Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 13: Where I Work, Convincing Students to Disconnect, and Applying Deep Work to Deep Social Problems | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on where I work (hint: an absurd number of different places), convincing students to disconnect, and applying deep work to deep social problems, among many other topics.I need more audio questions for my habit tune-up mini-episodes. You can submit your audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportI will be sending out a new request for text questions to my mailing list soon. You can sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com.Please consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners consider the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps: * My (many) deep work environments [1:50]  * Law firms are deep work disasters [6:42]   * On the deepness of business development efforts [13:03]  * Deep work for high school teachers [14:17]  * The danger of using random masters degree to "fix" your professional life [17:04]  * On becoming a great thinker (in graduate school) [18:26]  * Question Roulette: coping with mission failure. [20:12] * My book writing toolbox [24:38]  * The myth of the necessity of social media for professional success (rant alert!) [26:56]  * Getting students to disconnect [31:19]  * On social media and democratization movements [34:48] * The right order to teach my books [39:54]  * Moving past repeated failures to minimize technology use [44:48]  * Finding motivation to get things done (sermon alert!) [44:48]  * Deep work on deep social problems [52:37] Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. The show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. I've got a really good batch of questions today. You know, what I often do once I get rolling on my recording is I'll make cuts on the fly so the show does not go too long. But what I'm going to try to do today is be succinct when I can so we can actually get through more because I really like the questions we have ahead of us. Speaking of questions from a logistical standpoint,

I am running low on the audio questions that I use for the habit tune-up mini-episodes. So if you would like to submit an audio question for the show, go to the website speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport, one word. So again, it's speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. And you can record your audio question right from your browser. in terms of the non-audio questions I use for this podcast in general. I have a lot left, but I still will probably send out a survey to my mailing list at Calnewport.com asking for new questions probably next week or the week after just to make

sure that they remain timely. All right. As always, of course, I'm interested in your feedback. You can reach me at Interesting at Calnewport.com. If you want to help spread the word on this podcast, subscribing, that's what Apple uses to rank their podcast. So that's very useful. reviews and ratings are used by potential new listeners who want to know if this podcast is

legit. So both of those things are useful. All right, enough of the administrative details. Let's get started with work questions. Annie asks, where do you do deep work? And is it in the same location every time? If not, what conditions do you recommend for the environment? Well, Annie, I do deep work in multiple different locations. So here in my deep work manner, as I call it in Tacoma Park. I used that name facetiously, but it's semi-accurate as it's the house I was able to buy because of the success of deep work. I have a study. And in that study, on one side, I basically replicated a university-style library.

So I had a long but narrow library table custom built to fit the space. And then I have brass library-style lamps like you would see, like the Library of Congress Reading Room or the New York public library reading room illuminating the table and it's next to my bookcases. I also have in here a big leather chair. Long time readers on my blog know about the big leather chair because it was one of my prized purchases 10 years ago when I first bought my first house. So maybe that was 10 or 8 years ago maybe. And I love seeing that chair to read or work. And so when I'm in my study, I switch between my library table and the big leather chair. There's a fireplace actually near the big leather chair, but I have yet to actually get that up and running. But that's part of my

dream is that on a winter night I could actually be doing work by a fire. That's all part of the image I have. I have a porch as well. So I will work outside on my porch just as frequently as I work inside. Sometimes I need that change of scenery or I need to escape the sound of having multiple young boys running through the house. So those are my main. Those are the main locations. I sometimes use a chair I have up in my bedroom as well. Just for a change of pace, sometimes I'll switch up there as well. The key thing here, Annie, is that A, I think a lot about my environment. It's actually, you know, something I try to optimize for.

And when I was buying a house, I work backwards from what's going to be conducive to deep work. And B, I move through environments quite a bit. Sometimes it's for no other reason that I need a change. And sometimes it's because for a certain type of work, I associate different types of environments for that work, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for arbitrary reasons. Now, as of this fall, I'm adding another deep work environment to my rotation. I have just signed a lease for some office space. It's above my favorite, one of my favorite restaurants here in downtown Tacoma Park. It's called Republic, and it's a couple blocks from my house. And there's office space

above it, and so I have leased a suite of office spaces above the restaurant. I call it my deep work layer. Now, the main reason I did this is I do a lot of podcasting, but I also do a lot of interviews, radio interviews and podcast. And as a professor in a time of coronavirus, I do a lot of online streaming of my lectures. And so I needed a place to do this where I could have, not have to worry about noise and more importantly, not having to have my family worry about trying to be quiet. I don't want them to have that concern. And so now I'm building out a podcast recording studio where I could just go do that in comfort. Also, I got a, from a deep work perspective, worrying some notice from Georgetown. You know, I have an office at Georgetown, which obviously is

another place I could do deep work. But we got a, we got a notice recently because they're building where my office is on Georgetown, on the Georgetown campus is at the north of campus near the hospital. And they're building a new hospital building, essentially right outside my window. We got this noticed that said, oh, there's going to be some contractors in your office temporarily because they're trying to put noise abatement filters onto your windows, essentially because the construction's going to get so loud. They're preemptively hoping to try to cut down some of that noise. So that probably for this fall, my office at Georgetown will not be in the rotation of deep work environments because I don't know if the sound of jackhammers is really going to be conducive to concentration. So I don't know, Annie. I guess I have a lot of different deep work environments, as you might imagine.

The deep work layer I'm excited about, though I know that's not an option that most people have available, but that will be nice. My study, I love my study. Probably going to be losing it. I mean, we're temporarily. Our school's closed through at least February. We're going to probably be homeschooling our kids. We're probably going to use my study.

We're going to transform it into the sort of Newport family schoolhouse. So maybe I'll move some of my French or like the big leather chair over the on my deep work layer, and I continue to love working on my porch. All right, so good question, Annie. Have lots of different locations, shift between them, keep things fresh, prioritize environment, don't take it for granted. Even little things that make an environment a little bit better for concentration may give you big returns and otherwise good luck. All right, C.C. asks, how would deep work work for a big law attorney? As a lowly associate in a large law firm, I'm constantly getting emails from partners about urgent matters.

