Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 168: Should I Quit My Law Partner Job?

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.Videos of today’s questions: https://tinyurl.com/b2rkctfjDEEP WORK QUESTIONS:- How should we use a ticketing system?  [4:15]- Should I resign after my boss does? [9:19]- Are breaks to rest your eyes considered context switching? [13:10]- How do you time block long but ambiguous intellectual activity?  [21:49] - How do you get back to scheduling after a vacation? [24:57] DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:- Is it okay for a one activity to fit into two different deep life buckets? [29:51] - How do I live deeply with a demanding job (i.e., should I quit my law partner job?) [33:51]Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This podcast is sponsored by Blinkist. You've heard me talk about Blinkist before. It's a subscription service that provides you 15-minute summaries, both audio and written, of thousands of popular non-fiction books and podcast. And my recommendation is to use these summaries to quickly survey the big ideas and important new books and decide which of them you'll dedicate it your limited time to actually buying. Now, I'm looking at Blinkist right now and seeing summaries for a really exciting collection of big swing idea books like James Sussman's work or Matt Mason's The Pirates Dilemma or Skip Gates, the Black Church.

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I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 168. So as mentioned in Monday's episode, which I actually just finished recording since I record back to back. Jesse is not here today. He'll be back next week. Because of that, instead of doing what I normally do for Thursday's episode, which is a listener calls episode, I'm going to instead do a classic written question episode. And the reason is typically when Jesse is here, the way we do the listener calls episode is we do, we do. do them live, Jesse has the calls loaded up on a soundboard essentially, and he can just play them, and we can hear them, and they get on the tape. And what this allows us to do is to film the whole

episode. So you can have a video of the whole listener calls episode. We do the whole thing live. When he's not here, the way I used to do these episodes is I would stop recording, bring in the audio file of the episode, of the call, and then play the call and record my answer, stop recording, bring in a file for another call. etc. And so we can't film that whole thing. And I do like the idea. Now that video is up and running of having video of the whole episodes for those who prefer it. So I'm going to do just a classic episode here so I can film the whole thing and we can release it. That was the other update from Monday. So I'll remind you again of today. The exciting news is that we are now releasing video of every episode, video also of each individual quest. So there will be a, you can find the link to the YouTube page where these videos are going up in the show notes from Monday's episode. I put a post about it on my blog at Calnewport.com slash blog as well. We'll be trickling out videos from each episode in the week that follows that episode coming out.

So check that out if you want to save or share or just look at individual responses or if you're just interested in seeing what it looks like here in the DeepWork HQ. You know, I'm under some time constraints today. I have a block of, geez, three hours, of a three hour meeting block on Zoom, mind you. You can see, those of you watching the video can see the excitement in my face. I have a three hour meeting block coming up in less than an hour. So I am not going to do a deep dive. I'm going to jump right in these questions. Let's just rock and roll.

We will start, as always, with questions about the work. Our first question comes from Charles. Charles says, In the podcast and in your book, a world without email, you reference ticketing systems as models for taming communication. At my job, we have something like a help desk model, but the job request and questions being sent up and down the chain still take the form of unstructured messages. I know the key is looking at our processes, but it's hard to find good.

examples. Well, Charles, let me summarize what it is I like about ticketing system-based communication, the kind of the properties I like. And then you can step back and say, can we obtain these properties for the type of communication you're talking about in your job. So here are the properties that I think are good about ticketing systems. And first of all, let me just clarify that when I'm thinking about ticketing systems, I'm talking about context where you're dealing with questions, questions or requests that eventually have to be satisfied. There's someone who is waiting for you or your team to get back to them or to resolve an issue they have. That's the context in which ticketing system type solutions make sense.

So in this context, what I like is to have a place where those open questions all live. So it's not scattered between a bunch of different inboxes or just ad hoc conversations you have. There's a place you can go where every open request lives. Two, all of the notes and communication related to the particular question is right there all stored together. Here's the original thing they asked. Here was a response. Here's some notes that someone else gave. And then here's what I responded instead.

