Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 160: REPLAY: What is Discipline (and How Do I Get It?)

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

Because I'm away on vacation these week, I'm replaying a classic show from the Deep Questions archives. This is Episode 125, which originally ran back in August. ---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: How Reachable Should We Be? [1:45]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - What should I do if I finish a time block early? [8:28] - How do I work deeply at home with a crying newborn? [12:54] - How I work deeply while taking care of a child full time? [17:50] - How do I manage a shared mailbox with my team? [23:11]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - What is discipline (and how do I get it)? [32:18] - Should I take a harder job to get better faster? [40:04] - What about people who don't want to do deep work? [43:49]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.

Hi, it's Cal Newport here. I'm on vacation this week. So for today's episode, I will be replaying a classic show from the Deep Questions Archive. In particular, I'm rerunning episode 125, which originally ran back in August. Now, in terms of things to listen for in this episode, longtime fans of the show know that I particularly enjoy and find amusing the type of question where I'm essentially challenged to explain how deep work is possible in increasingly

preposterous scenarios, as if I'm claiming that if people can't do deep work constantly, there's something wrong with them. So I really love watching how people ratchet up the, well, what if I'm in this situation? How would I do deep work there? Well, early in this episode, we get what I think it might be the king of all of these what aboutism questions, which is someone asking, how do I work deeply when I am literally holding a crying newborn baby? There's the sound of me applauding quietly. You win the challenge of the game in which you describe a preposterous situation and ask in that moment how you could do deep work. There's also later in the show a good classic half rant, half sermon on the question of discipline.

Hope you enjoy it. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 125. Well, she's not going to appreciate this story, but I think it's kind of instructive, so I'm going to bring it up. Right before I started recording this episode, I saw a text message pop up here on the message app on my computer from my sister, and it was a message to my family group chat that was saying, why isn't Cal answer? text. And so I looked here on the message app on my computer and saw she had asked me a question a few hours earlier today. So it's 3 p.m. right now and she had asked me a question at 10 a.m. I hadn't I hadn't yet seen it. Now, she was kind of joking, but let's take it seriously because

it will allow me to introduce a bigger point that I want to talk about anyways, which I think is an important point, which has to do with two competing ways that our culture can integrate the idea of communication tools, tools like email, tools like Slack, tools like text messages, both in the context of work and the context of our personal life. Now, the one way to think about this is the way that I think about this, which is as a time block planner, as someone who looks at my work hours like a chess board and wants to move the chess pieces around into the best configuration for this particular day, I see communication channel checking as one of any number of activities that have to happen that day.

And I get time put aside for it and making sure that I'm able to see incoming communication and answer requests that need to be answered. But it happens during a given time. So if you take a day like today, today's a very tightly packed chessboard. I was in a committee meeting all morning. Right after that meeting, I had to go straight into finishing a draft of a New Yorker article that was due this day. So it had to get done.

That left me just enough time to, I ordered food from my local coffee shop near the HQ. Shout out to Bevco. I ordered the food, walked home. I needed a button-down shirt for a conference talk I was going to give virtually for my HQ. So I went to get the shirt, picked up my shirt, vectored back to the coffee shop, picked up the food, came back to the HQ, had 10 minutes to eat that, set up the studio, two hours on camera, doing the very, is videotaping and talks I had to do for this conference. Got right off that camera. There was a very urgent Georgetown teaching related admin block that I had blocked out with my

time block planning. I had to get in touch with my TAs. I had to upload my lecture notes from yesterday's lecture. I had to update the syllabus to have a Zoom link so that we could do hybrid office hours. So some people could come in person and people who couldn't could come on office hours. I had promised that. So that had to get done. right from there into my studio because I have to get this podcast recorded by a certain cutoff time today so I can bring my workday into a landing at the end of that cutoff time was basically when I'd be checking in on my communication channels for the day.

That's the day that made the most sense for me today. And it's a day where I'm not really seeing communication channels until the end of the day. That's why I didn't see the text for my sister. Here's what I'm learning. That's very rare. It seems where our culture is converging on the role of communication tools is that it is somehow separate from other type of work and should instead be a concurrent presence to other type of efforts. So there's different things you have to schedule, committee meetings, podcast recordings, conference recordings, whatever. That's work to be scheduled.

