Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 166: LISTENER CALLS: The Deep Life vs. The Good Life

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.OPENING DISCUSSION: How I schedule podcastingLISTENER CALLS:- My thoughts on psychedelics and the pursuit of awe. [8:38]- Time-block planning for the visually impaired. [19:07]- Struggling to escape a job. [23:24]- Concerns about book editors. [33:26]- My blog writing process. [43:41]- The deep life vs. the good life [48:49]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.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 166. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ. Once again, I am by myself, no Jesse. Now, it was actually unnecessary just now for me to say once again, because I actually record each week's episodes back to back in one big session. So the fact that Jesse was not here for Monday's episode means, Of course you want to be here for Thursday's episode because I recorded Thursday's episode five minutes after I finished Monday's episode. Now, I bring this up because people ask me about how I schedule podcasting in my life right now.

And I thought this was something that would be worth briefly talking about because there's some general advice we can extract from it. And then we'll get on with the listener calls, which is our plan for the bulk of today's episode. So when I first started this podcast, it was early in the pandemic. It was the summer of 2020. I started with one episode and I was doing almost everything on my own. Actually, I think I did everything on my own. Let's be honest about it. I did everything on my own.

I would record the episodes, edit the episodes, upload them to the podcast host. I just did everything, right? I was doing one and then eventually pretty soon I added a second episode because I liked the idea of doing calls. Because it was the pandemic, I know we were all home and things were kind of shut down and it was something to do. Like actually, it having a varied footprint on my schedule was good. It gave me something to do because a lot of things I had been doing had been canceled and hadn't, there wasn't virtual alternatives yet. So I would record whenever, like in the afternoon. I would definitely do a lot of recording on like Sunday mornings.

There's a lot of early episodes you would hear me talking about it being a beautiful day outside and I was stuck inside my windowless HQ. And so it would just have these varied footprints throughout my week. But then at some point, you know, life kind of got back rolling again. And things reopened and kids are at school and I'm going back to Georgetown and things are rolling. I have another book I needed the write. I had a book I needed to sell. And at some point I realized I actually can't just have this be a wandering ad hoc time suck in my schedule. I need to get systematic.

What role do I want Podcasting the play in terms of my schedule on a weekly basis? What's going to be sustainable here for my schedule, but also make sure that this thing I'm doing can actually succeed. And so I decided I would apply a strategy that I've been talking about since the very early days of me talking about anything publicly. I think you can go back to 2008, maybe even earlier, at Calnewport.com and see articles about this.

I was going to apply an idea that I used to call fixed schedule productivity. Take something that's important to you, but that has the danger of metastasizing to unlimited time demands, and you fix in advance, here is the time when I'm going to work on this. And I have to work backwards from those constraints and do whatever it takes to make it work. Now, whatever it takes might be getting more productive or organized. definitely fixed schedule productivity induces innovation in your personal productivity, but it also might end up in simplification. I'm not going to do all of this. I'm going to quit this.

I'm going to separate these two things. I'm going to move this to a different time. I'm going to promise only one at a time. I'm going to reduce my commitments. A lot of good comes out of, a lot of interesting changes, some radical, some important, come out of working backwards from this is my fixed schedule for which I want to work on this particular thing. I said, that's what I'm going to do with my podcast. And what I settled on was one half day per week.

Now, I came to that amount somewhat arbitrarily. I mean, look, if you're a professor, there's this, and when you're a professor, there's a standard that says roughly one day per week, like 52 days a year, it's appropriate to spend on what they call outside consulting activities. So if you do, you know, expert testifying or whatever it is, professors typically do, sitting on boards. It should fit roughly within like one day a week, one day a week worth of time. So I said, well, there's other things I might want to do too. So why I take half of that?

So one half day a week, that's how I got to that value. Because I got to work backwards to make that fit. And that's what I do right now. One half day a week, usually Friday afternoons, but not always. I come to the HQ. We record, Jess and I record the next week's episodes and do all of the business related. for the week for the podcasts and the related ancillary media, et cetera. Because there's other things we're doing now.

There's video coming imminently soon. Jesse is up to his ears in video editing. I'm talking to him right now and is almost literally up to his ears in video editing. We had to buy a superpowered computer just to crunch through the amount of video editing we're doing. So there's a lot coming with video soon where almost every question is going to have a standalone video that you can save and come back to or share. It's going to be cool. We have cool things going.

