Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 179: Do Techniques Beat Talent?

Episode Date: March 7, 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.Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaThe Books I Read in February 2022 [4:45] DEEP WORK QUESTIONS:- Can you implement Cal’s productivity tips without time-blocking? [32:46]- Does technique beat talent? [37:28]- Do you recommend multiple email accounts for someone who works at different institutions? [43:12]- Can intense collaborative work be considered deep? [44:52]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:- Are podcasts good for you? [52:11]- Can you elaborate on concentration calisthenics? [57:29]Thanks to our Sponsors:PolicyGenius: policygenius.comWorkable: workable.com/podcastExpressVPN: expressvpn.com/deepAthletic Green: athleticgreens.com/deepThanks 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 179. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined, as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, it seems like we have two arbitrary milestones, one that we've reached and one that's coming up. So the one that we've reached, which we didn't notice because we're busy, was the $5 million download milestone. I've been tracking that for a while and then forgot about it and what we hit it. So I guess we're now a 5 million download show. So we got that in our first before we got to year two, before we finished two years.

That's impressive. It's something. You know, now we're doing a million downloads every three months. So that's accelerating. The other arbitrary milestone, I guess, is episode 200. That feels like something. For sure. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know what to do about it. But let's see. We're at 180 on Thursday's episode. So we've got to get 20 more. We do two weeks, 10 weeks. Okay. That's early summer.

Yep. All right. Blow out. Blow out when we get the episode 200. We will have a huge audience. We'll do something. We'll do something big. Maybe not around here.

Let me tell you, speaking of having crowds around here. I have my Starbucks coffee I grabbed this morning. And I felt like I had to solve the riddle of the sphinx to try to figure out what to do with this Starbucks and wearing a mask. So for deep question listeners to know, we don't talk a lot about COVID, but this town, which is right on the border of D.C., is probably one of the more COVID cautious places in the country. This and San Francisco and a few other places, for better or for worse. But now it's starting to confuse me because I went to the Starbucks today and they had a sign. that said two things. So one, masks are recommended.

And then below it, it said, we would appreciate if you still follow the CDC guidance. Well, the CDC guidance for DC, where the Starbucks is, is not to wear mask indoors. It's low prevalence. They do not recommend wearing masks indoors, including in large congregate setting, even with young people are not vaccines.

So the CDC guidance says don't wear masks. But so the sign is basically saying, we recommend that you wear mask. We recommend that you follow guidance that says you don't wear masks. So I'm just throwing up my hands now, Jesse. I haven't really been paying a lot of attention to this because we have enough going on. But now it's confusing. So even I who can track things really carefully, don't know what to do. So I don't know.

I put on goggles. Was that the right silly? I was trying to say, like, how do we do this? Or maybe I wear them, I cut a hole. I don't know. I don't know. But anyways, the point is when we have our giant. episode 200 blowout in which we gather

50 to 60,000 people to come hear us record. Maybe we won't do it here. Maybe we'll go down to like... Navy Yard. Yeah. Go to Navy Yard. Yeah.

Go down there. Best Hill, D.C. So we got the Virginia where you live where, as far as people around here understandly, they vaguely know about Virginia is that like it's roughly like cowboys and bandits. And it's like the Wild West.

A lot of people would pick up truck shooting shotguns or something. So we'll go down to Virginia and they will let us gather 50 to 60,000 deep questions fans without confusing us all. But you know what? I got my coffee. So, sweet. Success. Yeah, okay, let's add this on our list of things not to do for the show. So our list is growing. We had become a sports talk show where I know very little about sports. I believe we had, I don't forget, I forgot what it was. We had a second idea for what this show should not become. Oh, it was giving bad medical advice, right? So it was something about fiction science fiction

Oh yeah bad yeah doing talking about fantasy but not knowing any of the actual like famous fantasy books and then third I think is like let's also not be a show that gives really bad COVID advice and rants about

COVID restrictions. I think we have enough of those shows. That's a pretty crowded space. I guess we'll stick with deep living and productivity for now. All right. So speaking of deep living and productivity, this is the first

show that we are recording in March of 2022. So as is our tradition, I wanted to do a segment in which I go through the books I read during the previous month. So the books I read in February 2020. As long-time listeners of the show know, I typically aim to read five books per month. I count books in the month in which I finish them. you have to break that symmetry somehow. That is how I break it.

I'll say, Jesse, this was a weird, a weird reading month for me. I have some unusual choices. It was an unusual month and I was grabbing stuff kind of randomly. So you'll see, as will the listeners here. All right. So let's start with the first book I read in the month. I just grabbed this out of a little free library here in Tacoma Park and read it in a day or two. It was not a long book.

It was called Living with a Seal by Jesse. Itzler is a book where Jesse Itzler, who's a entrepreneur among other things, I think he worked with like net jets or one of these jet leasing. Do you know him? I've read the book, yeah. You've read the book. Okay. So anyways, it's a,

he hired, who turns out to be David Goggins, though it's not revealed in the book, to live with him for a month and make him do these terrible intense workouts. And so it was interesting. I was interested. I find Goggins to be an interesting character, so I read the book. I will say, and I don't know how to say this without, this is going to sound a little bit snobbish, but I'm not that used to

this style of ultra accessible nonfiction. So there's this style of ultra accessible nonfiction where the chapters are three or four pages long and it moves at a really fast rate and it's, I don't want to say it's superficial, but it's just we did this and that and this and it's very compulsively readable. And I think this book sold really well. And what I realized, And again, there's no way to talk about this without sounding like a super snob is that there's like a whole genre of nonfiction that's made to be very accessible, very short chapters. It moves really fast. It's sort of the opposite, I guess, of some of the nonfiction worlds in which I swim. And so that was an interesting part about reading this book was saying, oh, there is this sort of bubblegum nonfiction world out there.

