wood is the only sort of traditional academic in that crew in the sense that he is a distinguished professor at Brown, a history professor, whereas let's say Chernow or McCola operas. outside of a university system for whatever that's worth. So I like what he's a little bit more academic because of that, but, you know, given my professional background, I don't mind that. So even though his public facing books are very accessible, they have more of a patina of more of an academic patina than let's say McCola does or turnout does like his books. So Wood came up in this generation that included

those writers, also Stephen Ambrose and some others. They came up in this generation where a lot of writings of figures from colonial American period became accessible for the first time. There's a whole generation of scholars that paved a lot of new ground because there's a lot of work on these collections of letters, etc. that became available so they could dive into these archives

and really make careers out of making sense of it. I think Gordon Wood is perhaps best known for goodwill hunting. So if we remember all right, that's a bad thing to say. He's best known probably for his Bancroft Prize and his Pulitzer Prize. and his 50-year distinguished career as a professor.

But let's just say in popular non-academic culture, he's probably best known for being referenced in Goodwill Hunting. So we remember the scene. Matt Damon is at the bar, and there is the cocky Harvard grad student. Because Harvard grad students, of whom I know many, wear buttoned down shirts with v-neck sweaters and have long ponytails. That's what all history grad students wear.

So if you remember the scene, though, Damon is, going up against it with this pretentious Harvard grad student. And Harvard grad student is trying to sound smart, and Matt knows all the things he's citing. So I actually pulled up the script here. And so the Harvard grad student is saying, well, no, that's the problem here. I was hoping you might give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities, especially in the southern colonies, could have most aptly be characterized as agrarian. and pre-capitalist.

This, by the way, is how a Hall, Harvard, history, grad students talk. And Matt Damon's character will interrupts them and says, well, of course that's your contention. You're a first-year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Peter Garrison, probably. You're going to be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon. And then you're going to be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania are entrepreneurial capitalists very all the way back in 1740. And that's going to last until next year. Then you're going to be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood.

talking about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital forming effects of military mobilization. And then Clark says, well, as a matter of fact, I won't because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social and Will interruption. Wood drastically, would drastically underestimate the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth. You got that from Vickers, work in Essex County, page 98, right? So there we go. Gordon Wood is what you get to as a second-year grad student at Harvard, unless you are Will hunting, in which case you have already read and memorized. it. All right, so maybe that's where you've heard the name Gordon Wood before. He came bursting out of the gate at Brown in 1969. He had this book, The Creation of the American

Republic. It got the Baincroft Prize, which is a big prize for American history writing. Also got a National Book Award nomination. I'm assuming this was probably his dissertation turned into a book. And then he won the Pulitzer in 92 for the radicalism of the American Revolution. One of the things that Gordon Wood is really good at is content. So he really understands the historical context in which the colonial period was operating and that the revolution emerged from. The book he got, The Pulitzer 4 underscore something that he did really well, which is he went back to England, basically, and said, what was going on, let me better understand the philosophical context of England, what was happening in the English Enlightenment. And in that Pulitzer Prize winning book, and in some of his other books, he really figured out the story of the Enlightenment. influence on the American

revolutions more complicated than just we read some John Locke and there was these particular types of labor revolutions happening in England at the time and he could get exactly how various American colonial leaders were exposed to him which is all to say he is very good at

sucking in tons of information about a period and really deeply understanding the period especially the intellectual currents and to slightly lesser extent the economic currents and then trying to confront these colonial figures in that context. All right. That's

more than you want to know about Gordon Wood. This brings us to the Americanization of Ben Franklin. Fantastic book. It is not a biography. It's actually pretty short. It's just 250 pages. It just took me three or four pages to get three or four days to get through. You know, if you've read,

let's say, Isaacson's Franklin biography is like a more traditional public-faced biography. A lot of these details are left out of this book. But Wood is basically hammering home a few big questions or points about Franklin that he's trying to understand by looking at the context of the time. And he does a great job. It's incredibly accessible writing, but you come out of it really understanding these threads of the tapestry that was the American colonial period and how Franklin interacted with them, all without using complicated language. All without Wood having to talk about the, what did they talk about here? The impact. act of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth. And so it's interesting.

And I really got a lot out of it, even if someone who read a lot about it, again, at a very high level, and I'm just going off memory here, and I'll have notes, but it is a really big thing trying to understand the role of the gentleman culture in the pre-revolution colonial period. And the sort of pseudo-aristocracy, the aspirational pseudo-aristocracy in America versus England and how that was changing and how the rising of a wealthy artisan class was challenging and changing it. And you can basically understand the first 50 years of Franklin's life about trying to make this

shift from a artisan to a gentleman, someone who is living off their wealth. But it was a much more complicated, very specific social distinction. And so his fight to try to fit into that culture and make that shift and do it really carefully. That's kind of the first part of the book. And then in the second part of the book, it gets really into, he was in England. I mean, he was in England, France, for most of his adult life. He's over here in England, Franklin, trying to have a impact on imperial affairs and very much a British imperialist. And there's this interesting switch that has to happen at some point where he switches from British, loyal British imperialist to colonial revolutionary. And then

there's this final piece about how around the time of his death, Franklin was viewed with great suspicion, was not seen as one of the great founders, and then how that changed over time. So why and how his myth was created, which was very much a 19th century thing, and it had to do with the rise of political influence and social standing of the American labor.

Anyways, these are the three big parts of the book. Expertly executed. I am always impressed by a good Gordon Wood book. But this brings me back to that scene from Goodwill Hunting. So Will and the pretentious Harvard grad student referenced this supposed critique from someone named Vicar saying that Wood drastically underestimates the economic impact of inherited wealth and its role as a social distinction. I don't want to get involved in an argument between Will hunting and the guy in the V-neck sweater with a ponytail, but reading the Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, Wood seems to have an incredibly sophisticated understanding and take on social distinction and inherited wealth and its role in American colonial society. So I don't know if that's something he really would miss, if that's actually a critique or something they just threw in some words that sounded right.

maybe what's going on here is that Woods maybe doesn't have as strong of a handle on some of the economic stuff going on in the colonial period. When I read Wood, more of the philosophical and the social, these tend to be the really strong contextual tapestries that he weave. So maybe what Vickers is pointing out here is that that is a shortcoming exactly how those economic dynamics unfolded. Or, you know, maybe we need to defend our boy Wood here. and that is not actually an accusation that holds water. So how do you like those apples? All right, that's enough of me pontificate, and you can probably tell.

I need to get back in a classroom soon. I haven't been in a classroom. I haven't been teaching since December, and I haven't been in a classroom since last year. I should stop subjecting you to academic herrings. Let's do a quick ad read, and then we'll jump into the questions. I want to take a moment to talk about our friends at Magic Spoon.

I also want to offer some personal gratitude to Magic Spoon. They've been a sponsor of the show for almost a year now, but they in recent months have been filling a pretty important role in my own life. As I emerge from the pandemic, I'm getting back in front of crowds again. I'm getting back in front of the camera again. I had a Netflix crew at my house last week. I'm going back into the classroom soon. I have to start taking seriously again what I'm eating.

