Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 158: LISTENER CALLS: The Story of My First Book Deal

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.LISTENER CALLS:- Was Tesla the ultimate deep thinker? [4:01]- Writing for academic audiences (bonus: the story of my first book deal).  [7:03]- The difference between deep work and the deep life buckets (bonus: Jesse and I discuss the latest progress on my new book). [19:05]- Do YouTubers have a terrible job? [45:06]- Preparing for the GMAT and job interviews. [52:18]Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, 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 show is sponsored by Optimize, an online network dedicated to helping you live a deeper life. When you sign up for Optimize, you get access to over 600 philosophers' notes. These are best in the business summaries of some of the most important nonfiction books ever written. You also get access to over 50 101 video masterclasses on some of these big ideas, one that I taught called Digital Minimalism 101 and you get a daily plus one email that takes one big

idea from this corpus presents it to you in a accessible video and then links below to the Philosopher's Notes you can follow for the books from which that knowledge was extracted. I've been talking about Optimize on this podcast for a while because I'm good friends with Brian Johnson,

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And right away, immerse yourself in this knowledge to help your life become deeper, so there's no reason not to try it. Go to Optimize.combe today and create your free account. I'm Cal Newport, and this is DeepQuart. Questions. Episode 158. I'm here in the Deep Worked HQ, joined as always by Jesse, but not as always. We're actually trying something new today that we're quite excited about. This is the first time we have had the technical capability to actually record and film an entire episode of this podcast live, as opposed to doing multiple cuts and takes, recording a question, stopping, bringing a question, stopping, another question, doing another question stopping. We're actually going to try to do this whole thing live, which includes

the ability to actually cut to a camera that shows our intrepid producer. Jesse, how are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you. Thank you for, you know, wearing black for the black background today. I always appreciate that. I didn't think about what I should wear as thoroughly

as I probably should have. Well, in fairness, I sort of surprised Jesse by bringing a whole bag full of cables to the H.S. Q this morning, which actually makes this possible for the first time. So it turns out there's a lot involved. The other thing we're going to be able to do today is it's a listener calls episode. Jesse can play the calls live as if this was a live call-in show. We don't have to put those in in post. So we really will be able to, in theory, roll to this whole episode. Now, of course, just to make things particularly well suited for our first live episode, I'm getting over

a pretty nasty cold. So my voice is definitely where you want to be for talking for an hour straight. So I think we, Jesse, we really timed this one out well. Good stuff. I'm excited about it. The cords are all set up and we're ready to rock here. So one quick bit of business before we get into the calls. Last week, I asked Jesse if we should decorate the Deep Work HQ. And today he hasn't seen it yet, but I brought in a artificial garland that has built in Christmas lights that I am going to put on the desk in the main office. of the HQ. So I believe that counts and we can, with no exaggeration now describe the HQ as being a winter wonderland when it comes to the level of decorations I've just introduced. I'm excited about that. We'll see it all in action soon.

All right. So with that out of the way, let's see what we can break. And we're going to take our swing at doing our first live listener call show. So let's jump into some calls. Jesse, what is our first call about? Hi, so our first call we have Nikola. He's going to ask you a question about the Serbian scientist Tesla. So here we go. All right. Hi, Kyle. Do you regard Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla as the ultimate deep pork tinker? Because he was 100% focused on his inventions and that led him to become the greatest inventor of all time.

I don't know if I would say, so it's a good question. So if I'm hearing it correctly, the question is, do I personally consider Tesla, Nikolai Tesla to be the greatest inventor of all time? I'm not sure if I would say that. I mean, it depends how we want to actually define what makes you the greatest inventor of all time. I recently read a pretty dense Edison biography. And so something Edison had, for example, that Tesla didn't was the ability to commercialize. to take an idea but then actually push that idea through into something

that could be mass produced, sold at mass. Tesla was not interested in that. He was interested more in the technology. There's also some mythology around Tesla. I think the Tesla mythology has grown to the point where he's seen as basically inventing every technology ever in a 10-year period.

Well, Tesla thought about that and he thought about this. And I think that's a little exaggerated. All that being said, from what I know about Tesla, he was a good exemplar of deep work. he had social phobias. He did not like being around other people. He could focus intensely on a problem and made some really big breakthroughs, and particular breakthroughs about how to actually make alternating current practical,

how you could actually build devices to run on alternating current. I mean, this is maybe getting a little bit in the weeds, but the advantage of direct current is that you can directly drive a motor. And driving a motor is one of the most important early applications of electricity, because it replaced steam engines and factories. Alternating current, if you just hooked it up to a direct electromagnetic motor, would have the motor go back and forth, back and forth. So you actually had to invent a clever electrical apparatus.

It would allow the alternating current current to still drive a continuous motor forward. There's also some other work you did on transformers, etc. Anyways, great inventor, great example of someone who focused on being so good they couldn't be ignored. pushing the technology, pushing the technology. Clearly, he played a big role in Westinghouse's rise, the downfall of Edison, the rise of AC over DC current. So I like the question. Good example of deep work. Don't know if he is the greatest inventor of all time, but he does have a car named after him, so that's not so bad.

All right, Jesse, what do we got next? All right. Next question we got Andrew. He's got some ideas about writing for a technical audience. and he wants your thoughts on that. So let's fire away with Andrew here. Hi, Cal, Kyle, long-time listener, first-time caller. My name is Andrew, and I work as a virtual CFO,

who also builds data pipelines for my clients. I found some interesting topics when combining those two worlds that I'd like to write more about. I'm specifically writing more about timeless business management principles and combining those with the new data-rich world that we're in. I've written for more of a general audience in the past, but I'm pulling with the idea of writing for an academic or a research journal type audience. My background is in finance and accounting, which did not have a lot of writing in school.