In addition, you will be concurrently monitoring communication channels. Now, of course, the model of concurrently monitoring communication channels has conveniences. You see questions, for example, right after they come in. As the cinder of a question, you'll get an answer much quicker. You'll also know as to receive or if there's something happening that you need to know about, if there's a change of plans, you'll see that as soon as it comes in, so you can be up to date on the situation on the ground. I think this is where most people are.

I think it's what most people expect. But if you read a world without email, you'll also see my extended argument for why this is a problem. And the reason why it's a problem is that our brain can't do these two things at the same time. We discovered this in the early days of developing digital computer networks. When we were first working on that technology, we had the computer main processing units itself keep track of all the traffic on the digital network cables to which it was connected. The problem was you would use up all of the computation cycles just monitoring all this traffic on the wire and trying to figure out what messages were for you. And so computer scientists and computer engineers quickly figured out, oh, we need a separate processing unit just to handle the communication on the network. They call these NIC cards, network interface cards.

We have a separate circuit that does nothing but handle the communication. It will hold on to messages relevant to the computer. You can grab them from that queue when you need it. We can't have one brain do the same thing. electronically, the same is true with the human brain. Every time we have to context shift to check a text message, to check an email inbox, to check a Slack channel, there is a cost. It takes us up to 15 minutes to fully change our cognitive context from one target to another.

And what happens is when we glance at these other targets briefly, what's the latest message, what's the latest chat, we initiate these context shifts and then abort them before they complete. to go back to the original target of our attention, this significantly reduces your cognitive capacity, so you can't think as clearly. This induces cognitive fatigue, so you can't get nearly as much done. You sort of run out of steam by 1 o'clock or 2 o'clock in the afternoon,

and for a lot of people, it creates anxiety. I can't tolerate any of those things if I'm going to continue to balance the various things that I balance, and so I choose the former model. Anyways, if you've read a world without email, a lot of this is familiar, But I thought this was a nice excuse to get into those points one more time because it is, I think, one of the most pressing things about our current moment, our current digital moment. It's one of the pressing issues that we don't really deal with because it's just easy to keep that phone on.

And to not do that creates problems. Look at my life. And so we ignore it. But I think we should at the very least face the price we pay if we stick with this status quo. a concurrency model. All right, that's enough ranting. Let's do some official questions here about the deep life. Our first question comes from David.

David says, suppose I'm time blocking my day and I finish a block early. Should I start executing my next block early? Or should I capture or address some reactive list items in that remaining time? Or should I do something else? Like take a longer break. Well, David, my default answer here is to take a longer break. I am, however, going to give you both a caveat and an elaboration, but let me first say why I think you should use found time for a break. It's because we do too much in our days and it's stressful.

In the introduction to today's episode, for example, I talked about how tightly packed the chessboard of my day actually is. I don't like that. I don't think this is a good day. Too much got packed in. It happened somewhat accidentally. Just some things fell on the schedule and I just had to make it work and thank God I'm a time blocker and do fixed schedule productivity. And I can make this work in a way that's not going to have an excessively negative footprint on my day in general. But it's really tightly packed and I'm exhausted.

And it's not a great way to live. So I think in general we should do less than we are. An ideal workday would have many breaks in it. Do a small number of things. do them well with breathing room, finish with energy in the tank. We rarely do this. So if you have a chance to get closer to that standard,

I think that you should. Now, here's my caveat. If through the day so far, you have come across things that weren't in your original plan, but you know have been added to your plate, things you know that need to be taken care of. And, you know, if they don't get done today, you're going to have to squeeze them in somewhere else.

And, okay, then yes, this is a good chance to use your found time to catch up on that. So, for example, if at 9 you had a meeting, that meeting generated some small semi-urgent tasks, and then you found out later your block from one to two ended after just a half hour, maybe you go back and take care of those small tasks because otherwise they're going to have to get into your system and push something else out of the way the next day. Otherwise, though, take a break. Here's the elaboration I want to offer, though.

The right place to take that break might not be obvious. In other words, taking the break right in that moment. might not be the right thing to do. If you can consolidate breaks, you sometimes get into a better situation, a situation that has a higher return. So, for example, let's say you're in the mid-morning and you get done with something early and it frees up a half hour. You could take it right then. But maybe what you're going to do is say, let me slide down the next thing I have, which I was going to do up until my half hour lunch break. Let me slide that down now, add my found half

hour to that lunch break and take an hour for the lunch break. Now you have a longer break. Now I can go to a restaurant maybe and bring a book and sit there and get a lot more relaxation with an hour versus a half hour. So you're taking that time and maybe adding it to an existing break later in the day to try to get a more effective break. I think the return you get on break minutes grows with the total size of the break that it is attached to. So 30 minutes added to an additional 30 minute block gives you more return in terms of mental rest and relaxation than taking a 30 minute break working and then another 30 minute break.

