Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 2: Improving Concentration, Influential Books, and Figuring Out What to Focus On | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader queries on how to improve your ability to concentrate, books that proved influential on my thinking (including the origin of the term “deep work”), the complex process of figuring out what to devote your limited attention toward, and so much more.For more about me about my writing: www.calnewport.comThis episode features the Swoosh 1 sound effect, used under a Sampling Plus 1.0 license (see here for details: http://soundbible.com/682-Swoosh-1.html). 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, the show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. I've got a good one today. Among other topics, I'll get into how to train your ability to concentrate screen time for kids and how to figure out where to focus your deep work efforts. I do my best not to go into any rants. Spoiler alert, I fail, so be prepared for that. but I think in general we're going to cover a lot of good territory today.

So before we get started, let me just remind you, I solicit the questions I answer on the show from my mailing list. So if you want to submit your own, you need to subscribe to my list at calnewport.com. All right, let's get started. It's time for work questions. Andrew asks, what are techniques to improve focus from someone who may be scattered in their concentration. Well, Andrew, I think a good analogy when thinking about becoming better at focusing is a triathlon. I said, Andrew, I am going to prepare you to be a pretty good triathlete. You would expect there to be two different things involved. First, there would just be general fitness. I would say, look, we've got to overdo, overhaul your diet, you've got to get more sleep,

you've got to drink more water, you have to be a healthier person. That's the foundation on which you can expect to actually be able to compete in a triathlon. The other thing we would do was actual training for the specific activities that make up that event. So we would swim, we would ride our bikes, we would go for runs. The same holds for doing concentration or focused activities at a very high level. You have to work on your general cognitive fitness and you have to specifically train your ability to focus on the type of things that you hope to be focusing on. General training, specific training. So how do you do general cognitive fitness? Well, there's a lot of different things that could help. I think embracing boredom is useful. And what I mean by embracing boredom is that getting

used to this idea that on a regular basis, you will find yourself bored and seeking novel stimuli, something to bust the boredom. But instead of pulling out your phone or putting an earbud in your ear, you just remain bored. Now, I'm not saying you have to do this. all the time. I'm not saying that you should constantly be bored, but I think you should be bored on a regular basis. How come? Because if you don't participate in this type of training, your mind is going to form a Pavlovian connection that says boredom means stimuli, boredom means stimuli. And then when it comes time to actually concentrate on something hard, let's say in your professional life, you're going to be unable to do it because your mind says, hey, this is boring.

There is no novel stimuli. We're doing the same thing again and again. I don't like this. come on, let's look at our phone, let's look at social media, let's look at email. So you'll have a very hard time focusing when the time comes if your brain never gets any practice being bored. I think reading is, let's say, the cognitive equivalent of eating really well. So the more time you spend reading, and it could be fiction, it could be nonfiction, the better it is for your cognitive health, especially when it comes to wanting to do elite level concentration. It just really forces a lot of different areas of your mind to to come together to sustain concentration, to do interconnected processing, the image center

is talking to the verbal center, which is talking to the memory banks, which is talking to the sensory memory. They're all working together. It's exercising these different connections. It's building comfort with sustaining the locus of your focus on one target. All of that's very useful. So if you're bored on a regular basis and read as absolutely much as you can tolerate or fit into your schedule, your base cognitive fitness is going to get where you needed to be to do some elite level focusing. Okay, second category of activities. How do we now train you on the specific focus activities you want to do? One thing I would recommend is what in my book deep work I call Teddy Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, I should say, sprints. So it's a technique inspired by the way that Teddy

Roosevelt attacked his deep work. What you want to basically do is practice working on something as intensely as possible for a very limited amount of time. Use a timer. I think this is a great way to actually build up to this. Start at 20 minutes. That's fine. So, okay, here's the actual activity I want to be better at writing code, writing a chapter of a book,

business strategy memo, whatever it is you do, whatever you're trying to get better at focusing that, and say, okay, I'm going to set a timer for 20 minutes. And during those 20 minutes, I'm going to give this to Teddy Roosevelt treatment, which means laser-like, unbroken, intense focus. if I wander off and do something else glancing out of phone, social media, whatever, doesn't count.