So all the information is in one place. It's not scattered between a bunch of Slack chats and emails. Three, there's a clear status. Here's the status of each of these questions. No one's looked at this yet. We're waiting to hear back from someone. We sent them something. We're waiting to hear back.

We need information from someone else to answer it. And we're waiting for that to get back. And here's a person we're waiting for it. You can clearly see that you clearly see the status. And then optionally, four, a lot of IT ticketing systems do this. But optionally, number four, is an easy way to keep the originator of the request up to date on the status of their request. So they can say like, okay, this is being looked at. It hasn't been forgotten.

They have it. Someone, they're waiting to hear back from someone else. and then they'll get back to me, et cetera. You get the uncertainty of what happened to this thing I sent out there into the black hole of office communication. Where is this request? Is it being looked at? Those are standard properties of IT ticketing systems. I think those are good properties for any system in which you're dealing with open questions request and almost any type of knowledge work.

If you have a system that can do those three and perhaps also that optional for thing, this now allows you to effectively answer people's questions, handle people's request without constant context shifting, without constant ad hoc back and forth, what's going on, what messages going on here, trying to keep track of seven or eight things in your head,

about that cognitive load without all that context shifting. It enables instead a workflow in which at regular times you log into whatever system is keeping track of all of this. And you can say, okay, I have a set process here.

I first I look at new stuff that's come in and I handle them and I update their status. I let people know what's going on. I see where people have sent stuff for me for second opinions or have handed things off to me and I try to update those notes. I look at things where we're waiting to hear back from someone. We haven't heard back in a while. So maybe I should ping it. But the point is, it's like, oh, I'm in the system. All the information's there.

I'm processing stuff in there. And then when you're updating things as you go along and then when you're done, you're done. Then another day or another time of the day you have time to go. back into the system and you work on it. That is the magic you want from a ticketing inspired system, that there's times where you're engaging with all that information and it's all there and it's all organized and you see its status. You can work on something and update it status, and then when you're done, you're done. Contrast that with a standard knowledge work approach of just, I don't know, all this stuff exists as ad hoc emails. Some are being sent towards me,

some are being sent towards other people. Other people are trying to obligation hot potato it on the my plate by saying thoughts because they don't want to deal with it. And it's just all constantly. You have to keep checking your inbox or Slack to see what's going on here. And I sent this over to this person for a question and when they write back, I have to remember to get back. And that's just chaos, constant context shifting. You're juggling all sorts of stuff just in your head. It's incredibly inefficient way to deploy cognitive resources. So that's what I like out of ticketing systems. Now, whether you are actually implementing that with an actual IT grade ticketing tool or if this is happening on a Trello board or even a shared Google Doc that just a few. of you use. I don't really care. But if you can get those properties and how you deal with these things, you can deal with questions and request in a way that is very effective, but has a much smaller footprint on your brain. All right.

Our second question comes from Theo. Theo says, my manager is resigning. Should I, too? Yes. Next question. Now, let's look at what Theo has to say here. It's a little bit elaborate, but basically, here's the short version of Theo's story. He has been working for three years now as an assistant to a CFO.

He's done well. And now that guy is quitting. And he doesn't feel, Theo doesn't feel like he's been protected. So his mentor, CFO has quit. And he says, if I stay around, it would mean starting from zero again, you need to prove to the new CIO that I'm worth it to them, should I quit? So Theo, no, unless you have a good reason to. The default thing to do here, the craftsmanship mindset right here would say, great, now there's someone else to learn how great you are, be so good you can't be ignored.

So what you want to find is, is there a reason not to do that? And I could think of two. one, if there's other factors in this job that are specifically negative, you know, I don't like the people, the way they dealt with this CFO indicates to me that they're morally bankrupt or something. I mean, if there's like specific reasons, negative externalities about this position, then yes, that's a good time to leave. But you know what? If there's existed, you should, you should have left even when the other CFO was there. Two, if there is a specific alternative opportunity that you think fits even better

with your lifestyle-centric career plan. Just briefly, I don't want to... We'll get into this in a later question, but remember, lifestyle-centric career planning is my approach to thinking out your career. You start with a very clear picture what you want your life to be like, not just professionally, but everything.