So, C.C., I've done some work for law firms. And I've talked to a lot of lawyers at a lot of different levels about exactly this issue. And here's what I can say. Big law firms are terrible when it comes to cognitive hygiene. They really are terrible places to work from the perspective of unbroken concentration. Essentially, every major law firm where I've talked to associates or partners, this is an issue. There's this demand of constant accessibility via email from both clients, but even more so from other lawyers, especially more senior lawyers to yourself.

I think the level of network switching that happens in law firms significantly reduces the both the quality and rate at which lawyers are able to produce results. Even though this is one of the most purely cognitive pursuits that there is in the history of cognitive work, they're doing it. Most law firms do it in a way that is terrible. Now, why is this? Well, I think there's two things going on. One, the incentive structure here is warped. If you're at a major law firm, what's the incentive necessarily for getting things done faster? You bill by the hour. I mean, you bill in seven minute increments.

It's not a big deal from a financial perspective. If something you could have gotten done in one hour of concentrated work ends up taking you four hours because you're also answering emails every seven minutes, well, four hours is four times to billing. So what these law firms do, which is completely unsustainable, is they just try to fill their associates time and their partners time to some extent, basically every waking hour and then reduce the number of non-waking hours. So a lot of law partners, I know, especially newly minted equity partners, you know, they're working until 2 a.m. up at 5, just again and again. Because essentially, like,

let's just saturate the system. Who cares if we're efficient or not? In fact, being inefficient is kind of nice because it's going to force you to have to fill out your billables farther than you might have if you were getting your work done more efficiently. So I think that's a big problem. Secondly, it's just a very conservative industry. I mean, partners at big city law firms, this is a very conservative field. I don't mean it in a political sense. I mean it in the sort of true sense of the words.

It's a slow changing old-fashioned type of field. There are the sort of power dynamics in which, you know, the partners say I should expect to get responses to things. and there's this like Navy SEAL buds type mentality of, you know, if you want to sleep, you should have got another job. You know, answer my message. I did the work to get where I am. You got to do the work now to get there.

There's just sort of that mentality there in Big Law. So to be honest, C.C., I know this is not a great answer because instead of giving you advice, I'm telling you that your industry has a problem. But I will give a general picture observation. I think there's a huge opportunity here. If you were a law firm, an upstart law firm, actually respected people's cognitive life. You found the way where you said, what we respect is your

ability to actually focus without distraction and produce really, really, really good decisions, really, really good briefs, really, really good strategy. You're not going to be constantly distracted, and we're going to keep your hours reasonable. You would have, you know, Yale and Harvard and Berkeley law grads beating a path to your door. And yeah, okay, you can't have them bill until 2 a.m. But they would be so good, you could bill much higher. I think it's a strategy. that I'm surprised isn't being more widely deployed. I will give you one last example of what you could get out of this approach in law. And that would be the example of Raymond Kethledge.

So he's on the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. I believe he's in the Sixth Circuit. So that's up there in like Michigan, Ohio, etc. And Kethledge, I write about this in digital minimalism. He's very well respected. Now, I know a couple federal lawyers here in D.C. who have argued in his court and said, yeah, he's a very sharp guy, and people really respect his opinions. And he's famous, among other things, for actually insisting on writing drafts,

the first drafts of his opinions, as opposed to having his clerks do it. Well, it turns out, as I wrote about in digital minimalism, his strategy is he has a barn. He owns a barn on his property with no internet. And he goes out there to actually do any of his serious work, like writing briefs, right? I'm trying to get to or writing opinions. He goes out to to this barn where there's no internet, there's no distractions. All he can do is concentrate without interruption. And as I report, he says in an interview, going into that barn, it's like raising my IQ a non-trivial number of points.

Like the Raymond Kethledge example shows you, hey, if you actually take these top legal minds and let them actually work in a cognitively appropriate environment, you produce really, really good outputs, the type of stuff that gives you a good reputation, the type of stuff that impresses people. So I think more law firms should adopt that Catholic model of like, let's let minds think. I don't want to pay $170,000 starting salary

to an associate that can't go four minutes without having to check an email. You know, it's like drafting in baseball, someone with a killer fastball, but you're making them wear like a restrictive shirt that's taking five MPH off their Vile. And what's the point? Why get the guy with the 97 mile power fastball

if you make them wear a uniform that knocks it down to 92 just because it's a little bit more convenient and you don't want to bother with buying the new uniform? So all right, these metaphors are getting a little bit specific to the baseball season here. But, C, see, I think you take my point. This is a rant that I've done before.

There is a lot of room in law to improve. They have to think about how human brains actually function. They have to get out of this conservative mindset of just, you know, everyone, it was hard for me, it should be hard for you. And I think a lot more people would be a lot more happy. Okay, I think we can all agree that I am now failing at the goal I declared earlier of trying to go a little bit faster so we can get in more questions into the episode.

So let's see if we can compensate now and speed things up. Casey asks, if you are an artist, are tasks outside your craft such as marketing, consider deep work, is the business side just as important to getting noticed as your craft? I mean, roughly speaking, Casey, I would say no and yes. In other words, there is a lot of business activities involved in art that is not, strictly speaking, deep work. That is, it's not necessarily highly skilled activity or activity that benefits from lack of distractions, but it's really important. You have to do the business side if you are going to succeed as an artist. So my main point being here, sometimes people fall into the trap of thinking that what I are

is that deep work is good and shallow work is bad. But that's not true. I mean, shallow work is what keeps the lights on. Shallow work is what keeps the insurance paid. Shallow work is what, you know, allows your customers to have a system in place where they can pay you. Absolutely crucial. You want to be organized about it. You want to attack it with, you know, systematic efficiency, etc. But it's really important. So it's not like shallow work is bad and deep work is good. They're both important. You have to do both. The ratio of deep to shallow depends on the job. So both are important, but just don't mix the two together. All right, CJ asks, what does deep work look like for a high school teacher?

Well, CJ, I've worked with multiple different K through 12 teachers on these issues, and I will say that that job teaching in the K to 12 system probably has one of the highest deep work demands of any jobs in our country, similar to like surgery or, an ER doctor. Because almost everything you do as a teacher is deep work. Teaching is deep work. 100%. I mean, the concentration required to clearly and effectively deliver information to a crowd, 100% deep work.