I have to start over. Start over the timer, right? So it's high stakes, but not a lot of time. What happens is you get used to what it feels like operating your mind at a very high level of intensity. You know, most people just aren't used to it. Just like if you go outside right now and sprint as fast as you can, you are not going to get very far unless this is something you're already training for because your body's going to say, what are we doing?

this is terrible. We got to go throw up. But if you sprint a little bit every day and then you add more distance, add more distance, you know, six months from now, you can be doing 400 meter intervals at the track. So if you haven't been training, you're not going to be used to it. Focusing incredibly hard on something cognitive is like sprinting incredibly hard on the track. We can absolutely do it. It's good for us to do. But if we don't train for it, it's not going to go well at first. So I would recommend these timed Teddy Roosevelt sprints. And once you get a lot, comfortable at 20 minutes, make it 30. Once you get comfortable at 30, make it 40. Your goal should be to get to about 90 minutes. If you can do 90 minutes at sustained peak focus, and at the same time,

you have your general cognitive fitness going really well, you're comfortable with boredom, you're reading all the time. I think you could have a remarkable turnaround in your concentration abilities in, let's say, a six-month period. So it's hard work, but it's work absolutely worth doing. Jillian asks, you know to move from research to writing when you're working on your books. And I see here in my background notes that Gillian is a Georgetown grad, so Hoyasaksa, Jillian. So this maybe is a good time to talk about my research process for my books. I've published six of them so far. I have a seventh coming out next winter or early spring. I'm sure I'll probably be writing an eighth before I get

there because you know what? I get antsy and I like to write. So let's talk a little bit about the process I has honed, because this is actually a question people often have who are interested in writing, which is, how long do I spend thinking about a book before I actually start writing it? And the concern here is, what if you go on endlessly? You know, year after year after year thinking about a book and gathering research and you never really pull the trigger on writing the book, that's not good. On the other hand, if you jump too soon, you might not have what you need and maybe the book won't be too good. So it's a real question for people who are interested in writing.

So my basic approach is I tend to audition ideas in my short form writing on my blog, for sure, but also articles I do for the other types of publications I write for. So I might try some things out in a New York Times op-ed or in an op-ed for Wired or in a long-form piece for the New Yorker. So I'm trying out ideas. And over time, just trying out ideas talking to other people I know, talking to other writers, I begin to typically feel, you know, there's one planet in this orbit of information that's starting to accrete more gravitational mass. It's starting to seem more interesting. It just emerges as I think there's something here.

And so I write more about it and I sort of feel out the edges. And at some point, I make this transition in the feeling that this is a topic that I want to devote my attention to for my next book. Typically, my wife is the final indicator here. she's really good at knowing when I'm ready to write a book about a topic because she hears me talk about tons of ideas. I'm always telling her about different ideas. I apologize to her in advance because I know it's not always the most fun thing. But at some point, she'll be like, you know, this one you keep coming back to and it seems about right. So she's usually the final arbiter for me switching from ideas searching mode to locking in on an idea to be my next book.

Now, at this point, nowhere near having all the research done. It's just maybe something I've explored in articles and essays, and I have some rough ideas of how the idea is unfolding. I'll usually then spend a few months, maybe as many as six, in an intensive research period where I'll buy a bunch of books. This is typically my approach is I'll buy all the books I think are relevant, and I'll just start reading. So I'll go through a lot of books. I'll look at some articles, maybe I'll talk to some people to a really intense phase. When I leave that phase, I shift over to book proposal writing. So in nonfiction, you write the proposal and sell the book before you write it. It's important to know if you're thinking about writing books. That's different than

fiction. In fiction, you write the book first, then you sell it. Nonfiction is the other way around. Proposal writing for me takes a while. I go back and forth with my agent. It can usually take us about three months to get it right. And during that process, I'm really trying to structure the ideas that have come out of the research I did for the last three to six months as well, all the article writing I've done before that. So now I'm done with a proposal. I sell the book. I have a pretty good idea of what's going to be in it.

I have a pretty good idea of the structure. I have the main ideas worked out. But I'm nowhere near yet having all of the research I'll need to write the book. So then the final thing I do, the method I use is when I write a book, I spend one month per chapter. A book of mine will typically be, let's say, 70 to 90,000 words. it'll usually be around 10 long chapters. So this is about a 10-month process to get a draft of one of my non-fiction books done.

So I'll spend a whole month per chapter because what I do during that month is a lot of research specific to the chapter I'm writing. So do a lot of research, write a little bit, do a lot of research, write a little bit, polish, come back, bring in another source that I think will punch it up. And in the course of that month, I've done a bunch more extra research just to make that chapter work. So by the time I finished this 10 month or so process of writing chapters, there's really about 10 months more of research that's gotten into the book. I've just made it in line with the actual writing itself. So when you put this all together, there's probably, I would say, on average, one to two years of thinking pretty intensely about a topic and researching a topic that goes into one of my mainstream nonfiction books. So that's my method for doing it by doing more research as I go. I can avoid the problem of just getting stuck in a research cul-de-sac. It's just easier for me to actually be tackling the chapter itself when I'm doing research for

that chapter because then I know more particularly like, you know, I really need to know more about X. I need to know more about Y. Sometimes that could be hard to figure out in advance. So all authors do it differently. That's my method. Jack asks, have you read the book Range by David Epstein and has it affected your views of career success? Jack, I have read Range. I actually know Dave Epstein. He lives nearby. We both live in the D.C. area.