If similarly, this found time comes later in the day, I would say shift things and just end your day earlier. That's the ultimate break, right? You do your schedule shutdown complete. You're done with work until the next morning. That's a very long great break. It's our best break. It's our daily break.

The thing that recharges us day after day. So if I have a schedule that runs till 5 o'clock and at 3 o'clock during my 3 to 4.4 block, I find a half hour, I'm just going to shift down that schedule and say, let's get out of here by 430. And you know what? When I get to that final block of the day and I see that 430 is coming, maybe I'm going to turn on the afterburners a little bit and get that final work done even quicker because, man, if I could end at 415, that's even a nicer afternoon. Now I'm free before it's even the evening, and that feels really good.

All right. So that's my elaboration. Take the break, but maybe not right in that moment. Our next question comes from Oswin. Oswin says, recently I have been blessed with a daughter. Congratulations, Oswin, which has been a very fulfilling experience. However, the ability to do deep work has been impaired in this working from home world, apart from the obvious lack of sweep, I find it hard to concentrate when very near my daughter when she needs

care or is upset and crying. This is not very conducive to my work. I should add that Oswin elaborates that he's not the primary caregiver. So his partner is actually watching the newborn full time. He's just at home because his company is temporarily working remotely because of the pandemic. All right. So, Oswin, here's what you need to do. you need to buy a copy of deep work on tape, get an audio copy, you need to play that near the crib of your newborn daughter, right, so that she can get up the speed on the cognitive cost of these unpredictable, audible distractions.

And once she's up the speed, you can get on the same time block schedule, use a crayon for her block so that she can see them and understand them a little bit better. And then you can just sync up your schedule is no problem, right? I literally think that's what a non-trivial fraction of my detractors actually think. Actually think that's how I think about child care and deep work. Now, Oswin, here's the question. How can you do deep work in the same house as a crying baby? You cannot. And trying to do it is going to be an exercise in frustration.

So what do you need to do instead? Well, two things. One, you have to adjust your mindset. that. We're at the tail end, at least here in the United States, we're at the tail end of this remote work period where we are working remote when we used to not just because of the pandemic. We're at the tail end of that. That will probably die down relatively soon as we head back to the office. But while we are in this period, it is for many people a dumpster fire. You're in a bad environment to work. You're an environment with your children. You're an environment with your spouse also trying to work. It is noisy. There's no room. There's homeschooling going on. There's Zoom schooling going on. This is not a conducive environment to get things done.

Our basic approach was to pretend like this is not happening and say, hey, guys, we have Zoom. What's the problem? And the reality is, again, it is a terrible environment to work. You're going to get a lot less deep work done. The last 16 months is not going to be the 16 months if you're the parent of a new baby. If you had kids doing school from home, it is not going to be the months in which you really do your best work. let's just lean into that and say it's okay. My house was on fire, so I wasn't able to empty the dishwasher.

The second thing you need to do is get out of Dodge for the deep work that you actually want to get done. Get out of the house. I think there's a real issue, a blind spot that many of us have when we're thinking about doing our best work. We're not creative enough. We set these boundaries. Well, I got to be at my desk that I set up in my bedroom at my home, and work has to happen during these type of hours. And that's just how it has to happen. So how do I make it now work?

We need to be way more creative. Get out of your house. Go somewhere else to do deep work. I don't care. Go into the woods. Hike a half hour. Use a cell phone hot spot so you can pull out your laptop on a rock and work on that memo next to a creek. Drive to a park, and if it's raining, work in your car with the air conditioner still going.

If you have any money you can throw at this problem, now is the time to throw this money at the problem. Forget your vacation, forget buying the new car, lease some office space, get a co-working office environment that you can go to. I don't know. Go to a museum for the day. Get a monthly membership or an annual membership for a museum and find a corner in which you can secretly go and think your big thoughts. Get creative. Don't just settle for. I have to be at this desk.