Lesson planning. Deep work. Working one-on-one with a student, even just interacting with the student. What's going on here? Well, I'm trying to understand what the student needs. Where are the challenges she's having? how do I give the right solution here? That's incredibly deep work as well.

So you're basically doing deep work in like 80% of your day when you're a teacher, which is why a particular point of annoyance for me is the degree to which that's not respected by the schools. And I think this is personified by the growing email demands on teachers, this casual declaration that, yeah, you need to answer your parents' emails. We need to offer them that you're going to respond within, you know, 12 hours or whatever. And so now you're taking a job in which you're asking someone to do deep work almost all day and say we're going to add a huge load of shallow work on top of it, which makes it a job that requires a second shift and is incredibly cognitively demanding.

I mean, if you look to doctors, you know, they figure this out. Like, no, look, I'm sure it would be convenient for my patients if everyone could just email me whenever, but that's not going to work out. I need to focus on what I'm doing, the case in front of me. I need to focus on actually doing medicine. And so, you know, a lot of doctor's offices, you can't directly email the doctor. They've also figured out that what they're doing is really cognitively demanding, so they're going to pay them a lot of money.

You know, teachers don't have any of these protections. They get all these shallow work demands thrown on them. They don't get either like financial or organizational respect for the depth required in their job. So I think it's a big problem. So, CJ, you're doing lots of deep work as a high school teacher. You should give yourself credit for that. And you should recognize the difficulty of what you're trying to do and feel less guilty about not being able to maybe be as fast to get on with the sort of shallow stuff

that most people spend most of their days with. You're basically a surgeon who's being demanded to also answer 100 emails a day. It's almost untenable. So, you know, you have my empathy and respect there. All right. Tim asks, I want to get out of the digital marketing industry. and move to a field that rewards depth, such as psychology research or writing or podcasting, etc. Do you think going back and getting a master's in psychology is the best route, or is there a

different route you would suggest? Tim, randomly getting master's degrees is not an effective career capital acquisition strategy. I feel like I say this maybe every other episode. The only condition in which you should be going to get a graduate degree is when there is a specific position you want that you want to do, that you know about, that you think would be very good for you, that requires the specific degree you're going back and getting training for. Never go get a graduate degree on spec. Right. That's how the graduate school will stay in business, but it's also how you lose both money

and years of your life that could be more effectively spent. So, Tim, you need to get more specific in your thinking. I think it's fine to start thinking about taking to career, capital you've built in digital marketing and using it, deploying it in another field where you can still get credit for it, but it has more of the traits that you're looking for. But be very specific about what you want to do. Do not go off to gather more skills until you have clear evidence that those skills will be rewarded. All right. Let's do one last work question here. Anne asks, when starting a PhD,

what can I actively do to become a great thinker and find serendipity? Well, Anne, you have to get to the cutting edge of your field. All major academic breakthroughs tend to happen in the adjacent possible that exist right beyond the cutting edge where you can begin to find novel combinations of existing cutting edge skills. The only way to get to the cutting edge

is to actually do the work, and the relevant work in academia is, for the most part, reading. You have to read. read the top research, understand the foundations, and then start building up to what the cutting edge research is in your field. And you have to understand what you're reading. So if you can teach a seminar, so you're forced to actually teach the research to someone else, that helps. You can sign up to give talks in your research group. That helps. You can just write your own summaries. So you have to put the work in your own words, whatever it takes. But read, read, read, read, read. That's 100% going to be

what's going to put you ahead in your PhD program is that you get to the cutting edge of what top people are doing and what's happening in their top papers. And I'll tell you, it's almost like a switch flicking. You're in your first couple years of your program. Like, I don't have any original ideas. How am I going to ever write a dissertation? How do these people do it? I don't understand it. And then one day you'll have read enough that you have made it to the cutting edge. And suddenly you're going to be looking over that hillside into the sea of the adjacent possible beyond. And you begin to see those combinations. You begin to have those ideas. Things begin to click. And it's like a whole different experience. So the faster you read, the harder you read, the quicker you will get there.

All right, I think we made up some ground there with those last few questions. So before we move on the technology, let's do a quick round of question roulette. So I will now load up a randomly selected question I have not seen before and try to answer it without any preparation. All right, so I'm going over to my browser here. Move my microphone. All right, this question is from Alex, see what we got here. And so good they can't ignore you, you talk about building career capital, getting great at what you're good at, then applying that to your mission. However, what does someone do if they find themselves 10 years in having built a great deal

of career capital but don't have a mission or had a mission but are becoming disillusioned with it? If your career capital is not specialized enough to immediately show you the next place to go, how do you go about trying to find that mission from scratch? All right, that's actually, that fits kind of well with the question we just had before. So, you know, thanks for that, Alex. Well, first of all, I would say missions, as I talk about it's so good they can't ignore you. Missions are not a necessary precondition for career satisfaction.

They were listed as one of the strategies, one of the strategies by which people build careers they have passionate about. So I would first start with that caveat, Alex, that you don't necessarily need a mission to love what you're doing. some fields are not really well suited to missions, right? It's just not the nature of the field. If you're an academic, then missions could be great because you could have some particular endeavor that is going to change the world that you've dedicated your life to, and academia has a mechanism for that. You know, but if on the other hand, you are, you know, you're running your own business and you're a unionized, let's say, electrician, you know, on which you can build a really satisfying, very successful business. But that's not really.

really the setting in which what you're looking for is some sort of world-changing mission in the way you might have if you're a virologist, like I talked about, it's so good that can't ignore you. So I'd give you that precondition first. You don't necessarily have to have a mission. The traits that make a great career trait, consistently speaking, tend to be things like autonomy, like connection to other people, like impact or the sense that you're doing something that's useful to the world. And you can have those in a lot of different fields. You don't necessarily have to have a world-changing mission to reap those benefits.

Now, if you really like that idea, though, if your line of work, and you didn't really clarify what that was, so I'm just guessing here, but if your line of work makes it possible, makes it possible to potentially have some sort of mission, like my whole life is built around doing this professional goal that could be a real source of satisfaction, then I would go back to the advice I gave to Anne, and that I really outlined in that chapter of So Good They Can't Ignore you, missions are found at the cutting edge. You get to the cutting edge and in the adjacent possible beyond, it's in the combinations of cutting edge ideas, tools, and ideas that you find the breakthroughs.