And I think it's good. I mean, I'm glad I was exposed to it. It was an interesting book. All right. Another book I read was Susan Casey's latest voices in the ocean. So Susan Casey

wrote the devil's teeth which I really like. This is a book about the what they call the Farrow or Farrelland Islands off of San Francisco. Anyways, it's one of the great white shark hot spots in the world. It's just surrounded by great white sharks.

They're attracted by the seals and there's researchers out there who study them, and she went out there, and it's about the sharks and about the research. That was great. She wrote The Wave, which I really like, which is about large waves. But half of the book is her following Laird Hamilton

to do Big Wave Surfing. That's another fantastic book. Anyway, she has this style where what she does is goes on adventures. She meets interesting people and goes and does interesting things and uses that as the narrative spine for writing about a topic like great white sharks or large waves. So this was about dolphins.

Voices in the ocean is about dolphins. And so she goes on various adventures. She goes to travel to see various places where dolphins are being held in captivity. She goes to the Solomon Islands where there is a dolphin trading going on and it's a little bit shady. She likes to put herself into this semi-danger as part of these books. She goes to that Japanese city featured in the documentary, The Cove, where they push these dolphins into this cove and they slaughter them and she goes there. So it was an interesting book. Now, I'll tell you the reason why I actually read this book, and so this was a bit of a

disappointment, is I'm interested in Susan's story herself. So Susan was a very successful magazine editor. So she went and she took over, I believe, outside magazine and really helped their reinvention back when they were starting to win all those national book awards. This is the crack hour era of outside magazine. And then Oprah tapped her to run the Oprah magazine. Oh, the Oprah magazine. And that did really well under her tutelage.

So she had a very intense corporate job running these magazines. And then she would write these books sort of in parallel. And it reminded me and myself trying to write books while doing these other things I do. And what happened to Susan is she burned out at some point, said enough of this, stepped down from those running the magazine type positions and move the Maui. and lives there at least half the year and spends a lot of time swimming in the ocean. She's really into the ocean with dolphins or this or that. I thought that story was going to be in this book because I know this book was connected to her making that change,

but I think she made the change after she finished the book. So unfortunately, I did not get in the book those insider stories of the overworked author shifting to a deeper, simpler life, but I enjoyed the book nonetheless. less. Then this was just random. I grabbed this from my library of mice and men, Steinbeck. I just realized, I don't know if I've ever read Steinbeck or haven't read Steinbeck since high school.

And I saw the book in my library. It was a copy from the 60s. And so I grabbed it and read it. It was quite interesting. This, by the way, is an argument for having a library. I know there is a minimalist movement out there surrounding books that says, come on, don't hold on the books. Why are you holding on the books?

It's clutter. You're never going to read them. I actually go old school. I have a large library spread over many rooms and many bookshelves and actually many buildings. I have a library here at the HQ and multiple rooms full of books at my house. And I like the idea of having, I go to my shelves and I pull books off and I read them. And I think this is an example. I grabbed Steinbeck off the shelf and I hadn't ready yet and I did.

I would say usually at least two of the five books I read each month. are grabbed serendipitously from my personal library. And I like the idea that my kids are growing up just surrounded by, surrounded by books. So of my cement, it was good. It was good. It's interesting because it's old enough. It's old enough that the style, there was so much formal innovation in fiction that took off

not long after that earlier period of Steinbeck that it seems almost old-fashioned, right? that it's largely third person perspective, just observing on the characters, establishing characterization almost entirely

through dialogue and action. And it just feels like, oh, this is just old-fashioned, old school style for novels, but Steinbeck is very good at the style,

and it sticks with you. He does very interesting characterization through dialogue and action. And when it's over, it sticks with it. you. So it's interesting. So there's no formal flash in it. All of the

modernist stuff that followed and then the postmodernist stuff that followed that in terms of formal innovation, it has none of that. I mean, Faulkner started doing his modernist stuff so quickly after this period and then you get the postmodernist and

doing their stuff with fiction after this and you get pension and all these other writers that all took off after mid-century. So it was old-fashioned, but it was you heard it here first Steinbeck is a good writer there you go

all right then I read a book by Boyd Vardy called Cathedral of the Wild so Boyd was actually a guest on Tim Ferriss's show and that's actually what brought

this book to my attention so that worked he was on the show and I bought his memoir so that worked out well did you hear that episode Jesse the the line tracking Yeah.

Yeah. Right. It's an interesting guy, right? I've listened to all those episodes for the most part. Right. So I listened to Boyd on Ferris and then said, I got to get this guy's memoir. And crazy. You actually, we might like this book, Jesse.

Because I was watching, I've been watching this series Yellowstone on Paramount Plus or wherever it is. And it's, you know, the story of this ranch family or this or that. And I was thinking, forget that. Like someone needs to make a series about the Vardy family's life. It's this crazy story. So they're South African and his grandparents, I believe, bought this land that was considered worthless in eastern South Africa. It had been overgrazed, and so you couldn't really farm on it anymore. And they basically created one of the first wildlife preserves that was set up around sustainable safari.