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Let's get started with some questions about deep work. our first one comes from Abyshech, who says, Cal, I work for a large organization with offices all over the world. I sometimes have to work with various administrative teams such as HR or finance or real estate. And while my own work follows set processes, the request I make to other departments are ad hoc and custom. What are some ways or best practices to interact with these other departments so that I am not inadvertently propagating a culture of context? switching. Well, Abyshech, this gives me an excuse to talk about one of my favorite bits of research that hasn't yet made it into any of my published works. And that is a couple of years ago,

I was really interested in the question, if it's going to simplify it, of how we sent a man to the moon without email. Incredibly complicated endeavor that required the collaboration of many teams within organizations and many organizations working together all around the country and some all around the world, especially for talking about the deep space satellite networks that are antenna erased or all around the world. I mean, there's just a lot of complex coordination that had to happen. And of course, we did this largely in the late 50s and 1960s when we did not have email. So how do we do it? I originally did research on this question. I think it was for a New Yorker article. Believe it or not, this research was in the early stages of the

the article that ended up being called the rise and fall of getting things done and was built around a profile of Merlin Man as the structuring narrative, the original form of this article had me, it was going in some different directions. So I actually talked with people, not so much at the Apollo program, though I read a lot of reports, but from the preceding Ranger program. These were the probes that went to the moon. They were designed out of JPL. And then I, so I didn't make in that article, the article went a different direction. So I wanted to use that research. So I brought it into a world without email, and I had a whole section about it. But it was slowing things down, and I wanted to get some more intellectual momentum.

And I took it out of there. So I've tried a few times to write about this and haven't been able to. So great, let me talk about it. So when I was focusing in particular on, again, this sort of predecessor to the Apollo program, because that's where I could find people who were still alive and who, for whatever reason, is just where I had contacts at this Ranger program. And what I learned is that they structure their communication in some sense in the same way that they had been innovating to structure the electronic communication of the systems on board the space probe they were building. Now, we had never up to this point, just because of this technology was new, we didn't really have a lot of best practices for how do you build complex electronic devices?

The electronics devices we had in the first part of the 20th century, these are relatively straightforward. You had a radio, you had a TV. There was a circuit, and you had components screwed into the circuit. It was usually a relatively simple circuit. If something broke, you could take the back off your TV and just say, what's going on here? This vacuum tube is out. This resistor got blown. Let's replace it.

The space probes that preceded the Apollo programming, these were some of the first really complex electrical devices. And so they had to figure out how do we build these things so they can work it. We can't just have one giant circuit board that does all of the things you would need to, let's say, send the probe to the moon. And what I learned is they innovated what's now standard today, which is abstraction. So you would have different, think of them as components on your board to handle different things. You had the telemetry module. You had the navigation module. You had the module responsible for dealing with the cameras.

And the way they worked this out is like, let's abstract this. There's how this works internally. So all the circuits and switches and transistors and resistors and capacitors that go into, let's say, the telemetry system. And then we have a really clearly find interface for how it talks to the other systems that needs to talk to. So now if you're working on the navigation system, you don't need to know how the telemetry system works. You just need to know the interface for talking to it. And if you're working on the camera control system, you don't need to know how the telemetry system was encoding information

and the radio signals to send back to Earth. You just need to know the interface for getting from it the information you need, requesting, you know, whatever. Are we in the right location to turn on the camera? This type of abstraction with well-defined interfaces is something that sounds pretty familiar today, but that's how all had to be innovated back then. Well, the way the actual teams at JPL worked on this project kind of mirrored that. So there was the internal team collaboration, and then there was well-defined interfaces for how the different teams interacted with each other.

In particular, if there was a team working on a particular aspect of the probe, there's only one person you could contact from the outside. I wanted to talk to that team. You didn't all have email addresses. I could bother anyone about anything. God forbid we weren't all on a Slack channel. There was one member of your team called the Cognizant Engineer. He communicated on behalf of that team, and then they had very rigorous protocols for the most part

about how you would actually interact. Cognizant engineers would interact with each other. So these groups of peoples and offices, sending memos and making phone calls back and forth, they were basically simulating these electronic components on the Ranger, space probe, with their well-defined communication interfaces between them. And this turns out to work very well because different modes of communication are more appropriate for different types of collaboration.

For a team of six engineers that are all working on a particular system, and the engineer I was talking to, for example, their team cared a lot about shake testing and making sure components wouldn't fall out from circuit boards as they went to take off with the rocket, etc. that small team working together probably should have something very close to a hyperactive hive mind style of collaboration. They're literally physically co-located and they're working on physical things. They have boards in front of them and they need to just be going back and forth. Here's our whiteboard. And that's appropriate. But that team talking to another team, talking to the procurement officer, talking to the other people that are putting together electronic specs for the components or whatever, that should be way more structured. So that type of communication was very structured

so that the team could focus mainly on the thing that they were mainly doing. I think more organizations and teams and modern knowledge work should take a page out of this particular playbook. We should treat how we collaborate internally quite different than how we collaborate between different groups

or also externally to the company or organization as a whole and in both cases we should have a lot of intention and structure. Now, Abyshech, in your case, you're having to self-inue. these changes. I mean, it sounds like you're probably not going to transform your company to the Cal Newport mindset overnight, but that's fine. So even if you're the one initiating these changes, the way to think about this is what are the common types of interactions I have with HR? What are the common types of interaction I have with finance, with real estate, etc., and figure out on your own

what is the interactive protocol I want to use for each of these types of interactions? And again, your goal, and this comes from a world without email my book, your goal with these protocols is reducing context shifts. So in this case, that's going to be, how do I minimize the number of unscheduled messages to require a response for this interaction to succeed? And you can basically just describe your protocol to the people in the other offices. Don't call it a protocol. Don't be heavy-handed about it. Just tell them. Like, hey, look, we got you know, these forms that need approval, this seems to happen a lot.

So, like, here's what I suggest we do. And then you just explain the protocol you came up with. We'll have the shared drop box. It's where I'll put forms that still require signatures. You can just check that. In fact, I can even send, you know, a P-ing at first to remind you. And then there's another Dropbox folder next to it where you can put the signed forms. And if you have any questions, you know, I have this Monday office hours.

It's when I'm working on the stuff anyways. You can always just stop on my office or call me during that hours and we can work things out. Yeah, you might have to remind them a few times, but you knock them into this protocol. Boom, they're on a protocol now you design, context shifting reduced. Do this again and again. It's not always going to be clean. They're not always going to follow it. But it is better to have these clear protocols for inter-team, inter-department communication.

It's much better to have these than they try to run the hive mine at the scale of department. That really starts to make things go awry. I do not think we would have successfully gotten a man to the moon if we had tried to do something like the hyperactive hive mind between all these different teams and groups and organizations that were working on the project. We needed some structure for that communication. Otherwise, people would do nothing but answer communication. So Abyshechak, that's my suggestion. You list out the things any protocols. You come up with protocols you think could work that other people would be on board with. Don't be heavy handed, just say, here's how I think we should do this, and then just keep nudging people back

into that again and again, to the extent that you're capable. Don't let perfection be the enemy of better. Having some protocols in place that are working pretty well is much better than just throwing up your hands and saying, let's hyperactive hive minded. My next question comes from Krista. Krista asks, how do you capture small tasks as part of your capture, configure control? I am a business owner and manage my business all on my own, from HR to payroll, to marketing, to getting the things done.