And breakthroughs are on which you can build tractable, impactful missions. So that's the other caveat I would give. Building career capital by itself does not necessarily mean you're at the cutting edge. The get to the cutting edge is a very specific endeavor. In my field, I want to figure out what the very best people are doing. I want to figure out what people at the bleeding edge of innovation in my field. What is that? I want to be up the speed on that.

Be really up there at the cutting edge and then aggressively looking for the new recombination. So it's possible that if you're in one of those fields, you're good at what you do or you build up a lot of different skills and you do what you do really well and it's respected and you have a good practice, but you're not at the cutting edge, right? So maybe you're the solo practitioner doctor who is a great doctor and has built up a really good practice because people like you and you're good and you give people good diagnoses and you run a tight ship in your office. but if you're looking for a medical mission around which to build your life,

you would need to do something more than that. You would have to find a particular direction within the medicine you practice and get to the cutting edge. And then once there, you might say, oh, now there's room for innovation. And it could be the cutting edge of different approaches to running a practice or cutting edge on particular types of technology or cutting edge on particular types of treatment modalities,

like maybe you really study hard about functional medicine and it completely changes the way you run your practice, etc. So Alex, I think that's a good question, rule that question, and that is the advice I'd give you. Make sure a mission is really reasonable in your field. And if so, separate career capital acquisition from the more narrow goal of getting to the cutting edge. All right, let's move on now to some technology question.

Dan asks, what tools, whether software or physical, do you use when writing books? Well, I collect a lot of ideas and links and notes in Evernote. So I will have an Evernote notebook for the book. That becomes a dumping ground. I might gather maybe one to 200 Evernote notes during the process of working on a book, especially in the early stage where I'm still brainstorming. That's a great place for me.

I throw in ideas like maybe I want to structure the chapters this way. Or maybe if I use this example might be useful for the book. Once I actually start writing, I write in Microsoft Word. I tend to start a chapter with an annotated outline in a word document where I'll reference various notes and Evernote or various articles I found. I'll reference those in the annotated outline along with just sort of expository text about what I want in that section. And then as I write a section, I replace the annotated outline with the actual section. So by the time I'm done with the chapter, the annotated outline's gone. and what's left is the chapter.

Within my file system on my Mac, I'll have a dedicated folder for the book that's synchronized with a Dropbox accounts as well, so everything is backed up automatically all the time and I can access everything from every computer. In addition to storing the word files in which I write each chapter, I tend to put PDFs of articles,

so like academic articles or articles from magazines or newspaper that I'm using as research, I tend to actually store those as PDFs in dedicated direct, as opposed to in Evernote. So I could do it in Evernote. You can attach files.

It's what I should do going forward. You can attach files to Evernote notes along with descriptions. But for whatever reason, I'm in the habit of I'll have these named directories for different types of research. And then I'll fill them with named PDFs. And then I'll reference those like in my annotated, you know, bibliography. Like look in the Sophie Leroy folder paper number seven is what I'm talking about here. So a pretty simple setup. Evernote, Microsoft Word,

directories full of PDFs, everything not an Evernote backed up on Dropbox. Emma asks, Is social media necessary for career success? Well, Emma, in my experience, usually it's not. There's some fields where it is, but I think those are actually more rare than we think. We tend to overestimate how important it is

to have a big social media presence. to succeed in our career. This is true even in fields where it's just widely assumed that you do. I have a friend, for example, who's a pretty well-known comedian, and he was telling me that he was convinced Twitter must be crucial for comedy because all the comedians have these big Twitter followings and are always tweeting about their shows. But he said, I went back and did a post-mortem on my career,

and every break I've ever had, you know, it came from people seeing my show and saying, yeah, that's good. We want to hire you for this. Or we want to write for the show or whatever it is. He's like, I can't actually think of a single good thing that came out of tweets, like an opportunity, for example, that came out of tweets. So that was interesting to hear. He says mainly comedian Twitter is just them yelling about come see my show,

come see my show. And that's an example of a field where it's just widely assumed that, of course, you need Twitter here. So for other less audience-focused fields, the demand for social media might be less than you think. Not everyone agrees with me on this. I mean, I know this from personal experience. In 2016, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times

that was titled, quit social media, your career might depend on it, and where I made exactly this argument. So let me read to you here a core line from that op-ed. I think this behavior is misguided. The behavior here is using a lot of, of social media early in your career. In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that

are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable. Any 16-year-old with a smartphone can invent a hashtag or repost a viral article. The idea that if you engage in enough of this low-value activity, it will somehow add up to something of high value in your career is the same dubious alchemy that forms the core of most snake oil and flim-flam in business. So I published that in 2016, and the world blew up. This was back when people still liked social media. And so they were very mad that I was saying bad things about social media. The New York Times the next week ran a counter op-ed.

They actually solicited an opt-ed from the social media manager of Monster.com specifically to refute my op-ed because they got such bad feedback. People were so incensed that I would say that social media is not really that important for your career. that they actually had to run a counter op-ed. And I got to say, it's not like there wasn't more important news going on in the world at that time that they could have used the op-ed space for. Literally, my op-ed came out on, I believe it was November 16th.

It was the, it came out in the week in review. It was the Sunday after the 2016 presidential election. So there's a few things else going on in the world. you know, like the fate of the Republic or something that required probably more attention than some professors saying social media was not good. But people were so invested in social media back then that they said, this can't stand. And I got accused of a lot of things and people are pretty mad at me. But you know what, Emma, I still stand by that. I still stand by it, right? I mean, this is basic queer capital theory. If you're not doing something that's rare

and valuable by posting on social media, then it's not going to generate that much value. And I know we don't want this to be true. Young people don't want this to be true. because it's easy and fun to be on social media and posting and doing Instagram and doing Twitter. It's controllable. It's a hack. It's something that you can do that doesn't require much energy. You don't have to train. There's no competition. It's not like you had to earn a spot on Twitter before you're allowed to use it. It's just something you can do and it's kind of interesting. So we all want that to be really important. But look, in the end, what can you do that other people can't do. The more rare and valuable of the thing you can do, the more we will want you.