I talked to him recently. You know, I get asked a lot about the ideas in his book, Range, and how they interact, and particularly with the ideas in my book so good they can't ignore you. People ask me a lot about it. So because I know him, I called them up and said, hey, let's talk. You know, like, I want to understand what's the best way to understand your ideas versus my ideas. So, I mean, I think what I probably should do long term is I should do an episode of the show where I have Dave come over and we do this as co-host. We can really get deep here.

But let's do the really high-level summary. Basically, the premise of range is that generalists do surprisingly well as compared to specialists in the professional space. So the specialist in Dave's book would be those who really focus for a very long time on a very narrow, skill set, maybe perfecting it for 10,000 hours, perfecting it over 10 years, and then reap the rewards, whereas the generalist, by contrast, might master at a lower level multiple different skills, and then over time, those combine into an interesting new career. Dave likes to point to himself as an example of this. He was an academic in training. He was a doctoral student. I believe he was studying. It was something scientific. I think it was maybe geology or geography, something like

this, and then he switched over to sports writing, that Sports Illustrated. And he said, actually, that combination of skills was really valuable because it meant when he went over to sports writing, he could bring a scientific rigor to it because of his training that a lot of the other writers didn't have. And he became known for this sort of scientific rigor that he brought to sports writing. His preceding book to Range, the sports gene was a fantastically written in research book that was all about what the research literature tells us about the role of genetics and athletic performance. This is a book that really required someone with doctoral-level science train. So his example of a generalist doing well is himself. He said he was not the world's best researcher,

and he wasn't the world's best long-form writer, but he put those two skills together, and he had a unique combination. So the question is, does this conflict or does it complement the type of things I write about, focusing on things for a long period of time, building up skill over a long period of time. How do we think of these My Philosophy versus Dave's? Well, actually, this is something I tackled specifically in my 2012 books so good they can't ignore you, which was all about looking at what makes people satisfied in their careers. The book that really said that Follow Your Passion was way too simplistic advice.

The first book that really got me in trouble on the national scene was so good they can't ignore you. So in that book, I have a chapter where I talk about what I call the winner take all approach to career success and the auction market approach. The winner take all approach was I am going to enter a well-defined competitive playing field and be better at that than almost anyone else. I will reap real rewards for that. There's a huge disproportionate reward that comes from being one of the best as opposed to just being good. The auction market approach, on the other hand, the way I talked about in the book, was you build up multiple different skills. And then you use that unique combination of skills to define your place in the market. In the book, I give the story of my longtime friend Mike Jackson, who became a venture capitalist in the green energy space because of an interesting combination of skills.

he had picked up some venture capital skills, some environmental skills, some startup skills. And they all came together to enable him to do this one thing because it was a very unique package of skills. So basically, as far back as 2012, I've been saying both of these approaches are good. Now, what Dave agreed with when I talked to him is that regardless of which of these approaches you take, you're still going to have to work hard and focus and do deliberate practice to get better at things. So even if you're going to be a generalist, you still have to get to a reasonable level of proficiency with a skill before you can add it to your unique mix. And the fastest way to get to a level of proficiency with a skill is deliberate practice. To focus without distraction and stretch yourself past where you're comfortable.

So whether you want to become one of the best in the world, in one particular skill, or put together a unique in the world package of skills, getting any of those skills to a level where we'll actually register on the market means that you're going to have to focus intensely, push yourself past where you're comfortable. So in some sense, a focused or deep life or deep approach to your craft is unavoidable no matter which route you take towards crafting a really interesting or impactful career. Jareline asks, how can an organization motivate its employees to do more deep work? All right, Geraldine, I was doing good so far, doing well so far, avoiding rants, but this is kind of pushing me into that territory, because I often hear this.

I don't know this is what you're asking, but I'm just going to use this as a jumping off point. I often will hear from managers, hey, this deep work stuff does sound valuable. How do I get my employees to do more of this? As if it's something that you just choose to do or not do, and for whatever reason you're just deciding not to do deep work, what these managers are not realizing is that the very thing that is making deep work so rare in their organization has nothing to do with the individual energy or motivations or ideas of their employees is the fact that the way that your organization is set up makes it nearly impossible.

You have to fix the actual structure of work in your organization if you are going to expect deep work to become a common element of how your organization runs. Let me be more specific. Here is the issue. Here's the issue. If you run a knowledge work organization, one of the key questions is how is work identify, assigned, and reviewed. So it's known as a workflow, what I call a workflow.

