Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 143: What Would You Say You Do Here?

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: What would you say you do here? [3:05]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS: - What time management strategies do you suggest if I work a 9-5 and want to pursue master's or phd? [13:32] - How to overcome productivity pr0n?  - Lifehacker addict is hung up on the fomo (fear of missing out) of potential shortcuts. [19:51]- could save time - How to time block deep work while juggling the demands of "in the moment questions". [25:03]- Pharmacist manager gets bogged down with constant questions despite needing time to do deep work. - How do you differentiate productive meditation with "day-dreaming mode" to solve problems?  [32:28]        - Relaxing the pre-frontal cortex - What are your thoughts on scaling up for sole proprietors? [35:37]- A digital marketer thinking of outsourcing for book keeping, etc.DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS: - What do you do/read to keep the path of living a deep life?  [38:57] - What's your class policy regarding your students and their phone use?  [42:38] - How do you combat confirmation bias as an author and academic?  [44:58]  - How do you balance reading new books and re-reading books (especially past ones that have proven valuable)?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.

This podcast is sponsored by Disco, a clean skin care brand based in Austin, Texas. Now, here's the thing. Disco products are created specifically for male skin issues. We're talking under-eye bags, razor burn, oily skin wrinkles. Now, I didn't used to think a lot about my skin, but these days I'm on camera quite a bit more than I used to be, and suddenly I realize I don't have a 20-20. two-year-old smooth face anymore. I didn't know where to get started when it came to taking better care of my skin,

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incredible skin care products for yourself, I have a special offer just for Deep Questions listeners. Go to www. 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 143.

I'm pleased to report that as I record this here in the last week of October, the download numbers for the Deep Question podcast seem to be increasing. After a slow summer, the numbers have been climbing. Some of this is due to specific events. when I did Charlemagne the God's TV show recently. He talked about the podcast and showed the graphic. That gave us a little bit of a pop. But in general, I think this is mainly just you, the listeners, helping to spread the word.

So let me pass along my thanks about that. Now, I have promised you that I don't bother you every episode about subscribing and reviews. I try to only do that once a month. So here we are at that once a month time. If you are listening to this show and like it, please consider subscribing. if you subscribe and like the show, those comments and those reviews go a long way, and I promise that that's the last you'll hear me talk about that

for at least another month. We've got a good batch of questions to get through today, some on deep work, some on the deep life. But I figured before we get into those queries, let's start with a deep dive. The topic of today's deep dive is a question. What would you say you do here.

Now this is a quote that comes from Mike Judge's 1999 satire movie Office Space. And I use this quote in a recent article that I published in The New Yorker. Now, the column I have been writing for The New Yorker is actually called Office Space. So partially, I want to just pat myself on the back. Six articles into this column, I finally found a way to work an office space reference into my office space. column. But there is obviously a deeper meaning underneath that quote that I was trying to unpack in that column. And I want to spend some time talking about it here. So the point of the article was revisiting Tim Ferriss's classic 2007 book, The Four Hour Workweek. And I told the story that I

don't think it's been told that often about how that book debuted to the world, it debuted to the world at South by Southwest Interactive in 2007. After a last-minute cancellation, the organizer of that event, Hugh Forrest, found a room for Tim to come to give a talk about his book that was just about to come out. The conference was in March. The book came out in early April. And he got up on this stage in this makeshift room into a capacity crowd that was full of people, was the argument I'm making the article, it was full of people who were the

epitome of the 10x programmer hardcore move fast and break stuff Silicon Valley culture of that first decade of the 2000s. These were people that said you get after it because you might become a decadionaire when your startup gets sold when you go to your IPO. This was a time and a place where work ethic really trumped all. You stay up late. You drink soulant so you don't waste time with meals. It's a hardworking group of people. Tim got up in front of them and said, essentially, you work too much. This isn't sustainable. Give up on this type of career and do something more interesting with your time.

That is what that speech was. I went back and listened to the audio of the speech. I remember it from 2007. I went back and listened to the audio of its speech. It was all about this is completely unsustainable. This hard charging 12 hours a day. Check email all the time. You should have many retirements.

You should redefine what work even means in your life. You should heavily automate things. You should take these startups and make them into lifestyle businesses. It was a radical talk. And this audience of hard charging tech types loved it. The tech bloggers there in the crowd wrote about Tim. That put him on the radar of bigger tech luminaries. They started talking about Tim.