Right. And they figured out how to do that, how to reduce. Juvenate the land so that animals could come back to it and you could have a diverse ecosystem of animals and then support it by doing eco-tourism so people could come and do what they call photo safari where then you could tourists would pay a lot of money to come take pictures of these animals and that helps fund the recovery of the land. But their story is crazy. I mean, this is a story where he has stories of getting attacked by a crocodile. The crocodile trying to pull him in and he was just lucky enough that his footwork. was in the crocodile's mouth, and he hit inside the crocodile's mouth, the whatever valve they breathe through, and as a reflex, the crocodile spit it back out.

There's black mamba's crawling over his body. Him and his dad are sitting there. No one can move because if you get bit by the mamba, you're dead in 30 minutes, crawling across their bodies, like looking at them and then crawling away. Nelson Mandela This is where he came After being released from Prison on Robbins Island

This was the reserve he came to to recharge And reflect And they have all of these stories of Of being there with Mandela On their reserve On their preserve And trying to Watching as he's figuring out

How to bring South Africa back together There's stories about them Desperately trying to get a radio phone going Because there was a brief revolution attempt by right wing elements in South Africa that was happening and he was at their preserve all of this happens at the same place crazy stories like jesse you probably heard on the fairest podcast about you know the flying adventures they would fly these bush planes around and the the stork that crashed through the windshield of the plane and the pilot had a stork head and neck

sticking out of his head like it went into his head and so the pilot passes out the dad takes over the plane. The pilot finally comes through, pulls the stork beak out of his head, passes out again. The mom is in the back reading the checklist for them to land. They're covered in gore and feathers. The windshield's broken open. They land the plane. They're flying to the commercial airport and they land and they go on and get on their commercial flight.

Walk down the eye. So anyways, I thought it was great. I actually read it. We were on vacation down in Florida and we were going to some wildlife preserves and stuff like that. I was reading it down there. So, but it's just, I've never heard, or I've rarely heard a more interesting memoir. Someone, if someone does not own the rights, the film rights or the series rights to this life, get on it. I think it would be a fantastic show.

And he's a really interesting guy. I mean, all right, you heard the Ferris interview. Have you ever been more jealousy induced than the opening of that interview where Tim asked Boyd-Bardi? All right. So where are you right now? And he's like, okay, I'm in the, this cabana. our property and I'm looking out the window at a bow bow tree and there's like a cheetah in the tree and I can see elephants walking by the river, you know, down by the river below or something

like that. I was like, okay, that guy wins. He's got a good voice too. I bet you his audiobook is good. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Maybe I should have listened to it. I looked up there.

I looked up their place, by the way. I think the dollar is relatively strong against the RAND. And so I thought it would be crazy expensive. I mean, if you look at it now, it's super luxury now. Like really nice, you know, beautifully appointed. But you can rent like your own villa. And it was like a thousand something US dollars a night. Which, like, that's a lot of money, but not a lot of money for being in a luxury.

I mean, the villa I was looking at has like a dock almost. It comes out of it. So it comes out of the villa and it's out up above a riverbank. And there's a bathtub at the end of it. So you can take a bath in the bathtub and the elephants walk by in the river right below it. Then Miami would be like 10K a day. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Because I was in Florida. I was like, oh, yeah, $1,000 a day would be like entry stakes for like a reasonable resort. so maybe we'll do that for episode 200 we're going to go to void Vardy's Safari down in Safari down in South Africa I don't know how many South African fans we have so but maybe we could gather

a crew you can see the headlines now minor podcaster from DC killed by Black Mamba trying to take a bath near elephants that would be be the headline. All right, that's four.

What was my fifth book? Oh, and then I also read a techno-criticism book by Jacob Ward that just came out that's called The Loop. These are just the type of topics I keep up on in my semi-academic role when I comment on and think and write about tech and culture. Jacob Ward wrote this book called The Loop. Jacob Ward is a science writer, technology writer, that focuses on the ways that artificial intelligence can create these feedback loops with the human brain, especially the natural biases and heuristics that the human brain already uses, the type of things that you see Danny Connaman talk about, for example.

Connman shows up a lot in this book. And Ward's argument or concern is that we have these biases and heuristics that we use to sort of simplify how we think about the world, and those can get stuck in a feedback loop with AI, which exploits them. and then that feeds back to the AI, which feeds back into those biases. And then the AI itself can actually push human behavior into ways that are actually pretty distant from how we might actually want to live

or what we actually value. So he's worried about these tight feedback loops between the human subconscious bias and artificial intelligence. And so it's always a... Look, all these topics are interesting. I thought it was an interesting book. I don't know that there was a knockout blow

of an argument in this particular one, but I'm glad that people are looking at these issues. AI is definitely on my, definitely on my radar. I'm not quite sure exactly how I think about it yet. But good book. All right. So those are my five. You know, Jesse, someone asked me, they said,

when you do your books, we'd like to hear something to Jesse's reading to. So I'm putting you on the spot. But I know you're doing an interesting reading project right now. Maybe you'd want to share what the project is you're working on with the wars and maybe mention one of the books you read recently. You mean Neil Stevenson? Weren't you doing a project where you were reading, like trying to read a book from every major, about every major war? Oh, no, that wasn't me.

That wasn't you. Who was doing that? Maybe one of your students. Maybe one of my students. I was thinking about starting to get into some of the, you know, the War II and World War I. And you mentioned the one book about. Maybe that's the conversation we had. Yeah.