There's a crying baby. give me some miracle cure that's going to allow work to get done here. All right. So those are the two things I have to say for you, Oswin. In addition to, of course, congratulations on that baby. Lower your standards. The pandemic created a work dumpster fire for about 80% of the workforce. The other 20% is young single people who actually just get more done because now they don't have to commute and we all hate them and are jealous.

And the other thing I'm saying is get way more creative. get out of Dodge, get rituals, get exotic settings, reset your brain, find places to go to do that deep work that you actually enjoy going. You probably have more options here than you realize you just have to get outside of the literal box in which you are now trapped with a crying baby. All right, let's do another baby question here. I don't know why I got a lot of baby questions this week, but we did. So we might as well do them back to back. This next one comes from Jordan. Jordan says, hi, Cal.

I'm a professional writer for TV, film, and theater who mainly works from home. I also have a one and a half year old. Because of COVID, child care options are not great at the moment. So my time to do deep work is incredibly limited. And I have a ton of work to do. I can get up early. I can work while my daughter naps and I can work in the evenings after she's gone to bed. How do you recommend I make the most of my deep work sessions when my time is extremely limited?

Well, Jordan, first of all, you need to meet Oswin. And you guys need to go out together and get a beer and get away from a crying baby, it sounds like. You're both having a hard time with that. And I completely empathize. The first thing that's important to recognize, and I said the same thing to Oswin, is that you're in a very difficult situation. I think it only makes it worse if we assume that, oh, this is easily handleable. It's just a matter of throwing the right productivity hacks at it. you can do what you were doing before as a professional writer, even though you're also full-time

taking care of a kid. The reality, of course, is nonsense. Taking care of a child is a full-time job and a very hard full-time job at that, right? So we could reword your question equivalently as saying something like, hi, Cal, I'm a full-time doctor. I work in the emergency department at Shady Grove Hospital. I'm also trying to write a book. So it's hard because I'm busy as a...

doctor at Shady Grove Hospital. How do I also write a book? It's not impossible, but it's going to take you a long time and you have to think about what you're doing as being a pretty extraordinary thing to do. And that's the point I want to make here. So again, we set expectations. I don't want you beating up yourself because you have this very hard full-time job and you're not able to somehow do a second very hard full-time job at the same time. You just can't. You can get some work done. Sure. There are doctors, for example, who write books while they while they are a doctor, Michael Crichton wrote his first books while a medical student at Harvard. He just found times and places to work on them.

But on the other hand, Michael Crichton's first books, the books he wrote as a doctor, he wrote him under a pseudonym, weren't very good. And it wasn't really until he became a full-time writer that he wrote his first really good books. I guess we'll just keep that in mind. But it is possible. And I think the right model here is probably graduate students. This is much more common among graduate students, that they have a lot of. a baby while in their doctoral programs, and they then go on to complete their dissertations. When I used to give talks about student productivity, I used to talk about the so-called baby

paradox, which was, I knew a lot of doctoral students who, after having a baby, seemed from the outside to get more productive. Actually, they got their dissertation done quicker than we might have imagined. Now, this is actually more of a commentary on how inefficient a typical graduate what student is than anything about what's possible when you have a baby. But the solution to the paradox is that they ended up not having very much time at all to work on their dissertations. It was very specific periods, usually like a nap time or when they had some sort of limited child care. Grad students can't afford dannies. Grad students can't afford full-time daycare. So they have 90 minutes a day or something like that. So they just had to use

it. They had to just work on the dissertation. They had nothing else they could do. No procrastination, no doing whatever. This had to work when they had the work when they had that time. And it turns out for something like writing dissertation, 90 minutes a day where that's all you do in and out actually adds up. And it adds up pretty well and it gets them to a dissertation on a pretty good pace. That's basically probably where you are, Jordan. You can choose one session a day that you can pretty consistently count on. And you have to just execute in that session. And then when that baby wakes up or that friend or family member who's watching your kid has to go home, you're done and you completely shut it off.

Don't try to squeeze in a bunch of these because you're a full-time job and that doctor is exhausted and does not have time to write in the morning and the evening and during breaks between the shift. You've got to just choose one shift. So you can rest when you're not when you have other time to rest. You can unwind when you have other time to unwind. Choose that one shift. Come in hard. Do your writing. Come out.