Videos are the full episodes. You know, those cool things we're doing. We're going to build out the website to have a page for every single episode with all the information on it. Like really nice stuff is happening. All of it fits into one half day per week. And I like that challenge because, again, it forces more productivity, innovation, and

it keeps it reasonable. It is what has allowed me to pace the growth of this particular part of my empire because I only have so much time. So until I can free up time, I can't do more. When I first started doing this podcast, I did everything. It was me. It was garage band. It was my host, my podcast host, and a lot of time dragging stuff around and clicking

on stuff and doing whatever. Then over time, as the podcast has become more successful, I can reinvest the sponsor money. I reinvest almost every dollar of it into the show. I can reinvest the sponsor money to take more stuff off my plate, freeingest. up more of my time so I can improve the product and do better things. So now, this night and day, if you look at our half days today, not just do I have Jesse here typically that runs the computer screens for me.

I mean, he pushes the mic towards me. Here you go. Talk. Which is pretty nice. We also have Mark, our engineer, who does all the sound mastering and the, any edits that need to happen in the episodes. He's the person who works with the podcast host and uploads files and schedules. them. So we have, we have that going on as well.

Fantastic ad agency that really handles everything when it comes to talking with sponsors and working that out. And so we've, we've kind of built up a team here. And that frees up more and more of my time, which is why now keeping the time the same, we can be working on video. We can be working on individual pages. There's some series I'm working on for the podcast. I think it'll be really cool where I'm doing a lot of writing in advance. Some really cool segments coming up. I can start working on making the segments cooler. Jess and I are talking about when the time is ripe and available doing some, you know, extra video work outside of the podcast of, you know, a day and the life type stuff. Again, all of it's cool, but I can't do it until I have the time.

And as I free up more time, I do more things. So, yeah, maybe it slows it down. This is why I'm not an Elon Musk style character that when you see something worth doing, you go all in. I'm going to give it all my time and all my money and we're either going to go big or we're going to blow up. That's not my attitude. I'm kind of the opposite. I'm a deep life guy. I want the day-to-day rhythm of my life to be reasonable and sustainable and not too stressful.

So I keep this in a pocket and see what I can do with that pocket. And over time, it hopefully will end up somewhere cool, even if it's slower. The process is slower. But I just wanted to detail this, not the harp on the details of how I run this particular thing, but to underline that general strategy of fixed schedule productivity, especially where you have autonomy, fix how much time you want to spend on something, insist on that constraints. This can induce quite a bit of innovation and serious and effective reflection on what you actually need to be doing. All right, well, what we need to be doing as listeners of this show is moving on from this monologue and taking a few listener calls.

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Tudor Tudor Tudor.com. So go to MyBodytutor.com today. And if you sign up, tell them deep questions sent you to get that $50 off. We'll start with a call from Lisa who asked about Michael Pollan. In his latest book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan describes his experience taking the psychedelic mescaline as a tidal wave of awe. He cites Aldous Huxley, who had a similar experience on the drug and mused that humans might have evolved to not feel awed all the time, because if we were so blown away by, say, the creases in our pants, we would never get up and actually do anything. Knowing that you're a fan of the book All Things Shining, which urges us to seek out awe, I have two questions. First, do you agree with Huxley about the downsides of excessive awe as they relate to productivity? And second, at the risk of getting you in trouble with Georgetown, what do you think about using psychedelics to find more awe in our lives?

Well, this is a well-timed question because I was actually just working in the book proposal I'm writing for a book on The Deepwater. life, it's working on that proposal just the other day on a chapter about essentially awe and transcendence and its role in a deep life. So it's something I have been thinking about some recently. My general take on this is crumudgeonly. So let me give you that warning right now is I don't want to dismiss. I don't want to dismiss the potential role of psychedelics in certain types of therapy situations. I know there's a lot of research being studied about in particular microdosing psychedelics for dealing with issues surrounding, say, terminal illnesses.

We've seen it used for smoking cessation. I think maybe even Tim Ferriss has invested money in a particular research effort. It looks at DMT and post-traumatic stress. There's been some pretty good results there. So I let me put to the side, there's formal research into using psychedelics for various types of psychological alleviation of various distress. So I'm not dismissing it. However, my crumudgeonly point of view is that awe and transcendence is important and

it probably should be hard work. Now, what I mean by that is I think there is a quality to awe that is earned, in quotation marks, that is different than awe that came from a substance that you ingested. And I could be 100% wrong about this, but to me it's all about context. The context surrounding in which the awe is achieved can be significant for the impact of that particular awe. And I'm thinking, for example, you know, the adventurer and you do the training and you make your way to the top of that mountain. and there's that awe of just looking out at the landscape around you and the solitude, that awe is amplified and its meaning, I would say, is more impactful because of all that went

into you getting there, as opposed to if I put on a photorealistic virtual reality helmet and showed you that same view, or it was a drug experience that triggered a similar feeling. Because there's a whole context, a narrative context of the role that awe plays in your life, that I think can help increase the significance of that that actual experience. Same thing with religious transcendence. Karen Armstrong, I talk about her a lot. I think Karen Armstrong does a good job writing about this.