Okay. I haven't started that yet. I've been kind of reading a bunch of Neil Stevenson stuff. And then I'm also reading a book on John Thompson, the former. He went to Carroll High School at school. And then I'm reading a book. I bounce around a lot like you do too. I picked up the Sisson book from last week.

So, dived into some of that. The primal blueprint? Yeah. Yeah. And then there's a book that I found at Amazon just about how people, like in Congress, like fought all the time back in the day, like maliciously fought. Yeah, we talk about that. Yeah, we always think things are worse.

But it was bad back then. They got killed. And like that cane beating was really serious that happened to lead up to the Civil War. Yeah. It took that guy two years to recover. Yeah. You just beat him with a cane.

The interesting thing about Stevenson is, Neil Stevenson's books is he, I'm listening to one on audio, reading one and then have another on hard copy. But the one on audio is before the one that I'm reading and their characters, some of the characters carry over. So what are the two?

Reimdi and then the fall. Oh, yeah, yeah. So Riemdi was first, I think. Yeah. And it must be because Zool is older in the fall. Which one is... Which one has... So the fall, is this the one where there's a...

It's like a heaven-type world, but it's virtual? The fall is... Dodge dies and... By the way... Spoiler alert. They try to save his brain. Yeah. So I'm kind of like in that part where...

And then there was like that fake, like, nuclear thing. They can, like, upload people's, is this the right book or they can upload people into, like, the virtual world or something like this? Probably. Yeah. It's probably getting to that point because I'm not, I'm only like 25% in. Yeah. The last Stevenson book I read was seven eaves. I'm reading that too.

That's a cool book. Yeah. Yeah. That one's, yeah. That's a fun book. I read that on vacation. The moon blows up and the hard rain's supposed to come. And the world gets destroyed.

And, yeah, it's interesting. Here's the thing about, you'll see when you get to the end of it is I love the Stevenson, you know, let's work through the details. Like, he has that. Andy Weir instinct of like let's work through some details but then he also has like the Ursula K. Gwynn instinct of I really care about people and characters in a way that like Andy Weir

you know does not and so he has that mix of really interesting characters but he takes his time and unfolds the story and it's interesting and captivating then you'll see when you get towards the end of the book it's like he ran out of time he's like and then it was like a lot of years later and this was going on

and surprise and a couple spoilers and we're out so it's It's this, I think, really interesting unfolding, unfolding story. And I like the Neil deGrasse Tyson character. You know, the scientist that goes up in the space is mostly was based off of. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. I just finished Snow Crash, too, like a couple weeks ago. And that's the life. I mean, I know it's hard. We talked about Brandon Sanderson last week. But creating fiction and not literary fiction, because I think that is when you're doing literary fiction, I think it's so brutal because it's so fickle and it's so like you're trying to create art.

And like if it doesn't go right, it's just brutal and the whole thing can disappear. And but if you're Stevenson, you know what you're about. It's not like I have to get the National Book Award for this and the book or like the Booker Prize or people are going to think I'm dumb. My career falls apart. And it's like, no, I'm going to, I know the type of thing I write and I can experiment. It's interesting and my fans love it, you know. And then just he lives in Seattle.

and has this cool house by the water and they just sit and write these interesting cool books with a fan base that likes them and that's the main thing you do. That's the dream, I think. He comes up with so much stuff. I like that guy. I mean, I was reading the Wikipedia thing on Snow Crash

and he had a code for like two years to like get it all right in his head for him. He could write the book. That's the man. That'd be the dream. Live somewhere cool. Stevenson needs a cooler place to live though. He has like a traditional house

in like a suburb of Seattle. He needs like a compound somewhere. but live somewhere cool and think really deeply about one idea and then compose these books and they come out on your schedule. And he's such a cramogen. Like he booked tours reluctantly and not that long and then goes back to write. I mean, I know he did some stuff with Blue Origin and Magic Leap. Like he's done some consulting stuff. But Sanderson, Martin, all these all these guys, Andy Weir.

It's kind of cool too, like reading the fiction. and then you're walking around in reality and you just think certain things because you have this fiction in your mind. Like the other day when you're like, oh, something bad's going to happen. I was like, oh, the hard rain in the back of my line. Yeah.

Jesse's prepping for the hard rain. I don't know if it's worth prepping for it. It seems like you didn't have a lot of options there. Like you could have gone in the space where spoiler alert, things don't go well, or there's the people who buried themselves underground. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, anyways, those are the books. those are my books for February and a couple from Jesse as well. So keep reading and we'll check in next month with the five books I read in March. By the way, I'm about two down right now. So I have three books to go in March. I mean, almost two. I'm almost done with the second.

So we got three books to go. I'm also reading a really big long book that I don't know how to count this because I'm not going to finish it in a month. It's 800 pages long and hard. But what I'm thinking I'm going to do is in addition to the five books I report, I'm going to start reporting progress on this big book. That's a good idea. Because you've talked about it several times. Yeah.