That put him on the radar of major media. They began writing about Tim. The book debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, where it basically stayed more or less for the next four and a half years. It went on to sell millions of copies. It was mentioned in 2011 in the NBC show The Office. Darrell actually looks to the camera at one point and says, Four Hour Work Week. So it was a really big event, a cultural milestone,

that these overworked, stressed out workers embrace this message of maybe we should rethink work. The question I then asked in that column is, how come we don't hear more about the four-hour work week today? Right now in this period, of post-pandemic reconsideration of work, this period of what is known as the Great Resignation, which more and more knowledge workers are leaving their jobs or rethinking what role work should play in their life. In some sense, for our work week should be the manual for this movement. If you go back and reread this book, Tim nails the reality that remote work is going to be the key

to a much more fulfilling an autonomous mode of pursuing your career. He nails the reality that excessive email and meetings is going to be the main obstacle to your work and your life being much more fulfilling. I mean, this is a book that is getting at exactly the questions people are asking today, but you don't hear about it that much. Now, why is that? And I should say, of course, it sells strongly. I'm just saying when I've been reporting for the New Yorker on the Great Resignation and people rethinking their work over the last year or year and a half, this book doesn't come up as much. And what I said in the piece is that this is in part because over time, Tim and his message got transformed. The book was radical.

Tim got changed in the mind of the media, in the mind of the culture into something that was much less radical. He got changed into a productivity guru. And you can go back here and watch this happen. By the time Darrell Philbin holds up, or he doesn't hold up the book, we fact checked that. By the time he says four-hour work week on an episode of the office, the plot line was that he was trying to get more work done so that he could get promoted to a more grueling management position. That is the opposite of what the four-hour work week was about. But by the time we got to 2011, the writers of the office didn't know that. They thought about that book and Tim as being vaguely speaking all about optimization and productivity and trying to get more done.

There's a couple of reasons why this shift happened. And I mean, some of it is completely rational because Tim did go on to do quite a bit of writing about optimization and productivity. What he explained to me when I talked to him for this article is that his overriding interest during this period was minimum effective doses for any type of goal. And when you applied that to work, it led to this radical rejection of the standard career path in the working 12-hour days until you retire at 65. But when you apply this mindset to other topics like health and fitness, which he did in his second, book, it comes across as more pragmatic. You know, how do we rethink our diet, what are more aggressive ways to exercise? So partially, his writing turned more pragmatic.

But I put out another hint in this piece that also partially, maybe as a culture, we weren't ready for the radical message that was embedded in that book. Tim was looking at this world in which we were getting increasingly busy and saying, most of this stuff is probably nonsense. Probably most of what you do could be reduced to a few hours a week and your impact on your organization might be more or less unaffected. He was implicitly asking of the entire culture that question that came out of office space, that question, what would you say you do here?

A question that was actually asked in a scene where you had a pair of efficiency consultants interviewing a cubicle dweller at this corporate park office park, and they were trying to figure out what this guy's actual job was. And he was struggling to actually come up with a good explanation for what he actually did. And in exasperation, one of the consultants asked that question. In exasperation, one of the consultants finally said, well, what would you say you actually do here? Tim was asking this of a whole culture.

I don't think we were ready for that question backed in. As I say in the piece, this period after the first dot com bust in 2001 up until the recession in 2009 was a period where busyness worked. Phrenetic energy worked. We were buying mortgages and packaging them up into these collateralized debt obligations that no one really understood. And suddenly we had Blackberries and we were answering a volume of messages and no one ever really requested or said it was a good idea. but we were just doing stuff and making money and seeing our stock portfolios rise, cash was plentiful. It was not an environment where people wanted to step back and say, is what I'm doing actually useful? Why am I on my BlackBerry all day?

Why am I in all these meetings? What exactly do I do here? So I think there was almost a cultural immune response to Tim Ferriss in the four-hour work week. We can't face that question. So let's turn Tim into a productivity guru. And then we can raise our noses and say, look at this hack stuff. That's beneath me. And we were avoiding the question.

Today we can't avoid it. What happened to all these knowledge workers who maybe avoided the radical provocations of the four-hour work week in 2007? They were unavoidably confronted with them in 2020 and 2021. When we were forced to go remote and work from home and suddenly we had all these new things we had to figure out, So the amount of Zoom meetings skyrocketed, the amount of email skyrocketed, the amount of Slack skyrocketed. We had people discovered that they were spending 80 to 90% of their day in meetings and doing email. And yet somehow their job still worked.

The company still did what it was supposed to do. The product still went out the door. They were actually working a really small fraction of the day. There was someone who tweeted in response to my New Yorker piece that says, yeah, I know about the four-hour work week. That's about how many hours of work I could get done. done having to work from home with my kids' school closed. And yet these jobs still worked. And now I think an entire sector of the economy is facing the same question.

Well, what would you say you actually do here? And they're looking at themselves and they're looking at their jobs and they're saying, not as much as I probably imagined. We're communicating. We're in meetings. We're in email. We're in Slack. Is the hyperactive hive mind supercharged?

But the pandemic started to teach us, most of that is probably performative. Most of that is probably overhead. Tim Ferriss reduced what it required to run his company from 18-hour days to four hours a week. And it seemed to run just fine. And I think there's more and more people out there who are finally ready for that provocative question that he asked. They're looking at their own lives and saying something like that might be right for me too. So that is why I wrote about the four-hour work week 15 years later, because I'm I think Tim was ahead of his time.