And this holds regardless of how many Instagram followers you have. All right. Jell asks, how do I motivate my students to really put their phone away while studying? Now, Jell, I assume you mean beyond the obvious superior solution of just buying people copies of my books, because that's the solution I give to most people's problems by my books. and all will be solved. Now, assuming that that has not been enough, Jill, I think what helps when talking with students is getting serious about how the brain works.

In particular, emphasizing the points about network switching costs. So if you're a student, you are basically a cognitive athlete. Your job is to use your brain to do things that are ultimately valuable, to intake and synthesize information and then use these sort structures to produce new information that has some value to the world. So your job as an athlete is to get in shape and get really good at the basic skills of your sport.

Your job as a student is to get your brain in shape and get really good at taking an information, processing it, and using as a foundation for producing new information. Okay, once you've established that foundation, the question is, what happens if you're using your phone simultaneously with doing that work? And we know from network switching theory that lots of really bad things happen. our brains are not good at switching targets of attention. I mean, we can do it, but it takes a little while. In the new book I have coming out in March, in the chapter I get deep into the research about why cultures of constant email is bad, I went deep into this research literature.

I mean, I talked to the main researchers in this field, and I read basically every relevant paper. And I can tell you, crystal clear, switching your attention from one thing to another thing to another thing is not how our brains operate. It takes them a while to switch their target of attention. So if you go to your phone, then back to your work, then back to your phone, then back to your work.

You're doing that really quick. It never fully switches. It starts to switch over to your phone, and then it starts to switch back to the paper you're writing, then it starts to switch to something else on your phone. And all these switches are done in an incomplete status, and they all jumbled together. And as a result, your brain is basically in cognitive gridlock.

So its ability to learn things or to produce new information is significantly reduced. Significantly reduced. It really is the equivalent of if you're an athlete. Again, I'm going to the gym because I have to be really strong. But I'm drinking whiskey while I'm in the gym. It's the same thing. It's actually quite similar in its negative effects. It's going to make it really difficult to do what you're trying to do.

It's a huge self-imposed hurdle. So I think that's helpful. Jell. Talk about this. Like if the, switching itself is absolutely catastrophic to your brain's ability to function. You're the athlete that's, you know, drinking whiskey and smoking in the gym. It's a very irresponsible way to work.

And more importantly, it's going to make everything take much longer. And the quality of what you produce is going to be much worse. And that's not good. So, yeah, maybe it's fun in the moment that you can be looking at Twitter while you study, but you're going to have to be up to 4 a.m. because you're operating at a fraction of your capacity. So that's the way I would come at it, jail. I'd come at it from a functionalist perspective.

A lot of people don't realize the cognitive cost of network switching. So make that clear for your students. And again, if that doesn't work, I can't emphasize enough. Buying my books is always a solution to every problem. Okay, Dragos asks, is social media useful in unstable democracies? Well, Dragos, I could give you a Twitter answer, by which I mean there's an obvious yes or no answer, and my answer is the best one, and the other answer is the wrong.

one and you are bad if you believe the wrong answer and righteous if you believe the right answer and don't think about it anymore. But I don't like Twitter answers. You know, I think if you want to really have a point of view on a complicated subject, then you actually have to do the work. And what I've been recommended in this podcast is actually doing Socratic analysis where, you know, take a really good book about one point of view on the topic and then take another good book that gives you another point of view on the topic and then let those two things clash together in your brain. Because I'll tell you, the roots run deep.

The intellectual roots run deep when you do these type of dialectical clashes in your brain. And then you're going to be able to understand a topic from a real place of confidence. And your perspective on the topic is going to be a perspective that you hold with confidence. And when you hold a perspective with confidence, you can actually do some good with it. So why don't we try that out here for this question? Is social media useful and unstable democracies? I'm going to give you two book recommendations. They're both good.

They're both written by really, really good thinkers on tech. They're going to give you two different answers. And when you read both those books, you're going to come away really knowing what you're about on this topic. And I think you'll find it much more useful than just having a Twitter answer. So what are these two books? Well, first, I would say read The Net Delusion by Yvini Morozov. So Morozov, he actually comes from former Soviet bloc country. he is brilliant and acerbic.

I think we even share, or for a while we shared an editor, though I have never actually met Morozov, but he's brilliant and acerbic and quite skeptical about the idea that these tools coming out of Northern California are going to be enough to destabilize the terror of authoritarianism that was basically in the air around him in his childhood, right? He's speaking from firsthand experience. So the net delusion, let me read a quote.

This is from the jacket copy, just to give you a sense what this book is about. The revolution will be twittered, declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after a protest erupted in Iran. But as journalist and social commentator, Eugenei Moresov argues in the net delusion, the internet is a tool that both revolutionaries and authoritarian governments can use. For all the talk in the West about the power of the internet to democratize society's regimes and Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. Social media sites have been used there to entrench dictators and threaten dissidents, making it harder, not easier to promote democracy.

Right? So Morozov has a very skeptical view. He said, look, these tools can be used just as much as by the dictators as they are by the those looking to democratize. They probably cause more harm than good. He wrote this book. This was sort of contemporaneous with the Arab Spring where we first started really thinking about this idea of.

of social media being a democratizing force. There's also a good New Yorker essay that Malcolm Gladwell wrote around that time that quoted and elaborated on Morisov's book. All right, that's one side. But let's look on the other side. So there's another sort of techno critic who I really admire. Her name is Zaynep T-Nep T-E-K-C-I. That last name is spelled T-U-F-E-K-C-I.

She's a professor, but a really smart thinker. on a lot of these issues. And she wrote a book, it's slightly more recent, but she wrote a book called Twitter and tear gas. Now, here is a blurb about this book from Carlos Lazada, the Washington Post critic

that actually won the Pulitzer last year. All right. So Carlos says, Tufecki's personal experience in the squares and streets melded with her scholarly insights on technology and communication platforms and makes this such an unusual

and illuminating work. Tufecki is much more pro, but not in a, mindlessly on utopian way. It's a very subtle take, but she's much more positive about the role of social media tools in things like protest movements

or democratization movements. Both brilliant thinkers, both very respected thinkers, both thinkers that I admire. So Dragos, read both those books. Read both those books. Let them clash in your mind. You will come away from that

with deep roots in your understanding of this issue. And whatever conclusion you come to, even if tentative, after going through this Socratic dialectical process, it will be a conclusion that you are able to hold with much more actionable confidence than 99% of what we get from Twitter dunking. All right, so let's move on now to questions about the deep life. Nathan asks, if you taught a class on your books, in what order would you teach them? And would you leave any out? Yeah, Nathan, I think it would depend on the audience for the class. So if you were teaching a class for professionals,

I don't know that I would teach my student books, right? It's probably less relevant to professionals. I would almost certainly link together So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work as those books are actually conceived as a response to each other. So So Good They Can't Ignore You explains how do people end up really passionate about their work. And the answer has a lot to do with building up rare and valuable skills and deep work

in some sense is an answer to the question of what's the best way to build up those rare and valuable skills. So those are a good companion. Digital minimalism, I think, could come right after that. It's not really about the world of work. So if your audience is professionals, it's not directly about the world of work.