And it's broken up into eight smaller books inside of it. So I might just, I won't count it as one of my books. But I'll say I read, you know, books two or three of this big book this month. Because I have to get going in it. I just,

I got to get that momentum going. The other thing about books in general that you mentioned to me offline was how one of your editors said that you don't read enough. I found that amazing. I think your audience might want to hear that story. Well, enough literature. Enough literature. Now, granted, this is someone with a graduate degree in literature from a very good school. He correctly points out, let's put it this way. I do not think that he has recently read Jesse Itzler's living with a seal. So I think he thinks I need to read more literature. And he's right. I need, if I'm going to be, I'm doing thinking and commentary and cultural discussion to have that common cultural heritage of really smart people and our literary heritage. I need that to be better. So this big long book I'm reading. is a classic. I need to read

I've read a fair amount of the classics, but I want to make that more apart on my regular routines. I'll report back on that success, but I want to read more classics. So more on that, more on that soon. Nice. All right. So before we get to today's

questions, let's talk briefly about a couple of the sponsors that makes this podcast possible. I'm going to start with Policy Genius. Policy Genius is a a website that can help you find home and auto coverage similar to what you have now, but at a lower price. So this is all about saving money. It is a one-stop shop to find and buy

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Workable is hiring made easy. I like the sound of that. Cheaper than Annette, too. All right, let's do some questions. As always, we start with questions about deep work. Our first question comes from Tanner. Tanner says, can you implement your productivity tips without time blocking? He elaborates, I'm a public defender, and I have implemented a capture, configure, control setup that has greatly helped me rain in my case load.

I'm skipping here a little bit, but he says he generally finds it hard to time block, however, because there's aspects of his day that are so out of control. He says, often things bubble up throughout the day, and I have more small tasks than can be easily scheduled. Is it possible to implement the patented Cal Newport productivity system while mostly askewing time blocking? So yes, Tanner, you can. So what is the patented Cal Newport productivity system? Well, here is where I can point everyone to a video in which I explain this step by step, a core ideas video. If you go to the YouTube page for the show, YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. Go to the core idea playlist and I have a core idea video on time management where I say here is my philosophy for time management.

What are the high level principles? and then I explain my specific system for implementing those high-level principles. So the high-level principles, as you mentioned, Tanner, are capture, configure, control. Time-blocking is part of how I specifically implement that last piece control. So you can certainly take those high-level principles and implement them in a way that makes the most sense for your job.

And for your job, that might mean for that control piece not having time blocking. That's actually quite common. I would say the most commonly occurring example I get or hear from in terms of individuals who use that system but don't use time blocking and implementing control is people who do support work. So IT professionals, for example, will often run their days off a ticketing system. So time blocking is not that relevant for control. What they typically do is have, what they worry about is there's a small amount of non-urgent, personal, initiated work that has to happen in addition to just servicing tickets. There's always some stuff you have to do. And they typically put aside a certain amount of time, set time every day

where they do that work. And otherwise, they're just running through their ticketing system. And so they are definitely controlling their time, but they don't have to time block every minute. It doesn't make sense because most of their day is actually executing one ticket after another. So it could be similar for you, Tanner, that you have a different method of controlling. The key is just making sure that these three principles are implemented. So capture is about not having things in your head, be it small obligations or big projects. You're not keeping track of things in your head. They're in trusted systems.

Configure is wrangling with and making sense of all the stuff on your plate, simplifying, getting rid of things, clarifying, taking things off, moving things around. So you really understand what's on your plate. You have plans at multiple scales. You're not just winging it. And control is making sure that you are not reactively just going through your day, saying what's next in a way that is uninendency. intentional. So however you want to implement that is fine by me, I will say though, Tanner, looking at your elaboration, I'm not sure that time blocking is not going to work for you. It looks like to me, and again, I'm basing this off of just two paragraphs of description I have here, but it looks like to me that if you put a little bit more emphasis into configure, you might be able to use time blocking and control. Because you talk about here that, you know, you have all these more small tasks that can easily be seen. scheduled. Well, you don't need all the small tasks on your plate to be scheduled. You need them to be captured and configured in a way that you can make intelligent decisions about what's going to

happen this week and what's going to happen this day. So if you potentially had a better handle over the small tasks, they're grouped, they're categorized, you automate some, they're in separate particular list. You have certain times where you work on certain things. You can make decisions about which of these things, so I need to get done this week, and when am I going to do them, that time blocking might actually work. So it's a certain time. It's So what might be happening here is that you're getting to your time outside of cases where you're presenting in court and then just feeling so overwhelmed that you just fall back to reactive mode. So I'm going to say, and I don't know if this will work for you, because again, I only have two paragraphs here, but I'm going to say, lean in more into the configure step. Because you're telling me you just have one large word document where you try to keep track of everything.

Lean more into the configure step. Go watch that video and hear about how I implement configure. And you might be able to get a better handle on all of this stuff so that you're going to be able to get a better handle on all of this stuff so that you. you can get to a time-blocking level of intentionality. It's not necessary and maybe not best for your job, but it might be. I want to dismiss it so quickly. All right, we got a question here from Fiego. He says, does working smarter beat talent?

I'm a data scientist and researcher, so I know the value of good work, but you really think an average person who follows this path can achieve a PhD from MIT and make breakthroughs in science. Yeah, you know, it's a complicated question, Diego. There's a complicated question, in part because talent is very vague exactly what that means. But I do think, yeah, it's realistic to say, no, not every professional objective, ambitious professional objective you have is necessarily achievable. Right. And this might be because of talent.

My personal view is that talent is a complicated picture because, it involves a lot of training and it involves the circumstances for training. It might involve maybe your personality is well suited to stick with certain types of training. I'm not a big believer in this. You have this talent that makes it doing really complicated high-level work easy for you.