So I feel like this is a blind spot for me. What advice do you have for a non-academic trying to write for this world? And are there any resources you'd recommend checking out? Thanks, Cal. There definitely is a gap between general audience writing and academic writing. Probably as much as anyone else in the world I know about this gap. as I'm someone who has done quite a bit of both. General audience writing in some sense is harder, right?

Because you actually have to deploy more craft to do general audience writing well. So the actual writing itself is harder to do. The clarity of the ideas, the structure of the writing, the examples you give, the narrative momentum that brings people from one idea to the other, the introducing a lay audience to complicated ideas without over. overwhelming them, giving them enough to latch onto so they can keep figuring out what you're trying to talk about. That's all hard from a craft perspective. When it comes to technical writing for, let's say, a journal, an academic journal, you have to be clear, but no one really cares

about the craft. You don't have to have a lot of narrative momentum in your journal article. You don't have to have nice illustrative examples. You don't have to worry about redundancies. You don't have to worry about the issue of, you know, I mentioned this thing earlier and it needs to pay off here and I need the end, the call back, the beginning. You don't need a turn or a nut necessarily in academic writing. It's more workmanlike. You want to write clearly. You're conveying the information, but the real craft in academic writing is generating that information in the first place. Here's the theory.

Here's the experiment. Here's the idea. So it's two very different worlds. Now, I will say as an aside, I sometimes bring the craft that I have worked on in the world of general purpose writing to my academic papers. I will sometimes, for example, as I'm known among my collaborators to do, obsess over introductions, wordsmith them, so it flows really well and there's a storyline. Here's the thing, none of that really helps. I mean, I think the readers appreciate it. I have not seen a discernible impact on whether or not my papers get accepted.

or not into academic venues if I write at a, let's say, a New Yorker style introduction to my academic paper. So I do it because I can't help it, but it doesn't really matter. If you're going to do academic writing, don't wing it. You have to understand for the venue that you're writing for what is required for a paper to be accepted for publication. Who needs to be on that? Like, can you do this as a virtual CFO who's special and building data pipelines for the journal you want to write for. Can you just write for them from that perspective or do you need an academic co-author? So who needs to be on these paper?

What is the level of original theory or ideas that needs to be in here? What sort of backing do you need? What type of literature, reviewer understanding do you have to convey? This is a big piece of a lot of academic writing is showing a sophisticated understanding of the landscape of existing publications and showing that you understand where your work fits. into the landscape. It's one of the big sins in academic writing that if a reviewer senses you don't know our field well, they're not going to publish your piece.

Don't guess at all of this. You really need to know the right answers because your papers will not get accepted if you try to wing it. There's very specific parameters for each different particular venue that you might try to publish in. So that would mean at the easiest deconstruct existing papers in the

venues you want to publish. perhaps more effective, though slightly harder, is to talk with people who are publishing in those venues already, people who are writing similar articles, talk to them about their work and what's required for these things to get accepted. Even more effective and even more difficult would be get a co-author who is experienced, convince someone who is already publishing multiple times in a venue, the co-author of paper with you, learn on the job, what is required, what do we need to be. need, what standard of evidence, what review, what does it really take? But all this comes

back to the same idea. You need information. You need hard, realistic, on-to-ground information about how this type of publishing works before you try to do it. And I'm going to attempt to generalize this for lots of different issues because I think this comes up a lot when people are thinking about new projects or endeavors. It is very easy to come up with what you want to be the reality. Here's what I'm going to do. Here's what I want. It's to be. I want to be a novelist, and that means I'll do national novel writing month with a proper Scrivener configuration, and that will make me a novelist. We want the story to be what we wanted to be, but the reality might be, you know, there's a lot more training involved. There's a lot higher

bar that you have to pass. Here is how you can tell if you're at the right level. And so in general, I like to push that advice. When doing something new, first do the work of figuring out about what is actually required to succeed. What is actually required to succeed? So there's a story I told in a podcast interview recently. It has not come out yet. I don't usually reveal interviews I've done until after they've come out. But I think Jesse knows who I'm talking about here.

I did a podcast review interview recently with a relatively large podcaster. You'll verify it was a pretty large podcaster. Yes, for sure. I'm a fan of this podcast as well. All right. That's all we'll say for now. And that's coming down the new year at some point.

But one of the things we got into in that interview was how did I get started in nonfiction book writing? And I got into detail about the path I took because I was 20. I was 20 years old when I got serious about writing books. And I signed my first book deal with Random House right after I turned 21. So we're getting into it on this podcast interview. How did I make that work? And what I did, I think this is the biggest differentiating factor between me and

the other sort of weird, nerdish 20 year olds who might think about writing books is I said I want to get the real answer about what would be required for someone my age to get a book deal. And so I used a family friend who was in journalism and said, can you connect me with a literary agent

and you can make it clear to this agent that I'm not going to try to sell them something. I'm not going to get her to sign me. I just want 30 minutes information. And so my name is, memory is he hooked me up with a phone call with an agent. She was a fiction agent, so this was good. There was no chance I was going to try to sell her. She primarily focused on fiction, but she was very well established, knew the industry well. I said, look, I'm a 20-year-old. I want to try to sign a book

deal. What would really be required? And she gave me the reality. And honestly, it's probably not what you'd want to hear. I think what I wanted to hear was like, you're great, your idea is great. Just start writing every day and, you know, your book will be published. And it's not what she told me. She's like, look, there's going to be a huge bar for you to cross as someone that young, trying to get a book deal. It's a risk. So here's the things you're going to have to do.