Heschel does a good job writing about this as well, if you want to go back a little bit farther. The way to which there are certain religious ritual and adherence that you do, in large part because over time, it can bring you these intimations of the divine. It can bring you these momentary transcendences, but it's hard work. You've committed to this.

You're doing the Jesuit doing the examine prayer twice a day. And then you have that moment of connection and the transcendence. And it's all the more important for the dedication you put towards it. Now, again, I'm conjecturing there's something different because of the narrative context of that awe, that it's different than I'm at a lab in Johns Hopkins. and they're giving me a dose of DMT. Now, maybe not. Maybe in the end, it's chemicals as chemicals, right?

There's a chemical reaction and something comes out of it. But when you actually look at people's descriptions of the way that psychedelic experiences have helped them with psychological trauma or distress, it doesn't sound like I took an Advil and my back pain went away because it was blocking chemically certain sensors. It was something about getting lost and something bigger to myself gave me new perspective on life, which allowed me to better take care of or compartmentalize or deal with these other types of distress. So it's an experience. That experience might be even stronger if it's in some sort of meaningful narrative context. I don't know if that's true.

And people are studying this. And probably any awe is better than no awe. But I also think it's a safe thing to say. This is not going to hurt anyone to say, at the very least, you should be trying to make wonder, which I use to capture both awe and transcendence, a regular part of your life. You're not going to achieve it every day, but you should be regularly putting in an effort that is leading towards you achieving it. And that probably does play a big role in the deep life. All right.

So I hope that didn't get me in too much trouble with the psychedelic crowd. Again, I'm not dismissing it. There's good research going. I trust the research. But this is my more old-fashioned crumaginly view. I actually met Michael Pollan once. We were at the speaking at the same event a couple years ago and he was talking about this book. And it was an event in Kent, Connecticut.

And I learned The Kent Connecticut, which is one of these sort of Tony West Connecticut in the mountains, you know, people from New York flee to have these cool houses

type places. Kind of Gilmar Girls, Connecticut. That's where Michael Pollan's house was where he lived and wrote about in botany of desire in a place of my own.

The house he talks about with the woods in the back. It's in Kent, Connecticut. He still owns it. He's in Berkeley now at the journalism school, but that's,

why he was there. So there you go. A little bit of insider information on Michael Pollan. He has a cool house in Kent, Connecticut. All right, let's move on now. We have a call from Douglas about time block planning if you are visually impaired. Hi, Cal, this is Douglas. I want to offer an affirmation and also make a request. The affirmation is I run a consulting firm. We serve educational institutions throughout the U.S. in about 40 countries. Deep work and a world without email is required. reading. We also give copies of the time block planner to new colleagues and encourage its use and follow up. So we love it. However, here's the request. I have some visually impaired employees for whom the current physical version of the time block planner does not work. And I would really like to ask you to consider having a time block planner in electronic format that people can expand to super large type or otherwise engage in for visually impaired workers. They're wonderful colleagues. They do great work.

They believe in deep work. But it would really be helpful if we could have more of your work in a format that is accessible to them. Thanks for considering this, Cal. Bye. Well, first of all, I appreciate that support of my writings and my planner within your organization. I'm honored. It's a very good question. So if you're visually impaired, the smaller fonts of something like my time block planner would be hard to use.

use. I'm going to give you a hack right now that you can actually deploy without waiting for a new product to come out without having to spend any money on it. And this would be using existing calendar tools to create your time block plan, web-based calendar tools that you can make the font whatever you would normally do within your browser on your screen to be readable anyways. So something I have I've seen before, and I recommend, is that you basically create a new calendar that is just used for time block planning. So if you use something like Google Workspaces,

you could have a separate Google calendar with its own color that you keep distinct from your normal calendar. And you can turn it off right there on the side with the little checkbox. Turn it off when you're just looking at your normal calendar. and then when you want to switch, you can click it to turn it back on again. And what you do is actually just use events on that calendar, the time block plan.

So the advanced way to do this is, and again, I'm coming from a Google-centric view here, but I think you can do something similar in Outlook as well, is you have, when you're looking at your day, at the beginning of the day to build your plan, you have existing appointments and meetings or on there already,

and that's great. So that part of your time block plan is already filled in. Then you switch over to your other calendar, which should be a different color. You're on the same screen. You can have multiple calendar colors on the same screen. I have multiple different calendar colors I use on the same Google screen. I have one color for appointments,

and I have another color I call logistics or admin, where I give myself notes or make notes like work on this in this space. You go to the other color, so this other calendar, and you time block out all the rest of the time. And now you have your events in one color and your other time blocks in a different color. And then you use as your time block plans. you go throughout the day.

