Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 140: LISTENER CALLS: Frustration and the Deep Life

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: Smartphones and moral panics. [3:43]LISTENER CALLS: - Scheduling when you've fallen behind. [12:29] - Squandering autonomy. [18:06] - Hacking habits and the shortcomings of raw discipline. [26:11] - Tenure and valuable skills. [31:38] - Adding more to your plate without it tipping over. [36:24] - Frustration and the Deep Life (and an update on my next book). [42:41]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.

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just for Deep Questions listeners. Go to www.w.org let'sdisco.com slash deep or enter deep at checkout for 30% off your first order. That's let's disco.com slash deep or 30% off your first order. Thank you, Disco. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 140. Quick announcements, we still have a good number of listener calls in our queue, but not a huge number.

So I'm going to put out my call for you to phone in some more. If you go to Calnewport.com slash podcast, you can find a link there where you can record your questions straight from your browser. We have a good show today. I have six calls I'm hoping to get to. I'm actually recording this episode from my second mic. As I mentioned in Monday's episode, which I recorded right before this one. I'm doing a TV appearance today. So I just finished rehearsal.

So my primary mic is very carefully positioned for that. appearance. So I'm now leaning awkwardly over my desk into my secondary mic to try to get some of this episode recorded before I have to go on and do other things. Now before we get into these questions, I thought we would start with a quick deep dive. Let's talk about smartphones and moral panics. A listener just earlier today sent me a clip from Bill Maher's HBO show real time. This was a clip from one of his closing monologues. I think it took place maybe about a month ago. The clip was titled, Our Smartphones Are Turning Us Into A-Holes or something like that, though he actually does the full curse. Now, readers of digital minimalism know that I have some affinity with Mars take on these technologies. I quote his interview with Tristan Harris. Quite extensively, actually, in digital minimalism. This was one of the first big interviews that Tristan did back in 2017 when he was one of the original whistleblowers on the intentional addictiveness engineered in the social media. And Marr gave what I thought was a very good monologue where he was saying, we have to stop thinking about these technology company founders as nerd gods or what have you.

And think about what they really are, which is cigarette pushers and t-shirts. Now, that was an important monologue when he gave it, because as I've talked about on the show before and as I talk about in my book, that was a transition point prior to 2017. There was generally exuberance towards tools like social media. It was still in a Steve Jobs originally emanated glow of high tech and new and options and expression and creativity and connection. And the idea that we should be concerned about it was something that was newly emerging. So Marr was early on that. more generally what I like about Mars approach is that he's one of the few people out there who aligns with me in the sense that my main concern is the impact that these technologies have on the quality of your life. As I discussed in a deep dive last week, most of the criticism coming from, let's say, media or other elite commentators in the recent years has really been focused not on social media's impact on our lives and should we not build our life so much on social media.

Should we perhaps push social media to the periphery of our existence? The critique has been more about you have the wrong information. Let me and my friends decide what the right information is and everything will be okay. It's about bringing companies to heal, not trying to heal our relationship with these devices. So Marr has always been, I think, very good about let's not lose the main thread here, which is looking at this thing makes us miserable, even if you fixed all of the content on there, even if you got rid of all the misinformation, even if you got all the people you don't like off of these platforms, the damage to the quality of our lives would still be there.

And again, this is something I talk about in digital minimalism, because when I was interviewing people for that book, most people's issues had nothing to do with the content they were encountering. It had to do with the footprint that their phone usage had in their life and what was keeping them away from. All right. So we look similarly at these issues. Now we get to his monologue from last month.

He makes a lot of points in this monologue, but there's one I wanted to underscore here, which is where at some point he says, I know, I know, once we start or anyone starts critiquing a modern technology like smartphones, we hear the same response, which is, this is what always happens. It's what we did when radio came along. It's what we did when technology came along. It is a moral panic that demonstrates your colloquial conservative naivete.

Now, I haven't heard this argument as much recently because, again, there's political arguments against social media from all sides of the spectrum. So everyone actually has something invested, it feels like, in being antisocial media. So I don't hear this as much, but it's an important argument that does come up.