I think what you need to do, first of all, is get more publication credits. You have to start writing articles that are on the topic you want to sell the book on. They're going to want to see writing samples in this genre to see that you really know how to write. So you've got to sell it. Also, you're going to want to do a lot of research in advance. They're not going to trust you to come up with the right idea. So you need to do that all in advance. I would do as much of the research for the book as possible in advance

so that you can give the agent followed by the publisher a really detailed table of contents. Here's what I'm thinking. So I can write on this topic. People have paid me to write on this topic. I've done all the research. Here's the content. You can see exactly what's going to be.

She said you're probably going to have to do some pretty extensive sample chapter writing. So I took that all to heart and it took me a while. I went out there and got commissions. There were small publications. My first books were aimed at college. So these were student-focused publications. Some of these were online only. Some of these were paper magazines that they would distribute for free on college campuses.

There used to be a publication called Business Today. I'm sure if that still exists. Came out of Princeton University students would run it. But whatever. There's these publications. They weren't high-bar publications, but they were publications. And I began pitching articles that were student-advice-oriented. And as part of that effort, I did all of the research for my first book.

It was one article commission that required me to talk to a small number of Rhodes Scholars for the article commission. And I took that commission and interviewed 25 people. Way more than I needed for that article, but it was all the research I needed for the first book I was going to pitch. How do I want to call it? So I did that work and it was a pain and it's not what I wanted the answer to be. And it took me a year. But then when I was done, I could get an agent like that, and she could turn around and sell that book like that,

and we were off to the races. If I had done what I wanted the right answer to be, which is just people will recognize your brilliance when you give them a one-page summary of your idea, and they'll just give you a lot of money, I never would have started writing. So this is my broader interpretation here. If you want to do something new, regardless of what it is,

face to hard truth by talking to experts about what's really required, it stinks in the moment because it's usually more than you want to do. But it is a huge competitive advantage in the long term because it means you're actually going to put your energy on the things that really matter while all of your potential competitors

trying to get started in the same world will be doing National Novel Writing Month and optimizing their Scrivener their Scribner configurations and they're never going to get there. All right. I think that works. Jesse, would you be excited to read a book about virtual CFOs and rich data pipelines?

Possibly. That was a good answer, though. I mean, you gave Andrew a lot of content there. Andrew's going to be happy. I hope so, yeah. It would be funny if what Andrew was really wanting to write was a, like a thriller novel, but about virtual CFOs who, through the construction of a rich data pipeline,

saves the world from a meteor strike and gets the girl in the end. I'd be there for that book. And he also throws like a mean, Fastball. He plays baseball on the side. He plays baseball on the sea. Richard, we're giving you the secret here.

That's the book you need to write. Forget what everyone tells you. Just start writing, man. Ten pages a day. Follow the muse. You're going to be Dan Brown this time next year. The baseball throwing virtual CFO, who's rich data pipelining,

he's been using just to attract women but decides to put his skill to use and takes a break from his pitching responsibility slash data pipeline responsibilities to save the earth from meteor. I love it, man. You're set. All right. What do we got next?

Our next question, we got a question about the deep work buckets and then keystone habits. So, let's take a listen. This podcast is sponsored by Foursigmatic, a wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Four-Sigmatics mushroom coffee is a 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. That feeling means deep work. and I can shift into that deep work mode faster. Now, I know what you're probably thinking. Does this coffee taste like mushrooms? I can guarantee you. It does not. It will taste just like the coffee you love.

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and get free shipping if you go right now to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash deep to fuel your productivity and creativity with some delicious mushroom coffee. This podcast is sponsored by Grammarly. We have arrived at that season again. When your end-of-year projects or reports are due. When holiday festivities mean you need to be sending out holiday cards or getting back in touch with family or friends you haven't spoken to in the last 12 months.

It is a season in which you need your communication game to be on point. This is where Grammarly can help you. Grammarly is like having that grammar nerd friend of yours who reads the element of style for fun looking over your shoulder. As you write in all the different apps where you write on all the different devices in which you run those apps to make sure that you are saying what you want to say the right way. I have been very impressed by the features that now are found in Grammarly. This seems like Star Trek type stuff. You know, you want a better word, they'll give you a synonym.

You want a better tone. You can use the Grammarly Goals feature, and they will make suggestions to help you match that tone. End of your feedback report, it can help you do a formal tone. Writing out a holiday card, it can help you write in a friendly tone. let's say you already wrote something and you want to know if it's coming across correctly, it's built-in tone detector will tell you, hey, this is the tone of what you just wrote. I'm telling you, the things that Grammarly can do these days really is amazing.

It really is like having that grammar nerd friend looking over your shoulder, making sure that you are communicating what you really mean to say. So take the stress out of getting the words right with Grammarly. The good news is that my listeners will get 20% off Grammarly Premium if they go to Grammarly.com slash deep. That's 20% off at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y dot com slash deep. Hi, Cal, it's Nevec here. I'm wondering if you could explain the difference between...

deep work and the roles that you play and your buckets and your keystone habits in those. I'm assuming you have other things you do in the buckets, and I'm just not clear how you see the relationship between the buckets and your roles, and I suppose deep work. Thanks. All right. This is a good question because we can clarify the relationship between the deep life, the philosophy that includes the buckets and deep work, which is a type of professional activity. Jesse, let me ask you, though, right off the bat, I sort of stumbled into this terminology of buckets early in the pandemic when I was thinking through the deep life.