It was a big deal, a warning shot that that crowd took to that message. We ignored the warning shot. Now the rest of the salvo has arrived and we can no longer ignore that. We are all looking around and asking, what would you say you do here? And I don't think we have any more a good answer. All right, let's move on to some questions about deep work. Our first question comes from Jamie. Jamie says, if you work a nine to five job and would like to study part-time for postgraduate studies, what time management strategies would you suggest or type of planning would you do as well as what techniques would you use to learn the information faster?

Well, Jamie, if you're going to do academic work and you have time constraints, like you have here, you have a nine to five job and you have to fit this around. deploying a strategy that I call the student workday is probably going to be particularly important. Now, this is an idea that I used to expound back in the early days of my blog when I was talking primarily to students who had busy schedules. And the idea behind the student work day was to look at the classes you are taking and then identify what is the work that I know has to happen on a repeated basis. Is it a reading assignments that have to get done every week, a lab report that has to get, written up every two weeks, a problem set that has to be solved weekly, or whatever it is, figure out the work that you know happens repeatedly and answer the question of, when am I going to do that work?

Same time, same days every week. You actually put that on your calendar just like you have your dentist appointment or meeting a friend for drinks. You have to figure this out. You work a nine to five jobs. You might not have a lot of options, but the work has to get done. So identify where that work is going to happen. Maybe you have an 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. block on a day that you work from home, and that's when you do the first draft of your problem set, and you do that on Mondays.

And then after dinner, you do a 6 to 7.30 block to finish off that problem set. Maybe you take 90 minutes out of the middle of the days on Wednesday to do your reading assignments, because, again, may you have some flexibility and you can find that time. And there's a conference room in your office that you can go to that's quiet and a good place to do that work. But you figure out this is all the work that has to get done on a regular basis. This is when I do it, this time, this day. I don't have to think about it. It's routine. Advanced tip here, throw in where that work happens.

Okay, as long as I'm fixing when it happens, why don't I also throw in where? So that I can find locations. I associate just with that work. And it leads to me shifting into a deep work mode quicker. So I go to this library to do this work. I have a home office in my basement for that work. You want that ritual and routine surrounding this work. what I'm trying to do for you here, Jamie, is get rid of any on-the-fly decision-making about what should I do today, what's due soon.

That's what's going to get you in trouble. If you just fly by the seat of your pants and say, oh, man, I got something due tomorrow. And, you know, I was at work and I went to the dinner and I went to the gym and it's eight and it's going to take four hours. That's where you get into trouble. So find when and where that work is going to happen. Fix on your calendar. Stop thinking about scheduling. Now, what happens if you can't fit it?

It's just not reasonable. You're taking up every evening and it's taking up all your hours and you have no give. You have no time for exercise. You have no time for dinner. Well, now you are facing that productivity dragon. This is the reality. I don't have time. If you don't have time, you have to see you don't have time.

This happens more than you would think there's a semi-famous to me. I'll say important to me blog post I wrote years ago. It must have been like 2008, maybe even 2007. and it was about a student I was advising at MIT. She didn't work a 9 to 5 job, but the number of activities that she was involved with might as well been a 9 to 5 job. We went through this exercise.

What's everything you need to do on a regular basis? Let's find time for it on the calendar, and we couldn't fit it. We ran out of room. And I said to her, her name was Lena. Lena, you obviously are doing too much. I'm looking at this calendar. We cannot actually fit the work.

The work is to work. We can't fit it in. we made it as efficient as possible. We can't fit it in. But she couldn't bear say no. She couldn't sit bare, say no to things. She couldn't take things off of her plate. The next semester, she had to go on leave for mental health.

It just completely overwhelmed. So I always say, you've got to face the productivity dragon here. Here's what I want to do. When am I going to do it? If you have time, good. And if you don't, you might want to rethink this plan. Only then, once you know when this work is going to happen and where it's going to happen and it all fits nicely into your schedule and you're not thinking about scheduling

and you're not making decisions on the flight. you're not staying up late all night because you forgot about your problem set until late the night before. Once you've done all that, then care about your study habits themselves. You want to make these blocks as small as possible while still getting the work done well. That comes down to how you study. I would recommend my book How to Become a Straight A Student for a Deep Dive on how the most efficient students get their work done.

I will just give you two very brief hints about what you're going to find in there. hint number one your work accomplished as a student is the product of the time you spend and the intensity of your focus so if you were trying to do your school work with a low intensity of focus i.e. you're looking at your phone, you're looking at email,

you're looking at Slack, you have the TV in the background, it's going to take a lot more time in that equation to get the same amount of work done versus if when you work, you're 100% focused that intensity of focus is maxed out, the time required to get the work done is going to go down. You need to hack that equation if you're going to get this work done with a 9 to 5 job

to banish the word study from your vocabulary. That's way too vague. That's way too emotional. You've got to be instead incredibly specific. For this type of work, how am I going to do it? And what evidence do I have that this is the right way to do it? How to become a straight-A student will get you all those details.