And trust the compounding power of slow productivity. doing concentrated deep work at a slow pace but a regular pace. I come back to this day after day can really add up on the larger scale. What did I produce over the last six months? What did I get done this season? What did I get done this year? Can actually produce some pretty impressive work. Not nearly as much as if you were working full time.

You have a full-time job. Your available time is very limited. but if you have to get something done concurrently with this full-time job, just do that. Pick one session, get in and out in that session. You might be frustrated at the pace on the scale of days, but you might be impressed by what you still are able to produce on the scale of months. We're going to move on now to a more technical question. I should give some context here about what's going on around me. During that last question, there's a lightning storm happening here in Tacoma Park, and after one particularly loud lightning strike, we suddenly got weird, sporadic, changing, unpredictable hums in all of the audio equipment.

Now, some quick Googling says this is perhaps a ground loop issue. A lightning strike somewhere has essentially dirtied or muddied up the power source. and we're getting a dirtier power source into the equipment here, and this is leaking through the cables. The hum comes, it goes. I don't know to what degree it's picking up on the recording. I don't know to what degree it's going to still be here after conditioning and compression. I hope it eventually goes away.

I hope that the lightning strikes don't come through my wires and transform me into some sort of audio technology-related superhero. Though I guess that could be kind of cool, podcast man or something like that. But anyways, that's what's going on. So I don't think this hum's going to come through. But if it does, it's because I am dodging natural disasters heroically to bring you this podcast. All right, let's get to our question here. This is by Anna. Anna says, can you give any advice about how to deal with a team shared mailbox?

How can each of us have deep work time, but make sure that someone from the team picks up request from this shared mailbox? Anna elaborates that she is an accountant, and they have this shared mailbox. Her team of accountants has this shared mailbox. It gets all types of requests, questions, etc. These are usually tasks. She says that anyone from the team can solve. Well, Anna, you're asking the right question, which is what is the right workflow for this? Let's actually think through how do we want to collaborate work together to implement this particular process that's important to our work.

Now, of course, anyone who has read a world without email knows, I think we should be asking us a question about everything. But here is an obvious place to ask and answer the question. Now, in this case, you probably need a ticketing system. That's what this sounds like to me. You have requests coming in. Those requests need to be stored in a common place where people can grab ownership of them, update their status, pass them on to other people if questions need to be answered. And all of this can happen without having to have ad hoc back and forth unscheduled messages.

So I would recommend having some sort of ticketing system. When I was the director of graduate studies in my department here at Georgetown, me and my program coordinator used Fresh Desk. We could try out the free version of it, and that was actually enough for what we were doing, but the paid versions weren't too expensive. But you should have a ticketing system that these questions either automatically go into, like you have an address that they go to that automatically generates a ticket,

or you can forward them to this. ticketing system to an intake address that transforms them into a ticket. And then you can keep track of all these requests internally. So now what you need to do is just have everyone has regular days or regular times where they're going to take a turn with the ticketing system, which means, okay, you have a shift. During your shift, you have to go through every ticket that comes in. You have to update the status of every ticket. Answer all the ones you can.

The ones you can't answer, you have to assign them to other people. the ones where you need more information. You have to update the status of the ticket in the system so that it says we're waiting to hear back from Norm about this so that we can then give the answer there. And then when you're done with your shift, all of the work you did is there in the system. So when someone else has a shift, okay, tomorrow it's your turn to work with the ticketing system. You immediately get up to speed. Process the new thing. See what's been assigned to you.

This is the type of thing you need. A more structured way of keeping track of request and their status and all of the related information. So that's what I would say, Anna. Everyone has a day. If it's your day, you have to make sure that day ends with all incoming tickets having at least been touched. There can't be any unopened tickets that haven't been looked at yet. Everyone gets a day. Things get done.

Things don't get lost. And you're not just slinging messages back and forth. All right, quick update on the storm. I have switched over to my other mic. I mean, it seems like my primary mic is humming. When I switch over to the other mic, it's humming less. So I don't know. Maybe I fried the audio processor on my primary mic. I don't know what I'm doing here, guys.

I got a big studio full of equipment that I am just zapping with electricity. All right, I want to move on to some questions about the deep life. But before we do, let's take a quick break to hear from the sponsors that makes this show possible. This podcast is sponsored by Blinkist. As you've heard me say before, ideas are power and the best source of good ideas are books. The problem, of course, is figuring out which books are worth your time. This is where the Blinkist app comes in. Blinkist takes top nonfiction books, pulls out the key takeaways, and puts them into text and audio explainers called

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Cometeer.com slash deep. All right, let's move on now with some questions about the deep life. All right, our first question here comes from Ishan. Ishan says, what is your definition of discipline and how do I start growing it in my life? Well, Ishan, when I think about discipline, what comes to mind is when you are doing intentional action to try to make progress towards a vision of something important to you.