As such, I have really struggled with how to capture small tasks. You know those things that will take roughly five to ten minutes to do. Well, Krista, I think the authoritative source on this capture philosophy would be David Allen and his book, Getting Things Done. He really introduced this idea that a task kept only in your head is what he called an open loop, which is a source of stress and a drain on cognitive resources. So everything has to get captured in a trusted system. key adjective there is trusted. It has to be a system that your mind trust will get reviewed. You then need, according to Allen, inboxes, to capture things in the moment.

And these inbox themselves must be trusted because you need to believe that as part of your daily business, everything in these inboxes will get moved into the trusted systems that are regularly reviewed. So that's, that's Allen's vision. You have these inboxes that can immediately capture things and get them off your head. And then at some point soon, they move out of these inboxes into a trusted long-term storage system that's at the core of your planning and work so that as soon as something falls into that inbox, your mind can say, boom, let it go. It will get handled. So for your long-term storage system, I mean, obviously you have to have something to keep track of your non-time-bound task. Time-specific tasks will be on your calendar.

but other things, you need some sort of master task list or list. I often use task boards for these. We'll get into this in a later question, but it could be in workflow. It could just be a large Google document, however you want to do it. But there's some master list that you trust regularly, that you look at regularly, rather. I have you go through these as part of your shutdown ritual, just quickly go through them so that your mind trust that nothing's been forgotten and that you go through them in much more detail when you do your weekly plan. Like, what's really on my plate? Is there anything I need to maybe put aside specific time through?

Just remind yourself what's going on. So that's foundational. Have that system that you review regularly. And then the inboxes are whatever is going to work for you. You know, if you use my time block planner, for example, there's capture page right there next to your time block grid. The idea is if something comes up, you can record it right there in your planner. And why I want it right there in the planner is that they shut down complete checkbox

that you check at the end of each data. So you've done your shutdown rituals right above them. So now you can really trust that notes written down in your time block planner will get processed because you know that you will literally see them as you do your shutdown complete ritual. There's no way you're going to check that box while ignoring them because they're right under it. But you can use whatever system makes the most sense for you. I've had a lot of success in the past, too, with a text file. A text file on my computer that I just keep open where I can just grab stuff, grab notes.

Someone comes to my office, jot down notes. I'm in a meeting. I have my laptop with me, jot down notes. I can type quicker than I write, so I do like that text file approach, and then I'm just used to as part of my shutdown ritual processing everything in that text file. Some sort of physical inbox is usually important, one at your home, one at your office, so that if there's mail or forms or something that is a physical artifact that needs to be processed, you can throw it in that inbox and know that it will get looked at and turned into a task.

Once a task is in your task list associated with a physical artifact in your inbox, you can then take it out of there and file it because the placeholder is now in your task list pay this bill. You don't actually have to see it. So that can work well. Alan talks about sometimes jotting things down on a piece of paper and throwing it into a physical inbox. That actually works pretty well.

You know, if you're not around your planner or for whatever reason it's a weekend, you're not using your planner, that works really well. Okay, here's a physical inbox tray at my house where I put mail I need to deal with, etc. And I just remembered, I need to follow up on the Johnson report. You can write it on a piece of paper thrown in that inbox and know that when you process that next, that you will see all of it.

So that's the basic idea that Allen elaborates. The complex thing in here is email. Email was on the rise when getting things done was written, but didn't have the same volume then that it has today. Some people like to treat their email inbox like one of these other inboxes, so process it down to zero. as they do their daily review, their shutdown routine. It's great if you can do this, if you could treat it like an inbox and get everything out of there onto your calendar or your master list at the end of the day. This is often impractical for modern volumes of email due to the various terribleness of the hyperactive hive mind. So what I recommend typically as a compromise here is that as part of your daily shutdown routine,

you take everything in your physical inbox, process it, take everything in your other, be in your planner or in your text file, these inboxes, process it. In your email inbox, you scan. You're not going to bring it down the zero, but you're going to go through and make sure, is there anything urgent I need to see or know about or put a particular note to get back to or answer it right away so that when you do your shutdown complete, though your inbox is not empty, you know it was not alarming, that you're not missing something now as you shut down your day that you really can't miss.

A end-of-the-day email from your boss needs to respond to, et cetera. So that's, I think, is a fair compromise for people who get a lot of email. All right. So quick summary, then, Krista, you have various inboxes, physical and digital. They get processed every day into your calendar and master to-do list. Your master to-do list is something that, you know, you should glance over at the end of each day as you process your inboxes into it, but you should look at it in more detail when you do your weekly plan. You don't have to empty your email inbox every day, but as part of your shutdown routine, when you're processing these other inboxes,

give it a good enough read to make sure that you can, you're not missing something critical so that your mind can get that piece that when you are done with your day and you've done your shutdown that you really can shut down. All right, we have a question here from Robert. Robert says, how do you feel about the paid use of career counselors? Well, there are two related roles here I want to discuss. There's counselors, career counselors, that help you figure out what to do. Like, I want to change a job. what should I do with my career? Should I shift from this industry of that industry?

And then there's career coaches. I put a distinction here. I think coaches are more about how do I do what I'm doing now better. Now, of course, these overlap because coaches, in addition to helping you do your job better in a way that is more sustainable, that naturally might also lead to questions of shifting what you do or perhaps shifting jobs. So I think of career counselors has been very much focused on what job should I do. and coaches focused on how do I do my job better. I'm not against career counselors.

I'm somewhat indifferent. I think in most cases, and this is the philosophy that I capture and so good they can't ignore you, in most cases, figuring out what to do is not a super tricky decision that requires expert guidance. I mean, you look at your career capital,

you find an available position that takes advantage of the career capital you have, and it will open up interesting options or opportunities if and when you get better. And that's usually sufficient. The real interest is in what you do once you have the job. How do you shape that into something that is going to be a source of meaning and passion? I mean, some people need a sounding board, so a counselor could be useful there.

But I don't want to over, I don't want this to lead to an over emphasis that this is a very complicated question. That's going to require a lot of expert assistance to get right, because when your focus is on what my job is versus how I do it, I think that's less useful. So career counselors are fine if you think you need that sounding board, but oftentimes this decision is not as exciting as we think. There's a few options to make sense. We take one that seems to have the best balance of things. Yeah, it's fine. Career coaching I'm very much in favor of. I mean, I'm surprised that agree to which in knowledge work, we spend so little time thinking about how to be good at knowledge work.

Obviously, in a pursuit with a clearly defined competitive structure, if you're a professional musician, if you're a professional actor, if you're a professional actor, if you're a professional athlete all about coaching. How do I get better? Am I not putting the attention on the right things? Am I focusing on distractions? But also how do I train? How do I improve? Where is my weaknesses?

How do I improve those? And a lot of knowledge work like, nah, it's just, you know, show up, be busy, get it done. And we're leaving a lot of potential on the table for acquiring career capital and therefore getting more meaning and satisfaction and autonomy out of our work.