It does come up. So what was Mars response to it? Well, he said, it's not the same thing. TV came along, and yes, we watched it a lot more, but as he said,

I didn't use to bring my TV into my bed at night and watch Huckleberry dog until midnight. I liked McAllister, and sons, I didn't watch it eight hours a day. My parents' 27-inch

Zenith was not playing hardcore pornography and so on. He was saying, what is actually happening with the technologies matter? It's not just enough to say this was a technology that we were worried about. As we moved from radio to TV, it was really just a change in degree, but basically the same type of thing we'd had before.

The jump from TV to smartphones, he says, is really a change of kind. It's completely new, and he lists all of these harms that it seems to be causing, which are severe and not found with these other technologies. So I think there's something to that critique to say you can't just generalize technologies and say we're worried about other technologies. This is a technology. We shouldn't be so worried about it. You have to actually take each technology and consider it in isolation and say,

what are the harms here? How big are they? Should we be concerned? Because of course, a course there have been other technological developments historically where we were worried about them and we're right to be worried about them. People worried that teenagers smoking seemed to get super addicted. Their brain couldn't handle it. Maybe teenagers shouldn't smoke. That was right. We didn't say, come on, this is just like rock and roll music or convertible cars or the radio. We're always worried about kids these days. What's wrong if they smoke? No, in this case, we said it's a problem. It's different than rock and roll music. It's different than roller skates. as an aside here, I don't actually know if people ever complained about teenagers and roller skates,

but I don't approve, so I'm just going to assume they did. So the actual kind matters. So you can't go either way. You can't say if it's new, it's bad, but you also can't say because there have been some examples of new technologies where we now accept them, that no new technology is bad. If we apply Plato's Reducto ad absurdum, we can see that this doesn't get us somewhere very good, or if we want to jump forward in philosophical circles and maybe apply a Kantian categorical imperative,

we see that these rules do not universalize, so how could they possibly be a foundation for a techno morality? Can you tell I have been reading a lot of digital ethics recently as part of some new academic work I'm doing? So I think that was a really sharp point. The other point I want to throw into this conversation cites a really good thinker on this topic. Myself.

I wrote an op-ed on this. exact issue, this argument from technophobia for Wired magazine a couple years ago. It was called the myth of technophobia. And what I did is I took some common examples. I used radio. I used a telegraph. I think I used

maybe the telephone. I'm not exactly sure, but I took some common examples that are cited as look at these technologies that we completely accept today. We really worried about them back in time. And I went back and did historical research. And in a lot of these instances, actually, we didn't worry about them that much. It was very

isolated and unusual the critiques. It was eccentric. It was nothing comparable to what we see today with social media where there is widespread general population-wise concern and push back against the technology.

Yes, Thoreau had that one quote about Texas and Maine when he was being grumpy about the telegraph. It's not quite the same thing about what we see with, let's say, teenagers and social media use today. So that's the other thing I want to throw into this argument. Be wary when you see that equivalency about the fundamental assumption that we did get really worried about some of these

now considered benign technologies. It's not always true. So we've got to take each issue as it arise. What problem is this technology causing? How can we assess that? What should we do about it? And I think those are really pertinent questions when it comes today with things such as smartphones, especially when we're thinking about young people. Now, if you want to hear an interesting debate on this, I was involved in. A couple of years ago, I did Brian Coppelman's podcast. You might know Brian Copleman

as the showrunner for billions, the screenwriter behind Rounders. He has a great podcast, very smart guy. And I went down to a studio in Manhattan a couple of years ago to talk digital minimalism.

And we kind of got into this. We got into this argument among others. And, you know, he had good point. I had good point. So it's an interesting smart take if you want to see a bigger discussion on this topic.

But for now, I will say, Bill, once again, I think you and I have some big points of agreements. You just make them with slightly more curse words than I tend to do. All right. And with that, let's take some calls. Hi, Cal. Thank you for advice regarding living life with intention. My name is Brian and I'm a PhD neuroscience student.