Now, if you want to get really advanced, you use three calendars all viewed together. Your appointments, et cetera, are in your main calendar, whatever color that is. And if you're in a company that shares calendar, everyone can see that, et cetera. A different color for deep work and a third color for non-deep work. If you really want to get sophisticated and make the deep work color color calendar red. Now you can really see, okay, how much deep work did I get done this week? It's right there on your calendar. And then you see the shallow work in a different color.

So that's what I would recommend visually impaired or not. Anyone can do that if you prefer. If you prefer to have a digital-based time block plan, work with the existing calendar software. There's no need for there to be a unique software product written here. All the power you need for that probably already exists in whatever tool you are reading or using, I should say. All right, let's move on now. We have another call that is about interviews. Hello, Cal, this is Ankit. I'm a fresh graduate, and recently I joined a job as a software developer. It has been a year. And I found out that there is almost no growth. And the compensation is too low for my liking. And the upper management is a bit unresponsive. So to fix that, I had joined a mini boot camp along with my job eight months ago. And the classes for that run on Thursdays, 8 to 12.

in the night and Saturdays and Sundays for eight hours each. Lately I've found out that while there has been some progress, but I still don't feel confident enough to attend interviews and perform well. This is in part because of the fact that I have a lot of classes. I have a lot of catching up to do. I have been inconsistent for some time. Some days I would work really, really hard. and some days after that for a very long stretch,

I wouldn't be doing anything. I really want to fix that. And I really believe that fixing this would help me in better job prospects, career prospects, and a lot of financial freedom for the same. All right. Well, let me try to summarize what I'm hearing in this question so that we can tackle it. Because I think the general frame here of this question is an important one to get after. So if I'm understanding you correctly, what you're saying is you graduated recently.

You took a job as a software developer, but don't like it. Now, I couldn't quite, there was a glitch in your recording there. I couldn't quite hear what it was about the job you don't like. But there's something that was a problem. So if I'm understanding you correctly, you signed up for a boot camp. I'm going to assume to get you even further software skills so that you can get a new or better job. and make more money and get away from this job you don't like. But the boot camp you signed up for had a huge hour requirement,

ate the midnight every night during the week and then really long sessions on the weekend. So you didn't go all the time. You kind of went. Sometimes you did. Sometimes you didn't. And you're saying, you know what? I missed enough that I don't feel like I got enough out of this boot camp to be confident interviewing for a new job. All right.

So, uh, and could I be honest here. It sounds like you're all over the place. And then we need to step back and we need to focus what's going on here. First of all, you're right out of school and you're already, you're in your first job, but you're already looking for another job right away. That's the red flag, number one. Number two, you got in over your head with something that you don't have, really have time for, or maybe you do have time for it, but obviously your heart's not in it because you paid for this thing,

but you're only sometimes going. So let's step back here. you're in this job now right after school let's just let that sit for a second let that sit for a second before we say I don't know I don't like this one let's do another one because it's possible and I'm going to use terminology here for my book

so good they can't ignore you that you're deploying the passion mindset the passion mindset focuses very carefully on what does this job offer me all right that's the focus of the passion mindset so it's very suspicious almost right away especially a new job the passion mindset is often very very

quick to be like, I don't like this. I don't like the upper management and it's a little ambiguous and there's not enough work being assigned to me right now. My God, this can't be the right job. Then we have to get out of there. That's the passion mindset. The alternative to the passion mindset is the craftsman mindset in which you say, well, what am I offering this job?

How valuable am I to this organization? How could I be more valuable and how quick can I get there? It might be a case where we want to spend at least a little bit of time with the craftsman mindset in mind here. How can you A, be dependable? So anything that gets put on your plate, you get done. And how can you produce, when you do produce things, you produce at a dependable rate of quality. So people like, we know this guy.

He gets things done. He produces things at a high level of quality, right? So you're on the radar. You can use to the landscape. It takes a year just to even know what's going on in a job. If you're expecting to be doing something really cool and the job to be great in the first year, you should be expecting something different. Then you can look around and say, okay, now what are my opportunities?

I've established myself. I've proved myself what's a direction I could go here? Can I move up to this position, get to maybe leadership of my own team? Let's start making our move. Put the career capital we just earned to get something better, earn new capital there, get something better. And you begin that process. After a year or so, you're like, ah, this isn't working.

It's all over the place or whatever. you know, there's something going on here. It's not, the options for as you get good or confined. Then you can say, okay, now let's start thinking about moving. But the thing you do now is to make sure, let me stay another year, get this career capital really locked in the place

so I can use that as leverage to get my next job and be very careful about how I shift over so I can leverage that cap on the new job. It's very systematic and careful. This is very different than, all right, I got my new job. I don't like this. I'll do a boot camp.