You have a vision of what you want your life to be like, what you want your work to be like, something that you deeply feel is important aligned with your values, and you say, I'm going to take action to make progress towards that. Even if, and this is crucial for discipline, I don't feel like it in the moment. It is breaking away from that fundamental animal stimuli response loop where we're just looking at the environment around us and saying, what do I want to do? What feels appealing or pleasurable in the moment? And you're saying instead, you're saying instead, what do I need to do? What is the activity that's going to move me closer to things I really value and therefore help me get more resilience, more satisfaction, more impact out of my life? that is discipline. Now, before we get into cultivating discipline, we have to quickly address some of the

interpretations or perhaps we'll even say misinterpretations of this concept that can lead people to have trepidation. Discipline definitely can make people a little bit nervous. So let's try to go through that and see why. One, I think people get nervous because they think about discipline in the context of coercion. Discipline is taking options away from you. Discipline is being rigidly stuck in some pattern and therefore missing out on other aspects of life or some sort of liberal notion of freedom.

But it doesn't need to mean that. When discipline is self-imposed, this is you consciously and with full autonomy and freedom saying, I'm going to do this thing right now because I care about what it's getting me towards. This is not the opposite of freedom. It is actually the definition of freedom. This is the thing that we lose our will to live when it is removed, when we lose our ability to actually on our own make progress towards things that are hard but important. So discipline when it comes from you, it's not about coercion.

It's about autonomy, about the human ability to take, on hardship voluntarily because we can see down the line what we are going to get out of it. The other issue I think people have with discipline is that they believe acknowledging this concept is somehow going to make responsibility, personal responsibility, the only thing that matters. They believe if we say discipline is important, that we will then quickly respond, great. I'm not going to help that person. I'm not going to change situation over here that will make that person's life easier. And those people over there, they can just go be disciplined on their own.

It's all up to each individual to just have discipline if you're having a hard time is because you don't have discipline. This is also a misinterpretation of this concept. Let's look, for example, if we're going to use a case study. You think about James Stockdale, Vietnam War, Prisoner of War, Hanoi Hilton, under these extreme terrible circumstances under this extreme duress. Now, if you read Admiral Stockdale's, he went on to become an Admiral. If you read his account of this time, it is clear that the thing that got him through there was discipline. A sort of stoic-inspired, duty-inspired discipline to his actions.

It was hard. In some cases, it would literally lead to torture and beatings because he was disciplined, and here's how we are going to deal with interrogation. Here's how we're going to deal with people going home. That discipline is how he survived. Yet, no one would say, well, discipline is all that matters for Stockdale in this prisoner war camp, so we're not going to try to rescue him. We're not going to try to negotiate with the Vietnamese.

We're not going to try to get him out of that situation. No, both of these things can exist at the same time. We can be doing everything we can to help people that are in bad situations while also acknowledging that regardless of your situation, the more you're able to apply discipline, probably the better you're going to be. There are no worse situations than what Stockdale was in, but without discipline, he would have died. Even with discipline, he still needed the help of everyone else to try to get him out of there. It all matters. Okay. So we put those objections aside. Now we feel a little bit better talking about discipline. We don't have to look over our shoulders to see if someone's going to

tweet angrily at us. The question is, how do you get more of this in your life? And Isham, The most effective method I have seen for cultivating discipline is to work backwards from a positive vision that you absolutely buy that is so compelling that you can feel it in your bones. You need to capture and visualize what this discipline is getting to you and you need to believe as strongly as you believe anything that that's a place you want to be. That is the foundation that gets you up and gets the running shoes on. That is the foundation that gets you to pick up that book and put down that phone. That is what gets you to get up, drive over to that friend's house, sacrifice non-trivial time and attention on their behalf to strengthen that relationship because that's what they need. They're going through a hard time. You're not going to just put an emoji in a text thread or a nice comment on a social media post.