And my question is, much of what has talked about in the podcast revolves around normal, usual workflow. of things, of how to schedule and intentionally tackle the actionable items that we have laid out for ourselves, for example, based on quarterly plans. And my question is, how do you plan and how do you execute when you are behind on work and when you have work backed up and when you feel like you have to work every minute to make up for it, which we obviously never do? How do you prioritize and execute under these pressures. Well, it is exactly this situation. We have fallen behind.

There's more work on your plate than you really know how to handle. You have a lot happening and you can't quite get your arms around. It is exactly in these scenarios of overload that being intentional and careful about your time is going to be most important. Yes, there's a little bit of overhead involved, of course, and building your daily time block plan, maybe about five minutes. There's a little bit of overhead involved in creating your weekly plan for the week. This happens once a week. It might take you about 30 minutes. There's some overhead involved once a quarter.

Thinking through your plan for the quarter, this might be a 45-minute, 60-minute walk where you really think this to do and write it down. Yes, there's that little bit of overhead. But as I like to argue, the difference between being very intentional about your time, going from quarterly to weekly to daily time blocks, the difference between that and the list reactive method. Oh my God, there's so much going on. What's in my inbox? What's do right now? Go, go, go.

Let's just try to figure things out. The difference between those things is a factor of two. You're intentional about your time. You'll get about twice as much done with the same amount of input resource, in this case, minutes of your day. So it is exactly when you're overwhelmed and behind it. You want to get that 2x advantage. That is exactly the scenario where you say,

I want to start getting more done than I was before. I want to get as much done. as possible because I have water that's really coming in and over the sides. I need to bail as as fast as possible. So I'm just going to flip that question completely around. And instead of saying, how can I find time to be organized and intentional and scheduled when I have too much going on, I'm going to say, how could anyone possibly not get organized and scheduled intentional when they have too much going on? That seems like an unforced error. So that's what I'm going to say. Now you might be worrying like, well, it's frustrating.

You know, I have more than I can fit in my day. I have more projects on my plate than I can make progress on. I have more deadlines this week that I'm going to hit. I have more things that just in the next five hours you need to get done than I can actually fit in the five hours because I have seven back-to-bag Zoom meetings packed in there, right? That can be really scary. You could say, I can't possibly get into that organized intentional mindset because it's so overwhelming. But here the answer is, and long time deeps question podcast listeners will know what I'm about to say, the best thing to do here is to face the productivity dragon, which is really the nerdiest possible way of saying it's better to see with great clarity what it is you're not going to be able to get done.

it's better to quantify with precision exactly how impossible your schedule is than just generally have a mindset of I have too much and I'm frustrated confront it here's my week my God it doesn't fit here's my day my God it doesn't fit all right there it is that's the dragon you've seen it

you're still alive he hasn't burned you to a crisp yet now what and you have to make some hard decisions okay well I'm going to have to get out of this and I'm going to have to talk to this person and say it's going to have to be three weeks till I can do it and I have to say no to this and this I'm going to have to do here and that I'm going to have to do here and I have to get six hours for this. Let me cancel that Zoom meeting.

Let me cancel that Zoom meeting and say I don't, you'll have to send me a summary and I'm going to have to add a stupid 6 p.m. block three days in a row here that I don't like to do, but that's the only way this thing is going to get done and the client has to get that or out of business. And all right, that's the best we can do. And I'll tell you what, that solution you come up with there will 100% be better than whatever you end up doing if you just put your head in the sand and say, ah, running out of that proverbial cave, smoke billowing behind you, swinging wildly at the air and saying, I'll just work frantically and see what happens.

It's always better to face the productivity drag and say, situation sucks, but what's the best I can do? Because that best is better than just, why don't I just flail and hope that things are okay? Quickly summarize those threads then. Number one, when you were really overwhelmed the behind, that is the best time to be organized and intentional. Number two, yes, it is scary to confront just how impossible your schedule has become, but it's still better to confront it.

Facing the dragon would give you a better chance of saving the princess, getting the gold, whatever the metaphor, whatever the mythological analogy is here, then running away. Now, of course, there's a bigger issue here about, like, why do you have so much on your plate in the first place and the systemic failure to be the structure of work and how much it puts on our plate and how non-transparent it is. And there's a whole rant there I'm not going to do. But there's my pragmatic answer. All right, let's take another call here.