You picture and you can see the images of it. And then you work backwards to figure out different professional configurations that support this lifestyle vision you have. Not just one piece of it, but can support the whole lifestyle vision. If there's another opportunity that, hey, we'll support this even better, then yeah, maybe this is a good chance to leave. But otherwise, don't just leave because you're annoyed. Don't just leave because you say, I don't like that, you know, my ego is bruised. They don't seem to care. They fired him and no one's like,

oh, we really want you to stay Theo or whatever. They're not stroking my ego. Don't quit because you think you're going to show them. They're going to be like, man, Theo quit. We really, we really, we did bad. He taught us. We have learned our lesson. You know, they don't care.

People are busy and distracted and terrible. They don't know. Those aren't reasons to quit. Be so good they can't ignore you. Yeah, that guy's gone. You have a new one. even better for the new one. Unless you have a very specific reason to leave,

which is this other job is specifically better, or I just realized that, you know, the CEO is demanding animal sacrifices and makes us use slack. And I'll know what's worse. I could do a little bit of animal sacrificing,

but if I'd be on slack all the time, no go. No go. I'm out of there. All right. So anyways, don't quit unless there's a really good reason to. All right. Our third question here comes from Gabriel.

By the way, those who are watching on video will see I keep checking. This is my Jesse's Not Here check that is things recording. I never trust myself. And they are. Our third question here comes from Gabriel. Gabriel says, are breaks to rest your eyes considered context switching? He elaborates. Would you consider a 20-second eye rest, a content?

context switch. No. I think literally turning away from your computer screen is not a cognitive context switch. It would be funny if I was like, yes. And what I want you to do

is get those clockwork orange style things that hold your eyelids open so you can't look away and have a cervical collar screwed into your skull so that you have to be staring straight into your computer. So no.

efficiency is lost with eye movement. But it's a good question because there's actually a deeper question here, which is like, how do you take breaks? Because I opine against context switching as being an expensive operation, which is why it's not so innocent to say, just, you know, keep an eye on email because I'm going to get back to you soon with, you know, meeting times. I need you to get right back to me. So it kind of keep checking your inbox. And it's not so innocent.

We say it's innocent because I'm only looking five seconds at a time, not multitasking. I'm writing my thing. I just glance at this, but then I close it again and keep writing. It's expensive because when you go and look at that inbox and see all those other emails, it creates a context shift and now, boom, 10 minutes, you're screwed. 10 minutes of your brain jumbled between different contexts and trying to get back to what it was doing before. So how do you take breaks? Well, I mean, okay, a couple things here.

And again, I'm not talking about moving your eyes for 20 seconds or whatever. But it's like serious breaks. Like you're tired and you want to take a break. I mean, yes, there is going to be some. A real break will cause some context shifting. So roughly speaking, if you have like a demanding bit of thinking you need to do, see that through before you take a break. Take a break right before.

But then if you're trying to write a draft of an article, let's just lock in and write that article and not take the break in the middle. But if you're working on something all day long and you need to take breaks, they use an example from like what I'm about to go do. Faculty Search Committee meetings and I have to look at a lot of applications this week. And it's intellectually demand that you have to read

these applications and assess them. You've got to take breaks because it takes a long time. But if you if you're like jumping on to email or social media or something in between applications, like your

context switching costs would be killer. But you still have to take breaks. I'm not going to sit there for three hours and do this. So how do you take a break in a way that minimizes the negative impact? Well, I've talked before on my newsletter about

deep breaks. So how do you take breaks during deep work in a way that's minimally intrusive. And the two things I talk about is, A, any content, I don't like using the word content, but like information you encounter during your break, just make it really unrelated to work. So the context switching cost is not nearly as bad. If you're reading applications and then you shift over to read about baseball. it's not nearly as bad as switching to email and reading about other work-related things.