So I'm a big believer in career coaching. There's a lot of different types of coaching. If you're an entrepreneur, they can help you figure out how to get your business rolling. If you are in a non-entrepreneurial role, it can be very useful to getting your act together, focusing intensely on the things that matter, getting away from the things that don't, honing your skill. Obviously, some coaches are probably better than others, but I think in general, career coaching is something there should be much more of. And is one of these investments that can probably give you a very high ROI. And let's just talk money here, right?

If you're thinking about, oh, I have some money. I have $2,000. I have $1,000. How do I get the biggest return on this money? There is very little that you could possibly put that money in, let's say, an asset, a stock, etc., that's going to come close to returning the amount of money you'll probably get by putting that into a good career counselor, a good career counselor that's going to, over the next five years, make you thousands and thousands of more dollars, because, again, most people don't really have their act together in knowledge work. if you get your act together, you will stand out. So we should normalize career coaching as something that more people do, especially if you're

new to the working world. Just think about the cost of a career coach potentially as one of the expenses you have for your salaries, just reduce your salary in your mind about how much I'm making by 3 or 4 percent and think about putting that 3 or 4 percent or 5 percent into coaching early on. I think it would make a huge difference in the long-term trajectory of your career. All right, we have a couple of questions that came in on the same topic. So the first form of this question came from Miso who said, are there professions or types of work for which time blocking or the time block planner does not add any value? I gifted your planner to

a friend who is a physical therapist whose workday already consists of blocks of time for patient appointments. How can she gain value out of your planner, given the nature of her work? And then almost right after this, I got a question from someone who said, I'm an emergency medicine physician. in my work, I routinely have to make very fast decisions that can save the life of a patient. How can I apply time blocking principles to this kind of job? I think the big picture answer here is that yes, there is definitely types of work for which time blocking is not that relevant. I mean, at the extremes, this is obvious. If I am, for example, I don't know, a professional baseball player or this or that, there's very little degrees of freedom in my day.

I mean, here's the warm up and training schedule. Here's the practices. Here's the games. There's not a lot of decisions I need to make about my time. There's people in patient care like physical therapist, like GPs or other types of doctors, who your whole day is basically structured around appointments. You already have a system for that. And to use the other example from the question itself, ER docs, for example,

are inherently reactive jobs. You deal with what comes through the door. All right. So, yeah, these are all positions in which time block plan. an eight-hour day does not make sense. The key caveat I would add is that where you do need some intention is to figure out when you're going to do the work that is not captured in those appointment systems. So if you're the physical therapist, most of your day is seeing patients.

They're in your planning system. What about the other stuff that has to get done? You know, you have to update your website. You've got to pay your estimated taxes. you need to install the new table that you got for your physical therapy room. There's other stuff that's not an appointment. The basic philosophy of time blocking does apply here. Be intentional about where you want to do that looking at the layout of your week.

Now, something I suggest to people in these situations like doctors in particular is that leverage your appointment system as your time blocking mechanism. You have whatever software you use for keeping track of all the different patients you're going to see. figure out these other things you need to get done that aren't patient appointments and get them into your system as an appointment. As long as you're trusting this system to run your day, take advantage of that. It not only protects the time, but you're already in the mindset of when I see a block of something in my appointment system, that's what I do next. So it's patient, patient, patient, oh, web development time. Deal with the web developer, whatever.

You're like, okay, I guess that's what I'm doing now. So if most of your day is blocked in some sort of system for something like patient appointment, use that system to very intentionally put in place the other types of things that need to get done. Have a say of when that happens or when you do email or when you get back to client referrals. You need to be intentional about that. Now again, you probably don't need a full-time block plan for that. Use the system you already have. Same thing for the ER doc.

In the ER, it's not that you have an appointment system. You know, you're actually driven by who comes in the door, but also this big wall. I talk about this a little bit in World Without a World. email, but the big whiteboard where you have the different patients and their statuses, and this thing is dynamically updating. It tells you where you need to go next or where your help is needed. So, you know, okay, you don't have an appointment system, but your day is being driven by these type of things. You again need some sort of intention. What are the other things that have to get done that aren't going to be this, and when am I going to do it? And have some intention

about it. And yes, you probably don't need a full planner for that. But maintain the time block philosophy of you give your time a job, at least for the stuff you have control over, don't just be reactive about the stuff you can control. Can't control when the patients are going to come to the door, sure. But you can control when you are going to go,

whatever, sign up for your board exam coming up, when you're going to go and update your forms at HR. The stuff you can control, be intentional about when and where that happens. Our next question is from Will. Will ask, how do you recommend task organization without boards?

try as I might. I can't get Trela, Asana, etc. to click for me. I currently organize my task in an obsidian notebook. I have one file of admin, very short-term task, and then a number of files, one for each major project with next-step tasks. I link all these files to one file of major projects that I try to review weekly, but often this is just monthly. Do you have any suggestions? Well, Will, I'm relatively tool agnostic. I think the key idea, as I talked about in a previous question from today, episode is that you have a trusted system where things go that is reviewed regularly. I don't really care what it is. I like task boards because I get a very quick gestalt of what's going on with a given role when I see not just what I need to do, but what their status is, which is indicated by columns. But you can do this in text files. You can do this in Obsidian. You can do this in a bullet journal style journal if you don't have too many tasks. Like whatever you care, what matters is that you trust it. And that might be the thing where it sounds like

you're falling short a little bit, make yourself look through these files, or at least the files of small tasks or admin tasks. You don't necessarily have to go through all the big projects if the projects are not active. But the projects you're actively working on your small task, glance through these quickly when you do a shutdown routine every day, reorganize and give it a serious work each week for your weekly plan.

See, if you don't do that, then having the system doesn't really get you much value. your mind doesn't trust that something in there is going to be seen. So it's going to try to keep track of and organize everything in your mind. It's not very good at that. You're going to become reactive. You're going to be using unnecessary mental resources. So I don't care about the tool, but I care about how you use it.

Regular review is the key to however it is you keep track of your task to making sure that that actually gets you the maximum benefit. Our next question comes from Jacob. Jacob says, I am grateful for your continued efforts with the podcast. and I am setting up an iTunes account to review it and to give something back. I'm about to move shortly and I think a lot about the optimum surroundings for a deep life for reflection as well as relaxation. The easy answer is to put friction on the bad stuff. You know, the very first TV test came with shutters.

It's the time to go back. But I am thinking of going radical here, like keeping a whiteboard in the living room and move the furniture on a regular schedule. Well, Jacob, I am very much in favor. taking radical steps to help support the deep life. I think there signals to yourself that you take it seriously. It reduces the effort required to persist with the activities that support depth. And I just think it makes things more interesting.

Commitments held visibly and with great vigor are just more interesting commitments. You get more out of them. So I don't know about moving your furniture every week, but I do like the general way you are thinking. A couple things I would suggest is, definitely have a radical setting that you have configured for contemplation,

for reading books and thinking about books and reflecting on your life or journaling. You know, you don't have to build an outbuilding on your massive property. You can take a nook of your house

or your home office or what have you and go a little bit over the top and how you configure this space to be inspiring and relaxing or somehow peeking. intellectual curiosity. Do something like that, a really intentionally designed space that you go to to read big books, to journal, to do reflection.