Hi, Cal. My name is Melissa and I'm a lawyer from Australia. I've recently cashed in on my career capital and have left my job of 15 years as an employed solicitor in a law firm to go out on my own and become a self-employed barrister. I feel as though I have won the deep work lottery, meaning that I now have complete autonomy over my time and attention, which is something very new to me. I don't want to squander this amazing opportunity,

and so I would love to hear your advice about how I can discern the best of my time and attention in circumstances where I'm starting from a completely blank slate. Well, I'm both excited for you and excited that you're asking this question, because you are at a critical juncture. Heading forward from right exactly where you are right now in your professional life, there are two paths before you. One path really leverages your autonomy well to create a deep life, a life of meaning, satisfaction, resilience, and impact.

The other path leads you into a worst situation than you were before, before you quit your job as a lawyer for a larger firm, a situation where you feel just as overwork, but more stressed because more is on your shoulders, more is on your plate. You're doing more work and you have more responsibilities outside of your main expertise and things are worse. You have to go one direction or the other and now is the place where that decision is really going to get made. And at the key of heading towards the deep life path right now is the application of intention. This is the time to figure out what do I want my life to be like, not just professionally.

I mean, ask that question. Yes, professionally, what type of things I want to work on? What's going to be meaningful to me? But asking in all those other areas of the deep life, what's my family, community connection, right? What's my health like? What's my spiritual, philosophical life like? What's my, whatever it is. You're building out this image, this image of what your life is like, where you live, what you do, what you have time for, the role, work, play.

you're getting that crystal clear, something that's very aspirational. And now you are in the very fortunate position of having some flexibility to actually craft the life that meets or heads towards that image. That will then allow you to make a lot of decisions in terms of what type of work you do and how much you bring on your plate. And that's really the core question you have right now about your practice as a solo law practice is what type of work am I doing, how much work am I going to take on my plate? What am I billing, et cetera, right? You're laying out that foundation. And you want to lay that foundation working from the image of a inspirational view of what you want your life to be. Like if you don't do that, the default instinct answer will be more is better than less.

Opportunity squandered is better is a travesty. Go after what you can. Don't say no. Be worry about running out of money. Be worry about things failing more, more, more and very quickly that can spiral out of control. You need a governor and the right governor is that image. once you know then this is roughly what the type of work I want to do and roughly what type of load I want to do, then you just want to be very controlled using my standard techniques or something like that for being intentional and organized about your time and obligations.

My quarterly plan, my weekly plan, my daily time block plan, then put in place systems for communication protocols and moving information around. You want to try to avoid context shifting. You want to try to avoid a lot of unscheduled messages they're going to arrive and require you to respond to them. the standard stuff I talk about. But all that's going to be great, once you've answered the core question of, this is roughly the type of law I want to practice and this is roughly the workload I want to do.

I'm at this hourly rate doing 20 hours a week, and I move here from here, this is all going to work out well. Great. So let me just, now I know that. Now I know what type of client is solicit and now I can build my

organizational systems around servicing those clients well, but in a way that is time efficient and without a lot of context shifts, et cetera. So you're a great situation. Stay intentional, stay clear, stay structured, stay organized. Keep this work as one bucket among many that you're trying to optimize right now. And I think you will head down that first path, the path that I think we all crave. This podcast is sponsored by Four Sigmaatic, a wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee.

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popular blinks, 15 minutes, get the basics, figure out if you want to spend more time with that book. Now, right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off in a seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. All right, let's do another call here. Hi, Cal. My name is Bo. I'm a Canadian music teacher. I love your work. I have a question for you about building habits based on consistency. So in the in the Newportian system, We're tracking daily metrics based on values, and we're optimizing these metrics for consistency.

So I'm not going to make a daily metric to exercise for three hours a day because that's unrealistic, and on some days I'm not going to be able to hit that metric. This lines up with Stanford behavioral design expert BJ Fogg. His recommendation is to create daily habits based on micro or tiny goals, and then that way you can actually follow through on them. So my question for you is, in your own life, how do you straddle the balance between optimizing for realistic execution of daily things with this other mindset that says, well, no, also sometimes we just need to attack this with discipline.