For whatever reason, I'll know the neuroscience here, but if it's a completely different cognitive context, somehow it's the overlap, the issue of the overlap is minimized. Two, whatever information you encounter when taking a break, try to make it not be emotionally salient. but it's emotionally silly and if it's going to get emotions going that is going to have an inhibitory impact on your ability to work when you return it's going to take some time to shift out so if you get really upset or really excited

that is going to have more of an impact than if you don't so again boring baseball is like a go-to I have it's like a real it's been a real issue it's been a real issue this winter that there's been a lockout between the managers and the players because that means there has been

a lack of the standard news you would get in December and January of trades happening and teams reconfiguring and it's fantastic for deep breaks. It's like interesting. You know,

are we in the hunt for this free agent, right? But it's not particularly emotionally salient because it's not like, we're winning or losing a game. Like, you're like, I don't know, maybe it'll go well, maybe it's just kind of interesting. and it's a good distraction.

It doesn't distract you that much. Emotionally salient stuff will. This is why social media is a bad idea if you're taking a deep break. Because that whole world has been engineered to be emotionally salient. Don't go down a COVID rabbit hole when you're trying to work on an unrelated article because it's going to get you fired up. However, wherever you are, there's so many different ways I could get you fired up. If you're one of the very anxious types, you're going to get even more anxious.

if you're one of the like very upset types that people are overreacting, then you're going to get super upset. Whatever you're looking for, you're going to see it. If you're like a really huge fan of the CD4 epitope number seven, and you see that that has undergone some phenotypic mutation in the last variant, you're one of those types. You're going to be really upset reading about Omicron, etc.

So you don't want it to be related to work. You don't want to be emotionally salient. So no social media. To be non-related to work. work, then for sure no email, for sure, no slack. Those type of breaks are good. The final thing I would add for deep breaks is move, get up, walk, go outside, get fresh air. Maybe, you know, read a little baseball news, go for a walk, get some water.

It's a perfect break if you're going to take a break. Yes, it has a cost. I mean, if you're locked in trying to solve a theorem and then you go and do that for 10 minutes, you're not going to like pick it up right where you were, but you'll pick it up much faster than if you were jumping over to email with your boss. about, you know, how COVID's going to affect an upcoming report or something like that. And for God's sakes, it's going to be much less impactful than interleaving that type of stuff while you're trying to do the deep work.

Let's not even go there. All right, Gabriel. So hopefully that is helpful. This podcast is sponsored by Zoc Doc. Finding a booking a doctor who's right for you doesn't need to be a terrible experience. Well, they take your insurance, understand your needs, or be available when you can see them. With Zoc Doc, the answer can be a refreshingly pain-free yes.

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and my health a breather. So happy New Year everyone may it be filled with just egg. Just egg really good eggs. All right, so we have a question here from No Name. No Name says

I find that deep work often requires me to have a lot of space, i.e. a lot of thinking and moving time that may appear unproductive, such as half hour periods where nothing seems to advance, but where a lot of brain connections are being made. How do you

time block for this. If I block out large chunks of time, I procrastinate. If I block out half hour segments with measurable goals, I don't reach them because the goal often is not yet measurable. It's just getting one step closer to teasing out a conundrum. Yeah, so no name. I think what you need, if I'm understanding you correctly, what I think you need to do here for this type of intellectually demanding deep work where if you just say three hours deep work and leave it at that, nothing only get done, but if you try to break it down into like, now for 20 minutes, I want to look at

book chapters. Then for 15 minutes, take notes on the, you know, that's too detailed. I get that. I would say have long blocks and have more ritualized structure for those blocks that is custom built for the type of work you're doing. So it's not, you're not time blocking out every little thing, but you do have

a little bit of structure to how you approach these blocks. And when I say ritualized, I mean, you're just used to doing the same things every time you come to these blocks. So if you're working on a book, and you do mention here, you're working on an academic social science book project. And that there's a ritual to these writing blocks. Put it in the same time. It's the first thing in the morning I do or whatever. Like you put in the same time, you go for like a walk to a certain place to get your mind ready.