What are the rules for how that happens? Now, if you're like most knowledge work companies, you probably have not thought about that question, which means the way that workflow is unfolded, is in a haphazard ad hoc way, almost certainly fueled by email inboxes or Slack channels. This is the lowest common denominator, low friction default that most knowledge work organizations fall back into, which is just let's figure things out on the fly. I'll email you, you'll email me, hey, did you look at that? Let me just send you a quick Slack message here. What about that thing

from last week? Hey, can you do this? Oh, shoot, this client is upset. Can you get into that? Just this ongoing, unstructured ad hoc electronic conversation. It basically takes the way that a group of two or three people in the same room would naturally coordinate themselves as sort of on-the-fly ad hoc and tries to scale it up to whole organizations. As long as this is your workflow, you are implicitly going to punish people who try to do more sustained concentration. Now, why is that? It's because if I am in one of your organizations that works this way. And I want to go spend a few hours giving a hard thing unbroken concentration because A, the hard thing is probably the thing that's going to create value, the thing that keeps us in business. And B, if I can work on this with sustained concentration,

I'm going to be 2x more effective than if I have the network switch the whole time. So let's say I want to go do this. I'm going to go spend two hours focusing on something very hard. The problem is during those two hours, I'm not monitoring inboxes and chat channels. And yet, if all of the work in this organization unfolds through these ongoing unstructured conversations, if I'm away from those channels, it's a problem. This is what mainly stiples deep work and most knowledge work organizations that the underlying workflow of these organizations punishes people for wanting to do it. And then there's nothing to become sort of more maddening or misery making than having a boss be like, come on, I want you to do more deep work. And at the same time, the demands of the company

punish you when you try to do it. So again, I get really into this in the new book I'm writing, so I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too far. I have 90,000 words on this topic that will be seen in not too many months from now. But this is something that I think we need to get out there. Workflows matter. And if your workflow is dependent on ad hoc unstructured back and forth communication, if you just say, hey, welcome to our company, here's an email address, let's rock and roll. You have set up a workplace in which it's going to be very hard for people to take their brains. The main capital resource you have at a knowledge work organization, the human brain,

it's going to be very hard for people to take their brains and actually get a good return from it to actually produce value at a high level. It is the equivalent of buying expensive machinery for your car factory and then running them too hot and not cleaning them appropriately and getting sand in the gear so they're operating well below their potential capacity. That's what we're doing with brains and knowledge work organizations. If you want your employees to do more deep work, make sure that the underlying workflows that identifies the signs and reviews work are set up. So it doesn't require people to constantly be checking and participating in communication. All right, that wasn't so bad. Let's move on now to technology questions. Daniel asks, do you think social media is worthless? All right, that's a good, that's a good query. Let me give you two distinctions here.

First, I want to distinguish from the social internet and social media platforms. Now, I want to make this distinction because Daniel, in your elaboration, you talked about staying in touch with family and friends as being valuable. Often people are doing that these days with the social internet. text messaging, messenger apps. They might be doing it through FaceTime. They might be doing it through Zoom. They're using the Internet's ability for you to do multimedia communication over distance to stay in contact with friends. That's the social internet.

It's a fantastic innovation. It also has very little to do with social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. I love the social internet. I'm very suspicious of social media platforms. in particular because I believe they have built an ecosystem on a foundation of addiction where the entire purpose is to get as much attention and data as possible from you. They are under a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to get you looking at their services as much time as possible. As someone who really values my mind and my cognitive cycles, that makes me really suspicious.

distinction number two still doesn't mean that what happens even on those platforms is always bad so i think the right guide here daniel is what i talk about in my book digital minimalism where i say the right way to deal with social media is start by figuring out what you want to do what's important to your life what do you value what activities are crucial once you have identified these values what's important you then work backwards and say how can i use technology to support you or amplify these things I care about. Sometimes some social media platforms will be involved in these answers. So maybe there's some group that's really important to you and it organizes itself on a Facebook group. That's great. This is tech supporting something you care about. Once you know,

however, why you're using a particular social media platform, you can optimize the use so that you can get that value but avoid all of the other pitfalls or traps that surround these, addictive ecosystem. So if you realize that the only reason you need Facebook is for a particular Facebook group that's important to you, you say, well, there's no reason for this to be on my phone. Right away, 95% of your addictive checking of Facebook will be gone if it's not on your phone. You'll say, it does have to be on my phone because I only need to check this once or twice a week. Then the newsfeed, you'll realize. Do I really need to see this algorithmically generated news feed that's been optimized by statistical

models to get me scrolling as long as possible? No, I don't think so. I'm going to get the newsfeed eradicator plug in for Chrome. So now when I log in the Facebook on my computer, it will take me straight to my Facebook group and I don't see any other content. See, now you've optimized. You preserved the thing that really gives you value. And because you were clear about what that was, you could sidestep all the things that sucks value out of your life. So no, I don't think social media is worthless. I'm very wary of social media. And I think digital, minimalism is the safest, most productive way to approach these technologies. Put it to use for particular purposes, optimize that use. Be very wary of a more general maximalist approach where you allow any technology into your life that shows any potential benefit. That's a trap. That's a trap that's going to lead you to checking your phone most of your waking hours. Claudia asks, what is your take on technology and screen time for kids? So I'll say maybe this is a little heterodox right now.