Well, when it comes to discipline, scale matters. the scale that we're functioning at matters when we're talking about the importance of discipline. So the issue is when we're at a small time scale, like what am I doing this morning? What am I doing this afternoon? Discipline can be kind of slippery. And we can just say, I should just do the things I'm supposed to do. You know, don't eat the bacon at the dinner. Do the run.

immediately go in and write this really hard memo, then make five sales call. I mean, you could just say I should just be disciplined about the, in the short term, in these small timescales, just be disciplined about the right things to do and just do them. That type of discipline is slippery because it runs a foul of the physiological realities of our moments to moments throughout the days. BJ talks about this.

His research talks about this. James Clear talks about this in atomic habits. You can see this in Charles Duhigg's power habits too. It's in the moment, you may be low energy. You may be tired. You may have something taking longer than it took before. There may just be a chaotically produced mental configuration in which your willpower in that moment is very low. And you can't necessarily consistently just force through that.

It doesn't matter. I'm always going to do the right things all the time. Even the most disciplined people in the world do not have that ability to say on the small time scale of this minute, that minute, I always do the right thing. Because physiologically, that is impossible. So if that is a definition of discipline, you're in trouble. And that's why in BJ's working in James is working in Charles' work. There's a lot of work on how do we actually get habits that work, habits that stick, habits that you're able to do again and again. You can't just say, oh, I'll do it again and again because I said I should.

a lot of effort has to be involved. You know, it's the right habit with the right hook and the right whatever. So where I think discipline becomes important, where we should rely on it, and we shouldn't just fall back and say, hey, what can I do? Is that the larger timescales? So saying my discipline is, I'm going to be healthy. You know, for me, for my kids, for whatever, I'm going to be healthy. discipline to me is saying I am not going to let that goal go.

Now, it might take some work to find something that's practical. Maybe I try the gym that doesn't work. I try working out at 5 a.m. That's not quite working, but I'm not going to let it go. At this larger time scale of this month, of this year, of this season, I am going to be coming back to this thing that I think is important. And if I see my systems aren't working, my habits aren't working whatever, I'm not getting results. I'm going to change it and try something else and try something else. I'm not going to give up until I have something that works.

Now, the thing that works, again, might take some work. It's complicated to get habits to stick. I think a lot about what my keystone habits are in the different buckets of the deep life. Because it's a game you have to play. It's be tractable, but it can't be so easy that it's trivial. The materials matter, the priming matters. Is there a time queue that it's tied to? I mean, again, BJ Fogg, James Clear, Charles Duhigg, all of these books are going to get you

advice about how to do that. But the discipline is not, I decided to have it arbitrarily and I am going to do it. The discipline is I have decided what's important and if I believe that that's important, I'm not going to give up until I'm actually living in a way that is aligned with it. I think that's what discipline really means. We're not all going to be able to David Goggins it on every single element. And I'm sure there's things that even David Goggins isn't happy about. I've heard Jacco Willink talk about eating cake.

that's not discipline that that chain is never broken the discipline is you come back to the things that's important you align your life to it repeatedly again and again and again through thick and thin all right so anyways be very hacky about habits good but be very consistently disciplined about the big picture things that you are trying to actually improve or support or amplify with those habits all right let's see what we have here oh here's an interesting call about tenure. Hi, Cal, I enjoy the podcast. Thank you for your work there. I have two questions. Number one is, how do you rectify these ideas of both tenure and rare and valuable skills?