It'll walk you down that. path, but those are the big picture summaries of what you might find. All right. So summary, schedule all your work in advance. You know when it's going to happen. And then two, get very serious about your work habits once that time set aside. That's your best bet to succeed with studies, with a full-time job, without making your life into a joyless grind. Our next question comes from LifeHacker Addict 9-28.

LifeHacker Addict asks, how do I owe? overcome productivity pran. He elaborates here, and I think this is useful to hear about his relationship with this. He says, do you have any thoughts and suggestions on how I could overcome productivity prong for good? I have practiced time blocking fairly successfully for quite some time now. I use a straightforward set of tools to do it to avoid productivity prong distractions. I do not want to be about which tool to use, but I still struggle with a persistent nagging feeling that I might be missing out big time by not using various apps or keyboard shortcuts,

etc. All right, this is a good question because there is a subset of people who really do struggle with this. The core claim of productivity prong, which, by the way, if you want to find out more about, I wrote an article called The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done, came out last summer in the New Yorker. My editor and I were excited to get the term productivity prong into the hallowed pages of the New Yorker after 100 years. So I don't know if that's a high point or a low point. But read that article for the whole history of this movement. But the core message, if I'm just going to summarize it, is that with the right tools, with the right configuration, with the right software, you can make work easy. You can make producing very high impact, high value results, something that is a walk in the park. The tool can somehow take off of your plate the cognitive strain of producing really good output. I call shenanigans on that notion.

It's not going to do it. Here's what you get with better tools, better configurations, better software. You can get at max a 20% improvement in the difficulty of getting your work done. That 20% matters. It's nice. I like that when I use Scrivener to write an article instead of Word, I can have two pains and on one pane I have the notes from my research and on the other pain is the section of the article I'm writing and I can therefore type verbatim from my notes into the article I'm

writing. That makes my life 20% easier, but it's still really hard to write an article. And I wrote seven books without having Scrivener. Yeah, it would have been a little bit easier, but it doesn't make the work itself easy. That's the key thing to keep in mind when you're thinking about productivity habits or tools. You want a good set of them because you don't want to keep track of things in your mind. You want to be intentional about your work that really matters. You want to get rid of friction you don't need, but don't sell yourself on the image that the tools itself is going to make hard work not hard. Nothing can do that for you.

Hard work in the end is going to be hard. Now productivity prong hit its peak in the first decade of the 2000s, but there is a particular threat of it that I think has come back in recent years. It's something I've been talking about a lot on this show. which is over-promising about what a note-taking system called Zetelcastin can actually offer. So it's this really interesting approach to note-taking that I've talked about on this show. If you look at my interview with Shreeny Rao from a couple months ago, we got into it. And it's a really interesting way of taking notes where you link your notes with links like you would web pages. You create a conceptual map of different ideas.

A perfectly fine way to take notes. I'm messing around with it myself. There is, however, an extreme view of what is possible of Zetelkastin that is brewing out there, where the actual art of having original creative thoughts is being offloaded according to the note-taking system itself. There's an extreme version of this out there where people think that if you're just creating notes and making good links, eventually you will be able to survey those links, to surf or navigate those links and have really original creative connections come up. you'll have really brilliant thoughts. And a book or an article will just fall out of your, out of your complex web of notes. And I just don't think that's going to happen.

I've been writing books and articles my entire adult life. And there really is no shortcut to this very human and very cognitively demanding task of thinking and sorting through all this stuff you know, these expert schemas you have in your mind for what articles are, all these hundreds or thousands of articles you've read in your life and slowly trying to accrete something that could actually work as a piece. that's never going to just fall out as a side effect of you using a software tool properly. So I give that example just to emphasize that the productivity prod mindset is still out there.

So life hacker addict, care about your tools, care in particular about the types of things I talk about, which is less about tools and more about being intentional with your time and organized with your information. That's all great. But also be ready that hard work is going to be hard. And that's not a bug. That's a feature.

There's no miracle. out there. So stop wasting time, seeking that miracle, spin that time instead doing the hard work right in front of you. Our next question comes from JK. J.K. Ask, how do you plan your day or week or time block when you have a job that has reactive parts and parts requiring deep work? J.K. elaborates, I'm a pharmacist manager working in a busy hospital environment, managing a team of 15 to 20 people at any one time. This means I can be interrupted with questions at any time of the day by my staff as well as by other hospital staff outside of my team. These interruptions sometimes can be delayed, but mostly they are in-the-moment questions requiring an answer for them to proceed with their hands on work. At the same time, I have non-reactive and deep-thinking work that needs to get done, but it gets pushed aside due.

to mental overload or lack of time. She gives examples like doing quality improvement work, analyzing data, etc. Well, JK, this is a problem in general with the medical field and in particular hospital work. I have given talks to hospitals in person virtually. I have worked with various hospital administrators on this problem. So just to lay out that foundation, you are not alone in this issue. There is a fundamental reactive nature about the way that hospitals run right now, which is quite degrading to the cognitive capacity of the individual practitioners. And it is a real problem.