Screen time in general, I don't know how much I worry about that. Like, I'm a child of the 80s. We watched a lot of TV. That's just how it worked back in the 80s. We were okay. It's probably not the best usage of your time. But I'm not one of these parents that's so worried that if my kid sees more than 15 minutes of TV screen before their nine or whatever,

that they're somehow going to be, I don't know, mentally deficient. I watched a lot of TV. I'm okay. So I'm not so worried about screen time in general. Social media, however, I'm incredibly worried about. The distinction being here is that these are platforms that, as we've been talking about, are engineered to foster addiction. A lot of the methods that foster this addiction actually play on deep-seated psychological vulnerabilities.

I think this is bad enough when you're talking about a 25-year-old, but when you're talking about a 15-year-old's brain, now we get into really dangerous territory. These brains are so hyper-aware of sociality. They have very poor impulse control. They're still forming. It's a very dangerous stage to expose them to tools that are designed to exploit these things, these structures that are already in a form that's very nascent and very exploitable. We knew this with cigarettes.

Nicotine affected young minds much more than older minds. Impulse control is low. could get much stronger if you started smoking as a kid. So we said no cigarettes till 18. We have similar worries about alcohol. When it comes to any of these attention economy platforms that are designed to get us to use them as absolutely as much as possible, and especially those that are also designed to take data from us, to abstract us away into a vector of statistical data points that could then be sold to the highest bidder, I think that's dangerous territory for kids. So I don't care if young kids watch TV. There's better activities, but you're going to

going to be fine. 80s cartoons were probably some of the dumbest content, some of the lowest quality dumbest content ever put on television. Have you ever seen a He-Man episode? It was poorly done toy commercials. I love them. I'm fine. Social media platforms, ooh, let's be wary. Honestly, if you ask me, that's something you can think about using once you go to college. I know kids hate hearing me say that. People think I'm crazy. I think the cigarette age is a reasonable age for social media as well. Santiago asks, do you track how much deep work you do? I do. I have a daily journal in which I track a bunch of metrics about my daily life. This is my whole Jocko-Wilnick inspired discipline is freedom methodology of tracking the things that are important. Do the things you

know are important every single day. Even if you don't want to, you'll end up with a better life because of that. One of the things I track is deep work hours. I do it as a simple. tally. Sometimes I'll subdivide that tally into hours devoted to computer science research and hours devoted towards my writing on non-computer science subjects. So sometimes I'll try to break that out. Sometimes I keep it together. Really simple, but I've been doing it for years. All right. Keith asks, do you think coding is a necessary skill for everyone to learn? Right, because I'm a computer scientist. I guess I'm supposed to say yes, but I don't really think that's true. I think this idea that everyone needs to know how to program a computer is a little bit

overblown. The one exception is, I think, more scientists need to know how to program computers. I'd also say social scientists probably should know how to program computers. Not serious programming, like the type of stuff that we would teach in a computer science curriculum or that you would do if you were a hardcore operating system programmer. But like Python coding, like real simple coding where you can read in data and do some things with it and print some charts out. This is incredibly useful for a lot of science and social science research. So I do think if you're in an academic field, so even if you're like an economist or a psychologist or a biologist or a linguist, knowing how to do beginner Python-style programming,

that probably is good. That should be universal in those type of curriculums. But this idea that every fifth grader needs to use logo writer or learn how to do some like really hand-holdy type Python programming. I don't think that's that important. I also a big believer in the sort of transferous literature, which tells us that this idea that you should give really young kids, these really simplistic tools that are supposed to give you the general idea of programming, where you drag blocks around to make programs or this or that. I tend to think, look, if you want to teach someone to program, they need the practice actually programming. So let's do activities that are

programming like to prepare your mind for programming, that's probably a waste of time. You're better off just jumping in feet first into a really easy language like Basic. That's what I did. And struggling for air until you can breathe and then move on to a harder language, just rip off the Band-Aid if you want to learn to code and actually start coding. So that's my thoughts on that. I hope they don't take away my academic card for that. Sorry, computer scientist.

All right, let's move on to questions about, the deep life. Hasham asks, during your time as a PhD student, what would your typical schedule look like? Well, the one thing I did that was unusual from a lot of my fellow PhD students at MIT is that I actually work nine to five.

The basic way I saw it is that I got married young, so I had a wife and she had a job that had normal hours. And so I wanted to be done with work when she was done with work so we could hang out together. And I didn't like just being at the apartment alone while she was at work. So I would just get up when she got up and when she would leave to head to her job in Watertown. So she'd walk over and get on one of the buses on Concord Avenue. I would walk down and get on the T, the Harvard Square stop and take it down to the Kindle stop for MIT.