It seems like possessing rare and valuable skills would negate the need for tenure, and I'm wondering about your thoughts on that. Well, when talking about Professor Tenure, it's usually important to differentiate between, let's say, a research-focused university and more of a teaching or non-research-focused university. I'll stipulate that in the latter case, tenure can often be basically a job perk. These universities aren't going to pay you as lavishly as other things you might do with your academic and intellectual gifts, but it's a great job perk. You know, once you have tenure, this is a very secure job. Now, when we look to the world of research-focused universities, there's another argument for tenure, which I actually think is quite consistent with my rare and valuable

skills approach to thinking about careers. In particular, my terminology is career capital. As you build rare and valuable skills, that gets you more career capital, which you can then invest to get into your working life to things you find valuable. It's the leverage you have to make your working life more and more consistent with what you like or what you care about to be a bigger source of passion. So if you look at a typical path, from pre-tenure to tenure for a research-focused professor, in some sense you're building up a rarefied form or career capital. I'm building up enough expertise in a research area that I can actually have a real footprint in the world of ideas

and through my cited publications really established that I can do something rare and valuable. I can move forward to a world of ideas and the reward for that, then, among other things, you can get tenure. One of the things tenure then affords you is the flexibility. to build up a new store of capital and a new idea. See, I really have to emphasize as someone who has gone through this process, I got tenure, man, it's been almost five years now. When you're building up the tenure at an R1 institution,

you're publishing a lot. Now, if you're in a field like mine, like theoretical computer science, I was publishing four to six papers a year. These are peer-reviewed papers at competitive processes. Four out of five papers submitted don't get in. So they've got to be good. the only way you're going to sustain that pace is by building up a head of steam on a particular expertise that you hit the starting blocks on leaving your doctoral or postdoctoral work, right? You do not have the breathing room to say, let me retool.

Let me retool and come up with a different direction that might be interesting. Let me take what I've learned and learn a new skill and combine it because you can't have a two-year gap. You can't have a one-year gap. I mean, if you're someone like me who went up for 10-year early, so after just four years, there's no, there's no room for you to slow down. Tenure gives you that room. And now if you slow down for a year or two to retool or catch your breath, it's okay. You're not in jeopardy of that job going away.

And so I think tenure actually does serve that purpose. And again, we can take me as an example here. I've slowed down recently. The pandemic had a big part to play in that. But I'm partially right now retooling a non-trivial portion of my research efforts towards digital ethics, which I think is an important field, and Georgetown is playing or hoping to play an increasingly important role in that field. And I think I have something to say there, both academically and in my public-facing writing for publications like The New Yorker.

But you know what? It's a complicated field. And I have to read and I have to think and I have to recruit new students. And it takes time that I can't dedicate to just publishing more and more papers on the topics I've published on before. Teen Year lets me do that. So I'm building up new career capital in a related capital market that I then will be able to hopefully cash it in a way that allows my career to do interesting things, is good for my university, good for the world of ideas, etc. So I really do think, even though it sounds cliched, this idea that tenure gives professors the freedom to actually explore new ideas, it can really serve that purpose.

And you really don't understand what that freedom is and how important it is until you've gone through the tenure process. and you've published that many papers and where you don't have any breathing room. And there has to be three papers going concurrently at a time. Until you've gone through that, you don't really understand what a big distinction it is to not have to do that.

So that's what I would say. I think there's some value there to tenure. I think it's about rare and valuable skills, not about avoiding their importance. All right, we're on a roll now. Let's take in the next listener call. Hi, Cal. This is Coran. The 33 jobs guy whose question you answered

in episode 101. I recently changed positions, and so I will be working full-time as a college center manager answering financial aid and student financial questions. But this coming fall, I'll still be teaching classes. I'll be teaching one class, hopefully at the community college, but hopefully getting 10 to 20 students, and then I'll be teaching two classes at a university near me, which will be a total of 60 students. Now, the reason I am giving all these details is because I'm looking at my schedule for

fall my quarterly plan and I'm saying I feel like I want I can feel it I want to do more I'm going to be taking that Saturday as my high quality leisure because as we talked about in that podcast you said that it's fine to do have that Saturday for high quality leisure but I still look at my plate and I'm like I want to do more I want to read more scholarly articles I want to become better at my craft and learn more about financial aid get better at my full-time position there's this so many things that I want to do, so many things I can think of. But how much should I, how should I systematically think of what I want to add to my plate without that plate tipping over? Thanks, Cal.