Also go radical on your routine. So have a couple rituals or routines surrounding the deep life that you put into your life, some sort of hikes. You know, if there's a particular forested path nearby, maybe you really get to know that path. Maybe you have an outdoor office at some point on that path that you stop at to read and you do this every morning. Whatever it is, I think having radical, these sort of radical.

these sort of radical rituals and routines that you do on a regular basis. That also can be just as effective as having a radical setting. But there is, it's the bottom line. There is in great value in going over the top to signal to yourself, this is important to me, and I'm putting more time and effort into this than the normal person than the people I know. That's what convinces your mind to take it seriously. When you take it seriously, you get much bigger rewards. Look, I get emails about this all the time.

People send me photos of their cool setups, their new home offices, the attic, nook that they transformed. I've talked about before in the podcast that I gave a talk in LA once and one of the wait staff sent me a photo of a Darwin-style sandwalk that he built on the land where he lived. So a lot of people are doing this. I think it's cool. I love seeing those photos, by the way, interesting at calnewport.com. If you've done something radical to support the Deep Life, send me a note. I like to see him. But Jacob, I would say when it comes to this idea, definitely get after it. All right. Let's do one more question here. A really, reading, writing related question. This is from Constantine, who says, what is your advice to become

the right person to write a non-academic book on a topic? You recently mentioned briefly that there are several things you can do to become the right person to write a book. Could you please expand on these thoughts further? Right. So as a quick reminder, my advice for doing non-journalistic nonfiction book writing is that you have to have an idea that people are going to feel as if they need to read about it. There'll be a non-trivial audience. It'll feel like I need to read this book. You have to be the right person to write the book, so it has to make sense that you're writing it. And then finally, you have to be a not bad writer. So the writing has to be professional. It doesn't have to be Pulitzer caliber, but it can't look amateur. So Constantine's asking about

that middle piece, and okay, how do you become the right person to write a book? The simple answer here is generally speaking, when someone sees the book and reads your author flap bio, they say, yeah, it makes sense that this person wrote this. It should make sense to the reader why you're writing the book. And maybe this is a tautological answer. It's being the right person to the book is how you be the right person to write a book. But I think you know what I mean, that there's this instinct. You know it when you see it.

Yeah, it makes sense that you're writing that book. Let's get a little bit more specific. Let me elaborate carefully here. Constantine gave me a lot more background on who he is, et cetera, and all that's anonymous. Let me just say at a very high level, he's a successful CEO and investor, has put money into businesses on the scale of hundreds to millions of dollars. So a successful business person by a lot of normal scales who's also on a continued upward trajectory. I think, for example, that it would make sense for someone in your situation to write a Ray Dalio principal-style book. Someone who's very successful in business writing a book about business. Okay, I think that's fine. I think that makes sense. I think that would pass a smell test.

You're good. Now, in your case, I think the issue would be, so this is a good case study, Constantine? I think the issue, if we look at those trio of things, you need to write a successful non-journalistic nonfiction book. the one that you're going to have to worry about is, is this a topic that a non-trivial number, there's a non-trivial size audience that is going to feel like, oh, I need to read that. And this is where you're probably going to need to be more careful.

Because if the book is just, here's some various ideas I have about success in life, it's a harder sell. I mean, Ray Dalio kind of did that with his book principles, which was very successful. But he's also a really high-level executive. I mean, so, in a way, he had a profile, he had a profile that was known pretty wily before he wrote that book.

If your profile is not quite as high, you probably are going to want to focus that pitch a little bit more. You want to give it a little bit more zing. If it's just, here's various principles I've learned for success in life, you know, there's got to be an extra little bit of zing. Now, that zing could actually be format. It doesn't necessarily have to be, here's my high concept idea. you know, Constantine's book that waking up at 3 a.m. is the key to success. Like, you have some big high concept. It could be the format. The book that I based my very first book off of was Jeff Fox's book, How to Become CEO,

which was built off of a speech he gave to alumni at Penn. Really the pitch for how to become a CEO is that it innovated this format of very short chapters with contrarian ideas. So the zing could be the format. I have this format for the book that's really catchy and interesting, and I think it'll be, it'll catch people's attention. Or it could be the idea itself. Like, okay, so I have this idea for success in business or life that all comes down to this maxim, the such and such principle. And it has a name, and it's sort of a catchy, high concept idea that you see it. You're like, oh, that's interesting.

This very successful CEO and investor says this principle is key, and that idea seems intuitive or a little contrarian. Okay, I'm in. The only other caveat I would give here is that if you've had a very interesting career, so in other words, if your career has generated stories that are interesting in their own, all right, that's another angle is I'm going to give advice, but the advice is going to be intertwined with these stories that on their own are interesting because I just had an interesting career. That's the third angle in the business space that works.

So this is the angle that a lot of well-known CEOs take. So if you read like Bob Auger's biography, which I did, that was very good, by the way, he has ideas in there for being successful in business, but what makes it interesting is that, hey, this is a guy who ran ABC, then ran Disney through very interesting times. I want to hear his stories. It's interesting to hear about what that world was like. Jocco Willink did this with his leadership book, Extreme Ownership.

He has this idea about leadership, and the idea is kind of out there, but he could intertwine it with, oh, by the way, this is what it was like running task force bruiser in the Battle of Ramadi. Okay, that is an interesting. story on its own. So the summarize here, you're the right person to write the book if, tautologically speaking, someone sees your bio, looks at the book flap, and says, yeah, makes sense this person's writing the book.

That passes the smell test. In that case, you really want to make sure that you're satisfying the first property of success and non-journalistic nonfiction, which is writing a topic that a non-travel audience will feel like they need to read. And what I mentioned there is you have a few options here. you have a format play. Got a really sharp format for this book. Hey, by the way, don't underplay the importance in principles,

Ray Dalio's book of the two-color printing. I am a big fan in having two-color printing. So he has red commentary, red marginalia, and then black text. I think there should be more of this. I love multicolor printing. Bit of an aside. But it can be a format play. It can be a straight up high concept idea play.

you know, it's the Constantine principle and it's some idea that you're like, ah, yeah, I like that. I'm interested in being more successful and that principle feels like intuitively there's something right there. Or it could be, I have interesting stories play. So the reason why you're going to feel like you have to read this is that in between the advice, you're going to hear about a world that's interesting. My adventure's doing X. All right. So that's where I would put my attention, Constantine.

And those three points in general is where I would recommend anyone thinking about writing a non-journalistic nonfiction book, those are three points to keep in mind. The idea, if you're the right person, and is you're writing good enough to not be, to not have that feel of amateurness. And if any of those things aren't yet there, you got to get them there before you should expect to have success, at least in traditional publishing. I'm going to take a moment to talk about our friends at Grammarly. So there's two tiers of product with Gramerly. There's their basic Grammarly service, which is free, works on all of your devices and all the different apps. you do your writing in, and then there is the paid product called Grammarly Premium.

Let me actually delineate this ontology here. The free Grammarly is going to fix your mistakes. Spelling errors, punctuation errors, grammar errors, you have to be doing this. If you do any type of professional communication, you simply cannot have those mistakes. You can't have an unnecessary possessive apostrophe. You can't use the wrong variant of there. these are unforced errors that will greatly reduce your effectiveness. Again, your point across being taken seriously.

You've got to be using something like that. Can't make mistakes. Grammarly premium. Now, this costs money. Again, works on all your devices, every app you write in. But what it brings to the table is something that I think is somewhat incredible from a technology perspective. It actually can help you make that writing, not just mistake-free, but better. It can give you clarity suggestions.