I would commute at the same time she would commute and I would come home and around the same time she came home. It just seemed to make sense because of my living arrangements. turns out if you're actually working consistently nine to five as a graduate student, it's more time than you need. So this is why I started doing a lot more blog posting at study hacks. Long time readers will remember, for example, like Monday masterclass. I used to do three posts a week because I had a lot of extra time. I also wrote a lot of books during that time. Because again, if you're just nine to five consistent structured time, you can get a lot done.

The only other thing I remember from that time, my typical schedule, is that when I was a doctoral student, I used to like to walk the infinite corridor. The MIT people know what I'm talking about. Not on the first floor, which is very busy, but on the second or third floor. And the infinite quarter is very long. I don't know what it is, a quarter mile or a half mile. And I had a way to get from the status center where the computer scientist were housed, this sort of cool Frank Gehry design building. and you could go through various tunnels and cut-throughs. I could get from the status center to the infinite corridor without going outside.

Then I would walk all the way down to the atrium at the other end and then back again and then do it on the floor below so people wouldn't think I was weird. And that's where I would work on proofs. So I don't know. For what it's worth, that's my memory of MIT is wandering that cool piece of architecture, thinking big thoughts while surrounded by people that were TNEC smarter than me. All right. So Sam asks, by extolling deep work, aren't we looking down on people who would not choose to live their life that way?

Nah, they'll get over it. Moving on, Jose asks, would like to know where your thinking comes from. Actually, it said, I would like to know where yogurt thinking comes from. I'm assuming this was just a typo. That would be a different type of answer, I'm sure. He goes on, I mean, what books have shaped the way? way you think. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, there are literally hundreds of books that have had an influence on my life and my writing. I was trying to think of a couple

assorted examples. So these aren't, I wouldn't say these are the most important book, but just some examples of books that have been influential for me. I think the Bill McKibben book, Deep Economy, came at a pretty formative time when I was just coming up as a writer. A little piece of trivia, actually, it was the title of that book, which I really like, deep economy that gave me the original idea for the term deep work. So I have to give Bill McKibbon credit for that. More importantly, what I liked about this book was the approach. McKibbon has a really big idea. And the way he delivers it is a mixture of original on the ground reporting, drawing from science, and also just his own sort of public intellectual ideation. He put that all together to say,

here's a big, bold idea, I'm going to make the case for it. I thought that was very exciting when I read it. I think this book was maybe 2007 or 2009, somewhere in that range. That style is obviously a style that I've carried through in my writing. And again, it gave me the name Deep Work, so I have to get credit for that. Another book that was really influential was James Gleek's biography of Richard Feyneman. It's called Genius. I've read this book a couple times. Gleek is a fantastic science writer.

I recommend everyone, by the way, in addition to reading Genius, you might want to read chaos, and in particular the information, if you want a really good overview of the entire computing revolution, is a fantastic book. But what did I get out of genius? I learned about how some of the top minds actually approach the task of thinking hard about hard things. It's such an abstract thing. I think genius is something that we really abstract often. It's just this person's really smart and they have smart thoughts. In Gleek's book, you get a sense of how one of the top minds of the 20th century actually went about his work. And you see, it's an entire life devoted to thinking about things, tracking down ideas, finding connections

between ideas, coming back to an idea, an obsession with deep work, an obsession with concentration. I read this book when I was young. I've read it multiple times since. I think it had a real influence on my deep life philosophy and a particular deep work. So genius was significant. You are not a gadget. So this was a manifesto that Geron Lanier, wrote, and again, this is maybe 2009. So it's real early in social media's rise to this ubiquitous presence in our culture. I had never seen anything like it. It was really strident, but also really smart criticism of the major social media companies and in general the culture they are engendering and their effect on our humanity. And this was at a time when there was almost universal exuberant,

for these tech companies and what they were doing. And I remember reading Lanier's book and thinking, man, this is really smart. Not only says it's really smart, but I think these critiques that exist at this intersection of technology and society are going to be really important. We're used to reading big philosophy from periods past, philosophy that ended up being really influential

and saying, man, that was really interesting, this work that these people did 30, 40, 100, 150 years ago. And I had this aha moment. oh, this is what that topic is going to be 30 years from now. People are going to look back at the cutting-edge philosophical criticism of tech and society happening now in the 2010s and the 2020s as being significant. And so that really helped motivate me to think I probably need to get into that game. And you'll notice if you look at my essays on my blog, by around 2010, you see that I'm beginning to engage with the world of technology a lot. more. And Lanier was a big part of that shift. Finally, along those lines, I think also Lewis Mumford's

Technics and Civilization was another very influential book. This is older. This is early 20th century. But it was one of the first great works of what techno philosophers call technological determinism, which is these bold philosophical theories about the ways that technologies introduced for one reason, can have these unexpected, unintentional impacts on the way we live our life. So Mumford has these huge theories about, you know, you invent this type of tool and it changes the way that our economy and general functions, the way we even understand the world and ways that we don't even predict. There's been a lot of great techno-determinist, Lynn White Jr. In mid-century, we have Neil Postman later in the 20th century.