I'm not really doing the boot camp. I don't know. Maybe I should, look, I'm telling you, man, and I don't want to scare you. but based on what I'm hearing, you're like three weeks away from, forget this,

I'm going to do crypto in a podcast. You know, like, well, maybe that's the secret or maybe I can do this instead. You got to be careful. You're all over the place.

So that's what I can suggest. Let's just take a breath here. Let's just lay down a foundation of execution at this new job. I'm dependable. I deliver at high level of quality. Just do that for a while. Figure out how to reset the coffee maker and where the light switches are.

and then really survey and say, what's my plan here? How do I want to move to the next step and the next? And how can I deliberately get to that place as quickly as possible? That's what I want you to try out for a bit. And you know what? If it turns out, which it very much might, this place is not for me, you have built up the career capital that's going to help you make the shift to something else.

Whereas if you've been here and hasn't done anything yet and you're trying to shift, people are going to be saying what's going on? What's the deal here? What went wrong? So anyways, I don't know all the details of your situation. This might not be applicable, but I've heard from enough people in similar situations to be somewhat confident in advising. Let's take a beat and do a little bit of the craftsman thing for a bit. This podcast is sponsored by Cynard.

You know, of course, I am a big believer in focusing deeply on your work and doing one thing at a time. problem, of course, is that most of this work takes place on a computer, which is like a distraction machine. You have access to every possible diversion information and distraction right at your fingertips. This is where Centered can enter the scene and help you out. Centred is an app that you run on your computer that helps you stay mindful and in flow by blocking distractions, encouraging monotasking and time blocking, playing bespoke and music and even offering a coach who will nudge you if you open an app or website that's not on task. In addition, you can get analytics about how you are actually spending your time, real feedback on how you're actually spending your time.

So if you go to centered. And use the promo code deep questions, one word, you will get a free month free of the centered premium service. that cinerd. app and use the promo code deep questions to get a free month of Cynard. This podcast is sponsored by Grammarly. It is the new year. It seems like just yesterday we were sitting by the fire, enjoying our holiday break, dreaming of ambitious New Year's resolution, and then we hit the reality of the new year, which is that we are crushed with new work.

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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. All right, so moving on, we've got two questions here from Anna. Hi, Cal. My name is Anna, and my question is about the book editing process.

Here in Brazil, agents and advanced book contracts are not so common. Most commonly, the author writes the book first and submits it directly to the publisher. So I was curious to understand this process. I see several advantages to writing a book with publisher support along the way, but the degree of interference from these editors worries me. For example, editors may focus only on the commercial aspect, while the author has additional concerns such as contribution, integrity, and impact. Well, first of all, hi, Anna. So Anna is a longtime friend of the show and the newsletter.

We've emailed back and forth about other issues before, so it's good to hear from you. Also, interesting, interesting details you're sharing about how book publishing differs in Brazil versus here in the U.S., in the U.S. for, at least for trade publication, right? So let's put academic presses aside. But if you're writing nonfiction for just a standard major publisher, you do not write the book in advance. You get in advance. You sell the book and they give you an advance on your royalties that then go out and write the book. In fact, it is a, in almost every instance in the U.S., it is going to harm your chances of getting a book published if you write your nonfiction book before you try to sell it.

Fiction is the opposite. You can't sell fiction on spec for the most part. They've got to see the manuscript. key distinction is academic presses. Academic presses in the U.S. for the most part want to see the full manuscript before they publish it. It's much more like an academic

publishing pipeline for academic presses. Now, Anna, it's possible, because I know you're a professor, it's possible that what you're talking about is a Brazilian academic press, in which case, that's actually not different than the U.S. But if you are talking about

a trade press, a public-facing press, that is interesting if in Brazil they want to see the book first. So my short answer to your conclusion, concerns about, well, are these editors going to ruin my book, make it more commercial or push back on my integrity or not understand what I'm getting for or getting at? The answer is almost certainly no. No.

Editors are not going to ruin your book. They're not going to force it to be some weird commercial thing. They are either going to reject it or they're going to accept it. And if they accept it, they're going to be accepting basically what you wrote. They'll help you strengthen it. But they're not going to come to you and say, look, you wrote a book about this. but I want you to drastically change what it is, you know, I want you to drastically change it so that it's more commercial.

They just aren't going to buy your book and just wait until they see a manuscript that is more commercial, right? So you might be exaggerating the degree to which they, an editor is going to change what is submitted. In nonfiction, like they're going to help you polish it, et cetera, but they're not, they want a different book. They'll buy a different book. All right. So I wouldn't worry about that, Anna. if you're writing a book, don't be concerned about it. There's a broader point I want to talk about here.