We do need more structure. And a lot of hospitals are thinking about this. So let me just lay that out there now. It's a big problem that hospitals are starting to think about. In terms of what you can do before those solutions actually happen is, number one, I would go easy on yourself. you aren't going to be able to do a lot of deep work in this environment. The cognitive context switching created by all these interruptions is draining. It's going to make it hard even if later you do have time for you to get things done.

So you might have to actually lower to some degrees your aspirations about how much deep work you're going to get done. Two, put aside that time early in the day, first time in the day. I've negotiated with whatever, my supervisor, my attendance, the fellowship director that I'm working on my data analysis Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I do it from 8 to 10 and then I'm on call. You figure this, you probably are going to have to figure out times that are protected much more officially. And there might be less of those times than you would like, but at least those times are protected.

Their first thing, if possible, so you have all your energy and you try to get as much done as possible in those windows when you get there. A surprising amount of deep work can get done if you consistently do that. That's probably what you're left at right now because the rest of your day is going be pretty frenzing. As for time blocking, I think it just depends on the nature of your work. Some inherently reactive jobs aren't well suited for detailed time blocking. You might time block out the big things that you know have to happen so you can see the character of your day, but you will be frustrated if it's impossible to know if you're going to get the next hour free or if the next

hour is going to be dealt dealing with something that you had no idea what's going to happen. And in that case, you might not be doing fine grain time blocking. So just to quickly summarize, hospitals are terrible for this, but they are getting better. Hopefully, knock on wood. I think we have to start with probably banning the inter-messaging feature that was added to Epic EMR record software. I've heard a lot about this that you can now

instant message people in the EMR software, but that's a whole other argument. Number two, negotiate for the deep work time so it's protected. Use to write vocabulary, you know, explain why this is important that you want to fit this in, point them towards my work, blame it on me, get that time negotiated,

It'll be less time than you hope, but you'll get more done in that time than you think. All right, that's my advice, JK, so good luck. This podcast is sponsored by For Sigmatic, a wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Four Sigmatic's mushroom coffee is real organic, fair trade, single origin, arabica coffee with Lyons main mushroom for productivity and Shaga Mushroom for Immune Support. I like to drink this mushroom coffee right before each of my deep work sessions. The mushrooms give it a unique physiological footprint. So my brain begins to learn over time. That feeling means deep work.

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Jim asks, What are your thoughts on leveraging the mind's daydreaming mode for creativity and problem solving versus productive meditation. Well, as long-time listeners know, productive meditation is a cognitive training exercise where you maintain your focus on a single professional problem while you walk when your mind wanders, you bring it back to the problem. If you do this over time, you will greatly expand your ability to focus your mind's eye on a single topic.

You'll expand your working memory capacity. you'll expand your ability to just in your brain itself manipulate variables and schemas and make cognitive progress. It's pull-ups for your brain and it's something I recommend. Jim is asking about daydream mode. You know, what about just letting your mind wander as a way of finding a solution to a problem? Well, Jim, I'm also a believer in that. There's an actual school of study on this topic. It's called UTT unconscious thought theory.

they tried to actually study this in the lab. They found some results, but then UTT suffered from a replication crisis. Some people tried the same studies and couldn't replicate those results. But let's ignore the research for now. And I will just tell you, Jim, anyone who is a practicing academic theoretician, someone who does applied math or theoretical computer science like I do, we'll tell you in our experience that it works. You know, you want to work on something hard.

But when you come back to it the next day or the next week, you're often surprised by the new angles you have on it. Some sort of unconscious processing seem to unfold. I find the same thing happens to me when I do peer reviews. When I'm reviewing, for example, a journal paper. I'll read the paper and I'll think to myself despairingly. This is too complicated. I don't know what's going on here.

And then I'll come back to it and start writing up my review. And I'm looking at my summary of this paper and saying, wow, my brain understands this paper way better than I do. Like, I don't understand these nuances. My brain was figuring out in the background. I do think that happens. Do you need to do anything proactively to try to leverage this unconscious thought? Not really.

When you're working on something, work on something. When you're done, be done and do other things. When you return to it, hopefully you've made some progress. I don't think there's something you have to plan here. I don't think there's a strategy you have to develop. Unless you're thinking about this problem, every waking hour day after day, you'll have plenty of downtime when your brain is not thinking about the problem. So just to see this as a gift, you know, if I come back to something,

I might be smarter than I was the last time I tackled it. If I was to give any concrete advice here, it might be, don't do too much in one session. If you're trying to do something hard, maybe have three sessions spread out instead of one big session. So you can leverage this effect more. You can leverage higher cognitive intensity. You can stave off cognitive fatigue. But otherwise, I don't think there's much you have to plan here. I think we do get stuff done in our unconscious.