It's about your relationship to technology outside of work. But it really gets into, to, for example, why we have such a hard time looking at our screens in a way that I didn't do in deep work. I just stipulated it. So I think there's really interesting information, even for the professional audience from digital minimalism, but you need to pair so good with deep work together. For high school students, probably how to become a high school superstar, that's the book to read, especially if you're talking about students that are worried or stressed out about college admissions. For college students, I would read how to win at college before straight-A student,

how to win at college is a mindset setter, right? It's the mindset of the student who's going to college and looking to win. It's the mindset basically of there's good ways and bad ways to do things, and I want to take the time to figure out the good ways. And that's going to make a difference. Don't just approach college randomly. Don't just throw an effort. Don't just say, hey, I hope this works out.

I hope I'm smart. You actually have to think, like how do I actually want to live? That's a key mindset shift, especially for an 18-year-old. That's what How to Win teaches you. That's why you have chapters that might seem trivial, like make your bed. But that's foundational to your mindset, right? You know, that type of advice shifts your mindset to like, oh, should I be making my bed? Why am I making my bed?

You know why? Because I'm taking control of my life. I'm trying to get after it, which means I need structure, I need discipline. That's the mindset on which all success in college beyond. It's going to be built. A lot of teenagers don't have that. And so you got to read how to win at college first. But then straight a student is going to get you the nitty-degree.

that you really need, which is, okay, once you're making your bed, et cetera, et cetera, like once you're in the mindset of, I want to get after it, so let me know what the good way to do things is and what the bad way is to do things. Straight A, we'll then get really into, okay, so here's how you take notes. And here's what you should do with your time as a student, how you should manage it. Okay, here's how you should write a paper. And so that gets into the real details of once you're ready to go, it'll really help you go. the only maybe non-obvious addendum I would make to my reading list order for college students

is I would then add potentially deep work, potentially digital minimalism. They both serve two purposes that I think are important, but largely non-overlapping for college students. So deep work is going to take, there's a thread in straight A about the importance of concentration. Deep work elaborates on that. Now, the reason why I didn't elaborate on the importance of concentration too much in straight-day student is you've got to understand. I wrote that book at a time when students didn't have smartphones.

I wrote that book predominantly at a time when almost no one had a social media account. I mean, when I wrote that book, Google had just left the Stanford.edu domain. I mean, when I started working on that book, if you wanted to Google something, it was like Google. It's an old book. I'm not that old, but it's an old book. I wrote it when I was young. I was 21 years old when I started writing that book. So we didn't have the same problems with concentration back then that we have today. So that's why deep work, I think, is a good addendum because it makes it clear. Hey, focusing is important. Digital minimalism is also going to be useful for the college student because it makes the argument of here's why

you're so distracted. And here's why that's not necessarily the path this going to lead you to the best possible life or the most happiness. If there's a problem with just looking at your phone every day and that you feel it, you probably feel that. This is going to articulate why and show you a better way. So Nathan, my order for college students would be how to win a college, straight-A student, and then in any order you want, deep work in digital minimalism. Dan asks, what words of encouragement can you offer those of us who have attempted digital

minimalism, but repeatedly fallen into old habits and failed. Well, Dan, what I've learned about digital minimalism, or more generally the quest to have a much more healthy relationship with your technology, is that sustainable change must be built from an image of what you want. The way people fail, and most people actually do, Dan, so this is not some unique flaw. that you've come across in your own life. This is very common. Most people fail because they come at digital minimalism from a

perspective of trying to get rid of things they don't like. They think they look at Twitter too much. They think they look at Instagram too much. They're like, I don't want to do that as much. So I'm going to try to cut that out. Good intention, Dan, but it's really hard to succeed with consistently because, you know, one weekend, two weeks in, three weeks in, you're bored.

You don't really know what you're all about. and that phone is beckoning and then you fall back into your old habits. So what I would recommend is if you're having a hard time here, you have to start, as I recommend in the book,

digital minimalism, you have to start by cementing your vision of the life you want. These are the things I value. These are the things I want my life to be about. These are the things I think if I focus on, I will have lasting and resilient satisfaction.

And then you work backwards and say, great, let me now intentionally shape my technological habits in such a way that they best amplify these things I care about and don't get in the way. Those types of changes are much more sustainable because you're focusing on building towards something that's very positive. And that's really motivating and that is really sticky from a habit perspective. I say, yeah, I'm going to keep up with this particular habit of Instagram because I really like this new life I've created and I'm proud of it.

It works much better than saying I'm really down on myself using Instagram. too much because we're willing to be down on ourselves. We're willing to pile on a little bit more if we're already down on ourselves, but we're much less willing to, once we're feeling really good about ourselves, to do things that will put that into jeopardy. So that's my advice there, Dan, focus on the positive. And that's going to take reflection. That's going to take experimentation.

But once you're really locked in about what you care about, what you want to spend your time doing, then work backwards to make those habits fit and those changes will be much more sustainable. All right. Ali asks, the force of procrastination is stronger than the structure of my autopilot schedule, time blocking tactics, monthly goals, etc. Even with no social media and minimal professional admin obligations, I'm finding every opportunity to do something other than follow the plan I set.

What can I do to conquer a deeply entrenched habit of procrastination when all us fails? Well, Ellie, this overlaps, I think, with what we were just talking about with Dan. But let me add this extra element to it. No system or strategy or software or hack or collection of advice by itself can give you motivation. Time block planning does not give you motivation. Getting things done does not give you motivation. A deep understanding and belief that undistracted deep work produces more quality than more distracted type of work is not going to give you motivation. All these systems and hacks and habits, what do they do?