Oh, here's a clearer way of phrasing what you are saying there. It can also give you vocabulary suggestions. This word is kind of overused. Here's a better one to use. This is the type of feedback you would normally get from an editor, the type of feedback that gives professional writing that's seamless shine. You can now get some of that in your own writing from this tool. So now you're not only avoiding unforced errors in your writing,

your writing can actually become an asset. When you're doing professional communication, people think there's something about this. It's sharpest to the point. Nothing catches my attention as a weird word or a repeated word. it really makes a difference in the professional context. So if you want to hit Send with confidence and get your point across more effectively, sign up for Grammarly Premium.

Now here's the good news. You can get 20% off Grammarly Premium if you sign up at Grammarly.com slash deep. That's 20% off at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep. I want to talk here for a moment about ExpressVPN. Here is something you might not know. When you log on to the internet, let's say you're at home and you use Comcast or Verizon for your internet, when you log onto the internet and start visiting websites, they know every website you're visiting because they are watching these packets come onto their network. The packet that says, I want to go to Calnewport.com.

the packet that says, I want to go to Amazon.com, to buy a Cal Newport book. Your internet service provider sees all of that. Now, in the U.S., they can legally sell that information to ad companies. They can say, hey, this person

is visiting a lot of websites related to calnewport.com. You should probably give him some Cal Newport-related ads. A lot of people don't realize that's happening. So how do you get around that? Well, a VPN could be the solution. Here's how a VPN works at a very high level. I'm now logging on to my internet. I use

Verizon. I use Comcast. I say, you know what? I don't want you guys to know where I'm going. So here's what I'm going to tell you where I'm going to go is I'm going to connect to a VPN server. Now, once I'm connected to the VPN server, everything I send to it is going to be encrypted. I'm going to encrypt that packet on my machine and then send it to that machine where they'll unencrypted. So, hey, Comcast, hey Verizon, you don't know where I'm going. All you know is I'm sending encrypted packets to a VPN server. That VPN server then unencrypts those packets and says,

oh, you're trying to talk to calnewport.com, and it talks to Calnewport.com on my behalf encrypts the response to send it backs to me. So your provider, Comcast Verizon, I have no idea where you're going. That is what a VPN offers you. If you're going to use a VPN, use Express VPN. They are a leader in the industry.

They have these VPN servers all around the world. Really good bandwidth, very high speed, very easy to set up. It's seamless. So you're there on your browser going to calnewport.com. You don't know about all this VPN stuff going on in the background. You don't notice any difference in your speed, but you are protecting your privacy against those who are trying to invade it.

So secure your online activity today at expressvpn.com slash deep. If you go to that slash deep URL, you will get an extra three months free. So that's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-P-N.com slash deep. ExpressVPN.com slash deep. All right, let's get back to the show. We'll move on now to some questions about the deep life. Let's get started with a quick one. Our first question comes from Daniel.

Daniel says, in regard to digital minimalism and tracking health goals, what are your thoughts on using apps that receive frequent usage throughout the day, such as My Fitness Pal. Daniel, I have no problem with that. And in general, there is nothing intrinsic about, let's say, a health tracking app like My Fitness Pal, which if people don't know, you enter in a lot of detailed information

about your activity and your food throughout the day. Nothing about that intrinsically raises a digital minimalism red flag. So just to do a really quick review on digital minimalism, this is not a philosophy of minimizing technology use, it is a philosophy of making technology use more intentional. It says you should start by saying what's really important to me and then ask the question and what's the best way to use tech to support these things I care about, putting guide rails up around those usage so that you get the benefits without the cost.

All right, well, if you go through this exercise and your health is very important to you, and in your particular situation, being pretty careful about what you eat is going to be really important for you to get to the health goal, you're trying to get to you. And you look at an app like My Fitness Pal and says, yeah, this really helps me get there. And I know people who use this and have a lot of success with it, then great.

You're deploying technology for a very specific reason with very clear guardrails. Like, My Fitness Pal is not Twitter. You're entering in the macro nutrients of the food you're eating, right? It's not like an addictive thing. And it's giving you a big benefit. So actually, I think using an app like My Fitness Pal is a great illustrative example of how digital minimalism is not about avoiding technology. It's about putting technology to use on your behalf and avoiding having that equation be switched the other way around.

Our next question comes from Joshua. Joshua asks, When is the right time to take a break or spend time in a leisure activity rather than working on a project? Well, Joshua, the short answer here is that when you are exhausted or burnt out or just feel like your energy is gone. on for working on that project, it's time to maybe move on to a different type of thing. Shut down your work, move to leisure, take a break, etc. Now, of course, the reality is a little bit more subtle because what if you're doing that all the time?

Well, I see this as almost a different issue. So in the short term, you know, you work hard on things until it becomes too hard to do or it becomes hard to do because you're exhaust or out of energy, you're tired or whatever, and then you step away. If you think you're doing that too much, that you're not getting enough time into your projects. Well, this should be diagnosed separately. There's a couple things that could be going on here. One is you might not buy into the projects. Maybe you have too many projects or you have legacy projects that your mind doesn't really trust that you're going to succeed at, but you've just gotten in the habit of working on it. You have the novel you've been working on, but you know the novel's not going to succeed and you're just going through the motions.

Okay, so you might need to actually do some spring cleaning on your projects themselves, make sure that it's a reasonable collection of projects and you have a plan for them that your mind is on board. with that this will succeed and it's worth achieving success here. What we get from success is worth it, right? So that could be part of it. Another part of it could just be physical stamina or energy. Are you trying to do too much work? Are you doing work on hard things at times of the day that aren't well suited for it? You're trying to force in deep work at 3 p.m.

And that's just not happening. Is your health and nutrition off? You know, you're drinking too much. You're hung over. You're staying up too late. You know, so there's a physical stamina and energy. thing that you might want to look at and say, okay, if I feel like I'm switching away from projects too much, not getting enough time with these projects, let me look at these other

sources of my energy. And then finally, of course, there's just a basic discipline question. Have you fully embraced the idea of being intentional about your time, time blocking when you work, shutting down when you're done, getting after the things you need to get after? This is just a discipline issue. Long time listeners, no, I'm a believer in Jocka Willink's Discipline is freedom concept that actually having more discipline in your life makes your life more free, gives you more options. It can sound paradoxical, but it's not. So there might be an underlying discipline thing, and of course this needs to be addressed more fundamentally. Do I want to take control of my life, take control of my time, focus my life towards the things that matter that gives me resilience, that gives me meaning that's useful to the world or not?

And maybe you haven't yet actually sufficiently tackle that underlying question. So those are three different things to think about if the short-term heuristic of stop working on a project when you feel like you need to stop working on a project seems like it's actually not working out for you. My next question comes from Abby. Abby wants to know what is the deep life way of getting back on track and staying on track. In this pandemic year, thanks to your books and podcast, I have developed the habit of weekly planning, daily time blocking, and deep work sessions with clear intentions. and now it feels odd if I don't time block a working day. However, the last couple of weeks, I feel my productivity is in a slump for some reasons. I am missing time blocked events, not able to focus on important but non-urgent task,

and there is an in general feeling of laziness. I now consider these off days as something that happens to some of us and I need to just get back on track with focusing and the bigger picture. Well, Abby, we have seasonality in our work. You might just be going through a summer lull here. Maybe it's time to back off a little bit, take things easy for a few weeks, regain some of the energy that was exerted to build a structured life, especially during the pandemic. The three things I talked about in my answer to the last question are relevant here as well. So if you feel that this is more than just a seasonality thing that you need a couple weeks lighter before you get back to your normal type of work, look at those three things.