And we should be glad that that is true. But I don't know there's much from a productivity system. standpoint that we need to do to take advantage of that. All right. I think we have time for one more work-related question. And this final question comes from Alicia. Alicia says, hi, Cal. I'm a longtime fan of yours.

I am thrilled to be finally setting up my own home office for a sole proprietorship. I am one year into business and wondering about scaling up. I'm looking to collaborate with people for specific needs instead of hiring employees. what are your thoughts on scaling up for sole proprietors? Well, Alicia, I have a book recommendation. I think you are at a perfect point to read Paul Jarvis' book, Company of One. And he interrogates in this book this question of scaling up your small business. And he interrogates it to make sure that that's actually what you want to do.

He says, this is always the pressure. Companies need to grow. get more people, get more employees or contractors, increase the deal flow, increase the revenue, increase the products that you're offering. But he argues that that does not necessarily put you into better position. Yes, that is the necessary steps if you one day want to have a company worth millions, but most people aren't going to get there anyways. And what you get along the way is all the stress that comes from the growing, all the stress from managing, all the different contractors or employees, all the stress that comes from having the additional problems. the additional clients. His alternative is to instead focus on getting better and better at what you do.

Instead of leveraging that to get more clients, you leverage that to get paid more per hour for the clients that you currently work on. Your revenue grows. Your time expenditure doesn't. And you try to find some sort of sweet spot where you have a lot of autonomy. Your time demands are reasonable, but you're making good money. That's not what everyone wants to do. I think some people say the sole proprietorship is step one towards an empire.

And I think that's absolutely fine. You know what you feel. I just want to make sure that you're not falling into a scaling mode because you don't know what else you're supposed to do. Because you think if I have opportunities, of course I have to go after them. If there's more work I could take on, why would I turn that down? And I think Paul does a great job in that book of saying make sure before you do that, that's what you really want to do. It reminds me about this quote that I bring up often on this show that I believe I heard Joe Rogan say once, where someone was talking to him about assistance. Everyone in Hollywood has assistance.

I've been around Hollywood people who have assistance. He doesn't. And his argument was, if I get to the point where I feel that I need an assistant just to keep track of everything that's going on, that's my cue to do less. That's the Paul Jarvis mindset stated pithily. So Alicia, you're at a great decision point. You're at an exciting decision point. Read company of one. I blurbed it so you know it's good.

Read that book. Do some reflection and figure out, do I want to scale? And only then you can figure out the mechanics of how to find people, how to hire people. A lot of people have written about that. A lot of people have good advice to offer on that. You probably don't want my advice on that. But ask that big question first. All right.

And with that, let's move on to some questions about the deep life. Our first question about the deep life comes from Joyce. Joyce asks, what do you do or read to inspire and remind yourself of the importance of living a deep life? Well, Joyce, for me, I love encountering case studies. you know, be it in magazine profiles, books, or videos, documentaries, etc., whatever the format, I love encountering case studies of people who are living deeply. Seeing actual people doing this never fails to give me that hint of inspiration. So, for example, my oldest boys and I like to watch videos of people that are in the maker community,

people who build things. And in particular, we like watching these videos. I've mentioned this before on the podcast of Adam Savage, former host of the Mythbusters. He has this massive, he calls it cave. It's actually a warehouse in the Mission District of San Francisco that's just full of tools and supplies. And in there he can build these elaborate things. And there's a focus and craftsmanship to that that I think is really inspiring. You can get this with athletic examples.

You know, I really like seeing people or examples of people whose life have been crafted around master's. a particular physical pursuit. I like what Steve Ronella does on his Netflix show Meat Eater. Because it's very philosophical. Rinella, in some sense, is an heir to the stylist show that Anthony Bourdain was doing. It's not coincidental that Bordane has been on or was on Ronella's show. They go out there and do these long hunts. Sometimes they are successful.

Sometimes they're not. But they are shot elegiically. Beautiful, long, long form. long-focused shots. There is a very smart voiceover that Rinella does. Rinella is a hunter, but he also writes for the New Yorker.

This is someone who knows how to think and write. So there's these really interesting insightful voiceovers with these beautiful shots. And the whole thing is done in a world of depth. It's just them alone, the mountains, in the plains, wherever they happen to be.

And there's something this calming about that. I wrote in deep work about being affected by watching the video. of Rick Furr, who is a old-time metalsmith. So he does blacksmithing using old-time tools, and he works out of a barn that's up there in Door County near one of the great lakes, and he throws the barn doors open, and it overlooks a field. And I watched a video of him building a Viking sword. It was a Nova episode I came across it. And again, something about that.