Hi, Karan. It's good to hear from you again. I'm glad that you're coming at this question critically because as you point out, it would be easy in this situation for you to add too much, to add too much to your plate. And then the whole thing is you say tips over, which practically speaking means you get burnt out, you get overwhelmed, and actually your progress in many areas is impeded because when the whole system gets gunked up, very little progress can actually occur going forward. So when thinking about this drive, this drive to do more, this drive to be more distinguished, this drive to have more impact, an idea I used to reference pretty often in my newsletter at calnewport.com was an idea that came from Steve Martin's

professional memoir born standing up. Longtime readers on my newsletter know that that biography came at a important point in my professional career and had a big influence and a bunch of ideas I went on to develop from there. One of the ideas I pulled from that was the notion of diligence. Martin talks about diligence in this book and he says, look, diligence is not just about sticking with the same thing and making consistent progress on that thing over time. It is also about during this period saying no to everything else. And Martin talked about his own diligence and trying to innovate comedy and play the banjo. And those were his two things.

In order to do that, he had to go through long periods in which he was saying no to everything else, to give concerted effort to one thing, and then give your mind the time needed to relax, to recharge, to have insight, to have innovation, to come back at it fresh the next day. That was what was most important for him to get to a very high level. lots of high performers and lots of field see similar impacts. You're a professional violin player for an orchestra. You have your intense two sessions per day, two hours per session of practicing. And you're going to do very little outside of that, if possible, because you need to recharge, you need to recover so that you can hit that practice with full intensity the next day, which ultimately is what matters for becoming a virtuoso style violin player.

I took this advice to heart. I really focused my diligence on computer science and writing. Really kept it at those two things. Computer science writing, computer science writing, relentlessly saying no to other things for a very long time. And it allowed me over time to develop those two fields into something that yielded some interesting professional fruit. That focus on computer science that I started in undergrad and a course got serious about during my grad program at MIT, led me to being able to get a professorship, get tenure.

My relationship with Georgetown is foundational, of course, now. to my career. And in writing, you know, again, it went from college publications to writing advice guides that sort of helped subsidize my living expenses when I was a poor grad student. And then from there into more serious idea nonfiction book, more serious writing for magazines, etc. So it was diligence. So I'm a big fan in diligence. So Karen, what does that mean for you? What that means is you need to figure out what's the one, maybe two things that you want to make a professional stand on, the things that you want to do so good you can't be ignored, and therefore generate their career capital in which you can make your career,

do whatever you want it to do for you. Once you figure out what that one, maybe two things are, you want to be focused on doing those things better, and as a consequence, say no to almost everything else. How do you do those things better? Well, you should have basically one major initiative at a time that's getting your full attention with plenty of rest and relaxation because it's the only thing you're working on

and you do that one initiative to the best of your ability and you move on to the next. So in writing, it might be, look, all I'm doing right now for writing is writing this book. And some days I'm working hard and some days I'm taking a break and I want to write this book as good as possible. Now let's see what comes next. You need to find the equivalent. So that you're always having something you're putting focus into

that's going to push you to the next level, going to make you better. But you really only have one thing that you're focusing on per each of these areas you're trying to get better at. So if there's at most two areas that you're trying to make your stand on, there's at most two concurrent projects going on at a time. This is all about timescale. Don't get caught up in thinking, how do I have as much as possible going on this week

so that my options are open in my life is interesting. You instead want to say, how can I make sure over the next five years, I get as many really high-quality projects done as possible. And that really is a game of sequentiality. One thing at a time with as most attention as you can possibly muster for it. It is also approached as better suited to the human brain. don't like having a ton of concurrent work we can't keep track of. We want to say this is what

I'm doing. Let me go all in on this. Now it's done. What's next? And that's the way Karan, I would suggest that you think about this really admirable drive you have, which you should be happy that you have. It's not something you should take for granted. Not everyone feels it, but you feel this drive to move, to accomplish, to get better. This, I think, is the best way to actually harness it. All right. Let's do, what time is it here? I think we can fit in one more, one more call before closing down to show. Cal, I would just like to know if frustration and boredom can lead one to the deep life. Thanks. Well, this is an important question. What is it that actually drives people to seek the deep life?