High-level complicated work requires a lot of training, but some people end up now you're 20 years old and for whatever reason you've been exposed to and have done a lot of that training. And someone who hasn't, you're in two different places. So I find talent to be a vague, a vague issue. So I don't typically use that term.

Though I do think it's true, so yeah, not every objective is open to everyone. So for example, let me, I'm going to be, I'm going to first be, what would you call it, sort of braggadocious and then I'm going to be humble, then I'm going to humble myself, right? I'll use myself as an example. Because you mentioned PhD from MIT. All right. So when I was in college, for whatever reason, I found the computer science work. especially the mathematical or theoretical computer science work pretty easy. Right?

And I always used to think, well, that must be because I had good study habits. I managed my time well or this or that. But I received an email, like a year or two ago from the fellow student who I used to work with on my theory and algorithms problem sets. And this was the student I liked to work with because he was very sharp and we would be very efficient together. And I guess he saw one of my articles or something. And he sent me a message and said, oh, it was cool to see whatever, some article he saw of mine.

And he said, my memory, my memory from Dartmouth was working with you on some of these problem sets or whatever we'd working on was, oh, I can't do that. I know now, like, I'm not going to be a professor, this or that. I guess that's what it looks like when, you know, someone has like a really strong aptitude for something. So, like, that was his memory, is that it caught his attention and temperate his ambition, seeing me working on these problem sets. So I guess, you know, there was some sort of thing there that made me good at that. But then I go to MIT, and it became clear after a while of, oh, the top people here, the people who are going to be, like, at the top of the theoretical computer science field, I'm never going to be that. So, you know, there's things you can do, things you can't do. So for whatever reason, I was pretty good at this stuff, but also not the best in the world.

And I'm not sure if I would have been able to get to the best of the world. So I don't know. I'm sort of wandering here, which is my way of saying of like, yeah, there are some limits to what you can do. It's more obvious with physical stuff. I'm not going to play professional sports. I'm still holding out hope I'm going to play professional baseball, but I think that window is, that window is closing pretty rapidly here. So it's more obvious there than with intellectual stuff. I think people have more gives and they realize, but some of this stuff gets,

baked in over a decade of training. It's really hard to say. But, all right, let's put that all aside then and say, so what do we do about it? I say, let's forget about that. Let's forget about talent. Let's forget about can I do anything I want to do and ask the better question. What is the real advantage you get from working smarter and deeper? So being really intentional about how you work and what you work on and how you organize your life.

The goal there is not to enable the accomplishment of arbitrarily elite, professional accomplishment. The goal is to give yourself the best shot of living a deep life. If you're intentional, if you're deep, if you're organized, you're making the most of your current circumstances, that is the leverage you need to shape your life into something you can control. That's the leverage you need that when you do lifestyle center career planning, you can push your life towards a lifestyle that resonates and away from the things that don't. That's what you need to feel engaged and meaningful and competent and efficacious. that is more important than I think hitting some arbitrary professional goal.

You know, I'm not going to be a MacArthur Genius Grant winning top in the world theoretician, but it doesn't mean that I can't use the skills I do have that I am carefully developing to try to build a really cool life. And that friend of mine who was very, very smart, he might be saying, okay, I guess I wasn't going to be a professional academic to do theoretical computer science, but I'm sure he's doing something really cool and interesting with his life because he was very sharp and focused and was, working with what he wanted to do. And so that's what I would say, Theago, who cares about this debate?

About how much is, are you born with? How much is it life circumstances that trained you? How much of it? Can you just change now through deliberate practice? I don't know. Possible to answer. So why don't we just focus on what we can control

and try to build the deepest, most interesting life possible, each one that's going to look different? That's a good question. All right, let's move on here. Ricardo says, do you recommend having multiple email accounts for someone who works at different institutions? Even if the work is similar between institutions. Yes, Ricardo, in general, I'm in favor of multiple email accounts.

I want more friction, not less. But more importantly, I want context shifting to be minimized. The biggest under-emphasized tax we pay when doing professional work is the cognitive drag required by shifting our mental context from one target to another. it's draining, it reduces our ability to think and it burns us out. So when you are sharing multiple institutional communications all happening in one inbox, you're seeing multiple professional contexts existing together and your brain is trying to bounce back and forth between these things. It's terrible for the brain. Terrible for the brain.

I have, I think, six email addresses right now. And then Jesse has another for our organization. But I personally have six email addresses. because I want to keep these things separate. I use separate. In Google Chrome, you can have these profiles, browser profiles, so that, like, if you have your password, say, for Gmail for one address, you can switch to another profile, another profile,

where you have your address saved for Gmail for a completely different account. And so I have three of those and six different email addresses. And, you know, I'll tell you what, some people get mad because, like, oh, it's longer before I hear back from you because you have to wait until I'm next at a day or time where I'm checking that address, but it keeps the context shifting minimized. That's critical. All right, let's fit in one last deep work question here. This one comes from Brandon.

Brandon says, can intense collaborative work be considered deep? Yes. Deep work has two elements. Cognitively demanding. So you're actually pushing your mental ability. So it's requiring real thought. And it's done in a state without distraction. So you're not context shifting from the context of the work to other things.

this could be with people, this could be on your own. I talk about this in my book Deep Work, but it's often overlooked by people who will say, I don't do deep work because I'm in a collaborative field. But nothing about that definition has anything to do with being alone. I think we get caught up on that idea because we have a notion of Deep Work as Neil Stevenson, you know, in his basement alone in his house, writing the Quicksilver trilogy with the Quill. and yes, that is Deep Work, but also Deep Work is a collection of physicists at Bell Labs

at a whiteboard that they're sharing trying to figure out how to make the transistor work. That's awful deep work. Deep Work is also the mission control in Houston during Apollo 13, trying to figure out how to make the air filters from the command module work in the lunar module. You're focusing really intensely on something cognitively demanding. You're not switching context.