They help you take your existing motivation to do something and get a higher return on it. It focuses your energies. But it's like a law of willpower physics. it doesn't create those energies from scratch. To-do list cannot create energy. It can only help you deploy that energy in a more efficient manner. So I'll leave a question you have here. It's not a question about systems.

It's a question about how do I get energy? How do I get motivation? How do I get on board with what I'm trying to do? And that's a really hard, big question, but I think it's important to recognize that that's a really big, hard question. And that's a question that has to be answered. before any of the other type of stuff we talk about here is going to prove relevant.

So what might help? Well, I think what I talk to about Dan is relevant here as well. We know this from the psychology literature that it's really useful when trying to actually change the direction of how your life is unfolding is to go through the heaven, hell exercise. You identify, okay, how are things going to get worse? if I just keep going the way I'm going.

And make that really clear, and I want a really clear picture of hell. There's a bunch of different psychologists who have tried this in different types of studies. Okay. Now, how could things be better? Imagine, you know, the things that are important to me. And what if I was really prioritizing those

and I was on top of those things? What would my life look like? That's the image of heaven. You want to get that really clear as well. And you have these two competing visions. You have the vision of heaven. You have the vision of hell. that's really motivating, it turns out.

Now you have energy. You're like, you know, I don't want to go towards the hell, and I really am attracted to the heaven, and I can build lasting change on top of that. Now, I say psychologists have looked at this, and they have, and there's literature behind it, but of course, this is also the foundation of all theologies as well, right? I mean, this is essentially in the sort of pre-enlightment days

we're trying to understand human flourishing, and we used mythology back then because we didn't have things like empiricism. think about how much our mythologies are actually built around these notions of there is this underworld that you may be dragged through but you really want to avoid and then there's like the Elysium ideal

that you want to try to get to and your actions make the difference, right? This is at the core of all philosophy and theology going all the way back to the archaic heroic period of the ancient Greeks and all the way through all the modern religions and into more modern philosophies, right? So this is a really effective tool.

It's not something we just discovered. but it's something we have data for. And so that's where I'm going to point your attention out. He's trying to figure out, like, well, here's my hell, and I don't want to go there. And here's my vision of heaven. And man, I really want to be there. Now you're touching on deep, sort of mythic Carl Jung-style archetypes, if we want to use more early 20th century thinking. Again, there's a lot of different psychology and philosophy and theology that all touches on this.

But basically, now you're getting deep. And now you can actually have some lasting change. And now once you know what you're trying to do and you're motivated to get after it, then you can bring in, I'm going to do some time block planning, and I want to do some monthly plans, and I'm going to do full capture, and I'm going to do, you know, capture, configure, control style, time management at a higher level like Cal recommends and all these other types of things. And it's great. It's going to take that energy. It's going to take that will to get after it and it's going to focus it and get you the best returns.

But that's the separation I would make. The question of motivation is a foundational one. It's a deep one, and it's the most important one. And everything that is tactical can only build on top of that foundation. All right. So, Allie, you want to move away from your hell. You want to move towards your heaven. The type of advice we talk about here can help you in that journey,

but you're the one who actually has to start down that path. All right. Let's do one last question. I think after a literally slow start, we made some progress. We got through a lot. So I'm proud of myself as always. so let's do this one last question here. It's from Evan.

What learnings from deep work would you apply to the movement for racial justice going on right now? Well, Evan, I think we can all agree that I probably don't have a lot of specific advice to give about the particular movement happening now because it's not a movement in which people think of me as an expert and rightly so. But I do have some advice more generally to give about the role of things like, deep work and deep thoughts in social movements or large movements in general. As this is something I have done, some studying of. Now, one thing I'm really convinced about is that deep problems, historically speaking, almost always require deep thought as a precondition for their solution.

Now, this is something that worries people sometimes. And I understand why. Let's go through the worry. So some people get concerned. that believing that you need to do some really serious or deep thinking to really get your arms around a problem, that that somehow diminishes the severity of the problem, that somehow if you say, look, this requires some deep thinking, that that means that the problem itself is somehow nuanced.

Or maybe there's good people on both sides or that, you know, this is not an obvious what the right answer is here. And that's not at all true. In fact, I want to argue, if we go back historically, we can see case after case of problems. where there are egregious obstacles. And there is no doubt, especially looking back, there is no doubt on what the right side of the issue is.

And yet, those on the right side still require deep thinking to figure out how are we going to take this egregious obstacle and actually demolish it. Let's get historical here. History is where I'm a little bit more comfortable. Let's get historical here. Let's go back to Cicero. Let's go back to Cicero's or his oration against Catalina.

right, this is back in 63 BC. Lucius Catalina was leading a plot to overthrow the Roman Senate. To basically let's get rid of the republic and allow an emperor, dictator, to rule. And Cicero, I mean, he knew deep in his bones as well as he knew anything else that this was not good. The fall of the republic would not be good. it wasn't a nuanced thing for him. He didn't have to think deeply about what's the right answer here. He knew that in his bones.

But his oration, which is a classic in human rhetorical tour to force, it's like a sort of a classic rhetorical exemplar, man, that took a lot of deep thinking. It's a beautiful oration, incredibly carefully structured. He's taking this instinct that he believes as clearly as anything else in his life that Catalina is wrong, and it took a lot of deep thinking to try to make it clear

why that is true, and we still look back at that oration today. Let's take something equally as obvious. Slavery in the U.S. A black mark on our history. Obviously, an egregious wrong.