Or you go to the coffee shop and you always do some sort of reading. And some days it might be background reading. And some days it might be reading over a draft that you wrote the night before. But like I go to the coffee shop. I do that reading. get a cup of coffee to a second cup of coffee to go and I come back and then it's like one hour

writing time always one hour writing time and then there's like a half hour free thinking time after that you know right I wander and think and take notes of a notebook to set me up for the next session so you have some structure and some ritual I do it at the same time I go to the same places but the details of what you're doing within the structure

can alter and evolve as the project goes on and you don't need to then block out subblock precisely where each of these things happen. It's exactly 20 minutes at the coffee shop or whatever. It's like, no, it's one big block. But what you're doing in that block is not just work on your book.

You have this flow and structure that takes into account the reality of how your brain operates, what works for you, what doesn't. You'll get to look forward to these blocks. I mean, ritualized structure gets you to a point where you're like, yeah, I look forward to this every day or every week whenever I do it. So that's what I would suggest. Add some structure. Treat it like a ritual. don't be too detailed.

Once you use that structure, you don't have to write it all down just when you put a block for doing that ritualized structured work. You know exactly what that means. All right. Let us do one last, look at what we have here.

Let's do one last work question here. How do you get back into your regular scheduling after a vacation or a major disruption to your routine? I have a lot of trouble getting back in the time blocking after a break, there's usually so much piled up I'm just in survival mode getting things up and running again.

Part of me feels dread thinking about time blocking again even though it feels good when everything's running smoothly again. I've started feeling a lot of stress before breaks to regular scheduling because I knew even a few days off will cause weeks of disorganization until I'm back on schedule. So RK, I think the problem is not time blocking. I think it's a lack of flexibility in what these time block schedules can look like.

So I'm guessing, reading from your question, that when you're rolling, you know, like you're going, you haven't had a vacation recently, like all cylinders are firing, that you have like relatively intricately time block days.

You're able to switch between a few different things. You're making use of your time very well. Progress is made on four or five things together. Like you feel very much in control. And the issue is when you get back from vacation, those type of schedules don't work. There's so much stuff piling up and it takes you so long to get through and there's so much just like getting things back up and rolling again that the, you know, seven blocks schedule, intricately made schedule, they just don't work and you feel like that's a failure. What I'm going to suggest is that you introduce the idea that, no, there's other types of time blocks. And a day after a vacation, a day after vacation may be like one big block for most of that day.

which is just let's just get in the email and just process and update our plans and, you know, I'm going to put aside a whole day to do that, one block. That's successfully time block day and it's acknowledging it's facing the productivity dragon in this situation that I need a whole day to catch back up and just get all the information process and figure out where I am and update my task systems and my calendar. I just need a whole day to do it. It's one big block. But the key is not I have a lot of blocks.

therefore it's a successful day. The key is I was intentional. My intention is this entire first day is going to be that. I mean, for the entire first week, you're like, I spend two hours every morning with a block that just says wrangling. I'm kind of just wrangling all this different stuff that's coming up and down trying to keep track of it or whatever. Well, it's like a lot of ad hoc meetings pop up your week after vacation. There's a lot of people need you and there's a lot of meetings that are going to show up. You keep your, like my afternoons are going to be clear.

That's just for meetings. and I just assume that meetings are going to pop up throughout the day and I'll just be like, hey, grab me in the afternoon. You know, again, that's fine. It looks different than your time block plans during those periods where all your firing all cylinders, but you're still being intentional. And that is, again, the goal you need with time blocking.

Are you being intentional about here's the reality of my situation, here's what I want to do in response to that? Or are you just saying, I don't know, list reactive, just have stuff come at me, what do I feel like doing next? Intention is the key. So I think that is the issue and it's not your fault. I think it's the fault of time block, the way I talk about time blocking in particular. It can look very different depending on what's going on your life.

And it could be one giant block some days. That's fine. As long as you're being very intentional about how you spend your time. Speaking of time blocking quick advertisement, we're working now on version 2.0 of the time block plan. which you can find out more about it at timeblockplanner.com. And what I always encourage people to think about, if you use my time block planner,

which of course you do not have to, but if you use my time block planner, you're not buying, like here's the planner and that's what it is. You're sort of, you're buying into a commitment to do time blocking. And we are going to continue to update the planner. So like maybe there's things,

if there's something you don't like about the current planner, by a time you get to the next three-month period, there might be updates that make it even better. And I just want to let you know that we're working on updates for the next, the next batch of time block planners. We printed a ton of them. I think we printed 20,000 of them or something.