I even go so far as talking about in Deep Work what I call the whiteboard effect, which says if you're working on something deep with someone else, you often can obtain higher levels of intensity than if you are just working on your own. Because having another person there staring at the same problem on a shared board raises the social cost of your attention wandering

because then you're going to have to say, hold on, hold on, back up, what were you just talking about there? You're pushing each other to go deeper. So actually some of the deepest work comes in group settings. Brandon also ask about what if you're doing a therapy session. So he's a psychotherapist or teaching. That's all deep too.

Kindly demanding. You're not switching context. The number of people in a room doesn't really matter. All right. So that's what we have for deep work. I have a couple of deep life questions. Before we get there, let me just talk about two other sponsors that make this show possible.

We'll start with ExpressVPN. You've heard me talk before about how VPNs work and how they protect your privacy and security online. You've heard me say before that I personally use ExpressVPN as my preferred personal VPN that I use. But there is an added benefit to these services, which is you can use ExpressVPN to unlock movies and shows that are only available in other countries.

This has been relevant this week. I don't know if you've been following this news, Jesse, but I have been using ExpressVPN so I can use the BBC player because I think the BBC coverage of the war in Ukraine, for example, is really top-notch. I find it better than trying to watch the American cable news coverage of this war because the whole screen is full of all of these things moving and there's animations of, you know,

number of people who could theoretically die and like eagles flying by and I get a mini seizure every time I watch it. BBC I like, but the BBC players for the UK. ExpressVPN, all I do is change my location to the UK in the ExpressVPN app. Now as far as the BBC player is concerned, they're talking to someone from the UK, and I get access to that. You can do that for many different services and many different countries. ExpressVPN is actually in a hundred different countries. They have servers in a hundred different countries.

I just think about all of the international content. you can access. And of course, what I like about ExpressVPN, easy to use. Very fast connections to their servers. You won't even realize that it's on. So if you visit my special link right now at ExpressVPN.com slash deep, you will get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. So you can support our show and watch what you want while protecting your privacy and

security online with ExpressVPN at ExpressVPN. VPN.com slash deep. Also want to talk about athletic greens. I say every time I talk about athletic greens that this is a product that I use each morning.

Jesse can attest to this. I've told them this before. Actually, Jesse, you were telling me before that someone you know is going to start using this because they heard I was using this. This is true. My mom. There we go. Yep. You convinced my mom to get triathletar greens and she's going to start using it.

There we go. This just in, this is just coming in off the fax machine here in the Deep Work HQ. It says here, news alert, Jesse's mom wins really elite sports competition. So that I mean, I'm not. Pickleball. Pickle ball. She's the pickleball champion. Something the fans say that her energy and health just seems substantially.

suddenly substantially better. So like we get correlation, maybe not causation, I'm just saying. All right. So for those who don't remember, so Athletic Greens product AG1 is a powder that you take with water. You take it once a day. It includes 75 high quality vitamins,

minerals, whole food, source superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens. Jess and I looked up that last one. It helps reduce anxiety. That sounds relevant today. The point is they obsess over making this product as good as possible. It is their only product.

and they improve it. They call it versions. Each year they upgrade and upgrade the quality of the ingredients. They want to get this right. If you want to make sure that you're getting all the stuff you need, all the stuff you need in your diet, you just take the athletic greens every morning and you don't have to worry about that anymore.

But that is what I do each morning. So right now it's time to reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient daily nutrition. I will note this seems especially relevant because of the flu and cold season we're in right now. Put those vitamin D drops in your athletic greens to help make sure that you are in tip-pop immune shape. It's just one scoop in a cup of water every day.

That's it. No need for a million different pills and supplements. Look out for your health. So to make it easy, athletic greens is going to give you a free one-year supply of those vitamin D drops that you can add to the athletic greens each morning, which I do, and five free travel packs. These were useful to me,

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Again, that is athletic greens.com slash deep to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. All right, let's see here. 52. Let's do a couple questions on a deep life before we call it a day here. My first one here comes from Brian.

Brian asks, Are podcast good for you? So he has a bunch of different points about this, but let me point out two in particular. The first is he asked, what would Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman say about a medium that feels like 100 times the old talk radio format? So Brian is concerned about the sort of,

what does it do to your mind, this relationship, or you have someone in your ears for multiple hours each day? and he looks to McLuhan and Postman, who of course have this, the medium is the message type analysis of media. McLuhan and his protege postman would argue that the form in which you're consuming media

actually changes the message and the impact of the message. And I think this definitely is at play for podcasting. However, and this is very self-serving because I'm telling you this on a podcast right now, I think generally the impact of this medium on the message is positive. right? So what do you get, for example, when the medium is tweets? Let's say we're looking at Twitter. Well, now it's very short. There's trying to grab attention. And there is a really tight feedback loop of likes and dislikes and retweets and catching the algorithms attention so that a tweet immediately gives you these clear indicators of its taking off or not taking off. Now, that's an example of a medium that really changes the message.