It's someone who's working deeply with great focus, mastery. they're just doing one thing. They're doing that thing well and deeply. And just something about that hits a chord. I actually heard from Rick after Deepak came out. We've had an interesting back and forth conversation, which I enjoyed great pleasure of actually having some of this work out there in the public. So that's what I would say.

I love to encounter real people living deeply. You know it when you see it. It gives you that feel of inspiration or aspiration. And that's a feel that we should take seriously. What is it that I'm feeling? What is it that is causing the sense of aspiration or inspiration in what I'm watching? How can I isolate that? How can I identify what it is that's causing that feeling?

And then once I've isolated those elements, I can then answer the question of how can I get more of that in my life? This is the type of investigation question asking and answering. I think more of us probably should be doing right now. And in the meantime, though, it's an excuse to watch some of those fun, inspiring videos online. This question comes from Annalisa, who asks, what do you tell your students about phone use in class? Well, my policy has converged to me not bringing it up. Essentially, the configuration of the type of classes I teach are such that it is to your peril if you are trying to divide your attention.

Because I teach technical classes, algorithms, mathematics, theoretical computer science. if you stop paying attention to look at your phone, you will miss the thing I'm explaining. And if you miss the thing I'm explaining, that's going to be an issue because you need to know how to do it for your exam. So because of the technical rigor of my classes, it's just a natural side effect

that most people aren't going to use their phone. And if people want to, then I think there's just natural consequences. I'm not really of the mindset that I should be talking to fellow adults. And if you're at college, you're fellow adults and telling them how they should or shouldn't behave,

I will leave them up to that to make that discovery. Two things to say about this, though. One, I may have a biased perspective because my reputation now precedes me. My students might be unusually compliant about not using the phone in a way that other academics might not enjoy. In other words, it might be a little bit nervous to be on their phone in a Cal Newport class. That might be going on. Two, I will say there was an occasion a few years ago teaching a PhD-level class. It was theory of computer science, doctoral theory class.

And there were some students on their phone. Some of my grad students were on their phone. And I did talk to them about it. And I said, you know, this is a small class. It has complicated material. And I don't know if you should be on your phone or whatever it was, right? I actually confronted them about it. And it turned out that they were actually looking up, you know, what I was talking about in class or they had their textbook on their phone.

I forgot exactly what it was. But it made complete sense why they were on their phone. They weren't looking at their email. They weren't looking at social media. They were actually trying to pay attention even better to what I was saying. So I kind of learned my lesson there. I'm not going to yell at people. I teach in such a way that it's in your benefit to pay attention.

But if you want to check your phone, your adults, and it's not my role to tell you what to do. I think we have time for one more question. This one comes from Charlotte. Charlotte asks, as an author and academic, how do you combat confirmation bias within your line of work? Well, Charlotte, when it comes to my main academic work, which up to this point has largely been theoretical computer science,

I don't have to worry much about confirmation bias because mathematics doesn't care about your bias. I have to prove theorems. Either the theorem is true or it's not, technically speaking, you can check that, look at the math. It either works or it doesn't. If I can't make a proof goes through, it doesn't go through. And if I can, it can.

So in my primary academic work, I haven't had to worry much about confirmation bias. In my work as a writer, a course it's going to rear its head all the time, especially as a writer who makes cultural arguments, who does cultural critique confirmation bias is something that is quite relevant. Now, I have two different angles I want to follow here on the issue of confirmation bias. Angle number one is that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Now, what I mean about that is that we often, especially those of us who aspire to rationality, have the Socratic model in our head of the individual as the perfectly rational being, fully reflective and careful in their thought. and when we aspire to that model,

we want to be sure to try to get every possible bias out of our thinking patterns. However, if you zoom out, if you zoom out and look at a population of people who are thinking and sharing their thoughts, you see that confirmation bias is more a feature than a bug. Maybe what you want out there is this person, is wildly advocating for this angle,

and this person is wildly advocating for that, and this person has a nuance they're really advocating. And when all of these different voice, collide, what you get is better wisdom that if instead you had everyone trying to get every possible caveat, every possible angle, every possible objection, all worked into their own individual take on the issue. If you look at a lot of big cultural issues, if you look at a lot of scientific progress, it often is moved forward by these clashes of people that you would say are suffering individually from confirmation bias.

Let me make the best argument I can for this. You make the best argument you can for that. Combined will have a better understanding of how the world actually functions. We really do see that as the way that things often execute. One place this comes up, I think, in an interesting way, is when you do pragmatic nonfiction writing. So I write advice books. I've written advice books.