And now we're kind of stuck with them. You think this is a good thing or a bad thing? You've talked about the buckets for a while because I've been like, listen to your podcast since the very beginning. I like the terminology and I remember you mentioning it even before I started working with you, but I've always been a fan of the buckets. I use it when I explain it to certain people. So I think it's fine. But yeah. All right. So we got we got what it is. Buckets, we're stuck with buckets. Let me do, by the way, let me do an update on the book. And then I'll get to this answer. But I just finished my sixth version of the potential

outline for this book. I've gone through six versions. I had a hard time with it. I did the first version that I actually sent off to my literary agent and said, okay, I think I have this thing cracked. I think I might be ready to write a proposal. So, so Jesse, let me do an update. Let me give you the latest update on the potential book I will be writing about the deep life. And then we'll get to the meet. We'll get the meat of this question. Yeah, let's do it. So here's what was struggling with me before. I was struggling before when I was thinking about this book because it was important to me that for this subject matter, that the book was, for lack of a better word, smart.

I didn't want to tackle something as philosophically resonant as living a deep life. I didn't want to tackle it with, and now here's the seven steps, and here's bullet points, and here's lazy writing, which in the non-fifference. fiction space, the pragmatic nonfiction space, you know you get lazy writing when a lot of rhetorical questions enter the scene. That's a little tip when you get a lot of, but would this really work? What about a da, what a blah, blah, blah. It's like, man, that's your notes for like what you need to craft good writing about. You can't just put the rhetorical questions into the writing. So I thought this topic really needed, um, it needed to be smart. I mean, it's, it's a complicated

topic. But my issue was when all I was doing was trying to come up with a table of contents for the book, I was putting all of the, um, I was putting all of the, um, the book. the necessity to make the book smart onto the table of contents. And so it was leading me down these unusual and contrived structures for the book because it's like, well, I want the structure itself to convey that this is something different. And eventually what I realized was, you know, keep the structure simple and let the writing do the work. And in fact, not only make it simple, why don't we distill down to its essence, like the very elements of a Cal Newport book and simplify them down to. to its purest form.

So the structure is there, and it's there, but in a minimalist form. And then let your writing do all the work of showing the philosophical depth of this topic. And so that's what I ended up doing with my current outline in the prolog. Right up there in the prolog, it's me, it's early pandemic, this topic arise. I coined the term buckets. And I just let this one short prolog is going to do all the work of just motivating why this topic matters. It's been around forever. Each, whatever, each generation comes out of differently.

We have our own moment where we're kind of re-appraising this topic. But no, like multiple chapters with citing 70 things. A prologue that is just grounded in a place and a time and me, boom, right? Then we go to a next chapter, prepare. All of the stuff we've talked about. You know, I mean, the buckets, in general, what makes a deep life deep? I mean, I've pretty much simplified it in my own thinking that the death. definition of a deep life is

you radically aligning your life to be in alignment with things that you really value. So it's about not just aligning elements of your life but being willing to make radical changes to your life to align into things that you value. I think let's just give the definition. Let's talk about it.

Like what's the hard thing about it? Well, it's hard to figure out what changes to make. We have this bucket system. We'll talk about it a second that can help. But like, there it is. Just one chapter. Call it prepare. Out of the way. Not dragging. this out, not going whatever, just boom. And then the whole rest of the book, I have five chapters.

Each is a different element of something you might radically align as part of building a deep life. Naming them with one word verbs and let the writing do the work. So you have this prologue, you have this

prepare chapter, and then it's right now the terminology I have is move, quit, serve, train, wonder, the current list. And the list might change, but one word, one verb. Like, I'm trying to get down to the essence. Like, let's get down to the essence of a Cal Newport book. Here's the problem. Here's the solution. Let's look into how you implement the solution. Just getting it down to the essence. And then I can let the writing do the work. And I'm going to follow my own journey through these chapters. I'm a character in this. They're going to be asymmetrical. So it's not like every chapter has the same structure as every other one. I really want to get away from, you know, opening stories. interpretation of the opening story, complicating story, four bullet points.

It's going to be, you know, some chapters be different than others. I'm a character in it. Let's be nuanced in tackling these issues. Take these different elements

of building a deep life and really go, try to understand why do they resonate, what's at the core of them, what do you have to think about if you're trying to do an alignment here,

give some respect to the reader to help put the pieces together. So that's where I am now. A very simple structure. Now it then ends with an epilogue. Okay, here's how I've changed my own life. Very simple structure, one-word chapter titles. Get down to the core of it and then really let a journey unfold, let the writing do what the writing needs to do.

I don't know. So what do you think, Jesse, better or worse than where I was before? I like it. So I have a question. When you were doing, when you were trying to make the book seem smart and you were developing the table of contents, how did you, explain that to the agent or whoever you submitted it to that it was the writing that was going to be the smart work? Or did you write the epilogue as well? So they had an example, like an example. You know, so yeah, it's a good question. So like what I was doing before is I was getting too cute with the structure. Well, I think the last time I talked about on the podcast maybe at that point I was doing paths. Like here are the four main paths that people follow. And that wasn't quite right. I wanted to get to the crux of the matter. Like, what? What are the actual changes that create the depth, the residence?

I wanted to be more concrete. So that seemed too complicated. And then I had a form where each, each chapter was a setting. It was like, I'm at this farm. I'm at this like writer's retreat or something like this. And then I would build out from the setting. But I was like, this is, again, it's not clear to the reader. Why are we at this setting?