So the type of communication you would get on a platform like Twitter, just to use that as an example of McLuhan and Postman's thinking, is one that is way more simplified and emotionally charged. It is a place where people are trying to dunk on each other. It's very tribal and very anxiety-inducing. So that's an example where the medium changes the form of the message. Podcasting, I would say, has an opposite effect. It's long form, and you can hear the human voice. So you get all of the nuances and subtleties that is embedded in pacing and tonality

in the human voice and it's long form. Someone can take their time and explain how they're thinking about something, change their mind on how they're thinking about something, think out loud in real time. It's much more human, much more humanizing than some of the other big digital communication technologies

that have taken off in the last 10 to 20 years. And so I actually think what it does is it gives you a more moderating style message. And so it is, I believe, if we're looking at digital tools or modern media tools, I actually think the podcasting does a pretty good job. If we're going to rank these things, I think it does a pretty good job. I mean, Twitter creates a dumpster fire. TikTok just turns people into essentially algorithmically enhanced cyborgs.

That algorithm just drives people into really weird places. Jacob War talks about. this in the loop, that book I talked about earlier in the show. And he talks about how TikTok, there's some interesting talented people on there, but the people who really take off, it's really weird. They're sort of playing with these

particular forms where you do like lip syncing, they're not very good at it, and it's just working with the algorithm and weird. So TikTok, that medium makes the message, turns people into cyborgs. Twitter turns people into like dumpster fire lighting zombie hordes.

if you go back and look at Postman's analysis of the old school TV when there used to be three channels, his big thing is it simplified everything down to these sort of sound bites. Podcasting ranks pretty well. I think it ranks pretty well. You get this long form, nuanced relationship with a real human being. And so, yes, as with anything, if that human being is intent on, you know, a particular point of view, then, yeah, it can really bring you into that world and, and, and, talk radio, right wing talk radio certainly did this at the time. It could really bring people into a owned a libs type mindset over time and it could, what have you. But I still think it is a medium that creates a good type of message. It just seems very humanizing. It's, it's

really hard to listen to a long-form podcast with a lot of people and come off and be like, really like I hate that person or I hate other people. So who knows? Maybe I'm being optimistic. Obviously it has its flaws, but I'll take it. over a lot of the other platforms any day. He also asked Brian also asked if they're more shallow and distracting than say reading books. I mean, I think yes, Brian, don't give up a book

reading habit for podcasting. It is different. It is shallower than a book because a book will typically represent someone who has spent multiple years trying to hone and craft and structure their thoughts on a topic. So it's just a from an intellectual consumption experience

different than let's say me riffing on the mic. But I think podcasting is great for otherwise wasted downtime. You know, I'm doing a chore, driving to work. Why not? I think that's a good time to do it. Now, if you do books on tape, you maybe want to alternate between these two. You should read real books as well.

So, yeah, it shouldn't be the only thing you listen to, but this is not going to surprise anyone by an improv podcast. All right, we got a question here from Jules. Jules says, my favorite nugget of wisdom from your book was something. to the effect of if you begin craving distraction, the next 30 minutes of resistance can become a training session of concentration calisthenics. I love this idea of strengthening your power to resist. What more can you tell us about this training?

Do you have a few stories from people who view the moment of resistance as training and how it slowly developed? So, Jules, the relevant piece of advice here comes from deep work, and it's where I recommend that you embrace boredom. and here is the whole argument. By embracing boredom, I mean expose yourself to boredom on a regular basis.

So at least once or twice a day, have a period in which your mind is craving novel stimuli and you do not give it to it. It wants to look at your phone and you don't. I do not mean embrace boredom in the sense of think of boredom as an unalloyed good,

something that's going to generate lots of good things. We should be bored. Bored is a good state. Bortem feels bad and we should take that seriously. Our body makes things feel really bad if there's a real reason it wants it to feel bad. So I don't think we should be bored all the time. The reason why I think you should be periodically, temporarily bored, however,

is that it breaks the Pavlovian connection that so many of us have developed between boredom and distraction. If at the slightest hint of boredom, you always take out your phone and relieve it. Your brain learns boredom means shiny treat. Boredom means shiny treat. So then what happens when you want to do something that's cognitively demanding? You want to focus deeply to write a chapter of a book or come up with a new strategy for your business. Your brain will say this is boring because there's no novel stimuli. We're just thinking about the same thing again and again.

Where's our shiny treat? And it won't tolerate it. It won't tolerate it. Your brain will go on strike and say, give me a phone. Come on, we don't do this. And then you can't actually produce things at value with your brain. So if on the other hand, on a semi-regular basis, you expose yourself to boredom, your brain gets comfortable with that option. And when it comes time to think deeply about something and you're lacking novel stimuli, your brain is not going to go on strike.

It's like, okay, this is one of those times where we don't get the stimuli. I get it. Okay, great. Let's go back to writing this chapter and thinking through this strategy. So, yeah, it is like training. Your brain hates it. You want to get it to the point where your brain hates it less. That is going to give you a lot more flexibility to do things of re-examined.

real value with that brain. All right. Well, speaking of value, I think we've put some good value into this episode, but we've hit the hour mark, so I think we should wrap it up. Thank you,

everyone who sent them their questions. Remember, if you like what you heard, you will like what you read in my weekly newsletter. Sign up at calnewport.com. If you like what you heard, you'll also like what you see. Video of this whole episode, as well as video clips of every question

and segment from this episode can be found at our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. We're back on Thursday with a listener call episode and until then, as always, stay deep.