Of course, they have other parts to them as well. but I'm partially part of the pragmatic nonfiction genre. And one of the things you learn, I've talked about this on the show before, but one of the things you learn as you become a professional advice book writer is that caveats make the writing worse. If you are giving advice to someone, make a good pitch for the thing that you are trying to argue is important. Leave it to the reader who is smart to add their own caveats. is not an idiot. They know that, you know, in my situation, that advice doesn't completely apply. I, as the reader, can figure that out. And I know that. And I can modify the advice accordingly

and extract from it what's relevant to me. When you talk to people who are not professional advice writers, they get really worried. Well, you don't have all the right caveats on here. You're not acknowledging all the different situations in which this advice might not apply. But the thing is, while that might be reasonable if you're in conversation with an individual, well, it might make sense if I'm talking to you one-on-one, that I should probably caveat the advice I'm giving you to actually fit your circumstances. When it comes to writing one to many, it makes you writing much worse. It's clunky and too self-referential and sluggish.

If you add all those caveats, it's also condescending to the reader, who are smart enough to know, for example, that, you know, if you're giving advice about jogging and getting better at your running times and they have a severely injured knee and they can't run, they know that. And they don't need you to say, and of course this advice doesn't apply if you have a severely injured knee. They know that's true, and they'll extract from it what they actually need to extract. So I think that's a good illustration of this bigger point that sometimes is good for people just to take their swings as compellingly as they can. when all these swings collide, we get more wisdom.

Now when we shift over, however, to an individual trying to understand the world, so not you trying to push forward your vision for the world, where confirmation bias is not necessarily a bad thing, but where you're trying to understand how the world operates, you're intaking other people's thoughts. This is where you need to be more wary about confirmation bias. And I would say our culture right now of intaking information is essentially entirely defined by confirmation bias. We figure out what is my tribe?

What do we believe? I need to get to a pep rally. How do I find my way to the pep rally where I'll feel really good hearing people I agree with? Hearing not only them say things I agree with, but hearing them trash the other people who disagree with us. Those are the others. We hate them. Let's all have a kind of weirdly sadistic pep rally where we not only cheer on our teeth. team, but discuss how much we hate the other team. That is basically our cultural conversation

right now online in particular in many different areas. This is a place where I try to resist that. I do not like teams. I do not like tribes. I feel like it's intellectual abdication to say, tell me what I'm supposed to believe, and then I'll go get the pom-poms. I like a wide variety of thought. And what I have found, what I've argued before is that the best thing to do here is to encounter the very best arguments you can that either disagree with or offer an alternative to things that you feel strongly about. This is how you dilute individual confirmation bias about the things you believe in. Now, as I talk about on this show, people get worried about that.

They say, if I expose myself to a really good alternative, a really good other thought, then maybe I will dilute my commitment to my team. maybe my morality itself will be degraded. It's not what happens. If you believe strongly in something and it's a good thing you believe in, when you encounter really good arguments against it or really good alternatives, that combination strengthens and nuances your belief. It gives you a stronger tie to the thing you believe.

And it gives you a more sophisticated take on why you believe in what you believe in and what's wrong with the alternatives and where they overlap and where it gets complicated. It makes you a better defender of the thing. that are important to you to encounter their best alternatives. That makes you a better defender than to instead try to avoid them. To try to stay within a bubble where I'm only hearing from people that makes me feel good. So I have been arguing for that. We all have confirmation bias when it comes to taking an information about the world.

And I say that's a good bias to try to get away from because when you do try to get away from it, actually you're biased towards whatever you believe and tends to get stronger. The only addition I will add to this is, while it is natural for individuals to say, I don't really want to encounter these thoughts because they might be, let's say, disagreeable to me. That's completely natural. Be really wary when other people are saying that for you. But if other people are saying, I don't want you to be exposed to this because I don't think you are smart enough to be exposed to it. I won't be tricked, but you'll be tricked.

So let me just tell you what you should look at. Be wary of these other things. And in fact, if I find out you're looking at those other things, there could be some trouble. Lace up your running shoes and start running. That has never in the history of the world of ideas ever led to a good place. Be wary of people who tell you what you should or should have shown to encounter. And again, come back to this point, that if you are advocating for something publicly, make your case, let other people make their other cases when they collide, wisdom grows.

that's fine. When you're intaking information about the world, know what you believe in, believe in what you believe in. That's great. You can be on a team, have a jersey. That's fine. We all like to cheer for things. But the way to really strengthen your understanding is to encounter the alternatives, encounter the best faith, smartest arguments that go against what you say that show different ways of seeing things. It's not going to turn you into some sort of conspiratorial weirdo. It's going to actually make you smarter. It's going to make your beliefs more nuanced. It's going to give you some more empathy. It's going to make you a better human. and ultimately it's going to make your understanding of the world better.

So Charlotte, I remember your name there, that's my take on this issue. I have those two angles on it. I think they can both be true at the same time. We could probably summarize them, although, at least we could probably reduce 80% of the issues I just talked about, if you just did one simple thing, which was quit Twitter and never ever look at Twitter ever again. That alone would actually solve most of the problems I'm talking about. So, you know, that's the short answer and the long answer you just heard. All right.

Well, that's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you, everyone who sent in their questions. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.