So we have to obviously get through the ones we already printed, which we're almost done with. But we have to get through the ones we've already printed before we can put out new ones. And there are some delays because there's paper shortages and blah, blah, blah. But my point is this is good a time to any to, if you want a time block planner, my planner, just grab it. And don't worry, just keep in mind what you're buying into a system where over time that planner is going to keep adjusting based on your feedback.

So that's a little unsolicited plug. All right. Well, because again, we're under that time pressure today. I think we should actually jump right ahead and get into questions about the deep life. Noah asks, is it okay for two of my buckets or values to be manifested in a single activity? So he elaborates. You often mention several of the different bucket values. that constitute a deep life.

If I look at two values such as escape and discipline, for example, there might be one activity that manifest both of these values. In my case, I enjoy going running and biking outside, and I view this activity as being a way to escape in the nature, but also as a practice in discipline due to the physical effort involved and the commitments to physical well-being that these activities support. Since I currently have a lot of things going on in my life, but I still want to live deeply,

it's tempting to count running and biking as both an escape and discipline. All right. It's a good question, Noah. So the way, you know, you're honing in here, I think, on a particular configuration of the deep life, my process for helping to support a deep life, a particular configuration that was somewhat short lived where I had these values and then you assigned activities to them. For the most part, I tend to come back to the bucket-based system where you have buckets for different areas of your life, not different values for different areas. career, constitution, contemplation, community, etc.

And then, you know, for each of these values, you start, your warm-up, as it were, was to develop a keystone habit for each of these areas, for each of these buckets. Something you do on a regular basis, you track every day,

a little signal to yourself that you take each of these areas of your life seriously and that you're willing to actually do non-truval effort for it. And then you go through when you one by one, spend one the two months per bucket

overhauling that part of your life. life. What do I want to do more of here? What do I want to get out of my life? How do I make this part of my life better reflected in my day-to-day activities? And then you can repeat this once a year or so. You might want to go back and update those overhaul. So it's just a good way of recognizing there's different parts of what makes a deep life deep

and being somewhat systematic and intentional in actually servicing each of those parts. That's the way I like to think about it. So as long as you're doing that, you're ahead of the curve. So it's not going to matter so much of like, what does running count as or this or that? It's just in one of these buckets when you do the overhaul, maybe the running habit is the thing you decide is really important, and it becomes a big part of your life.

And whether that's in, let's say, in this particular instance, when you're overhauling the Constitution bucket, or whether when it is overhauling like a community bucket because you run with friends, it doesn't really matter. The point is just do these different areas of your life. Do you have keystone habits,

and then have you built up, if you've done these careful overhauls of them that you return to again and again. remaining systematically intentional about I want to make sure the different parts of my life are getting attention and being aimed towards what matters. What you're trying to avoid here, Noah, is drift. I'm just drifting in my life. Occasionally I get excited about something and I go after that.

Or I pick one thing out of many that could be important, maybe something highly visible, like job status. I just put all of my energy into that while neglecting the other areas. Drifting combined with haphazard sprints towards just one, thing is very unbalanced and it tends to lead to things like burnout or dissatisfaction or midlife crises etc so that's what i want you to care about no and not not the sort of careful accounting of where does this activity go and how many activities should i have under each of these by the way by the way a side effect of this type of thinking

is often simplification when you deal with each of these things i have too much going on in my life and i can't i don't want me time for community i need to slow down with contemplation I don't get to just be outside and think big thoughts or make it to services or something like this. So when you do these exercises, you often end up taking more stuff off your plate trying to simplify your life to give a pure expression of these buckets. So I definitely don't want you in this mindset of like I have 75 activities that I carefully categorize and that's going to be the key to living deeply. That could be counterproductive. Moving on now, kind of a related question. It's a good question.