Let's think about Abraham Lincoln confronting this egregious long. Look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates. This is, Lincoln now is a public figure who's out there who's making these arguments. He's doing these debates in front of very large audiences against Stephen Douglas. And they're making, they're having these big debates, and this is about the Nebraska Act. But the point is, it's a big debate about trying to stop the expansion of slavery. Now, Lincoln famously said, if slavery is not wrong, then

nothing is wrong. By this point in his moral development, there was nothing that he was more sure about than that slavery was an evil. But it took a lot of deep thinking, to put together his side in the Lincoln-Douglas debate so that he could begin to deconstruct Douglas's argument, to find the chinks in that armor, to lay the moral foundation for what he knew in his bones was absolutely wrong, but it took a lot of work. In fact, it turns out, if you look back at Lincoln's moral development, the thing that made him a national anti-slavery figure, it was actually when he first got elected to Congress, not because being in Congress, put him on a national stage because it didn't. He was there for one term and was not a figure of any import while he was in the Congress. He gave sort of one big speech, the famous spot speech that was a bit of an embarrassment. He was ridiculed for it and he lost his seat. So why did being

in Congress for one term, why was that the foundation for his career as a national anti-slavery advocate? Because he got access to the Library of Congress. And so Lincoln, who was, you know, hoarding the small number of books he could find, you know, when he was growing up in Illinois. Now he had access to one of the big libraries in this country, and he began to read. And it was in this reading, this exhaustive, relentless research he began to do

to understand the origins, the political origins of the slavery issue in America. What really did the Constitution say? What were these earlier compromises built on? Where is the actual, like, political legitimacy here? He went and did the deep thinking. It led to his first breakout speeches like the Cooper Union address, which were considered one of his first really good speeches.

And it led him on the trajectory to Stephen Douglas. And he was able to really hold his own against Stephen Douglas, which is like, you know, the lightweight going up against the heavyweight in the boxing match. He was able to hold his own in these four-hour debates because he had done the work. He had done the thinking. And he was able to just pick apart the moral legitimacy of Douglass. is his argument. Again, if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. He felt it in his bones at that point. But the deep thinking on the issue is what helped him actually act on that. Let's look to

Martin Luther King, right? 1963, Birmingham, right? He's arrested in Birmingham, along with Abernathy and a lot of other people that he was involved with. And he's put in this jail in Birmingham in his terrible conditions, relatively early on in the fight for civil rights. And he's in this jail cell in Birmingham, and one of his supporters gets him a newspaper, an Alabama newspaper where there's this article in it called A Call for Unity. And it was written by eight white clergymen who were making sort of the standard white racist argument of the time about, look, you shouldn't be agitating. There shouldn't be outsiders down here. We have our way of doing things. And we have a court system, whatever, whatever. It was like, it was their big argument.

for like why King and the why King in his organization the related organization shouldn't be down there, they shouldn't be protesting, it's not good. And this really upset King, but he's stuck here in this jail cell. So he starts thinking. He's doing deep work under terrible conditions.

And at first he's writing on scraps of paper that are being smuggled into him by his supporters when they come to visit. And eventually they find a loophole where, okay, he's allowed to have legal pads because of his to take notes for his meetings with his lawyer. So now he can start writing on legal pads and he really works through his thinking

and you get the letter from the Birmingham jail which is foundational for all the civil rights movement to follow. King, of course, knew in his bones that what was happening in the South was wrong. There was no doubt about it. But the time for deep work and deep thinking is what allowed him to actually

articulate that argument in a way that could take reactionary critiques like a call for unity and completely deconstruct them. And it was foundational, foundational for the movement that followed. All right, so let me step back for a second. What I'm arguing here is to say that when you feel affronted by a condition of the world, when you feel drawn instinctually and magnetically to a cause, to then add to that instinct,

I want to think deeply and I want to read deeply and I want to contemplate deeply about this issue. That is not a dismissal of the urgency of the issue. It's actually an affirmation of the urgency. If you really take an issue seriously at some point, you have to think deeply about it because otherwise you're just floating around on the surface and things on the surface can get blown around quite easily.

All right. So let's get back to the question at hand. So what should you do? Well, read hard books, read books that come at the issue from different angles. Let this hard, careful reading collide. You know, we talked about this earlier in this podcast. I've talked about this in other podcasts, but this notion of letting hard ideas collide. That's what lays down the deep roots, the deep intellectual roots,

the deep intellectual roots that Cicero built on, that Lincoln built on, that MLK built on. and allows you to actually grow this sort of intellectual tree on which you can build real understanding, real commitment, real clarity, and real action. So that's what I think you should do is I want to understand this issue. Let me read the best things written about this issue. And let me read the best critiques of these things that have been written about this issue. And let me let those things collide because I want to have roots that I trust. And what happens if you don't do this?

Well, if you don't do this, you might just end up on Twitter. We've talked about this before. Twitter, from an intellectual perspective, is a very shallow world. It's inherent in the medium. I've gone through this Neil Postman critique that I've applied to Twitter, but essentially the conclusion of this critique is the medium is the message, and in this case, the message that the medium of Twitter delivers is that the world is very simple. There's terrible people and great people.

You want to be on the great people's team and you want to dunk on the terrible people. That's all Twitter offers. But that's not enough. You don't have deep intellectual roots. and so you'll eventually just become exhausted or you might get kind of pushed around in the points of view that aren't really congruent

with what you actually believe or with the truth or you just move on. Twitter cannot deliver philosophy. You have to cultivate philosophy and if you feel seriously about an issue you need to cultivate that philosophy. So that's my argument here.

I think deep thinking is how you approach deep problems if you want a sustainable, morally clear and really effective solution. So read hard things, have challenging conversations, and put aside time for just raw thinking, just raw reflection, trying to make sense of what you read, how you feel about it, how it all makes sense.

Resist the urge for easy solutions. It's not enough to just jump on Twitter and join a team and take your marching orders and do some dunking while in line at the store and then feel like you've done your part. If you want to transform your soul, if you want to try to transform the world, you actually have to do the work. You have to do the thinking. It is absolutely worth it.

I've argued this about many parts of the deep life. And I think when it comes to social progress, there's no better example of a place where the power of deep undistracted thinking is really needed. So Evan, thank you for that question. I think it gave me a chance to talk a lot about some more general issues. I've been thinking about a lot about the role of deep thinking in different aspects of life. And I think we'll leave it at that. I think that's as good of a place as any to end.

So, you know, thank you everyone who sent in your questions. I'm going to do my best to do another mini episode a little bit later this week. And then otherwise, I should be back next Monday with the next full-length episode. Feedback or comments can go to interesting at cownewport.com. If you want to contribute an audio question, please go to speakpipe. com slash cal newport i will be soliciting more text-based questions on my mailing list soon so you can sign up there at calnewport.com in the meantime if you haven't already please consider subscribing please consider leaving a rating and a review and until next time as always stay deep