And Anna, I don't think you're suffering from this, but in the U.S., I hear from this a lot from authors. So I want to use this as an excuse to talk about it, which is the gatekeeper fallacy. At the core of this fallacy is this idea that if you look at the space of possible, let's say, books. This happens in other industries, but let's focus on books. If you look at the space of possible books that could be successful and impactful and find an audience and be good books, that within that whole space of possible books, there's only a relatively narrow band of those that the gatekeepers, like the editors and agents in the publishing industry, will allow to be published. And not necessarily because they're being nefarious, but just their old fashion and they're uncreative or they don't understand different points of view. So the gatekeeper fallacy says there's this large space of. books that could be very successful, but only a pretty narrow band of them actually get published.

The gatekeepers narrow the path that successful books can actually trod. Now, if you subscribe to the gatekeeper fallacy and you're a first-time writer, you are tempted to say, I should do my own thing. I should self-publish. I should break it down and do it on Twitter, 140 characters at a time, or do it in audio on a podcast. I need to do something creative because, hey, I'm an interesting creative person. I probably don't fall into this.

I might not fall into this lane, this narrow lane that the gatekeepers will allow. I'm probably out here in the space beyond. And so it's my only chance to get my book. And in fact, probably my book will succeed if I can just find a way to get it to people's attention. The problem is when you are out of the standard publishing process, it's not impossible to find an audience. It's just really, really hard. And it takes a lot more overhead. You have to waste a lot more of your time.

doing nonsense unrelated to the creative act of writing to even get the book out there. There's editing and covers and submitting for copyright. And it's all this headache that you don't do if you're going through the standard way. So it takes way more time. It takes time away from what really matters. And then no one finds it very hard without sort of standard channels or even the backing of a standard publishing imprint for people to find or write about it. So your path you have to climb to get it seen. and succeed becomes a really steep path.

But if you subscribe to the gatekeeper fallacy, it's like, hey, what else can I do? The reality. The reality is that publishers are desperate for books to publish. They need a full pipeline. There's economics to this, but it's better to have a full pipeline than it is to have less books that are better.

Just you need inventory. You need inventory. Every agent I know, every editor I know, wants more books, they don't have enough books. I would suspect, you know, if we could measure this somehow, the space of possible books that would do well in the marketplace and the space of books that publishers would buy and purchases, they're substantially overlapping. Almost certainly your, it's very unlikely, almost certainly your situation. And again, you here is just generic to people who subscribe to the fallacy. almost certainly your book falls into that space,

the idea into the space that publishers would be happy to publish. And therefore, you know, save you all the overhead of doing stuff on your own, give you a big leg up for things getting actually seen. So what is the main obstacle? The main obstacle is typically either the idea is just not right under any circumstance or you're not the right person or in the right situation to write it. I mean, when it comes to nonfiction, especially non-journalistic non-fiction, the formula, you know, even in the early days of my blog I always talked about was you need a idea that there's an audience that's going to feel like they have to read. You have to be the right person to write about it and you have to be a non-amateur writer.

So there can't be amateurness in the writing because you can't put out a product as a publisher that has amateurness in the writing. So you have to be at a certain level. You don't have to be Hemingway. But it can't be like the typical high college freshman, right? So those are the three things you need. And so typically it's just lacking one of those three things to prevent a book from getting bought, right? The idea is hazy. It's a big one.

You've got four or five different ideas going on. No, no, for a book to where you have to focus it, right? Or maybe it's a cool idea, but you're not the right person to talk about it, right? So it's, you know, like I have this idea. I've heard pitches like this before about, you know, we put too much pressure on kids in the educational system or this or that. but it's just a the person pitching it to me. It's like,

it's not like you have some particular expertise in this or an unusually interesting personal story or that you, like you can't just be, I'm a generally smart guy and I want to write about this. There has to be some fit.

It has to make sense to the reader why this person is writing about this topic. It's why my first book was about college students. I was a college student. It was the only book for which I was the right person to be writing it. It was the only book I could convince them to publish. And then you have to,

you know, be a non-bad writer. This happens a lot. when people are like not in academic circles or they're they haven't done a huge amount of writing since school and you know they're just their writing's not there these are the main reasons where things don't get published so no the gatekeeper's not the problem now i think a lot of people embrace the gatekeeper fallacy because you're pre-protecting yourself from rejection uh you know i don't want to have the agent say no so i'll just in advance say the agents don't understand i need to do this on my own

But rejection is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, what it is is just a great free feedback indicator from the market. Okay, something's not right here. Let me tweak it and try again. Let me tweak it and try again. And then when the agent accepts it, you know, okay, I got this right. And then when they sell it, like, okay, I think we have the right combo here. And so you can write with confidence.