Question from Brian. Brian asked, how do I How do I best apply The principles of deep work and the deep life to a career that necessarily has Outsized demands on my time? He goes on to Clarify that he lives here in Washington, D.C. And is a partner at a very large law firm

And he talks about there's just huge demands on his time That makes it difficult to service other areas of his life that he thinks might be important. He mentions that he has to meet billable hours targets that generate business for his team. So concepts such as like working intensely for less hours is not possible. He says likewise, he genuinely gets emergency emails at odd hours

so he can't check out after work after doing a shutdown complete. And he says fitting in high quality leisure consistently or at the breath I'd like is very difficult. So he's like so basically he's asking, well, how do I do these? various things you talk about about how to live a deeper life.

How do I do that with this job? Well, Brian, you don't. You probably don't. Look, here's the thing about super high hour demand jobs. They demand a lot of hours. You know? And without a

Hermione Granger Time Turner, which is the type of timely and countercultural reference I'm known for, makes me very cool, there's nothing you can do about it. So because of that, I suggest that people think about high time-demand jobs as radical positions,

extreme positions. It's not that no one should do them, but you should be very careful and know what you're getting into. And I think a lot of people don't. A lot of people don't. I know a lot of law partners. Why do I know them? because I went to an Ivy League school

and that can throw you onto this path where you feel like you're just focusing on each step, well, what comes next? And because you're smart, you went to an Ivy League school and you're used to people, you know, being proud of you for being smart

as you say, well, all things being equal. I guess what thing is most impressive or difficult? Like, what's the higher, what's the more difficult or more advanced step I can do? like let me get this job at the big law firm. Those are hard to get. Well, I guess first is getting to the law school.

Let me get in the Harvard Law School. That's hard to do. Let me get a job at the big firms because those are hard to get. Like only, you know, most people want those. Most people don't get them. Well, let me get junior partner because like that's what the best lawyers are doing. And I want to be the best lawyers. Hey, I have a chance to be equity partner now.

Let me go for that. That's hard. It makes a lot of money. It's very prestigious. And, you know, most people have been winnowed out by now. So let me do that. and then you're done with that and you send an email to me and say, well, I can't do anything but work.

You kind of go step by step and then you end up there. So I say I don't disparage those jobs and saying they shouldn't exist, but they're extreme and they need to be treated like extreme. There's other extreme jobs like this to require very extreme commitments that we recognize that to be the case. People go into that job, their eyes open. If you want to be a Navy SEAL, that's an extreme job, but you know that. no one stumbles in the Navy seal. No one stumbles into that.

No one's like, hey, I don't know what to do. I joined the Navy. Hey, what's Buds? Let me just jump over to Buds. Let me just,

you know, you know what you're getting into. No one just kind of stumbles into it. It's like, man, I don't know how I ended up here. But now I am, you know,

on a submarine, a mini submarine with a Drager rebreather on, on route to putting a limpid mine in a bay in North Korea on the bottom of a mine sweeper. You know, like, how did I get here? You know what you're getting into. Professional athletics is similar. You know, at a certain point in high school, like, all right, I know I'm going to take the call at scholarship. I'm going to make a run at the pros.

I know what that means. It's going to be all consuming in the physical aspects and how long this is going to last. You know what it means. But in law, in a few other positions like management consulting, I think people stumble into it. You've got to see these jobs as extreme, these high-hour jobs as extreme. And you've got to be really going into it eyes open and saying, Is that what I want? And how do you figure out if that is what you want?

Lifestyle-centric career planning? You have to start with this so clear you can taste it. So clear you feel like you can reach out and touch the images. Vision of what you want your life to be like. All parts of your life. Imagine a typical day, a typical week, a typical weekend. Have these really clear visualizations. It's like, to use a Georgetown reference, you're a Jesuit doing the Ignatian spiritual exercise.

You're being incredibly clear in your visualization of it. I'm in this type of house and this type of place. And here's what I'm doing in the afternoon and in the morning and this is what I see and this is what the work is like. And you do that until you have the image that resonates. And then you say, okay, how do I build a life that is like this? And you look for all sorts of different configurations of jobs and other things in locations that would make that happen. And the cool thing about lifestyle-centric career planning is that it often leads you to interesting or unconventional or radical-type configurations because you're not saying what job do I want to do.