And I don't want this to be just one of these reflection books where I just like, I have these kind of reflections. and I prove that I'm smart with my writing. And that seemed too cute. And so really, and then I had more complicated traditional structures where, you know, here's like three, four chapters on like what's needed to prepare, you know, for the deep life. And it was like spending all this time on it. Like that felt forced or whatever.

So I just simplified it down to these one word chapters. And I sent it off just for my agent to look at. But I was like, the structure should make a lot of sense here. It's my standard. I've just simplified it. But the writing is going to do what the writing does. It's going to follow my story. Not every chapter is going to be the same.

And it was more for me. I just felt a clarity. And I felt like a book like this needed a lot of clarity. Just you look at the table of contents. Like I know what you're up to. Let's get into it. If that makes sense. Got it.

So this being the six version, how long is that process? Is it like six months? Like you submit a version every month or is it? So this is the first version I submitted. So the first five versions, I was like, no. So my whole thing, my whole process is I rely heavily on my sense of taste to borrow the terminology from Ira Glass

that like the first step into trying to produce something good is you have to develop the taste to recognize good things and it can be frustrating because then you know when you're doing stuff that's not hitting that, that's not hitting that level. So I know what I'm looking for and I'm very empathetic right. So I can, I put myself into the head

a potential reader and try to simulate, what's that response? Is there an aspirational response or not, right? So I'm very empathetic. I'm like this in person, by the way, too. I very strongly read and feel empathetically what's going on in a room. If I'm talking to someone like every little nuance about their state of mind and how they're feeling, it hits me really big, right? And this has negatives and positives.

It has some social implications that aren't great, but it's good for writing because I can simulate the mind of the reader really well. And so I really began working on this in earnest in July. Just trying to get an outline. And for the other five, I would finish it. I would sit with it and it was just a feeling. It's not right. It's hard to explain.

It's like a little premonition of like something's not right here. There's some grit into gears. And I would sit on it and I'd just say this is not right. And then I would try again. And I think, that's not quite right. And I would try again, it's like, oh, it's not quite right. So it's really for me, it's all this intuition. I just have an intuition when I finally feel.

like I think I'm honing in on I think I'm honing in on something that the readers it's going to get it's all about pressing the buttons I want to press I want the experience of reading the book to be be exciting like you have the sense of I'm going to change something in my life and I'm getting some revelation and there's a whole sense that I'm going for

and so I've been sitting with this one for a while and feel better about it so I think I'm getting closer were you influenced it all by your friend Ryan Holliday's new books with the one chapter titles that he's been doing? Did that influence it at all with the one chapter? Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. So Ryan, I think Ryan is a great example of this of keeping the form keeping the form simple and clear. And then letting the writing

do the work of actually affecting the person. Yeah, I think he's a great example of that. If we're going to be really highfaluting about this and self-impulsing, important. As you know, I went through this phase of reading a lot about film, film studies, etc. Technically, you could think about what I'm interested in is the pragmatic nonfiction equivalent of autour theory in film. So in film, when you look at Felini and Auteur theory, there was this sense of like what the, especially in the 70s and 80s, that these Auteur directors would take a well-established genre.

And then they would work within the constraints of that genre to create art. and it was actually in the tension of their work against the constraints that you would subvert this or what they would do with this, that you would actually create the value that somehow that there was something to this that was even more special or magical than just starting with a blank slate. So this would be the difference between Ford working within the constraints of the Western and visually and storytelling wise working with it. Or Clint Eastwood and Unforgiven, which I recently rewatch, taking the constraints of the genre that he, He helped define earlier in his career and is in the subverting of the constraints that actually like the power comes out. And then comparing that, for example, to like Terry Malick, who's just like, I'm going to construct this thing from scratch. You know, I'm going to, this movie is, it's going to be whatever it's going to be. The alter theory, you work within the genre.

I think it's an incredibly self-important way of describing how to books that I write. but at least it gives me some sort of motivation and Ryan does this too work within the constraints of the genre so I have a very clear constraint motivation idea all right so here's this issue

here's my original idea about what to do about it digital mentalism deep work replacing the hyperactive hive mind then a journey to understand how to implement it which is where you help the reader instantiate in their own

mind what changed, how their life might actually change to act on that promise. Like, that's my Western movie or detective novel. And I'm trying to work within it. So that's what I'm doing with this new one. Like, let's just distill it down to one word, incredibly simple, get the motivation to a prolog, get the whole, like, here's the idea down to just one chapter, use all the new muscles I've been building at the New Yorker to be clear and well crafted and balanced and momentum going and then just see where it goes. So this is like the self-important stuff I tell myself. So, so. So, I don't get bored, you know.

I don't know. Do you buy this? This is probably going too far, right? Talking about Auteur theory. No, I like it a lot. In fact, if it becomes a movie, we can get Andrew from the previous call to be a character and it's seen that he's got all those other traits. Yeah, I left that. Yeah, I did leave that out that that's going to be a big part of the book is going to be

these big callout boxes. And I'm going to have a like a sketch of Andrew, you know, a really dramatic sketch of Andrew and a lot of details on rich data pipelines. Because like you got to subvert. expectations, you know? Like, you're like, oh, man, what's going to happen? He's going to quit. This guy's going to quit his job.