You don't have to spend six months writing a book where you're not sure if, like, this book even makes sense. So there's like, it's actually kind of a useful signal. Like rejection hurts. but on the flip side, acceptance gives you a lot of confidence. So I think you have to have that dichotomy. You can't have the value of acceptance without the pain of rejection. So again, Anna, I apologize for hijacking your question, which is very specific about editors in Brazil,

to talk about this more general issue. But there's probably a lot more people out there who have this general issue than they have thinking about editors in Brazil. So I did hijack the question. I just wanted to make that point. Beware of the gatekeeper fallacy. The publishing industry is, they're not out of date and not ready. for you. They're desperate for stuff. So figure out those three things you need just to have any book

be publishable, get there, and enjoy the confidence that comes with actually having acceptance. All right. So since I feel bad about hijacking your question, Anna, let's grab one other query from you. My question is about your blog writing process. Do you finish the text and post immediately? Do you ask family, friends, or the writers to read your posts before publishing them? Or in this case, it's not possible to seek feedback because there is no time you are so busy. Or maybe at this point of your writing career, you feel it's not needed. What do you think about these issues? Well, I appreciate that question.

I haven't really talked recently about my blog writing process. And it's kind of appropriate because earlier in this episode I was talking about my podcasting process. So this is symmetric to that earlier discussion. I've been doing this for a while. Let me set the stage with that with that note. I have been writing roughly my once a week essay. It used to be more actually, but at least once a week since 2007. So we're at our, what's that, 15, 16 year anniversary coming up.

So we've been doing it for a while. So I do have some old habits there. I have Overlapped My weekly blog post writing With leisure time This was a change I made years ago As a graduate student

I used to write my blog post As part of my work day It's just one of my work things I did And back in the day When I was getting started I'd write three posts a week That's just kind of what things were like back then You would blog and you'd do high volume

At some point I think By my professorship Maybe a little bit earlier I switched the one Longer, more thoughtful essay per week and I shifted it to a leisure, pseudo-leisure activity. So I don't typically write my weekly blog post during work hours. I like to do it in the evening. And if it, depending on what day of the week, it is if it's late in the week, then I might even do it

with an adult beverage as well. Now, when my kids were young, when I only had two and they were really little and they go to bed early, I would do it after I put them to bed. I would go and sit in the big leather chair and long time, long time readers on my blog knows what that is. And I'd put on a record and I would write in that big leather chair. It was like a leisure thing. I enjoyed it. I wanted it to be something I enjoyed, right? Kids are older now.

I have more of them. I don't have a lot of time after they go to bed. They go to bed. I collapse. They go to bed and, you know, if you saw me like right after the last of those three kids have been put to bed, I look more or less and this is a, a technical description, like when you watch a movie about the Civil War and they show the Union soldier at the end of the battle that is stumbling through the cannon smoke with

blood all over his face and he lost his leg to a cannonball and he's sort of stumbling. And then they kind of zoom out and that's when they play the melodramatic music where the the military leader confronts the whatever it is, the loss of the terrible loss of life that is war, that character. Yeah, that's me.

That's me as bedtime's over. So no, I'm not writing a blog post then. So now what I've done to adjust to the shifting realities of parenthood is I'll do it sort of right after the workday. Like happy hour time, right? Like 4.35,

530 somewhere in there. So pick a day and I'll just in my workday a little later and do that kind of as a capstone. No, I don't have anyone edit. Look, I've been doing this for a while. So I can write and edit and post, conceive write and edit a post pretty quick hour, maybe 90 minutes tops. But if it's a shorter pose, an hour, no problem. I'll typically, to be honest and accurate, we'll write the post largely in my head earlier in the day. So as an adherent to productive meditation, I can do quite a bit in my head.

So typically on a walk earlier in the day, going back and forth between my house and the HQ, commuting back from Georgetown, I'll figure out the post that day, get the main beats of it. So I know what I'm doing. I'm not staring out a blank page and saying what's next. In about an hour to 90 minutes, the whole thing's done. So again, it's a pseudo-leisure activity for me. I want to find that something is kind of relaxing, not as work, because I just have a long relationship and history with this blog. I've been doing it since basically right after, almost right after I left college. And I do it pretty fast just because I'm used to it.

And so, no, I don't, I don't bother editing. My editing's fine. Mistakes get through, but it's not worth spending the time to have, you know, like a copy editor look at it. And in terms of ideas and writing style, I mean, I don't know. It's what I do. It's what I do for a living. I'm a writer for a living. I write books.

I write articles. I write all the time. So it's like a second language. that activity is very natural to me. So that is, and that is how I handle that. All right, we're getting a little long on time here, but why don't I just do one more question? We'll go a little bit more philosophical here.