I find techno-determinism to be very interesting, but it's also been very influential on my work. obviously a lot of the way I talk about tech, especially tech in the workplace, and to a lesser extent, tech on our phones, I talk a lot about these unintentional side effects it has, how it changes our interaction and understanding of the world, that changes how we even think about what work is, and often these changes aren't in our best interest. Lewis Mumford is who first gave me the conceptual vocabulary I needed to understand what this effect was and to understand that it's an effect that we could actually pry apart and make some. sense of. So anyways, there's a lot of books that have been influential to me. Those are just a few that come to mind that have had a long-lasting impact on the way I live and what I write about. Zach asks, if you couldn't be a professor anymore and you couldn't make a living from your writing, what would you do? Well, you know, this is something I wrote about in 2012. I had my first op-ed, I would say the first op-ed I ever wrote for the New York Times talked about the career decision I made as I was graduating college where I had two offers in hand.

There was MIT to go and be a grad student, and there was Microsoft. So I had a job offer for Microsoft. This was pre-Google. I mean, Google barely existed. This was before Facebook. Microsoft was the big company. Apple was just beginning its newest sense. So anyways, I had a very lucrative.

or from Microsoft. It was part of this project manager program that Steve Ballmer had put together where you simultaneously are getting an MBA while you're working at high salary at Microsoft. And I ended up that the point of the article is I ended up choosing MIT because I thought, A, it would be interesting, but it was mainly autonomy. I wanted to have the autonomy to keep writing books and articles. And I thought as a grad student I would have more autonomy. So I guess the easy answer would be if I wasn't a professor,

and I wasn't a writer, I would be a product manager, I suppose, at a company like Microsoft. Though I don't think that's actually right. If I really wanted to be honest, what would I be doing if I wasn't doing these things? I would be an entrepreneur. I'd have some sort of startup. I think that's probably the true answer. I had a startup when I was in high school that lasted into my college years. I was obsessed with startups and particular tech startups.

I love the energy and the autonomy of running your own business. So I would suspect that's probably what I would be doing. I don't know how long I would have lasted at a place like Microsoft. It's too big. Too much, I don't know, big companies have a lot of email and bureaucracy. Not that universities don't, but at least at universities, you have a right of refusal. So I'd probably be running some sort of chain of semi-successful startups. Okay, finally, Chloe asks,

How do you determine areas that are worthwhile to pursue with deep work? I mean, Chloe, this is the big question that undergirds the entire deep life project, right? I mean, my whole philosophy. So you take the areas in your life that matter to you, areas like craft, competence, community, constitution, contemplation. And for these big areas, say, where do I want to devote my energy? What are the big swings I want to make? What are the radical steps I want to take to support that thing I care about? And then you can really carefully try to either make very efficient or minimize

everything else distracting your attention. That's the deep life philosophy. For that to work, you have to know what are the answer to that question. What are the pursuits that I should really be giving my energy to in these areas that really matter? Well, there's two activities you need to do

to figure what those are. Figure out what those are. Reflection? Experimentation. So you actually have to think a lot. You have to spend a lot of time alone with your own thoughts. So not looking at a screen,

not with an earbud in, not talking to someone else. Reflection, time alone with your own thoughts. What I call solitude and digital minimalism is the time in which you make sense of all of the stuff happening in your life. You build structure around those experiences. You construct your sense of self

and you begin to identify what matters to you, what does it matter to you, how you actually want your life to go forward. Just like if you want to be able to run a very fast mile. There's no way to avoid actually training running. If you want to have a really sophisticated understanding of yourself, there's no way to avoid just racking up dozens and dozens of hours of self-reflection. So you have to get used to that. The second piece, experimentation. You're not going to be able to just sit and nasal gaze in some sort of Descartesian

moment of complete internalization and come up with the perfect answer for this is who I am and this is what I want to do. You also have to just get out there and try things. So you want to lower that bar of I have to get this just right. Until I get just right, I can't act. And say actually action is how I'm going to learn a lot about what is just right. So living deeply itself is a virtue that returns benefits, even if the targets of this depth may be shift as you gain more experience in your life and you gain more feedback from those actual behaviors. So experimentation really matters. reflection really matters. Now, I want to emphasize the degree to which you have to prime this pump with lots and lots of information. You have to expose yourself to lots of potential models for your life,

lots of potential models for these different areas of your life. That means you've got to read as much as you can. You have to listen to podcasts and interviews with the most interesting people that you can. This all matters. Documentaries. Watch the documentaries. I mean, you have to meet interesting people, take them out to coffee. You're not. going to be able to come up with the answers of, you know, in this aspect of my life, what do I really want to focus on? It's very hard to get the right answer, X, Nilo. It has to come from exposure to something else that resonates with you. You're like, yeah, I think they have that. I think they have that just right. So I want to emphasize that degree to which all of this

experimentation reflection has to be primed and supported with a huge intake of information, of potential models for how to live. Now, one of the things you're going to find when you do this, we try to take in a lot of information, is that you might find essentially already complete models, communities with already existing rules and ideas and philosophies that you could basically plug into your life fully formed, or the different aspects of your life fully formed. I think this is a great efficiency. And when it comes to contemplation, people's moral life, you often get this from religion. You don't sit down and necessarily try to do like a Sam Harris type, let me figure this all out from scratch because, you know, not everyone is Sam Harris.