Knowing what it is you want to be and why it's so important is where that discipline is going to come from. So you have to go out there, Ishaana, and establish that vision first. You don't have to get it perfect right off the bat. It will evolve with experience as you meet people, as you have things happen to you, as you go out there and try different things. But get this image down now what you want your life to be like. And you can get there by observing the world around you. Read things, watch things, meet people. See what gives you those intimations of great respect.

that gives you those intimations of I want that in my life and try to then decode what those intimations are and figure out this coherent picture. Why did that athlete doing this really catch my attention? Why did this book get me excited and I stayed up? Why was this podcast interview one that I really listened to all the way to the end? What was being displayed, what was being demonstrated by these individuals that is pressing my buttons? Let's grab that and construct this vision of what I want my life to be like. All right, Sean. So to summarize everything I just said,

discipline is putting action towards something you value, not towards something that you want in the moment. There's a lot of objections surrounding discipline, but if we're careful in our definition, we can actually bypass those objections, see that they really apply to other things. And to develop discipline, you first have to make as clear as anything in your life,

what it is you're trying to get to and why that is important to you. Ishaan Jaka Willink famously said discipline is freedom. It seems paradoxical to the outsider, but this idea that once you can pursue with intention what matters, you can push your life in whatever direction you want, and I think that really is the definition of freedom. All right, our next question comes from Aegis.

Aege says, I'm a young lawyer with three years experience. I recently got married and me and my wife now have an eight-month old girl. I am at a stage of my career, which I consider to be transitioning. What I mean is that I am in a stage where I will come to handle bigger and better cases if I wait. However, nevertheless, I have the opportunity to transfer to the public sector as an attorney, which will provide me invaluable experience and more caseload than I will ever. have in my current job in the private sector. This, I believe, will lead me to mastery at double the speed of the job in the private sector.

Shall I consider making the transfer of skill or shall I wait? What are your thoughts on this? Well, Aege's, do not think about skills and moving up completely in isolation. Career capital, which is what you are trying to earn by getting good, you're trying to earn leverage over the properties of your career that matters. Career capital is only as important as what you invested in. So I want you to back up and get very clear, this is my vision of the life I want with my wife, with my eight-month old daughter.

This is where I want to get. I want to live here. I want work to take up this part of my life. I want work to have this impact. is what I want to be doing outside of work. This is my connection with my community. This is what's happening with my soul. Figure out that vision and then figure out how do I get the career capital necessary to implement this vision.

Be very careful when doing this calculus. Be very precise because lawyers are in a tricky situation. I use them as an example all the time of a job where, depending on what sector you're in, It's not necessarily a place where more skills gives you more leverage. There are a lot of law careers where the only thing you get if you get better is more money and more respect, but you actually lose control over properties of your career. You get more stuck into high time demands at the office, needing to stay all night, needing to cancel your vacation at the last second.

Actually, your options for your life get narrower in a lot of law jobs. So that's why I want you to do this whole calculus carefully. Figure out, okay, if I do double the caseload and I get really good at this, how long will that take? Where am I going to invest that capital? Do I see an off ramp here where I then take that skill and it allows me to go back into my own practice? And in my own practice, I can move over here on this island to do it. And I can get much more autonomy or I can get this impact or I can go over here and finally defend death row cases, which is what I really want to do. I mean, I really want you to make sure you have the whole picture and it all makes sense. shifting here, this caseload, these skills, these skills give me X, X is what I want.

It is this common trap that in my book so good I can't ignore you, I call the autonomy trap. There's a really common trap that you say, the thing that's most obvious I want to do next is what's harder, what's going to make me better, what's going to make more money. But it's not necessarily the right path. So I just see alarm bells everywhere ages. I worry that you are five years out from being a completely miserable, overworked lawyer who's really good at what he does and has no outlet for using that skill to make their life better beyond what they can just spend money on. I don't know if that's the case. Maybe moving from the private to the public sector will prevent that from happening, but just make sure that you have this storyline worked out all the way to the conclusion before you start living out this tale in your actual life. I think we have time for one more question here.