I think frustration is probably a good word. It's probably a good word to think about this. Where the frustration tends to come in is that we're wired. We have these. We have these moral intuitions, these intuitive feelers that tingle when we see something heroic, when we see something brave and we see something beautiful. The same receivers that recoil when you're seeing cowardice or some sort of greed or pride run amok, whatever type of human ugliness that we might also encounter. We have these instincts. And when you feel as if your life as being lived right now has fallen out of sync with these instincts, with these intimations, with these intuitions, it is a sense of frustration. When you don't encounter in your life the behaviors that make those positive vibrations happen, when you look at yourself as a character and say this is not a character that I would have much sympathy for, if I was reading it's not. not a character that actually attracts me. That can be frustration. When you find yourself

basically just trying to avoid the feeling of negative through the injection of shallow, positive chemical positivity and happiness, be this by looking at your phone, distracting yourself with what's going on there, be it through alcohol, be it through drugs, be it through eating, whatever it might be that you're just using the shallow to escape the deep frustration you have with what is not happening in your life. These are all the drivers that I think push people to say, I want something deeper. I want my life to be a story that maybe doesn't have a happy ending, that maybe it's not positive in every chapter as a damn good one to read. The issue, and this is something I've been thinking about recently, because again, I'm working on

a proposal for a book on the deep life. And one of the main motivations I'm coming up with as I work on this book is that this idea that we want a deep life is very widespread, and yet the guidance for developing it is remarkably diffuse and ambiguous. And this is a real issue in our current culture. There's guidance that gets at pieces of it. Maybe you can take on a philosophical system, which will guide a certain part of the deep life, or a religious system that's going to help help you guide another part of the deep life, or some sort of career thinking or vision that maybe takes another part of the deep life and does well, but they're in bits and they're in pieces and certain things resonate. You read a book like deep work and something about that resonates in just the narrow bucket that relates to craft and that resonates with you.

And then maybe you read, you know, some of Ryan Holliday's work on stoicism. And there's something there about character and resilience and how you tinge your own mental garden that resonates there. But these are just pieces. We're trying to randomly and haphazily pull together pieces. And what I think we need is a more consistent. and well thought out way of thinking through here's your life now. How do you envision and then construct one that is deeper? In some sense, it's the ultimate self-help book would be the book that says,

let's talk about your life writ large and how to transform it. So frustration drives you there, but we need instruction for how to deal with that frustration. And so I'm working on that. The book I'm working on has gone through a lot of different formats because it's tricky. And I'll tell you where I am right now, where I am right now with this deep, life book is thinking about four different paths that are very common. When you look at people who

have lives that we would intuitively describe as deep, they typically fall into one of these patterns, one of these four different paths or some combination of them. And what I'm going to do is actually just investigate each of these paths. Taking a page out of Michael Pollan's omnivorous dilemma, let me go out there and for each of these paths,

spend time with someone or some ones who personify that particular path to deep life. And by spending time with these people, I can really try to deconstruct. What are the elements of this path that really give it its depth? And why are those elements so powerful? And therefore, let's step back and say,

now that we know we've isolated the elements, what are the practical way of trying to cultivate or inject more of these into your own life? And then maybe coupling this with some more foundational advice, like the type of things we talk about on this podcast, about looking at the different areas, keystone habits, discovery through action, etc. or a little bit of a roadmap here.

But anyways, I'm working on this. I'm working on how do we handle something. And at the one at the same time is very philosophical. And at the other time demands pragmatism that it currently lacks our discussion. And I think both of those things are possible. I think it's possible to write a book that can be touching an inspirational, philosophical, quite smart, literate. And at the same time, also feel like it's sketching out onto that paper, the path,

a map, something that you can fill in the rest of the details and actually follow. So, yes, frustration. is a big driver of the deep life. A lot of people are feeling that frustration right now. We are at, I think, a good time to start offering some structured guidance to get us past frustration, get us past instinct, and towards some intentional action. Speaking of intentional action, it's getting later in the day here, and I want to go, spend some time with my family.

So I'll wrap up this episode right now. Thank you, everyone who sent in their listener calls. go to Kylenewport.com slash podcast and find out how you too can submit your questions. I'll be back on Monday with a full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.