And then it's XML formats for maximum data portability. That's, I think that's where the magic's going to be. I love the explanation. I think it was great. There's an actual question lurking in there, wasn't there? Yeah, so the question was about deep work and working with the Keystone habits. You get this type of question a decent amount, but I always love hearing the

explanation because I'm a big firm believer that people need to be continually coached. So, yeah, okay. So yeah, now let's get back to the meat of it. All right. So we have the deep life. We have this growing definition of the deep life that I've been refining where it's really about living your life in radical alignment with things you value. So you're aligning the things you value. You're willing to make radical changes to actually make that alignment, like maybe radical changes to where you live and work or the structure of your day. Implicit in this definition is also you're comfortable missing out on other things to do this priority. So I'm going to really focus on a few things that really matter and radically align my life with it. All right. So that's my vision of the deep life. The hard part about the deep life, and this is something I've been refining when I've been thinking about this potential book, the hard part is, well, figuring out what that is. Like, what's really important? How do you align your life to it?

There's some preparation that's actually required to get better in tune with yourself and to get more comfortable with the idea that you have efficacy, that you can actually influence the way your life unfold. A lot of us aren't really used to that except for in very minor ways, like trying a new exercise routine. And so the bucket system I talk about on the podcast a lot is in some sense a way of doing that preparation, beginning to learn what's important to you, beginning to build that muscle of aligning your life with the things that are important, even if that requires sacrifices or deemphasizing other things, it's the preparation stage. And then once you're done with that preparation stage,

then you might actually make some more radical steps. Now I'm ready to, like, with confidence, move across the country, go to the farm, radically change our work situation, whatever it's going to be. So I see now the buckets as a preparatory step towards a more extreme push towards a deep life. The idea briefly is you identify the important areas of your life. I call these the deep life buckets.

The examples I give often are alliterative, and I'll start with C. So the original group I used to talk about was craft, community, constitution, and contemplation, but people have different list of what's important to them. And what I would recommend in this system is that you start, step one, identifying a keystone habit for each of these buckets. Something you do on a daily basis and track that you actually did it. That's not trivial, but is also tractable. So it's not, you know, I clap my hands twice, but it's also not I ran a half marathon every day. These keystone habits should be something that advances something you care about in that bucket. The idea here is not that this will radically transform your life, but that you begin to get used to this idea of I intentionally prioritize each of these things.

Each of these things gets attention. That's step one. Step two, then I recommend taking. each of these buckets in turn and giving it four, six, maybe eight weeks. So I usually say average out four to six weeks where you focus just on that area of your life and overhaul it. Like what more permanent changes do I want to make? What things do I want to eliminate? What new things do I want to do? What more permanent changes do I want to make to make to make to make sure that that part of my life is getting a good amount of attention and I'm extracting

from a good amount of value in my day-to-day life? And that takes some time in experimentation. So that's why I say take at least four to six weeks for each. This is a concept that I stole from the medieval Jewish practice of Musar, M-U-S-S-A-R, which is a practice of virtue cultivation where you actually focus one month at a time on different virtues that you're trying to improve and then you cycle back again. Very into that idea. I think it's a really cool idea that should be known more widely. So I'm sort of polling from there.

And then when you're done with those overhauls, you are going to be in a state now where you know what's important to you because you have been experimenting with it and trying to amplify things and just getting in touch with those intimations for each of the areas of your life you've just spent a month thinking nothing about that and you feel a lot more efficacious

because you've now done non-trivial rewiring of elements of your life to make sure that each of these buckets is being satisfied. That by itself is going to put you on a much more stable foundation. If you did nothing else, I think your life is going to be deeper. It also puts you into the right place if you want to make the radical changes.

Because now you really know what you're all about and you're confident you can make changes. So that's the deep life bucket system. Deep work, by contrast, is a particular type of professional effort. It is when you're working on something that is cognitively demanding and you don't contact switch. So you give it your full attention. Much more minor in the grand scheme of things. So where might that show up in here? well the craft what I call the craft bucket

is the bucket that's dedicated to what you produce professionally it also by the way can cover other things you produce that maybe it's not at the core of your job but any type of producing of things that are valuable if you're the actor Nick Offerman for example from Parks and Recreation he has this fantastic

woodshed warehouse and the suburb of Los Angeles somewhere where he builds these great wood creations you know it's not a business for him but it's craft and that's important to them. So it's building things, but definitely your professional life is covered there.

When you're considering craft, deep work matters, because as we talk about, you want to produce things of value, that means you want to make sure that you have good time protected for deep work, and you want to work on the load of work in your life, probably so that you have enough ratio

of deep to shallow work. Yeah, that's all considerations that apply narrowly when you're trying to figure out your craft bucket. So to get to the definitive answer to the original question, the deep life is this big idea. If you're going through my preparatory deep life bucket system, during the time you're focused on a craft or whatever your equivalent is of the craft bucket,

that's real care about deep work. And I like to make this point because I think deep work as a concept has inflated for some people to cover a lot of things. And I'm trying to keep these separations more clear. So this is why I like to talk about Let's get deep work narrow to what it is Focusing on something hard without distraction And let's use the term deep life To capture this broader goal of living a life

That's radically aligned With your values All right So I don't know do you think I think just that's probably the Breaking the I'm breaking records here For length of answers Before we actually get to any information

Relevant to the original question That was a good one That one was 21 minutes probably. Pretty close. Oh, dear Lord. It was solid. All right. You know, I'm going fast.

I'm going fast. This is my challenge. Fast answer on this next one. Be ready for it. All right. So here we go. The next question we have a question about your dislike of the words content and content creator. She explains more.