Hi, Cal, I'm wondering how you distinguish the deep life from the good life that so many philosophers discuss. Is living deeply different from living well? Perhaps this question could help you brainstorm for your upcoming book. Thanks. Well, it is a good question. It's one I have been thinking about as I've been working on the proposal for that potential new book on the deep life. There is obviously big overlaps between the notion of deep and good in this context.

However, I resisted using this extant good life terminology because I believe it is too overloaded. And you then have to wrangle with this existing cultural philosophical baggage. and I didn't want to do that. I wanted more of a clean slate. So the Good Life, capital G, capital L. You see this, for example, show up quite a bit in ethical philosophy. You'll see this in translations of Aristotle, also of Socrates, what is the good, what defines the good life? So you see it in ethical philosophy.

So there's a big history there. You also see Good Life has been more recently been reappropriated into more modern cultural context. So the good life is typically in an economic materialist terms. The good life is a consumerist, you know, consumerist utopia where you have all the stuff you want. So there's a sort of derogatory connotation and some more modern usage. So it's a very overloaded term. And I'm not simply just the deep life doesn't fit cleanly with, if we go back to those existing ethical definitions of the good life. A, they tend to be monofocus.

So it's, okay, here's a question. The answer should be singular. Aristotle talks about using your human faculties, your human faculty of contemplation without instrumentalist need or goal. This contemplation for the sake of contemplation, only humans can do that and sort of fulfill your teleological destiny that you should sit and think deeply. or something very specific. And you see this a lot in normative theory. Like, yeah, this is the thing. This is the definition of the good.

And that's, I think that's more constraining. My notion of the deep life is much more polyvalent. I also think the philosophical definitions of the good life, like a lot of philosophy, just gets really dry and technical. We're trying to very carefully built self-contained and self-contained and self- contained a consistent systems of thought and you veer off into weird lands of jargon and dryness, which I wanted to get away from as well. So when I talk about the deep life, I'm trying to do a couple things here.

One, I'm trying to marry the deeply aspirational, sort of you know it. When you see it, we want it. Put a term to that. We see these lives people live, these particular people live, and we say, I want that. I don't know why, but I just, there is a thing that is calling out from within me, that that's what I want my life to be like and something is lacking. I want to give that a name. Let's call it the deep life.

And I want to marry that with the intensely pragmatic. All right, let's think about this like a problem as how do I get my mile time faster? Like, let's be systematic. I want to marry the aspirational with the pragmatic. That's at the core of my style of thinking and writing. And that's what I'm trying to do with the deep life philosophy. And so what do you get with the deep life philosophy?

Well, it basically has these two components to it. One, you are living with intention to support the complete set of areas that are important to you. So you do not end up captured in just one area. It's just in my craft. It's just in my fitness. You see the different areas that are important to you and you live with intention aimed towards all those areas. So already you can see where I want to try to separate from the more monofocus normative theory approaches to this question. It's not one thing.

You have different things that you want to make sure that you're supporting. Two, when you really get that aspirational information when you look at those case studies that are so exciting, you should be willing to radically realign parts of your life, radically realign parts of your life to be more consistent with what matters. Those tend to be the two pieces that define a deep life.

You're not leaving one part of your life on the table to pursue another that's out of balance, that also there's this element of radicalness to it. So it's not just, My life is very traditional, is very boring. I'm careful about. I exercise and I volunteer and in my work. No, no, there's usually some sort of radical alignment that happened.

Yeah, I move to an island. I shape surfboards now instead of being an accountant. I'm rich role type character and I'm running ultra marathons and pushing my body to its limits. right it's there's something about at least in one or two areas that important to you that you're doing something radical there that you've radically changed your life just to prove to yourself that's more what matters to me is this and I'm willing to be on non-traditional I'm willing to go to big lengths to get it usually have those combinations so this polyvalent focus on there's different aspects that matter in life and this willingness to be radical in the

pursuit of at least some of them that tends to be what defines the good life uh the deep life and so I want to give it its own name again it's a good life and you're thinking about the Nicomachean ethics and you're thinking about that philosophy class you took in your second year and how you looked at that professor. You're an expert in this and you seem miserable and are kind of annoying and, you know, are out of shape and just got divorced and seemed depressed. So why are we learning about the good life from you? I mean, I'm glad that, like, you have nuances on Aristotelian ethics.

You know, I want to get away from that. I go move to an island and shape a surfboard. How do we put a systematic framework to people who do that? That is what I'm getting at with the deep life. Stay tuned. There's a lot of deep thinking to be done on this topic, especially if I do end up writing a book on it. So all of this will be refined.

But that is my tentative answer to this important question. All right, well, that's all the time we have for today's episode. Remember, if you like what you heard, you will like what you read in my weekly newsletter. subscribe at calnewport.com. I'll be back on Monday. God willing with Jesse's help with a new episode

of the Deep Questions podcast and until then, as always, stay deep.