You have your physical constitution, what's happening with your health and energy. you have the spring cleaning on what you were doing in work question. Again, if your mind is not on board with what you're spending time on, it's very difficult to generate motivation. And then finally, there's that fundamental discipline question. I don't think the fundamental discipline question is your issue. It looks like you went through that transformation already during the pandemic. So it's probably one of those other two things.

Physical constitution or the need to do spring cleaning. But honestly, I think the real issue here is probably you've burned a lot of energy making this transition. and it's summer. So I would try that first. Go to maintenance mode for a few weeks. Get done to things that need to get done. Secretly move your job into a part-time job without people knowing it.

Because again, if you're very organized, you can get away with that. Put a halt on bigger optional projects. Keep things simple. Stop work in the early afternoon. Take days off. Regain your energy. Maybe focus more on the deep life aspects

that aren't craft. Working on contemplation, working on Constitution, working in particular on community, read good books in the woods, volunteer for things, spend more times with your friends, spend more times outside, and then see if that gives you back your mojo after a few weeks. Now let me get back and to ramp you back up the energy. But again, if that is not enough on its own, look at Constitution, hey, what's going on else in my life that's affecting my energy?

And look, of course, at this question of what is actually on my plate and maybe I need to do some cleaning here. Purple Yam asks, what is your top piece of parenting advice? Well, I don't know that I'm an expert on this. I mean, I have a whole mess of kids, but I don't know if I'm doing well. So maybe we need to see how they turn out before anyone take seriously advice I have to give. I will mention one thing that I often come back to because I think it's relevant to the grown-up advice that I give on this show quite a bit. It's something I really believe in. and that is when it comes to shaping your kids' values,

how they approach things in life, etc., you've got to demonstrate it. You have to have your act together. Your kids will see this, your kids will internalize this. It's the absolute best way to give a lesson about these various approaches to life is to actually demonstrate in your own life what it looks like to live in a given way

and what the benefits are. You're worried that when your kids become teenagers, they're going to become obsessed with their phones? Well, don't be on your phone all the time. Let them see in you an option in which you use the phone FOIA method. Your phone is in the foyer. You go to it when you need it. It's not a default companion. You want to encourage the life of the mind.

Live the life of the mind. Read interesting things. Talk about the interesting things you're reading. Give time to ideas. Give time to appreciating culture and intellect. Let them actually see that. If you want health to be something to take seriously, get after your own health. Let them see it be something that you prioritize and something that they find pride in.

They see that you find pride in. If you want them to be resilient, let them see how you deal with the hard parts of life. Yeah, this is hard. Here's how I'm getting through it. Let them see that there are things in your life that you value beyond just here is a good accomplishment. Here is a material advantage. Here is something that is just pure enjoyable, that there's things you come back to as a foundation in your life that gets you through the thick and thin. Let them see you be committed to community. Connections to other people,

sacrificing on behalf of others. If you want to instill morality, be moral. You don't want your kids to curse. Don't curse. This is really, I think, and we'll see how this bears out. This is the biggest lever you have over how your kids develop, and most of this you actually have no influence on. But in terms of what you can influence, where they can see in your lived experience different approaches to life that are clearly positive, they're much more likely to integrate those similar positive approaches in their life. It's much more important than the advice you give them. It's much more important than the rules you put in place to try to have them avoid the opposite.

Be the change you want to see in the household. And, well, I should just throw in, don't give preteen smartphones. It's that last piece of advice. That's why if I ever set foot on a middle school, I might not make it out alive. does not make me popular among the 12 to 14 year old set. All right, let's do one last question here before wrapping up the show. This final question comes from Roz. Ross says, I'd really like to hear your thoughts on something.

I love your refreshing opinion about not following your dreams because I feel like it has been so drummed into us over the years to follow your dreams. When deep down, I instinctively felt that it isn't practical or helpful advice. I feel that now there is so much emphasis on, quote, expressing yourself, unquote, that people feel that it is. is all that matters. It's a personal bug of mine. It seems like every profession is all about expressing yourself. Chefs on TV programs, snowboarders, dog groomers. Perhaps I'm not phrasing it right, but hopefully you get the idea. I just worry about younger kids. I'm 39, getting so much

wishy-washy advice about expressing themselves and following their dreams that they will be set up for disappointment and wonder if you have any thoughts on that. Well, Roz, I appreciate this question, in part because it allows me to to act crumudgeonly and talk about kids these days. I should have a segment name for these type of answers where I get to be crumagently.

How about Cal's crumagine corner? I need some theme music for this. All right, so welcome the Cowl's Crumagine Corner where I will now talk about kids these days and their dreams and their obsession with expressing themselves. All right, so in doing this answer, Roz, let me pull apart two different issues

you bring up. follow your dreams and the primacy of self-expression. These are related, but they're not completely overlapping. So when you talk about my refreshing take on quote unquote follow your dreams, I think you're referring to my 2012 book, So Good They Can Ignore You, where I argue that follow your passion is bad advice. The basic idea there is not that passion is bad,

but that the advice to follow your passion oversimplifies how people end up with passion and their work. It emphasizes you're born to do one thing so what matters is having to courage to match your job to this thing you're born to do. And if you do, you'll have passion. If you don't, you won't. My argument is that's not

usually how it works. Passion is cultivated. So if we just tell people find your dream job and you'll be happy, they're never actually going to get to the work of transforming a promising job into a dream job, which is how in most cases it actually happened. So, follow the goal.

of ending up passion about your work is good advice. Shortening that to follow your passion can be bad advice because it will knock people off the path they need to be on to actually get towards passion. Now let's shift over to this related but not quite the same issue of the current culture's emphasis, especially in both the millennials and in Gen Z, this emphasis on expressing yourself, being true to yourself. This has a real primacy in our cultures. As I've talked about before, we see this a lot in.

kid-related movies. It's a frequent plot line in sort of the standard Disney movie now, whereas these movies used to be based off of sort of the classic Youngian heroes journey type mythologies of you go and sort of make these sacrifices on behalf of others and in doing so move yourself to a greater or more enlightened being or find real meaning through to commitment or sacrifice. A lot of these movies have shifted from those type of plot lines to play. plot lines of the main issue is you weren't being true to yourself. Once the main character has the courage to be true to their self, then good things happen. So they become less about taking on the burden of the hero's journey and more about a heroic commitment to self-expression against a culture that is trying to impede your self-expression. So yes, I do think this is a major emphasis of our culture. I'm seeing this issue discussed more and more in modern thinking

and writing. There's actually two books out right now that are both written by philosophical types that are my age that are reflecting on these issues. And they're both quoting the same otherwise not really well-known philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman, who had this term called Liquid Modernity. There's two books in a row I've encountered in which the authors who were in their late 30s or early 40s like me are quoting Bauman's liquid modernity to help get at this question of self-reflection, self-expression, and its issues. So the one book that gets into this that just came out is Pete Davis's book Dedicated, which has the subtitle, The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing.