Hi, Cal. My name is Tina. And I'm an academic medicine. You've mentioned in the show several times about how you hate the word content and content creator. I find that I don't like these terms either, but I can't quite articulate why. Can you explain further as to why these words just don't sound right, considering your deep life and deep work philosophies? Thank you very much. I'm a huge fan of the show. All right. I'll be quick on this answer. I think the, the, the,

Content and content creator terminology, the context in which it is often used, is in a very sterile business technique optimization type context. So when you hear content creator, you're imagining that you're going to be watching a YouTube video about optimizing your subscription numbers for your YouTube channel or something like this. When you think of content or content creator, you think of people saying, I want you to smash that subscribe button. You know, and hit the bell.

And so, anyways, it's sterile and business focused where I tend to focus more on the craft itself. The Steve Martin advice that be so good they can't ignore you. That you're not a content creator who's trying to meet a content schedule. You're trying to instead craft a book that hundreds of thousands of people are going to feel like changed their life. you're not trying to optimize readership numbers, you're trying to write an article that is going to change the way

a whole segment of the population understands an important issue. So I like to put the focus concretely on the actual artistic thing you're trying to create and put as much energy impossible into making that as good as possible. And then all the other stuff,

it comes along, but it's kind of on the side. I don't know. I mean, yeah, there's some stuff you have to do, but that's not the focus. The focus is producing the good stuff. Now, Jesse, you've been teaching me about some of this stuff, right?

So, like, you're helping me get videos online. You will admit to the audience that I know very little about YouTube or videos. And I practice what I preach. I do not know any content creator information. I'm not, I'm okay with YouTube and stuff. I have, you know, a channel on another field that's, you know, decent. But all in all, yeah, I mean, I can attest to that. I guess that, okay, one other, I don't want to go long because I promise to be short.

So I'll be short here. But I think there's also a there, but for the grace of God go I type fear I have, which is there's a very specific job in the world of people who work in written or visual mediums, which is being a YouTube personality. And they are really, beholden to these algorithms. I guess if you make money off of like YouTube advertisements, it really matters if your videos get recommended,

right? I guess that's where a lot of views come from. And there's all of these little things that matter for the algorithm to get your video shown more. And obsessing about these things really probably makes a very practical difference to how much money you make.

And so to me, when I see my son watching like Minecraft, YouTubers. I'm like, what a hard job. Man, this is a smart guy. Like, I'm wondering if you should go to med school. You know what I mean? Because, like, they have to do this all day long and get subscribers and this bell. I don't know what the bell does. But if they don't do this, it's not going to get recommended. And it doesn't get recommended. They're not going to be able to pay their heating bill. And they have to, like, render videos all night long. And, and like, I don't want to do any of that. So for me,

I'm also, I think, just in a self-protective way. I don't want anything to do with that world. I care about my books. Like when it comes to metrics of success, how many copies my books sell and podcast listeners. I think downloads of the podcast is very important.

I like this medium. It's distributed. We control it. I think it's given us a great relationship with the audience. And if YouTube videos help those things, that's great. But I really,

I think once you go down that line of trying to serve the YouTube algorithm, it's a Faustian bargain. 100%. I think the gamers, they have a tough lifestyle. I mean, they probably don't have the best diet in the world. They probably not exercising that much. Their backs probably hurt all the time. But they, some of them make banks. So, I mean, as long as they're not blowing all the money, maybe they're okay. But who knows. I mean, I completely agree with you, though. Here's my counterfactual, though. Let's say we take, let's say everyone who in the last five years made a serious run, and let's just focus on one game at a Minecraft YouTube. video, right? Like where they're doing it almost full time. Now, if we took all those people and said almost anything else, like try writing books, try starting a software company, like just get your college degree and try to go into banking, I bet we'd have the same income distribution. There'd be like a small number of people who made a lot of money and like some other people,

most other people, actually would probably be a better distribution. You'd have a few people that made a lot of money, but a lot of money would be more than the best YouTubers make. And then almost everyone else would have at least a stable middle class lifestyle, where with the YouTubers probably the curve is much more brutal that like 80% can't even, you know, pay their bills with it. But it would be the time demands of, you know, I don't know, I ran a software company or a banker would probably be better than the work. I guess my counterfactual is like,

is this actually opening up? Because I don't think it's a better lifestyle. It's a really hard job. Is it really opening up like more income making opportunities than these are smart kids than other stuff they could do? That's probably more rational thinking than they went into. They probably first started doing it and then realize they might be able to make some money with it. And then all of a sudden it is like a snowball effect.

So like people were doing it. And there's a tension. And I don't think that they would ever even want to begin, you know, starting an accounting firm or doing some sort of thing like that where they have to report to work and do whatever. Yeah. But you could be, they're all tech savvy. they could most of these guys I bet could build up pretty good computer programming skills and work

I don't know half the year on contract and have the other half the year completely free and probably have as maybe it's just not as much fun maybe I'm not a romantic some of them might be I think a lot of them might be like my good buddy who has like an online business plays games all the time he doesn't do videos

but yeah I mean yeah well this is just me justifying myself but okay good question that's semi-fast. That's semi-fast. Do we have another one? How are we doing with time? Yeah, we have one more question.