But you can get a fully formed ethical moral system, or at least a place to start there from a religion. That's a very classical example of you expose yourself to something that's already out there that resonates and that can help fill in. Here's what you should do in a particular part of your life. You see the same thing happened a lot in the category I call Constitution, which is my alliterative term for basically health, health and fitness, right? So if you really take your health and fitness important, see, what does that? the things I want to do here that are really big swings. Well, one of the things you notice in health and fitness is that often really healthy fit people will plug into place there a particular

pre-existing community that they've come across that resonates. And that really simplifies the task of putting huge energy in the right places in that part of their life. This is what happened with the CrossFit phase. People, I want to be really fit and I'm willing to go to extremes to it. CrossFit was something you could plug into that box. Right now, we're seeing that more with something like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. It's a whole organized activity with training and here's how it works and philosophies in place and community in place. You can plug into the Constitution area of your life and it'll allow you to feel like, okay, in this piece of the deep life, I'm doing something at a very high level, I'm giving it really intense focus. I'm really putting the energy I think this

part of my life deserves. So we see that in Constitution a lot as well. Now, one of the things that often really gets to me is when people react to this, what I think, supreme efficiency was cynicism. You know, say, well, yeah, yeah, you're part of a craze because you're doing CrossFit. Guess what? They get joint injuries faster. You know, aren't I smart? I figured it out.

You don't want to be part of a community. Or you get some of the excesses of the new atheist movement, where all religion gets reduced. to the simplest of straw men. And then you gleefully take down the strawmen like, man, aren't I so smart? I can see what's wrong with that community. But the radical individualism that undergirds such cynicism makes it incredibly difficult to actually figure out how to take these areas of your life and effectively invest huge energy and get big returns.

So yeah, I don't know. Maybe there's some bro culture, for example, that surrounds Brazilian. Jiu-Jitsu, but I do know also those guys, they're in really good shape. You know, so I don't know. Same thing with the, I think people are really into right now, bow hunting. Certain crowds are really into bow hunting. And again, we could go on about X, Y, Z, but one thing I do notice about those guys is, you know what, they're outside a lot.

They're in really good shape, and they're working on skills, and they seem a lot less anxious than other people. So anyways, I'm giving a long answer to a short question, but what I'm trying to, what I'm trying to underscore here at the end is that when you're doing reflection, you're doing experimentation trying to figure out what are the things I want to put deep intense energy into. Don't shy away from plug-in-place solutions. It's okay if those upgrade. You know, it's okay if maybe your childhood religion is not what you're doing when you're 35. It's okay if maybe you were cross-fitting, but you blew out your whatever, and now you're doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu

instead. It's okay. We need to be less worried about the cynics that if I choose to wrong, community that has just a little bit of flaw. Someone's going to come in and be oh so cool and picking that apart. I'll tell you what, the cynics are way outside the arena. They're way outside Teddy Roosevelt's arena looking down at their phones, anxiously looking for likes. You can be in the arena actually trying to do interesting things with your life. So let me put this together, Chloe. Let me answer your question. I'll give you a summary of my answer to your question. Choosing what to actually put your deep energy into, where to put your deep work in different aspects of your life is the central question. It's going to take experimentation,

it's going to take reflection. To succeed with those efforts, you have to have a ton of information coming in. You have to expose yourself to a lot of models. When doing so, if you come across pre-existing communities for different aspects of your life that you care about that resonate with you, plugging in those communities, even if they're not an exact fit, even if there's a cynics, they're going to not like some aspect of it. But even if you're worried that you're worried that someone maybe is going to make a snide comment on Instagram comment is often a really efficient way to start getting a huge deep investment in the parts of your life that matters really quickly.

And again, it's the deep life mindset itself that's going to pay the lifelong dividends, not the particular choices you have in the moment of what you focus on. So you've got to get after it, figure out what's important, take big swings, suppress the other stuff, stop looking at your phone, Don't worry about the abstract masses outside the arena who might be making fun of you. Live deep. Good things will follow. All right.

So let's leave it there for today. I hope you enjoyed this week's collection of questions. Remember, I solicit these questions from my mailing list. If you want to sign up, go to calnewport.com. I also send my weekly articles to that list. So if you like this type of thinking, you'll find out more then. Until next time, stay deep. Thank you.