let's do one from Brandon. Brandon asks, what about people who don't want to or cannot do deep work, ultra learning, etc.? Do these people exist? And if so, what is the message to them? I follow your work and own all of your books. I am a big believer and I am trying,

but I am also lazy and sometimes wonder what I am doing or even if I can do any of these things or not. Well, Brandon, I am going to reject your primitives. that you are lazy. This is not an intrinsic trait of someone like their hair color or their height. Laziness just simply describes the current configuration of your activity. So what you're saying right now is that I have a configuration of my activities that in my mind seems below where I want to be. So subjectively, I'd label it as lazy. Great. We'll change that configuration. We'll get it somewhere where you want to be. The question is, where do you want to be? And here I want to be very

careful about terminology because the way you reference deep work, the way you reference Scott Young's concept of ultra learning, by the way, read Scott's book if you haven't yet, I gave him the turn ultra learning so you know it's going to be good. The way you're referencing those turns, Brandon, means to me that you're probably thinking about something that is very specific, a subset of the vision of the deep life that I preach here on this podcast and in my writing. I think you're thinking about a particular trajectory in the way. life in which you are doing really intense intellectual creative work, if I had to guess.

I think you're looking at examples like me and thinking, okay, that's what deep work, ultra learning, that's what it means, that you're solving math proofs and writing for the New Yorker and going five hours at a time staring at a whiteboard. And I don't know, that doesn't appeal to me. Or you look at Scott doing the MIT curriculum on his own one course per week, you know, learning advanced computer science so quickly and like, man, I just, I don't really want to do that. That doesn't really appeal to me. Those are very specific instantiations of the deep life.

They are not the only instantiation of the deep life. It's how I happen to construct my deep life. My deep life is constructed around intellectual activity because to me, ideas are everything. That's just my particular thing. Generation of ideas that have some impact is what I love to do. my whole life is built around it. It doesn't mean that your deep life, Brandon, has to be built around ideas, that your deep life has to be built around academic achievement. Your deep life has to be built around high quality leisure or craft, etc., right?

It's just what I happen to do. My parlor trick is that my brain is good at piecing things together and finding connections that resonate. That might not be your parlor trick. So let's just be much more broader in our definition of the deep life. It is a life lived intentionally. You've identified the buckets or areas of concentration. I'm sort of moving, I'm trying to move away from the bucket terminology. Maybe it's too late now, but I just brought that up randomly a year ago, and now we're stuck talking about buckets.

And I'm trying to move it to better terminology. So let's try on for size concentrations. Maybe this is not the right word. But you have the different concentrations or areas, let's say, areas in your life that you know are important to you. Craft is important. Connection and community is important. your constitution is important, contemplation is important, celebration of things you just enjoy in the world and awe and gratitude, that's important.

Great. Write them down. We want to build a life that is serving each of those. And how do we serve each of those? Do less, do those things better. Know why you're doing them. Cut out the crap that's not necessary gets in the way. Bang, area after area.

Let's take some big swings that matter that move the needle. Let's avoid the crap that just gets in the way or organize the hell out of it so its footprint is small. and keep it simple, keep it quality. It's just going to look really different depending on who you are. You know, I mean, I was just listening to an interview with Daniel Ricardo, the Formula One race car driver. His life is built around sort of the antonym of the intellectual life. It's the physical life, these physical gifts he has, and his whole life is built around race car driving. Sure.

I was talking to someone who has a friend recently who is really into alpine climbing and ice climbing. And he just moved to North Conway, New Hampshire, where there's this really cool community that's formed there of if the American Alpine and Ice Climers, and it's like a really cool, serious community of people who take that type of thing very seriously. And he works enough to support himself, cheap house and is able to go on these, have this team of collaborators and go on these journeys all the time. That's a deep life that has nothing to do with solving proofs or writing articles for the New Yorker. There are so many people whose deep life is really built around family or their service to their community. It's incredibly meaningful. There's so many people whose deep life is built around some sort of high quality leisure pursuit that they find meditative and can get this objective sense of equality out of their Nick Offerman in his wood shop, for example, just finding the stability and peace. I don't know what it is for you, Brandon, but I know 100% there is a vision for you that makes sense.

Go through the areas, do some self-exploration, see what resonates, start building a life around that resonance. repeat polish learn repeat polish learn what i do what scott young does is incredibly idiosyncratic forget the specifics find inspiration in the general which is doing less doing better know why you're doing it in the areas that actually matter that is the recipe for a meaningful life and that is the recipe for banishing from your mind this idea that you're lazy the deep life is not going to be a lazy life but it is going to be custom fit to you you. And with that, I'd better count my blessings and get out of the studio before I get electrocuted by lightning. Thank you for listening. Thank you for the questions.

I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls of any episode. Until then, as always, stay deep.