I'm actually about halfway through that book right now. I'm finding it interesting. Pete lives in Virginia, so maybe I'll try to get him. He doesn't know this yet, but maybe I'll try to convince him to come in the studio. When I get back from my vacation, we can get into it. But he really leans on liquid modernity as an organizing philosophical principle. The other place I've seen this term used recently is Michael Brendan Doherty's new book, My Father Left Me, Ireland, an American son's search for home. So this is a memoir, and I haven't read this yet, but I've heard an interview with Doherty

where he's also using or invoking liquid modernity to understand his generation. So he's my age as well. So these are people, these are early millennials who are now, so we're the oldest millennial sort of reflecting back on these changes that began with us, but continue with the next generation, Generation Z as well. And Liquid Modernity, the core idea here is that one of the programs of modernity is that a lot of these structuring organizations and traditions and cultural institutions by which we structure our lives and our identities and our actions, the program of modernity melts those down.

leaving the individual to have to form their foundations and structures of meaning basically from scratch. So this is something that Baumann argues that we're kind of continually renegotiating, so it's liquid in the sense that our self-definition and expression and meaning structures are continually being renegotiated and rebuilt. So we're sort of in a liquid form continually reforming ourselves again and again in a way that we, in a pre-modern period, would not have had to because there would have have been culturally prescribed institutions to do that for us. And Balman points out there's real issues with this.

I mean, of course, this is not a new idea. We can go back to Nietzsche. He was really pointing this out that, hey, there's a problem, guys, with, you know, the Enlightenment pushed secularity obviously has advantages, but what's going to happen when you don't have God? You know, so we've thought about these ideas for obviously a long time, but for whatever reason, Balman's getting quoted quite a bit by some of these new writers of my age. And this is getting to the issue of self-expression because I would say self-expression culture is basically an embrace of liquid modernity, saying this is great because finding that right configuration for yourself that somehow resonates with a internal essence, a correctness.

This is from a philosophical perspective often left unspecified. but finding the quote-unquote authentic configuration is the core to happiness. And so the biggest obstacle to happiness, the biggest obstacle is the fact that there might be institutional or cultural forces is that prevents you from getting to that configuration. So we've got to melt down all those institutional cultural forces so that you can now have free flow in your liquid self-identity. Now, the issue that you're pointing out, Roz, which is the same issue that Dowerty points out, the same issue that Davis points out the same issue that Bowman points out

is that self-expression alone is not sufficient for meaning and resilience. If you think about the characters, be the people you know or historically that seem to live the lives of the greatest meaning, the lives that most resonate with us, almost none of it has to do with how they express themselves and almost all of it has to do with their actions.

how they live, the journey that they actually undertake, the sacrifices they're willing to make, that's where meaning seems to be generated. And so a focus simply on self-expression is ultimately going to be hollow and it's going to lead to despair, it's going to lead perhaps to anxiety, it's going to lead to the worries of the existential. So now we have a bit of a problem, right? on the one hand expression denied can be incredibly negative if who you are

your fundamental personality your fundamental identity is not compatible let's say with a very strict cultural structures on how you can behave and how you can do and how you can go in life if you're if you're in a strict conflict with constraining structures

it can be devastating this is one of the big goals of liberalism, and I don't mean this in the American political sense, but more in the philosophical sense, the sort of enlightenment generated liberalism. One of the big ideas, like, oh, okay, we need to knock down, enforced, this sort of enforced structure, because the mismatch between this structure and those for whom this structured way of living in this particular culture, for whom this is a big mismatch is that it's it's not just devastating to that person but it's a denial of the fundamental value of the human I mean all of enlightenment philosophy is really about this underlying fundamental value of the human

which itself is an ancient concept that really was developed fully for the first time probably in the Jewish Torah so this is a big point of liberalism and it gets to the fundamental value of the human The problem with the resulting liquid modernity, and this is Bowman's point, is that you have to get rid of the oppressive enforcement of identity and ways of living, but that alone is not enough to give you a fully-fledged philosophy of living a meaningful life. It is a problem If there's some church that says Here is how you have to act

That's going to cause a lot of problems Getting rid of that church however And just saying good we're done Is not going to leave you with a life In which you're going to be able to probably have resilience and meaning And the key notions that comes up in all these books I'm talking about about the liberal project Is that it's not a totalizing philosophy

It's not a philosophy for how to live good life. It is a philosophical, political approach that gets rid of really bad obstacles to living a good life, but how you live the good life is still going to be up to you and it's going to take some work. This brings us back to the self-expression issue. If you treat the modernist project, a liberalist project of breaking down enforced structure on life, if you treat that as a totalizing philosophy, then the natural consequence is like, yes, we want to, if getting rid of the things that prevents authentic expression is all that matters, then all that matters for happiness is authentic expression. That is a natural follow-up to that belief. And then it leads to issues.

Because guess what? You make some big change. You know, you make the big bold move to get the tattoo and the change the way you do your hairstyle or whatever, you know, whatever. I'm being very flip with these examples, but just to be hypothetical here. Whatever, you make the big changes. Now, like now I'm being really authentic to my expression. And then you say, huh, all right well i mean i'm glad that this option is available to me but it's not enough this by itself is not giving me great meaning or resilience there was some ancillary benefits in the short term people were sort of impressed by my authenticity or happy for me um but what's next and if you're just in liquid modernity then

not only you're just going to try thing after thing after thing and it's it's a it's a road to existential despair so where that leaves us is that although it is very important to get rid of mandatory oppressive structures, that's just clearing the road. You still have to go on the journey. And so, yeah, be true to yourself. That's important. If you're suppressing yourself, it's going to make you unhappy.

But then say what's next. And what's next is where you really begin to get some. interesting results. And this is the whole modern philosophical theological program of crafting a deep life. And it's going to take sacrifice, and it's going to take discipline, and it's going to take time, and it's

absolutely worth doing. And it is going to get you to someplace much richer than if you just stop at, let me just be true to myself. Now am I going to be happy? So I hope that makes sense, Roz. I mean, this is again, Cal's Krimodging Corner. Nothing I'm saying

here is very original. As I just pointed to two books, happened to look at in the last week that we're both talking about the same thing and both citing the same philosopher. So obviously this is an age-old topic that's been debated, but it's good to come back to. I don't like the Disney movie where the entire plot comes back to you're unhappy because the bad people were saying you can't, whatever, be a race car driver. And you say, you know what? Don't tell me what to do. And you decide to become a race car driver. and then you're the best race car driver in the world on day one and everyone lives happily ever after.

There is more to this story of how to live a deep life than overcoming obstacles to self-expression. Don't be held back, sure. Just don't think that the expression by itself is going to be the full story. At some point, this expression has to then be put into the service of action. All right, now that I'm done telling those kids to get off my lawn, I should probably wrap up this week's episode.

Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how to submit your own questions. While there, sign up for my weekly essay newsletter. You won't regret it. We'll be back next week with some more episodes of the Deep Questions Podcast. And until them, as always, stay deep.