You're saying how could I, what configuration of professional activities would give me this vision? And that's how you end up doing really interesting things. That's how you end up being the surfboard shaper that does podcast sound editing four hours a week on Fridays. And like that money is enough to, et cetera, et cetera. You don't get there by going to monster.com and saying what I want to do. You don't get there by looking around your classmates at Dartmouth. and saying, what's the impressive thing to do here? You get there by saying, what's going to get me to this vision?

For some people, the extreme hour jobs are the answer. You have this vision of, it's just exciting to you. I'm in a high rise, like this cool apartment. I'm in the city. It's, you know, Master of the Universe-style situation. I am making deals and making moves and am at the, you know, like a Mike Ovitz style character or something like this or whatever it is. You know what I'm saying? like for some people like I have this lifestyle vision and this is good.

At the core of that is being like a high hour lawyer but there's I know what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. And that's fine when you're working backwards from a vision that really resonates. So where people get into trouble is that they stumble into these things and then say this is incompatible. Now I'm here and I'm 42. And now I'm starting to think about what is this ideal lifestyle. And I can't get there with my current work. It's impossible. That's a hard realization to have.

And I think that's where you are, Brian. You can't get there. You can't have a lot of high quality leisure and contemplation, all these other parts of your life. It's very difficult to do if you're an equity partner at a D.C. law firm. So what I recommend, and again, I don't know your situation. So I'm not going to say quit or give up your other visions. I'm going to say be clear. Be clear.

Take the time to really understand what you want your day-to-day life to actually be like all the different aspects of it. What matters, what does it? And then think about what configurations, professional configurations are. going to make this possible. And you would want to make sure that you're taking advantage of the career capital you already have. That's probably the answer. It's probably not going to be quit and become a podcaster.

Trust me. It's not going to get you there. But it might be, wait a second, I'm doing the numbers here. And, you know, my wife does this work that is remote friendly. And I have this vision and there's more time in a small town and water. and like, okay, here's what we're going to do. I'm just going to give you a what if you're right. Here's what we're going to do.

She's going to shift into consulting and do 20-hour-a-week consulting. I'm going to leave the law firm. We're going to move to like Newberry Port or Gloucester or like around here to like Lewis, Delaware. We're going to put up a shingle. I'm going to specialize in, you know, use my training, but just specialize in like estate planning. We're going to have like a lock on the number of clients. Yes, our income is going to drastically decrease. But here's for the next year, actually.

we're going to save up a bunch of this, these bucks they're throwing at me as an equity partner so we can just buy a house with cash out there. It's cheaper. And we'll be making a lot less money, but who cares? Because we have this lifestyle where we walk on the beach each morning with the dogs and I want to write a novel and be around for my kids. And I like the school. I can walk to the school. We're going to buy this house at ship. There's a place in there, like Shipmaster Square.

It's not ship carpenter square in Lewis. And we're going to work on the guard. And you're just, you know, you start to move the pieces around. You're not being random. Like, I hate this job. I can do a podcast. No, you have a vision and you figure out what configurations get there. And maybe for you, it's like my wife switches to halftime consulting.

I switch to putting out a shingle and, you know, having a clear client cap. We live off of the savings we have for the next five years while we get the thing going that's going to supplement the income. We're going to live here. We're going to, you know, just the whole thing comes together. And boom, now you are heading towards a lifestyle that resonates. I'm giving a long answer to this because I think it's an important notion. Work should serve life. It's one of the most important and powerful tools you have for shaping what is possible

or not possible what your daily existence is like, but you have to know the target. You have to know what you're trying to do with it, what you're trying to shape. And if you know that and you're very talented and very smart like you almost certainly are, Brian, then you've got a pretty powerful tool to work with, but you've got to start wielding it. And you can't wield it if you don't know what you're building. So that's where I would start. And that's where Brian should start, but that's where this episode is going to end.

Thank you, everyone who sent in their questions. Remember, on YouTube now, you can find videos of the individual questions that I answer today. We'll be back next week, hopefully with Jesse. Looking forward to that. And until then, as always, stay deep.