This is a question about studying for the G-MAT, and then at the tail end, she's also juggling job hunting. So we'll take a listen to what Lindsay has to say. All right. Hi, Cal. This is Lindsay. Huge fan of your work. I am wondering if you could speak to. two things. The first is most effective way to study for the G-MAT test. I took it back in 2011. I have to

retake it now that I'm applying to school again for something else because they have changed the test. and there's so many guides and books in online courses out there that I don't know, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. So if you could speak to that or like generally standardized higher education. Jessica, can we pause her right there? Secondly, so let me answer her first part and then we'll get her second part if that works. Because GMAT, I have a simple answer for any of those standardized standards. test. Doing sample test under the real time conditions is by far the actual best practice. I can do real sample test and get this score under those conditions. Then you will get that

score in the real test. If you can't, you won't. The only thing you do is use books. I don't think you need the online courses. Get books to learn the techniques they recommend for each of the different types of sections. She's like, okay, I'm going to study these type of questions. and look at the techniques. Now I'm going to try it under time conditions. Then I'll go back and deconstruct the answers I got wrong, figure out how to answer them right, see if I'm missing any techniques.

Why did I get that wrong? Was it a mistake or I didn't know how to do it? And then do it again under time conditions. And that's it. I mean, this is how I did, for example, the GRE. When I was applying to graduate school in computer science, most of these schools cared only about your math section. I knew you needed a high 700s in the math

to be in contention for any of these schools. They preferred 800, but I gamed it out and was like, okay, high 700s would be enough. And that's all I did. Like, okay, let me read a book about the different types of questions and the techniques they recommend. Sample test. How'd I do? Try again. Try again.

Okay, I'm in the high 700s. Go. Took the test and we're done. So that's the way to prepare. Nothing else fancy. Get in real conditions. Do the test. Figure out what you got wrong.

Look at one book on techniques, but it's really a game of practicing. All right. Let's see what your second part of the question is. Dively, job hunting, you know, organization, best way to practice answers, things like that, you know, in interviews. So I'm kind of doing both at the same time. Thank you so much. Okay, bye. All right.

Well, first of all, tangentially. Jesse, was that the first call we've had where someone seems to actually be walking? There seemed to be a lot of talk in the background. I heard footsteps. Yeah. So, I don't know, can the technology we use for people to call in? I guess that must work on your phone, right?

I think so. Okay, so now we know. Now we know. We've never heard someone actually walking. I think it would be funny if the reality was Lindsay had a really large media cart. And like on the media cart, she had a desktop computer with a monitor. and like a keyboard. And then there was another wagon

that had a generator in it. And there was like someone pulling the cart and someone pushing the generator and she had like a headset on connected to the computer as she walked trying to answer the question. It's either that or speak pipe works on your phone.

We'll see. But anyways, that's cool. So all right, everyone, now we know you can answer these questions from the phone. And if you want to know how to do this, by the way, Calnewport.com slash podcast.

There's a link. But it's just a service called speak pipe. and you record right from your web browser. Okay, so for job interviews, so for corporate job interviews, if you're going to be doing corporate recruiting in particular, you've got to practice that too. And the way you practice that is it has to be practiced specific to those types of interviews,

just to give you a little insider look, if you're at an elite college, for example, and watching people interviewing for banking jobs or consulting jobs, there's practice sessions that they do again and again with sample types of questions. How do you answer case questions? How do you answer brainstorming questions? Coders, so let's say you're trying to get a job as a computer programmer at Google.

I'll tell you just based on our grad students here at Georgetown, they practice a lot. And there's various tools like Leit Code, I think it's called, where you can practice the types of coding puzzles that they will give you to do on the whiteboards. But it's a very specific skill. you have to think about corporate recruiting like you're going to juggle. I got to practice how to do this. Quick personal story. When I was at Dartmouth,

I signed up for one of these interviews for a consulting firm. They were doing the first pass on campus. And I was like, I don't need to practice. I'm a smart guy of fouros. And just got destroyed because it was so specific. I was like, what the hell are you talking about?

Because I did not practice. They're like, all right, well, I forgot the question was. It was something like, help us walk you through how you think through this question. Like how many windows? I think the question was like

how many windows are there in Manhattan? Now to me I was like, what the hell are you talking about? I don't know. But it turns out, oh, that's a very specific type of question that corporate recruiters ask and there's a method for how you practice it.

And I hadn't practiced it, right? And so that interview went disastrously. So that's all I want to say is that these type of jobs, especially for elite companies, people practice a lot, specifically a type of interview questions are going to do.

So that is worth finding a course for there's online training tools for different types of interviews, there's online courses for doing different types of interviews. It is highly specific, so you do want to practice that. So get that practice in, and it's just like with the GMAT. Once you know, I've done a hundred of these type of questions. I know how to do these questions. I know how to figure out the number of windows in Manhattan. I know how to come up with a binary search algorithm on the whiteboard that uses a single array pointer, or whatever the challenge is.

Like, I've done it 100 times. Then you'll be confident, you'll be confident for the interview. All right, Jesse, I think we made it. I think we made it through a whole episode live of questions, and the tech seems to be holding up. So, I mean, I think the only thing we're missing now is we have to figure out,

do you think actual live calls might be possible one day? If people have generators and, you know, wheelbarrels that they can move their cars. Yeah. We will demand that. We will demand that you are in the wilderness on a generator with a media cart.

That's the only thing that stands at our way. Actually, I see why not? I mean, they could zoom into your computer or something like that and because your computer's hooked up to our mixing board now. So, all right, stay tuned,

everyone. But the technology is advancing. This was a big step. We'll put the full video of this online as soon as that YouTube stuff gets rolling. so you can actually see a full episode video if you're curious what it looks like in here. But until then, I believe that's a full episode, Jesse. So let's call this a wrap.

All right, well, that was fun doing this live. Look forward to doing that for future listener calls episodes as well. To keep up the date with all the updates to this show, subscribe to my mailing list at calnewport.com. We'll be back on Monday at the next episode of the Deep Questions Podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep. Thank you.